God Loves Haiti (9780062348142) (14 page)

Why doesn't somebody move that dead child's body away from her crippled mother? he screamed. Can't they see she can't move? Can't they see what seeing what her baby looks like is doing to her?

Natasha saw one tragic tableau after another, and words failed her. She couldn't emit a single sound. She tried to tell the driver to drive faster, to get her away from a scene by escaping to another street. But the street had disappeared a long time ago. People were everywhere, suffering, not smiling. And they swirled and froze in a constant, random, awesome, and horrible traffic-clogging movie, causing the SUV to move at a glacial pace, if it moved at all, for hours. Natasha felt like a tourist in her
own city being guided through an open-air museum of pain and despair. If the driver's name is Virgil, I'll kill myself, she thought. Her eyes took in grotesqueries her mind instantly wanted to forget. When she turned her head elsewhere in search of a balm, her eyes invariably landed on an even sadder sight. Then all three of them saw a sizable green garden. Their battered spirits were so grateful to see the color of life free from ruined brown bodies they took a while to notice the caved-in white building looming behind the lawn. The National Palace. It really was destroyed.

History was not her thing, nor was patriotism, but Natasha felt a loss of something dear and big and common to all Haitians at the sight of the seat of her country's leadership destroyed, with its guts spilling out on a grassy knoll. This should not have been allowed to happen, was an immediate thought. This is how much God hates the Republic of Haiti, was another. A building that had stirred passions to the point of madness in the hearts of some of the world's greatest emperors, from Napoleon to Woodrow Wilson, recalcitrant peasants, stentorian poets, sensitive singers, and conniving nation-builders and rebels over centuries was laid low by a random and brief belching of the earth. Oddly for a first lady, the loss of her home, which also happened to be a potent fetish of the country's power, identity, voice, and, in many ways, its right to exist, felt liberating. Relaxing even. We will have to finally figure out if we even deserve the right to be a
nation, she thought. And, if yes, what kind of nation we will be. What exactly was the point of us? She remembered, vaguely, her ex-lover's rant one afternoon at Chez Marie's in Tabarre about Haiti's lifelong bout of existential indecision. We seemed incapable of choosing between philosophies, he said. Communism or capitalism? Social democracy or plain-vanilla democracy? Tourism-driven or manufacturing-driven job and economic growth? The Americans, like the French before them, want nothing more than to make those decisions for us. We resist their interference and rightly so, but come on, people, can we collectively take responsibility for a way forward that benefits everyone and stick to it?!

Like certain artists, Natasha Robert enjoyed swimming in tragedies and not comedies—after all, great pieces of art or song, to her, almost always evoked the pulpy thrill of heroic death followed by births and resurrections—so she was blissfully indifferent to the degree to which these questions scared the bejesus out of most folks. Stop the car! she said. The car stopped.

What now? Bobo said.

She got out and stood on the scorching earth. The wrecked National Palace stood mute in front of her. She gently touched the black metal fence surrounding it. Behind her, across Avenue de la Republique, was Place Pigeon, where an upside-down rusty red Chevy and its injured owner, unbeknownst to her, yearned for her. When she was a kid, she was, like many people, afraid to even
touch the gate surrounding the National Palace of Haiti, for it protected a building of almost sacred importance and bottomless terror. The stories of bizarre crimes to occupy and hold the palace were legion and grim. And crazy, her husband would say after he'd had one drink too many. What were these fools hoping to get when they fought and killed so much to get this bureau? This?! The last time he had one of those drunken fits, the old man who had probably sold his soul to become president had lost his balance and fell face-first to the floor. Right in front of his grand oak desk, with its vintage pens and ten-year-old PC. When she tried to help her husband get back on his feet, he waved her off. No! he said, Let me crawl. Let my face and tongue suck the floor, let the parquet be the last thing to hold back my vomit. Let my busted lip sting and my blood stick to the floor. I lick shoes for a living, don't I? What difference will licking another unwanted thing make? It was a sad night. It was their honeymoon.

Outside the palace a few days after the quake, wounded people moaned at her feet. She cupped her hand over her brow to block the sun and see better. The palace was shattered; its dome severed off its body. Natasha struggled to make out the location of offices and rooms. She almost found it difficult to remember what the building had looked like when it was, well, palatial, fit and gleaming white. Tall, lordly, inscrutable. Memories of a relatively healthy and perky Port-au-Prince began to fade, she found, and fade quickly. The image of the National Palace
as she left it the morning before the earthquake might as well be sepia-toned in her mind's eye. She could as well have been looking at the Sphinx in Giza. A sparrow, black and smooth, swooped down and perched himself casually on a ledge near where the west wing of the palace used to be. That's where Alain was, Natasha thought. Life attracts life, and the sparrow was the first animal she had seen since the earthquake. Surely it's a positive sign! Natasha took off in a sprint down Avenue de la Republic along the palace gate.

Excuse me, excuse me, she said to the men and women and children underfoot along the way. Madame! Madame! It was Bobo, chasing her. The run felt good. The air flooding Natasha's lungs filled her with joy. In motion, on a run, she felt purposeful, no longer a victim. The stale smell of death that had coated her was temporarily banished. A hand on the cement pillar at the corner to help her keep her balance, Natasha turned on rue St. Honoré. This normally shady and cool street was as forlorn as any street in Port-au-Prince, but the people were engaged in the hope business. Men and some women were trying to dig people out of the debris of fallen houses. Even from across the street, Natasha could hear survivors' cries for help and pleas about injuries. Cell phones rang everywhere, causing rescuers to stop and look and shake their heads when they realized the ringing was from another phone. Every phone on the street chimed and chimed, it seemed, because practically everyone with a cell phone
had someone he knew buried alive with a cell phone somewhere in the city. And that person was calling and calling for help. How do you focus on rescuing a stranger or neighbor when a loved one or a friend is calling you for help so insistently? How could you, Natasha, go through so much trouble to try to find this one friend when you knew you had friends and distant relatives all over town whose well-being should concern you? Leave me alone, conscience, Natasha thought with a shrug to the singsong of dozens of cell phone ringtones while speed-walking on rue St. Honoré. She reached the back of the National Palace and discovered that the entrance she'd hoped to use to get through a secret passageway to where she left Alain was crushed beyond use. She covered her mouth.

No, she said, shaking her head. Not you. You can't be dead. No!

Her heart finally said, Perhaps he really is. Her spirit gave in. Hope in her spacious soul was blown out like a candle. Out of the corner of her eyes, she saw Bobo quickly put his gun away. He took Natasha gently by the shoulders and into his massive arms to guide her away from the fallen manse.

We can't stay around here too long, Bobo said. People might recognize you.

Natasha let herself be walked toward the car. She didn't try to stop or wipe the cold tears streaming down her cheeks. She couldn't stop their flow even if she'd wanted to. Alain, Alain, oh Alain. Natasha folded herself in the
car. One last glance at the palace, then the Range Rover pulled away. In a country where tradition called for people to build elaborate pink-and-green or sky-blue minihouses in cemeteries to host their dead loved ones, she thought the National Palace had become a regal resting place for the man she loved, a too damned saddening event for her to appreciate its irony. Not yet anyway.

A fey noon sun was aloft and hot. Glistening four-by-four trucks were parked at various points around the Champ de Mars. The trucks ferried international humanitarians to ground zero to dispense aid. Some of the trucks were painted alarmingly ugly colors, like the school bus yellow of the truck with the word “Scientology” emblazoned on it in a large red script. Bobo found Avenue John Brown too congested. They turned left instead, soon skirting Place Pigeon and passing Le Capitol movie theater. Men waving fists of money came banging at their windows, startling Natasha out of her despondency. They're money changers, Bobo said. They want to sell gourdes for US dollars. Look, they think you're a foreigner. Bobo made that remark cheerily, like it was a compliment of some kind.

Soon they were in Fort National, Natasha's neighborhood. More accurately, the car drove through the canyon of rubble and dead bodies formerly known as Natasha's neighborhood, chilling the blood in her veins. Inconsolable since seeing the National Palace, Natasha was now suffocated by grief. The guys avoided her eyes. There
wasn't just pain in Natasha's heart. There was an emptiness. She felt hollowed out. A great chilling vacuum where the warmth of hot blood used to be.

Mon Dieu!
Bobo exclaimed a few minutes later. The car came to another abrupt halt, compelling Natasha to wipe the tears from her eyes and reluctantly brace herself. In front of them was the National Cathedral. Nôtre Dame de l'Assomption of Haiti, Natasha's favorite place in the whole world, loomed before them as a mix of rubble and jagged, broken concrete. Its towering pink and beige walls had been rent asunder by the earthquake. The colorful stained-glass windows Natasha spent almost a decade working on were shattered and scattered on the streets. The roof was sheared off the church's head, probably collapsed into the pews, smothering the altars and snuffing out remembrance candles. They stepped out of the SUV and walked on rue St. Laurent dazed, as if answering a mysterious call. The sky was electric blue. There was a small fire ablaze down the street. Piles of gray and pink cement had swallowed the front gate and sidewalk. Natasha could barely make out the top of the church's front door. But she badly needed to go inside. Giving up on the National Palace after the earthquake had split it in two and spread its interior on the ground like a spilled deck of cards was one thing. There was a former
lover buried in that newly minted national tomb who deserved a better fate and proper mourning, like, she suspected, she would have to do for more than a few friends and former colleagues around town. But the thing between her and the cathedral was different. It was personal. It was about saving her sanity and, more important, her soul, the meaning of her life and afterlife.

Natasha was an old hand at grieving for loves lost. She had given up hope of having any surviving relatives in Haiti long before the earthquake. If they didn't come out of the woodwork to reach out to her after her name and face had made the news when she married the president of the freaking republic, they couldn't possibly exist anywhere on God's green earth. She really was the last of her kind on this
maudit
planet. This was why the sight of the Catholic cathedral, even gutted by Mother Nature, stiffened her spine. The church had had the effect of making Natasha feel . . . salvageable . . . ever since she was a child. And on this day, the church needed her to try to repair it and make it relevant again; maybe they could save each other. Natasha started climbing the rubble toward the door and thinking about the ways Jesus had been good to her via this cathedral. She was around ten years old the day the pack of boys chased her down rue Borgella. She deserved the ass-kicking coming to her. She had taken their soccer ball on an impulse during their game. They wanted the ball back, and they wanted to teach her the lesson to not mess with them in the process. Natasha's heart leapt in her chest, tickling her throat, but she outran the boys. Yes, she did. She took their ball for no reason as it rolled out of bounds, and ran away laughing.
The boys screamed, cursed, and gave a chase that got more and more futile, so she smiled, relaxed. The air felt sweet, pumping her muscles to the point that she feared they might burst, explode. But she had relaxed a little too much in her sprint. One boy caught up to her and touched her shoulder.
Putain!
Natasha made a sharp turn to shake his grip, opened a gate and closed it, padlocking it. Give us the ball! Give us the ball! the boys bayed at the gates, arms outstretched. Natasha felt powerful, like Joan of Arc. When it seemed as though the boys' frustration would tear the gate apart, she giggled and tossed the ball over it. The ball flew into the sky, disappeared briefly in the white sun, then thudded on someone's face. The boys welcomed the ball like a long-lost friend and went back to playing their soccer match. Except for one of them. He lingered behind long enough to make sinister eye contact with Natasha. He gave her the I'll-slash-your-throat-for-that sign with his fingers. She gulped.

Well, that wasn't a smart thing to do, young lady, a deep voice intoned behind her.

Natasha turned to discover the voice belonged to the monsignor, Monsignor Dorélien. He stood over Natasha under the arch, between heavy metal doors. He looked like a young Desmond Tutu, darting eyes, smiling round face, big hands. Behind him a vast hall with a marbled cool beckoned. Natasha finally realized where she had escaped to. The National Cathedral. A building she didn't like much as a child, though she lived nearby. She couldn't
remember the reason. Her parents, back when they lived together, forced her to go to Mass on Sundays. For some reason, after she became an orphan, she thought that if there was going to be one perk from that unwanted state, it would be the right to skip out of attending sermons about love every week. What time could she have for such nonsense after all her loves had disappeared or given her away? Uh-oh, she thought, looking at the monsignor. Young Natasha felt guilty for calling his work bullshit, even if it was only in her head.