The Immortals Read online

  The little girl. Her death left me with a great void. An irreparable void, I’d even say. All these sandwiched bodies, dislocated between the loose masses of reinforced concrete. All these screams calling for Jesus. It’s the first time I’ve heard so many people asking for Jesus. That I ever saw so many arms reaching for the heavens.

  Jesus, for many people—especially Christians—was both the author of this thing and the savior of all of those who escaped unharmed. A woman who just emerged from the rubble waved her arms in the air and began to shout all around her: men Jezi m t ap pale w la. Here’s the Jesus I was telling you about. When he’s your one and only savior, this is what he’s capable of. A thousand houses fall down to your left. A thousand fall to your right. You will not be trapped. Hallelujah! After all, this thing was the only trophy Jesus had left to win to be considered the greatest champion of all time, to become unquestionably, indubitably the most murderous and ridiculed dead person of all time.

  Her mother. She lived in Martissant and sold bibles and books of Gospel songs. This poor woman would have given everything to see her daughter succeed. As long as her daughter was exactly like her. Christian, pretentious, hostile towards everything of this earth. Sometimes nature works against itself. There’s nothing you can do.

  The little girl had always been so ironic. It was undoubtedly thanks to those books that she never ceased to devour day in and day out. How could she love me, me? Nobody had ever told me such a thing before. That’s what she told me when it was all over.

  Did she know that she was going to die? Had she already seen it in her dreams, that she would end up like that, stuck in a corner under the rubble from which nobody could pull her out. Even the White aid-workers. Even their highly trained dogs, more intelligent, more well-kept than the ti nèg* from here.

  The little girl. She isn’t dead. She doesn’t have the right to die. I still smell her odor in everything that moves. It’s the odor of catastrophe, the odor of the cadavers mounting from the street, the odor of everything that moves. All the concrete monsters have fallen. All the brothels. Grand Rue isn’t what it used to be. But us, we’ll never die. We, the whores of Grand Rue. We are the immortals.

  Contrary to her mother’s wishes, she loved everything that was of this world, because this world, she said, is where the street was and in the street the wind, the freedom to never stop. She was known as Shakira, like the celebrity. She was a great reader of Jacques Stephen Alexis, the famous Haitian writer who disappeared under François Duvalier’s dictatorship. Nobody could keep her from being simultaneously the echo and the contradiction of herself. Nobody.

  The little girl. She shouldn’t have been there, in this place, at this exact moment when this thing happened. She’d planned to go visit Emma, a fellow streetwalker who was ill. If she hadn’t changed her mind, maybe the end would’ve been different. If only I hadn’t forced her to put away her books, to walk the streets and stir up more clients.

  No, she shouldn’t have told me that she had a son somewhere, abandoned in the immense swamp that is the world. Sometimes it’s urgent, she said, to let everything go, to abandon everything, even what is most dear, all to pursue your dreams. … She shouldn’t have told me that she was counting on me to find him, her son. That she loved me. That she appreciated all that I had done for her. It was to tell me how self-centered and insensitive I was to have offered her the street, this shitty profession. But what else did I have to offer her? Can you offer what you don’t have? Why did she pass over all the doors of Grand Rue, all the doors in the world, to come knock at mine?

  Poor Emma. She suffered from this illness that I don’t want to mention here so as to not worry those who have already been on the other side of her little panties. … Before, she worked as a maid in one of those great big bourgeois houses in the hills. One day, she ran away after poking out her boss’s eye, the one who wanted, above all else, to have sex with her without her consent. Those versed in the art of gossip say that the boss’s wife found her stealing her jewelry or sucking off her husband; everything depends on the version the story and who is doing the telling. They would’ve thrown her out the door like a stray bitch. Géralda Huge-Tits introduced her to El Caucho the Cuban. The manager of Drôle-de-fesses who employed her without any questions asked. Drôle-de-fesses, I’ll remind you, is the brothel where I used to work. Well before I moved into this room from which I’m telling this story so that you, the writer, can turn it into a book, so that you immortalize all the whores of Grand Rue, taken away by this thing. Emma’s body was never recovered.

  I know by heart all of the nooks and crannies of this concrete desert. All the faces. All the whims of the clientele. The city is a sad painting where animals and humans eat from and do their business on the same plate. Quite the match.

  Grand Rue, it wasn’t just the street intersected by a thousand other streets, the bastion of cheap sex. Flocks of whores lined up on the sidewalks at all hours of the day. The rotten sheets, pinned to the balconies flutter in the wind, giving the buildings wings, making them look like large immobile birds. But also, the eruption of a whole world that jumps out before your eyes. Walking market women who harass the passersby. Panicked passersby in the midst of an auditory assault by the jerry-rigged pick-up trucks smeared with naive paintings. Hordes of the famished, of thieves who steal the wallets of distracted and reckless passersby. The police who track them like dogs. Stinking dogs. The shit. The mountains of trash. The sidewalks bursting with people. The insane. The homeless. The interminable honking of cars caught in traffic jams. The children of streets turned into improvised carwashes. The wads of dollars exhibited by the foreign exchange dealers. It was also this, Grand Rue. More than this.

  My grandmother, my mother, my aunts, my cousins (all whores as well), they told me about this Port-au-Prince of old. The streets were clean and the men respected ladies. A time when an all-inclusive session between the sheets was worth no more than twelve goud. A time when they hadn’t quite started this seaside Venice of fortune that it has become today by pushing away the water to plant houses that, with time, sink into the earth and others that haphazardly crawl up into the mountains like children scribbling with crayons. It’s a moment in time that I never knew. I came into this world too late.

  May I continue… ? Have you taken note of everything, writer, all the silences, everything left unsaid… ? It’s been twelve years—it’s the mother who’s talking now—since my daughter left home. Since she’s been gone. My greatest worry is that I will get to the point where I won’t be able to do anything. To continue looking for her. To fight. I know that this day will come. It’ll come. And I’ll kill myself to put an end to all of this.

  The little girl. Already twelve years since she left her mother’s house to become the most beautiful, coveted whore of Grand Rue. Twelve years without a word. Twelve years of silence. It was her fault that she left. It was your fault that she left because you did nothing to keep her there, you piece of shit mother!

  Her mother. She was actually quite a marvelous woman. A woman who wanted the best for her child. For her to be different. To see differently what all the others see with ordinary eyes. Never allowing her to identify with these vain models on magazine covers. She never hesitated to go to bed hungry. She destroyed herself for her daughter’s well-being. And she wasn’t ready to see her leave like that in a cloud of smoke for all these years of sustained fighting against death.

  What wouldn’t this woman do to be reunited with her daughter? She looked and looked for her constantly, for twelve long years, looking for at least a trace of life. After this thing, was it necessary to continue looking for someone who never came home? I don’t believe in miracles.

  My daughter—desperate, it’s still the mother talking—it’s best for you to go even farther away. Far away from home. As far as possible. So that you forget me completely instead of being little more than a heap of bloody flesh stuck under the rubble. At least there will be a survivor, somewhere, who forgets the existence of her poor mother.

  Misfortunes—can they compare to one another? Do they shrink to the point of disappearing, to the point of being locked away? Are there some that are more insignificant or profound than others? When this passerby told me about what she was going through, of her misfortune, I felt a certain discomfort regarding the disappearance of my daughter. It seemed like a drop of water in the ocean. She lost her husband, her sister, her older brother, her two cousins, her two sons, her youngest daughter, the first son’s girlfriend, the wife of one of her two cousins, her house, her dog. In the end, this thing took everything from her. Me too, my daughter.

  No, I don’t want to forget. Forgetting is the worst kind of catastrophe. It’s the first time in my life that I saw the wound from so close, the vulnerabilities of the world with so much pathos, real pathos. That I’ve seen everyone crying, all at once. Everyone. Without exception.

  I’m the one who taught her everything about the profession and about the street, at least my own philosophy that I cobbled together myself over time. There it is. Simple. You proceed according to the type of client you have, little girl. Just like there are many types of whores. There are also many types of clients. There are those who just breeze through. They have nothing but this to do, in order not to say that they have plenty of things to do. They’re people who seem very busy. But they can’t resist it. A session between the sheets; that clears their minds. It helps to begin or end their day in all its beauty. They have this way of surprising you, of smacking your ass like you didn’t expect it. As though smacking a whore’s ass was something uncommon, something marvelous, so much so that they know how to do it better than anyone. It’s all they’ve ever done their whole life. Smack whores’ asses. These clients are among t
he ones who pay well, but who don’t have enough time for caresses, for sucking or to be sucked off for their money. Surrounded by their security agents, they climb into new cars, windows tinted, that burn rubber as they peel out.

  Everything began with a fall. One that gave me my freedom, at this exact moment when I decided to break the silence. It’s been twelve years since then, if I remember correctly. It was raining hard on Grand Rue. The street was completely soaked, like usual. A little girl came knocking at my door to ask if I could let her stay the night. My name is Shakira. I have nowhere else to go, she told me, and I hate my mother. I don’t want to live with her anymore. The rain kept me from distinguishing her tears. But her voice delivered the shock vigorously. I had pity on her.

  I’d rather kill myself than go back home and live with my mother, she continued. It truly seemed like a ruse to convince me. But I didn’t have a choice. You don’t slam the door in peoples’ faces like that. Not in the face of a girl like that, at any rate. Beautiful and undeniably audacious.

  The clients. There are those who come for the first time, brought by a friend or by themselves. Sometimes, they’re so timid that they seem scared. Especially if they’re already in a committed relationship, married, fathers and everything. They’d rather take you somewhere else so that they don’t get noticed by someone who could report their fugue to their wife. These clients, they gravitate toward the edge of social cliffs and have a habit of showing up during work hours. You see what I mean?

  There are also those who don’t move around at all. Offering their services voluntarily. We even came up with a name for them. Tchyoul Bouzen.* Fucking dogs. There it is. Simple. The one who helps you find four blowjobs earns the right to one blowjob. Eight blowjobs, two blowjobs. Twelve blowjobs, the rest of the night. Little assholes who want to split without paying after coming, after having relieved themselves in a whore’s mouth, the Tchyoul Bouzen hunt them down and beat the shit out them. Never start before you get paid.

  Providing is the thing that I have never been good at doing, and this, despite my great generosity. I’m never satisfied with the circumstances, everything that revolves around my care. When forced to provide anyway, I provide poorly. Forgive me, little girl, if I never knew how to provide well.

  Me and the other whores, we took on the habit of almost making love from time to time. Rubbing one another. Taking turns penetrating one another with dildos. Her, no. Except during the rare orgies, when we’re hired out elsewhere, in the beautiful bourgeois neighborhoods for example, where everyone sucks, fucks, penetrates everyone and gets sucked, fucked, and penetrated by everyone simultaneously. I didn’t see coming between us these feelings of filiation that I felt for quite some time. Since after the shooting on Grand Rue that killed my parents … so many parents. … It’s a long story. I don’t want to talk about it.

  You’ve got to work at night and rest during the day, little girl. It’s better at night. The cats are gray at night. The night is best for avoiding the clients’ faces, their expressions at the moment when they ejaculate. You can spend all the nights in the world tricking in this city without anyone recognizing you. The night hides the true face of the world.

  Here, take this bag. A whore without a bag is like a soldier without a uniform, without a gun. A whore should never be separated from her bag. Take it. You’ll need it to put all your little things in. The money the clients throw at you. Everything. Your condoms. Your earrings. Your spare cloths. Your slutty clothing. All that a whore needs to shine. Me, I want you to shine. That you look like a real whore: an immortal.

  The clients. Nothing but sons of bitches who run up the price higher and higher if they have to in order to possess you, to take more and more of you in every direction, to ask you to bark like a dog, to become a dog. To have it all. And afterwards leave the carcass to the dogs. Those who think that with their money they can eventually comprehend the immense infinity that is the heart of a woman.

  You’ve got to work on your sex appeal, little girl. Cry, moan even before they touch you. The clients, they love that, you know. You have to give them the impression that their money wasn’t worth nothing, that they’re worth something. After serving a client, you have to assure yourself that he’ll come back.

  You can’t even know, little girl, how advantageous that can seem, how dangerous it is for a whore to be appreciated, loved by her clients, for a slave to be cherished by her master. The only unity possible between the oppressor and the oppressed is in the very act of oppression. The oppressed suffers. The oppressor climaxes.

  I was always motivated by the desire to be completely free, she confided in me, to live my life as I see it. And, for me, to be a whore is to be completely free. I want to become a whore. It wasn’t convincing enough. Because we don’t need to be whores to be completely free. And it’s not because we are whores that we are completely free. It’s obvious. It wasn’t convincing enough. But it still struck me.

  I told her what I’d told all the other girls before her.

  “Your body, it’s your only instrument, little girl.”

  That night, it continued to rain. The street emptied of passersby and of dogs. I talked with her about the street. About clients. About Géralda Huge-Tits, the mother of all the whores. About Fedna “The Blowjob Queen.” About Emma. About the Red BMW Man. … The room was dark; I slid into the calm waters, recently unleashed from a story with a thousand and one voices when, all the sudden, I heard a sound. She had already fallen asleep. Poor little girl.

  The things that last until the end of time, they usually start with a joke, a funny comment, then it becomes more serious, inevitable. It’s obvious. In the beginning, I really thought it was a joke, one of those wisecracks that someone says in a serious tone of voice to better surprise those listening, simply a phase, that she didn’t really want to be a whore, that it would quickly pass. But she didn’t take long in learning how to sell herself, from the moment when she realized that a real whore never looks back, she takes it on completely. It was finished between she and her mother. She made her choice. A whore for life.

  Just as I never stopped insisting the little girl, and all the other girls before her. My body has always been my only instrument, my only chance, the only way out. And I never really asked myself, not even a single time, if it was really this type of life that I wanted, if another life for me existed. I never wanted to end up like these women who aren’t proud, who have little desire to do themselves harm, in looking back on the road that they traveled.

  The street is of extreme importance in this profession, little girl. Because it’s where everything is in play and is bound to lure in clients. You negotiate and you bring them here, to this room, since you’ll inevitably need a place to do it in. And afterward, you return on the hunt. Don’t become a house-whore. To me, a whore is like the work of a great painter. They’re made to be exhibited. To be seen. To be a feast for the eyes.

  In the beginning, the Red BMW Man was for me some kind of insurmountable barrier. Certain whores of Grand Rue talk about his member in praiseworthy terms. Others only see in it a handicap that makes him a filthy animal, a burdensome fuck. The first time that he undressed before me, I threw his money back in his face saying that my pussy was made for something normal. Not for a third leg. Not for a fifth appendage.