poor country like ours. But as to
“They want half a million American dollars,” Solange finally interrupted her philosophical neighbor, lest he should go on speaking forever. “It’s too much. Far too much. I have to imagine that they would take half of that, which is all I have liquid right now.”
In the windowless room where Rosanna sat contemplating her fate, the heat kept rising and her body began to shake in fear. She couldn’t stop thinking of all the kidnapping cases that had been in the newspapers. Of the sixteen-year-old boy who was killed and dumped on a trash heap even after his family had paid the ransom. Of the girl who had been taken all the way to the northern city of Cap Haitien and was gang raped then murdered after having both her eyes gouged out. Of the school bus full of children that had been abducted, forcing each parent to come up with a thousand dollars. Of the shoeshine man who had been beaten on the spine with a crowbar and was paralyzed because his family could not afford the ransom. But there were also happy stories, happy endings worth clinging to. There was the girl at school who had only spent several hours in captivity because her parents had quickly negotiated and paid. Not a hair on her head was touched, she had insisted to everyone at school. They had blindfolded her, just as they had Rosanna, so she didn’t know where she had been taken. All she knew was that it was extremely hot and full of mosquitoes.
There were mosquitoes flitting about Rosanna now too. By the thousands, it seemed. Flies buzzed annoyingly around her ears, occasionally landing their tiny moistened tentacles on her skin. She could also hear the man guarding her, breathing across the room, swatting the mosquitoes dead with loud slaps to his own skin.
Meanwhile, because they could not go to the police, Solange’s philosophical neighbor took Davernis with him back to the Portail Leogane bus station, hoping to find witnesses. The bus that Rosanna had intended to take to Les Cayes had already left. The street vendors who had surrounded her, and even the others who had not, but had seen everything unfold before their eyes, refused to tell them anything.
“M pa konnen,” they answered to Davernis and the neighbor’s repeated questions. I don’t know.
“I understand.” The neighbor tried to coax them with small purchases until he had an armful of wilted fruits and vegetables. “You have to come back here every day, and even talking to me right now might put you in danger, but I am a customer and customers and vendors have an intimacy.”
“M pa konnen mesye,” they all repeated, the fear evident in their eyes.
The guard was still looking at his beautiful captive, cowed in a corner in the unfinished house where they housed their victims. His blood was heating up in his veins, images of him and the girl whirling in his mind. He pictured her as a nightingale in a cage and himself both her potential killer and protector. The sense of power that this visual metaphor inspired vibrated through him. He had rarely felt this before-that is, sympathy for his captives. She wasn’t a regular payday in his eyes. His other captives were often rich men and women, spoiled aristocrats who wanted water or even soda as soon as they got here. This one had not even groaned to have the duct tape removed from her lips and she actually seemed like a genuine innocent.
A few drops of rain could be heard tapping the tin roof above them. To him it sounded like a rhythm of Gede, the god of love and death. To her it sounded like thunderclaps, and she imagined each drop as the toll of a bell that might bring help.
“Mademoiselle, I have an offer for you,” the guard said. Rosanna could hear the mild hesitation in his voice. Even though he was the one with the gun and the power and she was blindfolded and helpless, he was addressing her the way men of his class addressed women of hers. He was addressing her the way Davernis would.
“I can let you go unharmed, mademoiselle.” He tried to make his voice sound more forceful. “You are a woman, mademoiselle; you must know what I am trying to tell you. I am a man, and this desire is flowing strongly through my body. The attraction you carry around yourself creates in me the desire to make love to you. And naturally, if you allow your body to slip under mine, maybe I’ll let you escape. I have the power to let you go.” The captor removed the duct tape from Rosanna’s mouth.
“Monsieur, zanmi mwen, I beg you,” Rosanna pleaded, addressing him like someone of her own class. “You’ve already taken my freedom. Please don’t take my…”
The man stood up and abruptly unzipped his pants. He pulled out his penis and pointed it toward her, taking pleasure in knowing that she would not realize what he was doing until he was already upon her.
She heard the unzipping of the pants and the thump of his footsteps when he dropped the gun on the cement. “Tanpri ede mwen!” she cried. Please help!
Her supplications had absolutely no effect on the aggressor. He had shaken off his momentary lapse of judgment in feeling sorry for her and was now saying to himself,
With this in mind, he grabbed Rosanna’s arms and legs and stretched her out on the floor. He threw himself on top of her, stamping his lips roughly on her face. She squirmed out of his grasp and tried to roll away, scraping her skin against pebbles on the floor. She balled her fists and managed to squeeze her wrists free from the duct tape. Then, before he could reach her, she yanked the blindfold off her face.
The room was a gray square with unfinished cement blocks piled on top of one another; the roof was made of rippling tin. Up front was a padlocked black metal door to which this man probably had the key.
While she was contemplating a way out, the man grabbed her by the arm and threw her against a wall. He was using even more force than before. He squeezed her left arm and twisted her right one behind her back, trying to join them, perhaps to tape them together again.
She felt both her shoulders snap, the pain throbbing through her entire body. She had no more to lose. She had to keep fighting. For the first time since the guard had pulled the tape off her mouth, she began screaming. She screamed as loud as she could, and for every scream, every push, every punch she tried to throw, he countered with one of his own. She tried to bite him. He clung to her, pressing his body against her so tight that each of her movements echoed his. He picked her up and slammed her down on the ground, throwing his body’s weight on top of hers, pinning her to the concrete. They started rolling together on the floor, and as she struggled to break away, he took the opportunity to snatch up her skirt with an unsettling rage. Her courage was flagging. She was exhausted. Her screams seemed completely useless. No one was coming.
Rosanna cried out one last time. At that moment he raised her leg, chafed raw from the floor, and she felt something like a hot iron on the outside of her genitals, something like fire between her legs.
She opened her mouth to scream even louder, but this time no sound came out. There was just a feeling of suffocation as the iron attacked her flesh. The man grunted and shrieked with an animalistic joy. The pain grew so unbearable that she could no longer yell. He, however, was laughing as he hammered his hips into hers. Finally, the pain became so intense that she lost consciousness.
At Solange’s house, her cell phone rang again.
“Hello. Madame, it’s me. Is the money ready?” the deep voice snapped sharply.
“Sir,” Solange said in a quavering voice, “I can give you two hundred and fifty thousand U.S. dollars. That’s all we could put together.”
“What! You’re leaving the half-million behind and talking about two hundred thousand? Madame, I’ll call you later.”
While Solange waited, it felt to her as though the entire city was in mourning. Above the hills, a series of curling black clouds, sympathy clouds, draped the sky like a flock of bad-omen birds. Her eyes puffy from crying, Solange scolded herself between sobs. She should have never let that girl go to Portail Leogane. She should have agreed to the halfmillion dollars that the kidnappers were demanding. She should have told Davernis to take Rosanna directly to Les Cayes.
Her philosophical neighbor tried to reason with her: “Madame, if the kidnappers were following your Rosanna, they would have found a way to get to her. Most of these kidnappings are well planned, you know.”
The phone rang again.
