T
he hum quickly gave in to the sound of a hundred tumbling oil drums. Then a morbid absence of sound. Odette lay there watching the shards and splattered chunks of grapefruit marmalade dotting the white linoleum floor of her house. A few seconds seemed like an eternity. There was no other way to say it. Could time even be measured anymore, in this new silent and fractured world?
When the crash came, her five-year-old granddaughter Rose watched her with an extraordinary intensity. It was as if at that very moment the child had inherited the gift that the women in her family had been known to have for generations. The gift of double sight. The child’s amber eyes narrowed and she let out a loud melodic scream that lasted the entire thirty-five seconds of the shaking. But then, like the rest of the world, she too fell silent.
Her daughter, the child’s mother, had the gift as well. But she had turned her back on it, joining a Protestant church that made her believe she was haunted by ghosts. Then, over time, Odette’s gift had faded. After her husband died and her daughter left, she no longer felt the desire to tell total strangers to be careful because she knew there was nothing they could do. There was fate and there was destiny. And there was nothing you could do to stop your star from diving from the heavens, if that’s what it wanted to do.
As the roar reverted to another prolonged hum, she heard a constant ringing deep in her ears and felt her eyes fill with dust. When she finally heard her granddaughter’s voice, it was very far and faint. As the child crawled toward her, she noticed that the girl’s bony little body was moving slowly. Odette’s mind and eyes faltered between light and dark. For a moment, she couldn’t figure out why the child was crawling toward her; nor could she grasp why she started feeling sparks in her spine and lower legs.
By the time the child’s soft, warm hands touched her face, and she noticed the girl’s tear-filled eyes, a valve seemed to be cutting off power to Odette’s brain. The silence and darkness were deepening, becoming shapeless. Then something seemed to stir inside her. Was she in water? Drowning? That’s what it felt like. She was drowning while listening to the sound of intermittent clicking. She tried to spit each grain of dust out of her mouth as though it were water, but she could not.
Her body was playing a strange orchestra. She hadn’t played classical music in the house since her daughter left to marry someone from that church—extra protection, they had convinced her daughter, against the ghosts. Leaving the child behind was part of that too. Her daughter had dreaded when that day would come for her own daughter, when the earth would seem to shake and she would pass out and wake up with her gifts. Except they had not been gifts to Odette’s only child. The entire world’s pains had become her own. She could not read or write or even listen to the classical music she loved without intruding voices.
“We were going to the beach,” Odette heard herself say. Before the earth began to shake, she and the child were standing in the kitchen eating bread covered with grapefruit marmalade and talking about taking a trip to the beach. They both loved going to the beach, especially since the child’s mother had left. Odette’s daughter used to love going to the beach too. There at the beach, between swims, they danced to the blasting konpa music of the other beachgoers’ boom boxes. The music, like everything else, was in their bodies. But now Odette couldn’t dance to it. Instead, waves of silence filled her. Her heart was pounding faster than normal. She wanted to scream but she couldn’t. She closed her eyes and felt the child’s hand on her face. The child’s voice still sounded far away. At moments she thought they were both still standing in the kitchen eating their sweet bread, sobbing. She closed her eyes again and clenched her teeth. Her body felt like it was being pricked by thousands of needles.
Her granddaughter’s voice became clear for a second. Then Odette saw what was pinning them both to the floor. A large cement beam the size of two kitchen chairs was on her lap and on the girl’s head. Her granddaughter was completely drenched with blood. It was like when they played “monster” and the child covered her entire body with a sheet. Odette wanted to tell the little girl that she loved her. She wanted to laugh and tease her about not being a convincing enough monster, but something stabbed her in her coccyx area and flushed her head once again with darkness. She envisioned herself walking on the beach with both her daughter and granddaughter while eating ripe mangoes. In her ancestral village in the southeast, they raced each other by a stream of red and violet flowers.
“We can’t get to the child,” she heard a voice say. It finally registered that the voices belonged to some men who were helping to pull her out from underneath the concrete.
“The child is in pieces,” she heard another say.
“Continue to be brave,” another said. “We’re going to get you out.”
While those voices were instructing her, the pain spread from the center of her back and rapidly shot up through her entire body. She was still unable to scream.
She would later remember being raised by many hands, then placed on the ground with a small cushion behind her head. When she reopened her eyes, multiple heads were standing in a dark circle over her. A car came: a black shiny 1970 Peugeot pulled by two muscular Andalusian horses. Horses? Where could horses go in a broken city? They would ride over the cobalt-blue ocean of her daughter and granddaughter’s favorite beaches and their perfectly spaced coconut and palm trees.
In the tent clinic, she smelled the rubbing alcohol as they poured it on the gashes on her leg, but she felt nothing. Around her, she heard people groaning and screaming, “M ap mouri!” I’m dying! It was as if they were all swimming in a pool of fire.
When she woke up from another bout of sleep, she was in a massive white tent surrounded by doctors speaking to each other in Spanish. She remembered the bright smile of one young girl—like her Rose, she couldn’t have been more than five years old—as she lifted her stumped left arm.
“Alone. Dementia,” she heard someone say. “But otherwise okay.”
Dust was still blanketing the kitchen where she lay. A brown angel whose white wings flapped high up in the breeze touched the back of her hand and said in a very assuring voice, “You’re lucky to be alive.”
After her daughter was born twenty-five years ago, driving home from the hospital, holding the baby in her arms in the back of her husband’s shiny black Peugeot, they had passed a bidonville in the middle of the city and she had thought of Hiroshima. The city she was being driven through now was like Hiroshima, the epic destruction reminding her of the World War II films her husband loved to watch. The National Palace’s collapsed domes were like crushed camel humps; the National Police Headquarters compressed onto its blue and white walls. Thousands of desperate bodies were now sleeping on the streets, on bare concrete like stray dogs. Not sure where they were taking her, she felt defeated and small in the back of the open pickup. Then she remembered that she had asked to go. She had told them that she had a house, one of the few policemen still alive had volunteered to take her back to Rose, to take her home.
The entire front of the two-story terraced house had collapsed. As some of her neighbors ventured into her yard, both happy and surprised to see her, she longed for the strength to dig beneath the rubble with her bare hands to find Rose. Instead, she climbed as close as she could to where she thought the kitchen was and sat there weeping, with the scalding sun beaming down her back.
“You can’t stay here alone,” a neighbor said, while handing her a small packet of crushed saltine crackers. “Come.”
And that’s how she let herself be led to the tent city closest to her house.
In the middle of the sweltering assemblage of human bodies, she sat under a sheet held up by sticks all day and unbraided her long salt-and-pepper hair, which she then covered with a dingy red satin head-wrap that someone had given her. She had also acquired, she did not know where, a polished pine stick with intricate carvings that she tapped while humming before she went to sleep. Despite the constant chatter of her fellow evacuees, the tapping made a persistent noise in the humid hot air that seemed intrusive to some and meditative to others. Eventually, she began to inspire gossip.
The gossip was a way to both pass the time and deflect resentment, which, without an identified target, would have reattached itself to its originator. Odette thus became an unwitting target over the next several weeks, as words traveled from mouths to ears to other mouths. Her tapping and ongoing conversations with herself were rumored to be a secret code, her red satin head-wrap proof of what many had heard for years: that she was such a lougawou, a wretched person, that even her own child had abandoned her. Many could now recall her predicting some horrible event that had actually taken place. A car accident. A coup d’état. A bad hurricane season.
“Why didn’t that old witch see this one coming?” they asked.
Rumor had it that Odette’s only child had died from an infection and loss of blood after she’d left her mother’s house and married a pastor.
“Even Jesus couldn’t save the child from that old witch,” they said.
People would have been happy to ask her about all of this, except Odette had not uttered an intelligible word since that horrible afternoon in January.
During the long sleepless nights of tent city life, gossip spread at a distorted speed, occasionally ricocheting past Odette’s ears. She knew the pain of those who even in their search for food and water found ways to invoke her name. She started crossing herself multiple times before falling asleep.
Every once in a while, Rose would appear to Odette in her sleep. The child would unwrap Odette’s head scarf and undo her gray tresses, then would braid them again and again. At night, the neighbors watched the old woman in silhouette as though she were the heroine of a silent film.
The less hostile ones sobbed, placing their hands over their mouths, as others continued to declare: “That woman is a witch!”
“I know one when I see one.”
“I’ve been waiting for someone else to realize it.”
“I don’t play games with witches.”
“In my old neighborhood, they never stayed around.”
The neighbor who had taken Odette to the tent city was among those who just watched and sobbed. Her young daughter, also killed in the earthquake, had been Rose’s best friend until the rumors had caught up with them. That neighbor appeared now and then with a plate of rice or some water for Odette. Otherwise, Odette would have died of hunger and thirst.
As she lay down in the dark one night, Odette heard the voices discussing her outside. Most of the talk was about her flying around in the dark, her being a witch. Closing her eyes, she longed for the clamoring of crickets, for the stillness of her old house, for the embraces of her daughter and granddaughter, for the breeziness of the beach. She had been living alone for so many years now that all this sudden company was agonizing.
An uneasy premonition was coming over her, an old sensation that she thought had long faded. Her hair stood up and her heart began to beat a little bit faster. As she listened to the voices, growing closer to her ears, she remembered how she had wailed helplessly when her mother was dragged into the street one night by an angry cross-wielding mob. It was the summer of 1955 and she was five years old.
Now, in a different time and place, that same fear and horror gripped her yet again. As the clamor grew louder, a wail pushed itself past her lips. The entire tent city seemed to be alive with commotion. The news that Odette, the lady lougawou, was about to be dealt with brought ecstasy to many.
A small group of stick-wielding women were already inside her makeshift tent. She felt an arm around her neck, which was followed by the tearing sound of the front of her dress and then a slap at the side of her head. All she remembered saying was: “Ki sa m te fè?” What did I do?
As the torrent of slaps continued, she wrapped both her arms around her head. Had it not been for a police pickup that was parked nearby, her body would surely have been hacked. Even in the presence of the officers, some managed to land a kick or a slap.
In the police truck, the destroyed city was not as visible, a less structured darkness now shielding the living and the dead from each other. The Andalusian horses were galloping ahead of them. Odette turned to the young police officer who sat next her to bring this to his attention, then she changed her mind. Instead, she raised her eyes to the sky, which was the brightest she had ever seen it and teeming with stars. She tried to search for her own star, but could not find it. It had forsaken her and dashed out of the heavens, it seemed, very long ago.
I’m sitting in my father’s chair—a tattered and tired office chair that I’ve lugged to the porch. It is showing its age: scarred faux leather, armrests sprouting prickly stuffing, scents of Papa in the fabric. Half shaded by an acacia tree, I am sipping rich, dark café au lait, scattering a bit on the ground first, just like my father does, to feed our ancestors. The air is soft with breeze and sweet with roasting coffee, the few clouds in the sky moving like fishing boats out on the Caribbean Sea. The voices of the neighborhood rise and fall in spurts. Outside the prisonlike gates of my parents’ house in Kenscoff, young girls balance buckets atop their heads, up and down the graveled roads. Sun-wrinkled women sell huge mangoes and homemade peanut brittle, while boys in cutoff jeans run in circles with makeshift kites or push around trucks made from plastic bottles.
Papa struts from the house. A dark beard nearly covers his entire face. This angled face is also mine. Only fear and distance make it seem less familiar. My father’s hair is still wet from the shower. His I-am-home clothing is worn and comfortable: a stretched-out sweater, blue chinos, and old wool socks. The skin crawls on the back of my neck and the pit of my stomach crashes into my pelvis. My father’s presence always makes me uncomfortable. He’s more of a jailer than a father. I don’t like his grim outlook on the world and the way he tries so hard to make a father and daughter out of us when we are in fact complete strangers.
He walks around behind me in his cramped, thin shoes, places his hands on the back of the chair, and asks, “What are you doing, Magda?”
I can’t see his face now but I know his eyebrows are furrowed in curiosity. I take a deep breath, push my wild furious loathing into a soft, horrible place inside myself, and I swallow. “Thinking,” I say.
He sits in the rocking chair next to me, elbows on knees, with his whiskered chin in the palms of his hands, and sighs. Then he picks up the magazine I have been reading, clutches it in his calloused and rough hands.
“I don’t think a girl should be allowed to go to nightclubs until she’s eighteen,” he says.
I nod my head up and down, like a bobble doll, pretending to be interested.
Papa looks at me. “You don’t like me much, do you?”
I raise my shoulders in annoyance. “Don’t be ridiculous.”
He takes a deep breath. “What if I let you go out with your friends tonight?”
Just like that. My life in Kenscoff becomes a dazzling succession of house parties, balls, gaieties, not only night after night, but also sometimes an afternoon gathering at one house followed by an evening party somewhere else. I dance, sing, and drink toasts with cheap beers. I wear trendy wide-leg jeans, white denims, belly shirts of neon colors, dresses with abstract, multicolored designs. At seventeen, I feel like I’m running my own show. I understand what it means to live at the rainbow’s end and have its colors shimmer about me.
Tonight, Lakoup Nightclub is crowded, noisy, and literally vibrating with the beat of music blasting through large speakers. The air itself is alive with energy, the crowd abuzz with anticipation. I walk into the music, into the shadows, and the hot, sticky night presses against my skin until perspiration beads my upper lip. People line up three deep at the bar, in the rez-de-chaussée of the old gingerbread house. The bartender is chatting with a woman. “What is so dreadful about your hair that someone would call it dreadlocks?” she asks.
I don’t know the number of gourdes required for a Coca-Cola or a Prestige beer. I let the sexy bartender get me a cocktail “on the house.” I explore the dark, empty rooms upstairs. I walk out on the balcony, the den of iniquity, where a couple is smoking something with a peculiar smell. The girl laughs and reaches up. She slips her hand under the boy’s blue shirt, up near the collar. Her hand is moving, rubbing the boy’s neck. They’re in search of privacy, but I just stand there. Then the couple leaves and I’m alone, under the stars, sipping my cocktail, watching people dancing downstairs, in the yard.
From the balcony, I can see the band in the backyard. Lead singer Michel Martelly’s voice is strong and unlabored even when reaching for notes in the upper registers. I love the grainy vocal quality that lends the band a tortured but familiar sound, as if one were remembering a bad day. Martelly keeps listeners hanging on every phrase, awaiting the next pause or streak or curve.
“Hello,” a voice says behind me.
There’s something boyish about the man standing there— the dimples and the apple cheeks. His hair is wild and shaggy, as if the wind has been playing with it. He’s probably in his late twenties, handsome, with broad shoulders and a narrow waist.
“Do you want to dance?” he asks.
He says his name is Ben and he is a lanky mulatto. As he moves me around in a circle, Michel Martelly sings, “Yon samdi swa nan lakou Lakoup, desten fè de moun kontre.” On a Saturday night, at Lakoup Nightclub, their destinies intertwined. The singer laughs and adds to the lyrics, “But he was a mad, mad man.” Ben’s hands leave damp spots on my back. He smells of oiled wood, and during the next dance he pulls back to look at me and says that I’m pretty. He gets me another drink.
Then we are lounging in the parking lot, his back against his beat-up Volkswagen, blowing smoke rings to the sky, watching them rise and disappear slowly. He calls me a wild grimèl. We can still hear the crunching guitar and the keyboard. They come together to create a sometimes sultry, sometimes dreamy, and sometimes raucous feel. I want to listen to Michel Martelly forever. His voice is both loud and strong and soft and vulnerable. His solos are the sound of supreme confidence: not aggressive or necessarily flashy, but casually assuring that every impulse will pay off.
“I’d like to see you again,” Ben says with a grin that crinkles the laugh lines around his eyes and deepens the grooves that bracket his mouth.
We meet again at another party in Pétionville, in a two-story brick house with an iron balcony. Ben’s eyes are chocolatebrown; his smile, easy and warm, makes me feel like the only person he’s ever truly smiled at.
While we’re dancing by the pool, a young man accidentally bumps into Ben.
“Watch it, fucker,” Ben says with a flash of recognition in his eyes.
“What did you call me?” the other man asks.
I give a horrible squeal, like a kitten under a rocking chair, when the stranger pushes both Ben and me into the pool. I don’t even have time to take a breath before I find myself underwater. Wild fear grabs the edges of my mind. Panic pounds loudly in my temples and twines my heart. I kick and squirm, fighting to get back to the surface. My lungs are screaming for air. I am choking. I am drowning. I gulp big mouthfuls of water; I can feel it going up to my nose and down into my lungs.
With one hand, Ben helps me out of the water. In the other hand, he’s holding a gun.
He fires toward the sky. Gunshots pop like firecrackers. The air is electric—people run around in circles and scream, boys hold their girlfriends’ hands. Leaving Ben behind, I plow through the madness to the side of the bar. I drop to the floor, crouching beneath the porch railing. There are too many people to see what’s happening; I am caught in a spiral of chaos and movement, charging, rushing, spinning, trampling. Just a sea of people and crashing movement. There is more running, sauve qui peut, and dizziness. I press my hands against my temples as two more gunshots shatter the air.
The other guy is gone. Ben calms down. He finds me in the crowd and asks me if I’m okay. There’s a dangerous flicker in his eyes.
I don’t go out that much anymore because Ben seems to materialize everywhere. Besides, there’s the embargo and the gas prices have skyrocketed, making it impossible to get around town. My father often spends half a day in a line to get his tank filled; no gas container allowed. I can only go to school three times a week. On school days, because of the traffic caused by the long lines, the alarm clock rings at four o’clock in the morning.
“C’est l’heure! C’est l’heure!” my mother chants each morning as she opens the windows for the mountain air to rush in.
We fetch water from a cistern built under the house for our bath and press our clothes with a smoky charcoal iron, whose hollow interior is filled with smoldering coals. High, spoutlike openings allow for the coals to be fanned when swinging the iron back and forth vigorously.
If there’s no electricity, I do my homework by candlelight. After I’ve studied a whole chapter on the French Revolution or read about la Négritude, there’s not much to do and I’m bored out of my mind.
I don’t remember giving him my phone number. But Ben calls.
We talk every night. I sit Indian-style, wringing, twirling the curly phone cord in my left hand, receiver tucked between my ear and left shoulder, until hours later it leaves hickeys on my ear. I tell him about my father. One moment Papa is normal, calm, quiet, in control, reliable; the next he is a wildeyed stranger, screaming so loud my ears sting. His eyebrows join together in a frown line across his forehead. His thin face is stern, lips latched tight, and his black-rimmed glasses magnify his furious eyes.
“If you ever need me to kick his ass,” Ben says, “I’m one phone call away.”
Ben is not that bad, after all. He might be dangerous—but he’s also fun. He doesn’t try to hide his trying to get into my pants. We have phone sex once, or so he thinks. I am only pretending, playing Tetris silently on my Game Boy. Maybe he’s faking it too.
I want to learn how to drive. Ben knows someone who knows someone else who works at the Department of Highway Control. I get my driver's license before I ever sit behind a wheel. I think that once I get the rectangular piece of colorful plastic, it will be easier to convince my parents to send me to driving school. Well, no. Papa says I am too impulsive to drive a car.
“Teach me,” I tell Ben.
Mom is okay with the lessons because I told her that Ben is a math teacher chez les soeurs. Truth is: Ben doesn’t exactly have a job. He was into stealing credit card numbers on the Internet for a while. Now, he admits just living off his mother’s retirement money.
That same afternoon, I am in the driver’s seat of his red Volkswagen. He spent the whole morning at a gas station, in an “embargo” line—his tank is full. The ashtray is polluted with cigarette butts; the floorboards have rusted out from summers at the beach.
Ben is distracted by my legs. I’ve been flirting with him out of boredom, wearing skimpy skirts and using words that my mother doesn’t know I know.
He shows me how to turn on the engine, how to back up. I chug and lurch two or three times in reverse before we make it safely out of the driveway. I spin the buggy in a one-eighty. Dried grass from the summer’s heat throws dust into the air and I narrowly miss hitting a parked pickup truck. I jump the curb, taking out several shrubs and a small tree, and then I regain control of the car.
We stop the bug and walk around it. The front bumper is wrenched downward; branches weave between it and the crammed wheel well. Ben starts pulling at the greenery and I join him. With one leg propped up on the slanted bumper so he can see some more skin, I tug on a particularly huge branch.
“I’m sorry,” I say. But I don’t really mean it.
Ben says I am a fast learner, and I tell him I don’t want to have driving lessons on a back road. I want the real thing, the treacherous Kenscoff Road leading to the mountains. This road is extremely slim and steep, with sudden turns and a ravine on both sides. There’s no way to survive a fall.
I want someone to temper my urges to look for trouble. I am expecting a
No, are you crazy?
from Ben when I mention Kenscoff Road. That’s how I usually deal with my impulsive, crazy ideas. I state them, and a saner person rebuffs them. Should I get a tattoo? Should I dye my hair blue? No. No. No!
But Ben says okay. So on day two, we are already on the main road. Tires spinning. Music blasting. The freedom! The excitement! I pop in a Bob Marley CD, crank up the volume, and punch the accelerator to the floor. The car makes a deeptoned hum and jolts forward with a squealing of the tires and a cloud of dust. I scream excitedly as we speed past the huge, honking trucks.
The first car I hit is a tap tap, a taxi full of people.
“Ben, you are in big trouble,” I say.
After all, I’m only seventeen; I’m still a kid. He’s the adult here. And it’s his car. Why should I care? He’s the one who was willing to let me drive.
The other driver is surprisingly unruffled, however. One look at Ben and the stranger is flustered, nervously running his short fingers through his hair. His eyes open wide, sending his bushy black eyebrows to the top of his forehead. He says his tap tap needed serious repairs even before we hit it.
The second car is a brand-new Honda. The woman looks angry for a minute, and then she composes herself and asks us if we’ve ever heard of Amway. She says there is a reason for all this to be happening, that God wants me to become a rich girl in Haiti. As she hands me her business card, she says, “Don’t worry about the repairs.”
So off we go again, down the mountains this time. We stop by my friend Nelly’s house. As soon as I park, the whole front of the car collapses. Nelly’s father gives Ben a hand to temporarily adjust the front of the vehicle. I let Ben take the wheel for the drive back—too much adventure for one day.
We fly up the road, kissing the embankment at speeds that test fate. Suddenly, Ben jerks the wheel to the right and sends us flying into a cow field. The headlights bob into an eternity of wheat-colored grass, the moonlight miles ahead. I can hear a million voices, like flies, buzzing at the back of my neck.
And then the engine dies.
I don’t expect fear to come at me so violently. I am alone with a grown man in a deserted area. He grabs me, tries to kiss me. I want to say,
Oh no, you creep. Crank this puppy up and get me out of here or I’m … I’m … I’m walking!
But I simply ask him to stop. He doesn’t; his hands are fumbling with my shirt. I can feel something in the air. Something nasty that is taking over. I have to think fast.