In Darkness (9 page)

— Give us sweets, we said, cos to be sure Marguerite was thinking the same thing.

— Give us toys.

People started to scrabble on the floor, picking up all this stuff that the kid had only just thrown there. They brought it to us. And when they put it in our laps, they put money, too, and sometimes they asked questions. It was hard to hear and it was hard to see, with all the people and the smoke. But we did our best.

— Will I ever have a baby?

— Yes. Yes, you will. Marassa bless you.

— Will I see my Nerese again?

— When the time is right, yes. Marassa bless you.

— Will my karamel come back to me? Will she leave her husband and come back to me?

— No.

— Will Aristide stay in power?

— Yes.

Always yes to that one. Always, with no hesitation.

You had to do the touch, too, of course. A blessing is not a blessing if it’s just words, everyone knows that. Got to be touch with it. So each person who drops money, you hold out your hand and you touch them on the hand, or on the head if they’re kneeling, and they get this dumb expression on their face like they just saw the clouds open and angels fall out, or some shit.

Some of them, they only wanted the touch. No questions; they just came limping, crawling, even, and they waited there for the touch. I felt kind of bad about those people. You knew them: you knew them cos they had arms missing, or legs, and they stared around with blank eyes, or they had bits of them swollen up like watermelons, or they were just gray and thin – and those were the worst ones. We didn’t like to touch them. But we did it. We did it cos we were told to, but also cos it was all we could do. We always gave them our blessing.

Well. Almost always.

And at the end, there we were, with toys and money and sweets in our laps. It was like a damn party, but we couldn’t enjoy it right then cos we had to seem like we were wise and magical and from old Africa. Course, sometimes we had to be rude, or not make any sense, cos that’s what people expect from Marassa – as lwa, the twins are powerful, but they’re kids. They don’t do everything all goody-two-shoes and clean and predictable.

— Is my husband cheating on me?

— Of course he is. You’re ugly.

Sometimes, and this was the nasty thing, you had to turn away from the sick people, too. Marassa are childlike: the twins take against some people, no fault of theirs, no fault of the lwa, either. Me and Marguerite, we hated doing this. We chose before the ceremony – like, every third man, we’ll ignore him, OK?

Sometimes these people cried. It was fucking terrible.

So, anyway, all of this was like it always was. Manman, she went over to Dread Wilmè and was talking to him, and people started to file out.

We began to put the money together. What happened was that we gave this money to Dread Wilmè. The sweets, we could keep. Not the toys. Papa might see the toys and then he might know what we were doing, and even though we didn’t really understand it, we knew that would be bad.

Daylight always came down from upstairs when the trapdoor was opened, but suddenly there was a solid shaft of light in the basement, like someone had thrown the trapdoor wide open. And in that shaft of light were the rickety stairs from the upstairs world.

Papa came down the steps. It hadn’t seemed like a strange day till then, but at that moment it did. We were two liars, sitting with sweets in our laps that we didn’t deserve.

Me and Marguerite, we looked down, ashamed.

— Come, said Papa. Now.

His voice was cold, like nothing I had ever heard before. Dread Wilmè stepped up to him and started to say something, but Papa turned away, didn’t even reply. He picked us up from the ground, effortless, like we were light things. The sweets fell. He swung us; he carried us to the stairs.

— It’s for a good – began Manman.

Papa held a hand up.

— They’re not performing monkeys, he said.

After that, there was a lot of coldness between Manman and Papa. There was no shouting; Papa didn’t shout. When he was angry he was quiet and cold, like the deep sea, and that was worse.

Me and Marguerite, we played outside on the street whenever they discussed something, which is what they called it when they argued. At first we thought we were in trouble, but it didn’t seem like we were.

It seemed like it was Manman who was in trouble.

There weren’t any other children on our street to play with us – no one lived on our street, not anymore. We were the last family on the street. On one side of our street was Boston, which belonged to the rebels, and on the other side was Solèy 19, which belonged to Dread Wilmè. Later, Solèy 19 became Route 9, cos that’s the name of a big road MINUSTAH are building on our side of the Site, to join us to the rest of Haiti. They’ve been building it for years now, and it still isn’t done yet.

Anyway, Route 9 came later. For now, all you need to know is that me and my family, we were living on a strip in the middle, between Dread Wilmè’s territory and that of the rebels.

You understand? No man’s land. Manman told Papa we should leave, but he didn’t want to.

— It’s not our war, he said. We’re anyen to them. If we move to either camp, then we’ve taken a side. And they’ll kill us for it.

Me, I think Manman would have liked to go to the Lavalas side, to Dread Wilmè’s territory. I could see she was happy when we were there, playing at being Marassa. But she must have loved my papa, cos she never pushed it.

So, on the day I’m talking about, Marguerite and me were playing all by our ownselves, while Manman and Papa argued inside. Occasionally we heard a bit.

— They’re just children!

— You’re exploiting the sick!

I didn’t understand what those words meant then, not really. But I do now. And you know what? I think Papa was wrong.

One: we weren’t just children. There’s no such thing as children in Site Solèy, only smaller starving people, only smaller dead people. On the road next to ours there was a morgue –
Morgue Privée
, said the sign. It was one of the first things I learned to read. On the sign also, which was really just paint on a wall, there was a little girl, and above her an angel, flying her up into heaven. You think this was meant to manipulate people; you think it’s kind of sick. But it wasn’t. It was a reality. You didn’t take your husband to a morgue – you couldn’t afford it, could you? But when your child died, then you found the money, if you could. Your family helped you, maybe. Unless it was a baby you didn’t want. Then you just threw it on the trash.

That sign, it wasn’t about manipulating your emotions. It was like a car-shop sign with a tire on it to say, we change tires. Only instead it said, we look after dead kids. And the Site was full of dead kids.

Two: exploiting the sick? I don’t think so. Me and Marguerite, for sure we didn’t like to touch them. But if you saw the expression on their faces when they thought they’d been blessed, your heart would fucking break. If some of those people didn’t think themselves healed after they believed the lwa of twins touched them, I will turn myself into a parrot.

But back then we didn’t really know what Papa was saying, and we didn’t care, either. We were just glad we weren’t in trouble.

We had a game: you had to flick bottle caps and make them jump into a tin can. It was a good game. We had five bottle caps each and if I won, then Marguerite had to be my slave for the day and do everything I told her. I could have been really mean, but I never was. If she won, which wasn’t often, then I had to be her horse, and she’d sit on my back as I rode her around the street. I told her it wasn’t as good as having a slave, but she loved horses. She’d never seen one, but she loved them all the same.

Biggie never saw a Cadillac Escalade or a bottle of Cristal, but it didn’t stop him rapping about them.

Anyway, on this occasion I had lost, so I was on my hands and knees, Marguerite whooping on my back, pretending to whip me with her hand and laughing.

Suddenly there was a scream. It sounded like Manman.

I bucked Marguerite off and she landed in the mud.

— What’s happening? she said.

— I don’t know. Stay here.

I ran over to the shack and ducked inside. I saw anpil young men in there, with baseball caps on their heads. They were carrying baseball bats and machetes, and had scarves around their faces like bandis.

Manman was backed against the wall of the shack, screaming and screaming. One of the men grabbed me and held me tight, my arms against my sides. He held me a long time. I struggled and he hit me and the world went black, and I don’t know how much more time passed after that.

More men came in from the street.

— The girl? said one of them.

— Done.

— No, not my – began my papa, but one of the chimères kicked his legs out from under him and he fell hard on his back.

— Shut up, another man said.

Papa got to his knees and swore. It was the first time I had ever heard him swear.

— Let my family go, he said.

The chimère who seemed to be the leader sighed. He made a little gesture and one of his friends slashed down with his machete, then Papa’s arm was gone below the elbow. That’s how easy it was. After that the others started hacking and stabbing, too, and I was struggling in the arms of the one who was holding me, and he was laughing, and everything was flying blood and twisted faces and terrible, wet noises.

Eventually, I closed my eyes. I think I maybe fainted. I remember hearing someone say:

— What about the woman?

And another man said:

— He said she should live.

Another said:

— Well, yes, but . . .

And all his friends laughed.

Then blackness.

See? I’ve been in darkness before, with bodies. I know this place. I wonder now if the hospital is only the shack again, and maybe I wasn’t shot in the arm but in the heart or the head, and all of this is hell, or the land under the sea where the dead go to be lwa of the Gede family. Maybe I’m back in the room after Papa’s murder, and that’s where I’ll always be now.

I take a deep breath. Everything I remember is too vivid. My fallen-down hospital room is a cinema with the lights turned down – it’s total blackness, and my life is too bright against it.

So, the shack.

At some point the darkness ended and I was looking up at one of the men with guns. He winked at me.

— This is what happens when you fuck with the Boston crew, he said.

Another chimère laughed.

— For sure, he said.

I didn’t understand. Papa hadn’t fucked with anyone. All he did was take us away from the peristyle, where we were pretending to bless people. Even then, though, I think I knew that this had nothing to do with that, cos I understood that the chimère was Boston, not Route 9. I clung to that.

I told myself, one day all of these Boston pigs are going to die.

Then there was a loud bang that I recognized as a gun firing. I looked up and Manman was standing with a semi-automatic in her hand. She was crying. One of the chimères, the one who had spoken to me, was screaming. Blood was pouring from his shoulder. I noticed that there were skulls and crossbones on the bandanna over his face.

— Bastard, he said.

— Get out, said Manman. Get out now.

The chimères backed away. Manman stood for a long time holding that gun, and we waited in the silence. But they didn’t come back.

I was still on the ground. Papa’s blood was on my hands and my face; it was sticky and smelled of everything bad. Manman stepped over me and went out into the street, holding the gun in front of her. A minute or a day later, she came back inside. There was a flat, cold look in her eye. She was shaking, and I was worried that the gun might go off by accident. But then she seemed to seize control of herself and she was Manman again.

She picked me up and gently prised open my fingers.

— What do you have there? she said.

It was a bottle cap. I hadn’t realized I had been holding it.

Manman carried me out through the back of the shack. She walked and walked, and I didn’t know where she was going. Then I smelled the sea and I knew she was heading for the boat, the one Papa used for fishing, and she said we would sleep in there till we could find somewhere else.

— What about Papa? I said.

— We can’t help him now.

— And the gun? Where did you get the gun?

— It doesn’t matter.

— But what about Marguerite? What happened to Marguerite?

In my mind’s eye, I saw my sister sitting on my back, smiling. I hoped she had run away.

Manman stopped and looked at me. That flatness had come into her eyes again.

— They took her, she said eventually. Those chimères.

— Why?

Manman hesitated.

— She’s a girl, she said. And she’s pretty. One day she might be valuable.