God Loves Haiti (9780062348142) (17 page)

Like what? Gilbert said. Mud?

Well, yes, the woman said.

Man, she had canons, Alain thought. Sweat from the scalding midday heat drenched them. They glistened. We should build a statue as a tribute to them, Alain thought. You could hold an entire nation happily aloft on them shits.

Mud! Hollywood said, snapping his fingers. That's a great idea! I once saw a piece, I don't remember where, Art Basel Miami or in Basel. It was a giant swan made of mud. It was great, soaring even. Very inspiring. It looked like chocolate and did not fall apart at all. Show of hands: Who can sculpt? A dozen hands went up.

Really? Alain thought. That many of y'all can sculpt? Jesus, you people are so easy to underestimate.

Good, good, Hollywood said. He was excited. Hey—Philippe, is it? Why don't you lead our little team of sculptors and visionaries on a walk around the park, so we can find a suitable location for the memorial?

If I may, I would suggest you explore a location somewhere along the fence facing Avenue de la République. It's the street with the most traffic, thus the memorial would get the most attention.

Good idea! Hollywood said, as if genuinely surprised Alain could have one of those or care enough to share it.

The idea of a memorial, a thing that would honor their dead and express their collective vision and hope for their future, a concept heretofore alien and even absurd to the
most ardent dreamers among them, energized the small community of walking wounded survivors in Place Pigeon like nothing else, not even the occasional food distribution by the United Nations. Even Alain was swept up in the moment and the emotion and visions of that heart-pumping thing called a future, a better tomorrow. Buoyed, he stood on his crutches and watched Alyssa and Philippe and Steve's merry band walk off to peruse the camp's perimeter under the cheer of passing doves and golden sunlight. A place to plant their symbol of the future! Who'da thunk it! A future. We could have one. We were entitled to one. Ah, from the mouth of babes. The fresh wave of positive thinking of a future made of ideas of community, peace, and love and cheer, and not just plentiful food and medicine and schools and life in a city without debris had a cooling effect on Alain, wiping away the sweat on his brow and dramatically increasing his sense of fellowship with his fellow men and women. Around him everyone felt that way. They were all thinking the same thing: What will our future look like? What should our future look like? The only way forward from here was up. Had to be.

His hand began to tremble. His body was tired from holding him up with crutches. Pain made his foot throb. His vision blurred. Mr. Alain? said Raymonde, one of the camp's sages. She spoke rarely, but her big, booming presence was never ignored. Mr. Alain, why don't let me do something about that leg? I know a potion that could help.

Yes, OK. Anything, Alain said. Anything to stop the pain.

He let himself fall in Raymonde's meaty open arms, fainting. Raymonde caught him as if he were a child who weighed no heavier than a feather.

        
GANGSTERS IN NEW YORK

A
little-known fact was that the president of Haiti was secretly a Madonna fan. A huge one. When alone in his office in the National Palace of Haiti during moments of high tension, he'd press play on the greatest-hits album,
The Immaculate Collection
, an inexplicable but surprisingly wonderful birthday gift from a US ambassador. Every line in the fourth song, “Like A Virgin,” gave him immeasurable pleasure. At the 1:38 mark, when the Material Girl went
heee
in the chorus, the old man felt all the pressure seep out of his shoulders. His whole body exhaled. His stresses, ecstatically albeit all too briefly, were replaced with the lightness of being that was generally associated with the smiles of children at play in grassy parks on summer days. Despite his efforts at discretion, the
President's infatuation with the tart from Michigan was well known among the cabinet. Now the cabinet was dead. Each member reduced to dust by the quake. The President hadn't had access to Madonna in the intervening weeks. He craved her. There had been no balm for the Herculean strength he summoned to give his wounded country the look of having a pulse. In the aftermath of the earthquake's carnage, he walked the streets, collar open, shoes dusty, and hugged everyone in sight. Be it strangers or friends, it didn't matter. He couldn't tell the difference anymore. Everyone knew him; no one asked him how he felt. On crowded street corners under a brilliant sun or a maudlin moon, he took in their grief. It was the least he thought he could do. He listened patiently to the painstaking details of their stories. He liked how their voices went from high and hysterical to low and soft after they discovered they had his undivided attention. The president of Haiti allowed himself to imagine the horror of the circumstances of each individual's loss, which invariably involved watching walls of houses and buildings fall on themselves, lovers, parents, or children. Or having a house or building or a lover, parent, or child suddenly vanish without a trace during or after goudou-goudou. Throughout these tours, he was there, but he was not there. No one ever asked him how he experienced goudou-goudou. It was as if no one noticed him as flesh and blood and human. He had become an avatar, and he himself began to notice his existence less and less too.

Mercifully, there was no rage yet in the country. Just shock. Not “what the fuck” type shock, but a “why me” type shock. Not self-pity, but an overwhelming sense of
pitifulness descended upon Haiti. Its hills, its trees, even its clouds, hung their heads low. Life was going to go on, but a feeling that it had deeply stalled overwhelmed everyone, and not just in Port-au-Prince, where the disaster had struck, but in peaceful and generally pristine communities as far from ground zero as Chambellan and Fort Liberté. It's not bad luck, Haitians had always figured. Life was just hard, absurdly so. They took comfort in knowing that life abroad was not anxiety-free either. Life was supposed to be hard, for us to appreciate its stretches of sweetness. If you expected life to be easy, you were an idiot. But this new blow was too brief, sudden, and violent. It would take a long time to get used to.

Of course, the world did not allow Haiti to lick its wounds in solitude. Once the initial wave of sympathy and pledges of support had died down, some people began looking for ways to find the president of Haiti wanting. Most Haitians were still looking for what hit them, but some folks needed to hit something. They needed a scapegoat. It's natural. When you can't blame God or his girlfriend, Mother Nature, or you can blame them but get little satisfaction from holding a grudge against our invisible overlords, it makes much more sense to look askance at the head of state. The young aide who was telling the President all this in the limo trudging toward Manhattan spoke like it was news. He wore a dark suit, a blue shirt, and a dark tie that were all one size too big. He spoke in a whisper, as though he were delivering the Word to the
old man. All in an effort to appear calm and reassuring and to becalm and reassure a president he assumed had to be freaked out of his mind. They were in the back of a limousine in New York City a month after the quake. They were about to meet a gaggle of the President's peers, people the kid assumed would look down on the President even as they pressed mounds of cash into his hands to help Haiti's reconstruction, per the orders of their truly dismayed citizenry.

New York City made the President think of no one else but Madonna. He disliked the Big Apple, but the city had given the world Madonna, an angel if there ever was such a thing. It couldn't be all bad. The President's arrival at JFK Airport that wintry afternoon had been rocky. An airline stewardess actually took his freshly buttered bread out of his hand right before he could bite into it because the plane was about to land. He never felt rage hotter than the one he felt looking at the prim and prissy bitch standing over him in the airplane. He glared hard. His bodyguards and new aides had to drag and push the old man off the plane and through customs. The President was so mad he didn't bother closing his coat in the face of the first blast of cold winds that greeted them outside JFK. In silence, they walked toward a black town car whose chauffeur had smartly, though rudely, decided not to leave the driver's seat to brave the elements and open the door for the visiting head of state he was there to pick up. Of course, there was a snowstorm. It's rare that snowstorms
don't greet you when you visit New York City from tropical Port-au-Prince in February, the President thought, a truism he first experienced in his twenties. Ice daggers rained from the gray sky. The air was still and quiet, yet rough and menacing. The brick buildings of Queens's rows of warehouses looked bombed-out in the stormy haze. It was morning, but dark like dusk. The President's group heard icicles whistle through the air, searching for exposed skin to prick and cut open. In the car, the President soon realized the thing making the incessant buzzing sound he had been hearing was in his pocket. He fumbled a bit with the new device, a BlackBerry, then watched a message from Bobo unfurl.

We found Destiné, boss. I sent a few of the boys for him. He was in a refugee camp where he is living for no apparent reason. They went there in the afternoon. No guns. I gave them baseball bats to protect themselves. It can get wild in those camps sometimes. They say the place was filthy and crowded. I told them to be nice and discreet. Destiné seemed to have been living there since the quake, they said. They said he was hurt, a broken leg. Either way he had no intention of leaving the camp to go to the hospital or just go home. Could be he's gone crazy. There's a lot of that happening since goudou-goudou. We didn't expect any trouble. But the guys told me that as soon as they approached his tent in the camp, twenty guys with guns showed up. If it's
true, boss—and we have no reason not to trust these guys; they're pros; I've used them before—if it's true, I think Destiné might be raising a militia to come after you. His security guards killed two of our guys. The two others barely got away safely. They said Destiné's guards had big guns. Maybe Destiné's fallen in with Colombian drug runners? He's pretty shifty. According to the guy I have watching him 24 hours a day, Destiné is now friends with some famous American actor. They have even appeared on TV. They're building a memorial to the victims of goudou-goudou made of mud in Place Pigeon. The international press loves them. Reporters and camera crews are always over there, swarming them. It's complicated but we'll keep trying to get him. You can count on me, boss!

Don't worry about your wife, sir. We have her under constant surveillance too. You're right. She's a good girl. She's never left the Cathedral. I have a guy bring her food and supplies daily. She's taking care of Monsignor Dorélien, who's near death. She stopped going out, and she seems to have forgotten about looking for Destiné.

Faithfully yours, Bobo.

The President wanted to slam the device against the wall or break it apart with his hands, but this was the wrong time for him to show any signs of weakness. The mood in the car, which was now rumbling along the Fifty-Ninth
Street bridge, was tense enough. The members of his government's new makeshift cabinet were heading into the biggest negotiations of their lives. They were young and not eager to find out just how deeply unprepared for the moment they were.

Bobo was lying, the President thought. Bobo had always been a lousy liar. That's the main reason the President had trusted him over so many others throughout the years. Somewhere in Bobo's bumbling dissembling was the nugget of information the President needed to make his next decision. Bobo's idiots for hire probably did indeed find Destiné and fail to get him. But they didn't fail because Destiné had assembled a revolutionary army of
sans abris
to scare them. Destiné was a smart kid who was capable of many things, but at his core he was a loner, a talker and not a fighter. It was the character flaw that prevented him from becoming a leader of men in the best of times in Haiti. These were not the best of times in Haiti. Did Destiné talk his way out of capture? Possibly. The kid was magnetic, and, boy, could he talk a good game. Why didn't he have the decency of doing me a favor and die already?

At this thought, the President saw his conscience take the form of his predecessor Métélus with big old white angel wings. What are you doing, man? You never hurt anyone intentionally in your life.

And what of it? the President said.

You knew Bobo would misinterpret your request that he find Destiné for you. You just wanted the kid found by
your people before your wife did. You hoped they found his body, deceased. Of all the Haitians the earthquake killed, surely,
ce merde de Destiné
would have been one of them, right? That was too much to hope for, old friend. Destiné is your cross to bear.

The man is fucking my wife, the President said.

You don't know that for sure.

The President gave the angel a blank stare.

OK. He's fucking your wife.

I got other crosses to bear.

Like, what? Leading a ruined country with few resources?

Yes, that.

That's easy, man. That's playing with house money. You know that. Heads you win. Tail you win.

Mais, compère
, the kid is fucking your wife! the devil said, waving a pitchfork on the President's left shoulder. He looked a lot like Duvalier
le père
.

You've been a good boy all your life. You're entitled to snuffing out one life with your presidential privilege before you leave office, especially after all the horrors you've been through with the earthquake and all.
Écoute
, he was fucking your wife in your own palace! What the fuck's the point of working your whole life to become master of your own palace when young bastards are going to stroll through the front door to sleep with your woman? He fucked her well too. Real good. If he's crippled from the earthquake, you'll be putting him out of his misery.
Besides, it's not like you're sending Navy SEALs on the other side of the planet to execute some son of a bitch you never met and calling it justice. Unlike that case, there are no courts of law, local or international, where you could bring charges of crimes against humanity against the kid. There isn't. No one will notice or mourn the boy's death, not even your old lady from the sounds of it. Isn't this what it's all about anyway? Her love. After removing the small hindrance of a typically over-reaching boy out of your marital lives, you'll have your lady all to yourself. Think about it, you'll be killing the boy for the love of a wonderful woman. How romantic is that? Isn't that His way? Shit, I should become a poet. Call me Cupid.