by Maryse Conde
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FOR HIS DAUGHTER, Babakar wanted a nursemaid who was in touch with modern times. None of those toothless old hags from years gone by with their starched madras head ties and mouths full of Creole proverbs such as Fout la vi sé yon sélérat! (Life’s a real bitch!) Such a nursemaid might very well cast a cloud over the child’s character. Furthermore, he wanted the nurse to speak French-French, and preferably to be pretty, patient, and loving, and capable of putting up with a baby’s bawling for no rhyme or reason. Some nursemaids can’t cope with the pandemonium, fly into a rage and consequently into court. It was Hugo Moreno who introduced him to a niece of his wife, a woman who had been a coolie of exceptional beauty. Chloé Ranguin was a graceful apsara who had studied a serious course of pediatric nursing in Paris.
As soon as she was hired, Babakar became jealous, fearing she was having too much influence over Anaïs. In order to safeguard those precious moments of intimacy with the child, at six every morning, before the day began to color, he would take her in his arms and walk along the Simon Poirier forest path that wound through the savanna of pineapples, passing the ajoupa hut at the Little Waterfall before finally reaching the foothills of the volcano.
“Look at all this beauty!” Babakar whispered in Anaïs’s ear. “Look at it before it disappears. That tree is a Honduras mahogany, recognizable by its jagged leaves. And that one is almost extinct; it’s a guaiac tree, sometimes used as an aphrodisiac. Those over there grouped in a bunch are bay rum trees and mountain guavas. Look at the scarlet splash of the heliconia. I’ll teach you to cherish this cramped little island where all of Nature’s marvels rub shoulders.”
Anaïs seemed fascinated by his words. Head raised firmly on her neck, she looked around her and appeared transported, spellbound by the splendor of the landscape. As far as the eye could see, the green of the tree ferns colonized the grayness of the rocky foothills and the sun sparkled over all this motley mix of colors.
The neighbors, who in the early hours of the morning were sipping their coffee or hot chocolate, already spying on other people’s comings and goings, watched the father and child, and with pursed lips commented on how anyone with common sense could possibly take a baby out at this hour of the morning without covering her head. And what if the rain, which was always lurking, took them by surprise?
That morning, as usual, the surgery was crowded. Don’t be misled, it hadn’t always been like that. This island is not just a land surrounded on all sides by water as the geography books tell us, it also feels perpetually threatened. It abhors foreigners and thinks them the cause of its misery. But given its reputation as an island of prosperity in the midst of the persistent poverty of the Caribbean, Haitians, Dominicans, Dominicans from Santo Domingo, Puerto Ricans, not to mention African marabouts from Senegal and Mali, all converged on this tiny piece of land. There are even a number of down-and-out Whites who come to warm themselves under the sun of its eternal summer. All it would take was for Babakar to save the lives of two or three poor agricultural workers for his reputation to change, and even for him to become “the doctor in vogue.”
“My doctor’s the African.”
“An African doctor? I can’t believe it!”
Babakar was surprised to see a man in the waiting room. A man in an obstetrician’s surgery is like a gunshot in a concert of violas da gamba; unless accompanying his wife, his sister, or his mistress—a rare event in our macho lands. This one was obviously on his own, sitting with his back to the window, and Babakar smelled danger. The man patiently waited his turn. It was past eleven when Babakar ushered him into his office.
“Ou pa sonjé’m?”
The man sat down in the armchair. It was his Creole which tracked down the man in Babakar’s memory. Movar, Reinette’s companion! Babakar relived that memorable night when Anaïs was given to him—it was Movar! Movar hadn’t attended Reinette’s funeral. Babakar had gone, reluctantly walking at the back of the procession, trying to go unnoticed, fully aware, however, of the inquisitive looks and guessing the gossip his presence provoked. No flowers, no wreaths. Nice and quick. A botched ceremony for a poor foreign wretch.
Movar began to speak. Slowly and painstakingly at first, as if he was conscious that Babakar had trouble deciphering his Creole, then he forgot about Babakar and gradually became galvanized.
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MOVAR’S STORY
There’s nothing sweet about wretchedness: Lan mizè pa dou. That’s what one of our songs says and believe me, it’s so true.
Ever since I was a little boy, I have gotten up with her in the morning and gone to bed with her at night. She is my most faithful companion and has never for a single day left me in peace. She’s the reason my papa vanished without even taking the trouble to say goodbye. One evening he didn’t come home to sleep. We didn’t see him the next day either, nor the day after. Neighbor Céluta told us he’d probably gone to look for work somewhere, perhaps in the US or Canada. Maman stayed and struggled as best she could with three children on her hands, then she too disappeared. One evening she didn’t come home from the market where she sold odds and ends. We waited and waited for her but she never came back. I don’t blame her for leaving us alone. I think she was tired of her burden and needed a rest.
After Maman disappeared, I had no other choice but to follow Frère Hénock. That’s what I called him, but in actual fact he was not my brother. He was Neighbor Céluta’s son, my maman’s good friend who took in my little sisters. To start with I helped Frère Hénock do all kinds of thieving with his gang. For example, I stood as a lookout at the places he burgled. Then he made a chance encounter that changed his life. He became a member of the Lavalas party, a new political party. Don’t ask me anything else, I’ve never understood politics. He soon became a member of the President’s personal militia. He saw the President every day and worshiped him like God Himself.
“Can you imagine,” he never stopped saying, “he speaks Creole all day long! He speaks Creole like you and me and all the Haitians who have never set foot in school.”
According to him, our country had never known anyone so devoted to its cause. A country, he asserted, is like a child: it needs a mentor, it needs a guide to set it on the right road. In his opinion, all our presidents were only interested in profiting from their situation. They had castles; Baby Doc had over a hundred. In Spain, in France, in Morocco, all over the place. I don’t know if that’s true because you hear so many things. What is true is that being a member of the President’s militia brought Frère Hénock a lot of money. He gave it to me for safekeeping: I counted wads and wads of American dollars, which I kept in shoeboxes. Sometimes they were euros, or else some other money I hadn’t heard of. Together with other boys of my age we escorted the militia who jokingly called us “the Baby Boy Band.” In other words, we were armed and marched in front of them, behind and on both sides. While we marched on the sidelines, we would fire our Kalashnikovs into the air, making a terrible noise so as to scare people and get them to make way for us. When the militia drove around in their jeeps we would sit on the hood, swinging our legs. We were not allowed to hurt or kill anyone. Only the militia could do that, and believe me, they didn’t think twice about doing it with their big Remington rifles. Sometimes, before killing someone they would take him far into the woods or onto a deserted beach and play cat and mouse with him. In other words, they tortured him. I couldn’t help feeling pity for the person, but this made Frère Hénock angry.
“What are you blubbering for, crybaby?” he would shout. “They’re our enemies, people who have always despised us. We’re only giving them back what they deserve.”
Afterwards, it was the turn of the Baby Boy Band to burn the bodies. We escorted the militia everywhere: to their secret meetings, their parades, but also to the supermarket and restaurants. As you can imagine, I loathed my work. The only thing I enjoyed a little was when they made out with the girls while
we spied on them through the keyhole. It was just like in the movies.
Suddenly everything changed: Frère Hénock was killed. One lunchtime a group of individuals dressed in civvies, whom we didn’t know from Adam, burst in. We were calmly eating our grilled pork and djon djon rice with black mushrooms in a restaurant we liked called La Perle. They leaped out of their jeep and, before we could make a move, began firing at us. I still can’t fathom how I managed to escape. I think it’s because a member of the militia called Gros-Louis collapsed onto me and sort of protected me with his body. I got up stunned, in a daze but still alive. Who were these individuals who had taken potshots at us? Where did they come from? Were they paid by people who didn’t like the President? There was so much chaos in the country that I’ll never know the truth.
After that I was even more frightened; I was scared all the time. I was convinced they were going to murder me for no reason at all. I no longer wanted to stay in the house where I had been living with Frère Hénock. I hid out in one of those abandoned warehouses you see on the seashore. The beach was so filthy, a real junkyard, that nobody came there. Only rats as big as dogs plunged into the black waters. I only came out at night to go and eat at Fouad al-Larabi’s place. He was Lebanese, a friend of Frère Hénock’s. He wasn’t a soldier or a drug addict. He and his uncle owned a hotel-restaurant called The Cedars of Lebanon. But his uncle had been killed and now he was left on his own. He had taken pity on my two little sisters, who had become a burden for my aunt; besides, she wasn’t my real aunt. He paid their school fees, their uniforms, and their books. One afternoon he came to look for me in my hiding place.
“You’d better come and take refuge at my place. There’s probably going to be riots in town.”
“More than usual?” I asked.
“I think so.”
He was right. That night it wasn’t only the town but the whole country that went up in flames. All the people who loved the President crowded onto the streets. On the Champ de Mars, shots were being fired in all directions. The bodies of the wounded and those of the dead lay in the same pools of blood. Nobody bothered to take care of them. The glow from the flames burning red as bonfires turned night into day. Around midnight, things got so heated up we went down into the cellar. Fortunately, there were no longer any guests at the hotel. The last of the Americans had decided to fly out. Apart from my sisters and myself there were just a group of neighbors left. The women, naturally, were reciting their rosaries, praying at the top of their voices, while the children were sound asleep. There was also the girl from Santo Domingo whom Fouad was courting. I saw her for the first time. She never stopped swearing at him and saying it was all his fault.
It was that night I made up my mind to leave the country, which had become too dangerous.
Unfortunately, that was easier said than done.
Almost a year passed before I managed to achieve my dream. I was at my wit’s end, waiting and waiting. Ever since the President had been obliged to pack up and go, things went from bad to worse. Waking up in the morning you never knew whether you would still be alive in the evening. There were kidnappings every day. Fouad found me some work. I would have preferred to stay and work at his hotel, The Cedars of Lebanon, sweeping the rooms, helping in the kitchen, and waiting tables. But he told me that business was bad and he couldn’t pay me. So he sent me to one of his friends, Yacine, a Lebanese like himself, who owned a shop that sold firearms. On the outside it looked perfectly normal; you’d walk past the door and never guess what was going on inside. In the shop window all you could see were transistor radios, TV sets, and CD players. But at the back there was a padlocked door which opened onto a room where the rifles and machine guns were stored. At certain hours of the day men came to fetch them. Yacine paid well; unfortunately, I couldn’t cope. Not because of the harassment by the police, who kept us under constant watch and barged into the shop at any hour of the day, revolver at the ready, supposedly to check on the accounts. Nor because of Yacine, who treated me like dirt, probably because I was blacker than him. The real reason was that I was scared of the dogs that guarded the shop at night with me. Every day at six in the evening, while Yacine lounged around smoking his joints, I had to go and fetch the dogs from a so-called Lyonel. Lyonel lived on a farm, up in the region of Kenscoff. He made a lot of money hiring out the most ferocious of his guard dogs: German mastiffs, Dobermans, rottweilers, and pit bulls. I went up there in a local bus and came back down on foot with two hounds on a leash, who were as a rule twice as big as me. As soon as they got outside the dogs began to run wild, barking and foaming at the mouth, their red jaws baring their sharp white fangs, wide open like an alligator’s. When people saw us, they took fright and ran a mile. I had to hang on to their leashes with all my might and keep up with those hellish creatures as they raced all the way down in the evening and dashed all the way up when I took them back at four in the morning. There was no way you could eat in front of them since the smell of food made them excitable, and you should never turn your back on them, otherwise they would leap on you.
Finally, after a few weeks, I cracked up. If I had continued, I would have gone mad. Yacine was furious. Fouad too. But since he was a good soul, he didn’t say anything. I don’t know how but he managed to find a “smuggler,” a stocky mulatto from Santo Domingo. He demanded seven hundred American dollars to take me to another island in the Caribbean. I would have preferred the States and to go and join my cousin Florimond in Miami. Florimond used to work like me in the Baby Boy Band. One day he suddenly said, “We’re all going to die if we don’t get the hell out of here. We’re going to get a bellyful of bullets and die like dogs.” I didn’t listen to him and now I’m sorry I didn’t. But there was a scale of smuggler’s fees; it cost more to go to the US or Canada—three thousand American dollars! As I said, Fouad was already paying my sisters’ school fees.
Knowing that I was going to leave behind Myriam and especially Jahira—the younger of my two sisters, whom I adored—was agony; and they too suffered. We cried all the time and it made Fouad angry.
“You’re the one who wanted to leave! May Allah protect you!”
Allah! That’s the name he gave to his Good Lord.
The boat Cinco de Mayo was waiting to load its passengers in a creek near the village of Desperacion. We had to take three local buses to get there; it took four days. It was the first time I had left Port-au-Prince. I had never seen such high mountains and I was frightened. The poverty was even worse. We stopped at noon to look for food, but there was nothing to buy on the markets. Sometimes we found some akasan to drink and some shriveled fruit. We traveled at night to avoid attacks. The children looked old and their parents resembled guédés, those dead spirits straight out of the graveyard.
Finally, we arrived at Desperacion.
The sailors on the Cinco de Mayo were English-speaking, from Jamaica and Dominica, but they spoke excellent Creole. The boat was built for twenty-five passengers; they embarked thirty-five.
I ran across Reinette, just like that, in the main street of Desperacion the morning of our departure. I was haggling over a straw hat I wanted as protection from the sun once out at sea. She was doing the same. Until then I had never looked at a woman. Though I could have had as many as I wanted. If you have a gun or a firearm you can have as many women as you like; it makes an impression on them. Reinette was so lovely I almost went down on my knees as if she were the very portrait of the Virgin Mary. I immediately sensed she was out of the ordinary. She didn’t give the time of day to just anyone and especially not to a little good-for-nothing such as me, an ex-member of the President’s militia who couldn’t even write his name. So I kept my distance.
Around five in the evening I set off for the landing stage because the boat was scheduled to leave at night. When I arrived, there was a great discussion going on since most of the passengers objected to Reinette coming on board as she was pregnant and w
hat would they do if she gave birth?
“E si li vin pou akouché, ka nou ké fè?”
I hadn’t noticed her belly, occupied as I was looking at her eyes. So I sided with her and oddly enough I managed to convince the sailors, even though I’m scared of speaking in public, to let her on board. You’d think she would have thanked me for what I’d done. She didn’t even deign to look at me.
The boat sailed off in a hullabaloo of farewells, benedictions, and prayers. On the jetty a renegade priest waved great signs of the cross in the air. The passengers chanted, “Jesus, have pity on us.”
From the very first day it was obvious Reinette had no intention of mixing with the others and stayed in her corner. When she was not vomiting in the plastic bags the sailors handed round, she remained stretched out on a bench, her head wrapped in a piece of sackcloth under her hat. I could see only too well she didn’t want to be disturbed and take part in the others’ idle gossip: for or against the former president; for or against the interim government nominated by the Americans, who everybody knows are our masters. What was the use of wasting saliva on the subject? Our paltry opinion didn’t mean a thing. Reinette had no intention either of singing the same never-ending hymns or chants, love songs or laments. She would close her eyes and pretend to be asleep. I say “pretend” because I knew full well that behind those eyelids, she wasn’t asleep. How could you possibly sleep in such a burning heat, amid a glare that singed the backs of your eyes and a stench that stuck to your teeth and gums and wormed its way to the back of your throat, making you retch? There was no WC aboard either. The men as well as the women had to use a kind of tent that the sailors had put up at the back of the boat which housed a bucket and some toilet paper. Once they had done their business, they would empty the bucket and rinse it out as best they could in the sea.