But my first year in Haiti, I didn’t know that, and the excuse for my trip to the little hotel in Anse du Clerc was that I had written and decided to delete a page of dialogue. It was a windy day, bright peaks on the Caribbean and the sky streaked with long, fine clouds.
Terry didn’t notice me as I came walking across the broad crabgrass lawn that came up from the beach. He was dressed in a pale blue policeman’s uniform, open-necked, with the American flag on one shoulder and the United Nations insignia on the other. This was the first time I had seen him in uniform, and he looked a little stockier, a little more bull-necked, a little less handsome than I remembered. He was in animated conversation with a tall fat man.
I walked in their direction, and as I got closer, I could see the fat man’s light brown face, three chins oily with sweat; and his maroon shoes shined to a high gloss; and a bright red tie matched nicely with a light pink shirt. His cream coat was neatly over the adjoining chair. Then I could hear them, and Terry was saying, “You can’t let the sonofabitch talk like that, you got to step up—,” at which point he saw me, stopped himself, and said, “Hey now, Michael Dukakis.”
I had made the mistake, when I met Terry, of proposing that we drive to the beach in an Uruguayan armored personnel carrier. It was only a joke, but I suppose the image had sparked his imagination.
I said, “Hey now.”
Then Terry introduced me to Judge Johel Célestin.
I reached out and shook the judge’s hand, sumptuous like the best leather.
The judge said, “How do you do.”
His face was pear-shaped, substantially broader at the jowls than at the temples. He didn’t have much of a chin or jawbone, just a bountiful wave of fat. In his precisely trimmed goatee were curled a few snaky gray tendrils.
“Hanging in there,” I said.
“The heat not getting you down?”
He spoke with a neutral Northeast accent, the clipped inflections of educated American speech.
“Learning to sweat,” I said. “Never knew I could sweat like this until I got to Haiti.”
“Good man,” he said.
I trust first impressions, and mine was that this man was as out of place in Jérémie as a zebra at Sea World. This brother, I figured, had made a wrong turn somewhere round about the Bahamas. What he’d been aiming for was St. Croix. His handsome clothes; his refined, chubby features; and his general high-toned snooty air—he looked as if he ought to be shanking a 3-iron wide, dressed in knickerbockers and wearing a silly white cap, laughing things over with the senior partners. But here we were in Haiti.
There had been a kid on the beach asking me for money. Now he was at my heels right there in the outdoor restaurant, barefoot and wearing nothing but a filthy T-shirt down to his ankles. His hair was reddish-orange at the roots: protein deficiency. You could have taken his picture and put it on the cover of Save the Children’s Annual Report, both from the cherubic cuteness and the desperate poverty POV.
“Blan, mwem grangou. Blan, ba’m cinq gourdes,” the kid said. Blan, I’m hungry. Blan, give me five gourdes.
Terry and the judge were seated at a table on which a large fish had been reduced to a flimsy skeleton. A few grains were what remained of what had once been a rice mountain.
It was Terry, still sucking on a beer, who said no.
The kid looked at his feet, all confused. But he didn’t back off. He just stood there looking cute and desperate.
“Ba’m cinq gourdes,” the kid said all over again, as if he were turning the key on a stalled engine.
Terry said, “Ba’m cinq gourdes, s’il vous plaît.”
The kid just stood there. He wasn’t in a hurry. He had all the time in the world. He was thinking things over. Then he smiled at us. What a smile! What the good Lord gave this kid in exchange for all his troubles was this smile, as hot as a hundred suns.
“Blan, ba’m cinq gourdes, s’il vous plaît,” the kid said, figuring things out.
So Terry turned out his pockets and gave him some coins, and the kid, still smiling, wandered away. You would have needed a scanning tunneling microscope to find a spot of trouble in his soul: he would eat that afternoon. Life would take care of itself.
“I hate to see that,” Terry said. “Kid should be in school, not begging for money like that.”
This was such an obvious moral truth that nobody else I knew in Haiti but Terry would have said it. I had been in Haiti only a short time, and I was already coming to see that kid and his protein deficiencies as an irritant, like clouds on an otherwise sunny day. The phrase “breaks your heart” can mean many different things.
“Maybe he would be in school if he wasn’t making a living begging,” the judge said.
“Maybe he’d be fucking hungry if I didn’t feed him,” Terry said.
The way these two men bantered, you could tell that they bantered back and forth all day long. It was like watching them chuck a football, and after a minute or so, I interrupted them. “So you’re a judge?”
Terry had told me that he worked with a Haitian judge: the two somehow collaborated.
“Juge d’instruction,” the judge said, just a touch of snootiness in his voice.
“Wait—,” I said. “Are you Juge Blan?”
A smile, not modest, broke across his fleshy face.
“Some folks call me that,” he said.
I had heard the name a dozen times—from my Creole teacher, from the plumber, from the woman who squeezed our lime juice, and from the woman in the market who hacked up our meat. “Take your problems to Juge Blan,” they said, and it had taken me some time to understand that this wasn’t some difficult Creole proverb, but an injunction to encounter a living man, a member of the local judiciary who kept offices at the Tribunal.
Terry said, “You want a beer or rum or what?”
“I’ll get a Coke,” I said.
“Get a beer,” Terry said. “Life is good.”
“Coke is okay.”
“I’m getting another one,” he said. “J.?”
“I’m good,” the judge said.
“Cherie!”
Cherie was dozing in a chair in the shade. At the sound of Terry’s voice Cherie lifted her head, then shifted her torso, then rocked on her haunches, then stood up. With a sigh she ambled over to our table.
“Oui?” she said, putting her hand on Terry’s shoulder.
“Bring us more beers, and some cigarettes too, and another round of plantains,” he said. His Creole, after however long he’d been in the country, was good enough to communicate his needs.
Cherie was the lady, pretty in a fleshy kind of way, accused by rumor of betraying and murdering her patroness. The smile that she flashed Terry, however, suggested only flirtatiousness, sweetness and light.
The judge and Terry had been talking about something heavy when I showed up. They were still both of them thinking about that something heavy. It was weighing on them. They were thinking up one more thing to say to each other, that last and conclusive point. I was about to excuse myself and allow them to conclude their conversation when Johel said, “So how are you liking Haiti?”
I started to say, You know, Haiti is a lot like pussy, but instead I told the judge something like the truth: I had never been anyplace so dysfunctional, so rotten, or so very fascinating. I had been in the Caribbean before and had expected the light, the colors, the tastes. But Haiti had something different from Jamaica or Barbados: that profusion of stories. If you enjoy the taste of an overripe peach, then you might like Haiti; it was a place that sunk tentacles down deep into the soul.
“How’s your kid?” Terry asked me.
“Toussaint Legrand?”
“What a name!” the judge said.
“Still a fuckup,” I said.
And I told them the latest Toussaint Legrand story.
“I think he might have died if I hadn’t given him the money,” I said. I didn’t say it looking for praise or glory, because every foreig
ner in Haiti who isn’t deeply hard has done something like that: it’s just part of the Haitian experience.
“I hear a story like that, and I wonder if we were all meant to be here,” the judge said.
“Like destiny,” I said.
The judge reclined his head rearward and looked down at me, his sharp gaze skimming over his broad nose. I had thought he was drunk, but his eyes were sober and clear and humorless. He had that concentrated attention for which a man in trouble pays ten dollars a minute. “You think we got one?” he asked.
“A what.”
“A destiny.”
All you can really say to a question like that is “Maybe.” It’s easy for the guys drinking a cold beer on the beach to figure that this is the way it’s all supposed to be.
I glanced at Terry. “Do you?”
“No doubt, brother,” said Terry. “I know His strength. We’re all here for a reason. That’s what I’m telling this guy. I’m saying, ‘Judge, you can’t escape your destiny. You’re like a fish on a line. Destiny is reeling you in, and you’re fighting. Just give in, brother.’”
“Sounds like Terry thinks you’re a marlin,” I said.
The judge didn’t laugh.
“Where does Brother Terry think your destiny lies?” I asked.
“Brother Terry thinks I have a vocation.”
“I don’t really see you in a clerical collar.”
Now the judge laughed. “Terry’s been telling me to run for senate.”
“Where?”
“Right here.”
“In Haiti?”
“In the Grand’Anse.”
“Against Maxim Bayard?”
“Next year, maybe.”
Had the judge announced that he was auditioning for the role of Hamlet at the Old Vic that year, it would have seemed hardly a more grandiose or improbable a project than winning some contest of charisma and wiles against the legendary Sénateur.
And yet I once heard a man declare that he was going to rob a bank—and two weeks later he did it. A roommate in college joined the French Foreign Legion, announcing his decision in a voice no more swelling with excitement than that of the judge. If you meet a thousand people, one will do something that only one in a thousand will do.
“That’s ambitious,” I said.
“Things have got to change around here,” the judge said. “They have to.”
A dugout canoe was cutting across the bay, laying down lobster traps. Its motion, the swell and fall of the sea, the lapping of the waves—they were hypnotic. Things changed all the time in Haiti. They just always seemed to change for the worse. Even in the short time I had been there, I saw things declining. The road to Dame Marie was worse for the fall storms. There had been an outbreak of measles. A water pipe burst and now a swath of the town had no water. The standard Haitian response to “How are you?” was “Pas pi mal”—No worse. No worse was as good as it got.
“You hear the story about the ice chest?” I said.
“The fingers?”
Every election day, the story went, the Sénateur sent his goons around to the polling stations to offer the poll workers a cold drink, thanking them for their labors. Inside the ice chest, on a bed of ice, there’s nothing but human fingers and bottles of Coke, all those fingers stained with the indelible ink which identifies a voting citizen—presumably someone who had voted for the Sénateur’s opponent. After that, the poll workers often found their way to slip a ballot or two the Sénateur’s way.
“That doesn’t scare you?” I asked.
“In six years since we’re back, I have yet to meet a nine-fingered man,” Johel said. “And believe you me, I’ve looked.”
“Brave man.”
“Stories like that, that’s the way Maxim is,” the judge said. “That’s how he maintains and perpetuates power. He’s a talker.” That didn’t seem enough, so he added, “Was it safe for Martin Luther King to march in Birmingham? Was it safe for Gandhi? Was it safe for Nelson Mandela, spending twenty-seven years in prison? Was that safe? Things have got to change around. People can’t go on living like this.”
Terry seemed to sense that the judge had stumbled. He said, “What you got to understand—Johel and I are in the trenches here every day. You’ve got no idea what’s going on here, really going on here. People come up to us, they say, ‘Thank you, Judge. God bless you, Judge.’ People say, ‘If only you were president, Judge.’ People offer him money, he never takes a dime. Real money sometimes. You go anywhere in the Grand’Anse, I bet they know Johel. We go up into the mountains, they know him. And they’re asking him for help every day of the week.”
“What’s wrong with the guy they got?”
Terry said, “Are you kidding me—”
The judge interrupted him. His voice was soothing, calm.
“Is this a—confidential conversation?” he asked.
“I’m not friends with the Sénateur.”
“You live in his house.”
“I’ve never met him.”
“We’re not hiding anything,” the judge said. “But I haven’t made any decisions, and I’d prefer if this was—between friends.”
I nodded, and the judge leaned in. His face was glossy with sweat.
“You know the new road they talk about?” he said.
Jérémie was just one hundred and twenty-five miles or so from Port-au-Prince as the vulture flew, but the trip overland on the old road, the Route Nationale Numéro Deux, could take fourteen or fifteen hours, if the road was passable at all. When the summer rains set in or the fall hurricanes blew through, the road was just mud. Rumor held that a Canadian proposal to build a modern road connecting Jérémie to the southern port city of Les Cayes—where a two-lane highway to Port-au-Prince began—had been rebuffed by the government of Haiti.
“It’s true,” the judge said.
“I don’t believe it.”
“I didn’t when I first heard it. Something like that, you’d think you’d hear about it. I mean, it’s a road. A whole damn road. Seventy million American dollars. Maxim Bayard won’t let it go through.”
“He wants a cut?” I said.
“Nothing like that. Government gives the okay, the Canadians give the money to the Inter-American Development Bank, the IADB puts out the call for tender, pays the winning bid directly. Last time, they awarded the contract to some Italian outfit to build that one up north. That’s a good road now. Government of Haiti never sees a dime, just gets a road.”
“So what’s the problem?”
“That’s just what I asked. I put in a call to Port-au-Prince. And what the minister of finance says is his hands are tied. I say, who’s tying them? He says Maxim will bring down the government if he signs the accord. Or worse.”
“What’s his deal?” I asked.
The judge spread his hands wide.
“Man doesn’t want a road,” he said.
“But who doesn’t want a road?”
“Sénateur Maxim Bayard, that’s who.”
“Why doesn’t anyone mention something like that?” I asked. It seemed to me the kind of story that you’d read in newspapers.
The judge said, “The Canadians are as embarrassed as anyone. That money’s just sitting there in an escrow account, waiting for a signature. Once the money’s budgeted—that’s a slap in the face. Heads roll in Ottawa, that money just sits there.”
The thought of decapitated Canadian civil servants distracted me. I was startled to find Cherie standing at the table with our drinks and plantains.
“What would you do if there was a road to Port-au-Prince?” I asked her.
“I’d go to Port-au-Prince and buy a new dress,” she said, putting the food and glasses on the table. She spun her skirt in a coquettish circle. “Then I’d never come back.”
“I guess a road would make some difference,” I said to the judge, watching Cherie amble back to the kitchen.
The plantains were salty and topped with piklis so spicy it burned
your nostrils before it burned your tongue. The judge ate a plantain, then another. He tilted his head and considered me. What you had in the judge was one of those men who looked at all times as if he were quietly evaluating your intelligence and finding it lacking. Terry looked at all times as if he were quietly evaluating your manliness and finding it lacking. Between the two of them, they had all bases covered. “How much you pay for bananas? Or for mangoes?” the judge asked.
There were at least two dozen varieties of mango in the Grand’Anse, but my favorite was the mangue Madame Blan, a mango whose tawny skin sliced open to reveal pale flesh as inviting as the thighs of that long-ago golden-haired plantation mistress for whom the fruit was named. I had once believed that the South Indian mango known as the Alphonso was the finest mango in the world, but this mango was subtler, less fibrous, and more sensual.
“A couple gourdes, maybe?”
“I pay one gourde one banana. And I pay ten gourdes a mango,” he said.
“Is that a lot?” I asked.
“You know how much a banana costs in Port-au-Prince? In Port-au-Prince, a capital city of a tropical nation, sometimes you pay twenty-five gourdes for a banana. Sometimes more.”
He was waiting for me to respond. When I didn’t, he kept talking.
“Rich folk eat bananas in Port-au-Prince. Poor folks don’t eat bananas. Poor folks don’t eat fruit in Port-au-Prince. You got babies going to bed hungry in Port-au-Prince because they have nothing to eat, you got babies swole-bellied here because all they eat are bananas and mangoes. You think that lady who sold me a banana for one gourde would like to sell her bananas for five gourdes? Sure she would. And you know why she can’t? Because there’s no road.”
He was quiet and I was quiet and so was Terry.
Peacekeeping Page 3