The Ordinary Disaster

Abstract

The Ordinary Disaster Yanick Lahens Translated by Gayle A. Levy Mirna woke up to the mauve light of the dawn, between moon and sun, in a silence broken occasionally by the husky rasp of waves on sand. The room was plunged in a murky light, and the halting purr of the air-conditioner gave off a dampness that almost paralyzed her. Limbs numb, she lay still, frozen in the unmoving time of this closed space. If not for the tingling in her nipples and the slight bruise between her thighs, it would have felt like this body, hers for almost twenty years, suddenly was no longer a part of her. She half-opened her eyes to examine the walls, the window, the sheets, and then the walls again. In that brief panic, the stunned confusion of someone waking up in an unfamiliar bedroom in a strange city. She slid under the covers, closed her eyes for a moment and all at once remembered: the night before the curtains had been carefully closed by William, and for the first time she, Mirna, had slept in this hotel by the sea with a man she hardly knew. She felt a slight twinge in her heart, bit the inside of her cheek hard, and suddenly wanted to be back in the purity of the morning, tasting her first sip of coffee, under the almond trees along the beach. When she stretched slowly under the sheets, it was to forget everything: the burning in her mouth, her life among the defeated, and her body which hungered for the first time. Her right arm fell heavily on William’s bare chest as he slept beside her. He moaned softly in his sleep and turned over as though to hug her. Mirna, forgetting for one moment the pure morning outside, closed her eyes again in this silent, dim bedroom, and let life pulsate through her, as it did in the blind and deaf almond trees. Mirna had met William one month earlier when thousands of men and women greeted the American soldiers in an ecstasy that approached a hypnotic trance. Some bodies were burned, tires tightly wound around their necks, and old women accused of witchcraft were lynched at random. Embassy waiting rooms never emptied of tie-wearing loyalists, engaged artists, and sophisticated professionals: everyone in a hurry to be in the right place at the right time. Behind their microphones, reporters concealed the shame of occupation with all kinds of lies about the joy that would soon fill our hearts and soothe our souls. All of this flooded our chests, as intoxicating as hot rum. Mirna had herself gone to the port to welcome their liberators, a smile on her lips like the others, a short skirt revealing the muscles of her long, black legs. She thought the uniformed GIs were handsome and powerful but deep within she desperately sought warriors from her own island who would resemble those in the first history books she read as a child. All for naught. Very quickly this jubilation left her empty. There were seven of them: Lucien, Norma, Simone, Nicole, Mirna, their mother Octavie, and their aunt Violette. Seven living in three narrow rooms: one living room and two bedrooms in one of the neighborhoods in Port-au-Prince whose houses were concrete but twisted, with mangy walls, half-painted, half-built, their guts, hair, and fingers of steel spilling out. Where the drunk streets stagger from time to time without completely toppling over. Which is to say, Mirna’s neighborhood was not only made of mold and rot. This was not one of those neighborhoods where, between the shacks, the intertwined alleys with their bad breath disgusted each other. It was a partly wormy fruit into which [End Page 76] hungry teeth could still bite. But, nonetheless, it was a neighborhood inhabited by the defeated, where men and women spent most of their time in mutual mistrust. If behind these walls mistrust often stood in for love, it was because those whom the defeated should truly have mistrusted were too far away. So, they directed their attention to their neighbors, the new arrivals or the improvised...