Dimitry Leger - God Loves Haiti

Then there was the not-so-small matter of his affair with the artist Natasha Robert. She was an even rarer bird than he, for she came from a far more meager background than his to achieve a degree of success that was potentially greater than his. She displayed talent to become an artist and a celebrity unlike any seen in Haiti in a while, not since Father Métélus anyway. She took pleasure in illustrating Haitians’ flirtations with self-destruction, chasing your own death, to paraphrase Freud, unlike most other local artists. She was almost ascetic about painting and sculpting visions of Haitians, Dante’s circles of hell, and a forgiving, Haitian-looking Jesus. Her canvases used a lot of faded blues, greens, pinks, and yellows. “Provençal” was the word Alain had heard an international art dealer use to describe her style, as in reminiscent of the palettes used by Cézanne and other old-school painters from southern France. Natasha, of course, painted different subjects. Explicitly political and spiritual in theme, Natasha’s paintings were disturbing, dealing with unironic notions of Haitian sanctity that countered or mocked every traditional narrative of the rise and fall of Haitian society by pointedly and repeatedly asking unsettling questions: Did Haitian society fall, as many development markers suggest, or is it on a heavenly trajectory? Is financial failure a sign of virtue? Isn’t it inevitable that all rich people will go to hell? Aren’t foreigners’ reactions to Haiti proof of God’s sense of humor? In the process, Natasha certified herself as nuts among the rich and as clever among the smart set. And the poor… stole her art whenever they could.

Natasha’s focus on her work was impressive. Her only indulgence, as far as Alain could tell, was sleeping with him every couple of days since they’d met at a party for a new exhibit of some other artist at Cane A Sucre a few years earlier. Alain had trouble remembering who spoke to whom first, who made the first move, who said cool, all right, let’s go. Did she choose him? Is that why she was able to let him go so easily? Should they have married?! Was that my cardinal sin? Could those words, of all things, have saved the day? She never told me she loved me either, but that was beside the point, wasn’t it? She loved me. I inspired her work, the thing she cared about the most. Did I love her? Or did I simply want to beat the President at the game of winning deeper feelings from his wife than he could, Haiti’s oldest sport? Maybe. Maybe if you didn’t play it so fucking cool, Destiné, too many fucking jokes, maybe if you told her you loved her, maybe she would have spurned her old man completely in your favor. Your victory would have been total. Maybe. And maybe not. Jeez. Alain, grow up. Could it ever have been so simple? It was so simple because you actually did love her. Face it. Alain, old chum, things did not go according to plan with this one because you had no plan for this one. Love was new ground to you, a foreign language you had yet to master. Just give up and move on. Your case over your rival could have been helped if you had a plan for her like you had a plan for everything else about your future. Jesus, Alain, you loved her, didn’t you? said another voice inside his head. The case could have been made, Alain thought. He liked to believe he’d made it. Alain was not one for loose ends. They had an understanding, he thought. The old man would serve as a placeholder until he scored, or got on solid track for, the fortune to secure his and Natasha’s future together. They had a deal! Unspoken, but such was the way of such deals since time immemorial, no? For the love of God, woman, what the hell did you want from me? We had a deal. Should I have spoken the unspoken?

At this thought, Alain Destiné got off the ground and started looking around for a key, anything, to get him out of the closet of the National Palace that hot afternoon. He suspected a key had to exist, but tumbling cement bricks of sadness had pummeled him into wasting the day. You can be such a loser sometimes, Alain. The darkness of the closet was thick and inky and closed in on him. Sunlight leaked through the bottom of the door from the bedroom, humming a faint hymn. Empty clothes hangers click-clacked and hissed this way and that as his arm slid between them. He tapped and tapped the walls in hopes of uncovering a light switch, a key, a window, a… doorknob?

The door opened into a stairwell. A humming light-bulb greeted him. Its dim light was surrounded by flies and the smell of a thousand pairs of old sneakers. The fuzzy light left the stairwell dangerously too dark, but down the rabbit hole Alain went anyway. Maybe this secret stairwell was created by a prudent former president of the republic who wanted his wife and children to have an escape route out of the palace if an unruly mob came calling. They did have a tendency to do that around here. Or maybe the stairwell merely served as a pathway for maids and servants to flit about their duties to the first family even more invisibly than tradition called for. The stairwell was lit no better than the locked closet, but it had a railing, which Alain grabbed with both hands to keep from falling. Alain used the railing to guide his descent and maintain a sense of balance, which was rendered fragile by the assault of the aforementioned horrid smell. A surprise burst of euphoria from his escape from that infernal closet excited him. So did a keen sense of what his next move had to be. Alain began to skip down the stairs, two, then three steps at a time. His enthusiasm for his next move, which had leapt swiftly from musing to concrete and urgent action plan, mounted. He will race to the airport! That’s what he’ll do. He will race to the airport and talk his way through to the tarmac, where the President and Natasha would hopefully be stalled for one reason or another. He will then speak New York English to persuade the peacekeepers to part and let him reach the first couple. I’m his nephew, he’d say. I have one last message to give the President. It’s from his mother. Part, the sea of stupid blue helmets will. Then he will reach the President and his wife. The sun will be hot, but the tarmac will be hotter. Heavy fumes and heat will have everyone wondering if his presence was a hallucination. Natasha will briefly set aside her typically bored artist pose. Her shift in spirit will be visible mainly to him, a man who has evoked it before, after either eloquently working his tongue between her legs or making her laugh with such abandon at an off-color joke or a bit of tickling that she snorted like a hog and her eyes danced.

Destiné, the President will say, on guard.

The President will try to play it cool, indifferent even, because noblesse oblige is the President’s signature move. To what do I owe this grand and very surprising visit from Haiti’s best and brightest? he’ll say. Have you already completed your work turning our economy into Sweden’s?

The President’s right hand will, no doubt, disappear into the folds of the pocket in which he kept the small gun he’d told Alain he always had on him. I even sleep with it, the President once confided. Alain couldn’t tell if he was joking or not. Probably not. The President will no doubt shoot me in the forehead, Alain thought, if I make a sudden move or if he is struck by the reasonable impulse to murder the man who has been sleeping with his wife. After putting me down like a dog, the President, of course, will turn to the blue helmets and tell them and other shocked witnesses that I was an assassin he had been warned about by the government’s intelligence services, as if the country these days had any of those things, a functional government and intelligent public services.

I will avoid this unwanted scenario by greeting him most cheerfully, Alain thought. Mr. President, I’ll say, in the firm but eager tone of a military man submitting to his master. Then I will take Natasha by both hands and turn her to face me while keeping her positioned between the President and me. If he lost his head, he would have to shoot her to shoot me. I think I could count on him to not do that. Not at that moment anyway. Natasha, I will say, with as deep and heroic a voice as I can muster. Shit, what should I say?