Haiti Noir Part 2

by Edwidge Danticat

  When he called to report that the mission had failed, the phone rang in vain. There was no answer, as there had never been any such number. That was the day he was murdered. Not on the day before my birthday, in that small hotel room where he went to look under the skirt of that snotty girl, his mother had said when I came to offer my condolences. Ah, that snotty girl everybody in town described as a rich girl at odds with her family, twenty years old, not black-black but a burnt-earth color. Yes, he was dead before our encounter. I imagined him faking sleep, gone on another road, toward absolution, love, or another girl’s breast.

  Yes, pain and sadness had arrived the day people started to turn around on the street to look at him, naked under his mask of a public character wanted by the police. I had met him, had reached out to him, not knowing that everything had become, literally and figuratively, cold around him, and that he was in a way pouring boiling water over his own head. We made love inside that madness. Voices, carried by the winds, were speaking inside of him. I had met him during that period. In front of a movie theater, on Lamarre Street. He’d come to see Bird, the seven p.m. show. He’d come out of the theater and was tying his shoes on the sidewalk when I spotted him. I’d been selling junk jewelry to make a living for me and my daughter; so I showed him a wristwatch and asked if he’d like to buy it for his wife or girlfriend. Not knowing that I would become his girlfriend a few moments later. That same evening, we slept together in a crummy hotel on Grand-rue. No fuss. We had a long talk about Charlie Parker, who, as a teenager in Kansas City, played the recorder while he rode his mule and entertained big dreams listening to Count Basie’s orchestra. He told me he was my Bird, and me his Chan, the dancer Bird admired. I told him no, let’s switch roles and get it right, I am the Bird and he’s the Chan, but he wouldn’t hear of it. And sleep fell upon us, all of a sudden.

  After that, we’d meet at his place, not far from the cathedral, on rue Borgelat. A very dark two-room apartment that smelled of mold and cold tobacco, because ever since my husband had left, aside from occasional one-night stands, I had no steady man in my life, which was all right by me— the body has its needs—as long as my lovers didn’t promise me the sky and the earth or rain from countries where it no longer rains. I’ve got my home, you’ve got yours. As the police were after him—he rarely went out, and only at night, in disguise, taking dark roads with their streetlights out—we agreed I would be the one to go visit him. Aside from the films he’d go see secretly, I had become his only contact with the outside world. I’d show up at his place three times a week: on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Like a rebellious girl, I was attracted to the danger he represented. I didn’t know why. I suppose it gave me the exhilarating feeling of betraying somebody, something I wasn’t completely conscious about, but it really turned me on. To the point where I wouldn’t remember if I truly loved him. We’d spend our evenings talking travel, although neither of us had ever left the island. The only sea he knew was the one polluted by the barrels of toxic waste foreign cargo ships dumped into the harbor of Port-au-Prince. Once, on a whim, I brought him back a shell from the sea-fest in Pestel where I’d taken my daughter. I made him listen to the sound of the waves inside it. Yes, everything was fine, until that time when he forced me to spend the night. He heard me moan in my sleep as I was touching myself. At first, he didn’t seem to mind; then, a week later, he started to think—wrongly—that I was seeing another man. From that point on, he’d made surprise visits to my home. Most times he’d run into my daughter, sitting on the stoop in front of the house, smoking a cigarette. She was rather nuts—had always been so—but was very beautiful, with big black, sunken eyes, a subtle smile. She knew what he was coming for, so she’d look him up and down and stick her tongue out at him.

  Jimmy was buried at the national cemetery on a Saturday morning. Dirty, ragged children wept and put flowers on his grave. That day, there were also women, many women, most of them very beautiful, wearing long dark dresses under the shade of their black silk mantillas. I was there too, with my daughter, in the background, dry-eyed. I had the impression that we weren’t there for his funeral but for an ultimate erotic parade, a way for each of us to prove to him that we loved him more than anything, more than that tall, big-boned woman who was looking disdainfully at me from behind the gray designs of her fan, sweating in the heat of the last days of summer.

  One afternoon, in the middle of our endless interviews with Inspector Joseph, my daughter came out of her room almost naked. She leaned over the inspector’s ear and told him that if he went looking into the crumpled sheets of the hotel room, he could find, in the play of the shadows created by the subdued light of the lamp on the bedside table, the meanderings of the murder, how the scene had unfolded. The inspector knew she’d been born nutty and he laughed, but that same afternoon he took us to the crime scene, to that hotel high up in the Carrefour-Feuilles neighborhood, to that room with a view over the harbor and the rusty roofs that hemmed in the sea. He took pictures of the hotel which had been deserted since the night of the crime, of its entrance lined with bougainvilleas and oleanders, of the walls of the room decorated with cheap paintings, of the bedspreads, of the private cop with his hunting rifle who had seen the young woman arrive on Jimmy’s arm, her steps heavy with alcohol, both laughing madly.

  After the visit, we walked part of the way home, and my daughter kept repeating that in the room she had felt the presence of Irène Gouin, who had bent over Jimmy’s blood-soaked body and felt sublime. She was talking nonstop, deciding even as she was detailing them how the facts were to be arranged. And me, to cool off the situation, I reminded Inspector Joseph that she has never been in her right mind. She pretended not to hear me, and kept on talking as if she wanted to take control of the situation, deconstruct the hypothesis of unpredictability and randomness of Jimmy’s murder: Irène’s act and her state of mind at the time, the strong smell that night of salt and seaweed, of the sea rising from the harbor, filling the city streets with their brackish fragrance, Jimmy’s ugly skin and bones, the golden reflection of his Barbancourt rum on the rocks, and the bubbles in Irène’s Coke at the hotel bar, before they went up to the room.

  She encouraged the inspector to get rid of his pretentious desire to understand everything about a life that took pleasure in secrecy, the way a virgin might get pleasure from her little perfumed firebrand, she said, explaining to us that sometimes, when she had nothing else to do, she imagined she was the murderess Irène Gouin, and that they resembled each other down to every detail of her face, like two drops of water at the bottom of the ocean.

  On the Chemin des Dalles, near the Saint-Géraud bridge, we stopped a cab and settled into the backseat. The cab was really a pile of scrap metal, a small apple-green Datsun that you could immediately tell dated back to the ’70s. A little old guy with a straw hat on his head was at the wheel, driving slowly. He threw himself into rue Pavée, and taking advantage of the traffic jam, started to talk, mumbling through his teeth. Seeing we didn’t pay any attention to him, he put on some konpa music by Shleu-Shleu. We got off at the entrance to my neighborhood, at the top of the Bel-Air hill. My daughter headed straight to the stand of the spirits seller, Brigitte. She was thirsty, she said, although our house was nearby. Scratching the back of her head, she ordered a rum taffy. Inspector Joseph and I caught up with her right away. She was swaying her body more and more wildly. I sometimes thought I’d brought her into the world so she would become my master and I her slave, I told the inspector, as if she was the one who had tinkered with me, knowing she was the prolongation of my dreams, my shipwrecks. I had projected myself on her, wondering on which of her shoulders she would have to bear my cross. But she was more clever than I was and had escaped in time.

  Then the inspector left me and walked up to my daughter as if to give her a kiss. He held up his hands too, like he was framing her in his camera, before moving closer.

  “Oh!” she exclaimed, as if she’d never seen the man before
. She swallowed her rum in one gulp and a few drops escaped from the corners of her lips. She handed the empty cup to Brigitte, coughing in the loose end of her blouse, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and thanked her. She then lit a cigarette, grabbed the inspector’s arm, and led him to our place, except that all the inspector wanted was to talk about Jimmy.

  Before our conversations, I usually offered him coffee and cookies, but this time I didn’t find any in the kitchen. So I joined them in the living room. It was very hot. The inspector was helping my daughter open the two sides of the high window that looked out onto the façade of a big white house on the other side of the street. I walked up to them.

  My daughter said, “Come on, Manman!”

  The inspector didn’t see my knife entering the back of his head, and blood, not thick but clear and sweet-smelling, spurted onto my face.

  “That big white house is where Irène Gouin lives,” my daughter said as he was dying.

  Irène Gouin’s house, she explained, was a mix of high tech and refinement, a hotel with a gym and a large room for brunches, a white marble porch at the entrance, a living room with a glass ceiling, a white Chesterfield couch, a vodka bar, a sun deck, and spacious, luminous bedrooms. An electrical system allowed you to create a mood with all shades of blue, tile-and-chrome bathrooms, deep oval bathtubs, thick white wall-to-wall carpeting, pop art–colored objects.

  Yes, Irène Gouin’s house, my daughter went on, had two duplex suites with their own swimming pools. The top floor was for B.H., a famous singer. It included an immaculate bedroom and, at the head of the stairs, a small living room opening up onto a deck with a view of the city’s rooftops and a tiled swimming pool all lit up at night. The bedroom led to a second deck—summer breeze and diving under the sky.

  Irène Gouin, my daughter said, wanted nothing to do with the neighborhood people and even less with the good old city of Port-au-Prince, which sometimes takes itself for London or Paris.

  Everybody was dirt on her shoes, she said. When she arrived in the neighborhood, Irène Gouin didn’t introduce herself to anybody, and they all understood her need for solitude, and Irène Gouin had always been very composed. Irène Gouin never wanted to have company, couldn’t stand heroes, Saturday-night drunks, and Sunday Christians. At first everybody had doubts about her, but after a month they thought they were lucky because she didn’t behave like those young Dominican girls with hennaed hair who partied all night long.

  From her window, my daughter concluded, she could sometimes see smoke billowing out from that Irène Gouin’s cigarette or hear the notes of “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone” looping, over and over again. My daughter was Irène Gouin.

  PART III

  WHO IS THAT NOIR?

  THE LAST DEPARTMENT

  BY KATIA D. ULYSSE

  Puits Blain

  The languorous drone in Foufoune’s ear meant that her international call had gone through. She’d been on the phone with relatives for hours, explaining through scalding tears how she came home after work and found her elderly mother dead. Her message was met with perfunctory sympathy. Foufoune and her mother had lived together for years. She would miss her more than most. Wedged between everyone’s words of condolence, however, was relief. And blame. Dona “Gwo Manman” Malbranche had been as happy as a prisoner in solitary confinement.

  Every morning after Foufoune left for work, Gwo Manman would take her place before the television to chat with the strangers who lived inside.

  “I wish I could sprout wings and fly back home,” she often confided to Bob Barker, host of The Price Is Right. When the Showcase Showdown ended and the last prizes were distributed, Gwo Manman would turn off the television and sit for hours in silence. Until four o’clock. Her most trusted friend and confidante, Oprah, would nod knowingly each time Gwo Manman explained how Foufoune had kidnapped her from her home and was forcing her to live in the worst kind of exile.

  When all her television friends were gone for the day, Gwo Manman would sit and stare at the wallpaper, imagining the distant place that used to be home and the freedom that was hers to do whatever and go wherever she pleased. A map of Puits Blain’s nameless alleyways was imprinted in her memory as clearly as the lines in the palms of her hands. Sitting in a chair thousands of miles from home, she went for long walks along Route des Frères, visiting with friends for hours. Being trapped inside an apartment day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year was torture. She missed the roosters announcing the dawn, the ominous lights flickering from Boutilier and Morne Calvaire.

  “You’re hardly a prisoner in exile,” Foufoune would tell her mother when she complained. Sure, Gwo Manman got to dress up once in a while for a wedding or a funeral, but being taken out of the apartment only for special occasions made her feel like a clown, a madigra mal maske.

  When Foufoune came home from work at night, she was always too tired to do anything but sleep. Too tired to ask Gwo Manman how she had spent the day. Gwo Manman would want to talk about her garden back home, her house, her friends who sold lwil maskreti behind the cemetery and fried food to the taxi drivers waiting to ferry passengers to the end of the road just beyond Hotel Flamboyant. In the States she had rain, sleet, illnesses she’d never even heard of—she didn’t want to talk about those. She had changed, and hated the person into whom America had turned her. Once, while Foufoune was at work, Gwo Manman unlocked the door and escaped. She wandered into the unfamiliar streets, improperly dressed for the snow that reached her ankles. She turned a corner, then another, then another; soon she could not find her way back. Hours later, a good Samaritan found her shivering and dazed.

  “What’s your name?” and “Where do you live?” the good Samaritan had asked. But all that was more English than Gwo Manman understood. He took her to a nearby hospital. Foufoune spent an entire day trying to locate her mother that time. She prevented a reoccurrence by having a sturdier lock installed. Gwo Manman tried but could not get out of the apartment without a key, forcing her to retreat further into the wallpaper and the television world. But even that had changed. Bob Barker was no longer a resident. Just when she had gotten used to him, a stranger came and took his place. Even Oprah was not the same. She spoke only in tongues now. She’d become distant and unfriendly, prompting Gwo Manman to try and smash the screen with a mop, spraining her frail wrists. When Foufoune came home and found her mother hitting the television screen, she covered it like a corpse, saying, “The TV people won’t be able to bother you anymore.”

  Dona Malbranche died the day after she turned seventy— a gift from God, as far as the old woman was concerned. The frown on her face was a perfectly inverted grin. “Ki te mele m.” She had drawn her lips tight on the “m” to intercept her final breath. “Ki te mele m,” she used to tell Bob Barker and Oprah—her companions and life’s witnesses. She no longer cared.

  When Foufoune returned from another double shift and found Gwo Manman slumped over the chair, her instincts as a nurse rose up like a tsunami. She lunged toward her mother, determined to pry her loose from Death’s stubborn grip, but her limbs had as much life left in them as dried gourds. Foufoune dialed emergency, saying, “Hurry, please hurry.” The bottle of lwil maskreti clutched in her mother’s hand had spilled on her good rug. “Please, please hurry!” Within minutes the apartment was flooded with strangers in uniforms. Everyone shook their heads sympathetically. Foufoune sniffled and sobbed as she unclasped the gold necklace which Gwo Manman never would have parted with while she was alive. It had been a Mother’s Day present from her other daughter, Miriam, who still lived in Puits Blain. Foufoune continued to sob as her mother’s lifeless body was carted away; suddenly stung was she by the realization that if Gwo Manman had had a choice, she would have been savoring breadfruit grown on her own little patch of land in Puits Blain, instead of dying alone abroad.

  Foufoune put off calling her sister for last, hoping someone would do her the favor of forwarding th
e news. No one did, of course; the call was hers to make. She adjusted her earpiece with trembling fingers. Her sister would answer momentarily, and sever the sliver that was her last nerve. Miriam had always sided with Gwo Manman: The woman is old enough to know where she should live. She’s not a child. If she doesn’t want to live in the States, you must respect that.

  Foufoune had considered sending her mother back, but after just a few weeks in the States it was already too late. America did not agree with Gwo Manman. She had an allergic reaction to the very air. She changed as soon as she left the island. At first Foufoune thought her mother was just homesick and would overcome it soon, but Gwo Manman’s condition steadily worsened. When after several months Gwo Manman grew even more despondent and sickly, Foufoune had her seen by the best physicians she knew. And out came the diagnosis she dreaded: onset dementia, Alzheimer’s. She knew all too well how those diseases ravaged the mind.

  “I never got sick back home,” Gwo Manman argued, even after Foufoune was careful enough to make up the best lie rather than translate what the doctors had said. “I wasn’t sick until I started to live à l’étranger,” Gwo Manman maintained.

  “You have the flu,” Foufoune explained. “A very bad strain. You’ll get better soon.”

  Miriam was singing along to an old Coupe Cloue tune while stirring a bubbling pot of cornmeal when the phone in her apron pocket rang. She set down the long-handled wooden spoon and turned off the radio. A light rain was falling, rinsing the dust off the flamboyant branches over her porch as well as the splotches of blood where she had cleaned goat meat the night before.