Terry was in Haiti as a so-called UNPOL, or United Nations Police, assigned to monitor, mentor, and support the fledgling national police force. The Mission was established in 2004, when the former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, fled the country in the face of a violent rebellion spreading down from the north. In his absence, the new government of Haiti, lacking legitimacy, popularity, and power, and confronted with a nation in chaos, requested the assistance of the United Nations Security Council, which responded by creating this vigorous, well-funded multinational peacekeeping mission.
The theory behind the Mission was this: In his time in power, Aristide had dismantled the military and neutered the police force, fearing, not without good reason, a coup d’état from one or the other. The coup came nevertheless; and now the future of the country and the eventual guarantor of security and domestic tranquillity would be a new police force, the Police Nationale d’Haïti (usually referred to by its acronym, the PNH), which the United Nations would train and equip. For this purpose there were about two thousand UNPOLs in Haiti, distributed about the country, of whom there were about twenty-five in Jérémie: a dozen francophone West Africans; a pair of former antiterrorist commandos from the Philippines; four or five French Canadians; a couple of Sri Lankans; a Romanian woman; two Turks, both named Ahmet, hence Ahmet the Great and Ahmet the Lesser; a Jordanian; and one American—Terry White.
Now, I should say straightaway that people either liked Terry very much or could not stand him; and when people said they couldn’t take him, I understood. He was a know-it-all: “What you gotta understand about voodoo…,” he said when I mentioned that I had been visiting local hougans. “What you gotta understand about the African law enforcement official…,” he said when I mentioned one of his colleagues. He wanted to argue politics: “What liberals don’t understand…,” he said. He didn’t let the argument drop: “So you really think…” He told me how many people he had tased, and he offered to tase me to show me how it feels. He called Haiti “Hades,” which was amusing the first time, but not subsequently. He called his wife his Lady. He was vain: I told him I got caught in a current down at the beach and came back to the shore breathless; he told me that his boat once capsized in the Florida Keys, leaving him surrounded by sharks. Even Terry White’s kindnesses had about them some trace of superiority: “If you ever hear a noise outside the house at night, just give me a call,” he said. “You stay inside. I’ll come down and check it out.” Between men, those kinds of declarations have meaning.
All that said—I liked him. He was, for one thing, a good storyteller and an effective, if cruel, mimic. When you talked to Terry, time passed very quickly. This was a kind of charisma. So when he told me about an argument he’d had with a colleague a couple of days before, I was all ears.
They’d been headed up to Beaumont, Terry said, and the whole way out, Ahmet the Great was talking about some lady they saw lifting her skirt and taking a leak on the side of the road. She was balancing this big basket on her head at the same time. There was a decapitated goat’s head covered in flies visible in the basket. “You gotta figure the rest of the goat was in the basket, too,” Terry said. Granted, maybe it wasn’t the prettiest spectacle in the world, this lady dropping to her haunches—“You probably wouldn’t paint the scene with oils and hang it on the living room wall”—but she did what she was doing with a heck of a lot of grace, for a big lady.
“What you got to realize is that those animals weigh upward of forty pounds,” Terry said. “Just try it, peeing like a woman with a goat on your head.”
In any case, it was Ahmet the Great who opened the discussion that day on the way to Beaumont.
“In my country, is big shame for lady pee,” Ahmet said. “Is never something lady do.”
Terry said, “In your country the ladies don’t pee? I can’t believe that.”
“In my country, is big shame lady pee like animal in streets. In my country, lady pee like lady.”
“And how does a lady pee, Ahmet? Riddle me that, my brother.”
“Not like cow or animal in street.”
This argument went round and round, up into the mountains and down, past seaside Gommier and pretty Roseaux and muddy Chardonette, one of those arguments that start out as banter but before long start to rankle, just two guys in a car, each thinking the other’s an asshole.
“So just where is this lady supposed to pee?” Terry said. “Just stop in the nearest Starbucks?”
“In my place, lady not make pee in side of road like animal or dog.”
“Are we in your place?”
“In my place, we have no United Nations. No peacekeepers. Lady not big shame, like here. My place is no-problem place.”
Terry looked at me. The incident had been weighing on him. There was hardly a tree in sight, a lady’s been walking since before dawn with a goddamn goat on her head, she feels the need—who the hell was Ahmet to judge her? People here gotta live in poverty, suffer from dawn to dusk, sweat rivers, and die young—and Ahmet, with his pompadour and mother-of-pearl–handled revolver and three-bedroom apartment in Ankara, is going to tell them in their own country where they can and cannot pee? What you got to understand is that this was the hajji mentality.
“So what do you think?” he said.
Here was an examination it was very simple to pass. “Their country,” I said.
“Damn straight,” Terry said. “Who the hell cares where this lady pisses?”
“Not me,” I said.
“What you got to understand is that for the towelheads—”
“I hear you, brother.”
“Those ladies—”
“They suffer, man. They suffer.”
I don’t believe Terry had expected me to capitulate so quickly. He seemed unsatisfied. We sat in silence for a moment or two, until from the other table a harsh, cruel laughter broke the early-evening calm. A couple of UNPOLs—one from Burkina Faso, the other from Benin—were trying to feed scraps of barbecued chicken to the chickens pecking under the table and were kicking away the hungry dogs attempting to steal some chicken for themselves. This was cracking the table up. Terry got a disgusted look on his face, seeing that.
“Knock it off,” he said. “You don’t got to humiliate those damn birds. It’s enough you’re eating their carcasses.”
The Africans laughed. Terry glared at his colleagues for a long time in a way that wasn’t friendly. I don’t think they understood the menace implicit in his low voice, or they thought laughter would defuse it. The guy from Benin kept feeding the chickens their kin. Terry’s stare was a prelude to standing up. It shocked me how swiftly his mood had switched from placid good humor to something nearly violent. An afternoon with Terry White was not necessarily relaxing.
Then the tension was over. The African UNPOLs backed off, still laughing, and Terry grinned at me: we were complicit, if but for a moment, on the side of justice. That gesture endeared him to me.
Terry told me that before coming to Haiti he’d been in law enforcement almost twenty years. “What you gotta understand is that a professionally conducted interrogation isn’t fair,” he said. Terry talked, he gave examples, and with a little prompting, he talked some more. Later he told me that his testimony had sent a man to death row—that’s something. How’d that feel? “Like it was the best thing I ever did,” he said, but not callously, rather as the only decent end to an all-around bad business. Terry told me that he’d been active in Florida Republican politics for years: at one point he’d taken a run for sheriff and lost. “Now, that’s a brutal game, Florida politics. Those boys don’t play.” So how’d you end up in Haiti of all places? He told me about Marianne Miller, Marianne Miller being his erstwhile rival back home. The upshot of the narrative cul-de-sac was that no one had appreciated what a terrific law enforcement official he was, not least the new sheriff, who had let Marianne Miller whisper poison in his ear, which had led to the complicated imbroglio that had led to the best interrogator in
Florida being out of a job, then going broke, then ending up in Nowhere, Hades.
Terry was not interested in me. Not once did he ask what brought me to Haiti, what my work consisted of, or where my family was from. But had he pressed the issue, I would have told him that I had followed my wife here: she was a civilian employee of the United Nations, working as a procurement officer; and I would have mentioned that I intended to use my time in Haiti, after a decade working as a journalist, to complete a novel. Terry’s sole attempt to broach the conversational divide was to ask where my wife and I were living.
We rented our house on the rue Bayard from Maxim Bayard, a member of the Haitian Sénat. The previous tenant had left the Mission to return to Zimbabwe, and we had taken the keys directly from him, completing the details of the rental with the Sénateur by email. The Sénateur had left a small library of spiritualist literature, in both French and English, on the bookshelves: books on the interpretations of dreams, a volume on yoga, guides to communication with the dead, the margins filled with handwritten comments in bright red ink. This was all I knew of the man.
“Maxim Bayard is a maximum asshole,” Terry said.
It was like learning that Terry knew Mick Jagger. I leaned forward as he maneuvered his plastic fork and knife around on the table so that the fork was perpendicular to the knife, with a small gap between them.
The fork and the knife represented vehicles in the parking lot of the Bon Temps, a little hotel and restaurant not far from our house, where Terry had been at lunch with colleagues on a Sunday afternoon. “This was my car here”—he indicated the knife—“and this was a white pickup truck here.” He gestured to the fork. “And if you were backing up the pickup, maybe it’s not easy to get out, but there was plenty of space, if you don’t drive like a monkey’s ass.”
Terry had been gnawing on a chicken bone when he heard the crunch. He looked up. The fork had backed up directly into the knife.
“Whoa!” Terry had shouted, and all the other UNPOLs swung their heads around to see what the commotion was about. He was on his feet and walking toward the lot when the driver pulled forward and slowly rear-ended his vehicle all over again.
What Terry could recall about the Sénateur with overwhelming clarity was the expression of happy unconcern on his face. Terry had spent more than a little time as an ordinary traffic policeman, and he had never seen anyone cause an accident in this manner and subsequently display no trace of anxiety. “What you got to understand is that I was in uniform. I was armed. This was a UN vehicle,” Terry said.
And yet this man not only betrayed no sign of worry, he was still maneuvering his pickup to make a third try at the tricky turn. Terry figured that if he hadn’t walked over, the older fellow would have kept ramming his vehicle over and over again until sooner or later he succeeded.
“That’s my car,” Terry said.
“The wife of my driver, she is having a baby,” the Sénateur said in heavily accented English. “I cannot ask him to work, with his wife in the hospital.”
It all made sense in the Sénateur’s mind—you could tell. In his mind, there was some seamless chain of cause and effect that left him blameless and Terry’s vehicle dented. Something in his half smile suggested that to the contrary, Terry was at fault here, that Terry didn’t care enough about his driver’s wife. The Sénateur’s smile incarnated what Terry hated most: arrogance, impunity, indifference to the consequence of one’s actions. It was the smile of a man who believed—nay, knew—that he was above the law.
Then one of those crowds that seems to spring up out of nowhere in Haiti on a moment’s notice was watching Terry and the Sénateur. Terry could hear schoolchildren giggling. There is a terrible power in laughter: Terry began to sweat, and his face went red. The Sénateur began to laugh also, and he shouted something in Creole to the onlookers—the only word Terry could understand was “blan.” Terry felt humiliated in the eyes of his peers, who considered the encounter from the doorway of the hotel.
“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 hotel: 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 mit
igated 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.
Peacekeeping Page 2