“Who did you say you live with?” Safira asks.
“My tonton,” I say.
“Just your uncle?”
“Yes.” I don’t say anything more than that.
“My manman sent me here to stay with my auntie when she figured out I was pregnant,” she says. “She thought I’d get aid if I was in the camp. So I stay with my auntie and her two little boys. We’re on the other side, near the entrance. I watch the boys for her. They’re naughty! But they go to preschool during the day.”
“Where were you before?”
“Belekou, in Cité Soleil.”
Cité Soleil, the sprawling shantytown down by the sea in Port-au-Prince. Mme Faustin used to say the gangsters boiled people alive and ate them there, but Manman said it wasn’t true, that the people there were simply very poor, just like us, or even poorer. “Where’s your auntie right now?” I ask.
“She goes to buy vegetables during the week in Cabaret, to sell at the market downtown. So I take care of the little boys and bathe them and walk them to school.”
“So you’re alone most of the time?”
She smiles. “I always have God.”
I don’t know what else to say. “Let me beep you,” I finally say. “Then you’ll have my number in your phone.”
Safira grins, revealing her chipped front tooth. “Okay! Where do you go to the market?”
“Sometimes in Delmas 32, sometimes downtown.”
“If you want to walk to 32 together sometime . . .”
“Sure.”
“That’s good! I get so bored walking alone, you know.”
I don’t want to be bound to her, but I find myself confessing my secret, as though, if I don’t speak these words aloud to someone, I won’t know if anything is real.
“Safira?”
“Yeah?”
“I’m going to Miami. I’m going to go live with my sister in Miami.”
“Oh, Magdalie! When?”
“Not quite yet. My sister is going to get me a visa, and then I’m going to buy a ticket.”
Safira’s eyebrows jump. “You have money?”
“Not yet. I mean, that’s what I’m working on right now. I’m going to do a little commerce. My cousin’s friend Jimmy gave me a little help. I’m going to sell water.”
“Around here?”
“No! No, and don’t say anything. I don’t want my uncle to find out. Please don’t tell anybody. I’ll go downtown.”
Safira stops smiling.
“What about it?”
She shakes her head slowly. “You know it’s not safe.”
“Ah, nothing is safe. Let me tell you, my friend. You can be hiding in your house, minding your own business, and the roof can collapse and crush you flat. We don’t control any of it.”
“That doesn’t mean you have to look for problems, Magdalie.”
I smile. “I’ll be fine. And I’m not doing it forever. Just until I get enough money for the plane ticket.”
Safira looks as if she has something more to say, but she stops herself, then says quietly, “Okay. Well, say hi to all your people from me!” And she leaves, lightly, despite the swell of her belly. Her narrow back curves inward with the weight.
I twist an old T-shirt into a flat, round roll and balance it on the top of my head. Then I set the old red Igloo cooler on top of it. When I steady it with one hand, it doesn’t feel as heavy as I had expected. The Igloo is filled with a hundred little plastic bags of Alaska drinking water, packed with ice and salt and wrapped in burlap to keep them cold.
“Bwe dlo, bwe dlo, bwe dlo!” I call. “Drink water, drink water, drink water!” I force my voice to the front of my mouth. It comes out nasal, but it carries far. Still, I sound like a child. I never sound like a child in my own head, but when I hear my voice amid the cacophony of downtown Port-au-Prince’s streets and all the other merchants and noises there, it is high and startled, like a little girl’s.
I work around the Grand-Rue, careful to stay far from the blocks where people I know might be working or shopping. The crowds are so thick here that no one notices me. I haven’t sold a single bag of water. Everyone’s too busy looking out for themselves—keeping an eye out for thieves, watching for taptaps and old American school buses barreling down the road or turning around on streets that are too narrow for them, pushing their way onto the sidewalks and crushing the machanns’ wares. People don’t dawdle here. They move as quickly as they can, making sure not to trip over discarded chunks of rubble or kick a skinny street dog or slosh through a rotten pile of garbage. Mango peels, orange peels, Styrofoam oozing milky gray. It is exhausting to pay attention to so many things—to watch your feet and the people around you at the same time. Who would pay attention to another girl selling water?
In my history book, in school—school!—I saw photos of the Grand-Rue as it once was. The photos were black-and-white. The Grand-Rue was a beautiful and civilized place—stately arched doorways and brick facades, wooden balconies overlooking the uncrowded street. The men wore suits and hats, the women wore dresses, and everyone looked clean and unafraid. A ghost image. I try to reconcile it with the commotion around me—the jostling, the garbage, the noise and dust. So many of those buildings have crumbled, burying forever beneath them the Digicel guys selling phone cards, the machann selling plastic sandals or bottles of molasses or hair extensions, the children walking home from school. Vines spring up from the dust—even squash vines and other things you can eat—and wrap themselves around the ruins, in the middle of the city, as though the island were trying to reclaim itself.
I adjust my Igloo on top of my head and continue my promenade. “Bwe dlo, bwe dlo, bwe dlooo!” I call. I cannot be shy anymore. There was a time I would have been too shy to take to the streets calling out, but now I am not. Now I am too grown-up to be timid.
“Dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo, dlo!”
“Dlo!” someone calls, a man in a Boston Celtics jersey. I take my Igloo down and hand him three bags of water. The water is so cold, it makes my fingers ache. The man hands me a ten-gourde note, soft, sweaty, and wrinkled with age.
“I don’t have any change, msyè,” I apologize.
He glares, dumps the water bags back into my cooler, and snatches his money back, sucking his teeth at me. I am an idiot. I should have had a few coins, enough to make change, enough to get started. I want to cry. I want to call after him, “Please, msyè, we can make change somewhere, anywhere . . .” But there are so many water vendors on the street, he’s already moved on and bought it from someone else.
The really fearless kids weave in and out of traffic with their buckets of water bags on their heads or in their arms. They stand at the doors of taptaps and the backs of pickup trucks as the passengers get on, and they sell a lot of water that way. They are bold and deft, confident that they won’t get run over. I stand on the sidewalk, my back to a wall that smells of pee, and pray. Dear God, give me the courage to do what they do. But I can’t. My feet are glued to the sidewalk. I can’t will myself to walk like Moses into that traffic.
The sun bears down on me, so hot, it prickles. My stomach is so empty, it’s gnawing on itself; my mouth waters, and I don’t know whether I feel hungry or nauseated. The Igloo is heavy, and I can feel myself growing shorter as the bones of my neck are pressed together. I put the cooler down at my feet.
A pair of giggling schoolgirls approach, arm in arm, wearing the yellow-black-and-red plaid uniform of Collège Marie-Jeanne. I wonder if they are sisters or just friends.
“Dlo!” calls the shorter one. My arms burn as I lift up my Igloo and hurry toward them. She presses a five-gourde coin into my hand, and they tear the plastic bags open with their front teeth and resume their gossip.
They don’t see me. My shins are skinny and gray with dust and dried mud, and the hem of my skirt is ragged. They can’t see me. A street child, uneducated, dirty and alone, as invisible as a little ghost. I was just like you, I want to tell them. Someday I
will be like you again.
My mouth is dry, and I’m dizzy. One of the taptaps is playing Barikad from a speaker so big, the sound makes my teeth rattle. I take one of my own bags of water from the cooler and suck half of it down. It is so wonderfully cold that I cough from the chill. The rest I squirt over my hair; it dribbles down my forehead and my back.
A dented SUV creaks down the street, bouncing through a pothole and spraying me with thin mud. As the car slows, I hoist my Igloo and call, “Dlo!” I hear the door locks click, as if the driver is double-checking that she is protected and safe.
As one tinted window descends, I panic. I know those eyes, even before the window reveals the sour mouth. I want to run away. I can’t bear for her to see me like this, with no dignity left, as low and as worthless as she always believed me to be.
“Magdalie?” says Mme Faustin.
I swallow. “Wi, madanm.”
“What are you doing here?” It’s the voice she used once when I was a little girl and she caught me staring too long at the china figurines on top of the television. A low, punishing voice that says, You don’t belong here.
“Would you like to buy some water, madanm?”
“That water? Child, have you never heard of cholera?”
“No, this is good water. Potable water. I drink it, and I never get sick.”
“You people never know the first thing about hygiene. What are you doing, Magdalie, selling water like some urchin on the street?”
“I . . . um . . . ,” I stammer.
“Yolette was a good, clean woman who did honest work, and look what you’re doing, standing in the mud.” She looks disgusted, her lips curling as if she has just smelled something rotten.
I want to hammer her fat face with my fists, but I can’t even make a sound, let alone move.
A kamyonèt driver starts honking and cursing, and the guy selling batteries smacks the side of Mme Faustin’s car three times with his open palm. “Are you buying or not? Get outta the way! Don’t block the street! Damn!”
She jumps. The tinted window zips up, and she pulls away into traffic without another word, before I have the chance to tell her she’s wrong about everything.
By four in the afternoon the city is a grayish haze, and I’ve made seventy-five gourdes. It’s not a lot, but it is something. It’s only my first day. I have plenty of water left to sell. I take my kerchief out and wipe my forehead, and it comes away black with soot. I feel the weight of the coins and wadded-up bills in the pockets of my skirt and hidden in my bra. The weight of promise.
But Mme Faustin’s words stick like a fishbone in my throat. What would Manman think now, if she could see me? This is not what she’d hoped for for me. But she had never hoped to die like she did, either.
Even though dusk is still hours away, I’ve got to get home before Tonton Élie grows suspicious. As I sit in unmoving traffic, in the taptap that goes down Grand-Rue toward Kalfou Aviyasyon, I calculate my profits: five gourdes for this ride, then ten gourdes for another to take me up Delmas. That leaves me with sixty gourdes. Should I buy some fried breadfruit for five gourdes? I am so hungry that my fingertips feel icy, despite the heat. But if I buy a snack, that’s less money in my hands . . . And I still need to pay Jimmy back.
I’m leaning my head against the metal grate at the front of the taptap with my eyes closed when a hand clutches my knee and shakes it roughly. “Hey, little girl! Ti fi!” Two young men with sweatshirts wrapped around their faces stand at the entrance to the taptap, their eyes hard and blazing. Two small silver guns glint in their hands.
No one says anything; no one fights, because it’s more important to live. All the passengers resign themselves; they know what this means, and they take out their purses and their wallets and remove their earrings. The two young men work quickly, snatching the men’s wallets, reaching into the women’s purses and taking their money, their cell phones, pulling off any jewelry that looks as if it might be valuable. They reach into people’s pockets and into women’s bras and into the backs of their panties, where some women hide their money. The thief’s hand feels small and young as it digs into my bra and finds my crumpled money. He gives my breast a squeeze. I close my eyes and grit my teeth and do not gasp. Then they step off the back of the taptap, back into the traffic, and I watch as all my profits disappear with them.
No one in the taptap says anything for a moment. Finally one man says, “Tèt chaje. What can you do?” A woman responds, “Look at this country,” and tsks. I don’t say anything. I realize I’m shaking. “Oh, pòdyab, poor little thing, she’s trembling!” says a lady next to me. She has a kind voice with a lisp. She strokes my hair as if I were a frightened child. “You’ll be okay,” she says. “Don’t be scared. It’s over now.”
But I’m not shaking because I’m scared. I’m shaking because I’m furious.
TONIGHT I LIE ON MY BED, REPLAYING WHAT happened and trying to figure out how I will ever get the money to pay Jimmy back. Tonton Élie brings home some spaghetti and tells me to fry it up, but I just turn over and stare at the wall. I smash a mosquito against my thigh, and my palm comes away smeared with bright red blood.
“Did you hear me, Magdalie? I told you to make dinner. Do I have to do everything around here?” I shut my eyes, as though that could keep out the meanness in Tonton Élie’s words. “You just lie around here all day, doing nothing. What a lazy child Yolette raised!”
I think of the hard young eyes of the thieves on the taptap. I recognize their fury, because it is my fury, too. If you get hungry enough, poor enough, desperate enough, you can do anything. Even steal. Even kill.
I flip over and glare at my uncle, as if daring him to challenge me.
“Lazy! Useless!” Tonton Élie spits the words. Then he stops, and a strange look comes over his face. He is suddenly old and tired. He drops the package of dry spaghetti on the bed and stalks from the tent.
I can never tell him what I tried to do today, because all he’ll see is the money I lost. He doesn’t appreciate me; he can’t appreciate me. But it’s not Manman’s fault. How dare he say this is Manman’s fault? How dare he speak her name that way! Hot tears of rage spill down my face. We are all turning against one another in this country, where the hungry steal from the hungry, the poor persecute the poor. We, the poor, on the streets, visible and exposed, with no walls or windshields to keep us safe. Everyone devours us, including and most of all ourselves.
APRIL 2011
THE NEW PRESIDENT SAYS HE’LL PROVIDE free primary school to every child in Haiti, but I’ll believe it when I see it. Last night, fireworks exploded all over the Champ de Mars, but where we were, in the camp, we couldn’t see them. We could only hear the thunder as it echoed throughout the bowl-shaped mountains of Port-au-Prince, and it sounded like war. I dropped to the floor in panic. Tonton Élie just said, “Mezanmi, Magda, why do you exaggerate everything!?”
I’ve come up with a new idea for how to make money, but it is too horrible to speak, too horrible to admit to myself, because it means I can fall no lower.
The manager of our camp is a guy named Félix Télémaque. Like most leaders, he got there because he’s the one who talks the best. He knows how to tell the blans, the foreigners from the aid organizations, the sorts of things they like to hear, about hope and sustainability and making a better Haiti for himself and his countrymen. He speaks good French and decent English, and his baseball cap still has the sticker under the brim, like in rap videos. Tonton Élie says privately that he’s a djolè, a bigmouth know-it-all, and a schemer. Félix is broad and muscled and a little fat. Tonton Élie says that anyone who’s that fat who lives in the camp must be “drinking cool water from a nice, fresh source.” Félix’s belly is big, stretching out his T-shirt, and people like to tease him and say, “Oh, how many months along are you?” But they tease him in the careful, grinning way you tease people more powerful than you.
The international organization gives Félix money to
pay designated people to clean the latrines, because we are supposed to be responsible for them and “have a sense of ownership.” That’s what Félix told everyone who went to his meeting last week. I didn’t go, because kids don’t go to those meetings. It was almost all men, because the women in the camp were either out selling things on the streets or washing clothes or cooking. But everyone else hears about it. People talk.
It’s a joke that we should feel proud of our latrines and take good care of them. No one wants to go near them. When Nadou was here, all those pathetic things seemed funny, because I had an accomplice to go through them with. Now it’s just me, and it’s not funny anymore.
Félix is recruiting guys to clean the toilets, and everyone is pretty sure that he’s making a little money off of it. “It’s like this, Magda,” explained Tonton Élie, putting his fingers together and sounding like a professor. “Say the organization gives Félix two hundred dollars a month to pay someone a living wage to clean the toilets. Félix pockets one hundred dollars and pays one of his cronies one hundred dollars. But that person doesn’t really want to clean the toilets, right? You understand? It’s too demeaning. So he finds someone more desperate than he is, and pays that person twenty dollars, and he pockets the eighty dollars. And then that third person finds someone who’s really desperate, who’s starving and living on their last nerve. And he pays that person two or three dollars to clean the toilet. You understand?” Tonton Élie laughed joylessly. “Everybody wins, Magda. Everybody wins.”
When Tonton Élie finished his speech, I thought, I’ll clean the toilets for two or three US dollars a month. That’s about 120 gourdes, and every little bit helps. I tried to reason with myself: I’ll get gloves. I’ll wear a mask. I’ll hold my breath as much as I can. Magda, I tell myself, you’re beyond humiliation. There is nothing left for you to lose. Go on, clean up other people’s shit.
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