The Forgetting Tree

by Tatjana Soli

  Jean-Alexi didn’t leave but neither did he touch her. She wanted to be touched by someone she chose. Nothing more than that. Too much. Instead they lived chastely side by side in the abandoned house for a couple of days. It was the happiest time of Marie’s life. One night after he took her out for a big dinner at a friend’s restaurant, they lay in bed and held hands.

  “That day on the beach I told you about?” she said.

  “Listening.”

  “You were so beautiful that day. I wanted you for mwen boyfriend, but you don’t even look.”

  Jean-Alexi smiled and closed his eyes. “You were just a girl-child, I think.”

  He leaned over to kiss her, then kissed her more. “I’m leaving here,” he said.

  “It’s okay,” she said, and covered his mouth with hers. She made love to a man of her choosing. This is it, she thought, this is what it should be. The other times were such a sad fake. Women did it to eat, but why did the men buy? Compared to the real, it was worse than nothing.

  After a time, the moon drifted up, and she was so peaceful in the quiet room, she fell asleep. In the morning, she woke up, and Jean-Alexi was gone.

  * * *

  After Jean-Alexi left, something hardened inside Marie. She went to a higher-class madam who paid off Madame Zo, and soon she was walking the fancy streets of Pétionville. Jean-Alexi’s prophecy haunted her—she wasn’t going to let the life eat her up. She saved to buy one expensive outfit, and once well-dressed, she worked her way into the restaurants. She would sit alone and order dinner and hardly ever was she alone by the time she finished, check taken care of.

  A French aid worker took a fancy to her after several times together and made a deal to have her to himself when he was in town. He was an older, important man in local politics; she heard him give interviews on the radio, speaking of aid and saving the Haitian people. Although he did not care enough to keep Marie his when he was gone, he insisted on owning her body when he was there.

  He would arrive and open his rented apartment that remained empty and locked against her while he was gone. Each day when he left, he turned the key from the outside, imprisoning her no matter how she argued that she would like to take a walk or visit with a friend. When he returned, he filled a washbasin with warm, soap-filled water and motioned Marie over. He bathed her as gently as a mother: her feet, her elbows, behind the ears, although she had already made herself clean for him. Then he would have her spread her legs apart, and he would rub only there, and at that moment he changed into lover. He brought her food, delicious food, and took pleasure in watching her eat, sometimes feeding her himself, but each day he brought less, so that finally Marie was starving even as she ate.

  She could have tried to jump out the window, but she would only have succeeded in breaking her neck. And what was she escaping to? She could have pounded and yelled at the door, but the crafty landlady was against her. People’s hearts tend to understand the side with money, the side that pays the bills. What is another young, ruined girl, after all?

  * * *

  Often the Frenchman drank in the small room, and the alcohol would make him homesick for Cannes, for his wife and two boys.

  “Why don’t you stay home then?” Marie pouted.

  He narrowed his eyes at her, as if considering the implications of the question. “Because I never love them as much as when I am here.”

  “Tanpi, too bad,” she said, smirking, and then he would hit her. It always ended like this, and so after a while she found herself hurrying to this point to get it over.

  Afterward, he would be filled with remorse and passion. His eyes would tear, and he would give her extra gourdes to buy herself something nice. “You don’t understand, ma petite nègresse. I’ve never loved anyone like I love you.”

  Marie wondered at the horror of this being true.

  One time only the Frenchman took her on a trip out of the capital. They traveled to the coast, to a resort on the beach where one of his UN buddies was giving a party. Marie was excited because this appeared a step in making their relationship public and permanent. He parked the car in a gravel lot with a long dirt track to the beach, fenced jungle on either side so the locals were kept out.

  As they walked, small girls appeared from behind the trees and pressed against the fence, holding bunches of bananas. When the Frenchman came close, they began their chants: “Baa-naaan-nan. Baaa-nan-naan.” Up and down the road they sang like birds, small girls who reminded Marie of herself at seven or eight years old. Would they, too, eventually become the girls moaning and pleading in the dark along the Champs de Mars?

  The Frenchman laughed and pointed, thinking their hawking charming, but Marie shook with fury. She hissed at them, “Pe la! Shut it!” But of course the girls saw her nice dress, her well-fed stomach, and wanted that for themselves, ignoring her.

  Finally the Frenchman chose an especially scrawny girl who looked half-starved and bought the largest bunch she had. When they arrived at the resort, a crowd was out on the terrace dancing. Most of the men were European; all the women were black.

  “I’ve brought the banana girl,” the Frenchman announced as Marie carried the bunch in behind him.

  She burned with humiliation, but she could do nothing. All eyes were on her, expectant, so she lifted the bananas on top of her head and danced slowly around the floor, pulling off and handing a banana to each man and woman she passed. The Frenchman clapped, delighted, but Marie understood she was nothing more than those girls standing in the dirt.

  * * *

  When the Frenchman wasn’t around, she often went to her father’s abandoned house. In its cloistered emptiness, she tried to see a future that wasn’t the obvious one she was headed toward. She tried to recall the days spent there with Jean-Alexi, the only bit of happiness she could summon. When the Frenchman returned to the island the next time, she wore her best dress, and as soon as he had a few drinks, she broached her plan.

  “I’d like to go to France.”

  “Yes?”

  “Could you help me? I want maybe to be a teacher, like my maman.”

  “A teacher doesn’t have a pute for a daughter.”

  She wanted to slap him across the face, but she knew it would cost more than the momentary satisfaction was worth. “That’s the problem with you people. You believe history only moves in one direction. Sometimes it slides backwards, sometimes it just gets mashed up.”

  “I like you right here. Waiting for me.”

  * * *

  Next, Marie turned to her only other hope, Uncle Thibant. Since he couldn’t read, she hired a messenger to tell him her request—pay for her boat passage to Miami or she would come to the village and tell everyone what Tante Josie had done to her. Not only that, Marie would be sure to get her fired from the pink house. “No matter what it takes, I will ruin Tante, tell him that. But tell him I love him.”

  When Uncle Thibant showed up in the capital, he looked older and more frightened than she remembered. It was his first time in Port-au-Prince. She took him out for dinner, and he fidgeted, not eating a bite. “I never knew what she done to you.”

  “You knew, or you didn’t want to know. But I never blamed you, Thibant. I figure you and me are just the weak in the world.”

  “I find a boat through zanmi Jean-Alexi. So they don’t steal from you, he pay at other end.”

  Her heart was pounding so hard at the reality of leaving, she hardly heard him, didn’t care for the details. A good omen—Jean-Alexi would be on the other side for her.

  They hugged to say good-bye. Thibant such a country peasant he insisted on sleeping at the side of the road all night to make sure he caught the first tap tap out of the capital in the morning.

  “You tell Tante this is the money she owes me. This makes us square, okay?”

  Uncle Thibant moved off quickly, and Marie realized with a sting it was to get away from her. No matter that she had been the one wronged. Especially in the country, people tended t
o condemn a person for her misfortune; it was easier that way. Thibant didn’t want proof of who Tante was. Easier to pretend when Marie was out of sight and gone.

  Victim turns into monster, and they don’t want themselves to blame for it, wi?

  Chapter 3

  The horror of the boat trip was forgotten because Marie thought at last her life would change. “Change, life, change,” she chanted under her breath, to the rhythm of the waves, until the other girls thought she was singing, and they hummed along searching for the melody.

  The slosh and thump of water against the boat’s hull, the constant fear of the mosquito whine of a Coast Guard boat coming to turn them back, or the equal fear that the smugglers running the boat would take advantage of the women, all vanished at the first sight of land. From far off the orange halo over the cities of South Florida looked like giant bonfires lit to signal them in. Magic names—Miami, Key West, Delray, Boca Raton—like incantations. No one waited for them, or wanted them. They stole in like thieves. But Uncle Thibant promised Jean-Alexi would be there to pick Marie up.

  Grateful to have someone to take her away from the beach and the danger of police, she didn’t notice until later that he was also chatting up the other women in the group—the thin, young ones—who crowded into the back of the waiting van with her.

  Behind the tatty front seats, the van was pure island, stripped out with nothing more than a filthy metal floor to sit on. At first, the most fussy of the group, those who had saved clean clothes to be worn after the landing, if there was a landing, tried to squat and preserve the impression they had struggled so hard to make—white blouses and dark, printed cotton skirts—of well-behaved convent girls. But the quick driving, the hard turns, knocked them over and into each other. Marie had to brace her legs against the side of the van to avoid landing on top of, or underneath, other bodies. They were like chickens thrown carelessly in a box on the way to the butcher.

  The two men who crowded together on the passenger seat did not introduce themselves, did not follow polite island custom. They sat, squat and muscled, with blue-black skin, and hungry rat eyes. Marie knew such men from Port-au-Prince. They sat and drank till they were filled with lust, then they picked luxuriously, like choosing cuts of meat, and went up the stairs, and the girls didn’t talk for a long time afterward.

  Jean-Alexi didn’t seem to recognize her. Or if he did, he wasn’t letting on. Not that she’d expected a honeymoon meeting. He’d lost weight and put on years—he looked old and tired for twenty-four. His eyes were scattered and hyped. The old cockiness gone.

  The main thing she noticed was the increase of his dreadlocks—now enormous and dusty-cocoa colored, billowing up large like an engorged cockscomb, bundled in half with a tie like a huge crest. His hair frightened and fascinated her. A shantytown rooster. As she reached to touch one braid, unable to guess if it felt stiff and hard as rope or soft as fur, he grabbed her wrist hard.

  “Now, little Erzulie, what kind of trouble you looking for from your Jean-Alexi? Nuh, girl?”

  Marie tried to pull her hand back, but he held the wrist fast as with a band of steel, a deceiving strength from such a banty man, strength hid like a strand of spiderweb.

  He looked back at her, foot tapping, other hand thumping the wheel, his eyes a cracked gold that didn’t seem right. Then he pulled her hand to his lips, stuck out his tongue, and ran it along the inside of her wrist.

  “Hmmm, homegrown sugar, that’s what I miss the most of the island.”

  At this possibility, the other two men looked at her for the first time, appraising.

  “Too bad you’re Thibant’s folk,” Jean-Alexi said, and dropped her hand roughly.

  “Not mine,” one of them said.

  Jean-Alexi looked at him hard. “Way too precious for you, brother.”

  Marie was confused at this behavior after the way he had been before and wondered at the change. Was this fierce new look and behavior some kind of act in front of the others?

  The past gave her a flicker of courage. “We’re hungry,” she said.

  “Well, let’s feed you,” he said. “Don’t you know? Now you’re in the land of plenty?”

  His crazy eyes studied her, but she convinced herself he meant no harm. No love, either. She remembered the candy he gave her that day on the beach—a dried-out, pink piece of taffy too stale to eat.

  * * *

  There was whispered discussion up front while in the back the girls and Marie exchanged wondering looks. A few minutes later, they pulled up to a brightly lit building with glowing neon. Jean-Alexi rolled down his window and talked at length into a speaker box that crackled back answers to his words.

  When he drove around the building, a girl was sitting in the window. Marie guessed the same one he’d been talking to through the box. Her skin was pale and blotchy, her eyes a drained blue, her whole appearance suggesting something uncooked. Greasy, long hair, the color of brass, was held up out of her eyes with black bobby pins. But Jean-Alexi spoke to her as if she were the most enchanting princess, and Marie felt a stab of something—embarrassment for him? Jealousy? Here he was, courting the lowliest of white women.

  “How you doing this night, beautiful lady?”

  “That’ll be fifty-two fifty, please,” she said, expressionless.

  Marie liked that she wasn’t buying his stupid flatteries.

  He handed the window girl a crisp one-hundred-dollar bill with a flourish. “How about I take you out after work sometime, pretty lady? Take you for some real food?”

  Marie thought that maybe the girl only heard words through the earphones, that in person, communication was only one way, outward.

  The girl blinked at the bill and hesitated, then took out a fat highlighter pen and ran a yellow line over it, then held it against the fluorescent light. She signaled back to her manager, who was busy shoveling fries into small paper pockets. He shrugged.

  “I’ll have to get change.”

  Marie looked into the main building where the tables stood under the scrubbing light that killed any shadow. Each detail—a crack in a plastic seat, a man’s stubbled chin—showed in stark relief, like looking at grains of sand under the clear ocean back home. The people at the tables seemed to be moving in slow motion as if they, too, were underwater. Eyes half-closed, they ate their food out of paper and avoided looking at each other’s face. The night was hot yet they were bundled up in long sleeves and jeans and jackets. They did not seem to know the temperature outside, to know where they were. Marie could tell them—she who still had the smell of sour bilgewater on her feet, who’d risked everything to arrive at this very spot. You are in the land of dreams come true. What would they make of her sacrifice? The thought came up inside her, unwanted: What if this place cost more than it gave, what if it was really no better than what had been sacrificed for it?

  The brass-haired girl came back and gingerly counted out the green bills into Jean-Alexi’s outstretched hand, avoiding touching his long, curled fingers. One of the men in the passenger seat turned on the radio, and reggae blasted out. Maybe to convince her that it was like a regular tropical vacation in the van?

  Large, white paper bags were handed from the manager to the girl to Jean-Alexi, who turned and gave them to Marie to pass out.

  “You want extra ketchup with those?” the girl said. Already she belonged to someone else, her brow furrowed as she listened to a new order through her earphones and punched it in on her plastic board.

  “You lose a big, fat chance at happiness, girl,” Jean-Alexi said, when the last tray of drinks crossed over.

  “Would you mind moving your car ahead, sir? So the next customer can pull up?”

  The van stood idling, Jean-Alexi tapping his fingers along the steering wheel as if he were sending out a message in code.

  The girl cupped her hand over the mike and leaned over the counter, her head partway out the window. “I don’t do black fellows, hon.”

  Jean-Alexi stepped d
own hard on the accelerator, jumping over the corner of the curb, and shouted, “Bouzin sal! Dirty bitch!” out the window. The bounce of the van tilted the big, papery cup of soda, which spilled down Marie’s shirt, but already she was smart enough to say nothing.

  * * *

  They parked in a deserted corner of a lot, and the men got out to relieve themselves against a dumpster. They smoked while the girls huddled in the back and ate their fill of hamburgers and fries. The girls trembled and asked Marie if they would be safe, and she assured them yes, even though she had no idea. They threw the paper remains out the window and curled against each other like stray puppies and fell into a desperate sleep.

  * * *

  They, twelve girls old and new, shared a single bedroom in a cinder-block apartment building. One had to step carefully because someone was always either lying asleep or sick. The girls marked their floor space by spreading out sleeping bags, or towels, blankets, pillows. But for all their efforts, the places they fought for still ended up being only the size of a coffin. There was hell to pay, and fists, if anyone touched another’s belongings. The net effect of their jealousy was that the room never got cleaned, the floor on which they slept turned grimy with grit and dust, dead insects and loose hair.

  They were so possessive because they had nothing else, and this was no fanmi, family. Girls disappeared with alarming frequency, to be replaced by others, and so they became aloof and protective and tried not to get too close.

  Maman’s girl, Marie felt too far from God in that filth, and she spent the first week negotiating the permission of each girl to mop her section of the floor on condition that each possession be guarded and then returned to its rightful place. Jean-Alexi, impressed by her leadership abilities, gave her special jobs.

  * * *

  Amélie, a girl already there when their group arrived, had a single possession that made her the envy of all—a pair of red, patent-leather high heels. She and Marie became friends because they discovered they had each lost their maman within a few months of each other, suffering much after that, until finally ending up in the cinder building. Amélie was light skinned, with soft eyes like a deer, and a straight, thin nose. Men stopped in the street and stared at the way she rolled her hips as she walked by. She talked all the time of becoming a model, but first she needed to save money to have her teeth fixed.