God Loves Haiti (9780062348142)

by Leger, Dimitry Elias

Everything’s going to be all right, the boy said again, as if reading his mind. Come with me.

  The boy pulled Alain’s arms like he expected Alain to have the ability to get up and stand on his own two feet with no problem. Alain stood on his two feet with no problem. Merci, Alain whispered.

  De rien, the boy said. Viens.

  Allowing himself to be tugged toward the three humanitarians and their crowd of eager beneficiaries, Alain Destiné stuck out his square jaw, flashed his battle-tested negotiator’s grin, and soon began shaking hands with a businessman’s winning handshake. Martin, Mariana, and Adam, they were doctors, two Canadians and a Peruvian. While bandaging and dispensing painkillers to the group of earthquake victims still mobile enough to come to them, they briefed Alain on Haiti’s status. Seven-point-two magnitude earthquake, thousands dead, most of Port-au-Prince and Léogâne destroyed. As Alain tried to digest the news, locals pressed him to tell the doctors to come help a dying child or parent or sibling or neighbor lying about somewhere around the park or in the rubbled city beyond it. In the middle of the action, tugged at all sides, feeling useful, Alain briefly felt a surge of his old adrenaline. But the effort was tough. The back of his neck began to sweat. The noon sun and heat felt like they were closing in on him. The smell of mass deaths, plangent and sour, started to fill the park, sapping him. Alain had to shake hands with his left hand because the right one was still no good and hurting. Keeping the boy close to him, Alain steadied himself. As had happened to him whenever his self-esteem perked up, he found himself thinking of Natasha.

  Where are you, baby? You should be here, he thought.

  For the first time since the earthquake, he thought of the woman he loved, the same woman who, when they last saw each other, seemingly an eternity ago, locked him in a closet and said good-bye to him. It was never meant to be for us, was it? Alain could now begin to concede.

  Dr. Mariana was the least Latina-looking Mariana Alain had ever met. She had red hair, green eyes, freckles, and a nose too big for her face. She turned out to be the leader, or at least the spokesperson, of this troika of saviors. They came from the Canadian Red Cross; they were student trainees on a mission of observation only, but the scale of the disaster had forced them into duty. She said there indeed had been earthquake. In turn, Alain played translator, relaying the information to the crowd as loudly as he could. They nodded at the news with no emotion. An earthquake?! Of course! Only God could test us like that, their faces said. Fuck God, Alain thought. Xavier looked up at him, again, as if he’d read his mind, as if to tell him that resistance was futile. The earthquake was massive and unprecedented, Mariana said. The earthquake originated somewhere between Carrefour and Léogâne and caused extensive damage, destroying most homes. Even the United Nations lost its headquarters and dozens of staffers. The event made headlines around the world, and the world had responded with an outpouring of sympathy and support for Haiti. Billions of dollars were being gathered. An unprecedented collaboration between American military forces and charities from everywhere had been working all through the night to stabilize the situation and bring medical and other aid to everyone. The only reason Marianna and her colleagues were already in place was because they were in town attending a workshop at the Canadian Embassy when the earthquake struck. After a night of caution, they came out first thing in the morning to do reconnaissance for a damage assessment report.

  As if she anticipated his next question, Mariana announced that the President was alive. The plane he was to take at the time of the earthquake was destroyed, and the President was bruised but alive and kicking. He was working closely with the United Nations and the international community in a temporary office near the airport to get help to Haiti as quickly as possible. And the first lady? Alain asked. Everyone looked at him like he was crazy, like, Where did that question come from? Alain squeezed Xavier’s shoulder during the silence that preceded Mariana’s answer. No news on the first lady, Mariana said. Pauvre diable, an elderly woman standing next to Alain said.

  Alain went light-headed and his knees buckled. Little Xavier held him up until a couple of older guys noticed and came to help. To everyone’s surprise, Alain pulled himself out of his fainting spell. Fine, he said to no one in particular, let’s be grateful for what we still have. Our president is alive and doing his part. Let’s do our part.

  He ordered the able to help the weak stand and form a line to receive basic care from the nice Canadians. More Canadians came, and they came with the good stuff. For lunch, the refugees ate crackers and drank a sip of water. When dinnertime came, they ate the same things. Be grateful, Alain said to everyone as he helped distribute the food. Be grateful.

  Over the next couple of weeks, Alain slept a dreamless two to three hours a night on a military-gray cloth covering a piece of cardboard in a tent pitched on a grassy patch in the park. After the blue embers of dawn filtered through the tent’s seams, he sprang up, sat, and listened to the sounds of the new world he had come to inhabit in Park Pigeon. A dog sniffing about. The clang and hiss of a giant pot being cleaned by Yanick, the camp’s designated chef. The soft hiss of a child pissing. The boy Xavier had refused to stray more than a meter away from Alain since they’d met. Pre-earthquake, Alain had greeted new days with as many push-ups and sit-ups as he could muster no matter where he was. Today, he barely had enough energy to keep his eyes open. One of his legs was broken and without the benefit of casts was healing in all sorts of ugly shapes. His washboard abs, which used to give him a boxer’s confidence that he could bounce back from any punch, were gone. Aches and inertia made Alain move like an old man in the days after the earthquake. He was wasting away and uninterested in doing anything about it, not even going home to Place Boyer. Instead, he lay awake on his cardboard for as long as he could until just the second before his new buddy, Philippe, the diminutive, cornrow-wearing leader of their refugee camp, who, it should be said, had turned out to be an even better leader in disaster relief than Alain was, came looking for him.

  Alain was embarrassed by the brokenness of everything. The simple fact that Philippe did not look like he wanted to flee and find a corner in which to vomit at each sight, smell, and sound of their damaged compatriots in the refugee camp, as Alain did, kept convincing Alain that he was truly weak but should at least stick around to help. So he lay in his hot tent, wondering how he could die in a way that Xavier, Philippe, and their new dependents would forgive him for. He assumed no one suspected his posttraumatic stress disorder was leading him to contemplate suicide. He wrongly suspected that no one would care if he died. So many people had died in the quake and daily in the camp, how many tears could anyone muster for a cripple’s parting, even if he was useful as the camp’s resident translator? The problem was, life in the camp, ironically enough, made suicide fairly difficult. With Philippe softening aid workers with his soul brother–community leader act, Alain worked as a closer, hammering out arrangements with aid agencies to secure his little community precious necessities like food, water, hygiene kits, tents, his-and-hers toilets, separate men’s and women’s showers, and even lamps and lights to scare off potential rapists, thieves, and demons in the wee hours. Alain’s ability to glad-hand and fake a condescending, look-at-these-poor-unlucky-Haitians, aren’t-we-noble nod with the fey Canadian or haughty Frenchman or perky American in charge was offensive, but it translated into supplies for the families of Park Pigeon, so no one called him on it. The work still added to his depression, though. Under little Xavier’s ever-present and ever-watchful eyes, Alain was careful to stay upbeat and solution-oriented. His compassion cup ran over—when in public. He had always been a good actor. Everyone, especially the foreign visitors, seemed too preoccupied and overwhelmed by Haiti—All that natural and stunning beauty! All those vacant, shocked faces! All those glistening bodies! The Middle Ages–level misery!—to scratch his smiley surface to see the morbidity that had spread over his soul like a cancer. These people never asked the obvious questions—You�
�re from Place Boyer, what are you doing here? Place Boyer was unaffected by the earthquake, why don’t you go home? Why are you still living in a tent? Isn’t it dangerous here?—and Alain didn’t have to figure out an answer.

  Place Pigeon and the surrounding parks along the Champ de Mars teemed with thousands of earthquake refugees. They lived five or more people to a tent fit for two. They were cramped, tired, hurt, grieving for all the people and things, a world really, they had lost during the thirty-five-second earthquake. How can an event be so short and cause so much damage? People talked about that day, that quake, and their terror all the time. Oh, there were cries for help everywhere. All the survivors remembered hearing them as they made their way, or were made to make their way, out from under tons of rubble. But you had to ignore them, didn’t you? Or you were made to ignore them by the sheer scale of your powerlessness, your infinite meekness? I can’t believe we got to live.

  My dear dead Natasha, Alain wrote, furtively, in the diary he began keeping in his tent.

  Why did you leave me? I mean, leave me leave me. Oh I know why you left me, but where did the strength to do so come from? I know I approved of the marriage. I encouraged you to find a patron for your art. I needed more time. You needed a nicer life ASAP. I got it. The President’s not a bad man. A weak man, a man without a courageous bone in his body, but he was wise enough to take the quasi-love you made available to him. You gotta give him credit for that. We would have had great stories to tell our children after you left him for me to whom you rightfully belonged. Yeah, I said it. Belong. I owned you like you owned me. I’m sorry.

  I don’t know what to do with my life now. I survived the earthquake. I can’t believe I survived the fucking earthquake and you didn’t. I’m supposed to be grateful. It’s some kind of miracle. I ain’t grateful. You alive is the miracle I would have preferred. The rest, I’m ashamed to admit, is noise. Thousands of people like you are dead. Estimates are wild. I’ve heard numbers as high as 100,000! But nine million of us remain, no matter what the number of earthquake deaths settle at. Probably half that number still living wishes they were dead too; they persevere. I can’t. You should see their toughness as work. I’m not them. I can’t handle life anymore. My nerves are shot. My own shadow scares me. I refuse to leave the refugee camp. I cannot bear the thought of the world beyond it, my father, our house, our society, and the flow of talk of books, politics, profits, children, beaches, football, travel, America, reconstruction, rubble, God. Maybe the earthquake shook away my Haitianness, our supposed innate capacity to grin and bear all God’s sick jokes. I don’t know. I’m being useful in the country’s darkest hour. I have a job, handling relations with foreigners who come around to offer help. I got our camp food, water, tents, first aids kits, even hygiene kits for girls, soccer balls, toilets, showers, even occasional police patrols. I have my own tent, lamp, pen, pad, cardboard to sleep on, crackers to eat, water. When it rained last night, I got mud too. I used it as a pillow. Might as well. My hair is falling out. The pillow was soft and gooey. Tasty too. Just kidding.

  I have a roommate in my tent, just one roommate. A privilege. (Privilege, as you liked to point out, had a way of always finding me. It does even now in this damaged new world. At this rate, I’ll probably have my own cabin in the Devil’s cruise ship in hell.) Most people are piled in four to six in their tent. My roommate is a preternaturally mature orphan from nearby Fort National. He could be the Son of God, but I’m too afraid to ask. The last thing I want these days is to give my conflicted feelings about God a face to hate. I like the kid. He keeps me calm. You see, Natasha, I don’t want to do anything with my life now that you’re dead. I feel the country died too. Life as I knew it died that January afternoon. The new world is for the brave. I do not feel like one of them. Assuming you’re in heaven—surely adulterers go to heaven—you have to tell me how to join you as quickly as possible. Send me a sign. You have to help me figure out a way to gracefully escape whatever is trying to pass as life here on earth after Ragnarok. It’s gotten harder to kill yourself in Port-au-Prince since the quake, believe it or not. Or maybe mustering energy to do anything but lay in my tent—it is a nice tent; it’s from Taiwan—and play-acting at public servant will wear out soon. Some invisible damage I suffered internally during the quake may end me. It’s become a common phenomenon. We bury more seemingly unhurt people in the camp each day. It’s like they decide to not wake up. We bury more of these people than we help mothers give birth! An old lady or man or child sits in a corner staring into space for days on end, looking stunned, just shocked, that the earthquake did what it did to them and then they either close their eyes and tumble from their seat onto the dirt or someone touches their unblinking face and discovers their souls had long fled their bodies.

  Have you seen your mom in heaven? Does my grandfather walk with a limp up there too? Dad can’t be dead, can he? Pétionville, I’ve heard, was spared by the quake. Shit, I should go check up on him. And mom too. If they’re alive, they’re probably worried sick about me. They approved of you, you know. I was only messing with you when I told you dad didn’t like you. I suspect they liked you because they knew you wanted to leave here permanently and they wanted me to leave too. They worried too much about my safety. They should have worried about my heart breaking. I loved you so much.

  GOD IS ON LINE ONE

  In the thirty-sixth second, the earth stopped shaking, and a fog of dust fell like gentle snow on Port-au-Prince. On the ground of the airport’s tarmac an old man in a torn suit lay flat on his back and performed snow angels in the dust with a big grin on his face. Of all the Haitian reactions to the earthquake, his will be the most scrutinized. His will be considered by millions of observers the world over as a call to arms or a call to surrender, or a reminder that death and life go on, and that life on earth was meant to suck, even when it seemed as though it could not suck worse than it did on the thirty-sixth second after the thirty-five-second tremor in Port-au-Prince that January afternoon. Slowly, oh so slowly, his eyes opened and took in . . . snowflakes? No, these flakes were small and dry. They caused the old man’s eyes to itch and his grin, which was stupid but involuntary, to fade. The picture of grim determination, he rose on his elbows then to his feet, patting dust off his suit jacket as he went along. Near him a plane stood in an unflyable position. The airport’s tower, as far as he could make out, had crumbled into itself, sending heaping chunks of red-and-cream concrete sprawling all the way to his tasseled loafers. The air smelled of brimstone. His throat felt choked. The first notes of the melody of his voice escaped him. However, a nauseating group of moaning voices belonging to others rose faintly, like mist, in the distance, the first sounds he’d heard since the sound of his voice got completely bossed by the mysterious force that ejected him off the airplane’s steps. Above, the sun shone a hazy white light. Yet he felt cold. Am I dead? he thought. Before the old man could raise a hand to shield his eyes from the white sunlight, which had grown intense and was causing his head to throb, his vision blurred. He rubbed his eyes, hard, then a vision, dream, or nightmare appeared to him.

  The scene was lit like the eye of a hurricane in a film, bright but surrounded by a cold darkness and winds that roared. A tall, bearded man stood behind a lectern. Behind the man the President saw the entrance to what looked like paradise: one of Haiti’s idyllic beaches, like at Club Indigo, the kind of inheritance taken for granted by locals throughout the Caribbean but beloved by northern-dwellers. You never love something more than the moment you believe it to be lost. The President suddenly yearned to run and throw himself at full speed into the warm and blue sea that was his birthright. In front of him, however, was a line of about forty men, roughly the same size and age, but with different cuts of hair and clothes, reflecting different periods in Haitian history, from the Napoleonic era to the twenties to the bespectacled fifties to the guayabera-shirt eighties. The men were short and twitchy, and humbly looking at the ground or at the sky around them wi
thout saying a word.

  A Napoleonic-costumed man was the first to meet Saint Peter. A hush fell over the group. The President started to recognize these guys. They were his predecessors. All of Haiti’s dead presidents! He saw all the other presidents take a step back and work hard to pretend to ignore the conversation the guy in front was having with their maker. Saint Peter was in a foul mood.

  Dessalines, is it? he said. Looking at your ledger here, I see some truly remarkable achievements. You were a general in an army that fought and won a great war to bring freedom to slaves. Slaves! Saint Peter looked at the tall, dark man with the kind face standing behind him. The man nodded his approval. There are few acts we care for more than the emancipation of slaves. Freedom to choose your fate is Our Father’s greatest gift to man and woman. You did Him proud. Your countrymen had been slaves for centuries. Centuries! My word. The odds! The courage! Dignity is the highest and one of the greatest gifts you could give your fellow man.

  But . . .

  But?

  Jean-Jacques Dessalines hesitated.

  But what? Saint Peter intoned. The plaza got really warm.

  But, Mr. Peter, I don’t feel worthy of heaven.

  With a weary look on his wizened face, Saint Peter said, And why is that, General Dessalines?

  I killed too many people to feel worthy of heaven, sir. I even had women and children killed after we won the war. Rage and darkness won me over for too long, long after I think I should have let it go. I couldn’t let it go. How could the Father forgive me? I lost my head and couldn’t turn the other cheek.

  Then Dessalines began to cry. His sobs echoed across all the way to the President at the back of the line.

  Do you know how you died, General? Saint Peter asked.

  I don’t know, sir. Last thing I remember is that we were near Pont Larnage and there was an ambush. My cortege was surrounded. Lots of voices screamed confusing and contradictory orders at me. Stay inside! Come out! Show your face! Stay quiet! A bunch of arms broke inside and reached for me. Then the world went black. I don’t know for how long. The first light I saw was the one that led me to your feet.