Haiti Noir_The Classics

by Edwidge Danticat

  He usually prefers the fantastic to anything else life might offer, even the first love of his life with her translucent skin and fine bone structure, her body so narrow that it labored to produce a first child, who then died in utero, and then contorted itself to produce a pale-as-roses son who survives still. He would be twenty or twenty-one, that first son. A full-grown man Romulus didn’t even know, born in the years when he was still on the cusp of remaining in the real world. He had not quite been an addict then. But by the time the boy was three, he had already lost a sense of up and down. They had called him Christian.

  She had taken everything, that first love. Her name was—is—Ellen. She had taken the house and the pool and the rights to the royalties from most of his early recordings. The apparition who looked so much like this first wife, who had been there even before he had a first wife, told him to forget such details in her strange tongue that made him think of the word brogue. As other faces receded into the wall, hers became more pronounced, coming and going like the fine breath of air that sometimes wafted in from the brick-sized opening up above.

  In the end, Romulus did not have the strength to tell her to disappear. He closed his eyes instead and felt her hovering above him, penetrating the soft matter of his mind. He wished she would disappear when the pink pills found their way into his open palms, held out like a supplicant receiving communion after a long period of retreat and contemplation.

  After a few weeks, the pills stopped coming. All he was left with was his slackening body, tired muscles, shortening sinews, sluggish blood, rattling bones and rattling teeth, hair falling out, skin flaking.

  Romulus did not think that he could bear the periods of withdrawal, his muscles quivering intensely as if in shock.

  To distract himself from his own failing form, he watched all the other bodies around him, defecating, peeing, peeling, brown skins turned to odd shades of dullness out of the sun’s reach. Smiles turned to grimaces; folds of skin became grotesque as each of them lost weight. They were thrown dirty aluminum bowls filled with a greenish-brown slop once a day, if they were lucky.

  He had never seen such shit.

  For the first month, he waited for his sister to bring bowls of white rice with dark beans and a stew of chicken falling from the bone. For a time, he traded those meals for his drugs and then, when the pills ran out, he traded the food for his cot and quiet. His frame became lighter and the apparition resembling Ellen haunted his dreams.

  L ap pèdi tèt li, the other men said of him when he would scream at the walls to leave him alone. They laughed at him under the cover of their thin arms and elongated fingers, looking day by day more like the figures of emaciated peasants Romulus had seen captured in the paintings that hung in his Miami houses. He laughed wryly to himself: he had become one of the figures in his own paintings.

  She told him to forget about the paintings. He had work to do beyond these prison walls. A land to go to so far away from everything he had known, a history to resurrect. If only he would awaken.

  Romulus struggled with her every night. His stomach clenched at the sight of her. His dreams were polluted with her image, the sounds of her foreign tongue. She took him to her land so green it seemed touched by the hand of God. There, the skies hung low above the hills; the clouds embraced their roundness like the suckling child its mother’s breast and threw shadows down like blankets of protection. Yet, in places, there were barren mounds without pasture, small crosses by the side of rocky roads weathering heavy rains to commemorate the dead.

  Romulus could not understand it but he vowed to her that if he ever got out of this stinking hole of despair, away from the men whose humanity rotted steadily from within, if they hadn’t already lost whatever shred of decency they had been born with—if ever he got out, he would go to this land, if she would only leave him alone after that, if she would only relent and let him regain his right mind.

  He did not imagine, as he made this promise, that deliverance was already on its way. He had not imagined that he would ever again walk further than five paces forward and two to the right where he urinated against the wall every day, burning a hole of anger into the limestone, washing away someone else’s trace of existence with each impotent outpouring, each erasing the other in a dark dance of expiation.

  * * *

  On the one hundred and eighty-sixth day of Romulus’s captivity, deliverance arrived.

  * * *

  On that eighty-sixth day beyond the first hundred, Romulus sits on his pallet and looks out at the sea of legs and arms before him. The stink emanating from the walls and floor is at its worst. He has almost become immune to the shit, the constancy of anxious sweat rising from the serpentine, coiled bodies before him. And then, suddenly, the earth trembles beneath them. The doors are pried open and blinding light streams into the darkness.

  Men wearing worn and mismatched army fatigues pull the thronged arms and legs out into the daylight. Romulus has his vision of dark angels in flight. He sits like a rock on the cot while the others precede him. He sees a dark arm hovering in the open space of the door, a space the length of a man, tall and broad, much larger than the brick-sized opening above they have all gotten used to for light. The arm motions in his direction. Romulus does not know if he can move. He closes his eyes and She comes to him.

  Kanpe. He thinks he hears her tell him to stand up, as if all these days and nights of communication have taught her his language.

  Kanpe, he hears again, but this time it is a man’s voice. The dark arm gestures toward him.

  Romulus rises and walks toward the light, knowing it could be the death of him. The prison doors have never been opened in all the time he has been there. No one has left. No one has entered. The cell has been filled to capacity with no hope of exit. It is the kind of thing one gets used to in Haiti.

  * * *

  Romulus realizes he is still alive when the heat of the sun hits his skin and the winds play with his tightly curled hair. The dark arm he has seen in the cell is attached to a burly man dressed in army fatigues. Romulus suppresses laughter: the man’s head is topped with a red beret recalling scenes from Ramboesque American films.

  It surprises him, the gurgling well of happiness in his chest, the desire to feel mirth rather than his stolid apathy. He looks away from the man in the red beret and the fake general turns from him and begins to exclaim to the company of men that they are all free. All the criminals and innocents, free.

  Romulus begins to walk away from the jubilant, stinking men (for they are all men, young and old, well and decrepit, all shades of brown) as they scream their freedom to the blue canopy of sky, as if their deliverers are emissaries from the heavens rather than rogues in borrowed clothing.

  Romulus walks away from the group with only one idea pulsing in his mind: to walk all the way through dust and fire, from the hell’s edge of the prison walls and into the city’s glowing inferno to reach its other side, to reach the roads leading out toward the country of his cursed birth.

  March 7, 2004, Streets of Port-au-Prince

  Romulus pursues his path with driven intent. Focus, he thinks, focus. He speaks to himself in a colonial tongue, a language he learned in order to get by in the world. Without it in America, ou bannann: no one with nowhere to go. You might as well be left hung out to dry, as the Americans liked to say, like a sheet of banana leaf.

  As soon as he is out of the prison walls, and far enough away so that the men he had been jailed with cannot see him, Romulus begins to run, homeward, not thinking about who might be there to greet him, or if he will be welcome. He does not stop to think about his disheveled appearance, his sunken cheeks that make his eyes seem as if they are bulging out, frog-like.

  He has lost many pounds in the prison, pounds he cannot afford to lose from an already slight frame. His shirt is torn in places, missing buttons. Still, he runs. How could his sister turn him away? Blood is blood, as his father had always said, despite his own lack of attention to
matters of loyalty. Blood comes back to blood, always, like rivers to their beds.

  There is an indescribable stench in the air. Romulus is used to the smells of rotting garbage, has gotten used to the putrid odor of disintegrating human waste. But what he smells in the air now is even more overwhelming than what he has endured in prison. His eyes trail the spumes of smoke rising from behind the crowded buildings on both sides of the road. He is startled, as he looks left and right, to see rubber tires piled high burning in the middle of what had been open roads.

  In one alleyway, a car sits, torched, stripped of its tires, its windows smashed. Grocery stores that had been off-limits to the poorest of the poor stand looted, usually full shelves empty, products strewn on the floor rendered inedible. He falls into a sea of demonstrators, bodies pushing against him from all sides. As he wades through the crowd, he sees a charred body at the side of the road. The form is carbonized. He cannot tell if it is a man or a woman. What might have been an arm points upward, a black branch emerging from a charcoal trunk.

  A few feet beyond the first corpse, another lies on the ground. Half of the man’s face is smashed, stoned to death. An eye stares out at Romulus from its hollowed cavity, blood pooling out from the deep wound staining the broken cement of the road. Romulus winces. Poor devil, he thinks.

  Romulus’s run has slowed to a fast walk as he navigates the debris in the roads as best he can, avoiding the waves of demonstrators emptying from the houses of the bidonville and spilling out into the street. His mind reels at the thought of what has been going on outside the jail walls all this time. He has been safer in there than out here, he realizes, and wonders if there is anything to return to, any home left standing, if his sister is still alive.

  “Romulus!” he hears his name called. He continues, thinking the voice is in his head. After all, hasn’t he gone mad? He keeps on.

  “Romeo!” the voice calls again, more insistent, distinct. It is a man’s voice and Romulus realizes then that it is coming from beyond him, from the direction he has just left.

  He tries to keep on but as his feet move forward, his head turns back. He walks forward like an ostrich, his feet moving, his long neck peering over his shoulder, his eyes too curious to stay on course.

  In the moment of turning his head, Romulus has the sensation of energy slipping away from his being. The feeling is like a small wave washing over him. It leaves a tingling in its wake and a sense of foreboding, of loss. But Romulus cannot fathom what it is that he could be losing, though he knows it has everything to do with this moment of turning around, with the need to hear his name called out more pronounced than his desire for freedom.

  “Romeo,” the voice says again, using his stage name to good effect. Romulus sees the lips of a square-jawed face mouthing his name. The man’s high cheekbones seem to be holding up great folds of skin that embrace his chin in a swath of thickness. The folds stretch and tremble as he speaks. “Romeo, brotherman, where are you going?”

  Romulus thinks about his sister’s house out in the country cradled by those of neighbors they have known all of their lives who had practically raised them both out of the crib. He looks at the man who towers over him, thick and elongated cords of muscle binding his arms and legs. Romulus recognizes the man from the meeting in Miami that had led him home and then to prison. He remembers that the others had called him Marc or Marco. Romulus had never considered that he would run into him again.

  Marc advances toward him, all muscled power. Romulus regrets having stopped. Marc is bad news. Romulus knows he is going to be swept away into something beyond his control and yet he stands still, refuses to turn away. He should keep on walking but he is used to being swept up. It has become a way of life. Romulus tries to think of the fact that Marc knows him only as a first-class junkie, not as the person he has become in the prison: swept clean, penniless, with only the shirt on his back to show for wealth. He has to maintain the coolness of intent he had had in that meeting in Miami when he had been wearing a designer suit and worn dark glasses to cover up the fact that he had been high even as he had made a deal with people he had never been involved with in his life as a musician, people who were far below him in the food chain of Haitian life.

  Marc’s face does nothing to promote trust, with the jagged scar that runs down the length of his left cheek, as if thunder had visited him there and felt his flesh wanting.

  Still, Romulus moves toward the man as if he might present salvation. The truth is simply that the fear of returning to a place he can no longer legitimately call home has taken stronger root than the desire to continue running toward the place his youth remembers. He does not realize yet that he is running, nonetheless, from one hell to another. Sometimes, one hell was sufficiently different from another to seem like a worthwhile reprieve.

  “Sa k pase?” Romulus asks, forgetting without truly forgetting the chaos surrounding them, the burning pyres of car tires, the crowd emptying into the streets chanting, Libète, libète—a rallying cry not heard for years.

  The mantra of the dispossessed had escaped ready definition over the years as the times changed: leaders fleeing and returning while the masses remained prisoners to a land once rich, a land rich still with the echoes of their ancestors’ knowledge, their murmurs sounding out in the barren hills, imitating the cries of children at their births. Some of them had no intention of ever leaving. They watched those who left and returned with mirth, sometimes with condescension. Journalists mistook the hard glints in their eyes for murderous envy while their anger festered for expression. Most of them simply wanted their piece of land, their corner of the universe beneath the benighted stars promised to them after the Revolution. They were frustrated by the constant denial. This time, it was for their children that they abandoned shacks and stands, some of the wealthy at long last joining them in solidarity to announce that the future might be different—that the next generations might not have to survive in misery. It was a wonder, really, Romulus thinks, that the masses had any energy left at all.

  “Ki bagay sa a! Yo lage kò ou nan la ri a? Ou pa gen limouzin ou?” Marc laughs a wide laugh, baring red-gummed teeth, and sweeps a large hand through the air as if to show an invisible limousine. His head tips backward, forcing the muscles of his wide neck into half-moon arcs that form an elongated v-shape emanating from the clavicles of his collarbone and ending just below each ear on both sides of his jaw. His laughter ripples out in waves, making passersby heading out to join the demonstration frown in wonder at this merriment. These are difficult times, after all.

  Romulus feels only shame rising up from his solar plexus like bitter bile, shame for the loss of his past fortune, shame for the loss of the meaning of his family name. He keeps to himself that he had been heading to his sister’s home.

  He walks toward Marc and feels, suddenly, for no reason at all, as if he might be letting go of his past forever. It is a feeling not unlike the snap and spin in his head when he flirts on the edge of an OD, a hair’s breadth away from the black abyss of non-return.

  He should never have turned around.

  Romulus had known moments like this before, moments in which the past seemed to recede and the future seemed like a wide, open pit before him in which, without a care, he could fall headfirst. He had learned that the feeling was deceptive. There was nothing but the present with which to contend. Yet, he knew that what one decided to do could alter one’s life so irrevocably that one would want to go back and undo each of those moments as if they were knots on a string. Sometimes, he’d made decisions that altered not only his own life but the lives of those for whom he cared—his wives, his children, his bandmates.

  Romulus was an expert at leaving things and people behind as he moved forward. He was like the children in the fable of Hansel and Gretel, leaving houses and cars in his wake as the children had left morsels of bread when they walked through the forest. For Romulus, waiting at the end of the path, in the blistering heat of the witch’s oven,
was the anger and disappointment he engendered in others and would do everything to avoid. It never occurred to him that others did not see him as an innocent in a hostile world, but as the witch herself, hidden in the woods, waiting to strike. Deep down, as destructive as he was to himself and to others, he sought to be found. It was this yearning that delivered him to Marc, even though Marc’s smile was no more convincing than a scorpion’s.

  “Ou ta prale?” Marc asks with false caring.

  Romulus feigns ignorance of his motives and smiles sheepishly. Marc wraps a thick, seemingly protective arm around Romulus’s diminished frame.

  “E ou menm?” he asks Marc while he thinks of the last time someone had put an arm around him. His thoughts vaguely drift to Brigitte, his third and last wife, the only one who had looked nothing like the woman who appeared in his dreams, who persisted her haunting in his hallucinations.

  It had been Brigitte who had prompted Romulus’s illegal return to Haiti by locking him out of his own house. If it hadn’t been for that, Romulus would never have agreed to become a carrier. He would never have seen Marc standing in the darkness of a room that contained some of the key figures involved in drug trafficking across Haiti’s borders. He never would have found himself, now, with this fiend’s thick arm around his shoulders. It wasn’t his fault.