Waiting for the Waters to Rise

by Maryse Conde

  By early in the evening, nothing had happened. Indefatigable, Fouad, assisted by Myriam, managed to hand out rice and smoked herring, and having eaten their fill the younger ones soon fell asleep while the men drank their rum and the women chanted their eternal hymns:

  Nearer my God to Thee,

  Nearer my God to Thee,

  Darkness be over me

  Yet in my dreams I’d be nearer my God to Thee.

  Shortly before midnight, a torrential rain began to fall. Never before had they seen such raindrops, as big as ping-pong balls, which crushed everything in their path. In the morning it stopped all at once. But there was no use twiddling the knobs on the radio or television since the electricity, never really reliable, had simply vanished. Consequently, there was no way of knowing what had happened in Gonaives or the rest of the country. As early as nine in the morning a stifling heat set in and the hard disk of the sun appeared threatening and relentless. Fouad and Babakar went out to look for news and more provisions. The supermarkets were guarded like Fort Knox, filled with armed, trigger-happy men, prepared to fire on the penniless crowds bustling along the shelves stealing everything they could. Carrefour and Jumbo had been thoroughly looted. Babakar and Fouad bumped into Monsieur Saint-Omer, accompanied by his team, who had come to check on the considerable damage. All that could be seen were shacks ripped open, sheets of corrugated iron scattered through the streets, and heaps of planks. In certain places, stagnant pools of water had formed and there was muddy water thigh-high.

  “It’s beyond understanding!” Monsieur Saint-Omer lamented. “Hurricanes used to be few and far between. Today, they’re commonplace. Three or four during the same season. They say Gonaives has been wiped out. At least five hundred dead,” he continued. “There’s no counting the number of homeless. This time, it really is the end of Haiti. We’ll all perish and what the Duvaliers, Cedras, and other despots haven’t managed to do, the angry skies will do instead.”

  Then he thanked them warmly for helping the town’s underprivileged.

  “If we manage to survive, I’ll introduce you to the interim president. You’ll see, this is a man who loves his people.”

  Don’t they all claim to love their people? Babakar thought. And work for the good of the people? Even Papa Doc said he was working for the dignity of his people and their entry into the concert of nations.

  Leaving Fouad to take care of the provisions, Babakar walked back to La Maison through the devastated streets. Lord, what will it look like once the hurricane has passed over? He must check on the flood drainage channels being built by the unemployed whom he had made the wise decision to recruit and who were delighted with their good luck. On the terrace of Building A, Jahira was keeping an eye on Anaïs, whom she had bedecked with all sorts of amulets ever since their visit to Jacmel.

  “What sort of danger are you predicting?” Babakar asked, somewhat exasperated.

  “There are dangers everywhere,” she claimed. “Invisible to the naked eye.”

  Anaïs was clumsily piling cubes one on top of the other. Deep in concentration, on seeing her father, she merely twittered, “Papa, Papa!”

  Leaning against the balustrade a short distance away, Jahira, unlike her usual self, appeared miserable and despondent.

  “Are you scared of the hurricane that’s coming?” Babakar asked her affectionately.

  “Yes, very scared!” she confessed. “Everyone thinks the Good Lord wants to get rid of us.”

  “I don’t know what Dr. Michel was thinking when he built this place,” said Babakar reassuringly, “but we have nothing to fear here. All the Hurricane Hugos in the world would be unable to destroy it.”

  “I’m especially worried about Movar,” she continued. “He’s been gone three months and there’s no news of him.”

  Babakar drew her up close and kissed her. At the same time, he recalled Fouad’s words: “Cuca had become an evanescent perfume whose scent had disappeared. Myriam was close by with the smell of Palma Christi oil in her mop of hair.” Jahira’s hair too smelled of Palma Christi oil. It had been untangled and straightened with a hot iron, while her domed forehead and round cheeks were satiny soft. Wasn’t happiness here within arm’s reach? Once again Babakar was ashamed of himself and let the young girl go.

  In the middle of the afternoon the sun suddenly vanished. A low, leaden sky gripped the earth. Those who were lingering foolishly in the park around La Maison looking for mangoes hurriedly ran inside. Fouad and Babakar had carefully stopped up the slightest openings in Building C. Frightened by the surrounding darkness the children began to cry. Large acetylene lamps had to be lit to reassure them.

  People soon formed groups according to their natural affinities. Babakar went and laid down on the mattress beside Jahira who was cradling Anaïs. Frightened by the strangeness of the place and all these unfamiliar faces, the child was whimpering and fidgeting. Babakar felt that despite himself he was heading inexorably along the path he had deliberately denied himself.

  A few steps away Karl, the Austrian physician, was clutching his beloved and listening to the music of Arvo Pärt, his favorite composer, on his iPod. Zohran was sucking greedily on Myriam’s breast, oblivious to the stressful situation around them, while Giscard was talking to Fouad about his favorite subject: the role and function of Art in a time of crisis.

  “The Artist is a miracle worker!” he thundered. “A miracle worker for his people. That’s why we ask writers to write in Creole, the language that has forged the people. What we need are hundreds of writers like Frankétienne.”

  Like someone gripped with fever, Babakar tossed and turned in his sleep when his mother, whom he had sometimes banished from his dreams, reappeared. She seemed tired and long-suffering, her cornflower-blue eyes strangely faded.

  “I never thought this would happen,” she sighed. “I’m losing you, I’m losing you. Why do we always end up losing our children?”

  “You’re not losing me, Maman,” Babakar exclaimed, upset. “That’s impossible. I’m simply snowed under with work. I have to shoulder all the responsibility of La Maison and it’s too much for me.”

  She carried on as if she hadn’t heard him.

  “Your misfortune, I repeat, is that you fall in and out of love with the first person you meet. First it was Azélia, then Reinette. Worse still, that true daughter of François Duvalier, the fiendish Estrella Ovide. Soon it will be that little uneducated Haitian girl. Okay, she’ll be an excellent substitute mother for Anaïs, but that’s all!”

  With this barb, she vanished, leaving her son outraged.

  How unfair! How hypocritical! As if she didn’t know that, deep down, she was the only woman he loved and desired, and that that was the cause of all his misfortune.

  The human heart, however, is so strange it never ceases to amaze us. Stricken with anxiety and not knowing what tomorrow would bring, the men and women in Building C couldn’t help joking and larking about. Some of them were telling jokes in Creole. A fine example of globalization was the group of students from the hotel management school, which had been transformed into a sieve in next to no time by the torrential rains, who were strumming on a guitar and imitating a French singer, popular on the very nationalist Radio Haiti, a certain Francis Cabrel.

  When there’s nothing more than walls in front of me

  I’ll go sleep at the home of the lady of Haute Savoie.

  A little farther on, a woman was singing traditional songs and the atmosphere was becoming festive.

  It was then that a small man getting on in years with graying beard and hair, dressed all in black like an English clergyman, stood up straight as an arrow, and shouted with a piercing voice in excellent French before kneeling down, “Enough! Enough! We must pray to God! Down on your knees!”

  Some people protested, but most of them obeyed him on the spot; some mothers even forced their little
ones to kneel down and join hands.

  The man continued in a powerful voice. “You think it’s a coincidence that we have to suffer over and over again? From the dictators who kill us and force us into exile, to the boat people who drown by the thousands and the schools that collapse on our children, as well as the hurricanes, three in one season, and the floods.”

  The place went silent.

  “It’s because the Good Lord is tired of us,” he trumpeted at the top of his voice. “Haiti never stops sinning. Yes, sinning. First voodoo, then fornication, now drugs and all kinds of violence and robbery. On your knees, I’m telling you, and repeat after me: ‘In the name of the Father, the Son, and the Holy Spirit.’”

  He had asked the real question that nobody could answer. Was this “pathetic” nation, as one of its own children called it, guilty? Guilty of what? Victims are often guilty and that’s a fact.

  Now there was utter pandemonium. After the Lord’s Prayer, some people were chanting “The Lord is my Shepherd, I shall not want …”

  So began the second night, in utter chaos.

  Soon, however, the sounds faded. Preceded by an enormous rumble, which seemed to well up from the very bowels of the earth, the wind began to rage. Consequently, everyone hugged each other tight.

  The wind raged furiously the remainder of the night. Then the following day and night, and the day and most of the night after that. Finally, it died down and the torrential rain dried up. Trembling and dazed, the men and women opened the doors and, venturing out onto the terrace, what they saw was unrecognizable.

  -

  A HURRICANE IS God’s hand of wrath beating down on a country. One by one, it rips the leaves off the trees, snaps their branches, uproots the strongest and flattens the weakest. It respects neither the rich nor the poor. With equal fury, it crushes the yachts of the privileged in the marinas and the patched-up shacks of the destitute in the countryside. It has fun sending the cars and the scooters left in the parking lots flying. Once it has broken and destroyed everything, then the Good Lord has the last laugh.

  The days following a hurricane are a premonition of the Armageddon, that end of the world we all dread. Armed with paltry weapons such as shovels, buckets, and brooms, everyone endeavors to uncover again the traces of his past life. Monsieur Saint-Omer did wonders and managed to house all the homeless under military tents. Babakar found time to give free consultations to the women who were pregnant. He was well aware that behind his back he was nicknamed “Papa Loko.” But he didn’t know whether the Creole word had the same meaning as the Spanish. Even so, he was much amused.

  “Does it mean that everyone takes me for a madman?” he wondered in delight. “I’m the son of a blue-eyed black woman and a ruined noble yerewolo. Who can beat that?”

  The international press unanimously reported this formidable hurricane that had almost wiped Haiti off the map. Depending how important they thought poor Haiti was, the information was deemed front-page or back-page news. Once this atmospheric turbulence had been covered, Omni Media for example chose to publish a long article on a charismatic gang leader by the name of Henri Christophe in memory of the former emperor. He refused to lay down his weapons before settling scores with the interim president, former friend of the ousted President, whom he was accused of having betrayed. In order to excite his readers, the journalist had no qualms portraying a sort of drug- and alcohol-addicted visionary who remained fiercely loyal and true to his ideals. A series of photos along the lines of those that had made this magazine famous showed Henri Christophe in a mountainous context, wearing a Fidel Castro-type cap and pointing a gun; or, on the contrary, in the midst of an elegant reception dressed in an impeccable Giorgio Armani suit, or else in bathing trunks, revealing a muscular physique. In one of the photos he was arm in arm with a pretty woman wearing an attractive sequined dress.

  Babakar devoured the article with a heavy heart and recognized Estrella in the photos. How lovely she was! What had become of her? He had no news of her. Was the couple still in Johannesburg?

  While he was agonizing, Henri Christophe announced his return in a sensational manner.

  At dawn, taking advantage of the chaos caused by the hurricane, his men waged a mortar attack on the presidential palace. They didn’t find the interim president, who as a precaution spent every night with a different mistress, but instead tore to pieces the battalion of democratic forces who were standing guard. Henri Christophe’s men had attacked with such savagery that all that was left were chopped-off heads, broken limbs, and disemboweled bodies, which they hastily threw into a common grave. But the victims’ relatives were emboldened by their despair. We should not forget that those who have not had a religious funeral before being buried can never be found. As a result, the relatives set up camp around the presidential palace praying and moaning to such a degree that the interim president had to intervene. He ordered the corpses to be dug up from the common grave where they had been piled and handed back to each family in a metal-gray plastic bag together with 250 US dollars, which amounted to the last monthly wage of the deceased. Most of the families had never had such a sum and it helped them get over the loss of their loved ones.

  The atmosphere was tense.

  There was no news of Movar and the worst-case scenario was now assumed. Babakar was overcome with remorse. If it would have stopped Movar from leaving and disappearing, shouldn’t he have done his best to come up with the wretched ten thousand dollars Sô Fanfanne was demanding? Couldn’t he have borrowed the money from a bank or a friend? From Giscard, for example, who was making a fortune from his metal objects? Contrary to what everyone thought, La Maison had suffered a great deal from the hurricane. Winds at times blowing 350 kilometers an hour had ripped off the roofs and torn open the passageways linking the buildings. They had managed to blow through the cracks in the sheets of plywood Babakar had fixed to shore up the doors and windows and sent them flying. Consequently, the rainwater had gushed in, flooding the floors. The gully had become a genuine torrent, overflowing its banks, and fueled streams of water that ran in every direction. The waterlogged earth was strewn with tree trunks and branches, sheets of corrugated iron, piles of furniture, and all kinds of rubble. They were forced to live in chaos and filth that would take months to put right.

  One night when he was particularly demoralized, Babakar lay down on his bed fully dressed. He hadn’t slept for nights. Like in a film, images flickered over and over again in his head: Movar sheltering from the rain under a banana leaf, Movar weeping for Reinette, Movar and Sô Fanfanne, but also, and above all, the picture of Estrella, so unlike the image we have of the companion of an armed gang leader—the Estrella who had put a spell on him.

  He heard Anaïs’s adjacent bedroom door close, then Jahira entered the room.

  “What do you want?” he asked rather roughly, for there was no room for her in his thoughts.

  She didn’t answer and stood leaning against the wall. Then she let her dress slip to the floor and remained for a few moments in her unsightly panties and pink cotton bra, which she then took off. All that was left was the immodest beauty of her young body. Babakar, stupefied, trembling with an unexpected desire, looked at her dumbfounded. She resembled a painting by Ingres or Botticelli celebrating the beauty of a woman whose skin would have been black. She walked resolutely across the room and slipped into his bed. There she undressed Babakar with a firm yet gentle hand, clasped him in her arms, and guided his rigid member, stiff for penetration.

  “What are you doing?” he managed to murmur.

  “Last night I saw Movar in a dream,” she whispered. “He told me he would like us to have sex.”

  Babakar surrendered to the pleasure of sex. Unlike Azélia, Jahira was not a virgin.

  Oh well, he told himself, unhappy with the feeling of having been swindled. We are, after all, in the twenty-first century.

  It did not dam
pen the blissful moments that followed.

  “I loved you the first time I set eyes on you,” she claimed. “From the moment you stepped out of Fouad’s van. I thought, ‘This man is for me. Yes, I’ll be the mistress of his house.’”

  “For me, it was more complicated!” he confessed. “My head is crammed with all sorts of images, memories, and ghosts which I can’t get rid of.”

  “I know, I know,” she said tenderly. “Movar told me. You had a wife in Eburnéa and they killed her and your child.”

  “Did Movar tell you everything?” Babakar asked in a fit of sincerity. “Did he tell you that Anaïs isn’t perhaps my daughter as I had imagined?”

  “She’s your daughter!” she assured him, closing his mouth with a kiss. “You love her as if she were yours.”

  It would have been impossible to compare Azélia with Jahira since they couldn’t have been more different. Babakar now realized that Azélia was shy and timid because of her vulnerable condition as a woman. Throughout her life she had been crushed and marginalized by men, her father and her brothers, who had cramped her in her decision-making and choices. As a result, she had lost confidence in herself. Jahira was totally different. She was cheerful and didn’t mind Babakar’s absences and silences. Despite her youth, she radiated strength and self-confidence with her gift of constantly reading meaning into Nature like Movar—which both delighted and exasperated Babakar: a rainbow which pushed open the door of the clouds; a trio of hibiscus blooming once again after the hurricane; a chicken hawk flying across the sky from right to left instead of left to right. She had wanted to be a singer and sang Anaïs to sleep of an evening with a thin little voice. She had once been a member of a humble choral society singing traditional songs, now famous the world over since most of its members had fled to Canada. Sometimes, she thought of joining them, but quickly changed her mind.