Haiti Noir

by Edwidge Danticat

“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.”

  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 brothe
r, 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.