Because We Are: A Novel of Haiti (24 page)

— You’re going to cut me? Like you cut Claire, eh? Like Ezili Dantò was slashed?

— I may cut out your tongue, but not because of Ezili. Claire was killed because it had to be that way. And what world would it be for an infant without his mother? Better he should die, too.

— But why?

— Why what? Why did I do it? Money. Why did I kill her the way I did? She was a symbol. The cuts I gave her—Claire you said her name was?—were a message. She stole something and planned to talk about it. This upset some people. So she lost her tongue.

— And life.

He shrugged, taking another step toward her.

— You come an inch closer, and I’ll kill you, Libète growled.

He was taken aback at her bluster before chuckling. I can make this painful. More than it has to be.

— You can kill me! Or try! she hollered. I don’t care anymore! I thought a devil had killed those two at first, mother and child, and I see I was right. You’ll burn!

He said nothing else. His jaw was set, a scowl etched on his face. She turned, leaving her back exposed to the man, scouring the ground wildly as he continued stepping forward.
Yes, that’s it
!

Scooping up a long stone, Libète turned and took quick aim, flinging it with perfect precision at the man’s face. He recoiled, stunned, pulling his hands and the knife toward his head. She took the moment to run toward him, closing the remaining gap and head-butting his groin. He tried to swipe down with the knife and catch her, but the intense pain grabbing hold of him caused his slash to miss. He crumpled to the ground, affording Libète the briefest window to flee.

Harnessing all possible speed, she burst through the reeds. The closest structure was her fort, a waypoint on the path back into the edges of Bwa Nèf where there would be help. She careened about through the marsh as dark mud flung into the air, splattering her entire body. She afforded herself a moment to glance over her shoulder to see him pursuing her and closing fast. A horrible realization set in:
I won’t make it to Bwa Nèf before he catches me!

She neared the fort. Instead of pushing ahead and falling into his grasp, she began to scale an inner wall. She went up effortlessly, hands and feet instantly reaching for the toe and handholds she had used to climb hundreds of times before. She slipped through a hole in the ceiling. Her pursuer closed the gap between them and now, at the wall himself, jumped to try to catch one of her scrambling feet. While his grasping hand missed by inches, her fortunes were still bleak. She found herself trapped on the second floor, looking down upon him through broken floorboards.

— Bitch! he shouted, spittle erupting from his mouth. He assessed how to reach her and decided to pull himself up the way she had gone. She picked up broken pieces of cinder block littering the floor, chucking them at him as he drew closer. He cursed her again, his own adrenaline and anger deflecting the pain.

She had to escape. There was a large beam that supported the floorboards beneath her feet running perpendicular to the wall she had just climbed. The beam still stood strong even though most of the floor had fallen away long ago.

She crossed it, balancing, knowing that she was putting herself in a corner without an apparent way out. The man, now up and through the hole, stood fuming, looking at how best to reach her and wondering if the beam would support his weight. He started crossing himself, stepping gradually to maintain his balance. Libète looked for more things to throw, but found none. She had mere seconds before he would be upon her.

She spotted the old window. It was reachable but required stepping out upon a slight outcrop and using it to hoist herself into the window frame and back outside. It would mean a painful drop and only a few seconds’ lead, but it was her last hope.

She sidled along the wall, stepping on the outcrop to push herself up and into the opening so that her body, halfway through, was shaped like a horseshoe. The murderer crossed the beam and was nearly upon her.

She scrambled, struggling to right herself in the window but unable to muster the needed strength. She knew the end was close and began uttering a prayer, surely her last, asking for final forgiveness of all of the wrongs she had visited upon others, her eyes squeezed tight as she waited to feel the knife plunge into her exposed back.

The earth and everything upon it began to tremble. Almost as if all this evil was too much for it to bear. Her prayer ceased, her eyes shot open. The shaking made the man pause his pursuit, wondering if this was divine judgment. He dropped his knife and moved toward the closest wall as the shaking continued, clinging to it in hopes it might provide some support as the world around them began falling to pieces.

The fort’s bricks and mortar buckled. It was near collapse.

Libète used all of her strength, one final agonizing push, to pull her torso through the opening. The man sprung from the wall, scrambling to descend to the bottom floor. At the last possible instant, as the weak and heavy walls started to fall inward, Libète pushed herself out, completing a mid-air somersault that ended in a dull and painful thud.

She lay there upon the unsettled ground, feeling its grumbling finally calm and still. Unable to breathe, she gasped for air and cradled her arm and shoulder that suffered the brunt of her fall. Plumes of dust from the new pile of rubble filled the air, coating her. She heard muted cries and shouts in the distance, rising up from Bwa Nèf.

Libète snapped to attention in a moment of clarity, mindful that the devil might be upon her any second. She searched for signs of movement, anything, her arm causing her agony.

Finally she saw it. There, in what remained of the hole in the collapsed wall from which she had just fallen, was a protruding forearm, a motionless hand reaching for something but grasping nothing. The rest of the murderer’s body lay hidden under the heavy brick and timber.

She was alive. And he was dead.

Libète begins to weep with great, unstoppable sobs, her mangled body shuddering as plaintive moans pour out of her like desperate prayers. She cries out for all that has befallen her, but also mourns for the passing of a world, her world, that has just fallen away.

Tho’ much is taken, much abides; and though

We are not now that strength which in old days

Moved earth and heaven; that which we are, we are;

One equal temper of heroic hearts,

Made weak by time and fate, but strong in will

To strive, to seek, to find, and not to yield.

All the darkness in the world cannot extinguish the light of a single candle.

-St. Francis of Assisi

Lane pase toujou pi bon

Last year is always better

Sa ki fè pwomès bliye, sa k’ap espere sonje

Those who make promises forget, those who are hoping remember

The Sun has tried its best. It is not enough.

Like all things, it is frail. It tries to stay awake, like a fearful king keeping watch over his enemies, like the nurse unable to cure her patients, like a laborer never able to work enough to rid himself of his poverty. But rest is inescapable. There is an order to things that cannot be changed.

Like the Sun, we fight against the impossible: the changing tide, furious winds, coming night, ephemeral seasons. We fight against death but we will never win. Unseen powers shape and pull at the world around us. They are explained with laws and rules of our making as we attempt to order what is fundamentally disordered. We try to describe and extract, we try to
know
, but we perceive all things darkly. What is meant to clarify only hints at the true powers that underlie everything.

The sky is a desperate orange turning to pink as the Sun struggles to keep the world alight. Now it is a mute sentry, knowing what is about to happen, able to see it coming in the distance, and doing every possible thing to sound the alarm and make it known. But no one else watches. And so the darkness spills over into times and places it has never occupied before.

Take Dany. A five-year old boy who lives in the Twa Bebe encampment, a veritable tent city. He lays outside a hospital, suffering from rotavirus, an easily treatable disease that causes severe diarrhea. He is near death from dehydration. His mother, who is poor, decided to take him to the private hospital for treatment even though she does not have money to pay.

Ten months ago, when the quake struck, Dany was trapped inside a collapsed home. Outsiders gathered nearly a billion dollars in emergency aid and mobilized dramatic rescues from around the world to save him from under thousands of pounds of rubble.

Now he is about to slip away. Where will the rescue for small Dany come from this time?

Or maybe the Widow Bélizaire. Her home was rendered unlivable when a wall collapsed and her absentee landlord refused to rebuild. It was raided one morning soon after and her dearest possessions stolen. It is difficult to prosper in the market where she sits each day when she only resells cassava and there are ten other vendors she competes with doing the same. She roasts in the heat of the day watching her vegetables desiccate and, as the Sun departs, knows she will not eat tonight.

The same outsiders who pledged assistance to Haiti did not place it in the hands of Haitians. No, there was too much corruption in the government to do that. So the outsiders appointed intermediaries to receive the funds. Their agents moved to Haiti en masse, into expensive houses, driving new SUVs, appointed to “manage” and “facilitate” and “develop” the country—to protect Haitians from themselves. Take out “programmatic expenses” like salaries, overhead, benefits, international travel, and publicity, and these development experts and aid workers have eaten up so much that it feels like only one dollar out of one hundred reaches sellers like the Widow Bélizaire.

And there, at the edge of Cité Soleil on Route 9, you can just make out a woman in the fading twilight named Patricia. She wears a second-hand red push-up bra that she makes sure can be seen under her tight, low-cropped top. She hovers, waiting and watching, advertising that she is for sale.

But it does not have to be this way. The U.N. has committed $800 million per year to pay for “peace” here. Money for investment in schools that can educate and empower gets guzzled away in MINUSTAH’s trucks and tanks, deposited in imported troops’ foreign bank accounts. Patricia had finished school and excelled, but there was no money for university, and no jobs to employ her using her keen mind. So Patricia resorts to using her body.

A bland taptap pulls up. Its driver whistles to her and she saunters over, putting on a false smile.

He smiles back, leaning over to roll down the passenger window.

They dicker over the price to use her, soon reaching an agreement. She gets in the truck and sits next to him. When the driver does not look, her dead eyes drift ahead, revealing what lays in her soul.

She hears a bottle drop and roll in the back of the truck. She turns, surprised, looking through the small rectangular window at the back of the cab. Someone else is with them. She looks to the driver with surprise, and he looks back at her with his own eyes, darkened, dead.

Shooting through the open window comes a man’s burly arm holding a hand towel, a white blur in the near black. The towel is forced over her nose and mouth, its smell pungent and sweet. She thrashes terribly, pulling at the hand and gasping for breath as the vapor forces its way up her nose and down her throat. She feels a jab to her belly, a threatening knife pushed into her flesh by the driver, about to break skin. Distracted, he veers madly, about to collide head-on with a speeding sedan, but he misses it, saving them all but delivering Patricia, now unconscious, to an unknown fate.

The Sun is ashamed. It failed again to save, to protect, to deliver.

Maybe next time they will understand. Maybe next time they’ll see
.

Such unimaginable power, yet unable to speak.

**

The girl sits upon an aged wooden pew in a grand cathedral. It is a foreign place for her. The light is low, sunlight shining upon the western face of the holy place, breathing life into its lancet windows and their kaleidoscopic glass.

She leaves her seat and tours the windows’ familiar scenes, the place utterly quiet except for the echoes of her footsteps on stone.

She sees the plagues visited upon the nation of
Lejip
;

The Jewish people left to camp in the wilderness;

The city of
Jeriko
and its falling walls;

David
slaying
Golyat
with a simple stone;

Estè
going unbidden before her king;

Amòs
, the minor prophet
,
who told
Izrayèl
to cease oppressing the poor;

Jan-Batis
in the wilderness, preparing the way for his coming Lord;

Jezi,
the Lord himself with his red heart, stretched upon the cross for the world’s wrongs;

And finally, the Virgin and her holy child, both glorified.

She proceeds down the line, wondering why these scenes were chosen to fill this place. Still, there is a sense of recognition in these moments that disturbs her. Some are instances of deliverance, but others of supreme suffering, and despair.

When she reaches the end of the row, she stops. There is someone else there, someone watching her.

She turns slowly to see the faceless form of San Figi. They stand before one another without making a sound.

— It has been a long time, the girl says to the void-where-a-face-should-be. The void moves as if nodding and points to the final tableau, the one of Mary and the infant Jesus. Libète follows her finger, looking more closely at the figures.

She is amazed. They have come to life, breathing slightly though keeping their original shape and pose. The faces are very familiar to Libète on second glance, those of Claire and Gaspar.
Why didn’t I notice before?

— I haven’t forgotten them, she says to San Figi. I’ll never forget them. But things have changed. I’m not who I was before. I have my own concerns, my own struggles. I have to think about myself now.

Claire begins to speak. You have done much for us, and we are grateful.

Libète is surprised at first, but this passes quickly.

— That should be enough, she replies. Shouldn’t it?

— But you must. Our murderer is dead, though our killer walks about. You must continue.

— Wha–what do you mean? There’s nothing else
I
can do.

— Please, without justice there is no rest for us. There never will be.

Libète slumps, her mind churning with the heaviness of what it would mean to push on.
Without justice there is no rest for me
.

San Figi hovers behind. The fear and menace she exuded in times past is gone. There is now comfort there, and warmth.

Libète looks up to face the living glass again.

Full of reluctance and sadness, she nods.

**

Libète awoke on her mat and shot upright, rubbing her eyes. The whole of her canvas tent glowed with a soft amber color in the early morning, shafts of light bursting through small holes worn in the sheeting at its top.

She sat for a few moments, collecting her thoughts. It was all so disorienting, her dream and the memories of all the heavy things that had happened to her in the last three days, and the last ten months.

She eyed her arms and legs suspiciously, her mind playing catch-up as she remembered that, yes, she was thinner than she pictured herself in her dreams. She stood and gave a meager stretch, cracking her back and scratching her matted hair. Exhaustion from the night before made her want to lay down again, but she forced herself to press on with her day. She reached for her purple knit cap but laid it down, bringing to mind too many hard things. She reached instead for a headscarf, one of her Aunt’s that looked just like the Haitian flag, and disguised her sorry braids.

She surveyed their few remaining possessions to anchor her to this reality. There was her plastic basin and bucket, a calabash for water, a disused mortar and pestle kept for sentimental reasons, two yellow jerry cans, their sleeping mats, plates, pans and stove, and empty tins meant to store food when they had any. The contents of her Aunt’s old sacks of salvaged clothes, kept in the back corner of the rectangular tent, had been sold in recent months. The dual exigencies of hunger and her Uncle’s vices required more income than they could scrounge. While she kept some of her old dresses for church, they were, like her few sets of shoes, quickly becoming too small. More valuable possessions had already been parted with and soon, Libète thought, she might just have to sell herself.

She chose not to change the mauve dress in which she had slept (it was clean enough despite everything) and slipped on pink flip-flops. She picked up a crinkled black plastic bag, hidden inside her old pillowcase, and peaked at what was inside. Pleased at the contents, she tied the bag shut with a loose knot and slid it down her wrist, letting it hang. She then reached for a jerry can, entirely empty, further unzipped the tent’s entrance, and stepped outside into Twa Bebe, their encampment.

She greeted the bright Sun with a sour face. Her stomach lurched, crying out for food she did not have to eat. Despite this, it seemed like her best friend these days, always close by, always willing to carry on a conversation.

But today was different. Today, the hunger was joined by anxious fear that percolated up her chest and into her esophagus, so acute it threatened to make her vomit.

She had not been looking forward to this, but everything confirmed that it had to happen. She could not move forward without taking this step. It would be a day of truth-telling, she resolved, and one of reckoning.

Libète awakens upon the unfaithful ground.

It is dark.

She is thirsty.

She shifts until shooting pains from her injured arm rush through her body, causing her to cry out. She pushes herself up with her other arm.

Was I asleep? Or knocked out?

Her thoughts and memories come crashing back to her.

I was chased. By the murderer, that devil. To the fort. And there was an earthquake, and now this. Rubble.

She lifted herself up, quick to cradle her clamoring arm as she staggered over to the debris, her head spinning. Her throat demanded quenching but there was nothing to drink. She spotted the protruding wrist and hand of her pursuer, still there, still unmoving. She nearly collapsed, falling lightly to her knees a mere two feet from his remains.

She looked more closely at his fingers, frozen in their final moments of life as they tried desperately to reach for something. Her maybe, or life.