It was a joy to watch the Sénateur. It really was. It was a pleasure to watch him in the way it is a pleasure to watch any thoroughly competent professional, a major-league shortstop shading toward second base, or a sous-chef in a top restaurant disemboweling a chicken. I watched him dealing with three or four supplicants before my turn came up. I tried to imagine the things people wanted from him: My well has gone dry. A landslide wiped out my fields. A rich man wants my house. My donkey is ill. My enemies have used magic against me and I need to buy some expensive magic to punish them.
To each of these complaints, the Sénateur listened patiently. His eyes were by turns focused, kind, authoritative, sympathetic, wise, amused, intelligent, and cruel. From time to time he nodded. You can’t fake that level of attention. At the end of each interview he’d hand the supplicant a wad of cash from his wallet or say something to one of his goons or just seize the man’s hand between his own and hold it there.
Then finally it was my turn to sit with the Sénateur.
Before he said a word to me, he glanced at his watch. Then he looked into my eyes. I introduced myself and offered him my hand, which he accepted with a handshake that began limply then gained force until his grip was almost painful. His hand swallowed mine. All the while he pulled me nearer to him, until we were very nearly touching. He was much stronger than I was, although I reckoned he was twice my age.
“Maxim Bayard,” he said. “Enchanté.”
I could smell his breath—it was unexpectedly sweet and minty from behind those yellow, crooked teeth. He held on tightly to my hand until he squeezed out of me an admission that I was enchanted also.
Only then did he let my hand go, and I finally had the chance to speak.
“Sénateur, I’m sorry to bother you.”
“Bother me! Nonsense! You delight me! Pierre, bring coffee for our American friend. Or would you prefer juice?”
“Neither, Sénateur. I’m only here a minute or two.”
“I would be offended if you won’t try our coffee.”
“Coffee then.”
“Pierre, make our friend’s coffee strong and with plenty of sugar.”
“Thank you,” I said.
“This is our Haitian hospitality. With a guest we share nothing less than our hearts.”
The Sénateur leaned back in his small wicker chair. He cracked his knuckles. It sounded like padlocks springing open.
“The people from Venezuela were here last month.”
It was a statement of unexpected familiarity, as if we were gathering up a thread of an old conversation.
“The mayor of Caracas was sitting in your chair. You know he still has the president’s ear. We had an argument—a discussion. He warned me to be on the lookout for the North Americans. He said you would be coming. I said, ‘We must be friends with the Americans. They are kindhearted beasts.’ And as the philosopher reminds us, the only absolutely good thing in this world is a good will. Do you agree with me?”
“Bien sur,” I said.
Pierre brought the coffee to me with a grunt. It was very strong and unpleasantly sweet.
The Sénateur leaned forward until he was at a distance where he could have easily sprung forward and bitten off my nose.
“Then why do you oppress us like this?”
His voice was as friendly as one can be in asking such a question. I thought for a moment that he was referring to my conversation with Terry White and the judge; I thought of innocent-faced Cherie, listening to us.
Then the Sénateur said something about birds. That morning he had been surprised to find in his garden a pair of western Caribbean warblers. The Sénateur wanted to know if I enjoyed also the pleasure of our aviary companions. He mentioned birds in the poems of Ronsard and spoke of hunting birds as a young man with a slingshot—Goliath on the trails of David!—and how, if I were to take the time and opportunity that a man in his position no longer possessed, I would find in the hills other young men today still hunting in this manner. The hills, he said, were like rich museums of the Haitian past: men and women still lived not several hours’ walk from where we sat, in the very manner of the men of the revolution. This was at once Haiti’s strength and her tragedy. If I was to understand Haiti, I must understand her history. “We have had such a tragic history,” the Sénateur said, and he spoke of the crack of the slaver’s whip, the whispers of long-ago slave revolution around the flickering campfire. These were our ancestors, mon cher, brave men! In all of human history, the only successful revolution of slaves—the casting off of chains—our glorious land of freedom.
The lecture went on for quite a while, and the Sénateur’s deep voice mingled with the high buzzing of the bees; the minutes passed neither slowly nor quickly; I was aware only of the sweat stains slowly expanding from my armpits and a fly crawling across the Sénateur’s knuckle, which I restrained myself with effort from shooing away. Then the Sénateur startled slightly. Something had snapped him out of his reverie. He looked at me as if he had never seen me before.
“And what can I do for you, mon vieux?”
“It’s a little thing,” I said. I produced our rental contract from my backpack and handed it to him, explaining that we had rented a house with electricity (gasoline at the charge of the tenant) and now occupied a house without electricity. It was in paragraph two, clause three, the relevant objects clearly listed as functional in the état des lieux.
The Sénateur took the papers in hand. He found a pair of spectacles on a side table and settled them down on the bridge of his nose, the gesture lending him a mandarin air. He looked through the papers slowly, for a very long time. He read every line of the document, turned the pages over to see what was written on the back. His ugly face was quivering like a molded aspic by the time he had flipped the last page around and come back to the first. Then he ripped the pages up—once, twice, three times, scattered them on the floor.
“This is my home,” the Sénateur said. “If you’re not happy in my home, you can leave.”
I attempted to speak, but the Sénateur cut me off. He stood up.
“You are my guest. This is not how a guest treats his host. Pierre!”
“Maître!” Pierre cried.
“Would you come to a man’s house and accuse him?”
“Jamais!”
“Would you thank him for his hospitality, take his hand, promise him help and kindness?”
“Bien sûr!” Pierre said. “That is basic. That is to be polite.”
All the goons were smiling now, enjoying the specter of a blan humiliated. The regular people in their seats in the sun were laughing too. They’d go home to their villages and families and tell them how the Sénateur treated me. Thus the story would go out into the world. The Sénateur was a very good politician.
I got up from my seat and offered him my hand. I said, “Thank you for the coffee, Sénateur.”
He ignored my hand. “Sit again,” he said. Then, after a moment, “We don’t have time in this short life for quarrels. Not between friends. I want to be your friend. I have too many enemies. In Creole, we say, ‘Only cats have time to fight.’”
Then the Sénateur winked and I sat down.
We sat in silence as a thick cloud covered us in shadow. Finally he said, “I admire the coolness of your blood. Here in Haiti we have hot blood. A foreign scientist has studied the matter. This gentleman discovered that the average Haitian has a temperature of between ninety-nine point seven and one hundred degrees. I myself am never less than that. I have measured! It is a scientific fact.”
He fanned himself. He leaned back in his wicker chair. He made a gesture to Pierre, who poured a tall glass of water from a pitcher, placed the glass on a small plate, centered the plate on a wooden tray carved and painted to resemble an eggplant, and brought the ensemble to the Sénateur. The Sénateur sipped from the glass, swished the water in his mouth, and spat on the deck.
“I will give you a story,” he said.
He
pulled his chair very slightly back and addressed not just me, but everyone on the deck.
He had received the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, he told us, from a priest named Jean Vincent Brierre. Père Brierre was in his day a celebrated man, on account of an incident in his youth, when the great President Sténio Vincent decided to allow the Rara bands to circulate on the feast days of the Church, so long as the bands did not enter the cities themselves. Père Brierre was a man of fierce conviction, and when he saw the peasants leaving their fields, turning their backs on prayer to dance and drink all through the holy days, he was outraged. He sent a telegram to the president himself denouncing the president’s decision.
“And, you understand, he used certain words…” The Sénateur coughed. Pierre brought him another glass of water. The Sénateur took a drink and continued.
The president sentenced Père Brierre to die by firing squad should he fail to apologize for the offense to the state and the outrage to the presidency. Père Brierre would not do so. He announced from his pulpit that he was defending the soul of his parish and the honor of the Haitian people, and he declared gallantly that he would prefer to die by bullet than to renounce his words. He requested of the president only the honor when in front of the firing squad to cry “Fire!” himself.
The privilege was so granted.
The Sénateur began to chortle.
Père Brierre was arrested and brought in chains to Port-au-Prince, where he demanded the opportunity to exercise his presidential privilege. But the army would not shoot him. The generals declared that it was an outrage to the honor of the army for any soldier to receive an order except from an officer. No civilian would ever order a member of the Forces Armées d’Haïti to fire a shot.
And so nobody would shoot Père Brierre. After a while he was allowed by the army to return to his parish and continue preaching—there was no reason to waste a good priest—until such time as the president would rescind the curé’s privilege and the army could shoot him properly.
The Sénateur’s chortle had progressed to a guffaw. The peasants were laughing with him. “Alors,” he said. “In 1939 my father was crossing the great Grand’Anse on his horse in a storm, when the river was full, when the beast was startled by a lightning stroke and bucked my father off into the raging waters. My father would certainly have drowned had Père Brierre, who was returning from a Mass in Roseaux, not dove into the waters and saved him. Shortly after that, I was conceived. That is why my father asked Père Brierre to baptize me—because I owe my very existence to him. And so I tell you now, so there is no confusion—I too am the kind of man who reserves the right to cry ‘Fire!’ myself when in front of the firing squad! And mon cher, you ask me now to cry ‘Fire!’ but I’m not ready!”
The Sénateur laughed until his face was a menacing purple. Then he leaned in very close, so close I could smell his clean, minty breath. The ordinary folks faded away, and it was just the two of us, alone on the deck. “You can tell your friends also, the kind of man I am,” he said. “Let them know that I’m not ready.”
The Sénateur was quiet. I thought the conversation was over. But then he said, “You know that this is a city of poets, don’t you?”
“I saw the sign at the airport.”
The dirt landing strip was carved into the fields of sugarcane and bananas like a scar. The airport itself was a one-room cement hut. A sign read BIENVENUE À JÉRÉMIE. LA CITÉ DES POÈTES. Seeing that sign had been the first hint that I would love this place.
“Do you enjoy poetry?” the Sénateur pursued.
A verse began to round out in my brain, something from high school: Hear the voice of the Bard / who present, past, and future sees.
“Of course,” I said.
His face brightened.
“Then you will know Docteur Révolus. Jean Joseph Vilaire. Callisthènes Fouchard. General Franck Lavaud. Félix Philantrope. All men of Jérémie—these splendid poets. And those are only some of our more famous poets. When I was a boy, you could not find a man in Jérémie who did not reckon himself a poet. They called us quite correctly the Athens of Haiti.”
Hear the voice of the Bard / who present, past, and future sees; / Whose ears have heard / The Holy Word—I couldn’t remember the last line of the stanza. That walk’d—and what?
“I too am a poet,” he said.
The Sénateur paused. He was waiting. He had an almost shy look on his face.
“Perhaps I might read your poems someday,” I said.
“What an honor that would be for me! What a pleasure that would be! Then you would know my soul. Pierre!”
“Maître!”
“Bring the man the book.”
Pierre went off into some inner room, locking eyes with Fidel on his way out. He came back with a small book. There was a portrait of the Sénateur on the cover, in profile and black-and-white, in a high turtleneck sweater, looking mournful and serious. The book was titled Les chansons de l’aigle.
“I very much look forward to this,” I said.
“Please do not judge me too harshly.”
“I’m in no position to judge anyone when it comes to writing poetry.”
“I’m afraid the poems reveal the man.”
He said this with such unexpected humility that I felt the first stirrings of fondness for him. By now I had long forgotten electricity.
I was at the top of the stairs when I said, “Sénateur?”
The Sénateur was already talking with the next of his visitors, giving him all the attention he had offered me.
“My friend?” he said.
“Would you mind signing your book?”
His face exploded in a huge, ugly smile. “Pierre!”
“Maître!”
“Bring me a pen!”
He wrote in the book in perfect cursive, almost calligraphic handwriting:
For an American friend—
welcome to my country,
this place of joy and sadness,
where the days shall pass swiftly,
the nights in pleasure,
and to which you will owe no less than your heart.
with all respect and affection,
Sénateur Maxim Bayard.
That evening, nestled under the mosquito net and listening to the drums beating out messages to the other world, I remembered the last line of my stanza. It had been worrying me. Hear the voice of the Bard / who present, past, and future sees; / Whose ears have heard / The Holy Word / That walk’d among the ancient trees.
PART TWO
1
Here is Haiti, by every statistical measure the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, but don’t be surprised by the Boucan Grégoire, which would not be out of place at all in Paris or New York, not in its elegance, not in its food, not in its prices. Out front of each arriving car, the young boys gather. Half begging, half menacing, they offer to watch the car as you eat: “Blan! Remember me! I’m Fanfan. I’ll give you good security! Best security!” At the entrance to the restaurant there is a man with a shotgun. A man with a shotgun stands at the entrance to every place the wealthy in Port-au-Prince cluster—at the supermarket; at the bank, of course; in the driveways of the villas of Pétionville. After a while you no longer see the man with the shotgun, but you know he’s there; you wouldn’t feel right if he wasn’t.
So you sit at the bar of the Boucan Grégoire and look at the other customers. The patrons have plush, oily skin; their well-fed bodies glow. Everyone is quiet, and they lean close over their plates to talk: the world of the wealthy in Haiti is intimate, suspicious, inbred. These people know one another and hate one another; they have green cards and apartments in Miami and cars with bulletproof glass. They live behind high walls topped with barbed wire. What is it Kapuściński wrote? “Money in a poor country and money in a rich country are two different things.” Nobody understands money like a rich man in a poor country. A wealthy man in America, in Singapore, in Norway, has a bright, happy, satisfied face. For
tune has favored him; his pleasures are endless.
But if you are wealthy in a poor country, that is something different. You are a fat sheep in a land of wolves. You are always alert, always watchful; the worst is always yet to come. You live on a small island where uncertain winds are blowing. A wealthy man arrives at middle age in Haiti stripped down to a tough, resilient, unsentimental core. A wealthy man in Haiti has narrow, shrewd eyes. You can never relax. Tomorrow somebody might kidnap your beloved nephew—he’s careless, that one, coming home from the discothèque by motorbike in the early hours of the morning. Tomorrow there might be mobs on the street, throwing rocks at your car or trying to storm your office. Tomorrow the government might fall—there could be a coup d’état—and you might need to flee again into exile. Soon there will be an election, and elections are precarious: the former president once spoke of placing burning tires around the necks of the wealthy. Such a man could be in office again. Do you send the children abroad for their education? Your father died of a heart attack. There are no facilities to treat a coronary in Haiti. Sometimes you are out of breath when you climb stairs. Your wife says, “Miami.” She says, “Jean, now is really the time for Miami.” But what would you do in Miami? Sell used cars like your brother-in-law? No, you have your dignity. Do you know what it means to do business in a country such as this one? Tomorrow the Americans might discover a worm in the mangoes, and then where will you be? Tomorrow the president might appoint your enemy as customs inspector. Then where will you be? You will be poor. There is nothing worse than being poor. You know what poverty is: you live in Haiti. How do you live with anxieties like that? You take your wife out for dinner at the Boucan Grégoire. You wave to your friends. You order a rum sour and another, and then—why not?—the smoked salmon with its crème fraîche.
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