Dimitry Leger - God Loves Haiti

I will quote Dante, her favorite author:

There was no hymning of Bacchus or Apollo but of three persons in the divine nature, the divine and human natures in one person

The singing and the dancing were completed

and those holy lights seemed to turn to us

happy to pass from one care to another

then that light which had narrated to me the marvelous life of the poor man of God

broke the silence of those concordant powers

and said: “Since one lot of corn has been winnowed and since the seed has been stored away, sweet love invites me to thresh the other.”

Then I hope I will have the courage to look her in the eyes and say: I love you, baby. All that matters is that we be in the same room, house, bed, together, forever, ’til death do us part. Nothing else matters to me. Not Haiti, not my family, not pacifism, not the end of unemployment, torture, infant deaths, malnutrition, or illiteracy. Fuck all that. Let me know where you land in Tuscany as soon as you can. I’ll come to you on the next plane to Italy, and then we’ll run away and go start our family wherever else. Even if we have to run away to Papua New Guinea to do so in peace, I won’t give a fuck. I’ll be the happiest man alive as long as I’m with you. OK?

Yes, she’ll say.

I’ll nod to her. Then I’ll turn to the President and say, Have a safe trip, Mr. President, sir.

I’ll say so with utmost sincerity. Then I’ll turn around and walk, briskly, away from them and into the bosom of peacekeepers and their gob-smacked faces before disappearing into the crowds inside the airport.

With that inspiring thought of swashbuckling gallantry, Alain Destiné completed his naked run down the secret stairwell of the National Palace and burst through a heavy metal door and into the cement-floored backyard. Merde, je suis nu , he realized. As he caught his breath and covered up his immodesty, a heavier-than-expected silence drew his attention. Downtown Port-au-Prince felt oppressively hot. Steam rose from the asphalt between his toes. There were no security guards or soldiers around, even in the parking lot. The buzzing voices of cell phone sellers, money traders, urchins begging a few meters beyond the tall barbwire wall bordering the back of the palace, seemed stilled. As though time itself had been frozen. He fought through what felt like the loudest pregnant pause in history and ran to his car, a ten-year-old Chevy, rusty red, with a black leather interior he liked to keep shiny, an absurd, small indulgence that gave him immense pleasure. The car was so uncool to just about everyone else in Port-au-Prince that he never feared someone would steal it, even during the city’s occasional waves of carjacking frenzy. So he often left it unlocked. There, in a garment bag in the trunk, lay his backup suit. Thank God he never left home without a backup of his favorite uniform, a dark jacket and trousers only a very trained eye would recognize as unmatched, and a white shirt. Maybe he won’t wear a tie today. No time to waste on a Windsor knot.

He ambled the car out onto rue St. Honoré. The time, late afternoon, was a rare one for him to be leaving the National Palace. Since his girlfriend had moved in there a couple of months ago, he entered and left mainly in the wee hours, like a thief, though he felt as if he was the only person to lose something after each clandestine visit. Traffic on rue St. Honoré was light. Even foot traffic. A bank of narrow, aluminum-roofed shacks in varying shades of green featured their usual array of activities. One was a restaurant. Next door, an old man sold soda. The ubiquitous cell phone dealer stood under a red umbrella. They are the new cocaine, these cell phones, Alain thought. If prostitution is the oldest profession, telecommunications is the newest profession. Natasha was right. I need to get my head into these new businesses. A huge woman with broad shoulders swept away dirty rainwater trapped in the backed-up manhole in front of her house. She did it so determinedly. Her face wore the gravest concentration. The two girls jumping rope around her should be more careful, Alain thought. Their mother spent so much energy sweeping the floor she seemed to have none left to keep an eye on her bored daughters playing in one of the busiest streets in one of the most crowded cities on earth. All that garbage. Her broom was too small.

The way the house then toppled onto the woman and the girls happened in slow motion. Alain saw the house and the house next to it and the house next to that one and most of the other houses on the street tumble onto the street, the people, and the passing cars. The odd thing was that Alain Destiné found himself watching houses fall and people die while high off the ground. His car was… flying. What the fuck! Alain’s car had been catapulted into the Caribbean sky by an invisible and powerful force. The force had turned his Chevy into a flying carpet of sorts, a rusty red Haitian-American combo of the sort of magical melding of adventurous and funky transport mechanism that had tickled him pink in the stories of Arabian nights his father read to him as a child. From the sky, strangely, Port-au-Prince looked uncommonly beautiful. He hadn’t visited Paris yet, but surely Paris couldn’t be as beautiful as his hometown, this jewel of the Caribbean, this diamond in the rough, when viewed from the driver’s seat of a car launched two hundred meters above sea level. Awesome. Natasha, he thought, I have got to show her this.

During the car’s descending arc, death jabbed Alain in the ribs.

Oh my God! Alain screamed. He saw the National Palace collapse into itself like a wedding cake stepped on by an invisible giant toddler.

Oh. My. God.

He gripped the steering wheel as the car nose-dived toward the earth.

When Natasha Robert began walking up the stairs to the private jet minutes before the earthquake, hand in paw with her husband, she looked like she was walking slowly. In truth, she was being dragged. Gently and discreetly, but pulled against her will all the same. Her resistance was palpable to her husband. She felt like the puppy the President had had as a boy, the one he found wounded on a dusty road one morning and was determined to nurse to health and keep happy for no damn reason other than the belief that a puppy this cute deserved a better life than the one fate had on the table. Eventually the boy who would become president and the bleeding stray dog had tugs-of-war all the same, mainly when the boy was ordered to kick the dog outside so he could do his homework. Accustomed to his owner and savior’s love, the dog grew scared of the world outside the house. He rarely ventured outside without his master, so getting him to go out and have fun was a chore the President took pleasure in. At Toussaint Louverture Airport, five minutes before the devastating quake, the president of Haiti interpreted his new bride’s resistance as a replay of his beloved Fox’s bad case of nerves. Like that puppy, few things had ever worked out for this girl in her young life in this country where few things, if anything, ever worked properly, except for love and death. (Tax collecting didn’t work; trust him, he tried.) Not that the President felt he should be held even partially responsible for this tragic state of affairs. We inherited a bad hand and are doing the best we can with it. That’s the only explanation he had for Haiti’s seemingly unstoppable decline from the pearl of the Caribbean during the colonial era to the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere postindependence. In his sixty years, he had yet to hear a better explanation.

The President stepped down a few steps to retrieve his nervous bride, reaching first for the tips of her fingers. Her hands were appealingly soft but wet with sweat. They were clammy and cold too. Natasha looked smaller and browner than usual, but she was still beautiful. So gorgeous, in fact, that his heart skipped a beat when she returned his gaze. After all these months he was as surprised as anyone by how she still took his breath away each time her eyes met his. His cheeks felt flush. He wished this would stop happening. Will it ever? I’ll have the rest of my life to find out, he thought, a thought that made the old man turn serious.