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English texts

Resentment

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Eva received a few marriage proposals that she rejected or perhaps it was the men that were backing off. She had one non-negotiable condition for saying yes: she would never bear a child. 

Eva’s mother, Trinity, liked to tell her how her dad and her formed a couple until Eva was born in 1960 on Thanksgiving Day. Her father felt useless while Trinity was in the labor room getting ready for delivery. During this time, he went through an array of emotions. His joy switched to uncertainty, his excitement to anxiety, all while recalling bad jokes too often heard from playboy friends: “Fatherhood is an act of faith”. 

When Eva was brought to him, he seemed indifferent both to her and his tired wife. He performed a methodical examination of the little creature before him and felt no real connection to her. He anxiously searched for the features resembling his.  Not my nose, my mouth or my forefront, he noted. “She is not mine” he dropped out loud as he stormed out. 

Eva grew up without a father and with a mother who despised her for being the reason her husband walked away. Eva would not risk putting a child into this world until she knew they would be unconditionally loved. She could never have confirmation of this ahead of time and therefore condemned herself to a lonely life. It was cruel that something she could not control, like the shape of a nose, could determine the love of a dad. 

Des Nouvelles d'Elisabeth, English texts

The Escalator

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Invitation

“The All Appliances Store” at Port-au-Prince
invites you to
the unveiling of the first escalator of Haiti
on Friday, June 21, 1996 at 5:00 pm.

Cocktail attire.
RSVP: 225-1996

When Elisabeth’s friend told her about this exciting invitation, she had no doubt that she would also receive one. She surely did not want to miss the unveiling of the first escalator in her country! She became thrilled remembering that her and Jeff Lafleur, one of the owners of “the All Appliances Store”, attended the same college in the United States. He would certainly not forget to put her on the guest list. Gossip travels fast in small countries, and Jeff probably knew that she admired his hardworking family who invested heavily in their poor, unstable, and risky economy. They were the ones who introduced modern appliances in the Haitian households: refrigerators, microwaves, washing machines, electric irons, and more. She thought they were visionaries and respected their success.

Two weeks before the event, no invitation had reached Elisabeth. She dared calling Jeff despite the fact that it had been years since she had her last conversation with him. She couldn’t resist telling him how honored she would be to be present for this upcoming important gathering that his family was hosting. Flattered by Elisabeth’s uplifting words on the achievements of the Lafleurs, Jeff acted as if Elisabeth’s envelope had been sitting on his desk, waiting for a confirmation of the recipient’s address. After the call, he promptly assigned one of the drivers the task to hand deliver Elisabeth’s envelope. On the printed card, he wrote a personal note: “So glad you can make it”. That would compensate for the late delivery of this invite.

Once Elisabeth had the assurance to be part of the headcount, she would start planning her outing. How should she dress? In June, it is still daytime at 5 pm. A nice skirt suit should be perfect. Does she have one that fits? Elisabeth would not want it to be black. Black looked too serious, too professional, and rigid and it was not really cocktail attire. A nice tender color would do better. She remembers a pretty baby blue skirt and jacket purchased about a year ago, that she wore only once. With a white shirt, a golden breast pin, a pair of classic black patent leather pumps, she should be fine.

She wisely made arrangements to carpool with two friends. With the insecurity prevailing in the streets, it was safer not to be alone in a car. In addition, an article of the local press about this event released that there would be 500 guests. Parking would be an issue, and it would help to have to find a place for only one car.

At their arrival, they are welcomed by a rum punch and excellent Haitian delicacies: “acras” (1), fried plantains, fried breadfruits, crispy peanuts, delicious griot (2). The store is clean, spotless, well decorated, and chairs are placed facing the majestic shining escalator showing a red and blue ribbon ready to be cut. An orchestra is playing some background music. The crowd gets bigger and bigger. Everyone is smiling, mingling, happy to see each other, conversing admiringly about the Lafleur family.

A host announces the beginning of the ceremony with a procession marching towards the podium located by the stairs. The parade is headed by the members of the board of directors of the family venture “The All Appliances Store”. They are followed by the mayor of the city of Port-au-Prince, two deputies, two senators, the legal counsel of the company, their banker, and a priest. Once installed on the stand, there are speeches, all of them panegyrics of the Lafleur family. And finally, the priest is asked to bless “the wonder”.

This is the moment that has to be perfect! It has been planned, programmed, rehearsed, and repeated numerous times. Four actions have to elegantly synchronize: the priest says his last “Amen”, the mayor cuts the ribbon with a pair of golden scissors handed on a lace pillow, the orchestra starts with the joyous notes of the Fifth Symphony of Beethoven, and a designated employee turns on the button of the escalator. It has to be theatrical and memorable:

Amen – ribbon cut- Music – escalator starts!

Practice makes perfect. It is therefore not a surprise that everything works out fine! It is such a magic moment that it takes the crowd a couple of seconds to realize that the bending priest going up the stairs progressively leaning forward is not part of the show! His black cassock has been caught between two stairs of the escalator and he is scared to be swallowed by them.

– Scissors! Yells the President of “The All Appliances Store”!

This exclamation is an eye opener and the seconds that follow are long…. There should be a pair of scissors handy as one was just used to cut the ribbon. Thank God!  They are quickly handed to the President of “The All Appliances Store” who rushes up the stairs. To carry out her operation, she can’t hold the handrails. She lacks balance on these moving stairs where she manages to face the priest with threatening scissors that she promptly uses to generously cut the priest’s cassock and set him free. Annoyed by this large piece of fabric holding its sophisticated mechanism, the escalator loudly starts shaking. It then stops completely with a not so reassuring smell of burning. Now at the top of the escalator, liberating scissors in hand, the President of “The All Appliances Store” bears a wide satisfied smile: the priest is no longer held captive but he is sweating with a totally drawn face.

His impeccable, chic black perfectly ironed cassock that walked on the red carpet is now missing a quarter of it, from the front waist to the floor. It sadly reveals a worn-out pair of pants poorly mended in several places and held at the waist with a very old belt. This is an unwanted reminder of the humble daily life of this priest dignified for the occasion.

A wave of sadness went through the assembly.

The “All Appliance Store” had taken all steps to have this escalator never stop rolling once it was turned on. They had  worked on a contingency plan with a focus on reliable continuous electricity with a generator and a backup one. They were selling electrical appliances in a country where most of the time a power outage is what turned them off. They concentrated their planning of this nice event on having these stairs on, surely not off. This explains why scissors came to their mind when a disappointing, unfortunate, unexpected incident happened during their well-rounded ceremony. “Turn it off” was not in the plan.

-(1) acras: yam fritters

– (2) griots: fried pork

 

Des Nouvelles d'Elisabeth, English texts

Is Life Short or Long?

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Would Elisabeth ever have enough time to achieve all she had to do?

In her beautiful country of Haiti, she had a job, a home, and a healthy family. One would think that this leads to a happy, peaceful existence. However, that was far from reality.

For many reasons, life in a third world country is slower and longer.

One of them being that what’s considered to be normal in Haiti is not elsewhere.  To be half an hour to a whole hour late for an appointment or meeting is totally acceptable there. Elisabeth though, found punctuality to be an admirable quality, which differentiated her from the people she was meeting and brought her unimaginable frustrations. She worked hard on estimating as precisely as she could the time she needed to commute to her meetings. She also took into account inevitable traffic jams, possible police controls, and crowds of pedestrians that might be blocking the streets. Overall, her personal statistics indicated that in Port-au-Prince or Pétion-Ville, the speed of a vehicle during the day was not more than six kilometers an hour. This being established, for an encounter of one hour, she needed to take out three hours of her day: one hour for the meeting and two for the commute, which would generally be short distances. Walking would have been faster, but the prevailing insecurity in the country made it imprudent.

Unfortunately, Elisabeth’s intricate planning did not take into account the unproductive time she would often have to spend waiting for her tardy interlocutor, who never apologize for being late. Elisabeth knew her friends and acquaintances to generally be polite so she could only explain and pardon their rude behavior by the modern world. Nowadays people are short of excuses for being late, as they can no longer pretend their watches suddenly stopped working.  Time is now available everywhere: it shows on cell phones that nearly everyone owns, it is broadcasted at regular intervals on radio stations that everyone listens to in the car, and they can also see it on the dashboard of their vehicles. Elisabeth thought it was a shame that no one longer needed to gently address a passerby to ask  for “an hour as a gift” (1).

All in all, the hellish traffic on the streets of Port-au-Prince and Pétion-Ville was what made Elisabeth feel a little better about the many latecomers. Anyone would need strong nerves to survive the horns, pedestrians, and unruly tap-tap drivers (2) who would stop and go without any signal just to pick up one passenger or to drop off another. Not to mention, the motorcyclists passing right and left without warning, or that casually swerve on the sidewalks when the streets are overcrowded. All this can quickly make any driver clench their teeth, removing any hint of good humor and banishing the possibility of showing up on time.

At the end of a soccer game, extra time is given to make up for time lost during the match. It seemed to function the same way for Elisabeth at her office. She often had to work late to catch up on her paperwork which she could not address while losing time in traffic or waiting for a tardy interlocutor. Thus, it was common for her to be exhausted when she returned home in the evening. Thank God, she had the precious help of Marie! Marie cleaned the house in her absence, prepared and served dinner for the family, and did the dishes. Marie was the reason Elisabeth could sit down at the dining room table to work on her personal small business of cosmetics which she was managing from home. Yet, Elisabeth couldn’t help to pay attention to the sound of the water flowing from the sink faucet which would prompt her to shout a few times, “Marie, lower the water pressure please! Water trucks are expensive.”

It was time-consuming for a working person to pay attention to the many necessary details that government services should normally provide. If you lived in Haiti, you had to think about adding distilled water in the inverter batteries, checking the level of fuel in the generator, leaving the checks at home to pay for garbage collection or delivery of water, taking empty gallons of drinking water to have them filled and  making sure the propane gas tank was full, all to avoid the unpleasant surprise of not being able to brew coffee upon waking up in the morning.  And that’s just the short list. It was important to not forget to pay the electricity subscription on time—even though the invoices were not delivered and the city only supplied electricity a few hours a day. EDH (3) was quick to disconnect its subscribers for a few days of late payment and slow to reconnect after the account had been updated.

Although Elisabeth’s small cosmetic business was often time-consuming, she welcomed the additional income it provided. The money she earned from it was used to finance the annual vacation with her family. Elisabeth and her husband always visited developed countries in order to let their children discover little pleasures as simple as walking in a park or going to the movie theater—things they could not do at home. Caribbean resorts were of no interest to them; they had seen enough coconut trees, had had enough sun, and had suffered too much from the heat! They wanted to see conifers, feel a little cool and have to cover themselves. A real change in horizon was what they wanted for their annual vacation.

She and her family had visited New York, Montreal, Paris, Rome, and other big cities. She always came back enchanted by her travels and, as soon as she returned home, she started dreaming about her next vacation that she started to plan right away. She often thought that life was too short and would not allow her to carry out all her projects and follow all her dreams.

But then she thought that only the blessed and  privileged could  think that life is too short. It was Black Alex(4) who made her understand this sad reality with his hit song delivered with his powerful and piercing voice sang from the guts:

Lavi a long, li long, li long

Pa gen tankou’l

Ou pralé wap kité’l la

Sa fè’m mal oh (5)

Black Alex was only 26 years old when he uttered this cry of pain in 2002, despite the great talent he had received from God. His voice made him famous, but did not bring him happiness: “Lavi a long, li long, li long”(5). Black Alex died in 2015 at the age of 39. His life was short, but he sang it long.

Elisabeth was now older than 39 and decided she would never complain that life is too short. She would rather say that she was happy to be among the blessed who found their lives short because they had dreams, plans, a decent life, and no time to kill. And during her busy days, this prayer often came to her mind: “God, please grant to all my compatriots the happiness of a long life which they end up finding too short.”

                                                      ———————————————–

(1) In Haiti, before time was available everywhere we frequently used the Creole formula “fè’m kado on ti lè” to ask a passerby for the time. Translation: “As a gift, let me know what time it is.”

(2) Tap-taps: very colorful public transport vehicles. They have no stopping points, and their name come from the fact that the passenger taps on the vehicle body to indicate to the driver that he has arrived at his destination.

(3) Ed’H: Electricité d’Haiti, Electricity of Haiti, state power and light company.

(4) Black Alex (1976-2015) : Haitian Rap and Ragga artist from group King Posse

(5) English translation:

Life is long, long, long

There is nothing like it

You will die and leave it there

That hurts, oh!