“I don’t understand.”
“I want you to understand. I don’t want you to be hurt.”
“I will be hurt, but let’s not talk about it right now and interrupt what is nice.”
“Will you do one thing for me? When we get to the airport?”
“Yes?”
“When you go through the gate, and you want to turn around and look at me, don’t look back.”
“I know what it means, for you to say that to me now.”
“Shh. Put your face against mine. Touch your face to mine.”
“I don’t know what to say.”
“Don’t say anything. Just put your face against my face.”
“Language fails.”
“Just close your eyes and let go for a while. Let’s be together. Let’s be.”
“But what does it mean?”
“You don’t have to understand what it means. I don’t understand what it means. It’s not less beautiful if you don’t understand it.”
“I want it to mean when we get to the gate I’m going to turn around and take one last look at you.”
“Shh.”
“So I can remember you until the next time I see you.”
“Shh.”
“I love the way it feels, being so close to you.”
“No more words.”
SEVEN STORIES ABOUT SEBASTIAN OF KOULÈV–VILLE
1. The First Day I Met Sebastian
THE CHILDREN AT THE ORPHANAGE SAID Sebastian is a liar.
The man at the tree place said Sebastian is the best translator in Ouest Province. No French in his English.
The missionaries said, Sebastian is bad news. When he was a child he was always breaking things. You should see the two ladies who raised him. They’re both hunched over. He wore them out.
The Canadian dentist recommended Sebastian. He said one day he was up in the mountains doing field dentistry, and this husband and wife came in with vampire teeth. Triangles that came to points. They said their teeth hurt, and Sebastian said, “Don’t fix the vampire teeth. Just do the fillings.” But the dentist didn’t listen. He restored the man’s teeth and the woman’s teeth to happy squares. He showed them in the mirror. He thought they’d be so happy. But the woman yelled and the man cried. Sebastian listened and did his translating. Sebastian said, “Get out the file. They want the vampire teeth back. There’s a thing they do.” The man pulled the neck of his shirt to his shoulder. There were hundreds of little scars, some of them fresh.
I paid Sebastian seventy dollars a day. The other translators got fifty, but he said he had a thing for sevens. He said he had seven older brothers. When he was seven days old, seven women begged his father not to give him away to the two lady missionaries. They said seven curses will befall him.
“The first curse was the curse of English,” Sebastian said. We were walking the village Barette, taking the census of the rabbits and the chickens. “No Creole allowed. No French. Only English.”
He spoke in English, read in English, wrote in English, watched movies in English, gave tours of the missionary compound to visiting Americans and Danes in English. “They said, we’re your mothers now,” he said. “Children speak the language of their mothers.”
The day he turned seventeen, the two missionary ladies drove him up the mountain to his father’s house. They said, “Now you’re grown. We’ve done all we can.” Sebastian said, “Aren’t you my mothers?” They cried and drove away. His father came out of the house and cried and embraced him and spoke to him in a language he couldn’t understand. “The second curse was the curse of Creole,” Sebastian said. “It took me seven years to speak it well enough to pass for a Haitian.”
Up the hill was the houngan’s house. His wooden roof was painted purple beneath a field of orange stars. I wanted to visit him and convince him to sell it to me to take to Florida. Sebastian said, “If the houngan came to my village, we would have to kill him.”
“Why?” I said.
“Because,” Sebastian said, “he does not have the love of Christ in his heart.”
Later, I asked the elders of Sebastian’s village if they would kill the houngan. They laughed. “Sebastian is a liar,” they said. “The houngan is our friend. He goes to the church in Barette sometimes on Sundays when they need a trumpet player. The houngan is a good trumpet player.”
In the village Barette, Sebastian told me the third, fourth, fifth, sixth curses. It was getting dark, and we were walking up out of the village. I asked him what was the seventh curse. “You see these people, all my neighbors? I have to live among them. You and me, we’re not like them.”
He headed up the hill a ways, and I followed him across the mountain to his home. From every house we passed, people called their greetings.
2. Before the Earthquake
This was before the earthquake reduced the Hotel Montana to rubble. We were sitting at the bar drinking Dominican beers. Jean-Pierre, Sebastian, and me. The next morning we had to drive to Jacmel to count some rabbits and chickens. Sebastian had a little cocaine, and I gave him a little money, and he gave me the cocaine, and I put it in my pocket for the morning.
We were playing a game called Who’s More Heroic Than the Americans. It was a joke of a game. The first round everyone said: “Everyone who’s not an American.” The second round you had to tell another true story, but this one had to be specific.
“I knew a Catholic priest in Cité Soleil,” Jean-Pierre said. “He was Nigerian. The people were so mean to him. This went on for years. They stole things from his house. Once, he was beaten in the street and no one came to his aid. Still, he lived seven years in a shanty house, even though he could have lived well. He could have lived anywhere. One day a little retarded boy was crossing an open sewer on a lashed-together bridge made of two halves of one tree. The sewer was five feet deep with water and every kind of human waste. People pissed in it, shit in it. The sewer was the color of disease. This little retarded boy couldn’t have been more than five years old. Halfway across the bridge, some older boys came and shook both sides, just to be mean. The little retarded boy fell in. He was flailing around. There was a big crowd. People were watching him go down, but nobody wanted to jump in. Around the time the boy went over, the Nigerian priest came walking by. He didn’t even hesitate. He didn’t take off his clothes or his watch or take out his wallet or anything. He just jumped in, head-first, into the shitwater. He went under and came back up with that kid. That brown sludge was in his mouth, in his teeth, in his eyes.”
“I can beat that,” Sebastian said. “I knew a man who took a blowtorch to the side of a shipping container somebody was using for a store in the village Marigot. The store owner caught him red-handed at midnight. His bag was filled up with biswuit, dry goods, Tampico juices, Coca-Colas. The store owner called for his cousins, and his cousins called for their cousins. Soon all the men of the village surrounded this man in the shipping container. They tied him up, and in the morning they dragged him out into the middle of the road. They brought out all the children to see. The store owner said, ‘See what happens when you steal.’ While the man was still alive, they hacked off his fingers and toes one by one with a machete. They sealed the wounds with a hot iron. Then they hacked off his feet and hands. Then they hacked off his arms at the elbows and his legs at the knees. Then they poured gasoline over his head and set him on fire and watched him dance around while he died.”
“The store owner was a hero,” Jean-Pierre said, “for protecting his family business.”
“No,” Sebastian said. “The thief was a hero, for risking his life to get food for his family.”