Haiti Noir_The Classics

by Edwidge Danticat

  “Ou pral wè,” Marc says as the two are encircled by a group of young men Romulus has mistakenly assumed to be on their way to the march, heading toward the square in front of the Presidential Palace where the statue of the unknown slave stands blowing his eternal bronze conch shell as if mocking them.

  Freedom. Emancipation. These were words that had lost their meaning.

  Romulus no longer knows the country well enough anymore to identify the group ferrying him along under the protection of Marc’s heavy dark arm. He feels suddenly like a child, captive and subservient, afraid of what might happen if he chooses to break away, running, again, toward home or what was left of home. In Miami, he had heard about the paramilitaries dressed from head to toe in futuristic-looking black gear that seemed so anachronistic in a Haiti that still appeared almost medieval. As a child he had resented this more than anything. He had wanted to be a part of the modern world he saw advertised in the French press and on the news beamed in from the outside world. He yearned for the pleasures recounted by uncles who floated in and out of the country with unceasing levity, thick gold rings and bracelets shackled to their fingers and arms like spoils of war. These were uncles who fell beyond the circle of his mother’s approval. Romulus had to seek them out on his own, surreptitiously. They were dangerous men, men who had links to the government, if one could call it that, men who talked of themselves as existing beyond the laws of any land and seemed successful in doing so. Romulus had wanted to be one of the anointed, not dangerous per se, but certainly beyond the law. He had learned that wealth was the key to obtaining this sort of dubious freedom. For him, music had been the way.

  They walk against the flow of the crowd, lost in it for long stretches, and then they are suddenly alone, heading up into the hills above the capital where the houses of the rich gleam like white and pink shells rising fresh from the ocean bed. Romulus begins to feel nervous. He knew these homes well once. He had even owned one. There were relatives and friends of his father’s who lived there still. What did these men want? He had heard of the chimères spreading panic in their wake. He had heard of the kidnappings and ransoms demanded of the wealthy or dyasporas like himself. Returning dyaspos were always surprised by such events. They did not realize that what was survival elsewhere constituted wealth here, that for those on the ground they had become part of the elite, however Black they might be.

  Romulus wonders again what he has gotten himself into. This is a rare thought for him, one that surely stems from his sobered state. For the first time, Romulus begins to understand the root of his addiction: his fear of being forgotten. He craves recognition of any kind. This is what has brought him within the fold of this unlikely group, men clad in discarded Nike-wear from the factories, brightly colored short-sleeved shirts and baseball hats advertising Canadian baseball teams. He has been brought amongst them by his fear of refusal at his sister’s door. But as he feels his legs grow leaden while they make their way in convoy to the upper reaches of Lalue, it is a new fear that grips him, the fear of harming, in full consciousness, one of his own.

  Romulus wonders if he is imagining the heaviness growing from Marc’s encompassing arm dropping into his body like poisonous lead. He wonders when and where the journey will end. Some of the men are speaking in low whispers to each other while they look ahead, determination outlined in their posture and in the straight-ahead doggedness of their heads, eyes fixed on the goal lying before them, in those hills that still sing with green bursts of color, unlike so many of the bare mountain ranges that ring the city.

  They pass tall wall after tall wall, some topped with coils of barbed wire, others with the more colonial lines of jagged broken bottles: green, amber, and clear, cemented to the top of the walls. Romulus recognizes his old house and cringes as they pass it. He does not own it any longer and doesn’t know who lives there now. They pass the UNICEF headquarters and its half-mooned entrance filled with a line of high-end jeeps. It is surprising, even to someone of Romulus’s background, to note how well-equipped their saviors are. The men point at the jeeps and comment. There is laughter in the ranks for the first time. And then, a few houses later, Marc’s arm stops propelling Romulus forward and falls away. It is the moment that Romulus has been waiting for, to breathe again, but his stomach is clenched. They are in front of a house he knows all too well.

  Marc smiles upon seeing the light of recognition of Romulus’s eyes and the men move forward in unison. Unlike the other houses, the portal to this one has been left unlocked. The men move one by one in an organized single file past the gates and stumble into the yard. There is a familiarity in their movement. Romulus feels as if he is experiencing his own, disturbing déjà vu.

  * * *

  Romulus feels his hand on the vined gates as he follows Marc and the other men into the yard. His hand has performed this action before, pushed the gate open confidently and ushered himself into another world, a world so unlike the broken and sullen streets that greeted him daily like so much useless ash. He has walked down the flat white slabs shaping a snakelike path to the front door, through the lush flowers of the manicured front garden, his leather school bag bouncing up and down the length of his right thigh. He had come all the way from the private school for boys he attended in the city, brought to the hills in a tap-tap, when such service had been available and reliable, the streets not so far gone as to need American technology to be tackled. Now, there are no black-speckled orange lilies craning their necks toward the path, nor the pink leaves of fallen bougainvillea strewn across the stones, making a scratchy, papery noise as the wind lifts them away, nor are there roses in full bloom, their heady perfumes letting him know that more treasures lay ahead behind the heavy oak door of the house.

  If Romulus had paused to think about love over the years, in the absence of his mother’s arms, and in the silence that enveloped his father’s occasional appearances in his life after he had left home at sixteen, he would have remembered his times in this house as defined by such a thing. But since love had so far eluded him, like a glass vase kept out of grasping hands on a high shelf in his grandmother’s house, he could not attach the word to the place. He could, though, feel warmth enveloping his chest as he moved forward across the stones that had been reshaped by the many feet that had rubbed away their harshness and left behind grooves telling of movement and hospitality. The owner of the house was as retiring as she was welcoming and only the stones revealed how many guests had quietly and ceaselessly beaten a path to her door. Was this what the men before him were doing? Had done already, in another time? Romulus could only wonder. They seemed so out of place, so ungainly, so unrefined. The owner of the house is nothing if not refined.

  If love is not the word that came to mind when Romulus thought about this house and its once lush gardens, it is another word that pronounces itself a close synonym to his mind and in his memory: music. It had been here, amongst the sound of the bougainvillea flowers scraping past his feet, the rosebushes, and the tall, wild grass, that he had begun to understand the meaning of the word symphony and the conjoining of sound and scent to create a language that only the spirit and heart might be able to decipher.

  She had been his piano teacher, and for a time, in his adolescent years, the years before he had drifted away into the fog of chemically induced visions, his muse. She had been the first woman he had loved without recognizing the feeling as love, and left, never to see her again, as his mother had left him some forty years before, without a trace. It dawned on him fleetingly that he himself was the trace his mother had left behind: the thought gave hollow comfort.

  Although it had been the murmur of something akin to love that Romulus had felt then for Tatie Ruth, the owner of this house, Romulus had had no designs on the woman to whom he would dedicate his first songs and empty pop lyrics. He barely took note of the fact that Tatie Ruth had been in her thirties when he had taken lessons from her, still a relatively young woman. He had taken no notice of the curvature
of her bare legs shaped by long walks in the mountains when the air was clear and crisp, legs that spindled out from beneath her skirts like the long stems of the most hardy of flowers. She would adjust a thin sweater on her shoulders, push back her reading glasses, and peer over his head at the notations on the weathered sheet music she allowed him to take home so that he could continue to practice, either at the home of the uncle with a piano, or in the large hall at school where gatherings were held on holidays of the Catholic calendar. In those days, he had no knowledge or interest in the female form, or perhaps Tatie Ruth had simply seemed beyond the reach of his eleven years. He kept all of his energies for the music, as if he was an athlete in strict training, remembering only much later how inebriated and inspired he had been by the pollen of flowers in the garden, by the whiff of Tatie Ruth’s thick French perfume.

  It is this sensory memory that strikes him as he walks into the foyer, the tiles radiating cold, stunning him into his past, his beginnings, a time that had been so innocent and free of all the madness that followed on its heels.

  “Sa n ap fè la?” he asks Marc. “Ou konnen Tatie?” he continues, a childish innocence punctuating his words.

  Marc leaves the questions hanging in the air and gestures to the others to take their positions. He sweeps Romulus back toward the front door.

  “Sa k gen la?” a thin, reedy voice wafts in from the back of the house. Tatie Ruth. Even after all these years, Romulus recognizes her distinctive Creole. Soigné. Careful and peppered with French intonations. She would be in her late seventies by now, aging, skin and bones made heavy by the pull of gravity.

  Marc signals Romulus to speak. The men are positioned in the darkness of the receding perimeter of the round foyer like foxes circling a chicken coop. He hesitates. Marc gestures more emphatically. This is no rehearsal. What has he gotten himself into?

  “Tatie,” Romulus begins, “Romulus ki la, wi.”

  “Romulus!” she exclaims, voice quivering slightly, emotion audibly catching in her throat. He hears her moving hurriedly through the halls of her house to the foyer. “You came back.”

  He sees confusion in her face.

  “Are you back at the house?” she asks, referring to his old house up the road, the one he had once lived in with Ellen. He had hardly seen Ruth during the two years he had lived there, trying unsuccessfully to end the drug habit that eventually destroyed the marriage.

  Romulus has no answer for her. He becomes suddenly self-conscious of his attire, of the soft layers of dust clinging to his perspiring skin. The heat is suffocating. He feels tired, wan. What can he be doing here? Why this, the gathering place? He has the impulse to tell her to run back, run back, to keep out of sight, but he knows it is too late. He is always too late.

  “They let you out?” she asks, her voice weak.

  “Wi,” he says finally, because there is nothing else he can say. How did she know? Did everyone know? “Yes. They let me out. I’m out.”

  She emerges on one of the arcs leading from the foyer to the rest of the house. There are three such arcs. She stands in the hollow of the farthest to his right, the men forming a half-circle in the dark. She is still slightly too far away to see them all gathered there, foxes in the den.

  Go back, back, Romulus thinks, hoping she will turn and ask him to follow her to another part of the house, perhaps to the back kitchen for a strong cup of café. Then he could tell her about Marc and the men and the need to find shelter in her yard, or elsewhere.

  But she stands there like a ghost, waiting for him to speak, and Romulus realizes that she has been waiting for a long while, although he is not so sure that she has been waiting for him in particular. Does she already know what is about to happen? She must have heard about the jails being opened by the rebels.

  “I’m sorry,” she says, “It’s just that . . .”

  “Je sais,” he responds, feeling the rush of shame travel up the length of his neck.

  She has lost nothing of her mystique with her wide robes and flower-print dresses. She is stooped slightly and grasps her back with one hand against the pain radiating there to her right hip. Her hair is held back in a tight bun and though they stand some fifteen feet and years apart, he can smell her perfume more strongly than ever, making him wonder at the clarity of his pre-addict memories. They are both like ghosts standing before each other, each remembering the other as they had been in another life, incredulous over the changes that time has wrought. Still, they cannot see each other clearly. The foyer is dimly illuminated by light streaming in from the arcs. There are no windows here. Romulus can make out a table in the center of the room, a walnut table with a sturdy clubfooted stand. A thick plastic sheet seems to cover the surface of the table.

  He would think later that this was an odd detail to note at the time—the thick plastic covering nothing like the delicate embroidery that usually graced Tatie Ruth’s tabletops, embroidery she taught the young girls who were hired help in the neighborhood to make, so they would have some kind of a trade. He sees the photographs beneath the plastic, his much younger face staring up at him, as if looking at a stranger. What a failure he must be in her eyes, Romulus thinks, forgetting for the moment the men hidden in the shadows. What a failure.

  Then, simultaneously, as if propelled by an invisible shift in gravitational pull, they advance toward each other. Romulus stands closer to the table with its plastic covering. He can see now that the plastic keeps a series of photographs locked in place beneath its weight. Tatie Ruth advances into the circle of awaiting men. He thinks that he sees her smile at them in recognition, a smile quickly dissolving into apprehension.

  Their eyes catch and Romulus senses that he is being forgiven his betrayal. Tatie Ruth smiles again quietly, sadly, and then makes a small circular gesture of hand tight against her waist as if to say to them, Come, come, I have been waiting for you.

  * * *

  Later, only minutes later, minutes that seem to stretch into an unbearable knowledge of infinity, Romulus falls into a black hole of amnesia, a temporary blackout that will help him to survive the day as he has survived so many others. This time, however, he is sober and he still cannot believe the sight before his eyes: was it she who had fallen, or he? Was it Marc who had used the machete or one of the skinny young men in the troupe too impatient to wait to be led through the house’s many halls to a treasure they must have assumed lay beyond? Was it their feet he heard running back up the path, leaving the front door wide open so that light inundated the dark foyer suddenly, like a blast of thunder in a storm, or was it he himself fleeing the scene? Had it been his fourteen-year-old face that he saw looking expectantly up from a jaggedly trimmed black-and-white photograph beneath a now blood-streaked clear, plastic tablecloth, he standing amidst the bougainvillea in the garden in his Sunday best, sheet music in his hand? Was that his smile as a twenty-four-year-old, cut from a newspaper and placed next to a picture of a young woman who eerily resembled his visitor in prison, that peaked face hovering above him on the walls? Picture upon picture: brown, yellow, peach-complexioned faces—a map of Tatie Ruth’s inner world laid out as if she was afraid that she would forget them all, or that the disappearance of the actual people from her hall meant they would never return. There, too, was a photograph of an unsmiling Marc in short pants, exposing knobby knees, skinny fingers poised over piano keys.

  In this way, she kept them captive to the echoes of another world that reverberated with music and laughter, sounds she hardly heard anymore, sounds replaced with the ringing of bullets and cries of despair and a silence all the more piercing for its meaning: the absence of love.

  Blood speckles the bright faces and white teeth. Was it hers or his? There is a wild rush of sound in his ears, making a small whoosh as the liquid particles hit the solid surfaces in random syncopation. He’s heard the sound before, usually before landing on the ground after a particularly bad hit. This time, he has to remember his sobered state. It is difficult to mark a di
fference. He wonders if he has ventured close to death. His own? Hers?

  The pictures beneath the plastic look up at him, furiously, as if he could have stopped the chaos. It is vertiginous to peer down at so many faces and to feel the sensation of falling toward some unknown depth.

  * * *

  As Romulus’s body convulses in a cold sweat against the clamminess of the linoleum floor, he hears some of the men walk through the house under Marc’s supervision. They seem unable to uncover the treasure they have sought.

  He hears them scramble and swear beneath their breaths. We shouldn’t have killed her so fast, one of them says. He hears them curse him as they step over his body on their way to other parts of the house. Romulus cannot open his eyes. He cannot move. For a moment, he thinks he hears her call out his name. He thinks he can see her in his mind’s eye, but he cannot move toward her, cannot embrace her. It is too late. All he wants to do is lie there and let life seep out of him. He is a coward too, not wanting to see what has already been done to Ruth. He cannot think ahead to what might happen to him if he is found there, in a house turned upside down with bitterness, a woman’s dead body lying not far from him. His body aches; his mind feels on fire. He cannot move. He could be dying. He lets his mind drift away from his body, from the house, from the other men. He thinks about his childhood, his absent mother and brooding father. He wonders how it could all have been different.

  He dares not open his eyes. He does not want to see the sight of blood, his own or another’s. He does not want to see the ghost’s face mocking him for his cowardice or Ruth’s frozen in disbelief at what he has become.

  * * *

  The only thing Romulus can be sure of as he feels his body run cold and slick with sweat, before his head comes in contact with the ground, rendering him unconscious, is that he had not heard her scream her surrender or her pain. All he hears as he falls is a throbbing silence in the house and the muted sound of field crickets emanating from somewhere beyond.