Dimitry Leger - God Loves Haiti

Still, murder went against the new leaf the President had turned since the earthquake destroyed Haiti. The media and, even more important, Haitian word of mouth for the most part praised his sangfroid, compassion, and, to everyone’s surprise, eloquence in helping the people deal with the tragedy and traumas that followed. In marshaling resources around the world to help the country figure out how to pick up the pieces, the President had been darn-right heroic. Haiti had developed faith in its president after years of familiarity, a first in the country’s history.

In the lobby of the United Nations, the President’s cabinet greeted him with desperate, searching eyes. Although the President had gotten sick and thrown up during the elevator ride down after the meeting with Satan and his kitchen cabinet, the humiliating ritual did generate good news for the fate of Haiti. The superfriends would provide resources for Haiti’s resource-free government and send armies armed with potential relief for the victims of nature’s freakiness. The President gave the guys the thumbs-up. They jumped for joy. He had secured billions of dollars in grants and low-interest loans from the American and his friends, to be funneled through United Nations agencies and other nongovernmental organizations to rebuild Haiti. Build back better, they said. The President watched his cabinet high-five and hug each other. The President was careful to avoid hugging anyone. He didn’t want them to smell the vomit on his breath.

In the euphoria, the President also decided he didn’t want Destiné dead for sleeping with his wife. Part of him did. Really, really did. But when the President considered the order he’d given Bobo, regret gave his heart an acidity he longed to erase. He couldn’t help but try to distance himself from it. He didn’t want Destiné dead, he decided, just roughed up. A warning. So he would finally stay away from Natasha for good. If that hardheaded boy would not obey such a reasonable message, the President would come up with an alternative solution that would be effective but not deadly.

Murdering Alain Destiné would have been the first time I’ve used my power as head of state to try to give myself a small amount of pleasure. Would God forgive me for this sin? Will God forgive me anything? I am doing the right thing for millions of others. Belatedly, but still. Will my immortal soul pay for this one indulgence if I manage, in my final act as a public servant, to corral commitments to bring food and water and medicine in a timely fashion to millions of people who are hungry, unemployed, without homes, and living in the bull’s-eye of a host of coming rainy seasons, deadly diseases, and natural disasters?

When the President was finally alone in his suite at the Warwick Hotel a few hours later, he groped for an answer to the right moral choice despite his aggrieved pride. He got on his knees by his bedside, a habit of well-bred boys he’d acquired, and he said the Lord’s Prayer. He took a hot shower, put on pajamas, and crawled into bed. The team had made him promise to check out the news to see sound bites from the press conference he’d participated in at the UN that afternoon, so he turned on the eleven o’clock news. He watched the American president announce the humanitarian financial package the international community had pledged to help Haiti, our neighbor and friend in its darkest hour, come out from under the rubble and chaos caused by the earthquake “better than ever before.” The Haitian president flashed back to a chart some United Nations Development Programme consultant had showed him estimating the earthquake had generated as much rubble as twenty World Trade Centers. It took New York City one entire year to clear the rubble of its ground zero, and nearly ten years later they had yet to finish constructing a worthy replacement, and that disaster was located in the center of one of the wealthiest cities in the world with access to the best and biggest trucks, the widest streets, and state-of-the-art dump sites, construction experts, architects, engineers, and technologists. If politics and grief could paralyze mighty New York, how much time will Haitians need to clear the chunks of concrete littering their towns when all they have are bare hands, mighty hearts, and traffic-clogged streets and zero public awareness of the concept of a dump site and pooling resources for collective sustainable development? How would the people of Léogâne, Carrefour, and Port-au-Prince muster the patience and strength to spend the next twenty years sanding down, cleaning up, and rebuilding streets when food, health care, education, and care for their children will also be concerns without regular relief? The President had no answer, and no answer came to him while he knelt and bowed his head in his hotel room. How diminutive and frail and hot under the collar that consultant back then, like the American president today, made him feel by his disparity of know-how and resources in the face of such a great challenge. The President rushed to the bathroom to vomit. While worshipping the porcelain god, he had an epiphany about the frailties of the Haitian condition and the coping devices his people, particularly, their men, had relied on over centuries and generations to gain and maintain a little dignity. The President hunted down a Haitian radio station on the AM dial and found a syrupy Roger Colas song he hadn’t heard in years, “Tu peux compter sur moi.” Sur qui? the President wondered. Sur Lui? Ou lui? Lui et moi? And for the first time in his long, tough life, the President felt a tinge of pity for someone other than himself. Out of the seeds of pity grew a wave of warm kindness and affection for a collective that had come to be symbolized by the face and fate of one stupid young man. He picked up his Black-Berry and he wrote Bobo.

It is extremely important that Alain Destiné is not harmed under any circumstance. Arrange to have him medivaced to Miami for treatment of his injuries as soon as possible. I’ll be home tomorrow.

Alain Destiné would live, the President decided, or at least not die by his hand. He’ll lose permanently his right to live in Haiti, but he’ll get to keep his life. The boy, like most of us, had lost enough things that mattered in his young life. Not least of which will be the woman he loved, my wife.

The glory of He who moves everything penetrates the universe and shines in one part more and, in another, less. This idea, learned from Dante, of course, had energized Natasha in the past and fueled her faith. It made her feel like she visited heaven when creating art, a heaven that took most of His light. And now she had seen things that should not be told, and she thought, What I was able to store up of that holy kingdom in my imagination may not be enough to get through my travails and life.

More or less around the time her husband, a veteran cynic, and her boyfriend, a robust atheist, experienced fresh sparks of faith, the object of their affections, a self-proclaimed Caribbean-born daughter of Dante and the most devout Catholic they knew, lost her faith in the fog of disaster. The fog of natural disasters had a lot in common with the more well known fog of war. The confusion caused by the chaos of war and battle, which had been practically patented by the Americans since World War II, shrouded Port-au-Prince. The notable difference between the fog of disaster and the fog of war, however, may be that the state of perplexity created by natural disasters comes with the added deprivation of a specific asshole for victims and revenge-seekers to blame for their rotten luck. The pacifying anger that comes from blaming other nationalities, ethnic groups, or religions for stunning sudden losses escapes those struck by disaster. So does its temporary relief from grieving and rebuilding. Without righteous rage, what are you left with? Are you reduced to a baby’s pre-sentient state of frustration? In this new near-fetal position, Natasha struggled to keep a handle on her sanity. Guilt, furthermore, braided through her memories of the very flawed adult she had become. She had reason to believe her boyfriend had died because she locked him in the closet in a room near the top of a building the earthquake had brought low. As if practically killing the man she loved wasn’t enough, her cuckolded husband’s subsequent surge of courage and strength in the face of the calamity that befell their island further shamed her. Regret and sadness made her feel like a living scarlet letter. Alain died because of me. My husband was a good man I treated shabbily. There’s nothing I can do to change any of those things. Heaven will have no place for me. Why am I still alive and not in the appropriate circle of hell for adulteresses? Why? The answer had yet to arrive despite her vigils under a weeping statue of Jesus on a cross in the cathedral she had chosen to call home since the disaster. After the earthquake, survivors had moved to live everywhere and anywhere around town and the countryside. They lived in parks, mostly, but also in yards and gardens and golf courses and soccer fields. Natasha made her home in the dark and dank catacombs of the National Cathedral. The cathedral’s tone of grave and perpetual mourning matched her mood well. Like a giant tomb. Strangely, no other survivors joined her. Her only company was a dying old priest who slept in a cot in his former office in the decapitated church.