Haiti Noir

by Edwidge Danticat

  Monkey-mind had a hold on him tonight. He let his monkey watch the show. As it would do before a crisis, the drumming knotted up as the dancers tightened themselves under the drums; the dancers mostly women now, except for one male onsi clad in white, working his way blindly toward the center, holding out a white candle with its yellowish flame and a white enamel cup of water. Charlie let himself sway like a tree in the wind. A respectable-looking woman standing just ahead of him let out a quiet sigh and slumped back into the arms he’d reflexively raised to catch her. As easily as that. It was a peripheral event; the dancing and drumming were still binding tighter. Charlie supported the woman from her armpits; her limp arms spread wide, like the arms of Christ on the cross. Presently others came and bore her away.

  Charlie had just been relieved of his burden when the clenched fist of dancing cracked open under the drums. Two women who’d been dancing very close flung back, repelled from each other; one screaming harshly and tearing at her head. Charlie didn’t know what had happened to the onsi with his candle and cup, but between the two possessed women appeared Magloire; the women falling away from him like two halves of a hatching egg. Strangely, Magloire now seemed to be cradling the nub of red candle Charlie had earlier seen him place on the altar. That was Magloire’s body certainly, the deep eyes ringed with red, then white, but the person Charlie knew as Magloire was nowhere behind those eyes, not now. He had gone elsewhere, and Charlie, knowing that he could not follow, swelled up with jealousy and loneliness; at the same time, however, there was a moment of sympathy, for he knew in a backward fashion the same thing Magloire had known of him before, thinking, If only I could see, could be, the face of a living god.

  Abandoned, Doctor Oliver sat by the railing above the hotel pool, lapping at a stale beer. There was a three-way discord between the soft konpa playing in the bar, the drumming and chanting and occasionally shrieking from the onfò, and the more aggressive dance music booming from a club at sea level down below. He watched the moon climb higher in the sky above black waves, perfectly round and full and alien and cruel. This moon cared nothing for him or for his predicament. A number of starved dogs quarreled in the dark streets below the battlements of the hotel; he felt sure they would devour him if they could. That man, that man in the square today, had believed that Doctor Oliver was stealing something from him with his eyes.

  Behind his eyelids he could feel the pullulating of the marketplace where he had been that day with Magloire, the interminable screaming of need and exchange and over it all that harsh voice crying in its monotone, “Oil, oil, oil.” Grease the wheel. How abjectly everything seemed to cooperate in its own spoliation, quite as Charlie Chapo had said. The scene was miniaturized in his mind’s eye as if he saw it through a backward telescope, and he did appreciate how very small of him it was to imagine that this whole swarming nation existed only to serve his need. Still, they had robbed him. He had been robbed. He’d been robbed and he wanted to kill someone.

  PART II

  NOIR CROSSROADS

  CLAIRE OF THE SEA LIGHT

  BY EDWIDGE DANTICAT

  Ville Rose

  The morning Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin turned seven, a rogue wave, measuring, by some visual accounts, between ten and twenty feet high, was seen in the ocean outside of Ville Rose. Claire’s father, Gaspard, was one of a few people to notice the wave as he untied the twin sisal ropes that bound his fishing boat to a large rock on the beach. He first heard a low rumbling, like that of distant thunder, then saw a wall of water rise from the depths of the ocean, a giant blue-green tongue, trying, it seemed, to lick the sky.

  Just as quickly as it had swelled, the wave crashed in, collapsing on itself, sending hardly a ripple toward the beach where Gaspard was standing, in shock. Thrust above the crest of the wave then pinned down beneath its trough, a small dinghy vanished. Its owner was a man who for years Gaspard had greeted as they hurried past each other, at dawn, on their way out to sea. In an instant Gaspard’s neighbor and friend was gone and so was any sign that anything out of the ordinary had taken place.

  That sweltering morning Gaspard had slept in, contemplating the impossible decision he’d always known he’d one day have to make: to whom, finally, to give his daughter.

  “Woke up earlier and I would have been there,” he tearfully told his sweet-faced little girl after watching the boat disappear.

  Molasses-toned with bulging penny-colored eyes, Claire was still lying on the foam-board cot in their single-room shack, her thin night dress soaking in the back with sweat, as she dreamed of something she wouldn’t be able to recall when she was fully conscious. Upon waking, she wrapped her long bony arms around her father’s neck, just as she had when she was even littler, pressing her nose against his tear-dampened cheek. Some years before, her father had told her what had happened on her very first day on earth, that giving birth to her, her mother had died. So her birthday was also a day of death, and the rogue wave and the dead fishermen proved that it had never ceased to be. Even so, before her father had spoken that morning, Claire had hoped that he might have come to wish her a happy birthday, but she knew that he might also be saying goodbye.

  The day Claire Limyè Lanmè turned six, Ville Rose’s new mayor decided to host a massive victory party in the seaside town. However, before the party, he gave a long and tiresome speech from one of the stone steps of the town hall, which overlooked a flamboyant-filled piazza, where hundreds of residents stood elbow to elbow in the May afternoon sun. The mayor’s speech was badly organized, and even more badly delivered, and the mayor, a tall balding man, soaked, with his sweaty fingers, the nearly twenty typewritten pages the speech was written on, even while occasionally pulling a handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his armpit-stained linen suit to wipe his brows. Claire was wearing her pink muslin birthday dress, her thick, woolly hair neatly plaited and covered with tiny bow-shaped barrettes. She sat on her father’s shoulders while he stood on the edge of the crowd, close to the giant speakers that made Claire feel the mayor’s words rattling through her bones. Still, she could hear a familiar voice shout above it all that it seemed as though the speech had been written by a primary school boy.

  “Don’t all political speeches sound like that?” her father replied, inspiring a coy smile from the woman he had snaked through the crowd to stand next to. The woman was in her early thirties but, because she was short and round with an oval girlish face, looked a lot younger. She owned one of Ville Rose’s most popular fabric shops, where Claire’s mother, a seamstress for the town undertaker, used to buy cloth. After Claire’s mother died, whenever Gaspard went in to buy a piece of cloth to have a dress made for his daughter, the woman would always refuse payment by saying, “Fòk youn voye je sou lòt.” We must look after one another.

  Only when the fabric vendor stroked Claire’s knees during the mayor’s speech, occasionally glancing at her then quickly returning her gaze to the mayor’s clammy face, did Claire realize that this was the woman her father had been trying to give her to for years.

  The mayor had commissioned from a local artist a giant portrait of himself, looking younger and more lithe and athletic than he had ever been. That portrait, reproduced on what seemed like a massive bedsheet, draped the front of the town hall and other official buildings.

  “Thank you for putting your trust in me,” the mayor was winding down nearly an hour after he’d begun speaking.

  Gaspard cupped his hands over his mouth, joining his fists into a funnel that led into the woman’s delicate seashellshaped right ear: “Next time we’ll put even less trust in you.”

  Later that evening, the fabric vendor showed up at the seaside shack to have another look at Claire. Gaspard had insisted that Claire pat her hair down with an old bristle brush and that she straighten out the creases and wrinkles in the pink muslin dress that he’d made her keep wearing all day. Standing in the middle of the shack, the woman asked Claire to twirl by the light of a bell-shaped kerosene lamp on
the small table where the girl and her father usually ate their meals. The walls of the shack were covered with flaking, yellowing newspapers glued to the wood long ago with limestone and manioc paste. From where she was standing, Claire could not see her own stretched-out shadow, which always made her feel taller, and thus older.

  While twirling for the lady, Claire wondered whether her father had already been made the usual promises, that she would not be whipped, that she would be kept clean, that she would be well fed, that she would be sent to school, that she would be taken to a clinic when she was sick. All this perhaps in exchange for some cleaning both at home and at the shop. The woman had no living children so there would be no older kids to tease and beat her.

  “You would be staying with a nice lady,” her father had told her on the way to the mayor’s speech that afternoon. “It would be like an adoption. You’d be a doll for her to dress up, the little girl she lost.”

  But as soon as Claire stopped twirling, the woman turned to her father, her long shiny fake hair blocking half of her copper face.

  “My girl was older,” she said.

  Gaspard’s eyes dropped from the woman’s fancy hairpiece to her pricey open-toed sandals and bright red toenails. “She’ll grow,” he replied.

  “I can’t afford to wait for her to grow.” The woman headed for the narrow doorway.

  “No problem,” her father said, following her out.

  Claire allowed them the breezy darkness outside and moved closer to one of the moths circling the kerosene lamp.

  “Why would you want to give your child to me?” she heard the woman ask her father over the loud sound of the evening waves.

  “I am going away,” he said, “pou chèche lavi, to look for a better life.”

  “Ohmm,” the woman groaned a warning, like an impossible word, a word she had no idea how to say. “Why would you want your child to be a rèstavèk?”

  “This is what would happen anyway,” her father said, “with less kind people than you if I suddenly died. I don’t have any more family here.”

  Her father put an end to the woman’s questioning by making a joke about the mayor’s victory and how many bad speeches Gaspard would be forced to suffer through if he remained in town. This made the woman’s jingly laugh sound as though it were coming out of her nose. Reaching closer to the kerosene lamp, Claire expertly captured a spotted tiger moth between her palms, not sure whom she wanted to imagine it to be, the fabric vendor or her father.

  The good news, though, was that this would be the only day her father would do this for a year. The rest of the year, he’d act as though he would always keep her, letting life go on as usual. During the week, she’d go to the Protestant preschool where she had received a charity scholarship, requiring her father to only pay a few Haitian dollars a month. At night, she would sit by the lamp and try not to be distracted by the moths as she recited the alphabet out loud. He would enjoy the singsong and her hard work and would miss it during her holidays from school. The rest of the time, he would go out to sea at the crack of dawn and always come back with something for her to eat. He’d talk about going to work in construction or the fishing trade in the neighboring Dominican Republic, but he would always make it sound as though it was something the two of them could do together, not something he’d have to abandon her to do. But as soon as her birthday would come, he would begin talking about it again, chèche lavi, going away to make a life for himself, placing her with someone, finding her a family. His and his dead wife’s relatives, whom they’d left behind in the hills, had it even harder than he did. Rather than a nearly barren sea, they had the dry eroded earth to contend with and already too many mouths to feed. If he died they would take the girl, but only because they had no choice, because that’s what families do, because fòk youn voye je sou lòt. We must all look after one another. He didn’t want to leave anything to chance.

  That night after the fabric vendor left, colorful sparks rose up and filled the night sky before fading and plummeting into the sea. With cannonlike explosions, the mayor was celebrating his victory with fireworks. Still lying on her foam mattress as her father snored on his across the room, Claire couldn’t help but feel like she was the one who’d won.

  The day Claire Limyè Lanmè turned five was a Sunday, so she and Gaspard walked to the beach in the morning, watching a sandy pool that had formed, where a group of children splashed inside a ring of brown water then plunged into the sea to rinse themselves. Claire wore the pink muslin sundress, which Gaspard had ordered made for her in the same color and style but a slightly smaller size the year before. The afternoon air felt sticky on her skin as though they were trapped in one of the many humid air pockets where the sea breeze met the stifling heat of the town. Moving away from the beach, Gaspard motioned toward town. Even before they turned their backs to the sea, Claire knew that, just like the previous year, they’d be visiting her mother’s grave.

  The main road was crowded with pedestrians either dodging or hailing moto taxis and tap taps. Gaspard held his nose up and sniffed the air, breathing in the scent of soft tar on an asphalted stretch. Raising his arm to respond to the occasional greeting, he kept walking at a steady clip, daring her to keep up. Passing a Vodou temple with pictures of Catholic saints doubling as lwas, he pointed out, just as he had many times, the glowing face of a pale Mater Dolorosa and said, “The goddess of love, èzili Freda, your mother liked her.”

  Claire had never seen a picture of her mother. There were simply none. If not for the class portrait at the Protestant school, which her father had not purchased, there would be no pictures of her either.

  Leaving the main road behind, they cut through a narrow dirt track with wooden houses enclosed by tall cactus fences. Claire trailed behind her father as he followed the smell of wet pine and burnt sugar in the air. A muddied rubber-booted man returning from the cane fields with an overburdened mule called out to them, “Paying a visit to the dead Mesye Gaspard and Manzè Claire?”

  Gaspard nodded, as he did to everyone else who greeted him from then on.

  The burial site was next to a cane field so vast that Claire couldn’t even see where it ended. Standing on the edge of the twenty or so cement crosses rising out of the hilly terra cotta earth, she forgot at first which one was her mother’s. Her father bent down and, using the end of his shirt, wiped a light coat of red mud off the letters of her mother’s name. She could only read the letters because she had just learned to write her name at school. Her mother’s name had also been Claire, Claire Narcis. Her father had decided to call her Claire Limyè Lanmè, Claire of the sea light, after her mother died.

  Squatting there with one knee lodged in the moist earth, Gaspard spat on the end of his shirt, but could not produce enough saliva to further clean his wife’s headstone.

  “Need some from you too,” he told his daughter, who at first hesitated then playfully obliged, digging deep into the back of her throat with adultlike grunts.

  Next to her mother’s was a year-old grave with a polished gray cross that was smaller than the others. On the cross was a metal wreath, painted in pale blue and white with a brown angel carved on the front. It was the grave of a child.

  This was one of many times that Claire wished she knew how to read and write more than her own name. Her father didn’t even know that much, so she couldn’t ask him to read the name for her, to tell her who the child was that her mother was now looking after in death.

  Once her father was done wiping her mother’s headstone, covering the entire front of his shirt with the red earth, he sat down on the stone slab that in Claire’s mind kept her mother forever pinned to the earth.

  Gaspard was mumbling, talking to himself as he sat there, seeming strangely at home among the dead, until he saw the fabric vendor.

  The woman was wearing a white lace dress with a polka dot scarf wrapped around her head.

  “I knew she would come today,” he said, quickly standing up.

 
Grabbing Claire’s hand, he pulled her forward, blocking the woman’s way. The woman peeked over his shoulder at the child’s grave with the angel wreath on top.

  “Do you remember my daughter?” her father asked while nervously patting Claire’s shoulder.

  “Please let me remember mine,” the woman said.

  The day Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin turned four, the fabric vendor’s seven-year-old daughter, Rose, was riding in the back of a moto taxi with her teenage caretaker, when a private car rear-ended the motorcycle and sent Rose flying fifteen feet into the air, forcing her to land, headfirst, on the ground. Rose was plump, like her mother, and her hair was perfectly coiffed. The mother did it herself in playful and colorful designs, carving simple flower and butterfly shapes into the girl’s scalp. Those, like Gaspard, who witnessed the accident, swore that when Rose’s body ascended from the rear of the motorcycle, she almost seemed to be flying out of her primary school uniform—an azure pleated skirt and spotless white shirt with white tennis shoes and lace-topped ankle socks—raising both her hands and actually flapping them before she hit the ground.

  It was not the first time Gaspard had seen an accident like this. This was a small and sometimes unlucky town and the narrow, mostly unpaved streets were crowded with motorcycles and cars. But none of the previous accidents had been so personally disheartening. He had expected Rose to scream at some point—just as the mothers and other spectators had rushed up to the spot, cradled their heads in their hands, and screamed—but the girl had not even made one sound.

  The moto taxi had nearly reached the mother’s fabric shop when the accident happened, so it did not take long for word to reach the fabric vendor, who even before she was told the details was bent over and retching, looking only at the ground as she made her way through the stalled traffic toward where her child was lying, bloody and still, in the dust.