Nicolas rested his elbows on the table and leaned in closer. “I don’t think you’re hearing me—”
“I’m hearing you,” Raymond retorted. “It’s you who’s not hearing me. You can’t, because we’re speaking different languages.” He pushed his plate away. He regretted the way the utensils clattered aggressively, but his heart was racing with the familiar rush of anger that overpowered him whenever he tried talking to Nicolas.
“You are not a kamoken rebel,” Nicolas said. “You’re just a taxi driver.”
Raymond bristled. “So you keep reminding me. Ever since we were kids. Do you think you could make it through just one day without giving me shit about how I make a living?”
“Please,” Eve said, clearing her throat. “Let’s not get into all this now.”
Raymond pushed on. “I’m just a cabbie. I’m poor. Why does that offend you so much? I do honest work, always have, while you sat around like a prince, like labor was beneath you. Do you seriously think you’re better than everyone else? You and your snobby friends sitting in your study, drinking whiskey, smoking, running your mouth about politics, like you have any idea what it’s like out there.”
Nicolas raised a menacing finger in the air. “If you don’t like my friends, then don’t come to my house.” His eyes bulged out of their sockets.
“I won’t then!” Raymond pushed his chair back.
Eve reached out to grab him by the arm, surely to insist that he didn’t have to leave, that Nicolas never meant what he said, that he was just overly sensitive. She couldn’t stand the way her husband treated his brother. She had grown up in a loving family before she married Nicolas, and she believed in the bond between siblings because she herself once had brothers. It was one of the things Raymond liked about her.
“Raymond,” she pleaded.
“Let him leave, Eve,” Nicolas said.
Raymond didn’t wait for her to finish her sentence. He started down the hallway, but then spun around and walked back to the dining room. He didn’t know why. It was the same instinct that made him drive Milot Sauveur out of Cité Simone.
Nicolas and Eve were still sitting there. Nicolas was chewing furiously on a toothpick, nearly stabbing his gums. Eve held her head low in her hands like she was suffering from a violent migraine. When she saw him return, she implored Raymond with her eyes.
“You know the real difference between you and me, Nicolas?” Raymond asked. “You’re an ass.”
Eve began to protest, but he continued, unfazed.
“No, please. Let me speak my piece or I’ll choke on it tonight. Nicolas needs to hear this.” He paused and looked right at his brother at the head of the table. “Everything I do, I do for my family. I slave away out there, I sweat. Sometimes I only eat once a day. The other day, I had to syphon gas out of a car just to get my car going. My meals, my money, my blood, it’s all to keep my family alive. I always think of them first. But you, Nicolas, you don’t think about anyone but yourself.”
Nicolas stared back, quivering with rage. Raymond sighed. Suddenly, all of this just seemed exhausting.
“You’re selfish,” he said, dropping his voice. “Look at all you have, and you’re risking losing it all.”
“You’re angry because of what I have?” Nicolas roared. “How typical.”
“I’m angry because you don’t cherish it!” Raymond’s mouth filled with spit. “Any man who plays with fire like you do, dancing with the Devil, is bound to burn.” He looked at his brother knowingly. “And what will your family have left except your ashes?”
Nicolas slammed the table with the palm of his hand and Amélie’s face twisted with fear. Eve jumped up as the baby began to cry. Her husband’s eyes glimmered like fiery lumps of coal.
Raymond chuckled, but his laugh was tired, empty. He shook his head.
“You stupid, stubborn little man.”
“Get out!”
“Nicolas!” Eve seized her husband’s arm. She looked to Raymond, but he had already walked away.
FIVE
Raymond knew he wasn’t going to get much sleep that night. He lay frozen on the mattress next to Yvonne, listening to her rhythmic breathing and the creak of bedsprings each time she shifted. He stared at the dark ceiling and let starlight bathe his half-naked body, the sheets rolled down to his waist. He was used to the city heat. When Yvonne opened her eyes and found him wide-awake, she barely lifted her head off the pillow.
“You should sleep,” she said.
There was concern in her voice. Also exhaustion. She needed sleep too, probably even more than he did. When the sun rose, she’d rush out of the house to her job laundering clothes, a job they both knew was more physically taxing than Raymond’s.
“Don’t worry about me,” he whispered. “I’ll be tired soon. You go back to sleep.”
She lay there, staring at him, until her eyes closed. He felt grateful. He didn’t want to talk to her, didn’t want to explain himself, and by now, she was used to him returning home from his brother’s house silent, stewing, rehashing threadbare arguments in his mind.
“God will provide for us,” she muttered as she drifted off. “Don’t give up hope.”
What does God know of our suffering, he wondered, or our hope? Hope was a luxury, nowadays. Haitians liked to believe that I’espoir fait vivre— where there is hope, there is life—and that you could survive on hope alone, but there was a breaking point. And Raymond had to admit that he could not survive as a taxi driver. Sometimes he wished he had stayed in the village, kept their parents’ house, and farmed the land. But the exodus of villagers to Port-au-Prince had swept him up. He needed to make a life for himself and his family, and there wasn’t much money in fixing up cars in Saint-Marc, nor in rice harvests. Breakneck inflation kept the working class on the edge of starvation while the bourgeois like his brother were starting to import luxury goods. There was nothing left for farmers to do. Yvonne could barely afford rice these days, much less meat. In the darkness, he shook his head, eyes still wide open.
What does God feel about all this? Raymond felt as if God had stopped listening, up there, wherever there was, but quickly regretted his blasphemy. Losing faith was not an option. After all, God had enabled him to be alive so far, and given him such blessings: a beautiful family with a devoted wife, gems for children. He turned to look at her sleeping face.
He silently thanked God for that day in the city when they’d met, and that he hadn’t had the heart to let her stand there in the rain. She’d just finished her shift at the Karibe Hotel. Her dress was soaked, and she had to get to her next job in Martissant. He flirted with her the whole way, because he liked the way her red dress clung to her small body, wet with rain, and how she never looked him in the eye when he joked with her, but instead looked away with an amused smile.
“What’s your name?” he asked. “Mine is Raymond. Raymond L’Eveillé.”
She laughed. “You’re chatty, aren’t you? And fresh too.” He pressed until she gave in and told him her name. He was there to pick her up again that night, surprising her as she walked through the hotel gates after another long shift.
“Let me give you a ride home,” he said to her.
“You just give out free rides, huh? You’re just generous that way?”
Lying next to her in the darkness, Raymond shuddered. Where had all their flirtation and joy gone? A few days after they met, he’d driven her to the Champ de Mars and bought her a fresco. They made love in his car. A few weeks later, he told her he wanted to marry her and