God Loves Haiti (9780062348142) (10 page)

Natasha sucked her teeth. Really, Alain? she said. Please let's not talk about this anymore. What's the alternative for me? Stay here with you until you get tired of me and leave me behind?

I'll ignore that provocation, he said. You know I will never leave you. You own me.

Alain smiled at this, for it was true. Despite her effort not to, Natasha smiled at this one truth they shared.

Stay, he continued. Together, we could turn the bookstore and all the other businesses I've started into something special. It won't be long before someone pays my father a lot of money for the store. We'll live in the big house. Have children . . .

You and your big business fantasies! They never stop, do they? They take too long to become reality.

Because they're realistic. Growth takes time. It's normal. It's normal in the US and Europe, too. So it should be normal here. Come on, you loved hanging out at the bookstore. I told you about that Canadian couple that
was interested in buying it a few months back. Once we spruce it up, we'll get an even better price for it. I'll have the nest egg to set us up in Montreal or New York.

Those cities are too cold for me, she said.

Miami then. Even though I hate Miami.

I love Miami, though I've never been. I hear it's nice and small and warm.

It's also dirty. You have to drive too much there for me. There's a highway there, I-95. Almost every day you see a couple cars on the side of the road crunched up in ridiculous shapes after accidents. Sometimes I can't even figure out how the cars collided to produce those shapes. I suppose you could have fun there, turning those scenes into paintings. You love the macabre.

Even while blustering to buy time, Alain Destiné could tell he'd upset Natasha. She stiffened in her thin white dress, which had acquired a bluish tint from the first rays of the dawn sunlight. She hated the way he, like many people, spoke of art, especially her art, as though the work allowed them to read the artist. Like they knew her. Don't tell me what I love to do, she thought. Don't tell me about myself because part of you was aroused while taking in my art. The connection between the work produced and me, my heart, is never as simple and linear as you want it to be. Alain remembered the first lecture Natasha had given her about this: I create because I like to do it when I'm moved to do it, and it feels natural, funny. The colors and shapes flow through me. I create images and not
words because I'm not interested in debate or discussion. I even know novelists who feel the same way. I bet most do. I could care less what you think of it. Experience it as romantic or macabre all you want, for sure, but keep your theories about it, and me, to yourself.

She didn't say all that to Alain this time, for she was tired and ready to move on with her life. Still . . .

You and that fucking nest egg, she said.

Yeah, that fucking nest egg, he said. You're an artist, baby. People don't have to know who you are or what you look like or even if you can speak English before they buy your work, invest in you. Me, I've been to other countries. I've seen life there. Jobs good enough to take care of a family are almost as hard to secure in lands of plenty when you're a foreigner as they are here. No one likes immigrants, especially your precious Europeans. Notice how I talk about jobs when it comes to life abroad while here I talk about creating organizations. Out there, I can't just go out, make shit up, and make a living. I can here.

You can do it anywhere, Alain, she said. You're the smartest man I know! A sound businessman. Let's go away and create something, a new organization, a new business. Whatever. Something. Let's just go. I can't believe we're having this argument again.

I can't leave Haiti again, Natasha, Alain said, suddenly fatigued. My life is here. This is my country. It's your country too, by the way. Haitians need you more than the Italians do. Stop acting like you don't know that.

Shhhh, not so loud, Natasha said.

I don't care if your husband hears me.

Why don't you want me to be happy?

Why do you have to leave me to be happy? Why can't you be happy with me here? Wait, you are happy with me here, if last night and this morning were an indication.

Natasha smiled.

It's not you, Alain, she said. It's me. It's this city, this country. I don't know how to explain it. They bring me down. I can't breathe here anymore.

Why?

I don't know why. Maybe I need to leave Haiti to understand why. It's hard to explain. I feel like nothing ever happens here. Or what happens here is not enough. We live. We suffer. We die. Prematurely. Suddenly. Passively.

That's how it goes for all mankind, Natasha.

But here, the sun shines and shines and shines. Then the sky rains and rains and rains. Only the stoic palm trees seem to be in on the joke, the incredible nothingness of this tropical sameness. The extremes of this country are just too much. They threaten to make me numb to novelty and invention. The joy of inspiration stopped existing here for me recently. I don't want to feel numb, but I do. I can't work and certainly can't live that way. From what I can tell, life here's been the same way since the beginning! Maybe I don't fit in to this society anymore. Maybe I don't want to fit in to this society anymore. Maybe I can't. Come on, Alain, you know what I'm talking about.
You're the only member of your entire class at College Bird who still lives in Haiti.

So fucking what? I'm happy here. The country's been good to me. More than generous. Can you imagine the obstacles our forefathers and mothers had to overcome to make sure we got the chance to exist in this room in this town this day? The Middle Passage across the Atlantic from Guinea and Benin, which meant weeks, if not months, of living in the bowels of too-small and too-crowded Dutch ships. Slavery. Centuries of slavery. The rebellion. Two decades of revolutionary war. The international embargoes. Two centuries of them shits. The American occupation. Two decades of that. The Duvaliers. Three decades of them. Post-Duvalier anarchy. Two decades and counting. We only know the other stuff from books. We are children of the anarchy era. Still, I bet you everyone from Haiti's previous eras would happily trade places with you for life in this Haiti, this so-called vacuum of originality. The so-called Republic of NGOs. How could Haiti be so devoid of inspiration when we fell in love here? What greater creation can a society allow, the freedom to love? Do you remember that day?

I don't want to, she said.

She looked down. Her toenails looked nice. Pink went well with her dark chocolate skin. She should cry, she told herself. Cry, Natasha. Cry, damn it. He deserved as much. He deserved to see you cry at least once for the pain you have caused him and will cause him further still this day.
Let him see that you hurt as much he does. For once. Just a little. It could be your good-bye gift to him. Oh no, what is he doing?

I told you I was almost ready for round four, Alain said.

Alain wrapped his arms around Natasha and cupped her breasts through her thin dress. She could feel his readiness and his forgiving smile without turning around. Natasha purred. Oh, baby, she said. The condoms are on the top shelf of my closet. Could you please go get them first?

Yes, Alain said. Though pregnancy would make a hell of a parting gift, he thought.

I can't find them, he said, once inside the closet. The room was large and empty and poorly lit. Its owner had clearly given up on it. Natasha didn't answer him. Instead he heard her close the closet door on him, then lock it, carefully, tenderly, as if she were closing a coffin.

What, what are you doing, Natasha? Alain said. Are you crazy?

I'm sorry, Alain, Natasha said. But I have to. I have to go.

Alain stood there in his bare feet with a rapidly shrinking erection, hands on his hips, mouth agape. He was a businessman, an expert at cost-benefit analysis. No cost-benefit analyst worth his salt would recommend he start screaming and pounding on the door from inside a married woman's closet in her bedroom in a palace under armed guard while her husband slept down the hall. No, I can't do that, he thought. Not even if I wasn't naked.
You're a real genius, Destiné. How could you overplay your hand so badly? How the hell did you end up trapped in a closet in another man's mansion with no clothes on?
Mon Dieu
, he thought. What a bitch.

He heard keys faintly jingle outside the closet. They had been tossed on the floor. He couldn't tell if they'd landed inside or outside the bedroom. Alain heard Natasha open the door leading out of her room into the hallway. The girlfriend who wouldn't have been his girlfriend if he'd been a wee bit less cocky walked out of her room without looking back. Alain would have felt her glance if she had. Three men swooped in to take her luggage. They did so silently. Then the bedroom door closed, and Alain knew he had been left alone with only the creaking sound of his breaking heart for company.

E
ight hours later, a serene calm fell on the National Palace. For one of the rare times in its two-hundred-year history, the city seemed to be empty. Alain Destiné found his ability to coolly assess and deal with his situation fray. He sat on the floor and sobbed. The floor was carpeted and the carpet was plush. He felt like he was having a heart attack. He pressed his hand hard on his breast, as if trying to keep his heart from exploding out of his chest and through his eyes and nose. He could barely breathe. He felt dizzy. Alain tried to stand but his legs buckled under his weight. He fell to an elbow. A pop song's lyric
wafted through his mind: “Be still my beating heart / It would be better to be cool.” Last September,
Le Nouvelliste
, the Haitian newspaper of record, had praised Alain for his cool. The august daily named him among the young business leaders of the future of Haiti because he had successfully negotiated raises for workers at a Pepsi bottler in Léogâne, ending a strike.

Congratulations, Mr. Capitalist Tool, Natasha said when he sneaked into her bed that evening, wearing the stink of several celebratory drinks. You're really going to be popular in the business community after this move.

Alain ignored her sarcasm. He knew she was right. She was always right. His bosses were unhappy with the deal with the union. They hated the word “union.” Politically, though, his reputation received a boost and a new dimension. Thanks to his feat, the government finally began to take a hard look at how it could better protect the country's workers. It began to explore setting up a national minimum wage policy and an agency to enforce it, a chairmanship job Alain was going to audition for at a parliamentary hearing scheduled for the next day. He was only twenty-five years old, a smooth talker in a nation of smooth talkers, armed with a hard-won MBA from New York University. He had been holding his own in a town overpacked with internationally educated bullshit artists far more seasoned than he was. He had already proved adept at cultivating good mentors in the local and international castes that ruled Port-au-Prince, including the
president of the republic, Natasha's husband. His friends among the working-class people who did the hard work of trying to build and live in Haiti all year round kept faith in him too. Nothing had ever gone wrong for young master Destiné, not for long anyway, during his rise from anonymous son of an anonymous librarian from Place Boyer to potential industrialist and policymaker. He had no reason to believe it ever would. He got things done. That's what he did. He was a rare bird. Debilitating setbacks for other men were mere speed bumps for him. Winning was easy. It's my Destiné, went his lame pun about why his luck was so consistently good and his will and wits were so consistently winning.

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?