Heading South

by Dany Laferriere

  Sam remains thoughtful for a long moment.

  “Look, I’ll buy the whole thing from you outright . . . I’m not in the habit of taking on partners, you see. I’ve always worked alone. If you’re willing to sell, I’m willing to go along with it . . .”

  “You just told me the place isn’t worth anything, and now you say you want to buy it. Is there something going on here I’m not getting . . . ?”

  Silence.

  “Look, Mauléon, you’ve gone about as far as you can go with this place, but you don’t have the capital it would take to take it further. So why not let me pick up the slack?”

  “Why not come in as my partner?”

  Sam smiles sadly.

  “Business is business, Mauléon . . . Sell now. In three months it won’t be worth half of what I can offer you for it today . . .”

  Mauléon’s face is furious.

  “This discussion is over . . . Whatever happens, I’ll never sell the judge’s land.”

  MAULéON IS SITTING at the side of the road, across from the hotel, thinking things over. Of course he can always borrow more money, but then he’d have to be certain that the hotel would make a profit, and in the first year. On the other hand, there’s total bankruptcy, possibly even prison. Already there are two other hotels in the vicinity that are, according to Sam, in serious trouble. But Sam, of course, is trying to panic Mauléon into selling. Maybe that’s the only solution. Sell everything. But what then? Return to that hellhole, New York? No, that he will never do. But what, then? He doesn’t want to move north, and he has no chance if he stays here. It’s like that nightmare that has been haunting him ever since he came back to Haiti: he scrambles up a tree to escape from a tiger only to find a python sleeping in the top branches. The only thing he is sure about is that he can’t hold out much longer under the present circumstances. And Sam, that old shark, will attack at the first sign of weakness and swallow him whole.

  The next day Mauléon again takes up his seat on the side of the road and continues his reflections. He knows full well that the solution will have to come from his head, since he has nothing whatsoever in his pockets. Strange that he could come safe and sound from the worst jungle in the world— the Bronx, where he spent the last two years of his New York exile—only to die of boredom on the shores of Gressier. In the Bronx, one moment of inattention could earn you a bullet in the back of the head; here it’s boredom that’ll skin a man alive. If you have nothing to do here, you’d better invent something quick, or else long siestas, alcohol or malaria will bring you down. Mauléon is still sitting there when he notices a curious exchange taking place a hundred metres down the road: sitting on the porch of another hotel is a woman who appears to be in her fifties, sipping a coloured drink, when a young man of sixteen or seventeen crosses the sun-drenched road and approaches her table. They talk for several minutes, then the barman comes out and tells the youth to leave the porch. The young man rises politely and makes to leave, but the woman, a guest of the hotel (which is known as a gathering place for people from Quebec) says something to the barman and the young man sits back down. However, they don’t stay for long. The woman empties her glass, picks up her handbag, and the two of them head off towards the beach.

  Mauléon watches them for a moment as they enter the water. The woman is tall and elegant. The young man is neither particularly handsome nor well muscled. A relaxed couple. What interests Mauléon is that they didn’t head straight off to one of the rooms, but went instead to the sea. The sea that knows no age. In the presence of that turquoise eternity, fifty years is not that far from seventeen. Playing in the water makes you young once more. As young as the world. Mauléon waits for a while before going over to speak to the barman. He finds the man standing on a table, changing a light bulb. He, too, is in his fifties, self-assured and a bit taken with himself.

  “That couple who just left?”

  Yes, of course he knows them.

  “The boy came up from Port-au-Prince about two years ago. His name is Legba. He comes from the Cap, same as me. The sea puked him out one morning, and I took him in. He was as thin as a rail. I fed him, looked after him like I would any other wounded bird that washes up on the beach. That’s the way I am. Every morning I ask myself what the sea is going to bring me today.”

  “Yes, but getting back to Legba . . .” says Mauléon.

  “I sent him to school to learn English, which he picked up in the blink of an eye. He’s a bright kid, highly intelligent. I hoped he’d continue his studies, but he went in for hard drugs and easy money, the sea, which he knows well, and forbidden fruit. I don’t mind admitting that he disappoints me. That’s why I don’t let them hang around here. There’s a whole gang of them in these parts. Mostly they come from Cité Soleil, that shantytown you can see across the bay there . . . They’re pests . . .”

  “And the woman?”

  “She’s from Quebec . . . When they get cold up there they come down south to get warm. It doesn’t cost an arm and a leg, and every day is sunny. They come for a week or two and stay for a month, two months, even six months . . . And every year they come back.”

  “Why?”

  The barman leers at him.

  “Because of them,” he says, pointing to a group of young men horsing around on the beach.

  Mauléon watches them for a while (their young, supple bodies, their crazy laughter, their childish games). Children of the sun god. He suddenly feels as though a light has been turned on in his head. He quickly says goodbye to the barman. “That’s just what I need,” he tells himself when he is back on the road. He won’t ban those magic boys from his hotel, he’ll put up with them, he’ll welcome them, he’ll even invite them. They’re a real gold mine.

  Beach Bar

  THERE THEY are, hanging around the bar down by the beach.

  “A ham sandwich and a glass of pomegranate juice,” Gogo calls out.

  “Same for me,” says Chico, “but make mine a real thick sandwich, Albert . . . I had a hard night last night and I need to regain my strength . . . Okay?”

  The barman says nothing.

  “Ah, don’t be like that, Albert,” Mario teases. “Everything’ll be all right . . . This is better than being in jail, isn’t it? Nothing to complain about . . . Give us a smile, just a little one . . . You know, I’ve never seen Albert smile . . .”

  “What would you like?” Albert says to him archly.

  “All right, Albert, you win. No smile today, either . . . So, I’ll have a malted, lots of ice . . . I have to go up to Number Eight in a few minutes.”

  “Ah, you’re doing Mrs. Wenner this morning!” Chico cries merrily. Chico is always in a good mood.

  “She’s a real hard nut to crack,” says Gogo. “Hey, Albert! I said a cheese sandwich. You know I can’t stand ham, it upsets my stomach . . . He does it on purpose, I swear . . .”

  “Let him alone,” says Mario.

  “Gogo’s right, Albert,” Chico says, laughing. “He ordered a ham sandwich; I was there.”

  “Stop it, Chico,” says Gogo, “you’re going to drive the poor man crazy . . .”

  “Hey, guys!” says Mario. “I’ve got to go up to Number Eight; someone give me some pointers . . . And you, Gogo, don’t play the same trick on me today that you did yesterday . . .”

  “What’d he do?” asks Chico.

  “He told me that Mrs. Woodroff was a former nun and I had to fuck her from behind while saying the Lord’s Prayer if I wanted to make her come . . .”

  “Jesus! You’re not even supposed to touch her,” says Mario.

  “She’s not as bad as Mrs. Hopkins,” throws in Chico, seriously, “the widow in Number Six. She spent three hours talking to me like I was her son before jumping my bones.”

  “I’ve already done her,” says Gogo. “It must have been the first time in her life that she found herself alone in a room with someone who wasn’t her husband.”

  “She must have been shy,” Mario says.
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  “Maybe at first, but after a few minutes it was clear she knew exactly what she wanted . . .”

  “She reminds me of Madame Bergeron,” says Gogo.

  “Who’s that?” asks Chico.

  “You remember her, the one who went around introducing herself by shouting, ‘I’m Madame Bergeron from Boucherville. Do you know Boucherville?’”

  “Oh, her. Now I remember,” says Chico. “Why bring her up?”

  “It would be like being in a restaurant with her,” says Gogo, “with her giving her opinion about everything, every minute detail, making sure the meat they served was top quality, the vegetables fresh, the napkins clean, and so on.”

  “Oh, yeah, I remember now,” says Chico, laughing. “She’d go: ‘Lower, no, lower . . . Now higher . . . A little to the right . . . There! Now get back on, get back on, but gently, oh gently . . . No, my breasts, keep on massaging my breasts . . . Where are your hands? What are they doing? You should be using them . . . Now go hard, harder, as hard as you can . . . That’s it, as hard as you can!’—she’d say that a little scornfully—‘Softer . . . Softly . . . Use your tongue, too . . . Ah, there, now you can do what you want, I’m going to come . . .’”

  The others watch Chico and Gogo mimicking the scene under the intensely disapproving eye of Albert.

  “You can laugh if you want, Albert,” says Gogo. “They won’t make you pay for it, you know.”

  “I know he laughs,” says Chico. “He’s laughing on the inside. I’ll bet he tells our stories to all his friends.”

  Albert’s implacable face.

  “All this talk, and I still don’t know what I’m supposed to do with Mrs. Wenner. I have to go up there in a few minutes . . .”

  “Mrs. Wenner from Cleveland, Ohio,” Chico says calmly. “She’s the marathoner of sex. She can go twenty-six miles without leaving her bed.”

  “Listen,” Gogo says with a glint of panic in his eyes, “this woman is sixty years old and she can fuck without stopping for more than ten hours . . . Then she’ll rest for ten minutes and be ready to go at it again . . .”

  “You’re kidding me, Gogo . . .”

  Gogo turns to Chico and the two of them go through a rapid dance step.

  “Am I right, Chico, or am I right?”

  “You’re right! She’s going to swallow little Mario whole in the first go-round . . . Bad deal . . .”

  Gogo and Chico continue dancing, holding each other close, laughing, as though Mario’s predicament is the funniest thing in the world.

  “Are you going up there to Number Eight or not, Mario?” says Gogo.

  “Mrs. Wenner’s waiting for you, Mario,” Chico teases.

  “What am I going to do?” says Mario, sounding a bit frightened.

  “You could go down to the Arts and Crafts Institute and learn how to do a real job, like carpentry or mechanics.”

  The three boys turn in perfect synchronicity towards the barman.

  “Albert,” says Chico, “what we do here is a real job.”

  “Anyway,” says Gogo, “there are no dumb jobs, only dumb people. Isn’t that right, Albert?”

  “But what am I going to do with Mrs. Wenner?” Mario asks again.

  “I know!” Chico says quickly, with his angelic smile.

  “Spit it out, man,” says Gogo.

  “You know how after a couple of hours of fucking, she goes into a kind of trance . . .”

  “Oh, yeah,” says Gogo, “it’s like she goes into automatic pilot . . .”

  “When she’s like that,” says Chico, “you could get up and go for a piss and she wouldn’t even notice . . .”

  “Go on,” says Chico.

  Even Albert is listening as he sets up the bar for the afternoon cocktails.

  “So, what if we do her in turns, every couple of hours?” Chico says without laughing.

  “What are you saying, Chico!” cries Mario.

  “It’s simple enough: as soon as she goes into her own little world, one of us switches with whoever’s in the room with her.”

  “That way,” adds Gogo, “whoever’s in the room can come down here to the bar and freshen up a bit, have a sandwich and a malted with extra ice, prepared by our very own games master, none other than Albert himself.”

  “Never mind dragging me into your filth,” sniffs Albert.

  “That’s cool, Chico!” Gogo nearly shouts.

  “But what if she dies?” asks Mario, more than a little alarmed.

  “She won’t die. She’s got a tough old hide on her. Crocodiles like her never die under these conditions.”

  “They’re like ants,” says Chico. “Ants are never crushed by a bag of sugar.”

  “That’s us,” adds Mario. “We’re the bag of sugar.”

  All three of them laugh. Albert pretends to wipe off the bar. Several of the hotel’s female guests come into the bar area with towels wrapped around their waists and a ton of sunscreen on their faces, chests and backs. They’ve come up from the beach. They crowd around the bar and order their afternoon punch (“Let’s put some of that heat inside us for a change!”). After three of Albert’s punches everyone is pretty much settled in for the rest of the day, until at least five o’clock. There they are, standing around the bar. Those who know Albert from other hotels (Albert worked at two or three others in the area before landing at the Hibiscus) chat him up, talking fondly about the good old times. The good old days of Brise de Mer or Lambi. Albert’s tone is always respectful. No familiarity with the clients, despite a few obvious come-ons from those for whom a single glass of punch makes them lose all sense of time and space. Gogo watches Albert with a strange smile on his face, a mixture of admiration and irreverence. Doesn’t this guy know he’s working in a brothel? People are so strange. Some people can remain the same whether they work in a church or in a bordello. Albert, for example.

  “I’m going up now,” Mario says suddenly.

  Heading South

  BRENDA

  My husband and I both come from the same small town north of Savannah. The middle of nowhere. I won’t even bother telling you its name. I’ve never met anyone who’s even seen it on a map. I’ve known my husband since we were little children. We don’t come from the same religious backgrounds. He’s a Methodist and I’m a Baptist. The way I see it, it doesn’t make any difference what you call yourself as long as you believe in God. That’s what my husband told me after we got married, and now we’re both Methodists. I talk about it, anyway, but I haven’t been confirmed yet. If my husband were here, he’d say, “That’s Brenda all over!” His name is William, but he likes to be called Bill. Actually, Big Bill. Oh, I almost forgot: you don’t have to know what to call him, because he didn’t come with me on this trip. That was my idea. I didn’t think I could ever do it, leave him alone up there like that. This isn’t the first time I’ve been to Port-au-Prince. It’s the second. The first time, Bill came with me. I’ve been wanting to come back for two years. Pamela, I call her Pam, she’s my best friend, she says that I’ve been like a drug addict in withdrawal for two years. I tell her that no drug addict ever went through what I went through. My whole body suffered, my head, my chest, my blood, every possible pain you could ever imagine, I suffered. For two years. Every day. Every night. Every hour. Can you imagine such a thing? I don’t think anyone who isn’t called Brenda Lee, and who didn’t come from a tiny little town north of Savannah, and who hasn’t lived for twenty-five years with a man named Bill who hasn’t touched her more than a grand total of eight times in all those years, could ever understand what I went through.

  ELLEN

  I’ve always been attracted by the South, but I never thought of coming to Port-au-Prince. As far as I was concerned, Port-au-Prince was for nymphos. Not for me. One big sex park. Anyway, I’ve been coming here now for five years. I come down every year and spend the whole summer. My courses end the last week of June, and generally a week later I fly to Port-au-Prince. I always stay at this hotel. It’s qui
et, it’s clean, and it’s on the beach. This is how you know you’re getting old: you want everything close at hand. Port-au-Prince. Who would have guessed that this is where I would spend my holidays? I went to a private school, and for the past twenty-five years I’ve been teaching at Vassar. I teach stuck-up little bitches to keep their knees together so they can trap husbands. And if you think things have changed in that regard you’ve got one very long finger stuck like this in your eye. (She makes the gesture.) Actually, I’m supposed to be teaching contemporary literature, but all they want to know is how to go about making the best of what the good Lord gave them to work with. A tidy little mouth, two little tits that they check for signs of growth every day, blonde hair and a pretty little ass. Scrumptious little packages. And who can blame them? The boys are worse. Complete ninnies that don’t deserve any better. I hate that country, even if it is my own. You can’t imagine how much I loathe those little sluts and their asshole boyfriends. All they think about is getting laid and producing litters of more brats and, when they’ve bought as much junk as they can at their supermarkets, washing up on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean like so many overstuffed sperm whales. Always with their hair in curlers, always wearing sunglasses, always shoving their shopping carts into your legs at the checkouts. So will someone please tell me what the hell I’m doing here, where that’s exactly the type of person who forms the majority? (She motions with her chin to the line of her compatriots covered in sunscreen trying to get a tan on the beach.)

  SUE

  I’ve tried every diet known to science and I still look like a blues singer from Harlem. And I’ve never set foot in Harlem. I never go anywhere where there’s more than ten blacks. It’s not that I’m afraid of blacks, it’s just that black men aren’t my thing. Now you’re going to say that I’m not making any sense, because I’m really crazy about Neptune, and Neptune is as black as the ace of spades. But Neptune is Haitian. To me, when I say black, I mean American black. All American blacks think about is cutting white throats, and we do everything we can to help them do it. You’re shocked, hearing me say that, aren’t you? Well, that’s what I think. Who built all those schools American blacks go to? Not them! Well, I say that, but I’ve also got to say that I can’t stand white American males, either. They never look at a woman like me. If you want to get an American white male to notice you, you have to weigh less than a hundred and twenty pounds, and I weigh twice that. I’m still light on my feet. I work in a factory and there isn’t a man there who works harder than me. I can carry a heavy box a long way. I’m strong as an elephant and light as a butterfly. If he knew how to handle me, a man could do anything he wants with me. He could make me his slave. But those idiots, all they want is some anorexic bimbo. They have no idea that under all this fat I’m as thin as a razor. Neptune is the first man who ever paid me a compliment about my weight. To him, being big isn’t a fault. It’s a quality. He’s a fisherman. He has a little sailboat. He fishes not far from here, near the Île de la Gonâve. His philosophy is very simple: fish, eat, drink, sleep like a baby and fuck like a lion. Not a bad life, eh?