The World is Moving Around Me (3 page)

The Lost Friend

I met Filo at the end of the 1970s. Was it at the theater school that took over the large rooms at the Lycée des Jeunes Filles after classes were over? Or was it at the Sylvio Cator Stadium where we went to see the finals between the Racing Club and the Black Eagles or Le Violette? Filo has always been in my life. We were part of the little group of starving kids who mixed up art and revolution. Radio Haïti-Inter was recruiting new journalists. Filo went to try out. At the beginning, it didn't work; he was too much a rebel to follow the station's strict rules. He had no notion of time. He would get to his show a half-hour late. In the end, his bosses figured it out: they stuck him at the very end of the day's programming. He could show up when he wanted and do what he felt like. His audience was made up of insomniacs, and he helped them get through the night. The very next day, Filo was a star. His mocking irony and sharp eye—he was a young man from a rough neighborhood—attracted all levels of society right from the start. President Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier imprisoned then exiled most of the country's influential journalists in November of 1980, muzzling what was called at the time “the independent press.” They all returned when Baby Doc went into exile himself in February of 1986. There was dissension within the group of alternative journalists, which meant that some were left on the outside. Filo wandered in the wilderness of Port-au-Prince for a while. When I asked after him, every time I came through town, often no one knew where he was. I was told he was doing odd jobs, an elegant way of saying that he wasn't part of the tribe anymore. The last time I saw him was at the Hôtel Kinam in 2008; he'd come to interview me for his show on Télé-Ginen. Filo was in a class by himself. The others in the group didn't seem to have progressed much, but he'd made changes in his head. Of course he still talked about religion, which scared the Haitian left, but he was as sharp-minded as ever. And subtle enough not to impose his beliefs on other people. That day he gave me a present: an image of the Black Virgin of Poland that believers in voodoo take for the Polish version of the goddess Erzulie. I still have it. With his traditional dress and his peasant hat, Filo looked like he'd never left the 1970s, a time marked by the furious search for authenticity among intellectuals. Despite his choice of clothes, he was one of the liveliest minds in the country. When I came back for this trip, I met up with him at the beginning of the month in front of the Rex Theatre, and we set a date for January 12. I went to the radio station in Delmas. We started the interview more than an hour late. Filo gave the false impression of being interested only in popular culture, whereas he knew plenty about a lot of things. I knew his little mannerisms, like that sideways smile that let you know he was nobody's fool. At first, he insisted on taking me back to the hotel, but he had to meet a group of American businessmen who might invest in the station. If I waited for him, I'd probably be late; I had to leave right away to be back for my five o'clock meeting. Finally Filo agreed. I got to the Hôtel Karibe just in time to meet Saint-Éloi, who was coming in from Montreal with his two suitcases stuffed with books and an urgent need to take a shower. Instead, I dragged him to the hotel restaurant where we ordered lobster and fish in sea salt, just before all Port-au-Prince began to shake.

A Short Film

I'm spending so much time on the moments that preceded the explosion because it's impossible to recreate the event itself. It lives within us in too intimate a fashion. No distance is possible with those kinds of emotions. The moment is eternally present. We remember the very instant before in the slightest detail. A short film where people are laughing, crying, talking, fighting, kissing, getting upset because the other guy is late, eating, begging, saying hello, setting a meeting for tomorrow or later in the evening, swearing to the other person that you won't lie to them any more, or steal or kill or torture or make promises you have no intention of keeping, consoling someone who just lost a loved one, lying on a hospital deathbed, playing soccer, coming to Port-au-Prince for the first time or leaving the country (an airplane has just taken off). All these small acts bind us together and weave the great cloth of humanity. At 4:53 in the afternoon, our memory trembled.

A Green Jeep

A horn sounds three times. The green Jeep that was following pulls up next to us. What's going on? Arms reach out of the open doors like branches of a leafless tree. They tell us they've been driving around town, saying hello to the living. We turn right. My mother lives at Delmas 31.

At Frankétienne's Place

We wander in circles through this labyrinth of alleyways; most of them turn into dead ends. Finally, we get onto a street that slopes up toward Frankétienne's place. The massive red wall that made his house look like a small fortress is badly damaged. A twisted electric pole blocks the entrance. Wires hang along the gate. A neighbor tells us he's there. I look up. There's a gaping hole in the wall. His library is devastated. We push open the gate, careful not to touch the wires on the ground. There's no sense getting electrocuted after surviving an earthquake. He hears our voices and comes out. I've never seen him so upset. Red as a boiled lobster. No theatrics this time: he is naked in his pain. He hugs us and won't let go. His wife appears, as discreet as ever, in his shadow. Her smile is sadder than usual. Frankétienne tells us his version of the event. He carries the city inside him. He turns toward his gutted house, overwhelmed. He heard a locomotive noise like most people, then decreed it was “the sound of all that Port-au-Prince contains breaking up.” A poet talking. The cloud he first thought was a great fire turned out to be “the dust of my city.” The city and his body are one. We avoid looking at each other. The cry of a bird in the noonday sky. Frankétienne watches it fly toward the bare mountains that surround Port-au-Prince, then he takes up his story again. He was on the terrace with a South American journalist when it happened. Since he's in symbiosis with the elements, he immediately understood it was an earthquake. With the journalist on his heels, he rushed down the stairs, grabbed his wife in the kitchen, and ran into the courtyard. He was out of breath by the end of his story. Though he's often caught in the web of banal details of daily life, finally he had an event equal to his gargantuan appetites. Only one place was spared: the garden where we often met to discuss Tolstoy, Joyce, or God (Frankétienne doesn't bother with small fry). We stood a moment in silence, and then Frankétienne, as if suddenly remembering we were there, urged us to view the damage. Paintings on the floor. The broad walls covered in frescoes were shattered. His house is an art gallery devoted to his work. His books were scattered everywhere. He's both artist and businessman—a Renaissance man. The last time I visited, he brought me to his little warehouse where he keeps hundreds of paintings. He told me to choose one. I can't bring myself to ask him about the state of his warehouse. And now, with all necessary gestures, he launches into a description of how he was rehearsing a play about the earthquake a half-hour before it struck. Standing in the garden, he begins declaiming. We stand back to give him space for his theater. He speaks of a Port-au-Prince “that is torn, that is crevassed.” Frankétienne replays the earthquake with his words. His prophetic one-man show. Marie-Andrée keeps watch so he doesn't get overwrought. Suddenly, he calms down. We gather around him. He isn't the indefatigable man he used to be. And sometimes he forgets that fact. I've known him a long time, and I've never seen him so affected. He is not mourning his own fate, but the fate of the city he's never wanted to leave. He realizes he'll never be able to put on this play “that stinks of fear.” We tell him the opposite is true: his play is part of all this. Port-au-Prince has to absorb the earthquake so it won't swallow us up. Instead of fleeing, we have to confront “the thing,” as they're calling it in the poorer districts. We have to name it if we intend to digest it. Frankétienne should leave his lair. People need to see him. Like the young man who, as I hesitated at the gate, called from the other side of the street, “He's there. The poet is home.”

On the Cross

Standing in the middle of the street, her arms raised, a woman is demanding answers from heaven. She has lost her whole family. She sees cruelty in the fact that she was spared. They were all at the table. She stepped out to get a dish that was cooking in the yard when everything started shaking. She had the presence of mind to save the food. When she turned around, the house was a heap of stones. She wants to know why she wasn't allowed to die with her family. We wait for her to stop before going on our way.

At My Mother's

My mother lives close to Frankétienne's. We turn left at the first alleyway. My heart tightens. But the houses on her narrow, shaded street, by some miracle, look untouched. We drive slowly. The silence is unusual. As if the country had frozen. I have absolutely no idea what to expect. My heart leaps when I spot my brother-in-law (Christophe Charles, the poet) by the big red gate. He looks worried, but no more than he usually does. We leave the car by the wall. I see that the new house just across from my mother's is completely destroyed. Nothing can be done. The owner was so proud of it. My brother-in-law's thin smile reassures me. I figure that if something had happened, he wouldn't be standing outside. But I try not to come to any hasty conclusions, because you never know. I shake Christophe's soft hand, and he lets us go by. Everyone is in the yard, even my nephew Dany (we have the same name to keep the dictator, who pushed me into exile, from having the last word). A shiver runs through me when I realize Dany could have been at the university or somewhere else when the earthquake struck. By chance he'd stopped by the house, since he didn't usually get home before nightfall. Delmas 31 is hard to reach (public transit doesn't go there), and he has no car. Normally his father picks him up after class. But this time he was here. If my nephew hadn't been there, my mother, who's more than eighty years old (she won't even tell me her age), and Aunt Renée, who can't get around without help, would have been alone. And here they are, safe and sound, waiting for me. Aunt Renée is lying on a mattress that was thrown into the yard. She seems comfortable there. My mother is very excited. She takes me in her arms and whispers this litany into my ear: “I've seen it all in this country. Military coups, one hurricane after another, floods that wiped everything out, dictators who hand the country down from father to son, and now an earthquake.” She's kept a detailed list of the natural disasters that have befallen us over the last two decades. I don't know whether dictatorship should be included among natural disasters. It might be at the root of these misfortunes, or just their logical extension. My mother insists: “I've seen it all.” I stare into her wide eyes that have seen it all. That sadness lasts only a moment. My sister is making us bitter tea that is meant to lower our blood pressure. Aunt Renée grips my hand (hers is bonier than last time). The house doesn't seem damaged. My mother takes me by the arm and shows me a little crack in the living room, and a much bigger one in the bathroom. Not too serious, but enough to worry her. But deep down, we are all so shaken that fear will be part of us for a long time. When it comes in such unexpected and massive fashion, death will not easily leave us. It's so enormous that instead of casting us into sadness, I feel something like drunkenness come over me. Even my sister, who's normally so care-worn, suddenly seems lighter. Today's tragedies have erased yesterday's worries. The feeling that we've finally hit bottom and can only go up. And the simple joy of still being alive.

My Nephew

I stepped into the yard with my nephew. The little shacks on the other side of the ravine had stood up to the earthquake. The old wall collapsed. We sat on the hood of the car.

“I'm going to write something,” I said.

“I imagine …”

“I'm going to write about this.”

I still couldn't give it a name.

“I understand,” he said to me in a serious voice.

It's like he's matured overnight.

“What are you thinking about?”

A dog moved up the street. What could it live off, now that people are as destitute as it is? It looked thin and agile enough to find something to eat in the ruins.

“May I ask you something, Uncle?”

I sensed it was something serious.

“I'm listening.”

“I'd like to write something about this …”

“Nothing is stopping you.”

His head was lowered, but I could tell he hadn't finished.

“What's wrong?”

“I'd like you not to write about it.”

The boy certainly knew what he wanted.

“It doesn't work like that, you know.” I showed him my black notebook. “As you can see, I've been taking notes non-stop.”

“No,” he said, laughing. “That's not what I mean. You can write your journal, but not a novel.”

Completely taken aback, I listened as he explained in great detail that this is the event of his generation, not mine. Mine was the dictatorship. His is the earthquake. And his sensitivity will speak of it.

“I can't promise you that. No one book takes the place of another.”

I gave him my point of view. In any case, that kind of novel isn't up my alley. It would take a kind of power I don't possess. Besides, nature has already written it. A grandiose novel in the classical style that features a time (4:53 in the afternoon), a place (Haiti), and more than 2 million characters. You'd have to be Tolstoy to take up a challenge like that. I watched his determined expression. Homer believed the gods send us misfortune so we might make poetry of it. Tolstoy, Homer: we picture ourselves like them before we start writing. But what if this young man has what it takes? Just as I was leaving, my mother slipped an envelope into my pocket.