by Kyle Minor
“I mean it. This is something I will take with me when I leave.”
“Shh.”
•
“The reason I can’t let you kiss me is the same reason as always. Even though right now I want you to kiss me. Do you understand?”
“I don’t understand.”
“I want you to understand. I don’t want you to be hurt.”
“I will be hurt, but let’s not talk about it right now and interrupt what is nice.”
“Will you do one thing for me? When we get to the airport?”
“Yes?”
“When you go through the gate, and you want to turn around and look at me, don’t look back.”
“I know what it means, for you to say that to me now.”
“Shh. Put your face against mine. Touch your face to mine.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything. Just put your face against my face.”
“Language fails.”
“Just close your eyes and let go for a while. Let’s be together. Let’s be.”
“But what does it mean?”
“You don’t have to understand what it means. I don’t understand what it means. It’s not less beautiful if you don’t understand it.”
“I want it to mean when we get to the gate I’m going to turn around and take one last look at you.”
“Shh.”
“So I can remember you until the next time I see you.”
“Shh.”
“I love the way it feels, being so close to you.”
“No more words.”
SEVEN STORIES ABOUT SEBASTIAN OF KOULÈV-VILLE
1. The First Day I Met Sebastian
THE CHILDREN AT THE ORPHANAGE SAID Sebastian is a liar.
The man at the tree place said Sebastian is the best translator in Ouest Province. No French in his English.
The missionaries said, Sebastian is bad news. When he was a child he was always breaking things. You should see the two ladies who raised him. They’re both hunched over. He wore them out.
The Canadian dentist recommended Sebastian. He said one day he was up in the mountains doing field dentistry, and this husband and wife came in with vampire teeth. Triangles that came to points. They said their teeth hurt, and Sebastian said, “Don’t fix the vampire teeth. Just do the fillings.” But the dentist didn’t listen. He restored the man’s teeth and the woman’s teeth to happy squares. He showed them in the mirror. He thought they’d be so happy. But the woman yelled and the man cried. Sebastian listened and did his translating. Sebastian said, “Get out the file. They want the vampire teeth back. There’s a thing they do.” The man pulled the neck of his shirt to his shoulder. There were hundreds of little scars, some of them fresh.
I paid Sebastian seventy dollars a day. The other translators got fifty, but he said he had a thing for sevens. He said he had seven older brothers. When he was seven days old, seven women begged his father not to give him away to the two lady missionaries. They said seven curses will befall him.
“The first curse was the curse of English,” Sebastian said. We were walking the village Barette, taking the census of the rabbits and the chickens. “No Creole allowed. No French. Only English.”
He spoke in English, read in English, wrote in English, watched movies in English, gave tours of the missionary compound to visiting Americans and Danes in English. “They said, we’re your mothers now,” he said. “Children speak the language of their mothers.”
The day he turned seventeen, the two missionary ladies drove him up the mountain to his father’s house. They said, “Now you’re grown. We’ve done all we can.” Sebastian said, “Aren’t you my mothers?” They cried and drove away. His father came out of the house and cried and embraced him and spoke to him in a language he couldn’t understand. “The second curse was the curse of Creole,” Sebastian said. “It took me seven years to speak it well enough to pass for a Haitian.”
Up the hill was the houngan’s house. His wooden roof was painted purple beneath a field of orange stars. I wanted to visit him and convince him to sell it to me to take to Florida. Sebastian said, “If the houngan came to my village, we would have to kill him.”
“Why?” I said.
“Because,” Sebastian said, “he does not have the love of Christ in his heart.”
Later, I asked the elders of Sebastian’s village if they would kill the houngan. They laughed. “Sebastian is a liar,” they said. “The houngan is our friend. He goes to the church in Barette sometimes on Sundays when they need a trumpet player. The houngan is a good trumpet player.”
In the village Barette, Sebastian told me the third, fourth, fifth, sixth curses. It was getting dark, and we were walking up out of the village. I asked him what was the seventh curse. “You see these people, all my neighbors? I have to live among them. You and me, we’re not like them.”
He headed up the hill a ways, and I followed him across the mountain to his home. From every house we passed, people called their greetings.
2. Before the Earthquake
This was before the earthquake reduced the Hotel Montana to rubble. We were sitting at the bar drinking Dominican beers. Jean-Pierre, Sebastian, and me. The next morning we had to drive to Jacmel to count some rabbits and chickens. Sebastian had a little cocaine, and I gave him a little money, and he gave me the cocaine, and I put it in my pocket for the morning.
We were playing a game called Who’s More Heroic Than the Americans. It was a joke of a game. The first round everyone said: “Everyone who’s not an American.” The second round you had to tell another true story, but this one had to be specific.
“I knew a Catholic priest in Cité Soleil,” Jean-Pierre said. “He was Nigerian. The people were so mean to him. This went on for years. They stole things from his house. Once, he was beaten in the street and no one came to his aid. Still, he lived seven years in a shanty house, even though he could have lived well. He could have lived anywhere. One day a little retarded boy was crossing an open sewer on a lashed-together bridge made of two halves of one tree. The sewer was five feet deep with water and every kind of human waste. People pissed in it, shit in it. The sewer was the color of disease. This little retarded boy couldn’t have been more than five years old. Halfway across the bridge, some older boys came and shook both sides, just to be mean. The little retarded boy fell in. He was flailing around. There was a big crowd. People were watching him go down, but nobody wanted to jump in. Around the time the boy went over, the Nigerian priest came walking by. He didn’t even hesitate. He didn’t take off his clothes or his watch or take out his wallet or anything. He just jumped in, head-first, into the shitwater. He went under and came back up with that kid. That brown sludge was in his mouth, in his teeth, in his eyes.”
“I can beat that,” Sebastian said. “I knew a man who took a blowtorch to the side of a shipping container somebody was using for a store in the village Marigot. The store owner caught him red-handed at midnight. His bag was filled up with biswuit, dry goods, Tampico juices, Coca-Colas. The store owner called for his cousins, and his cousins called for their cousins. Soon all the men of the village surrounded this man in the shipping container. They tied him up, and in the morning they dragged him out into the middle of the road. They brought out all the children to see. The store owner said, ‘See what happens when you steal.’ While the man was still alive, they hacked off his fingers and toes one by one with a machete. They sealed the wounds with a hot iron. Then they hacked off his feet and hands. Then they hacked off his arms at the elbows and his legs at the knees. Then they poured gasoline over his head and set him on fire and watched him dance around while he died.”
“The store owner was a hero,” Jean-Pierre said, “for protecting his family business.”
“No,” Sebastian said. “The thief was a hero, for risking his life to get food for his family.”
They looked at me. I shielded my part of the table with my arm. I poured some of the
powder on the table, made a line, and snorted. I said, “I wish I had some to share.”
3. After the Earthquake
We went down to the mausoleum where Sebastian’s dead were buried. The earth had buckled in waves, and one of the waves split the center of the concrete, and where it had split, the fresh corpses had fallen out of their graves and mingled on the ground with the bones of the longer dead, and some carrion animals were pulling at a dead woman’s face. The smell is in my nostrils still.
At the graveside, I told Sebastian I couldn’t take this gruesome scene, this horror movie.
Sebastian lifted the bodies from the ground one by one, and held them for a while. “Auntie Marie,” he said. “Auntie Ti-ti. Auntie Solange.”
4. The Pig and the Pony
We reached a vista. All of Port-au-Prince stretched out beyond us, the sun reflecting from the metal roofs of the bidonville shanties like a hundred thousand daytime stars. An American Airlines jet took off from the airport. Sebastian said any child with a shoulder-fired rocket launcher could stand on any rooftop in La Saline and blow any airplane out of the sky. Why hadn’t it happened yet?
A donkey draped with yellow saddlebags came up the road from the distance. A thin man in a yellow shirt led the donkey up the hill. He waved as he got closer. His shirt and the saddlebags said DHL in red letters. We said bonswa and komon ou ye and byen, byen. “What do you have?” Sebastian said. “Letters,” the DHL courier said. “Where is your motorcycle?” Sebastian said. The DHL courier said the gas tank had rusted out, so he had replaced it with a gallon milk jug, but someone had dropped a match into the milk jug while he was making a delivery at the cement store.
After the DHL courier left, six men came up the hill carrying a casket. They were dressed in fine linen suits, and white specks from the dirt in the road were soiling their shoes, which were newly shined. We made room so they could pass us, and as they passed we briefly joined in their funeral song.
We watched them disappear behind a bend where the road followed the curve of the mountain, and when they were gone, I asked Sebastian who was in the casket. “That is the wife of one of the elders of the village Jean-Baptiste,” he said. “She fell in love with a bourgeois man in the city. Every day she took the tap-tap to see him. He gave her so much money. When the elder found out, he fed her feet to his pony.”
Later I visited the village Jean-Baptiste and played soccer with some of the men who lived there. After the game, the women made a feast of rice and stewed tomatoes and a sauce of leeks and carrots. For me, they killed their fattest rabbit, and they would not take any money for it. While we were eating, I asked about the elder who fed his wife’s feet to a pony. A man stood up and said, “Come, let me show you.” We walked down the orange path, past his sister’s house, his brother’s house, the houses of his two friends and his one sworn enemy. A bone-thin pony was tied up in the front of his own house. He petted the pony, and said, “The lies they are telling about you.” Then we went to the back yard, where he kept two pigs, and he pointed to the fatter one. “It was this fellow who ate the feet,” he said. “Not the pony.”
We stared at the pig for a long time. I imagined the woman’s feet in its mouth. Then the man laughed bitterly. “Do you think this is a village where we feed the parts of people to animals?” He said it to shame me.
When I told Sebastian, he said, “Don’t believe it. I don’t trust that pony.”
5. The Third, Fourth, Fifth, and Sixth Curses
Once, late at night, we were trying to sleep in the reclined seats of a borrowed Jeep in the middle of the treeless forest, on our way to cross the Dominican border. We both kept machetes under the seats, and I had a gun. Somewhere near enough to hear but not near enough to see, a lot of people were singing and beating drums. I kept the keys in the ignition.
Sometime before morning, Sebastian said, “Tell me about your mother.”
“She was a good woman,” I said, “but for twenty years she refused to talk to her sister.”
“Her sister slept with her husband?” Sebastian said.
“No,” I said. “It was a misunderstanding. Her sister forgot to pick me up from school one afternoon, and one time she left me alone in her house for a half hour while she went to the store to buy some groceries. There was an incident with somebody saying something to somebody else about what somebody else said to some other person. I’m not sure I understand it.”
“After I was born, my mother ran away,” Sebastian said. “No one knows where. There was some kind of craziness in her family. My father said many of them had been turned into zombies. He took me to see them near Furcy. They were chained to a plow, four of them, and pulling it. My father said, ‘That’s vodou,’ and I said, ‘No, it’s not. That’s mental illness.’ The farmer had a whip, but he wasn’t driving them with it. He didn’t need the whip. Their spirits were broken already. They were machines with broken brains.”
He reached under his seat for his water bottle and took a sip. “Why are people so bad to each other?” he said. “There was this crazy woman. She always came into town with this mongrel dog. She only had one friend. He was a crazy person, too. A line of drool always hung from his mouth. He had gums instead of teeth. Sometimes he stole some food for her dog. I never saw her eat. She was always looking for food for the dog.”
Sometimes when I think of him, now, it’s this moment. He’s staring out the window in the direction of the mountains of Massif de la Selle, thinking about his mother.
“Sometimes she slept on the steps of the mission school. When she did, we stepped over her. Someone might poke her with his foot, to wake her. Someone probably kicked her sometime, but I never saw anyone do it.
“One morning the dog was gone. She was walking the street, looking for the dog. All day she was looking. The next morning, she lay on the steps of the mission school. I stepped over her. We all stepped over her. Nobody poked or kicked her. We let her sleep. We felt sorry for her, because of the dog.
“She was still lying there at the end of the school day, when they opened the doors and let us free. She didn’t move the whole day, and then she didn’t move the whole night. One of the teachers came along and covered her body with a black sheet. Nobody wanted to take her body. Nobody wanted her to live forever with their own dead. Nobody wanted her bones with their bones.
“Nobody claimed her body until the next morning. It was the crazy man who fed her dog. He lifted her body, sheet and all. He was talking to her. He had her under the armpits, and he started spinning with her. He was dancing with her. They were turning and turning. He was making a noise like an animal soon to the slaughter.
“People were yelling. Put her down, put her down! The boys picked up rocks and threw rocks at him. He had to flee. He tried to carry her away with him, but she was too heavy. The rocks were still coming. His face was bloody from them, and his shirt was torn. Finally, he dropped her in the grass by the side of the road. She lay there for three days, and then a Dutch man paid to have her buried in another village. He sent two men to collect her body.
“For a while I didn’t think about her much. But after I saw her relatives chained to the plow, I thought: Could that crazy woman have been my mother?”
6. The Tumor
The kids at the orphanage said, why do you ride around with Sebastian?
The missionaries said, watch out. He wants things from you. He will steal things from you. Watch your guns. Watch your jewelry.
The man at the tree place told me about a cash-for-charcoal scam that ended in nobody getting any charcoal. The man at the art kiosk across the street from the mission told me about a middleman scheme. The man who built the wooden A-frame houses that were meant as temporary housing, but which the people who bought or received them meant to last a hundred years, told me about a strike-and-extortion scheme, which yielded nothing. “I have a hundred bodyguards,” the man said, although he only had two. A farmer in Artiste told me of a scam where Sebastian tried to sell elec
tricity he was stealing by tying barbed wire to the new power lines the president was running up the mountainsides. “Does he think I don’t have barbed wire?” the farmer said. “Everyone has barbed wire.”
Almost every day, Sebastian asked me for more money. He said his nephew needed money to give the school for photocopies. He said his niece needed money for needle and thread. He said the church needed money for sound equipment. He said his father needed money for a saw and a lathe and a level, so he could start a new business as a carpenter. He said he knew a man whose father had a tumor the size of a small grapefruit on his prostate. He said he needed money to take out the tumor and the prostate. “Let me see this man,” I said. “Take me to see this man.”
We walked down into Sebastian’s village. “Don’t be alarmed,” Sebastian said, “when you see their eyes.” All the members of the family had a degenerative eye disease. They all went blind by age twenty-five. “My friend is twenty-three,” Sebastian said. “You can see it already. The disease is eating his eyes.”
There were eight small children, two teenage girls, Sebastian’s friend, and his father and mother, both of whom were in their seventies. Sebastian’s friend was a very late child. (“A miracle child,” I said. “A shame and a burden,” Sebastian said.) The teenage girls and the children were the sons and daughters of sons and daughters and grandsons and granddaughters who had long since fled for the city. These were the unwanted children, or the too-many children, or the children taken early by the blindness. Sebastian’s friend was working for tips at the Hotel Kinam to bring in money, and tending the garden in the mornings. When he was gone, people stole from the garden. There was no one in the family able enough to do anything about it.
We greeted Sebastian’s friend. “My friend,” he said, “my good friend. You will come see my father.”
He led us through a maze of banana trees, past the hundred-year-old stone house, to the unfinished concrete house at the back of the property. It had holes for windows and a hole where the roof would go. The old man sat shaking in a chair at the center of the one room. Piles of construction sand filled the four corners.