The World is Moving Around Me by Dany Laferrière

sat down on the toilet. My legs were weak. I went back to the table once I’d gotten hold of myself. The same atmosphere as before. Nothing indicated there’d been a tremor. I can’t be the only one who felt it. People are going to mention it. I just need to wait. The conversations were as lively as ever. Finally I understood that my body had shaken, not the earth.

    A New Word
    I’m standing on the sidewalk, waiting for my nephew to come back. Young women slip out of their tents in the camp next door. They’re dressed for Saturday night. My nephew is late, and my mother is worried. I listen to the radio that she forgot on the gallery by her chair. Actually, I’m not really listening. You can’t count the number of radio stations in Port-au-Prince. I recognize them by their decibel level. A lot of announcers think they have to scream to get the public’s attention. Their voices add to the heat. Other announcers present a more distinguished profile to charm the upper-class audiences who hate those loud, demanding voices. Really, I’m not as bothered as I let on by the cacophony of everyone shouting out his argument without even pretending to listen to anyone else. Politics is the only subject, the daily bread of those who prefer opinion to information. Despite the noise, it’s a kind of barometer. Someone has just burst into flames of wrathful anger—then I realize it’s only theater. From the inflamed discussions, I’ve picked out these words (shouted every time) that keep coming back: cracks, ruins, reconstruction, camps, tents, provisions. Will they dislodge the words from the previous generation: Aristide,
les chimères
, corruption, de facto government, eradication, and embargo? Or the terms from the generation before: Duvalier, dictatorship, prison, exile,
tonton-macoute
. Every decade has its vocabulary. The frequency of certain words in the media informs us about the state of things. For many years, the two favorite ones were “dictatorship” and “corruption.” Now, for the first time, we’re hearing “reconstruction.” That’s a new one. Even if most people can’t really believe it.

    A Slight Indisposition
    My mother and my sister were on the gallery. My nephew was working on his political economy homework. I was on the bed in his room. My brother-in-law was eating dinner alone with his newspaper. Suddenly, we heard a dish shatter. My nephew jumped up and discovered my brother-in-law stretched out on the table, his jaws locked. We didn’t know what to do. My sister walked calmly into the room. Her cool demeanor always scares me because I know, deep down, that she’s panicking. She threw cold water on my brother-in-law’s face. I worked to loosen the grip of his jaw as my nephew tried to slip an aspirin into his mouth. It was no use. A little sugar water was more effective. He’d felt ill suddenly, and thinking his blood pressure was too high, he took a drug to lower it. But the opposite happened. A quick drop in blood pressure threw him into a kind of coma. My mother’s face was a picture of concentration as she paced the corridor, calling upon the Virgin’s help. Once the crisis passed, my nephew started making jokes, but we knew he was afraid. We all went off to bed without any more discussion. My nephew plugged in the machine that keeps away mosquitoes. We listened to the dry buzz of grilling mosquitoes until my sister asked him to turn the thing off so we could sleep.

    Frankétienne’s Strategy
    I went by Frankétienne’s place yesterday. He wasn’t there. I looked around the garden. Everything seemed to be in good order, including the disorder. This morning I saw the stone-masons at work. The foreman invited me to look around; Frankétienne wanted me to, though he couldn’t be here today because he had a meeting out of town. Once a month, he meets with old friends for long