To Run Across the Sea

by Norman Lewis

  Joselito Ballesteros, aged 9 but looking hardly older than 7, gave an impressive demonstration with the cape, shaking it in a taunting fashion, and making defiant bullfighter noises at his father, one of the teachers. The father, shoulder hunched, head down and horns thrust forward, scraped with one foot in the sand in the manner of a bull who is about to attack. In due course he was despatched as Joselito lunged forward with his imaginary sword, an estocada loudly applauded by the bystanders. In another part of the ring the mature student of 16 skipped aside to avoid the charge of an instructor manipulating the simulated bull on wheels, raising himself on tip-toe to plunge the pair of banderillas into a padded leather surface where the neck muscles would have been.

  ‘In this profession, as in others,’ Ballesteros the father said, ‘everything depends on an early start. Joselito started training at 5. At the moment he can hardly see over an animal’s back, but he could be giving private performances by the time he’s 14. He can’t be accepted as a professional for four more years after that.’ Ballesteros described the principles inculcated by the school. ‘The art of the ring is wrapped up with moral attitudes,’ he said. ‘We keep a close check on their behaviour in the day school as well as in the home. We are engaged in the development of artists and believe that art is inseparable from life.’

  ‘How many children like this can expect to become great bullfighters?’ I asked.

  ‘Five per cent.’

  ‘And how many will die in the ring?’

  The question startled him, and his face crumpled.

  ‘When they’re properly trained, as these boys will be, there’s nothing to worry about. It’s the old-timers trying for a comeback, and the kids that will do anything to get a start. The bulls cut them down, but they don’t make the papers. How many of them go that way? There’s no knowing.’

  He seemed depressed at the turn our talk had taken. Perhaps it was something he wanted to put out of his mind. The boys were dancing round us with their capes, striking attitudes of defiance, sizing up phantom bulls, coming close to the imaginary horns. Now the master’s attention was taken up, a little horseplay had been brought in.

  ‘Above all we teach our boys to master fear,’ Ballesteros said. ‘That’s the most important thing of all.’ Almost plaintively he added: ‘You see, the horns are very sharp. It’s bad for them if they get scared.’

  The more I saw of these Spaniards of the deep south the more it became clear to me that it was a misapprehension to believe that their feeling for bulls was anything less than an almost obsessional admiration and respect. Near Alcalá a handful of olive-growers had clubbed together to pay an enormous price for a bull to be killed at their annual fiesta. Whatever their excuse, this could not have been anything but a sacrifice to ensure a good harvest, and understandably, only the most splendid of animals could be offered to the gods. Noble is the adjective never out of Spanish mouths when they speak of the bulls, to whom they frequently attribute such human qualities as candour and sincerity. This is F. Martinez Torres, himself a bullfighter, on the subject of courage: ‘The bull is the only animal in creation that is not daunted by any wounds he receives. He does not possess the treacherous or bloodthirsty instinct of other animals that crouch unseen and spring on their prey from behind. He attacks nobly from the front. Face to face, there is no animal that can beat him.’

  This is only part of the story, for the bull is capable of enduring friendship, and never forgets a face—or a voice. ‘There have been some bulls,’ Torres tells us, ‘which during the fighting, on being called by the herdsman they knew, have broken off the fight and trotted meekly over to the place where their former custodian stood, allowing him to stroke them from inside the fence, or at times in the arena itself. When he has finished doing this, they have returned to fight with the same fierceness as before.’

  The hard-bitten professionals of the Spanish press, bull-lovers to a man, are saturated with the pathetic fallacy. Here is a passage from Antonio Lorca’s account in El Correo of a novillada for young bulls in Seville at the time of my visit. Lorca cannot stomach vulgarity and believes that the bulls feel the same. ‘Such a bull as this demanded at least a token authority to direct its noble charge. A real fighter would have provided inspiration and, faced with a tasteless fidgeter, it showed indifference, even impatience.’

  Manuel Rodriguez of ABC, also covering this event, noted that the fourth (inevitably ‘noble’) bull gave the matador Fernando Lozano two warnings of the danger he placed himself in through misuse of the cape. Rodriguez too, abhorred vulgarity, ‘Elsewhere they might have thrown cushions. Here in Seville we correct such lapses with an icy silence.’

  Back to Lorca. ‘Four bulls received huge applause from the crowd as they were dragged from the ring. As for the fighters, it was a mediocre harvest of a single ear. Again I ask myself the question, is a bullfighter born, or made? From what we saw yesterday I can only conclude that he is born. Nevertheless, it is his duty to himself and to us to continue to grow. Shame it was to see great bulls thrown away in this fashion.’

  A SMART CAR IN HAITI

  WHEN I FIRST WENT to Haiti there were 6,000 generals in its army out of a total force of 20,000, and now one of the survivors of this legion of high-ranking officers sat at the bar of the modest but charming Hotel Meurice, watching the world through a whisky glass he rotated in such a way that its cut facets projected golden spearpoints of reflection on the ceiling and walls. The general was rubicund and genial, very black, as most army officers were, but with a bronze burnishing of the cheekbones of the kind that in Haiti advertised the good life. He was at the hotel to deliver a fresh supply of Papa Doc Duvalier’s ‘gold’ postage stamps, commemorating the fifth anniversary of Papa Doc’s assumption of the title of President for Life. Mr Johnson, the owner, was required to top up his stock, and also display a stamp on a newly designed showcard on his reception desk. He was expected to persuade at least 50 per cent of his guests to buy a stamp, costing the equivalent of £8. The general asked me if I had made my purchase, and I excused myself saying that I had only checked in that morning. ‘Be advised by me,’ he said. ‘Acquire all you can. This is philatelic rarity that will soon double or treble in value, and you are getting in at the bottom of the market.’ He gave me a beautifully engraved card. Vincent Deshayes. Général de L’Armée. ‘You are a friend,’ he said. ‘Come to me privately if you desire to make a substantial purchase at a good discount. You will make a killing.’ He drained his glass, patted me on the shoulder, picked up his swagger stick, and sallied forth into the impeccable Haitian day.

  Mr Johnson watched him go, hatred and gloom expressed in what could be seen of his face, which was largely swathed in bandages. He was just out of hospital where he had been detained for a week after an encounter with one of the general’s subordinates who had beaten the living daylights out of him. The captain had side-swiped Johnson’s car in passing in his Jeep, and Johnson’s fatal mistake had been to sound his horn in protest. The captain pulled up and sauntered across.

  ‘What’s your name?’ he asked in French.

  ‘Johnson. I run the Grand Hotel Meurice.’

  ‘Someone’s screwing your wife.’

  ‘I hardly think that,’ Johnson said.

  The captain raised the baton he was carrying. ‘Say, “Someone’s screwing my wife.”’

  ‘Someone’s screwing my wife,’ Johnson agreed.

  The officer then struck him a number of blows about the body and head, flattening his nose and breaking an eardrum and several ribs. The beating, Johnson said, was bad, and the hospital if anything worse. Luckily he was not in need of medicine because there was nothing but aspirins. Food had to be brought in, and his wife, called in to look after him, slept on the floor beside his bed. ‘That’s it so far as I’m concerned. I’m calling it a day,’ he said. But I knew him too well, and I knew that next year if I came back he would still be there, a prisoner for life of the charm of this strange and beautiful island.
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  Even the beating and the hospital had not been the end of Johnson’s troubles. Haiti depended for survival on US aid, most of which went to foot the bill for the salaries of fictitious generals and the military equipment they were supposed to require, leaving little over to be spent on essential services. At this moment Haiti was suffering from its worst water shortage in history. Newspapers reported that women were rising at two in the morning to walk to the mountains to carry home their water supply for the day. In Port-au-Prince robbers raided hotel swimming pools, and while Johnson had lain groaning on his bed of pain a well-organised gang, having first drugged his dog with bread soaked in rum, had syphoned away 30,000 irreplaceable gallons.

  Two days after my arrival the marauders were back. Johnson rushed up literally tearing at what could be reached between the bandages of his hair to say that once again they had knocked his dog out with overproof rum, and cut down and gone off with the finest of his specimen trees. This had been planted by the rich creole who had owned the place and who collected arboreal rarities. I remembered it as having a thick glossy trunk with many wart-like protuberances, and flowers that attracted clouds of sombre-moths. The thieves had carried it away, Johnson said, to convert into charcoal, second only in value in the absence of all other combustible material, to food itself—which in any case Haitians were slowly learning to do without.

  We looked down from the veranda into the swimming pool where a small snake was twisting desperately in the 18 inches of curdled water in its bottom, and then, a little to one side, at the naked stump where Johnson’s tree had once spread its opulent shade. Johnson’s single visible eye glistened in the opening of the bandages. ‘I have to get away for a time and simmer down,’ he said. The number of misinformed tourists attracted to Haiti in these days made it hardly worth keeping the hotel open; in any case his French wife who enjoyed les affaires could easily manage. Besides this he had a project in mind. ‘I’ve lived here 20 years,’ he said, ‘and the time’s come to put a few thoughts on paper.’ Someone had just discovered a pocket of black men who spoke Polish. They proved to be descendants of the defeated legion of General le Clerc—Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, living as charcoal burners on a mountain-top in the Departement du Nord. It sounded like promising material for his book, and when he suggested that we might run up there together, I immediately agreed.

  Johnson’s pride and joy was his Facel-Vega, an ostentatious and over-elaborate French car of which only a few hundred had been made to special order. It was studded with the gadgetry of its day, little of which continued to work after exposure to the primaeval servicing arrangements provided in Haiti. The lights did not switch on, the power-steering had failed, and the electrically operated windows on which the air-conditioning depended had suddenly fallen and could not be raised. The worst trouble with the car was that the mere sight of it was offensive to the police and the miscellaneous thugs supported by those in power, who believed that only they should ride in comfort. It was inevitable that any squad car or collection of motorised tontons-macoutes noticing the Facel-Vega parked in the street should do what they could to scrape a fender as they passed. This, Johnson said, would be the first opportunity he had had to get out on the open road and put the car through its paces.

  The next day, a Sunday, we set out in hope, although over-shadowed by the news that the road to Cap Haitien on the north coast, where we had hoped to stay, had become impracticable for all but a jeep. The general opinion was that we might get two-thirds of the way, but we had been driving for less than an hour and had only just passed St Marc, 35 miles from Port-au-Prince, when the road ahead disappeared among what looked like bomb-craters, and we turned back. ‘Looks as though we shan’t be seeing the Poles,’ Johnson said, and I agreed, suddenly realising that all the bare and bitter landscape of northern Haiti studded nevertheless with so many delectable, wildly coloured and ramshackle little towns such as Marmelade, Limonade, Petit Paradis, Limbo, Phaëton, Plaisance and Ditty, some of which I had seen, and some not, had passed for ever beyond my reach.

  But at least St Marc was left to us, on the frontiers of the lost world, wearing its coat of many colours. Long-limbed, barefoot girls in white dresses and wide Edwardian hats roamed the streets which were painted with all the colours of yesteryear: greens to rest the eyes after the hot plain, saffron, cerulean, ultramarine, and reds in all stages of reduction by the sun to a final nostalgic sepia. The girls floated towards us as if moved by a slack tide. At the far end of the street a number of tiny Lowry figures were tugging on a rope to pull a gingerbread house upright. A man drifted past caressing the head of a fighting cock shorn of comb and wattle, carried under his arm. The street was scattered with scampering black pigs, and somewhere behind a ruined clapboard façade a piano tinkled out a hymn.

  REJOICE! said the single word over the door of the bar. We went in and were instantly, and without ordering, served by a negro of huge solemnity with a fried banana apiece, upon which he ladled a dollop of shrimps. With this went blue tumblerfuls of the pale and ensnaring Haitian rum. The girls lined up in the doorway and followed our every movement with their splendid but melancholic eyes. One used her muslin scarf to polish a small area of the Facel-Vega’s wing, then smiled shyly at her reflection. Swept along by the rum, Johnson began rummaging in his stock of folklore and myth. ‘One of these days you may turn up out of the blue and find all our rooms taken,’ he said. ‘Should this ever happen let me warn you not to go to a boarding house run by a nubile woman. They have this habit of falling in love with any white man and putting menstrual fluid in his food. It works, and you’d find yourself in quite a predicament.’

  In Haiti you were expected to believe anything, and no story of werewolves or enchanters was too fantastic to be true. Foreign residents like Johnson, who had done a long stint on the island, were more credulous than the natives themselves. There was something about the fey and dispirited postures of the girls at the door that prompted a question. ‘Have you ever seen a zombie?’

  ‘On more than one occasion,’ Johnson said, as I knew he would. ‘They are characterised by an appearance of extreme lethargy, as well as their way of speaking through the nose.’

  ‘Any chance of my ever seeing one?’

  ‘That would largely depend upon you. Ask yourself, have you an open mind? A professional sceptic is a man in blinkers. If we had the time I could show you extraordinary things, as for example a mapu tree that is the home of a spirit. You are bound to laugh but it is a phenomenon scientists are in two minds about. Do you remember the celebrated Ti Bossa?’

  ‘I’ve heard of him.’

  ‘This was the voodoo priest who put President Magloire in power. As you know, he had forty wives and could render a man invisible purely by pouring a small amount of a certain white powder over him.’

  ‘Didn’t Magloire give him a Cadillac?’

  ‘The island’s first. It’s still up there in the mountains. His people built a temple round it and they still sacrifice a white cock to it every Saturday.’

  ‘Now that’s something we should see,’ I said.

  A narrow lane led down to the sea, and a boat painted with a cabalistic design, its bottom stove in, sat in its shadow on the beach. There were hardly any small boats left on the island now, and three ebony-black fishermen were just about to launch a raft to fish for sharks. Slow, rakish tropic birds joined wing-tips with their reflection in the cobalt sea. A boy sat cutting mother-of-pearl to make brooches from a pile of helmet shells. He came up with a sample of his work in the hope of a commission. A brooch carved and polished with a routine Dahomey head could be finished in the day and would cost one gourde. There were seven gourdes to the dollar. ‘Pas cher,’ he said.

  Johnson suggested we might as well go back to Port-au-Prince, then take the so-called international highway up through the mountains to Belladere. We had both come to the conclusion that if we wanted to see anything of the fast-vanishing countryside of Haiti, it was now or never. The map
promised us 40 miles of tarmac, but at Poste de Flande, roughly half-way, the international highway seemed about to give up the ghost.

  For months not a drop of water had fallen from the skies of Port-au-Prince, but here the rain fell in sudden opaque showers between intervals of brilliant sunshine. We groped our way cautiously through streams and round landslides. Sometimes road and river-bed would be united for a hundred yards and large, greyish kingfishers went hurtling past on both sides of the car, and we could see little fish darting away from the front wheels. All the trees had been cut down and when the sun came out the tall, ragged poinsettias on the eroded hillsides made the day seem hotter. In rural Haiti only one couple in ten can afford to get married in church, but those who still do clothe the ceremony in dignity and panache. A bride on her way to her wedding who went splashing past on horseback in a great muslin foaming of veils and skirts was preceded by a dozen capering drummers. The name of this village was ‘Peu de Chose’, which in a way described it well.

  The small town that followed was a piece of nineteenth-century Normandy recreated in the tropics. A clapboard version of a French church wore its spire askew like a comic hat. It was supported by a mairie, a closed-down École de Jeunes Filles, a pigmy château patched with corrugated iron, and a magnificent Parisian pissoir ennobled by its positioning at the top of a flight of wide steps. A herd of dwarf cows occupied the square, where they browsed of the fallen blossoms of the flame trees. We stopped to watch the approach of a ghostly black version of a French grandee with white Napoleon beard, cutaway coat, panama hat, spats and malacca cane. A girl had set up a stall near by, and sat smoking a cob pipe, her skirts pulled halfway up her black thighs. She sold single and half-cigarettes, olive oil by the spoonful and dried fishes’ tails at one cent apiece, and cuffed away sparrows that alighted for a quick peck at the fish. The 2,500 generals had been treated well by their backers, but these were the poorest people in the Americas.