Free The World is Moving Around Me by Dany Laferrière Page B

still searching for their families in the wreckage. One of my cousins replied that the earthquake didn’t kill Aunt Renée, and that my sister shouldn’t mix things up. My mother, her eyes still closed, began to murmur Aunt Renée’s favorite prayer: “The angel of the Lord encampeth round about them that fear him, and delivereth them.” I remember the intensity with which Aunt Renée would say “and delivereth them.”

    A Young Christ
    A large portrait of Christ on the gallery. It hung in my brother-in-law’s school that collapsed in the earthquake. While he was transporting everything he could save in a truck, the portrait dropped onto the street. Someone found it and took it home. A passerby told my brother-in-law what had happened and pointed out the person’s house. It took a lot of negotiations to get the portrait back. My mother has always liked this particular portrait of Jesus with his clear eyes and little pink mouth. Wavy hair cascading to his shoulders. His well-tended beard, strangely split in the middle. The index finger of his right hand strokes a flaming heart girdled by a crown of thorns. A soothing light forms the background. My mother looks that way every time she sits on the gallery.

    The Street-Corner Prophet
    Just about everyone wakes up together in Port-au-Prince with the early morning sun. I go and brush my teeth in the yard. A light breeze carries an aroma of coffee. My sister wants to go food shopping, and I go along. People still greet one another like before, despite the trials of daily life. They sleep next to their houses. I see tents everywhere. A group of young students chatting under a tree. Everyone else hurrying to work. The camp on my left occupies a soccer field. Already sweating, adults emerge from the tents, holding the hands of their children swathed in colorful uniforms. Well-groomed, white socks, and polished shoes. Two men prepare to cross the street with a mattress on their heads. My sister slows to let them go by. This is new, I say to her; people never used to brake for pedestrians. My sister smiles. Red light. A man next to the car is shouting: we haven’t seen anything yet, the end of days is near. Only the blind can’t see the signs. A man walking by asks him ironically what the next step is going to be. A tsunami, he says very seriously. But before that, he adds, we’ll have another earthquake two times stronger and three times longer than the last one, and it’ll knock everything down and help the tsunami wipe out all trace of our existence here. This land doesn’t belong to us. We’re just renters. The owner lives upstairs, he says, pointing to the sky. And he’s disappointed with our behavior. Instead of thanking him, all we do is fornicate and backbite. We don’t have to pay rent; all he asks of us is to recognize him as our Lord and God. Instead we’re too busy worshiping the Golden Calf. A few people stop to listen to him, mostly women. Green light. The car pulls away, leaving the prophet to gesticulate under the lamp post.

    A Star in Town
    We continue driving down Delmas. My sister points out the Internet café where the surfers were found crushed to death in front of their screens. Not far from there, rescuers found a girl sitting quietly, as if she were waiting for someone, except that she had an iron bar sticking through her body. I glance at my sister, who’s doing everything within her power to act relaxed. Her eyelids blink rapidly, and she rubs her temples. I wonder how much longer she’ll be able to hold out. On the way back, she stopped to buy water. I picked up a newspaper. On the front page, abundantly illustrated, there’s a story about the Hollywood stars who have come to Haiti. I have no idea how someone must feel, stepping into this kind of setting, surrounded by cameras. They’re doing it to help out. The idea is to attract a new clientele. People who are