God Loves Haiti (9780062348142) (22 page)

A
few hours later, in the long shadows of a late afternoon in the steaming Caribbean winter, a beat-up Datsun parked on rue Dr. Aubry. Out came two nuns, one of whom, Sister Robert, walked awkwardly in her new robe. Her worst nightmare at that moment was that her flowing black robe would get stuck in a door or on a tree branch and accidentally be ripped off her body, leaving her nude in front of a shocked public. Paranoid doesn't necessarily mean careful, she realized, for as soon as she closed the car's door, the tail of her nun's habit became caught in it. Fortunately for her, she was
moving slowly enough to avoid disaster. Sister Hopstaken, meanwhile, was distracted by the full view of the disaster their city had endured. The collapsed Notre Dame de l'Assomption Catholic cathedral crouched in front of her and beckoned shock, awe, and terror. Be careful, Sister, Natasha said as Sister Hopstaken walked toward the jagged piles in front of the cathedral as if in a trance. Sister Hopstaken struggled to find a way around the pile of rubble in the area of the back door entrance to the cathedral. The older nun was about to fall and truly hurt herself until the young one took her by the elbow and said, I know another way in. It'll be easier.

They walked around the corner and climbed a smaller pile and entered the church. Inside, there was a crowd. They were dressed in what passed for their Sunday best these days. Their clothes were free of that terrorizing white dust. Is it safe to be here? Sister Hopstaken said, looking nervously at the destroyed church from the inside for the first time. It's the safest place in the world, Natasha said.

The cathedral didn't have much of a roof left. What was left of the once majestic hall was crumbled and split apart. People sat on plastic chairs for the upcoming ceremony despite the obvious threat that whatever walls were left standing could fall if the winds blew or the earth caught another shiver. People sat on milk crates too, even though the wall of the giant tower, the one filled with giant snowflake-shaped windows of varying sizes, looked
shaky and worrisome. Turning away, Sister Robert looked her new colleague in the eyes and said with a resolve that came from a place deep inside and beyond her, God is good. The cathedral will not let us down this day. I'm sure of it. Let's go find Monsignor Dorélien.

        
WOMEN

D
own in Place Pigeon, Alain Destiné was about to attend the same ceremony. He had undergone a resurrection of sorts. And he was excited. How do I look? he asked Hollywood. They were standing in the brown patch of dirt in front of Alain's tent, and the closest mirror available was buried in the palace across the street. You look like a man who just showered and shaved for the first time in a month, Hollywood said, grinning. You look like shit with makeup. And you could use a haircut.

You and your jokes, Alain said. Tasteful as usual. Xavier,
viens ici, mon petit
. How do I look?

Xavier smiled and gave Alain the thumbs-up. Alain wore the same clothes he'd worn during his crash-land in Place Pigeon. They were the only clothes he owned. He had had them washed by Yanick's girls, and, more notably, he had finally braved the communal showers in the middle of the refugee camp and washed himself up, even
going so far as to shave off the beard that had combined with his bushy-dreadlocking afro to make him look a bit like Jesus. He shaved with a small shaving kit a matronly Swedish aid worker had suggestively slipped him a few days before. He had used deodorant, an environmentally-unfriendly spray, but it worked wonders, at least dampening the terrible smell he carried. Eradicating said smell would take many more showers, and to take that many showers as regularly as sanity demanded required Alain to take the long-overdue next steps of returning to his civilized life. Or at least to his parent's house, the next-best thing. Return home, to Papa and Maman, the house on Place Boyer. Engage Haiti's disaster recovery process from the rarefied airs inside the national and city governments and business communities that were his inheritance and not via the grass-free-roots level he had been working in since goudou-goudou.
“Goudou-goudou.” The onomatopoetic word Haitians used to describe the earthquake, or, more accurately, an approximation of the sounds the quaking earth had made as the ground made the things in their world rock back and forth and up and down. The word was primitive, but it had an accuracy and a musical quality Alain had come to enjoy. His appreciation of the small pleasures of life at the bottom of Port-au-Prince's society had grown in direct proportion to his dread to return to life among Haitian strivers without the company and the love of Natasha Robert to strive for. There had been no news of the first lady since goudou-goudou. The news from the presidency centered around the work the President was doing or not doing enough of to secure food, medicine, and enterprise to help Haitians dig themselves out of the rubbled city God's belching earth had left behind. Fucking God, Alain thought. There was no God. There never was. There were tectonic plates deep beneath the sea. That's for sure. Shifty motherfuckers. There was human kindness, courage, and mortality. There were whole hosts of political and scientific reasons to explain Haiti and its dire circumstances. There was philosophy, to be sure. Every day Alain looked out at the reality surrounding his tent. The matrons braiding hair, the boys chasing balls, the girls looking proud yet nervous about their curves, the bored men, the resigned elders, the hurt, the sick, the troubled. The waiting for death. The fundamental nature of the reality we shared was no longer worth Alain's concern. His new religion was no religion. His new God was no God. Fuck God. There was death and there was life filled with micromoments to fill before death.

The idea of faith in an omnipresent, benevolent, and discrete deity may have dimmed in Alain in the wake of the earthquake, but the aggrieved romantic hung on to a soft spot for love, the very essence of Jesus, Christianity, Islam, Buddhism, any religion
digne du nom
. Which was the only available explanation for his excitement for the coming wedding, the first anyone had heard of in Haiti after the earthquake. These were not his nuptials. He had
looked and smelled and sometimes behaved too much like a wounded sewer rat for far too long for a woman to look at him with anything other than concern, pity, or disgust. Besides, he told people he lost his wife during the earthquake, and he'd come to enjoy the persona of a widower. It wasn't a total lie. His one true love seemingly had died that day, vanished. Oh, how he'd give up a limb or two just to see Natasha again and scoop her up between his arms, but he was working hard to move on. Who chases a married woman, anyway? How foolish is that? He knew Natasha was gone, to her heaven on earth or beyond, and he was making himself be happy for her. If you love someone, set her free and all that. Philippe's getting married, and I'll live vicariously through him, Alain thought. His buddy Philippe, the refugee camp leader extraordinaire at Place Pigeon, deserved this happiness. He'd met a girl in some unfathomable corner of the Place Pigeon refugee camp one night and fallen in love. To Alain, it seemed fitting that Philippe's affection for their community would develop a sexual component. The camp's population had mushroomed from one thousand to twenty thousand seemingly overnight, and even though the ever-busy and dedicated socialist that was Philippe knew everyone and kept a running tally of who needed what help, he had somehow shoehorned in time to fall in love with a girl named Fabiola Georges. Fabiola was something else. The few times Alain had met her, at camp leadership council meetings—Fabiola
represented a group from the street on the other side of the National Palace; they were wretched motherfuckers, even in this collection of wretched of the earth—Fabby immediately struck him as smarter than he and Philippe and Hollywood put together. The first time they met, to debate choosing among tarps for tents from different donors, or whatever the fuck—Alain couldn't remember—Fabby had made a point that was so spot-on, man, Alain should've written it down. Hollywood poked Alain with an elbow and whispered, Is that how y'all grow them here? Jesus H. Christ, why couldn't I have found one of those in Los Angeles?

Not that Hollywood had any problems getting women. On an every-other-day basis, like clockwork, an international entertainment starlet or gorgeous philanthropist or celebrity of some kind came around his tent for a visit. Part sport, part PR move, Hollywood's Love Parade, as Alain and Philippe had come to call it, was good for Place Pigeon's business, though it didn't seem to do much for Hollywood's spirits. If Alain was pitifully post-God from heartbreak, Hollywood claimed to be post-love from the same.

I don't even jerk off anymore, Hollywood told Alain one dawn after another of their all-night drinking binges/vigils. What's the point? My imagination can't muster anything transcendent anymore. Maybe I've lived too long and fucked too many beautiful women.

Or maybe you've watched too much porn, Steve, Alain said.

Yeah, that's it. Fucking porn, pun intended. Porn ruined me for women and sex. I can't even look at my right hand the same way anymore. I blame the Internet.

Yeah, Alain said, Steve Jobs should've stillborned the thing instead of making it so fucking fun to fuck with. iHate the fucking Internet too.

During the courtship, Philippe had come around Alain's tent almost every night to get their help deciphering the Chinese-puzzle-worthy, head-scratching signals of the Haitian woman. As though Alain, of all people, had a clue. Few women on this planet are more difficult to read than Haitian women, Alain's father had told him when he was too young to understand, though Papa's seriousness about the topic made Alain care. Trust me, son, Villard Destiné said, I've traveled the world and, er, broken bread with women from India, Africa, even
beurettes
, Europeans, Asians, Americans, and Latinas, women from all the way in the deepest jungles of the Amazon to the saunas in Iceland. No matter. You can't be loved like a Haitian woman loves, nor could you be dropped as completely and as coldly as when a Haitian woman's done with you. May you never experience such a cold, son. Cold like space. A vacuum that turns Caribbean homes into igloos.

Alain's father continued: Haitian women and their steel decisiveness mystified me like no other in much the same way they mystified my father, his father, and his father, and his father's father before him. We men, we debate. Women, they act. We sing. They make the drums.
We dither, lord, we dither. They build. My father did tell me that if I got more than second breath of
chaleur
from one, I should grab on to her mighty hips and never let go or bruise them. And my father was right, Alain. My subsequent brief brushes with these women's glorious sound and terrible fury convinced me. So I married the first fantastic Haitian woman who would have me and never looked back. I hope you do the same, son, and don't mess around. I'm talking about a breed of women whose men have let them down for so long, through many centuries, and dozens of generations, that they may be incapable of feeling pity for us, like almost everyone else does. They, more than anyone, it seems, accept that talk is cheap. Haitian men, we talk, boy, we talk. Son, you might be all right with them if you were born without the gab gene, son. If you unfortunately have that tendency, keep it in check. Park it somewhere. Don't be no talker, kid. Haitian women can love us still, and their love is . . . something else. Out of this world. Become a man of courage and substance, a doer, an earner, a creator of value in your life, in the world you live in, to match these women's character, son. That's my most fervent wish for you.

Listening to Philippe talk about his developing bond with Fabby, after weeks of watching Philippe lie, steal, and cheat to feed and nurse a thousand wounded strangers, Alain thought that if ever there was a Haitian man of substance worthy of the mythical Haitian woman of his dad's imagination, Philippe was one.

Philippe and Fabby's conversations, according to Philippe, were deep, their philosophies, ethics, and dreams were in sync and bullish. Their childhoods and backgrounds were similar (Her father was carpenter! Mine was a construction foreman!) the amount of times they'd been in love, where each was during goudou-goudou (I was in a car! Her too!).

Fabby kept Philippe on a tight leash, and this turned him on even more. She let me touch her hand! Philippe said one night. The next night? We touched foreheads and whispered for an hour!

What? Alain said. Did you kiss her?

No, Philippe said. But I'm getting closer!

The man had gone nuts. The man was happy. The man was in love with a capital “L.” He grinned ear to ear after every bit of infinitesimal progress in extracting warmth from Fabby. I didn't know much about Philippe, Alain thought. He was older than me. Maybe about thirty, could be more. He had lines on his face that suggested he'd seen things, and that he'd suffered a great deal in his life. His cheerfulness, however, made him seem like a teenager. Post-earthquake, I aged ten, twenty years. This guy may have gotten fifteen years younger. Philippe would hate to have himself described as a spiritual guide and healer, he was too modest for that, but that's what he was for Alain and everyone around him in Place Pigeon. In fact, Philippe had all the talents of a voodoo priest. Alain didn't know much about voodoo, except that he knew believers moved
between voodoo and Catholicism all the time. Catholics had the big churches and visible symbols and Sundays. Voodoo had every other day of the week, and once you got past that business about
loas
,
bondye
, and speaking in tongues, its tenets were banal calls to fellowship and faith in the unseen like most religions.

Philippe did look good in red, the color of voodoo. On the wedding day, Alain watched him strut through Place Pigeon in a wicked red suit, fire-engine-red shoes gleaming. You could tell Philippe felt pimpish, shaking hands and drinking compliments from friends and strangers with florid smiles. Fabby wore the whitest sliver of a dress Alain had ever seen in his life, the dress was of a whiteness Alain had forgotten was capable of existing. Philippe had proposed marriage to Fabiola the night after she'd first made love to him. She accepted, and the ceremony was promptly scheduled for two days later, because in the brave new world they lived in since goudou-goudou, they understood that love shouldn't wait. Death wouldn't.