“They told me there was no cure,” she said.
“Let me talk to Roland. We’ll find you some care.”
I had no idea where to find the best treatment in town, but I knew Roland would. He knew something about nearly everything, especially things that involved worst-case-scenario types of problems. This was a hotelier’s job, he sometimes reminded me. If someone shows up hungry, you feed them. If they want a drink, you ply them. If they want to be left alone, you make yourself scarce. If they want company, you entertain. If they are lovelorn, you find them love. And if someone shows up sick, you find treatment quickly, before that person expires on your watch.
* * *
My sigh of relief was as loud as a hundred-mile wind. My son was negative. The same Canadian doctor who performed his HIV test was the one who’d help us get the retroviral drugs that Mélisande needed. The best thing, he told us, was a new one-pill treatment that many of his patients were opting for because it made compliance easier. Someone like Mélisande, he could already tell, was not going to be compliant. First of all, she was claiming that she’d never had sex with anyone, and since she’d never injected herself with a dirty needle and had never had a blood transfusion, all he could conclude was that she was in terrible denial.
“If you won’t even own up to the possible ways that the disease might have entered your body,” he’d told Mélisande in French-accented Creole, as she sat across a desk from him, her eyelids fluttering between open and closed, staring, when they were open, at a back wall full of framed diplomas, “how can you hope to treat this disease aggressively?”
* * *
Once the doctor provided us with a month’s worth of pills from his own private stash—at ten American dollars each—Mélisande was a lot more compliant than any of us expected. I had told her to come and find me every morning so I could watch her take the pill as we ate breakfast together, and she had done it for over two weeks now. Most of the time we ate something quickly on the patio outside my room. Other times we ate in the hotel dining room, with my son at our side. Mélisande was gaining weight, my old clothes fitting her a little better now. She cried less and less too at breakfast, in part, I think, because she knew the staff was watching us. But what she never did again was touch my son, who reached his tubby little arms out to her, contorting his face into a grimace that would turn into wails, then tears, when she simply ignored him or turned away.
I stopped bringing my son to breakfast with her after a while. It was too much for both of them. By the time Mélisande had to return to the doctor for another month’s supply, I cancelled the breakfasts altogether and passed on the job of monitoring her compliance to her mother, who from the day she learned that Mélisande was sick never stopped calling her a bouzen, a whore, even as she took a break from whatever she was doing every morning to make sure that her oldest child swallowed the pill and chased it down with at least a piece of bread. Some mornings I’d watch this exchange between them from the bungalow in the hibiscus garden where I sometimes sat with my son. The mother was no taller than Mélisande herself, but was a strapping, muscular woman. I could almost see a line of veins popping out under the rolls on her flabby neck as she continuously berated Mélisande, who’d try to put an end to their transaction by swallowing the pill quickly and rushing off.
“What are you going to do when Monsieur and Madame stop paying for your 400-gourdes pills?” the mother would occasionally shout, like a drill sergeant hazing a recruit. Her fear was palpable. Her daughter’s survival now completely depended on Roland and me. If we decided to sell the hotel and move elsewhere, her child could die. What if the drug companies, who provided the doctor with the free supply that he unethically resold to us, stopped making the drug or no longer sent it to Haiti? What if that doctor took off as well? If any part of the chain that ran from the creation of the drug to our ability to get our hands on it broke down, she could lose her daughter.
One morning, I heard her asking Mélisande as she was taking the pill, “What if the white man starts keeping all of the pills for himself? What if Monsieur and Madame are killed in a terrible car accident?”
“You will never have a healthy child,” she told her another day. “You will never have a husband.”
“You should talk to her,” Roland said to me after overhearing this too. “All illness involves state of mind as well as state of body. It can’t be helpful for the poor girl to be treated that way.”
I felt like a coward for not intervening sooner.
“Where do you want to be buried?” the mother said soon after. “You better start saving now if you want a fancy coffin.”
In the Haiti of my time and place, death was always looming around some corner. In car accidents. Illness. Kidnappings. Suicides. Unlike the rest of us, Mélisande’s mother could not afford the conditional optimism this tiny little pill allowed. I could easily imagine myself in the mother’s place. I’d probably have many of the same concerns and fears.
That morning, after Mélisande had gone off to breakfast, I asked to have a word with her mother, who as soon as I closed my husband’s office door behind us, began to cry.
“Mèsi, mèsi,” she sobbed, grabbing my hand. “Thank you for not throwing her out. Thank you for not letting her die.”
“There are people all over the world being kept alive in this way,” I said, gently tugging my hands out of her grasp. “Besides, you’re wasting precious time with your daughter. You can help her the most by not cursing, but loving her.”
“Love her?” She frowned and her eyebrows nearly became one.
“Yes, love her.” It must have sounded like an order. “You must love her.”
I knew what she was thinking. These silly half-assed outsiders, these dyasporas with their mushy thinking, why does it all come back to love with them? Love the world. Love life. Love yourself. Love your children. Don’t yell at them. Don’t hit them. Don’t give them away. Don’t these dyasporas know that there are many other ways to show love than to be constantly talking about it?
“Of course I love her” she replied, spreading both her arms wide as if to prove it. “That’s why I am so rough with her.”
Sitting on a cushioned bench near the office door, she looked unconvinced, but also ashamed that I, on top of everything, now had reason to scold her, ashamed that she had no choice but to sit there and take it. I too felt ashamed for having made her feel that way. Pressing both her hands down as if she’d suddenly realized how much they protruded from her body, she then responded to what I had not said.
“You loved your mother too, didn’t you?” she said. “I saw you. I saw you the day she drowned herself.”
I moved from behind the desk and closer to her. Both our faces were now soaked the way Mélisande’s had been the day she’d made her announcement to me. Sitting across from her, our protruding knees nearly touching, I said, “You did?”
“Wi. I was in the kitchen cooking when I heard your scream. I rushed out and saw her floating facedown in the pool. It was unkind of her to come all the way from Miami to kill herself in your new husband’s pool.”
I didn’t know whether she was being unkind, but I wanted to tell her that this is what had happened. My mother had never been a good swimmer, neither in Miami nor in Léogâne. She had only gone near streams and oceans and pools when my father was with her. When he died, she had no one to protect her from water.
“I saw you with her body in your arms,” she continued, her eyes fixed on her worn-out sandals, on her feet, on the floor. “When I heard you scream, I thought the sky would open up and it would start to rain because I thought even God would have no choice but to cry with you.”
It did rain that night, I reminded her (“Ou sonje?”), a torrential rain that caused mudslides that pulled dozens of houses from the hillside shantytowns into trash-strewn ravines all over the capital. God had shown, I now said, that his tears only brought further losses. Still, I hadn’t been able to feel sad for the others. I f
elt no solidarity with the mudslide victims, the mothers and fathers and babies whose bodies were engorged by the red earth like my mother’s had been by the meticulously maintained pool water. Why should I be the only one grieving? I had thought. Why should my mother be the only one to die? I had not felt truly bad for even one person’s loss since, I realized. Until I’d learned about this woman’s daughter. I didn’t want Mélisande to die, I told her. I didn’t want her to cry to the heavens for her daughter the way I had for my mother. I didn’t want another type of sky to open again and carry others away.
“Okay,” she replied, somberly, giving in to my tirade.
I knew that even after our talk there would be no reconciliatory embrace between her and Mélisande. There would be no apologies.
* * *
The next morning, I watched from my patio where my son was jumping up and down in a playpen next to me as she silently handed Mélisande a glass of water.
“What did you tell her?” Roland asked as we ate breakfast at the same table that Mélisande and I had occupied for a few weeks.
“You know . . .” I said, which he knew meant that I didn’t want to talk about it.
* * *
At the end of the month, just when Mélisande needed another refill of the drugs, the doctor mysteriously left Haiti and moved back to Montreal. As Mélisande’s supply dwindled to nearly nothing, Roland called everyone he knew but couldn’t track the man down. Mélisande had no choice but to start seeing another doctor, a Haitian woman this time, who ordered a new series of tests, dredging up the distressing diagnosis, the counting of T cells, which I could tell, when Mélisande came back with now several bottles of pills, had taken away whatever illusion she might have harbored that she was getting well.
The new regimen did not agree with her. She had stomachaches, diarrhea, and nausea, and spent her days in bed. It would take time for her body to get used to the new drugs, the doctor said. Roland made a few more calls and we found Mélisande yet another doctor to confirm that she was indeed getting the right treatment.
She wanted the one-pill treatment back, Mélisande told the third doctor as he examined her on the small cot in the bedroom of one of the hotel’s workers’ bungalows, a small wallpapered room that she shared with her mother. Fishing out an old prescription bottle from one of my old purses, she handed it to the doctor, a tall Cuban man who spoke Creole with only a slight Spanish accent.
“Ay!” the man exclaimed when he saw the Canadian doctor’s name.
“What’s wrong?” I asked from where I was standing by the door.
It turned out, the Cuban explained, that what Mélisande had first gotten from the Canadian doctor was a placebo. It was more or less aspirin. It had not been doing anything for her at all. The doctor who had prescribed and sold them to us had suddenly fled Haiti because he’d been discovered selling useless pills to unsuspecting patients all over town.
“Your long-term treatment begins now,” the Cuban told Mélisande as her tiny body sank deeper under the thin cotton sheets on the bed. “You must be vigilant about it.”
I saw Mélisande’s eyes sink along with her body. She had lost precious time, he was telling her. The disease had probably advanced further.
“He was playing with her life,” the doctor told me as we walked out of Mélisande’s room. She turned her face away from us, burying it in her pillow while I pulled the door shut behind me.
What would it have cost me to have trusted less? This is what I would have done for my son. I would have questioned, made deals, insisted, yelled.
“We’ve gone way beyond the call of duty,” Roland said when I met him for lunch under a sun umbrella by the pool.
“How? By getting her a quack?”
“We tried to give her a chance,” he said. “We tried to do everything we could have done for our own child.”
Our own child, whose second test by another doctor was also negative, could have left the country. If a quack had intentionally fed our child a placebo instead of treating him, Roland himself would have hired the hit man.
* * *
That afternoon, Mélisande’s mother served us a late lunch on one of the terraces while our son napped. She was sweating in her tight gray cotton uniform and dirty white cooking apron. Her head was wrapped in a black scarf, and though this was something she wore every day, it suddenly looked like mourning garb.
“We’re sorry,” Roland told her, “but she was probably sick before she came to work with us. Maybe someone was with her when she was young.”
She lay the food down quickly, turned her back to us without saying anything, and walked away. In her mind, we were possibly just as bad as the quack, and now we were insulting her child too. Had we not fed Mélisande the hope of that pill, perhaps she might have taken her home to a bòkò or a leaf doctor or someone else who might have really tried to help her. If intention counted, her people might have better intentions than ours. They might have tried harder than we did to help her.
Perhaps I should apologize to her too, I told Roland, reassure her that we really tried, were doing the best we could. We had been duped, just as she had been, as her daughter had been. But our child’s life was not in danger.
I got up from my seat and started to follow her, but Roland grabbed my hand and pulled me down.
“Leave it alone,” he said, sounding now truly angry, not at me or at Mélisande’s mother, but rather for us, for her.
* * *
After lunch, I went back to the bungalow to see Mélisande. She was lying in bed in a deep sleep and did not even stir when I walked in the room. Her body, stripped except for a matching set of polka-dotted bra and panties, would eventually adjust to the new cocktail, the Cuban doctor had told us. And slowly she could once again rejoin our lives at the hotel.
Watching her sleep so quietly, without even a hint of a snore, I thought about the strength of her will. Her symptoms had completely disappeared while she was taking that useless pill. It had seemed to help her once she believed it could.
Yet there was something different about her face now. She no longer seemed so young. Perhaps it was because of her sudden weight gains and losses, but she appeared to have wrinkles, some between her eyebrows, some around her mouth, a few under her eyes.
* * *
A week later, her body did begin to finally adjust to the cocktail and Mélisande got out of bed again. I noticed her one morning sitting by the pool staring in the water, then up at the sky, while my son and I ate breakfast on my patio. She reached into her pocket and pulled out something that she traced against the lifelines in her palm, then made a fist around it before placing it in her pocket again. She did this a couple of times—pulled the thing out of her pocket, then looked down at it and put it back. At some point, I noticed it was shiny, a little ring with some kind of stone that, though minute, was catching the light.
I took my son’s hand and walked down to the pool. She was startled to see us. Her eyes had been closed and I had to call out her name to let her know we were there.
“How are you?” I asked while Gabriel and I slid onto on the lounge chair next to hers.
Sitting there, I couldn’t help but think of my mother, so lost after my father had died. They had married when she was nineteen and, aside from me, he had been, whatever that meant now, her whole life. When I finished school and retraced my steps back to our beginning, to Haiti, she had dutifully followed, then at the first opportunity had leaped into a pool and drowned herself. Her death had been the most recent in a series of goodbyes. In many ways, my mother and I had been like Mélisande and her mother, without the friction, without the harsh words, without any words at all. For so long, before my mother had died, we had already been separated by water.
My son reached out for the shiny object and Mélisande’s hands, but she pulled them away and shoved them into her pocket.
“What’s that?” I asked.
She must have been wondering how long I had been looking at he
r, watching her pull this thing in and out of her pocket. Slowly she reached in deeper and out came the tiny ring once more. The gold was as thin as a strand of angel hair pasta, with a small glass stone that was once again capturing the light.
Drawn by the glint of the stone, my son reached for the ring again, but Mélisande yanked it away.
“Did one of the guests leave that behind?” I asked her.
She shook her head no.
“Did someone give it to you?”
She nodded.
“A man?”
Another nod.
“Did he give it to you before you were sick?”
“Maybe,” she answered softly, two lines of tears suddenly running down her face.
“Did he say he loved you?”
“Wi,” she replied with her head bowed, her eyes on her feet.
“He said he was going to marry you?”
He did, then he left and never came back.
It was worthless, of course, one of the fake gold krizokal rings made by the corner jeweler down the street. I had seen a bunch of them on the hands of young girls who came to the hotel for drinks and sexual exploits with both foreign and local guests. That type of ring even had a name. It was called the Port-au-Prince Marriage Special.
“Mélisande . . .” I began, trying to think of the best way to tell her. That ring was like the pills she’d been taking at first. There was no hope or healing in it.
“M konnen,” she said, “I know,” signaling with a wave of one bony hand that she no longer wanted to talk about it.
TRUE LIFE
BY MICHÈLE VOLTAIRE MARCELIN
Rue des Miracles
(Originally published in 2008)
Translated by Nicole Ball
My mother weeps. And the continuous murmur of her tears is so intense that it’s impossible not to hear it all over the world. If she were a fountain, barefoot girls—ragged graces—would rush to her to gather the water from her eyes in enamel vessels, plastic goblets, and banged-up aluminum basins. But she’s neither a drinking or luminous fountain, she’s only a woman with swollen eyes, pregnant with a tiny tadpole splashing around in her amniotic fluid. The cause of the present tragedy: my father doesn’t seem to care. Indifferent to the flood, he hitches up the legs of his trousers so as not to get them wet in the puddles. Goes right through my mother’s arms, removing those clinging hands, those fingernails—bird’s claws sinking into his flesh—and gets out of bed.