A car parked by the sidewalk, its motor still running. The radio was playing. People have stopped bothering to cut the engine when they leave their cars. I was trying to get news of other parts of the city. People wanted to know how bad the damage was. But I heard only static, or a pre-recorded program. I turned the dial and tuned in RFI (Radio France Internationale) that gave no news of the earthquake, at least not yet. I turned off the radio. Where was the driver? People were figuring it was less dangerous on foot. They left their cars behind and took to the road, often with no destination. People who had never done more than a hundred meters on foot walked kilometers that night and felt no fatigue. Their minds were so upset, they lost all awareness of their bodies. Two groups of people have always rubbed shoulders in this city: those on foot and those who own a car. Two parallel worlds that meet only by accident. “You can’t know your neighbor if you drive through the neighborhood,” said a grieving mother who lost her son. She said that the poorest residents—whom she had never met before, even though she passed through the area twice a day—were the first to support her when she learned that her son was dead in the wreckage of his house. For once, in this city ruled by social barriers, everyone moved at the same speed.
A Prayer
Night falls suddenly as it always does in the tropics. We whisper our fears to each other. Now and then, we hear a muffled cry: someone has managed to reach a family member on the phone and has gotten news. A young bank clerk tells me he is afraid to call home for fear of what he might find out. His family lives in Pacot, one of the hardest hit zones. I don’t know what to say. Suddenly, a man gets to his feet and begins telling us that the earthquake is the result of our unspeakable behavior. His voice rises in the night. We quiet him down because he’s waking the children who have just fallen asleep. A lady tells him to pray in his heart. He walks away, insisting that you can’t ask the Lord’s forgiveness in a low voice. A group of girls launches into a religious song, so soft that some adults manage to fall asleep. Two hours later, the air is full of noise. Hundreds of people are praying and singing in the streets. For them, this is the end of the world announced by Jehovah. Next to me, a little girl wants to know if there will be school tomorrow. A breath of childhood settles over us all.
Animals
Dogs and roosters kept us company through the night. The Port-au-Prince rooster crows whenever he feels like it. Normally I hate this habit. But that night, I listened for his cry. We didn’t hear cats meowing. Port-au-Prince is more a dog city. Dogs, most often in the streets, survived, while the cats that hid under beds and in closets didn’t make it. As for the birds, they took flight at the first movement of the earth.
The Crowd
On that first night, the city was filled with a disciplined, generous, and restrained crowd. People ceaselessly moving with other-worldly determination. They seemed unconcerned with the pain they bore with an elegance admired the world over. The rest of the planet was glued to the small screen, watching the strange ceremony wherein the living and the dead mingled so perfectly they couldn’t be told apart. Malraux, just before his death, traveled to Haiti because he felt that the painters of Saint-Soleil had intuitively discovered something that makes all struggle against death fruitless. A secret path. People were amazed by that ability to remain in the wreckage so long without eating or drinking. That’s because they’re used to eating very little. How can they take to the road and leave everything behind? They have so little in the first place. The fewer objects we possess, the freer we are—and I’m not singing the praises of poverty. Haiti’s misfortune was not what moved the world: it was the way the Haitian people stood up to misfortune. We gazed with wonder as the disaster revealed a nation whose rotten institutions prevent from it from coming into its own. When those institutions disappeared from the landscape, even for a moment, we discovered a proud yet modest people through the clouds of dust.
A Song
The children have been sleeping for a while. Shadows pass in the garden. Security staff keeping an eye out. Suddenly a song rises. We hear it in the distance. A guard tells us that outside (we’re quite far from the road) is a large crowd of people singing. Their voices are harmonious. That’s when I understood that everyone was affected. And that something of unimaginable depth had occurred. People were in the streets. They sang to calm their pain. A forest of human beings moving slowly across the still trembling ground. I saw shadows descending the mountains to join them. How do they manage to dissolve so quickly in the crowd? The song they were singing to the heavens, in the whitish light of breaking dawn, united them.
Forty-Three Tremors
From time to time, a slight tremor awakens our fears. The earth is shuddering as if it could not find its rest. People say it’s not over. That other major shocks await us. All that is just rumors since the seismologists have yet to speak. But we can’t seek stable shelter yet, because what if things degenerate again? So we wait. With each new tremor, as small as it may be, people who were drifting off lift their heads like startled lizards. I hear muffled cries. No one knows what the next few seconds have in store. We don’t know what is stirring beneath our bellies. You can hide from the wind or even from fire, but not from the earth that moves beneath your feet. We glance at each other to gauge our neighbor’s fear and measure our own. By the fence around the tennis courts, next to a dozing security guard, a small radio is spitting out sound. Sometimes we even understand what it’s saying. Often a voice is shouting out advertisements for mattresses. Which is ironic when most of the city is sleeping on the ground.
The Concrete Trap
A lady who lives nearby spent all night talking to her family still trapped beneath a ton of concrete. First her husband stopped responding. Then one of their three children. Later, another. She kept begging them to hold out a little longer. More than a dozen hours later, people were finally able to rescue the baby, who had been crying the whole time. When he got out, he broke into a wide smile.
The Revolution
The radio announced that the Presidential Palace has been destroyed. The taxation and pension office, destroyed. The courthouse, destroyed. Stores, crumbled. The communication network, destroyed. Prisoners on the streets. For one night, the revolution had come.
The First Messages
Day breaks. We awake slowly. Some are still sleeping, especially those who stayed up all night. The night is frightening; the day, reassuring. A mistake to believe that, since everything happened in broad daylight. We’re still in the hotel garden, under the spreading trees, elated to be among the living, even if we lack the essentials. We try to reach our friends. The means of communication (cell phones, land lines, Internet) are still not working up to capacity. Someone shouts that there is Internet access in front of the hotel. We rush over there. I’m amazed by this group ability to find a solution when everything seems blocked. We fan out, then someone shouts, “It’s here!” I go running and discover a row of people sitting on the ground at the entrance to the hotel, feverishly sending messages to their loved ones. We need to act fast because the connection, we’re told, can go down at any minute. A guy next to me, his face running with sweat, is staring at his screen. I see he’s looking at the news. I grab the machine from him. He turns to me, incredulous, but doesn’t try to take it back. I send my first message to my wife: “I’m all right but the city is broken.” I add that Saint-Éloi is all right too and that we’re together every second, day and night. Our little group has washed up on a desert island the day after a ferocious storm.
The Outside World
We were sitting around a table talking in the hotel garden when Lyonel Trouillot the writer showed up. He told us what happened the day before, once night fell. Everything was pitch dark, but he left his house and headed for the hotel. Trouillot walked the entire way last night, to the hotel and back, two hours in total darkness. Knowing his health problems, the effort must have been superhuman. Today, he seemed relaxed. He had his car now. I decided to use the oppor
tunity to go see my mother, since I haven’t been able to reach her by phone. Saint-Éloi will join us. The hotel is set back from the main road by a hundred meters or so, just enough to separate us from the city. We leave the hotel life and fall into the cauldron of Port-au-Prince and its suffocating reality.
The Mango Lady
She’s the first thing I see on the road to Pétionville. A mango vendor sitting with her back against a wall, a dozen mangos spread out before her. This is her livelihood. For her, there’s nothing new. It doesn’t occur to me to buy from her, though I love mangos. I hear Saint-Éloi’s voice behind me: “What a country!” These people are so used to finding life in difficult conditions that they could bring hope down to hell.
The First Bodies
Just outside Pétionville, I see bodies on the ground. Carefully stacked one next to the other, eight in all. I don’t know how they died or who put them here. The houses are below. Modest structures made of sheet metal. We wonder who could have placed the bodies by the side of the road. Not the government; it hasn’t recovered its wits. Not the families either, who would have found a way to bury them. Maybe the dead were just passing through, anonymous here. People are always on the move in a city where it’s hard to find a job. They look for life wherever it can be found. Later I learn that the dead are so numerous they can’t be buried individually. The figure climbs by the hour and takes over everything, to the point that people don’t talk about the dead, but only their number.
Rhythm
We reach Pétionville. I spot a dozen broken houses. Maybe there are more. I can see only those along the road. Pétionville itself seems to have survived. I breathe a little easier. People are standing in small groups on the sidewalk, talking. I expected crowds crushed by pain, but daily life has already resumed its rhythm. Even misfortune can’t slow down the incessant activity in one of the poorest regions of the world.
A Bon Vivant
A man is standing by a big red gate. “That’s my father,” Saint-Éloi says. The same warm spark in his eyes. And the same way of thrusting out his chest. The two look too much alike not to be fellow pleasure-seekers. Saint-Éloi described his father as a bon vivant who likes cooking and chatting up the young vendors who pass by his door. A man whose interest in women has never slackened. Saint-Éloi gets out of the Jeep and goes to see him. I stay in the car. They talk for a while, touching each other on the forearm from time to time. Ten minutes later he returns. His father waves to us and closes the gate. “Everything all right?” I ask Saint-Éloi. “Except for a cousin who was at the Caribbean Market. They say she’d made it to the door when a cement block hit her in the head … Another step and she would have been safe.” We drove in silence to Delmas.
The Caribbean Market
We enter the enormous district of Delmas, that insatiable monster whose tentacles are getting ready to swallow up Pétionville, the fragile, middle-class suburb where there are more and more poor people. The traffic is intense in Delmas: humans and cars play bull and matador. All kinds of noises (horns, shouting, sirens) rise from a crowd that’s always on the edge of explosion. The commercial buildings that line the main road hide thousands of houses of all sizes built in such an anarchic fashion that the place is like a world unto itself. Whoever ventures into this labyrinth for the first time will wander in circles forever unless he finds a helpful soul to show him the way. The government tried unsuccessfully to make the place more orderly by putting numbers on the different entrances. The area looks like it’s been bombed. One building in five has collapsed. There are hardly any cars, which makes it amazingly easy to get around. Someone points out the Caribbean Market, always crowded with customers this time of day. My heart tightens at the thought of them under that heap of stones. People blessed with a decent salary would stop to pick up provisions here when they got out of work. They would exchange the latest gossip and use chance meetings to extend invitations of all kinds. The Caribbean Market was the crossroads of the striving middle class that had sprung up in this neighborhood over the last twenty years.
Money
I noted that very brief moment when money disappeared from circulation. For several hours, in a metropolis of three million people, no one produced a bank note to buy something. With the stores destroyed, merchandise was for the taking. It could only be given away or bartered. Commerce is generally carried out among the living. But, for once, the living were thinking only of the dead and of those who had disappeared, for whom they were searching throughout the city. The moment was brief indeed. People hadn’t even buried their dead, and already their thoughts were returning to money. They started thinking about it as soon as the future became imaginable.
A Yellow Square
That feeling of déjà vu. I know this part of town. Seeing I was upset, Trouillot slowed down. I was right, he told me, that’s the Télé-Ginen building. Compè Filo works there. And I was there yesterday at 3:30 in the afternoon. I could have been there at 4:35 too. Between two concrete slabs, I spotted a small yellow square the size of a license plate. It’s all that’s left of the little car that took me back to the Hôtel Karibe after my interview with Filo. I combed through the totally flattened building and discovered, at the back, a few photos miraculously spared next to the trophies I’d noticed yesterday on the desk of the Télé-Ginen owner, an affable woman whom Filo was quick to introduce me to. I’d been in a hurry yesterday. I had to be back at the Hôtel Karibe by five o’clock. After a lot of back and forth, since he wanted to drive me himself so we’d have time to talk in the car, Filo finally agreed to let a young journalist drop me off in that little yellow car that was now completely flattened in the wreckage of the building. The place was a strange labyrinth; first I’d come across a chorale of girls dressed in white in a trance, and then I’d listened to a pastor shouting into a screechy microphone. Walking the corridors, I realized they were taping a religious program. Meanwhile, in his studio, Filo was singing the praises of voodoo and popular culture. The building reminded me of a murderous jungle where everything proliferates wildly the minute you turn your back. Now there was no one here, no employee who could tell me what happened to the staff. Everyone seemed preoccupied by his own troubles. I remember thinking as I left Télé-Ginen yesterday that there’d be no survivors if ever fire broke out.
Musical Chairs
People move through the streets, hoping to come across a family member, a friend, a neighbor, or even an acquaintance: someone to legitimize our claim to be among the living. We’re zombies until someone calls our name. The person no one has seen could well be dead. Meanwhile, that other person thinks you’re dead, though he hopes to see you alive. There’s no way of knowing where death was waiting when you were at that particular place. Some people did all they could to show up at the meeting. Others walked away from the fatal spot a few seconds before. And to think we had no idea we were playing heads or tails with our lives. I left Télé-Ginen to get back to the Hôtel Karibe by five p.m.—but it could have been the other way around. A game of musical chairs the entire city was playing. There were a lot more people than chairs when the music started. You had to find an empty chair when it stopped at exactly 4:53 in the afternoon.
It
We have no idea what to expect in the coming years. People, like houses, can be divided into three categories: the ones who are dead, those who are gravely injured, and those who are deeply damaged inside but don’t know it yet. The latter are the most troubling. The body will keep going for a while before it finally falls to pieces. Suddenly. Without warning. Those people have hidden the screams inside them. One day they will implode. Until then, they seem in perfect health. A mixture of bonhomie and high energy. Happy to exist since their brush with death. They’ve been able to put a distance between themselves and the images that haunt them. Sometimes they talk about it with a joyful glow in their eyes. How do they do it? That’s the point—they’re not doing it. You can’t have experienced it and go your way as if nothing had happened. It�
��ll catch up to you one day. Why do you say “it”? Because “it” doesn’t have a name yet.
The Lost Friend
I met Filo at the end of the 1970s. Was it at the theater school that took over the large rooms at the Lycée des Jeunes Filles after classes were over? Or was it at the Sylvio Cator Stadium where we went to see the finals between the Racing Club and the Black Eagles or Le Violette? Filo has always been in my life. We were part of the little group of starving kids who mixed up art and revolution. Radio Haïti-Inter was recruiting new journalists. Filo went to try out. At the beginning, it didn’t work; he was too much a rebel to follow the station’s strict rules. He had no notion of time. He would get to his show a half-hour late. In the end, his bosses figured it out: they stuck him at the very end of the day’s programming. He could show up when he wanted and do what he felt like. His audience was made up of insomniacs, and he helped them get through the night. The very next day, Filo was a star. His mocking irony and sharp eye—he was a young man from a rough neighborhood—attracted all levels of society right from the start. President Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier imprisoned then exiled most of the country’s influential journalists in November of 1980, muzzling what was called at the time “the independent press.” They all returned when Baby Doc went into exile himself in February of 1986. There was dissension within the group of alternative journalists, which meant that some were left on the outside. Filo wandered in the wilderness of Port-au-Prince for a while. When I asked after him, every time I came through town, often no one knew where he was. I was told he was doing odd jobs, an elegant way of saying that he wasn’t part of the tribe anymore. The last time I saw him was at the Hôtel Kinam in 2008; he’d come to interview me for his show on Télé-Ginen. Filo was in a class by himself. The others in the group didn’t seem to have progressed much, but he’d made changes in his head. Of course he still talked about religion, which scared the Haitian left, but he was as sharp-minded as ever. And subtle enough not to impose his beliefs on other people. That day he gave me a present: an image of the Black Virgin of Poland that believers in voodoo take for the Polish version of the goddess Erzulie. I still have it. With his traditional dress and his peasant hat, Filo looked like he’d never left the 1970s, a time marked by the furious search for authenticity among intellectuals. Despite his choice of clothes, he was one of the liveliest minds in the country. When I came back for this trip, I met up with him at the beginning of the month in front of the Rex Theatre, and we set a date for January 12. I went to the radio station in Delmas. We started the interview more than an hour late. Filo gave the false impression of being interested only in popular culture, whereas he knew plenty about a lot of things. I knew his little mannerisms, like that sideways smile that let you know he was nobody’s fool. At first, he insisted on taking me back to the hotel, but he had to meet a group of American businessmen who might invest in the station. If I waited for him, I’d probably be late; I had to leave right away to be back for my five o’clock meeting. Finally Filo agreed. I got to the Hôtel Karibe just in time to meet Saint-Éloi, who was coming in from Montreal with his two suitcases stuffed with books and an urgent need to take a shower. Instead, I dragged him to the hotel restaurant where we ordered lobster and fish in sea salt, just before all Port-au-Prince began to shake.
The World is Moving Around Me Page 2
