God Loves Haiti (9780062348142) (11 page)

At this thought, Alain Destiné got off the ground and started looking around for a key, anything, to get him out of the closet of the National Palace that hot afternoon.
He suspected a key had to exist, but tumbling cement bricks of sadness had pummeled him into wasting the day. You can be such a loser sometimes, Alain. The darkness of the closet was thick and inky and closed in on him. Sunlight leaked through the bottom of the door from the bedroom, humming a faint hymn. Empty clothes hangers click-clacked and hissed this way and that as his arm slid between them. He tapped and tapped the walls in hopes of uncovering a light switch, a key, a window, a . . . doorknob?

The door opened into a stairwell. A humming light-bulb greeted him. Its dim light was surrounded by flies and the smell of a thousand pairs of old sneakers. The fuzzy light left the stairwell dangerously too dark, but down the rabbit hole Alain went anyway. Maybe this secret stairwell was created by a prudent former president of the republic who wanted his wife and children to have an escape route out of the palace if an unruly mob came calling. They did have a tendency to do that around here. Or maybe the stairwell merely served as a pathway for maids and servants to flit about their duties to the first family even more invisibly than tradition called for. The stairwell was lit no better than the locked closet, but it had a railing, which Alain grabbed with both hands to keep from falling. Alain used the railing to guide his descent and maintain a sense of balance, which was rendered fragile by the assault of the aforementioned horrid smell. A surprise burst of euphoria
from his escape from that infernal closet excited him. So did a keen sense of what his next move had to be. Alain began to skip down the stairs, two, then three steps at a time. His enthusiasm for his next move, which had leapt swiftly from musing to concrete and urgent action plan, mounted. He will race to the airport! That's what he'll do. He will race to the airport and talk his way through to the tarmac, where the President and Natasha would hopefully be stalled for one reason or another. He will then speak New York English to persuade the peacekeepers to part and let him reach the first couple. I'm his nephew, he'd say. I have one last message to give the President. It's from his mother. Part, the sea of stupid blue helmets will. Then he will reach the President and his wife. The sun will be hot, but the tarmac will be hotter. Heavy fumes and heat will have everyone wondering if his presence was a hallucination. Natasha will briefly set aside her typically bored artist pose. Her shift in spirit will be visible mainly to him, a man who has evoked it before, after either eloquently working his tongue between her legs or making her laugh with such abandon at an off-color joke or a bit of tickling that she snorted like a hog and her eyes danced.

Destiné, the President will say, on guard.

The President will try to play it cool, indifferent even, because noblesse oblige is the President's signature move. To what do I owe this grand and very surprising visit from Haiti's best and brightest? he'll say. Have you already
completed your work turning our economy into Sweden's?

The President's right hand will, no doubt, disappear into the folds of the pocket in which he kept the small gun he'd told Alain he always had on him. I even sleep with it, the President once confided. Alain couldn't tell if he was joking or not. Probably not. The President will no doubt shoot me in the forehead, Alain thought, if I make a sudden move or if he is struck by the reasonable impulse to murder the man who has been sleeping with his wife. After putting me down like a dog, the President, of course, will turn to the blue helmets and tell them and other shocked witnesses that I was an assassin he had been warned about by the government's intelligence services, as if the country these days had any of those things, a functional government and intelligent public services.

I will avoid this unwanted scenario by greeting him most cheerfully, Alain thought. Mr. President, I'll say, in the firm but eager tone of a military man submitting to his master. Then I will take Natasha by both hands and turn her to face me while keeping her positioned between the President and me. If he lost his head, he would have to shoot her to shoot me. I think I could count on him to not do that. Not at that moment anyway. Natasha, I will say, with as deep and heroic a voice as I can muster. Shit, what should I say?

I will quote Dante, her favorite author:

       
There was no hymning of Bacchus or Apollo but of three persons in the divine nature, the divine and human natures in one person

       
The singing and the dancing were completed

       
and those holy lights seemed to turn to us

       
happy to pass from one care to another

       
then that light which had narrated to me the marvelous life of the poor man of God

       
broke the silence of those concordant powers

       
and said: “Since one lot of corn has been winnowed and since the seed has been stored away, sweet love invites me to thresh the other.”

Then I hope I will have the courage to look her in the eyes and say: I love you, baby. All that matters is that we be in the same room, house, bed, together, forever, 'til death do us part. Nothing else matters to me. Not Haiti, not my family, not pacifism, not the end of unemployment, torture, infant deaths, malnutrition, or illiteracy. Fuck all that. Let me know where you land in Tuscany as soon as you can. I'll come to you on the next plane to Italy, and then we'll run away and go start our family wherever else. Even if we have to run away to Papua New Guinea to do so in peace, I won't give a fuck. I'll be the happiest man alive as long as I'm with you. OK?

Yes, she'll say.

I'll nod to her. Then I'll turn to the President and say, Have a safe trip, Mr. President, sir.

I'll say so with utmost sincerity. Then I'll turn around and walk, briskly, away from them and into the bosom of peacekeepers and their gob-smacked faces before disappearing into the crowds inside the airport.

With that inspiring thought of swashbuckling gallantry, Alain Destiné completed his naked run down the secret stairwell of the National Palace and burst through a heavy metal door and into the cement-floored backyard.
Merde, je suis nu
, he realized. As he caught his breath and covered up his immodesty, a heavier-than-expected silence drew his attention. Downtown Port-au-Prince felt oppressively hot. Steam rose from the asphalt between his toes. There were no security guards or soldiers around, even in the parking lot. The buzzing voices of cell phone sellers, money traders, urchins begging a few meters beyond the tall barbwire wall bordering the back of the palace, seemed stilled. As though time itself had been frozen. He fought through what felt like the loudest pregnant pause in history and ran to his car, a ten-year-old Chevy, rusty red, with a black leather interior he liked to keep shiny, an absurd, small indulgence that gave him immense pleasure. The car was so uncool to just about everyone else in Port-au-Prince that he never feared someone would steal it, even during the city's occasional waves of carjacking frenzy. So he often left it unlocked. There, in a garment bag in the trunk, lay his backup suit. Thank God he never left home without a backup of his favorite uniform, a dark jacket and trousers only a very trained eye
would recognize as unmatched, and a white shirt. Maybe he won't wear a tie today. No time to waste on a Windsor knot.

He ambled the car out onto rue St. Honoré. The time, late afternoon, was a rare one for him to be leaving the National Palace. Since his girlfriend had moved in there a couple of months ago, he entered and left mainly in the wee hours, like a thief, though he felt as if he was the only person to lose something after each clandestine visit. Traffic on rue St. Honoré was light. Even foot traffic. A bank of narrow, aluminum-roofed shacks in varying shades of green featured their usual array of activities. One was a restaurant. Next door, an old man sold soda. The ubiquitous cell phone dealer stood under a red umbrella. They are the new cocaine, these cell phones, Alain thought. If prostitution is the oldest profession, telecommunications is the newest profession. Natasha was right. I need to get my head into these new businesses. A huge woman with broad shoulders swept away dirty rainwater trapped in the backed-up manhole in front of her house. She did it so determinedly. Her face wore the gravest concentration. The two girls jumping rope around her should be more careful, Alain thought. Their mother spent so much energy sweeping the floor she seemed to have none left to keep an eye on her bored daughters playing in one of the busiest streets in one of the most crowded cities on earth. All that garbage. Her broom was too small.

The way the house then toppled onto the woman and
the girls happened in slow motion. Alain saw the house and the house next to it and the house next to that one and most of the other houses on the street tumble onto the street, the people, and the passing cars. The odd thing was that Alain Destiné found himself watching houses fall and people die while high off the ground. His car was . . . flying. What the fuck! Alain's car had been catapulted into the Caribbean sky by an invisible and powerful force. The force had turned his Chevy into a flying carpet of sorts, a rusty red Haitian-American combo of the sort of magical melding of adventurous and funky transport mechanism that had tickled him pink in the stories of Arabian nights his father read to him as a child. From the sky, strangely, Port-au-Prince looked uncommonly beautiful. He hadn't visited Paris yet, but surely Paris couldn't be as beautiful as his hometown, this jewel of the Caribbean, this diamond in the rough, when viewed from the driver's seat of a car launched two hundred meters above sea level. Awesome. Natasha, he thought, I have got to show her this.

During the car's descending arc, death jabbed Alain in the ribs.

Oh my God!, Alain screamed. He saw the National Palace collapse into itself like a wedding cake stepped on by an invisible giant toddler.

Oh. My. God.

He gripped the steering wheel as the car nose-dived toward the earth.

        
THE COWARD

W
hen Natasha Robert began walking up the stairs to the private jet minutes before the earthquake, hand in paw with her husband, she looked like she was walking slowly. In truth, she was being dragged. Gently and discreetly, but pulled against her will all the same. Her resistance was palpable to her husband. She felt like the puppy the President had had as a boy, the one he found wounded on a dusty road one morning and was determined to nurse to health and keep happy for no damn reason other than the belief that a puppy this cute deserved a better life than the one fate had on the table. Eventually the boy who would become president and the bleeding stray dog had tugs-of-war all the same, mainly when the boy was ordered to kick the dog outside so he could do his homework. Accustomed to his owner and savior's love, the dog grew scared of the world outside the house. He rarely ventured outside without his master, so getting him to go
out and have fun was a chore the President took pleasure in. At Toussaint Louverture Airport, five minutes before the devastating quake, the president of Haiti interpreted his new bride's resistance as a replay of his beloved Fox's bad case of nerves. Like that puppy, few things had ever worked out for this girl in her young life in this country where few things, if anything, ever worked properly, except for love and death. (Tax collecting didn't work; trust him, he tried.) Not that the President felt he should be held even partially responsible for this tragic state of affairs. We inherited a bad hand and are doing the best we can with it. That's the only explanation he had for Haiti's seemingly unstoppable decline from the pearl of the Caribbean during the colonial era to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere postindependence. In his sixty years, he had yet to hear a better explanation.

The President stepped down a few steps to retrieve his nervous bride, reaching first for the tips of her fingers. Her hands were appealingly soft but wet with sweat. They were clammy and cold too. Natasha looked smaller and browner than usual, but she was still beautiful. So gorgeous, in fact, that his heart skipped a beat when she returned his gaze. After all these months he was as surprised as anyone by how she still took his breath away each time her eyes met his. His cheeks felt flush. He wished this would stop happening. Will it ever? I'll have the rest of my life to find out, he thought, a thought that made the old man turn serious.

We should get going, he said. Let me tell you a story.

Natasha Robert and the President were now standing in the shadow of the jet, which was embossed with a giant American flag. The President stood on a step so he could be the same height as Natasha and look her in the eyes. The soldiers who had escorted them to the tarmac of Toussaint Louverture Airport were off a ways, standing under the airport tower's shade, chatting among themselves. His posse kept a respectful distance. They knew not to be close enough to eavesdrop but he knew they heard every word anyway. These people had ears like bats.

I know what you're thinking, the President said. Long pause. Natasha looked up in surprise and pursed her lips. She wished she could melt into the asphalt.

What? she said. What did you say?

I just wanted to let you know that I understand how you feel, the President said. Back when I was your age, I got terrified when my dreams were on the verge of coming true too. Here's how I developed the ability to overcome this fear. When I was a boy, my father used to take me fishing in a corner of the Artibonite River. My father was a farmer from Hinche who was said to own no land. My mother was a laundry woman. I didn't care. Like every boy, I loved to hang out with my father without my siblings or mother around. Those mornings, honey-gold sunbeams bathed the green waters around us. The smell of jasmine enveloped us. Back then there were trees on the banks of the river in the country's breadbasket. The
trees were tall, leafy, and proud. Their branches and leaves opened their palms up to the heavens to drink in the sun's life-giving rays with
ivresse
. The trees looked like they were praying. Photosynthesizing with God. The millions of people, small and needy, who reaped the benefits of the trees' constant prayers knew well enough to thank the earth and God regularly for their existence.