Memories are ambushing me. It’s been one year this month.
If I’m going to be honest, I’d say I’m afraid of the notebook. Now I’m crying. I can’t stop crying; my nose is running, and hot tears are splashing down onto the paper, making the ink bleed.
I miss you. I miss you all over again.
Our souls rise from the pages like smoke. My heart hurts. I know that I am the only one left. The house where it all took place is gone. But for one afternoon, at least, we are together again—my mother, my sister, and me.
DECEMBER 2009
WHEN MME FAUSTIN’S ROOSTER STARTED kek-kek-kede-ing in the middle of the night, I groped around in the dark for my phone to check the time and accidentally elbowed Nadine in the face.
“Se pa fòt mwen,” I whispered, even though it was my fault. But what I really meant was “I didn’t do it on purpose.” Without really waking, Nadine rolled over, flipped her pillow to the cool side, and burrowed down like a little chicken in a dust bath.
Now I am awake, thanks to the rooster, so I am writing by the light of my phone. It’s three in the morning on a Monday, and I want to go back to sleep, to get in two more hours before we have to get up and get ready for school, but my eyes are wide open. Nadine’s fingernails are still painted—alternating nails, blue, green, and yellow, the colors of the Brazilian flag. We’re both fans of the Brazilian soccer team. She’d better not forget to take off the polish before going to school, or they’ll suspend her and send her home for the day. Manman was yelling at her yesterday, telling her to take off the nail polish, but Nadou said, “I can’t. I’m all out of acetone,” and Manman said, “Well, didn’t Élie leave a bottle of paint thinner around here someplace, child?” So Nadou will have to use that, instead.
My scalp feels tight and itchy from the ti kouri Nadine did for me yesterday. I hear Manman starting to move around, on the next bed. She’s swatting mosquitoes in the dark as they touch down on her skin, and that’s how I know she’s awake.
I can hear Manman’s knees crack as she sits up in bed and stretches. She unties the kerchief she wraps around her hair at night to keep her hair from frizzing. As she slips out of the bedroom, she picks up the plastic kivèt we pee in at night and goes to empty it in the garden, under the banana tree. It’s still dark out; the stars must still be shining brightly.
Manman has to get up early to start the charcoal fire; it takes a long time to heat up. It’s too cold for her to bathe, but as the charcoal heats up, she’ll splash water on her face and under her arms and between her legs. (Ever since we were little tiny things, Manman has told us that no matter how little water you have, you have to wash your chouchoun twice a day. Any woman who doesn’t wash herself down there twice a day is a nasty salòp.) Then she’ll start cooking. Probably eggs fried with onions and spices for Mme Faustin (with bread and coffee and sliced avocado and fresh orange juice), and then spaghetti with sliced hot dog and sweet coffee for me and Nadine. Manman says she eats after we leave, but I almost never see her eating. She drinks coffee with lots and lots of sugar. She says it keeps her full all day. Okay, I’m going to stop now and go cut onions for Manman and get dressed. There’s no way I’m getting back to sleep.
School was fine today. As Nadou and I walked up to the road, we stopped as usual to buy pink Tampicos and packets of crackers. The crazy man across the street who is there every morning likes to make loud kissing sounds at all the schoolgirls: “Mmm, mmm, cheri, I’ve got some cake! I’ll give you a little bit of cake if you suck me off!” It is disgusting that he says this to us, and even more disgusting when he does it to the primary-school girls who aren’t even young women yet.
“Oh, shut your jaw, and go home, you crazy old bastard!” shouted the lady selling the drinks and snacks, standing up with her hands on her hips. She turned to us as we counted out our gourdes. “Don’t pay any attention to him, cheri’m yo. His head isn’t right.”
“I know,” Nadine told her. “We’re used to him.”
As we walked on, I got this urge to sing. It was such a beautiful day. The sky looked so clear and blue, and the air smelled new. I started to sing a silly children’s song about breadfruit and okra sauce, which is what everyone eats in Jérémie, the place we come from in the countryside.
Lam polo, veritab polo,
Sòs kalalou a pare
Moun Jeremi yo sove!
Woy!
“It seems that moun Jeremi are the only people who are saved, eh, Magda?” teased Nadine.
We had dictées today in class. Dictation is boring.
1. L’île d’Haïti a été découverte dans l’année mille quatre-cents quatre-vingt douze par Christophe Colon, un explorateur italien.
2. Ma mère a trois poulets rouges et une vache noire.
3. «Les mangues sont extraordinaires!» Colette exclama.
I get distracted and wonder about the people in the dictées. I would like to know what the mother is going to do with her three red hens and her single black cow. Are the hens laying eggs? Does the cow give milk? Is she going to make a living now? Now that she’s got the hens and the cow, will she be able to make enough money to send her children to school and buy medicine for them if they get sick? Why is Colette so excited about these particular mangoes?
Sometimes I wonder too much about the people in the dictées and I miss the next one, or I miss something Soeur Altagrace has said. But it’s not a very big problem for me, because I am good at French, and good at Creole, too. Not like Nadou, who mixes up her orthography all the time, writing Creole with French spellings.
It’s nighttime now. Moths flutter stupidly in the light of the kerosene lamp, stalked by the fat, translucent geckos on the wall. I try to concentrate on my history homework but can’t. I’m supposed to be writing an essay about the French colonizers who enslaved our ancestors and how the slaves had a revolution to liberate themselves, and then Jean-Jacques Dessalines said that now we were the masters of this land. But all I can hear is Mme Faustin and her guests, upstairs in the main part of the house. I’ve put on my headphones and turned up the volume on the MP3 player Nadine bought on the street with money her papa sent her. I don’t understand the English words, but I sing along, anyway. I love Beyoncé. (Note: I will have a baby someday and ask Beyoncé to be the godmother.)
Nadine has laid out her school uniform on the bed and is waiting for the electricity to come on so she can iron. She irons her uniform every night, concentrating on each pleat in the skirt.
Even with the music in my ears, the voices upstairs are distracting and I can’t concentrate, even though I love history and writing. I am no good at math, though. It has too many numbers, and they confuse me. Nadou is better at it than I. Sometimes I think that if some doctor could just combine my brain and Nadine’s, we’d be a genius girl—sometimes I think that maybe when we were in the womb, Nadine got all of one kind of intelligence and I got all of another kind of intelligence, and then I remember that we were never in the womb together in the first place.
The loud voices belong to some out-of-town visitors who have come to visit Mme Faustin. Manman is in the upstairs kitchen. Hearing the clatter of china and silverware, I picture Manman, hair hastily braided and sticking out in ten different directions, wearing a mismatched pèpè blouse and skirt, pouring soup into bowls and placing them on a tray, filling a jug with treated ice water. Manman’s back is bothering her again, and Nadine or I will rub it with Vicks and maskrèti oil later tonight. She claims the combination of menthol and castor oil helps relieve the soreness.
On ordinary days, if Mme Faustin goes to bed early, Manman lets me and Nadou slip upstairs and watch a soap opera in the empty living room, as long as we keep the volume low and sit on the floor, not the furniture. Then Manman comes and joins us on the floor, barefoot in her thin white cotton nightdress. The one we’ve been watching lately is about Margarita, who works as a maid in a handsome doctor’s brother’s fiancée’s mother’s house (I think), and the woman is a demon,
a nasty demon, even worse than Mme Faustin, our own demon here in this house. That’s my favorite part of the soaps. No matter how unjust, scheming, and hateful the villains, you know they’re going to get it in the end.
No TV tonight, though. The visitors are talking late with Mme Faustin. No one has explained to us who these people are. They are simply more people to serve.
“Haiti is filthy now,” Mme Faustin is saying. Her voice echoes from the dining room, bouncing like a rubber ball out the window and caroming down into our basement room. “Everything used to be clean. Haitians were classy and respectful when Duvalier was still in control. Even though we were poor, we had dignity! The poor used to be happy. They didn’t think to ask why they didn’t have much. They didn’t know they were poor. They were happy and clean. Now they’re all criminals.”
I can’t say if it is true that the streets used to be clean. I know I’ve never seen them clean. There are always soda bottles and Chiritos packages and little plastic bags, discarded after people drink the treated water from them, collecting and growing dusty along curb-sides and filling up the sewers—but where else are people supposed to throw them when there are no public trash cans? I can’t believe that people never knew they were poor. It’s what we are; it’s what we call ourselves, even. The poor, the unfortunate.
“I’m lucky I got a good one,” Mme Faustin continues. “Yolette is loyal to me. She loves me. She gets me a glass of water before I even say I’m thirsty. Most people can’t trust their servants anymore. They’re the first ones to turn on you, to steal all your jewelry or shoot you in your bed.”
I hear footsteps overhead, Manman’s familiar rhythm as she moves from place to place, laying out the plates. We won’t eat until the guests have eaten and the dishes are cleared, and we won’t sleep until Mme Faustin goes to bed.
I’ll go help Manman in the kitchen. I’ll finish this later. I just have to make sure that Mme Faustin doesn’t see me. She doesn’t like to see me or Nadine doing anything around her house. She says, “I won’t have any restavèk children working in my house!” Apparently it’s okay to make Manman work her fingers to the bone, but if a child under eighteen so much as scrapes a plate, it’s a human rights violation.
It’s past midnight now, and Manman just came slowly down the stairs a few minutes ago and rinsed herself with cold water from the garden spigot. The radio’s on, and we will keep it on after we brush our teeth and climb into bed. Manman’s favorite station plays slow love songs—in French, in Spanish, in English; it doesn’t matter, as long as it’s sentimental and sweet, sweet-sweet-sweet like dous makòs. I am lucky. We’re poor, but there are people who are poorer. I know that I am blessed.
These words are in my handwriting. They were written by my hand, but they were not written by the same girl I am today. That Magdalie, she had a normal life, she had homework, she had a mother and a sister. That Magdalie didn’t know that her school would collapse, floor upon floor upon floor, like a house of cards. I don’t recognize her. I don’t recognize myself. And I hate this; I hate it all. I want my life back. I want to worry about ordinary things like algebra and French dictées again. I want everyone back and whole and alive.
But sooner or later I am pulled back into waking reality. I’m here, without you. The white flecks that came off the journal stick to my skin like ash.
FEBRUARY 2011
ORDINARY LIFE NOW IS LIKE A BAD PARODY of ordinary life before the earthquake—a worse, distorted version of the way things used to be. The other day, Tonton Élie said, “Why don’t we go to Kanaval?” and I said, “Why bother?” There are still floats throwing T-shirts to the crowds, there are still bands, there are still people covered in glitter and sequins, dancing all night through the streets—but now the parades wind through the camp on the Champ de Mars where thousands of people live under tarps. The city government put up barriers all around the camp to make it harder to see from the parade, but everyone knows it’s there. Why do they try to trick us into being joyful? Nothing is the way it’s supposed to be.
Last night, as Tonton Élie was fixing the wiring in an old TV set while listening to commentators talk politics on Radio Kiskeya, I said to him, “Tonton, I don’t know if it will be possible, but I want to be in school again.” My heart was pounding.
Tonton Élie didn’t look up.
“Tonton?”
“Michlove is getting bigger,” he said.
“Okay . . .”
“After she has the baby, I’m going to bring her here. She says she’s always worrying about me here. If she keeps worrying, it’ll make her milk spoil.”
“And so?”
He put down his screwdriver. “And so. I’ll see what I can do, Magdalie.”
Tonton Élie tries to be nice to me, but both of us know that we wouldn’t be living together if we hadn’t been forced to. He does quiet, kind things: he leaves me the bigger plantain, even though he works all day, and he lets me have the mattress, even though Nadou is gone. But he can’t do much for me. He can’t be Manman. He can’t be Nadine. He can’t give me my old life back, and that is what I really want.
He doesn’t even realize it is my birthday today.
What he said to me this morning as he left to see about a job was, “Are you washing laundry today, Magdalie?” He’s always going to see about a job, because cash-for-work is over now, and he can fix only so many old radios. “Use bleach to get my shoelaces white. I can’t go leaving my CV places if I look like a peasant.”
“We don’t have any bleach, Tonton.”
“So get some bleach!”
“Give me money to get a bag of bleach if you want bleach!”
“Degaje w, pitit! Figure it out, Magdalie! Do I have to do everything around here? Every burden of this family is on my back?”
“I’m not your servant! Don’t treat me like some dog, some restavèk in this house!” I screamed.
My anger made him angrier. “If you’re lucky, I’ll send you to be a maid in someone else’s house, and they’ll feed you leftovers, and you’ll sleep on the floor. Is that what you want?”
“What I want? What I want, Tonton? When has it ever mattered what I want?”
Tonton Élie ran his hands over his short hair, as if he was trying to rub away his frustration; he ran his fingers over his chin stubble, which is just beginning to show tiny dots of white. “Magdalie, I know this isn’t fair. But it’s not just you. You understand? Life is hard for everyone.”
He was right, but I didn’t want to be reasonable. “Now you’re saying I’m selfish? You don’t know what’s inside me. You don’t know. You know, they say that only the knife knows what’s in the core of a yam. You don’t know what’s in my heart!”
“Eh, bien, you never tell me a damn thing!”
“Why should I?”
“I should send you away,” Tonton Élie grumbled. “One less thing for me to worry about.” He slammed the door, and our neighbors all pretended not to hear.
That’s how it is in the camp—you pretend you’re not inches away from your neighbors and separated by a thin sliver of wood or a tarp as thin as a sheet. You hear every laugh, every fart, every moan, every fight, and every breath, but you act as if you don’t hear it, and they do the same for you.
Or sometimes they don’t. People are nosy. Jilène who does pedicures said, “Oh-oh, Magdalie, are you fighting with your uncle again?”
I said, “It’s not your business.” Oh, I’ve become so mouthy, so nasty these days.
Jilène shook her head and said, “There are children on the street because they don’t have anybody. Anybody at all. Thank Jesus you don’t have to sell your body on the street, child. Thank Jesus you’re not dying of hunger.”
That is how I am celebrating my birthday: a fight with Tonton Élie and a lecture from Jilène. When Manman was alive, even though she never had money for cake, she would boil sweet potatoes in milk with sugar and cinnamon for our birthdays. Now there’s none of that. All I want is
for Nadine to call. She is the only one who matters.
The thing I really want to tell Nadine, if she remembers my birthday, is “The water buckets are so much heavier since you left,” but I don’t know if that would make sense to her, and I don’t know why that’s the thing I want to say. “The buckets are heavier. The roads are longer. The dust is dustier. The burned rice is harder to scrub off the bottom of the pot. Everything has changed since you left.”
Today in front of me in the water line is a pregnant girl around my age. I’ve never seen her before. She’s got cinnamon skin and a too-prominent breastbone that makes me think of a tiny bird. She looks as if any little thing could crush her. Her belly is huge, so huge on her skin and bones.
“Bonjou,” she says.
“Bonjou,” I reply in greeting.
“Mezanmi, the sun is hot!”
“The sun is always hot,” I reply, because it’s the expected reply.
The skinny pregnant girl smiles at me, friendly and eager. “I’m Safira. Louis Safira.”
“I’m Magdalie.”
“I just came here,” she explains. “I’m staying with my auntie.”
“Okay,” I reply.
She keeps on smiling at me, even though I don’t want to talk. “Who do you live with?”
“My uncle.”
“It’s not the best, no? My auntie is nice enough, but I’m not really used to her. If I could still stay with my mama, I would,” Safira chatters. “But it’s not possible. Like they say, ‘When you’ve got no mother, you nurse from your grandma!’” She giggles.
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