He’s on the phone, and by early afternoon there are two thousand men and women ready to march. This is the last of their money, on the street. There are drums and a pickup truck packed with loudspeakers. And walking slowly, at the head of the march, is the judge, microphone in hand.
It doesn’t matter what Johel says, because no one can hear him over the roar of the crowd.
The press is there, both the Haitian press and the international press: at the start of the riots, there were a handful of foreign reporters; now there are more than a dozen, mainly photographers, some print, couple of camera crews. It’s nice to shoot Haiti in a crisis—just four hours from New York, two from Miami. Especially in cold weather up north it’s a good gig: you can shoot civil unrest in the day and drink rum sours at night poolside at the Hotel Oloffson. Rumor has it that the correspondent for CNN has a Haitian lover—he’s been down since day two of the crisis, doing stand-ups in front of the Presidential Palace, wearing a bulletproof vest and helmet.
Nobody wants a peaceful protest. The journalists can’t sell pictures of a peaceful protest, and if the journalists can’t sell pictures, what is the point of protesting? The Nigerian riot police backed by Brazilian soldiers don’t want peace: If there is peace, what are they there for? The kids in the crowd have been paid to throw rocks. The PNH have been paid to fire back tear gas.
The procession turns onto the rue des Miracles, and the PNH fire a barrage of tear gas, the projectiles rising and falling the distance of a city block in long, parabolic arcs, beautiful and deadly, then releasing on contact with the ground thick clouds of silver-gray poison.
Tear gas is an insidious weapon because it preys on two of the body’s most powerful defensive instincts. The first is to hyperventilate when panicked, and the second is to move quickly away from danger. Moving quickly causes one to breathe still more deeply, and in this way inhale still more of the gas. Lungs register the gas most immediately and provoke the first sensation of panic, but it is the exposed skin of the face and hands that causes the most intense pain, like dipping your face into boiling water, every bit as terrifying as the initial realization that the air you are breathing has been poisoned.
The photographers dart forward into the gas, many of them prepared for just this eventuality with gas masks of their own.
Johel felt the tear gas and began to die. The world tilted and swirled. The pain took him to a place beyond thought: he felt his skin slough off his bones, his heart explode, his lungs shred into a thousand jagged edges. Pain traveled from his eyes to his brain on nerves he had never before known existed. He could not move, he could not breathe. His great bulk settled on his knees.
Then the world went black.
Those watching Johel saw him collapse, then rise again. But Johel was gone. The riot police of the PNH firing tear gas projectiles and the protesters alike knew that Ogoun the warrior was in their midst. Ogoun rose to his feet, now taller than Johel had ever stood. He surveyed the scene with the cool of a veteran to whom battle is the natural condition of man. Ogoun felt the pain but felt no pain, knowing that to a soldier pain is only a distraction. At his feet a projectile canister leaked its deadly gas. Ogoun picked up the hot metal tube and considered it, then tossed it imperiously aside. “Grains mwem fret!” he cried. My balls are cold! This was his way of announcing that the battle had been well and truly joined.
And because courage is infectious, it takes only one such person to render an entire crowd, which would otherwise have been thoroughly dominated by tear gas, immune to the effects of the drug. Seeing Ogoun move in slow time away from the riot police, the crowd marched again.
Johel would later remember none of this.
7
Senator Charles Oxblood, Democrat of Florida, chairman of the Senate Appropriations Committee Subcommittee on Foreign Aid, keeps a papier-mâché lion’s head on the wall of his office. He acquired it on his honeymoon in Haiti, thirty years back. Those two weeks made Haiti an area of sentimental interest to him—but no senator from Florida could afford to ignore Haiti, any more than a senator from Florida could ignore Cuba. What did they say in the cloakroom? “Our esteemed friend from the Caribbean.” Let them laugh. He is the most powerful man in Haiti, although, of course, he is not in Haiti.
The senator likes to say, when it comes to Haiti, that he’s done what he can. At town hall meetings with constituents, questions about Haiti come up (and they do come up, this being Florida) and the senator ticks off his accomplishments on his fingers. The USAID budget comes out of his committee, and he makes sure that Haiti has not been overlooked. The senator was instrumental in passing favorable trade tariffs for Haiti. The United States pays a hefty chunk of the cost of the Mission, and there are members who’d see that budget whacked, but few are eager to wrangle with Senator Oxblood over the matter. State is forever trying to slip out of the Oxblood rule, the complicated series of vetting regulations that the senator has enshrined in American law to ensure that taxpayer dollars don’t fund drug traffickers or human rights abusers, but the senator does his best to rein State in. His committee holds regular hearings on Haitian affairs, and when he can, he schedules a fact-finding trip down there.
Still, when Senator Oxblood considers the work his subcommittee has done on Haiti over the years, if the conversation is private and his mood is mellow, he’ll tell you that it doesn’t seem to have done much good. He wonders if they’ve been on the right track at all. Haiti has broken the senator’s heart a dozen times over the years. Every year that country seems to get poorer, every year it seems like there’s some kind of damn riot in the streets—who can keep track of it all anymore? The senator sometimes felt that when it came to that country, twenty years of hard work had just been turning around in a circle.
Destiny comes for the judge and Senator Oxblood on the front page of the print edition of The New York Times. Senator Oxblood still reads the Times in print, being a man of a certain age. Nobody had planned for this, could have planned this. Destiny is on assignment in Haiti, shooting a story on deforestation for National Geographic, trapped in the Hotel Oloffson by the riots. Destiny is bored and gets a day rate from the Times to shoot the disorder. Destiny’s photo is one of those miracles of composition and storytelling, a photo so compelling that the editors at the Times agree there is no place for it but above the fold, A-1. Destiny is a photograph of a little boy carrying an honest-to-god white dove, the boy cowering in fear as three policemen with gas masks come at him with batons. Over the boy’s shoulder is the huge banner the protesters have hung on the looted building: DEMOCRACY IN HAITI NOW.
Senator Oxblood sees Destiny’s photograph as he drinks his morning coffee with Madame Oxblood. There is a power in a perfect photograph like nothing else. The flower of anger blossoms in the senator’s soul. Manipulated elections. Corruption. Sometimes the senator wonders what the hell the point of it is if he can’t do some good now and again. The damn country can’t catch a break. Ivy League–educated reformer illegally eliminated by a drug-trafficking socialist—and guess what side of the fence the pussies at State were on. Nothing enrages Senator Oxblood quite like the pussies at State. Secretary of Pussy. Undersecretary of Pussy. Department of Pussy. Same as it ever was.
* * *
Had life meted out its rewards in proportion to talent, Etienne Brutus would not have been the directeur générale of the CEH, responsible for the integrity of Haitian democracy, a burden that would have crippled a far more competent man. Strangers would not have approached him on the street and begun to bah.
No, had life slotted Etienne Brutus into the role he was meant to play in the vast drama of Haitian life, he would have been sous-chef in a hotel kitchen: not creative enough to set the menu nor charismatic enough to lead, but competent with a knife, a man who followed orders gladly and was willing to work hard. In addition, he was passionate about sauces. His ability to produce a decent meal was one of precisely three things in which he took pride; the others were his loyalty to hi
s patron, the president of Haiti, and the umbrella of loving protection he offered his three sons.
Etienne Brutus’s career had been facilitated by his late wife’s cousin, now the president of Haiti. On her premature deathbed, Madame Brutus had exacted a vow from her husband—that he would not touch another drop of liquor until the last of their boys had completed his education—and she exacted a reciprocal vow from her cousin, that he would facilitate the boys’ rise in society. Neither man dared violate a promise to the dead. And so it was that this mild, colorless, sober figure rose under the president’s tutelage through diverse bureaucratic ranks, displaying himself always the most loyal of servants. He had been the president’s man in the Ministry of Finance, in the Ministry of Ports, and in the Ministry of Agriculture. Now he was head of the CEH, the other members selected by him with the same attention to obedience that he offered the president. He had accepted the Sénateur’s bribe only after confirming that his action in no way displeased his patron. The president liked Sénateur Bayard and so permitted the transaction to proceed—although if the president or DG Brutus had been asked to identify the judge in a photo array or to explain in what way the judge offended electoral law, both men would have been at a loss.
The object of the DG’s labors, and the proximate cause of his corruption, was the education of his three sons. Enrico, the eldest, was now in his second year of medical school at Stanford, while Luciano, the middle boy, slender and intellectual, had been accepted at Swarthmore. The youngest boy, fourteen-year-old Placido, showed promise as an oboist and attended a Florida music academy. Etienne Brutus thought about school fees and tuition very nearly every waking moment. The DG began each day by telephoning all three boys in succession and then in the evening called them again.
All three boys were in the United States on student visas.
* * *
At 11:14 the judge receives a call from Senator Oxblood. He retires to the bedroom, closes the door behind him.
At 11:36 Johel walks back into the room.
He looks at Terry, sitting in the chair by the window; at Nadia, sitting on the couch.
“Well?” Terry says.
The judge doesn’t say anything. His face is cadaverous, sober. He walks into the bathroom. Terry can hear water running. Terry looks at Nadia: she is staring at a point on the wall. Terry doesn’t see where this is going to go now. There is no higher court of appeal than Oxblood—the ultimate arbiter. The judge is out. Terry starts to wonder what’s going to happen to him and Nadia now, him and Kay now. His Mission is over.
Nadia is thinking of a place in the mountains where she likes to go, a little spring and brook. There the ladies from the village wash clothes and tell stories about the men they’ve loved. She’s thinking of the golden watch glinting in the streambed, of bathing the baby in the cold, sparkling waters. Now there’s no place else to go.
The judge comes back into the room. His face is gleaming with water.
“You want to know the strangest thing?” he says. “It turns out that Charles Oxblood’s kid was once the Florida state spelling champion. He competed for the national title and lost. That’s what we talked about for twenty minutes—what a thrill that was.”
“That’s all?” said Terry.
“You can’t imagine what that is for a young kid, that kind of attention.”
“A lot of pressure, too,” said Terry.
“All those lights, all those people—you’d forget how to spell your own name.”
“Especially if you spell it all weird, the way you do.”
Johel puts on his tie. He’s a Windsor man. Only when the knot is centered on his shirt does he turn back to Terry and Nadia.
He says, “He’s making a statement at noon. It’s already prepared.”
“C’est vrai?” says Nadia.
“And he’s going to write a letter to State.”
“How did you do that?”
The judge smiles, all teeth.
* * *
At twelve o’clock, as promised, the office of Senator Oxblood released the text of his letter to the secretary of state:
The Honorable Secretary of State
Department of State
Washington, DC 20520
Dear Madam Secretary:
When I was in Haiti recently, I heard many people remark that the Haitian people deserve a government that cares more about the people than about itself. I could not agree more. As if Haiti did not have enough problems, now, once again, those in power there are trying to subvert the will of the people.
The Haitian Electoral Council’s unexplained exclusion of fifteen legitimate candidates from parliamentary races is alarming. Haiti’s future depends on a Parliament that is recognized as legitimate. Given the support the United States has provided to the government and people of Haiti in this election and the failure to promptly remedy this apparent fraud, I am writing to urge the department to take appropriate steps to convey our concern. By suspending direct aid to the central government and visas for top officials and their immediate family members, the United States would be sending that message. It is critical that the outcome of the electoral process is recognized as free and fair by the international community and, most important, by the Haitian people.
The United States must come down squarely in support of the Haitian people’s right to choose their leaders freely and fairly.
Thank you for your consideration.
Sincerely,
Charles Oxblood
Chairman
State and Foreign Operations Subcommittee
* * *
The SRSG was in his office that afternoon when the ambassador called. He was not displeased to hear from her. He enjoyed the sound of her voice; had she been a younger woman, he might have courted her.
“Anne, what a pleasant surprise,” he said.
The ambassador had a womanly laugh, and she knew the effect it had on men. It was her secret weapon. It was somewhere between a giggle and a moan: it suggested a hidden reservoir of pleasure.
“Dag, you’ve seen the way things are going,” she said.
“To my surprise—and at my age, I very rarely say that.”
“Chuck Oxblood has taken an interest, it seems.”
“I wish he hadn’t.”
“I’ll grant you that it’s unfortunate, Dag, but that’s the world we live in.”
She told the SRSG that she has had her staff prepare a list of visas for suspension. The secretary of state needed something to show Senator Oxblood as soon as possible.
“It’s budget time in Washington. We’re not going to cross the chairman on this one. If it matters to him—”
She let the sentence dangle.
“And what can I do for you, Anne?”
But he knew the answer to his own question. The embassy wanted him to talk to DG Brutus. They wanted his fingerprints on the knife protruding from DG Brutus’s back. And what choice did the SRSG have, really? You can’t cross State and aspire one day to be deputy secretary-general of the United Nations. That simply isn’t realistic.
* * *
The SRSG called around sunset with an offer: DG Brutus had agreed to “review” the exclusions if Johel would get his guys out of CEH headquarters. The embassy would hold off on suspending his sons’ student visas.
It was Nadia who insisted that they go out dancing, Johel and Terry both being steak-and-a-bottle-of-wine kind of guys. But she winked and pouted at both of them until they relented. They ended up at one of the big dance halls in Pétionville. Nadia danced first with Terry and then with Johel as the threesome drank their way steadily through a bottle of Barbancourt. Everyone in the club recognized Johel. His appearances on television had made him famous, and all night long, strangers came up to him and offered him a drink or clapped him on the shoulder or asked if he’d found his “lost goat.”
While Johel circulated through the crowd, Nadia danced with Terry. She felt as light in his arms as a sparrow, but a childhood
spent hauling water had given her shoulders and back a surprising hardness. He stood half a head taller, and he could brush her hair, arranged in cornrows, with his chin. He could feel her small breasts press against him, and her dress seemed to his hands as if it were made of gossamer: he took pleasure in the warmth of her body through the fabric. He had never wanted a woman more. He said, “I love you.” He had never said this to her before, but as soon as the words escaped his lips, he knew it was the truth. He wasn’t sure if Nadia heard him over the loud music, but she seemed to press her fragile body closer to his, as if in response. He thought that after the election, anything was possible.
Inspired by the moment, he kissed her. She reared back, beestung. “He’s not looking,” Terry said, and he tried to kiss her again. She writhed in his arms, and Terry realized that she was serious, that she would not kiss him. The mood was broken. Terry could see in Nadia’s green eyes reproach and contempt. His high emotions were like a bubble, as quick to explode as to expand. All the drama and the tension of the long week settled on his shoulders. He wanted to sleep.
But the judge didn’t want to leave the club. Soon Terry and Nadia were seated at a table with the judge and a half dozen other men, beefy men with bad skin, gold chains, and expensive wristwatches. Terry knew some of these men by name. They were members of the Port-au-Prince political world: a couple of deputies from up north, and a man who worked in the prime minister’s office. Terry’s Creole wasn’t good enough to understand the conversation, which came to him as isolated words floating through the loud music. Terry understood that in these men’s eyes, he was the judge’s pet blan. He wondered whether it had been worth all the struggle: maybe Johel was just another Haitian politician. Terry watched couples dancing, their laughing faces like masks. Loneliness assaulted him with a violence that was almost physical. His life, he thought, had amounted to nothing: he had built nothing, made nothing, begat no one. He wondered, should he disappear tomorrow from the planet, whether anyone would truly mourn him.
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