Haiti Noir

One afternoon, in the middle of our endless interviews with Inspector Joseph, my daughter came out of her room almost naked. She leaned over the inspector’s ear and told him that if he went looking into the crumpled sheets of the hotel room, he could find, in the play of the shadows created by the subdued light of the lamp on the bedside table, the meanderings of the murder, how the scene had unfolded. The inspector knew she’d been born nutty and he laughed, but that same afternoon he took us to the crime scene, to that hotel high up in the Carrefour-Feuilles neighborhood, to that room with a view over the harbor and the rusty roofs that hemmed in the sea. He took pictures of the hotel which had been deserted since the night of the crime, of its entrance lined with bougainvilleas and oleanders, of the walls of the room decorated with cheap paintings, of the bedspreads, of the private cop with his hunting rifle who had seen the young woman arrive on Jimmy’s arm, her steps heavy with alcohol, both laughing madly.

After the visit, we walked part of the way home, and my daughter kept repeating that in the room she had felt the presence of Irène Gouin, who had bent over Jimmy’s blood-soaked body and felt sublime. She was talking nonstop, deciding even as she was detailing them how the facts were to be arranged. And me, to cool off the situation, I reminded Inspector Joseph that she has never been in her right mind. She pretended not to hear me, and kept on talking as if she wanted to take control of the situation, deconstruct the hypothesis of unpredictability and randomness of Jimmy’s murder: Irène’s act and her state of mind at the time, the strong smell that night of salt and seaweed, of the sea rising from the harbor, filling the city streets with their brackish fragrance, Jimmy’s ugly skin and bones, the golden reflection of his Barbancourt rum on the rocks, and the bubbles in Irène’s Coke at the hotel bar, before they went up to the room.

She encouraged the inspector to get rid of his pretentious desire to understand everything about a life that took pleasure in secrecy, the way a virgin might get pleasure from her little perfumed firebrand, she said, explaining to us that sometimes, when she had nothing else to do, she imagined she was the murderess Irène Gouin, and that they resembled each other down to every detail of her face, like two drops of water at the bottom of the ocean.

On the Chemin des Dalles, near the Saint-Géraud bridge, we stopped a cab and settled into the backseat. The cab was really a pile of scrap metal, a small apple-green Datsun that you could immediately tell dated back to the ’70s. A little old guy with a straw hat on his head was at the wheel, driving slowly. He threw himself into rue Pavée, and taking advantage of the traffic jam, started to talk, mumbling through his teeth. Seeing we didn’t pay any attention to him, he put on some konpa music by Shleu-Shleu. We got off at the entrance to my neighborhood, at the top of the Bel-Air hill. My daughter headed straight to the stand of the spirits seller, Brigitte. She was thirsty, she said, although our house was nearby. Scratching the back of her head, she ordered a rum taffy. Inspector Joseph and I caught up with her right away. She was swaying her body more and more wildly. I sometimes thought I’d brought her into the world so she would become my master and I her slave, I told the inspector, as if she was the one who had tinkered with me, knowing she was the prolongation of my dreams, my shipwrecks. I had projected myself on her, wondering on which of her shoulders she would have to bear my cross. But she was more clever than I was and had escaped in time.

Then the inspector left me and walked up to my daughter as if to give her a kiss. He held up his hands too, like he was framing her in his camera, before moving closer.

“Oh!” she exclaimed, as if she’d never seen the man before. She swallowed her rum in one gulp and a few drops escaped from the corners of her lips. She handed the empty cup to Brigitte, coughing in the loose end of her blouse, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and thanked her. She then lit a cigarette, grabbed the inspector’s arm, and led him to our place, except that all the inspector wanted was to talk about Jimmy.

Before our conversations, I usually offered him coffee and cookies, but this time I didn’t find any in the kitchen. So I joined them in the living room. It was very hot. The inspector was helping my daughter open the two sides of the high window that looked out onto the façade of a big white house on the other side of the street. I walked up to them.

My daughter said, “Come on, Manman!”

The inspector didn’t see my knife entering the back of his head, and blood, not thick but clear and sweet-smelling, spurted onto my face.

“That big white house is where Irène Gouin lives,” my daughter said as he was dying.