“Mmm,” I reply. She must be bored or lonely to be talking to someone with a face like mine, I think, because I know I look angry.
“She doesn’t mistreat me or anything, though. She doesn’t beat me or order me around. And she cooks really well. Even if all she’s got is a chicken neck and a couple of half-rotten sweet plantains, she can make enough for five people! She’s good!”
“That’s nice.”
“You know they always say, ‘Bay piti pa chich.’ Giving just a little isn’t being stingy. We’re all doing what we can.”
“You speak in proverbs, like an old woman.”
Safira laughs. “There is wisdom in the mouths of the old.”
“You’re still doing it!” I start laughing, too. “Today’s my birthday,” I say suddenly. “I’m seventeen today.”
“Really?” Safira’s eyes widen. “Bonne fête!” She says this French “Happy Birthday” ridiculously. Then she starts singing, loudly: “Bon anniversaire, nos vœux les plus sinceres!”
“Stop it, stop it! Don’t do that, please!”
“Why not?”
“It’s embarrassing!”
She grins, a wide, trusting smile, with the skin stretched over all the bones in her face. “It’s your birthday! Are you having a party?”
“No.”
“Are you having cake?”
“No. Who’s going to buy me a cake?”
“So at least you need someone to sing for you.”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“Of course it matters! Another year on earth!”
Her words echo through all the emptiness inside me. I feel so sad, I can hardly speak.
“When will you come to my house?” Safira asks.
“What?”
“You should come to my house. It’s an ugly little house, but you’re my friend, aren’t you?”
“I don’t go out very much . . . ,” I mumble.
Safira looks at me in a funny way. I think her expression might hold pity, but I don’t know why she should pity me. “Well, you know, you’re welcome, whenever. You’re my friend.”
“Okay.”
Finally Safira finishes filling her water bucket and balances it on her head with one hand. “Bye-bye, Magdalie! And happy birthday, cheri!”
“Bye.”
What is her story? I begin to imagine. Some nice-looking guy on the street with a sweet smile called her doudou, and she thought the endearment meant he loved her. He promised her affection, he promised he’d take care of her, and he promised she’d never be hungry again. It felt like love. But when she got pregnant, he turned his back on her and disappeared. It happens all the time. Manman knew that. That’s why she warned me and Nadou all the time.
I’ve got five gourdes in my pocket, and on the way home I buy a little bag of fried sweet potato from stout Grimèl, who sells good fritay off a wide metal tray on the corner. Everyone calls her Grimèl because that’s her color, like coffee with a little Carnation milk stirred into it; I have no idea what her real name is. She has a whole band of children, including a little boy called Bouboul because he’s so round; I have no idea what his real name is, either.
“How are you, cheri?” Grimèl asks me. “How are all your people?”
“Everyone’s fine, wi,” I tell her, because sometimes it’s easier to give short answers. “And your people?”
“Oh, you know. Saïka had a cold, but she’s better now, thanks to God. Besides that, everyone’s still here.”
I stuff the sweet potato into my mouth quickly before I get home, even though it burns my tongue, because I don’t want Élie to know I’m eating food without sharing. It’s my birthday present to myself.
By the time I get home, there’s a red dent across my palm from the heavy water bucket. I stretch my fingers, open and close my hand. Tonton Élie is back. He is out working behind the tent; I can tell by the fumes of paint thinner wafting in the afternoon heat. They sting my eyes and make the world shimmer.
“Magda, come here so I can talk to you,” he calls. His voice has that funny sound in it, the sound of bad news he’s trying to cover up.
“Wi, Tonton.”
“Look, Magdalie,” he says, clearing his throat. “You know Michlove. I have to start thinking about the baby. I’ve got to bring her to Port-au-Prince after she delivers; I don’t want the baby growing up in the provinces.”
I nod.
“So that’s something we need to discuss. Michlove is my responsibility, right? She’s my priority.”
I nod again. My chest feels tight, and I’m waiting for the bad news.
“I won’t have money for your school, Magdalie. I just won’t have the cash.”
“Okay,” I say.
“There’s no work in this country.”
“I know.”
“You’re angry.”
“No.”
“You’re disappointed.”
I don’t have anything else to say. I can’t argue. There is nothing to argue about. I don’t have the right to feel any of those things. There is no money. I know there is no money.
I go inside the tent and lie down on the bed, my face in the pillow. The pillow smells like paint thinner. No school. No school.
I am alone, I am alone, I am alone. If I fall, there will be no one to catch me. I am responsible for myself. I have to be an adult now. No more birthdays. I can’t think about childish things. My old life feels like a film I saw while half asleep. Memories splash through my mind, but they aren’t my life anymore: buying new notebooks for school every year and covering them with plastic so they wouldn’t get dirty or ripped. Chasing Nadine around Mme Faustin’s muddy backyard, through the banana leaves and the mango trees, threatening to poke her with my new pencil. Washing my school uniform every afternoon, laying my socks out flat in the sun so they’d be dry before the next morning. I am alone. It is only now, in Manman’s absence, that the sacrifices she made, every single day, have become visible to me. And every time another layer of her quiet sacrifice is peeled away, I miss her all over again. The loss makes me feel at once so heavy and so empty.
It is late now. My birthday is over, and Nadine never called.
I WROTE A LETTER TO MANMAN TODAY. SHE never knew how to read and write when she was alive, but I don’t think that matters anymore. I think that Manman will understand everything now—there’s no such thing as illiteracy after you die, only understanding. I think the words will go to her—not even the words themselves, but what the words mean. But I wrote it in Creole, anyway, not in French, because if I were talking to her, I would have done it in Creole. I worry that I’m forgetting her. I can still see her face, but it’s getting harder to remember her voice. Sometimes I panic, because she is nowhere, because I don’t know where she is, because she doesn’t exist in the world. But sometimes Manman is everywhere. Manman is in the sharp thwack, thwack, thwack of the wooden mortar pounding spices, and in the softer, stickier, deeper thwack, thwack, thwack of breadfruit wedges getting beaten into doughy yellow tonmtonm. She is in the drumbeats that echo through the twisting, slippery corridors of the bidonvilles and in the blare of horns in the rara parades drifting unseen from downtown during Kanaval. She is in the smell of vanilla essence and in the sound of the rain ricocheting off the tarp and sheet metal at dusk.
Manman cheri, I love you so much. I regret that I didn’t tell you that every day. I want you to know that I am doing okay. I am sad that you never knew that Nadine and I survived. It hurts me, because I know that your last thoughts must have been of us. Please don’t be scared anymore—don’t be scared for us. We are getting by. Nadine is in America. She doesn’t call very much, but don’t worry, I won’t let her go. Even if she’s far away. She says she’ll send for me soon. I’ll take care of her now because you didn’t get to finish taking care of her. I miss you. Now that you’re gone, I know what you meant to me. I want to thank you, because even though you never got to finish raising me, if I am a decent and good person
today, if I am educated today, it is because of you. I love you. And I miss you. I LOVE YOU. I’m sad, I’m angry, I’m crying. I’m crying so much, I can’t see these words anymore. I love you. Magda
Then I burned the letter. It felt private and sacred; I didn’t want anyone to see it. The paper glowed like bright orange lace as the smoke rose toward heaven, and as the paper was transformed into soft wisps of gray, I closed my eyes and imagined the words finding Manman and uniting with her soul in an unseen place. I pressed my fingertips into the cool ashes and felt them crumble like velvet dust, then wiped my fingers across my forehead and up and down my arms.
I wrote a letter to Nadine, too. Which isn’t worth looking at again. It is so filled with shapeless anger that I’m ashamed to think of it. I ripped it up and threw it into one of the portable toilets. But I remember how it ends.
I will come to you. I will come to Miami. Somehow I will. You have forgotten me, Nadou, but I won’t forget you.
MARCH 2011
“WE CAN’T STAY IN THIS CAMP,” TONTON Élie declares suddenly this morning as he spits his toothpaste into the rivulet of dirty water, as brown and cloudy as stale coffee, running down the sidewalk outside our tent.
“Tonton?” I blow on the charcoal, and it glows red; I’m scrambling an egg for us to share.
He dries his face on a towel. “Have you heard, Magda? Ti Zwit died last night.”
“Oh! Poor old man! Like that? Dying without being sick?”
“They say it was cholera.” Tonton Élie whistles softly, sucking between his teeth. “This cholera! Where did this germ come from? How can it live in this heat of this camp when everyone else is being grilled alive under the sun?”
“I don’t know, Tonton. Did he die in the camp?”
“They took him to the clinic. No one wanted to touch him; they were afraid. He was covered in shit, shit everywhere, soaking him like water. He died by the time they got to the clinic.”
“Poor old man . . . ,” I murmur again.
After Tonton Élie leaves, I take out my old journal and flip to the end. How could Ti Zwit live so long and then die from some microbe the country of Haiti had never seen before? My tonton is right—we’ve got to get out of this camp. But I have to go farther. I’m not staying in the camp, or in Port-au-Prince, or in this country. I’m going to Miami as soon as I can.
WAYS TO MAKE MONEY
— sell things (water?)
— clean houses
— rich boyfriend
That last idea, “rich boyfriend,” is a joke. There are plenty of girls who do it, some even as young as me. But I never would. Manman would kill me if I did that. She’d say it’s really no different from being a whore. Even worse, maybe he wouldn’t be rich at all, just some smooth guy who spins sweet words, and I’d end up pregnant and skinny like Safira.
Maybe I could clean someone’s house, but I don’t want to, not yet. I don’t want to be humiliated like that. I don’t want to end up like Manman. But everyone is trying to get those jobs, because even a humiliating job is better than starving.
I can’t sell anything in the public markets because I don’t have the money to rent a spot. Even a tiny, crowded, muddy spot, squatting on a low chair in the sun. And all those ladies have been there forever; they all know one another; they all helped each other get their spots there. I couldn’t just show up with a pile of coconuts or a stack of hot peppers and start selling them.
I could sell things on the street. But it has to be something easy, so Tonton Élie won’t know about it. I don’t have the money to make candies or snacks like boiled breadfruit nuts, and even if I did, Tonton Élie would see that I was doing it. That leaves selling treated water, or maybe little packets of chewing gum. Everybody needs water; nobody needs chewing gum. I should sell water. Even though it is so, so heavy . . . But I’ll need help getting started.
After I wash all the dishes and scrape the burned remains of last night’s rice out of the cooking pot, I sprinkle a little kerosene on the ground to keep the flies away, and I padlock the plywood door to the tent. I’ve shined my shoes and put on one of Nadou’s old blouses—shiny, light purple with black stripes. It’s too loose on me, but I don’t have time to bring in the seams.
Jimmy’s house is visible from the camp, a two-story concrete building that rises out of the cité—in the cité but maybe not part of it. It only got a few cracks in the earthquake. Some people are luckier than others. The house has its own gate and a water reservoir in the back; it’s painted pale pink and white, like a frosted cake. Jimmy’s family lives well on the money his papa sends from America.
I rap on the metal gate with a rock I’ve picked up from the road. After a moment, an eye peeks through the peephole. It’s Farah, one of Jimmy’s little sisters, who must be around twelve. Her cheeks are round and bright.
“Hi, Magdalie,” she says. “Come on in.”
“How are you, ti chou?” I ask, kissing her fat cheek.
“Not too bad.”
“Is Jimmy here?”
“Yeah, he’s studying upstairs. Jim-my!”
The lakou looks the way poor people’s yards do when they suddenly make some money: cluttered. There is Jimmy’s regular car, a beige SUV that’s a few years old, and two other cars in the process of being repaired. One has no seats, and one has no wheels. There are a couple of goats tethered in a corner and countless chickens. A big generator sits next to the house, but it isn’t running. Scattered toys—a bright plastic tricycle, a baby doll with blue marker all over its face, and a bunch of stuffed animals—fill the floor of the entryway. The back of the house is still unpainted, and there’s a big pile of gravel with a shovel stuck in it on the ground. Tonton Élie says that people do such things all the time so they can claim their houses are “unfinished” and they don’t have to pay any taxes to the state. I don’t know if that’s true or not. Maybe they just don’t have the money to finish yet.
I sit on the plastic chair in front of the flat-screen TV and wait for Jimmy to come down. There’s a stack of bootleg DVDs on the shiny tiled floor—Haitian comedies with Tonton Bicha and Bòs Djo, and American action movies with Steven Seagal and Arnold Schwarzenegger, and some porn.
Jimmy bounces down the stairs, two at a time. “Hey, Magda!” he announces, beaming. He’s clutching a psychology textbook in his hand and pulling headphones out of his ears. As he leans in to kiss me on the cheek, I catch a strong whiff of cologne. “How are you? How is everyone?”
“Oh, you know.” I smile vaguely. “Fighting against this hard life. And you?”
“Comme si, comme ça. Do you hear from Nadine?”
“Sometimes,” I say. I don’t want to tell him more than that. I don’t even want to admit it to myself, to form the words, to say: I do not know if Nadou is who I thought she was. “I think she’s doing well.”
“Can I get you something to drink?”
“A little water, please.”
“You don’t want a Couronne? A Sprite?”
“Okay—Sprite.”
“Beautiful.” Jimmy grins and heads toward the kitchen. He returns with a whole bottle of cold Sprite and a glass.
“So, Magda, how have you been? What are you doing with yourself?”
I cough. Fear lodges in my throat like a lump of poorly pounded tonmtonm. Then the words spill out in a torrent. “Well, Jimmy . . . I’m not really doing anything. Uh . . . I guess that’s why I’ve come here today. My tonton makes a little money sometimes, but it’s nothing stable. It’s not stable—you understand?” I take a sip of my Sprite, but the cold bubbles make me cough. “He says he can’t pay for school for me. And I need to go meet Nadou in Miami, and I don’t have the money for the ticket yet. And the way things are going, I’m never going to get the money.”
Jimmy nods, his brow furrowed in concern. He leans toward me. I take a deep breath.
“So I need some kind of activity to . . . to make money. You understand? But . . . but I don�
�t even have the money to start.”
Jimmy nods again and cracks his knuckles. His hands are big and smooth.
“What kind of activity were you thinking of, Magdalie?”
“I could sell bags of treated water?” This comes out as a question instead of a statement. “It wouldn’t be that expensive to start. And I need something that my tonton wouldn’t know about. I just . . . I don’t want him to know if I’ve got my own money.”
“Do you have a cooler?”
“Not yet, no.”
“Okay. We’ve got an old Igloo out back. I could lend it to you. You’ll have to wash it out well with bleach, though.”
“Oh, that’s fine! That’s perfect!”
“And this.” Jimmy reaches into the pocket of his loose blue jeans and pulls out his wallet. He opens it and hands me three 250-gourde bills. “You’re going to need to buy the water in bulk.”
I feel as if someone has opened a door and flooded my life with light. The money is crisp and clean-smelling. I rub it between my fingers. “This is so kind of you, Jimmy. Thank you, infinitely.”
“This isn’t a gift, Magda,” he warns. “You’ll pay me back when you can. But it shouldn’t take that long.”
“Of course, of course. Still, thank you infinitely! You won’t be sorry.”
THE NEXT DAY I WAIT FOR TONTON ÉLIE TO leave, but before I can leave myself, Safira, the skinny pregnant girl with cinnamon skin from the water line, appears at our door.
“Bonswa, Magdalie! Do you remember me? I made some mayi moulen with sòs pwa,” she says. She is friendly, talkative as a mockingbird. “You want to eat?”
I want to leave, but I can’t be rude.
She is so skinny that I feel guilty taking anything from her, but I don’t want to embarrass her, so I take the small covered bowl. “Thanks. You can come in.”
“I thought maybe you wouldn’t remember me,” Safira says brightly.
“I remember you,” I say. She doesn’t know how few people I speak to these days; my voice has rusted. Her desperate enthusiasm frightens me, that she wants so much to be friends.
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