Authors: Nick Lake
Aristide touched the cheap wooden table that served as an altar.
— The colonial powers have been enjoying a banquet at our expense, he said. They sit at the table, which is dressed with indigo cloth exported from Haiti, set with bowls of sugar taken from Haiti, and cups of coffee robbed from Haiti. And where are the Haitians?
— Where are they? Where are they? called the people in the church.
— The Haitians are under the table, eating the crumbs like mice! The rules of the UN, of the IMF, are devised to keep the mice under the table, to stop them from joining the banquet. But we must not be made into animals again. We must upset the table! We must rise up!
At this, Aristide put his palms under it and threw over the wooden table.
— We must overturn the table! he shouted, as it clattered to the ground.
Everyone cheered, cos all the people in the Site loved Lavalas and Aristide. They loved the idea of receiving money and land from the rich. Later, of course, they just started to take it. And that’s when all the trouble began.
But this was before all that. So, everyone was cheering, when suddenly there was a shaking and the power went out and the lights stopped. This happened a lot in Port-au-Prince – it still does. On that night in 1995 there was no moon and it was very dark. People started to scream. Manman knew it was an earthquake and, like the others, she panicked a bit at first, turning to run out into the street, but then the trembling stopped and she heard Aristide call out:
— It’s OK! Nen inquiet!
He took a lighter from his pocket and lit a small candle. Then he showed the congregation where there were more candles in the church. Soon people began to calm down.
But Manman was not feeling so good. She stood there in the darkness, with only the candlelight flickering, and she felt a great pain in her stomach. She had a sick feeling in her spirit. She knew something bad was happening. When she had been to the houngan some months before, when she knew she was pregnant, he drew a veve in the ground and called up Papa Gede, and Papa Gede said the baby in her belly had a fierce soul and would begin and end in darkness and blood, but it would live forever, too.
At that moment, the earth shook again – an aftershock – and Manman was afraid the beginning and the end of her baby would come at the same time. She screamed. She looked down and her legs were wet; she thought her waters had broken. But when she touched her fingers to her thighs she found them sticky with blood. She felt faint and she sank downward to the ground – which was just earth, the church built right over it.
— Souplè, she called. Souplè, mwen ansent.
Please. Please, I’m pregnant.
Someone caught her. Someone else said something about a doctor. But then there was a commotion and Aristide was suddenly there, standing over her, in his glasses and his western suit. He smiled down at her, and he knelt on the ground. With gentle hands, he helped her to lie on her back.
— In my time as a priest, he said, I did this many times. In rural places.
Manman stared up at the roof of the church, and she saw that there was a hole in it. Through it, the stars shone out of the blackness, as if to say that darkness is never complete, that there is always hope.
She felt a tearing and she screamed again and again, and soon the screaming was a symphony, higher pitches joining her voice. She hauled herself up on her elbows to see first the big flaque of blood between her legs, and then Jean-Bertrand Aristide, the Prime Minister of Haiti, holding two babies, one in each arm.
He had delivered her children.
— A girl and a boy, he said. Twins! The Marassa Jumeaux made flesh. This is a sign. These are the first babies born in a free Haiti. They will never be slaves. They’re like a new Adam and Eve.
Everyone cheered, even my manman, though at the back of her mind she was thinking of the houngan. He’d said I – we – would be born in blood and darkness, and that had turned out true. But he’d said we would die in blood and darkness, too.
Years later, when Manman told the story, I said to her:
— Manman, everyone dies in darkness. Most people, anyway. And in the Site, a lot of people die in blood, too.
She said:
— I know.
But it didn’t make her any less sad.
It’s so hot in here, it’s like I’m in an oven, like someone is baking me. Some giant, maybe, so I can be his dinner.
Me, I’m trying not to think about food and drink, but have you ever tried to not think about something? It’s a joke. The more you don’t think about it the more you do think about it.
So, I’m making a meal in my imagination. I lay it out in front of me, and in the absolute blackness it’s easy, cos you don’t even have to close your eyes to picture anything you want. Actually, that’s half the problem, cos that’s how you stop knowing what’s real anymore and go shit-crazy. But, yeah, there’s a steak in front of me and chips and a big glass of Coke.
I’ve only ever had steak once. My papa brought it home one day. I never knew how he got it. He just came home all proud and smiling – he had a good smile, my papa, a bright one – and he laid this bag of steaks on the table. They were sweating blood; it was coming right through the plastic of the bag.
— For dinner, he said to my manman.
She gave him this look, like, what, are you serious? Where did you get them? She could say a lot with one look, my manman. He just laughed.
— Only the best for my lady and my twins, he said.
Before we ate the steaks, he took me outside and we threw a ball back and forth, back and forth. It was lame really, but it was fun, too.
Now I take a bite of my steak. In my imagination I have overcooked it a little, but it’s all good – it gives a little crust to the meat. I have put anpil salt on my chips, so I drink a great gulp of my Coke, and that’s good, too. Then I stop, cos I hear something. It’s a scrabbling sound, but it’s too small to be people digging, too delicate.
I turn toward it very slowly.
Skish, skish, skish. Tatatatatatata. Skish, skish, skish.
My hand snaps out toward the sound and I feel the smooth swish of a tail, hear something fast and skitterish disappear into the darkness.
Rats.
I take a long, slow breath. I can hear a gnawing sound now, or maybe I’m just imagining it. I need to get out of here. For a moment I’m on the verge of real panic. I start praying, like, get me out of this fucking place right now; there are rats eating the dead people, there are rats eating the dead people. Suddenly I can’t breathe, but then I think about Marguerite, my sister. I force myself to think about Marguerite.
Marguerite had curly hair and a smile as big as the moon, and she was my best friend. We were twins, but we didn’t look the same. I was big and strong, and she was a small thing, like a ghost already.
Marguerite, she had this necklace. I am holding half of it in my hand now. I should explain – it was a silver necklace with a heart pendant. The heart you could pull in half, and it would go into two jagged pieces. Papa got it for her from some mystery place. As soon as she got it she broke the heart in two and gave one half to me.
— Maybe you should keep it, give it to a boy one day, I said to her.
— We are twins, she said. We are the same person broken in half. So you have half my heart.
So I kept it and always carry it with me, even now, as I lie trapped in the darkness.
Marguerite was my twin, but she wasn’t like me, not at all. I was into machines; anything that had an engine, or electrics, or gears, I wanted to take it apart and see what made it go. I collected stuff from the street, from the garbage, from everywhere. My papa said I would be an engineer one day, but I don’t think even he really believed it.
Marguerite, she was different. She looked different, too. She had this tiny constellation of freckles on her nose, these enormous gray eyes. She was something too beautiful for the Site, everyone could see it. Looking at her, you felt like someone should come along and put her in a bulletproof case and just keep her safe, keep her happy. But then, you’d think, well, being in a case wouldn’t make her happy. Cos she loved
everything
, man. She wasn’t like me, with my bikes and my radios and my wires. She would walk around and it was like everything was fresh to her and new-made and wonderful, even the rats.
Yeah, even the rats. She loved those things, just like she loved the sky, and the sun, and bits of rubbish floating down the street when they made pretty patterns in the air. She saw some beauty in those filthy creatures that the rest of us could not recognize. Once, Manman found a nest of baby rats in one of the walls. This was when we were seven or something, I guess. Before Marguerite could stop her she killed the mother rat, whacked it dead with a broom. She wanted to kill the babies, too, but Marguerite would not let her.
— No, Manman, she said. I want them.
No one ever refused Marguerite anything. There was anyen that the people of the Site would not do for her, especially the older ones. It was this glow that she had inside, this way of lighting up like a lamp when she saw something that made her happy. So Manman let her gather up the nest, carefully, and take it to a place in the corner of our dirt yard, where she made a wooden box and filled it with newspaper, and that made her happy. She would just lie on the ground, right in the dirt, on her front with her elbows propped up, and I would watch her as she watched the rats. She brought them food; I don’t know where she found it, we never even had food for ourselves, not really. But the stuff Marguerite found was not food a person would eat – it was always moldy stuff, old, perished. The rats didn’t care; they loved it.
One day, though, the box was gone.
— The rats, are they OK? I asked.
— Yeah, she said. It was time for them to go and explore.
— Oh, I said. OK.
And she looked at me with those eyes like the ocean at dusk.
— I’m going to explore one day, too, she said. I’m going to get out of this place, and I’ll take you and Manman and Papa with me.
You know what? I believed her. You get me? I believed that shit. Cos when Marguerite said something, you listened. She was that beautiful, see, and that special, you just knew that whatever she wanted to be, she could be. She was like . . . like someone who had lived many times before, and knew how to be grateful. That sounds stupid, but it’s true. It’s like she had a soul that was much too big for her; it filled her to the brim till there was no more space, so then it flowed out through her eyes. It made her care for people, for animals, too.
Tintin was also like that – sort of, anyway. But with Tintin, what was inside was rotten, and it made him crazy, made him hurt other people.
But I’m talking to you about Marguerite. It wasn’t always rats with her, you have to understand.
This other time, not so long afterward, I was with her and we were walking to the sea to try to find Papa, see if he would take us out on his boat. He did that a couple of times; he would let us drop lines into the water, and we would wait for the fish to bite, and as we did we would look back at Site Solèy, rising up squalid from the ocean, and it would seem smaller and like a place you
could
escape from.
Papa would say:
— The sea, it’s a kind of freedom. But you two must do your schoolwork, OK? Then maybe you can have a better freedom.
Marguerite would say:
— Yes. See those big houses on the hill, for the rich? I’ll have one of those one day. I’ll have a swimming pool and a car, and you’ll all live with me.
And we believed her. We believed in her dream. Of course we did. When Marguerite said something, it was real.
So, that day, we were walking to the sea. We were on one of the wider streets; there was more room to avoid the sewage, and there were even a couple of carts with colorful umbrellas, selling fruit, but we weren’t the kind of people who could afford fruit. The sun was high above us and it was brutal hot, like a hammer on the skin. We saw this old guy who had a monkey on a chain – it leaped at us and screamed as we went past. Marguerite squealed and grabbed my hand, and the old guy cursed and pulled the monkey back – but not before we’d seen its big white eyes, the teeth in its wide-open mouth.
— I bet you wouldn’t feed that monkey if you found it, I said.
— The monkey’s OK, she said. It just doesn’t enjoy being chained like that.
Marguerite was famous for that kindness. She’d take a pigeon that had broken its wing and she’d make it better, no matter that Manman said pigeons were rats with wings.
That was Marguerite. You could stab her and beat her and steal her money, and she’d say that she understood, that you were hungry, that you didn’t know any better. Not that anyone would do such things to her – she was like an angel in the Site. Grandmothers would touch her for luck, I’m not fucking kidding. Really, we both should have been lucky. We were Marassa – I was just as much a twin as her, just as much maji. But ain’t no one ever touched me and looked happy about it, I’m telling you.
After the monkey, we walked for another block. Then we heard a sound. It was a crying sound, low and miserable. We both looked around. Marguerite spotted it before me and she walked over to this trash heap that was right at the side of the street. I followed her and suddenly we were looking down at a baby.