Hold Tight, Don't Let Go

by Laura Rose Wagner

  I resolve to go talk to Félix Télémaque in the morning. I don’t even know how I’ll ask the question, though, because you can’t just come right out and say that you know things don’t work the way they’re officially supposed to work.

  I COULDN’T DECIDE WHAT TO WEAR. NORMALLY, if I were going to go talk to a big shot to ask a favor, I’d dress nicely, in an ironed blouse and a skirt, with earrings. But I don’t want to look too pretty, or like some stuck-up girl who wouldn’t be willing to clean a toilet. This will get you to Miami, I tell myself. It’s not who you really are. In the end I wear a pair of jeans and a clean T-shirt with something written on it in English, and I tie a pink and yellow kerchief over my hair. No makeup. I think I look respectful and sensible—at least, I hope so.

  Félix’s current girlfriend is outside their door, a chunky, rounded woman in a short dress who doesn’t look much older than me. She sells hot food. When I approach, she’s stirring a huge pot of boiling vegetable stew with orange oil floating at the top, while an even bigger pot of white rice steams under a stretched-out plastic bag. It smells savory and spicy, divine. Manman used to have a way to describe feeling this hungry: Your small intestine is swallowing your big intestine.

  “Bonjou,” I say.

  “Bonjou,” she replies, not seeming very interested.

  “I came to see Msyè Félix?” It comes out like a question.

  “He’s not here,” she says.

  “Oh.”

  “You can wait for him.”

  “Okay.”

  There’s only one chair, and the girlfriend is sitting on it. She doesn’t offer me anything else, so I just lean against one of the wooden poles. Félix’s house is in the camp, but it’s not too flimsy. He’s got lots of plywood and a sheet-metal roof with new tarps over it and sandbags all around the bottom to keep the water and mud out when it rains. His tent is a lot nicer than some people’s real houses.

  I can’t think of anything to say. What’s your name? Do you like Justin Bieber? Did you hear he is dating Selena Gomez? Who do you like more, Barikad or Izolan? Those all sound stupid. Maybe she thinks I’m after her man? I didn’t think of that. But why would he want a skinny, dried-up kid like me? But a lot of women are jealous, jealous of nothing. She ignores me. Her jeans are low, and when she leans over to check on the rice, I can see her butt crack, where her jeans gap in the back. I think she’s probably showing it off—how big and healthy and pretty she is, compared to some people. She’s full of juice. She shines.

  I lean lightly against the pole and pretend to be busy with my phone. Actually I’m just rereading my old text messages, but at least it gives me something to do. Most of my messages are old ones from Nadou. Sometimes it’s just messages from Digicel, or hand-washing messages from the Ministry of Health—I go through and delete those. Beep. Beep. Beep, beep, beep. I wonder when Félix Télémaque will ever come. I wonder if I can nap with my back against the pole.

  It’s almost half an hour before Félix strides brawnily home. There are a couple of guys with him—his deputies on the camp committee—and a whole flock of little kids, some in school uniforms, some barefoot, some in broken, oversize plastic sandals. They like him because he gives them candies or gum or a couple of gourdes. He is never not smiling.

  “Bonjou, bonjou!” Félix announces as he leans down and kisses his girlfriend on the forehead.

  She shrugs. “This little girl came to see you.”

  That’s me. I’m the little girl. A wave of anger rolls like bile up my throat, but I don’t say anything, even though I’d like to go at the woman’s beautiful face with my fingernails. But I am here today to plead favors.

  “Yes, little girl?” asks Félix in an oily voice. “Why don’t you come inside?”

  I follow him into the dark tent-house. It has two beds on platforms and a wooden dresser covered in makeups and powders and plastic flowers, and there’s a fridge in one corner and a TV and DVD player in the other.

  “Your house is very pretty,” I say. He must get at least ten people coming by asking for favors every day.

  “Have a seat,” Félix says, and he gestures to one of the beds. It’s covered in a soft blanket with a picture of a gigantic tiger printed on it. “What can I do for you, ti fi?”

  “Well, Msyè Félix . . .” I falter. “My name is Magdalie Jean-Baptiste. I don’t really know how to say this . . . because, you see, I’m ashamed . . .”

  “Don’t be afraid, little girl.” Félix smiles. “I’m your friend.”

  He has a round baby face, despite his gold teeth, and I want so much to trust him. But I can’t think of what to say next, and I just stare down at my hands, at the polish peeling off my nails.

  “You need cash,” says Félix. He doesn’t ask. He just says it, because he knows.

  “Wi,” I say softly.

  “And how do you think I can help you?”

  I still my heart and think of Nadine. I think of how soon we will be together, far away from here. All it will take is for me to push through this, through the stench and the heat, through the humiliation, and on the other side will be Miami and Nadou.

  “I heard—I mean, I thought that maybe I could help clean the . . . the toilets.”

  Félix looks at me for a moment. Then his wide face breaks into a smile like a cleaved pumpkin, and he begins to laugh. His laugh is deep, boiling out of his mouth.

  “Oh, little girl, that’s a good joke. That’s a beautiful joke!”

  “But . . . I’m serious.”

  He just laughs harder. “I see you’re serious! That’s why it’s such a good joke!”

  “I’m a hard worker,” I insist. “I’m stronger than I look. I never get sick. I’m not afraid of working.”

  “Why would a pretty girl like you want to clean toilets? Are you crazy? Are you a crazy person?”

  I gulp. “I need the money, like you said.”

  “Haven’t you heard of cholera?”

  “I’d be careful.”

  “Listen to me, cheri. You go out and find a man to screw, a cock to suck. You’re a very pretty girl. Lots of guys would give you money, give you food. I’m just explaining it to you logically, like a businessman. I’m a businessman, tande—you hear me? And you’re not thinking logically.”

  “No,” I murmur. “No, that’s not for me . . .” My eyes are hot with tears that I can’t allow to fall. I can’t let Félix think of me as even more of a scared little girl than he already does.

  “Eh, bien,” he says. “Ah, well. Deal with it. But you’re not cleaning those toilets. It’s for your own good, little sweet thing.”

  His voice is firm, like a father’s might be, only it is dripping with sex.

  That’s it. I can’t argue. “Mèsi.”

  “Come back and see me when you’re ready to start thinking logically,” he says. “Like an adult.”

  I leave, and the girlfriend says nothing, just stares at me as I go. The sun is blazing, and if I go back to the tent, I’ll get cooked under the metal, so I just walk and walk so I can be alone and maybe think. I am thirsty. I wish I could buy an icy Coke from the lady with the cooler on the corner, but I don’t have twenty gourdes. How thirsty would you have to get, Magda, before you’d suck a zozo for that Coke? I ask myself, and I hate myself for asking the question, I hate myself for wondering.

  Is there nothing else for us? I’m seething. Is there nothing else young women can do than sell our bodies and our youth? I am sorry, God, for judging them. For judging girls like Safira. We’re all one illness, one hunger pang, one need away from being Safira. From being the beautiful girls in their tight jeans and their long, straight weaves and their shiny lips, haunting the Grand-Rue, prowling the street corners of Pétionville at night, aglow in the fluorescence bouncing off the wet black asphalt. I’m sorry, Manman, if I can’t think of any other way.

  I was wrong, before, when I thought that cleaning the toilets was the worst thing that could happen. You can alw
ays fall lower.

  I GO HOME AND PLAY SNAKE ON MY PHONE in the dark until the battery dies. I can’t concentrate, anyway. Félix Télémaque’s words stick in my mind like black burned rice on the bottom of a cooking pot. A man to screw, a cock to suck. I don’t have anybody to talk to, but I need to talk to somebody.

  The next morning, after I make coffee for me and Tonton Élie and wash last night’s dishes, I cross the camp and rap on the sheet metal of Safira’s door. I hear a child crying inside.

  “Cheri!” exclaims Safira as she opens the door, a wet-faced little boy on her hip. “How are you, boubou?” She gives me a kiss on the cheek. “This is Christopher, my auntie’s little boy. He has a fever today and couldn’t go to school.” The little boy stares at me, tears hanging on his lashes, and he hides his sticky face against Safira’s shoulder, smearing snot on her sleeve.

  Safira looks me up and down. “Why are you angry? What’s wrong? Something is wrong with you. Come in and tell me.”

  I sit on the cot. “I tried to get a job yesterday.”

  “For real?” She sits down, the little boy balanced on her lap, his hot cheek resting against her pregnant belly, and rocks him. “What about selling the water?”

  “You were right. It wasn’t safe. So yesterday I asked Félix if I could clean the toilets.”

  “Woy!” exclaims Safira, and she begins to bubble with laughter. “No, no! Are you serious? You’re serious! Wo-o-oy, Magda!”

  “I have to make money somehow!”

  Safira shrugs. “That’s because you don’t accept your situation.”

  “I’m swimming to escape.”

  “Ah, my friend, you can’t deny God’s plan.”

  The little boy, Christopher, has fallen asleep with his mouth open, snoring in a wet, congested way, like a piglet. Safira hoists him up over her shoulder.

  “I’m going to drop him off at the neighbor’s so I can go get some asòsi leaves to boil for his fever. Come with me?”

  “Okay.” Before he left this morning, Tonton Élie gave me fifty gourdes to buy beans and a little cornmeal. Safira drops the sleeping, feverish little boy off with a lady selling sodas from an Igloo a couple of tents over (“Mèsi, cheri, I’ll be right back”). We start up the hill to the street market.

  “Eh, bien,” Safira says, shrugging. “What will you do now?”

  “I don’t know,” I say.

  One of the plastic straps on Safira’s sandals is broken, and it flaps around, making her limp and drag in the dust.

  “These damn cheap things,” she says.

  “Manman used to wear sandals called Ti Fanfane. She said the mountain women like them because they never break, even in the mud.”

  “Do they sell them here?

  “I think if you go downtown. They sell them in all sorts of different colors.”

  “They have purple?”

  “Probably.”

  “How much do they sell for?” Safira asks.

  “I’m not sure . . . maybe seventy-five, one hundred gourdes?”

  “Well . . . I don’t have that. Not today, anyway.”

  “I think I’ve got an extra pair of plastic sandals at our tent.” They are Nadine’s old sandals. She’ll never need them again. “I’ll give them to you when we get back.”

  Safira smiles her wide, trusting smile. “Mèsi, cheri!”

  “Pas de quoi, ma chère, not at all, my dear,” I reply, as aristocratically as I can manage, just to tease. Safira laughs, and I’m suddenly aware of how comfortable and familiar her presence feels. Is Safira my friend?

  “Safira, do you ever worry about the future?”

  “I think about the future. But I trust in God. It’s all in His hands.”

  “I know, but . . . Sometimes I feel like I can’t control anything. I keep trying to get someplace, but I never arrive. I never, ever arrive.”

  Safira rests a bony hand on her belly. “The baby just kicked.” She giggles. She looks down, speaking to the child inside her. “You’re dancing konpa already, pitit mwen? You’re already dancing?” Then she looks back to me. “Magda, you know the preachers say that suffering is part of life. To be a good Christian, you are supposed to suffer, and we should accept it. God knows what He is doing.”

  “My uncle says that’s a god of poverty and misery. He says the blans and the preachers taught us to believe in a god of poverty so we wouldn’t complain.”

  “But God didn’t create poverty, Magdalie. We did. Man did.”

  “But God created man . . .”

  “In any case, we can only control what we can control, right?”

  Safira possesses so much peace. I don’t think I could, if I were in her situation. But she radiates peace, like warmth. Does she really feel so secure, so certain? I have no right to doubt God’s plan, but I feel that I can’t believe in anything anymore.

  A huge truck chugs down Route Delmas, belching a cloud of pure black exhaust into the air. Little boys gather on the median, asking for coins, trying to wipe down windshields. They know better than to ask the white UN and Red Cross cars, though. Their drivers will never give them money. A young man on Roller-blades hitches a ride up the hill by holding on to the back of a truck.

  “Why don’t you ask that guy to lend you some money for your plane ticket?” Safira asks suddenly.

  “What?”

  “That guy, the boyfriend of your cousin.”

  “Jimmy? I can’t!” I exclaim. “Not after I borrowed that money for the water and never paid him back. I think he hates me.”

  “I don’t think he hates you. Maybe he’d understand. Is he a good person?”

  “I think he’s a good person . . .”

  “If he’s a good person, then he’ll understand,” Safira decides aloud.

  “I’d be so embarrassed. I’m ashamed.”

  “Look, Magdalie, you say you want to go to Miami.”

  “It’s not just want. I need to go.”

  “Then ask him. Ask him! There’s nothing to lose, right?”

  “No . . . The worst that can happen is he’ll say no, right?”

  Safira nods, her black eyes wide. She looks a little sad. She sighs and slides her hand back and forth across her swollen belly.

  I can’t just wait for my fate to happen to me. I’m not a thing, like a rock or a bucket or a tent or whatever that can just sit around all day not caring what happens to it. I have to keep moving.

  “You have to put every drop of energy into finding a solution, Magda,” says Safira. “Do it for me, because I can’t.”

  “Chouchou . . .”

  “Ask your cousin’s boyfriend. If he loved her, he’ll do it.”

  Safira’s idea is making more and more sense to me. “Jimmy does have a job, and his papa is in New York, and he sends Jimmy money every month. He’s got a car and a camera; he buys his clothes new.”

  “He’s got money!” Safira exclaims. “He’s loaded!”

  “That money I owe him for the water—that can’t mean much to him. He doesn’t need it. And when I go to Miami, I’ll get an education and a job and make money, and someday I’ll pay him back for everything.”

  I summon all my courage, like an invisible jacket that will protect me from humiliation and judgment, as if I’m so hardened and burnished now by everything that has happened to me that I’ve become invincible.

  MAY 2011

  I’M GOING TO GO AHEAD AND ASK JIMMY IF he can lend me more money. Safira seemed so full of faith that things would work out. I don’t have enough money left on my phone to call him. I just send him a pre-programmed “Appellez-moi s’il-vous-plaît” message and wait for him to call me back.

  The phone rings an hour and a half later, as I sit in front of the tent, picking tiny rocks out of rice spread out on the table and flicking them into the dirt. “Wi, Magdalie!” Jimmy says. “Sorry I didn’t call right back; I was in my word processing class.”

  “It’s no problem, no problem. How are you?�
�

  “I’m fine. And you and your family?”

  “We’re all fine. Listen, Jimmy . . .” I don’t know how much money he has on his phone, so I don’t want to keep up the small talk too long. “Listen, there’s something I want to ask you about. But I’m a little embarrassed.”

  “You don’t need to be embarrassed, cheri. Just ask.”

  I clear my throat. “Things have been hard lately. I told you Tonton Élie says he can’t pay for my school. I don’t know what to do. I can’t stay here anymore. I need money so I can go to Miami and be with Nadou.”

  “What about the water? I thought I lent you that money to sell water.”

  “I . . . I was too ashamed to tell you. Thieves took the money. They pulled a gun on us in the taptap, and then I got too scared to ever go back again. I’m sorry. I should have told you, but I was afraid you would get angry.”

  “Pòdyab, you poor thing.” Jimmy pauses. “You need money?”

  “Wi. Nadine’s supposed to be working on getting me a visa.” I’m dizzy with expectation.

  “It’s no problem, Magdalie. Of course it’s no problem. You’re Nadine’s little sister, okay?”

  I exhale. It’s as though someone has just taken the weight of a bag of cement off me. I could take off and fly. “Oh, thank you, Jimmy. Thank you, God! Thank you infinitely!”

  “Can you come meet me tomorrow afternoon? There’s a little resto a couple of blocks in, in Delmas 33. I think it’s called Gloire à Dieu.”

  “Yes, yes, yes, yes! Of course! Thank you, thank you, Jimmy!”

  He laughs. “Magdalie, it’s like you’re my own little sister. Of course I’ll help you.” He hangs up, and I think: “Mèsi, Jezi, at last, something is going right.”

  Every afternoon, it rains. Hurricane season is beginning. The sky boils gray with clouds, then the rain falls in quivering sheets, and the city disappears. Our tarp roof leaks, but by now I know where to place the buckets to catch the water, until they overflow and we run out of buckets.

  All the walls throughout the city are still covered in rows upon rows of identical posters bearing the grinning faces of presidential candidates, peeling off, fading, and defaced, from December’s election. I have to dance around a couple of machanns selling mangoes, papayas, and passion fruit on the wet, filthy sidewalk, to climb the narrow mosaic stairs to Gloire à Die bar-resto. I’m a few minutes late, but Jimmy isn’t there yet. No one is there. It looks like the kind of place that gets little business during the day but becomes a discothèque at night. The walls are painted in neon swirls, the ceiling dripping metallic garlands and crêpe-paper coils. In a corner, a small grainy black-and-white TV plays Pirates of the Caribbean for no one.