Haiti Noir (24 page)
Haba stayed home and refused to return to nursing school even after Father John had found two months’ tuition for her. By that time, she knew she was pregnant. The torture didn’t end with Mrs. Lamercie’s threats. There were dead animals found in her yard. A snake in her bed.
Colin didn’t let up either. Every night he played a new song at her gate. She would go outside and throw rocks at him. Once she hit him on the head. He simply kneeled and asked her to do it again. He even brought more rocks for her to hit him with, but she couldn’t do it. She fell into his arms and they were both wracked with sobs not knowing what to do.
Then, on day three hundred ninety two, while Haba, still in her first trimester, was napping and her sister-in-law was in her last days, a little girl brought a plate of food from Mimose’s aunt who sold at the market. Mimose couldn’t resist. After eating this food intended for Haba, Mimose spent two days throwing up blood and she became so dehydrated that the baby couldn’t be saved. The young girl who had brought the food was never located.
One evening soon thereafter, Lamercie walked past the front of the house and sang a song that made Haba’s brother Jules run after her with his machete. It took about eight people to peel him off of her.
“You’ve signed your death certificate,” Lamercie had said.
The next night, in front of Our Lady of the Rosary, in front of the usual joke-seeking crowd, Colin announced that Lamercie was not his wife and asked Jules for Haba’s hand in marriage. Jules, his head and heart numb, accepted. The next day, Father John conducted the ceremony. Haba moved into the one-room apartment he had rented above the clinic. They were going to stay there until the baby was born and then move to Léogâne where he had received a position at a new hospital.
Then, one night, there was an emergency he had to attend to, and he didn’t return. The next day, the police paraded him up rue Stenio Vincent en route to the jail for booking. Even before he had reached the destination, people were whispering that the police had found him next to the dead body of a thirteen-year-old girl. The police said that the child had been raped. Haba didn’t dare show up at the jail and they sent him straight to Port-au-Prince, which had a jail fit only for the devil. This had all taken place sixteen years ago, but it felt to Haba like it happened yesterday.
In the days following her encounter with the half-dead, filth-ridden Colin, he came to Haba the way thread comes through the eye of a needle. Every shadow and scurrying animal was Colin. She wondered if he would come seeking her. As Clotide liked to remind her, “You are still his bona fide wife.”
After two months of jumping at every noise outside of her house and running from shadows, Haba finally started to relax. She returned to her gardening and even resumed tutoring the neighborhood children in her home, as she had been doing for several years.
One day after a particularly hard-headed third-grader left, Haba was reviewing her notes for the next student when a pair of shiny brown shoes appeared in front of her. Slowly, her eyes climbed up the beige pants to the matching linen shirt tucked in by a belt of that same reddish-brown tone as the shoes. Her gaze froze there because she knew what the head looked like.
Colin lifted her chin so softly that she couldn’t pull away. Slowly, he dropped down and kneeled in front of her. Their foreheads touched the way they used to. They remained in this position for a great while—just drinking in one another.
Once inside, their bodies spoke an inexplicable language that only they could explain. It apologized. It told of the aches, the yearnings, the angers that had built up over the years. It screamed of joy and forgiveness. It was a rhythmic dance that Haba imagined would make God smile.
That same afternoon, after school, as Moah rounded the corner of rue Stenio Vincent, cut through the closed toy factory, now a soccer field, and pranced the hundred yards to her fence, she bumped into Tiboguy. He was somebody’s child. Somebody with a lot of children but no one could really remember who. He ate at any “aunty’s” house, anyone who would feed him for whatever chore they needed done. His stomach protruded over his dingy Superman underwear which he was too old to wear.
“Seems like your auntie’s husband has come home to see her.”
“Mind your own business, Tiboguy. How do you know all this?”
“I saw him there on his knees making love faces.”
“Get out of here or I’ll beat you to a pulp.”
Tiboguy ran. At a safe distance, he spread his butt cheeks at her. Moah pretended to chase after him, but when he had gained a good distance, she took the footpath behind the marketplace and headed for Pierre-Paul’s house.
She found him on his veranda, in his green rocking chair.
“Moah, Mo pa mwen, why are you so beautiful? You just want to break an old man’s heart, make me wish I could be thirty years younger.”
“You were never young. Why would you want to be young, old man? Where’s the pail? I want to give you a foot bath.”
“You know where—under the bed. The leaf vendor brought some nice, fresh medicinal leaves. They are on top of the table. Use those cause I’ve got a lot of swelling today.”
Moah went straight for his drawer. She knew he kept money there. Lots of money. There were medals, gold, jewelry, and two old guns. She knew he would not miss anything. She took what she needed and quickly grabbed the bucket.
“Today, I’ve got a story for you. This is going to make you believe the curse of Croix-des-Bouquets.”
“Does it involve you?” she asked.
“No, put this picture in your mind. It’s the heyday of the Duvalier regime, when we were flirting with Cuba and the United States acted like a married man whose mistress was cheating on him. The political air was intense. Many young men had gone to study medicine in Cuba. There was a brilliant young guy who grew up a few blocks from here. His mother was of questionable vocation and thus no one knew his father. He was handsome and smart, so, like we do here in Haiti, he became everybody’s child. When he was about fifteen or sixteen, his mother died. He was taken in by the manbo next door.”
“Wait a minute, does this boy have a name?’
“Yes, he does, but it doesn’t matter because this is your story, my story, our story. He was about twenty when I heard that the manbo married him to èzili. He became the groom of èzili. Whether he knew or understood the implication, I’m not sure, because he fell head over heels in love with a local girl. She was nice. She had been sent to Port-au-Prince to study nursing, but once she fell in love with the boy, she never gave nursing another thought. The boy made a fatal mistake and married her. The manbo became raving mad. She killed the girl’s brother, sister-in-law, and their unborn baby. Then one day soon after, in the manbo’s compound, a young girl was raped and killed. Even though the young doctor was nowhere near the girl or the site, the police arrested him. He spent sixteen years away from the woman he loved and his baby daughter. Finally one day, he finds his way back to her. The manbo found out and killed them both.”
“This happened in Croix-des-Bouquets?”
“No, this is
happening
in Croix-des-Bouquets.”
“This is the best story you’ve ever told me.” Moah worked methodically as she nursed Pierre-Paul’s swollen limbs.
Everyone knew that Lamercie was going to kill Colin and Haba. She left her compound, machete in hand, her large blue dress flapping in the wind. At first it was the neighborhood kids who followed her. Then the neighborhood gossips. Pretty soon, all of those who lived in the bouk with nothing to do followed her past the cemetery. They followed her past Our Lady of the Rosary, Charlotin, and onto the busy rue Stenio Vincent. She cut through the yard of the old abandoned factory. By the time she got to the front gate of her destination, she was a woman possessed. She pounded on the half wall that held the makeshift gate. She trampled the patch of wild flowers struggling to hold on to the undernourished soil. Somehow, through it all, she heard the clicking of a gun. The crowd looked up.
Some will say that she wore her hat crookedly like some cowboy out of an old western movie. Some will say that Lamercie raised the machete intending to fling it at her. But everyone saw Moah raise the old gun and shoot straight for Lamercie’s heart. Everyone gawked as Lamercie thrashed like a chicken at a Vodou ceremony. Six of Pierre-Paul’s old bullets had penetrated her blue-clad body.
A week later, two gentlemen with serious looks on their faces claimed they had heard about some gunshots and had come to investigate.
“I was shooting birds,” Moah said. They paused; looked at her pretty face and her perky breast peeking from her sundress. Then they commented on how beautiful and tall the flowers next to the gate were. The flowers and a small cross had been planted over a tall mound at the gate. Although the men had long legs, they almost trampled the mound and its flowers when they tried to enter the yard. As they left, one of them kept repeating, “My, how do you grow such lovely flowers?” Moah simply smiled.
The police canvassed the neighborhood looking for witnesses who might know something about why Lamercie had vanished. No one had seen anything or knew anything. But everyone agreed with the officers that the flowers at the Didier family’s gate were the prettiest they’d ever seen in Croix-des-Bouquets.
I
zzy Goldstein felt in his heart that he was really Haitian, although no one who knew him understood why he felt that way.
“Izzy, you’re Jewish,” his mother would say with sorrow showing on her brow as she examined the Vodou artifacts displayed in his Miami Beach apartment. He had a particular affection for Damballah, the snake spirit, and there were steel sculptures, beaded flags, and bright acrylic-on-masonite paintings of snakes. He had thought of getting a terrarium and keeping actual snakes, but then there would be the responsibility of feeding them.
His original connection with Damballah began when he became convinced the spirit was Jewish. True, he was a lwa of Haitian Vodou and of African origin, but when not a snake he was often portrayed as Moses, and there were several richly colored chromolithographs of Moses holding the Ten Commandments on Izzy’s wall that he had bought in Little Haiti. This was little comfort to his mother since Moses was shown with horns. But even worse, from his mother’s point of view, was the other Damballah poster in which he was depicted as St. Patrick dressed like a Catholic cardinal with a Celtic cross and snakes at his feet.
Izzy argued that the name Damballah ended with an “h” and that Creole words never have a final “h.” Hebrew words, on the other hand, frequently do. His mother did not find this argument convincing. He also had an ason, a gourd covered with a net of snake vertebrae, that he had bought in Little Haiti too, and had the habit of shaking it when making a particular point, to the general annoyance of friends and family.
Also in his apartment was a picture of an admiral. This was in fact Agwe, who Goldstein tried to consult regularly because he was in charge of the sea. The sea was important in Izzy’s life. He had learned to sail in small boats handling a mainsail and a jib across Biscayne Bay, running to a causeway just so he could go beating in the wind to the other end of the bay. He tried to get away from the sea by going to college in Wisconsin, but after three semesters he dropped out and joined the merchant marines and spent five years on freighters across the Atlantic.
Five years of that was enough, and he was back in Miami trying to find a direction for his life.
Damballah offered fertility, rain, and wisdom. Yet it was only the last of these that interested Izzy Goldstein. Back in Miami he kept reading about Haiti. Then he started to go to Little Haiti, eat griyo, fried pork, and bannann peze in the restaurants and learn about Vodou. He even started going to ceremonies late at night. He wanted to be possessed by a lwa. He wanted Damballah but would have accepted whichever one took him. Only it reminded him of that period before his bar mitzvah when he would wrap himself in his tallis, close his eyes, and bob his body up in down in rhythmic rapture as he recited ancient Hebrew and Aramaic, languages—to be honest—he understood even less than he did Haitian Creole. But no matter how hard he had tried, the Hebrew God did not stir within him, and now, neither did the lwas.
At the lunches in the little restaurants, at the late-night ceremonies, at the clubs where groups played konpa and merengue and the people danced so perfectly while hardly moving at all, he asked,
What can I do for Haiti?
No idea came to him. There was no wisdom from Damballah. The lwas were as silent as Yahweh. Until one day …
A 110-foot rusted Honduran freighter was for sale for so cheap that he could buy it with the money he had saved from the merchant marines, with enough left over for the repairs. The engine only needed a little work, which he could do himself, the shaft was straight, the screw was almost new, and he only had to spend a small amount on scraping and repairing the hull. A forward pump needed a little work. And then Izzy Goldstein was captain of a freighter.
He was going to name it
Damballah,
but then a better idea came to him in Little Haiti on a block of two-story yellow buildings shining hot in the Florida sun. He could form an organization that brought relief to Haiti on his freighter. What kind of relief? Doctors? Medicine? Food? Tools? What should he bring them? He went to the Jeremie, a little bar where he could find his friend DeeDee.
DeeDee, whose real name was Dieudonné, was a light-skinned Haitian with graying hair. He kept moving back to Haiti and then back to Miami, back and forth as regimes changed and he was in or out of favor. DeeDee took him to a lawyer in a gleaming white office on Brickell Avenue. The lawyer’s name was Smith. He was tall and lean and had his hair slicked back in that way that had become fashionable for men with that kind of straight hair. He was from the rare group known in Miami as Anglos. This was a negative grouping. If you did not speak Spanish and you weren’t black and you weren’t Haitian and you weren’t Jewish, you were an Anglo. Smith wore powder blue–striped seersucker and this worried Izzy. He never trusted men who wore seersucker suits. Izzy was surprised that a lawyer who specialized in Haitian clients would have such a luxurious office, but whatever reservations he had about the lawyer were laid to rest when he told Izzy that he was not going to charge him. “I’ll just do it for Haiti.”
Wasn’t that wonderful? The lawyer showed him how to establish a nonprofit organization with tax-exempt status and a fund-raising program. Izzy called his organization National Assistance for a New Haiti and had the letters
NANH
painted on the hull of his freighter. Haitians pronounced it like the Creole word
nen
, which means
dwarf
and made them laugh, but Izzy Goldstein didn’t know anything about that.
What he did know was that thousands of dollars from concerned Americans were contributed to NANH, and with that money DeeDee loaded the freighter at night. He said it was too hot during the day. When they were set to leave, Izzy was surprised to see his deck stacked high with used cars, bicycles, and even a few Coca-Cola vending machines.
“I don’t know, DeeDee. Is this the kind of stuff they need in Haiti?”
“They need everything in Haiti,” the man replied with a big sweep of his arms. “Even bicycles.”
“But shouldn’t we bring medicine?”
“We are gonna do that too. But you have to be careful with medicine.”
“How do you mean?”
“Not everybody is happy to see white people come with medicine.” Izzy looked worried; he didn’t like being reminded of his color. “We will go to Ti Morne Joli and Madame Dumas will explain everything, man,” added DeeDee with a reassuring smile. The lawyer had talked about Madame Dumas too. She was going to be important for NANH.
They pulled up the anchor and made their way around the curve of the Miami River into the bay Izzy had always loved, and set a course for Gonaïves, Haiti. In the pilothouse, Izzy Goldstein was too excited to sleep. Help for Haiti was on the way.
When Haitians die, it is Agwe’s work to carry them across the ocean back to Africa. But Agwe didn’t always have to do this work. In ancient times, when Haiti was still connected to Africa, life was much easier for Agwe and, in fact, for all the old lwas. In those days, all the lwas and all the animals of Africa could easily walk to and from Haiti. Haiti had lions and elephants and tigers and giraffes and leopards. The forests were thick with vegetation and the tree branches were heavy with every kind of fruit. But that was in the old days.
Gonaïves looked white under the hot sun with a black sky behind it filled with rain that would not fall. It was even hot at sea, and it got hotter as they approached the stone and cinder-block ramparts.
The quay below was chaos. There were trucks and cars, but mostly large handcarts and children chasing them, hoping for something that dropped. The port official boarded and Izzy Goldstein told him it was “the
NANH
from Miami,” and the official, hearing “the nen from Miami,” smiled. Izzy supposed that the man was laughing at his French. The official said something in Creole and Izzy looked confused, and then the man said in very good English, “How much are you gonna pay to dock here?”
DeeDee took over and Izzy was led by a deckhand down to the crowd, and in the middle of it he was introduced to the most beautiful man he had ever seen. Jobo was tall, broadshouldered, lean, and muscular, and his skin had the satiny luster of burnished wood, perhaps a very dark walnut. He escorted Izzy to a polished white Mercedes that clearly did not belong there in the ramshackle port.
Jobo seemed a pleasant young man, there was a sweetness to him, but when he sat in the driver’s seat and turned the key, he was transformed. With his fist he pounded ferocious blasts of the car horn and left no doubt that anyone in his way would soon be under his tires. The crowd parted and they were on their way, climbing only slightly as they left the steamy dilapidated city and entered the last green village on the edge of a bone-colored Saharan landscape that rolled on and on like a sea.
Again Jobo honked the horn insistently in front of an iron gate, which, to the great excitement of Izzy, was fashioned into a swarm of black metal snakes. A boy appeared, and with every ounce of his small body managed to push the gate open. They entered a lush tropical world of ponds and fountains and green and orange broad-leafed plants and drooping magenta bougainvillea and coral-colored hibiscus sticking out their tongues suggestively. Rising above this forest were highpitched roofs and wide balconies.
They got out of the vehicle and stepped up to a wide, high-ceilinged porch with a tiled floor and large potted plants. Between two lazy banana bushes was a tall cage about two yards square. Inside was a leopard, lean with angry yellow eyes and ears cocked back and fur like silken fabric in black and rust and ocher. The cat was pacing back and forth, as though exercising to keep in shape. But Izzy couldn’t help thinking about himself. He was hoping someone was about to offer him a tall, cold drink.
* * *
When Haiti was sent away, many of the lwas—including Damballah, èzili, Legba, and Agwe—went as well, but most of the animals stayed in Africa. However, the goddess of love, èzili Freda, kept one leopard because she could not resist beautiful things. She wanted to keep the leopard the same way that she kept closets full of beautiful dresses and fine jewelry. The leopard tried to run away, so she kept it in a pink-jeweled cage.
Jobo ushered Izzy inside, holding open a large glass door that did not fit with the rest of the house. Izzy’s body instantly hardened to a tense knot. It was as though he had walked into a refrigerator, possibly a freezer. He was not sure but thought he saw traces of vapor from his breath. A furry red creature glided toward him speaking the same formal and emotionless French of his ninth grade teacher who had always called him Pierre because she said there was no way to say Izzy in French.
“Bonjour, bienvenue. Comment allez-vous?” she said with a smile made of wood. She was wrapped in a thick red fox coat. Her body stuck out at angles, a hard thin body. Her straightened black hair was swept up on her head. She wore shiny dark-purple lip gloss with an even darker liner. Her green eyes were also traced in black, which matched the carefully painted polish on her long nails filed to severe points. All this dark ornamentation on her gaunt face made her skin look pale with a flat finish, like gray cardboard.
On one finger was a very large emerald that was close to matching her eyes, and when she held her long hand to her face, the stone appeared to be a third eye. She would have been attractive except that everything about her seemed hard. Even her face was boney. Maybe, Izzy thought, she understood this and wore the fur to try to appear softer.
She turned to Jobo and ordered him in French to fetch a cold bottle, which was exactly what Izzy wanted to hear. To Izzy it seemed odd—here he was, trying to learn Creole—that a Haitian would speak to another in French, even though Jobo answered only in Creole. Izzy soon realized that she also spoke nearly perfect American English. So who was the French for? Even when she spoke English, she punctuated everything with “N’est-ce pas?”
Jobo returned with two very long crystal champagne flutes and a bottle of champagne, which he opened with the craftsmanship of a well-trained wine steward. It was cold and bubbly with a flush of rose like the blush on her protruding cheekbones, though probably more natural.
“Pink champagne, n’est-ce pas?” she said. “Don’t you love pink champagne?”
“èzili’s drink,” said Izzy, who knew that the goddess loves luxury and her favorite color is pink. The smile flew off her face like a popped button, leaving Izzy to wonder what he had said that was wrong.
She offered him a building near the port that he could use as the NANH warehouse, although when he said “NANH warehouse,” she smiled. She could also provide a staff for distribution of the goods he brought in so that he simply had to bring them in and the rest would be taken care of. She asked nothing for this service, simply explaining, “I am Haitian and I love my people.” He was moved but he thought he detected a certain angry glow in Jobo’s eyes while she was speaking.
“All I ask, mon cher …” She paused and he thought maybe she was going to ask about aid to a favorite cause. Which in fact may have been the case. “Gasoline, N’est-ce pas?”
“Gasoline?”
“Mais, oui. Beaucoup, beaucoup. I will tell you how many barrels.”
“But, ah, Madame Dumas?” He was now so cold his teeth were chattering.
“Oui,” she said softly like a kiss.
“How do I justify spending relief money like that?”
“Ah-bas, c’est tout correct, n’est-ce pas. It is an operating expense, n’est-ce pas? It’s for my generators,” and she moved her green eyes across the ceiling. “This takes a lot of gasoline, n’est-ce pas? And then there are the freezers for the meat, n’est-ce pas?”
He supposed that she was keeping meat for the village and that would be a worthwhile thing to subsidize. Far safer than leaving meat out in this tropical heat. Although you could keep food fresh forever in this living room.
“As a matter of fact, I am going to buy a freezer compartment for your ship. You can bring down meat.”