Because We Are: A Novel of Haiti

by Ted Oswald

  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.

  PART II

  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.

  - Alfred Lord Tennyson, Ulysses

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

  -St. Francis of Assisi

  AFTERSHOCKS

  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.

  He had a gold watch on his wrist, in pristine condition while its wearer was anything but. She reached at it with her working arm, undoing its clasp and slipping it off with some resistance offered by the rigid, lifeless fingers.

  Libète laid the watch carefully on a nearby cement block and looked at it intently.

  She then picked up a clump of broken cement the size of a softball, eyed her would-be killer’s hand, and began screaming as she crushed his remains into oblivion.

  Libète digs through the surface layer of dirt, a pale brown color, looking over her shoulder every few seconds at the tents in the distance to ensure no eyes pry into her business. Her tool is a hardened shard of ceramic pottery, shaped like a triangle. She turns it like a drill, tearing up the soil until it permits her to sift through it with her bare hands.

  Was it really this deep? she wonders, worried her memory may be faulty and that what she seeks may not be where she left it.

  Her searching hand finally catches on its familiar rounded rim and she sighs in relief. She digs carefully, like an archaeologist unearthing a lost treasure, replacing the ceramic in her black bag. She pulls another plastic bag from the ground, this one protecting a sealed metal jar. She unscrews the top, careful to check for spies once more, and looks inside the container.

  When Libète had left her tent in Twa Bebe that morning, she began walking resolutely toward the water station with her faithful jerry can and dangling plastic bag.

  The camp was not too far from Bwa Nèf, erected on open land near the southeastern edge of Project Drouillard. If viewed from above, the layout of the camp’s several hundred tents resembled a white athletic sock, organized for the most part into nearly straight rows with a larger improvised road that ran along the top of the foot, severing the ankle from the heel. The water station was toward the toe.

  She greeted neighbors only if they spoke to her first. They were the unfortunate souls to have woken up in this circle of hell, one even lower than Cité Soleil. But the slums, for all their misery, had not been as rocked by the quake as other parts of Port-au-Prince. The worst damage occurred where buildings were constructed several st
ories tall. When the earth began shaking, these pancaked, floor collapsing on floor collapsing on floor, their victims caught between. Others’ lives were cut short by falling concrete and mortar. Shanties, with their metal sheet roofs and improvised building materials, maimed and injured more than killed.

  — Bonjou, my queen. Libète greeted the Queen of Spain, banished like her to this unlikely place.

  — Bonjou, my little subject, she sighed. The woman’s gaze lazily fixed upon a small naked child crying in the dirt across the way.

  The Queen was situated in front of her tent on a mat shaded by a hanging tarp. She did not look well. Her matchstick legs were curled up to her chest and her eyes glazed over. Her easy and joyful air had evaporated with the passing of her fellow monarchs. The Queen of England departed in the days after the quake (due to infection or dehydration, Libète couldn’t remember which) while the Queen of France was found dead in her tent one morning in a smaller camp on the west side of Bwa Nèf, probably from her epilepsy.

  — I see you are selling bananas today, Libète observed.

  — I am.

  — I have a small problem.

  — Oh?

  — You see, my stomach cries out like that unhappy baby you watch across the way. But I can’t feed it.

  — Ah. I understand, my subject. I can help you with this thing. She picked a not-yet-ripened banana from her bunch and handed it to Libète. A queen must provide for her subjects, no?

  Libète gave a deep bow, depositing the banana in her plastic bag.

  — I shall eat it later, away from others. The old woman waved her away with a faint smile.

  Picking up her jerry can again, Libète continued on toward the water station. There was a queue at the bloated water bladder, a square of dense rubber that when filled looked like a five-foot tall pillow ready to burst and spit feathers everywhere. Tanker trucks, bearing the mark of a crimson cross and the words “Croix Rouge Haitienne,” came each day to refill them. This was not dlo potab, or potable water, and was used by camp residents for washing and bathing. To drink, camp residents relied on aquatabs, small chlorine tablets that dissolved in water. These cost money though, and neither the truck with the red cross nor the other aid organizations were handing them out anymore. So Libète, like many others, drank the contaminated water.