Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [63]
They show me their scrapes and bruises and I hug them some more, until my body aches. I take pictures for the rest of the family. I know everyone will be astounded by how well they look, how beautiful and well put together in their impeccable clothes. I love them so much. I am so proud of them. Still, I ask myself how long they can live the way they are living, out in the open, waiting.
Two of them have tourist visas to Canada and the United States, but they stay because they cannot leave the others, who are mostly children. NC does not have a visa. She wants a student visa, to continue her accounting studies abroad. She hands me a manila envelope filled with documents, her birth certificate, her report cards, her school papers. She gives them to me for safekeeping, but also so I can see what I can do to get her out of the country.
NC, like many of my family members in Haiti, has always overestimated my ability to do things like this, to get people out of bad situations. I hope at that moment that she is right. I hope I can help. I have sometimes succeeded in helping, but mostly I have failed. Case in point: my elderly uncle died trying to enter the United States. I could not save him.
I sleep in Carrefour to be closer to the town of Léogâne, where a few of my maternal cousins still live. Something close to 90 percent of the structures in Léogâne were destroyed in the earthquake, including a small pharmacy run by a young couple I know, both of whom were killed when their building crumpled on top of them. While driving through Léogâne one morning, Jhon and I spot, past a cardboard sign with a plea for food in the entryway of a makeshift refugee camp, a large white tent with a striking image painted on it: a stunningly beautiful chocolate angel with her face turned up toward an indigo sky as she floats over a pile of muddied corpses.
Jhon leaps out of the car to have a better look.
Misty-eyed, he whispers, “Like Picasso and Guernica after the Spanish Civil War. We will have our Guernica.”
“Or thousands of them,” I concur.
Miraculously, my maternal grandmother’s house, the house where I spent parts of my summer vacations as a girl, is still standing. It had been rebuilt some years back, cement blocks replacing the wooden walls and tin roof I knew and loved. The outer wall around the property has collapsed. As has the house that my cousin Eli and his wife had recently bought a few feet away.
Since the earthquake, they had already built a tiny two-room house with wooden walls and a tin roof and a narrow porch in the middle of an open field in an area named Cité Napoléon, after my mother’s family. Eli’s new house looks like my grandmother’s old house, the one I’d loved.
Some time later, my last stop, before leaving Haiti, is at the compound in Bel Air where Maxo and his wife and children had been living. There is the church, my uncle’s chef d’oeuvre, which had been built nearly forty years earlier at street level and had cement walls and a triangular metal roof. Underneath the church, in a kind of basement that was on the same level as another street, were the classrooms for a small school. Behind the church was the two-level apartment where Maxo and his family lived. Over the years, Maxo had added two more stories and a few small rental apartments to the complex. During the earthquake, all of that crumbled and, when he was running from the street where his car was parked to the apartment where his wife and children were found, fell on top of him and the others.
No one is sure where Maxo’s son Nozial was, but it is believed that he had been playing where the rubble is most impenetrable, where all four stories piled up. Because Maxo was running when the building collapsed, he may have jumped or crawled into a place that made it easier to find his remains. The pile of rubble on top of the others made it impossible to extract theirs.
When I enter the church during my visit, I am amazed how little damage it appears to have