Dimitry Leger - God Loves Haiti

Soon they were in Fort National, Natasha’s neighborhood. More accurately, the car drove through the canyon of rubble and dead bodies formerly known as Natasha’s neighborhood, chilling the blood in her veins. Inconsolable since seeing the National Palace, Natasha was now suffocated by grief. The guys avoided her eyes. There wasn’t just pain in Natasha’s heart. There was an emptiness. She felt hollowed out. A great chilling vacuum where the warmth of hot blood used to be.

Mon Dieu! Bobo exclaimed a few minutes later. The car came to another abrupt halt, compelling Natasha to wipe the tears from her eyes and reluctantly brace herself. In front of them was the National Cathedral. Nôtre Dame de l’Assomption of Haiti, Natasha’s favorite place in the whole world, loomed before them as a mix of rubble and jagged, broken concrete. Its towering pink and beige walls had been rent asunder by the earthquake. The colorful stained-glass windows Natasha spent almost a decade working on were shattered and scattered on the streets. The roof was sheared off the church’s head, probably collapsed into the pews, smothering the altars and snuffing out remembrance candles. They stepped out of the SUV and walked on rue St. Laurent dazed, as if answering a mysterious call. The sky was electric blue. There was a small fire ablaze down the street. Piles of gray and pink cement had swallowed the front gate and sidewalk. Natasha could barely make out the top of the church’s front door. But she badly needed to go inside. Giving up on the National Palace after the earthquake had split it in two and spread its interior on the ground like a spilled deck of cards was one thing. There was a former lover buried in that newly minted national tomb who deserved a better fate and proper mourning, like, she suspected, she would have to do for more than a few friends and former colleagues around town. But the thing between her and the cathedral was different. It was personal. It was about saving her sanity and, more important, her soul, the meaning of her life and afterlife.

Natasha was an old hand at grieving for loves lost. She had given up hope of having any surviving relatives in Haiti long before the earthquake. If they didn’t come out of the woodwork to reach out to her after her name and face had made the news when she married the president of the freaking republic, they couldn’t possibly exist anywhere on God’s green earth. She really was the last of her kind on this maudit planet. This was why the sight of the Catholic cathedral, even gutted by Mother Nature, stiffened her spine. The church had had the effect of making Natasha feel… salvageable… ever since she was a child. And on this day, the church needed her to try to repair it and make it relevant again; maybe they could save each other. Natasha started climbing the rubble toward the door and thinking about the ways Jesus had been good to her via this cathedral. She was around ten years old the day the pack of boys chased her down rue Borgella. She deserved the ass-kicking coming to her. She had taken their soccer ball on an impulse during their game. They wanted the ball back, and they wanted to teach her the lesson to not mess with them in the process. Natasha’s heart leapt in her chest, tickling her throat, but she outran the boys. Yes, she did. She took their ball for no reason as it rolled out of bounds, and ran away laughing. The boys screamed, cursed, and gave a chase that got more and more futile, so she smiled, relaxed. The air felt sweet, pumping her muscles to the point that she feared they might burst, explode. But she had relaxed a little too much in her sprint. One boy caught up to her and touched her shoulder. Putain! Natasha made a sharp turn to shake his grip, opened a gate and closed it, padlocking it. Give us the ball! Give us the ball! the boys bayed at the gates, arms outstretched. Natasha felt powerful, like Joan of Arc. When it seemed as though the boys’ frustration would tear the gate apart, she giggled and tossed the ball over it. The ball flew into the sky, disappeared briefly in the white sun, then thudded on someone’s face. The boys welcomed the ball like a long-lost friend and went back to playing their soccer match. Except for one of them. He lingered behind long enough to make sinister eye contact with Natasha. He gave her the I’ll-slash-your-throat-for-that sign with his fingers. She gulped.

Well, that wasn’t a smart thing to do, young lady, a deep voice intoned behind her.

Natasha turned to discover the voice belonged to the monsignor, Monsignor Dorélien. He stood over Natasha under the arch, between heavy metal doors. He looked like a young Desmond Tutu, darting eyes, smiling round face, big hands. Behind him a vast hall with a marbled cool beckoned. Natasha finally realized where she had escaped to. The National Cathedral. A building she didn’t like much as a child, though she lived nearby. She couldn’t remember the reason. Her parents, back when they lived together, forced her to go to Mass on Sundays. For some reason, after she became an orphan, she thought that if there was going to be one perk from that unwanted state, it would be the right to skip out of attending sermons about love every week. What time could she have for such nonsense after all her loves had disappeared or given her away? Uh-oh, she thought, looking at the monsignor. Young Natasha felt guilty for calling his work bullshit, even if it was only in her head.

Come in, child, he said. I know that boy. He’ll be waiting for you for hours. You’re welcome to wait him out here. Give him and his friends time to cool off.

This can’t turn out good, Natasha thought. However, getting those boys to chase her into the church’s protection turned out to be the single best mistake of her life. The cathedral Natasha walked into that day a decade ago was a chantier of artistic activity. High above the neat rows of brown wooden pews and the cream-white marble floors, which felt nice and cool under Natasha’s naked feet, men and some women hung from all the church’s stained-glass windows. They stood on scaffolding, to be sure. The paintbrushes they held caught Natasha’s eyes. The workers had their backs turned away from the world. They were literally painting Jesus’s grace onto the windows. The windows were high and long and skinny. The sun bathed them with approval, like God was thanking the artists for their work. Natasha had walked the aisles of the National Cathedral dozens of times before. Usually, she had been dragged against her will by a particularly religious prostitute friend who was going to take communion at Mass. During those trips down the aisle, Natasha looked down at the floor, partly out of respect for the grandeur of the moment of worship, but mostly out of embarrassment. She had never been baptized. Many of the worshippers in the church those Sundays knew her as the eccentric local orphan who had never been baptized and thus never had a first communion, and therefore did not belong in their company at Mass, the one moment where their eyes could watch God and feel that He was returning their gaze. Young Natasha, however, did not meet those disapproving glances because she felt them valid. She could not articulate why, but Natasha thought they were wrong. God’s eyes smiled on her too. She lowered her eyes as a way to prove to the Lord that she could submit to at least one person’s will — Jesus’s — and to prove to herself that she was not some wild, untamable animal, no matter what people said. For a few minutes on the occasional Sunday, she, too, could get over herself and appreciate the cool smallness of submitting to the unknowable, endlessly vast presence of Jesus, his Father, and the Holy Ghost. The day Monsignor Dorélien invited her into the church in its off-hours Natasha looked up and around the cathedral for the first time. The place was huge! And rich with colorful mosaics and rainbow-colored stained-glass windows. Natasha felt the thrill of her id snap, crackle, pop, and for the first time she didn’t feel guilty in the flow of artistic inspiration. The cathedral was not empty with a tomblike chill, as a big church on a weekday morning could be. Instead, the cathedral, to Natasha’s eyes, seemed to be in the process of becoming, of being held up by the hands of two dozen artisans who were working at its various windows with fierce, happy concentration. They seemed to be transforming the National Cathedral into something worthy of heaven, or at least something inspiring to the eyes of parishioners seeking glimpses of heaven. To Natasha, the artists at work were doing the work she’d dreamed of doing, even when she didn’t know how they did it. The artists were artisans, but they looked like conduits to God. She did not know you could be both.