Peacekeeping

by Mischa Berlinski

  “I am so relieved that you enjoyed them,” he said.

  We sat without talking for a minute or two. There was a woodpecker hammering away, and although it was well past dawn, when the wind shifted, the last drumming from a bal vodou down in Basse-Ville came in on the breeze and filled the terrace with its melancholy, frantic song.

  “There was nothing we cared for as youth but poetry,” the Sénateur said. “We sat on this terrace. There was a group of five or six of us. We called ourselves the Héliotropes—we were a generation of innocents! I remember Georges Clérié, with his yellow bow tie; and Fernand Martineau, who sang; and Roger Boncy, who had such a beautiful sister—what was her name? Marcelle, and her friend Paulette Martineau … You have no idea, young man, what time has done to us. But we were once as optimistic as you and your—your friend. I know of your long interest in our Jérémie poets, our history. That’s why I thought this morning that I would come and talk to you.”

  “I appreciate the visit,” I said.

  “I will be the last of the Bayards to sit on this terrace and discuss the miracle of literature. My grandfather built this house—and I am not a young man! I heard it said from my mother that he was the tallest man in the Caribbean, and for that reason he insisted on these high arched doors. He would not stoop entering his own home! It is a family trait.”

  He stared past me at the winter flamboyant just coming into bloom, a crimson cloud.

  “I was in exile for twenty years,” he said. “For twenty years I didn’t see this house. I would wander through it in my dreams. When I came back, it was much smaller than I recalled it.”

  He leaned forward and put his hand on my forearm.

  “You think I will lose, don’t you?”

  There was no such thing, of course, as public opinion polling in the Grand’Anse, and it was impossible to know for sure who was likely to win the election. But I had the sense—the Sénateur must have shared it also—that the electoral winds were blowing in the judge’s favor. People seemed to smile when the judge’s name was spoken and frown when the name Maxim Bayard was uttered. Both men had been campaigning vigorously, crisscrossing the département from morning till night, holding two or even three rallies in the course of a day. But the judge’s rallies were better attended.

  The Sénateur didn’t wait for my answer. He said, “Tell your friend I wish to speak with him. Informally. A friendly chat. He need not be frightened. This is a private conversation. I have never had the pleasure of shaking his hand.”

  * * *

  When the Sénateur and the judge finally met, not that evening but the next, I was reminded of large animals sniffing each other. They were almost shy, as if, having imagined and supposed the worst about each other for so long, they could not quite wrap their heads around their adversary’s corporeal reality.

  I said, “I’ll let you gentlemen talk.”

  But the Sénateur said, “We have no secrets—not even from our northern friends.”

  “Stay, brother,” the judge said.

  So I sat back down. The cat strolled out on the terrace and surprised me by once again hopping into the Sénateur’s lap. She was ordinarily a timid creature. The Sénateur took her lightly veined ears between his thick fingers and massaged them.

  “She likes you,” the judge said as the cat began to purr.

  “If only she could vote!”

  The Sénateur roared with laughter at his own joke, and the cat, frightened, jumped off his lap. Inside the house, I heard my telephone ringing. I went inside to answer it, and when I came back five minutes later, the two men were discussing the election with surprisingly good-natured civility. They were gossiping about the various personages of the Grand’Anse and the places they had visited in the course of the campaign. They had declared a truce for the evening.

  “And his grandfather was Noé Fourcand,” said the Sénateur. “You, Monsieur, remind me quite a bit of Avocat Fourcand.”

  The judge smiled indulgently. He expected to win the election now and was happy to be deferential.

  The Sénateur took a sip from his rum. He had been no older than ten when Noé Fourcand had made his reputation—“And you, Monsieur, will find this story of particular interest. Noé Fourcand was a great orator, like you, Monsieur, and a magnificent conscience of our city—and like you, Monsieur, a substantial man, broad and strong. You might be his twin.”

  The Sénateur closed his eyes as he recalled the long-ago afternoon when Père Fouquet, bishop of Jérémie, found Josué Jean, town beggar and thief, rifling through the collection plate:

  “We followed Josué Jean through the streets of Jérémie, tossing stones at this man who dared violate the sanctity of the holy space. As you and your supporters would stone me! We took him before the juge de paix, and I recall even now the smell of sweat and fear as the commissaire de gouvernement rose up to condemn poor Josué Jean, who stole from our church two gourdes! Thank goodness for the alert and dedicated priest who noticed this impious villainy in action! The commissaire demanded a sentence on Josué Jean’s head of six months’ seclusion, as a gesture of respect that one owes our saints and holy places.

  “Josué Jean, simpleminded in his rags, regarded his accusers in stupefaction, his dark face lightened with dust from the street. Would no one dare rise to say a word on his behalf, offer up for him a defense, advocate his cause?

  “And it was Noé Fourcand who taught us all a lesson in courage. He arrived just as the noontime bell from the Cathédrale had sounded.

  “And I remember, Monsieur, his bass voice, his grave demeanor—all of these things, Monsieur, in which you seem to reincarnate his presence.

  “And he said, ‘It is at midday, my brother and sisters, when the Angelus sounds, that the Christian man ought to grant himself a minute of retirement to consider his actions from the first portion of the day. Retire now, magistrate! Retire now, citizens! Retire now, implacable priest! Demand of God to inspire in you a decision marrying wisdom to your power! Act now in the spirit of a true Christian!’

  “His words, Monsieur, caused me to drop the stone I had in my hand.

  “Noé Fourcand said, ‘Before us we have a poor man, a man whose eyes alone tell us of his days and nights of hunger. His stomach and his entrails are tangled by the knots of hunger! Feel his suffering pain, oh Christian brothers! This man could turn for compassion only to Christ Almighty, friend of the poor and suffering! And what does he see, entering the holy space of Mother Church, but the words of our Lord, “Come unto me, those who are hungry?” And what does he spy but the collection box? And what does he feel but the Divine presence? And what does he do but break the box open, his weakened hands trembling, in obedience to Divine commandment and answered prayers? And who among us would condemn him, whose only crime is to be poor?’

  “And I tell you, Monsieur, this speech had an effect on the crowd I have not seen since you also began to inspire our people with your grandiloquent oratory. The rage fled from my heart as swiftly as it had once arrived. Not only did we liberate Josué Jean and feed him, but at the next election thereafter, we made Avocat Fourcand our sénateur.

  “Noé Fourcand!” the Sénateur said. “And how many years has it been since I’ve said that name. And here he is again!”

  The Sénateur put his hand on the judge’s thigh. He looked at the judge with an expression on his ugly face not unlike tenderness. “You don’t want this burden.”

  “I think I do.”

  “I remember Noé Fourcand’s funeral. He was hardly in office a year before his heart gave way beneath the weight of his new responsibility. How his widow wailed!” the Sénateur said.

  The cat wandered back out onto the deck, and the Sénateur leaned over, picked her up, and settled her on his lap.

  The judge smiled. “Sénateur, you should write these stories down. When you’re no longer here, our history will be lost. When you are in retirement, I advise you to write a history of this town.”

  The Sé
nateur shook his head.

  “You have misunderstood me, young man. Men like you and Noé are not meant for the burden of public office.”

  “And why is that?”

  The Sénateur took the judge’s hand in his. The judge bridled at the touch, but allowed the Sénateur to hold his hand.

  The Sénateur said, “Because you and Noé are too fine. That is a compliment, my friend, that no one will any longer extend to me. My mother always said to cherish every kind word.”

  The judge took his hand back.

  “Sénateur—,” the judge began.

  The Sénateur interrupted. “Life is too short for us to be enemies. Only cats have time to fight. You and I must be friends.”

  The judge said, “When they call me Sénateur, you and I will be friends.”

  “In politics, you will learn to concentrate on essentials. I am proposing friendship. Can we not—compromise?”

  The judge was quiet for a long time. Then he started to laugh. I thought he was going to choke. His body shook.

  “Would you build the road?” Johel asked.

  “I am not opposed.”

  “And traffic on the road?”

  “We could share,” the Sénateur said. He spread his hands wide, as if to encompass between them endless bounty. “We could serve each other’s needs. Eat at each other’s tables. Laugh at each other’s jokes. And share the harvest of our beautiful land.”

  “And you would be?”

  “What I am. The Sénateur of the Grand’Anse.”

  “And I would be?”

  The Sénateur slapped his hands together. “You will be young!”

  The Sénateur stood up, groaning slightly. He extended his hand in my direction and the judge’s. The judge started to stand up also, but the Sénateur said, “Sit on my mother’s porch and enjoy the night air. It is wisdom to learn from the mistakes of your elders. I should have spent more time sitting on this porch and thinking of the most pleasant things in life.”

  The judge sat silently on the Sénateur’s mother’s porch. I thought, just for a moment, that he might accept the Sénateur’s offer. He was a tired man imagining a quiet life: a house by the sea, a library of books, a garden. His face grew peaceful in his fantasy. The stress and tension and anxiety of his campaign ebbed from his fat features. His eyes closed. Then, like a film run backward, his face reacquired its former rigidity. He stood up, took his leave of me, and drove down to campaign HQ, where, I learned the next day, he stayed at his desk working by gas lamp until the early hours of the morning.

  5

  I was hired as an election day observer by the Organization of American States, which put in place a three-hundred-member observation team distributed throughout the entire country. I was assigned to the mountain town of Chambellan, about forty-five minutes from Jérémie on the road to Dame Marie.

  Haiti was a good teacher in the arts of gratitude, and only the coldest hearts would have remained unmoved by the long lines of solemn voters, dressed in their Sunday best, congregating from dawn onward at the Lycée Jean Rabel, a one-story concrete block house. I hadn’t expected to see anyone come and vote, on account of the swine flu, but the line stretched out through the schoolyard and down the side of the mountain. The morning had a chill, and the voters shifted from side to side to stay warm, with that remarkable capacity for fortitude that those who do not know Haiti well confuse with patience. The villages around Chambellan had been heavily contested by both the Sénateur and the judge; both men had rallied more than once in the town. The voters today weren’t just braving swine flu. The short history of Haitian democracy had been punctuated by many elections that degenerated into violence. At any time, a gunshot could ring out, and who would stand in line then?

  In Chambellan, only one incident threatened to disrupt the calm of the day.

  It must have been midmorning when the voters in line began to shout. An elderly man was lying on the ground, looking dazed. He was wearing a bow tie and a neatly pressed suit, and the folks in line were insisting that the man was dead.

  What happened was this.

  The man on the ground, whose name was Berthillus Simeon, had been a partisan of the Sénateur’s in this election and in elections past, a member of the older generation whose loyalty to the Sénateur could not be shaken by any promise of a road or riches, and he had made no attempt to hide his scorn for the younger voters of the village who had come to admire the judge. He was an ornery old cuss whose ultimate answer to any political argument was to spit on his opponents’ shoes.

  It was just two days’ back that Monsieur Simeon had drunk himself a bottle of clairin and died in the night. Given his age and fragile health, no one in the village was much surprised by the man’s demise, not even his children or his wife. Until the coffin was ready, the family was keeping the cadaver right in his bed, with an iron on his chest to keep him from rotting. They were proposing to bury him that day or the next—which is why his presence on the voting line was arousing considerable agitation.

  Not only was old Monsieur Simeon present, he was insisting that he be allowed to vote. The judge’s supporters, sensing trickery, had surrounded him, and he had responded by hocking a wet loogie at his antagonists’ feet. The subsequent pushing had gotten to shoving, and in this way Monsieur Simeon ended up on the ground, looking dazed.

  So the questions for the election officials were complicated: Was this in fact Monsieur Simeon? If so, was Monsieur Simeon dead? If he was dead but still capable of voting, was his vote valid?

  Voting was suspended for almost an hour as the election officials treated the case of Monsieur Simeon. Partisans of the judge were soon shouting that the whole election was fraudulent—who knows how many of the dead had been allowed to vote?—while partisans of the Sénateur were yelling that the election was a fraud, too, one man waving a copy of the Haitian Constitution in the air and demanding to know just where it said that only the living were entitled to vote.

  The second secretary of the Voting Bureau was a skinny schoolmistress brought in from Dame Marie, who gave Monsieur Simeon a glass of water and asked him if he was dead. But Monsieur Simeon seemed to think the question was offensive and wouldn’t answer.

  A voice in the crowd proposed that this monsieur was a ringer, someone who had taken the deceased’s voter identification card and was proposing to cast a ballot in his name. The only problem with this theory was that first, the man calling himself Monsieur Simeon and the man on the voter identification card were very nearly identical; and second, there were at least two dozen citizens in line insisting that this was Monsieur Simeon, only he was dead.

  As it happened, one of the ladies in line worked as a nurse at the clinic in Chambellan, and she was enlisted to ascertain whether Monsieur Simeon was, medically speaking, alive or dead, a fact whose juridical relevance remained uncertain. A hush came over the crowd as this lady, clearly more accustomed to laboring women and newborns than walking cadavers, pressed two fingers to the old man’s scrawny neck and sought out a heartbeat. She waited a minute, felt the faint tapping of the man’s old pulsing blood, and said, “He’s alive.”

  A roar went up from half the crowd as the other half shouted wildly: even zombies had heartbeats. Out on the margins of the crowd, the debate was philosophical, as so often in Haiti, folks wondering just what life consisted of. Someone was sent for a mirror, on account of the widely known fact that a cadaver doesn’t have a reflection, but no one could seem to find one.

  The situation threatened to explode out of control. The president of the Voting Bureau was trying to reestablish order, the muscles in his neck straining as he shouted at the voters to get back in line; and the first secretary was on the phone with the PNH, asking them to send a vehicle. But the PNH were overwhelmed, on account of the situation in Marfranc, where a brace of toughs, armed with machetes, had been hired by a local candidate for député to storm the polling center. By the time the PNH responded to the disorder, the ballots and the ball
ot boxes were in flames. The violence had nothing to do with either the Sénateur or the judge—they were equally collateral damage to the disorder—but the effect was that no voters voted in Marfranc that day for any candidate whatsoever, and the PNH had neither vehicle nor officers to spare.

  The day was saved by the arrival of Monsieur Simeon’s son. The son of Simeon had the thick hands and flat feet of a true scion of the Haitian soil. He said that he didn’t know for sure if his papa were alive or dead, but he could confirm that all and sundry had sincerely believed the old man dead for the past two days. This morning, he continued, he had gone into the bedroom where the cadaver was reposing, expecting to salute his deceased father, only to find the bed empty. So either his daddy had risen from death or he hadn’t been dead at all, and he expected it was the latter.

  But there was an easy way to know for sure if the old man was a zombie. Zombies couldn’t abide the taste of salt, so if Monsieur Simeon was willing to taste salt, then he should be allowed to vote. Everyone seemed to think this was fair except Monsieur Simeon himself, but by now most folks’ patience with Simeon was limited, and it was decided to make him eat salt whether he wanted to or not. Soon one of the marchandes selling deep-fried plantains was enlisted to produce a specimen glistening with grease and salt, of which Monsieur Simeon, looking around nervously at the crowd, took a healthy bite and then another.

  When fifteen minutes passed and Monsieur Simeon wasn’t dead of salt poisoning, the president of the Voting Bureau made his official ruling: Monsieur Simeon was not dead, had never been dead, and was therefore entitled to vote. Monsieur Simeon, like all other voters, was escorted into the polling center, where his documents were inspected, and he made his mark on the voting sheet. He was handed one ballot for the senatorial race and another for the local deputy race, and was escorted to the private voting booth. A few minutes later he handed the ballots, folded neatly, to the second secretary of the Voting Bureau, who placed them in their respective boxes. Monsieur Simeon’s fingernail was painted with black dye.