Farewell, Fred Voodoo by Amy Wilentz

Author:Amy Wilentz
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Simon & Schuster

11

WEREWOLVES IN THE CAMPS

Tou sa w we, se pa sa

Nothing you see is what it seems

In times of crisis in Haiti, in times like these, werewolves come out of hiding. They prowl through the popular quarters. They descend from the roofs of houses where children lie sick. They can enter your tent without your knowing it. Those strange marks on your sick baby’s arm are the marks of the werewolf’s teeth. Sometimes these monsters gather in one neighborhood and keep everyone awake all night with their howling.

This is when Filibert Waldeck turned up. I’d given up on him, almost. And then, one evening, I sat down for dinner at a table on the terrace of the Hotel Oloffson, and there he was. He called me “Mommy” in his hoarse voice. He was sipping gingerly at a beer that a reporter had bought for him. As one of his little sons sat in a pristine button-down shirt and a pair of pressed jeans, Filibert went on and on about the werewolves, who seemed, in his narrative, like any epidemic: they might as well have been cholera. These werewolves, he said, were living near his collapsed apartment in the weeks just after the earthquake. I’d heard about werewolves often in Haiti and had been shown their victims, who are usually small, listless children and babies suffering from disease and malnutrition. Filibert was a grown-up now but overexcited by all that had transpired. He sat very stiff and straight as he told the tale. The werewolves in his neighborhood were stealing children, giving people fevers, making nursing mothers sick. They were howling through the night. Filibert was worried for his sons; he didn’t want them kidnapped. He was estranged from their mother, and afraid at the time that she might come and take them back.

In his encampment, no one could sleep.

The werewolves weren’t people anyone knew, Filibert said. Usually, you’d know the werewolf who was haunting your quartier. But not these, Filibert said. These seemed to have emerged from the rubble.

I only half listened to his fairy-tale chatter. Grow up, I wanted to say to him. He was in his thirties now, not some kid who was allowed to let his imagination run rampant. I was sick of Haitian stories, of this kind of lived ethnography. I’d been coming to Haiti too long and the earthquake was serious, for God’s sake, and Filibert, so newly rediscovered, was already giving me burnout; Filibert plus the earthquake, which itself made everything seem futile, which called into question every tiny achievement of the past twenty years and even every achievement of the two-plus centuries since Toussaint’s revolution. Stop being interesting, I wanted to say to Filibert. Stop telling me quotable things. Don’t talk garbage; get your act together.

I feared, too, that Filibert was telling the table of foreign journalists all this apparently interesting stuff in order to get us to buy him more beers so that we could keep him with us—so that we could keep getting good quotes from him, and not let him escape to other tables of competing journalists.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.