by Tracy Kidder
Farmer turned to her. “What’s that supposed to mean?”
He was trying to smile. Looking at him, she thought, “He’s innocent about meanness.” He was the sort of person who didn’t feel compelled to tell you all his thoughts, but she sensed that if he did tell you some, if he let you in, and you made fun of him, it would be a long time before he’d open up again. For the first time in months she was in the company of someone she could have fun with, and she’d blown it. “I’m sorry, I’m sorry,” she said. “I didn’t mean it.”
He smiled at her, and the next time someone called “Blan!” he waved just as before. She felt forgiven. He did other nerdy things, like telling her the Latin names of trees and shrubs. He wasn’t shy at all. He seemed able to talk to anyone but was clearly most interested in talking to peasants—who were, he explained, the vast majority of Haitians, even in the urban slums. He took photographs. He made notes about the hospitals they visited. He asked peasants many questions. Where did they get their drinking water? What did they think caused illnesses? He recorded the conversations and transcribed them at night back at the Eye Care house. He was mastering Creole with enviable speed. She’d been in Haiti for months, and he had only recently arrived, yet by the end of their week of travel, he had surpassed her. He could almost, in the Haitian phrase, speak Creole like a rat.
At the end of that week in the countryside, the Eye Care team headed back toward Port-au-Prince. She and Paul sat together in the backseat on the long drive. By now, he was calling her by the nickname her family had given her, Min. He was regaling her with the myriad nicknames in his own family as they neared the steep, narrow part of National Highway 3 that scales down Morne Kabrit, Goat Mountain, toward the Cul-de-Sac Plain. The Rover began turning a corner beside the cliff, and they were thrown to one side together, and then up ahead they saw a carpet of mangoes spread across the road. Children dashed around, gathering up the fruit. A little farther on, a small, battered pickup truck lay on its side. Obviously, the tap-tap had been top-heavy with passengers and fruit, heading for market. Obviously, it had exhausted shock absorbers and bad brakes. Overturned baskets and mangoes were strewn all around. The passengers were market women, in head wraps, some sitting by the road looking dazed, others standing around talking heatedly. One woman lay near the truck, her body surrounded by mangoes and only partly covered with a piece of cardboard. There was a policeman at the scene. He told them cheerfully, three gold-framed teeth gleaming, that, yes, the woman had died. There was nothing to be done.
For Ophelia the scene behind them would become a fixture in her memories, like her first scent of Haiti—the acidic, garbagey smell that had hit her when she’d first arrived at the François Duvalier Airport. She looked over at Paul as they drove on toward the city. He was staring out the window. He had become, she would remember, “very, very silent.”
They didn’t become lovers that spring, but they saw each other almost every day over the next month or so, sometimes on Eye Care’s outreach expeditions, more often in Port-au-Prince. When they were both in the city, she would walk over to his place after work. He lived in an old ruin of a mansion, covered with balconies and wooden fretwork, set in a garbage-strewn lot. It belonged to an art dealer. The wife of a previous owner—so the story went—had gone into labor one night during a period when Baby Doc had imposed a curfew on the city, and the husband had run out to get help and been shot dead on the street. The house was huge and empty, except for Paul and one other tenant, a Haitian woman, who would sometimes cook meals out in the courtyard, the smell of burning charcoal rising into Paul’s windows. His room was on the second floor. It had many windows with old, elaborate wooden shutters opening onto balconies. Through the windows you could see a large part of the city and the waterfront and, off to one side, the tents and cardboard huts in a slum called La Saline. She often found him up in his room writing. He had composed a poem, called “The Mango Lady,” dedicated “To Ophelia.” He read it aloud. The third verse began:
We start, eyes drawn reluctantly back
over baskets, to the dead mango lady
stretched stiff on her bier of tropical fruit.
She is almost covered by a cardboard strip,
like the flag of her corrugated country,
a flimsy strip too thin to hide the wounds.
No doubt being far from home simplified their courtship, so that it didn’t even seem like one. When they went out, she paid the way. She had money. He didn’t have much. It seemed only sensible and natural that she share hers. And he shared his superior knowledge of Haiti. He told her about Madame Max, for instance—teasing her, explaining that the Eye Care house sat on Madame Max’s land, so that, in effect, Ophelia was working for the tontons macoutes. One time she said to him, “I met this interesting guy at the Oloffson. He says he’s the model for Petit Pierre in Graham Greene’s book The Comedians.” Paul explained that this was true, and that the clownish little man she’d met was a Duvalierist informant. Paul was educating her, she felt, though not deliberately. Usually, she asked the questions. Often, a little artfulness was needed. If he made a cryptic or broad statement, it was best not to challenge him, because then he might grow reticent. Better to say, “Tell me more.” Up in his room in the haunted house, she initiated many talks—“our long, windy discussions,” she’d say years later.
“What is anthropology exactly?”
He told her, in effect—I am using words he would put in print in an article about a year and a half later—that anthropology concerned itself less with measurement than with meaning. As in mastering a language, one had to learn not just the literal meanings of words but also their connotations, and to grasp those one had to know the politics and economic systems and histories of a place. Only then could you really understand an event like the mango lady’s death.
In the article he wrote the following year, Farmer would use phrases such as “highly reticulated relations among disease, nutritional status, socioeconomic factors, and health and illness beliefs and practices.” As a rule, he didn’t speak much more plainly about subjects like the mango lady, but Ophelia made her own translations. Accidents happen. Sure. But not every bad thing that happens is an accident. There was nothing accidental about the wretchedness of the road down Morne Kabrit or the overloaded tap-tap, or the desperation of a peasant woman who had to get to market and make a sale because otherwise her family would go hungry. These circumstances all had causes, and the nearest ones were the continuing misrule of the Duvaliers and the long-standing American habit of lavishing aid on dictators such as Baby Doc, who used the money to keep himself and the Haitian elite in luxury and power and spent almost nothing on things like roads and transportation.
Before she’d met Paul, Haiti had seemed merely vivid—terrible and strange. The worm a full foot long that she’d seen wriggling out of a baby’s anus in the hospital where she first worked. The numberless children with diarrheal diseases. The daily national anthem ceremony in front of the presidential palace, where by decree everyone had to stop and face the tinny music or suffer the wrath of the macoutes. Now she had someone to translate Haiti to her. In the process Paul laid out a comprehensive theory of poverty, of a world designed by the elites of all nations to serve their own ends, the pieces of the design enshrined in ideologies, which erased the histories of how things came to be as they were. And he knew the details for Haiti, a catastrophe covered with the fingerprints of the Western powers, most of all those of France and the United States.
Ophelia gazed out the windows of Paul’s room in the mansion as he read his latest poem to her. Poverty was his subject, she thought, and the windows of this haunted house were his observation post. He was looking for a better one. His plans weren’t clear, but his aims seemed to be. He’d come here to do ethnography, the kind of anthropology he most admired—learning about a culture, not through books and artifacts but from the people who had inherited and were making culture. His special field was going to be medical eth
nography. He wanted to learn everything about morbidity and mortality in the most disease-ridden country in the hemisphere. He’d write about what he discovered and in this way, he told her, “lend a voice to the voiceless.” He’d also be a doctor. He wasn’t sure which branch of medicine he’d choose. Maybe psychiatry. In any case, he’d be a doctor to poor people. Maybe he’d end up working in Africa or an American inner city.
Drawing him out, Ophelia felt both enthralled and disturbed. During one of their long talks in his room, she found herself thinking, “Oh dear, oh good, my life has changed.” Years later she would tell me, “I think there’s a point where you realize the world has just been revealed to you. It’s like realizing your parents are both good and bad. It’s sort of, Oh no, things will never be quite the same again.”
She was, after all, very young. A person five years older could be a credible mentor, though now and then he’d say something that reminded her he wasn’t very old himself. Before she left Haiti, late that spring, she told him she was going home to do premedical studies. She was going to become a doctor, too.
“Good,” he said earnestly. He had finished his own premed work. “You know what you should do? Make flash cards.”
They promised to write.
Paul had asked Ophelia to call his parents when she got home, but he had neglected to tell her that the Warden, still very much alive in 1983, had a rule that his daughters call home every night before they drove back to Star Road State Prison from their after-school jobs in Brooksville. And Farmer also hadn’t told her that his sister Peggy had lately affected a convincing English accent.
She made the call. “Hello, Mr. Farmer. My name’s Ophelia and I just came from Haiti. I was just with Paul and he sends his love, and he wants you to know he’s all right.”
“Yeah, yeah, yeah. All right, Peggy, knock it off.”
“No, my name is Ophelia and I was just with Paul.”
“I’ll feel ya, Peggy. Get on home!” said the Warden and hung up.
Ophelia called back and managed to convince him eventually. The Warden apologized. She could hear laughter in the background.
Ophelia had left Paul several contemporary novels. By the time she got back to England, a letter had arrived, a book report of sorts. “The entire novel is more fun if you’ve read Dante’s Inferno, Joyce’s Ulysses (the chapter in which Bloom brings Molly breakfast in bed), Homer, Proust (À la Recherche du Temps Perdu), and The Maids, a play by Genet.” At the end, he had written, “P.S.: You’re a slut for leaving me here alone.” Increasingly ardent requests for a letter followed: “You trollop you. Why haven’t you dispatched any passenger pigeons in my direction?” If she didn’t write “tout de suite,” he’d lock her in a broom closet with a rather unattractive mutual acquaintance of theirs, give both of them “potent aphrodisiacs,” and “take away the Lavoris.” For a time, she didn’t write him back. She wasn’t sure why. Maybe she was just being lazy. She still intended to become a doctor, and she hated to think that she might never see him again.
Soon after she got back to Europe, her father took her to lunch with Graham Greene, who Paul had said was one of his favorite writers. The elderly novelist, tall and stooped, seemed genuinely glad for news of Haiti, especially of the egregious Petit Pierre. He inscribed her copy of The Comedians, “To Ophelia, who knows the real Haiti.” If he really thought that of her, she wondered, what would he have made of Paul Farmer?
CHAPTER 8
It was soon after Ophelia left that Farmer first saw Cange, in late May 1983. Still searching for a place to do his work, he had traveled back to the central plateau and was spending some time in the company of a Haitian Anglican priest named Fritz Lafontant. He was a small but imposing man, with a grand, almost leonine countenance and a forceful manner, sometimes abrupt. With assistance from the Episcopal Diocese of Upper South Carolina, Lafontant administered a rather rudimentary one-doctor health clinic in Mirebalais. He and his wife had also helped to build schools and to organize community councils and women’s groups and programs for adult literacy in several small, impoverished towns in the region. Cange was one of those. Lafontant had arranged and supervised the construction of a chapel and the beginnings of a school in Cange. Farmer rode out there from Mirebalais in the back of the priest’s pickup truck.
Spring in Haiti is usually a fairly wet season, and much of the route was green, especially the stretch along the Artibonite where the river had cut a gorge too steep for agriculture. Farmer remembered admiring the trees and foliage there and the rushing river. Then the large dam and the reservoir heaved into view, and after that he found himself staring through clouds of grayish dust—dust in his hair, dust up his nose, dust adhering to his sweaty skin—at an utterly changed landscape, with scarcely any trees, colored in shades of brown and white, a landscape he would remember as “amazingly, biblically, dry and barren.” Cange, the squatter settlement, lay in the midst of this arid desolation, half a mile up the road from the huge freshwater reservoir.
Most of the dwellings were crude wooden lean-tos with dirt floors, constructed, it seemed, without much conviction, as a friend of his would later put it. Farmer noticed especially the roofs of these tiny hovels, roofs made of banana-bark thatch, patched with rags, clearly leaky. Back in Mirebalais the roofs of rusty, thin metal, of “tin,” had seemed to him like the emblems of poverty. “But,” he would say, “the absence of tin, in Cange, screamed, ‘Misery.’ ” Most of the adults he saw and talked to were clearly dejected. It was as if, he thought, the people who had built these miserable lean-tos weren’t convinced that they’d ever live in anything better, indeed expected things to get worse. Many, perhaps the majority, were obviously ill, and there was no medicine of any sort being provided there. They seemed like the people he’d seen in waiting rooms in the dreadful public clinics he’d visited. It was as if the whole makeshift settlement were one of those waiting rooms. Haiti had already redefined poverty for him. Cange redefined it again. An individual might exist in misery this great almost anywhere, but it was hard to imagine an entire community poorer and sicker than this.
Père Lafontant’s party spent the night in Cange, on the floor of the school’s classrooms, sleeping on old army blankets. Farmer remembered waking up at 2:00 A.M. to go to the bathroom and pissing loudly in a bucket, a sound he recalled from his days on the bus, preferable to stepping outside in the night, among the parts of creation that had always given him the creeps—huge bugs and, especially, tarantulas.
He didn’t stop in Cange for long, not on that first visit. He kept traveling around Haiti, hitching rides from blan sometimes, sometimes riding in tap-taps among the peasants and their chickens and their baskets full of mangoes. He came down with dysentery, probably because his budget obliged him to eat food sold on the streets of the cities and towns. He remembered lying in a grubby hospital in Port-au-Prince, on a floor that lacked a toilet, and a middle-aged American woman, a public health expert whom he’d gotten to know, visiting him there. She was saying that, if he got any sicker, she was going to take him back to the States, and he was telling her, No, no, he was all right, while thinking, Please take me home. When he recovered, he went on sampling Haiti, and anthropology and medicine in the context of Haiti. He attended Voodoo ceremonies, talked to peasants about their lives, and found his way, among other places, to a hospital in Léogâne, a town about twelve miles west of Port-au-Prince, on Haiti’s southern peninsula. He worked there for a while as a volunteer, assisting the nurses and doctors.
Farmer told me that he found his life’s work not in books or in theories but mainly through experiencing Haiti. “I would read stuff from scholarly texts and know they were wrong. Living in Haiti, I realized that a minor error in one setting of power and privilege could have an enormous impact on the poor in another.” The eradication of the Creole pig, or the dam at Péligre, for example.
He was already attracted to liberation theology. “A powerful rebuke to the hiding away of poverty,” he called it.
“A rebuke that transcends scholarly analysis.” In Haiti, the essence of the doctrine came alive for him. Almost all the peasants he was meeting shared a belief that seemed like a distillation of liberation theology: “Everybody else hates us,” they’d tell him, “but God loves the poor more. And our cause is just.” The Marxists Farmer had read, and many of the intellectuals he knew, disdained religion, and it was true that some versions of Christianity, and more than a few missionaries, invited impoverished Haitians into what Père Lafontant called “the cult of resignation,” into accepting their lot patiently, anticipating the afterlife. But the Christianity of the peasants Farmer talked to had a different flavor: “the shared conviction that the rest of the world was wrong for screwing them over, and that someone, someone just and perhaps even omniscient, was keeping score.” He felt drawn back toward Catholicism now, not by his own belief but in sympathy with theirs, as an act of what he’d call “solidarity.” He told me, “It was really the experience of seeing people up there in Cange, or in some awful hospital, or at a funeral, or knowing that people were awaking in their huts to two rooms full of hungry kids and still going on. Religion was the one thing they still had.”