Haiti Noir (18 page)
From her window, my daughter concluded, she could sometimes see smoke billowing out from that Irène Gouin’s cigarette or hear the notes of “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone” looping, over and over again. My daughter was Irène Gouin.
T
he languorous drone in Foufoune’s ear meant that her international call had gone through. She’d been on the phone with relatives for hours, explaining through scalding tears how she came home after work and found her elderly mother dead. Her message was met with perfunctory sympathy. Foufoune and her mother had lived together for years. She would miss her more than most. Wedged between everyone’s words of condolence, however, was relief. And blame. Dona “Gwo Manman” Malbranche had been as happy as a prisoner in solitary confinement.
Every morning after Foufoune left for work, Gwo Manman would take her place before the television to chat with the strangers who lived inside.
“I wish I could sprout wings and fly back home,” she often confided to Bob Barker, host of
The Price Is Right
. When the Showcase Showdown ended and the last prizes were distributed, Gwo Manman would turn off the television and sit for hours in silence. Until four o’clock. Her most trusted friend and confidante, Oprah, would nod knowingly each time Gwo Manman explained how Foufoune had kidnapped her from her home and was forcing her to live in the worst kind of exile.
When all her television friends were gone for the day, Gwo Manman would sit and stare at the wallpaper, imagining the distant place that used to be home and the freedom that was hers to do whatever and go wherever she pleased. A map of Puits Blain’s nameless alleyways was imprinted in her memory as clearly as the lines in the palms of her hands. Sitting in a chair thousands of miles from home, she went for long walks along Route des Frères, visiting with friends for hours. Being trapped inside an apartment day after day, week after week, month after month, and year after year was torture. She missed the roosters announcing the dawn, the ominous lights flickering from Boutilier and Morne Calvaire.
“You’re hardly a prisoner in exile,” Foufoune would tell her mother when she complained. Sure, Gwo Manman got to dress up once in a while for a wedding or a funeral, but being taken out of the apartment only for special occasions made her feel like a clown, a madigra mal maske.
When Foufoune came home from work at night, she was always too tired to do anything but sleep. Too tired to ask Gwo Manman how she had spent the day. Gwo Manman would want to talk about her garden back home, her house, her friends who sold lwil maskreti behind the cemetery and fried food to the taxi drivers waiting to ferry passengers to the end of the road just beyond Hotel Flamboyant. In the States she had rain, sleet, illnesses she’d never even heard of—she didn’t want to talk about those. She had changed, and hated the person into whom America had turned her. Once, while Foufoune was at work, Gwo Manman unlocked the door and escaped. She wandered into the unfamiliar streets, improperly dressed for the snow that reached her ankles. She turned a corner, then another, then another; soon she could not find her way back. Hours later, a good Samaritan found her shivering and dazed.
“What’s your name?” and “Where do you live?” the good Samaritan had asked. But all that was more English than Gwo Manman understood. He took her to a nearby hospital. Foufoune spent an entire day trying to locate her mother that time. She prevented a reoccurrence by having a sturdier lock installed. Gwo Manman tried but could not get out of the apartment without a key, forcing her to retreat further into the wallpaper and the television world. But even that had changed. Bob Barker was no longer a resident. Just when she had gotten used to him, a stranger came and took his place. Even Oprah was not the same. She spoke only in tongues now. She’d become distant and unfriendly, prompting Gwo Manman to try and smash the screen with a mop, spraining her frail wrists. When Foufoune came home and found her mother hitting the television screen, she covered it like a corpse, saying, “The TV people won’t be able to bother you anymore.”
Dona Malbranche died the day after she turned seventy— a gift from God, as far as the old woman was concerned. The frown on her face was a perfectly inverted grin. “Ki te mele m.” She had drawn her lips tight on the “m” to intercept her final breath. “Ki te mele m,” she used to tell Bob Barker and Oprah—her companions and life’s witnesses. She no longer cared.
When Foufoune returned from another double shift and found Gwo Manman slumped over the chair, her instincts as a nurse rose up like a tsunami. She lunged toward her mother, determined to pry her loose from Death’s stubborn grip, but her limbs had as much life left in them as dried gourds. Foufoune dialed emergency, saying, “Hurry, please hurry.” The bottle of lwil maskreti clutched in her mother’s hand had spilled on her good rug. “Please, please hurry!” Within minutes the apartment was flooded with strangers in uniforms. Everyone shook their heads sympathetically. Foufoune sniffled and sobbed as she unclasped the gold necklace which Gwo Manman never would have parted with while she was alive. It had been a Mother’s Day present from her other daughter, Miriam, who still lived in Puits Blain. Foufoune continued to sob as her mother’s lifeless body was carted away; suddenly stung was she by the realization that if Gwo Manman had had a choice, she would have been savoring breadfruit grown on her own little patch of land in Puits Blain, instead of dying alone abroad.
Foufoune put off calling her sister for last, hoping someone would do her the favor of forwarding the news. No one did, of course; the call was hers to make. She adjusted her earpiece with trembling fingers. Her sister would answer momentarily, and sever the sliver that was her last nerve. Miriam had always sided with Gwo Manman:
The woman is old enough to know where she should live. She’s not a child. If she doesn’t want to live in the States, you must respect that.
Foufoune had considered sending her mother back, but after just a few weeks in the States it was already too late. America did not agree with Gwo Manman. She had an allergic reaction to the very air. She changed as soon as she left the island. At first Foufoune thought her mother was just homesick and would overcome it soon, but Gwo Manman’s condition steadily worsened. When after several months Gwo Manman grew even more despondent and sickly, Foufoune had her seen by the best physicians she knew. And out came the diagnosis she dreaded: onset dementia, Alzheimer’s. She knew all too well how those diseases ravaged the mind.
“I never got sick back home,” Gwo Manman argued, even after Foufoune was careful enough to make up the best lie rather than translate what the doctors had said. “I wasn’t sick until I started to live à l’étranger,” Gwo Manman maintained.
“You have the flu,” Foufoune explained. “A very bad strain. You’ll get better soon.”
Miriam was singing along to an old Coupe Cloue tune while stirring a bubbling pot of cornmeal when the phone in her apron pocket rang. She set down the long-handled wooden spoon and turned off the radio. A light rain was falling, rinsing the dust off the flamboyant branches over her porch as well as the splotches of blood where she had cleaned goat meat the night before.
“Alo.” Miriam had decided she would send the caller away, or else risk having too many lumps in her signature dish which today she would serve with black beans and salted herring. Customers would start arriving soon for their noonday fix. She would not disappoint them. The goat meat she painstakingly cleaned was now marinating in a special concoction. By nightfall, every bit would be gone. People would come from far away for a taste. Kenold and most of the other guys who sold those brightly painted canvases up the street from the lycée and Anne-Marie Javouhey elementary stopped by Miriam’s for food on their way home. In all the years since she quit a back-breaking factory job to open the eatery, she had never let her customers down.
“Alo?” Miriam repeated, annoyed. Jean-Jean, the man she hired to clean the latrine behind her house, walked by with his shovel in one hand and a cell phone in the other. Miriam’s house was equipped with indoor plumbing, but she kept the old relic behind the house for customers. Miriam’s thoughts shifted to the days when hers was the only household in all of Puits Blain with a telephone. Nowadays, everyone had phones: maids, stall keepers at the marketplace, farmers, tap tap drivers, even Jean-Jean—a man whose profession required him to work under the cover of night when no one would see or judge him.
“M-m-i-s-s Mi-ria-m,” he stuttered, his head bent low due to chronic humiliation, “I’m c-coming tonight to start that j-job for you.”
“Kapitèn Poupou!” a group of giggling children saluted Jean-Jean. Ashamed, he pretended not to hear.
Miriam nodded. Now was not the time to explain why the job would have to be postponed. She would speak to Jean-Jean later. Perhaps she should have him seal that hole and make the old latrine disappear like the thatched huts and tincovered shacks that used to populate the area. Puits Blain was no longer an idyllic haven. The kenèp groves were gone. The cornfields had been replaced by top-heavy palaces with high walls surrounding them. Tightly clustered wannabe mansions and the ever-expanding bidonvilles did not spare a single sapling. On the upside, there was now a Culligan water depot just steps from her porch, making it much easier to run her business. The cyber café halfway down to Kay Peshòt—right in that spot where Papa Malbranche used to tether his blind horse—stayed packed with those seeking escape via the Internet. Hotel Flamboyant’s sparkling point of light stood on land where, it was said, a girl once turned herself into a mabouya to escape a beating. Miriam’s umbilical stump was buried under the flamboyant tree in her front yard. So was Foufoune’s, but that meant precious little to her sister. The dirt path where Gwo Manman used to ride her mule was now a bustling artery that accommodated the United Nations’ fleet of tanks hellbent on keeping Haiti safe. Minustah soldiers manned every few feet, catching gang members before they could disappear into the convoluted alleyways. Gone were the days when Puits Blain did not need guarding. Yes, Miriam resolved, it would be best to have Jean-Jean seal the latrine and demolish the decrepit wooden shack surrounding it once and for all. Anyone could hide in there. Why hadn’t she thought of this before? Her customers would have to manage without it. Miriam shook her head. Her old Puits Blain no longer existed, but unlike her sister, she would never abandon her ancestral land to live elsewhere.
“Alo,” Miriam said a third time, keeping one eye on her steaming pot of cornmeal. She realized by the loaded silence on the other end that it was Foufoune. Gwo Manman’s children knew each other so well that they needed to maintain at least one ocean between their respective homes. Same mother, same father, same ancestral blood in their veins, but those two had even less love for each other than a goat and a butcher. Foufoune liked to think she was accidentally switched at birth. Nothing else could explain why her blood turned to ice whenever she even thought about her sister. Hatred raged inside of them like a parasitic cancer. The disease spread over the years, taking control of their lives, until one could no longer bear the sight of the other.
“It breaks my heart that my only two children cannot get along,” Gwo Manman often lamented.
“I have no problem with my sister,” Foufoune would lie to appease her mother. But to her friends, Foufounce would say: “Miriam is jealous of me because I made it and she’s nothing.”
“Hello, Miriam?” Foufoune said timidly.
Miriam knew what her sister had called to say: their mother had died; no one needed to tell her that. Just as she was cleaning the goat the previous night, Gwo Manman had stood under the flamboyant tree and announced that she had had it with the snow, the sleet, the wind, and the crazy language that always left her mind in a jumble. Foufoune’s apartment was a jail cell she would escape, and soon.
Yes
, Gwo Manman had whispered in the darkness,
I’m on my way home.
“Who is this?” Miriam asked sharply. A doctor might have just signed her mother’s death certificate, but Gwo Manman had been dead for years, as far as she was concerned. The day Foufoune put her on that plane and made her say goodbye to Puits Blain was the day Gwo Manman had passed away. Taking a fish out of water suffocates it; putting a bird in the most beautiful aquarium drowns it. Every time Gwo Manman looked out of the apartment window, all she saw was sky and shapeless air—sheer torture to a woman who preferred her bare feet on a packed-dirt floor to fancy tiles, or even Foufoune’s pretty rug. As far as Miriam was concerned, Foufoune might as well have put a bullet in the old woman’s heart.
“Miriam, is that you?”
Who else could it be?
“Gwo Manman ki te nou.” Foufoune’s throat tightened around the words. Our mother has left us.
“I’ve heard,” Miriam lied. “I was about to call you when the phone rang.” With her free hand she picked up the wooden spoon and resumed stirring her cornmeal. Elderly people like Dona Malbranche died every day in the diaspora, leaving relatives to bury the truth in distant graves. Some who did not believe in cremation became sudden converts; get rid of the evidence!
“Manman nou mouri,” Foufoune’s voice broke. Our mother is dead.
“When are you bringing her body?” Miriam asked, her eyes narrowing.
Foufoune scratched her head. She saw no reason to bring the body back to the island. She could not be expected to travel all that distance every time she wanted to place a wreath on her mother’s grave. She was a naturalized citizen, an expat; the tenth department was her new patrie. Why did her sister always go out of her way to be so damn difficult?
“Bring my mother back,” Miriam snapped. She was addressing a brazen kidnapper, not her sister: “You can’t keep her a prisoner anymore.” Hadn’t the ransom been paid in full? Hadn’t Gwo Manman paid the ultimate price for her freedom? “You need to bring her back where she belongs.”
Foufoune sniffled, hearing accusation after accusation between every two words. “If wanting to give my mother a better life was my crime, then I’ll take the blame.”
“But you didn’t give her a better life,” Miriam hissed. “You cheated her out of her life. You stole years from her. Years! She was living in exile. She was confined to the life you thought she should live. Gwo Manman did not want to be in the States.” There! She had said what she’d meant to say for years. No more civility. No more pretenses. “Gwo Manman never stopped crying,” she added. “She wanted to come home. Her life was here in Puits Blain. She was happy with me. Everything she was familiar with was right here. You locked her up in an apartment morning, noon, and night. She was free here, not trapped like a tortured detainee.”
