This could be the start right here of a lot of good things.
* * *
There was one photograph not on Père Samedi’s wall that well belonged there, but it exists only in my imagination. It is a portrait of an immensely fat woman dressed in a green silk gown hiked up around her waist. She is wearing no underwear. The woman, her skin the color of wet mud, is lying in a patch of wet mud, being nosed by a snowy white sow. Her arms and legs are askew, in a position that the viewer, not knowing why, knows immediately is unnatural. Her head lies a meter away from her body. Her mouth is open, and her tongue lolls out. In her eyes there is a wide-eyed, unblinking stare of perfect terror.
Stories circulated still about Père Samedi in the year immediately after his return from exile. Papa Doc and Baby Doc were only recently gone, and the parish was still divided between those who had supported the dictatorship and those who had opposed it: everyone knew which way their neighbor had gone. Père Samedi, returned to his parish after so many years away, now attracted vast crowds with his furious sermons. He urged his parishioners to rough-and-ready justice. It was said—whispered, hinted—that Père Samedi himself led bands of men armed with machetes to lonesome houses where once-powerful Macoutes now trembled. They said that the priest made lists of his friends and lists of his enemies, and he scratched names off one list and inserted them on the other. It was around this time that the head of the aged Sanette Balmir was discovered in a pigsty.
They say that it was Maxim Bayard, returned from exile also, who tempered Père Samedi’s righteous anger. Both men had suffered the depredations of the dictator: nobody understood Père Samedi’s anger so well. Maxim had spent his exile in Paris, driving a taxicab. Not a day had passed when he did not feel the sadness and longing that only an exile can understand. The very day that Baby Doc fled Port-au-Prince, Maxim Bayard came home. He swore that he would never again sleep in the house that Sanette Balmir had profaned, and he built himself a small hut on the edge of his large property. Then he sought out his old friend Abraham Samedi. The two men, together with half a dozen like-minded men in various districts of the Grand’Anse, devised a plan for justice. Soon Maxim Bayard was Sénateur Maxim Bayard, and Père Samedi spoke to him as an equal.
Nowadays, it was said that in Père Samedi’s parish, there was only one voter, and that was Père Samedi. He had learned in his youth a hard lesson in the importance of politics. At the pulpit, he was not afraid to identify the candidate in each election whom he supposed would best benefit his flock. For a great many of his parishioners, confident in his judgment and grateful for his assistance, that would be enough. His parishioners knew that those who had voted for the candidate of Père Samedi’s choice would be rewarded. Père Samedi seemed to always know who had voted for whom, and he could be trusted to arrive at your homestead with a small envelope in which could be found a petit cadeau in appreciation of one’s trust and fidelity. Others of independent mind who persisted in rallying or campaigning for the opponents of the lanky priest would find themselves visited at night by Père Samedi, who would sit for hours in attempts at gentle persuasion.
But when this failed, fields would mysteriously be set aflame. Women who crossed Père Samedi would sit in the market and not sell so much as a clove of garlic. Yet the most dramatic sanction the priest could impose was to withhold Communion: for many years, Père Samedi had seen to it that there were no Protestant churches in his parish, and to be outside the safe confines of the Church was to lay oneself open to every kind of danger.
By one means or another, Père Samedi succeeded in delivering the votes of his parish, all of them, election after election, for the Sénateur or for some other candidate of his choosing. It was to deliver his votes to the judge that we were in Abricots.
4
The judge had been selling himself vigorously to Père Samedi for maybe twenty minutes when he asked Terry and me to wait for him outside. The judge was a professional negotiator, and he knew that the only people who belonged in a room when final terms were discussed were the principals themselves.
Terry and I went outside. He had the kind of pale Scotch-Irish complexion that turned crimson the instant it was in the sun.
“Christ, it’s hot,” he said.
“He’s good,” I said.
“I told you. And he will get it done. These people will have that dentist if he says they’ll have a dentist.”
Terry pulled a packet of Marlboro Reds out of his pocket. “I hate these things. Eight years I didn’t smoke. First cigarette was twelve minutes exactly after I landed. That’s what this country does to you.”
I looked at Terry for a long time. His face was too irregular, too puffy to be handsome, but he’d seen a lot of life, and that gives a man’s face something attractive also.
He said, “You ever wonder why he doesn’t want to build that road?”
“The Sénateur?”
“I’ve got a theory,” he said. “I used to think he was after the money. I didn’t know how it all worked, but I figured if you traced it all back to where it came from, you’d find money. But I got to thinking more and…”
Terry walked over to the car and pulled out a bottle of water. He took a long swig from it and handed it to me. “What you got to understand is that they’re his. That’s how he sees it. If they build that road, what the hell do they need Sénateur Maxim for? They’ll sell the frigging mangoes in Port-au-Prince, or fish, or they’ll plant gardens and sell tomatoes. The way Maxim Bayard sees things, these people don’t need him, it’s like he doesn’t even exist.”
There was an open cement cistern covered in a scum of rainwater and algae. Mosquitoes danced across the surface. Terry bent over, picked up some loose gravel, and started tossing pebbles into the water.
“He says they’re his children, but I tell you, a father can hate his children too. It doesn’t happen often, but it does happen. I once had a guy who found out his wife was cheating on him, he took his two kids and slit their throats. This guy told me he felt evil in their hearts. That was my death-row case. And that’s the way Maxim Bayard loves his quote-unquote children. He feels evil in their hearts.”
The world makes you, and then you see it through the eyes it gives you. Another man sees the same world, but he doesn’t have the same eyes. I didn’t want to debate Terry. I just let him talk.
Terry said, “There was this time—I guess it must have been, I don’t know, 2004. Something like that. Rainy night, right in front of me, two out-of-state vehicles, head-on. One guy died, name was Terry Moore, still remember that, Terry just like me, and the car that hit him, that was this old couple, down from Maine. Here I was in Florida, one car was from Virginia and the other car from Bangor, Maine, and they meet two hundred yards in front of me.”
Terry started laughing.
“So why I remember all this, is what I had to do was call this guy’s wife and tell her that her husband was dead in Florida. And she’s like, ‘Florida? What’s he doing in Florida? He told me he was going to Graceland with Al. You tell that fat bastard I never want to hear from him again. Tell him I die, he ain’t invited to my fucking funeral.’ She was going nuts, that lady. Finally, I was just, ‘Lady, I’m going to go tell his cadaver everything you just said.’ Next thing I know, the woman’s wailing into the phone. ‘Please don’t tell him nothing. Oh, he knows, he knows!’”
Terry kept chucking gravel. The pebbles formed small circles in the water that expanded and encroached and interfered with one another.
“Any case, what I keep thinking to myself, you know, couple thousand miles of road between them, and if those old folks had just gone a touch slower or Terry Moore had stopped for an extra cup of coffee, everyone would have been fine. You ever think what a thing like that means? I mean, really think about it? It’s just—there’s gotta be some kind of plan. Some kind of plan that makes those two cars slam into each other. Like you ever think of all the fucked-up things that had to happen before I meet Nadia? It’s some
crazy shit.”
I picked up a branch and tossed it into the water. It broke up Terry’s circles.
“So you think there’s a point to it all?” I said.
“There better damn be,” he finally said.
Terry and I didn’t talk for a while. That house was making both of us feel pretty lugubrious. I let Terry chuck gravel in the water like he was taking aim at bad memories, and I walked out onto the road. Nobody shouted at me or asked me for money. People just averted their eyes when they walked in front of Père Samedi’s house. I was so grateful when a little kid ran up to me with a big smile that I gave him all the change in my pocket.
Finally the judge came out of the house.
“Père Samedi sends you his best,” he said.
“I wanted to say goodbye,” I said.
“He’s not feeling well.”
A few minutes later we were on the road back to Jérémie.
“How’d it go?” Terry said.
“He told me he’s had the same donkey a lot of years, but it wasn’t carrying its weight. He told me he’s in the market for a new beast of burden.”
“And what’d you say?”
“Hee-haw.”
He said it with so little affect that I couldn’t figure out what happened.
“So that’s good news?” I said.
“He’s got it in for the Sénateur, that’s for sure.”
“That’s good for you, then,” I said.
The judge nodded. His face was like a mask. He had imported the heavy air of the priest’s house into the vehicle. It wasn’t easy to breathe.
“It’s about the dentist?” I said.
The judge shook his head. “No. The Sénateur could find a dentist, that’s what it took. No, there was a little girl on the Trois Rivières. That’s what this is about.”
“What about her?” I asked.
But Terry had already understood. “Man, have I got to take a crap.”
“I had no idea,” I said, thinking of that flock of children I had seen playing in the priest’s garden. Even if you’re looking, even if it’s all right in front of you, sometimes you don’t see the story. Then you wonder why you’re always so surprised by how the world turns out.
Johel nodded. We didn’t talk. Out at sea, you could see thick clouds and rain, a heavy storm over a small patch of big ocean. But it was sunny where we were.
She was nine. Her mother was taking her to Port-au-Prince. She had a toothache.
PART SIX
1
Coming in from the airport, just out front of the police commissariat, the first thing you saw was the judge’s face, twelve feet high and fake-smiling. He fake-smiled at the marchandes walking up the coast with baskets of fish on their heads, at the kids in parrot-bright uniforms heading off to school, at the old men rocking in their chairs and admiring the goats. The judge fake-smiled at the UNPOLs dropping off prisoners at the police station, at Balu, the chef de transport, buying beer at Marché Soleil, and at the Uruguayan soldiers heading down to the beach. He fake-smiled at the motorcycle taxi drivers and at the vendors of used American clothing. He fake-smiled at all of Jérémie, his bright, round face reminding every voter of the promise of a new day.
The new billboard was the start of the electoral campaign. Kay told me that the judge had hired a company out of Port-au-Prince to execute the work and had personally approved the heavily photoshopped image that hung there: the man that overlooked the rue Abbé Hué was some twenty pounds lighter than his fleshy reality. He had settled on his campaign emblem: a hawk soaring above two lines that suggested a road. This was Toussaint Legrand’s only successful artistic accomplishment. He had created the image in a single, perfect moment of inspiration. Beneath the judge’s face was written “Célestin: The Road to Prosperity.”
Although the campaign was in its earliest days, I couldn’t imagine that the judge had spent less than ten thousand dollars already and seemed prepared to spend much more. Johel in his own financial affairs was generally parsimonious. I had seen him pass ten infuriating minutes patiently bargaining down the price of a basket of bananas. His salary as a judge was barely more than an honorarium, if the government succeeded in paying him at all; but I understood that he had some family money and savings from his career in corporate law on which he relied, and he had inherited two apartment buildings in Port-au-Prince, one near Canapé Vert and the other in Pétionville. The rental income from these properties was probably sufficient for his needs.
Still, the prospect of financing a senatorial race out of his own pocket was daunting. Haiti is poor, and the Grand’Anse is the most remote corner of Haiti; but politics in the Grand’Anse were not cheap. I made a back-of-the-envelope calculation: the judge needed SUVs to transport him, his aides, and his security from place to place; he probably needed at least three vehicles, and he needed them for at least three months. He needed radio time, and pigs and goats to feed people at his campaign rallies. He needed tens of thousands of T-shirts imprinted with his smiling face. He needed to pay campaign staff and people to walk around the hills telling his story. He needed big crowds to attract big crowds at his rallies, and crowds of paid supporters don’t come cheap. He needed to pay kids to graffiti his name all over town. And above all, he needed to buy votes, because what poor man is ever going to give away something as valuable as a vote for free? And even that’s not enough, because the judge needed to buy the people who counted the votes.
There were diverse rumors explaining how the judge funded his campaign. One story, widely repeated, was that he was funded by the CIA. The story was not implausible: the United States did have a sordid history of meddling in Haitian politics, both covertly and overtly, and the Sénateur, with his socialist politics and fervent denunciations of the “cold nation” to the north, had not made himself any friends among that small coterie of powerful Americans who interested themselves in Haitian affairs. (I also heard stories that the Sénateur, whose campaign was equally expensive, was himself funded by the CIA, his rhetoric and ostensible political convictions an elaborate ruse.) Variants on these stories had the role of the CIA played by the secret services of Cuba, Venezuela, and Russia; or various narco-traffickers; or a consortium of real estate speculators eager to profit from the construction of the road.
There was one story, however, more widely diffused than any other, a story that had the additional merit of being true. I heard the story first from Toussaint Legrand, who, after his success with the logo, had painted a portrait of a three-legged yellow dog (he ran out of paint before applying the final limb) that he was proposing to sell to me. With the proceeds of the sale, he intended to buy a bottle of cologne, brewed locally and known as Lightning, so-called for its effect on the ladies. Toussaint indicated the subsequent step in his plan with a sheepish smile. I bought the painting, and Toussaint threw in the story for free. I later gave the painting to Kay White, who said, “That’s interesting.” She had heard the story also, and fleshed out further details. But the definitive version was told to me by the judge himself, speaking on the dual condition that the story would remain confidential for as long as he pursued or held political office, and that I remove Toussaint’s painting from the wall above the toilet of campaign HQ, where Kay had hung it.
* * *
Even the lowliest peasant in the most remote village of the Haitian hills will know the name Andrés Richard, or they will call him by his nickname, La Gueule d’Haïti—the snout of Haiti. What the nickname meant was this: What came into Haiti, and fed the nation and nourished it and was essential for survival, passed through him. He chewed upon and digested the meat of the nation. If you spend a dollar in Haiti, some portion of that dollar will filter upward through middlemen and merchants until it has settled in the Richard family coffers. Haiti is an island nation that produces nearly nothing: what is consumed must be imported. So every drop of gasoline in the nation came through Andrés Richard’s oil terminal, and every grain of imported rice was stored in hi
s warehouses. Groupe Richard held a controlling stake in the leading distributor of filtered water; they owned the leading bank and its competitor. It was said that the Richard family alone possessed more wealth than the Haitian peasantry combined; of the great mulatto families who lived in the hills above Port-au-Prince, his by far was the greatest and most powerful. Otherwise sober men and women in Port-au-Prince swore that Andrés Richard owed his fabulous success to human sacrifice.
“Abraham Samedi had told me that you have political ambitions,” Andrés Richard said to the judge, his voice faint and palsied over the telephone. “Haiti needs men like you.”
Château Richard was accessible only by private road—or helicopter. Johel had never been in a helicopter before. The thing rose up in a swirling cloud of dust, then banked, and the city swung skyward, slums spreading like concrete fungus up the sides of elephant-hide mountains. Hulks of rusting ships gleamed grotesquely in the bay. As the helicopter circled over the hills, Johel could see vast neighborhoods of shimmering tin shacks, and in the streets, brilliantly colored cars like jewels, the sun reflecting off each emerald, amethyst, or topaz roof. The last concrete roofs of Port-au-Prince receded into the lower distance as the helicopter rose; then they disappeared entirely from view, the helicopter following the bowls of great canyons and mountain ridges until, at a distance, Johel could see, set on an immense green lawn, the marmoreal whiteness of Andrés Richard’s house. Andrés Richard had purchased not only the mountain on which his own house was situated but also the two mountains visible from his home, to ensure that his view was never marred by the encroaching bidonvilles.
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