Three Days in March

For Nathalie and her son

March 26th

It is a weekday, I wake up early because I have to cook breakfast for my son, Johnny, before he goes to school. I glance over at his bed, alongside the opposite wall of the room, and I see that he is already awake, scrolling down on his phone, texting. They must have given electricity for a few hours during the night, I think to myself. Johnny looks up and sees that I am sitting up on the bed.

“I will go get you water to wash,” he offers.

He puts down the phone and slides his feet into the plastic slippers placed by his bedside before he goes outside. The cool air of the night makes the room feel pleasant and for a few minutes I just sit there, listening to the early-morning noises that reach me from the street — the roosters’ cocky announcements, the barking dogs, the drawn-out singsong of street vendors offering hard-boiled eggs and bananas for breakfast. Life, with its usual noises, is expecting us all who are ready to join the flow.

I hear Johnny going to the front porch, filling a bucket with water from the large, plastic containers that serve everyone in the house and carrying it to the bathroom for me. My son has the moves of a lioness, soundless but watchful. Never conspicuous, he takes careful note of everything that happens around him.

I get up and go to the kitchen to start cooking breakfast. I text Raoul, my cousin, to make sure that he will be here on time to pick up Johnny and take him to school. Over the past two months this has become our routine. There have been so many people kidnapped in Port-au-Prince, it is better if Johnny doesn’t take a taptap, or is out on the streets by himself. I don’t have a car, I cannot drive him. With Raoul, who occasionally works as a taptap driver and knows the streets and many people in the area, Johnny is safer anyway.

We follow our usual morning dance without speaking much to each other. Turn on the electric plates, put water on them to boil, one for coffee, one for the cornmeal. While the water warms up, I go to the bathroom to wash myself, to take a bucket-shower, as Johnny’s father calls it. When the coffee is ready, I put a different pan on the hotplate to make sauce with chicken, for lunch. My sister’s son appears in the kitchen. I add the cornmeal to the boiling water and ask my nephew if he will eat with us.

Johnny is sitting on the porch, looking at the yard, lost in thoughts. He has always been a quiet boy, sensitive, but the past year made him even more withdrawn. “He is a teenager,” his father always tells me . . . But Johnny’s silence became deeper after he was taken and held hostage, just over a year ago. It happened in the afternoon, right outside his school, after classes ended. Johnny was waiting inside the building for his friend, they wanted to catch a ride home together. A scuffle broke out on the street, somebody must have been robbed or shot, or both. Johnny and some other students went outside to check what had happened, but all they could see was a man lying on the ground, bloody and visibly hurt, and two other men riding away on a moto, the one in the back brandishing a shotgun. People on the street were gathering around the wounded man, then a few policemen arrived and started asking questions. After about ten minutes, one of them went up to Johnny and told him they needed him to come to the precinct to write up a report of what he had seen and told Johnny to get in the car with them. My son didn’t protest, it was a policeman after all, so he didn’t resist when the man pushed him inside a vehicle. That vehicle, it turned out, wasn’t a police car.

He was gone for two days . . . forty-nine hours and thirty-three minutes . . . until Matheus, his father, negotiated his release, delivered the ransom money collected from family members and acquaintances, and brought him back home. The men who took him demanded thirty thousand dollars for Johnny’s release, but Matheus persuaded them to accept eight. They wanted it placed under a rock by a side road, way outside of town. Two men collected the money from under the rock while Johnny was still held; they only released him two hours later, at a different spot. Matheus brought him home. Johnny said that they did not beat him, and he appeared unharmed. He recounted the events to us, and for the next few days he stayed home from school and did not say a lot.

He turned sixteen a week later. We got him an American-style birthday cake, hoping that it could help him forget. There wasn’t much mention of those two days after that. Nowadays, when I attempt to tease out something about how he felt, he looks at me and says, “It is alright, Ma, it’s behind me. I don’t think about that.”

*

An hour later, Raoul arrives. I offer him coffee with some bread and we make small-talk, while he is having breakfast.

“How is your mother, chéri?” I ask. “You know, hanging in there. My sister’s kids keeping her busy…,” my cousin says with a tone that signals his nieces are a handful, and we laugh. When Raoul is done with the coffee, he and Johnny get in the car.

“Be careful, and don’t annoy your uncle on the way,” I remind Johnny, like I do every other morning. I give Raoul some of the food I made so he can eat it later, tap the roof of his car and then send them on their way. “Off you go. I will see you tonight.”

I go inside and try not to worry about Johnny. I text Suzy to ask if I can stop by for a haircut that afternoon. Then I finish getting ready and sit down to wait for Jimmy and Soraya who stop by every morning to pick me up and drive me to work.

*

They arrive late, having been held up by the rush-hour tumult of Port-au-Prince mornings. We work at Human Rights for Haiti, a US-based non-profit; Jimmy as a security guard, Soraya and I as secretaries. We belong to the lucky few who hold relatively stable employment. Jimmy has a car, so he picks me and Soraya up every morning and we pitch in with the gas money.

Driving along the dust-filled roads of the city, we joke and argue whether to keep the windows up or down. If we keep them down, the dust and the exhaust fumes of the vehicles sting our eyes, but if we roll them up, the inside of the car gets unbearably hot and stuffy.

“We had them down yesterday, they should be up today,” reasons Soraya, while Jimmy rests his elbow in the fully rolled-down driver-side window, busy flirting with girls on the street who ignore him, or brush him off with a teasing riposte, or put him in place with a defiant look. I don’t mind the windows being rolled down so I let Soraya and Jimmy fight this out, relaxing in the back, listening to the music blasting from the car radio.

A few minutes later, to shift the conversation from the issue of the windows, I ask Soraya whether her baby was fussy last night, and she tells me that he woke her up twice to feed.

“Oooohhh, six months old and still feeding twice at night! A man for you, eh!” Jimmy says, and we all laugh.

Soraya forgets about the windows and takes her phone out of her purse, to make a call. We are heading towards Martissant, a neighbourhood where the gangs have regular shootouts and kidnappings are frequent. Jimmy always takes the side streets, as people who are from the area would do, trying to avoid being conspicuous. Toddlers and young children hang out by the side of the road, jumping among dirty puddles, splashing water, yelling and chasing each other or running errands for their mothers. People go about their business, motos speed by, leaving us behind.

We drive through Martissant without any trouble and I feel a sense of quiet relief. We are coming up towards the beach, near Carrefour, where my mother used to bring us once a year when my sister and I were kids. We are about fifteen minutes away from the building where the NGO has its office. My eyes are searching for the sparkling blue of the sea, when I notice that Jimmy has quieted the music and slowed the car a bit. Soraya, who is still on the phone, says, “I’ll call you back” and she hangs up.

I spot some men about two hundred meters ahead of us, a group of five, lingering alongside the unpaved strip of road. Two of them hold rifles. Jimmy rolls up the windows, as if to erect a shield around the three of us. The men do not move, they are simply standing there, with eyes fixed on the passing cars.

I try to calm myself: in this area many people have guns . . . we drive here to go to work every day. . . simply another roadblock, to check who passes through the area . . . but I sense fear gripping my stomach. I feel sick. We get closer to the men, and as the two with the guns move towards the middle of the road, I see a third one, pulling a knife from his pants.

March 27th

I must have dozed off for a couple of hours, but it is still dark outside. The room where we are being held is small and hot, the window opening blocked by wooden planks, letting through very little fresh air. In the background, I hear Soraya crying in a neighbouring room.

I am sitting in the corner, on an old, dirty mattress, leaning my back against the wall. Jimmy is in the opposite corner, there is dried blood on his face from a fresh cut, his breathing is laboured and heavy. He says nothing, but I know that he is in pain. They beat him when they came and ordered Soraya to go to the other room with them. Jimmy tried to put in a word for her.

*

I hear Soraya from the next room, her pleas mingle with her curses and her cry.

“I have a six-month-old baby at home who still nurses . . .” I hear the men laugh,

“Why not nurse me then tonight?”

Moans and shouts, Soraya must be fighting. A slap on a face,

“Shut up, bitch.”

Bodies shuffle. I cover my ears to muffle the sounds.

*

What would it take for Johnny to act like these men? How much pressure would it take for him to comply? I suppress the thought in my mind.

*

Twenty-five hours have passed, more or less. They brought Soraya back. I am not sure whether Matheus or the family members of Jimmy and Soraya have already been contacted. People who take others in this country tend to wait, keep the doubt and the fear running loose for about a day, let the relatives imagine the worst. Raise the stakes before naming their price. Our price . . .

On the news they talk about kidnappings but we tend to avoid that word, it makes things sound like scenes from an action movie, while these are our real lives, from which we have been taken.

I gave them Matheus’s number. I have known Matheus since high school, and I trust him with my eyes closed when it comes to matters like this, although, recently, we have been living apart.

*

I wonder if you have already been told, my son. I wonder if you know that thinking about you is what makes me strong enough to get through this. I need to go back home to you. I see your face in the dark.

I am glad that you were not born a woman. To rape a man is a taboo around here, although God knows for how long. Taboos have been broken and lost, and our humanity is sinking under an ever-thickening crust of desperation, opportunism and festive cruelty that have taken over our collective mind. Day by day, limits are redrawn. Soon there will be no limits to the desire to become a big man, a feared man . . . so one will not have to live in fear oneself.

I see your face in the dark. I hear your voice. “It’s alright, Ma, I don’t think about that anymore . . .” I need to get back home to you. I want to make sure that you grow up to be a different kind of man. A decent man, a humane human, no matter what. If that is even possible.

*

After they were done with Soraya they took me to the other room as well, but when they realised how heavily I was bleeding from my period they brought me back here. I wasn’t appealing enough, my underwear soaked with blood.

Then they sent a woman over with some water and pieces of cloth.

“Clean yourself up, dear,” the woman told me. She looked at Soraya.

“I am sorry,” she said, then left and returned with a towel and a glass of water. She handed them to Soraya and left again.

It must be around noon. I can hear the men outside instructing someone to bring us food. Jimmy is pretending to be asleep. Soraya is lying on the mattress, next to me, her eyes are closed. She is silent. I feel a vague sense of guilt for being spared, spared by force of the same womanhood that played to her disadvantage. And I am afraid.

“Do you want some water?” I ask Soraya and I move the cup that I have in my hand towards her. She accepts the drink.

“It’s not your fault,” she says, but she doesn’t look at me. “These coward sons of bitches only enjoy seeing blood when they are the reason it was spilled.” She is beyond fear, her voice filled with hate and anger.

I think about her baby boy, and of you, son, again. About the curses and the blessings of being a woman. How fast do our blessings run out? We should keep reminders of them at the depth of our hearts.

March 28th

I hear them talking to Matheus on the phone. He asks to talk to me, or to any of us, but they don’t let him. They tell him to hurry up and get the money, if he wants to see us alive again. They gave him forty-eight hours, and that has almost passed. I hear the man threatening Matheus, haggling with him over the price which is now down to fifty thousand dollars, for the three of us. Impossible amounts.

The man goes outside the house, towards the street-side of the yard. I miss the rest of the conversation.

*

Forty-nine hours have passed. I was up all night, I am exhausted. The TV in the next room was on for hours, the government must have given electricity. We could hear segments from a telenovela, then explosions from an action movie. Later, rap in Creole then love songs in French. The men did not take Soraya today, so we spent the hours of darkness lying on the mattress, all three of us, next to each other. Jimmy’s face is swollen, his eyebrows caked with blood.

“My uncle will give money. My sister, she is in Florida. People we know will all pitch in. Perhaps even our boss . . .”

“Better to pay towards our ransom than towards our funerals,” Jimmy reasons.

Soraya keeps quiet. I think about her husband. Outside the house, children are running and laughing, playing tag. I can hear the noise of women washing and cooking in a neighbouring yard, gossiping and arguing while they work. Music blasts from a nearby house.

*

“Neighbours are like family,” my mother used to say. “This is a small country, aren’t we all neighbours?” I think to myself. Jimmy looks at me and as if guessing my thoughts, he says, “Werewolves are the hardest to spot inside the family — that is what my mother told me.” I must have said aloud what was on my mind.

“Were all werewolves people at one time?” I ask Jimmy. “What would it take to turn them back to people?”

*

Fifty hours have passed. The woman from last night brought us fried plantains to eat. Soraya doesn’t touch them.

“You have to eat,” I tell her. “Think about your baby. We don’t know how long this is going to last . . .”

Soraya opens her eyes.

“It won’t be that long before they kill us if we don’t pay up,” her voice is bitter.

Jimmy picks up a plantain and nudges Soraya to sit up. He hands her the plantain.

“They won’t kill us. They want the money.”

“They killed that French couple. And that schoolteacher, from Santo.”

“The French tried to resist being taken. And the schoolteacher’s family contacted the police. Put this out of your mind, chéri, and eat.”

Jimmy sits up on the mattress next to Soraya and runs one hand along her hair. He is glad to have found something better to do than weigh the passing of time.

*

Fifty-five hours have passed by the time Matheus delivers the money. He must have managed to negotiate a few added hours to the original lease on our lives.

Our release is unspectacular: the men who deliver us to Matheus park the car about two hundred meters up the road from where he is standing, they let us out and drive away, leaving a cloud of dust in their wake.

Matheus starts walking towards us and we meet about halfway. His face is tired, sad. He reaches for my hand as we walk towards the car he came with.

“Are you all right?” I nod.

We climb into the car. I sit in the passenger seat, Soraya and Jimmy are in the back. Matheus is driving. I look over at his face. He keeps his eyes on the road, but I sense the tears welling up in them.

“I am taking all three of you to a hospital,” he says, softly. “I called Soraya’s husband. He will meet us there.”

As we reach the main road the tension in my body is slowly giving way to relief and exhaustion. Traffic inches along, and I hear the prime minister’s voice on the radio from a roadside kiosk:

“According to human rights organisations, kidnappings in the country have risen 300 percent over the past months . . . Our government is determined to combat the insecurity tearing our country apart . . . State institutions work closely with international NGOs to realise social programmes . . .”

I sink back into the seat and look out the window. I watch the leaves of the palm trees waving in the wind, the dogs manoeuvring between the cars on the street. I hear the honking of the motos passing us, I see the people by the side of the road offering mangoes, peanuts and plantains for sale. I watch life in its undisturbed flow, and I know that we are back, flowing with it again.

***

This short story was published in the Caribbean Quarterly in March 2022. Issue 68, 2022.