When Adam pulls up with his driver, I’m surprised. Adam grew up in Vermont, so I was expecting a pale farmboy with blue eyes. Instead he looks Haitian, like one of the light-skinned young men we’ve been seeing driving up and down the street in their SUVs. Later, we’ll learn more of his story. His father, Louis, was in the Peace Corps in the seventies in Niger, where he married a Tuareg woman, Adam’s mother. The marriage did not last, and Adam ended up being raised by his dad in the States, so he both is and isn’t a typical young American of the under-thirty generation.
Introductions are brief, with effusive thanks on our side. We jump in the pickup and follow Adam’s car toward the center of Port-au-Prince. Because it has gotten dark, we are spared the full impact of the devastated city. But we can smell it: sewage and cooking fires and the concrete–sawdust–ground dust smells of construction sites, or more appropriately here, destruction sites. Slowly, figures emerge from the darkness, clusters in front of tarps and tents, women around small fires, basins of water, groupings on the streets, at corners—masses of humanity surviving.
Two more comedians at the Oloffson
Pulling into the Oloffson is another unreal moment. The lobby is lit up and crowded with another kind of humanity, the thriving kind. Little groupings of people I imagine to be journalists sit at tables, talking on cell phones, laptops open. Many are foreign-looking—i.e., white. (Interestingly, the word in Kreyòl for foreigner, blan, also means white.) There are plenty of Haitians here, as well, all shades of brown, as this is one of the permeable places in the city where outsiders can come in contact with insiders, those who know or who pretend to know.
As we walk through the restaurant area to the front desk, we spot some members of the band already setting up at the far end of the veranda, testing the sound system. One musician strums a guitar, and the sound from the humongous speakers makes the floor vibrate. How can people traumatized by a recent earthquake not freak out?
At the front desk, the receptionist pages through her guestbook and announces that there is no reservation in our name. Adam steps forward and, with a few words of Kreyòl, resolves the matter. There are only two rooms left. They are going fast. It turns out that the six-month anniversary of the earthquake is in a few days, and the city is flooding with journalists returning to report on how the reconstruction is going. Haiti is again newsworthy.
Bill is ready to hand over his credit card. But Adam suggests we take a look at the rooms first.
We trudge upstairs behind the young porter, leaving Piti in the lobby to guard our belongings. The first room is down a long open-air corridor. It’s actually quite pleasant with a big ceiling fan, a magisterial bed, a freestanding floor mirror, and slatted jalousie doors that open onto a balcony that looks down at the garden below. But just as we’re about to give our approval, the explosive sounds of electric guitars and drums comes booming through the floor. It turns out the band plays directly below this room. No wonder that, in a city filling with journalists, this room is vacant. And RAM regularly plays until three in the morning.
I shake my head at the porter. This will not do.
Almost as if we are connected by a push-pull mechanism, Bill insists we stay. The noise won’t be that bad. “We can close all the windows.” Great! We’ll stay awake all night having a sauna instead.
But it’s not just the heat. Even a closed room can’t stop the walls and floor from shaking. With scenes of the televised earthquake still fresh in my head, I know I’ll be awake all night, thinking it’s happening again. “Didn’t you just hear that? Didn’t you just feel that?”
But Bill claims he didn’t hear or feel anything. I’m tempted to turn to Adam and Mikaela and ask for their testimony. But I’m already ashamed enough to be arguing in front of them and the waiting porter.
Two adults should be able to figure this out reasonably. “Let’s go outside in the hall and talk about it a second. Will you excuse us?” But out in the hall, Bill isn’t any more reasonable. He wants to stay at the Oloffson. He has always wanted to stay at the Oloffson ever since he had lunch in the dining room twenty-seven years ago.
“But don’t you want to get some sleep?”
“Okay, OKAY, you win!”
I take a deep breath. I’ve had enough of this vaudeville act. Then and there, I decide. We are staying at the Oloffson. Mikaela and Adam are at the door. “I’m sorry,” I tell them. “I guess we’re going to take it.”
Into this impasse steps Adam. He reminds us of something that his father had mentioned. Louis, Elsie, and Adam are actually renting two apartments at their compound: one for their use, another to accommodate guests or visiting coworkers. The extra apartment is currently empty; we are more than welcome to stay there. Adam assures us that it’s not an imposition on him. We should think of it as a house swap. His father and Elsie are staying at Alta Gracia. It’s only fitting that we stay in their guest apartment.
“It’s up to Bill,” I say, knowing if I agree to anything, there’s a good chance he will oppose it.
“Just as long as we can have lunch here,” he concedes grumpily.
We descend the stairs and stop at the front desk to let the receptionist know that we won’t be taking the rooms, after all. In front of us, a guest with a British accent is explaining that he is checking out for the night so he can get some sleep. He turns, shaking his head. “I adoooore Richard,” he announces, elongating the middle vowel as only a Brit can do. “But this band idea is a ghastly mistake.”
This is so perfect, it saves me a dozen I-told-you-so’s.
And so, once again, we follow Adam through the twists and turns of downtown Port-au-Prince and back up to Pétionville. In the Graham Greene novel, the comedians of the title are the white charlatans, so caught up in their personal dramas, they seem oblivious to the deadly despotic regime around them. Even though we didn’t end up staying there, Bill and I would fit right in with the other comedians in Greene’s version of the Oloffson.
Money to be made among the ruins
Adam pulls up in front of an electric gate that opens; we follow him past several buildings to a cul-de-sac parking area in the rear. The compound was built by a well-off Haitian family for themselves to live in, but they are now using only one of the buildings and are renting out the others. With rents in Port-au-Prince now rivaling those of New York City and LA, the family is cashing in on the demand. We drive past building after building. It’s astonishing to think that a single family once lived here, albiet an extended one.
Adam and his father and Elsie are living in a rear building on the top floor above their ground-floor guest apartment. It feels palatial with a living room that opens onto a back terrace, a kitchen, and two bedrooms each with a bath. Piti assures us he won’t mind sleeping on the couch. He now confesses that he is very glad we did not stay at the Oloffson. I recall the meek, big-eyed look on his face as he waited in a corner of the lobby with our suitcases, a young man feeling humbled—by what? I’m curious. What didn’t he like about the Oloffson?
Piti shrugs. He just did not feel welcome there. While he was waiting for us, the receptionist, the porters, the people milling around did not look on him kindly.
I’m surprised, as Richard Morse and his band are known for being huge advocates of the Haitian little guy. All I can figure is that Piti hasn’t traveled widely in his own country. He has never had much contact with Haitians of the upper class. He has met plenty of upper-class Dominicans in the DR, but perhaps he takes it as a matter of course that he will be second-class in somebody else’s country. Among his own people, it stings to feel those differences.
We invite Adam to join us for supper at any place he recommends. He picks a restaurant called Quartier Latin, where a Cuban group plays on Thursday nights. (Thursday nights seem to be music nights in Port-au-Prince.) As we follow Adam’s car, we turn and find ourselves engulfed in a crowd that closes around us. There’s some sort of open-air concert going on in front of one of the tent cities. People hav
e taken over the street, dancing, singing, waving their arms. Faces peer in at us; hands bang on the pickup in the rhythm of the drums, but also in impatience because we’re breaking up their party in order to get through. Ahead of us, Adam has slowed to make sure we are behind him.
My heart is beating as loudly as the drums outside. We are inside the very scene I envisioned this morning when I was tempted to cancel the Port-au-Prince trip, surrounded by people who have every reason to feel desperate.
But nothing happens. We don’t get pulled out of our pickup and told to surrender our wallets at knifepoint. It could be market day at the border in Dajabón, sans the military escort. I am left puzzled by my own expectations. What scenarios have I absorbed from the media or books—the violent history of Haiti can make for nightmare reading—that have led me to assume that poverty and misfortune will always bring out the worst in people?
At the Quartier Latin, we are turned away by the guards at the gate. The place is packed, filled to capacity. The city must be crawling with people who have money to spend. Later, Adam will tell us that there are ten thousand NGOs on the ground—that’s not counting the personnel who work for them; seven thousand Brazilian soldiers here with the United Nations; aid workers, journalists, consultants, embassy people. There is money to be made among the ruins, services to be provided for foreigners, many of whom are well-meaning, but also accustomed to a certain level of comfort, of safety, of good food, dependable Internet, fun and entertainment.
We stand on the sidewalk outside Quartier Latin, debating what to do. It’s well past nine o’clock. If it were up to me, I’d head back to the compound, open one of our cans of vegetables, another of chickpeas, assuage our hunger, and then crash. But I’m also determined to end this night on a grace note if it kills me. Briefly, I consider injecting some humor in the situation by suggesting we head back to the Oloffson, have dinner there, then dance to RAM till the cows come home.
Adam comes up with an alternate plan. There’s a Lebanese-Haitian restaurant he thinks we’ll like called Magdoos. It’s a short drive to the pull-in parking, across the street from another tent city. Entering through the tall, guarded gates is another unreal moment—like entering Papaye earlier today. But since Bill and Piti didn’t have that experience, this place is more of a shock to them. The chandeliers, the crystal, the crimson canopies draping outdoor tables. The place is full of foreigners, embassy people, NGO workers, consultants—most of whom will be gone by the time we are done with our meal. It turns out there is a midnight curfew imposed by many international organizations on their personnel. A safety precaution, Adam explains. This is, after all, a city under siege—by the aftermath of a natural disaster as well as the ongoing onslaught of poverty.
In fact, the United Nations forces have blocked out the city into zones, reminiscient of Baghdad; there is a downtown red zone where foreigners are advised not to go; a more residential yellow zone, where folks are urged to be cautious; and finally a green zone (where we are now, in the hills of Pétionville), a place with no history of trouble. And yet, the first kidnapping of foreign nationals after the earthquake, back in March, happened right here in Pétionville.
“There are no ‘safe’ areas in Haiti,” the US State Department travel advisory warns on its Web site. It goes on to recommend against nonessential travel. Don’t go to Port-au-Prince unless you have to. Which is exactly the opposite of the choice we made this morning, coming here without having to. And I’m glad we did. Yes, I will say it, even to a spouse I’m at odds with. We should be held accountable for our fears, be forced to journey to the hearts of darkness of our own imaginings. We might find ourselves surprised, uttering not “The horror! The horror!” with Joseph Conrad, but “The Beauty! The Beauty!” with Junot Díaz.
We are in luck: a table has just opened. The waiter escorts us to an outside patio and hands us each a large menu like a choir’s music folder. I have a brief, absurd image of all of us standing up to sing the Hallelujah chorus.
I’m at one end of the table with Piti, who is gazing down at his menu as if it were written in a foreign language. It might be that he doesn’t read French, or perhaps he is shocked at the prices—most entrées are in the mid- to high-twenty-dollar range. With my translation help, he decides on the fried fish, perhaps thinking of Eseline’s choice of fish last year in Cap-Haïtien.
At the other end of the table, Bill and Mikaela and Adam are talking about Haiti, the frustrations of the reconstruction, the six-month anniversary on Monday. I’m relieved not to have to participate, as I’m feeling that I can’t trust any of my reactions or instincts right now. Only one impulse feels trustworthy: seeing to it that Piti isn’t again left out in the cold as he was in the lobby of the Oloffson.
“What a difference from last night!” I say, recalling our singing and dancing in the tiny back room in Moustique.
Piti shakes his head, as if he, too, doesn’t believe we got here from there.
“What do you think so far, I mean, about Port-au- Prince?”
Piti’s expression is suddenly grave, his forehead lined. It’s that old man who occasionally makes an appearance on his baby face, a preview of what he will look like when he is my age. “Poor Haiti needs so much help,” he says, sighing. “If I had money, I would help.” I wonder if he knows that the majority of people dining at Magdoos tonight came to Haiti with the same idea: to help.
We finish our meal with a half hour to spare before the midnight curfew. On the way back to the compound, Adam takes us on a dry run to the Dominican consulate, so we will be able to find it on our own tomorrow. As we say our goodnights to him, then to Piti and Mikaela, I brace myself. This will be my first time alone with Bill since our full day of squabbling. At dinner, he was chatting away, effusive and happy at last to be among friends, eating good food, anticipating a good night’s rest. See, I wanted to call down the table, see what comes of not staying at the Oloffson!
But neither of us has energy for recriminations or I-told-you-so’s. What’s more, Bill’s intrepid eating of the mystery meat dish in Moustique last night has resulted in upset bowels. He admits that he hasn’t felt himself all day. “Do you mind if I use the bathroom?” I shake my head, feeling myself melting already at the thought of this bloke, whom I was going to leave forever, dying on me from food poisoning. “I have Pepto-Bismol in my case by the sink if you need it.”
The door of the bathroom closes. I sit on the edge of the bed and take a deep breath. I would meditate if I thought it would help. But what’s the use? No matter what, I keep coming back to this faulty default self. When Bill finally returns and climbs in beside me I curl into the curve of his body and listen to his breathing a long while, before I, too, fall asleep.
July 9, Port-au-Prince—we came to see
Breakfast at pâtisserie Marie Beliard
The sun is shining brightly through the picture window—so soon after I fell asleep! As I’m coming awake, I hear a soft strumming through the closed door. It’s Piti, playing his guitar. He brought it along to Haiti with the idea of leaving it behind for that future day when he will come home to stay. But once in Moustique, he changed his mind. He will need his guitar to make it through the long, lonely months without Eseline and the baby. Right now, hearing him play, I wonder if he needs it just to get through the day, bracing himself for more of what we saw yesterday.
We’re eager to get going, figuring we’ll find a place open for breakfast. Adam drops in to say good-bye and tells us that there is actually a very good pâtisserie called Marie Beliard on the way to the consulate. “On the way” is one of those slippery phrases I’ve learned not to trust in Haiti. But Adam, who has not failed us so far—it wasn’t his fault the Quartier Latin was packed last night—is right again. We make one left turn on the way to the consulate, and go down about a block, and there it is, a shop with large picture windows and a pull-in parking area not piled high with rubble.
It is breakfast time and the place is hopping. We stand aroun
d, trying to figure out the system for ordering. A bemused woman in her forties offers to help in a slightly French-accented English. She reminds me of women I’ve seen in delicatessens in Manhattan’s Upper East Side, so neatly attired—their pumps match their purses—you’d be surprised to learn that all they’re dressed up for is this outing.
Madame explains that we must pick a number from a dispenser at the end of the counter; wait for it to pop up on a panel; then we must place our order with our attendant, who writes it up and hands the slip to us; whereupon, we must join that other pressing crowd at the register; pay for our order; get our slip stamped; then return to the first crowd, where we must try to catch the attention of our attendant; hand over our stamped slip; and wait for her to fill our order. I’m exhausted just hearing how to do it.
But the system seems to be working: people keep getting their bags and boxes and going out the door, our patrician lady among them. Meanwhile we wait and wait and wait. Even people whose numbers were after ours have come and gone. Nine o’clock ticks by; we’ve been waiting over a half hour! I go out to give Piti, not really a progress report, more like a regress report.
Back inside, another English-speaker, a man named Junior, hears us grumbling and asks what’s the problem. When we explain, he puts in a good word for us with one of the attendants, then begins telling us his story. It turns out he lives in Miami with his wife and kids, but he travels back and forth because he has business in Haiti. What kind of business? “I make ice and sell it to restaurants, hotels, grocery stores.”
My next question is one that I’m sure everyone in Port-au-Prince must be asked: “Were you here when the earthquake happened?”
A Wedding in Haiti Page 16