The World is Moving Around Me Read Free Page A

Suddenly, a man gets to his feet and begins telling us that the earthquake is the result of our unspeakable behavior. His voice rises in the night. We quiet him down because he’s waking the children who have just fallen asleep. A lady tells him to pray in his heart. He walks away, insisting that you can’t ask the Lord’s forgiveness in a low voice. A group of girls launches into a religious song, so soft that some adults manage to fall asleep. Two hours later, the air is full of noise. Hundreds of people are praying and singing in the streets. For them, this is the end of the world announced by Jehovah. Next to me, a little girl wants to know if there will be school tomorrow. A breath of childhood settles over us all.

    Animals
    Dogs and roosters kept us company through the night. The Port-au-Prince rooster crows whenever he feels like it. Normally I hate this habit. But that night, I listened for his cry. We didn’t hear cats meowing. Port-au-Prince is more a dog city. Dogs, most often in the streets, survived, while the cats that hid under beds and in closets didn’t make it. As for the birds, they took flight at the first movement of the earth.

    The Crowd
    On that first night, the city was filled with a disciplined, generous, and restrained crowd. People ceaselessly moving with other-worldly determination. They seemed unconcerned with the pain they bore with an elegance admired the world over. The rest of the planet was glued to the small screen, watching the strange ceremony wherein the living and the dead mingled so perfectly they couldn’t be told apart. Malraux, just before his death, traveled to Haiti because he felt that the painters of Saint-Soleil had intuitively discovered something that makes all struggle against death fruitless. A secret path. People were amazed by that ability to remain in the wreckage so long without eating or drinking. That’s because they’re used to eating very little. How can they take to the road and leave everything behind? They have so little in the first place. The fewer objects we possess, the freer we are—and I’m not singing the praises of poverty. Haiti’s misfortune was not what moved the world: it was the way the Haitian people stood up to misfortune. We gazed with wonder as the disaster revealed a nation whose rotten institutions prevent from it from coming into its own. When those institutions disappeared from the landscape, even for a moment, we discovered a proud yet modest people through the clouds of dust.

    A Song
    The children have been sleeping for a while. Shadows pass in the garden. Security staff keeping an eye out. Suddenly a song rises. We hear it in the distance. A guard tells us that outside (we’re quite far from the road) is a large crowd of people singing. Their voices are harmonious. That’s when I understood that everyone was affected. And that something of unimaginable depth had occurred. People were in the streets. They sang to calm their pain. A forest of human beings moving slowly across the still trembling ground. I saw shadows descending the mountains to join them. How do they manage to dissolve so quickly in the crowd? The song they were singing to the heavens, in the whitish light of breaking dawn, united them.

    Forty-Three Tremors
    From time to time, a slight tremor awakens our fears. The earth is shuddering as if it could not find its rest. People say it’s not over. That other major shocks await us. All that is just rumors since the seismologists have yet to speak. But we can’t seek stable shelter yet, because what if things degenerate again? So we wait. With each new tremor, as small as it may be, people who were drifting off lift their heads like startled lizards. I hear muffled cries. No one knows what the next few seconds have in store. We don’t know what is stirring beneath our bellies. You can hide from the wind or even from fire, but not from the earth that moves beneath