Haiti Noir (6 page)
Josiane watched me eat. She was spying on me from under the thick fringe of her eyelashes. I thought again of the girl I’d seen asleep in the room with a décor from beyond the grave. I could see her breasts again, the hollow of her belly. Once again, after dinner, I felt almost faint. I was drifting sweetly, wearily along. I thought only of Josiane’s body, so very present in the room. All my questions sank into oblivion. The rhythm of my blood was slowing. My movements were getting all bogged down. I had only one desire: to give myself up to Josiane’s skillful youth.
And yet when she put her hand on me, a last burst of conscience propelled me to my feet. I was sinking, calmly disappearing into quicksand. They’d sent me here to destroy me. Paradise Inn would be my final destination. But it wasn’t too late to escape. I had to get out of here right away, on foot if need be, this very night. I’d surely find a truck driver on the highway who would take me to the next town. My survival instinct was telling me to react, to shake off this torpor that was inexorably condemning me to oblivion.
I caught Josiane’s wrist and twisted it until a little cry of pain burst from her lips. I badgered her with questions.
“Who are you? Who is your mother? Who do you put up in this hotel? Where are the other guests? Who are you working for?”
She was turning blue with pain under my grip. It hurt me to manhandle her, but I had to save my skin first. She gasped out: “I don’t know. I don’t know anything. I only work here. Ow! You’re hurting me.”
I felt like slapping her. All compassion left my soul. I just kept squeezing her wrist harder.
“I won’t let you go until you answer all my questions. Got it, you little bitch? Who are you, you and your mother?”
She was groaning with pain but said nothing. I squeezed her wrist harder still and kept on pushing her with questions.
“Who does the cooking, and the wash, and the cleaning up here? Why is the rest of the house dead? What is hidden behind all that?”
Josiane’s silence was incredibly irritating. I was foaming with rage. This little woman thought she could manipulate me through sex, lead me to the scaffold by my prick. I was going to teach her a lesson she’d never forget. I let go of her wrist and slapped her very hard. I thought I’d broken every bone in my hand. Her head was wobbling, she looked like a puppet. She fell to her knees and I kept badgering her.
“Where do you get the electricity from? I haven’t heard a generator and I don’t see any other system, how do you make electricity? Answer me, for Christ’s sake, or I’ll strangle you!”
Kneeling on the floor, she tried to look into my eyes. Maybe she thought she’d move me. Her lower lip was already swollen; blood was gushing out of a crack in it. At last she spoke. It was hard to understand her words.
“I’m telling you, I swear. I don’t know anything … My mother takes care of everything!”
A tear flowed down her cheek. I wanted to continue my questioning. I raised my hand to hit her again, but my energy was rapidly disappearing. I was out of breath, my heart was about to burst in my chest, as if I’d run a hundred miles. I had exhausted my last stock of energy. I was being paralyzed by a will stronger than my own. My arm fell to my side. All I could do was drag myself to bed and sit down. Josiane realized I couldn’t budge; she understood my exhaustion. She kept on crying softy as she spoke to me. I could hardly make out her words, which seemed to drift over to me from so far away.
“I don’t know the people who live here. They’re all men but you can’t see them. They’re sent here by the high command. The electricity that powers the hotel comes from draining their energy and willpower. They don’t last long. That’s all I know. You’ll become like them too, until you’re just a breath. You never should have set foot in this place. Never.”
That’s all I heard. I couldn’t hold my body up anymore. I sank back into the pillows and passed out.
I felt better in the morning, although still very weak. When I looked at myself in the mirror, all I could see was a silhouette, a blurry image. My car was no longer in front of the hotel. On a hunch, I searched for my weapon in the chest of drawers where I was sure I’d left it the night before, next to my police badge. They had disappeared too. I smiled. I couldn’t care less about all that anymore. I didn’t give a good goddamn. It really relaxed me to not worry about a thing. All I was thinking about was having a good breakfast in the dining room on the ground floor, at my table, number 6. And above all, enjoying a big cup of that good, strong, scalding coffee my dear hostess had served me the day before.
I was calmly eating breakfast at table 6. Banana peels and crumbs of bread littered the other tables around me. But the guests still could not be seen. Through the window, I saw my brother Roland arriving. He parked his car in front of the hotel with a big squeal of the tires. He seemed worried. He rang the little bell and spoke to the manager as soon as she appeared. I heard my name. I realized my brother was giving her my physical description. He raised his arms to indicate my height, and with both hands he outlined my width. My hostess shook her head and looked truly regretful. No. No. She hadn’t seen a police captain around here for ages. She said she was sincerely very sorry not to be able to help Roland. And I watched the scene from my table, sipping my coffee, totally indifferent. The high command had sealed my fate. Another life was beginning for me. I thought Roland would see me but his gaze just passed over me as I sat there, no more than ten yards away from him. He stood still for a moment, hesitating. Then he thanked the lady and walked away.
Translated by David Ball
T
he great-aunt in Brooklyn had promised to come get one of them, but which one? And take her in under her own roof, in her four-bedroom apartment—a godsend in New York! In a neighborhood that was getting less and less shabby: now the whites were trying to force her out.
“They can’t make me leave. They can move in with their sidewalk cafés, their little ‘boutiques’ with those French names they pronounce in their terrible accent. No way I’m leaving here!” declared the aunt in Brooklyn.
“Her apartment takes the place of a husband,” her niece Beatrice confided. “A submissive husband who doesn’t answer back, stays clean, and doesn’t have wandering hands. Who could ask for more? Four bedrooms is a luxury in New York!”
The bathroom next to her bedroom was graced with an enormous bathtub on ornately decorated feet. She had it put in after visiting the house of a friend audacious enough to tell the aunt that not having a bathroom connected to the master bedroom revealed a standard of living that was borderline primitive. The Brooklyn aunt allowed no one she knew to school her, be they relatives or friends. After all, ever since she came to the States she’d worked for a rich family on Long Island, Italian Jews with a taste for the good things in life and the ability to turn their money into more money. So nouveau riche Haitians thinking they could spin yarns to her—that really takes the cake! At her last yearly visit, Beatrice had gone into long raptures about the Italian tile in the bathroom and the bouquets of artificial flowers decorating the master bedroom. The second bedroom was reserved for the few rare relatives and friends bold enough to face the aunt’s sharp tongue for more than a few hours. After all, she was a hardened spinster set in her opinions and prejudices. The third bedroom was transformed into a sewing workshop where the aunt made cushions and curtains in velvet materials she thought were fancy because her employers were crazy about them. For the moment, the fourth room, the smallest, was full of old furniture and knickknacks. It served as both a storehouse and a treasure trove. This was the shambles she counted on fixing up to take in one of her grandnieces, one of the daughters of her nephew Aramis. But which one?
When Beatrice talked about the whims of her Brooklyn aunt, both of us would listen with a mixture of dread, fascination, and envy for that other world of perpetual wealth and light. But also with the vague fear that TB (Tante de Brooklyn), which we only called her behind her back, of course, might learn of our conversations in which we made fun of her. Still, they were so much fun and so therapeutic that we never got tired of them. We mothers. After all, it was the great-aunt who regularly wired us money and had sent for her nephew Aramis, the one who was carrying on the family name. The one who looked the most like his late father—and the one who had gotten us both pregnant roughly two days (or maybe a few hours) apart. Who knows? In any case, our daughters were born on the same day, at full term and almost at the same time. Right in the middle of an Easter Sunday, like a double, sunny act of defiance. Aramis had told his aunt about it right away. From her Brooklyn apartment, the great-aunt had used her privilege as an elder, settled in the States for more than three decades, to name the babies: Marie Catarina and Marie Carlotta, Italian names embellished with the name of the mother of God in the good old Haitian Catholic tradition. We had not protested because these imposed first names were associated with the father. For Aramis Salnave—with his aunt’s approval and an endearing smile from his sister—had legally recognized both children. I wonder what the clerk at City Hall thought when he saw the same date of birth and the names of two different mothers.
Which one of us had first succumbed to Aramis’s charms? He’s as seductive as the most handsome of the musketeers, Beatrice would repeat, always with the same pensive, nostalgic expression for that brother who’d left too soon, and also for a time when such literary allusions did not necessarily have to be explained. She would look at us almost despairingly when we didn’t react. And yet from the very first day Aramis told me about the character to whom he owed his name, I got all excited despite myself, and without ever telling him, read and reread whole passages in the copy of the novel he’d lent me, carefully covered in plastic. His father, Hébert Salnave, had unlimited admiration for Alexandre Dumas and gave this name to his only son. Beatrice and her younger brother had grown up reading, listening to, and telling the stories of the three musketeers. Aramis knew his namesake’s lines by heart and would quote them in the course of many conversations. He could easily narrate a whole episode if the person he was talking to seemed a bit lost. With a childish smile on his lips, he had charmed me with his cloak-and-dagger stories that were so far removed from our world that I was enchanted despite myself. I should have known this plunge into fantasy would cost me dear, I should have listened to my instinct, which told me to watch out.
He moved his hands when he spoke, like an enchanter whose only material to work with was his body. A beautiful body. Long, long, from his forehead to his slim, muscular legs. He walked like someone in a hurry, but with that relaxed, elegant air that attracted my eyes right away. Did the other mother also instantly feel fire spreading beneath her skin like lit paper before it’s burned up by a flame? I could kick myself even today for not being able to resist that need, for having wanted the burning encounter of our two skins at any cost. Despite my instinctive distrust of sweet-talking men, despite my persistent refusal to believe that life was granting me a reprieve. Even when I learned that he’d wooed another woman in the same month, with the same success, all he had to do was touch me and I was conquered anew, impatient to feel the delicious bite of his body again and again. Even while deep inside me, a child was already growing.
Yet my twenty-five years of existence had not really entitled me to become somebody’s mother. According to the family legend, after the departure of the man who had nonchalantly declared that the earth already had enough people on it, my mother, who was six months pregnant, let herself die. For five years. I still remember her lackluster, teary face and a childhood spent bucking up against that ever-present maternal sorrow. A world of constant privation, of sighs. Never enough food to satisfy you completely, restrained laughter, and shrunken, stifling spaces. No affection. My good grades in high school confirmed my conviction that education wasn’t much use when poverty and bad luck were aligned against you. There I was with my diplomas under my arm, an arid mouth, and a long, gray, dirty avenue in front of me. You had to use people and things—before you were used yourself, and then discarded. That was my motto for survival. Aramis challenged it with a hearty laugh.
When Aramis told me he was leaving, he once again sang the praises and expressed his affection for his aunt in Brooklyn, the one who’d always promised the son of her deceased brother she would bring him to New York for good, on a student visa. Since the papers were ready, he was to leave as soon as possible. As for Beatrice, she had no desire to immigrate to the States. Comfortable in her role as a middle-aged childless widow, she did not want to start life over outside of the country. But Aramis always seemed like he was about to take off and fly. He was always looking for an excuse to change worlds. Put him anywhere at all, he always preferred elsewhere.
He left us mothers, each one with a baby less than a month old in her arms. He left without any sign of emotion except for a teary half-smile and his eyes drunk with anticipation. He left us with our sudden disillusions; the fury of targeting each other. He left us with the rage of tearing each other’s memories away, along with any affection we might have felt for him. He left us to devour with our fingernails the breasts he had touched, the skin he had stroked, the folds of the arms where he’d buried his lips.
It finally took an international phone call from that four-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn to restore order and calm between Carrefour Feuilles and Delmas, between all those streets Aramis had walked down to go from one neighborhood to another and get into our homes, and into us, with promises and smiles and words so sweet that believing them was pure pleasure.
If I get the slightest whiff of a quarrel, I’ll stop the money transfers. No more presents for the little girls, no more anything.
Beatrice transmitted the implacable message from the Brooklyn aunt with a touch of commiseration in her voice. Beatrice, with unavowed fantasies in her eyes and her bitter, frustrated hands. I pitied her a little, for her eyes often searched us for a spark of the fire that the merest mention of her brother’s name would light up, turning us into two wild beasts. Peace reigned in her house, at 15 rue Paultre, where she remained in her secure solitude and refused the rare men who were brave enough to dare measure themselves against the frozen perfection of her deceased husband.
“Why don’t you move in here?” she finally asked us both. A skillful way to watch our every move and distribute her gifts according to our behavior. “I think that solution would please TB.”
When did we mothers learn to tolerate each other? When the memory of Aramis’s caresses was too distant to give his body any human substance? When the sweet heaviness of his sex faded away under the weight of unforgiving daily life? Searching for something to eat every day, looking for a job, picking up your dignity and shoving it under your hunger. In vain. Starting over again the next day. Holding back your surges of rage and walking up and down the streets of Port-au-Prince, trying not to deposit your fear onto them. Taking your desire to hit someone and transforming it into a caress over a baby’s soft skin.
We couldn’t reject Beatrice’s invitation. She was giving us a neutral, comfortable space between our two wretched lives. Saving us from the envious mockery of our families, giving more legitimacy to our offspring. At 15 rue Paultre, in this wild, monstrous city, we found a stopover where we could shelter our shared disappointment. With Aramis gone, we found ourselves abandoned in exactly the same way. All the more so, as he quickly became too sick to talk on the phone and his destructive silence blanketed our memories with distrust. News came to us through Beatrice, who talked regularly with the great-aunt.
A few months after Aramis left, a family acquaintance brought some photos that showed us an emaciated, almost unrecognizable figure. Which of us turned her eyes away first? A hideous grin had replaced the seductive smile of the man whose lips had imposed their law on my body. His clothing floated around his tense, stiff arms and legs, as if the fabric refused to have any contact with his dried-out skin. A quickly metastasized cancer killed him a short time later. He’d sworn he would come for me as soon as he got his green card. Maybe he’d also promised the same thing to the other one? My hopes, already so slim, were utterly crushed.
Beatrice flew to Brooklyn for the funeral, armed with the tourist visa she was always careful to renew. She brought back a videocassette for each of us as an inheritance.
“My aunt thinks the children will probably want to watch it later,” she said.
We mothers followed the religious ceremony on the screen, more curious to see TB’s face than anything else. A very short, very plump little woman, hardly five feet tall without the high heels she wore—quite elegantly, in fact. Her face hidden behind a black veil, Italian style, of course. I was unable to watch the whole recording and I stopped before the burial. All those dark silhouettes gave me the impression of a black-and-white film, the kind impossible to understand, where the action never quite ends and you have to guess at so many things. Except I could already assume I hadn’t been given a good role in this film. I closed my eyes. I wonder if the other mother kept watching to the end.
Beatrice then informed us of the great-aunt’s decision to have one of the little girls brought to New York. To adopt her legally. Surprisingly, TB had hung onto her Haitian passport even though she’d only set foot on her native soil three times in thirty-two years—for her father’s funeral, her mother’s funeral, and then the double funeral of Beatrice and Aramis’s parents, who had died in a car accident. She’d said goodbye to this unhealthy country, a perpetual insult to her delicate senses, definitely a danger for her eyes, which had been recently operated on to remove hard, thick cataracts. So, she was going to come here to adopt her nephew’s child.
“With her, it’s family first,” Beatrice affirmed again. She had been entrusted with the task of setting the administrative procedures in motion as soon as possible. We mothers both had the same question on our lips and in our eyes. Which one of them? Faced with our anxiety, Beatrice’s enthusiasm collapsed. Her voice fell silent between words as if she could suddenly see all the complications that lay ahead. “She says she hasn’t made up her mind yet.”
Late in the afternoon after the babies’ bath, we would sit on the stoop with them. But most often, when Beatrice got back from her job as a civil servant in the General Tax Office, she would volunteer to take her nieces out for some fresh air. “Go for a little walk, go see some friends, I’ll take care of the girls.” She seemed to avoid talking to us individually. In her eyes we were merely the two mothers, the women who had borne the fruits of Aramis’s love. Her affection for her brother stripped us of our identities. Just as she would say “the little girls” when she spoke about our daughters. Always referring to them in the plural, relegating them to the position of a falsely twinlike appendage of their father and thus doubly erasing us, the mothers.
The neighbors would come by for a little chat, depending on the day of the week and the time, to get their fill of gossip and more details of that tragic story of the deceased brother, the little orphans, and the impoverished mothers who were taken into the home out of Christian charity by their childrens’ paternal great-aunt, a good person despite her difficult personality. Passersby who didn’t know the hidden side of their births would always react. The girls are the spitting image of Aramis, they would say. You can’t tell them apart. Real twins. Man, do those little girls look alike. It’s incredible! Doesn’t God work wonders? Isn’t that the truth! Beatrice would agree complacently. Often we would dress them the same way. It was inevitable, after all, as most of their clothes and linen— towels, washcloths, bibs, pajamas, onesies, tank tops, T-shirts, caps—arrived from Brooklyn in pairs. Only the loveys came with a very slight difference, and all that did was emphasize their similarity: two stuffed rabbits, one pink with white ears and the other white with pink ears. Compared to the display of clothes from America, with their smell of talcum powder and lavender (TB sent over laundry products and toiletries too), the few modest items of clothing we bought stood out immediately, like the poor relatives that we were.