Then the judge said, “People here live on a dollar a day. They had three dollars a day, they’d be okay. Five dollars a day and they’d be great. They’d have enough money to feed their kids, enough money to pay a doctor when the kids get sick, enough money to send their kids to school, maybe even save a few bucks and start a little business. Buy some pigs. There’d be doctors and schools because people could pay for them. That’s five dollars a day, and the difference is—a road. It’s fine and dandy to build a school or some latrines or give away mosquito nets, but at the end of the day people still have just that one dollar they got to stretch out from sunrise to sunset. Look at that right there—”
And what was there on the fringe of the property but a magnificent manguier, dripping with fruit like money …
“Up north, a tree like that, you can get maybe twenty gourdes a dozen. A tree like that can give you—what? A hundred dozen in a season. That could be seventy-five bucks, just for gathering the fruit from your own mango tree. Two or three trees, and people around here don’t see that kind of cash in a year.”
Mangoes! An export fruit! Johel’s voice was sincere, eager, persuasive. A mango tree is for a small peasant like a little money machine: a mango tree and a road are school fees for your child; a mango tree and a road, and your wife has prenatal care; a mango tree and a road is a concrete cistern to gather rainwater, and that means you’re not drinking ditchwater. A mango tree without a road is a pile of fruit; a mango tree without a road is a swollen belly; a mango tree without a road is timber. And what happens to the mangoes now? They fall to the ground and rot—the pigs eat the mangoes and the kids go hungry. And why is that? Because there is no road. Farmers nowadays were cutting down these trees to make charcoal, the only thing you could transport to market in Port-au-Prince. Things didn’t change around here, soon the hills would be denuded, the topsoil washed away, and the last place in Haiti still covered in thick forest would be, like the rest of Haiti, nothing but barren hillside.
When the judge was done talking, his face was covered in a fine sheen of sweat. Terry was with him word for word, nodding when the judge nodded, shaking his head when the judge shook his.
“Good luck with all that,” I finally said—one of those rare occasions on which I have succeeded in saying just what I meant, no more and no less.
3
Mild days coalesced into calm weeks, and I heard nothing more from either Terry or the judge. They had their destiny and I had mine; and mine involved swaying in a hammock in the afternoon while my wife was at work—swaying just so in and swaying just so out of a hot stripe of sunlight, all the while admiring the industry of the hummingbirds. Another portion of my attention was devoted to a chicken pecking lazily at a fallen mango. I was considering writing a poem on the subject. What I had in mind was a kind of dialogue between the chicken and the hummingbird on the theme of love.
I was trying to find a rhyme for “cluck” when a voice startled me from my poetic reverie. “Anybody home?”
“On the terrace,” I said.
A blond woman with a fine, thin nose and light blue eyes rounded the corner. She was small, and walked with a graceful step. Her hair was pulled back in a sporty ponytail. She was wearing a white skirt and sandals with a bit of a heel and a pink polo shirt and a very fine gold chain around her neck.
“Cookie lady!” she said with a little laugh.
I was attempting to roll out of the hammock, and I must have looked a little ungainly because she quickly said, “Don’t get up—you look so comfy. Just stay where you are.” But by then I was vertical, and I offered her my hand, which she shook firmly—professionally, even.
“I’m Kay White. Terry—you know Terry? from the Mission? he’s my husband? He said you would be here. I made cookies.”
She said all this in one slightly embarrassed, charmingly girlish rush, and her eyes flicked downward to the plate of cookies she was carrying in her hand.
I said, “Would you like some lemonade?”
Micheline, the woman we hired to cook and clean for us, had squeezed a pitcher of juice that morning, sweetened with raw cane sugar. I went to fetch the jug and a pair of glasses from the kitchen and told Kay White to make herself at home. She smoothed out her skirt and sat gingerly in the wicker chair, saying to me as I receded into the kitchen, “Oh, I feel at home here. Your house is just lovely, so peaceful.”
“It’s over one hundred years old.”
“I love old houses,” she said.
I settled myself in the chair opposite hers. I poured two glasses of lemonade. I said, “Please.” She took her glass and sipped.
“Do you want to hear about Micheline?” I said.
“That’s just why I came.”
“She has a cookbook collection. French cookbooks from the 1950s. She looks at them every night. My wife and I were very excited when we first moved in; we thought she must be quite a cook. First night she left out the Larousse Gastronomique or whatever it was, told us to pick out whatever we liked. I think we chose a soufflé. That night she served us some rice, some beans, and some boiled bananas. We thought maybe we hadn’t understood, but the next night it was the same thing. I don’t think she can read.”
Kay looked thoughtful. “What does she do with the cookbooks, then?”
“I think she was just hoping the recipe we wanted was rice, beans, and boiled bananas.”
Kay laughed, and I asked her how long she would be staying in Haiti.
“Two weeks, and I’m not doing anything,” she said. “I’m going to read a book and go to the beach and sleep. Maybe we’ll eat a fish if we get ambitious.”
“First time you’re down?”
“Oh, no! Fourth time!”
Her shoulders and calves were nicely toned—it was all the Pilates and yoga, I figured. The delicate tracery radiating from her eyes and thin lips had erased the first blush of youth, but she was still a very pretty woman. I supposed she was in her late thirties. At first glance she had struck me as girlish, but the serious way she held herself now suggested hidden stores of competence, as if you could entrust her with details: a complicated travel itinerary or negotiating escrow. “What you got to understand is that my Lady handles million-dollar properties every day,” Terry had told me. She was also a little sexy.
“So I guess you like it,” I said.
She had a bracelet of small turquoise stones on her left ankle. The stones flashed as she crossed her legs. Her toenails were painted a rich pink, like the fringe of a coral reef.
“Not at first. At first it just made me think about all the money I used to spend,” she said.
It makes me think of all the lovers I used to take—that was her tone of voice; and the intimacy broke the tension between us.
“I love to spend money,” I said. “I just wish I had more of it.”
“Me too,” she confessed. “I feel guilty just thinking about how much money we went through.”
“Tell me about it.”
“Sheets. Just for example.”
“Not diamonds?”
“Have you ever slept on a really good sheet? A girl’s best friend is definitely her sheets. I got those cotton sheets with superhigh thread counts, you know? Just because I liked the way they felt against my skin? And I replaced them when they weren’t soft anymore or if the colors faded? So I get here and a lady asks me for money to send her kids to school for a year, and I do the math and I used to spend that—I didn’t spend that on a sheet. Maybe on a pillowcase.”
“You spent all that on a pillowcase?”
“It’s easy,” she said. “If you want a good one.”
“Had you ever been to a poor country before you came here?”
She said, “You know those commercials on TV? Send money so this kid in Africa can eat? And he’s got flies in his eyes? And he’s all snotty? That’s it. There was this little kid in Kenya? His name was Wilson, that was my little guy. Then Terry came to Haiti, he called me up and said, ‘Kay, you can�
��t believe this place, how people are living.’ When he got here, I saw the pictures and how beautiful it was and all the kids looked like Wilson and I said, ‘Terry, I’m coming to visit, like it or not.’”
I asked her what brought her husband to Haiti in the first place.
“Didn’t Terry tell you?”
“He mentioned something—”
“Oh, we went broke!” she said with defiant cheerfulness. “We were broke before everyone else went broke. You could not believe how broke we went. Terry lost his job and I was in real estate, but with the economy—well, you know. We had some properties, investments that didn’t—you know with the crash and everything—work out. We went broke, broker, and brokest. When Terry got the job here, it was Haiti or lose the house and move back in with my mom and dad.”
Talking about money had made her anxious: she had begun to stare at the cookies.
“Would you like another cookie?” I asked.
“Just one,” she said, and took the smallest cookie on the plate.
Conversation faltered for a moment. We sat in silence until, employing that feminine expertise in small and unimportant talk so essential to her métier, she asked how I met my wife—India, temple, lynch mob, isn’t that romantic!; how I found “inspiration” for my books—I wish I knew; and whether we ate the mangoes that fell from our mango trees—no, they were small and wormy. The sunlight had crawled high enough that it was now in Kay’s eyes. She moved her chair closer to mine. Then I asked her how she met her husband.
It was the summer after college, she told me, when a green Cadillac Escalade raced through a red light and hit her yellow Volkswagen Golf, which had been her father’s graduation present just three weeks before. She thought she was going to die, and when she looked up, there was Terry, in uniform.
“It was like the baby ducks, you know? Are you my daddy? I guess he just imprinted on my brain. I was like, ‘Don’t leave,’ and he said, ‘Don’t worry.’ The second I saw him, I felt safe.”
“I could see that,” I said. “He’s got that kind of quality.”
“You know who hit me? It was a priest—he was drunk. In his clerical collar and everything. They had like this Sunday luncheon after Mass, and there you go. Too much wine or something. After that, Terry came to visit me in the hospital.”
“Talk about the hand of fate.”
“Terry was so sweet when I was in the hospital. He brought me balloons and flowers. I was there for a long time, and he came just about every day. So I married him.”
“Just like that?”
“Just like that,” she said. “And you know who married us? The priest who put me in the hospital.”
“What an idea!”
“Terry thought of it.”
“Did it work out the way you hoped?”
“He got drunk.”
“Terry?”
“The priest. We took away his keys at the end of the reception.”
“I was asking about the marriage.”
She smiled, her lips pursed neatly together. She waved her slender ring finger. “Still together,” she said, an inscrutable expression, evocative and compelling, settling again on her pretty lips and eyes. “You have hummingbirds!”
“And woodpeckers. They drive my wife—”
“So we had dinner with Johel last night. You know Johel, don’t you? He grilled the most amazing tuna steaks. And Nadia—she’s just a beauty.”
So that was why Kay was on my porch. She wanted to know things; she was probing. And I had heard a story. I didn’t know if Kay had heard it also. At the Hotel Patience one could rent a little room for the afternoon. It was here, they said, that Kay’s husband and the judge’s wife passed an occasional petit moment. They said the judge knew; they said the judge didn’t know. I knew because everyone knew; and everyone knew because everyone else knew. But I didn’t know if it was true. It could have just been a story that people told.
Kay said, “I’ve never seen an African American lady with blue eyes before.”
“I haven’t met her,” I said.
“It’s so striking.”
I said, “Some Frenchman raped her mother’s great-great-grandmother and some other Frenchman raped her father’s great-great-grandmother. Then those genes just floated down through the generations, waiting to meet each other again. You see it here from time to time.”
“She was so quiet. She didn’t talk all night.”
I tried to change the subject. “Did you know he was a national spelling champion?”
“Johel? Where did you hear that?”
“I looked him up,” I said.
“I’m a crummy speller,” Kay said. “I’m lucky I have a short name.”
“He grew up in New York. When he was thirteen, he was the national spelling champion. His word was ‘elegiacally.’”
“I admire him, I really do,” she said. “He’s got so much talent, he could be anywhere doing anything, and still he’s here.”
“Is he still going ahead with the election thing?”
“What I heard,” she said—and what she heard was this, from Terry: “Brother needs to grow himself a fucking pair and not let his woman tell him what to do.”
“So he’s not going to do it?” I said.
“Terry told me that Nadia is too frightened. She won’t let him.”
“What is she frightened of?”
Kay lifted her hand and formed it into the shape of a pistol, which she fired at my head.
“Bang, bang,” she said.
“It sounds like the woman has a head on her shoulders.”
Kay looked disapproving. “I don’t like a man who won’t make a decision for himself.”
“Would Terry listen to you about a thing like that?”
“You mean, would Terry do something I didn’t approve of?”
I nodded.
“Hello!” she said. “We’re in Haiti!”
Kay looked around as if hidden in the bougainvillea or hibiscus, there might be someone listening.
“Just after Terry got the offer to come here, he got another offer,” she said. “Head of security at a shopping mall in Tennessee. And I thought, Great, now he doesn’t have to go to Haiti. We went up there to visit. I liked the way we could go out at night, the shopping, the music. It was good salary, good hours for Terry, good for me, everything good. But Terry said he wasn’t going. We had a big fight. He said, ‘I don’t want to spend my life protecting the Gap and Zara,’ and I said, ‘Honey, those places are essential to my way of life.’ But in the end Terry got what he wanted.”
“And you didn’t approve?”
Kay’s fine-boned face was immobile, her eyes like slivers of old ice. There was a long conversational silence, filled with callings of innumerable birds and the cry of the ice vendor on the cobblestone street: “Vann glace! Vann glace!” Laughter of children from the neighbor’s garden. The scratching of lizards on the pebbles. A smell of burning charcoal.
“I was scared for him. For us,” she said.
“Why?”
“Terry and I see someone at home,” she finally said. “She’s an older lady. She has—powers. And when Terry got the offer to come to Haiti, we visited her, like we do. Madame Roccaforte saw two birds. She saw an eagle and a hawk. And the hawk was attacking the eagle. And after that, Madame Roccaforte told me not to let him go.”
4
Électricité d’Haïti supplied us with electricity just three times a year—for the festival of the city’s patron saint, Saint Louis; for Christmas; and for Carnival—and by electricity I mean two or three hours every evening for a week or so. The rest of the year, the big generator on the rue Abbé Hué lay idle—no fuel—and the city lay in darkness. The house we rented from the Sénateur, though, like the houses of all the wealthy, had a generator, an array of car batteries, and an inverter, and so maintained an autonomous electrical supply, sufficiently powerful for a few lights or even a small refrigerator. A couple of weeks after our arrival th
e generator groaned, the inverter sparked, and the batteries burst into flames. We stumbled around by candlelight thereafter as a series of increasingly agitated emails to our landlord went unanswered.
Not long after I met Kay White, a caravan of three black SUVs delivered the Sénateur back from Port-au-Prince. He was home to meet with his constituents. The next morning I wandered down to his concrete cottage, on the same large property as our house but separated from us by a bamboo grove.
The Sénateur’s cottage was neither so imposing as to frighten the peasants nor so humble as to make his wealthier patrons ill at ease. It was just right. The clay water basins, filled from a muddy well, told the regular folk of Jérémie that the Sénateur lived not much better than they did. A dozen citoyens were waiting to see him, all dressed in their Sunday best, the ladies in faded calico dresses, the gentlemen in oversize suits and black ties. A few carried offerings for the Sénateur: some mangoes or avocados or a large sack of beans. One woman was carrying a big silvery fish. When the others saw me, they made little murmuring noises and somebody said, “Blan,” indicating a space on the bench beside him. It was warm in the early-morning sun. I waited with the others for perhaps half an hour until somebody else said, “Blan.” Then I was summoned up the stairs. Now I realized I had passed only from the first waiting area to the second, but here at least I was in sight of the Sénateur.
Maxim Bayard was a scion of one of the town’s famous but now disappeared mulatto families: I never met a Haitian man with lighter skin. He had tight curly hair, gone gray. His nose was large and fleshy, bulbous at the end and bumped in the middle. It was an ugly face, as goofy and grotesque as a children’s clown. He was a large man, and bulky also, broad-shouldered, round-gutted, thick-handed, long-limbed. He had a gold chain around his heavy neck and wore a white linen shirt.
The Sénateur conducted his business in a wicker chair, leaning close to one of the regular folk, the two of them talking quietly. On a stucco wall, just above the Sénateur’s head, a younger version of the Sénateur was shaking a younger version of Fidel Castro’s hand, both of them smoking fat cigars. Behind him now were the Sénateur’s goons, three large men in black blazers playing cards at a little table, holstered sidearms visible under their jackets. The rest of us sat farther out, our faces in the shade but our backs in the sun.
Peacekeeping Page 4