A Rendezvous in Haiti

by Stephen Becker

  “Your what?”

  “Lieutenant.”

  “That’s all right,” McAllister said. “‘Boy’ will do fine. I’m not much of a hero today.”

  “I was only going to suggest that you drink up and pour another. They’ll send in food, and take us to the stream, but we cannot hurry matters.”

  “I asked her if the women made the rum and she said no, the men and the zombies. Did you see any zombies?”

  “No. The rum is good. They add guavaberries.”

  “That’s wonderful,” McAllister said. “How broadening is travel, as the man said. Maman speaks slowly and I understand her. She asked if I needed a woman.”

  “Easy does it. Drink up.”

  “Dutch courage?”

  “No. You’ll sleep better.”

  Later the old woman returned, and she was not alone. Scarron and McAllister stared; the priest drew a deep breath, and smiled to see the war on McAllister’s face. With the old woman was a very young woman wearing only a breech-clout. It was obvious that the lieutenant found her disturbing: his lips parted, his expression was suddenly brutish, he could not take his wide eyes from her body. The priest found her beautiful, either more or less than human: frizzy hair like a helmet on the round head, the nose of no race, the lips voluptuous, the neck and shoulders framing flawless breasts. Obscure dangers singed him, too sharp and transient to be the monk’s old bane, morose delectation. Her waist was slim and supple, her motion was dance, her buttocks were high and round, her thigh was long, her calf was full. For a tremulous long moment he suffered the truth of lust, and almost gasped. He called upon Christ, and all was well.

  “Belle ti, ça,” maman agreed. “She is Faustine, the blanc’s woman. Also the hen-girl at the Petro service, and the goat-girl and once the bullock-girl.”

  Faustine spoke little, maman said, and was believed to inhabit another world, among the gods.

  The two Haitian women served them goat chops and the inevitable beans and a bitter flat breadfruit cake. Maman chattered on: Faustine had gathered firewood as a child, and tended kids with a switch, and was fond of sucking at cane. She scrubbed the smaller vessels with sand. She worked fresh goatskins and pounded grain. She also crafted small snakes and birds and Christs on the cross, and sacred trees and suns and full moons and the horned goat. It was she who chanted and hummed the old invocations: prayers for rain, and for not too much rain, for the health of donkey’s hoofs; for no sandstorms; for fecundity among the domestic animals, or for the immediate fertility of one; for the victory of a fighting cock; against invasion by the small people from the east.

  And the charms and curses: against bellyache, sterility, pregnancy, cramps, rape; against murrain and the death of valuable beasts; against faithless men, labor pains, the police and the blancs; against smallpox and yellow fever. Against untimely marriage; for timely abortion. And more curses: to kill, to disquiet the freshly dead, to strike down a rival in love. And potions: for love or sleep or slow death.

  McAllister said, “My God.”

  “The Haiti no blanc ever sees.”

  McAllister said, “I know so little about Haiti.”

  “Does she rouse desire, this young one?”

  “Oh yes,” McAllister said. “I try not to lie to myself.”

  Scarron inspected him again, this lord of the world, this blanc, the new hero, democrat-aristocrat, eternally youthful and not unintelligent. “He is not a bad man. He is in fact a rather good man”: yes. But history was made by bad men. Without Judas, where was Jesus? Or was Judas God’s agent for good?

  Who was the Judas here, he wondered, and who the Jesus.

  Later the guards marched them to the stream and back, and McAllister stretched and groaned and yawned and cursed. Father Scarron whispered his evening prayers like a child, adding a fervent plea for Caroline; he felt less empty and more Christian in these pagan hills.

  No woman came to the hut that night, and Martel himself woke them in the morning. Scarron struggled to the surface of a dream, and before he was properly awake heard the deep raging voice, “You’re in luck, Marine. That French macaque is on his way, and he has made his mistake, and he is all yours.”

  10

  Caroline and Blanchard rose to a fine clear yellow dawn. Blanchard was silent, Caroline sullen: new fears. Perhaps time should stop here, events never better, never worse, a safe eternity. Blanchard tended to the animals, patting his horse and murmuring, “Sammy.” Finally he said, “Hot coffee’d go nice about now.”

  “Bacon and eggs,” she said. There might be awful journeys to come. Perhaps she would look back wistfully on her days with Blanchard.

  “Won’t be long,” he said. “Can be done, you know, bacon and eggs. Mountain hog fattens easy here. Suckling pig one time: damn good. For now, plantain and water.”

  “I’ll live,” she said. Doves settled to peck at their scraps.

  They were high in the hills, and half that morning they descended rolling ridges. It was a day full of doves: they cooed like little owls, oo-coo, oo-coo. Wood rats peered from the brush, unafraid, curious. Placid wisps of black smoke or white rose miles off—homes, farms.

  Blanchard was all talked out. But what he had told her worked in her now, and spoiled even Paris. Bobby in the Tuileries, Bobby in the Bois, and the saucers and filtres and horse-cabs, and thanks to Blanchard it was all dying, the ashes of civilization settling like dirty snow on the great cities. Blanchard’s lips pressing her own: she groaned in shame but the groan did not deceive her.

  “Listen,” he said, “I’ll stick by you.”

  “Thanks. My buddy.”

  They paused for clairin and water. It was like the end of a season: over. The last petal. The first snow.

  “I’d best have that pistol,” he said.

  She passed it to him. She had killed a man! For three hours she had ridden these hills and that had not once crossed her mind. I have killed a man. She said it again: it was without real meaning.

  Once in the lowlands they rode faster, across a patchy plain, dried grasses, stands of cane; mongooses fled, like great savage alien squirrels.

  “I hope they come out to meet us,” Blanchard said. “Every damn stand of trees looks like bandits.”

  “How would they know?”

  “They know.”

  Yes: they knew everything. The tambors. The ambush at the ford. “Blanchard,” she said.

  “What?”

  “Nothing. I never said your name before. Louis Paul Blanchard.”

  “Caroleen Barbour.”

  “Caroline.”

  “Caroline,” he said comfortably. “My girl Caroline.”

  “What’s your other one’s name? Or the two.”

  “In the village, Faustine. In town, never mind. The woman in town is my friend,” he said.

  They rode, and the breeze died, and the sun lay heavy. Blanchard’s eye roved, but the plain was deserted. “There,” he said at last, and she saw a wooded morne, imposing, rising vast and bluff from the plain, a gentle humped range of mornes beyond it; she saw a darkish dazzle, a stream; miles yet to go.

  The small Haitian sat across the fire from McAllister, and all four men swallowed hot coffee from wooden bowls. Women waited upon them, and one was the girl Faustine. The little man said, “Fleury heard her crying out and went to the wagon. There was a scuffle and then a shot, oh it was loud, like thunder in the night, and I dashed for the bush and took cover. I heard them talking afterward, the two blancs.”

  The smoke of fresh fires hovered. Villagers hovered too, at a distance. The little man was filthy and red-eyed, and spoke through mouthfuls of sweet potato.

  Martel spat into the flames. “That fool Boniface!”

  “Your friend,” Scarron said.

  “My friend! To let Fleury’s son die!”

  “Fleury’s son on the left hand.”

  “So, a bastard. We are all bastards here. Fleury doted on the boy—boy! already a man! They called him Gros-Cul because
he chewed tobacco.”

  McAllister did not understand.

  Scarron said, “It means rough-cut tobacco but also Fat Arse.”

  “So I have no choice,” Martel said. “Well, I don’t mind seeing Blanchard dead but I thought Boniface was shrewder. Unless—no. Boniface is one of us. But to send the boy with Blanchard! The boy could read and write!”

  “Blanshar,” the little fellow said. “Brrr.”

  McAllister asked him, “Did you wait for morning?”

  The Haitian squinted at this blanc; not at him, not quite; and said, “I waited. I hid myself and waited and in the morning when the wagon was gone I went to see, and I found Gros-Cul.”

  “The blanche,” McAllister said. “Did you see her?”

  “I did not.” To Martel the little man said, “This is one of the blancs. Why do we parley with him?”

  “He will be gone tonight,” Martel said, “one way or another. Can you find Gros-Cul again?”

  “Oh yes. He lies in the old valley Josselin, up the south slope.”

  McAllister was reborn. Hope burned like a fever as the priest translated patiently from Creole. The little Haitian had blurted his tale ten times—he had told Martel, and the men, and the women, and the children, and other men, anyone who would listen, and now he sat bug-eyed before Martel while the priest murmured to the blanc. “It might have been me,” the little man said.

  “But it was Gros-Cul,” Martel said. “And Blanchard is coming here. I want to know something, and I want you to think, and remember.”

  “I am thinking,” the man said. “I am remembering.”

  “Then tell me if Blanchard knew who the boy was. Tell me if he ever used Fleury’s name.”

  The man considered this in silence. They heard the snap of burning wood, the cry of a baby; in a nearby hut a bolt shot home—a guerrilla cleaning his weapon. “He never used Fleury’s name or my own. Not once did he say to him, ‘Fleury,’ or ‘Gros-Cul,’ or to me ‘Ti-Tomas.’ Only ‘ou’.”

  “Good,” Martel said.

  “Good,” McAllister said.

  “Why good?” the priest asked.

  McAllister and Martel spoke at once. Martel nodded, and McAllister went on: “If he knew who the boy was, he’d head for the border. He didn’t know, so he’ll just come home.”

  “Hired thugs,” Martel said. “He thought they were hired thugs. It’s the language he understands.”

  “I’d like my weapons now,” McAllister said.

  “You’ll have them in time. The Marines have mutilated Cacos, you know.”

  “And the Cacos have mutilated Marines.”

  “Patience. Hours yet.”

  “It feels like Sunday,” Scarron said. “One of the sad Sundays.”

  After this early coffee they dismissed Ti-Tomas. “The sun barely risen,” Martel said. “Hot meat this morning, hey? Chicken, I think. You,” he called, “Faustine! Spit a chicken, with the little apples and the sea-salt and the plantain. You hear? You understand? Good. Do it now. I like that,” he told Scarron and McAllister. “Let his woman cook for us.”

  “If he didn’t know who Gros-Cul was,” Scarron said, “he is not so much at fault.”

  “It is not a question of fault,” Martel said. “Fleury is me and I am Fleury and no more need be said. I’d kill Blanchard myself but am being courteous to my enemy here, who has a prior claim. If the lieutenant misses, I do the job myself.”

  “The lieutenant will not miss,” McAllister said.

  “Bad enough to hurt Fleury,” Martel said. “If I cannot show him Blanchard’s body, God help me and all of us.”

  McAllister said, “We do it at the ford?”

  “Certainly. He must come that way. The sentries are out now, and will report when they see him. We have every advantage at the ford.”

  “I know all about the advantages,” McAllister said.

  “I shall stand on the bank, and wave him welcome.”

  “Is that usual?”

  Martel said, “No.”

  “Perhaps it should all be as usual as possible.”

  “Yes; perhaps the sentries will greet him. But I must see him dead. No more white Cacos.”

  “About my weapons …”

  “Shut up about your weapons! I cannot have you flaunting weapons. In my village no blanc carries a weapon.”

  “Blanchard did.”

  “No more. I will carry them to the ford; I will hand them to you myself. You must behave yourself, Lieutenant. My men have you always in their sights.”

  “I’m your guest,” McAllister said. “It is not my habit to shoot my hosts.”

  “There are a number of dead Haitians who might contradict you.”

  McAllister made no answer, but in time said, “It would be interesting to fight beside you.”

  Martel said, “Haiti could use a man like you. You really ought to be an officer in the Gendarmerie.”

  Scarron smiled; another day, McAllister too might have enjoyed the joke.

  “A beautiful morning,” Martel said. “I wonder if the rains are over. Too early for the Christmas winds. Time for a clairin, hey?”

  McAllister said, “Not before breakfast, thank you. Maybe after work.”

  Their breakfast was hot and they took it without much talk. The chicken was richly spiced, but what with his pain and impatience, and the naked Faustine serving them, McAllister could scarcely swallow; he gulped his coffee gratefully. He was breathing quicker, as he did before any action, and he did not deceive himself: it was a murderer’s rapture rising in him, the emotion that would impel a decent man to the final and irrevocable breach of decency, horribly mingled with a final and irrevocable joy. But he did not like killing from ambush, and the coffee soured on his tongue.

  He saw his friend the crone. They exchanged a nod. McAllister could not be comfortable among these people but could not dislike them. Martel offered cigarillos; his guests declined; the guerrilla smoked in the shade of a mountain mango tree. To quiet himself and to pass time McAllister said, “What would you do if the Americans left?”

  “Conquer,” Martel said, “and rule. Look at Haiti: a happy, busy, pastoral people bustling about their daily work.” Deux Rochers was already torpid, and Martel’s irony was more than broad—it was bitter. “My God, what history has done to them!”

  “History and their own masters,” Scarron said.

  “Agreed, agreed,” Martel said. “I suppose after a century we should stop blaming the blancs. When I first came to this village last year there was not even a faded memory of blancs: only legends. The blancs had constructed great palaces of wood and stone, I was told, and the blood of dead slaves thickened the mortar, slaves imported from Guinea and Dahomey, and some of these villagers believe they are still in Guinea or Dahomey. They might as well be.”

  McAllister said, “The small people from the east, who are they? And why is there a charm against sandstorms?”

  “Survivals of Africa,” Scarron said.

  “There is a chant,” Martel said. “‘The sun rises in the east, and sets in Guinea.’”

  “Old magic,” McAllister said.

  Martel shrugged, and smoked, and said, “You see magic as hocus-pocus. To my people the other world is real, and this daily life merely a pastime.”

  “And to you?”

  “The revolution is my god,” Martel said. “But I wear a ouanga bag.”

  “Revolution,” McAllister said. “What’s wrong with elections? We supervised a plebiscite last year and gave you a new constitution.”

  Martel said, “Merde, alors.”

  “It was a farce,” Scarron said. “The only clause so far invoked allows foreigners to own land. The rest is either irrelevant or unenforceable.”

  “Good intentions,” McAllister said. “The longer I stay the less I know.”

  “Good intentions,” Martel said. “I believed in them once, and I can remember the day I ceased to believe.” He flicked his cigarillo viciously into the fire, and a
sked Scarron, “Do you remember?”

  “I remember.”

  “We were in school together,” Martel said, “and one day, sitting among the priests, leafing through my history, I came across the account of an enlightened European, traveling through Haiti in seventeen-ninety. He was a gentle man and a friend to the poor Negro.”

  A homily. A lecture. McAllister frowned; resentment stirred. This was not a time to discuss morals and manners.

  “And in his account was the passage that told me who I was. I read it several times that day and never lost it. In the morning I speak it aloud as Ti-Jean prays to Christ. I carried it with me in France and Port-au-Prince and Cap-Haïtien and prison, and I carry it with me now, and I have never before spoken it aloud to a blanc but here it is.” Martel’s eyes had reddened. He spoke swiftly in a cold, vindictive tone.

  Scarron translated: “‘A woman I saw, a young woman, one of the most beautiful women on the island, gave a banquet. Furious when a platter of botched pastries was served, she ordered her black cook seized and had him flung into the red-hot oven.’”

  McAllister muttered, “Jesus.”

  Martel said, “The blancs used to stuff gunpowder up a black arse and blow a slave to bits, for amusement or example.”

  After a moment McAllister said, “Times change,” and immediately felt like a fool.

  “Not unless we change them,” Martel said. “You fear revolution, do you? But do you know what is the real wonder? Not the ferocity of a revolution, when the brutes finally rise in a brief violent spasm, but their endless patient moderation.”

  There seemed no answer to that; McAllister made none.

  Soon Scarron said, “Sufficient unto the day. Our problem is Blanchard.”

  Martel said, “Yes. In a war we must survive our enemies; in a revolution we must survive our friends.”

  Blanchard said, “Look there.”

  A couple of acres of cane, and the stupefied marchers again, the chanting foreman with a bundle, the drugged laborers in lockstep. The men halted, the foreman passed machetes, they all vanished into the cane.