Haiti Noir

Gaspard was grateful that his daughter, after having visited her mother’s grave that morning, was safe with a neighbor, momentarily away from cars and motorcycles, at the beach. Still, in that moment he missed his daughter more than he had at any other time since she was born. He missed her so badly that he even felt jealous of the way the fabric vendor was holding her daughter. At least she’d looked after her own child during the girl’s entire short life, he thought. But he was a man. What did he know about raising a little girl? He would always need caretakers he couldn’t afford, neighbors from whom he’d have to beg favors, women he could either pay or sleep with, so they would “mother” his child. And even those most motherly acts, like bathing and dressing and plaiting hair, did not include embraces, like the type this woman was lavishing on a blood-soaked corpse. It took watching another child die in her mother’s arms to make him realize how very much he’d miss Claire when he finally gave her away for good.

The day Claire Limyè Lanmè turned three, she was returned to her father from the countryside where she had been living with her mother’s relatives since she was two days old. His wife’s death had been so startling and abrupt that seeing his daughter’s face had not only saddened but terrified Gaspard. To most people, his daughter was a revenan, a ghost, a not quite fully whole person who had entered the world just as her mother was leaving it. And if these types of children are not closely watched, they can easily follow their mothers into the other world. The only way to save them is to immediately sever them from the place where they are born. Otherwise they will always spend too much time chasing a shadow they can never reach. All this was once believed about children like Claire. San manman, motherless, was the way you described someone who was lost, brutal and cruel. Fantom, ghost, was another. People without mothers, it was believed, were capable of anything.

Aside from all of this, as soon as the umbilical cord was cut, there was the immediate problem of feeding the baby. The midwife had dressed her in a light yellow embroidered jumper from the layette his wife had spent months sewing. Gaspard had picked up the baby, wrapped her in a matching blanket his wife had also made. The midwife had rushed into town looking for some formula or possibly a wet nurse. But Claire was a silent, easy child. It was as though she already knew that she had no mother and could not afford to be picky.

During those first moments with his daughter, there were times when he had visions for which he detested himself, fantasies about letting her starve to death. He’d even considered dropping her in the sea, but these were things he was dreaming for her because he could not do them to himself. He could not poison himself like he so desperately wanted. He couldn’t hazard the possibility of leaving his child totally parentless, of having her end up in a brothel or on the streets.

While he was fantasizing about his daughter’s death, he was also worried that a mosquito might bite her and that she might get malaria or dengue fever. He feared for himself too. He feared getting hit by a car, or being struck with a terrible disease that would separate them forever. So when the midwife did not return, he wrapped the blanket more tightly around his daughter and took her into town at dusk.

Walking by the town’s largest fabric shop, he saw the fabric vendor standing by her night watchman as he locked the tall metal gates. Next to her, her fidgety three-year-old daughter Rose was tugging at her skirt. Claire began to cry and the fabric vendor turned to see where the cry was coming from. Before her eyes could rest on them, Gaspard was already walking toward the gate.

“Madame,” he said, unsure now what his next words should be.

He could already see on the fabric vendor’s cheerless face that she knew what had happened. Most of the women in town must have heard by now that his wife had bled to death toward the end of her labor, and nowhere does news spread faster than in Ville Rose.

The fabric vendor was still nursing her pudgy three-yearold- the town’s namesake-who was tugging at her skirt. This was so unusual for such a busy woman of her societal standing that everyone knew about it.

She asked her night watchman to unlock the gate, motioned for him to wait for her outside and for Gaspard to follow her inside. She pushed open another door, then flipped on a series of lightbulbs dangling over the fabric-filled shelves and standing spools of cloth. There was a long wooden bench in the waiting area and she motioned for her now sleepylooking daughter to sit there before she and Gaspard did as well. Signaling Gaspard to bring Claire closer, she unbuttoned her loose hibiscus print blouse.