“IT SEEMS THAT PEOPLE in your grandmother Mika’s country have reached the limit of what they’re willing to put up with.” That’s how Soledad tells me that the country of her birth is caught up in political upheaval, which eventually leads to the departure of the sea pig who’s been running the show. I remember coming across a picture of him, Baby Dòk, and he looked remarkably similar to a scotoplanes globose, the kind of sea cucumber we call sea pig. This species of invertebrates lives in abysses, burying itself at the bottom of the ocean and eating whatever it digs up in the mud. Soledad’s scathing pronouncement is disconcerting, and I think back to that picture, the sea pig stuffed full of everything it has come across. The country must have been just a huge swamp to him, a natural habitat he’d been splashing around in since he was born. Jean-Claude Duvalier refused to leave office, balking at calls for his resignation. In February 1986, blood is flowing again across the island. As far as the makout are concerned, Haiti is their personal trough, and there is no way they will ever let go. Once again, they set the death machine in motion, and the massacres come, swift and merciless. They shoot at schoolchildren, killing dozens. History doesn’t repeat itself, it just marches on.
On Friday, February seventh, 1986, finally, after bleeding the island dry for fifteen years, the son of the despot François Duvalier, who inherited the presidency from his father at the age of nineteen, is forced by popular pressure to pack his bags. It’s on the radio, on TV around the world. I can’t sit still.
I’ve never set foot in Haiti. Soledad explains with uncharacteristic indifference that a society defined by social exclusion is upheld by crime and favouritism. Did Baby Dòk’s departure challenge the logic of that system? Soli doubts it. Privilege will remain the law of the land, she thinks. “I don’t want to talk about it anymore! Understand?”
Her tone brooks no reply. I can sense the rage quivering inside her.
That night I must have been screaming in my sleep. When I open my eyes, Soledad is in my room. “You’re having nightmares again,” she says flatly before closing the door.
Half-awake and shaken, I wonder whether I should go make myself a cup of lavender tea to calm down or flip through my photos. I need to see my mother’s faces: what confirmation, what other mystery might I discover? The herbal tea can wait. I have a bunch of photos of Soledad. I carry my camera with me all the time and follow her around, taking pictures of her even when she is sleeping. Often she brushes me away; there’s not a day goes by without someone trying to pin me down, she says.
I spread out the photos and move them around, mimicking her expression, tracing her half-smiles. I run my fingertips around the contours of the eyes, the lips, as if searching for truth, for a sign. Probably I am hoping to discover a crack through which I could slip in to reclaim what was stolen from me.
It isn’t quite daylight yet, but I walk around the house looking for Soledad. I need to talk to her. She must be in her studio…Yes, she spent the night there. “I’m burning up, I’m feverish,” I tell her. “Let’s go out for a walk.” A soft light hovers in the skimming glow of dawn. We’ve barely gone a block when I turn to her abruptly.
“I refuse to live like Mika, like a snail coiled up in my shell.”
“It’s up to you to live differently,” she replies, her voice empty.
I wonder if she knows how haunted I am by what happened in January 1958. I refuse to let that night be forgotten.
“What was stolen from you and Mika has to be returned. I’m going—I’m leaving Thursday. And nothing can stop me!”
“You should be suspicious of projects dreamed up in the heat of the moment; you said it yourself, you’re burning up. You can want to do whatever you can, you can be stubborn, try to mend what’s broken, only to realize after all that effort that it wasn’t worth it. On the day when the moron who’s just been toppled took his oath of office, I lost faith forever in the justice of men. There was always a little flame burning within me, like those little lamps that the women over there light in front of icons to pray for favours. A tiny flame at the end of a cotton wick that’s tied to a piece of cork and placed in a dish in a mixture of oil and water. The lantern burns for a few days, I imagine, until the favour is granted. How long did my lantern burn for? I don’t know…But I had hoped that crime couldn’t go unpunished. Today Papa Tyrant rests, and Junior’s just landed on holiday in the south of France—the land of human rights! Did my lamp go out on its own or did I snuff out the flame?”
As always, our steps bring us to the gardens at the Carmen de los Mártires. We sit on a bench and Soledad caresses the stone. The gesture appeases her. The minutes pass; we say nothing more. The freshness of the early morning can do nothing to soothe her pain, and for the very first time I take her in my arms. In a silent embrace, our limbs relax, and our tears run together.
I search the pocket of my suitcase, looking for the address—the only one I have—but come up empty. It’s as if the card vanished into thin air. Not a good time. The official at the counter looks tense. Visibly annoyed, his elbows propped on the desk, he stares at me rudely. “I have family here,” I tell him again.
Prim and uptight in his uniform, the man asks me for the address again as he flips indolently through my passport. He looks around as if there might be someone else, a supervisor maybe, but everyone nearby is too busy or isn’t paying any attention to his drama. Just another zealot wanting to play at being important. The airport lobby is crowded with people coming and going, dragging heavy bags. Behind the glass, all the employees look drained by the early afternoon heat.
“Since you’re not willing to say where you’re going...” He stops in the middle of his speech, hesitates, then shuffles away from the desk, moves his chair back, stands up. He opens the cubicle door, looks me up and down, and pulls the door closed. What’s his inspection all about? Sweat drips down my spine, the heat making me uncomfortable. What was I thinking, dressed like this? A hairpin slips and a strand of my sweaty hair falls loose. I slide the pin back into place. All at once I remember that I put the address in the camera pocket. I start fumbling again, but then—stroke of genius—I change my mind. The man starts speaking to me in English and, perhaps because of the distance the language imposes between us, the tension drops. “I just can’t find it,” I hear myself say. I explain that I was born in Spain and grew up there, that this is my first visit to the island, maybe someone will come pick me up. Irritated, he scribbles something, stamps my passport, and hands it back to me.
I’ve been meandering around Mika’s house since I got here—Mika’s room, the twins’ room, which has been empty for years since they left to go live abroad, one in Mexico and the other in Venezuela. And at the end of the hallway, Soli’s room. I spend long hours in this territory that is no longer my mother’s, looking at the objects on the shelves: postcards, books with yellowed pages, photos of friends now forgotten. I sit on the steps of the staircase with my knees tucked under my chin, caressing the mahogany railing. If wood could talk.
During one of her outbursts, Soledad told me that when they were kids they used to race wildly along this long hallway to see who would get to the railing first and get to slide down the varnished mahogany horse, whooping. That past isn’t mine yet it’s so clearly imprinted in my soul, it’s there, before my eyes, it’s real. All these years...Time is still the same. Soldiers parading along in large covered trucks, chasing hungry youths who run around looting and settling scores. The town is on fire, there are roadblocks everywhere, tires burning. The sea pig has been gone for more than a week but resentment here smoulders on unabated. Unleashed. The smell of blood, dust, and alcohol, and the sting of tar is everywhere and grabs me by the throat. Houses are ransacked by gangs from the slums, all those neighbourhoods that landowners spit on while thieves take advantage of the pandemonium to grab whatever they can get their hands on.
With my camera slung over my shoulder and my sunglasses hiding my face, I walk around the city with a press badge I got during an internship. I never finished film school, but who cares? All I’ve ever done is ask myself why. Why? How? Difficult questions, asked of women who are too often mute, bereft in their distress. Questions that mostly go unanswered, though many of the answers came loud and clear during Soledad’s episodes.
For example, when I was young I never imagined that I needed a father, I never tried to understand why I didn’t have one, and now I wonder if something bigger than I am, some force stronger even than instinct, was telling me that the subject was forbidden, that I shouldn’t talk about it. As a teenager, I would have liked to know, but I also knew I had to protect Soledad.
Curiously, in this city saturated with rage and dismay, I’m in no particular danger, nobody pays any attention to me. There are clashes, violence permeates the air and clings to the leprous walls of the cité, to the barbed wire that coddles the more opulent homes. The city is hectic and the sun, searing already in the still-new day, flashes its claws. And the dogs, everywhere, so many stray dogs, hungry and hassled.
In the neighbourhood where Mika lives, a group of teens who hang out under a gazebo at the bottom of the hill have adopted me. They all want to talk, they want to make a documentary to tell the whole world what nobody wants to hear: the weary but still hopeful voice of a population that has been scorned for too long.
“They want everything to change and to stay the same: nothing for us, everything for them, with repression as a perk!” Gabriel is tall and slender, and his body seems to pour along, long and serpentine, walking on air. His pants are held up by a rope. He lives at the bottom of the hill in one of the basins, the slums, he tells me. His eyes are red: he proudly announces that he hasn’t slept since the night of February sixth. “We have decreed that we will keep vigil until the country has been completely cleaned up!” He warns me: “They won’t let go, so watch your step. They hate journalists, photographers—real ones. Have you heard of Manuel Buendia? He was a journalist who wrote a book about what the CIA did in Mexico. He was shot right in the middle of Mexico City two years ago. I dream of being a journalist too. But here we only have our dreams.”
“You have your dignity.”
Gabriel’s reply is blunt, his words clattering like stones.
“Honestly, I’m sick of hearing that word tossed around over and over again. They bring up dignity at the drop of a hat, as if it’s supposed to be any consolation. A very poor one, believe me: don’t you know how scarce dignity is in this country? Journalists and politicians are sold, and cheap. They get offered trips, conferences, bank accounts. Same for a lot of NGOs—many of them are supposed to deliver aid, but they’re nothing more than CIA gravy trains. How many are filling their pockets from state coffers? They’re just working for death agencies. Where is the dignity? Mine, my dignity, is to lie prone in my bed at night clutching my stomach, my mouth clamped shut as hunger screams in my belly.
“I’m eighteen,” Gabriel goes on, “and I’ve already buried my father and mother, dead before their time, dead of starvation and misery, and God only knows what they worked for. Have you seen the porters, Junon? Those men in the market with wheelbarrows loaded up like trucks, even an ox couldn’t pull one alone. My father did that all his life. And it pains me—an ache, right here in my chest—how often he worked on an empty stomach. Even worse, there are men who haul dumpsters around and they still have to sell their own blood just to feed their children. It’s not a metaphor, I’m serious. There’s a clinic across from the hospital—they say it belonged to a man named Kambronne, a renowned vampire, a scavenger for Papa Despot for years—people could go sell a litre of blood for five dollars. That’s the kind of democracy they want to build. Everyone knows that those who have just seized power, I mean the general and his cronies, are from the same school, trained by the Americans in Panama. They got their diplomas as torturers there. But they won’t get us! Grenadiers—attack!”
Gabriel’s words ring with faith and bitterness, a harsh cocktail, and once again I try to establish a hierarchy of suffering, only to realize immediately that there is only one single foul wound oozing everywhere.
Someone waves to Gabriel, who suddenly moves away from the group. The newcomer looks older. He strides over, distraught. “It’s Jérémie!” Gabriel’s voice drops, and he almost runs over to the man. They speak for a moment, gesturing. After a few minutes, Gabriel returns, crestfallen.
“Last night,” he says, “the army ambushed a small group who were about to break into a lawyer’s house. The lawyer was negotiating to sell orphaned children to foreigners. They crushed them…It was Jacques’s crew, from La Plaine,” he explains. “They were completely decimated! We tell them and tell them that we have to be more careful, that it’s too easy to get in, but they just take anyone. They had gotten it into their heads to drag this lawyer to the square, to judge him. But they have no experience,” he laments. “There was one kid, Jamal, not even fifteen. I warned them not to be so impulsive. The army had men everywhere. How did they know?” Gabriel looks around at his friends. They are all unarmed. “That’s for you to find out,” he grumbles. “There were five of them, all of them shot!”
He clenches his fists.
“Did you hear me? They shot them all! Sometimes I wonder if we’re used to it, dying like that, like cockroaches. We got used to the idea of our own death. The dirty bourgeoisie will be well pleased,” he spits. “They will dance with joy. Junon, do you know what they call the street children you see everywhere? They call them kokorat, little cockroaches. They’re so scared of losing their position that they want to exterminate all of us.”
Gabriel looks disgusted. He is sweating profusely and wipes his face with his shirt. His ribs jut out through the bruised, purpled skin of his chest. The little group gradually disperses, unravelling like a sweater, the stitches falling away one by one. I see them moving away, the boys turning in on themselves, stumbling. Two of them, unable to stand up on their own two legs, crouch, head in their hands. Their eyes are empty, they’re dizzy, high on despair and humiliation. They gravitate around Gabriel with their heads down, all of them are looking for a glimmer of hope down in the dust, in the pebbles they mindlessly kick around off the tips of their busted shoes.
Time stretches out, and no one opens his mouth. A military tune blasts suddenly from the road, crackled out at full volume over a loudspeaker. I think of María Luz. Snippets of one of our long conversations come back to me, about Franco. Fascism exists only to dispossess you, she told me over and over, as if I had to be convinced. Her usually melodious voice was shaking. It takes everything from you, it never takes enough from you, it takes your very soul, do you see? Her voice was husky as she quoted one of those great authors—Mauriac, I think, who wrote that fascism is above all the art of neutralizing the masses, of making them harmless.
The music shuts off abruptly. There isn’t a sound, nothing but the dry tumble of the pebbles the boys were chucking around in the dust all around Gabriel. I feel like the world has stopped. Days, hours…Everything is caught in this strange moment, at once empty and full of something that’s taking such a long time—some event, a catastrophe, or even a miracle. And why not? Because life can’t be reduced to so much sorrow. As I watch them, my thoughts crash into me, they knock around inside me like a door banging. I am sinking into an unfathomable sadness. Is this harmless? I guess, up to a point: with their foolish dreams of reversing the course of things, the boys have lost their way and all they have left is mad desire buried in their entrails. They’re like animals ready to pounce. Harmless, toothless, they only vaguely suspect that their destiny, which has laid out for them, drips with death, death that never strikes at random. Held up by the apparatus of repression, death will trap them, vengeful. It chooses them, marks them with its seal.
“Junon?”
The intensity in Gabriel’s voice startles me. His eyes are red though he hasn’t cried. He’s burning on the inside, he has been nothing but a torch for a long time, an inferno that will only be put out when the explosion everyone is waiting for finally comes.
“There are men who have propped up Duvalier to the end, even after being humiliated in every possible way. How can you explain that? It’s insane, it’s completely insane.”
“As my grandmother says, they are beasts of the deep. And this inexplicable behaviour, as you know, is nothing but the lure of power. Power is hard to resist, Gabriel. Don’t be surprised if you start hearing comments, including from people you would never have thought capable of such an aberration, scrabble up to the ramparts, taking over the airwaves to defend the scum that you drove out of the country.”
“That’s all they’ve been doing since the movement started!” Willy is Gabriel’s cousin. His shirt is threadbare, and he keeps his eyes on the ground, without the look of the conqueror that Gabriel has about him. “They’re calling for order and for sanctions against the troublemakers that we are.”
“They will eventually get what’s coming to them!” Gabriel thunders. Willy is distressed.
The pain of seeing his friends shot down like pigeons is making Gabriel delirious. He’s afraid too, no doubt. Look at them all: the same blood flows in my veins. Just like them, I am a child of violence.