Overnight our country had completely changed. We had fallen asleep under a dictatorship headed by a pudgy thirty-four-year-old man and his glamorous wife. During the night they’d sneaked away-I had to see the television images myself before I could believe it-the wife ornately made up, her long brown hair hidden under a white turban, her carefully manicured fingers holding a long cigarette, the husband at the wheel of the family’s BMW, driving his wife and himself to the tarmac of an airport named after his dead father, from whom he’d inherited the country at nineteen, to an American airplane that would carry them to permanent exile in France. The presidential couple’s reign had ended, his having lasted fifteen years and hers the span of their six-year marriage. Their departure, however, orphaned a large number of loyal militiamen, who had guarded the couple’s command with all types of vicious acts. Now the population was going after those militiamen, those macoutes, with the determination of an army in the middle of its biggest battle to date.
My cousin Vaval, who’d left the house at dawn to catch a camion to the provinces but then had postponed his trip to come back and brief us on what was going on, told us how on his way to the bus depot he had seen a group of people tie one of these militiamen to a lamppost, pour gasoline down his throat, and set him on fire. The flock making its way through the alley behind our house was probably on a similar quest for vengeance, most likely looking for a man called Regulus, who lived nearby. Regulus ’ eighteen-year-old son, Romain, was my hero and the person whom at that time I considered my best friend.
It didn’t take long for the crowd to move past our house. I had to remind myself that these men and women, old and young, meant no harm to people like us, people like Mother, Vaval, and me. Vaval was so certain of this that he was standing out in front of the house watching the crowd, as though it was an ordinary parade going by. Mother, however, whose creed in life was something like “It’s harder for trouble to find you under your bed” (yes, I know there are many ways she could have been proven wrong), had thought that it would be best for us to hide. The rock coming through the window reinforced her case. I couldn’t help but be frightened. I was twelve years old, and, according to my mother, three months before my birth I had lost my father to something my mother would only vaguely describe as “political,” making me part of a generation of mostly fatherless boys, though some of our fathers were still living, even if somewhere else-in the provinces, in another country, or across the alley not acknowledging us. A great many of our fathers had also died in the dictatorship’s prisons, and others had abandoned us altogether to serve the regime.
My mother’s hiccups subsided. Judging that the crowd had moved a safe enough distance from our house, she raised a corner of her skirt and used it to wipe the sweat from her forehead, crossed herself several times, then crawled out from under the cot. She waited for me to come out, then sat on the cot’s edge and dusted a film of white grime from her knees.
“I knew that girl was not sweeping all the way under the beds,” my mother said, quickly reverting to her normal griping self, perhaps to erase the image in my mind of her cowering with fear under the cot. The “girl” she was referring to was Rosie, a distant cousin my mother had summoned from the provinces to do such things as cook and wash and sweep under beds, when she’d promised Rosie’s poor peasant parents that she’d be sending her to school. In fact, the only education Rosie was getting was from talking to the people who came to buy colas at a busy intersection where my mother stationed her when Rosie wasn’t inside the house cooking, washing, and
All the commotion with the departure of our despised leader and his wife and the crowd passing through the neighborhood had made me hungry. But what I wanted most to do was head over to Romain’s house and make sure he was okay. Like us, Romain and his mother had nothing to fear from our angry neighbors. It was Romain’s father, Regulus, they wanted. He’d beaten them up and stolen money and property from most of them and had put many of their relatives in jail or in the grave. In addition to his other crimes, Regulus had abandoned Romain when Romain was a month old. Romain had never called his father Papa but, like everyone else, referred to him as Regulus, his last name, which Romain didn’t even have.
Romain and I had met when I was about eight years old. His mother and mine had become friends, taking turns visiting each other every evening to catch up at the end of the day. I would accompany my mother on her visits to his house, and while our mothers sat inside and chatted, we would play marbles or kick a soccer ball around out front.
Unlike many of the older boys, Romain didn’t have many friends and didn’t seem to resent having to play with a runt like me. In fact, he even appeared to like it and came around to my house most Sunday afternoons to ask my mother if he could take me to a kung fu movie or for a bike ride on Champs de Mars plaza.
Our mothers had a falling-out one day-neither Romain nor I was ever able to find out from either of them what it was about-and I stopped visiting Romain’s house with my mother and he stopped coming around to ask my mother’s permission to take me places. Our outings became less frequent, but every once in a while we’d plot to meet somewhere and then proceed to a karate flick, especially if it was a new Bruce Lee.
Romain knew what it was like to be an only child. And maybe this is why he always watched out for me, stepped in if I was in a scuffle with some other kid from the neighborhood, slipped me some of his mother’s money now and then for candy and ice cream, and invited me over to his house whenever his mother was away. His maid, Auberte, would prepare whatever I wanted to eat, whether it was good for me or not. While we ate Auberte’s delicious fried sweets, I would listen to Romain talk and talk, mostly quoting lines from books I’d never read and writers I’d never heard of. Even though I rarely understood everything he said, I was grateful that he was speaking to me, like a peer, like a man.
Looking back now, I realize how much I needed someone like Romain in my life. He must have felt this too. Come to think of it, aside from Rosie and Vaval, who were always too busy with my mother’s chores to spend much time with me, Romain was my only friend.
When Mother and I finally made our way outside, we found Vaval and Rosie out front, commenting to each other on the procession of marchers that had just gone by. Before she realized that my mother and I were watching her, Rosie bent down and picked up a few sprigs of greenery and flowers that the crowd had strewn along its path. She held them up to her nose and inhaled what was left of their fragrance, even though they were dusty and soiled and had been trampled flat before she’d gotten to them.
Vaval too walked out to the street and collected a few cast-off beer and rum bottles. Putting an end to their contemplation, my mother ordered them both to go back into the house and find something more useful to do. Rosie somehow managed to interrupt Mother long enough to point out that across the alley Monsieur Christophe’s tap station had been dismantled by the passing crowd and his faucets were pumping free water faster than a newly slaughtered pig pumps blood. A different crowd was emerging now, a crowd of maids, menservants, and indentured children, restaveks, carrying all sorts of vessels, including buckets, water jugs, earthen jars, calabashes, and even chamber pots, to gather the precious water. Mother ordered Rosie and Vaval to hurry up and collect as much water as they could for our house.
At my mother’s side, I tried to calculate how much money Monsieur Christophe was losing as each of his six faucets and their missing handles pumped out several gallons of water per minute. Usually, he would sell a bucket of water for twenty centimes, to everyone except my mother, who could get it from him for less. When cassavas and colas, breads or mangoes or straw hats didn’t sell, my mother would buy a bucket of water from Monsieur Christophe and have Rosie walk through the streets downtown, reselling the water by the cup to thirsty people. Now Monsieur Christophe, a scowling, cinnamon-colored man who was only slightly taller than I, was trying to shut off the main valve that would keep any more water from gushing forth. But someone had walked away with the large knob that controlled the water flow, leaving Monsieur Christophe and a group of other men who worked for him with no choice but to try to slide the large knobless tube shut by force.
“Michel, come over here.” Monsieur Christophe spotted me during one of those times when he turned away from the valve in despair. “We need more hands.”
It was a new day, I thought. The number of people marching through the alleys when it wasn’t carnival or Rara season without being shot down by the macoutes had confirmed it. What right did our resident water hoarder have to order me to do anything? Still, I walked over. The big shove from my mother also helped me make up my mind. Besides, there was always the possibility that things could return to the way they’d been the night before-the television could have an image of the presidential couple coming back-and the crowds could ungather. Also, there were people with shops in our neighborhood, people like Monsieur Christophe, who had always been and would
