History was not her thing, nor was patriotism, but Natasha felt a loss of something dear and big and common to all Haitians at the sight of the seat of her country’s leadership destroyed, with its guts spilling out on a grassy knoll. This should not have been allowed to happen, was an immediate thought. This is how much God hates the Republic of Haiti, was another. A building that had stirred passions to the point of madness in the hearts of some of the world’s greatest emperors, from Napoleon to Woodrow Wilson, recalcitrant peasants, stentorian poets, sensitive singers, and conniving nation-builders and rebels over centuries was laid low by a random and brief belching of the earth. Oddly for a first lady, the loss of her home, which also happened to be a potent fetish of the country’s power, identity, voice, and, in many ways, its right to exist, felt liberating. Relaxing even. We will have to finally figure out if we even deserve the right to be a nation, she thought. And, if yes, what kind of nation we will be. What exactly was the point of us? She remembered, vaguely, her ex-lover’s rant one afternoon at Chez Marie’s in Tabarre about Haiti’s lifelong bout of existential indecision. We seemed incapable of choosing between philosophies, he said. Communism or capitalism? Social democracy or plain-vanilla democracy? Tourism-driven or manufacturing-driven job and economic growth? The Americans, like the French before them, want nothing more than to make those decisions for us. We resist their interference and rightly so, but come on, people, can we collectively take responsibility for a way forward that benefits everyone and stick to it?!
Like certain artists, Natasha Robert enjoyed swimming in tragedies and not comedies—after all, great pieces of art or song, to her, almost always evoked the pulpy thrill of heroic death followed by births and resurrections—so she was blissfully indifferent to the degree to which these questions scared the bejesus out of most folks. Stop the car! she said. The car stopped.
What now? Bobo said.
She got out and stood on the scorching earth. The wrecked National Palace stood mute in front of her. She gently touched the black metal fence surrounding it. Behind her, across Avenue de la Republique, was Place Pigeon, where an upside-down rusty red Chevy and its injured owner, unbeknownst to her, yearned for her. When she was a kid, she was, like many people, afraid to even touch the gate surrounding the National Palace of Haiti, for it protected a building of almost sacred importance and bottomless terror. The stories of bizarre crimes to occupy and hold the palace were legion and grim. And crazy, her husband would say after he’d had one drink too many. What were these fools hoping to get when they fought and killed so much to get this bureau? This?! The last time he had one of those drunken fits, the old man who had probably sold his soul to become president had lost his balance and fell face-first to the floor. Right in front of his grand oak desk, with its vintage pens and ten-year-old PC. When she tried to help her husband get back on his feet, he waved her off. No! he said, Let me crawl. Let my face and tongue suck the floor, let the parquet be the last thing to hold back my vomit. Let my busted lip sting and my blood stick to the floor. I lick shoes for a living, don’t I? What difference will licking another unwanted thing make? It was a sad night. It was their honeymoon.
Outside the palace a few days after the quake, wounded people moaned at her feet. She cupped her hand over her brow to block the sun and see better. The palace was shattered; its dome severed off its body. Natasha struggled to make out the location of offices and rooms. She almost found it difficult to remember what the building had looked like when it was, well, palatial, fit and gleaming white. Tall, lordly, inscrutable. Memories of a relatively healthy and perky Port-au-Prince began to fade, she found, and fade quickly. The image of the National Palace as she left it the morning before the earthquake might as well be sepia-toned in her mind’s eye. She could as well have been looking at the Sphinx in Giza. A sparrow, black and smooth, swooped down and perched himself casually on a ledge near where the west wing of the palace used to be. That’s where Alain was, Natasha thought. Life attracts life, and the sparrow was the first animal she had seen since the earthquake. Surely it’s a positive sign! Natasha took off in a sprint down Avenue de la Republic along the palace gate.
Excuse me, excuse me, she said to the men and women and children underfoot along the way. Madame! Madame! It was Bobo, chasing her. The run felt good. The air flooding Natasha’s lungs filled her with joy. In motion, on a run, she felt purposeful, no longer a victim. The stale smell of death that had coated her was temporarily banished. A hand on the cement pillar at the corner to help her keep her balance, Natasha turned on rue St. Honoré. This normally shady and cool street was as forlorn as any street in Port-au-Prince, but the people were engaged in the hope business. Men and some women were trying to dig people out of the debris of fallen houses. Even from across the street, Natasha could hear survivors’ cries for help and pleas about injuries. Cell phones rang everywhere, causing rescuers to stop and look and shake their heads when they realized the ringing was from another phone. Every phone on the street chimed and chimed, it seemed, because practically everyone with a cell phone had someone he knew buried alive with a cell phone somewhere in the city. And that person was calling and calling for help. How do you focus on rescuing a stranger or neighbor when a loved one or a friend is calling you for help so insistently? How could you, Natasha, go through so much trouble to try to find this one friend when you knew you had friends and distant relatives all over town whose well-being should concern you? Leave me alone, conscience, Natasha thought with a shrug to the singsong of dozens of cell phone ringtones while speed-walking on rue St. Honoré. She reached the back of the National Palace and discovered that the entrance she’d hoped to use to get through a secret passageway to where she left Alain was crushed beyond use. She covered her mouth.
No, she said, shaking her head. Not you. You can’t be dead. No!
Her heart finally said, Perhaps he really is. Her spirit gave in. Hope in her spacious soul was blown out like a candle. Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw Bobo quickly put his gun away. He took Natasha gently by the shoulders and into his massive arms to guide her away from the fallen manse.
We can’t stay around here too long, Bobo said. People might recognize you.
Natasha let herself be walked toward the car. She didn’t try to stop or wipe the cold tears streaming down her cheeks. She couldn’t stop their flow even if she’d wanted to. Alain, Alain, oh Alain. Natasha folded herself in the car. One last glance at the palace, then the Range Rover pulled away. In a country where tradition called for people to build elaborate pink-and-green or sky-blue minihouses in cemeteries to host their dead loved ones, she thought the National Palace had become a regal resting place for the man she loved, a too damned saddening event for her to appreciate its irony. Not yet anyway.
A fey noon sun was aloft and hot. Glistening four-by-four trucks were parked at various points around the Champ de Mars. The trucks ferried international humanitarians to ground zero to dispense aid. Some of the trucks were painted alarmingly ugly colors, like the school bus yellow of the truck with the word “Scientology” emblazoned on it in a large red script. Bobo found Avenue John Brown too congested. They turned left instead, soon skirting Place Pigeon and passing Le Capitol movie theater. Men waving fists of money came banging at their windows, startling Natasha out of her despondency. They’re money changers, Bobo said. They want to sell gourdes for US dollars. Look, they think you’re a foreigner. Bobo made that remark cheerily, like it was a compliment of some kind.
Soon they were in Fort National, Natasha’s neighborhood. More accurately, the car drove through the canyon of rubble and dead bodies formerly known as Natasha’s neighborhood, chilling the blood in her veins. Inconsolable since seeing the National Palace, Natasha was now suffocated by grief. The guys avoided her eyes. There wasn’t just pain in Natasha’s heart. There was an emptiness. She felt hollowed out. A great chilling vacuum where the warmth of hot blood used to be.
Mon Dieu! Bobo exclaimed a few minutes later.
The car came to another abrupt halt, compelling Natasha to wipe the tears from her eyes and reluctantly brace herself. In front of them was the National Cathedral. Nôtre Dame de l’Assomption of Haiti, Natasha’s favorite place in the whole world, loomed before them as a mix of rubble and jagged, broken concrete. Its towering pink and beige walls had been rent asunder by the earthquake. The colorful stained-glass windows Natasha spent almost a decade working on were shattered and scattered on the streets. The roof was sheared off the church’s head, probably collapsed into the pews, smothering the altars and snuffing out remembrance candles. They stepped out of the SUV and walked on rue St. Laurent dazed, as if answering a mysterious call. The sky was electric blue. There was a small fire ablaze down the street. Piles of gray and pink cement had swallowed the front gate and sidewalk. Natasha could barely make out the top of the church’s front door. But she badly needed to go inside. Giving up on the National Palace after the earthquake had split it in two and spread its interior on the ground like a spilled deck of cards was one thing. There was a former lover buried in that newly minted national tomb who deserved a better fate and proper mourning, like, she suspected, she would have to do for more than a few friends and former colleagues around town. But the thing between her and the cathedral was different. It was personal. It was about saving her sanity and, more important, her soul, the meaning of her life and afterlife.
Natasha was an old hand at grieving for loves lost. She had given up hope of having any surviving relatives in Haiti long before the earthquake. If they didn’t come out of the woodwork to reach out to her after her name and face had made the news when she married the president of the freaking republic, they couldn’t possibly exist anywhere on God’s green earth. She really was the last of her kind on this maudit planet. This was why the sight of the Catholic cathedral, even gutted by Mother Nature, stiffened her spine. The church had had the effect of making Natasha feel . . . salvageable . . . ever since she was a child. And on this day, the church needed her to try to repair it and make it relevant again; maybe they could save each other. Natasha started climbing the rubble toward the door and thinking about the ways Jesus had been good to her via this cathedral. She was around ten years old the day the pack of boys chased her down rue Borgella. She deserved the ass-kicking coming to her. She had taken their soccer ball on an impulse during their game. They wanted the ball back, and they wanted to teach her the lesson to not mess with them in the process. Natasha’s heart leapt in her chest, tickling her throat, but she outran the boys. Yes, she did. She took their ball for no reason as it rolled out of bounds, and ran away laughing. The boys screamed, cursed, and gave a chase that got more and more futile, so she smiled, relaxed. The air felt sweet, pumping her muscles to the point that she feared they might burst, explode. But she had relaxed a little too much in her sprint. One boy caught up to her and touched her shoulder. Putain! Natasha made a sharp turn to shake his grip, opened a gate and closed it, padlocking it. Give us the ball! Give us the ball! the boys bayed at the gates, arms outstretched. Natasha felt powerful, like Joan of Arc. When it seemed as though the boys’ frustration would tear the gate apart, she giggled and tossed the ball over it. The ball flew into the sky, disappeared briefly in the white sun, then thudded on someone’s face. The boys welcomed the ball like a long-lost friend and went back to playing their soccer match. Except for one of them. He lingered behind long enough to make sinister eye contact with Natasha. He gave her the I’ll-slash-your-throat-for-that sign with his fingers. She gulped.
Well, that wasn’t a smart thing to do, young lady, a deep voice intoned behind her.
Natasha turned to discover the voice belonged to the monsignor, Monsignor Dorélien. He stood over Natasha under the arch, between heavy metal doors. He looked like a young Desmond Tutu, darting eyes, smiling round face, big hands. Behind him a vast hall with a marbled cool beckoned. Natasha finally realized where she had escaped to. The National Cathedral. A building she didn’t like much as a child, though she lived nearby. She couldn’t remember the reason. Her parents, back when they lived together, forced her to go to Mass on Sundays. For some reason, after she became an orphan, she thought that if there was going to be one perk from that unwanted state, it would be the right to skip out of attending sermons about love every week. What time could she have for such nonsense after all her loves had disappeared or given her away? Uh-oh, she thought, looking at the monsignor. Young Natasha felt guilty for calling his work bullshit, even if it was only in her head.
Come in, child, he said. I know that boy. He’ll be waiting for you for hours. You’re welcome to wait him out here. Give him and his friends time to cool off.
This can’t turn out good, Natasha thought. However, getting those boys to chase her into the church’s protection turned out to be the single best mistake of her life. The cathedral Natasha walked into that day a decade ago was a chantier of artistic activity. High above the neat rows of brown wooden pews and the cream-white marble floors, which felt nice and cool under Natasha’s naked feet, men and some women hung from all the church’s stained-glass windows. They stood on scaffolding, to be sure. The paintbrushes they held caught Natasha’s eyes. The workers had their backs turned away from the world. They were literally painting Jesus’s grace onto the windows. The windows were high and long and skinny. The sun bathed them with approval, like God was thanking the artists for their work. Natasha had walked the aisles of the National Cathedral dozens of times before. Usually, she had been dragged against her will by a particularly religious prostitute friend who was going to take communion at Mass. During those trips down the aisle, Natasha looked down at the floor, partly out of respect for the grandeur of the moment of worship, but mostly out of embarrassment. She had never been baptized. Many of the worshippers in the church those Sundays knew her as the eccentric local orphan who had never been baptized and thus never had a first communion, and therefore did not belong in their company at Mass, the one moment where their eyes could watch God and feel that He was returning their gaze. Young Natasha, however, did not meet those disapproving glances because she felt them valid. She could not articulate why, but Natasha thought they were wrong. God’s eyes smiled on her too. She lowered her eyes as a way to prove to the Lord that she could submit to at least one person’s will—Jesus’s—and to prove to herself that she was not some wild, untamable animal, no matter what people said. For a few minutes on the occasional Sunday, she, too, could get over herself and appreciate the cool smallness of submitting to the unknowable, endlessly vast presence of Jesus, his Father, and the Holy Ghost. The day Monsignor Dorélien invited her into the church in its off-hours Natasha looked up and around the cathedral for the first time. The place was huge! And rich with colorful mosaics and rainbow-colored stained-glass windows. Natasha felt the thrill of her id snap, crackle, pop, and for the first time she didn’t feel guilty in the flow of artistic inspiration. The cathedral was not empty with a tomblike chill, as a big church on a weekday morning could be. Instead, the cathedral, to Natasha’s eyes, seemed to be in the process of becoming, of being held up by the hands of two dozen artisans who were working at its various windows with fierce, happy concentration. They seemed to be transforming the National Cathedral into something worthy of heaven, or at least something inspiring to the eyes of parishioners seeking glimpses of heaven. To Natasha, the artists at work were doing the work she’d dreamed of doing, even when she didn’t know how they did it. The artists were artisans, but they looked like conduits to God. She did not know you could be both.
That day, Monsignor Dorélien stood back to carefully observe the wonder in the little girl’s eyes. The girl actually sat down in a pew to watch the stained-glass-window makers and cleaners work. She was entranced, like she was at the cinema. Oh, how Monsignor Dorélien longed to see some of the perpetually in motion children in the neighborhood pause to do just that. With a wave of an arm, the monsignor caught the attention of a glass maker.
Natasha watched the woman scamp
er down the scaffolding. The woman was a girl not much older than Natasha. She was short and wore no makeup, denim overalls, and the sauntering self-confidence that comes with a history of successfully deploying God-given gifts. With the glow of a thousand sunlit shards of rainbow-colored glass behind her, the woman said, Hi, I’m Vanessa. Then she shocked Natasha by shaking her hand, as if Natasha was her equal. Vanessa offered to show Natasha how to do what she did: make and paint church windows with scenes of biblical stories and figures.
Go ahead, Monsignor Dorélien said to Natasha. Vanessa’s one of our brightest young painters. She’ll show you the ropes, if you’re interested. Young Natasha couldn’t believe her luck.
Today, almost a decade and an earthquake later, in the roofless and almost window-free ruins of the cathedral, Natasha saw Monsignor Dorélien half-buried under chunks of church walls fallen on the exact spot where she’d met the woman who taught her how to paint and sculpt homages to God.
DAMAGED GOODS
In the refugee camp at Place Pigeon, Alain Destiné, Natasha’s wounded ex-boyfriend, alternated between looking forward to death and mainlining nostalgia for her love, until one night his life was saved by a white man. The night had been so black and gloomy that the darkness muffled the crackle of Alain’s fire. The camp had decided it needed a security force within days of its setting up a governing structure. No guns or knives were available, so a warm body armed with nothing more than a whistle would have to do. This night, it was Alain’s turn to be the camp’s night watchman. As the refugee camp in Place Pigeon had slowly morphed from a wreckage of the wrecked, terrified, and desperate to a loosely organized family of the wrecked, terrified, and desperate, small, interesting things had happened. The camp begat small plots of property, corridors with names, and a health clinic manned often by visiting foreigners and local student nurses and doctors, and also a restaurant, a church, a barbershop, a couple of beauty salons, a brothel, and even a small pharmacy and liquor store. Yes, the pharmacy and liquor store were one and the same. As they should be, Philippe said at the pharma-bar’s opening. Philippe, God bless his heart, had even tracked down a pot dealer who made regular visits to the camp. Alain Destiné, who had been a model of dull and curmudgeonly sobriety all his life, evolved into a dull and curmudgeonly pothead after the earthquake. If I had any talent for music I’d be on my way to becoming a Haitian Bob Marley right about now, he wrote Natasha in his diary one afternoon.
God Loves Haiti (9780062348142) Page 11