stewed cashews and the chicken were legend.
Robby wanted to catch Tanya right when she was leaving work so he wouldn’t be bothered with having to say hello to her uncle, whom she worked for in a small office behind his mechanic’s shop downtown. The old man expected Robby to ask for his niece’s hand in marriage any day.
Sporting a freshly pressed pair of khaki pants, a striped short-sleeve rugby shirt, and Italian leather shoes, Robby strolled down the busy street outside his house in Delmas. He took his sweet time, seductively whistling his favorite konpa tunes at some of the women passing by. Only once did he stop a lady whose breasts were nearly spilling out over the neckline of her T-shirt. She didn’t own a cell phone so Robby gave her his number instead, even though her shoes were cheap and her fingernails were dirty. Robby would never dare bring a woman like that around Toni or his other friends. After being with Tanya and Caroline, his standards were higher. Minouche was the least sophisticated, but at least she took care of herself with weekly manicures and pedicures. Whomever he chose to marry when he was good and ready, he would also have to be able to introduce, with pride, to his mother.
Robby smiled at the thought of his mother. She had called him on New Year’s Day to remind him to come visit her in Leogane for a big bowl of soup joumou. He got his bowl of soup joumou with nice big chunks of beef and fresh warm bread, but it was from Tanya’s aunt and not from his mother.
It was just past four o’clock and Tanya would certainly be happy to see him. She wouldn’t have to get into her uncle’s jeep as he made all his stops at his friends’ houses. It was noisy as usual in Delmas. The scent of grilling chicken from a new outdoor barbecue place enticed him, but he would wait to eat with Tanya. The air was thick, and unusually still. Not even a subtle breeze blew in from the ocean to remove the daily stench. He looked up at the sky, now a paling blue, the sun a dim yellow. His eyes wandered across the road toward a woman he thought looked like Minouche. He stopped, his brows furrowed. He tied his dreads into a knot, smoothed his beard, adjusted his shirt, and made his way across the street to encounter Minouche’s accusations that he was obviously going to see another woman because he wasn’t at work.
It wasn’t until he was nearly halfway across the street, having been almost run down by a speeding tap tap, that he realized the shapely woman was not Minouche after all. He was still in the middle of the street when the ground began to shift, and it was as if a huge truck or maybe a train, like the ones that used to carry sugarcane from Leogane to Port-au-Prince during his childhood, was approaching. He looked up and down the street, trying to figure out from which direction the truck or train was coming so he could move. But when the balcony of the nearby auto parts store collapsed onto the pedestrians and merchants below, he stayed put. He crouched down to the ground, not knowing what else to hold on to, because the ground was moving. The cars and trucks stopped. The people ran in every direction. Then the buildings, the cement, maybe even the sky and clouds and sun, were falling!
He knelt, covering his head with both his arms, and clenched fists as a few small things landed on his back. He began to pray, realizing that this must be it-la fin du monde, that final judgment day that the old man who often sat on an overturned bucket down the road from his house was always preaching about to passersby. He’d been to the Protestant church with Tanya, Catholic mass with Minouche, a Sunday luncheon hosted by a foreign missionary organization at a fancy hotel with Caroline, but never in any of those instances did he give his life to Tanya and the old man’s Jesus, take Minouche’s Holy Communion, or give one cent to charity for the peasants in the countryside, as both Caroline and his mother often urged him to.
He sobbed, slowly raising his head and opening his eyes to see a cloud enveloping him. The screaming pierced his ears. He looked up at the sky, still a pale blue with a dim yellow sun, and waited for it to part, for a beam of white light to descend like some sort of ladder-something, anything, to justify the thunderous sounds. But the heavens were too peaceful. Then it must be hell, he thought. Slowly rising to his feet, he was unable to see more than a few inches in front of him. He looked down at the ground and glimpsed a crack in the road. Everything beneath him was too white. Maybe this was heaven, he speculated. But people were screaming and there was still that horrible sound as if the world itself was crumbling.
Toni was at the phone company where they both worked. The top floor housed the office where he, Toni, and the secretary, who was also Toni’s on-and-off girlfriend, worked along with two salesmen, Marlo and Donaldson. As he stood at the intersection where the building should have been, cars and trucks-some speeding, some slow- moving-dodged him and hundreds of other people who were suddenly crammed at every corner of every street. Maybe Toni, Carole, Marlo, and Donaldson had managed to run out. Maybe Toni had stepped away to get something to eat. His friend whom he had known all his life was smart, witty, and quick on his feet. He should have had enough sense to get out.
The building had completely crumbled. Robby searched for the door, a window, any opening he could squeeze through to find his friends. But then the ground shook again and he sped away from the rubble to the middle of the intersection. A woman came running toward him, screaming, grabbing him and burying her head in his chest. He did not hold or comfort her. It surprised him that he had absolutely no desire to press his body against hers, to caress her hair and tell her,
Instead, he pushed the woman away and turned in the other direction to find Tanya. Had he not kept her tender body and warm smile on his mind, he would’ve never gotten to her. The men shouted at him, demanding that he come help move rubble off a friend, a mother, a child. He moved around the dead on the ground. He walked in the middle of the street where tap taps, cars, trucks either cruised slowly by, surveying the fallen buildings, or sped past to get to a hospital, any hospital.
Had Robby not felt the stinging pain near his shoulder, the slow movement of his legs, he would’ve sworn that this was death. He stopped at an intersection that was barely recognizable. The landmarks, the signs, the stationary street vendors were all gone. He stood, turning in a full circle to survey what had become of this little portion of Port-au-Prince. He peered up toward the hills. The houses in the distance looked like an avalanche of concrete.
Robby stopped in front of the auto parts store Tanya’s uncle owned and saw a group of men lifting pieces of concrete from the caved-in entrance. The cinder-block archway where he always stood waiting for Tanya to emerge from the tiny office in the back of the open yard was buried beneath piles of rubble fallen from adjacent buildings. Tanya’s uncle, according to a spared neighbor, had been seen running back into the office, probably to alert Tanya when the ground started to move.
Robby had no idea where he found the strength to lift a fallen piece of concrete the size of a small child with his bare hands. He thrust his body into a narrow opening that led to the yard. He thought that above the screaming and praying that had become the new background noise of the city, he heard some people cheer. He could not get Tanya out of his mind. If she were under there, he would not leave until he had pulled her out. He blindly moved large chunks of concrete and long strings of rebar aside, estimating with his hands and feet the approximate location of the tiny office where Tanya might be trapped. Finally, he saw what he thought were Tanya’s beautiful legs peeking out from beneath a huge piece of wood from the doorway of the tiny office.
Robby clawed at more concrete and wood and managed to loosen the load on top of Tanya’s chest. Hauling the creaking wood aside allowed him to see an arm, then another. The impact of the fall had torn apart most of her clothes. Her flesh was sunken in places that, as well as he knew her body, he no longer recognized. Her face had been chipped apart by the debris as well, her features, her beautiful nose and mouth, all flattened into one, as though she had been kneaded by some gruesome baker’s hands.
Some more men were crawling on top of the rubble nearby. They were calling for Tanya’s uncle Serge and Manuel, one of the other mechanics.
Neither one answered.
“The building next door might collapse on top of this one,” one of the men said, as he turned around to leave. “You should get out of here.”
“Tanya!” He began calling her name, even though he knew she could not answer.
The screams he was hearing now were from farther away, out in the distance and not in the rubble beneath him.
