Haiti Noir

Molasses-toned with bulging penny-colored eyes, Claire was still lying on the foam-board cot in their single-room shack, her thin night dress soaking in the back with sweat, as she dreamed of something she wouldn’t be able to recall when she was fully conscious. Upon waking, she wrapped her long bony arms around her father’s neck, just as she had when she was even littler, pressing her nose against his tear-dampened cheek. Some years before, her father had told her what had happened on her very first day on earth, that giving birth to her, her mother had died. So her birthday was also a day of death, and the rogue wave and the dead fishermen proved that it had never ceased to be. Even so, before her father had spoken that morning, Claire had hoped that he might have come to wish her a happy birthday, but she knew that he might also be saying goodbye.

The day Claire Limyè Lanmè turned six, Ville Rose’s new mayor decided to host a massive victory party in the seaside town. However, before the party, he gave a long and tiresome speech from one of the stone steps of the town hall, which overlooked a flamboyant-filled piazza, where hundreds of residents stood elbow to elbow in the May afternoon sun. The mayor’s speech was badly organized, and even more badly delivered, and the mayor, a tall balding man, soaked, with his sweaty fingers, the nearly twenty typewritten pages the speech was written on, even while occasionally pulling a handkerchief out of the breast pocket of his armpit-stained linen suit to wipe his brows. Claire was wearing her pink muslin birthday dress, her thick, woolly hair neatly plaited and covered with tiny bow-shaped barrettes. She sat on her father’s shoulders while he stood on the edge of the crowd, close to the giant speakers that made Claire feel the mayor’s words rattling through her bones. Still, she could hear a familiar voice shout above it all that it seemed as though the speech had been written by a primary school boy.

“Don’t all political speeches sound like that?” her father replied, inspiring a coy smile from the woman he had snaked through the crowd to stand next to. The woman was in her early thirties but, because she was short and round with an oval girlish face, looked a lot younger. She owned one of Ville Rose’s most popular fabric shops, where Claire’s mother, a seamstress for the town undertaker, used to buy cloth. After Claire’s mother died, whenever Gaspard went in to buy a piece of cloth to have a dress made for his daughter, the woman would always refuse payment by saying, “Fòk youn voye je sou lòt.” We must look after one another.

Only when the fabric vendor stroked Claire’s knees during the mayor’s speech, occasionally glancing at her then quickly returning her gaze to the mayor’s clammy face, did Claire realize that this was the woman her father had been trying to give her to for years.

The mayor had commissioned from a local artist a giant portrait of himself, looking younger and more lithe and athletic than he had ever been. That portrait, reproduced on what seemed like a massive bedsheet, draped the front of the town hall and other official buildings.

“Thank you for putting your trust in me,” the mayor was winding down nearly an hour after he’d begun speaking.

Gaspard cupped his hands over his mouth, joining his fists into a funnel that led into the woman’s delicate seashellshaped right ear: “Next time we’ll put even less trust in you.”

Later that evening, the fabric vendor showed up at the seaside shack to have another look at Claire. Gaspard had insisted that Claire pat her hair down with an old bristle brush and that she straighten out the creases and wrinkles in the pink muslin dress that he’d made her keep wearing all day. Standing in the middle of the shack, the woman asked Claire to twirl by the light of a bell-shaped kerosene lamp on the small table where the girl and her father usually ate their meals. The walls of the shack were covered with flaking, yellowing newspapers glued to the wood long ago with limestone and manioc paste. From where she was standing, Claire could not see her own stretched-out shadow, which always made her feel taller, and thus older.

While twirling for the lady, Claire wondered whether her father had already been made the usual promises, that she would not be whipped, that she would be kept clean, that she would be well fed, that she would be sent to school, that she would be taken to a clinic when she was sick. All this perhaps in exchange for some cleaning both at home and at the shop. The woman had no living children so there would be no older kids to tease and beat her.

“You would be staying with a nice lady,” her father had told her on the way to the mayor’s speech that afternoon. “It would be like an adoption. You’d be a doll for her to dress up, the little girl she lost.”

But as soon as Claire stopped twirling, the woman turned to her father, her long shiny fake hair blocking half of her copper face.

“My girl was older,” she said.