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Prologue
I was probably in my twenties, alone and wandering the Saint-Antoine neighborhood, by then empty of its old, well-born families and full of people without pedigree or last name, when I learned most of what I know about the ordinary defeats that constitute the lives of the humble. And by the humble, in both economic and emotional terms, I mean the men and women who have aspired to common things—love, clean water—that are unobtainable to the point that it leaves its mark and dims something in their eyes forever.
Searching for an extinguished star, positing it as the most wonderful hypothesis, is more or less a constant in these stories. The dictatorship is an oft-recurring theme. It marked my childhood and adolescence. But romantic and family relationships are also a theme. In Port-au-Prince, where I first learned to look, I saw so many situations that were factories of unhappiness, of abhorrence, yet went unnoticed, drowned in a flood of ordinary sadness. Much of that sadness finds its way into this book, as does, from time to time, the victory of an affectionate act or a smile.
Those who profit, who wield power, those whom fortune favors yet who whine at finding their whims thwarted, those who form couples, who are loved, connected, beautiful, those who have the power to do, to choose, to refuse, to exclude, already have reality on their side. I don’t know that they also need writers and literature to sing their triumphs. I dedicate this book to the wounded and the outcast, who have a right to revenge and sometimes take it, if only in words.
The Living and the Dead
My mother had a one-eyed cousin.
This extraordinary man brought us news of the dead every evening. He was always followed by an entourage. His people were the dead. He maintained a constant communication with them, an unalloyed friendship. In the cool of water jars, in the corridors of the Palais de Justice (he was a lawyer), in the stands of the stadium, in reception rooms, under arbors, the dead reached out to him so he could tell their stories. He knew all the great heroes. Many a time, by his telling, he had happened on Dessalines lost in thought and discussed public affairs with him. From his workroom, thanks to his great learning, he’d often exchanged words with Baal and the Archangel Michael. He also spoke with more recent ghosts, the unimportant dead who had been stacked together in ill-defined cemeteries but still had much to say.
Roger would arrive at nightfall, my mother would offer him a chair, and the great tale would pour forth, from all the dead who had acquired wisdom in the afterlife that they’d never had while living. From the great number of people who spoke through Cousin Roger’s mouth, I came to believe that death was nothing very serious, since we don’t really go away but stay connected to the living. One ancestor predicted imminent political events. Another had advice on the education of girls and the career plans of members of the family.
Then, unexpectedly, Roger himself died. The event had a disruptive effect on my views. All the dead died with him. Other people tried to pick up where Cousin Roger had left off, but no one had his talent. His death killed off the dead, and his silence sentenced me to live with only the living.
Sad Guitar
Everyone in Saint-Antoine knew the young guitarist. He played by the streetlights and seemed to have a great talent for dreaming. His parents worried over his irresponsibility. His head was stocked full of popular songs, but none of the essential considerations: the future, making a living, starting a family. What he needed was a new résumé. His elders worked hard to get him a visa and buy him an airline ticket and some winter clothes. Tired of seeing him strum his tunes under the streetlamps, they endured a thousand sacrifices to give him a boost and set him on his feet in a foreign land. The United States is no paradise, but everybody knows it’s better than Saint-Antoine, and once thrust into that major arena, even the sorriest dolt could figure something out.
Jean left. And for years, the neighborhood had no news of this exemplary boy who’d resisted maturity for so long. Not every man becomes an adult willingly. In the end, we did get news of him, through another local boy who’d worked in a Brooklyn factory for ten years before returning home on his first vacation. Pierre had married a blond girl. Anasthase owned his own taxi . . . The neighborhood kids had done well for themselves, all except Jean. We learned that our musician friend never did manage to put a new string to his bow, or his guitar. He hadn’t understood that “man’s genius lies in his adaptability,” that “as you make your bed, so shall you lie in it,” and other wise sayings that a person picks up as a matter of course while waiting for payday in a Brooklyn factory. Jean had fled New York, feeling ill-at-ease in his winter clothes. And he never managed to hold down a job for more than seventy-two hours. For a while he played his music in Florida’s national parks and beaches. Then, like a memory, he was gone.
His death, too, was exemplary: he had no accomplice. On a street in Little Haiti, some attentive neighbors grew concerned about the smell and duly alerted the authorities. They found a man and a guitar in the bedroom. Jean is resting now in Miami-Dade Memorial Park, where he receives no visitors. And as no one thought to repatriate it, his guitar is still, I believe, living in poverty.