Waiting for the Waters to Rise

by Maryse Conde

  Ah, don’t fall in love on this earth

  When you fall out of love

  All that remains are your tears

  Ah, don’t fall in love on this earth.

  Jahira was no intellectual: Thécla had said the same thing about Azélia, little knowing that she herself had cured her son of intellectuals. Fortunate are those who masticate the black bread of life without seeking to analyze at all cost its ingredients.

  Sometimes Fouad and Babakar pledged solemn vows:

  “We will always stay together! We will never leave each other!”

  “We will never forget them!”

  “There will never be another woman in our lives!”

  Fouad also stammered, “I now know, it’s not in an American university you learn to write. Suffering is our teacher: suffering and grief. My heart and my imagination are overflowing. Last night I got out of bed; listen to what I wrote in front of the open window.”

  Babakar listened but was not convinced. He thought these overly mannered words a selfish shield and a hidden string of repressed feelings. Babakar would have preferred Fouad’s words to be receptive, porous, and transparent. Ah, if he himself wrote, he would love to do without words: they get you nowhere.

  Every day at dusk the few remaining friends got together on the terrace: Monsieur Saint-Omer, Giscard, and Ti-Son and Roro Meiji, who had come from Jacmel. The latter had exhibited his paintings at the Fleischman Gallery and had been unanimously shot down by the critics. “Monsieur Romuald Meiji mistakes a toilet brush for a paint brush,” the Organe des Démocrates had elegantly written.

  Roro took these comments very badly.

  “They hate me because I’m a mulatto,” he declared.

  “Come on now,” Giscard protested, mulatto himself. “The days of ‘noirisme’ are long gone. Haiti has finished with its obsession with color.”

  “You don’t know a thing,” Roro claimed. “You weren’t raised here. You’ve never been called a ‘camooquin’ mulatto.”

  The day before they were to leave, Monsieur Saint-Omer solemnly gave the funeral oration for the deceased.

  “They were two great Haitian women. My brother the President is very touched by their death.”

  And yet, Babakar thought without anger, slightly embittered, he was the one who killed them. All these incomprehensible games in the name of democracy, anti-imperialism, and national identity are in the end nothing more than power games.

  Roro Meiji, who was drinking more and more since his artistic setbacks, had brought a collector’s item—a gentian-flavored rum from Argentina. He walked out into the garden to pour a libation, then downed a full glass, as he was so fond of doing. Giscard looked at him with a critical eye.

  “You know what Shakespeare said? Alcohol provides the desire, but takes away the performance.”

  “Nonsense!” Roro roared.

  “All depends on what you mean by ‘performance’!” Fouad intervened.

  There then followed one of those discussions both sterile and passionate that they had a knack for. As usual, Babakar did not join in this verbal jousting. He probably had little confidence in his ideas about life and the world. Once the discussion was over, Monsieur Saint-Omer asked in a slightly mocking voice, “Where is this country you’re going to? I’ve looked everywhere on the map but I can’t see it.”

  Fouad was the one to answer. “It’s not a country. It’s a settlement, a tiny community in the south of Tanzania. There are Rwandans, Afghans, and Iraqis, people like us, who have lost everything. They have suffered so much they want to retire from the world to reflect together on how to improve things.”

  “And how will they do that?”

  “Thanks to Art!” Giscard thundered, who was waiting for such an opportunity to get on his hobbyhorse. “I keep saying over and over again only Art can change the world.”

  “I’m not thinking only of humans!” Monsieur Saint-Omer objected. “Perhaps you can manage to change their hearts, make them more open and tolerant and less violent. But Nature is even more ferocious than man.”

  Once again, they embarked on a muddled and passionate conversation.

  “I’ll miss you,” Monsieur Saint-Omer said when they had calmed down. “My brother the President will feel the same. We hope you won’t take away too many bad memories of our country.”

  It was as if Nature hadn’t recovered from the recent hurricanes and had no intention of renouncing its reign. A thick mist clouded the stars and a muffled rumbling could be heard. It couldn’t be the sound of the sea, which was a good hundred or so kilometers away. Perhaps the sound of all those victims snatched for no reason from everyday life. Perhaps to satisfy a loa’s appetite? But which one?

  When his friends had retired, Babakar went up to Anaïs’s room. The child was wide awake in her bed. Motionless, she was staring at the wall. What could she see? The two women who had carried her, one in her womb, the other in her heart, both now vanished?

  She did not ask for Jahira, but simply said, “Where has Maman gone?”

  On hearing her father’s footsteps, she sat up sharply. He switched on the bedside lamp and was about to take her in his arms when he noticed something had changed. Stupefied, he ran to switch on the ceiling light to get a better view. Anaïs’s eyes sparkled and gleamed in her face like two blue periwinkles. Since her skin was high yellow, the effect was not as surprising, unusual, and troubling as it was with Thécla. On the contrary, Babakar was overjoyed and this transformation added to his daughter’s already striking beauty.

  With his heart melting with gratitude, Babakar knelt beside her bed. Thécla was giving him the most magnificent of presents. By bonding Anaïs to her and the Minerve lineage, she was giving herself fully to her son. She was erasing his guilty and arbitrary gesture of appropriation on that memorable stormy night when everything seemed possible. In fact, it was not without a feeling of remorse that Babakar had shouldered Fouad’s projects. Deep down, he wondered whether he had the right to drag Anaïs into another adventure, to make her into someone like himself who had no faith or fixed abode, a nomad belonging to no mother country. Hadn’t he paid dearly for the education he had received? Neither Northerner nor Southerner, neither Bambara nor Creole, neither Muslim nor Christian. And consequently, guilty in the eyes of all those who desire a denomination. Henceforth, Anaïs could name her camp.

  Grabbing the infant, Babakar dashed to Fouad’s to have him admire her transformation. He was wide awake and feverishly composing a poem to a photo portrait of his son. Babakar had often told him about his mother’s blue eyes and was not offended by Fouad’s cheeky humor and mockery.

  “All women are witches, my friend,” he would laugh. “Thécla no more than the others. Didn’t you know that?”

  Fouad looked him straight in the eye and said in an unusually serious tone of voice, “Leave the little one out of all this nonsense. What have you gone and invented again? Her eyes haven’t changed color!”

  Am I going mad? Babakar asked himself, taken aback. Haven’t I perhaps dreamed it all? Perhaps my mother wanted simply to inform me that she was backing out of my life for good, like all the others? How would I know?

  In a fog of pain and confusion, he had to put up with “A Homily to Zohran.”

  The following morning, Monsieur Saint-Omer, detained by his increasingly important responsibilities, sent them a magnificent presidential limousine to drive them to the airport. A sententious government officer seated beside the chauffeur declared, “You’re wrong to leave our country at this very moment. It’ll soon become what it used to be, the Pearl of the Caribbean. You see all these businessmen? They’re coming from all over the world.”

  Then, caressing Anaïs’s cheek, he added, “What a lovely child. Who’s the father?”

  “We both are,” Fouad replied contentedly.

  How are her eyes? Babakar
was tempted to ask.

  As usual, getting across Port-au-Prince took forever. Babakar was engrossed in contemplating the town for the last time. He felt an unexpected emotion surging up as he realized that, despite what he believed, he had grown attached to this environment, the disorder and the chaos. In front of the presidential palace where soldiers were standing guard, a stream of poignant images flooded back to his heart. These young soldiers reminded him of others whom he had mistakenly hated: Captain Dalembert and his mercenaries in rags on the road to Jacmel. What had been Dalembert’s relationship to Jahira? Had they been lovers? Today, this jealousy that had tortured him and which he would never know if it was justified, had vanished. In that perhaps imaginary struggle between the two of them, Dalembert had won in the end, since he had taken Jahira with him into death’s infinity. At this very moment, they were walking arm in arm over the endless steppes in the land of the invisible. They were talking together in their own tongue. He, Babakar, had never been anything but a foreigner.

  They arrived at the airport.

  Thanks to Monsieur Saint-Omer’s officer, the police formalities were rapidly expedited. They were seated in the VIP waiting room, elegantly built of wood in contrast to the surrounding ugliness.

  “It’s in memory of the Americans,” Monsieur Saint-Omer’s emissary explained. “We built it for Clinton’s visit. He loved Haiti and spent his honeymoon here with Hillary.” Then he shook them both warmly by the hand. “You’ll be sure to come back and see us. Haiti won’t let you leave just like that.”

  The VIP waiting room was a genuine museum: naive paintings, tapestries, sculptures, and metal objects. A gigantic portrait of the President lorded it over everything. Anaïs attracted the usual attention.

  “She’s so cute. How old is she?”

  Babakar was surprised to see her so calm, as if leaving this country meant nothing to her. Was it the effect of being “adopted” by Thécla? Waiters in red waistcoats were serving refreshments. Suddenly, without warning, everything began to shake while an enormous rumble surged up from the depths. The paintings fell off the walls onto the floor with an enormous din. The objects on the shelves rattled together before falling to the floor in turn. The floor swelled and cracked into a thousand deep furrows. It was as if masses of monstrous snakes were rippling under the concrete. Everyone stared at each other, dumbfounded, but not yet terrified. Then a voice shouted, “Earthquake! It’s an earthquake!”

  There then followed endless seconds in which the growing cracks in the floor swelled and zigzagged and screams could be heard outside. Then, as suddenly as it had begun, everything fell into a deathly silence.

  Clutching Anaïs firmly in his arms, Babakar, followed by Fouad, made for the gaping door, opened by an invisible hand. The control tower had collapsed but the runways seemed intact. On the tarmac, the baggage carts had been overturned and suitcases had burst open here and there revealing a harvest of clothes strewn over the ground. All the surrounding buildings had been destroyed. Nothing remained but dust and rubble.

  “We’re going to have to say goodbye,” Babakar whispered to Fouad, with a lump in his throat. “I’m a doctor and I can’t leave. It would be a case of failing to assist people in danger.”

  But as he was about to embrace him with his eyes brimming with tears, Fouad pushed him away affectionately.

  “You’re crazy! You think I would leave you here on your own? We are friends for life.”

  He grabbed Anaïs and perched her resolutely on his shoulders. Together they made their way through the rubble as best they could and left the airport.

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  On the Design

  As book design is an integral part of the reading experience, we would like to acknowledge the work of those who shaped the form in which the story is housed.

  Tessa van der Waals (Netherlands) is responsible for the cover design, cover typography, and art direction of all World Editions books. She works in the internationally renowned tradition of Dutch Design. Her bright and powerful visual aesthetic maintains a harmony between image and typography and captures the unique atmosphere of each book. She works closely with internationally celebrated photographers, artists, and letter designers. Her work has frequently been awarded prizes for Best Dutch Book Design.

  The two contra-curves on the cover are formed from an enlarged, trimmed, and tilted S taken from the Fabrikat Hairline font by Hannes van Döhren. Complementing the cover of Maryse Condé’s previous World Editions publication, The Wondrous and Tragic Life of Ivan and Ivana, the curves here represent the land and the sea, with the blue swell appearing as a wave or a force rising up against the earth.

  The cover has been edited by lithographer Bert van der Horst of BFC Graphics (Netherlands).