Haiti Noir

The neighbors would come by for a little chat, depending on the day of the week and the time, to get their fill of gossip and more details of that tragic story of the deceased brother, the little orphans, and the impoverished mothers who were taken into the home out of Christian charity by their childrens’ paternal great-aunt, a good person despite her difficult personality. Passersby who didn’t know the hidden side of their births would always react. The girls are the spitting image of Aramis, they would say. You can’t tell them apart. Real twins. Man, do those little girls look alike. It’s incredible! Doesn’t God work wonders? Isn’t that the truth! Beatrice would agree complacently. Often we would dress them the same way. It was inevitable, after all, as most of their clothes and linen- towels, washcloths, bibs, pajamas, onesies, tank tops, T-shirts, caps-arrived from Brooklyn in pairs. Only the loveys came with a very slight difference, and all that did was emphasize their similarity: two stuffed rabbits, one pink with white ears and the other white with pink ears. Compared to the display of clothes from America, with their smell of talcum powder and lavender (TB sent over laundry products and toiletries too), the few modest items of clothing we bought stood out immediately, like the poor relatives that we were.

Which of us set off the latest skirmishes? Waiting for the final selection fed the hostility between us. Our hesitant complicity rapidly crumbled away under the weight of tight-lipped comments and suspicious glances. A muted battle began, all the more unnerving as it was hidden under civil appearances so as not to provoke the wrath of the Brooklyn aunt. A dress inadvertently stained, a door banging a shoulder a little too hard-unfortunate accidents followed by hasty apologies. Beatrice took note of our new attitude with an astonished, disappointed look. She who’d never had a child, never known the pangs of hunger that wake you up at dawn and don’t give a damn about the beauty of the rising sun. She who had always lived in the banal security of her job as a government employee, with her grandaunt’s support for those needs people call superfluous, but which give life some color. With the ability to go far away if ever poverty drew too near 15 rue Paultre. To take off for Brooklyn and live with the great-aunt, work like her with Italian Jews or plain Jews, or work somewhere else. Beatrice who had probably never desired someone hard enough to trample on her fears and hold on only to the intimate smell, elusive and fleeting, of skin between her fingers. Hold on to it at any cost, for otherwise everything is pointless. And see it disappear in time nonetheless. Despite all my attempts to hold on to memories, all I had now was this baby, so much like her father and the other little girl, just as vulnerable as she was. Which one of them would reap the benefits of the aunt’s hospitality?

“I’ll always be there to help,” Beatrice would declare tersely when the tension reached a climax in the house, making the walls seem as thick as a tomb. “My aunt can’t adopt both of them. She’s not young anymore, but the other little girl will stay here with me, if you like. Don’t worry, they’ll both be taken care of.”

I could see my hopes and frustrations reflected in the other one’s hunched shoulders. Our anxiety broke the silence. Even Beatrice couldn’t escape from it. The two little girls were becoming individuals who were still largely indistinguishable, but who each had her own fate. The one who’d stay here in our country and the other who would go live with the Brooklyn aunt in her big four-bedroom apartment. Oh, not right away of course, but in a few months or perhaps a year. All the papers had to be in order and the aunt had to reduce the number of hours she worked for her Jewish-Italian bosses, to get her early retirement and do all that was needed to take care of the child. Just as soon as the lawyer filled out the adoption request form, the administrative process would begin. And already, when she pressed the girls to her chest, Beatrice would whisper into the ear of one or the other of them with a misty look in her eyes: “Well, sweetie, are you the one who’s going to leave me? So it’ll be you, my little sweetheart?” And she would shower both of them with kisses.