I said, “You should sit down. You look like you’re going to hurl.”
“Not me,” Johel said.
“It’s pretty fucked-up.”
“That it is, brother, that it is,” he said.
“You got any idea what I should do with this guy?” I asked.
Terry said, “Somebody just handed him to you?”
“I think somebody figured his mother was in here. But I don’t see her.”
Johel said, “The water rises and drowns the women.”
The little boy reached for Johel’s hand. Maybe because of his size, Johel seemed like a more comforting presence. Johel held the boy’s hand with the stiffly self-conscious air of a man unused to children, but who is pleased to be liked by them.
A few minutes later two men from the morgue began to pick up the bodies from the pile and arrange them in rows. It was a two-man job: one for the arms, one for the legs. As each body rose up in the air, the head flopped backward. The men were straining hard, lifting the bodies over the others and dragging them into rectilinear order. Soon the men were sweating, drops of sweat flopping off their faces onto the faces of the dead. The men from the morgue rifled through their pockets, looking for money or phones.
Johel was trying to keep the kid from seeing his mother come out of that pile. But kids aren’t stupid. Johel turned him around and tried to keep him looking at something else, but there was nothing to look at, and the child turned around and stared at the bodies as they came out from the pile and the men from the morgue lined them up. Then Johel tried to pick him up and take him for a walk, but he squirmed out of Johel’s arms, walked back to the same spot in the courtyard where he had been standing, and stood there watching.
She never came out of that pile. The bodies were lined up in a row of eight and in a row of seven, and never once did that kid cry out Maman!—although he was looking for her, believe me he was.
Lined up in neat rows, they were like something else entirely from cadavers tossed in a heap. There is a difference between being tossed aside and being lined up in a row with your head neatly balanced between your shoulders and your eyes closed. Maybe the dead don’t care, but the living do. There was a man with a broad, muscled chest—mid-forties, a workingman—wearing one Timberland boot. He might have cared a lot about losing his shoe if he cared about anything. There was a teenager wearing a shirt that read LIFE IS SHORT. EAT DESSERT FIRST, the publicity for a bakery in Paulson, Minnesota. His face was smeared with a weird smile of sputum and sea foam, like being dead was better than cake.
Terry lit a cigarette and said, “Do what you want, Judge, but for me this isn’t acceptable. I had it in my power to change something like this, I’d do it.”
* * *
When we left the hospital, the boy’s mother saw him. He was still holding the judge’s hand. She had no idea if he had lived and he had no idea if she had lived. When she saw him, she cried out. He ran to her without looking back. A roar of applause rose up from the crowd.
“Merci Jezi,” a woman cried out.
“Merci Juge Blan,” another woman cried.
Thank you Jesus and Juge Blan! That crowd camped outside the hospital, which had seemed so recently threatening and unreadable, now became festive and rejoicing, not at their own good fortune, but at the happiness of another. The generous crowd swarmed around the judge, the men shaking his hand and the women embracing him. Johel’s face was soon streaked with tears.
In the weeks to come, he thought often of that moment in the foyer of the hospital, the crowd chanting his name.
4
Thank goodness for Kay! If it were not for Kay, I don’t think the judge’s campaign would have gotten much past “Hey! I would like to be sénateur!” When Kay heard that the judge had decided to contest the election, she put in place what she called Plan Kay, which consisted of her telling Todd Malgarini that she was out of commission for a while, flying down from Florida ASAP, and putting on her get-stuff-done hat, the actual hat in question being a tennis visor. Twenty-four hours after the judge announced his intention to run and just two weeks after the grounding of the Trois Rivières, Kay had already begun to turn a shaggy wooden house just off the Place Dumas into campaign HQ. The rental was concluded so fast that she must have organized it all, in typical Kay style, weeks or even months in advance. “Thank goodness for Kay!” we said when a large generator began to throb in the back; it was thanks to Kay that there was a fifty-five-gallon drum of petrol beside the generator; and it was thanks—yet again!—to Kay that there were desks, chairs, lights, and pens. Kay and the judge covered the walls of the office with maps of the Grand’Anse, each village, hamlet, and town shaded according to the size of its population. Kay even thought of pushpins, bright yellow, red, and green, sunk into the map in those places where the judge, after consultation with Toussaint, intended to campaign.
Not that there was much campaigning yet to do—the election was still months away. The judge hadn’t even gotten himself on the ballot yet. So in the absence of actual activity, there was an almost nonstop evening party, where the judge’s friends, disciples, acolytes, and acquaintances presented themselves at dusk for cocktails.
Jérémie was a small town, and the hours could stretch out. So it was nice to have a little social club where in the evenings we could repair for drinks. There was usually music on the stereo—Haitian Compas, Dominican merengue, or reggae. It all depended on who was closest to the stereo at a given time. Sometimes my wife would come and we would dance. Somebody would bring in a huge pot of rice and another huge pot of beans and plates of deep-fried plantains. The judge would be in shirtsleeves, collar loosened, sitting on the edge of his desk, talking about whatever was on his mind: some recent Supreme Court decision up in the States, his experience as a champion speller, the advantages of a road. He often wore a white Greek maritime captain’s hat perched on his large head—I have no idea where it came from, but it suited him in a kind of lighthearted, self-mocking way. Terry was in charge of the blender, mixing up drinks and pouring them with a bartender’s flair into the outstretched cups. (And it was thanks to Kay that there was a refrigerator that was cold and full of beer and ice…) It was the kind of place where people would bring a friend of a friend, just to talk politics and get a drink; it got so bad after a while that Terry had Toussaint hire two friends to serve as security guards to make sure no one walked off with the judge’s laptop.
The judge called all of this “holding a meeting.”
I found it strange to see Terry and Kay together. One evening I watched them dance the bachata. Both of them were light on their feet, with a good sense of rhythm, and to see their glowing, sweaty faces, you would have thought they were the most contented of couples. She was wearing a pretty sundress, and his hand lay authoritatively across her lower back, fingers splayed wide. Then he whispered something in her ear that made her laugh and blush.
But just that afternoon Terry had asked me if I had gone to see Nadia yet.
“I don’t want to get involved,” I said. “Kay’s my friend too.”
“Just tell me she’s okay. That’s all I have to know,” Terry said.
“And if she’s just fine?”
“Life goes on,” he said.
I was watching Terry and Kay dance and thinking about the mystery that is a man and a woman when I felt the heavy weight of the judge’s hand on my shoulder. I startled slightly at the unexpected touch.
“Easy now,” the judge said.
The smile on his face was so sincere—seeing me, his smile said, was the latest but certainly not the least significant in the string of happy moments and coincidences that made up an altogether happy life—that I was tempted for a moment to hug him. I enjoyed the smell of his aftershave.
“So you’re doing it after all,” I said.
The judge sipped from his beer. He was dressed as casually as I had ever seen him, in an immaculately pressed white shirt, open at the collar and rolled halfway up his chubby forearms.
“What did you see?”
“A lot of lines. Gray hair. Time passing.”
“A senatorial look, sort of.”
Through the open doors of the campaign HQ there was the Place Dumas. Citizens had come to enjoy the warm night air, playing dominoes and drinking rum. Terry dipped Kay and she giggled. Toussaint was talking to one of the judge’s prettier female students. “That night at the hospital, I made a promise to God,” the judge said. “I promised God when they were lifting up those bodies that if He gave that child back to his mother, I would do the right thing. I told God that He had to give me a sign.”
“I don’t know if you’re contractually obliged to keep that promise.”
His face settled into thoughtfulness. “There was offer and acceptance,” he said. “Due consideration. Not sure about the precedents. Probably a conflict of interest with the magistrate, but it’s not going to be easy to change venue. I’ll keep my side of the bargain.”
“How’s Nadia taking the decision?”
“She’s barely spoken to me since I told her.”
“And you’re still doing it?” I asked. “I wouldn’t have the balls.”
He started to chuckle, but the smile didn’t get past the corner of his lips. He nodded very slowly, his big chin merging into the wide neck. Then in his pleasant baritone he began to recite:
Ah, Love! could you and I with Fate conspire
To grasp this sorry Scheme of Things entire!
Would not we shatter it to bits—and then
Remold it nearer to the Heart’s Desire.
I told the judge that I was writing a piece about deportees. They were a distinct subculture in Haitian life: formed on the island, finished in the States, and then sent back to Haiti, sometimes penniless, sometimes not, as a result of some sin or failing after decades abroad. The stories of deportees were inevitably fascinating. The judge called Nadia on the spot, and she agreed to see me the next day at four.
* * *
When I saw her the next day on the sun-dappled terrace of the judge’s small house, I wondered how I could ever have thought that this was anything but a beautiful woman. She wore a white skirt and an apple-green blouse, a silver scarf wrapped tightly around her head. The ensemble lent her an air of faraway glamour, as if she had been transplanted that afternoon to Jérémie from the chicest café of Dakar or Abidjan. I had not noticed before how graceful she was. This was the first time I was alone with her, the first time she gave me her full attention. Her sea-colored eyes glittered.
“I’m happy to be here,” I said.
When a man describes a woman’s smile as “enigmatic,” it generally means only one thing: he is wondering what she thinks of him. Nadia now smiled enigmatically.
My notebook rested on the table between us. Nadia picked it up and began to thumb through it. From time to time I had attempted pen-and-ink sketches of interesting places in the Grand’Anse. “That’s Dame Marie,” I said.
“Very nice.”
Then she looked at sketches of the beach at Anse d’Azur and the fish market at Abricots and the hot springs near Sources Chaudes. Over her shoulder I could see the judge’s boxer shorts hanging on the laundry line, baggy, shapeless things, like hopelessness incarnated in an undergarment. They inspired me to say, “Terry asked me to come. He’s hurting something terrible.”
* * *
From time to time over the last five years (Nadia told me, her voice very low and soft, her remarkable eyes glancing at mine or resting on the horizon where the voiliers dipped and glided on the breeze) she had sung, when the mood struck her, with a local band. Galaxy was not a very good band, but they had a steady diet of gigs at nightclubs, feasts of patronal saints, political rallies, and private parties. For Nadia, having sung for years with a top East Coast Compas band like Erzulie L’Amour, Galaxy was just an excuse to get out of the house and onstage and let a little life back into her veins.
Nadia’s participation in Galaxy had produced a dozen fights or more with Johel. Perhaps because he couldn’t even carry a tune—Nadia winced when he tried to sing “Happy Birthday”—he couldn’t imagine the shared intimacy of the stage. Perhaps the look of transfixed passion on Nadia’s face as she sang disturbed him: that face, he thought, should be his alone. But the story he told her was that the back roads of the Grand’Anse were too dangerous for her to travel alone. Still, in five years, nothing had happened, if you didn’t count a few flat tires, until the incident in Dame Marie.
Nadia had just completed her set and was relaxing with the band when a shadow loomed across her table.
“Madame Johel,” the Sénateur said. “I salute you.”
The Sénateur bowed low, and his callused hand took her fingers and raised them to his lips. He spoke to her so softly that although she shared her table with a half dozen men, only she could hear him.
“Would you do an old man the honor of accompanying me on the dance floor? You must not refuse me! My heart is weak.”
She felt herself being lifted out of her chair. A hand materialized on her back. The Compas is not a complicated dance, a sinuous one-two rhythm, bounced along by limitless energy and a suggestive sashaying of the hips, but in the wrong hands (those of the judge, for example) it could be a tedious affair. The Sénateur, however, danced very well, not taking the vulgar liberties younger men took when they danced with her, but holding her close and maneuvering her with facility and grace.
He never stopped talking.
“Madame, I will not tell you—I would not wish you to report this to your husband!—the admiration—the trance that your remarkable eyes have cast over my soul. Be discreet! I have too many enemies already! Let this be our secret.”
He spun her in a half circle. She could feel the strength in his arms and hands.
“Do you know when I last saw eyes such as yours? She was the great love of my life—she was my nursemaid—I could have been no older than six—and I knew love such as I have never known before or since. And after a lifetime of wandering, hoping, and despair, those eyes have returned to me!”
Nadia said nothing as the Sénateur spoke, but it would be a lie to say that dancing with the man was unpleasant. Pressed up against his chest, she could smell the soap in which his white shirt had been laundered and his cologne, the clean, sharp, musky smell of a man who liked women. He guided her around the dance floor, the other couples clearing space for them. Sometimes—it was not the first time—when she was closest to the Fear, she felt it least intensely. She could not lie. Some part of her longed for the Fear.
They were done dancing, and the Sénateur led Nadia to a table in the back. The Sénateur had his private table in every nightclub in the Grand’Anse, all of them, like this one, out of sight and recessed from public view, where he met with important men and sat with pretty women. The Sénateur prepared drinks, pouring heavy shots of thick, molasses-like rum into two tall glasses, the ice heaving and cracking like ships pulling on ropes, then adding half a bottle of good Haitian Coca-Cola, which fizzed and crackled over the glass’s rim. He gestured to Pierre and said, “Bring me a lime and a knife.” Nadia admired the way Pierre sprang to attention. After a moment, Pierre came back with three small limes and a butcher’s knife. The Sénateur cut the lime into wedges—Nadia felt droplets of juice on her forearms—and squeezed them into the drinks. He took a tall spoon and stirred the glasses, the ice rattling the concoction. Then he handed Nadia her glass.
“Santé,” he said.
“Santé,” Nadia said.
They touched their glasses rim to rim.
After all the dancing and singing in the sultry heat, Nadia was thirsty. She drank greedily. She could remember being carried by her uncle as a child, going home from the market on long mountain paths, drifting in and out of sleep as he marched steadily upward. These were some of her earliest memories. She had no say in where she traveled: she had yet to even possess the capacity for words. Sh
e was in the grip of someone more powerful than she was. There was no question of resistance.
The drink went swiftly to her head. She looked around and saw that in this private area of the nightclub there was only the Sénateur and his strongmen. She started to stand up, and the Sénateur’s hand was on her forearm.
“Finish your drink,” he said.
His light touch coaxed her back into her chair. The feel of his hand dissipated her skittishness. The Sénateur was talking about his childhood, and then, to her surprise, she was talking also: the Sénateur had coaxed words out of her. “Child, how long were you on the other side of the water? When did you come home?” She enjoyed the feel of his strong hand on her arm, the intensity of his stare. Here was a man who understood her, who needed no complicated explanations. The Sénateur poured her another drink.
“So you’re with Juge Blan?” he said.
“He’s not blan.”
“He’s not from here,” the Sénateur said.
“His ancestors are my ancestors,” she said loyally.
The Sénateur put his hand on hers and held it tight.
“This is a Haitian hand. This hand cut cane. This hand held a machete. What kind of hand does the judge have?”
She thought of the judge’s hands, soft like butter in the sun.
The Sénateur answered his own question. “Blan hands.”
“Gentle hands,” Nadia said.
The Sénateur put his hand on her thigh. She was wearing a dress that she wished were longer. He rubbed her thigh with his thick thumb, and she felt the Fear flicker inside her. He leaned in close, and she could smell his cologne, his hair oil, his breath, rich with rum and mint. Now she felt her heart trembling. In the market Nadia had seen the marchandes slit the breasts of the butchered animals, and she could see the young beasts’ hearts trembling. Now she felt as she did when Baron Samedi slid down the poteau-mitan and wandered the dance floor, selecting this one, selecting that one, to be his concubine for the night. The Sénateur’s rough hand moved up her thigh. She could not get away from him.
Peacekeeping Page 19