dancer Bird admired. I told him no, let’s switch roles and get it right, I am the Bird and he’s the Chan, but he wouldn’t hear of it. And sleep fell upon us, all of a sudden.
After that, we’d meet at his place, not far from the cathedral, on rue Borgelat. A very dark two-room apartment that smelled of mold and cold tobacco, because ever since my husband had left, aside from occasional one-night stands, I had no steady man in my life, which was all right by me- the body has its needs-as long as my lovers didn’t promise me the sky and the earth or rain from countries where it no longer rains. I’ve got my home, you’ve got yours. As the police were after him-he rarely went out, and only at night, in disguise, taking dark roads with their streetlights out-we agreed I would be the one to go visit him. Aside from the films he’d go see secretly, I had become his only contact with the outside world. I’d show up at his place three times a week: on Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. Like a rebellious girl, I was attracted to the danger he represented. I didn’t know why. I suppose it gave me the exhilarating feeling of betraying somebody, something I wasn’t completely conscious about, but it really turned me on. To the point where I wouldn’t remember if I truly loved him. We’d spend our evenings talking travel, although neither of us had ever left the island. The only sea he knew was the one polluted by the barrels of toxic waste foreign cargo ships dumped into the harbor of Port-au-Prince. Once, on a whim, I brought him back a shell from the sea-fest in Pestel where I’d taken my daughter. I made him listen to the sound of the waves inside it. Yes, everything was fine, until that time when he forced me to spend the night. He heard me moan in my sleep as I was touching myself. At first, he didn’t seem to mind; then, a week later, he started to think-wrongly-that I was seeing another man. From that point on, he’d made surprise visits to my home. Most times he’d run into my daughter, sitting on the stoop in front of the house, smoking a cigarette. She was rather nuts-had always been so- but was very beautiful, with big black, sunken eyes, a subtle smile. She knew what he was coming for, so she’d look him up and down and stick her tongue out at him.
Jimmy was buried at the national cemetery on a Saturday morning. Dirty, ragged children wept and put flowers on his grave. That day, there were also women, many women, most of them very beautiful, wearing long dark dresses under the shade of their black silk mantillas. I was there too, with my daughter, in the background, dry- eyed. I had the impression that we weren’t there for his funeral but for an ultimate erotic parade, a way for each of us to prove to him that we loved him more than anything, more than that tall, big-boned woman who was looking disdainfully at me from behind the gray designs of her fan, sweating in the heat of the last days of summer.
One afternoon, in the middle of our endless interviews with Inspector Joseph, my daughter came out of her room almost naked. She leaned over the inspector’s ear and told him that if he went looking into the crumpled sheets of the hotel room, he could find, in the play of the shadows created by the subdued light of the lamp on the bedside table, the meanderings of the murder, how the scene had unfolded. The inspector knew she’d been born nutty and he laughed, but that same afternoon he took us to the crime scene, to that hotel high up in the Carrefour-Feuilles neighborhood, to that room with a view over the harbor and the rusty roofs that hemmed in the sea. He took pictures of the hotel which had been deserted since the night of the crime, of its entrance lined with bougainvilleas and oleanders, of the walls of the room decorated with cheap paintings, of the bedspreads, of the private cop with his hunting rifle who had seen the young woman arrive on Jimmy’s arm, her steps heavy with alcohol, both laughing madly.
After the visit, we walked part of the way home, and my daughter kept repeating that in the room she had felt the presence of Irene Gouin, who had bent over Jimmy’s blood-soaked body and felt sublime. She was talking nonstop, deciding even as she was detailing them how the facts were to be arranged. And me, to cool off the situation, I reminded Inspector Joseph that she has never been in her right mind. She pretended not to hear me, and kept on talking as if she wanted to take control of the situation, deconstruct the hypothesis of unpredictability and randomness of Jimmy’s murder: Irene’s act and her state of mind at the time, the strong smell that night of salt and seaweed, of the sea rising from the harbor, filling the city streets with their brackish fragrance, Jimmy’s ugly skin and bones, the golden reflection of his Barbancourt rum on the rocks, and the bubbles in Irene’s Coke at the hotel bar, before they went up to the room.
She encouraged the inspector to get rid of his pretentious desire to understand everything about a life that took pleasure in secrecy, the way a virgin might get pleasure from her little perfumed firebrand, she said, explaining to us that sometimes, when she had nothing else to do, she imagined she was the murderess Irene Gouin, and that they resembled each other down to every detail of her face, like two drops of water at the bottom of the ocean.
On the Chemin des Dalles, near the Saint-Geraud bridge, we stopped a cab and settled into the backseat. The cab was really a pile of scrap metal, a small apple-green Datsun that you could immediately tell dated back to the ’70s. A little old guy with a straw hat on his head was at the wheel, driving slowly. He threw himself into rue Pavee, and taking advantage of the traffic jam, started to talk, mumbling through his teeth. Seeing we didn’t pay any attention to him, he put on some konpa music by Shleu-Shleu. We got off at the entrance to my neighborhood, at the top of the Bel-Air hill. My daughter headed straight to the stand of the spirits seller, Brigitte. She was thirsty, she said, although our house was nearby. Scratching the back of her head, she ordered a rum taffy. Inspector Joseph and I caught up with her right away. She was swaying her body more and more wildly. I sometimes thought I’d brought her into the world so she would become my master and I her slave, I told the inspector, as if she was the one who had tinkered with me, knowing she was the prolongation of my dreams, my shipwrecks. I had projected myself on her, wondering on which of her shoulders she would have to bear my cross. But she was more clever than I was and had escaped in time.
Then the inspector left me and walked up to my daughter as if to give her a kiss. He held up his hands too, like he was framing her in his camera, before moving closer.
“Oh!” she exclaimed, as if she’d never seen the man before. She swallowed her rum in one gulp and a few drops escaped from the corners of her lips. She handed the empty cup to Brigitte, coughing in the loose end of her blouse, wiped her mouth with the back of her hand, and thanked her. She then lit a cigarette, grabbed the inspector’s arm, and led him to our place, except that all the inspector wanted was to talk about Jimmy.
Before our conversations, I usually offered him coffee and cookies, but this time I didn’t find any in the kitchen. So I joined them in the living room. It was very hot. The inspector was helping my daughter open the two sides of the high window that looked out onto the facade of a big white house on the other side of the street. I walked up to them.
My daughter said, “Come on, Manman!”
The inspector didn’t see my knife entering the back of his head, and blood, not thick but clear and sweet- smelling, spurted onto my face.
“That big white house is where Irene Gouin lives,” my daughter said as he was dying.
Irene Gouin’s house, she explained, was a mix of high tech and refinement, a hotel with a gym and a large room for brunches, a white marble porch at the entrance, a living room with a glass ceiling, a white Chesterfield couch, a vodka bar, a sun deck, and spacious, luminous bedrooms. An electrical system allowed you to create a mood with all shades of blue, tile-and-chrome bathrooms, deep oval bathtubs, thick white wall-to-wall carpeting, pop art-colored objects.
Yes, Irene Gouin’s house, my daughter went on, had two duplex suites with their own swimming pools. The top floor was for B.H., a famous singer. It included an immaculate bedroom and, at the head of the stairs, a small living room opening up onto a deck with a view of the city’s rooftops and a tiled swimming pool all lit up at night. The bedroom led to a second deck-summer breeze and diving under the sky.
Irene Gouin, my daughter said, wanted nothing to do with the neighborhood people and even less with the good old city of Port-au-Prince, which sometimes takes itself for London or Paris.
Everybody was dirt on her shoes, she said. When she arrived in the neighborhood, Irene Gouin didn’t introduce herself to anybody, and they all understood her need for solitude, and Irene Gouin had always been very composed. Irene Gouin never wanted to have company, couldn’t stand heroes, Saturday-night drunks, and Sunday Christians. At first everybody had doubts about her, but after a month they thought they were lucky because she didn’t behave like those young Dominican girls with hennaed hair who partied all night long.
From her window, my daughter concluded, she could sometimes see smoke billowing out from that Irene Gouin’s cigarette or hear the notes of “Please Don’t Talk About Me When I’m Gone” looping, over and over again. My daughter was Irene Gouin.
