Haiti Noir (23 page)
BY
M
ARIE
K
ETSIA
T
HEODORE
-P
HAREL
Croix-des-Bouquets
T
he contrast of jet-black, knotted pubic hairs against the squirmy white objects confirmed for Moade, called Moah, that what she was seeing was not rice or lice, but maggots.
“Aunt Haba, do you think the man is dead?” Moah asked in a voice no more audible than the flapping of butterfly wings.
The hustle and bustle of the early-September morning in Croix-des-Bouquets was well underway. The man in question was lying still; his naked legs, naked ass, ashen penis, exposed for all of Croix-des-Bouquets to see. Moah lifted her gaze from the sprawling man’s scantily clad body and the tattered doctor’s lab coat. Leaves covered his forehead and hair. There was the matted fur of an unrecognizable animal next to the man. Flies swarmed the animal’s carcass.
Moah looked at her aunt who was wrapping her old, frayed scarf, the color of budding okra flowers, around her nose. Moah watched and admired her aunt’s long, slender fingers as Haba broke a stick from a nearby bush to poke the body. The man winced faintly. Haba flung the stick to the side and took a step back.
Slowly, a mud-clad hand arose from beneath the pile of leaves. It had a scar the size of a nickel between the thumb and the index finger. Another scar, like a miniature Earth, was centered in the middle of the man’s palm. The hand lifted up from the top of the body. Moah flinched as it flung the debris from the man’s face. Moah realized that her aunt had been squeezing her hand. She couldn’t feel her fingers. She looked at her aunt, perhaps for confirmation, permission, or condemnation; however, unlike Moah, Haba hadn’t focused on the dark patches of matted pubic hair. Instead, Haba noted the brown eyes sunk deep into the man’s head. Those eyes looked as if at anytime they might become submerged into some deeper place in his head.
The man stared back at Haba. His gaze narrowed slowly like the lens of an old camera. He smiled a decayed smile. In shock, Haba’s face closed as though choking. Her left eye and cheek twitched involuntarily. Haba’s eyes grew wide not with fear, but with seething anger. A boiling swell of rage climbed out from deep inside of her and poured out of her eyes.
Moah looked at the half-dead man and wondered about his identity. If she asked her aunt, Haba would ignore her or change the subject, like she always did when Moah asked about her father and mother. When really pressed for an answer, Aunt Haba would only say, “Isn’t it enough to have an aunt who loves you? Isn’t it marvelous to have a name like Moah, ‘the word’? The word today is obedience.”
The look Haba was giving the man at that moment was further proof that this was a subject not to be broached. It was as if Haba had seen a ghost. No, the devil. At least that was the look Moah would give the devil, she thought, if she ever saw him. It was an I-don’t-have-any-fucking-business-with-you look. While she stood there unable to move as everything seemed to go in slow-motion, the wind howled as if to echo the complaints of an oppressed world. The butterflies humped the wind because there were so few flowers in Croix-des-Bouquets.
Moah thought back to the crowd she had seen in that exact spot only a few hours before as she and her aunt had made their way to morning mass. Her aunt had avoided the throngs of people by crossing the street and cutting to rue Stenio Vincent. They had rushed past the Charlotin boys’ school, the massive khaki-colored walls of the military headquarters, then into the yard of Our Lady of the Rosary. Now Moah knew that the crowd must have been looking at the man too.
Moah assessed the situation, trying to ascertain its advantages. After all, in addition to her beauty, a quick mind had made her the object of desire for three old men. Even though this was something she was proud of, she knew at that moment that there would be no more fooling around with old men. There would be no more Mondays with Jacques who visited while Haba was at mass. Jacques who always brought five green bananas or plantains. And for that, Moah allowed him to cup her breast for five minutes. No more than that. She counted every second. He held her generous breasts in his wide, rough palms, as if they were some mythic goose eggs or gifts from God. Afterward, he would brush her cheek with his index finger, put on his hat, and walk his long, lean body down the winding path back to Beudet where he lived in a small shack on a small farm.
Equally, there would be no time for old Pierre-Paul who paid her two gourdes for a medicinal foot bath and her listening ear. He talked of his exploits as a bodyguard during the olden days of the Paul Magloire presidency.
“Magloire was the best president because he loved to party with the people. This made my job very hard. I was shot at least five times when I was protecting him.” He repeated the same facts every ten minutes, as if he were meeting her for the first time. The story she most liked to hear him tell was how her town got the name Croix-des-Bouquets.
“There’s a curse of violence that constantly looms over this place. It’s from long before Croix-des-Bouquets was the famous place that allowed the slaves to seize Port-au-Prince during the Revolution because of how they massacred the French. There was a famous battle fought right here. However, long before that, it was the cradle of secret societies. Open your eyes and see. Wives go missing. Husbands die young. The curse I’m talking about is from a love affair that ended with a cross and a bouquet by the side of the old road at the onset of colonialism. This is how people came to know and name the town. There was a cross by the side of a road from Port-au-Prince. This cross was surrounded by a bouquet of flowers that never died. It marks the body of a beloved, unjustly killed lover.”
She never challenged Pierre-Paul’s assertion that the town grew from a foot-carved path from Port-au-Prince to a vibrant small town where centuries later the Duvaliers had built a lavish ranch. Pierre-Paul would gloat and say, “This ranch also fell under the curse.”
Pierre-Paul also loved to have her clean his guns and taught her how to hold them. He was surprised at how naturally it came to her. She could now shoot a bird from a hundred feet.
However, right now what concerned Moah was that she couldn’t stop playing visions of that half-dead man’s pubic hair in her head. She was sure that those visions would keep her away from her retired priest, Father John, who never returned to Grand Marais, Minnesota, where he was from and of which he talked extensively. He no longer attended mass at Our Lady of the Rosary either. He spent his days gossiping and playing bezig. When she picked up his laundry for washing, she would have to ignore the dollar that he always forgot in his pants pocket, and which she always replaced with a pair of her unwashed underwear.
Moah was completely turned off from sex after looking at that half-dead man. The sight of the man’s limp, grayish, flaky, peeling penis fixed itself in her brain. Over and over she saw the maggots crawling around his pubic area. At that moment, she could have just joined a convent.
Later and for the remainder of the day, Haba stayed in bed with a headache and a mild fever. Soon after she had sent Moah to the garden to collect leaves, Haba’s best friend, her cousin Clotide—whom she called Titide—flung the door of the one-room house open. Clotide’s voice was the perfect match for her flamboyant personality. Her dark brown flesh jiggled under her orange muumuu with bold yellow sunflowers. Moah crouched under the window, waiting to hear what the two women would say as they lay next to each other, chatting in Haba’s bed.
“Come on, Haba. You have to talk about it. They found him hugging a dead dog, his only friend since they let him out of jail three years ago.”
“Three years ago? He’s been out for three years? Where’s he been?” Haba turned onto her back to look at Clotide’s face.
“They say mostly roaming around like a lost soul. You wouldn’t know that now. Within two hours, Lamercie had found out and sent her people to collect him from the side of the road where he and his dog had been dumped. She’s totally cleaned him up. Two of the girls who serve under her told me they saw him and he looks great. I guess Lamercie finally got to him. I guess, judging by his state, her magic worked. It’s like a second Lazarus.”
“That stuff’s all bullshit. She’s got no more power than the fart I’m about to lay if you don’t leave me alone.”
Clotide reached over Haba’s head to the makeshift table where there was a pail of water. She grabbed the cloth, squeezed it, and wiped her cousin’s face with it.
“It’s been sixteen years since the incident and thirteen of those he spent in jail and you still can’t forgive him?”
“Forgiveness is not for the giving; the offender has to earn it.”
Haba tried to do what she usually did when she was in church. She tried to block out her surroundings and visualize God. Everyone saw her as a devout person. Last week Sister Imadresse stopped her after church to tell her how serene she looked during mass and asked her if she ever saw God during her peaceful moments.
Haba attended three services a day if they had them. But people had no idea that church was where she went to curse God. She knew for sure that God would be in church and he couldn’t avoid her there; so she went religiously. In her mind she’d called him all the bad words she knew at least a thousand times. She spent days making up words and thinking of bad thoughts to throw at God.
“I heard he named the dog after you, Habakkuk.”
“He should thank the missionary who convinced my illiterate mother to accept that ugly name in exchange for a bowl of food.”
“Haba, don’t be so mean. I heard he really loved that dog. He used to save the scraps of cornmeal they gave him and feed the dog through the hole in the wall of his cell. And the dog never left his side. That’s loyalty.”
“Something he knows nothing about.”
“You can’t blame the man. They arrested him and didn’t even give him a trial.”
“Titide, if you came to torture me, it’s working.”
“Okay, answer me this one question and I’ll go away.”
Haba lifted the compress from her head to look at Titide’s round, brown face.
“Tell me: when you saw him, didn’t your heart beat faster? Didn’t your knees go weak even though he was completely filthy?”
It was a question she wasn’t ready to answer. Titide hovered over her waiting. Moah stooped closer to the window to hear, but Haba didn’t answer it for fear it would unleash all the feelings she had locked away for sixteen years. She couldn’t stop her mind from going to those days that she had folded away. She’d folded them the way a widow folds a shirt or a pair of pants previously owned by her dearly departed.
She tried everything to keep her mind still, but it was like a raging bull, charging and pushing to let the memories flood over her body. Her mind went back to the first summer of nursing school. She had been unable to pay the tuition and had returned home to Croix-des-Bouquets from Port-au-Prince. At that time, she had been hoping the Church would help her go back. At that time, Father John from Grand Marais, Minnesota, was young and committed to educating the people, so he told her to come work at the dispensaire, the community health center that the white missionaries had built. At that time, it was the only hospital-like establishment in Croix-des-Bouquets. That’s where she’d met Colin Didier. She hadn’t known anything about him except that he had been sent to medical school in Cuba and he had actually returned. He spoke Spanish and French with as much ease as Creole, but when he spoke Creole, there was a song in his voice. His words dragged—an indication that he was not from La Plaine. He was from the North where people didn’t speak Creole; they sang Creole.
Now she was remembering the perspiration that rolled behind her ears as she assisted him in cleaning the gunshot wound of a “troublemaker” brought to the clinic. In those days, the less you knew about someone’s injury, the better. The three hundred and ninety-two days that followed proved to be sweeter than icing on cake. There were stolen kisses and fondling in the storage depot. She danced for him in the river as water rolled over her body. Afterward, he wrote her a poem and the first line said,
Dieu sourit quand l’africaine danse.
God smiles when a black girl dances. She remembered the kisses on her toes. He borrowed words from that golden-tongued bard Francis Cabrel to serenade her with his guitar. Indeed, he drew from the wells of her eyes to write love letters. Then there was the way he made love to her breasts. He wanted to wait until they were married to penetrate her. But each day they came closer and closer, until they couldn’t wait anymore, and like a deluge they drowned in the rhythm of each other’s body.
Then one evening, on day three hundred eighty-nine, she sat on her veranda shelling Congo peas with her then pregnant sister-in-law Mimose, and God let the world step on her throat. Her brother had been on a two-month contract to cut sugarcane in the Dominican Republic. That night, a woman dressed all in purple, with enough jewelry to sink a ship, accompanied by two men stood at the gate about ten feet from the veranda.
“Is this where a certain Habakkuk lives?”
Haba’s heart skipped. Very few people knew her real name. Outside of family—her brother, sister-in-law, her cousin Clotide, two aunts in Port-au-Prince and their five children— only Colin knew. She wondered if something had happened to him. She put the pan down and went to open the gate. The woman and her entourage entered.
“Would you like some coffee or water, miss?”
“Madame Lamercie Didier,” the woman said, with emphasis on the last name. “And no, thank you for offering. I don’t intend to stay long. I just wanted to see what the slut who refuses to leave my husband alone looks like.”
Haba felt faint and grabbed on to the post closest to her. Mimose dropped the pan and came to stand next to her.
The woman continued: “Be careful. I made him. I sent him to medical school for my purposes. No small-town tramp is going to take him from me. Back off. I hear he proposed to you. Be careful or the dress you marry him will be the dress you’re buried in.”