Haiti Noir

Yes, pain and sadness had arrived the day people started to turn around on the street to look at him, naked under his mask of a public character wanted by the police. I had met him, had reached out to him, not knowing that everything had become, literally and figuratively, cold around him, and that he was in a way pouring boiling water over his own head. We made love inside that madness. Voices, carried by the winds, were speaking inside of him. I had met him during that period. In front of a movie theater, on Lamarre Street. He’d come to see Bird, the seven p.m. show. He’d come out of the theater and was tying his shoes on the sidewalk when I spotted him. I’d been selling junk jewelry to make a living for me and my daughter; so I showed him a wristwatch and asked if he’d like to buy it for his wife or girlfriend. Not knowing that I would become his girlfriend a few moments later. That same evening, we slept together in a crummy hotel on Grand-rue. No fuss. We had a long talk about Charlie Parker, who, as a teenager in Kansas City, played the recorder while he rode his mule and entertained big dreams listening to Count Basie’s orchestra. He told me he was my Bird, and me his Chan, the dancer Bird admired. I told him no, let’s switch roles and get it right, I am the Bird and he’s the Chan, but he wouldn’t hear of it. And sleep fell upon us, all of a sudden.

After that, we’d meet at his place, not far from the cathedral, on rue Borgelat. A very dark two-room apartment that smelled of mold and cold tobacco, because ever since my husband had left, aside from occasional one-night stands, I had no steady man in my life, which was all right by me- the body has its needs-as long as my lovers didn’t promise me the sky and the earth or rain from countries where it no longer rains. I’ve got my home, you’ve got yours. As the police were after him-he rarely went out, and only at night, in disguise, taking dark roads with their streetlights out-we agreed I would be the one to go visit him. Aside from the films he’d go see secretly, I had become his only contact with the outside world. I’d show up at his place three times a week: on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Like a rebellious girl, I was attracted to the danger he represented. I didn’t know why. I suppose it gave me the exhilarating feeling of betraying somebody, something I wasn’t completely conscious about, but it really turned me on. To the point where I wouldn’t remember if I truly loved him. We’d spend our evenings talking travel, although neither of us had ever left the island. The only sea he knew was the one polluted by the barrels of toxic waste foreign cargo ships dumped into the harbor of Port-au-Prince. Once, on a whim, I brought him back a shell from the sea-fest in Pestel where I’d taken my daughter. I made him listen to the sound of the waves inside it. Yes, everything was fine, until that time when he forced me to spend the night. He heard me moan in my sleep as I was touching myself. At first, he didn’t seem to mind; then, a week later, he started to think-wrongly-that I was seeing another man. From that point on, he’d made surprise visits to my home. Most times he’d run into my daughter, sitting on the stoop in front of the house, smoking a cigarette. She was rather nuts-had always been so-but was very beautiful, with big black, sunken eyes, a subtle smile. She knew what he was coming for, so she’d look him up and down and stick her tongue out at him.

Jimmy was buried at the national cemetery on a Saturday morning. Dirty, ragged children wept and put flowers on his grave. That day, there were also women, many women, most of them very beautiful, wearing long dark dresses under the shade of their black silk mantillas. I was there too, with my daughter, in the background, dry-eyed. I had the impression that we weren’t there for his funeral but for an ultimate erotic parade, a way for each of us to prove to him that we loved him more than anything, more than that tall, big-boned woman who was looking disdainfully at me from behind the gray designs of her fan, sweating in the heat of the last days of summer.