A uniformed servant led Johel to the terrace of the house, where a large parrot in a cage that might comfortably have accommodated a family of three regarded Johel with mild curiosity. Johel waited on the terrace for several minutes, considering the splendid lines of the deck furniture, the tranquillity of the pool, and the undulating form of a large steel sculpture, until another servant emerged from the dark interior of the house pushing an aged lizard in a wheelchair.
“Don’t get up,” the lizard croaked. “I can’t!”
The lizard then flicked out his tongue to gather up a spot of spittle on his lower lip and began to laugh.
“Andrés Richard,” he said, extending a hand. “At your service.”
* * *
There was a hole in Andrés Richard’s wall, and now that he was old and was going to die, that hole bothered him, worried him at night, and deranged what little sleep he had. What he had built and what he had accomplished, when weighed in the balance of his soul, meant little against the hole in his wall. He had raised children and seen them grow to be wastrels, failures, drinkers, scoundrels—but that troubled him less than the hole in the wall. He had built an empire. He had made love to scores of beautiful women, had made and unmade presidents. He had held private audiences with three popes. He had made his peace with his Lord, but evidently his Lord had yet to make His peace with him.
The hole was in the wall of Andrés Richard’s private chapel.
It had been a decade at least since Andrés Richard had left his mountain sanctuary; and on his return from his last descent into the valley and country below, he had decided that to complete his estate and solidify his soul, he needed a space of solitary refuge and prayer. A man of impeccable taste himself, he had called on other men of superior taste to accomplish the work, providing them with all the resources at his command. He wished for a place of simplicity and beauty, and on the fringe of his estate, in a grove of pine and acajou, such a place had been erected: not large, not ostentatious, open windows overlooking only the grandeur of nature, and at the altar, the brilliant triptych by Michel Dumartin depicting his Lord’s crucifixion and resurrection.
Now Andrés Richard knew that death was very, very near, and one piece escaped his grasp, the third painting of the triptych. To complete the triptych would be to complete his collection and his chapel, and this, Andrés Richard felt sure, was necessary to ensure the survival of his soul in the world to come.
* * *
“Have you made the Sénateur an offer for the piece?” Johel asked.
How easily he slipped into the role of counselor. This was how he felt most at ease in the world, contemplating the problems of others and applying his intelligence in the search for a solution. Johel took Andrés Richard’s problem seriously: it was obviously of great importance to Andrés Richard, and whatever is of great importance to a man like Andrés Richard is important.
“Of course I’ve made him an offer for the painting! I’ve offered him buckets of money for that piece!”
“And he won’t take it?”
“Young man, do you really think Maxim Bayard wants my money? If you do, then your reputation for cleverness is severely overvalued.”
“I suppose he wouldn’t.”
“I suppose not.”
Johel knew that the problem was the former president. Andrés Richard had been one of the organizers of the coup d’état that forced him out of office and into exile. On the day the former president left the country, the Sénateur, interviewed on Haitian national television, had wept convulsively. A documentary filmmaker from Oregon had put the moment in his film, Haiti: Tragedy of a Nation, set to a Haitian soprano singing funereal songs.
The terrible irony of the situation was that before the departure of the former president, the Sénateur had agreed to sell Andrés Richard the painting. Andrés Richard had never imagined that a matter of politics would interfere with business between reasonable men; had he known that the Sénateur would be so troubled, he would have held his hand until the painting was in his possession. This was one of the great miscalculations of his life.
But Monsieur Richard’s role in the ouster of the former president had made the Sénateur an implacable enemy. When Andrés Richard contacted the Sénateur again to complete the transaction, the Sénateur had said, “Monsieur Richard, I look upon that painting every morning to remind me that the path to salvation is straight. If keeping that painting in my possession preserves my soul and damns yours, then it is an object to me of inestimable worth.”
Thereafter, Andrés Richard, for all his wealth, power, and influence, had never succeeded in convincing the Sénateur to part with his painting.
In the subsequent years, Monsieur Richard told the judge, he had tried many schemes to convince the Sénateur to sell the painting. He had hired a man from France to pose as a collector, and he had attempted to convince the current president to seize the painting as part of the national patrimony. (This plan had foundered only when the Sénateur had threatened to burn the painting before he relinquished it, at which point Andrés Richard had ordered the president to desist.) He had used all his political influence to stall the Sénateur’s projects. The Sénateur remained indifferent.
Andrés Richard recounted all of this, then, despite the heat of the day, began to shiver.
“I don’t recommend dying, young man,” said Andrés Richard. “It is an unpleasant business.”
“I will try to keep that in mind,” Johel said.
“Are you at peace with your Savior?”
“We’re cordial.”
Andrés Richard began to laugh. His laughter drew the attention of his bird, who from his cage regarded the old man with alarm.
“That will not be sufficient, young man. That will not do! You see things clearer when the end is near. You see the necessity of things. I do not wish to confront my Maker with unresolved affairs here on this earth. You will see as you grow older that the walls of Hell are thick like mountains.”
The parrot began to squawk. Its perch began to swing. It flapped its broad wings, revealing a confusion of reds and blues.
“And how can I help you with your problems, Monsieur Richard?” Johel asked.
Monsieur Richard shook in his chair.
“Why, I thought it was obvious! I thought that was as clear as day!”
At the altitude at which the château was situated, the day was indeed immensely clear.
Andrés Richard lifted up his bony hand, which calmed itself as if by the force of the old man’s will into something like a staff or rod. He extended his forefinger until it pointed directly at Johel’s heart.
“I am going to make you the next sénateur of the Grand’Anse,” he said.
Then, exhausted by the gesture, the hand flopped down into Andrés Richard’s lap, and the old man closed his eyes.
2
They had been a threesome: Sénateur Maxim Bayard, Père Abraham Samedi, and Docteur Auguste Philistin. The Three Musketeers of the Lycée Saint Louis, the three survivors. Once a year they had met on the anniversary of the death of François Duvalier to drink a pair of toasts: the first was to their dead, tossed by the Macoutes into unmarked graves; and the second, to the Hell-Fiend who supervised the eternal torment of their enemy. Père Samedi’s defection meant that the table was set for two, just the Sénateur and his physician.
(Dr. Philistin himself later recounted to me the details of his last dinner with the Sénateur. Our appointment came about in the following manner. Some months after the election and the terrible events that followed, Dr. Philistin published in Le Nouvelliste a short appreciation of the Sénateur’s life, and included his email address, inviting others who had known the Sénateur to exchange reminiscences. He was gathering material for a biographical essay. We met at Dr. Philistin’s art-filled house in the hills above Port-au-Prince. He had only recently retired when I met him, but his firm handshake, his energetic manner, and his unlined face all suggested to me that had he wished to, he
might have continued his practice a good deal longer. On the coffee table was an edition of the Sénateur’s poems. The volume, I noticed for the first time, had been dedicated to “Auguste Philistin, Master of the Healing Arts and Friend of Liberty.”)
Dr. Philistin had accompanied Maxim throughout his political career. Both were men of the Left, firmly convinced that the only solution to Haiti’s poverty and backwardness was in an ideology of their deriving, which they called Caribbean Socialism, hashed out by them in a hundred letters when Maxim was in exile. The chief tenet of their philosophy was a conviction that the river of wealth, so long flowing from the Haitian peasantry to the Great Powers, needed to be rerouted in the opposite direction, avoiding the bloodsucking mulatto elites like Andrés Richard. When Maxim returned from exile, Dr. Philistin had encouraged him in his political ambitions and then had revealed himself over the years a shrewd, well-informed adviser. It was Dr. Philistin who had the unfortunate duty of informing the Sénateur that Andrés Richard had decided to invest his resources in Johel Célestin’s campaign.
Dr. Philistin told me that he had never seen the Sénateur so agitated as that night at the Boucan Grégoire. The Sénateur’s bladder was spasmodic when its owner was anxious, and the Sénateur excused himself to the toilet three times even before the main course arrived. Then he sharply reprimanded the waiter when he allowed a few drops of the wine to stain the tablecloth. A telephone rang too long at a neighboring table, and the Sénateur’s face curled into snarl. Only the doctor’s calm hand on the Sénateur’s forearm had prevented him from confronting the offending device’s owner.
“I am being devoured alive by gnats!” the Sénateur exclaimed.
The judge was not the Sénateur’s only opposition in the coming election. A dozen candidates had presented their credentials to the electoral authorities. There was Emile Villesaint of the old Villesaints—he ran in every election and was always opposed, as in this election, by his daughter Emmanuelle. Old Emile must have been pushing eighty and Emmanuelle fifty: they lived in Miami and flew back to Jérémie just for elections. There was a Protestant preacher named Erasmus Callisthenes, who, it was said, could preach the Gospel twenty-four hours straight. Thibault Antoine Erick of the well-known clan out of Dame Marie was in the race as part of a wager with his brother-in-law: three hectares of arable land said he could take ten thousand votes. A lady doctor from Jérémie whose intentions were said to be honorable registered herself at election headquarters surrounded by a hundred children dressed in white.
But the judge, Dr. Philistin reckoned, was certainly Maxim’s chief opposition. That was the significance of Père Samedi’s defection. That news had infuriated the Sénateur. The notion that years of friendship be tossed aside for—for what? Père Samedi had not so much as called the Sénateur to explain himself. It was not only the loss of the priest’s solid block of votes, it was the signal it sent to the Sénateur’s other allies that the old man was weak.
Dr. Philistin was too politic to remind the Sénateur that he had predicted the priest’s treachery. The priesthood, he had long insisted, was a reactionary force.
The doctor studied his friend’s face. It had never been a handsome face, but its blunt, large, ill-proportioned features had communicated that unbridled energy, that enthusiasm for this curious business of being alive that was the essence of Maxim Bayard. He could remember Maxim’s first campaign all those years ago. Mon Dieu, the man was tireless: up at dawn, out on foot, stopping at every hut and hamlet, shaking hands, kissing ladies—and with every footfall so gaining in strength and energy that Dr. Philistin had to actively dissuade him from campaigning through the night as well, for fear of disturbing his constituents. The Sénateur had been determined to meet each and every voter and present his vision of the socialist paradise the Grand’Anse could become. Two or three hours of sleep a night, often on the floor of some peasant’s hut, half a mango for breakfast, a boiled banana for lunch: that was all the Sénateur needed as he marched across the great Grand’Anse. He had won that election in a landslide.
This evening, though, there was no doubt: the Sénateur was tired. Dr. Philistin noticed him yawning. This was not Maxim. At one point during the meal he closed his eyes and held very still. His skin had the pallor of ash.
“Are you sleeping at night?” the doctor asked.
“A few hours.”
“When was the last time, my friend, that you saw the inside of a doctor’s office?”
“Are you proposing to bleed me, Doctor, or apply leeches?” asked the Sénateur.
No evidence could dissuade Maxim from his intimate belief that the leaf doctors in the hills were infinitely more capable healers than the doctor and his white-coated peers. There was a variety of yam that grew in the Grand’Anse, the so-called English yam, that was said to enhance the virility of men and give to all and sundry the energy of a young ram. It was in a daily boiled English yam as a cure-all that the Sénateur reposed his confidence.
Dr. Philistin wondered how the Sénateur and his English yams would navigate their way through two rounds of fierce campaigning should the Sénateur fail to win a majority in the first round; and given Andrés Richard’s support, along with the defection of Père Samedi, it was hard to imagine the Sénateur winning outright in the first electoral turn. Even as the judge’s financial position had solidified, the Sénateur’s had weakened: with the mayor of Les Irois in prison, the river of money that flowed from Colombia to the Cold Land had shifted course to the Département de Sud, where the Sénateur and the people of the Grand’Anse were not in a position to profit. Perhaps, Dr. Philistin reckoned, the Sénateur’s energy and money would tide him over for the first round. But a second round of campaigning would double his expenses.
By long-standing convention, the men did not discuss politics until they had arrived at the digestif. They traded recollections of their youth and discussed literature. Both men felt the absence of Père Samedi keenly. The Sénateur was drinking an aged sipping rum, thick like syrup, full on the palate, a belly warmer of a rum.
“It is an insult,” he finally said.
“Have you met this judge?”
“He speaks with an accent.”
“But he’s popular.”
“If I give a child nothing but bonbons and chocolate, I will be popular. But it will not produce a healthy child. We have yet to arrive, Doctor, at the stage of social evolution where our citizens are able to discern a true friend from a friendly face. I will never cease to be amazed at how devious, how cynical our enemies are.”
The Sénateur swirled the amber liquid in his glass.
“I tell you now, Doctor, I would welcome retirement. If a suitable man were to oppose me, I would gladly step aside. I have a little piece of land near Dame Marie, and I can see in my mind’s eye a cottage with a garden. I would grow bananas and paint, and in the afternoons I would nap. Do you know, my friend, the last time that I permitted myself the luxury of an afternoon nap?”
Dr. Philistin said, “You’re not obligated to fight this election.”
Maxim’s eyes narrowed to slits. His face colored.
Dr. Philistin could read the Sénateur’s thoughts. Other men of the sénat, even men of lesser stature, hardly bothered to campaign, so assured were they of their constituents’ devotion. The Sénateur was sure that he would be in this position also, had this foreigner, this blan, this intriguer not arrived.
There was something unseemly about the endless traipsing on the hustings. He had done so much already. Hadn’t he brought in the Cuban doctors? Was he not responsible for the solar streetlights in so many villages, which allowed the village children to study at night? The fishing boats at Dame Marie were his creation, the dispensary in Beaumont, the corn mill in Carrefour Charles. To how many of his citoyens had he offered his personal assistance? The line of peasants outside his door was proof that he lived his creed: a man of the Grand’Anse had only to give his hand in friendship to the Sénateur to receive an embrace.
Dr. Philistin knew that the Sénateur believed himself to be more than a mere politician: he was the creator of a social system. He had found a way to transform the isolation of the Grand’Anse to wealth: men and women merely had to ask him for assistance, and money that would have otherwise lingered in the Cold Land was theirs.
Dr. Philistin stared at Maxim’s face as it hardened into resolution. He had not understood his friend’s mood. What had seemed indecisiveness was merely a moment of reflection. What had seemed exhaustion was a husbanding of strength. What had seemed defeat was a prelude to victory.
There comes a time in a statesman’s career, the Sénateur told the doctor, after so many trials and such great successes, when it was appropriate, dignified even, that he stand before his public and, like a father to his wayward children, declare, “Take me as I am: you’ll find none better. No man will ever love you more. We are as one, my children—joined in heart and soul. I am your voice and you my lungs. I merit your fidelity and you merit my leadership. Together we shall endeavor onward!” That was all the campaign a great man required.
The Sénateur’s glass was empty. He gestured to the waiter to bring him another. The Sénateur seemed restored to vigor. He sat tall in his seat, his face flushed with color. Then he explained his plan to Dr. Philistin.
Perhaps, Dr. Philistin thought, there was something to the English yam after all.
* * *
Dr. Philistin told me that he and the Sénateur stayed up late that night planning the campaign to come: what towns and villages were vulnerable, who remained solidly in the Sénateur’s camp. Where the traitors were likely to be hiding. Who was faithful, and who was weak. How much support could they count on from the president. What would be the role of the scoundrels in the United Nations Mission? Money: Could they count on the usual arrangements? Were additional funds necessary?
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