“But—,” Terry said, “but why didn’t you just stop after you hit me the first time?”
The man spread his hands out wide, palms upward.
“Mais mon cher, I had no idea that it would happen again.”
Terry looked at me. His story had captured the attention of the whole table. We all laughed except Balu, who was responsible for the Mission’s fleet.
“So that’s the Sénateur,” Terry said. “Twenty years in criminal justice, I never saw a reaction like that before.”
“That’s some story.”
“It’s some country,” Terry said.
Something in his voice—
“Do you like it?” I asked.
Terry was quiet for a long time. “What you got to understand is that Haiti is a lot like pussy,” he said. “It’s hot and it’s wet and it smells funny. You didn’t know about pussy, somebody told you about pussy, you wouldn’t think you’d like it much. Probably think it was something nasty. But you get to know pussy, you can’t stop thinking about it ever.”
2
In the little seaside village of Anse du Clerc, midway between Bonbon and Abricots, there is a restaurant and hotel. The restaurant is ringed by a neat fence; the grass is short and manicured; there are bungalows with thatched roofs and beds neatly made with white linens. The mosquito nets sway gently in the breeze. The bay is filled with fish, and for a few dollars a local fisherman will take you out in his brightly painted boat for a morning of snorkeling. The water is transparent and clean; the boat’s shadow ripples on the seabed. The food is good: redfish, langouste, conch, in sauce or barbecued, accompanied by heaping platters of rice and beans and fried plantains; and for dessert, thick slices of fresh mango, or pineapple and papaya. Solar panels power the refrigerator, so the Coke and beer are icy cold. The toilets flush, the showers run. In the afternoon one can nap in the deck chairs or play dominoes. In the evening a few guys from the village strum guitars. The little hotel is the only place in the several thousand square miles of the Grand’Anse that could remotely be considered a tourist facility; it suggests a labor of love on somebody’s part. It is paradise.
There were two stories about the little hotel at Anse du Clerc. The first story, the one told by foreigners, was this: She was Canadian and he was Haitian. They met in Canada as students and had children and then, when the kids were grown, moved to his native region of Haiti. She designed and he built this little restaurant: she had good taste; he was crafty. The region was inaccessible, but guests still came. Decades passed. They were happy. He went back to Canada for a few months. She stayed behind. In a storm, the road to Jérémie, which was hardly a road at all, collapsed into the sea. Then she contracted dengue fever; there was no way to take her to the hospital for treatment. She died. Several months later, beset by sadness, he had a heart attack in Canada and died too. Now the servants ran the hoteclass="underline" the cook was a competent woman, and she had learned what foreigners liked.
But there was a second story about Anse du Clerc, a Haitian story: Madame was blan and Monsieur was Haitian. They met on the other side of the big water. They came back to Haiti. Madame built the hotel and Monsieur helped. Decades passed. They were unhappy. Monsieur had an affair with the cook. When Monsieur went to Canada, the cook seized her opportunity: she visited the boko with a scrap of Madame’s unwashed clothing, and he provided her with a deadly powder. Soon Madame died. Several months later, Monsieur died of grief and guilt and shame. Now the cook ran the place: it was her hotel now.
The first story was the story that foreigners told; the second story was the local story. The foreigner’s chief concern is: Will I get sick myself? Will my children fall sick? And so he investigates issues of health and disease. He takes what seem to be reasonable precautions, spraying himself with DEET at dusk and dawn. He discreetly asks the Uruguayan doctors about the risks of dengue. If he is prudent, he will think about how to evacuate quickly in case of illness. The world, the Occidental concludes, is a risky place. Danger is mitigated through prudence. Life is unpredictable.
The people of Anse du Clerc had different concerns. Rural Haiti is a place where life is fragile, transient: any day might be your last. The people who lived in this world did not want a set of facts. There was nothing facts could do to prevent dengue fever. Facts could not build a decent road. Facts did not give the people of Anse du Clerc a way to leave.
And so the people who lived in that world told terrible, wonderful stories — imaginative, inventive, and profound. The story the people of Anse du Clerc told to explain away misfortune was always a variant on the same theme: grievance led to hatred, hatred to magic, magic to death. There was a Creole proverb, “Pa gen mort Bondieu nan Haiti,” which meant literally, “God doesn’t kill anyone in Haiti,” and metaphorically that no one in Haiti died of natural causes. Where suffering seemed to lack an obvious cause, they invented one, and the thing that transmitted cause to effect was the supernatural. In this way of thinking, every death was a murder, every misfortune a crime — and the world made an awful, homicidal kind of sense.
But that’s the kind of story I’m telling here too.
* * *
It was technically the first day of spring when I saw Terry again, a few weeks after the barbecue. But what does spring mean in a tropical country? Flowers weren’t blooming, at least no more than normal; the weather wasn’t warming; nobody talked about picnics. After a while in Haiti I stopped thinking about spring and I knew that this was the hungry season, the difficult patch of the year before the mangoes and breadfruit were ready but after the manioc and yam were eaten, when the locals thought all day long about their nagging bellies. This was the food riot and revolution season.
But my first year in Haiti, I didn’t know that, and the excuse for my trip to the little hotel in Anse du Clerc was that I had written and decided to delete a page of dialogue. It was a windy day, bright peaks on the Caribbean and the sky streaked with long, fine clouds.
Terry didn’t notice me as I came walking across the broad crabgrass lawn that came up from the beach. He was dressed in a pale blue policeman’s uniform, open-necked, with the American flag on one shoulder and the United Nations insignia on the other. This was the first time I had seen him in uniform, and he looked a little stockier, a little more bull-necked, a little less handsome than I remembered. He was in animated conversation with a tall fat man.
I walked in their direction, and as I got closer, I could see the fat man’s light brown face, three chins oily with sweat; and his maroon shoes shined to a high gloss; and a bright red tie matched nicely with a light pink shirt. His cream coat was neatly over the adjoining chair. Then I could hear them, and Terry was saying, “You can’t let the sonofabitch talk like that, you got to step up—,” at which point he saw me, stopped himself, and said, “Hey now, Michael Dukakis.”
I had made the mistake, when I met Terry, of proposing that we drive to the beach in an Uruguayan armored personnel carrier. It was only a joke, but I suppose the image had sparked his imagination.
I said, “Hey now.”
Then Terry introduced me to Judge Johel Célestin.