Dimitry Leger - God Loves Haiti

Until the moment she abruptly stopped the exodus, Natasha had been all smiles; an award-winning, movie-star-worthy grin, her entourage noted early and often. Her smile was indeed winning. All her life, its brilliance seduced women and men, boys and girls, soldiers and nuns, and elders and babies. Recently, her gentle yet arresting beauty had ensnared a head of state and his entourage and her nation, too — well, the small percentage of the population with access to television sets. Her wedding day was like a national holiday. Their every move became an opportunity to celebrate rare national glamour. Even on this treacherous day, when the first couple secretly planned to ditch Haiti for Italy, smatterings of cheering throngs accompanied their procession from the National Palace to the national airport for what the President’s public relations people billed as the new first couple’s first foreign tour, featuring a first stop in Florence, Italy, to support Haitian artists featured at a biennale in the Uffizi. To be fair, crowds lined the streets of Port-au-Prince all the time. Sidewalks were too narrow or nonexistent throughout the city. The streets contained more adults, children, dogs, pigs, sometimes cats, bikes, puddles, and garbage piles at all hours than the overcrowded and lightly governed city could handle. Still, in a disturbingly short amount of time, Natasha had grown attached to the cheers, the approval of strangers. They had the livening effect of a good new drug. The first pangs of withdrawal pain already loomed in her spirit’s outer edges. On good days, or during good moments on uneven days, the flush of mass approval justified Natasha’s choice of husband and nursed her shattered and shamed heart. Life was golden, her entourage told her. You’re so beautiful, they said. You’re so lucky.

Damn right, she thought.

Natasha was only two days removed from a walk down the aisle with the most eligible bachelor in town, the president of the republic. Since their first date at the opening of the Orphan Art Gallery in Carrefour, he’d repeatedly told her that for the rest of his natural life his business would be the business of securing her health, wealth, and happiness. To love her to death. Everyone told Natasha that the President went to great lengths to impress her, shocking lengths in fact. Even now, during her ill-timed fit of buyer’s remorse, her husband was too busy being good to her to notice. He was multitasking, executing a slight of hand that would soon allow them to escape his duties to Haiti and hand her a posh life in Tuscany. On the other end of his cell phone was his longtime right-hand man, Reginald Leglise. Reginald was a source of good humor and as reliable as the sunrise. The President had charged him with securing the final details from US Embassy officials on everything from the President’s retirement cash flow in his Swiss bank accounts to hotel reservations to the day’s flight schedule. Port-au-Prince to Florence. Nonstop. Sweet.

Stay on them, the President said. Don’t let them out of your sight until you hear from me and I tell you we landed safely in Italy. All that is mine here will then be yours, old friend, as promised. No, not the National Palace. Very funny, Reginald. Thanks, I needed that. You’re right. I have been through a lot in recent weeks. This deal took a lot out of me. It’s a beauty though, isn’t it? My best ever. What can I say? It’s not like we had a pension system here to take care of me after my last term ended. Our people hate to pay taxes. They miss out on so much, the poor fools.

Natasha generally admired her husband’s ability to make people feel sorry for him when they shouldn’t. Not today. Today, the absence of scruples in his charm made her feel ordinary, small. A silver-tongued coward’s plaything. Marie Antoinette with a melanin overdose. Natasha never felt ordinary with… she still dared not speak her ex-lover’s name. His smirking ghost stood by her side, staring. Seeping courage from her. Natasha felt her grip on the world crumple in shades of bright green and yellow like a cubist painting. If… he… was unmuted, Natasha knew, her ex-lover would tell her the old man was unworthy of her, that he was a lousy president who had barely scratched the surface of possibilities of carrying out his great responsibilities as leader and protector of the dignity of their people, even in tasks as easy as rebuilding an airport with American Airlines’ money. He’d describe to Natasha the myriad ways the airport could and should have been better than it had been. And she would see the possibilities for transformation and improvement come alive in her mind’s eye. Then she’d reach for a sketch pad and start drawing images, a story that would come to her first as a low tickle in the bottom of her heart and then as a burst of rainbow-colored flavors in her creative id that she would need to tamp down over days to create a memorable and pleasant painting or sculpture. She was never too sure if these bursts of brain-frying inspiration happened because of the power of his words and ideas or the curves of his lips and the sparkle of his confident dark-brown eyes when he talked and touched her, or touched her while talking to her. He always touched her whenever she was near, lightly, sharply, sometimes pointedly, always possessively, intensively, and suggestively. His whole body spoke to hers whenever possible. Tickling bursts of excitement would fill her with each contact, almost literally lighting her up. When they went on walks during escapes to Wahoo Bay Beach. When they had dinner in his house on Place Boyer or in her room at the National Palace. (He often ate fritaille , a local mixture of spicy fried pork or goat chunks, plantains, and turkey, brought from the streets; she often ate a three-course meal prepared by the President’s ageless and spice-loving chef.) In a voice that seemed incapable of a yellow note of doubt, he often described in thrilling detail how the surrounding architecture, traffic, economy, foreign policy, art and music, constitution, infrastructure, agriculture, one arcane law after another, could be improved, tweaked, just so to make all Haitians’ lives better. Socialism mixed with a correct dose of capitalism ain’t that hard, he’d say. We just have to get over our commitment issues first. That boy had no sense of jobs and process and politics. But, man, could he talk up dreams.

Lost in her thoughts, Natasha hadn’t realized she had been moving forward, gliding toward the plane against her will. The President’s entourage subtly pushed her from behind, as they were wont to do, toward her husband, who was still talking on the phone but waiting for her. The white heat and the noise of the revving jet engines licked her face. The black droning sound and the smell of the exhaust pummeled her. The combination made Natasha dizzy. The moment, this dream-concretizing climax, felt ephemeral. Like she was about to wake up where she was born, in a roofless orphanage, naked, afraid, hungry, but pugnacious.

Really, why does the memory of the most painful moment of my life go together with my love for that guy? Really, God, what’s that all about? Is that more proof that I need to get away from him and his country as quickly and as far away as possible? The beginning thump of a throbbing headache emerged. Natasha thought of the unsolvable paradox of love and regrets. Love did have its upsides, she conceded. The feeling triggered a swelling and crashing of warm waves of emotions inside her. The waves grew stronger, especially now that the old man who was now her old man, a husband she liked but did not love, was living up to his promise to sweep her off their godforsaken island, inspiring her to inch closer to loving him, or at least to the point where she began experiencing glimmers of love’s cousins — affection, tenderness, awe, faith — toward him, but not quite love, for she was naturally frugal with her love, nipping it in the bud early and often in her young life except once. It’s not like she had much choice. The young man’s presence in her life seemed to ignite her life, as if she didn’t exist without his attention. The connection felt normal and permanent and urgent. Permanently urgent. But it doesn’t have to be a relationship, the chorus of prostitutes who lived near the orphanage had told her. These girls told her to remember that she was unusually pretty and charming and quick. It was her duty to use those God-given gifts to marry up, for richer and older wealth and security, and this young man, smart as he was, dashing as his military-perfect posture made him seem to be, and wealthy and honest as his square and steady gaze promised he could become, was no more richer than us whores today, and not worth too much of her time. He could be your lover, they said, ton petit ami , but never anything more, not even her boyfriend, and that would be OK. Her meager origins made it so. Haiti’s hardships ratified it. Provided you were tough enough to walk away from him for good within a minute of landing a rich man, you could play around with him, they said. That’s what these attractive girls expected from their future and demanded Natasha expect from hers. The mythical rich man who erases all deprivations. The girls were mostly newbies in a self-defeating game, but they were diligent about what passes for its learned wisdom. They alternated between recruiting Natasha and advising her to be smarter than they were about love, sex, and men. Natasha took their sisterly advice with a grain of salt. Today, while wallowing in guilt in the glow of her lottery ticket of a husband, she realized how closely she had actually followed the whores’ script. She remembered, also, that her new old man was human too and also haunted by his childhood’s deprivations. At this delicate hour of his life, Natasha would do well to behave like a supportive wife. She scolded herself to get it together.