“Maybe I’ve got something for you.”
I went upstairs and found an old bottle of Ambien. “Take two of these and a big shot of rum. If that doesn’t work, double the recipe. You’ll feel better in the morning.”
“You think?”
“It couldn’t seem any worse.”
After Johel went home, I followed my own prescription. I dreamed that I had been assigned by the Red Cross to teach the second grade. No matter what I did, no matter how I shouted, I could not get the kids’ attention, and they wandered one by one out of the room until just two remained, a boy and a girl. They were monstrous little creatures. In the morning, my wife told me that I had writhed and moaned in my sleep.
3
In the context of Haitian politics, handing out small cash payments to potential voters was not considered a disreputable practice. Although giving a few dollars to a potential voter in no way guaranteed his loyalty, failure to do so was perceived as an insult. Things might have been better for both the Sénateur and the judge had they mutually agreed to quit the practice, but the Sénateur, having distributed cash in each of his previous elections, did not feel that he could now stop. Voters, relying on the privacy of a secret ballot, accepted cash from both candidates, and voted their conscience.
But voters also sold their votes to a particular candidate. The challenge for the voter and the candidate was to find some way to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the candidate that the promised vote had, in fact, been delivered. Many schemes were devised to defeat the secrecy of the ballot box.
In past elections in Carrefour Charles, for example, the poll workers would examine the ballot, and if a voter’s X had been placed in the Sénateur’s box, they would paint his pinkie, not his forefinger, with indelible ink. The voter could then present himself later at the house of the local juge de paix, who represented the Sénateur in Carrefour Charles. In Beaumont, voters simply showed up at the voting center on election day, signed the electoral register, and walked away. The electoral officials would then complete the ballot and deposit it in the appropriate ballot box.
Somewhat more complicated was the scheme in Les Irois, where Mayor Fanfan in elections past had “rented” willing voters’ voter identification cards, which he would then distribute to his followers. Again, complicit election officials were required who would overlook the miracle that restored Monsieur François Simonard, age seventy-six, to the bloom of youth. The advantage of this scheme was that voters, who might be frightened to venture out on election day, could stay home.
All of these schemes required the cooperation of the local electoral officials.* The Haitian system of elections gave these officials tremendous power: in addition to administering the vote, they were responsible for counting the vote. At the end of election day, the urns were opened on the spot and the votes tallied in the presence of the public, neutral electoral observers, and partisan observers from the camp of each candidate.
Local electoral officials had lots of opportunities, then, to sway an election one way or another. The most prevalent practice was ballot stuffing—officials simply filling out ballots and shoving them into the ballot box, then counting them at the end of the day. You’d be surprised how many ballot boxes turned out 400–0 for one candidate or another; and even if all the votes didn’t end up for one candidate or another, it was easy for the officials to slip in a few extra votes for their patron in the course of election day. That could be enough, distributed across an entire commune or department, to sway the election.
Counting the votes also gave the local election officials the opportunity to fudge the numbers. In Jérémie, for example, I heard this story: The Sénateur had won a particular ballot box in the last election by a ratio of 137 votes to 100. But the president of the Voting Bureau, having verbally announced the correct total to the assembled crowd, hand-corrected the tally sheet to read 337 votes to 100, which nobody noticed until soldiers from the Mission had taken away both ballot box and tally sheets.
If Johel led the public campaign on his own behalf, Nadia led his private campaign to hand out cash to voters, buy votes, and influence local election officials. At first he had been reluctant to involve her in this aspect of his affairs, but he quickly came to rely on her political sense and judgment: she knew the back roads of Haiti better than anyone on his staff. Precisely because she was from the village, she was the only person the judge’s counterparts trusted to show up at their homes and offices to discuss these very sensitive matters.
Soon Johel was sending Nadia around the Grand’Anse with a car and driver. More suspicious than her husband, she had a fine instinct for who could be counted on and who was trying to swindle the judge and his campaign. More than once, Nadia told Johel that someone’s claim to control a bloc of a thousand votes was only so much bluff and bravado. If, on the other hand, Nadia told Johel that someone had made a fair offer and was serious, he trusted her instincts, and quickly the deal was done.
* * *
The only person who didn’t approve of the judge’s private campaign was Terry. He overheard the judge negotiating some arrangement on the phone, and his beefy face went dark red.
“You’re crossing the line,” Terry said.
The judge looked up from his laptop, confused.
“A man’s got to have a line,” Terry continued. “And that’s my line, right there. Those poor assholes don’t have anything, not even enough to eat, not enough to pay for their kids’ school, living on mangoes—what he’s got is a vote and a pulse, and I’m not touching either one.”
The judge rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“What good is it to have some line if the other guy just walks all over it?” he said.
“You still have the line. The line is the line. That doesn’t go away.”
“And what happens if on election day we lose because the Sénateur crossed the line and we didn’t do anything? We just sit and stare at our line and tell ourselves what a great line it is?”
“They don’t break all the mirrors the night they announce the results. You still got to wake up and see yourself.”
The judge rubbed his stubbly face.
“I’ve never been one for looking in the mirror myself,” he said. “There are no lines. You’re old enough to hear the truth, son. You got some other guy out there crossing the line, and if you don’t do the same thing, you might as well stay home.”
Terry couldn’t find the flaw in the argument. But he wasn’t convinced either.
“Most men don’t know where right and wrong are, but you and I—we know,” the judge said. “Don’t tell me we don’t know, because we do. That’s what it means to have power. That’s what this is all about. You get to be the one who decides.”
* * *
That evening, Terry went for a swim after dark. There was enough of a moon to keep an eye on the shore, and Terry thought that if he didn’t move, the humidity, mosquitoes, and small-town claustrophobia might eat him alive. He was grateful for the water, just cool enough to bite, and for the waves, bigger that evening than normal, high enough that he could wrestle with them. The waves came in rhythm: two or three small ones, easy to ride out, then a big one, surprising him in the darkness, picking him up and sending him crashing shoreward.
That afternoon, he had decided to tell Johel that he was headed home, that this wasn’t the way he wanted to play the game. But the words wouldn’t come, because he knew that if he left, he wouldn’t see Nadia again. It was that simple. When Johel had told him that Nadia had used love powder long ago to ensnare him, Terry had laughed. “More like poontang powder,” he said. Now he wondered whether there wasn’t something to the story.
Terry rode the waves for an hour or so, letting himself float and splashing. When he finally got to shore, he discovered that someone had stolen his pants, shoes, and shirt. The keys to his vehicle had been in his pants. His phone and wallet were locked in the car. Terry stood there cursing. He was facing a long walk back to the base, barefoot, in his
dripping swimsuit, and he was aware for the moment of the ridiculous figure he would cut on the road.
Terry smashed the window of the car with a rock. He knew he would catch hell the next day from Balu, the chef de transport, but he figured he could bluff it out. Then he called Johel, who was out there to get him in twenty minutes. When Johel saw Terry standing there in his wet swimsuit, he started to laugh, and Terry laughed too. All the acrimony of their fight dissipated in the warm night air.
* * *
Sometimes on those long drives Nadia would drift off to sleep in the jouncing car and Toussaint would come to visit her. That’s how she knew that Toussaint had been in love with her. He never spoke to her in her dreams, but simply watched her, his hollowed-out stare miserable with adolescent lust and desire. She didn’t think that he had ever touched a woman. Sometimes he’d come to her naked, and she’d marvel at the erection protruding from the undernourished, hairless body; and she would feel a tender pity for his suffering. She took him in her hands and caressed him, or she let him rub his thin, long fingers over her body. He’d just arrive at the very precipice of his desire when the shaking of the car would wake her up.
The dead are nothing if not persistent, and she’d drift back off to sleep and he’d come back into her dream, the big car bouncing and rutting across the rocky back roads, her head balanced on the strap of the seat belt.
The dreams came to her so often that she visited the woman in Sainte-Hélène who knew how to interpret such things. This lady listened to Nadia seriously and advised her that the dreams would continue until she pleased Toussaint. But the dead would only lie with a woman who was pure.
There was a little spring that Nadia knew in the mountains, a place called Source Bleu, where the water ran clean. It was a holy place, a place for the spirits. Nadia knew that women who could not get pregnant sometimes came to this pool in the hopes of finding a child. On the way back from visiting the juge de paix of Roseaux, Nadia instructed her driver to stop by the side of the road, and she hiked inland to the source, where she bathed herself in the cold waters, murmuring the prayers she had learned as a girl.
That night, she dreamed that she was in the village, following a funeral cortege to the cemetery. The ladies were in white and the men in suits, and everyone was singing, walking through the green-leafed, red-dirt mountain behind the painted white coffin. Such a pretty coffin, she was thinking, a lady’s coffin. She was asking everyone where they were taking the body, but no one would talk to her; she didn’t know any of these folks, and nobody wants to talk to a stranger on the day you bury someone. She fell into step beside Toussaint.
She didn’t expect him to talk to her either, but he said, “That’s a lady who died too young.”
“What happened to her, Toussaint?” she said.
“Her man found her in the wrong arms and took her head from her shoulders.”
“Some men are like that.”
“All men are like that,” he said.
She and Toussaint followed the funeral cortege for a long spell, marching side by side with the villagers. Then she found herself alone with Toussaint. She was so happy not to be dead that she allowed him to make love to her. But dreams being what they are, she knew as soon as he touched her that this was not Toussaint, but the man with the mustache, the first man who ever touched her. Every man who had ever touched her was inside her, none of them good, liars and cheats and deceivers all of them. She struggled with Toussaint and he held her down, strong and firm, like they all did, taking her wrists in his thick hands, pushing against her until she opened up with a cry of pain, panting on her with his thick smell of old sweat and sour breath, death and Lightning. Nadia never dreamed about Toussaint again.
4
The ballots had been impregnated with swine flu—that was the rumor that hit four days before the election. We first started hearing the story in Jérémie, then reports came to us from all the coastal towns, until even in the most remote mountain villages, voters had heard that the ballot itself was poison.
“Goatfucker,” the judge said when his campaign workers started talking about the rumor. “This is the Sénateur. This is just like him.”
The swine flu story infected all of the Grand’Anse in about a day. Nobody knew what the symptoms of swine flu were, how to identify a sufferer of swine flu, or whether it could be treated. Although the rumor was specifically associated with the ballots, people began to visit the hospital and clinic, where doctors were unable to reassure them that they were healthy. A fight broke out at the bank when somebody sneezed. A hysterical mother came up to me in tears, holding a healthy-looking baby, insisting that the baby had been looked upon by a woman known to have contracted the disease.
That final week of the campaign, the judge pushed himself and everyone around him to the edge of nervous collapse. But he wouldn’t stop. He could feel the wind at his back.
Just a few days before election day the judge made a four-day swing down the coast, hitting Dame Marie and Anse-d’Hainault, even visiting Les Irois, where the residents did not forget that the judge had put Mayor Fanfan in prison. Still, they turned out to hear the judge talk, eat his pigs, dance to his music, and drink his beer. Then he’d held a rally all the way inland at Source Chaude, going deep into the mountains, a stretch in the middle on donkeys and horses.
And he was making progress.
On his way back to Jérémie, word spread that the judge was coming over the mountains. At first it was just the curious, but soon there were hundreds and then thousands, standing on the side of the road. So the judge told Terry he was going to walk, and there he was, walking back home through the mountains—rara music sounding and someone beating a drum—carrying a little kid on his big shoulders, telling the people the story of the road they were going to build themselves.
When citizens heard the judge was coming, they would take the furniture from their huts and assemble couches, beds, chairs, and tables by the side of the road. This was their way of saying, Judge, my house is your house. Then they would dress themselves in their best clothes, the ones they reserved for church services and baptisms and funerals, and sit themselves down on their ratty old furniture, just waiting for his convoy to pass. It was a bad day for the goats, chickens, and pigs when the judge came to town, because it seemed that every family in the Grand’Anse had prepared a meal for him, stewing up something, on the grounds that he might just be hungry from his drive. Johel insisted on taking a bite or two from every pot. Long after Terry couldn’t stand the smell of another boiled chicken, the judge would still be moving from house to house and table to table, accepting a small plate or drinking another glass of rum, tucking some scrawny old lady under his big shoulder, and declaring that this was surely the finest goat meat he’d ever tasted.
For the last week of the campaign, at every rally, the judge changed his peroration. He’d had some of the guys at campaign HQ stitch him up something that looked like a ballot, and he’d wave it in the air.
“Swine flu is our ignorance!” he said. “Swine flu is our poverty! We’re broker than pigs in this country; the pigs ought to be worrying about catching our disease!”
He waved the ballot.
“There’s just one remedy for our disease! You don’t get better from our disease at the hospital!”
“Non, monsieur, non!” shouted someone.
“Don’t get better at no doctor’s office!”
“Uh-huh!”
“Don’t ask the leaf doctor brew you up some tea, make you feel all right!”
“C’est vrai!”
“This here is the medicine you want to cure our disease,” he said, waving the ballot. “I hear people say that this ballot is poison. But this ballot here is our medicine! This ballot here is poison only if you want to keep folks ignorant! This is poison only if you want to keep folks poor! This ballot here is poison only if you want to keep our people down, down lower than dogs and pigs! This ballot here is poison for Maxim Bayard and medi
cine for the rest of us! Look here—”
The judge ripped off a corner of that ballot and shoved it into his mouth.
“Mmmm-hmmmm good!” he said. “That ballot tastes good! Li bon, oui! That ballot tastes freedom! That ballot tastes progress! That ballot tastes hope! Gimme more of that ballot, I could eat it twice!”
In the course of that campaign the judge must have eaten a couple of dozen ballots, and you’d have thought nothing ever tasted better each time he wadded one down his throat.
* * *
I awoke to find the Sénateur, dressed in white linen, sitting on the terrace of his mother’s house. It was like finding a bear rummaging through your campsite.
“Sénateur, this is a surprise,” I said.
In the years my wife and I had lived in his house, he had never before visited us, although his own cement bungalow was no more than minutes away. From time to time I saw his caravan of black SUVs drive by on the back road that connected his house to the rue Bayard: that’s how I knew he was in town. Lately they had been rumbling out at dawn to campaign in the far corners of the département and coming back well after midnight.
“I have been having a lovely conversation with your cat,” the Sénateur said. “She has been telling me extraordinary things. For example, she has told me that you are good friends with Johel Célestin.”
The treacherous cat was curled up in the wicker chair adjacent to the Sénateur’s, staring attentively at his ugly face.
“Would you like coffee?” I asked.
“With plenty of sugar.”
I went into the house to make coffee, and when I came back with two cups, the cat had crawled onto the Sénateur’s lap and was allowing her head to be stroked gently.
“You never told me how you liked my poetry,” he said. “I awoke in the night concerned that I might be lodging a critic. I was awake very early and determined to know your true opinion.”
“They were beautiful poems,” I said.
It was true: they were beautiful poems, elegiac and wistful. The Sénateur wrote in a charming but difficult admixture of French and Creole that took me hours to puzzle out. “La fesse de ma fille”—that’s how he titled a sonnet praising his lover’s derriere. A longish history of the town of Jérémie in couplets. There was a successful plea from a fish on a line; the fish liberated from the hook proved to be a god and rewarded the fisherman with a castle. “The Baron’s Lament,” in the voice of Baron Samedi, lord of the underworld.
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