You can do it anywhere, Alain, she said. You’re the smartest man I know! A sound businessman. Let’s go away and create something, a new organization, a new business. Whatever. Something. Let’s just go. I can’t believe we’re having this argument again.
I can’t leave Haiti again, Natasha, Alain said, suddenly fatigued. My life is here. This is my country. It’s your country too, by the way. Haitians need you more than the Italians do. Stop acting like you don’t know that.
Shhhh, not so loud, Natasha said.
I don’t care if your husband hears me.
Why don’t you want me to be happy?
Why do you have to leave me to be happy? Why can’t you be happy with me here? Wait, you are happy with me here, if last night and this morning were an indication.
Natasha smiled.
It’s not you, Alain, she said. It’s me. It’s this city, this country. I don’t know how to explain it. They bring me down. I can’t breathe here anymore.
Why?
I don’t know why. Maybe I need to leave Haiti to understand why. It’s hard to explain. I feel like nothing ever happens here. Or what happens here is not enough. We live. We suffer. We die. Prematurely. Suddenly. Passively.
That’s how it goes for all mankind, Natasha.
But here, the sun shines and shines and shines. Then the sky rains and rains and rains. Only the stoic palm trees seem to be in on the joke, the incredible nothingness of this tropical sameness. The extremes of this country are just too much. They threaten to make me numb to novelty and invention. The joy of inspiration stopped existing here for me recently. I don’t want to feel numb, but I do. I can’t work and certainly can’t live that way. From what I can tell, life here’s been the same way since the beginning! Maybe I don’t fit in to this society anymore. Maybe I don’t want to fit in to this society anymore. Maybe I can’t. Come on, Alain, you know what I’m talking about. You’re the only member of your entire class at College Bird who still lives in Haiti.
So fucking what? I’m happy here. The country’s been good to me. More than generous. Can you imagine the obstacles our forefathers and mothers had to overcome to make sure we got the chance to exist in this room in this town this day? The Middle Passage across the Atlantic from Guinea and Benin, which meant weeks, if not months, of living in the bowels of too-small and too-crowded Dutch ships. Slavery. Centuries of slavery. The rebellion. Two decades of revolutionary war. The international embargoes. Two centuries of them shits. The American occupation. Two decades of that. The Duvaliers. Three decades of them. Post-Duvalier anarchy. Two decades and counting. We only know the other stuff from books. We are children of the anarchy era. Still, I bet you everyone from Haiti’s previous eras would happily trade places with you for life in this Haiti, this so-called vacuum of originality. The so-called Republic of NGOs. How could Haiti be so devoid of inspiration when we fell in love here? What greater creation can a society allow, the freedom to love? Do you remember that day?
I don’t want to, she said.
She looked down. Her toenails looked nice. Pink went well with her dark chocolate skin. She should cry, she told herself. Cry, Natasha. Cry, damn it. He deserved as much. He deserved to see you cry at least once for the pain you have caused him and will cause him further still this day. Let him see that you hurt as much he does. For once. Just a little. It could be your good-bye gift to him. Oh no, what is he doing?
I told you I was almost ready for round four, Alain said.
Alain wrapped his arms around Natasha and cupped her breasts through her thin dress. She could feel his readiness and his forgiving smile without turning around. Natasha purred. Oh, baby, she said. The condoms are on the top shelf of my closet. Could you please go get them first?
Yes, Alain said. Though pregnancy would make a hell of a parting gift, he thought.
I can’t find them, he said, once inside the closet. The room was large and empty and poorly lit. Its owner had clearly given up on it. Natasha didn’t answer him. Instead he heard her close the closet door on him, then lock it, carefully, tenderly, as if she were closing a coffin.
What, what are you doing, Natasha? Alain said. Are you crazy?
I’m sorry, Alain, Natasha said. But I have to. I have to go.
Alain stood there in his bare feet with a rapidly shrinking erection, hands on his hips, mouth agape. He was a businessman, an expert at cost-benefit analysis. No cost-benefit analyst worth his salt would recommend he start screaming and pounding on the door from inside a married woman’s closet in her bedroom in a palace under armed guard while her husband slept down the hall. No, I can’t do that, he thought. Not even if I wasn’t naked. You’re a real genius, Destiné. How could you overplay your hand so badly? How the hell did you end up trapped in a closet in another man’s mansion with no clothes on? Mon Dieu, he thought. What a bitch.
He heard keys faintly jingle outside the closet. They had been tossed on the floor. He couldn’t tell if they’d landed inside or outside the bedroom. Alain heard Natasha open the door leading out of her room into the hallway. The girlfriend who wouldn’t have been his girlfriend if he’d been a wee bit less cocky walked out of her room without looking back. Alain would have felt her glance if she had. Three men swooped in to take her luggage. They did so silently. Then the bedroom door closed, and Alain knew he had been left alone with only the creaking sound of his breaking heart for company.
Eight hours later, a serene calm fell on the National Palace. For one of the rare times in its two-hundred-year history, the city seemed to be empty. Alain Destiné found his ability to coolly assess and deal with his situation fray. He sat on the floor and sobbed. The floor was carpeted and the carpet was plush. He felt like he was having a heart attack. He pressed his hand hard on his breast, as if trying to keep his heart from exploding out of his chest and through his eyes and nose. He could barely breathe. He felt dizzy. Alain tried to stand but his legs buckled under his weight. He fell to an elbow. A pop song’s lyric wafted through his mind: “Be still my beating heart / It would be better to be cool.” Last September, Le Nouvelliste, the Haitian newspaper of record, had praised Alain for his cool. The august daily named him among the young business leaders of the future of Haiti because he had successfully negotiated raises for workers at a Pepsi bottler in Léogâne, ending a strike.
Congratulations, Mr. Capitalist Tool, Natasha said when he sneaked into her bed that evening, wearing the stink of several celebratory drinks. You’re really going to be popular in the business community after this move.
Alain ignored her sarcasm. He knew she was right. She was always right. His bosses were unhappy with the deal with the union. They hated the word “union.” Politically, though, his reputation received a boost and a new dimension. Thanks to his feat, the government finally began to take a hard look at how it could better protect the country’s workers. It began to explore setting up a national minimum wage policy and an agency to enforce it, a chairmanship job Alain was going to audition for at a parliamentary hearing scheduled for the next day. He was only twenty-five years old, a smooth talker in a nation of smooth talkers, armed with a hard-won MBA from New York University. He had been holding his own in a town overpacked with internationally educated bullshit artists far more seasoned than he was. He had already proved adept at cultivating good mentors in the local and international castes that ruled Port-au-Prince, including the president of the republic, Natasha’s husband. His friends among the working-class people who did the hard work of trying to build and live in Haiti all year round kept faith in him too. Nothing had ever gone wrong for young master Destiné, not for long anyway, during his rise from anonymous son of an anonymous librarian from Place Boyer to potential industrialist and policymaker. He had no reason to believe it ever would. He got things done. That’s what he did. He was a rare bird. Debilitating setbacks for other men were mere speed bumps for him. Winning was easy. It’s my Destiné, went his lame pun about why his luck was so consistently good and his will a
nd wits were so consistently winning.
Then there was the not-so-small matter of his affair with the artist Natasha Robert. She was an even rarer bird than he, for she came from a far more meager background than his to achieve a degree of success that was potentially greater than his. She displayed talent to become an artist and a celebrity unlike any seen in Haiti in a while, not since Father Métélus anyway. She took pleasure in illustrating Haitians’ flirtations with self-destruction, chasing your own death, to paraphrase Freud, unlike most other local artists. She was almost ascetic about painting and sculpting visions of Haitians, Dante’s circles of hell, and a forgiving, Haitian-looking Jesus. Her canvases used a lot of faded blues, greens, pinks, and yellows. “Provençal” was the word Alain had heard an international art dealer use to describe her style, as in reminiscent of the palettes used by Cézanne and other old-school painters from southern France. Natasha, of course, painted different subjects. Explicitly political and spiritual in theme, Natasha’s paintings were disturbing, dealing with unironic notions of Haitian sanctity that countered or mocked every traditional narrative of the rise and fall of Haitian society by pointedly and repeatedly asking unsettling questions: Did Haitian society fall, as many development markers suggest, or is it on a heavenly trajectory? Is financial failure a sign of virtue? Isn’t it inevitable that all rich people will go to hell? Aren’t foreigners’ reactions to Haiti proof of God’s sense of humor? In the process, Natasha certified herself as nuts among the rich and as clever among the smart set. And the poor . . . stole her art whenever they could.
Natasha’s focus on her work was impressive. Her only indulgence, as far as Alain could tell, was sleeping with him every couple of days since they’d met at a party for a new exhibit of some other artist at Cane A Sucre a few years earlier. Alain had trouble remembering who spoke to whom first, who made the first move, who said cool, all right, let’s go. Did she choose him? Is that why she was able to let him go so easily? Should they have married?! Was that my cardinal sin? Could those words, of all things, have saved the day? She never told me she loved me either, but that was beside the point, wasn’t it? She loved me. I inspired her work, the thing she cared about the most. Did I love her? Or did I simply want to beat the President at the game of winning deeper feelings from his wife than he could, Haiti’s oldest sport? Maybe. Maybe if you didn’t play it so fucking cool, Destiné, too many fucking jokes, maybe if you told her you loved her, maybe she would have spurned her old man completely in your favor. Your victory would have been total. Maybe. And maybe not. Jeez. Alain, grow up. Could it ever have been so simple? It was so simple because you actually did love her. Face it. Alain, old chum, things did not go according to plan with this one because you had no plan for this one. Love was new ground to you, a foreign language you had yet to master. Just give up and move on. Your case over your rival could have been helped if you had a plan for her like you had a plan for everything else about your future. Jesus, Alain, you loved her, didn’t you? said another voice inside his head. The case could have been made, Alain thought. He liked to believe he’d made it. Alain was not one for loose ends. They had an understanding, he thought. The old man would serve as a placeholder until he scored, or got on solid track for, the fortune to secure his and Natasha’s future together. They had a deal! Unspoken, but such was the way of such deals since time immemorial, no? For the love of God, woman, what the hell did you want from me? We had a deal. Should I have spoken the unspoken?
At this thought, Alain Destiné got off the ground and started looking around for a key, anything, to get him out of the closet of the National Palace that hot afternoon. He suspected a key had to exist, but tumbling cement bricks of sadness had pummeled him into wasting the day. You can be such a loser sometimes, Alain. The darkness of the closet was thick and inky and closed in on him. Sunlight leaked through the bottom of the door from the bedroom, humming a faint hymn. Empty clothes hangers click-clacked and hissed this way and that as his arm slid between them. He tapped and tapped the walls in hopes of uncovering a light switch, a key, a window, a . . . doorknob?
The door opened into a stairwell. A humming light-bulb greeted him. Its dim light was surrounded by flies and the smell of a thousand pairs of old sneakers. The fuzzy light left the stairwell dangerously too dark, but down the rabbit hole Alain went anyway. Maybe this secret stairwell was created by a prudent former president of the republic who wanted his wife and children to have an escape route out of the palace if an unruly mob came calling. They did have a tendency to do that around here. Or maybe the stairwell merely served as a pathway for maids and servants to flit about their duties to the first family even more invisibly than tradition called for. The stairwell was lit no better than the locked closet, but it had a railing, which Alain grabbed with both hands to keep from falling. Alain used the railing to guide his descent and maintain a sense of balance, which was rendered fragile by the assault of the aforementioned horrid smell. A surprise burst of euphoria from his escape from that infernal closet excited him. So did a keen sense of what his next move had to be. Alain began to skip down the stairs, two, then three steps at a time. His enthusiasm for his next move, which had leapt swiftly from musing to concrete and urgent action plan, mounted. He will race to the airport! That’s what he’ll do. He will race to the airport and talk his way through to the tarmac, where the President and Natasha would hopefully be stalled for one reason or another. He will then speak New York English to persuade the peacekeepers to part and let him reach the first couple. I’m his nephew, he’d say. I have one last message to give the President. It’s from his mother. Part, the sea of stupid blue helmets will. Then he will reach the President and his wife. The sun will be hot, but the tarmac will be hotter. Heavy fumes and heat will have everyone wondering if his presence was a hallucination. Natasha will briefly set aside her typically bored artist pose. Her shift in spirit will be visible mainly to him, a man who has evoked it before, after either eloquently working his tongue between her legs or making her laugh with such abandon at an off-color joke or a bit of tickling that she snorted like a hog and her eyes danced.
Destiné, the President will say, on guard.
The President will try to play it cool, indifferent even, because noblesse oblige is the President’s signature move. To what do I owe this grand and very surprising visit from Haiti’s best and brightest? he’ll say. Have you already completed your work turning our economy into Sweden’s?
The President’s right hand will, no doubt, disappear into the folds of the pocket in which he kept the small gun he’d told Alain he always had on him. I even sleep with it, the President once confided. Alain couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. Probably not. The President will no doubt shoot me in the forehead, Alain thought, if I make a sudden move or if he is struck by the reasonable impulse to murder the man who has been sleeping with his wife. After putting me down like a dog, the President, of course, will turn to the blue helmets and tell them and other shocked witnesses that I was an assassin he had been warned about by the government’s intelligence services, as if the country these days had any of those things, a functional government and intelligent public services.
I will avoid this unwanted scenario by greeting him most cheerfully, Alain thought. Mr. President, I’ll say, in the firm but eager tone of a military man submitting to his master. Then I will take Natasha by both hands and turn her to face me while keeping her positioned between the President and me. If he lost his head, he would have to shoot her to shoot me. I think I could count on him to not do that. Not at that moment anyway. Natasha, I will say, with as deep and heroic a voice as I can muster. Shit, what should I say?
I will quote Dante, her favorite author:
There was no hymning of Bacchus or Apollo but of three persons in the divine nature, the divine and human natures in one person
The singing and the dancing were completed
and those holy lights seemed to turn to us
happy to pass from
one care to another
then that light which had narrated to me the marvelous life of the poor man of God
broke the silence of those concordant powers
and said: “Since one lot of corn has been winnowed and since the seed has been stored away, sweet love invites me to thresh the other.”
Then I hope I will have the courage to look her in the eyes and say: I love you, baby. All that matters is that we be in the same room, house, bed, together, forever, ’til death do us part. Nothing else matters to me. Not Haiti, not my family, not pacifism, not the end of unemployment, torture, infant deaths, malnutrition, or illiteracy. Fuck all that. Let me know where you land in Tuscany as soon as you can. I’ll come to you on the next plane to Italy, and then we’ll run away and go start our family wherever else. Even if we have to run away to Papua New Guinea to do so in peace, I won’t give a fuck. I’ll be the happiest man alive as long as I’m with you. OK?
Yes, she’ll say.
I’ll nod to her. Then I’ll turn to the President and say, Have a safe trip, Mr. President, sir.
I’ll say so with utmost sincerity. Then I’ll turn around and walk, briskly, away from them and into the bosom of peacekeepers and their gob-smacked faces before disappearing into the crowds inside the airport.
With that inspiring thought of swashbuckling gallantry, Alain Destiné completed his naked run down the secret stairwell of the National Palace and burst through a heavy metal door and into the cement-floored backyard. Merde, je suis nu, he realized. As he caught his breath and covered up his immodesty, a heavier-than-expected silence drew his attention. Downtown Port-au-Prince felt oppressively hot. Steam rose from the asphalt between his toes. There were no security guards or soldiers around, even in the parking lot. The buzzing voices of cell phone sellers, money traders, urchins begging a few meters beyond the tall barbwire wall bordering the back of the palace, seemed stilled. As though time itself had been frozen. He fought through what felt like the loudest pregnant pause in history and ran to his car, a ten-year-old Chevy, rusty red, with a black leather interior he liked to keep shiny, an absurd, small indulgence that gave him immense pleasure. The car was so uncool to just about everyone else in Port-au-Prince that he never feared someone would steal it, even during the city’s occasional waves of carjacking frenzy. So he often left it unlocked. There, in a garment bag in the trunk, lay his backup suit. Thank God he never left home without a backup of his favorite uniform, a dark jacket and trousers only a very trained eye would recognize as unmatched, and a white shirt. Maybe he won’t wear a tie today. No time to waste on a Windsor knot.
God Loves Haiti (9780062348142) Page 8