Haiti Noir (10 page)

It was not the first time Gaspard had seen an accident like this. This was a small and sometimes unlucky town and the narrow, mostly unpaved streets were crowded with motorcycles and cars. But none of the previous accidents had been so personally disheartening. He had expected Rose to scream at some point—just as the mothers and other spectators had rushed up to the spot, cradled their heads in their hands, and screamed—but the girl had not even made one sound.

The moto taxi had nearly reached the mother’s fabric shop when the accident happened, so it did not take long for word to reach the fabric vendor, who even before she was told the details was bent over and retching, looking only at the ground as she made her way through the stalled traffic toward where her child was lying, bloody and still, in the dust.

Gaspard had not seen such grief since the public high school in town had collapsed some years back, killing eightynine of the two hundred and twelve pupils enrolled there. The day of the moto taxi accident, however, the fabric vendor was the sole owner of that tragedy. The driver and Rose’s caretaker were miraculously fine, like those students and teachers who had merely crawled out of the rubble of the collapsed high school building some years back.

Gaspard was grateful that his daughter, after having visited her mother’s grave that morning, was safe with a neighbor, momentarily away from cars and motorcycles, at the beach. Still, in that moment he missed his daughter more than he had at any other time since she was born. He missed her so badly that he even felt jealous of the way the fabric vendor was holding her daughter. At least she’d looked after her own child during the girl’s entire short life, he thought. But he was a man. What did he know about raising a little girl? He would always need caretakers he couldn’t afford, neighbors from whom he’d have to beg favors, women he could either pay or sleep with, so they would “mother” his child. And even those most motherly acts, like bathing and dressing and plaiting hair, did not include embraces, like the type this woman was lavishing on a blood-soaked corpse. It took watching another child die in her mother’s arms to make him realize how very much he’d miss Claire when he finally gave her away for good.

The day Claire Limyè Lanmè turned three, she was returned to her father from the countryside where she had been living with her mother’s relatives since she was two days old. His wife’s death had been so startling and abrupt that seeing his daughter’s face had not only saddened but terrified Gaspard. To most people, his daughter was a revenan, a ghost, a not quite fully whole person who had entered the world just as her mother was leaving it. And if these types of children are not closely watched, they can easily follow their mothers into the other world. The only way to save them is to immediately sever them from the place where they are born. Otherwise they will always spend too much time chasing a shadow they can never reach. All this was once believed about children like Claire. San manman, motherless, was the way you described someone who was lost, brutal and cruel. Fantom, ghost, was another. People without mothers, it was believed, were capable of anything.

Aside from all of this, as soon as the umbilical cord was cut, there was the immediate problem of feeding the baby. The midwife had dressed her in a light yellow embroidered jumper from the layette his wife had spent months sewing. Gaspard had picked up the baby, wrapped her in a matching blanket his wife had also made. The midwife had rushed into town looking for some formula or possibly a wet nurse. But Claire was a silent, easy child. It was as though she already knew that she had no mother and could not afford to be picky.

During those first moments with his daughter, there were times when he had visions for which he detested himself, fantasies about letting her starve to death. He’d even considered dropping her in the sea, but these were things he was dreaming for her because he could not do them to himself. He could not poison himself like he so desperately wanted. He couldn’t hazard the possibility of leaving his child totally parentless, of having her end up in a brothel or on the streets.

While he was fantasizing about his daughter’s death, he was also worried that a mosquito might bite her and that she might get malaria or dengue fever. He feared for himself too. He feared getting hit by a car, or being struck with a terrible disease that would separate them forever. So when the midwife did not return, he wrapped the blanket more tightly around his daughter and took her into town at dusk.

Walking by the town’s largest fabric shop, he saw the fabric vendor standing by her night watchman as he locked the tall metal gates. Next to her, her fidgety three-year-old daughter Rose was tugging at her skirt. Claire began to cry and the fabric vendor turned to see where the cry was coming from. Before her eyes could rest on them, Gaspard was already walking toward the gate.

“Madame,” he said, unsure now what his next words should be.

He could already see on the fabric vendor’s cheerless face that she knew what had happened. Most of the women in town must have heard by now that his wife had bled to death toward the end of her labor, and nowhere does news spread faster than in Ville Rose.

The fabric vendor was still nursing her pudgy three-yearold— the town’s namesake—who was tugging at her skirt. This was so unusual for such a busy woman of her societal standing that everyone knew about it.

She asked her night watchman to unlock the gate, motioned for him to wait for her outside and for Gaspard to follow her inside. She pushed open another door, then flipped on a series of lightbulbs dangling over the fabric-filled shelves and standing spools of cloth. There was a long wooden bench in the waiting area and she motioned for her now sleepylooking daughter to sit there before she and Gaspard did as well. Signaling Gaspard to bring Claire closer, she unbuttoned her loose hibiscus print blouse.

Claire Limyè Lanmè latched on quickly and emptied both the fabric vendor’s breasts while Rose, the woman’s daughter, looked awestruck and grief-stricken as though she had not been aware until that moment that this was something her mother could do for anyone but her.

Gaspard thought he might bring Claire to the fabric vendor every day, but after smiling and cooing at the baby and stroking her tiny elbow, the woman’s face tightened as she handed his daughter back to him, giving him the scowl one might imagine she reserved for her credit-seeking customers.

Pointing to the sleepy three-year-old sitting next to her, the fabric vendor said, “My child needs my milk.”

He did not say it, but he was thinking that his child and hers were now milk sisters. The fabric vendor had offered his baby her breasts. He could now freely ask her to be his child’s godmother. She certainly had the means. She had a big house in the hills overlooking the beach and a cook and a yardman to see after her every need. The only thing Gaspard didn’t like about her was her reputed loose ways, her rumored love for several men at once, her renowned insatiable longing for other people’s husbands. Still, because she had money and the shop, and because her father had once been the justice of the peace of the town, she had also inherited her own private pew at the cathedral down the street from the fabric shop. Gaspard’s wife had come to the shop often, sometimes to buy fabric for the undertaker she sewed for and other times to barter her hand-embroidered little girls’ dresses. Gaspard now wondered if his wife and the fabric vendor had ever spoken at length. Did they ever talk as more than client and customer? As potential young mothers?

While he stood there, near the shop’s entrance, rocking the contented baby in his arms, he thought that if he waited long enough the woman might change her mind and let his daughter come again to nurse. Instead, she reached into her skirt pocket and fished out a few bills and pushed them toward him.

“Do you have any other family?” the fabric vendor asked, while stroking her own daughter’s perfect hair. “A sister?” Before he could answer, she added, “If you don’t have a sister, you should send her to your wife’s people.”

He hadn’t thought of that. He hadn’t thought much in that direction at all. The child had taken the mother away. Now there would be no mother. That’s all he’d been able to concentrate on for more than a few minutes. She was right, though. He could not do it himself. He couldn’t even feed her.

“Do you have a place to lay her body, your wife?” she asked, steadying her fidgeting daughter’s hands in hers. “You can, if you like, make use of a burial site in the cemetery where I have some open land.”

When he left the parlor, he walked back home, with the child, where the frantic midwife was waiting with the bottles and powder and purified water, which along with the funeral expenses would wipe out most of his dead wife’s savings.

“You went out with this san manman child after dusk?” the midwife chided.

The next day, when his wife’s sister arrived for the funeral, he simply gave the baby to her along with the little money he had left. He was relieved not to have to worry about her for a while.

He worked harder, spent more time at sea so that he’d have enough to send for her care, but he never visited her, nor did he ask for her to be brought to him for visits. But as her third birthday approached, he felt he was ready to see her again. So he asked that she arrive on her birthday. And she did, looking long and thin and just like her mother. He had a pink ruffled muslin dress sewn for her that he would have replicated in a larger size each year. Her mother had made her one just like it, imagining that she would wear it for her first birthday. He had sent her off with it, not knowing whether they’d even put it on her. He wished now that his wife had been prescient about her own death, like so many people’s relatives claim to have seen them be. She had never told him what he might do with their daughter should anything happen to her.

The night of Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin’s seventh birthday, there was an informal vigil on the beach for the rogue wave victim, Gaspard’s fisherman friend, who was now considered lost at sea. Even though a full moon gleamed overhead, Gaspard and a few of the other fishermen had made a bonfire, and over the fisherman’s widow’s occasional wails they sat on the warm sand and drank kleren, played cards and dominoes, and told stories, just as they would at an official wake.

Dozens of townspeople came by the beach, bringing, as was the custom, small amounts of money to the fisherman’s widow. The town’s mayor came too, fearful that the way the fisherman died might be the very first sign of something more potentially and geographically tragic and widespread in the days and weeks to come.

At some point in the evening, Gaspard had lost sight of his daughter. He had occasionally looked up from his drink and seen her holding hands in a circle with a group of girls playing won or dashing behind the shacks on the beach for hide-and-seek. But he hadn’t seen her for some time, and the crowd of townspeople had grown thick.

Rising from the sand near the bonfire, he felt unsteady on his feet as the alcohol seeped through him. He was unable to even string together the words to properly ask the people he staggered into whether or not they had seen his daughter.

Suddenly he spotted her, sitting alone next to a woman. It was a woman he knew, except he had never seen her like this. Her hair was wrapped in a silver net, above some giant plastic rollers, and she was wearing a satin night dress the same shade as the moon. She had slippers on her feet, fuzzy red ones that looked like they might stink if they got wet. It was the fabric vendor, and she was in deep conversation with his timid-looking daughter.

This pleased him, made him happy, but it also made his drunk and nearly broken heart start beating faster. What could the woman be telling his daughter? he wondered. And why here? Why now?

He was too afraid to approach them and would have been happy to stand there with the kleren bottle dangling from his hand, except the fabric vendor noticed him and waved him over with the flailing sleeve of her fragile-looking nightgown.

She and his daughter were sitting on some large boulders that must have been picked up from somewhere else and put there for them. He sat on the sand and leaned closer so that he might hear them above the chattering well-wishers.

“Condolences for your friend,” the fabric vendor said.

His daughter turned her face away each time one of them glanced at her.

“Yes,” the fabric vendor blurted out emphatically, as though they were toward the end of a very long conversation. “I’ll take her. Tonight.”

Claire kept her eyes on the sand, but he could see a tear instantly slide down the side of her face. He wanted to reach for her, bury his nose in her face the way she liked to needle hers into his when he was distracted or sad.

“Why now? Why tonight?” he managed to say.

“It’s now or never.” The woman reached down to wipe the sliding tear, but the girl quickly moved her face. “I need another way to remember this day.” She brought her hands together in a fold in her night dress, between her knees. “Now or never.” She then clumsily lowered her hands to the girl’s back and attempted to stroke it.

Claire’s body was shaking as she watched the pile of driftwood and dried sticks that made up the puttering bonfire, which was meant to be as much a farewell as a beacon to bring the lost fisherman home.

“Claire Limyè Lanmè,” Gaspard called out to her.

Claire did not turn her face.

He had one final story to tell her before she was no longer his, but the kleren and the light-headed feeling it gave him were suppressing his words.

One night before he knew his wife was pregnant, they went out to sea together for some night fishing. Rowing quietly for some time, they circled the same small area before his dinghy stalled as if it had reached a wall. He was afraid that they might be stuck on a reef, but he managed to push back. Peering into the moonlit surface of the sea, his wife had removed her pleated sundress until she was sitting there in only her plain white cotton panties, her protruding belly aimed like an arrow at the void.

“Non,” Gaspard said, quickly noticing her slightly larger belly and breasts and realizing what she was trying to show him. But before he could say anything else, she slipped both her legs over the hull and slid into the sea, her body parting the waters, pulling her forward as she sunk her head into the wet darkness then raised it up and out again.