I had trouble imagining Uncle Frédo as ever other than this emaciated body, wrecked by drink, as the athlete he had been in his youth. He did obstacle racing and the four hundred meter hurdles. A member of the Athletic Federation, Grandma used to recount, came to the house one day and talked to her about her son’s performance in races. She was really embarrassed. No one from outside the Cité ever came to her house. There was no room for that. She had to push aside all the pots and pans, the big pile of plantains on the little porch to make room for his feet when he sat in the rocking chair. Frédo was a minor, so it was up to Grandma to authorize his going to the Olympics, which that year were held in Atlanta, in the United States. He also explained to Grandma that it was the one-hundredth Olympics. She did not understand what this meant, did not know what the Olympic Games were, and the only things she learned were that her son Frédo could leave, and was going to take a plane. She was so proud, she who had given him a hard time for neglecting his lessons and going out parkouring like a fool, risking getting crushed by a car or injuring himself irreparably. “Glory be to God,” she said, in the presence of the Haitian Olympic Committee representative, thanking him warmly, and trying her best to come across to the man as a woman of dignity, to show him that Frédo had a proper mother.
After the visit, Grandma took to telling everyone who came to buy food and everyone who went to church with her that her son was leaving for the United States to represent his nation in the Olympic Games, that she didn’t know if he would be coming back.
“Maybe he’ll decide to study in that wonderful country,” she continued, with a sigh, totally aware of other people’s jealousy.
Grandma would forever remember that first week in July, how she had run all over Port-au-Prince, spent all her hard-earned savings on getting Frédo undershirts, socks, a pair of black shoes, shirts so he wouldn’t be leaving with those disgusting tee-shirts he wore all day long.
Claudy was Frédo’s best friend. He lived in Carrefour-Feuilles. He too did athletics, and through that they had bonded. They would go out running like lunatics at five o’clock in the morning, jumping whatever obstacles they came across, from trash piles to old abandoned car engines, weaving through the baskets of merchants who yelled at them and threw stones, treating them to all the names. Claudy was very slim, even more so than Frédo, with the face of a boy not yet pubescent, so much so that Grandma doubted he was really seventeen. He looked thirteen and played up his confidence to seem older. He envisioned staying in the United States where his godmother lived. She had no children, and she too looked favorably on Frédo’s coming to stay. Secretly, Grandma hoped it would happen. Why didn’t she have someone in a foreign country? It gave hope, gave her an image of herself also in one of those faraway, beautiful, and rich countries where it was said to be easier to make money.
Grandma confided in Old Nestor, whose daughter had been living in the United States for fifteen years now, without ever having come home because her papers were not in order. She had not been able to attend her mother’s funeral, nor that of her younger brother who had joined the Cité Bethlehem gang, led by Big Elijah, and been killed in a shootout with the police.
“God controls everything,” Grandma said to Nestor to console him, thinking to herself how she’d rather have her daughter, Rosia, be far away in another country—who cares if illegal—than be here, shooting up morning and evening in the company of rogues.
As for Frédo, he started to fantasize about Atlanta, the United States, the lights, about a place where he could both go back to school and become a great athlete. Grandma heard him twisting and turning on the iron bed in the little adjoining room. She was used to this imperfect communication. The creakings of his sleep told of his torment, somewhere between the joy of adventure, participating in the one-hundredth Olympic Games, and the decision he would have to make to stay on, and to escape, along with Claudy, from the rest of the team. He was just an adolescent after all, brought up like most boys who’d learned they would have to figure things out by their own devices. He could sense that Grandma was okay with this. Maybe she should have spoken of it with him? But she never talked that way to her children. Her meager income was just enough to meet their basic needs. Yes, she’d dreamed of a better neighborhood, a nicer house for them, schooling, but she had always been a single woman. The two men with whom she had tried to make a life had left her, each leaving her one child to whom they had not even granted their surnames.
Grandma was certain of it. Leaving meant bettering your life, your mother’s, your big sister’s. Someone had to try to save Rosia, make her understand that the chance could come at any moment to change her life, that her brother would soon be able to send money to his family. Félicienne, a neighbor down the street, received at least once a month a transfer from her son Baptiste who lived in New York. She had even been to visit and spoke of things that beggared belief. No blackouts ever, the fridge always stocked with food, suspended highways, buildings that almost touched the sky. Four years since she had visited and still she walked with her nose in the air. It was that flamboyance, Grandma also thought, that pride, that people looked for in those countries. Frédo was maybe her only chance of ever getting to go there.
It was a struggle to get Frédo his passport, even with the help of the National Federation. It seemed ridiculous that she had to get a state-issued birth certificate for him, then get in line at Immigration, and wait four months for the passport to be processed. She clutched the navy blue booklet, gold-embossed with the Republic’s coat of arms, and brought it to church, imploring God to shadow her son on whatever path he took, and never let him, above all, forget his mother. She asked too that God influence the arrogant consuls who could refuse the visa because Frédo was a boy of the people.
The Federation picked up at that point. Grandma was not allowed to accompany Frédo to the Embassy. She regretted that. Not Frédo. Grandma sensed that he was embarrassed by her questions, her zeal, and the way she had of telling even people she did not know that her son was about to travel.
When Frédo had announced, a few days prior, that he would leave on Tuesday, he told Grandma he could not wear the shirts, pants, and socks she’d bought him. He had to wear the delegation uniform. Grandma smiled and said he’d need them anyway, that he was not going, for the rest of his life, to wear the red and blue jersey with the national flag embroidered on the left sleeve. She should have taken him in her arms, but she had never done that before, and he was a man now, her son, and it was up to him to protect her, to take care of her and of his sister. He looked lost, acne on his face still, his young body all muscle, and hair she wished he’d kept shorter, but she decided to say nothing that might sound like disapproval or rebuke.
She went with him to the airport. They did not speak much on the bus. It would have been hard with the blaring music. The loudspeakers pulsed in her heart. She was the one who carried the suitcase. He had looked sullen when he saw the color she had picked. Fuchsia. Grandma was blind to that detail important to a boy about to enter the world of sports.
It was her first time at the airport. She did not go inside. She was not allowed. Members of the delegation waited in front of the entrance, recognizing each other quickly thanks to the team merchandise. Claudy was already there. Frédo was not allowed to have his passport. The delegation head was to carry them at all times. He never even got to see the visa affixed to it. The team chatted excitedly, ignoring the ones around them, Grandma among them, a couple who had come with their daughter, and a sociable, camera-toting young woman who took pictures of them from every angle.
Frédo felt twinges of shame. Grandma made no effort to socialize. Her dress was overly tight. She had gained weight and not changed her wardrobe. Her sandals showed fat toes with nails eroded by mycosis. Before he disappeared into the terminal, Frédo gave a quick kiss to her right cheek. She returned home to a new silence that frightened her, despite the hubbub of the Cité and all the work she had to do before her customers showed.
Haiti got no medals. Most of the athletes decided not to come back. Who knows where their focus was? Taking their passports proved no deterrent. It was hardly the first time. The Federation chose to be silent on the matter. Grandma also. She heard nothing from Frédo and almost wished that Rosia, too, would stay away. In the course of their last argument, she had tried to hit Rosia, but Rosia was having none of it and, under the influence of who knows how many substances, had struck back. It was Grandma who found herself crying in a corner when Rosia left, taking with her all the money she could find.
“Frédo is doing fine where he is,” she answered when anyone asked after her son. She really believed it too. Why wouldn’t he, after all, even if he never sent word and seemed to have erased his past. He was better off. He was not in the same hole as Rosia, was not hanging around with gang members who sowed their terror, little thieves who held to ransom the merchants of the Cité.
The days slid past. Grandma divided her time between church devotions and her commerce. She took on a young helper, Mimose, who worked a full day on a small salary, purchasing produce, preparing food, and tending the fire. There is always someone poorer than the very poor. At least her job fed her, and let her take home a share of the leftovers. She was twenty-three, mother already to three children, all living with her parents packed into a hovel two alleys over. She was a good worker, and Grandma, so alone did she feel, enjoyed her company.
*
Célia. Cécé. It is, I’m often told, a pretty name. Three months ago I turned twenty. My mother, Rosia, had no name in mind when she was pregnant. She must have been barely aware she was bringing a child into the world and was clearly sincere when she told her mother she did not know whose her baby was. She was just an adolescent when she got into drugs and alcohol. Fourteen or fifteen. Grandma never saw it coming, too wrapped up as she was in “finding life,” as she put it.
Rosia returned home during the sixth month of her pregnancy. She continued to drink, smoke, and take drugs, whatever she could find. She stole from her mother to feed her dependence. Grandma told me she prayed a lot that I would come into the world spared a birth defect.
I was born so little they had to keep me at the hospital for two weeks. The doctor foresaw a high risk of illness. He was wrong, but I have stayed stunted. I am five foot one and not very pretty. It must be because of the drugs.
And, yes, Célia was the name of the maternity milk that Grandma bought at the Thankgod Grocery store, the biggest in the Cité. The sign reads Grocery, but it was really a shop that sold everything, from infant’s milk to kerosene for lamps. When Grandma asked Rosia what she wanted me to be called, Rosia looked at the small table that held three bibs, the milk bottle, a bottle of water, and replied: Célia. Rosia smiled. She thought it was a pretty name. “Célia Jérôme,” she repeated three times, as she went about preparing my drink. The doctor in charge of the delivery at the hospital forbade her to give me her breast. He caught her drinking a rum trempé that she’d secretly gone and bought near the Science Faculty not far from the hospital. Rosia could not have cared less. She didn’t want anything to do with me. She couldn’t wait to rejoin her friends, who spent their time in the streets begging for money to procure what to them was happiness, was freedom.
Three weeks after my birth, she went back to her ways. Grandma was angry and asked her not to be getting herself pregnant again by a good-for-nothing no different from herself.
Rosia came by the house from time to time without showing the slightest interest in me. Grandma was happy that she kept her distance from me, what with her bad smell, her reek of liquor, her hair a mess, and her perpetual cigarette. She was looking for money. Always. And Grandma paid to be rid of her. Grandma was my Ma. She was happy to have me. With no one else in the house since Frédo’s departure, I brought her huge joy. With me, she learned to talk, to express her tenderness, something she had never been able to do with her own children. I advanced less quickly than other babies. I walked at sixteen months. Grandma was at her wit’s end, and cursed her addicted daughter.
Then Rosia moved in with her mother to await her own death. She brought to her her fatigue, her excess of life pain, her sickness. Grandma put her into Uncle Frédo’s room. There was no question of her sharing her mother’s bed, since that place had been taken by me. She vomited up her life, was spent of all energy. They did not talk to each other. She was a daughter who had defied her mother and had once even struck her. Grandma was surprised that none of Rosia’s binge-drinking friends came to see her. No doubt they too were dying from the same illness, were too drunk and drugged-up to make it out the door, or had they simply forgotten her?
Rosia died at Easter. I had just turned two. Grandma would talk forever of her stress during the years my mother was alive and in the grip of narcotics, but she never dwelt on the heartbreak her death had caused. She had for so long put it away, perhaps, that one day this would happen.
“At least, she made you,” she would say. “She chose to leave you to me. Thank you, God. Thank you, Heaven.”
Cécé. Célia. I am a girl with a very ordinary story. My mother was my grandmother. As far as family goes, she is all I have had. At least until Uncle Frédo came back from his trip, even if he will never be more than a distant relative, like one of Ma’s cousins who visited from Maniche, not far from the city of Cayes, in the south. They were sometimes given to holding back, those women, having lost the thread of their relations with the one who had settled in the capital and built a house there. Tonton had so few moments of lucidity that, one day, Ma swore she must have done something wrong to be paying so dearly now through her children. At least he was there. It was to the house that he came to indulge his alcohol, spend long hours sleeping, let himself be taken care of by his mother, in spite of her age, making her responsible, guilty almost, for bringing him into the world.
I started school very late. Ma was afraid that the other children would break me in two or into several pieces. I think she wanted to keep me by her side as long as possible and would have liked to see me not go to school at all. I would hear her say to neighbors surprised that I had not yet started school:
“Cécé is a sick child, you see how she is stunted. I’ve already lost Rosia. I don’t want to run any risk with her.”
She still held out hope I’d become a doctor but, in truth, she thought that school was a place of perversion. It was at school that my mother had fallen in with a crowd who drew her to alcohol and drugs. I had possibly inherited some bad tendencies from my mother, in turn, of course, gotten from her father. Me, I felt great. I understood everything. I knew all the bad words and could shock any adult, even Lorette, the Cité’s crazy lady who berated everyone and completely undressed herself whenever someone angered her or simply because she was having a bad day. Or Dodo, the raging alcoholic who sang his head off morning, noon, and night, and swore at the ones who told him his wife had left him because he couldn’t get an erection. Little could Ma imagine how much I ran the alleyways when she went off to do the shopping, leaving me under the watch of Mimose, who, meanwhile, was getting groped by Fénelon in Ma’s bedroom, maybe in her bed.
Ma resigned herself to bringing me to see Master Jean-Claude, who ran the little primary school at the entrance to the Cité. It was the day I got very angry at Mimose for refusing me a cola and outed her in front of Ma:
“Dirty whore, taking it in your fat shit ass from Fénelon!”
Ma lost not a second bringing Mimose into the house and accusing her of teaching me bad language and providing me with sexual spectacles in her absence.
“An angel,” she said, beside herself with anger, on the brink of tears, “a little girl you have corrupted. And she is right, what is more. You are a whore!”
My grandmother gave Mimose her marching orders, asking her to come back at the end of the month to pick up what she was owed. She came back into the house, trembling, smelling of goat blood, Saturday’s typical meat, and took out from under the bed the cuvette in which we kept the toiletries, put toothpaste on my toothbrush, grabbed me by the hand, I who had taken refuge in a corner, very aware of the words I had pronounced, and dragged me through the backdoor to the rusted galvanized outhouse that was our bathroom, and brushed my teeth with a vengeance. The brushing was like an exorcism, its purpose to purify the mouth from which such abominations had come. Ma busied herself that day, all on her own, preparing the food, selling it, and washing everything after. It was very late when she finally closed the door to put herself to bed. On Monday morning, toward the end of the month of November, she took me to The Angels of the Cité school, run by professor Jean-Claude, an affable man, business-like, in his fifties, who refused no student, even at the end of the school year. She was with him in his office for about twenty minutes while I waited outside, sitting on a chair trying to get my feet to touch the ground, trying to take my mind off the ribbons with which she had tightly gathered up my hair.
The office was no more than a space in the same room, sectioned off with particle board that let through most conversations. The boards were all warped and had large water or oil stains on them.
I had not managed to get my feet to touch the ground. My grandmother came out of the office with a sad smile saying:
“That’s it, my dear. You start school tomorrow.”
She might as well have said that Rosia had died all over again. Master Jean-Claude, as everyone called him, made a ridiculous face and showed me his long teeth, blackened by tobacco and bad hygiene, when he asked:
“What is your name?”
I wanted to say something to him about his mother, the latest bad word in the Cité, but the look on Grandma’s face dissuaded me. I stammered, “Cécé, Célia Jérôme.” He added that it was time to learn to read, to write, and to speak French. He started to say a lot of things in French, none of which Grandma nor I understood. What did we care.
I, Cécé, for the first time had a book and a copybook. I went straight into the first grade. I was the eldest in the class, but I came across as younger. The others were more advanced than me. They could read the alphabet correctly. Me, no. My preoccupation, during that whole first week, was with trying to touch the ground with my feet while sitting on the bench. It was the first time in my life that I had to stay in the same position all that time. I was bored. I really needed to find something to do.
I sat between two girls, Natacha and Joanne. They seemed not to like me very much. On the third day, Joanne took to poking me in the side with a pencil she had just sharpened. It hurt a lot. I did not cry. I almost never cried. About an hour later, she tried to do it again, but I grabbed the pencil from her hands and stuck it into her left thigh. She let out a scream that would split a soul. Even Master Jean-Claude exited his office to see what was going on. She cried and squirmed in her little pale blue skirt covered in blood. Natacha was so frightened that she too was speechless. The mistress, Madame Sophonie, seemed clueless, fearing that the principal was surely going to think she was incapable of controlling her class, and Master Jean-Claude, himself disturbed, pressed me to recount what had happened. I just shrugged my shoulders. They concluded that Joanne herself had thrust the pencil into her thigh, a version of the incident that worked for everyone.
The following day, Joanne showed up with her mother, a corpulent woman whose fake hair was sewn on every which way. Master Jean-Claude had me brought in from the class. He gave an explanation in French to the woman who understood nothing and was sponging her forehead with a tissue that left little flecks of white paper on her face, not a good look frankly. It must have been the hair making her hot. Every so often she moved her hand as if to speak, when Master Jean-Claude gave her a chance, but no sound came from her throat. She dared not speak Creole and could not express herself in French. The director of the establishment The Angels of the Cité forbade speaking Creole. The reputation of the school rested on it. It was all the poor buggers living in the Cité and thereabouts could dream of for their children: to speak that language, which let you get on top.
I understood from the gestures of Master Jean-Claude and the repetition of the word petite that he was explaining to Joanne’s mom how I was too little to have committed the act her daughter had alleged. He compared my height and weight to those of Joanne who was a good head taller than I was and fairly round to boot. The woman left, annoyed. Joanne and I were sent back to class with the command that we make up, and that there be “absolutely no disruption!”
She walked behind me. Limply. She was afraid. As for Natacha, she was all smiles all morning. The two of them wanted to make peace.
I repeated my first year. Second year also. It was no big deal. Lots of boys did too. Sandino, Billy, Peterson, Robinson, Maradona. In fourth year, I caught up with Natacha who had been sick for two years. We became friends. As for Joanne, she had moved to another cité and no one knew what had become of her.
Grandma agreed that I should get private lessons in third year, finally understanding that it was the only way to get through a class in just one year. The teachers were more vested in students who boosted their monthly income. Master Jean-Claude went to great lengths to explain how the system worked to Ma, who had a hard time understanding. It must have been the strange language spoken by Master Jean-Claude. A Creole that does not exist, with rs and es, and intonations that intimidated Ma. The free dinner she served up to him on Saturdays must have been a part of the tuition. For all the time that I attended The Angels of the Cité, he ate on Saturdays without paying.
“Cécé knows how to read,” Ma told her customers, with tears in her eyes. It took me so much time to learn she had good reason to be chuffed. She bought a television. It was on the small side. I spent a lot of time in front of it, especially watching the ads. Ma involved me very little in the food business. I had to study, to prepare to become a doctor or an agronomist. She took on Lana to replace Mimose and insisted that I watch TV inside instead of talking to her, but I had learned not to say curse words in Ma’s presence, even if I knew lots and did not hold back with friends at school, where my reputation as a difficult girl was solid.
At thirteen, I took part in a protest. Maradona had said that we could not let the election results be stolen from us. I wasn’t aware of anything having been stolen from me, nor had I followed the elections, but I was happy to unwind on the boulevard among people I did not know who were very happy or very serious, chanting “It’s the people’s victory. We want this president.” They smashed windscreens and shopfronts, pillaged a few small businesses, targeted surely for being complicit in the theft of the people’s victory. “This time, we have the right one,” I heard a woman say. “This country has waited too long. This president will finally lift us from our misery.”
I received my certificate when I was seventeen, and left The Angels of the Cité for the co-ed Bernardin de Saint-Pierre Middle School, also in the Cité, where I was to start secondary school. The rector, a dry man with his tie always askew and a strap in his hand, explained to us that Mr. de Saint-Pierre was an eminent French writer, and that he was sorry we did not know that. That made us laugh. I was seventeen, but there were twenty-one-year-olds among my new classmates, as well as several teachers—poor students who had just gotten their secondary school diploma, or maybe not even—who were around the same age.
I did not like to study. I watched, as much as our ration of electricity would permit, Latin-American TV shows. The girls at school talked about these a lot. I had a Facebook account. Ma could not buy me a smartphone, something I resented, a little anyway. She just didn’t understand how I needed it to communicate, to see the world. She had the same phone I had, a basic model, good for only talking. I went to the Cyber Center near the National Theatre, a building next to a spectacular open sewer where thousands of polystyrene plates and plastic bottles stagnated. The connection was bad and I had no photos of me to post. I whiled away the time liking the posts and photos of my friends and added my gall to debates where everyone let loose with competing misfortunes and funnies.
I repeated the sixth grade. I barely passed fifth. And I stopped going altogether when Ma died. No one asked me why I no longer went. No one, in fact, could have cared less. Maybe they too supposed it was a money thing. It was true. I would not have been able to continue paying the six hundred gourdes a month of schooling cost but, truth be told, I’d also had enough.
*
Tonton Frédo gave no word of his tracks for twelve years. To me he was no more than the little boy standing to the left of Grandma in the family photo. When Grandma talked about him she looked into empty space, as if she were trying to imagine him in that faraway place, that big country of justice and infinite possibilities. She faulted him for only one thing: giving no news of his whereabouts to his mother. He didn’t even know he had a niece. “We all need a family,” she said, her voice tremulous.
A day did not go by that she did not think of him. I did not need her to talk about him to know that. She would turn her back to me so I would not notice her reddened eyes, the quiver in her lower lip.
Had he been sick? Had he continued playing sports? Did he work? Had he married? Was he dead? Only death could sink a human being into such a silence. Sure, she did not have an address like almost everyone in the Cité of Divine Power, but lots of people here have relatives abroad, and they always find someone returning home in whom to confide a letter, maybe several. The messenger would know which alleys to follow and would figure it out by asking around for the person being sought. Take Old Nestor’s daughter; she had no trouble. And now that there were cell phones, all she had to do was give his number to the messenger.
“You, you will never lose touch with your Grandma, isn’t that right?”
“Never will I lose touch with my Grandma,” I’d always answer, in earnest.
She would smile, and seem consoled. Grandma was not one for feeling pity for herself. We were better off than lots of our neighbors, could feed ourselves, had a house with walls and a galvanized roof in a landscape of mostly tarp-draped small huts in which several people slept. She did not pay much to the gangs for the right to do some commerce, a few meals here and there to some soldiers, and it was forgotten. All she was was a single woman, not young, an elder of the Cité they looked after kindly.
Uncle Frédo reappeared one day out of the blue in front of the house while Grandma was cutting plantains and sweet potatoes for the evening fry. She noticed that someone was blocking the daylight, but she did not want to look up and risk not being ready for the first customers if she let herself be interrupted by some crazy or a neighbor stopping by to talk about Élise’s latest fantasy or the cost of living gone up again. The shadow stayed without moving for a good many minutes and said nothing. She ended up caving in and looked at the person. He was a very thin man in crumpled clothes, a large afro, full beard, too long, tired shoes, and a battered fuschia-colored suitcase who was looking at her tenderly. Grandma started what sounded like yelping, and when I dropped my Experimental Science text to hurry outside, I saw a man whom I took for one of the Cité degenerates.
My grandmother stopped screaming, and whispered, “Frédo, Frédo,” as the neighbors came running to see what was going on. The slightest noise in the Cité of Divine Power could bring on a flock, except when there was gunfire. Frédo stepped forward, put down his case, and laid a hand on Ma’s shoulder. She cried hot tears. People could not believe it. It was not in such a state that one came back from abroad after all those years. Christa must have been having them on. This tramp must have just come straight from prison or the insane asylum.
Soline went home right away and prepared a teaspoon of olive oil and salt, no better remedy for “a big shock,” and had Grandma swallow it, all the while keeping an eye on the man who smelled awful.
“It’s my little one. It’s my little one,” said Ma, feeling the awkwardness caused by the presence of Frédo.
People seemed filled with reproach, and started to disperse, leaving us alone.
“This is Rosia’s daughter,” said Ma, rubbing my back, without looking at Frédo. “Rosia died. Died, do you hear?”
Her voice had risen, and she started to cry again, this time for Rosia’s death. She needed to cry for her daughter in the presence of her son. It was the first time in my life that I felt the distress my mother’s death had caused. Frédo smiled at me, a sad smile, weary, soft. He had folds around his eyes, and appeared old and tired. Grandma got up, prepared a plate of rice for him, and told him gently that the meat was not yet ready. By the way he tucked in, he must have been very hungry. Afterwards, he went into the little bedroom as if he had just left it yesterday, placed his old suitcase on the ground, and slept for two days and two nights.
Grandma was happy that her son had returned. He had been deported from the United States. In a low voice, while eating, talking more to himself than to his mother, he explained how. He seemed to be just realizing what had happened to him. Grandma had seen lots of young men return to the Cité who were labeled “deported” and therefore dangerous. Some joined gangs or adapted to their new life by taking something up, a sadness always on their face, a hope, a need to return to the country that had refused them a second chance.
Frédo was not a criminal, nor even a thug. He was a failed runner who could not clear the obstacles erected before him in a country where he could gain no foothold. He failed from the outset. Maybe if he had won a medal during the games! He’d been terrible, Claudy also, nowhere close to the level of the other athletes, and too obsessed with the life that waited for them outside the Olympic village. All that light, that well-being within reach.
All Frédo wished for upon return was to pick up life where he’d left off in 1996 and, why not, forget those terrible years when he wanted to die but did not have the courage to make it happen. To carry out this back-to-back-then, or to forget, he drank and slept. His mother understood it was better not to insist. Up until she died, Grandma slipped him some gourdes every morning, and he went and got drunk. He ate only once a day, slowly, as if it pained him. His lower lip was all pink, burned by the pure alcohol that went into those drinks he picked up from the many moonshine merchants in the Cité.
Now I am the one who gives Uncle Frédo money. He did not ask, but how would he manage otherwise? Besides, it was the least I owed to Grandma. Poor Tonton. It also helped me not have to explain the men I brought to the house. Not that he ever asked. No doubt he understood. What could he say? Uncle Frédo was a nobody, nothing but a wreck, a soul in pain, a thin body in soiled, ragged clothes.
