God Loves Haiti (9780062348142)

by Leger, Dimitry Elias

  Who was that? Natasha said.

  The boss, he said.

  Who?

  Who do you think? the President snapped. What, you didn’t think your president had a boss? I do. Everyone does. Even you do.

  Even your boss does, Natasha said.

  The President looked curiously at his new bride, then he trudged on. They walked up the steps to the airplane. Halfway up, the President tossed his cell phone away. He didn’t throw away the device in anger but did so softly, wearily. He was letting go of the unmentionable everythings it represented, did, and had him do. He was too tired from years of hating most of it to muster rage. He watched the black phone fly through the humid air. Suddenly, he found himself flying toward the phone. He found himself floating in the air away from the plane, horizontally, like Superman. The President looked like a fat, bald, nattily suited beach ball soaring through the sky between the sun and an undulating sea of asphalt. He didn’t know what caused this to happen. He knew the landing on the tarmac’s asphalt, whenever it occurred, was going to hurt like hell. The force of his momentum was such that his tie smacked him dead in the eye. His eyes watered. Now that, that really pissed him off.

  Merde, the President said.

  His jaw was the first part of his body to hit the ground.

  PART III

  If sub specie aeternitatis there is no reason to believe that anything matters, then that doesn’t matter either, and we can approach our absurd lives with irony instead of heroism and despair.

  —Thomas Nagel, “The Absurd”

  LOOKING FOR A NEEDLE IN THE RUBBLE

  Outside an isolated tent a hundred meters from hundreds and thousands of newly planted tents for earthquake victims in Port-au-Prince, two doctors, one American and the other French, had a cigarette before starting their workdays. It was six a.m., a couple of days after the quake. In most countries not located in the middle of the Caribbean Sea, there would be a slight chill in the air at that hour. In Haiti, the temperature was perfect, not too hot, not cool, just right. The doctors felt good in their skins. This bothered them. Life shouldn’t feel this good when death was so spectacularly random and massive around them. They smoked nervously. In the evening after dinner, they will drink heavily.

  They say the first seventy-two hours are your best chance of finding survivors after disasters like this, the man, a Frenchman, said. In Banda Aceh, they found practically no one after forty-eight hours.

  I know, an unmistakably American woman said. We got to Pakistan four days after their big one. There were no survivors.

  None?

  Zip. Zilch. Nada.

  Putain. The poor bastards.

  Inside the tent, which the doctors thought to be a storage tent, for it was the only tent with an armed guard standing in front of it at all times, the subconsciousness of a sleeping earthquake survivor filtered their analysis. Natasha Robert sprang awake. She was alert and amped, as if one of the doctors had extinguished his cigarette directly in her eye. She foraged around for her clothes, but all she could find were a pair of white tennis sneakers.

  What the . . . ? Natasha stormed out of her tent wearing nothing but a white T-shirt and those tennis shoes, trailed by a startled bodyguard calling out, Madame! Madame! while stumbling and struggling to keep up with her long-legged strides. Before long, Natasha was lost in a maze of tents. They were blue or green, the color of mud or the color of eggshells. Some even had potted yellow flowers outside their zippered doors. Where is he? she said over her shoulder to the bodyguard, who was too out of breath to answer. To a group of intimidated soldiers coming toward her, she said, Have you seen my husband?

  No, Madame, said the commander. Who is your husband?

  What the hell?

  She stalked off in another direction, down another row of tents. Kitchen staff, humanitarians, and other denizens of the camp parted like the Red Sea when they saw the determined, barely dressed Natasha stomping their way with her hair sticking out like antennas, shattering the delicate matinal, disturbing congregating ghosts.

  At the base’s hospital, Natasha stopped and gasped. There were dozens of wounded people seated on the ground. A line of them stood in front of a doctor, a nurse, and an administrator, who were already sweating from the rising heat and the workload. She saw the doctor fail to stifle a wince each time a child’s scream came from inside the hospital, a clinic, which, in truth, was closer to the size of a gas station’s bathroom. The nurse took note of each patient’s complaints, though all of their problems were visible to the naked eye. A half-crushed head or shoulder, a mangled leg, a severed arm. Children of all sizes cried and whimpered all over the place, like a chorus, from pains that were too hard to look at and too painful for everyone, including the stunned parents and guardians, to keep a brave face in front of. Arms aloft, these parents offered the children to the doctors with the desperation of people making offerings to gods.

  Humbled by this sight, Natasha turned away. The man she was looking for—her husband—turned out to be a few meters away with a concerned but clear-eyed look in his face. She saw her new bodyguard briefing the President. The President’s face went from frown to smile when his eyes met Natasha’s. His smile, she thought, was one of forgiveness for the scene she had caused in their funereal new neighborhood. They embraced warmly. His generosity made her regret her next words even though she said them with resolve.

  I have to go, she said.

  Where? The city is not safe. There are still aftershocks, buildings falling. We don’t know . . .

  I have to find Alain, she said, quickly adding, He’s like a brother to me, the only family I have left.

  But you don’t know—

  He’s alive. I know.

  She wanted to add: I can feel his soul’s glow within my own. It burns in our world still. If it had been extinguished, I would know. Because we are one, two sides of the same coin, alpha and omega. One true love. I was stupid to deny this truth before for reasons that never held water when confronted with our passion. The only way I can justify my new lease on life after the cataclysm that we have miraculously survived is by giving all my love to the only person it belonged to all this time, or at the very least by bidding him a more proper farewell than the one I attempted before the earthquake. It’s the right thing to do.

  Natasha Robert didn’t say any of those things to her husband when he took a step back to appraise her while holding both her shoulders. She tried to appear sweet and innocent. He seemed to buy her act. OK, he said, you can go, but you have to adhere to all our new security rules. They’re for your own protection.

  Of course, she said. The zing of nervous triumph she felt in her heart should have been tempered by the look her husband exchanged with her bodyguard. Bobo was his name. He was not dressed like a United Nations peacekeeper because he was not one. Bearish and bearded, Bobo belonged to an older school of friends of the President who Natasha rarely met, the kind whose jovial manner hid a tendency to protect their friend’s interests by any means necessary, few of them kind.

  By the time their bulletproof SUV exited the gates of the spontaneous settlement near Toussaint Louverture Airport she refused to call home, she stood poised to enter the choppy streets of Port-au-Prince for the first time since the earth beneath her feet had rioted. Natasha was wide-eyed and anxious but her mind and heart were clear. Her first glimpse of a toppled house gave her no pause as she nibbled absentmindedly on a croissant and sipped orange juice from a plastic cup. The croissant was buttery and flakey, and the glass of OJ was freshly squeezed and slightly bitter. This nice breakfast was courtesy of a female French soldier or humanitarian—is there really a difference?—who had come to her tent after her husband gave a signal. The lady also brought her new green cargo pants, a clean white V-neck T-shirt, and aviator sunglasses. She didn’t need the glasses. The earthquake seemed to have dislodged the painterly reverie with which she used to see the world and replaced it with a desire to see things as they were. The Haiti in
front of her looked extraordinarily vivid. All her senses felt fired-up. For once, her world seemed made of flesh and blood and not just souls, devils and angels, colors, canvas, palettes, puns, and hymns. We are all swimming upstream. We’re all saints and sinners, she’d thought over and over again in her cool and dark tent the previous couple of days. We will all be forgiven. History probably forgot about us the minute we started thinking about her. The idea that history was worthless and tomorrow was for suckers caressed her. She did not know how the thought came to her. She understood that many things were destroyed by the quake, and that we will have to make what we need out of the rubble of the existence we have left. Or not. Live what life we have left and leave the rest to God. Lost in thought, Natasha paid no mind to Bobo. He was sitting in the front seat of the car, next to the driver. He could have been polishing, loading, and reloading guns, which he was. She could have cared less. Until he ordered the driver to turn left.

  No, she said, turn right. We’re going to the Palais.

  She couldn’t wait to introduce her new self to Alain, a man she had no reason to believe was still alive. This new Natasha would replace the one Alain knew, she thought, the one who needed men to take care of her because the process of creating art was the only thing in her life she felt confident enough to control and develop.

  The President told me your friend lived in Place Boyer, Bobo said.

  She thought the conversation was over. Her order was given.

  No, Mr. . . . Bobo, is it? We’re going to the Palais area, because, uh, my friend was at work near there when the earthquake came.

  OK. But it’s not wise to spend too much time in that area. It’s the heart of the disaster and very dangerous. Right? Bobo said to the driver.

  Right, the driver said, confused, but playing along anyway.

  Why would the Champ de Mars be more dangerous than usual? Natasha asked.

  We, we, don’t know, Bobo said. The Americans told us it was. They said people there were desperate and could resort to attacking us. They said there may have been some looting.

  Really?

  The Americans said so.

  And no one else?

  And no one else.

  Right. Tell me, Bobo, how do you know the President? You seem like old friends.

  Bobo smiled.

  Oui, Madame, le Président was a good friend of my father’s. I’ve known him since I was a boy.

  How nice, she said.

  I’m hoping he takes us with him when you leave. This place is in bad shape. You’re still moving, right? Right?

  Natasha didn’t answer. She wasn’t sure of the answer. She didn’t think it was any of his business either way.

  During goudou-goudou, Bobo continued, without prompting, I had just gotten home after work and was standing in my garden with my arms wide open as my girl Diana and my son Nelson ran towards me. They are very affectionate children, like their mother was. Then the ground started shaking and literally threw them at me. I clutched them and we all fell down backwards. The house and the front porch exploded and landed right at my shoes. I tried to get up with the children but I couldn’t. The shaking wouldn’t stop. My feet kept sliding around, like I was ice-skating. I resorted to crawling away from the house with them. The earth hit me in the jaw repeatedly. Heavyweight champion punches, let me tell you. Somehow I managed to make it to my car. The quaking stopped and I drove off wildly. I came to the airport because I knew the President was here.

  You mentioned your wife in past tense, Natasha said.

  Yes, goudou-goudou killed her. The children told me she was setting the dinner table with Naomi our maid when they ran out of the house to greet me. I hope we leave the country soon. The kids deserve better than this. There’s nothing left for us here.

  Natasha avoided directly facing the blues in Bobo’s lingering gaze. But her scrim of aplomb began to fray anyway. Whether it would hold up in the face of the blues of millions of Bobos now existing in Port-au-Prince, only God knew. She didn’t like the odds. She resumed staring at the new Port-au-Prince, which forlornly stared back at her under the mounting blaze of a bright morning sun. The car ambled south on Boulevard Toussaint Louverture. The streets were strangely quiet. The air was still. Traffic was light. The few people Natasha saw were sitting on the sidewalks with ashy arms and legs and dumbfounded looks on their faces. In the direction of Lalue on rue Nazon, she saw the first of dozens of cars buried under the rubble of tumbled buildings. Then she saw her first looter. He was a boy, maybe eight, maybe ten years old. He was reed-thin, with sickly reddish hair. Wearing a red tank top with a white cross on it, blue shorts, and broken sandals, he carried a full-to-the brim grocery bag half his size and shuffled down the sidewalk quickly, anxiously looking over his shoulders. When the crowd following the boy emerged, crackling with noisy and nervous energy and carrying what looked like ill-gotten goods, Natasha, the driver, and Bobo all said merde in unison. To her surprise, Natasha screamed, Stop the car! She opened the car door quickly and told the boy to get in, fast. He did.

  You’re crazy, Bobo said. What are you doing? It’s against UN rules to give rides to nonstaff. Get him out of here. He can only bring us trouble.

  What are you talking about? Natasha said. You don’t work for the UN. Driver, the boy is strapped in. Go! Go! Go!

  And he went. The SUV steamed through potholes and picked up speed even as the crowd came closer. The crowd paid the car no mind. These were the able and the hungry and the newly homeless. Like the first humans, after being cast out of heaven. If they couldn’t eat or drink it, and no one had a gun pointed at them for trying to eat and drink (and, later, fuck), they couldn’t be bothered. Natasha imagined that, like her, each one of them had a loved one in need who was lost in the pulverized concrete wilderness whom they hoped to find and bring medicine, food, water, and love to. She gave the boy the rest of her croissant and OJ. He gulped them without hesitation or saying merci. Nazon was a very wide boulevard. People were everywhere, carrying stuff that was too big and heavy for them to carry. The SUV had to slow down. Threading around looters and invalids was like tiptoeing around on a beach made of broken beer bottles. The boy they had picked up got nervous, squirmed, and, when Natasha reached out to him, bolted out of the moving car, still holding his bounty tightly. He ran back up Nazon without looking over his shoulder.

  These are different times, Bobo told Natasha. People don’t want to look back anymore. They can’t. Too scary. They want the future.

  The earthquake was like a big bang, Natasha thought. And we’re scattered stars. She was crestfallen. Was she trying to hold on to a world that didn’t exist anymore? As had happened to her often whenever she felt out of touch with where and who she was, she thought of Alain.

  A tabula rasa, that’s what I am, she mused. Like the canvases you face every morning, Alain would have said. The car turned west on Avenue John Brown and began crawling toward Champ de Mars and the National Palace, post-earthquake ground zero. The car stopped for long stretches of time. Two days after the quake, the authorities and international helpers hadn’t had enough time to give everyone in the Champ de Mars area tarps and tents and sanitary and security facilities. A new city of homeless and seemingly nationless Haitians had grown around the national monuments. Right now the national square that was Champ de Mars looked like the world’s largest hospital emergency room. It was not the first time that Natasha, a native of nearby Fort National, had seen over a million people congregated there. A greater number ended up there at the end of every float’s parade every February during Carnival. Those teeming, sweaty people, too, were often half-naked and wearing red and blue in the form of red-and-blue handkerchiefs tied around the head, red-and-blue skirts around bouncing hips, red-and-blue shirts draped over the shoulders but rarely worn around glistening, muscular torsos, and red-and-blue capes (capes were big among the men come Carnival time) for shoulders both broad and malnourished. Red and blue were the colors of the national flag, and they were
creatively twisted and crafted in all sorts of fashionable ways. This day the red she saw and quickly yearned to forget belonged to the blood of earthquake survivors barely surviving. Blood ran from every body part you could imagine. Rivers of the stuff. Why hadn’t it all dried up by now, oh Lord? Maybe the blood was dry. Maybe it was the open, unbandaged wounds on all those bodies glistening under the hot and bright sun that made the blood look so fucking red. So fresh, so not clean. She saw red, but it was the blue that made her weep. People were crying for help. People were crying from pain. People were crying from grief. People were crying from the sight of other people crying. People cried out of rage. In the front seat, Bobo was horrified and kept talking to the people on the streets to calm his nerves, even though they couldn’t hear him.

  Why doesn’t somebody move that dead child’s body away from her crippled mother? he screamed. Can’t they see she can’t move? Can’t they see what seeing what her baby looks like is doing to her?

  Natasha saw one tragic tableau after another, and words failed her. She couldn’t emit a single sound. She tried to tell the driver to drive faster, to get her away from a scene by escaping to another street. But the street had disappeared a long time ago. People were everywhere, suffering, not smiling. And they swirled and froze in a constant, random, awesome, and horrible traffic-clogging movie, causing the SUV to move at a glacial pace, if it moved at all, for hours. Natasha felt like a tourist in her own city being guided through an open-air museum of pain and despair. If the driver’s name is Virgil, I’ll kill myself, she thought. Her eyes took in grotesqueries her mind instantly wanted to forget. When she turned her head elsewhere in search of a balm, her eyes invariably landed on an even sadder sight. Then all three of them saw a sizable green garden. Their battered spirits were so grateful to see the color of life free from ruined brown bodies they took a while to notice the caved-in white building looming behind the lawn. The National Palace. It really was destroyed.