Haiti Noir

CLAIRE OF THE SEA LIGHT by Edwidge Danticat Ville Rose

The morning Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin turned seven, a rogue wave, measuring, by some visual accounts, between ten and twenty feet high, was seen in the ocean outside of Ville Rose. Claire’s father, Gaspard, was one of a few people to notice the wave as he untied the twin sisal ropes that bound his fishing boat to a large rock on the beach. He first heard a low rumbling, like that of distant thunder, then saw a wall of water rise from the depths of the ocean, a giant blue-green tongue, trying, it seemed, to lick the sky.

Just as quickly as it had swelled, the wave crashed in, collapsing on itself, sending hardly a ripple toward the beach where Gaspard was standing, in shock. Thrust above the crest of the wave then pinned down beneath its trough, a small dinghy vanished. Its owner was a man who for years Gaspard had greeted as they hurried past each other, at dawn, on their way out to sea. In an instant Gaspard’s neighbor and friend was gone and so was any sign that anything out of the ordinary had taken place.

That sweltering morning Gaspard had slept in, contemplating the impossible decision he’d always known he’d one day have to make: to whom, finally, to give his daughter.

“Woke up earlier and I would have been there,” he tearfully told his sweet-faced little girl after watching the boat disappear.

Molasses-toned with bulging penny-colored eyes, Claire was still lying on the foam-board cot in their single-room shack, her thin night dress soaking in the back with sweat, as she dreamed of something she wouldn’t be able to recall when she was fully conscious. Upon waking, she wrapped her long bony arms around her father’s neck, just as she had when she was even littler, pressing her nose against his tear-dampened cheek. Some years before, her father had told her what had happened on her very first day on earth, that giving birth to her, her mother had died. So her birthday was also a day of death, and the rogue wave and the dead fishermen proved that it had never ceased to be. Even so, before her father had spoken that morning, Claire had hoped that he might have come to wish her a happy birthday, but she knew that he might also be saying goodbye.

The day Claire Limyè Lanmè turned six, Ville Rose’s new mayor decided to host a massive victory party in the seaside town. However, before the party, he gave a long and tiresome speech from one of the stone steps of the town hall, which overlooked a flamboyant-filled piazza, where hundreds of residents stood elbow to elbow in the May afternoon sun. The mayor’s speech was badly organized, and even more badly delivered, and the mayor, a tall balding man, soaked, with his sweaty fingers, the nearly twenty typewritten pages the speech was written on, even while occasionally pulling a handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his armpit-stained linen suit to wipe his brows. Claire was wearing her pink muslin birthday dress, her thick, woolly hair neatly plaited and covered with tiny bow-shaped barrettes. She sat on her father’s shoulders while he stood on the edge of the crowd, close to the giant speakers that made Claire feel the mayor’s words rattling through her bones. Still, she could hear a familiar voice shout above it all that it seemed as though the speech had been written by a primary school boy.

“Don’t all political speeches sound like that?” her father replied, inspiring a coy smile from the woman he had snaked through the crowd to stand next to. The woman was in her early thirties but, because she was short and round with an oval girlish face, looked a lot younger. She owned one of Ville Rose’s most popular fabric shops, where Claire’s mother, a seamstress for the town undertaker, used to buy cloth. After Claire’s mother died, whenever Gaspard went in to buy a piece of cloth to have a dress made for his daughter, the woman would always refuse payment by saying, “Fòk youn voye je sou lòt.” We must look after one another.

Only when the fabric vendor stroked Claire’s knees during the mayor’s speech, occasionally glancing at her then quickly returning her gaze to the mayor’s clammy face, did Claire realize that this was the woman her father had been trying to give her to for years.

The mayor had commissioned from a local artist a giant portrait of himself, looking younger and more lithe and athletic than he had ever been. That portrait, reproduced on what seemed like a massive bedsheet, draped the front of the town hall and other official buildings.

“Thank you for putting your trust in me,” the mayor was winding down nearly an hour after he’d begun speaking.

Gaspard cupped his hands over his mouth, joining his fists into a funnel that led into the woman’s delicate seashellshaped right ear: “Next time we’ll put even less trust in you.”

Later that evening, the fabric vendor showed up at the seaside shack to have another look at Claire. Gaspard had insisted that Claire pat her hair down with an old bristle brush and that she straighten out the creases and wrinkles in the pink muslin dress that he’d made her keep wearing all day. Standing in the middle of the shack, the woman asked Claire to twirl by the light of a bell-shaped kerosene lamp on the small table where the girl and her father usually ate their meals. The walls of the shack were covered with flaking, yellowing newspapers glued to the wood long ago with limestone and manioc paste. From where she was standing, Claire could not see her own stretched-out shadow, which always made her feel taller, and thus older.

While twirling for the lady, Claire wondered whether her father had already been made the usual promises, that she would not be whipped, that she would be kept clean, that she would be well fed, that she would be sent to school, that she would be taken to a clinic when she was sick. All this perhaps in exchange for some cleaning both at home and at the shop. The woman had no living children so there would be no older kids to tease and beat her.

“You would be staying with a nice lady,” her father had told her on the way to the mayor’s speech that afternoon. “It would be like an adoption. You’d be a doll for her to dress up, the little girl she lost.”

But as soon as Claire stopped twirling, the woman turned to her father, her long shiny fake hair blocking half of her copper face.

“My girl was older,” she said.

Gaspard’s eyes dropped from the woman’s fancy hairpiece to her pricey open-toed sandals and bright red toenails. “She’ll grow,” he replied.

“I can’t afford to wait for her to grow.” The woman headed for the narrow doorway.

“No problem,” her father said, following her out.

Claire allowed them the breezy darkness outside and moved closer to one of the moths circling the kerosene lamp.

“Why would you want to give your child to me?” she heard the woman ask her father over the loud sound of the evening waves.

“I am going away,” he said, “pou chèche lavi, to look for a better life.”

“Ohmm,” the woman groaned a warning, like an impossible word, a word she had no idea how to say. “Why would you want your child to be a rèstavèk?”

“This is what would happen anyway,” her father said, “with less kind people than you if I suddenly died. I don’t have any more family here.”

Her father put an end to the woman’s questioning by making a joke about the mayor’s victory and how many bad speeches Gaspard would be forced to suffer through if he remained in town. This made the woman’s jingly laugh sound as though it were coming out of her nose. Reaching closer to the kerosene lamp, Claire expertly captured a spotted tiger moth between her palms, not sure whom she wanted to imagine it to be, the fabric vendor or her father.

The good news, though, was that this would be the only day her father would do this for a year. The rest of the year, he’d act as though he would always keep her, letting life go on as usual. During the week, she’d go to the Protestant preschool where she had received a charity scholarship, requiring her father to only pay a few Haitian dollars a month. At night, she would sit by the lamp and try not to be distracted by the moths as she recited the alphabet out loud. He would enjoy the singsong and her hard work and would miss it during her holidays from school. The rest of the time, he would go out to sea at the crack of dawn and always come back with something for her to eat. He’d talk about going to work in construction or the fishing trade in the neighboring Dominican Republic, but he would always make it sound as though it was something the two of them could do together, not something he’d have to abandon her to do. But as soon as her birthday would come, he would begin talking about it again, chèche lavi, going away to make a life for himself, placing her with someone, finding her a family. His and his dead wife’s relatives, whom they’d left behind in the hills, had it even harder than he did. Rather than a nearly barren sea, they had the dry eroded earth to contend with and already too many mouths to feed. If he died they would take the girl, but only because they had no choice, because that’s what families do, because fòk youn voye je sou lòt. We must all look after one another. He didn’t want to leave anything to chance.

That night after the fabric vendor left, colorful sparks rose up and filled the night sky before fading and plummeting into the sea. With cannonlike explosions, the mayor was celebrating his victory with fireworks. Still lying on her foam mattress as her father snored on his across the room, Claire couldn’t help but feel like she was the one who’d won.

The day Claire Limyè Lanmè turned five was a Sunday, so she and Gaspard walked to the beach in the morning, watching a sandy pool that had formed, where a group of children splashed inside a ring of brown water then plunged into the sea to rinse themselves. Claire wore the pink muslin sundress, which Gaspard had ordered made for her in the same color and style but a slightly smaller size the year before. The afternoon air felt sticky on her skin as though they were trapped in one of the many humid air pockets where the sea breeze met the stifling heat of the town. Moving away from the beach, Gaspard motioned toward town. Even before they turned their backs to the sea, Claire knew that, just like the previous year, they’d be visiting her mother’s grave.

The main road was crowded with pedestrians either dodging or hailing moto taxis and tap taps. Gaspard held his nose up and sniffed the air, breathing in the scent of soft tar on an asphalted stretch. Raising his arm to respond to the occasional greeting, he kept walking at a steady clip, daring her to keep up. Passing a Vodou temple with pictures of Catholic saints doubling as lwas, he pointed out, just as he had many times, the glowing face of a pale Mater Dolorosa and said, “The goddess of love, èzili Freda, your mother liked her.”

Claire had never seen a picture of her mother. There were simply none. If not for the class portrait at the Protestant school, which her father had not purchased, there would be no pictures of her either.

Leaving the main road behind, they cut through a narrow dirt track with wooden houses enclosed by tall cactus fences. Claire trailed behind her father as he followed the smell of wet pine and burnt sugar in the air. A muddied rubber-booted man returning from the cane fields with an overburdened mule called out to them, “Paying a visit to the dead Mesye Gaspard and Manzè Claire?”

Gaspard nodded, as he did to everyone else who greeted him from then on.

The burial site was next to a cane field so vast that Claire couldn’t even see where it ended. Standing on the edge of the twenty or so cement crosses rising out of the hilly terra cotta earth, she forgot at first which one was her mother’s. Her father bent down and, using the end of his shirt, wiped a light coat of red mud off the letters of her mother’s name. She could only read the letters because she had just learned to write her name at school. Her mother’s name had also been Claire, Claire Narcis. Her father had decided to call her Claire Limyè Lanmè, Claire of the sea light, after her mother died.

Squatting there with one knee lodged in the moist earth, Gaspard spat on the end of his shirt, but could not produce enough saliva to further clean his wife’s headstone.

“Need some from you too,” he told his daughter, who at first hesitated then playfully obliged, digging deep into the back of her throat with adultlike grunts.

Next to her mother’s was a year-old grave with a polished gray cross that was smaller than the others. On the cross was a metal wreath, painted in pale blue and white with a brown angel carved on the front. It was the grave of a child.

This was one of many times that Claire wished she knew how to read and write more than her own name. Her father didn’t even know that much, so she couldn’t ask him to read the name for her, to tell her who the child was that her mother was now looking after in death.

Once her father was done wiping her mother’s headstone, covering the entire front of his shirt with the red earth, he sat down on the stone slab that in Claire’s mind kept her mother forever pinned to the earth.

Gaspard was mumbling, talking to himself as he sat there, seeming strangely at home among the dead, until he saw the fabric vendor.

The woman was wearing a white lace dress with a polka dot scarf wrapped around her head.

“I knew she would come today,” he said, quickly standing up.

Grabbing Claire’s hand, he pulled her forward, blocking the woman’s way. The woman peeked over his shoulder at the child’s grave with the angel wreath on top.

“Do you remember my daughter?” her father asked while nervously patting Claire’s shoulder.

“Please let me remember mine,” the woman said.

The day Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin turned four, the fabric vendor’s seven-year-old daughter, Rose, was riding in the back of a moto taxi with her teenage caretaker, when a private car rear-ended the motorcycle and sent Rose flying fifteen feet into the air, forcing her to land, headfirst, on the ground. Rose was plump, like her mother, and her hair was perfectly coiffed. The mother did it herself in playful and colorful designs, carving simple flower and butterfly shapes into the girl’s scalp. Those, like Gaspard, who witnessed the accident, swore that when Rose’s body ascended from the rear of the motorcycle, she almost seemed to be flying out of her primary school uniform-an azure pleated skirt and spotless white shirt with white tennis shoes and lace-topped ankle socks-raising both her hands and actually flapping them before she hit the ground.

It was not the first time Gaspard had seen an accident like this. This was a small and sometimes unlucky town and the narrow, mostly unpaved streets were crowded with motorcycles and cars. But none of the previous accidents had been so personally disheartening. He had expected Rose to scream at some point-just as the mothers and other spectators had rushed up to the spot, cradled their heads in their hands, and screamed-but the girl had not even made one sound.

The moto taxi had nearly reached the mother’s fabric shop when the accident happened, so it did not take long for word to reach the fabric vendor, who even before she was told the details was bent over and retching, looking only at the ground as she made her way through the stalled traffic toward where her child was lying, bloody and still, in the dust.

Gaspard had not seen such grief since the public high school in town had collapsed some years back, killing eightynine of the two hundred and twelve pupils enrolled there. The day of the moto taxi accident, however, the fabric vendor was the sole owner of that tragedy. The driver and Rose’s caretaker were miraculously fine, like those students and teachers who had merely crawled out of the rubble of the collapsed high school building some years back.

Gaspard was grateful that his daughter, after having visited her mother’s grave that morning, was safe with a neighbor, momentarily away from cars and motorcycles, at the beach. Still, in that moment he missed his daughter more than he had at any other time since she was born. He missed her so badly that he even felt jealous of the way the fabric vendor was holding her daughter. At least she’d looked after her own child during the girl’s entire short life, he thought. But he was a man. What did he know about raising a little girl? He would always need caretakers he couldn’t afford, neighbors from whom he’d have to beg favors, women he could either pay or sleep with, so they would “mother” his child. And even those most motherly acts, like bathing and dressing and plaiting hair, did not include embraces, like the type this woman was lavishing on a blood-soaked corpse. It took watching another child die in her mother’s arms to make him realize how very much he’d miss Claire when he finally gave her away for good.

The day Claire Limyè Lanmè turned three, she was returned to her father from the countryside where she had been living with her mother’s relatives since she was two days old. His wife’s death had been so startling and abrupt that seeing his daughter’s face had not only saddened but terrified Gaspard. To most people, his daughter was a revenan, a ghost, a not quite fully whole person who had entered the world just as her mother was leaving it. And if these types of children are not closely watched, they can easily follow their mothers into the other world. The only way to save them is to immediately sever them from the place where they are born. Otherwise they will always spend too much time chasing a shadow they can never reach. All this was once believed about children like Claire. San manman, motherless, was the way you described someone who was lost, brutal and cruel. Fantom, ghost, was another. People without mothers, it was believed, were capable of anything.

Aside from all of this, as soon as the umbilical cord was cut, there was the immediate problem of feeding the baby. The midwife had dressed her in a light yellow embroidered jumper from the layette his wife had spent months sewing. Gaspard had picked up the baby, wrapped her in a matching blanket his wife had also made. The midwife had rushed into town looking for some formula or possibly a wet nurse. But Claire was a silent, easy child. It was as though she already knew that she had no mother and could not afford to be picky.

During those first moments with his daughter, there were times when he had visions for which he detested himself, fantasies about letting her starve to death. He’d even considered dropping her in the sea, but these were things he was dreaming for her because he could not do them to himself. He could not poison himself like he so desperately wanted. He couldn’t hazard the possibility of leaving his child totally parentless, of having her end up in a brothel or on the streets.

While he was fantasizing about his daughter’s death, he was also worried that a mosquito might bite her and that she might get malaria or dengue fever. He feared for himself too. He feared getting hit by a car, or being struck with a terrible disease that would separate them forever. So when the midwife did not return, he wrapped the blanket more tightly around his daughter and took her into town at dusk.

Walking by the town’s largest fabric shop, he saw the fabric vendor standing by her night watchman as he locked the tall metal gates. Next to her, her fidgety three-year-old daughter Rose was tugging at her skirt. Claire began to cry and the fabric vendor turned to see where the cry was coming from. Before her eyes could rest on them, Gaspard was already walking toward the gate.

“Madame,” he said, unsure now what his next words should be.

He could already see on the fabric vendor’s cheerless face that she knew what had happened. Most of the women in town must have heard by now that his wife had bled to death toward the end of her labor, and nowhere does news spread faster than in Ville Rose.

The fabric vendor was still nursing her pudgy three-yearold- the town’s namesake-who was tugging at her skirt. This was so unusual for such a busy woman of her societal standing that everyone knew about it.

She asked her night watchman to unlock the gate, motioned for him to wait for her outside and for Gaspard to follow her inside. She pushed open another door, then flipped on a series of lightbulbs dangling over the fabric-filled shelves and standing spools of cloth. There was a long wooden bench in the waiting area and she motioned for her now sleepylooking daughter to sit there before she and Gaspard did as well. Signaling Gaspard to bring Claire closer, she unbuttoned her loose hibiscus print blouse.

Claire Limyè Lanmè latched on quickly and emptied both the fabric vendor’s breasts while Rose, the woman’s daughter, looked awestruck and grief-stricken as though she had not been aware until that moment that this was something her mother could do for anyone but her.

Gaspard thought he might bring Claire to the fabric vendor every day, but after smiling and cooing at the baby and stroking her tiny elbow, the woman’s face tightened as she handed his daughter back to him, giving him the scowl one might imagine she reserved for her credit-seeking customers.

Pointing to the sleepy three-year-old sitting next to her, the fabric vendor said, “My child needs my milk.”

He did not say it, but he was thinking that his child and hers were now milk sisters. The fabric vendor had offered his baby her breasts. He could now freely ask her to be his child’s godmother. She certainly had the means. She had a big house in the hills overlooking the beach and a cook and a yardman to see after her every need. The only thing Gaspard didn’t like about her was her reputed loose ways, her rumored love for several men at once, her renowned insatiable longing for other people’s husbands. Still, because she had money and the shop, and because her father had once been the justice of the peace of the town, she had also inherited her own private pew at the cathedral down the street from the fabric shop. Gaspard’s wife had come to the shop often, sometimes to buy fabric for the undertaker she sewed for and other times to barter her hand-embroidered little girls’ dresses. Gaspard now wondered if his wife and the fabric vendor had ever spoken at length. Did they ever talk as more than client and customer? As potential young mothers?

While he stood there, near the shop’s entrance, rocking the contented baby in his arms, he thought that if he waited long enough the woman might change her mind and let his daughter come again to nurse. Instead, she reached into her skirt pocket and fished out a few bills and pushed them toward him.

“Do you have any other family?” the fabric vendor asked, while stroking her own daughter’s perfect hair. “A sister?” Before he could answer, she added, “If you don’t have a sister, you should send her to your wife’s people.”

He hadn’t thought of that. He hadn’t thought much in that direction at all. The child had taken the mother away. Now there would be no mother. That’s all he’d been able to concentrate on for more than a few minutes. She was right, though. He could not do it himself. He couldn’t even feed her.

“Do you have a place to lay her body, your wife?” she asked, steadying her fidgeting daughter’s hands in hers. “You can, if you like, make use of a burial site in the cemetery where I have some open land.”

When he left the parlor, he walked back home, with the child, where the frantic midwife was waiting with the bottles and powder and purified water, which along with the funeral expenses would wipe out most of his dead wife’s savings.

“You went out with this san manman child after dusk?” the midwife chided.

The next day, when his wife’s sister arrived for the funeral, he simply gave the baby to her along with the little money he had left. He was relieved not to have to worry about her for a while.

He worked harder, spent more time at sea so that he’d have enough to send for her care, but he never visited her, nor did he ask for her to be brought to him for visits. But as her third birthday approached, he felt he was ready to see her again. So he asked that she arrive on her birthday. And she did, looking long and thin and just like her mother. He had a pink ruffled muslin dress sewn for her that he would have replicated in a larger size each year. Her mother had made her one just like it, imagining that she would wear it for her first birthday. He had sent her off with it, not knowing whether they’d even put it on her. He wished now that his wife had been prescient about her own death, like so many people’s relatives claim to have seen them be. She had never told him what he might do with their daughter should anything happen to her.

The night of Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin’s seventh birthday, there was an informal vigil on the beach for the rogue wave victim, Gaspard’s fisherman friend, who was now considered lost at sea. Even though a full moon gleamed overhead, Gaspard and a few of the other fishermen had made a bonfire, and over the fisherman’s widow’s occasional wails they sat on the warm sand and drank kleren, played cards and dominoes, and told stories, just as they would at an official wake.

Dozens of townspeople came by the beach, bringing, as was the custom, small amounts of money to the fisherman’s widow. The town’s mayor came too, fearful that the way the fisherman died might be the very first sign of something more potentially and geographically tragic and widespread in the days and weeks to come.

At some point in the evening, Gaspard had lost sight of his daughter. He had occasionally looked up from his drink and seen her holding hands in a circle with a group of girls playing won or dashing behind the shacks on the beach for hide-and-seek. But he hadn’t seen her for some time, and the crowd of townspeople had grown thick.

Rising from the sand near the bonfire, he felt unsteady on his feet as the alcohol seeped through him. He was unable to even string together the words to properly ask the people he staggered into whether or not they had seen his daughter.

Suddenly he spotted her, sitting alone next to a woman. It was a woman he knew, except he had never seen her like this. Her hair was wrapped in a silver net, above some giant plastic rollers, and she was wearing a satin night dress the same shade as the moon. She had slippers on her feet, fuzzy red ones that looked like they might stink if they got wet. It was the fabric vendor, and she was in deep conversation with his timid-looking daughter.

This pleased him, made him happy, but it also made his drunk and nearly broken heart start beating faster. What could the woman be telling his daughter? he wondered. And why here? Why now?

He was too afraid to approach them and would have been happy to stand there with the kleren bottle dangling from his hand, except the fabric vendor noticed him and waved him over with the flailing sleeve of her fragile-looking nightgown.

She and his daughter were sitting on some large boulders that must have been picked up from somewhere else and put there for them. He sat on the sand and leaned closer so that he might hear them above the chattering well-wishers.

“Condolences for your friend,” the fabric vendor said.

His daughter turned her face away each time one of them glanced at her.

“Yes,” the fabric vendor blurted out emphatically, as though they were toward the end of a very long conversation. “I’ll take her. Tonight.”

Claire kept her eyes on the sand, but he could see a tear instantly slide down the side of her face. He wanted to reach for her, bury his nose in her face the way she liked to needle hers into his when he was distracted or sad.

“Why now? Why tonight?” he managed to say.

“It’s now or never.” The woman reached down to wipe the sliding tear, but the girl quickly moved her face. “I need another way to remember this day.” She brought her hands together in a fold in her night dress, between her knees. “Now or never.” She then clumsily lowered her hands to the girl’s back and attempted to stroke it.

Claire’s body was shaking as she watched the pile of driftwood and dried sticks that made up the puttering bonfire, which was meant to be as much a farewell as a beacon to bring the lost fisherman home.

“Claire Limyè Lanmè,” Gaspard called out to her.

Claire did not turn her face.

He had one final story to tell her before she was no longer his, but the kleren and the light-headed feeling it gave him were suppressing his words.

One night before he knew his wife was pregnant, they went out to sea together for some night fishing. Rowing quietly for some time, they circled the same small area before his dinghy stalled as if it had reached a wall. He was afraid that they might be stuck on a reef, but he managed to push back. Peering into the moonlit surface of the sea, his wife had removed her pleated sundress until she was sitting there in only her plain white cotton panties, her protruding belly aimed like an arrow at the void.

“Non,” Gaspard said, quickly noticing her slightly larger belly and breasts and realizing what she was trying to show him. But before he could say anything else, she slipped both her legs over the hull and slid into the sea, her body parting the waters, pulling her forward as she sunk her head into the wet darkness then raised it up and out again.

She was gliding away from him to even deeper water. He rowed toward her, now frantically shouting, “Claire, reken, sharks. There could be sharks.”

“There will be if you keep calling them by name,” she said, and laughed a deep, breathless laugh.

As he caught up with her, his face relaxed. Then they saw what she had swum out to see. Surrounding her was a dazzling glow. It was as though her patch of the sea was being lit from below. She was, from her perfectly round breasts down, in the middle of a large school of tiny silver fish, which were ignoring her and feeding on equally gleaming specks floating on the water’s surface.

He stopped rowing and remained outside of it, watching her and pondering the news she had silently delivered to him, in awe. Then it was the sea he was watching. The bioluminescence amazed him. But soon, his panic returning, he started shouting her name again.

“Claire, come in now, Claire!”

She backed away from the fish, splitting the school in half as she paddled toward the boat. And for a moment she reminded him of Lasirèn, the long-haired, long-bodied brown goddess of the sea. With an angelic face like a bronzed Lady of Charity, Lasirèn’s vision was, it was believed, the last thing most fishermen saw before they died at sea, her arms the first thing they slipped into, even before their bodies hit the water. In his dinghy, like many others, he had a mirror and comb, a bugle and conch shell, which comprised a small shrine to attract Lasirèn’s protection.

When his wife reached the boat, he reached over and offered her his hand and she took it and climbed back in, even as the silver fish vanished, returning the sea surface to a charcoal gray.

Wiping the saltwater from her dripping face with her fingers, she whispered, “Limyè Lanmè. Limyè Lanmè.” Sea light. Then she cleared her throat and in a louder voice added, “Claire like me. Limyè Lanmè. Limyè Lanmè.” Claire of the sea light.

“You will not change her name,” Gaspard heard himself tell the fabric vendor.

The fabric vendor shook her head no.

“You will not let her ride moto taxis.”

“Non.” Both the woman’s hands immediately rose to her chest, as though she had been stabbed there. “I would never do that again.”

Even after all these years of wooing the fabric vendor for his daughter, he never expected it to actually happen so fast. But there was no turning back. From now on his Claire would be the fabric vendor’s daughter.

“Before you leave the country, there are papers,” the woman was saying.

Gaspard would later try to figure out where Claire got the courage to raise her skinny arms at that moment. He had underestimated her attachment to her few belongings and had assumed that she wouldn’t want them, but she did, and once her raised hand was acknowledged with a nod from both him and the fabric vendor, she pointed to their home and whispered, “Bagay yo,” the things. Not her things, but the things, as though nothing in the world was truly hers.

Gaspard understood immediately, but it took the fabric vendor some time to decipher the gesture.

I hope this woman comes to know my daughter’s ways quickly, Gaspard thought, as he watched the girl slowly walk, more like an upward crawl, toward the house. Claire weaved in and out of the groups of other children on the beach, ignoring their calls to play as she moved by, her long arms frozen at her side. Gaspard saw her reach the wobbly door of the shack before she walked inside.

She did not have that many things, Gaspard thought, only two bright green jumpers and two white blouses for school, the birthday dress she was wearing, her night dress which was really an adult T-shirt, her notebook and reading primer, and the foam mattress and patchwork blanket on which she slept. Maybe he should go and help her with them. She wouldn’t be able to carry everything by herself. Certainly not all the way to the fabric vendor’s house. He would have to accompany them. It would be the right thing to do. Maybe the woman wouldn’t even want those things in her house. Maryse. The fabric vendor’s name was Maryse. Now he could think it again. Now he could even say it. He could at least call her Madame Maryse. His daughter was now Madame Maryse’s daughter.

Madame Maryse was fidgeting a bit, shifting the weight of her round frame from one fuzzy red-covered foot to another. She looked at some of the townspeople clustered on the beach, then turned her gaze back to the door where the girl had entered the shack, then glanced back toward the water where many of her neighbors were sitting by the dimming bonfire with the fisherman’s widow who was still sobbing and rocking her face in her hands.

Gaspard followed Madame Maryse’s gaze and remembered how during the first three years of his daughter’s life, he used to dream of his girl, a little baby lying in his arms at night. Then in the morning, while he was on the water, he would imagine seeing her baby face bobbing in and out of the gentle wake of his fishing boat. He would instantly fear that she had joined her mother in death and would anxiously wait for the news of it to make its way to him, but it never did. She remained as alive as he was, and he was even more afraid of the possibility of seeing her in the flesh, as fearful as he was that she might have the face she had inherited, her mother’s. He never dreamed of his wife, though. That part of it, something in him kept locked away out of sadness and guilt. He had been absent when his wife had died and his child was born. He had been hoping to get one last series of catches before his daughter came. He had been at sea.

The crowd on the beach was beginning to thin out. People were slowly drifting away, heading back toward town. He felt sad that he had nothing more to say to this woman who was offering his daughter a new life, this woman who from now on his daughter would call mother. He had once fantasized that he would marry her, but he knew that even with her preferences for questionable men she would still consider him inferior, socially beneath her. And now there she was, growing impatient as his daughter refused to come out of his house.

“How much is she bringing with her?” she asked.

“I’ll get her,” he said.

He felt the woman’s solid and perhaps judgmental gaze on his back as he headed for the house. He was doing his best not to stumble, but each time the soles of his feet dug into the cooling sand, he was certain he would fall over.

Gaspard could immediately tell when he entered the shack that his daughter was not there. Several fast-moving creatures darted into further darkness as he inspected the foam mattress his daughter usually slept on. It was covered with its usual patchwork blanket, untouched since she had carefully pulled it tight and tucked the corners under that morning. Hanging from a wire hanger nailed to the wall were her school uniforms. He picked up the kerosene lamp by the door and, using it to light his way, searched all four corners of the room.

When he didn’t find her, he ran out to the beach and screamed her name. Madame Maryse rushed to his side, saw the look of panic on his face, and joined in the shouting of Claire’s name. Others did too, walking off in different directions until they had searched the entire moonlit stretch of the beach. Some even walked to the edge of the water, calling Claire’s name into the horizon.

When after some time Claire did not surface, many of Gaspard’s neighbors walked over to him and took turns telling him some variation of, Maybe the girl fell asleep somewhere. She will surely be home by morning.

The fisherman’s widow came to embrace him, her grief momentarily stalled by his. Her face was swollen from crying and the mourning scarf around her coarse black hair slid toward the back of her very long neck. She was his wife’s age, the age his wife would have been now, too young to bear such a burdensome grief, yet too old to start over.

The fisherman’s widow, like many of the others, thought that Claire might have gone to town and encouraged those heading there to continue their search. Gaspard, however, was certain that Claire would return soon and wanted to be at home when she did. Madame Maryse decided to follow those who were headed home. Squeezing Gaspard’s shoulder, she said, “She doesn’t understand, perhaps. She’ll be back.”

Using the boulder his daughter had sat on to rest his drunken and spinning head, Gaspard lay down on the sand and with his eyes glued to the scattered stars, he promised the heavens that he would never try to give her away again.

Most of the townspeople had left, except for a few young men who had nowhere to sleep and were grateful for the company all the commotion had afforded them. They and a few other stragglers set up for the night, arranging their sleeping bags and sisal mats and bedsheets in a protective circle around Gaspard.

Every once in a while, one of them would walk to Gaspard’s shack and peek inside, checking for Claire. They did this without asking Gaspard if they should and timed themselves so that they checked every half hour or so, when it seemed Gaspard might want to go and check himself. The entire night was spent like this, until worry, exhaustion, and drink overcame Gaspard and he finally slept.

The next morning, Gaspard woke up at the usual time that he would have been heading out to sea. The air was gray and growing lighter and the young men were still asleep. Gaspard’s head ached, his temples still throbbing. He staggered to the house and checked all the corners once more. Claire had not returned.

It suddenly occurred to him where his daughter might be. His heart was pounding and he was nearly breathless as he half walked and half ran through town. The early mass was beginning at the cathedral as the bell chimed the six a.m. hour. A large crowd of sick people had already gathered in front of the town hospital, hoping to be seen at the clinic that day. The streets were already crowded with cars and moto taxis ferrying people to and from the outdoor markets. He felt the gazes of people on his face as he raced past them, too quickly for them to say hello and for him to respond. He could barely breathe as he sped by the cane field toward the burial site.

At first he did not see her, lying on her side, coiled up like a baby on the dew-soaked red earth. Her head was resting on a large stone, half leaning against the farthest tip of her mother’s grave. She was still wearing her pink muslin birthday dress and a quarter of her face now seemed buried in the ground, showing that she had been there for some time, possibly all night long. Bending over, he placed his cheek next to her nose. He thought he felt a warm stream of breath against the cool earth, but it was his not hers. Reaching down, he pulled her into his arms and pressed her against his chest.

“Claire Limyè Lanmè?” he said, wanting to finish a thought, but not sure which.

Her eyes were wide open but she was not looking at him. She was looking somewhere off in a distance, past him. He swayed his hand back and forth in front of her face, but she did not blink. Her arms and legs were limp the way they were before she woke up from a very deep sleep.

“Claire Limyè Lanmè?” he said again. He felt her damp dress, and when he saw the blood that ran from the side of her face onto her shoulder, it did not startle him. She had pounded her head against the ground several times, it seemed, before one side of her forehead gave way in the form of a crack that had seeped with blood and further reddened the earth around her.

THE HAREM by Ibi Aanu Zoboi Delmas

The women called him Robby. A flash of his gorgeous smile, his fake Rolex watch, and a flick of his shoulder-length dreads would get him a phone number. Only after a few date nights, when he’d join them in bed, would they know his full name: Jean-Robert Dieujuste. But he insisted that they mustn’t ever call him that. To most of Pétionville’s young and fabulous, he was Robby, the smoothtalking Haitian sensation whose café-au-lait complexion and designer-looking clothes made the women fight each other, as he would oftentimes relay to his childhood friend, coworker, and roommate Antonio, better known as Toni.

“Ah, you get too involved, Robby,” Toni said to his friend one morning when he came home from an all-night rendezvous. Toni was sprawled out on the bed smoking a joint. He picked up a few pieces of Robby’s dirty clothes from the floor and threw them at him. “These women are not looking for love. It should be easy. But no, you are the one going goo-goo-ga-ga for them.”

Robby sucked his teeth, took a pull from his friend’s joint, and dropped himself on his ever-rumpled and unmade bed. “Did you see Caroline last night? Did you see the way she looked in that dress, man?”

“Yes, and you got to take off that dress and take care of some business, right? I don’t understand why you’re always crying She doesn’t love me, she makes me leave.”

“Well, what do you think is wrong with her?” Robby asked. “She doesn’t ask me to stay like Tanya or Minouche.”

“Maybe it’s because she knows you’re loving two, three other women at the same time.”

“You should talk!”

“Believe me, I know I am a vagabond,” said Toni. “That’s the difference between you and me. I admit it. But you don’t. You want to be in love, but this is about sex. If a woman meets you in a club and gives you her number and brings you home, then she just wants sex and everybody’s happy and you can go home. But you want to stay and have breakfast, lunch, and dinner, and then marriage and children-with all of them!”

Toni got up, buttoned his shirt, and pulled on a navy blazer. He was headed out to his job at the telephone company, in the same office where Robby worked. Toni clasped his watch, brushed his wavy, close-cropped hair, and splashed some cologne on his face. He took one last look in the mirror between their beds before turning back to Robby. “Going to work today or what?”

“I worked Saturday,” Robby said. “I’m taking two days off.”

“It’s Tuesday, you already took two days off.”

“Sunday we’re closed, so it doesn’t count.”

“What’s the matter, Caroline wore you out?” Toni walked out of their shared bedroom and into the adjacent small kitchen. In an instant he was out the door.

Robby lay down on the bed, exhausted. Caroline had indeed worn him out. He inhaled deeply at the thought of her cocoa skin and long dark hair. Robby would have never approached her if it weren’t for Toni’s encouragement. Caroline was ten years his senior, and she preferred her men young and hip. She had spent her early adult years traveling the world and dating men twice her age. Older suitors now bored her. She’d been promised her own villa in Italy, an apartment in Midtown Manhattan, a beach house in Tobago. But home had summoned her to repair the failing family business and maintain the magnificent chateau that towered over Port-au-Prince. After hours of intense lovemaking, Robby would stand on the second-floor balcony and search for the little two-room house he and Toni shared.

Caroline made love as if she had never made love before, as if she were searching for something buried deep inside her. Robby liked the hair-pulling, the delicate biting, and the throaty calling of his name. But he resented being shooed away afterward as if he were a pest. Once, after an evening together, she even left some money on the table, which made him yell at her.

Tanya showed him a lot more respect, but she was not as passionate as Caroline. She was still young, with a tender body and pliable mind-but courageous nonetheless. It was she who had approached him on the dance floor at a nightclub, turning her back and grinding against his body. After they made love, she would always get him a glass of water, wash herself and comb her hair, and head to her aunt’s makeshift neighborhood restaurant to bring him back a plate of food. She was quiet afterward and let him sleep. She did not badger him with questions. Robby always slept with her warm body pressed against his. With her, he felt comforted and soothed. Not like the hot-headed Minouche.

Minouche would open the door wearing only a tank top and miniskirt and begin cursing him out for not answering his cell phone for three days. He’d promised each of them that he’d never let more than three days go by without seeing them. But he couldn’t promise long conversations on the phone in between those visits.

Whispers of the possibility of marriage were enough to ease Minouche’s suspicions. While he was submissive with Caroline and gentle with Tanya, he was his wildest with Minouche. She would yell and cuss and threaten to leave him and return to her ex-husband, whom she claimed was wooing her again. She’d grab his cell phone and search for other women’s numbers. That’s when Robby would pull her from behind and cup her large breasts in his hand and suck the damp, salty skin of her neck. She’d soften in his arms and cry, and demand that he tell her he loved her. He imagined marriage to Minouche being full of drawn-out arguments, but it would all be worth it for the makeup sex.

Robby turned his face to the warm morning sun beaming from the small window beside his bed. The sounds of the cars and trucks on the busy road outside the house quickly lulled him to sleep. He envisioned the beautiful faces of all three women: Caroline with her long eyelashes, ruby-red lips, perfect white teeth, and dark, distant eyes; Tanya’s smooth brown complexion, close-set eyes, and long, braided hair extensions; Minouche’s dimpled plump cheeks, too-thin eyebrows, and cute button nose.

Robby sighed, rubbing his hands over his crotch while thinking of his night with Caroline. But it was Minouche’s often tense and angry body he longed for. He hadn’t seen her since Friday night and soon she would be calling. For now, he would sleep, resting as if he were in each or all of their arms, with their lips pressed against his ears telling him how much they loved him. But Toni was right, he was the one who most often declared his love. In the end, he could see himself married to all three of them. He loved them all.

Robby awoke from his sleep with a jolt, as if something had yanked him up from the bed. He was sweating; the room was unusually hot. There were sounds of children’s laughter outside the window, letting him know that it was late afternoon and the neighbors’ kids were home from school. He was starving. Unlike Caroline, Tanya would have certainly made sure that he got something to eat the night before. Tanya often told him that she wanted no other woman to feed him. She said this with what seemed like genuine concern and not in the jealous way that Minouche would. She wanted him to eat good meals from either her own kitchen or from her aunt’s restaurant where the stewed cashews and the chicken were legend.

Robby wanted to catch Tanya right when she was leaving work so he wouldn’t be bothered with having to say hello to her uncle, whom she worked for in a small office behind his mechanic’s shop downtown. The old man expected Robby to ask for his niece’s hand in marriage any day.

Sporting a freshly pressed pair of khaki pants, a striped short-sleeve rugby shirt, and Italian leather shoes, Robby strolled down the busy street outside his house in Delmas. He took his sweet time, seductively whistling his favorite konpa tunes at some of the women passing by. Only once did he stop a lady whose breasts were nearly spilling out over the neckline of her T-shirt. She didn’t own a cell phone so Robby gave her his number instead, even though her shoes were cheap and her fingernails were dirty. Robby would never dare bring a woman like that around Toni or his other friends. After being with Tanya and Caroline, his standards were higher. Minouche was the least sophisticated, but at least she took care of herself with weekly manicures and pedicures. Whomever he chose to marry when he was good and ready, he would also have to be able to introduce, with pride, to his mother.

Robby smiled at the thought of his mother. She had called him on New Year’s Day to remind him to come visit her in Léogâne for a big bowl of soup joumou. He got his bowl of soup joumou with nice big chunks of beef and fresh warm bread, but it was from Tanya’s aunt and not from his mother.

It was just past four o’clock and Tanya would certainly be happy to see him. She wouldn’t have to get into her uncle’s jeep as he made all his stops at his friends’ houses. It was noisy as usual in Delmas. The scent of grilling chicken from a new outdoor barbecue place enticed him, but he would wait to eat with Tanya. The air was thick, and unusually still. Not even a subtle breeze blew in from the ocean to remove the daily stench. He looked up at the sky, now a paling blue, the sun a dim yellow. His eyes wandered across the road toward a woman he thought looked like Minouche. He stopped, his brows furrowed. He tied his dreads into a knot, smoothed his beard, adjusted his shirt, and made his way across the street to encounter Minouche’s accusations that he was obviously going to see another woman because he wasn’t at work.

It wasn’t until he was nearly halfway across the street, having been almost run down by a speeding tap tap, that he realized the shapely woman was not Minouche after all. He was still in the middle of the street when the ground began to shift, and it was as if a huge truck or maybe a train, like the ones that used to carry sugarcane from Léogâne to Port-au-Prince during his childhood, was approaching. He looked up and down the street, trying to figure out from which direction the truck or train was coming so he could move. But when the balcony of the nearby auto parts store collapsed onto the pedestrians and merchants below, he stayed put. He crouched down to the ground, not knowing what else to hold on to, because the ground was moving. The cars and trucks stopped. The people ran in every direction. Then the buildings, the cement, maybe even the sky and clouds and sun, were falling!

He knelt, covering his head with both his arms, and clenched fists as a few small things landed on his back. He began to pray, realizing that this must be it-la fin du monde, that final judgment day that the old man who often sat on an overturned bucket down the road from his house was always preaching about to passersby. He’d been to the Protestant church with Tanya, Catholic mass with Minouche, a Sunday luncheon hosted by a foreign missionary organization at a fancy hotel with Caroline, but never in any of those instances did he give his life to Tanya and the old man’s Jesus, take Minouche’s Holy Communion, or give one cent to charity for the peasants in the countryside, as both Caroline and his mother often urged him to.

He sobbed, slowly raising his head and opening his eyes to see a cloud enveloping him. The screaming pierced his ears. He looked up at the sky, still a pale blue with a dim yellow sun, and waited for it to part, for a beam of white light to descend like some sort of ladder-something, anything, to justify the thunderous sounds. But the heavens were too peaceful. Then it must be hell, he thought. Slowly rising to his feet, he was unable to see more than a few inches in front of him. He looked down at the ground and glimpsed a crack in the road. Everything beneath him was too white. Maybe this was heaven, he speculated. But people were screaming and there was still that horrible sound as if the world itself was crumbling.

Tremblement de terre, he heard the people say after what seemed like hours of walking aimlessly through the streets of Port-au-Prince. It had only been an hour but Robby took slow, calculating steps. He had been coughing and swallowing dust, had felt a stinging pain on his back near his left shoulder and touched it to see that it was bleeding, though not profusely. He kept walking, even when he heard someone screaming to him for help. He just looked at the bodies beneath the fallen rubble, some reaching for anyone or anything, others unmoving.

Toni was at the phone company where they both worked. The top floor housed the office where he, Toni, and the secretary, who was also Toni’s on-and-off girlfriend, worked along with two salesmen, Marlo and Donaldson. As he stood at the intersection where the building should have been, cars and trucks-some speeding, some slow-moving-dodged him and hundreds of other people who were suddenly crammed at every corner of every street. Maybe Toni, Carole, Marlo, and Donaldson had managed to run out. Maybe Toni had stepped away to get something to eat. His friend whom he had known all his life was smart, witty, and quick on his feet. He should have had enough sense to get out.

The building had completely crumbled. Robby searched for the door, a window, any opening he could squeeze through to find his friends. But then the ground shook again and he sped away from the rubble to the middle of the intersection. A woman came running toward him, screaming, grabbing him and burying her head in his chest. He did not hold or comfort her. It surprised him that he had absolutely no desire to press his body against hers, to caress her hair and tell her, Everything’s going to be okay, chérie.

Instead, he pushed the woman away and turned in the other direction to find Tanya. Had he not kept her tender body and warm smile on his mind, he would’ve never gotten to her. The men shouted at him, demanding that he come help move rubble off a friend, a mother, a child. He moved around the dead on the ground. He walked in the middle of the street where tap taps, cars, trucks either cruised slowly by, surveying the fallen buildings, or sped past to get to a hospital, any hospital.

Had Robby not felt the stinging pain near his shoulder, the slow movement of his legs, he would’ve sworn that this was death. He stopped at an intersection that was barely recognizable. The landmarks, the signs, the stationary street vendors were all gone. He stood, turning in a full circle to survey what had become of this little portion of Port-au-Prince. He peered up toward the hills. The houses in the distance looked like an avalanche of concrete.

Robby stopped in front of the auto parts store Tanya’s uncle owned and saw a group of men lifting pieces of concrete from the caved-in entrance. The cinder-block archway where he always stood waiting for Tanya to emerge from the tiny office in the back of the open yard was buried beneath piles of rubble fallen from adjacent buildings. Tanya’s uncle, according to a spared neighbor, had been seen running back into the office, probably to alert Tanya when the ground started to move.

Robby had no idea where he found the strength to lift a fallen piece of concrete the size of a small child with his bare hands. He thrust his body into a narrow opening that led to the yard. He thought that above the screaming and praying that had become the new background noise of the city, he heard some people cheer. He could not get Tanya out of his mind. If she were under there, he would not leave until he had pulled her out. He blindly moved large chunks of concrete and long strings of rebar aside, estimating with his hands and feet the approximate location of the tiny office where Tanya might be trapped. Finally, he saw what he thought were Tanya’s beautiful legs peeking out from beneath a huge piece of wood from the doorway of the tiny office.

Robby clawed at more concrete and wood and managed to loosen the load on top of Tanya’s chest. Hauling the creaking wood aside allowed him to see an arm, then another. The impact of the fall had torn apart most of her clothes. Her flesh was sunken in places that, as well as he knew her body, he no longer recognized. Her face had been chipped apart by the debris as well, her features, her beautiful nose and mouth, all flattened into one, as though she had been kneaded by some gruesome baker’s hands.

Some more men were crawling on top of the rubble nearby. They were calling for Tanya’s uncle Serge and Manuel, one of the other mechanics.

Neither one answered.

“The building next door might collapse on top of this one,” one of the men said, as he turned around to leave. “You should get out of here.”

“Tanya!” He began calling her name, even though he knew she could not answer.

The screams he was hearing now were from farther away, out in the distance and not in the rubble beneath him.

He quickly went back to digging, lifting more cement from Tanya’s sunken torso. Her entire compressed body was now loose. He grabbed her and tried to lift her up, but she was limp and her body gave way, sinking back into the hole from which he had just plucked her. He tried again, grabbing her harder this time, not being as gentle. He lifted her with all his might over his healthy shoulder. She was soaked with blood and the movement released a cloud of bloody dust over his body and into his face, throwing him into a coughing fit that made his body convulse and nearly forced him to drop her.

He found an opening that both their bodies could fit through and exited the rubble. As he struggled down the crowded and dusty street, a woman holding an open Bible moved up beside him, placing a hand on Tanya’s body. His shoulder ached from Tanya’s weight, his thirst was unbearable from the heat and dust, and he shooed the praying woman away.

He had never thought of it this way before, but he now considered it a good thing that Tanya, Minouche, and Caroline, even with their various societal standings, all lived rather close to each other, and to him. The walk to his house from Tanya’s uncle’s mechanic shop took nearly a half hour with her body over his shoulder-it would’ve been much quicker had she not been so heavy. His house was one of the few on his block that were cracked, but had not fallen. He ignored the long gashes in the cement and headed inside.

It was only after he lay Tanya’s body down on his bed that he allowed himself to focus his full attention on what might have happened to Caroline and Minouche. Had they died as well? Was he the only person in their maddening puzzle who was still alive?

He’d been so cautious all along, trying his best not to fall in love with any of them. But he loved them all and now might lose them all, along with his mother in Léogâne, his city of birth. Who knew how widespread this thing was? It might come again, with the same vengeance, this time in the middle of the night while he was having a one-person wake for Tanya. It would be unfair, Robby thought, that his dear Caroline and Minouche would be out there longing for his embrace, when it was only Tanya that he had saved.

Toni was right. (Oh, had Toni perished too?) It would have been better if he’d never fallen in love with the three women. He was now feeling a stinging pain on the shoulder which had carried Tanya all that way. It was the least of his problems, though. Hell, he knew, was just outside his window.

The screaming and praying continued in the distance as night fell. Tanya was snugly tucked in when he stepped outside. The brokenness of the world around him shocked him for a moment. In the brief time he had spent inside, sitting at Tanya’s side, he had forgotten what it looked like now. How long would it be before he was used to it? Before he would look at it as though it had always been there, a normal part of the new landscape of the city he’d escaped to from the provinces when he was a teenager and had loved ever since? He would look for Minouche first. He imagined her smile and her plump, dimpled cheeks. He imagined her cursing him out for not coming sooner.

He didn’t know whom or what to thank when he spotted Minouche sitting on a plastic crate right in front of her partially collapsed house. She was surrounded by a group of dusty and bloodied women and children, crying. Many of her companions were hurt, others praying and singing. Minouche had her face in her hands, sobbing.

Robby braced himself for a slap in the face, but instead Minouche held both arms in the air toward him, like a child greeting a parent. Her left foot was crushed so badly she could not stand on it. He kissed her dry lips and caressed her dusty face. Even with the smell of blood and death all around, he kissed her neck, pressed his chest against hers.

“Hospital,” she whispered, grinding her teeth in agony. “Robby, please.”

“I’m taking you home,” he said. “With me.”

It now occurred to him that none of these women had ever seen his home. He had been at times ashamed of the cramped space and at times afraid they would take his willingness to bring them there as a sign of total surrender.

His shoulder throbbed with pain, but he allowed Minouche to place an arm around him to brace herself as she hopped on her good foot. When she cursed Robby for not being strong enough to carry her, he hailed down a pickup truck filled with people-some limp, lifeless, others staring blankly into the night air.

Maybe he was crazy for bringing her here, he thought as they entered his and Toni’s room. He could hear more singing and praying through the window that had earlier allowed children’s laughter to wake him. He helped Minouche onto Toni’s bed as she moaned in pain then mumbled something- another curse or demand. The whole world may be wanting a hospital or doctor, but his Minouche was safer here; he could care for her better than any doctor or nurse. He kissed her forehead once more and placed a single finger on her lips. She groaned in pain as he wrapped a towel around her bloody foot. She could barely ask for water.

He found some in the tiny kitchen and put a cup to her lips. She did not sip, she just let the water drip past her lips onto the pillow. He lay next to her for a moment, pulling her body close to his. Then he checked on Tanya, kissing her softly on the forehead as well. She was already cold and clammy, rigor mortis having set in. Both his girls were so peaceful. If indeed the devil had raised the earth, then it was here in his nearly unscathed bedroom that God lived. But Caroline was still out there. Unprotected by him, unsafe.

Minouche squeezed his arm, signaling for him not to go. She didn’t appear to notice Tanya in the next bed. Or maybe she was in too much pain to care. He kissed both their foreheads again. Minouche was getting warm, either from the heat or from an infection. Her body was shivering too. He wondered whether she’d be alive when he returned.

Outside, he managed to climb into a packed tap tap heading up the hill. It was full of people praying, crying, and cursing at their cell phones for not working. There was a body sprawled out on the floor by their feet. Robby avoided their eyes and the arguments about what had happened and thought of only Caroline’s face and how she looked in that dress the night before.

Caroline never stayed in her NGO’s office past two. Robby hoped that she had been safely nestled in her large, sturdy home. He jumped out of the tap tap at the foothill leading up to her minimansion.

Out of habit, he dialed her number on his cell phone, but of course there was no reception. At the still-standing high metal gates, he called out her name, but she did not answer. There were no lights on in the house, or anywhere for that matter, and everyone seemed to be in the streets. Her car was not in the driveway.

He remembered how she’d sometimes call him in the evening. If he didn’t answer because he was with Tanya or Minouche, she wouldn’t care. She’d tell him that he was free to do as he wished. He was more attractive to her, she told him, because she had to compete for him.

If Robby was indeed the ghost he was starting to believe himself to be, then he would have been brought back to life by the lilting sound of Caroline’s voice. Then he turned around to see her running toward him through a crowd of her neighbors gathered in small groups holding bedsheets and pillows, as if preparing to lay down in the middle of the street for the night. She hugged and kissed him, and he picked her up and swung her around.

“How are you?” she asked.

“Come back to my place,” he said immediately, while staring at her made-up face, neatly combed hair, and clean blouse.

“Your place? Robby, I can’t even go back into my own house,” she replied, dusting off his clothes with her hands.

Someone, another man, called her name in the distance.

“I’m coming!” Caroline shouted back to him.

“Who’s that?” Robby asked.

“Victor. He’s a friend,” she said, not looking into his eyes. “Some of us are going to sleep in his yard. It should be safe there.”

Robby pulled her toward him, making sure that this Victor person could see them. She wiggled away from him, and he drew her back to him.

“Robby, what’s wrong with you? You should come to Victor’s with me.”

“No. You should come with me.”

“Stop playing games,” she said.

“I’m not.”

“Then what’s this all about?”

“Please.” He reached for her hand, but she stepped back.

“Listen, Robby, as soon as daylight hits, I am leaving this place.”

“To go where?”

“ Dominican Republic, Montreal, Cuba, anywhere but here.”

Many of her neighbors with the blankets and pillows had dispersed, some making their way back up the hill to her friend Victor’s backyard, the others heading across the road to where a local priest and nuns had set up for the night.

“Please, chérie,” Robby pleaded as he pulled her to him again. “Please, Caroline. I need you to be with me tonight. My place is safe, if any place is safe on a night like this.”

He held her hand to his lips, kissed it, then placed it at his heart, which melted something inside of her. She kissed him on the cheek, embraced him, and whispered in his ear, “So it is now that you are finally inviting me to your home. This is what it takes to bring out the man in you?” Then she smiled and grabbed his hand. Cars were fewer and farther in between now, and those that went by them as they walked were packed with the dead and nearly dead.

They were both exhausted when they entered his dark bedroom. It was unbearably hot like the rest of the city, and the stagnant air grew sour. The moonlit, foul-smelling room revealed the silhouettes of the two bodies lying there, obviously dead, rendering Caroline as still as they were.

Robby gently took her arm and walked her over to each of them.

“This is Tanya,” he said, then reached down and kissed her on the cheek. “And this is Minouche,” he said, doing the same to her.

He motioned for Caroline’s hand, but she was pulling away, stepping back, trying to make her way out of the room, out of her lover’s house, and possibly out of the shaken, broken country.

But Robby would never let her go, because if the devil stirred again, beckoning the land to rattle and shift beneath them, forcing his little part of the house to collapse like a domino, encasing them all in this love, in this death, then they would truly be inseparable-he and his three lovers, bound for eternity.

ROSANNA by Josaphat-Robert Large Pacot

Radios were forecasting a beautiful Friday morning. Not a cloud in the sky over Port-au-Prince. As for the neighborhood roosters, it seemed as if they’d been waiting for this very morning to launch their songs into the world. A multitude of cock-a-doodle-doos echoed through the neighborhood of Pacot.

Ahhhhh! Rosanna thought, as she slipped into her favorite blue jeans and an airy white cotton shirt. What a wonderful day for a trip.

Rosanna’s aunt Solange had already put the daily work in motion. The servants were all on their feet. The one responsible for sweeping the front yard was wielding his broom like a soldier answering “Taps.” Dusters in their hands, the cleaning team had started the daily routine aimed at eliminating every particle of grime resting on every surface of the property. Melanie, the cook, whose task it was to make coffee, poured spoonfuls of grainy Rebo onto a piece of muslin cloth that she used as a coffee filter. Soon enough, the aroma of coffee spread throughout the house.

“Chérie,” Aunt Solange called to Rosanna from somewhere on the property, “Melanie has already prepared you some sandwiches for the road. How about a cheese omelet before you go?”

Aunt Solange was the proud owner of two large stores in Port-au-Prince’s commercial district. The first one was a boutique with an assortment of expensive European ladies’ dresses. It was there that the elegant demoiselles of Port-au-Prince shopped for their Pierre Cardin, Escada, or Oscar de la Renta gowns, which automatically bestowed a sign of distinction on any woman who aspired to be a part of the city’s high society. In the second store, one could find a selection of luxurious home furnishings from all over the world. That was where the rich people acquired the sofas, beds, decorative lamps, modern refrigerators, and other ornaments that beautified their homes. Needless to say, Aunt Solange was wealthy. Her primary residence was in the old neighborhood of Pacot, an area full of splendid clustered gingerbreads and terraced villas that looked as though they had been sculpted out of the neighboring hills. Lovely antique furniture filled the house as in a museum. Some rare pieces from Europe and Asia made Aunt Solange’s collection one of the most valuable in the country. Paintings with themes ranging from female nudes to carnival, pieces by famous Haitian artists-including Préfète Duffaut, Bernard Séjourné, and Edouard Duval-Carrié-added the final touches. Parked in her garage were two silver cars: a Mercedes-Benz and a BMW. One would have sworn that these vehicles had never been driven through the streets of Port-au-Prince, since they remained so shiny and clean all the time, thanks in part to Solange’s young driver Da, who treated them as though they were his own.

“Ah! This omelet is so good,” Rosanna declared, sitting across an elaborately carved dining room table where she and her aunt often ate breakfast overlooking a lush hibiscus and azalea garden. “Melanie is the master of omelets.”

“Melanie is the mistress of everything,” her aunt playfully corrected her. Melanie had been cooking for Aunt Solange for more than twenty-five years now, longer than Rosanna has been alive. Melanie had started working for Solange back when Rosanna’s parents had fallen in love while pursuing their studies in engineering at the École des Sciences. They had married soon after and a year before graduation Rosanna was born. One Saturday morning, they’d decided to take a day off from studying and parenting and had left six-month-old Rosanna with Solange, who was also the baby’s godmother. A fine rain was falling on the road as they returned from the beach in the dark. The surviving passengers from the camion that hit them claimed that they never had a chance. The camion driver did not see their small jeep until the last minute; as the justice of the peace report put it, the vehicle was as flat as a communion wafer.

Solange was grateful that her brother and his wife had been wise enough to leave the child with her. Having never married and with no children of her own, she saw it as a sign that she was meant to look after the girl for the rest of her life, which is why Rosanna’s sudden desire to go on a trip alone to Les Cayes to research her mother’s roots alarmed Solange to no end. When Rosanna’s parents died, everyone had agreed that Solange was the best person to raise the girl. But now that she was a stunningly beautiful young woman-as beautiful as the corpulent nudes by Solange’s famous painters-everyone would want to claim her, including her mother’s family, who had barely even visited during the twenty-one years that Solange had been taking care of her.

Simply looking at Rosanna was a pleasure for Solange. The girl had her father’s smooth black skin and her mother’s brown-streaked curly hair, making her what in Haiti they would call a marabou, the kind of dusky beauty who poems are written about. Even when she was just a teenager, grown men would admire her as she strolled down the street, and Solange often got the impression watching her niece that an invisible orchestra was playing just for her. Solange was very proud of the job she had done raising Rosanna. The fact that Rosanna even desired to make this visit to Les Cayes to see family members who had shown little interest in her was proof of it. Very simple pleasures, not Solange’s wealth, were what had always seemed to appeal to Rosanna; she preferred swimming in rivers to swimming in pools, gorging herself on mangoes and avocados to sushi and foie gras. And Solange could tell that even while inhaling her favorite omelet, Rosanna was itching to head to the Portail Léogâne bus station to catch a camion-as she had begged her aunt to let her to do-on her own.

“It’s the best way for me to see the country,” Rosanna had successfully pleaded her case the night before. “I want to travel like the regular people of this country do. That’s what my mom would have done.”

Solange did not want to smother the girl any more than she already had, but she was nonetheless worried about her. Still, she did not want to seem as though she was jealous of Rosanna’s mother’s family and trying to keep the girl for herself.

“Davernis can at least drive you to Portail Léogâne, right?” Solange asked.

“And my mother’s brother and sister will be there to meet the bus,” Rosanna completed what she thought would be her aunt’s next sentence.

For lack of more elaborate stories, Rosanna had invented a whole slew of fantasies about her mother. Everything Rosanna wished she were, she imagined her mother to have been. In reality, her mother was simply a pretty girl from a poor peasant family who, because of her mother’s acquaintance with some powerful henchmen in her area, had been given a scholarship to a fancy university in Port-au-Prince. This is what had put her in the path of Solange’s brother. There was no point in telling that story to the girl, however. She would soon find it out for herself, and from the horse’s relatives’ mouths, so to speak. Besides, in death everyone is equal, and Rosanna’s mother and father certainly were equal now. But Solange could not lie either, so rather than say anything she remained silent, allowing Rosanna to nurture as many illusions as she could muster about her mother.

While Solange and Rosanna wrapped up their breakfast, Davernis made his way into the dining room. He was a tall, muscular young man. He was twenty-one years old, like Rosanna, and in another type of house they might have been raised like brother and sister. Instead, she was the princess of the house, as the servants liked to refer to her, and he was the driver. That morning, he was wearing a simple watch that Rosanna had given him as a gift, hoping that he would take the hint that he no longer had an excuse to be late, as he often was when she needed him to take her to a friend’s house, to a party, or shopping. Davernis also worked as a messenger in Solange’s stores, which sometimes contributed to his lateness.

Before he was promoted to driver, Davernis had been a rèstavèk, an unpaid child laborer at Aunt Solange’s house. Rosanna could still remember the day that Davernis’s mother had brought him to the house. He was twelve years old. Davernis’s mother thought he could be of use around the house, and maybe in return Solange could send him to school and, when he was a grown man, give him a job.

Aunt Solange had resisted at first.

“I am raising a young woman here,” she had told Davernis’s mother, a skinny toothless woman who sold mangoes at the market. “I can’t have some wild young man here.”

“He will be very good,” the woman had insisted. And Davernis had certainly been good. He had been running chores for Solange both at the house and the store since he arrived and had been one of her drivers for two years now. He lived with the other servants on the property, in a big concrete house that Solange had a well-known architect build for her staff. He had never been in an accident, a major feat in Port-au-Prince, and treated the vehicles like they were precious jewels, often cleaning and polishing them in his spare time.

“You know that Davernis is taking you to the station,” Solange repeated.

“Yes, Tatie,” Rosanna answered, considering this a great concession indeed. She had expected her aunt to find some way to thwart her plans, perhaps asking Davernis to go with her to Les Cayes.

“My dear, you must be very careful,” her aunt was saying now. “There are so many thieves on these buses.”

“There are thieves everywhere, Tatie,” she countered.

“Davernis will accompany you to the station and he will help you buy your ticket.”

“Yes, Tatie.” Rosanna reached under the table and, for her aunt’s amusement, pulled out a massive straw hat that she had bought on the street the day before so that she might blend in better on the public transportation. She checked her purse for her camera and the micro tape recorder that she hoped to use to interview her relatives for details about her mother’s life. Her suitcase, a small black roller bag, was waiting by the front door and Davernis grabbed it with one hand and started dragging it away. Rosanna and Solange followed him toward the gravel driveway where the Mercedes was waiting. By the time they reached the car, Davernis was already sitting behind the wheel. Her bag, Rosanna assumed, was in the trunk.

Rosanna kissed her aunt goodbye and Solange hugged the girl tightly, as though she had just dropped her off at college or surrendered her to some young man at the altar. When their embrace grew longer, Davernis stepped out of the car and opened the door, motioning for Rosanna to step in. He waited for her to settle in the back before starting the engine. Then, before she knew it, she found herself waving goodbye to her weeping aunt as the car slowly pulled away.

The moment they left beautiful Pacot, Rosanna and a quiet Davernis entered the real Port-au-Prince. Both sides of the streets were filled with desperate vendors proclaiming in singsong the miraculous virtues of their produce. There were beggars at every intersection, their hands outstretched, pleading, “Please, give what you can! I am dying of hunger!”

Bones barely covered by skin jutted out from holes in their torn clothes. Red eyes peered out from behind the tears streaming down their faces. One of them was holding a halfnaked child in her arms, and through the glass window she bore down on Rosanna with her eyes while shouting, “For the love of God, please, help me!”

The child’s reddish hair was a sure sign that he was suffering from malnutrition. The woman continued pleading with both her eyes and words as they sat stuck in bumper-to-bumper traffic leading toward downtown Port-au-Prince.

“God who is in the sky,” the woman was saying, “look at such a beautiful young woman sitting in such a beautiful car. Wouldn’t you ask her to help? Please, God!” The child began to cry then too, and a yellowish liquid flowed from his nostrils. “Beautiful woman, please help me, please! We have no place to stay, no food to eat, and no water to drink! Please, help!” A great sadness emanated from the child’s face. His hollowed eyes touched Rosanna to the core.

“Mademoiselle, the baby hasn’t eaten for three days!” the woman shouted. “Please, help me. Throw a few pennies in my hands, I beg you, mademoiselle!”

Having spent the first twelve years of his life amidst similar poverty, Davernis was accustomed to this kind of blackmail from street beggars. Eager to drown out her voice, he yelled angrily at the woman: “Goddamn, leave us alone!”

The child was seized with fear and began to cry once more.

Rosanna intervened and said, “No, Davernis, at least have some pity for this child!” Then she took a Haitian twenty-dollar bill out of her purse, rolled down the window, and handed it to the woman. As their fingers met, Rosanna could see the layer of grime and mud on the woman’s hands. No matter how often she was part of such a transaction, it never ceased to make her feel guilty for the way she grew up. If Aunt Solange hadn’t taken her in, perhaps she too could have been on the street, hungry, begging.

Rosanna slowly rolled up the window as the woman cried out a loud and jubilant “Mèsi!” Thank you! The child, too, as if connected in every way to the woman, perked up.

“God will reward you,” added the woman, as the car in front of them finally began to crawl forward.

“Mademoiselle Rosanna,” Davernis said once they had cleared the worst of the traffic and were on their way toward Portail Léogâne, “I know you are a good person with a good heart. I’ve told you this many times before but you never want to listen. If you continue like this, people will always try to think of new ways to take money from you.”

At the Portail Léogâne bus station, Davernis lined up the Mercedes behind a swarm of vans, trucks, buses, taxis. A sea of people was waiting to board the buses for the countryside and horns were honking all over. Rosanna’s excitement at the possibilities for the trip was growing.

She waited for Davernis to step out of the car first, then took a deep breath and followed him. Thousands of people were going in all directions, buying last-minute things, corralling large animals, which would share the camion with the human cargo. Dogs were barking right and left. Goats were baying tirelessly, and if you weren’t careful, the cows roaming freely in the streets could poke you with their horns. One had to squeeze and dance like a matador around bulls to avoid being gored. Women held tightly to their handbags to elude pickpockets.

“Driver!” Davernis called out to one of the safest-looking camions at the station, a colorfully painted monster that was blasting reggae music to attract passengers. The camion was called Fate.

“We need the front seat for this beautiful young lady,” Davernis told the driver.

“The front seat is more expensive,” the driver replied, leafing through his ticket book. “If she wants to pay the difference, no problem. We leave in half an hour!”

With Rosanna’s cushioned leather front seat reserved, they had thirty minutes ahead of them. Davernis’s order from Aunt Solange was to not leave the station until he had seen Rosanna’s bus leave. But waiting in this torrid heat in the middle of the chaos at the station was tough, especially for Rosanna. In no time, she was surrounded by a horde of merchants pleading with her to buy everything from water and juice to plantain chips to cigarettes to painkillers. People were getting so close that she could barely breathe. The people’s voices blended with the reverberating sounds of the horns blowing from a multitude of buses arriving and leaving. It was all getting on her nerves. More vendors approached offering kolas, patties, candy, and chewing gum. Even though she would never admit it to Davernis, Rosanna’s head was spinning. Never in her life had she been so physically close to so many people all at once. As the crowd moved in on her, she searched their faces for Davernis, but could no longer see him.

“Davernis!” she called out.

“Mademoiselle!” She could see his head peering from somewhere behind the perimeter.

Turning to a roaming pharmacist in the mob around her, she asked, “Do you have aspirin?”

“Five dollars,” the small man said, lowering the bullhorn he used to advertise his wares as he reached into a small black pouch for the aspirin.

To get the five dollars-an exorbitant price-Rosanna had to open her purse in front of everyone. She reached in awkwardly, and in doing so a bunch of Haitian dollar bills that Aunt Solange had secretly stuffed in her purse rose to the surface, looking like a flush in a game of poker.

“Mademoiselle!” Davernis gasped from where he was standing, the crowd now seeming to push him back to purposely keep them apart. The people around Rosanna couldn’t help but notice the bills. Even Rosanna seemed shocked to see them. She was now an even bigger magnet. A group of beggars pushed in, landing on her like flies. Their hands stretched out toward her, they pleaded for help.

Now deciding to forsake the aspirin, Rosanna shoved Aunt Solange’s surprise deep into her purse. There must be at least a thousand Haitian dollars there, she thought.

Then, out of nowhere, two well-built men, men who looked like they might belong to a SWAT unit, approached her. “Get out of here! Get lost!” they ordered the group of people surrounding her. “Leave this beautiful lady alone!” They shouted at the beggars as they chased the crowd away. They were responsible for security in the area, they told her.

“We’ll hang around and look after you,” they said, “until you board your bus.”

“You are very kind,” Rosanna answered, relieved that they were there, since Davernis had simply disappeared, “but I really don’t need protection. I’m expecting a friend.”

Hardly had she uttered the words when one of the alleged security officers grabbed her arm as the other pushed a small handgun into her spine. The one who grabbed her arm picked her up off the ground and carried her away, with the other one trailing behind. The crowd quickly scattered, and even though the first man was carrying her, he ran faster than the second one with the gun.

“Don’t say a word,” she heard the one carrying her say. “If you cry for help, we’ll blow your head off. Do you hear?”

An intense fear invaded her, causing her to feel even dizzier. She was much too afraid to yell. Besides, everything was happening so fast that she had trouble concentrating on any one thing.

Soon she was in the back of a jeep with darkened windows. The man threw her in headfirst and quickly placed a dirty black rag over her eyes. He turned her on her belly and tugged at both her arms, forcing them behind her, ripping the sleeves of her blouse in the process. She could hear the tearing of duct tape, which he used to wrap her arms and hands together. Then he turned her on her back and placed a strip of tape over her mouth.

When the door slammed shut and the car barreled away, she fell on the floor between the front and back seats- cracking, she was almost sure of it, one of her ribs. Only as the sharp pain of the fall shot through her body did she realize fully what had happened. She was barefoot. Her shoes and her purse were gone. Over the hum of the car engine beneath her and the bounce of the bumpy road, she heard the loud chatter of commerce at the port and realized that they were driving along Bicentennial Road.

She had been kidnapped, she could now fully admit it to herself. On Bicentennial Road, at the seashore, albatrosses and pelicans used to glide low over the waves as large vessels approached the port. This, of course, was during another time, when she was free.

A shudder ran through Rosanna’s body when they arrived at what she imagined was the hideout. They removed the tape on her legs so that she could walk but kept the blindfold on her eyes and the tape on her mouth. One bandit placed her hand on his shoulder so that she could follow him like a blind person with a guide. Underneath her feet were muddy rocks and puddles. Then there was a stretch of dry earth. She heard the unlocking of a padlock and felt a shove on her back: she was being pummeled against what felt like an unfinished concrete wall. She hobbled along a corner, offering her now severely aching back some support. Nearby, as if in the next room, she heard some dogs barking. They sounded like hungry dogs, she thought, her heart racing. She wondered if eventually they would use these hungry dogs against her. She pushed her back deeper into the wall and tried to remain still.

A rancid smell hung in the air as the men paced back and forth around her. One was wearing boots, she could now tell by the way his feet hit the concrete on the ground. The other was wearing regular shoes, fake leather loafers, it sounded like to her. There was no air passing through the room. Perhaps there was no window.

“Now,” the man with the boots said, “let’s get started with the important part!”

It seemed that their plans for a ransom demand had already been set in motion. The one with the boots would make the call, they decided, while the other one remained in the room guarding Rosanna.

Before he left, the one with the boots ordered Rosanna through clenched teeth, “Don’t cause any trouble and you won’t get hurt.”

Rosanna tried to anchor herself against the wall, which was hard with both hands taped behind her back. She thought of Davernis who might be looking for her, of Aunt Solange who had not wanted her to take the camion in the first place, but had given in to make her happy. She thought of the stories of other kidnappings she’d heard in the past. The men were always beaten badly. The women were often raped. Some small children had been killed when the ransom was not paid. She thought of the shock that this could cause Aunt Solange.

Davernis drove back home as fast as he could. He was screaming like a madman when he got to the front door of Solange’s compound. From the slew of words that came out of his mouth, the only ones Solange could understand were: “Rosanna has disappeared!”

“What did you say? What do you mean, Rosanna has disappeared?” demanded Solange.

“Madame Solange, I swear, I looked everywhere. She was nowhere to be found!”

Suddenly there was commotion all over the house. The servants couldn’t control their emotions. They let out loud screams and tears flowed. As for Solange, she seemed dazed as she screamed over and over, “Oh my God, please have mercy! Rosanna was kidnapped!”

The neighbors started showing up. Having somehow gotten wind of the commotion, they came over to see what was happening, then they started offering advice. Many of them had themselves been victims of the recent kidnapping wave that had struck the capital.

“You have to pay the ransom right away,” they all agreed, “so that she can be released as soon as possible!”

Solange blamed Davernis. How could he let himself be separated from Rosanna?

“Why, for God’s sake, would you leave my niece alone in the middle of this crowd of thieves?” Solange banged the table with her fist. Then her cell phone started to ring. The screen read, Private number, but given the circumstances, she replied anyway. “Hello, hello! Who is this?”

A deep voice with a menacing tone spoke at the other end of the line. “Madame, listen carefully to what I am about to tell you. I will be brief, so open your ears and open them big. First, if you inform the police of our negotiations, I can assure you that you will never even find this girl’s body. Second, start gathering your money and make sure it is the exact amount of the ransom. Listen carefully! I will not repeat myself. Collect five hundred thousand U.S. dollars, do you hear? And then we’ll tell you where and how to give it to us!”

“How is Rosanna-” Solange started to holler, but before she could finish the sentence, the man hung up.

“Who could have done such a thing?” Solange shouted out loud to herself. “Who would want to kidnap Rosanna?”

One of the neighbors, a bony pale-skinned man, whose elderly mother had suffered a heart attack and died during a kidnapping attempt at her own house in broad daylight, had become extremely philosophical, a filozòf, in such matters. He chimed in, saying to Solange, “Ma chère, this country is a land of mystery. Mysteries enter your home quietly, and always when you least expect them. They come like a closed padlock and always without the keys to their puzzle. It’s almost impossible to discover what’s behind a mystery in this country. They are part of the essence of our people. They are stained into the fabric of our culture. When you hear the sound of drums coming from the depth of night, what you really hear are echoes. And never, never can you discover the true source of the drumbeats. And never mind whose hands are beating the drums. Those are the mysteries of the night. You know, madame, when the flying werewolves are in the air, one can only see the traces of their flames, but never can one guess which direction they are taking, or in whose yard they will land. Never will we know, as they fly, whose children they plan to eat during the night. But sometimes the solution to a mystery is right under our noses. In other words, what you need to know is right there next to you, though sadly, you never see it. Madame, you will never know who took Rosanna. The why, we know, is money. Money, we know, or lack of it, is the primary obsession of a poor country like ours. But as to who committed this crime, I am speaking from experience: your mystery will now join the rank of all the other mysteries that will never be solved in this country-”

“They want half a million American dollars,” Solange finally interrupted her philosophical neighbor, lest he should go on speaking forever. “It’s too much. Far too much. I have to imagine that they would take half of that, which is all I have liquid right now.”

In the windowless room where Rosanna sat contemplating her fate, the heat kept rising and her body began to shake in fear. She couldn’t stop thinking of all the kidnapping cases that had been in the newspapers. Of the sixteen-year-old boy who was killed and dumped on a trash heap even after his family had paid the ransom. Of the girl who had been taken all the way to the northern city of Cap Haitien and was gang raped then murdered after having both her eyes gouged out. Of the school bus full of children that had been abducted, forcing each parent to come up with a thousand dollars. Of the shoeshine man who had been beaten on the spine with a crowbar and was paralyzed because his family could not afford the ransom. But there were also happy stories, happy endings worth clinging to. There was the girl at school who had only spent several hours in captivity because her parents had quickly negotiated and paid. Not a hair on her head was touched, she had insisted to everyone at school. They had blindfolded her, just as they had Rosanna, so she didn’t know where she had been taken. All she knew was that it was extremely hot and full of mosquitoes.

There were mosquitoes flitting about Rosanna now too. By the thousands, it seemed. Flies buzzed annoyingly around her ears, occasionally landing their tiny moistened tentacles on her skin. She could also hear the man guarding her, breathing across the room, swatting the mosquitoes dead with loud slaps to his own skin.

Meanwhile, because they could not go to the police, Solange’s philosophical neighbor took Davernis with him back to the Portail Léogâne bus station, hoping to find witnesses. The bus that Rosanna had intended to take to Les Cayes had already left. The street vendors who had surrounded her, and even the others who had not, but had seen everything unfold before their eyes, refused to tell them anything.

“M pa konnen,” they answered to Davernis and the neighbor’s repeated questions. I don’t know.

“I understand.” The neighbor tried to coax them with small purchases until he had an armful of wilted fruits and vegetables. “You have to come back here every day, and even talking to me right now might put you in danger, but I am a customer and customers and vendors have an intimacy.”

“M pa konnen mesye,” they all repeated, the fear evident in their eyes.

The guard was still looking at his beautiful captive, cowed in a corner in the unfinished house where they housed their victims. His blood was heating up in his veins, images of him and the girl whirling in his mind. He pictured her as a nightingale in a cage and himself both her potential killer and protector. The sense of power that this visual metaphor inspired vibrated through him. He had rarely felt this before-that is, sympathy for his captives. She wasn’t a regular payday in his eyes. His other captives were often rich men and women, spoiled aristocrats who wanted water or even soda as soon as they got here. This one had not even groaned to have the duct tape removed from her lips and she actually seemed like a genuine innocent.

A few drops of rain could be heard tapping the tin roof above them. To him it sounded like a rhythm of Gede, the god of love and death. To her it sounded like thunderclaps, and she imagined each drop as the toll of a bell that might bring help.

“Mademoiselle, I have an offer for you,” the guard said. Rosanna could hear the mild hesitation in his voice. Even though he was the one with the gun and the power and she was blindfolded and helpless, he was addressing her the way men of his class addressed women of hers. He was addressing her the way Davernis would.

“I can let you go unharmed, mademoiselle.” He tried to make his voice sound more forceful. “You are a woman, mademoiselle; you must know what I am trying to tell you. I am a man, and this desire is flowing strongly through my body. The attraction you carry around yourself creates in me the desire to make love to you. And naturally, if you allow your body to slip under mine, maybe I’ll let you escape. I have the power to let you go.” The captor removed the duct tape from Rosanna’s mouth.

“Monsieur, zanmi mwen, I beg you,” Rosanna pleaded, addressing him like someone of her own class. “You’ve already taken my freedom. Please don’t take my…”

The man stood up and abruptly unzipped his pants. He pulled out his penis and pointed it toward her, taking pleasure in knowing that she would not realize what he was doing until he was already upon her.

She heard the unzipping of the pants and the thump of his footsteps when he dropped the gun on the cement. “Tanpri ede mwen!” she cried. Please help!

Her supplications had absolutely no effect on the aggressor. He had shaken off his momentary lapse of judgment in feeling sorry for her and was now saying to himself, Another crime, why not? Even though society had placed people like this girl above his stature, his life, his physical prowess, and his gun, would always get him what he wanted. In the end, the begging and praying meant little to him. Physical violence was the only thing those people would respect.

With this in mind, he grabbed Rosanna’s arms and legs and stretched her out on the floor. He threw himself on top of her, stamping his lips roughly on her face. She squirmed out of his grasp and tried to roll away, scraping her skin against pebbles on the floor. She balled her fists and managed to squeeze her wrists free from the duct tape. Then, before he could reach her, she yanked the blindfold off her face.

The room was a gray square with unfinished cement blocks piled on top of one another; the roof was made of rippling tin. Up front was a padlocked black metal door to which this man probably had the key.

While she was contemplating a way out, the man grabbed her by the arm and threw her against a wall. He was using even more force than before. He squeezed her left arm and twisted her right one behind her back, trying to join them, perhaps to tape them together again.

She felt both her shoulders snap, the pain throbbing through her entire body. She had no more to lose. She had to keep fighting. For the first time since the guard had pulled the tape off her mouth, she began screaming. She screamed as loud as she could, and for every scream, every push, every punch she tried to throw, he countered with one of his own. She tried to bite him. He clung to her, pressing his body against her so tight that each of her movements echoed his. He picked her up and slammed her down on the ground, throwing his body’s weight on top of hers, pinning her to the concrete. They started rolling together on the floor, and as she struggled to break away, he took the opportunity to snatch up her skirt with an unsettling rage. Her courage was flagging. She was exhausted. Her screams seemed completely useless. No one was coming.

Rosanna cried out one last time. At that moment he raised her leg, chafed raw from the floor, and she felt something like a hot iron on the outside of her genitals, something like fire between her legs.

She opened her mouth to scream even louder, but this time no sound came out. There was just a feeling of suffocation as the iron attacked her flesh. The man grunted and shrieked with an animalistic joy. The pain grew so unbearable that she could no longer yell. He, however, was laughing as he hammered his hips into hers. Finally, the pain became so intense that she lost consciousness.

At Solange’s house, her cell phone rang again.

“Hello. Madame, it’s me. Is the money ready?” the deep voice snapped sharply.

“Sir,” Solange said in a quavering voice, “I can give you two hundred and fifty thousand U.S. dollars. That’s all we could put together.”

“What! You’re leaving the half-million behind and talking about two hundred thousand? Madame, I’ll call you later.” Bang! The same message showed up on the cell phone’s screen: Private number.

While Solange waited, it felt to her as though the entire city was in mourning. Above the hills, a series of curling black clouds, sympathy clouds, draped the sky like a flock of bad-omen birds. Her eyes puffy from crying, Solange scolded herself between sobs. She should have never let that girl go to Portail Léogâne. She should have agreed to the halfmillion dollars that the kidnappers were demanding. She should have told Davernis to take Rosanna directly to Les Cayes.

Her philosophical neighbor tried to reason with her: “Madame, if the kidnappers were following your Rosanna, they would have found a way to get to her. Most of these kidnappings are well planned, you know.”

The phone rang again.

“Hello, madame. A quarter-million U.S. dollars will do.”

“Okay,” Solange said, regaining her sang-froid, “but I need proof that she is still alive.”

The afternoon drizzle started again. A smell of doom seemed to hang in the air. Rows of children were making their way home from school. Beggars sat with their hands stretched toward the sky, perhaps waiting for the love of God that had been promised by evangelists of all stripes. Solange had just left Sogebank, the philosopher neighbor at her side and a briefcase full of money on her lap. Davernis was driving. In the car, no one said anything. There was both too much and too little to say.

The booted man walked quickly down the dark alley leading to Rosanna’s prison. He leapt over the piles of trash that littered the narrow alleys. The smell of decomposing flesh lingered in the air. He finally reached the front door of the cement shack.

Tok! Tok! Tok! Three quick knocks on the black metal door was the signal he had agreed on with the guard who was inside with the girl, but there was no need for this. The door was open and both the guard and the girl were gone.

The briefcase full of money under her arm, and her philosopher neighbor still at her side, Solange had Davernis drive her to the rendezvous spot, a dead-end street not far from her house, which overlooked a crowded cement shack-filled neighborhood below. At the entrance to the labyrinthine neighborhood was a trash heap that was always smoldering.

An hour went by: nothing. No Rosanna, no kidnappers!

Solange felt heartbroken and discouraged. Would everything truly end this way for Rosanna?

Her philosopher friend for once had no words of comfort or enlightenment. Finally her cell phone rang, and Davernis answered it.

“That was Melanie, madame,” Davernis said a moment later from the front seat. “Someone was going by and recognized Mademoiselle Rosanna in the trash heap down there.”

“What do you mean they recognized her?” Solange asked.

“She is dead, madame,” Davernis explained, his eyes filling up with tears, “and her body in such bad condition that only some of her is identifiable.”

“Then how do they even know? How can they even tell it’s her?” Solange pounded her fist on the suitcase full of money, crying like a child. Her mind, her body it seemed, was drifting into the past, back to the Canapé Vert hospital where she’d visited her brother’s wife the day Rosanna was born, back to Rosanna’s baptism where she had promised to take over the parental duties should anything happen to her brother and his wife, back to the night that she’d learned of their death and had felt both agony and elation at the possibility of raising the girl herself.

And now Rosanna was gone. And suddenly the trash heap at the mouth of the slum that she had long ignored, a slum that was as much part of her neighborhood as the hilly houses of her closer neighbors, was much more visible to her. And when she rolled down the window of the Mercedes, she could clearly see in the distance this smoldering garbage heap where Rosanna had been dumped like refuse. The smell of decay in the air suddenly irritated her. Barely able to walk, Solange leaned on her neighbor’s shoulder as she left the car and moved toward the trash heap. Surely there would be an investigation, some press, some sympathy. And then, just as her philosopher neighbor had said, the mystery of Rosanna’s death would remain unsolved, like so many other mysteries in Port-au-Prince, whether in the slums or fancier neighborhoods. She tried to gather what was left of her courage just to keep walking through the mud and piles of trash. Then, all at once, they saw Rosanna.

“Jesus, Marie, Joseph,” she gasped.

Rosanna was as naked as the day she was born. Her body was covered with scratch marks, cuts, even what seemed like burns. Her face was swollen, her eyes gouged out, leaving two fleshy gashes. There were lines of dried blood on both sides of her mouth, which remained open, as though midscream.

Solange crumpled to the ground, her knees digging into the grime that was now cradling her niece, her beautiful niece.

“She fought,” Solange told those who attended Rosanna’s closed-casket funeral a week later. “She fought very hard for her life and her honor. Now it is our turn to fight for our lives and our honor.”

Solange had hoped that her private grief would somehow inspire a different resolution for Rosanna. She had hoped that her pleas to the authorities, to the press, would inspire someone to come forward to either deliver the killer or vow to at least try.

At the funeral, her philosopher neighbor sat discreetly in the back next to Davernis, who was waiting to follow the hearse in the Mercedes and return Solange home after the funeral. He had grown up with Rosanna, yet he could not allow himself to grieve as openly as Solange or even the throng of the girl’s mother’s relatives, who had heard about her death on the radio and had flocked to the funeral in Port-au-Prince to tell the stories about her mother that Rosanna had set out to Les Cayes hoping to hear.

“Ah, fate,” the philosopher neighbor sighed after one such speech from Rosanna’s maternal line.

“Indeed, mesye,” replied Davernis, who would never forgive himself for what had happened. He would also never forgive his collaborator, who had lost him such an important payday simply by lusting over the privileged flesh of some young bourgeois girl. Now they would have no choice but to try again. This time, the aunt.

MALOULOU by Marie Lily Cerat Martissant

Stay up long enough between midnight and three a.m. any day and you will hear Maloulou. But be careful to never run into her. Everyone in Lakou 22 knew this. Noises in the night defined that yard: husbands, young men, and prostitutes who caused old doors to creak while coming in some nights; lougawou, werewolves that turned skin inside out and jumped about loudly on tin ceilings, eyeing little children for future repasts; noise there always was. But the sounds of Maloulou were unique. With precision, many could reproduce the footsteps mixed with a light clinking of chains: clink, clap, clink, clap, clink-clap: sometimes coming and sometimes going. It even seemed a mark of honor to wake up and recount hearing Maloulou. Older stories about Maloulou that had been abandoned would resurface some nights when the folktales of Bouki and Malis could not be stretched any further. There was the broad cassava-colored hat over an invisible head, going clink, clap a hundred years or so ago after the first African slaves disembarked on the island.

“Don’t worry, Ghislaine, Lakou 22 came with Maloulou,” Destin and Madame Destin, the very first residents to build shacks at the entrance of the yard, told my mother one morning soon after we moved there. Darkness did not worry my mother, but Maloulou would. My mother had braved the dark streets for as long as I could remember before retreating to her own cinder block-mounted bed, hidden behind the paisleyprint curtain to protect me from the parade of visitors whose fees paid for our shack, my school, our food and clothing. In some ways, I was my mother’s daughter; I was never afraid of the dark.

Like the Destins, other residents with nothing to do often gathered, coffee cups in hands, under bright early suns to swap Maloulou stories, as if competing for the most exciting rendition. There were those who laughed in disbelief, others appeared pensive when reports were shared about the mysterious thing that had always lived in their midst but had never been seen. Young ones like me attending to morning chores before hastily preparing for a discounted ride to school with Josaphat, the camionette driver who lived in Lakou 22, used to listen furtively, ears tuned to what was being said, eyes wide with amazement. Where the name Maloulou came from, no one really knew. One version of the story was that Maloulou came from the sea to the island with the name Nkiruka, but it was changed to Maloulou because it rolled easier on the tongue.

Nevertheless, the nomadic and infamous visitor who was said to roam our compound in the ink-blue night enthralled all. One man in particular, it was said, Roland Désir, might have come nose-to-nose with Maloulou.

Roland Désir turned mad one morning, the story went, and folks repeated verbatim the words of the person who saw it happen, his wife Marguerite, who stood in the middle of the yard sobbing, saying that maybe if she hadn’t confronted Roland about the children’s school fees lost in a cockfight the previous night, he might not have lost his head. Years later, Roland was still roaming the streets and corridors, speaking to himself, living under trees, sleeping under the stars, begging for food, throwing rocks at the sea or at the gagè where he used to wage cheer on cockfights.

Lakou 22 people still sought Roland to give him scraps of food. After all, it was on account of this yard that his life changed. Folks remembered how he was a proud nèg nan nò, who had moved here from up north a long time ago with his young family. He provided for all his eight children, transforming abandoned oil drums into coal stoves to sell. Sadly, what he made was insufficient to sustain his avaricious cockfighting addiction; but all agreed that he was a fine member of Lakou 22.

What made matters worse for the Désir clan were the series of unfortunate events that hit the family right on the heels of Roland taking to the streets. Folks were in agreement that it was easy to imagine Kenesou, Roland’s youngest child, not living long. Less than a year had passed between him and Jean, the sibling before him, and Madame Roland’s body had not fully been restored to carry a healthy baby to term. And sure enough, Kenesou was very sickly: fever, bronchitis, diarrhea, you name the parasitic disease and he had it. Many thought the Désirs lucky to have had him alive for so long, but some still believed Maloulou might have been the culprit.

Now, the death of Hermione Désir, the eldest, came as a complete surprise. She was pretty like a rainbow, they say when telling her story. By all accounts, Hermione was angeliclooking. To have seen her walking down the road and not taken special notice would be cause for concern with any man: young or old. Men begged to nestle in her hips. Wives tried to shield their mates. Prostitutes wished she’d move away. Little boys could be heard praying for the gods to send them wives like her when they grow up. Young girls were said to imitate her walks and get their hair done like hers.

The whole neighborhood trembled, they say, the afternoon Hermione Désir started convulsing. Burning cotton under her nose, rubbing alkali on her face and chest, were not enough to bring her back. She did not even wait to have the tea that had been put on the fire for her. All of Lakou 22 mourned her, even crazy Roland Désir, the father she had supposedly lost to Maloulou. He was heard the night of her burial pacing about and lamenting, “This child was too young and pretty to die,” as if her death made him momentarily sane.

Mothers and wives who inherited these stories would evoke the fate of Roland to caution their men of the perils of walking dark corridors after midnight. In my head, though, I had preferred imagining Maloulou like the character Django, from the first spaghetti western film I ever saw. I envisioned Maloulou pulling a machetes-filled coffin in the dead of our nights, looking to rescue me, her own Maria, from renegades like Uncle Solon, who had mutated into a Tonton Macoute.

Mother never told me the familial relations we had with Solon. I suspected we had none. Personally, I had no recollection of his presence prior to the age of twelve or thirteen. We never went to his house; he came to us. My calling him Uncle Solon was just one of those impositions made on Haitian children, an effort at politeness by assigning a familial title to an adult stranger. Along with having to call people who curdled my blood aunties and uncles, I hated my mother for forcing me to kiss people I did not care for, but that was not the only reason I wished Uncle Solon dead. He was mother’s steadiest customer. And I could tell that he was one of the best payers since we seemed to eat a bit better after his passages. He was also short, bow-legged, had a receding hairline, and eyes set too far apart, and an unfriendly face that his small, stubby legs and arms did not help. But this had nothing to do with my disliking him. One night, during an early-evening visit as my mother prepared him some plantain porridge, he came over to the table where I was slumped on my school books, put one hand on my mouth and the other under my dress, and did not stop until he heard my mother returning to the room. That’s how and why my deep hatred for Uncle Solon started; and my passion for Maloulou began. Mother has had to snatch me from endless daydreams where Maloulou slays Uncle Solon and all the members of his nefarious, dungaree-clad gang.

My hatred for Uncle Solon grew deeper when he volunteered to bring me home from school to save mother the camionette fare, just so he could continue searching and playing with my bouboun under the nun’s school uniform during the car rides. That nourished my plan to catch Maloulou and make an offering of Uncle Solon. Yes, I pondered the fact that I too might not survive the encounter. But not surviving was the least of the deterrents, for I was already dying in small bits. All my desires and needs to unearth the Maloulou enigma and find an ally in stopping Uncle Solon took on realness when, for the first time, at the point when night and day mixed and lying wide awake in bed wishing to hear mother turn the key, and thinking of all the bad things Uncle Solon did, I instead heard with my own ears the clinking and clapping. I listened, still as a corpse, to steps moving through the passageway toward the sea, and waited silently until the same footsteps and dangling chains ambled back.

There were a few people who told of having heard Maloulou in the night. I told no one, though I felt a tremendous pleasure for finally belonging to a special cadre of people. After a while, I did grow tired of staying up nights waiting to hear Maloulou go by. But if I wanted to come upon the one who wandered in the hours of darkness, tell on Uncle Solon and have an ally in making him disappear from our lives, I needed to know the exact times when the stroll happened, study the pace, prepare some trappings and paraphernalia, and brace for what may come.

Had mother suspected my crazed plan, she would have made me gulp down daily concoctions of hellebore until I was completely purged of my foolish idea. Curing my folly would become her personal crusade. But I kept my idea and plan in my head, sharing them with not even the wind.

In conversations with myself, however, I pulled all sorts of reasons to give me the heart to go forward. The Bible tells how little David took on the giant Goliath, I recalled. I had two giants in my life and one was going to help me slay the other. Rather than continue to endure the visits and car rides with Uncle Solon or painfully imagine the size of mother’s sorrow when he kissed and hit her like what I saw him do one night behind the green paisley curtain, I was determined to risk everything. I was prepared to know Maloulou just as Roland Désir had, if only in the private confines of my head.

Amassing the items that I needed for my expedition to Maloulou was exhaustive and costly. It ate away at the tiny bit of money I was saving to buy Mother a set of gold eggplantshaped earrings like the ones she often borrowed from her friend Fifi. I knew Mother would never muster the courage to buy them herself, feeling that she’d be wasting hard-earned money intended for rent, food, and school fees on something unneeded for our survival. I was saving those pinched coins extracted here and there to one day appear as her own magi, bearing gold earrings she would love. To protect my meager funds, I did try to get her to pay for the rope for my plan, but it didn’t work. Her response to my request: “You’re too old to be jumping rope! Are you getting the rope to hang the both of us?” I had no comeback. Whatever I could say would be too lame against the disarming image of our lifeless bodies hanging from some tree in the yard or from our ceiling. And a long sisal rope I absolutely needed for my mission: so I dipped in my gold earrings fund.

Collecting salt and black pepper was the easiest. Many of us in the yard put out our salt to dry if it’s not raining. And whenever I came upon a calabash of salt in the sun, I would help myself. Plus, I volunteered often to be sent to market so I could purchase more salt and pepper for my mission. In less than a month, I hid away enough salt to spoil the taste of our water hole, and enough pepper to scatter about and get all of Lakou 22 fighting. Little by little, I pounded and mixed the two spices together to create a peppery powder that I’d be throwing in Maloulou’s face to cause momentary blindness as I roped her arms and legs and dragged her back to our shack.

The night of my operation, I carefully arranged rags on my bed so it looked like I was tucked inside. I prayed that it would not be one of these nights when my mother would fish for me in the dark, as if fearing that I would be sucked through a hole in the ceiling. If I did not carefully plan every move, I could lose money and my quest for Maloulou would fall to the wayside. And both Mother and I would be dying sooner than our Creator intended. I chose a Friday night because that’s usually when mother stayed out dancing and drinking with her clients into the wee hours of the morning. Other days in the week, some clients made quick and short stops for a taste of her on their way home, and she’d be around, going in and out through the night. But the weekends belonged to her clients. I too had taken the habit of staying out later those nights to play with the boys and let them kiss me in the dark, disobeying Mother’s directions to go home once the Pierrette twins, who were known good girls, went in to sleep.

I wore Mother’s faded black dress that she had worn to almost every burial procession, including that of her own mother and countless members of Lakou 22. The dress blended well with the dark. Standing in a corner of the gallery of the tworoom shack recently vacated by a couple named Janine and Jean, the rope and an alfò bag containing my salt-and-pepper mixture strung across my shoulder, I was waiting in a darkness that was as thick and heavy as molasses. I replayed in my head the clink, clap, clink, clap of the night promeneur, and knew that I would recognize those steps in a crowd of thousands. How much time went by, I couldn’t tell. Though I knew I had only blinked my heavy lids when suddenly Lakou 22 became a cane field, right under my eyes. The leaves of the cane felt like a thousand crazy red ants attacking my exposed arms, legs, and face, drawing me into a strange state of alertness.

Believing that I could be in a cane plantation wasn’t hard. Léogâne, one of the remaining towns of the Haitian sugarcane empire created by France, was no more than seven or eight kilometers from Lakou 22. I could have sleepwalked to Léogâne. But what followed disturbed the expected order of things. Before I was discovered that morning at the edge of the sea by Madame André, hearing her piercing yell of “Anmwe, vin pote l sekou,” Please help her, I thought myself dead and on the journey to Ginen, through this long underwater passage that Aunt Francine said all Haitians go to when they die. And the idea of dying soothed me. I would never have to speak overtly and with fear of these remembrances, never have to tell another soul of my encounters with Maloulou or be called the girl in Lakou 22 who went mad and spoke nonsense. And Uncle Solon would never touch me again.

When Madame André and Djo picked up my shivering, wet, and seaweed-entangled body from the shore, sensation in my limbs returned before my voice. But it took more than four months, plus the violent death of Uncle Solon after leaving our shack and the side of my convalescent bed one night, to confirm for Mother that I was not crazy. That got her to begin untying my arms and legs from the bed, no longer fearing that I would take off running. I was even allowed to read my old school books after I recited the daily Bible verses with her. Recording my experiences in some unused pages of some old notebook came to me only after Mother had me repeating this verse with the Bible open on my head. But the servant who did things that deserved a beating without knowing it will receive a light beating. Much will be required from everyone to whom much has been given.

These words started a memory flood and I could clearly see the cane field and the old woman who had appeared from nowhere in front of me; the steps and clinking of the chain made her unmistakable. There stood Maloulou, tall as a coconut tree, eyes bright like the stars above, with a metal collar connected to a chain that ran all the way to one of her feet. Without giving me time to catch my breath, take in the realization that I was nose-to-nose with her, or dig into the blindness-inducing mixture to execute the plan that I had rehearsed hundreds of times in my head, she grabbed my left arm and asked, looking down at me, in a voice as big as she was, “Why did you follow me?”

I remember stammering the words, “I need… help…” while remaining mesmerized by finally being in the presence of the one who has inhabited Lakou 22 before it was Lakou 22; the one whom the people have named, accepted as just another neighbor, feared, and blamed for undoing their lives and taking away their children.

“Children should not be out at this time of night. And those who don’t listen pay for their stubbornness,” she said in a hoarse, ancient voice that sounded like the scolding of a hundred worried grandmothers.

Since I had gotten a bit light-headed from the heavy and pungent smell of asafetida that enveloped the air around her, I mumbled some inaudible words.

“You can follow me, but you can’t speak,” she said, peering down at me, her head wrapped in a tiyon, then beginning to move away.

“Uncle Solon,” I remember stuttering, determined to tell Maloulou why I had followed her. “You have to liberate Mother and me from Uncle Solon.” Stunned and still immobilized by fear, I managed to add in a feeble voice, “Telling Mother how he touches my bouboun when her eyes are turned away would have caused so much… more pain…”

Maloulou stopped and turned again to look at me, her face softly lit by the half-moon overhead, revealing tender and clear eyes that seemed to see right into the profoundest corner of my soul, and let out a big sigh.

From one of the many pockets in her long dress, she drew something out and sprinkled it atop my head and on my face, saying, “He will never touch you again.”

I continued crying as Maloulou patted my head with her heavy tree branch-like hands to calm me down. Her powdery potions on my face and her words must have had an impact. I could hear, but was no longer able to respond to her as she lunged into a story about a horse and life.

“Just remember, my child, you die a slave if you let this horse guide you. You must command the horse, through the mountains of life and the valleys of death. Just be sure to always do things that will put you on the good side of life,” she said. “Sa n fè se li n wè, we always reap what we sow, my child. I cannot leave you here now, can I?” She seemed to be concerned by my presence. Tightening her calloused left hand on my arm, she ploughed through the cane; the machete in her right hand pushing the blistery leaves away. At the end of the field, there was a small assembly waiting; even the mastiffs and bloodhounds were there, tranquil. Standing a short distance from the crowd, she asked twice, “Sa ki la?” What’s there? And an echo of voices responded, “Bwa n ap kloure.” We are nailing wood.

“Good. I am the woman of the mountain with no name who Makandal sent,” Maloulou said, still holding on to me. The name Makandal reverberated in a dizzying swirl in my head. Ma-kan-dal, I replayed, visualizing the bench way in back of the class where I sat, and Mr. Laborde’s mouth as he gave a history lesson one afternoon long ago.

“François Makandal: man, myth, but surely rebellious slave, who was burned at the stake, just like Jeanne D’Arc,” he had said in quick French to show the ease with which he spoke the language. “Makandal’s followers helped in killing some six thousand slave-owners in his six years of rebellion,” he added in his showy style. “Makandal freed himself and rose to the heavens, perhaps still roaming the Haitian skies and forests,” he laughed, “having baffled them and even us. However, myth is sacred, impermeable even. But remember, a myth is just a myth, a figment of our imagination. See you all tomorrow,” he ended, dismissing the class.

In my mind that night, while repeating the short description of Makandal over and over in the same way that I repeated the Bible verse, trying to make it all stick in my head, I had imagined the tall, dark, and muscular Makandal in his ascension, the same way I effortlessly believed that Christ, Elijah, and the Virgin Mary went up to the skies, in flesh and blood.

That’s when I finally understood Maloulou’s question, and the answer that came back was some sort of password. It became clear that she had journeyed with me into a world and time long forgotten, misunderstood, and lost within the flimsy confines of yellowed history books.

“We have been expecting you,” they cried almost in unison, bringing me back to the actual moment, as they proceeded to tell Maloulou who they were.

In the order the island of Quisqueya had received them, they approached one after the other. The Taino priestess, her black hair adorned with feathers of all colors, her nagua dancing along with her copper hips in the glittering moonlight, led the procession. “I will sell them good kenèp wine that will bring on the longest sleep,” she said. Then there was the Creole mulatto with eyes that pulled like a magnet, promising to place the poison in her umbilical crevasse and swearing to make the rounds of all the beds of all planters along La Ravine. And they continued to come forth: the Hausas with their bags of deadly herbs and the three Katangas who embraced Maloulou, saying, “Sister, sè an mwen, we too saw him ascending, growing those wings that took him up atop the cloud of smoke.” A whole parade that perhaps I was seeing so clearly because like Roland Désir I was now considered mad, a whole parade of my history and theirs. I saw and heard them all, my tongue weighing a ton and my lips glued so that even if I had wanted to talk, I would not have been able to. What would I say? It was all clearly laid out under my eyes, the told and untold history lessons given by all the Mr. Labordes. In that very instant, if I could have spoken, perhaps I would have only told of this strange feeling of peace while holding on to Maloulou’s skirt. Or I would have confessed that my fears of never seeing Lakou 22 and its memories of pain had vanished.

They had all quieted down when Maloulou finally let go of my wrist and started distributing potions and powders from deep in the many hidden pockets of her large dress: this to tie tongues; that for rendering you invisible under the eyes of the enemy; here to sweeten the last cup of water and make them sleep forever; and this to scramble memories. And a final one to remove any power that anyone has to ever hurt you again.

“My children, take no chances and be prepared to risk it all,” Maloulou warned. “I must now go back to the mountain and Makandal. But I will return each night for news and supplies until victory rolls from mountain to mountain.” Her words, much like her eternal journey, kept replaying in my head, blocking everything else, and momentarily making Lakou 22 and the grunting Uncle Solon and his eager hands between my legs feel like a distant drum: faint and far.

DANGEROUS CROSROADS by Louis-Philippe Dalembert Pétionville ^{Translated by Nicole Ball}

Inspector Zagribay was about to turn the computer off when his cell phone told him he had a text message. Lulled by Ibrahim Ferrer’s voice, the inspector had been on the brink of losing consciousness. Only someone he knew well could text him at such a late hour. All around him the city was sleeping in complete darkness. In the last week, partial electricity rationing had turned into total blackout. In the meantime, converters were beginning to die and his own was soon to be part of the group. Owners of generators and solar panels were the last to enjoy the coveted energy. The inspector had to resort to charging his cell in his office to save a little electricity. But there was no way he was going to give up listening to his boleros once he was in bed. The boleros had the triple function of helping him untangle the threads of a current case, taking him back to his childhood, and coaxing him to sleep. And the last had become more and more of a problem. Instinctively, Zagribay turned down the music before he grabbed the phone. He might have even been waiting for that message on some level, as he hadn’t even bothered to get undressed before going to bed. The sender’s number, then the message, appeared on the screen. The inspector got up, picked up his service revolver, and stepped out into the heart of the night.

The car started right away and he pulled out into the street. The thick darkness reduced visibility to the immediate range of the headlights. The inspector turned right, drove a few hundred yards further, and when he reached the precinct- which was also shrouded in complete darkness-and the Baptist church, he turned left. At this hour, he could take Delmas, the long artery to Pétionville, without fear of getting caught in traffic jams. He would reach the meeting place soon after that. Though he was reluctant to inform too many people, he took the precaution of waking up a young colleague-who didn’t seem particularly happy about this show of trust-and asked to meet him at Place Boyer. After he hung up, he pushed the button of the CD player. Ibrahim Ferrer’s voice filled the car, leaving a melodious trail in the silent night that blended with the barking of roaming dogs and the buzz of the generators he passed.

Inspector Zagribay’s mind began racing as he drove down the bumpy road. He was getting close, he was sure of it. He had managed to gather almost all the pieces of the puzzle. Another one or two pieces-which his informer and hopefully a search warrant would soon provide-and the case would be closed. When his boss had entrusted him with the assignment, he never would have thought a story of humans transformed into cattle would take him so far. To tell the truth, neither would his boss, who knew his quixotic nature and gave him only minor jobs. But as the weeks went by, the case kept expanding. Recently, he had reached the stage of “friendly” warnings. Which proved that he was on to something big. All those warnings came from people who claimed to wish him well: his boss, colleagues at the office, his childhood friend Fanfan (who he hadn’t even told anything to). Even that Maria Luz, an NGO executive he’d met at the Canadian embassy, thought she should warn him too. Far from dissuading him, all this advice had actually stimulated him. It would be such a waste to stop when things looked so good. Stopping meant being subjected to his colleagues’ sarcasm and the neighborhood kids taunting him. Hey Zagribay, how about solving the mystery of that radio journalist Jean Dominique’s murder? Also, at some point you had to show people that there was justice in this damned country. That nobody could come here and just do whatever, whenever. As if it were a jungle.

The inspector remembered exactly when the case had started to turn into something serious and go way beyond him and his boss. It was a month and half ago. He was just emerging from his sleep when his cell rang. It was close to five a.m. The everpresent crowing of roosters, the voices of early risers mixed with the sounds of a few cars backfiring, filled the air. As it did every day, the early-morning smell of coffee had jumped over the fence to tickle his nostrils. That smell was enough to justify his homecoming. The inspector stretched out his arm, groped toward the nightstand. His hand finally reached the phone. He was about to give the intruder a piece of his mind when his eyes, still foggy with sleep, recognized the number on the screen. He didn’t even have time to say hello.

His boss was screaming, beside himself. Zagribay was to go straight to the entrance of Cité Soleil. A seventh corpse in a state of interrupted metamorphosis in his sector. One or two, okay. A human being’s life is of little importance in this screwed-up country, but seven, that was really too much. The chief of police, a man very popular with the media, must have been afraid of losing his job and was waking him up in the middle of the night to box his ears. The problem had been brought up the day before at the cabinet meeting, yelled the chief. The president himself was upset about it. The story had already traveled around the globe, thanks to YouTube: in Haiti, “Christians” were being turned into cattle before being sacrificed during rituals honoring bloodthirsty gods from Africa. And it was easy to infer from this that Haitians were all cattle. The minister of the interior shared the president’s indignation. He had promised that the mystery would be quickly solved and the murderer arrested. And there! Just this morning he had another mutant dead body on his hands. Zagribay had better move his ass instead of wasting the government’s money listening to his maricón music. The boss was known as being someone who didn’t mince words. He wanted results. As soon as possible.

It’s easy to yell now, Zagribay was telling himself as he got up. If they’d asked for his services before, we wouldn’t be where we are now. His chances of finding useful clues would have been greater, especially as the murderer always proceeded the same way. Each time, the body was crushed as if by a steamroller, then burnt to such a point that it was impossible to identify its gender. It surely came from the same brain or criminal organization. But there you are, the bosses had to wait to have three corpses on their hands to take him on board. No wonder the bastard kept doing his grisly job. What were they thinking? That he could perform miracles?

Meanwhile, the opposition was quick to claim on TV and the airwaves of dozens of radio stations that the government was incapable of ensuring the safety of its citizens. For all you know, the inspector said to himself, maybe one of the big guns of the opposition is behind this sinister show. Just to destabilize the government and indulge in the favorite game of this country’s politicians: musical chairs. These people have no scruples. They’d sell their mothers to get a position in the cabinet or a seat in the national assembly. The lead was worth pursuing. But after a week of investigation, Inspector Zagribay had to face facts: there was no connection between the logorrhea of the members of the opposition and the carbonized bodies found on the streets of the capital.

His informers found nothing worth mentioning on the drug lords or kidnappers either. It didn’t match the modus operandi of the drug traffickers. They were used to benefiting from efficient complicity at all levels of the state and had no need to resort to such conspicuous acts to punish people who crossed the line. As for the kidnappers, they would have ended up giving themselves away if they proceeded in this manner. This research had required two extra weeks. And in the interim, three more corpses had been added to the first three, making the front page of the local press. Same method, applied with diabolical regularity, the stiff exposed at a crossroads. He was left with the option of a serial killer, even though, as far as he knew, no case of this type had ever been reported in Haiti. In this field, no lead can be ignored, he repeated like a seasoned professor of criminology. Who knows, with all those deportees the United States have been sending back to us recently…

Zagribay had reached this point in his investigation when that seventh corpse fell on his hands. Seven murders in seven weeks! This was no small case. He quickly got rid of the tank top and underwear he usually slept in. He didn’t have time this morning to feel bad about his visibly broadening waistline. The chief’s voice was still booming in his ear. He slipped into the bathroom: a good shower, even a fast one, would wake him up for good. He turned on the faucet. The pipe produced a weird gurgling noise, the sign of an empty tank. He had forgotten to tell the cleaning lady to have it filled by the tank truck. He went over to the drum installed in the kitchen. Armed with a jug, he set out to fill the basin he had brought with him. As he was washing up, the phone rang again. Probably his boss, anxious to know if he was already on the premises. He finished washing in record time, grabbed the first pieces of clothing he could find, and rushed to his car, an old second-hand Toyota that started every other time.

The police department car stayed at the precinct: a stupid requirement from the minister of the interior to put an end to the improper use of vehicles outside office hours. Some had even been seen in bad neighborhoods when the driver wasn’t supposed to be on duty. As if police cars had to be parked in front of embassies and rich homes only! Besides, those cars broke down very often, victims of the terrible state of the roads; or of the mechanics in charge of repairing them: they’d slip in used parts in place of the new ones they were selling. In any event, the inspector preferred his old unmarked Toyota to the official police car. It allowed him to go unnoticed and have no time constraints. And his car had no fear of a tough fight with the streets of Port-au-Prince.

Luckily, the old Toyota started up right away. The inspector then realized he hadn’t opened the fence of the yard. He was wasting precious time. Slipping his hand into his pants pocket to extract his keys, he stepped back out of the car. After he had unlocked the padlock, he needed to remove the heavy chain which, in addition to the walls capped with glass shards, completed the security system. Then he had to open the fence to drive the car out before closing it behind him. The fact that he was a police inspector didn’t matter: he lived barricaded, like everyone else. Like those who could afford it, at least. Fortunately, Cité Soleil was not far away. Coming from Delmas 3, he had to turn left and drive along the former runway of the army airport. At that hour, the city of Port-au-Prince wasn’t yet the huge bottleneck it would become until ten a.m., and then again between two and six p.m.

A small crowd told him he had reached the crime scene. A swarm of chattering people was gathered around the corpse planted in the middle of the intersection. A TV camera and three journalists from a few of the many radio stations of the capital were already there. Who had informed them? He heard a witness answer the question of a journalist with another question that was more a statement than a question. “When you see something like this, human beings turned into animals, wouldn’t you say that the reign of Christ is near?” And the guy added: “It is indeed an individual who was being transformed into an ox, but the criminal’s dirty work must have been interrupted by someone showing up unexpectedly.” He pointed. “Look here, you can see that the feet haven’t been completely transformed into hoofs. Same for the toes there…”

Actually, since the discovery of these strange corpses, the rumor that a bòkò had lost a bunch of zombies he had started to turn into cattle and was chasing them through the streets of the capital to dispose of them had spread very quickly. And then people started praying, reciting psalms and singing hymns even more fervently than in the Protestant churches that were proliferating in the country, almost as fast as the NGOs.

Haitians believe in all kinds of crap, Zagribay said to himself. To me, there’s only one truth. What my eyes didn’t see and my hands didn’t touch does not exist.

Meanwhile, he asked the two policemen on duty to clear out the chicken coop. So far, the two cops had confined themselves to the role of amused onlookers, but they were happy to carry out the orders. The journalists grumbled that this was a democracy and they had the right to do their job.

“To hell with your democracy,” said the youngest cop. “Go on, scat!”

The small crowd finally dispersed and the inspector started to examine the corpse. The body, as expected, was crushed as if a steamroller or a truck weighing several tons had rumbled over it. Impossible to identify its gender. No trace of blood: the dead person had been carbonized. The inspector made a discovery nonetheless: no gas stain on the ground. Yet the body reeked of gas. He had obviously been brought from somewhere else. No shred of carbonized flesh around either. No matches, no lighter, not even a cigarette butt left on the premises. Absolutely nothing. For what kind of audience were they putting on this kind of show? wondered Zagribay. If he could answer this question, he was certain he would get closer to the murderers or to those behind the murders.

The inspector lingered there for another hour. Just to be on the safe side, he questioned some residents of the slum in the vain hope that someone might provide information that would put him on the right track. But all he got was a jumble of contradictory statements. The blazing sun put an end to the investigation. He asked the policemen to take the necessary steps to dispose of the dead body, climbed back in his old Toyota which acted out a little before starting, and drove off, his mind tormented by a number of questions. He had hardly gone three hundred yards when he made a U-turn right in the middle of the street, enraging some other drivers. He had the distinct feeling of having seen the “witness” questioned by the journalist somewhere before. But when he was back on the scene, the man had already vanished and no one knew where he lived or where he could be reached.

Five minutes later, he remembered. He’d seen that “witness” in one of the news stories he had watched when he started working on the case. He was ready to bet a month’s pay on this. From behind the steering wheel of his car-he was stuck in a huge traffic jam with a broken air conditioner and no siren to weave his way out-he made a call to a journalist friend. The journalist had several stories about the case of the corpses changed into cattle but happened to be working on an assignment just outside the city and couldn’t free himself at that moment. Zagribay explained that it was extremely urgent. The journalist promised to have the stories to him on DVD by the middle of the afternoon. Which turned out to be convenient, as the inspector also had to attend a reception at the Canadian embassy for the national holiday of the neighboring country. He finally had something that looked like the beginning of a lead. He slipped the Ibrahim Ferrer CD in the stereo and turned up the volume to cover the incessant honking.

Zagribay made a detour by the precinct and ran into his boss, who seemed in a better mood than in the morning. He was greeted with a “Hi, Messiah,” a nickname that emphasized his muckraking tendencies. He answered right back that it wasn’t his fault if corruption made him furious.

“Me too,” answered the boss. “But no matter how hard you try, you won’t change this country. The art of accommodation. It’s called intelligence, Dyaspora.”

“Why do you do this job, then?”

“To make a living, pal. To make a living.”

At least that was clear. The inspector couldn’t say why but he had an instinctive distrust of his boss. The way he lived was way over his salary. How did he pay for his villa on the capital heights? With what money did he take his family to spend weekends in Miami so often? One of his sons, who was no genius and thus couldn’t possibly have won a scholarship, was a student at the University of Pennsylvania. It’s a wellknown fact that Yankee universities frigging cost an arm and a leg. It was easy for both of them to get rich at their jobs. All they had to do was look away, ignore certain dirty deals. Nobody here will raise questions about spontaneous fortunes. You can start in the gutter, go to bed poor as a church mouse, and wake up the next day rich as Croesus. Nobody will bat an eyelid. On the contrary: most people just dream of being able to do exactly the same thing. And those who have the biggest mouths, who rail against politicians and the corruption of the elite, are quick to swallow the word “ethical” once they’re in power. Also, the chief had been in this job-for which he had no particular training-for such a long time. In a country where people in official positions are sent packing each time a new minister is appointed, this was rather suspicious. The man seemed to be part of the furniture, unmovable. Not one minister had succeeded in firing him. And for some, not for lack of trying. What did he know, and about whom?

After a lunch of fried plantains and taso on a corner of his desk, watered down with a glass of papaya milk, Zagribay set out to meet his friend at the TV station. He got permission to watch the DVDs there and to make copies of them. He had made sure to bring a blank DVD for the recording. After he’d watched the films, the inspector clenched his fist: bingo! He had guessed right. The “witness,” a guy in his thirties, neatly dressed but nothing fancy, appeared in three out of the six stories; the first corpse hadn’t been noticed, and a new “witness” could be seen on two others. Interesting, Zagribay thought. In both instances, the “witnesses” insisted, each in his own words, on the corpses’ transformation into cattle, almost as if they wanted to make absolute sure the public embraced this scenario. Knowing how superstitious Haitians are, it was rather clever, the inspector reflected. But why? Who was behind this? He stood up and thanked the journalist, but did not share his analysis with him. He’d better leave early if he wanted to be on time for the ass-pinching party at the embassy.

Zagribay couldn’t stand social functions but there was no way he could skip this one: he partly owed his job to the Canadian diplomatic services, which had financed a training program in their country. After fifteen years spent in Montreal doing police work, he had decided to come home. Fed up with the cold. Month after month of schlepping tons of clothing on his back. Whole days sometimes without a ray of sun. He had gotten out of bed one morning and just handed his boss his letter of resignation. Knowing that he was reliable, serious, and efficient, his boss had tried to talk him out of it, but Zagribay had made up his mind. One month later, he was on a plane headed to Port-au-Prince. Once there, the situation turned out to be rather complicated. The middle-class people he rubbed elbows with always managed to ask him, at some point in the conversation, when he was planning to return to Canada. Hence the nickname “Dyaspora.” Even his boss used it. And yet he had made the announcement loud and clear: he was back to stay.

When he was already thinking of sneaking out of the cocktail party, a high-ranking Haitian civil servant introduced him to a woman who said she was Dominican. She was a tall, beautiful brunette named Maria Luz and was barely out of her thirties. Her auburn hair contrasted with her gray-green eyes. There was a sense of mystery about her that made her even more attractive. She was wearing a crimson dress deeply cut in the back. Very quickly, her accent made the inspector suspicious. He detected a fraud. Why did the lady want to pass herself off as a Dominican? He knew how fond Haitian men were of Dominican women. She knew it too, obviously. She assumed that identity so she could sell herself better, Zagribay thought. She was probably the mistress of some politician or rich man. But she introduced herself as an important executive of an NGO whose activities spanned all five continents. Like Doctors Without Borders, it provided primary health care for the most impoverished populations. Her story was plausible. In recent years Haiti had become a paradise for all sorts of NGOs. There were an awful lot of them. But Zagribay wasn’t quite convinced. A professional reflex. It took him some time to get rid of the lady-who was rather clingy. But in exchange for getting her to leave, he had to give up his cell number.

Three days later, at the Toussaint Louverture airport where he had come to pick up a deportee expelled from Miami, he saw her sneaking out of a diplomatic lounge and rushing into the plane heading back to Florida in the company of Fanfan, his childhood buddy. Fanfan, whom he considered a close friend, had never mentioned Maria Luz, although he had been very open with him about his many other extramarital affairs. What kind of relationship could he possibly have with that scheming high-society woman?

Unlike his fellow citizens of some social standing, Fanfan had welcomed him back to Haiti with real joy. It was as if they’d only parted the day before. Fanfan, who was better connected in the capital’s social circles, had been instrumental in speeding up Zagribay’s hiring in the police department. Fanfan knew the chief well.

“We exchanged a few favors,” Fanfan had said by way of explanation. He had never emigrated and didn’t feel particularly proud about it. “Life has turned out differently for me, that’s all,” he’d say. “And unless you’re totally down on your luck or forced to, you don’t leave your country once you’re past forty.”

Fanfan lived in a superb villa in Belvil, a gated community modeled after those in Florida. Belvil was a small island of cleanliness and urbanization, in complete contrast to the huge, chaotic cesspool of Port-au-Prince. A city within the city, built in part, according to rumors, with drug money, as the country had become a hub for exporting narcotics to the United States.

You couldn’t access the house of Zagribay’s childhood friend without being seen by the two cameras-one in front, the other in back-connected to the main entrance. And one of the three guards, armed with a shotgun, showed up at the entrance before you arrived. The house was also surrounded by a wall three and a half yards high and spiked with steel nails, so that in order to get inside without permission, you’d need a grappling hook. A real bunker, that place. Zagribay had never known what his friend did to enjoy such protection. Fanfan had just reluctantly confided to him that he was in some kind of business. Import-export, he had said vaguely, like many people in this country who had a fortune with dubious origins. But that couldn’t be true for Fanfan, who had introduced him to Marxism when they were teenagers. Perhaps all that security was there to protect his wife and two children.

The accidental encounter at the airport led Zagribay to take a closer look at Maria Luz. First, as she’d been relentlessly pursuing him-practically harassing him-he let her get close. Their first meeting took place in Pétionville, at a restaurant called La Cascade. He would have preferred lunch but Maria Luz had insisted they meet for dinner.

“The place is so romantic at night,” she had whispered.

Zagribay had agreed, out of fear of looking like a bore. He showed up thirty minutes early. He liked to take a look at a meeting place ahead of time, a pure professional reflex. Maria Luz arrived on time. In a city where the fear of being kidnapped produced a great deal of paranoia, he was surprised to see her turn up alone, without a chauffeur or bodyguard, at the wheel of her gleaming SUV. The inspector didn’t know how to interpret this. Was she reckless? Was it a calculated risk? If this was the case, to what end? Maybe she was being followed from afar by another car? While hurrying to open the door for her, he looked around, but no one else showed up.

In the course of the very pleasant dinner, Maria Luz insisted on speaking Creole, the language she knew best after Spanish, she said. “And Creole is better here if you want to communicate with everyone, don’t you think?”

She was right. To the inspector’s ear, her mastery of Creole was equal to that of his Spanish. Just a slight inflection here and there that revealed she had trouble not rolling the “r.” Otherwise, she spoke Creole much too well for Zagribay’s taste. She probably works for the CIA, he thought. And the NGO, if she really had an office there, was a cover.

At the end of the meal, under the pretext that the capital was unsafe at night, she had him accompany her to her home in the Pacot neighborhood. Once there, the inspector, inventing an urgent report he had to hand in the next day, tactfully turned down her offer of a last drink.

“Next time then,” she simpered.

“Why not?” Zagribay answered, saying to himself in Creole: Wi pa monte mòn. Not every yes can climb a hill.

The investigation into the corpses changed into cattle was going nowhere. So the inspector decided to tail Maria Luz and asked a young colleague he trusted to cover for him. His old unmarked Toyota was a great help. He followed her for several days, enough to ascertain that the lady knew fancy people, from the chief of police to the minister of the interior and other influential individuals. He could never get over how easy it was for foreigners-especially if they were white-to have access to the highest authorities of the state. He also found out that Fanfan and Maria Luz were seeing each other pretty regularly. That said, she appeared to have no official relationship but was juggling several at once. She was living it up but not necessarily at her lovers’ expense, although she didn’t turn down their presents: a pearl necklace from this one or an emerald bracelet from that one. And among her regulars was his own boss.

Zagribay couldn’t resist the urge to ask his boss, one morning when he seemed in a good mood, if he knew a certain Maria Luz. The man smiled and answered with a wink. The inspector wanted to know more.

“I’m serious, chief!”

“Really?”

“I’m not kidding, chief.”

“Do you want a piece of friendly advice? Don’t get too involved with her.”

With these words, the police chief walked to his car where his chauffeur was already behind the wheel with the engine running. Zagribay bit his lower lip to contain his rage. Three days before, he had discovered that Maria Luz’s NGO was in charge of a clinic in Cité Soleil behind which stood a building with blackout windows, guarded by three armed men. He couldn’t see anyone coming in or out, as you normally would in a public building. He introduced himself and pulled out his badge, trying to get some information. One of the grim doorkeepers with shades on his nose sent him to a top executive: a rich-looking Haitian, well into his fifties, speaking like someone used to giving orders. He got on his high horse and made it clear that, given the absence of his own superior, he couldn’t allow Zagribay to visit that part of the clinic.

“We care here for terminally ill cancer and AIDS patients,” the man concluded.

A flat sentence, delivered as if he’d practiced saying it. The inspector then asked to see Maria Luz. The man winced before telling him that Doctor Luz was traveling. But the inspector had been trailing her the day before. It was possible, he supposed, that she could have left that very morning.

“How long ago did she leave?” he asked.

“Two or three days, no more.”

Zagribay left, smiling. He was on to something. Now he had to find out why the man had lied. This gave him the idea of tightening the vise around the NGO, even if there was no apparent tie between it and the mysterious corpses. He also got the idea of nosing around the Internet and ended up stumbling on a blog that mentioned Maria’s NGO in connection with a lab that did pharmaceutical and medical research. Several countries had condemned it for practicing illegal experiments on humans. The blog sent him to other sources that were blocked each time he tried to link to them. The information was pretty thin.

That night, lying on his back, the inspector couldn’t fall asleep. Was the NGO here hiding the activities of a clandestine pharmaceutical research lab? Ibrahim Ferrer’s voice trailed languorously in the night. Suddenly, Zagribay jumped out of bed as if a gigantic bedbug had bitten him. Why hadn’t he thought of it earlier?

He grabbed his phone and called a former colleague in Montreal. His friend wasn’t too happy about being awakened in the dead of night but indulged him nonetheless. They used to work together as a team in the north part of Montreal. The inspector explained the case and asked for his help in identifying the NGO and finding out what interests were concealed behind it.

Three days later, Zagribay found the information in his e-mail. The Luz NGO had been expelled from India and the Philippines for illegal activities and lab research potentially harmful to human beings. After having been subjected to various experiments and force-fed drugs of all sorts, the guinea pigs would become physically deformed. A few years before, the CEO of those labs had promised discoveries that would soon turn the world of genetics upside down. Hard to find a better place than Haiti to hide criminal activities like that, thought the inspector. They believe in all kinds of nonsense here; plus, there is intense poverty and the elite will do anything for money. All you had to do was set up a clinic, grease a few palms here and there, and that would do the trick. But if their research didn’t seem to give the results they were hoping for, they might have trouble getting rid of the guinea pigs without raising suspicion. On the other hand, relying on old local beliefs to eliminate the victims was a piece of cake.

Everything seemed clear. All he had to do now was speak to his informer and then get a search warrant. For this, Zagribay had to first talk to his boss, and, provided he agreed, find the judge willing to give the order to carry out the search. No country has more respect for the law than Haiti when corrupt civil servants want to make things tough for you. The fewer people who knew about it the better, as far as he was concerned. But he had no choice, especially since he felt this was a big case.

He was close to having collected rock-solid evidence. He was going to lay it out on the desks of his boss, the chief of police, and the press at the same time. The bomb would explode in their faces. He was determined to expose what everyone else refused to do, drag the culprits to court. The profound corruption of this country’s elite! With the politicians in their pocket, they were at the root of the endless misery of this island; the “most repugnant elite,” as a Yankee president had called them. The proof that he was getting close to his goal was his boss’s repeated advice to take it easy (“You’re not the messiah, Dyaspora”), Fanfan’s warnings-and he hadn’t even told him anything-and the remarks of Luz, who had somehow learned of his visit to the clinic. If he waited for the whole procedure to get rolling, the birds could fly away. He had to take action.

For the first time since the beginning of the case, Zagribay felt good. He had the distinct impression of being useful, of giving back a little bit of what this country had given him in his childhood and adolescence. Fresh air was blowing into the car through the open windows. Zagribay started to sing along with Ibrahim Ferrer:

He had just passed the cemetery when he was flanked by motorbikes coming out of two perpendicular side streets. Floating along on the music, he didn’t realize what was happening. On his left, the silver flash of the gun at the end of an outstretched arm brought him back to reality. But by the time he could draw his own weapon, the men on the bikes behind the drivers had already fired.

BLUES FOR IRÈNE by Marvin Victor Carrefour-Feuilles ^{Translated by Nicole Ball}

My daughter told the police that she’d witnessed the murder of Jimmy Labissière, and that the murderer was her friend, Irène Gouin. Irène, she said, stabbed him seven times in the stomach and then went down to the hotel bar, sat on a stool, and ordered a drink that she sipped for a long time before requesting “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone” from the maestro of the quartet playing at the other end of the deck.

A week later, Inspector Joseph showed up with his questions. Inspector Joseph knew I’d had an affair with Jimmy, but Jimmy wasn’t just my dead man. He was the dead man of all the people who lived on rue Tirremasse in Bel-Air and who had loved and hated him. He was a public dead man, I told Inspector Joseph right away, hissing it between my teeth. He was a dead man people never stopped talking about, trying to find with an abundance of proverbs and metaphors which part of him belonged to the devil and which part to an angel, obliterating our story as well as the ancient stories of all the other women he had been with, knowing that all we had left of him was the vague memory of crumpled sheets, moist with sweat, and the breath of old, whispered words. That’s how stories are made, I concluded, telling myself that Jimmy, clutching the murderer’s bottom and bawling as he was about to come, may have had a beautiful death. But nobody had talked about that. I personally had no desire to talk about Jimmy, but Inspector Joseph had forced me to cooperate. And in my reluctance to speak about Jimmy, I was hearing my voice pronounce his name. There was no logic possible when you started talking about him, no reason either when you knew that in people’s mouths he wasn’t dead, only an absentee. That’s what they thought, since they couldn’t hear him on the radio or see him on TV, leading demonstrations on the street, anymore. I didn’t want doom to come out of my mouth. I wanted the idea of it to be banished. In my opinion, his life was beyond commonplace thought-any thought, actually- for it had always been a mistake, a mistake related to the immense poem of childhood, maybe. I knew it right from the first moment I saw him. Imagine a vast, dark room; no glimmer of light ever slips into it. He told me I was that glimmer, and I’d forgotten to hear his words sliding over my skin, like his fingers when we made love. I let it happen. When the young president had started to build his underground army, Jimmy was at the heart of the movement, with the enthusiasm of a mad child. He’d spent six months, a year, maybe more, in a training camp. He himself couldn’t remember when he told me about that part of his previous life. A whole eternity spent waiting for a sign from the president. Many were waiting like that. Meanwhile, the president was making speeches, stirring up the people. Jimmy was inside that crowd too.

One morning he got the call. He was shaking on the other end of the line, as if he hadn’t been floundering in the smelly mud around the Saline. A load of weapons to transport to Camp-Perrin, along with money, lots of money. No. He did not understand, could not understand. He’d hit the road in a van, in the company of a comrade. In the middle of nowhere, the van started to smoke and backfire before stopping smack in the middle of the highway. There was sand and cane syrup in the gas tank. At some point, a man with his face eaten by a salt-and-pepper beard popped up; he offered to help, then pointed his gun at Jimmy’s temple and took the money and ammunition. A setup?

When he called to report that the mission had failed, the phone rang in vain. There was no answer, as there had never been any such number. That was the day he was murdered. Not on the day before my birthday, in that small hotel room where he went to look under the skirt of that snotty girl, his mother had said when I came to offer my condolences. Ah, that snotty girl everybody in town described as a rich girl at odds with her family, twenty years old, not black-black but a burnt-earth color. Yes, he was dead before our encounter. I imagined him faking sleep, gone on another road, toward absolution, love, or another girl’s breast.

Yes, pain and sadness had arrived the day people started to turn around on the street to look at him, naked under his mask of a public character wanted by the police. I had met him, had reached out to him, not knowing that everything had become, literally and figuratively, cold around him, and that he was in a way pouring boiling water over his own head. We made love inside that madness. Voices, carried by the winds, were speaking inside of him. I had met him during that period. In front of a movie theater, on Lamarre Street. He’d come to see Bird, the seven p.m. show. He’d come out of the theater and was tying his shoes on the sidewalk when I spotted him. I’d been selling junk jewelry to make a living for me and my daughter; so I showed him a wristwatch and asked if he’d like to buy it for his wife or girlfriend. Not knowing that I would become his girlfriend a few moments later. That same evening, we slept together in a crummy hotel on Grand-rue. No fuss. We had a long talk about Charlie Parker, who, as a teenager in Kansas City, played the recorder while he rode his mule and entertained big dreams listening to Count Basie’s orchestra. He told me he was my Bird, and me his Chan, the dancer Bird admired. I told him no, let’s switch roles and get it right, I am the Bird and he’s the Chan, but he wouldn’t hear of it. And sleep fell upon us, all of a sudden.

After that, we’d meet at his place, not far from the cathedral, on rue Borgelat. A very dark two-room apartment that smelled of mold and cold tobacco, because ever since my husband had left, aside from occasional one-night stands, I had no steady man in my life, which was all right by me- the body has its needs-as long as my lovers didn’t promise me the sky and the earth or rain from countries where it no longer rains. I’ve got my home, you’ve got yours. As the police were after him-he rarely went out, and only at night, in disguise, taking dark roads with their streetlights out-we agreed I would be the one to go visit him. Aside from the films he’d go see secretly, I had become his only contact with the outside world. I’d show up at his place three times a week: on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Like a rebellious girl, I was attracted to the danger he represented. I didn’t know why. I suppose it gave me the exhilarating feeling of betraying somebody, something I wasn’t completely conscious about, but it really turned me on. To the point where I wouldn’t remember if I truly loved him. We’d spend our evenings talking travel, although neither of us had ever left the island. The only sea he knew was the one polluted by the barrels of toxic waste foreign cargo ships dumped into the harbor of Port-au-Prince. Once, on a whim, I brought him back a shell from the sea-fest in Pestel where I’d taken my daughter. I made him listen to the sound of the waves inside it. Yes, everything was fine, until that time when he forced me to spend the night. He heard me moan in my sleep as I was touching myself. At first, he didn’t seem to mind; then, a week later, he started to think-wrongly-that I was seeing another man. From that point on, he’d made surprise visits to my home. Most times he’d run into my daughter, sitting on the stoop in front of the house, smoking a cigarette. She was rather nuts-had always been so-but was very beautiful, with big black, sunken eyes, a subtle smile. She knew what he was coming for, so she’d look him up and down and stick her tongue out at him.

Jimmy was buried at the national cemetery on a Saturday morning. Dirty, ragged children wept and put flowers on his grave. That day, there were also women, many women, most of them very beautiful, wearing long dark dresses under the shade of their black silk mantillas. I was there too, with my daughter, in the background, dry-eyed. I had the impression that we weren’t there for his funeral but for an ultimate erotic parade, a way for each of us to prove to him that we loved him more than anything, more than that tall, big-boned woman who was looking disdainfully at me from behind the gray designs of her fan, sweating in the heat of the last days of summer.

One afternoon, in the middle of our endless interviews with Inspector Joseph, my daughter came out of her room almost naked. She leaned over the inspector’s ear and told him that if he went looking into the crumpled sheets of the hotel room, he could find, in the play of the shadows created by the subdued light of the lamp on the bedside table, the meanderings of the murder, how the scene had unfolded. The inspector knew she’d been born nutty and he laughed, but that same afternoon he took us to the crime scene, to that hotel high up in the Carrefour-Feuilles neighborhood, to that room with a view over the harbor and the rusty roofs that hemmed in the sea. He took pictures of the hotel which had been deserted since the night of the crime, of its entrance lined with bougainvilleas and oleanders, of the walls of the room decorated with cheap paintings, of the bedspreads, of the private cop with his hunting rifle who had seen the young woman arrive on Jimmy’s arm, her steps heavy with alcohol, both laughing madly.

After the visit, we walked part of the way home, and my daughter kept repeating that in the room she had felt the presence of Irène Gouin, who had bent over Jimmy’s blood-soaked body and felt sublime. She was talking nonstop, deciding even as she was detailing them how the facts were to be arranged. And me, to cool off the situation, I reminded Inspector Joseph that she has never been in her right mind. She pretended not to hear me, and kept on talking as if she wanted to take control of the situation, deconstruct the hypothesis of unpredictability and randomness of Jimmy’s murder: Irène’s act and her state of mind at the time, the strong smell that night of salt and seaweed, of the sea rising from the harbor, filling the city streets with their brackish fragrance, Jimmy’s ugly skin and bones, the golden reflection of his Barbancourt rum on the rocks, and the bubbles in Irène’s Coke at the hotel bar, before they went up to the room.

She encouraged the inspector to get rid of his pretentious desire to understand everything about a life that took pleasure in secrecy, the way a virgin might get pleasure from her little perfumed firebrand, she said, explaining to us that sometimes, when she had nothing else to do, she imagined she was the murderess Irène Gouin, and that they resembled each other down to every detail of her face, like two drops of water at the bottom of the ocean.

On the Chemin des Dalles, near the Saint-Géraud bridge, we stopped a cab and settled into the backseat. The cab was really a pile of scrap metal, a small apple-green Datsun that you could immediately tell dated back to the ’70s. A little old guy with a straw hat on his head was at the wheel, driving slowly. He threw himself into rue Pavée, and taking advantage of the traffic jam, started to talk, mumbling through his teeth. Seeing we didn’t pay any attention to him, he put on some konpa music by Shleu-Shleu. We got off at the entrance to my neighborhood, at the top of the Bel-Air hill. My daughter headed straight to the stand of the spirits seller, Brigitte. She was thirsty, she said, although our house was nearby. Scratching the back of her head, she ordered a rum taffy. Inspector Joseph and I caught up with her right away. She was swaying her body more and more wildly. I sometimes thought I’d brought her into the world so she would become my master and I her slave, I told the inspector, as if she was the one who had tinkered with me, knowing she was the prolongation of my dreams, my shipwrecks. I had projected myself on her, wondering on which of her shoulders she would have to bear my cross. But she was more clever than I was and had escaped in time.

Then the inspector left me and walked up to my daughter as if to give her a kiss. He held up his hands too, like he was framing her in his camera, before moving closer.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, as if she’d never seen the man before. She swallowed her rum in one gulp and a few drops escaped from the corners of her lips. She handed the empty cup to Brigitte, coughing in the loose end of her blouse, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and thanked her. She then lit a cigarette, grabbed the inspector’s arm, and led him to our place, except that all the inspector wanted was to talk about Jimmy.

Before our conversations, I usually offered him coffee and cookies, but this time I didn’t find any in the kitchen. So I joined them in the living room. It was very hot. The inspector was helping my daughter open the two sides of the high window that looked out onto the façade of a big white house on the other side of the street. I walked up to them.

My daughter said, “Come on, Manman!”

The inspector didn’t see my knife entering the back of his head, and blood, not thick but clear and sweet-smelling, spurted onto my face.

“That big white house is where Irène Gouin lives,” my daughter said as he was dying.

Irène Gouin’s house, she explained, was a mix of high tech and refinement, a hotel with a gym and a large room for brunches, a white marble porch at the entrance, a living room with a glass ceiling, a white Chesterfield couch, a vodka bar, a sun deck, and spacious, luminous bedrooms. An electrical system allowed you to create a mood with all shades of blue, tile-and-chrome bathrooms, deep oval bathtubs, thick white wall-to-wall carpeting, pop art-colored objects.

Yes, Irène Gouin’s house, my daughter went on, had two duplex suites with their own swimming pools. The top floor was for B.H., a famous singer. It included an immaculate bedroom and, at the head of the stairs, a small living room opening up onto a deck with a view of the city’s rooftops and a tiled swimming pool all lit up at night. The bedroom led to a second deck-summer breeze and diving under the sky.

Irène Gouin, my daughter said, wanted nothing to do with the neighborhood people and even less with the good old city of Port-au-Prince, which sometimes takes itself for London or Paris.

Everybody was dirt on her shoes, she said. When she arrived in the neighborhood, Irène Gouin didn’t introduce herself to anybody, and they all understood her need for solitude, and Irène Gouin had always been very composed. Irène Gouin never wanted to have company, couldn’t stand heroes, Saturday-night drunks, and Sunday Christians. At first everybody had doubts about her, but after a month they thought they were lucky because she didn’t behave like those young Dominican girls with hennaed hair who partied all night long.

From her window, my daughter concluded, she could sometimes see smoke billowing out from that Irène Gouin’s cigarette or hear the notes of “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone” looping, over and over again. My daughter was Irène Gouin.