Because We Are: A Novel of Haiti (5 page)

She saw several people walking about and decided to ask for help. To her left sat three girls who appeared a few years older than herself, chattering away as they played a game that required tossing rubber bands onto the ground. Their play was lit by a small candle housed in a bucket hanging from a nearby window, attended by a host of moths called to the light but unable to touch it.

—
Bonswa
.

The three girls stopped their play and looked at Libète with empty stares.

— What? said the biggest of the three.

— I–I’m looking for the—what was it called?—the “water kiosk.”

One of the girls raised her hand to point and began to speak but the big girl cut her off.

— You’re new. Where do you live? Libète pointed to her Aunt’s house.

— The restaurant house. Restaurant Estelle.

The speaker’s buck teeth, visible in the candlelight, clashed with an otherwise pleasant face. So you’re their new
restavek
then? You look the part.

—
Restavek? Libète said quizzically.

— You don’t know what a restavek is? Where are you from?

— La Gonâve. I came this afternoon.

— You’re fresh then! said one of the others. Straight from the hills!

— They must be pretty stupid in La Gonâve to not know what a restavek is.

— We aren’t stupid, Libète said defensively. I’ve just never heard the word.

— You’re a
ti bòn,
stupid. A bonded child. A slave.

— A slave? No, no, I’m not anything like that. I’m their niece. My Aunt calls me her daughter.

— Whatever, said the big one with wild teeth. There are lots of your kind around here. “Get this, get that, do this, do that.” Orders. That’s all they’ll say to you.

— What’s your name? said another girl.

— Libète, she murmured.

They all laughed.

— Fitting. A slave named liberty. Just wait! If you don’t work, they’ll kick you out. We only get yelled at or beaten when we disobey—never sent away.

— They wouldn’t do that to me! she stammered. They’re my family!

The girls roared.

— Your “Aunt” goes through restaveks fast—faster than anyone I know. She had another girl that was booted out a few weeks ago. What was her name?

— Kalencia, said one of the others.

— Right. Kalencia. Put right out on the street. So be careful ti bòn, or you’ll find your ass on the road, too.

Libète glowered. Just tell me where the water is and leave me alone.

— We’re going to enjoy seeing you around “
Li-bè-te
,” they cackled. Down the road and turn right. You’ll see it halfway down.

Libète walked away wanting to throw the bucket at the girls. This anger, this biting, seething, stomping anger, was something new. She had not even harbored it against her father.
Why were they so mean to me? Am I a ti bòn—a slave
? She turned the thought over as she followed their directions.
At least they told me the right way
, she thought as she came upon the water station.

She handed her coin to the attendant sitting in a cell, or at least it seemed that way. He was hardly visible in the dark.

He turned a valve inside his booth and this released water into her bucket, which she had placed under a spigot protruding from the cage. It filled quickly, and each extra drop of water increased Libète’s worry.
How can I carry such a thing?

— Mesye, I am sorry to ask, but I have no way to lift this up.

— So? the jailed man said. Pour some out.

— If I do I’m afraid my Aunt will become angry.

— Got any more money?

Libète’s lip trembled. This was all too much. To have lost her mother, been whisked from her home, forced to go to this place where people with crazed teeth cannot help without teasing or taking one’s money…

Tears burst from her eyes. Mesye, she begged, please just help me put the bucket on my head. I’ll never ask again. I would give you more money if I had it, but I had just the one coin.

He deliberated, his thoughts inscrutable in the darkness. He got up and unlocked the door to his cell.

— Don’t think I’ll do this again, he said as he lifted the bucket and balanced it on top her head. You got it?

— Wi, I have it.

— Then go.

She did, retracing her steps while struggling to keep the bucket upright, she could not help but fall into prayer.

Bondye, please let me reach home.

Please keep even a drop from spilling.

Please protect me and stay close to me, because I’m afraid I am alone here with no one to care for—

POW–-POW–––––POW. Three loud pops, not too far away, made her jump.

Time slowed.

Horror took over as she felt her balance shift, the bucket’s center of gravity no longer aligned with her own. She screamed as it slipped forward and fell, its bottom edge making contact with the ground and rebounding once before tipping completely. The water spilled, seeping into the cracks of the road’s grey decagonal bricks.

She fell to her knees trying to shepherd the water back in but found it less agreeable than a trip of obstinate goats. She stared at the wet ground before her, praying it would miraculously reverse course and travel back into the bucket.

The new quiet of the road caught her and she looked up to notice it was empty. The sellers, the cruel girls, other passersby—they had vanished. Whatever was coming, whatever made that explosive sound, was very, very bad.
Where can I go? Where can I run? I can’t return to my aunt now!

Libète noticed that though there were no more pops, there were other more familiar and fearsome sounds to replace them. Men’s shouting—loud, apoplectic, escalating—and the sound of clanging machetes, were not far off.

She could not move, her blood setting concrete.

A small, lithe figure coursed toward her from the shadows and she winced, fearing harm. It grasped her wrist and pulled her to her feet, yanking her across the road and away from the brewing violence foretold by the clamoring up the road. Libète had already seen many new and disturbing things in Cité Soleil, and she wondered what kind of animal this might be.

The creature crashed through a door that was ajar, pulling her further by one of her limp arms into a vacant room, parts of its ceiling long since fallen away.

Though plunged into black, their eyes adjusted quickly and she could make out the creature’s shape and features. It was a short boy, and thin. She could tell he was shirtless because moonlight pried through cracks above, highlighting the distinctive ridges of his rib cage. He was examining her as well.
What does he see when he looks at me?
she wondered.

The troubling sounds, closer now, demanded their attention. The boy moved to watch the street outside and narrowed the door until it was a mere crack. Libète moved, positioning herself behind the crouching boy.

She gasped to see a group of eleven young men marching westward down the main street. Three carried improvised torches, their flames setting the scene with flickering orange. Three others carried gleaming machetes. The remaining men dragged along a pitiful, broken man. Another, the seeming ringleader, tall and strong, walked at the front carrying the silver pistol responsible for Libète’s spilled water.

They dropped the man upon the ground in an arbitrary spot at the leader’s signal, quieting as he knelt down and whispered something in the broken man’s ear. He began to wail.

— P–P–P–lease, d–don’t. I didn’t do it. I didn’t t–t–take anything!

— You’re a fucking liar, Valcin! shouted the ringleader. You don’t come on our turf and think you can steal from us!

— I was just p–p–passing through.

— STOP LYING! he shouted directly into the man’s ear. You can’t open your fucking mouth without lies spilling out. Say something else and I’ll empty your head.

— Do it! bellowed one in the mob’s ranks.

— Show everyone they can’t mess with Bwa Nèf! shouted another.

— I’m b–b–b–begging yo—

— I told you to shut
up!

The ringleader cocked his pistol and pointed it directly at the man’s head.

The poor man couldn’t suppress an anguished moan.

Libète turned away from the scene, unable to comprehend the hell into which she had descended. The boy who had saved her watched without flinching. This was his world, all too familiar.

A shot rang out.

Libète sits in
Paix et Solidarite L’eglise de Dieu
, her eyes closed tight and hands clasped. It is a cool morning, only two days after Christmas and one day after the discovery of Claire and Ti Gaspar. Congregants sit in rows of wooden benches over a smoothed concrete floor, protected from the Sun by a patchwork of blue tarpaulins. Reinforced concrete pillars stand erect, the splayed tips of iron rebar protruding from the tops like ecstatic hands lifted high, waiting in expectation of someday joining with support tresses to brace a roof.

The pastor, a man by the name of Formétus, leads a service in which he preaches against the violence that ended the life of a young mother and her child, violence that plagues their community and country.

Though death is never far away in Cité Soleil, news of the victims and heinous character of the murders spread as quickly as it could be spoken, capturing the prurient imagination of the slum’s residents. From Boston to La Saline, gossiping neighbors chose to escape their own misery by wallowing in the suffering of others that exceeded their own. Not all of it was self-indulgent. One of Libète’s neighbors had remarked that morning, Who am I to complain of an empty stomach when it could have been me with my tongue cut out and baby crushed?
True,
Libète had thought.
Very true
.

It had been an eternal day and night.

Police had eventually come and collected the bodies, disbanding the crowd. Libète and Jak conferred briefly before this, and she told the boy about her encounter with the devil and his man-pig at the edge of the reeds. Before any more time to discuss culpability availed itself, Libète’s aunt arrived to see the deceased for herself. Hot, sweaty, and winded by the effort required to trudge out into the marsh only to find the dead already removed, she ordered Libète back home. Libète spent the entire night waiting to hear what Jak had meant by the name he had uttered to her, “Ezili Dantò.” She knew the name as all Haitians do, a name steeped in Voudou, and that she was and is a
lwa
, or spirit. That was the extent of her knowledge.

Angry to be sent back to the house, Libète was surprised to discover a measure of celebrity ascribed to her by virtue of being the first to lay eyes upon the dead and report their location. Normally she would embrace the attention as if a lost friend. This was different. The baseness of the murders sat uncomfortably with her. When this particular friend came knocking, Libète greeted her with a scowl and slammed the door closed.

Pulling her wandering mind back to church, Libète focuses on her prayers.

Bondye, I ask you to strike down the one who did this thing.

I pray you make him suffer, cutting him twice as many times.

I ask you pour out your wrath on him, killing his loved ones, and that you take your grace and forgiveness and love and put them just beyond his reach so he sees them but cannot reach them.

The words left her mumbling lips while the rest of the two-hundred strong congregation sang a parting song to close the service.

Because it was a church comprised of the poor, it was a church perpetually under construction but never actually constructed. Members pooled their meager tithes week-to-week to purchase a sack of concrete here, some mortar and blocks there, crawling toward a completion that would most likely follow Christ’s return. Until that day, they would be bathed in the blue light passing through the tarps above.

The praising and singing reaches an end. The reverie is broken and all return back to the somber reality of life in Bwa Nèf. For Libète, this means looking to her left and seeing her Aunt.

— Come, Libète. We must prepare for the afternoon meal.

Her Aunt said these words after every church gathering on every Sunday ever since Libète had arrived in her home three years ago.
If God could rest on the seventh day, why can’t this woman?

Libète harrumphed, watching as her Aunt struggled to lift herself from her seat in the front row. The chair let loose a loud creak, a seeming sigh of relief.

Now up, she eyed her rear, noticing a streak of dust left upon the wide seat of her emerald church dress, wiping it with her white-gloved hand. She took her church clothing very seriously. “We have been blessed with very much,” she had once told Libète. “And so we must make sure others know it.”

— Come along, Libète.

— I am coming.

— Carry my things then. Oh, I was so stirred by the Holy Spirit that I can’t be burdened with anything.

— Wi,
tantie
.

Today, Libète’s ensemble is a lovely white dress with a wide-blue ribbon around the waist, complemented by plastic barrettes molded into bows that clasped each braided strand of hair. Libète did enjoy shedding her grubby house dress to don beautiful lace and colors on Sunday, but this grant was not thanks to her Aunt’s benevolence: she simply wanted a pretty plaything to show off, a doll to display. Both knew this and accepted it. Life with her Aunt yielded little fruit, so Libète tried to harvest them when they cropped up.