Haiti Noir

Her granddaughter’s voice became clear for a second. Then Odette saw what was pinning them both to the floor. A large cement beam the size of two kitchen chairs was on her lap and on the girl’s head. Her granddaughter was completely drenched with blood. It was like when they played “monster” and the child covered her entire body with a sheet. Odette wanted to tell the little girl that she loved her. She wanted to laugh and tease her about not being a convincing enough monster, but something stabbed her in her coccyx area and flushed her head once again with darkness. She envisioned herself walking on the beach with both her daughter and granddaughter while eating ripe mangoes. In her ancestral village in the southeast, they raced each other by a stream of red and violet flowers.

“We can’t get to the child,” she heard a voice say. It finally registered that the voices belonged to some men who were helping to pull her out from underneath the concrete.

“The child is in pieces,” she heard another say.

“Continue to be brave,” another said. “We’re going to get you out.”

While those voices were instructing her, the pain spread from the center of her back and rapidly shot up through her entire body. She was still unable to scream.

She would later remember being raised by many hands, then placed on the ground with a small cushion behind her head. When she reopened her eyes, multiple heads were standing in a dark circle over her. A car came: a black shiny 1970 Peugeot pulled by two muscular Andalusian horses. Horses? Where could horses go in a broken city? They would ride over the cobalt-blue ocean of her daughter and granddaughter’s favorite beaches and their perfectly spaced coconut and palm trees.

In the tent clinic, she smelled the rubbing alcohol as they poured it on the gashes on her leg, but she felt nothing. Around her, she heard people groaning and screaming, “M ap mouri!” I’m dying! It was as if they were all swimming in a pool of fire.

When she woke up from another bout of sleep, she was in a massive white tent surrounded by doctors speaking to each other in Spanish. She remembered the bright smile of one young girl-like her Rose, she couldn’t have been more than five years old-as she lifted her stumped left arm.

“Alone. Dementia,” she heard someone say. “But otherwise okay.”

Dust was still blanketing the kitchen where she lay. A brown angel whose white wings flapped high up in the breeze touched the back of her hand and said in a very assuring voice, “You’re lucky to be alive.”

After her daughter was born twenty-five years ago, driving home from the hospital, holding the baby in her arms in the back of her husband’s shiny black Peugeot, they had passed a bidonville in the middle of the city and she had thought of Hiroshima. The city she was being driven through now was like Hiroshima, the epic destruction reminding her of the World War II films her husband loved to watch. The National Palace ’s collapsed domes were like crushed camel humps; the National Police Headquarters compressed onto its blue and white walls. Thousands of desperate bodies were now sleeping on the streets, on bare concrete like stray dogs. Not sure where they were taking her, she felt defeated and small in the back of the open pickup. Then she remembered that she had asked to go. She had told them that she had a house, one of the few policemen still alive had volunteered to take her back to Rose, to take her home.

The entire front of the two-story terraced house had collapsed. As some of her neighbors ventured into her yard, both happy and surprised to see her, she longed for the strength to dig beneath the rubble with her bare hands to find Rose. Instead, she climbed as close as she could to where she thought the kitchen was and sat there weeping, with the scalding sun beaming down her back.

“You can’t stay here alone,” a neighbor said, while handing her a small packet of crushed saltine crackers. “Come.”

And that’s how she let herself be led to the tent city closest to her house.

In the middle of the sweltering assemblage of human bodies, she sat under a sheet held up by sticks all day and unbraided her long salt-and-pepper hair, which she then covered with a dingy red satin head-wrap that someone had given her. She had also acquired, she did not know where, a polished pine stick with intricate carvings that she tapped while humming before she went to sleep. Despite the constant chatter of her fellow evacuees, the tapping made a persistent noise in the humid hot air that seemed intrusive to some and meditative to others. Eventually, she began to inspire gossip.