A Visit to the Doctor
A little cat at my mother’s feet with eyes so soft, almost frightened, you’d think it was a mouse. We found it in the yard after the earthquake. My mother adopted it immediately, and ever since they’ve been whispering secrets to each other. And understanding everything, according to my sister. My mother has left the gallery, and the little cat watches her go, completely at a loss, as if its world has just collapsed. We’re waiting for my mother in the car. My sister is taking her to the doctor’s, something she detests above all things. She looks exactly like the little cat. She comes out of the house, then returns to look for something, but won’t tell us what it was. She’s really just stalling. My sister wants to be the first in line at the clinic, since she has only the morning off. If the appointment doesn’t take too long, we’ll have time to get to the lab and do the tests before eleven o’clock. Then she’ll drop us back at the house and rush off to work. She’s already starting to sweat. She’s done everything at top speed this morning: making breakfast at the house and planning the day’s meal with the cook. She has so many things to sort out (the bills, for starters) as she looks after my mother, who has developed all sorts of capricious manners; her son, who never has what he needs for school; her husband, who catches a new disease every morning; her daughter overseas, who’s depressed — no wonder she doesn’t have time to think about post-earthquake stress disorder, which is the theme this week on the radio. Ever since some psychiatrists got on TV and declared that Haiti is an excellent laboratory for studying post-earthquake stress disorder, that spice is being added to every sauce. Everything is seen from that angle. You get to work late. That’s due to post-earthquake stress disorder, even if you’ve never been on time in your life. Finally, my mother gets into the car and we drive off. My nephew left with his father. My sister figures they have a fifty-fifty chance of getting a flat tire on the way, which makes my mother burst out laughing. My sister tells me the doctor is good, but a little expensive. We get there, wait a short time, then we’re ushered into his office. A large, restful room. The doctor is a thin man, concerned with his own appearance, but he seems competent; in any case he has a dry manner with the discreet warmth of efficient people. My mother is always intimidated when there’s a doctor around. My sister is attentive and care-worn. The doctor, half-serious and half-jovial, looks a little worried at the sight of my mother’s swollen foot, especially the wound on her right leg. He scribbles a few instructions on a pad and sends us off to get tests. The results will be expedited to a specialist. In the car, I say that the doctor is lucky that his clinic escaped undamaged. My sister tells me he’s been kidnapped at least twice. He’s a brave man. That’s the minimum you can expect when you live here, my sister says, staring straight ahead. We went to have the tests done at a private laboratory, so we won’t have to wait so long. I expected to see people with a certain income level there, but they come from everywhere. They weren’t talking about the earthquake — only the difficulty of keeping their heads above water. Finally, they called my mother’s name. Her anxiety was visible even in the nape of her neck. I’d forgotten how frail she is. She lists to one side, and her little black purse keeps slipping off her shoulder. Her face is radiant when she returns; she didn’t have to have a shot. We drove straight home, and my sister went off to work.
New Art Forms
What art form will be the first to come forward after the earthquake? Poetry, so impulsive, or painting, eager for new landscapes? Where will the first images of the earthquake be seen? On the city walls or the bodies of tap-taps? Will the short story, not as fast as poetry but quicker than the novel, come back into fashion? The novel demands a minimum of comfort that Port-au-Prince can’t offer; it’s an art form that flourishes in industrialized nations. Are writers already at work? Will we see a race to write the great earthquake novel or the major essay about reconstruction? And the winner — will it be Frankétienne or a young, unknown woman novelist? Dalembert or a German writer who’d never even heard of Haiti before the event? Don’t forget that the great novel of the Haitian dictatorship (The Comedians, 1966) was written by Graham Greene, an Englishman. The earthquake is a planetary event. It belongs to everyone. What would we think if this great tragic novel ended up being written by a talented, yet mannered, young upper-class writer? Would we take that book for what it is (a masterpiece) or see it as the ultimate slap from a jesting god? What style would it be written in? Ironic or tragic? Could it be comic, even if so many people died? Laughter to tears? Who will censor the works that don’t live up to the standard of what is tolerable? The church, the state, or society? Do artists who weren’t present at the time have the necessary legitimacy to turn the earthquake into a work of art? Is the new Haitian someone who went through the event? The race has begun. But we’ve lost something: our intimacy. Everyone is carefully scrutinized now. Just to speak your mind, you have to show you’re clean. Say how many deaths you had in your family. As if it were a war, not an earthquake. When it comes to the Lisbon earthquake, Voltaire’s poem is what remains.
Social Bonds
There are hundreds, perhaps thousands of teenagers orphaned by the earthquake. Some have lost all their family members. If we allow them to drift, it won’t take long before we have a serious crime problem in this country. People think twice about killing when they have relationships with others. When the opposite is true, they develop a terrifying insensitivity. They’d hesitate to rob a woman who happens to be the mother of a schoolmate. Or kill a former teammate for his money. These bonds develop during childhood. They make us an integral part of society, and we owe it something. If we don’t start working on the social network, the city will soon become fragmented and gangs will multiply.
A Faithful Friend
I met Marcus for the first time in 1972 at a talk at the Institut français. I had just finished secondary school and had registered in the ethnology department, which, in my hopeful opinion, was one of the rare spots in Port-au-Prince where you could catch a good nap while getting an education. It was the final refuge for people who had failed to enter a more prestigious department, like medicine, engineering, or agronomy. Law wasn’t worth much at the time, but it was more highly rated than ethnology. The latter is useful in Haiti, but only if you want to do research on voodoo, traditional music, and sacred dances. You had to wear a full beard, a peasant shirt, and a few necklaces of dried maldioc beans. I whiled away the afternoons at the university, not far from the Palace movie theater, discussing Dr Price-Mars’ theories on the influence of African culture on Haitian identity, and the impact of French culture, which meant Parisian, on the local bourgeoisie. One evening, I met up with Marcus again at a show at the Collège Saint-Pierre museum, and he asked me to come and work with him at the Haïti-Inter radio station. I was a reporter for the midday news show that he was directing. Since we were neighbors, he on ruelle Roy and I on Lafleur-Duchêne, we used to have breakfast together. His wife Jocelyne wasted no time adopting me. We listened to Wagner, since Marcus had developed an addiction to his music during an internship in France. Every morning we’d go jogging in the Champ-de-Mars, discussing the political situation, or more often than not the complicated relation between power and the press. We had to watch what we said. There were signs that government spies had infiltrated the media, passing themselves off as independent journalists. Which was why we did our talking as we ran around the edge of the park. Marcus was a very meticulous journalist who hated rumors. He insisted on backing up every statement with facts, in a country where everyone was forever making up stories. The government, the opposition, the press, people in their daily lives, everyone was busy inventing a private universe that had no relation to reality. I wondered how he had developed his passion for fact. I saw him lose his head only once: the day his daughter was born. He came by the house because he wanted me to go to the hospital with him. The effort to maintain his self-control made him seem more wound up. I pretended I didn’t notice anything. He drove around the Presidential Palace three times in a row. Normally we avoided the place. It was infested with the regime’s henchmen, and a flat tire could have disastrous results. We reached the hospital untouched. His happiness was something to see when he learned he had a daughter. Yet he waited a month before he took the baby in his arms. His wife Jocelyne would give me desperate looks until one morning, just before getting into his car to drive to the radio station, he turned to her and took the baby. You should have seen her ecstatic look! Marcus was the first to tell me about the death of Gasner Raymond, the friend who shared a byline with me for Le Petit Samedi Soir, a weekly that covered politics and culture, and that was barely tolerated by the government. I left for Montreal after Gasner was murdered in June of 1976, and in November 1980, Marcus was thrown in prison with all the other independent journalists who called for elections in the country, since the Duvalier regime had been in power since 1957. Later, the group was sent into exile. We met again in New York. There was a return to Haiti in 1986 after Jean-Claude Duvalier left. We lost track of each other then, but came together again in Miami in 1990 when I moved there from Montreal to have a quieter place to write. I lived in Kendall, in the southwest, and he was next to Little Haiti. Every time I went to see my aunts there, I’d stop by and spend some time with Marcus and Jocelyne. He was still active and publishing a political weekly, Haïti-Demain, and hosting a radio show. We discussed all kinds of things, jumping from politics to literature, not to mention the gossip of everyday life. We also talked a lot about American culture, which fascinated both of us, even if we did live in the belly of the beast. I would bring escapist novels for Jocelyne who was still nostalgic about life in Port-au-Prince. She went back as soon as she got the chance. It was more difficult for Marcus; he had to stay in Miami for his newspaper and his radio show. His dream was to have a station in Haiti. With his friend Lucien Andrews, he did just that, years later. It became Mélodie FM. That’s where I met him today, at noon. He entrusted me to his young team of reporters as he finished the next issue of Haïti-Demain. I looked around the station and felt I’d traveled back in time to the mid-1970s. Then Batraville showed up, and we talked for a while (they served us coffee) in Marcus’s office, though he hadn’t finished the issue yet. Nothing could distract him from his work, even a friend he hadn’t seen in more than ten years. We got around to talking about what Marcus was able to save from the ruins of his house after the earthquake. He described everything in a neutral tone, without pathos. I know him welclass="underline" he’d throw himself into a raging river to rescue a dog. He was at the station when it happened. As soon as he understood it was an earthquake, he went home. He knew Jocelyne was dead when he saw the empty space where his house had been. She had to be in there. At that time of day, she would have been knitting in front of the TV. And it was true: he found her underneath a beam. He rushed her to the hospital but it was too late. He carried her body to a friend’s house before going back to the station. Why go back? Mélodie FM, he told me, a small station, was the only one on the air that night, along with Signal FM. “I’m a journalist. I couldn’t miss a scoop like that,” he said in a steady voice. It was only the second time in the country’s history that a major earthquake had hit Port-au-Prince (we didn’t know yet that Léogâne, Petit-Goâve, and Jacmel were affected too). He stayed and helped inform people about how the situation was developing, and he didn’t leave the studio for days. I imagined Marcus that way. His wife’s body was safe, so he returned to work. One-hundred-percent professional. When I left, he gave me a little radio for my mother. She was so touched he remembered her that she talked about it all evening. She wanted to know why we didn’t see him any more. The stream of life had carried him away.