a boy with a mother who tried to protect me so much that her actions incited me to go out and discover everything myself, was like twenty years for another kind of boy.
“He sometimes brought women here,” Romain said. “I used to follow him here. I thought he might have come here today.”
“Who, your father?” I asked.
I don’t know why, but every now and then I would ask a dumb question like that, demand an explanation for something I already knew.
“No,” Romain snapped, “
I don’t think he even realized why he said it. He was impatient, angry. His nerves were raw. Besides, it wasn’t as if I hadn’t suspected it. Unaware that I was paying attention, people had often whispered things around me, from the girls in the neighborhood who coyly commented how much I looked like Tobin, the child of the wife, the “inside” child, to even Tobin himself, who was sometimes kind to me and sometimes refused to look me in the eye as though we were rivals, to the wife who refused to ever come anywhere near the tap station in order to avoid facing her husband’s indiscretions and their living results. Still, it was too painful for me to be reminded that I had a father who lived and worked so close to me and still didn’t call me his son. I didn’t understand why my mother had to struggle so much to earn money when she could have asked him for it, why she had to force Rosie into virtual slavery to keep us afloat. I didn’t understand why Christophe hadn’t offered my mother money to feed and clothe me, why he only sold her water at a discount and did not offer it to her outright since it was water that I, his son, could also use.
As I sat there with Romain with the straw separated from the Coke bottle yet still hanging out of his mouth, it wasn’t the shock of hearing Christophe declared my father yet again that made me cry. I was simply ashamed to be considered a dishonorable secret.
Romain tried to reach over and stroke my head, but I shoved his hand away. I wanted to grab one of the Coke bottles and smash it against his skull, but I knew he would catch the bottle before it could hurt him.
He had brought me here, he’d said, to make me a man. Was this what he meant? Did he think that seeing his own murderous father hiding out in a low-grade hotel to keep from being burned alive would illustrate what kind of man I ought not to be? Was telling me, reminding me, about Christophe in this blunt, off-the-cuff manner his way of teaching me that I shouldn’t want to be too much like Christophe either? Or was it simply Romain’s way of forcing me to accept what he was about to do?
It was becoming clear to me that Romain was leaving, going off someplace where I couldn’t follow him.
“The taxi’s waiting for you outside,” he told me. “He’ll get you back to your mother.”
I was too angry at him then to ask him where he was going. I didn’t care.
“I’m leaving the country,” he said. “I’m getting out tonight.”
“But you didn’t do anything.” I heard myself sobbing, but I didn’t know whether I was crying for Romain and Regulus or for Christophe and myself.
“I just can’t stay here,” Romain said.
“What about your mother?” I asked. “What about Regulus?”
“I’ll get in touch with my mother when I reach where I’m going,” he said. “As for Regulus, he’s not my problem.”
And then it was very obvious to me, starting with the way his hands were shaking and his frowns were sinking deeper into his sweating forehead, that Regulus had always been his problem, the biggest problem of his life.
“Go on now,” he said. “The taxi’s waiting for you.”
I slowly got up and walked away, counting each step up the staircase leading to the lobby and then down the driveway where the taxi was waiting. I never looked back.
In the taxi, I lay down on the backseat and closed my eyes, shutting out everything, all the noise, the chants, the crowds out on the street. The car moved slowly and the roads were bumpy, but I didn’t care.
Given all that was happening-the looting of homes and businesses of former government allies, the lynching, burning, and stoning of the macoutes, the thousands of bodies that were suddenly being discovered in secret rooms at the city morgues and in mass graves on the outskirts of the capital-it would have been heartless of my mother to punish me, and she didn’t. Instead she yelled at Rosie and Vaval for not watching me closely enough, for letting me wander away.
“Soon after you went off,” my mother said with a severe yet knowing look, an almost kind look, “Monsieur Christophe managed to get his water turned off, but not before everyone in the neighborhood got enough to use for days in case the situation takes a bad turn and we’re all trapped inside our houses, like in the old days before you were born, under the father.”
“The father?” I asked dumbly.
I knew she meant the dictator father of the dictator son, but somehow I wanted to offer her an opening into a conversation that even then I knew we’d never have.
Though it was still light outside, I went to bed, trying to give the impression that it was the country’s political problems that were disturbing me. I’d let my mother keep her secret; I didn’t want her to feel like a liar.
That night we fell asleep to the sound of gunfire, sometimes from around the corner and sometimes in the distance. My mother and I slept on opposite sides of her room, on the floor.
When we woke up the next morning, Vaval had more news to report, this time with Rosie chiming in. A group of young men had spotted Regulus sneaking back into his house in the middle of the night to collect some of his belongings. They had cornered him, and to avoid being taken by them, Regulus had shot himself in the head.
I remained curled on the floor and I listened, hoping that Romain was too far away to ever hear of this. Lying there, I remembered something Romain had told me three days before. Rumors had been circulating that the president and his wife might be fleeing the country. The president had gone on television to deny the rumors, saying he was as “unyielding as a monkey’s tail.”
I didn’t know much about monkeys back then, except for a proverb that said if you teach a monkey how to throw stones, it will throw the first one at your head. So I asked Romain to tell me about monkeys’ tails.
Monkeys with short tails live on the ground, he’d said, and those with longer tails make their homes closer to the sky, in high trees. Some tree monkeys have tails that are longer than their bodies, tails that they use to swing from tree to tree. We’d both laughed, wondering which kind of monkey’s tail our president had imagined himself to be.
“He was a short-tailed one, but now he’s a long-tailed one,” Romain had said. “He’s looking for another tree.”
It had seemed impossible then that after fifteen years, a man who’d inherited a lifelong presidency at age nineteen would ever abandon it. But it also hadn’t seemed possible that Romain too could disappear and never be heard from again.
My mother is dead now. One day she collapsed from what was said to be a heart attack, but what I believe was her heart shattering into little pieces because, unlike me, she had loved Christophe and suffered quietly from his not loving her back. I have no proof of this, of course, for my mother was a stern and guarded woman who never would have taken a young boy, even as he became a man, as a confidant. Soon after my mother died, I left Haiti, at twenty, turning over my mother’s house to Rosie and Vaval.
I don’t know what’s become of Romain. I haven’t seen or heard from him since that day at the hotel. His aunt Vesta moved out of the neighborhood soon after Regulus died, and his mother never returned from her business trip. I don’t even know whether Romain’s still alive or dead.
Monsieur Christophe remains very much alive, Rosie and Vaval tell me when I call now and then to check on them, but he has retired and has turned the tap station and other businesses he’s since acquired over to his son Tobin.
To everyone who asks me about my father, I tell and retell the myth that my mother so carefully crafted and guarded for me, that my father perished before I was born, lost his life to something “political.”
As for you, my son, your myth is this: it’s now past midnight; if you’re born today, on this, the anniversary of the day that everything changed for me, on the day that I became a man, your name will be Romain, after my first true friend.
