Haiti Noir

Simply looking at Rosanna was a pleasure for Solange. The girl had her father’s smooth black skin and her mother’s brown-streaked curly hair, making her what in Haiti they would call a marabou, the kind of dusky beauty who poems are written about. Even when she was just a teenager, grown men would admire her as she strolled down the street, and Solange often got the impression watching her niece that an invisible orchestra was playing just for her. Solange was very proud of the job she had done raising Rosanna. The fact that Rosanna even desired to make this visit to Les Cayes to see family members who had shown little interest in her was proof of it. Very simple pleasures, not Solange’s wealth, were what had always seemed to appeal to Rosanna; she preferred swimming in rivers to swimming in pools, gorging herself on mangoes and avocados to sushi and foie gras. And Solange could tell that even while inhaling her favorite omelet, Rosanna was itching to head to the Portail Léogâne bus station to catch a camion-as she had begged her aunt to let her to do-on her own.

“It’s the best way for me to see the country,” Rosanna had successfully pleaded her case the night before. “I want to travel like the regular people of this country do. That’s what my mom would have done.”

Solange did not want to smother the girl any more than she already had, but she was nonetheless worried about her. Still, she did not want to seem as though she was jealous of Rosanna’s mother’s family and trying to keep the girl for herself.

“Davernis can at least drive you to Portail Léogâne, right?” Solange asked.

“And my mother’s brother and sister will be there to meet the bus,” Rosanna completed what she thought would be her aunt’s next sentence.

For lack of more elaborate stories, Rosanna had invented a whole slew of fantasies about her mother. Everything Rosanna wished she were, she imagined her mother to have been. In reality, her mother was simply a pretty girl from a poor peasant family who, because of her mother’s acquaintance with some powerful henchmen in her area, had been given a scholarship to a fancy university in Port-au-Prince. This is what had put her in the path of Solange’s brother. There was no point in telling that story to the girl, however. She would soon find it out for herself, and from the horse’s relatives’ mouths, so to speak. Besides, in death everyone is equal, and Rosanna’s mother and father certainly were equal now. But Solange could not lie either, so rather than say anything she remained silent, allowing Rosanna to nurture as many illusions as she could muster about her mother.

While Solange and Rosanna wrapped up their breakfast, Davernis made his way into the dining room. He was a tall, muscular young man. He was twenty-one years old, like Rosanna, and in another type of house they might have been raised like brother and sister. Instead, she was the princess of the house, as the servants liked to refer to her, and he was the driver. That morning, he was wearing a simple watch that Rosanna had given him as a gift, hoping that he would take the hint that he no longer had an excuse to be late, as he often was when she needed him to take her to a friend’s house, to a party, or shopping. Davernis also worked as a messenger in Solange’s stores, which sometimes contributed to his lateness.

Before he was promoted to driver, Davernis had been a rèstavèk, an unpaid child laborer at Aunt Solange’s house. Rosanna could still remember the day that Davernis’s mother had brought him to the house. He was twelve years old. Davernis’s mother thought he could be of use around the house, and maybe in return Solange could send him to school and, when he was a grown man, give him a job.

Aunt Solange had resisted at first.

“I am raising a young woman here,” she had told Davernis’s mother, a skinny toothless woman who sold mangoes at the market. “I can’t have some wild young man here.”

“He will be very good,” the woman had insisted. And Davernis had certainly been good. He had been running chores for Solange both at the house and the store since he arrived and had been one of her drivers for two years now. He lived with the other servants on the property, in a big concrete house that Solange had a well-known architect build for her staff. He had never been in an accident, a major feat in Port-au-Prince, and treated the vehicles like they were precious jewels, often cleaning and polishing them in his spare time.

“You know that Davernis is taking you to the station,” Solange repeated.

“Yes, Tatie,” Rosanna answered, considering this a great concession indeed. She had expected her aunt to find some way to thwart her plans, perhaps asking Davernis to go with her to Les Cayes.

“My dear, you must be very careful,” her aunt was saying now. “There are so many thieves on these buses.”

“There are thieves everywhere, Tatie,” she countered.

“Davernis will accompany you to the station and he will help you buy your ticket.”