Haiti Noir Part 2

by Edwidge Danticat

  In a market basket near the door, draped with colored netting like a Christmas parcel, their son Léonty breathed easily in sleep. He was nearly two years old and had to curl his legs under him to fit into the basket, but he needed the protection of the net because mosquito bites had caused his fever; mosquitoes were still whining in the close humid air of the room, though the light was growing quickly. Magloire turned back the net for a moment to look at his son’s face. It seemed to him that the fever had passed, though he had not been able to find money to buy medicine.

  In the yard outside the back door there was clean water in the white enamel bowl. Magloire used a little of it to wash and brush his teeth. The whispering of the broom had stopped and he straightened up to see his mother standing over a cluster of scrawny hens, holding a scant handful of cracked corn in one hand, irresolutely.

  Presently she scattered half for the hens and returned the rest to the slack cloth bag. Her deep-set eyes passed over him without stopping. Magloire knew that later in the day she would pound the remainder of the corn and mix it with a greater quantity of dirt to make small cakes—not very nourishing but able for a little while to block the most cutting pangs of hunger. Some passersby might purchase them. If he could, he would buy green coffee beans at market and a little charcoal so that his mother might roast the beans in her iron caldron and pound them in her mortar if the customer desired. There was some profit to be made preparing coffee.

  The bare-swept area of their yard climbed sharply up the jagged backside of Morne du Cap. On the high ground, propped on stones beneath a stand of bamboo, were two gas generators Magloire had taken for repair. He was trained as mechanic, electrician, plumber, refrigerator repairman, and could also drive trucks, guide tourists, and pilot small boats (in one case all the way to Miami). But lately no one could be found to purchase any of these skills. The two generators ran smoothly now but their owners would not pay to recover them, so Magloire was simply holding them hostage. This situation reminded him of a story he had heard from the capital: some zenglendo had summoned a man to shine their shoes, then kidnapped him when he was done, though the most they could raise for a ransom was twenty dollars.

  VEN DOLA. Shaking off the thought of the kidnapping, he walked through the house, pulled on a shirt, and came out onto the street. Through the alley that cut down to the waterfront, the rising sun blazed off the surface of the harbor. From the neighboring bar curled a stale odor of last night’s frying. Magloire’s stomach fisted. Squinting a little in the brilliance of the light, he walked through the alley to the edge of the breakwater and stood breathing in the clean salt air. Men called to each other from a couple of small boats going out to fish. Rope creaked against a makeshift mast as a sail bellied full, and from behind him Magloire could hear the steady hollow thump of his mother’s mortar. It was said that one should take ten deep breaths each day before the sea.

  Doctor Oliver drifted to a halt in the public square before the cathedral, a madman standing bare-headed under the scorching noonday sun. Once there had been shade trees in this place, but those were plowed under in some renovation and now there was nothing but bare flagstones and the statues of the national heroes, the metal ones looking as if they might melt. There were no people about on the square though a few had pressed themselves into tiny pools of shadow under the lintels of the church across the way.

  In the southwest corner of the square was a new monument Doctor Oliver had not seen before, a different style from the venerable statues: three curving husks of polished aluminum, grouped together and standing about man-high. When he approached he saw there were inscriptions on the inner curves; the sculpture was arranged so that he had to step inside the grouping to try to read them. The effect was obscurely menacing, like standing inside some sort of iron maiden that had not yet been completely shut. Doctor Oliver did not feel well. He needed to take off his teardrop sunglasses to read and the burst of reflected light worsened his headache, which might have been brought on by sun or by early stages of narcotic withdrawal. The inscriptions were in Creole, which he had trouble puzzling out; he was more functional in French.

  Gradually he absorbed the idea that each silvery husk memorialized a martyr of the Revolution who had died on this spot. Doctor Oliver recognized their three names from histories he had read. One had been burned at the stake and the other two broken on the wheel. This information seemed to be borne to him by some sort of voice-over narration, but surely that could not be real. Yet there was a Creole phrase being repeated in an angry monotone: Blan! Pa gade dokiman m! And a person saying it, a long scarecrow who’d detached himself from a niche of shade at the corner of the church and was walking toward Doctor Oliver in a jittery stride, obsessively repeating the words the doctor now understood to mean, Foreigner! Don’t look at my documents!

  Doctor Oliver put his sunglasses back on but that did not make him feel any safer. He felt dizzy and sick and unsure of himself. Normally this part of town was perfectly safe, but there were always exceptional days. The week before, an election had gone wrong somehow and since then demonstrators had sealed off the approaches to the town with burning barricades. Though those phenomena existed comfortably far away from the central square, the aggression hurling itself his way now seemed to partake of the same spirit. Doctor Oliver opened his dry mouth and found he could not frame a placating phrase in the right language.

  Then someone else had put a hand under his elbow and was steering him gently away, and at the same time speaking to the other man with the calm fluency Doctor Oliver had been unable to summon: Oke monchè, nou prale, nou pa gen pwoblèm ak sa wi?

  They turned a corner and there was shade. Immediately Doctor Oliver felt a little better. With his free hand he checked the nearly empty pill bottle in his pants pocket. He was in the company of Charles Morgan, a white American like himself, known to the locals as Charlie Chapo. Their soft tongues elided the “r” and took the crunch out of the consonants, turning Charlie into Shawlie.

  “You don’t want to be out in this with no hat,” Charlie Chapo was telling him now. They passed the grilled gateway of the Hotel International. Charlie’s battered Montero was parked across the street, and in the heavy dust on the back window someone had scrawled the name MAGLOIRE. An air conditioner rumbled in a window of the hotel restaurant and Doctor Oliver automatically moved toward the door, but Charlie nudged him past, to the “popular” bar beside it, which catered to the less prosperous locals and had no air-conditioning.

  “You’ll get pneumonia in that cold,” Charlie said, “come in here first,” and he assisted Doctor Oliver when he tripped on the step into the popular bar, which was, unusually, stone empty. Charlie rapped on a hatch in the side wall and someone passed two bottles of beer through it, releasing a puff of frigid air before the hatch slapped shut.

  Charlie Chapo took off his hat, which was the reason for his sobriquet, and set it on the chest-high counter where both men leaned. It was a nondescript straw hat of the sort the peasants wore, shaped like a Panama and as finely woven, with heavy sweat stains at the brow. Beneath the hat Charlie had, as always, a red bandanna covering his head and tightly knotted at the nape of his neck. The ensemble made it look as if he were affecting Indiana Jones, though if asked Charlie would say that he’d adopted the rig from pictures of the colonial planters and that it worked very well to protect his head—from heat and sun, presumably, though Doctor Oliver also knew that the red head-rag meant something or other among practitioners of Vodou, of whom Charlie Chapo was rumored to be one. At the embassy they sneered that he had “gone native,” which struck Doctor Oliver as peculiarly quaint in the twenty-first century, a line out of Somerset Maugham.

  “What’s the good word?” Doctor Oliver said.

  Charlie Chapo released a dusty chuckle. “We’re not dead yet.” He drank from his bottle of Prestige and snapped a lighter to a Comme Il Faut cigarette. “Nou lèd men nou la!”

  “Have you been out of town?”

 
“Not possible, monchè. The soulèvman’s still up and running.”

  At this, Doctor Oliver’s withdrawal pangs got sharper. “I thought those things were only supposed to last a day.”

  “Supposed to,” Charlie said. There was no electricity in the bar, which was shadowy as a cave. Charlie stepped to tip ash through the blazing doorway and took a quick look up and down the street. “Full moon’s coming,” he said. “They’ll start the ceremonies on Morne Calvaire. That might shut it down if it was local but word is those guys on the barricades came up from Port-au-Prince.”

  “Who’s running them?”

  Charlie shrugged. “There’s a hundred stories.”

  “That guy who was after me on the square,” Doctor Oliver began. “He was, I don’t know, more possessive than usual.” Possessed was another word that came to him. As if the whole person was owned, invaded, by the phrase he kept repeating.

  “There’s some strange stuff swirling around today.” Charlie leaned forward, pushing his sunglasses up above the dustcrusted rim of his red bandanna, exposing to Doctor Oliver his tired eyes. “They killed La Reine D’Ayiti, did you know that? In the Place Montarcher.”

  “What?” Place Montarcher was a smaller square, only a few blocks uphill from the cathedral. Nothing bad happened there. “In daylight? Who?”

  Charlie Chapo was nodding slowly. “I meant to tell you that. Chimè.”

  That, Doctor Oliver knew, was the current word for zenglendo or bandits or occasionally lawless persons who might sometimes engage in political thuggery, abruptly materializing, then fading away. Those on the barricades were chimè as well. The literal translation was “chimera.”

  “They cut her heart out,” Charlie added.

  “Jesus. Why?”

  There was a flash behind the bar, where a server had silently appeared, his eyes widening white in the shadows at what Charlie had said.

  “Scare the bejabbers out of everybody.” Charlie shrugged.

  He had known her, Doctor Oliver realized, this harmless madwoman who’d styled herself the Queen of Haiti and did the stroll from Place Montarcher to the Boulevard de la Mer, capturing whomever she could in tight lassoes of her crazy talk.

  “There’s always a sort of big energy buildup,” Charlie Chapo was saying. “Between Pentecost and Trinity—and it releases in the ceremonies. Normally it should. A thing like this, though … it can all start going in the wrong direction.”

  “I need to get out of here,” Doctor Oliver said. The demonstrations had cut him off from the airport, which was probably out of service anyway; he was meant to have flown to the States three days before.

  “Right,” said Charlie, “it’s inconvenient for me too.”

  Doctor Oliver touched the bottle in his pocket. Two pills left and why was he saving them? So there would be that much between him and the void. He resolved to speak about this to Charlie Chapo, who was sometimes something of a fixer.

  “Charles. I need to …” A delicate matter. “Um. Refill a prescription.”

  Charlie was looking at him slantwise. “For what?”

  “Um.” Too much delicacy and he would not be understood. “Well, it’s Dilaudid. But I can substitute! OxyContin, Percocet even …”

  “Or heroin would do.”

  “Yes,” replied Doctor Oliver, naked now, and almost unashamed. “It would.”

  But Charlie Chapo was shaking his head. “There’s coke around,” he said. “There’s even crack, believe it or not … but what you’re after—it’s not obvious.”

  “At the hospital maybe?”

  He felt Charlie Chapo withdraw a little, though his body had not moved. “You do the medical missions, right? So you know, they never have enough painkillers for …”

  … nonrecreational users, Doctor Oliver thought, his shame bitter now.

  “I’ve got a couple of cats to kill,” Charlie said. “I think you shouldn’t be kicking around by yourself—not today. Magloire’s looking for you, maybe he can help.”

  “Oh,” said Doctor Oliver, remembering the name scrawled in the dust. It gave him a faintly reassuring sense of connectedness. “I thought he was looking for you.”

  “I don’t have anything for him, though. All this traka— I’m light in the pocket.” Charlie Chapo put his hat back on and winked as he stood up. “I’ll check you tonight at the hotel.” In the burning doorway he turned back again. “Watch yourself, will you? Drug jail here’s not funny.”

  Surely no one could be in greater pain than this, Doctor Oliver kept thinking as he followed Magloire in an aimless stroll around the town. His organs were shriveling in withdrawal, his brain withering on its stem. The sensation worsened when Magloire persuaded him to buy a hat—a gaudy monstrosity designed for some nonexistent tourist. But the sunstroke warded off by the hat left him prey to all the rest of it. They were then in the thick of the crowded market streets with people pressing into them on all sides, picking their way to avoid stepping on wares spread over the gummy ground and Magloire’s eyes staring hungrily at everything. Among the market women strode a coat hanger of a man who shook a plastic jug of filthy yellowish oil in one hand crying “Lwil, lwil, lwil” like a crow. Seeing that Doctor Oliver was faint, Magloire procured a ladder-back chair for him, but sitting down in the midst of the crush was not helpful and Magloire led him out of the market, up the hill where the streets were calmer. They passed the gateway of the Hôpital Justinien, and paused to look at the whitewashed trunks of the corridor of palms receding to the stairway, but they did not go in.

  Doctor Oliver held himself up with a fist wrapped around an iron spear of the hospital gate. Somewhere in all the moil of frantic exchange there must be something to answer his need. Or else he would simply have to kick. He had done it before, but here? Not here. It seemed to him that somewhere the heart of La Reine d’Ayiti must be impaled on a fencespear like the one he grasped, deflated, tightening, the blood blackening to the iron as it dried.

  Magloire walked him back to the hotel, where Doctor Oliver invited him in for a beer. He had also purchased Magloire a paper plate of spaghetti in the market, but so far had not offered him any money. They had walked around the market for an hour without Magloire being able to buy anything that he needed, and although the figure of ven dola was burning in the center of his forehead, like the mark of Cain, Doctor Oliver never seemed to notice. Magloire could not bear to describe it now, as they sat in the shade of the bar above the hotel pool and sipped their beers.

  “It is very difficult to earn twenty dollars,” Magloire said, constructing the sentence carefully out of bits of French he still had from school. Doctor Oliver did not appear to hear or understand, just lurked behind his sunglasses as though blind.

  “To make twenty dollars,” Magloire tried again, “requires a great many transactions in the head.”

  “Twenty dollars?” Doctor Oliver raised his head.

  “Twenty dollars! Yes, yes.” Magloire felt hopeful, then excited. Twenty dollars—the doctor had spoken the words. The resonance of two voices saying the same phrase produced a sudden harmony between them.

  Now Doctor Oliver felt the confidence that had failed him before, in the light of all Charlie Chapo had said, to explain his requirements to Magloire in his own rickety French from school, and yes, Magloire was nodding and agreeing, though at the same time lapsing into Creole as he leaned forward to confirm the understanding, “Nenpòt sa w bezwen map jwenn li, wi!”

  “What?” said Doctor Oliver

  “Anytheen you wann, I get!” Magloire said in English, then, as if it were a code they shared, “Fòk nan pwen poum pa jwenn.”

  Magloire went back to the market quickly, his head illuminated with a pleasant ruby light. He had two minds, or more than two, and had just shifted from one to another. A certain mind had been molded by the bon frères of Saint Jean Bosco who had taught him his trades. This mind could calculate, plan ahead, and undertake the interminable transactions needed to acquire ven dola (in this
case)—it was like the mind of a blan, he thought, or even of a Haitian filozòf, for some Haitians were educated to the point that they no longer heard the spirits, or if they did they were afraid.

  But now, as he sailed through the market streets, his mind was washed clean of all that arithmetic that had burdened it earlier, for Doctor Oliver had simply answered his prayer— without knowing it he had obeyed the will of èzili Je Wouj, not because he knew her or served her the way Magloire did, but because he was a good man of the right instincts who could let himself be moved to restore order to the universe by folding a twenty-dollar bill into the warm pale palm of Magloire’s hand. Tout pou nan amoni, Magloire was practically singing to himself as he fractured Doctor Oliver’s deuce into larger soft piles of Haitian currency, the bills limp and fragrant with a fruity, sweaty smell and so blackened from passage from hand to hand they were entirely illegible. He purchased small but double rations of charcoal, oil, rice, and dried beans, and canned milk for the children, then green coffee beans for his mother and a handful of ibuprofen tablets for himself—his head had hurt a good deal earlier from the all the transactions scrambling in it. At another stand he bought two red candles and a ball of black string. There were then left four hexagonal coins; enough for a basket of green oranges.

  He divided his purchases into two sacks and the smaller of these he locked in a cupboard when he returned home, putting the iron key into his pocket. Anise looked at him sourly as he did so, for she knew very well what that was about. When he gave her the condensed milk for the boy she brightened, then asked him sharply about the medicine, but he pointed out that it was no longer needed, for the boy was well, happy today, teasing the chickens out in the yard, and then he gave Anise the oranges. As for his mother, when she received the charcoal and coffee she smiled at him with all her four remaining teeth.