The World is Moving Around Me Read Free

find a family member or a friend. They shout louder and louder into their phones. They hear the other person less and less. They lose patience. People are concentrated on their personal dramas. Language is whittled down to the essential. Then comes silence.

    Night
    Most residents of Port-au-Prince spent the first night outside. The previous nights had been chilly. This one was warm and star-lit. I hadn’t slept outside since childhood. Lying on the ground, we felt each of the earth’s convulsions in our very being. Our bodies were one with the ground. I was pissing against a tree when my legs started trembling: the impression that the earth was shaking. I walked through the garden, amazed to see that the most fragile flowers were still hanging from their stems. The earthquake attacked what was hard, solid, what could resist it. The concrete fell. The flowers survived.

    Time
    I never knew sixty seconds could last so long. And that a night could be endless. No radio: the antennae have fallen. No TV either. No Internet. The cell phone network is gone—though we had time for a few quick calls to the people who matter most to us. A strange moment when we realize we’ve lost the ability to contact people far away from here. All those wires that link us are cut. We can communicate with those immediately around us, who can hear our voices, but no one else. Human time is now contained in the sixty seconds that the first violent tremors took to change our lives.

    Place
    When it happened, people were scattered here and there: at home (the grandparents and the sick), at school (those slow to leave because class ended an hour earlier), at work (the best employees are often the last to clock out), in the supermarkets (those who have steady pay), in the outdoor markets (no danger for anyone there), in the streets (more than half of the population). An enormous number of people were caught in the monstrous traffic jams that paralyze Port-au-Prince during rush hour. The uproar suddenly stopped at 4:53 in the afternoon. The fateful hour that cut Haitian time in two. We gaze at Port-au-Prince with the stunned air of a child whose toy has just been accidentally stepped on by an adult.

    The Radio
    A car parked by the sidewalk, its motor still running. The radio was playing. People have stopped bothering to cut the engine when they leave their cars. I was trying to get news of other parts of the city. People wanted to know how bad the damage was. But I heard only static, or a pre-recorded program. I turned the dial and tuned in RFI (Radio France Internationale) that gave no news of the earthquake, at least not yet. I turned off the radio. Where was the driver? People were figuring it was less dangerous on foot. They left their cars behind and took to the road, often with no destination. People who had never done more than a hundred meters on foot walked kilometers that night and felt no fatigue. Their minds were so upset, they lost all awareness of their bodies. Two groups of people have always rubbed shoulders in this city: those on foot and those who own a car. Two parallel worlds that meet only by accident. “You can’t know your neighbor if you drive through the neighborhood,” said a grieving mother who lost her son. She said that the poorest residents—whom she had never met before, even though she passed through the area twice a day—were the first to support her when she learned that her son was dead in the wreckage of his house. For once, in this city ruled by social barriers, everyone moved at the same speed.

    A Prayer
    Night falls suddenly as it always does in the tropics. We whisper our fears to each other. Now and then, we hear a muffled cry: someone has managed to reach a family member on the phone and has gotten news. A young bank clerk tells me he is afraid to call home for fear of what he might find out. His family lives in Pacot, one of the hardest hit zones. I don’t know what to say.