The young men of Jeune Haiti had no notion of how cruel was the personality to whom they had put themselves in opposition. One by one, the dictator hunted them down, dragged them to Port-au-Prince, tortured them, shot them live on Haitian television, and left their decapitated bodies to rot openly in the streets, a warning to any who might indulge in like-minded folly. Then the dictator put his mind to eradicating their accomplices. The dictator was not of a mind to be subtle, and he counted as Jeune Haiti’s abettors the entire mulatto community of Jeune Haiti’s natal town, Jérémie.
* * *
Père Samedi found his old friend Maxim huddled in the small barn where he kept his donkey and pigs. He was dressed in the ill-fitting overalls of a peasant—his friend who took such pleasure in his tailored suits. His face was covered in blood, and his eyes, ordinarily so insouciant and charming, flickered from shadow to shadow. Père Samedi could not imagine what might have produced so dramatic a transformation of his old school comrade, who passed his days, to the frustration of his mother, composing mildly erotic verse, painting, and seducing village girls, the blacker and more full-breasted the better. Père Samedi did not have it in his heart to censure Maxim’s conduct, but neither had it been a friendship he had been eager to sustain after lycée and his years at seminary in Port-au-Prince. So it was a surprise to see his old school comrade prostrate in his barn, trembling in fear, pleading for his assistance.
“My Father, you must help me,” Maxim said.
Maxim had never before addressed Abraham by his title, and the young priest’s first thought was that Maxim had seduced the wrong girl, and some outraged boyfriend or father had taken his correct revenge. Or perhaps an outraged woman, Abraham thought: the image of one of Maxim’s slighted amours assaulting the runabout produced a hint of a smile on Abraham’s face. He wondered why Maxim had thought to come to him, of all people.
“What happened to you?” he asked.
“My Father, don’t you know?” said Maxim.
“Know what?”
Maxim stared at the priest. In that moment the priest knew that this was no matter of jilted hearts or wounded honor.
“We’re all dead. All of us.”
The priest stifled his instinct to demand an explanation. His own hut afforded greater privacy than the barn, which fronted a path where villagers would sometimes walk in the night, so he led Maxim through the lakou and into his dusty dwelling. He started a fire and brewed coffee, which he laced liberally with rum. “More,” said Maxim, and the priest topped up the mug until it contained more rum than coffee. Maxim sipped at the strong beverage until he found the strength to speak.
* * *
There had been rumors for some time, of course, that the Macoutes would come for them, but Maxim did not believe it: no one would let such a thing happen in that small town, where mulâtre and noir had so long lived side by side in easy friendship.
(Père Samedi stayed silent as he recalled the pews of the cathedral, the first ranks reserved for the mulattos, the remainder for the blacks. He recalled the time when Maxim had invited him to a literary evening at the Excelsior Club, a night dedicated to the poètes maudits, and some mulatto wag had set the room aflame by declaring that a fly had landed in the milk.)
Maxim had been at home with his sisters and mother when Sanette Balmir, the leader of the local band of Tontons Macoutes, came to the terrace of the family gingerbread accompanied by half a dozen of her men. Sanette Balmir! Who could have imagined that this woman could rise to such prominence? She was old and fat, a diabetic—too old to ply her quondam trade as whore and thief, but not so old that she didn’t remember every disparaging word the townsfolk had ever muttered at her hunched-over figure as she swept the streets of Jérémie in penal servitude—and there was no family she loathed more than the Bayards. This was because it was the testimony of Evelyne Bayard herself that had placed Sanette in the hands of justice after Sanette Balmir stole an entire harvest of roses from her garden. Sanette had made no secret of her loathing for this wealthy, privileged clan, and of her desire to take revenge. Now she was a great Macoute, and she awaited only the word of her patron and chief, the Doc himself, to obtain her satisfaction. The telephone call from Port-au-Prince soon arrived.
When she arrived at Maxim’s house, it was clear straightaway on what kind of errand she had come. The Macoutes stood under the spreading mango tree, their sunglasses, worn even at night, reflecting the torches they carried.
Maxim was in his middle twenties, but in such a moment it was nevertheless the family matriarch, Evelyne Bayard, who took command. (Maxim’s father had been dead now almost three years.) She said, “Sanette Balmir, what do you want with us?”
“How are your roses this year, Evelyne?” asked Sanette Balmir.
“Healthy and beautiful. If you or these gentlemen have some happy occasion, I’ll be pleased to clip you a dozen.”
“A dozen will not be enough.” Sanette Balmir handed a machete to Maxim. “Boy, go and clip me as many flowers as you can carry.”
Maxim took the knife, warm still from the fat woman’s hand. He trembled as he walked toward the rosebushes, accompanied by another of the Macoutes, a young man his own age, Dieuseul Bontemps, someone he had known, in the way of small towns, since earliest childhood. They had tangled numerous times on the soccer pitch. Now Dieuseul refused to meet Maxim’s eyes, an evasion that frightened Maxim more than a glare of outright hatred. Maxim gripped the machete harder—but he knew that his mother and sisters were alone with Sanette Balmir. He would not risk upsetting her further.
It took Maxim twenty minutes to cut down an entire season of his mother’s roses. His hands and arms were bleeding from the thorns as he carried the stems bare-handed. Then he made his way back up the hill, where Sanette Balmir, the Macoutes, and Maxim’s family stood where he had left them. Sanette walked over to Maxim’s mother, and with a stroke of her machete cut open the older woman’s dress. Then she cut off her underwear, not caring whether she sliced open Evelyne Bayard in the process. Evelyne Bayard stood naked in front of her family and her attackers, a film of red sliding across her breasts. Groaning loudly, Sanette began to massage the blood into the older woman’s skin. Mosquitoes attracted by the smell of blood began to swarm.
The Bayards were taken on foot to the commissariat, walking through the streets where they had strolled every day of their lives. No one ran to their aid. No one cried that generations of Bayards had been their friends, benefactors, and neighbors for a hundred years or more. They felt eyes on them from behind every window and door. Maxim’s sisters began to cry. It was Evelyne Bayard who silenced them, hissing sharply through her teeth. They were kept in the prison for almost half a day, united in their cell with the large Sansaricq clan and the Guilbauds. Half the daughters in the room had succumbed at one time or another to Maxim’s touch. Now the women stood naked and shook in fear.
The three families—the first of what would eventually be a massacre that consumed the entire mulatto community of Jérémie—were taken on the white road that led past the beach at Anse d’Azur to an empty plain near the airport. The Macoutes, displaying rare efficiency, had dug a pit already. The shots came in volleys. Maxim had the presence of mind, when he saw his family crumple, to fall into the pit as well. The bodies of the Sansaricqs fell on the bodies of the Bayards, and the bodies of the Guilbauds fell on the bodies of the Sansaricqs.
Sanette Balmir tossed roses on the open grave.
* * *
His fingertips trembling, Père Samedi crossed himself.
“I came on foot,” said Maxim.
“The Macoutes didn’t see you?” asked Père Samedi.
“They were too drunk by the end of the night to notice. They were too drunk even to bury the dead.”
Père Samedi thought for a moment that he could hear Sanette Balmir’s raucous breathing in the very room itself. He excused himself from the small front room and retired to his bedroom, where he kept a private altar. He drop
ped to his knees and asked his Lord for guidance. Where did his duty lie? To his friend or to his parishioners? He asked his Lord to give him the courage to decide. When he was done praying, Père Samedi felt certain that the Lord wanted him to tend his flock. Père Samedi thought of his namesake, the great Abraham, obeying the Lord’s injunction to slaughter his beloved Isaac. Père Samedi adjusted his cassock and decided that he would offer his old friend the opportunity to confess his sins. He would prepare for Maxim a decent meal—and then he would ask Maxim to leave his hut and render himself unto Caesar.
Père Samedi stepped back into the small salon. Maxim was seated at the low table, a look on his face of utter confusion. Before there is sorrow or even anger, there is surprise. He looked at Père Samedi as if he had never seen him before. At that moment, recalling the taste of komparet, Père Samedi decided—it was an instinct, not a decision—to abandon the narrow course of his decent and obedient life. He begged the Lord to pardon him, then told Maxim to hide in the back room of the hut before his maid arrived.
When she arrived shortly thereafter, he told the woman, whom he did not entirely trust to keep a secret, that he had hankered all night for a variety of shrimp found chiefly in Dame Marie—a morning’s walk and an afternoon’s return. Grumbling loudly, she left the priest alone in his hut to plot.
That morning, Père Maxim Bayard of Bretagne, dressed in clerical robes, accompanied by Père Samedi, set off in the direction of Port-au-Prince. They traveled in Père Samedi’s beat-up but serviceable old Citroën, on roads that in those days could still convey the traveler to the capital in a matter of hours. At military checkpoints the two priests blessed the soldiers in their work. A Catholic priest in Haiti is still a man of considerable influence, and the soldiers allowed them to pass without incident, all the way to the Dominican frontier, which Maxim Bayard crossed on foot.
Père Samedi’s scheming was not without repercussion, however.
It was the same maid who found the poems in the pockets of the dirty pants that Père Samedi gave her to wash. She had never washed these pants before. Scraps of paper, strange verse—it was Père Samedi who had taught her to read. Now she read the name Maxim Bayard and was horrified. She understood immediately that he had been in the house, that her priest had harbored him. She thought of her babies. Were it to come out that Maxim Bayard had stayed the night in Père Samedi’s hut, who would believe that she didn’t know?
Père Samedi spent the next year in Fort Dimanche, the place where the Doc tortured his enemies before he murdered them. He emerged only thanks to the influence of the Vatican: even the dictator hesitated before shooting a priest. (The Doc had watched his Macoutes torture the young priest, burning his feet with cigarettes and placing electric probes on his genitals, and had developed also a strange and merciful fondness for the young cleric. It did not bother him to let this one go…) The Jesuits found the priest a new position in the Vatican, but it was quite some time before his eyes adjusted from darkness to light and he was able to read again.
* * *
François Duvalier was a man little satisfied with the destruction of his enemies: the Doc believed in sowing their fields with salt. The key to Jérémie’s prosperity had long been direct commerce with the world, exporting coffee, cocoa, and rubber directly from her port on ships serving the Caribbean and Europe. Now Duvalier ordered all international vessels to serve Port-au-Prince and Port-au-Prince alone, and the prosperous town of Jérémie was effectively cut off from the world.
From that moment, the town began to wither. Nothing came in or out but what came on the boat from Port-au-Prince. The great wooden houses went untended as those families not murdered by the regime fled, some to Port-au-Prince, others abroad. The road to Les Cayes, built under the American occupation and so solid in the Sénateur’s youth that a man could travel to Port-au-Prince and return on the same day, was left to deteriorate. Farmers ceased to plant anything that required access to roads or markets, and the most prosperous region of Haiti soon became the territory of subsistence farmers. Forty years later, no trace of the road was left, just massed rocks and crevasses of mud.
The years that followed the massacre were the happiest of Sanette Balmir’s life. She soon moved into the Bayard house, together with her menagerie of flunkies, followers, lovers, and acolytes. The large Bayard library was fed, sheet by sheet, to the flames to start cooking fires. Sanette was too fat to fit in Evelyne Bayard’s clothes, but the dresses of the Bayard women were cut open and stitched together to make nightclothes for her. She enjoyed the feel of Evelyne Bayard’s soft sheets against her ample skin at night. She drank her way through the Bayards’ excellent collection of wine imported from France, and she was known for the rose she inevitably wore in her hair.
3
There were other photographs on the walls of Père Samedi’s study: Père Samedi leaning on a knee, surrounded by a large crowd of somber children—the orphans he harbored in the orphanage he had constructed at Bonbon. Père Samedi had restored the lovely church at Abricots, and Père Samedi, hard hat on his head, stood looking over an architectural blueprint with the French architect who had volunteered his time (at Père Samedi’s suggestion) to oversee the project. In another photo, Père Samedi was holding a shovel, digging out the ceremonial first scoop of dirt at his health clinic; and in another he was arm in arm with three blans at the prow of one of the fishing boats that Québécois Catholics had donated to Père Samedi’s parishioners following the passage of a hurricane.
I had been looking at the photographs on Père Samedi’s wall for five minutes or more, the room quiet and animated only by the swirling dust motes, when the priest finally spoke: “Let me see your teeth.”
“I’m sorry?” said the judge.
“I want to see your teeth.”
The judge bared his teeth—neat, square, small, and regular. They were neither attractive nor unattractive, and in no way particularly notable.
“Open wide,” Père Samedi said.
“Why?” he said.
“Open.”
The judge did as he was ordered. The priest peered inside his mouth carefully, as if looking in very much the wrong place for a lost button. Then Père Samedi stood up. He stood tall, like some complexly articulated skinny spider, and he ambled over to Terry. He said, “Now you. Show me yours.”
“These are for me and Dr. Stern,” Terry said.
“Show me your teeth,” Père Samedi said, and his voice was so mild that Terry smiled and opened his mouth wide.
The priest looked inside Terry’s mouth attentively. I could see Terry’s pink tongue. Terry’s eyes were smiling: one more Haiti story to tell back home.
“Now you,” the priest said.
He held my chin gingerly between an old leathery forefinger and an old leathery thumb. He looked at my tongue and my gold-capped molars. His examination lasted a long time. Then he released my face, returned to his place, and shouted, “François!”
After a moment, the gardener ambled in.
“François, show the men your teeth, if you please. It’s very important.”
With no hint of embarrassment, François opened his mouth.
We sat in our seats, nodding, until Père Samedi said, “No, gentlemen, I insist. Come and look at these teeth. Look.”
“It’s okay,” said the judge, embarrassed for François.
“François doesn’t mind,” said Père Samedi.
François didn’t seem to mind. His smile suggested that he might even take a perverse pride in the condition of his teeth. There were teeth in his mouth, technically speaking, but very few. It was a cul-de-sac of dental destruction. It was like looking at a rose garden after a hurricane rips through. François was opening his mouth wide and leaning over the judge’s face, and the judge was trying to maintain a neutral aspect, not wanting to alienate a voter.
Terry leaned over and whispered to me, “What the hell are we doing here?”
“Looking at François’s teeth
,” I said.
Père Samedi lit a cigarette, and Terry took that as permission to do the same. Then Terry offered François one from his pack; he accepted it happily.
“I sometimes wonder what His intentions were in giving us these fragile mouths,” Père Samedi said. “Surely He was aware of the conditions we would face. Why add yet another burden to our shoulders?”
The judge was thinking about those billable hours. He said, “So you need a dentist.”
“François needs dentures,” Père Samedi said.
“I imagine a lot of folks around here need good dental care,” said the judge.
“The children,” Terry added.
“Not just the children, everyone,” said the judge.
“We had a dentist once,” Père Samedi said.
“What happened to him?”
“He died!” Père Samedi began to laugh, a dismaying caw. “It was a long time ago. He drilled a cavity, somebody bit him, the blood became infected, and he died!”
“Doesn’t sound like he was much of a dentist,” said the judge.
“He wasn’t,” Père Samedi agreed. “He treated François.”
“Maybe we could find you another one,” said the judge.
Then the judge began to talk. It was as if he’d been thinking about rural Haitian dentistry for months. In Jacmel, he’d seen a volunteer dentistry program. Real model for how it should be done. An American dentist flew in every month or two for a marathon of oral care. Cavity. Boom. Extraction. Boom. Saw more patients in three days than he probably saw up north in a month. Now, if Père Samedi could supply a working space, nothing fancy, just a room, and maybe a place at the guest house, then Johel was betting he could find the dentist. Somebody who’d love to take his hygienist down to the little hotel at Anse du Clerc, fill cavities in the morning, snorkel in the afternoon, boff the hygienist at night—excuse my language, Father—why this could really work.
Peacekeeping Page 22