God Loves Haiti (9780062348142) by Dimitry Elias Leger Page B

an army. Our country had no obvious need for an army, but an army had freed us from slavery, and we grew paranoid about going back to slavery, so a new army had to be available to try to keep potential new slave-masters at bay. Anyway, a new president came into power at the peak of my father’s powers and was kindly told by the foreigners who bankrolled his existence to disband the army, and disband it he did. Our family fell on hard times. Of course, our hardest times were nothing compared to the hard times of most of our neighbors. But still. Yes, dear, my father was an ex-mighty man. Nothing worse than a man of highly visible importance to his community fallento the level of the ordinary. Papi struggled terribly with anonymity. That’s partly why I hope you never develop a taste for alcohol or celebrity or both. Your grandfather had his flaws but he was a good man. He never cut a corner nor smiled unnecessarily. See these muscles on my arms? His were bigger. If he was a little bit corrupt, if he was one of those people who thought the job in the army was a crown and not a difficult public service for a difficult public in need of more services than the government had means to deliver, if he didn’t worry about how I would think of him after word got out that he worked for the bad guys doing bad things, even though I was a child who thought he could do no wrong, if his legacy to me was less of a preeminent concern of his, which indirectly led to his loss of career and subsequent bankruptcy and love affair with Rhum Barbancourt—how that man, come to think of it, managed to drink himself to death, discreetly too, in our little quartier , is pretty fucking genius, pardonne mon français —if he was less noble, we’d be richer but much poorer for it. Because of his sense of honor we were never that poor.
    Natasha laughed a small laugh. These confessions by her father often took place in her small candlelit room after her father had tucked her in bed, a bed made of cardboard and a too-small towel. He spoke carefully in a valedictory tone. It was as if he wasn’t sure he’d be around or alive in the morning and he had to make sure Natasha knew the Robert family history. Like most things intheir country, their familial existence was fragile and easily snuffed out by unexpected forces, he felt. If he didn’t share their story with her, there was nowhere else for her to look it up. It wasn’t recorded much anywhere else and whatever records did exist could disappear in a flash of random fires and other disasters, though her father often made clear that she had no reason ever to feel unlucky or cursed or any such nonsense.
    Oh, Papa, she said. This was the way the sleepy little girl indicated she’d gotten her father’s lesson de la soirée and wished to sleep. But Papa wanted her to like him and think him an honorable man. That these things mattered, that integrity and a sense of charity even when inhabiting a “borrowed” house with no roof in a country where any half-wit with a good smile could scare up money to live beyond his means, these were essential aspects of the Robert family character. He wanted five-year-old Natasha, and fifteen-year-old Natasha, and, hopefully, twenty-, thirty-, and fifty-year-old Natasha to remember these values as deeply and permanently as her pigmentation. Neither Papa nor young Natasha had any idea that Natasha would eventually become a twenty-year-old who’d sold her soul for a pot of gold.
    She looked around her: a dozen stone-faced, armed, and oddly young Asian, Latino, and African soldiers stood behind her, the most powerful man in the country was in front, a jet with its engines running was impatiently welcoming her, open-ribbed. That morning, she had locked the one person capable of persuading her not to leaveHaiti in a bedroom closet. For good measure, she had thrown away the key. Yes, Natasha, she told her herself, you screwed