Haiti Noir (22 page)
“This morning, an old woman came by the center and left this for you.” He hands me a stained envelope, with nothing written on it. “She said she heard you yesterday on the radio, and she knew your grandmother. She didn’t tell me her name.”
I wait until I’m in my room to open the envelope and pull out the folded yellowed pages, torn from a notebook. It’s Grandmère Lucille’s handwriting all right, and the torn pages are from the very same notebook I brought with me.
I can’t wait to tell Miranda the whole story, to see the look on her face when I say,
Guess what? My grandmother knew Zora Neale Hurston. She helped her when Zora came to Haiti and wrote
Their Eyes Were Watching God.
She’s
that
Lucille, the one in
Tell My Horse.
My grandmother.
This must be the reason she visited me in my dreams. To show me this.
It’s three in the morning by the time I drift off, lulled halfasleep by the farmers’ vigil. First the murmured Latin phrases, the Gregorian chants from nuns in sky-blue habits who came by bus for the march. Then the soft acoustic guitars of troubadours in straw hats, their lyrics as sweet as the wild honey from the bees of Papay. Dawn approaches, and for the first time in my life, I hear gospel music in Creole.
“We need to love one another other,”
a woman’s voice sings, soaring and fading, trying to sow love in the dusty path of death.
We have two SUVs for the long ride back to Port-au-Prince, because some people from this center are coming with us. And, of course, Miranda is in the other van, so my story will have to wait. Despite the warnings not to march, the people voted to go ahead. Alexis’s eyes are calm but red-rimmed when he shakes our hands and thanks us for coming. He kisses Miranda on both cheeks and they look right into each other’s eyes. Am I out of it or did something happen between them? It’s true I didn’t see her much last night. Who cares? I feel triumphant this morning. Nothing can bother me now.
Alexis tells Manuel and the other driver to be careful. I take my seat of honor in the front, next to Manuel. Our two SUVs are whisked through the gates that quickly close behind us.
We’re stopped by uniformed men who, after peering into the cars, brusquely wave us on with their guns. I’ve never seen so many people with guns. We pass a village perched on the edge of a steep cliff. Below is the Lac de Péligre, the Lake of Danger.
Manuel is telling us how Americans created the lake in the 1950s to stop up Haiti’s largest river, the Artibonite, the lifeline for this region, known as Haiti’s breadbasket. The U.S. Army Corps of Engineers planned the dam. It was supposed to be a development project that would bring electricity to millions. In Port-au-Prince, assembly plants and agribusinesses, along with some lucky families, did receive electricity. But upstream, peasants from the valley who used to live alongside the river ended up fleeing with whatever they could carry. These were the “water refugees,” whose pastel dwellings cling hopefully to these cliffs. I peer down at the charred skeleton of a truck at the bottom of the ravine. A tiny swerve in the wrong direction. That is all it took.
In the departure lounge at the airport, I hug Manuel goodbye.
“Don’t forget to plant a tree,” he says smiling, holding me a fraction longer than I expect. He seems kind of sad to see me go, or am I just imagining things? I watch him walk away. He does not turn around or look back. I line up to take my seat next to Miranda.
Good morning, friends,
says the e-mail from Alexis the day after the march.
It is with a sense of great urgency that I write to you today to denounce the vicious attacks that took place yesterday in Hinche against peasants leaving the Congress.
Alexis describes how, after dropping us off at the airport, Manuel turned right around to return to Papay. He was driving alone, hoping to make it back in time for at least part of the march. Near that turnoff by the Lac de Péligre, he was flagged down on the road. Perhaps he thought he could help, or maybe he recognized someone. In any case, a few witnesses said Manuel got out of the SUV and was quickly surrounded by a group of young men with guns. They forced him into the backseat. The white SUV sped off. Manuel hasn’t been seen since.
Translated by David Ball
W
ho is that man? Orélus thought about it every day. Several times a day. Every night. For almost ten days now. He’d tried an infusion of soursop leaves, as he had every other night to calm himself down. Nothing helped. It was close to half past midnight and he couldn’t manage to fall asleep. To make things worse, it was particularly hot that night. Stifling. In this town of Saint-Marc, flat as a cassava. Flat as the palm of your hand. Who was that man sitting next to him in that SUV barreling toward Port-au-Prince? A trip that had turned his life upside down. Who was that man? He probably had a wife and kids, a mother.
Orélus flapped an old school bag in the air, first near his face, then around his left shoulder, and finally over his right shoulder. Despite the repellent coils to drive off the mosquitoes, they still made their usual rounds and were whining away relentlessly at his ear. So Orélus kept trying to chase them off by shaking that old satchel. It didn’t work. And it was hot enough to fry an egg—or your skin. Orélus had to get out of bed and sit right next to the window with the hope of getting some relief, and maybe, in the silence of the night, finding an answer to question that haunted him: who is that man?
His wife Yva was fast asleep, exhausted. She’d just gotten up to give her daughter a bottle, then went right back to sleep without even realizing how uncomfortable it was, what with the heat and the mosquitoes. Yva didn’t complain. Yva rarely complained. And luckily didn’t ask too many questions. Which was quite convenient as far as that incident was concerned—the incident that still made him shiver sometimes, just thinking about it. Orélus looked at his daughter Natasha for a moment. She had come into his life a year ago and he’d promised himself he would give her a better life than his own. That incident had made him even more determined. And he could see the scene of her birth at the hospital once again. Since from now on everything was connected.
In his mind, Orélus went over that day, the third of July, for the nth time.
Just like every month, he was getting ready to leave for Port-au-Prince and go to the main office of the health organization he worked for, to turn in his report on the assignment he’d completed over the past month. He had visited every corner of the main towns of Bas Artibonite and meticulously filled out the questionnaires:
Age, sex, number of children, marital status, date of last visit to doctor, declaration of illnesses,
etc. He had slept very late the night before, in order to file the papers according to the organization’s guidelines. His employers liked him, and Orélus was very much attached to his job, which not only allowed him to feed his family (the beginning of dignity), but to pay for his younger sister’s computer studies and be generous to strangers who’d been pummeled by misfortune. His compassion had saved him on that third of July. It made him all the more aware of his own good fortune and he had no desire to lose it.
He’d had a hard time waking up that day and had almost run to the station where the trucks left for Port-au-Prince. They were all full already, and time was passing. He looked desperately at his watch several times. Then a friend he hadn’t seen for a few years walked over and jumped for joy when he spotted Orélus. Pierre had left Saint-Marc for the United States when he was a teenager. His school friends heard from him once or twice, then silence. Orélus was sociable and liked companionship. They embraced each other with mutual warmth. They exchanged the usual questions friends ask after a long absence, but Orélus couldn’t help looking intently at the trucks to see if luck was smiling on him at last. Pierre asked him what was making him so impatient. When Orélus explained that he needed to get to Port-au-Prince for his work, Pierre told him not to worry. A friend was going to drive to Port-au-Prince that morning and he was alone. Pierre called that friend on his cell and the man agreed to take Orélus with him. Orélus thanked Pierre warmly for putting an end to his anxiety.
Ten minutes later, Orélus was comfortably seated in a brand-new SUV with four-wheel drive. He immediately stopped worrying. He exchanged a few words with the driver, whose name was Dudley and spoke Creole with a strong English accent. Although the guy was driving extremely fast, Orélus was so relieved that with the help of the air conditioner, he dozed off after the first few minutes. He remembered being suddenly awakened by the squealing of the brakes on the asphalt and realizing that the driver had just dodged a truck speeding in the opposite direction. Orélus promised himself not to fall asleep anymore. He tensed up a bit. All the more so as he noticed Dudley glancing constantly at his rearview mirror, trying to keep the car behind them from passing. Orélus knew those drivers—all too many of them—who staked their honor on the wrong things. And risked their lives for totally childish reasons. He said to himself he’d rather get there fifteen minutes late, but alive. Orélus told Dudley in a tone neutral enough not to offend him that he wasn’t in that much of a rush and it would be a good idea to let the impatient madman on their heels pass them. Taking advantage of that moment, when Dudley wasn’t paying attention, the vehicle went ahead and passed them and, to Orélus’s great surprise, swung a quick right and blocked their car.
Three men got out, each with a gun in his hand. The first came over to the driver’s door and aimed his 9mm at Dudley’s head. He made him get out and sit in the backseat. He then sat down next to him, against the left door. Orélus thought it was a classic attack by an armed gang, as happens sometimes on these roads—until the moment when Dudley said, “Elien, what’s happening?” And Elien answered, “You’ll find out what’s happening soon enough.” So Dudley knew them. This left Orélus completely at a loss.
The second armed man had already walked around the other side of the vehicle. He asked Orélus to move to the back of the car, pushed him in right next to Dudley, and sat down against the right-hand door. The third man got behind the wheel and took off fast. Orélus had the feeling he had landed at the wrong place at the wrong time, and with the wrong person. He also knew that people sometimes lost their lives because of such unfortunate coincidences. They weren’t far from Titanyen canyon: all the ghastly stories about the place came back to him. Titanyen, an isolated garbage dump where organized gangs and politicians got rid of their unwanted corpses. Orélus thought of his daughter who would never know her father, and his wife, left helpless.
It was eight a.m. Two trucks, one coming from Port-au-Prince, the other going to the city, sped by them without noticing anything. He was given the order to lower his head and not raise it again unless one of them asked him to. Orélus lowered his head. From the questions they asked Dudley in a threatening, cold, sarcastic tone, like killers in a movie, Orélus became acutely aware that not only was he caught in the middle of some dirty business—some very dirty business—but he knew nothing about it.
“What did you do with the packages that were unloaded at Fort-Liberté? Where’s the money from the sale of the merchandise? This is the last time you’re gonna enjoy yourself with other people’s money. The party’s over—got it, Dudley? Over. Because, you know, the boss, he’s not happy. Like, really not happy. You thought you could be a wise guy, well, forget it. Take a deep breath, because you don’t have long to live.”
Then Orélus remembered a piece of news that had made the headlines two months back: a plane crashed in the middle of the countryside in the Fort-Liberté area and two SUVs arrived on the scene a few hours later to take away the cargo. So he was caught in an affair involving the drug cartels.
When they asked Dudley who his companion was, he answered without a tremor in his voice: Orélus had nothing to do with the whole thing, a friend had simply asked him to drive the guy to Port-au-Prince, and that was it. He hardly knew him. Orélus thought he was home free until one of the three men observed that as he had seen everything, he was becoming a potential witness. Orélus didn’t hear any response from the two others. Since he couldn’t see them, he imagined they must have made simple hand gestures to decide his fate. Orélus had a strong urge to pee in his pants. But he held it in and decided he had to keep up his strength so he could explain himself when the time came.
After another ten minutes, the car turned off to the left. There was no more asphalt, just a bumpy road heading far into the countryside. Orélus prayed to God and invoked the eighty-third psalm. After the tenth invocation, the car stopped suddenly. The driver honked three times and a gate opened. Orélus had no strength left to pray. Entering a gated property meant it was all over for him. The driver of the car that had followed Dudley from Saint-Marc stood before the open gates and told the three thugs in Dudley’s car to get out. The men dragged Dudley with them. But in a burst of frantic energy, he decided to resist. They shoved him brutally to the ground and ordered Orélus to keep his head down. Orélus heard words being exchanged between these men, violent blows raining down on Dudley, the dull sound of a bullet from a silencer, and a noise like someone clearing his throat. Dudley made the noise twice. Then nothing.
When Orélus heard the steps of someone coming over to the car, he said a last prayer to God and commended his daughter to Him. As the man reached the car door, he ordered Orélus to lift up his head. Orélus obeyed and told himself he would not be weak: he would die with dignity. He raised his head and saw the man who had been driving the other car, and seemed to be the boss of the squad, make a little gesture of surprise. Then he said, “You don’t recognize me?”
Orélus shook his head; no sound could come out of his mouth at that moment.
The man went on: “Do you have a baby who was born fourteen months ago?”
Orélus nodded.
“Do you remember someone coming into the waiting room in the hospital that night and asking for money to buy medicine for his wife, who was at death’s door?” The event returned to Orélus’s memory. “You’re the only one who took out his wallet and gave me money. You forgot my face but I will never forget yours. Get out of here right away or you’re a dead man. Don’t ask me any questions. I’ll say you ran away.”
Orélus grabbed the few sheets of his report within his reach.
“Hurry up. If the others come back, you’re dead.”
A part of the health survey would have to be redone.
The stranger opened the gate and Orélus ran out and never looked back. He kept moving until he met a passerby and asked where he was. The answer: “You’re at Santo 19.” He asked where he could catch a tap tap and followed the man’s directions. He crossed through town in a mental fog as if he’d come back from the grave, from the other side of life.
When he got to the office, he collapsed and told his fellow workers every detail of his misadventure. They gave him unsweetened coffee and herb tea to calm him down.
In the truck bringing him back to Saint-Marc that afternoon, he resolved to say nothing to his wife. Women talk too much. Even the least talkative end up talking. The experience he had just lived through must not be known in Saint-Marc.
Orélus met Pierre four days later, and when his friend asked him how things were going, Orélus thanked him warmly for helping him get to his appointment in Port-au-Prince on time. Pierre left without asking any more questions, without any particular emotion showing on his face. Orélus listened attentively to the news on the radio, hoping someone would talk about the incident he’d just lived through. But no, nothing. Absolutely nothing.
That night, Orélus stayed up until almost two a.m. A light breeze was coming in from the sea. He eventually went to bed without having solved what would be the enigma of his life from now on. Who was the man he happened to get a ride with in that SUV going to Port-au-Prince?