Haiti Noir

In the departure lounge at the airport, I hug Manuel goodbye.

“Don’t forget to plant a tree,” he says smiling, holding me a fraction longer than I expect. He seems kind of sad to see me go, or am I just imagining things? I watch him walk away. He does not turn around or look back. I line up to take my seat next to Miranda.

Good morning, friends, says the e-mail from Alexis the day after the march. It is with a sense of great urgency that I write to you today to denounce the vicious attacks that took place yesterday in Hinche against peasants leaving the Congress.

Alexis describes how, after dropping us off at the airport, Manuel turned right around to return to Papay. He was driving alone, hoping to make it back in time for at least part of the march. Near that turnoff by the Lac de Péligre, he was flagged down on the road. Perhaps he thought he could help, or maybe he recognized someone. In any case, a few witnesses said Manuel got out of the SUV and was quickly surrounded by a group of young men with guns. They forced him into the backseat. The white SUV sped off. Manuel hasn’t been seen since.

WHO IS THAT MAN? BY YANICK LAHENS

Saint-Marc

Translated by David Ball

Who is that man? Orélus thought about it every day. Several times a day. Every night. For almost ten days now. He’d tried an infusion of soursop leaves, as he had every other night to calm himself down. Nothing helped. It was close to half past midnight and he couldn’t manage to fall asleep. To make things worse, it was particularly hot that night. Stifling. In this town of Saint-Marc, flat as a cassava. Flat as the palm of your hand. Who was that man sitting next to him in that SUV barreling toward Port-au-Prince? A trip that had turned his life upside down. Who was that man? He probably had a wife and kids, a mother.

Orélus flapped an old school bag in the air, first near his face, then around his left shoulder, and finally over his right shoulder. Despite the repellent coils to drive off the mosquitoes, they still made their usual rounds and were whining away relentlessly at his ear. So Orélus kept trying to chase them off by shaking that old satchel. It didn’t work. And it was hot enough to fry an egg-or your skin. Orélus had to get out of bed and sit right next to the window with the hope of getting some relief, and maybe, in the silence of the night, finding an answer to question that haunted him: who is that man?

His wife Yva was fast asleep, exhausted. She’d just gotten up to give her daughter a bottle, then went right back to sleep without even realizing how uncomfortable it was, what with the heat and the mosquitoes. Yva didn’t complain. Yva rarely complained. And luckily didn’t ask too many questions. Which was quite convenient as far as that incident was concerned-the incident that still made him shiver sometimes, just thinking about it. Orélus looked at his daughter Natasha for a moment. She had come into his life a year ago and he’d promised himself he would give her a better life than his own. That incident had made him even more determined. And he could see the scene of her birth at the hospital once again. Since from now on everything was connected.

In his mind, Orélus went over that day, the third of July, for the nth time.

Just like every month, he was getting ready to leave for Port-au-Prince and go to the main office of the health organization he worked for, to turn in his report on the assignment he’d completed over the past month. He had visited every corner of the main towns of Bas Artibonite and meticulously filled out the questionnaires: Age, sex, number of children, marital status, date of last visit to doctor, declaration of illnesses, etc. He had slept very late the night before, in order to file the papers according to the organization’s guidelines. His employers liked him, and Orélus was very much attached to his job, which not only allowed him to feed his family (the beginning of dignity), but to pay for his younger sister’s computer studies and be generous to strangers who’d been pummeled by misfortune. His compassion had saved him on that third of July. It made him all the more aware of his own good fortune and he had no desire to lose it.