REMEMBER ONE DAY
BY EMMELIE PROPHÈTE
Boulevard Jean-Jacques Dessalines
(Originally published in 1999)
Translated by George Lang
One day remember
this dismembered city
Between noise stupidity and pain
They created infidelity, the blue sidewalks
of another continent
Madness has become useful
We work at drawing up exits
From your eyes
Emptiness is to be reinvented
*
My only point of reference is your face in a spectral light. The desire for you came like a distant murmur. A vague memory of children’s books. A lesson learned long ago. I pace the sidewalks of Port-au-Prince. I am late for heartbreak. The path I ought to take to know your name. The city where you were born. All is closed for the holidays. My work goes on. I think of you. They told me how my disease began. To this day I do not believe it.
*
I shuffle
Against the stream of your passions
Against the gusts of prison wounds
I shuffle
Turned infinitely
Toward your irrationality
With me night never stops
We left our warmth on a bench
Sand comes up to our eyes
We all dream of sidewalks
The cries of our nakedness
Go without solution
Like your silence
RÊVE HAITIEN
BY BEN FOUNTAIN
Pacot
(Originally published in 2000)
In the evenings, after he finished his rounds, Mason would often carry his chessboard down to the Champ de Mars and wait for a match on one of the concrete benches. As a gesture of solidarity he lived in Pacot, the scruffy middle-class neighborhood in the heart of Port-au-Prince, while most of his fellow O.A.S. observers had taken houses in the fashionable suburb of Pétionville. Out of sympathy for the people Mason insisted on Pacot, but as it turned out he grew to like the place, the jungly yards and wild creep of urban undergrowth, the crumbling gingerbread houses and cobbled streets. And it had strategic position as well, which was important to Mason, who took his job as an observer seriously. From his house he could track the nightly gunfire, its volume and heft, the level of intent—whether it was a drizzle meant mainly for suggestive effect or something heavier, a message of a more direct nature. In the mornings he always knew where to look for bodies. And when war had erupted between two army gangs he’d been the first observer to know, lying in bed while what sounded like the long-rumored invasion raged nearby. Most of his colleagues had been clueless until the morning after, when they met the roadblocks on their way to work.
On Thursdays he went to the Oloffson to hear the band, and on weekends he toured the hotel bars and casinos in Pétionville. Otherwise, unless it had been such a grim day that he could only stare at his kitchen wall and drink beer, he would get his chess set and walk down to the park, past the weary peddler women chanting house-to-house, past the packs of rachitic, turd-colored dogs, past the crazy man who squatted by the Church of the Sacred Heart sweeping handfuls of dirt across his chest. There in the park, which resembled a bombed-out inner-city lot, he would pick out a bench with a view of the palace and arrange his pieces, and within minutes a crowd of mouthy street kids would be watching him play that day’s challengers. Mason rarely won; that was the whole point. With the overthrow and exile of their cherished president, the methodical hell of the army regime, and now the embargo that threatened to crush them all, he believed that the popular ego needed a boost. It did them good to see a Haitian whip a blan at chess; it was a reason to laugh, to be proud at his expense, and there were evenings when he looked on these thrown games as the most constructive thing he’d done all day.
As his Creole improved he came to understand that the street kids’ jibes weren’t all that friendly. Yet he persisted; Haitians needed something to keep them going, and these games allowed him to keep a covert eye on the palace, the evening routine of the military thugs who were running the country—the de facto government, as the diplomats and news reports insisted on saying, the de factos basically meaning anybody with a gun. Word got around about his evening games and the zazous started bringing chess sets for him to buy, the handcrafted pieces often worked in Haitian themes: the Vodou gods, say, or LeClerc versus Toussaint, or Baby Doc as the king and Michèle the queen and notorious Macoutes in supporting roles. Sometimes during these games the crowd grew so raucous that he feared drawing fire from the palace guards. And, regardless of the game, he always left in time to get home by dark. Not even a blan was safe on the streets after dark.
Late one afternoon he’d barely set up his board when a scrap of skin and bones came running toward him. Blan! the boy shouted, grinning wickedly. Vini, gen yon match pou ou! Mason packed up his set and followed the boy to a secluded corner of the park, a patch of trees and scrub screening it from the palace. There on the bench sat a mulatto, a young Haitian with bronze skin, an impressive hawk nose, and a black mass of hair that grazed his shoulders. His T-shirt and jeans were basic street, but the cracked white loafers seemed to hint at old affluence, also an attitude, a sexually purposed life that had been abandoned some time ago. He simply pointed to the spot where Mason should sit, and they started playing.
The mulatto took the first game in seven moves. Mason realized that with this one he was allowed to try; the next game lasted eleven moves. “You’re very good,” Mason said in French, but the mulatto merely gave a paranoiac twitch and reset his pieces. In the next game Mason focused all his mental powers, but the mulatto had a way of pinning you down with pawns and bishops, then wheeling his knights through the mush of your defense. This game went to thirteen moves before Mason admitted he was beaten.
The mulatto sat back, eyed him a withering moment, then said in English: “All of these nights you have been trying to lose.”
Mason shrugged, and began resetting the pieces.
“I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to be so stupid, even a blan,” said the mulatto. “You are mocking us.”
“No, that’s not it at all. I just felt . . .” Mason struggled for a polite way to say it.
“You feel pity for us.”
“Something like that.”
“You want to help the Haitian people.”
“That’s true. I do.”
“Are you a good man? A brave man? A man of conviction?”
Mason, who had never been spoken to in such solemn terms, needed a second to process the question. “Well, sure,” he replied, and really meant it.
“Then come with me,” said the mulatto.
* * *
He led Mason around the palace and into the hard neighborhood known as Salomon, a dense, scumbled antheap of cinder-block houses and packing-crate sheds, wobbly storefronts, markets, mewling beggars underfoot. Through the woodsmoke and dust and swirl of car exhaust the late sun took on an ocherous radiance, the red light washing over the grunged and pitted streets. Dunes of garbage filled out the open spaces, eruptions so rich in colorful filth that they achieved a kind of abstraction. With Mason half-trotting to keep up, the mulatto cut along side streets and tight alleyways where Haitians tumbled at them from every side. A simmering roar came off the closepacked houses, a vibration like a drumroll in his ears that blended with the slur of cars and bleating horns, the scraps of Latin music shredding the air. There was something powerful here, even exalted; Mason felt it whenever he was on the streets, a kind of spasm, a queasy, slightly strung-out thrill feeding off the sheer muscle of the place.
It was down an alley near the cemetery, a small sea-green house flaking chunks of itself, half-hidden by shrubs and a draggled row of saplings. The mulatto passed through the gate and into the house without speaking to the group gathered on the steps, a middle-aged couple and five or six staring kids. Mason followed the mulatto through the mur
k of the front room, vaguely aware of beds and mismatched plastic furniture, a cheesy New York–skyline souvenir clock. The next room was cramped and musty, the single window shuttered and locked. The mulatto switched on the bare light overhead and walked to an armoire that filled half the room. That too was locked, and he jabbed a key at it with the wrath of a man who finds such details an insult.
“Is this your house?” asked Mason, eyeing the bed in the corner, the soiled clothes and books scattered around.
“Sometimes.”
“Who are those people out there?”
“Haitians,” snapped the frustrated mulatto. Mason finally had to turn the key himself, which went with an easy click. The mulatto sighed, then pulled two plastic garbage bags out of the armoire.
“This,” he announced, stepping past Mason to the bed, “is the treasure of the Haitian people.”