The World is Moving Around Me

by Dany Laferriere

  Melancholy and Aunt Renée

  When I was young, I noticed that one of my aunts always kept to herself, which was striking in a house overflowing with laughter. She could spend hours without any emotion crossing her face. There was talk of migraines that gave her a pensive look. She didn’t seem to have a sweetheart. Her work as a librarian across from City Hall and her spot on the gallery where she spent her time reading—that was her life. Men carefully avoided her. She was the one who helped me grasp the subversive nature of a woman reading in a small provincial town. How could you disturb her when she was conversing with Stephan Zweig, her favorite writer? She read his novels but didn’t try to share the emotions that obviously shook her. At times I would hear her sigh, but that was all. Zweig may be a little precious, but he’s not necessarily worldly. His sad inner monologues and deleterious atmospheres created a state of total dependence in a passionate reader like Aunt Renée. I wonder whether Zweig’s toxic prose turned my aunt into a melancholy being, or whether her melancholy drove her to Zweig. How was it that such a sad creature appeared in our family in which everyone loved celebration? I must confess that, though I’m not sad myself, sadness has always intrigued me. What struck me was the respect she earned through it. As if her natural delicacy of feeling conferred a kind of grace to our town. Yet her life was lived according to strict ritual. She went to the library in the morning and returned to the house in the afternoon. I remember her colorful parasols, her only touch of fantasy, that sheltered her from the implacable four o’clock sun when she went to visit Dr Cayemite’s dispensary for her medicines. I always felt that people sought to protect her from the vulgarity of daily life. As if Aunt Renée represented that nobler part of themselves they could be proud of. As I watched her, I understood that pain in its constancy had profoundly shaped her personality. Her breathing, shallow as if she were gasping for air, gave her a particular winged way of moving—that was pain showing itself. Yet she stubbornly concealed her suffering. I remember that when the pain got too intense, she would go and lie down on the couch in the shadowy living room. She would stay there an hour or two without moving; the smell of camphor filled the air. You have to picture the rest of the house to understand the impact that sort of behavior had on a ten-year-old boy. Ours was a large house with six doors and four windows where people and animals alike moved in and out at all times. Aunt Renée made me see that we all had an inner life. She made dangerous incursions into Zweig’s universe and surfaced only to catch her breath. Sometimes she closed her eyes and hovered in her own darkness. How can a person retain such intensity when all around her people are chatting away? Once, one single time, when I asked her what she was thinking, she gazed at me, then said she couldn’t tell. Is it a secret? No, it’s intimate. That’s a word we don’t hear any more. Like the word melancholy, for that matter. The two go hand in hand. That art of living seems to have completely disappeared from our world, though it was only yesterday. Is that due to the fact that we can no longer tolerate the slightest pain?

  Malaria

  After the cemetery, we attended a small reception at a cousin’s house. The sea was right close by. In the center, under the mango trees, a dance floor where they had set up a long table covered in a white cloth. The family’s teenage girls served us. Now and again, someone took me aside discreetly to give me an account of everything that had happened in Petit-Goâve since I left in 1963. Naturally, I knew none of the names that were mentioned, but what touched me was the gravity with which these sagas were told. I didn’t know how to react, because I wasn’t sure what these people were getting at. We just want to talk to you, one of my cousins said. We don’t see you very often. At the end of the story, they shook my hand and held it, gazing into my eyes. I turned away in the face of such intensity. Calloused, peasant hands that left a smell of green leaves. City people smell like gasoline. The difference in smells separates us. We are all related in these little towns where cousins marry each other. I joined the rest of the group that was laughing as they told a story about Aunt Renée. After coffee and a last glass of rum, we went into the town, and I lingered by the harbor. The church, where I once waited on the steps for my teacher Mr Calonges, who gave me private lessons, is now a ruin. The library across the way, where I gave a talk last December, is just a memory. Not a stone standing. As I stood by the presbytery, I could see the water. On the way back, I met a young doctor working for the Red Cross. He told me in no uncertain terms that malaria had made a dramatic return to the region. Since I hadn’t taken my pills before I left on this trip, I went back to the car, and we got ready to leave. Back in 1974, I did research in Petit-Goâve and discovered that the town, surrounded by swamps, was infested with anopheles brimming over with malarial parasites. When we tried to drive off, we discovered that that car had an alternator problem. We left it in Petit-Goâve, in the care of one cousin, and set out in the car of another. That’s what funerals are: a tribe of cousins, men and women both. Total darkness on the highway. Luckily, we didn’t break down on the road. All that night, my sister was in a state of anxiety about the car. Since the earthquake, it’s important to have a car in good working order—for those who own one. She works on the other side of the city. We returned Saturday evening. On Sunday morning, a driver left early for Petit-Goâve with a second-hand alternator he’d bought. They installed it quickly so he could be back in Port-au-Prince before nightfall. My sister started smiling again. “That car is like my legs,” she sang. “Without it I couldn’t go to work. And if I don’t work, I’m dead. Dead, dead, dead.” There’s no one more alive than my sister when she’s happy.

  A Body Quake

  A friend invited me to a restaurant. Night was falling. We heard whispering nearby. A swarm of humans moving inside their tents. A few lamps lit. As we climbed toward Pétionville, we saw how much it had rained. We reached the place Saint-Pierre. I wondered how these people manage to sleep in the mud, night after night. Fortunately, the sun dries everything out during the day. Rainwater comes sweeping down the mountain. We went by a discotheque. Line-ups of luxury cars. People have come here to let go after all their trials. The restaurant is perched on a hill with a magnificent view of the city. I see people up there and wonder what it must be like, eating as you look out on a broken city. My friend took me to La Plantation where the fish is very good. Just before dessert, I went into the bathroom to rinse my face when my legs gave out. I grabbed onto the sink. I felt a good strong shock. My breath gone. Sweating already. I sat down on the toilet. My legs were weak. I went back to the table once I’d gotten hold of myself. The same atmosphere as before. Nothing indicated there’d been a tremor. I can’t be the only one who felt it. People are going to mention it. I just need to wait. The conversations were as lively as ever. Finally I understood that my body had shaken, not the earth.

  A New Word

  I’m standing on the sidewalk, waiting for my nephew to come back. Young women slip out of their tents in the camp next door. They’re dressed for Saturday night. My nephew is late, and my mother is worried. I listen to the radio that she forgot on the gallery by her chair. Actually, I’m not really listening. You can’t count the number of radio stations in Port-au-Prince. I recognize them by their decibel level. A lot of announcers think they have to scream to get the public’s attention. Their voices add to the heat. Other announcers present a more distinguished profile to charm the upper-class audiences who hate those loud, demanding voices. Really, I’m not as bothered as I let on by the cacophony of everyone shouting out his argument without even pretending to listen to anyone else. Politics is the only subject, the daily bread of those who prefer opinion to information. Despite the noise, it’s a kind of barometer. Someone has just burst into flames of wrathful anger—then I realize it’s only theater. From the inflamed discussions, I’ve picked out these words (shouted every time) that keep coming back: cracks, ruins, reconstruction, camps, tents, provisions. Will they dislodge the words from the previous generation: Aristide, les
chimères, corruption, de facto government, eradication, and embargo? Or the terms from the generation before: Duvalier, dictatorship, prison, exile, tonton-macoute. Every decade has its vocabulary. The frequency of certain words in the media informs us about the state of things. For many years, the two favorite ones were “dictatorship” and “corruption.” Now, for the first time, we’re hearing “reconstruction.” That’s a new one. Even if most people can’t really believe it.

  A Slight Indisposition

  My mother and my sister were on the gallery. My nephew was working on his political economy homework. I was on the bed in his room. My brother-in-law was eating dinner alone with his newspaper. Suddenly, we heard a dish shatter. My nephew jumped up and discovered my brother-in-law stretched out on the table, his jaws locked. We didn’t know what to do. My sister walked calmly into the room. Her cool demeanor always scares me because I know, deep down, that she’s panicking. She threw cold water on my brother-in-law’s face. I worked to loosen the grip of his jaw as my nephew tried to slip an aspirin into his mouth. It was no use. A little sugar water was more effective. He’d felt ill suddenly, and thinking his blood pressure was too high, he took a drug to lower it. But the opposite happened. A quick drop in blood pressure threw him into a kind of coma. My mother’s face was a picture of concentration as she paced the corridor, calling upon the Virgin’s help. Once the crisis passed, my nephew started making jokes, but we knew he was afraid. We all went off to bed without any more discussion. My nephew plugged in the machine that keeps away mosquitoes. We listened to the dry buzz of grilling mosquitoes until my sister asked him to turn the thing off so we could sleep.

  Frankétienne’s Strategy

  I went by Frankétienne’s place yesterday. He wasn’t there. I looked around the garden. Everything seemed to be in good order, including the disorder. This morning I saw the stone-masons at work. The foreman invited me to look around; Frankétienne wanted me to, though he couldn’t be here today because he had a meeting out of town. Once a month, he meets with old friends for long discussions on a variety of subjects. In other words, he wouldn’t be back until evening. I noticed solid-looking steel poles planted here and there, better to resist the next earthquake. Frankétienne had painted them in the Basquiat style. I detected echoes of the two Haitian painters closest to him, Tiga and Saint-Brice. That’s Frankétienne in a nutshell: he sees the world as an artist does. I wouldn’t mention it to the foreman, but if you ask me, adding steel poles is not going to make the house more resistant to earthquakes. The opposite is true. But Frankétienne is a maximalist. Faced with an earthquake, the best strategy is to bend so you don’t break, but he reinforced his backbone with concrete. The next time will be a duel. But what matters most is that he’s trying to turn this disaster into a work of art.

  Wood

  People have started talking about wood again. I remember that before the earthquake, the problem of clear-cutting was on the agenda. That’s all anyone talked about, especially in the international media. Haiti was on the brink of ecological disaster. No trees, so nothing to hold down the arable land when the hard rains fell. You could literally see the bones of the country. That’s because people cut down the trees to make charcoal. In recent years, every presidential candidate added tree-planting to their program. If there are any trees left standing, it’s because concrete has become the favorite building material. But since it failed the earthquake test, the latest talk is of going back to wood, since it’s more flexible and resisted the tremors better than cement. That’s true enough, but if we go back to wood, we’ll risk ecological catastrophe.

  My Nomadic Friend

  My friend Dominique Batraville lives in Port-au-Prince, but I don’t have his address. In any case, he’s never home. I always meet him at an art show, a book launch, or a press conference at the Ministry of Culture. He’s a cultural journalist, exactly what I did when I lived here. He’s part of the group of young poets that my brother-in-law Christophe Charles published a few decades ago in his magazine, which featured only poets eighteen years old or younger. His first collection of poems in Creole, Boulpic, was a great success. Like many in his generation, he went through hell without a complaint. When I ask after his health, he’ll slap his chest with his open palm: his way of reassuring me. His way of defying his illness, too. You never know what shape he’ll be in when you see him. He has his ups and downs. When things are going really bad, he’ll disappear from sight for a month or more. Alarmed, his friends go looking for him, though they know he’ll reappear on his own one day. And suddenly he’s there. You can hear his characteristic laugh from a distance. One of the few men I know who has no enemies. You should never say something like that, but I say it in his case. He crosses borders effortlessly in a country where social classes are no laughing matter. He’s a jack-of-all-trades: radio host, newspaper journalist, poet, actor, and volunteer impresario. Often you see him with a talented young artist he’s promoting. He travels the city. You picture him ever more fragile, especially since his mother’s death. When he catches my concerned look, he gives me a wink of reassurance. While Frankétienne watches Port-au-Prince from the balcony of his house where he stands bare-chested, Batraville moves through the city on foot. He knows every part of it. With his way of covering the territory, he reminds me of Gasner Raymond, my friend who was murdered by the dictatorship thirty-five years ago. Gasner was positively caustic. Although Batraville’s laugh might seem sarcastic at times, you can tell right away that he’s a generous, gentle man. You can feel it by the way he opens his arms wide when he goes to greet you—he does it with his whole body. I breathed easier when I learned he had survived the earthquake. In his precarious state, the man sums up this untamable city.

  A Photo

  In this broken place, a lot of people who have come to help brought their cameras with them. At first they try to capture the suffering on film. The pictures are sent to their friends via the Internet. Then, after a while, they begin to enjoy it. Every photo creates a certain amount of interest back home. And every amateur photographer dreams of being in the right place at the right time to get a great picture. They imitate the professionals by shooting away at everything and anything. I met one of those amateurs happily shooting blindly into the crowd. He told me he was taking a photo class at a Miami university with an old-school teacher who accepts paper photos only, which cost him a fortune. Be spontaneous, no framing, give me untouched reality. The teacher tears up the pictures so quickly you wonder if he took the time to look at them. He told me all about his class as he went on shooting. I watched him and realized his method is not much different from his teacher’s. And wondered who was taking the photo: he or the camera? Why didn’t he take the time to look at the person he was photographing? What is this need to shoot people blindly? As if any picture will do. The look he gave me made me realize we weren’t living in the same century. It takes me at least an hour to photograph a scene, but with his machine, he can take fifty a minute. I look like an old artisan with my black notebook in which I note down every detail that will help me sketch out a face. We followed the crowds and ended up on the square in front of the ruined cathedral. We went on talking about our different art forms and our respective methods. He seemed more receptive than before, making mental calculations to see how much he could save with this technique of a single photo. Still, there’s something seductive about a photographer shooting multiple pictures of the same subject. I don’t know what a writer at work looks like. We came across a woman standing with her arms thrown open in front of a great black cross—all that remains of the cathedral. I sat down on a low wall to write. How to describe a scene like that? He took just one picture.

  New Landmarks

  The government can name streets if it wants to, but people have their own way of establishing landmarks. A church, an empty house, a park, a public building, a stadium, a cemetery—anything can be a landmark. People invent their own personal map of the city. They come from the countryside
with precise information that will help them locate a family member or friend. Luckily, no one building looks like another, and no urban plan was ever considered. Everyone had his say when it came to building his house so it wouldn’t look like a rabbit hutch. Every house can be found thanks to its originality and especially its loud colors. But when everything has been destroyed, and since people have always refused to orient themselves according to street names, it’s a little hard to get your bearings, especially at first. That situation created a new reality and people had to adapt fast. “You know where the Caribbean Market used to be? Well, you go past it, and then two buildings that collapsed …” To the landscape of this crumbled city, people have added elements of the old one still present in their memory. For the population whose minds are always in ferment, things accumulate instead of disappearing. We’ll have to wait for a generation who never knew the old city, and who’ll be willing to accept a new map.