A Young Christ
A large portrait of Christ on the gallery. It hung in my brother-in-law’s school that collapsed in the earthquake. While he was transporting everything he could save in a truck, the portrait dropped onto the street. Someone found it and took it home. A passerby told my brother-in-law what had happened and pointed out the person’s house. It took a lot of negotiations to get the portrait back. My mother has always liked this particular portrait of Jesus with his clear eyes and little pink mouth. Wavy hair cascading to his shoulders. His well-tended beard, strangely split in the middle. The index finger of his right hand strokes a flaming heart girdled by a crown of thorns. A soothing light forms the background. My mother looks that way every time she sits on the gallery.
The Street-Corner Prophet
Just about everyone wakes up together in Port-au-Prince with the early morning sun. I go and brush my teeth in the yard. A light breeze carries an aroma of coffee. My sister wants to go food shopping, and I go along. People still greet one another like before, despite the trials of daily life. They sleep next to their houses. I see tents everywhere. A group of young students chatting under a tree. Everyone else hurrying to work. The camp on my left occupies a soccer field. Already sweating, adults emerge from the tents, holding the hands of their children swathed in colorful uniforms. Well-groomed, white socks, and polished shoes. Two men prepare to cross the street with a mattress on their heads. My sister slows to let them go by. This is new, I say to her; people never used to brake for pedestrians. My sister smiles. Red light. A man next to the car is shouting: we haven’t seen anything yet, the end of days is near. Only the blind can’t see the signs. A man walking by asks him ironically what the next step is going to be. A tsunami, he says very seriously. But before that, he adds, we’ll have another earthquake two times stronger and three times longer than the last one, and it’ll knock everything down and help the tsunami wipe out all trace of our existence here. This land doesn’t belong to us. We’re just renters. The owner lives upstairs, he says, pointing to the sky. And he’s disappointed with our behavior. Instead of thanking him, all we do is fornicate and backbite. We don’t have to pay rent; all he asks of us is to recognize him as our Lord and God. Instead we’re too busy worshiping the Golden Calf. A few people stop to listen to him, mostly women. Green light. The car pulls away, leaving the prophet to gesticulate under the lamp post.
A Star in Town
We continue driving down Delmas. My sister points out the Internet café where the surfers were found crushed to death in front of their screens. Not far from there, rescuers found a girl sitting quietly, as if she were waiting for someone, except that she had an iron bar sticking through her body. I glance at my sister, who’s doing everything within her power to act relaxed. Her eyelids blink rapidly, and she rubs her temples. I wonder how much longer she’ll be able to hold out. On the way back, she stopped to buy water. I picked up a newspaper. On the front page, abundantly illustrated, there’s a story about the Hollywood stars who have come to Haiti. I have no idea how someone must feel, stepping into this kind of setting, surrounded by cameras. They’re doing it to help out. The idea is to attract a new clientele. People who are acquainted with the Third World and those who have a soft spot for suffering in faraway places have already been solicited. Now they’re trying to reach the readers of gossip papers that describe the heartbreaks of the stars. The people who’ve had enough of seeing victims on TV. Show them famous politicians and movie stars instead. What has my sister worried is the brief article that predicts gasoline shortages because of the strike in Venezuela, our only supplier. The Dominican Republic is ready to help out, but how long can they last? Further on in the story, there’s a warning that prices are going to go through the roof. My sister wants to get back home and park the car.
The House across the Way
I’m sitting on the gallery. My mother slipped a pillow behind my neck and patted my shoulder. I drift toward sleep. Kids are playing soccer next door. I hear their laughter. The shrill voices of the street vendors. The joyful shouts when a goal is scored. The big house across the way that used to block our view fell down. The woman who owned the house was pulled out from underneath the stairway. Her son was part of the rescue team. She spent her whole life slaving away in New York to be able to build the place. She showed up every December and added a room, then went back to work in May. From the gallery, my mother followed the progress of the work as the years went by. It’s strange that the house, the envy of the neighborhood, was the only one that didn’t hold up. Now we can see the mountains it once hid. All day long, people speculate on why some houses stood the test while others, right next door, collapsed. Some people believe that Goudougoudou (the name that the poorer parts of town gave the earthquake, since this was the sound people heard) acted intentionally. A new god has been born. Not in the sense of a god who punishes; he’s been named to give him an identity. The way it’s done with hurricanes.
Aunt Renée’s Funeral
We were all ready early since, as family members, we have to be at the church before everyone else. My mother is elegantly dressed, with a slight smile that worries me instead of reassuring me, which is what she wants to do. I help her into the car. She taps me on the shoulder to thank me, which she never does. My sister tried in vain to get her to eat something before going to the church, since right after the funeral we’re driving to Petit-Goâve to bury Aunt Renée in the cemetery there, where she’ll join her sisters and brother. My mother decided not to listen to anyone today. She wanted to spend this time with her sister. Watching her, so serene, I sense she’s caught up to her somewhere in their childhood. My mother sat up very straight in the church. A determined look in her eye that I hadn’t seen for some time. Instead of crushing her (when Aunt Raymonde died, she denied the fact so completely that I thought she’d lost her mind), Aunt Renée’s death has had the opposite effect. The celebrant had a reassuring presence too — he was Aunt Renée’s confessor. Over the final months, he would come to the house to give her communion, Sunday morning after the last mass. He’s from Petit-Goâve as well and, naturally, he’ll be accompanying us there. I spotted relatives I thought were dead. They gave us news of our extended family. We lost several members to the earthquake, people I didn’t know. The church is full. I’m surprised that Aunt Renée, who never left the house and was bedridden the last twenty years of her life, could have known so many people. I’m told that they too lost family in the earthquake, and now they’re attending the funerals of people they don’t know to pay tribute to their own dead. Once mass is over, they come to offer their condolences. We could have offered ours. We have all lost someone. My mother is holding up well. She stands straight, and her eyes are steady. I don’t dare touch her for fear that her scaffolding will collapse. My sister goes to get the car; she’ll pick us up in front of the church. We start out for Petit-Goâve. Improvised camps line both sides of the road. I can’t imagine what will happen when it rains. Some areas haven’t been affected at all. But even in those places, people don’t seem to be doing much better. When it fell, Port-au-Prince took the rest of the country with it. Now comes Tapion Mountain. Petit-Goâve is just on the other side. We’re running very late. People have been waiting for us in the little cemetery, near my grandfather’s old still.