by Wade Davis
I still didn’t know his name, nor did I want to. He had a way of appearing at the strangest moments, always in linen, the same black cane in his hand, a jester’s baton, tapping the alabaster steps of the hotel.
“Ah, my young friend, you do not sleep.”
“Not tonight. I am just in.”
“And how fares your hunt?” I had told him nothing of my work. “I see by your expression. A shame. Mine, too, I’m afraid. A sordid commerce, trading one’s dollars for dreams. You could do better among the women of the Carrefour Road.”
His thin fingers plucked a tired rose from his lapel and discarded it on the table beside me. Once I had seen him in the bar of the hotel passing out copies of an article about himself in an American midwestern newspaper. It was ironic to see someone who exuded such self-importance striving so obviously for notoriety. Like the entire nation he was hungry for recognition. Yet it was he who, one afternoon with the heat rising off the veranda, had told me, “The world is not after Haiti as so many of us feel. The cold truth is the world’s indifference, and if there is one thing a Haitian hates it is to be inconsequential. It does not matter what is said about you, as long as you are the subject of conversation. Perhaps at some international soiree idle chatter passes to Haiti, but I doubt it.” One wanted to avoid him, yet in a country where the truth is taken so lightly, casually, he was irresistible.
When he was gone I moved to the edge of the veranda and looked out over the city. It was hard to believe that in a few hours the heat and glare of the sun would be difficult to bear.
Marcel Pierre was the only person I knew capable of making the zombi poison. In the three weeks since we had left his hounfour I had not, as promised, tested his preparation on an enemy. I had, however, learned something about the man. According to a number of informants Marcel Pierre was an early and loyal follower of François Duvalier, and a notorious member of the Ton Ton Macoute, the rural militia that Duvalier established to safeguard his regime. Apparently during the terrible days of the early 1960s, when to consolidate his revolution Duvalier killed hundreds of the mulatto elite, Marcel had used his authority to extort information from the traditional houngan. Although many of the houngan were themselves members of the Ton Ton Macoute, few could match Marcel Pierre’s ruthlessness. In exchange for protection from his gang, they reluctantly took him into their fold and shared certain secrets. Eventually Marcel’s abuses became intolerable, and he himself fell victim and was severely poisoned. Though he barely survived, the poison left him permanently scarred. Now close to twenty years later, his reputation was mixed. Some said he had repented and become a legitimately initiated houngan; others described him as a houngan macoute, a charlatan who lacks true spiritual knowledge. Still others, perhaps the majority, dismissed him as a lowly malfacteur, an evildoer, just as the BBC had done.
Though Marcel and his followers had a reputation for selling the powders, it had been immediately apparent to me that the preparation he had made me was fraudulent. The plants used belonged to botanical families known to have little phytochemical significance. And then there was his attitude. He had prepared the reputed poison in the presence of young children and in the immediate vicinity of the living quarters of the houngan. This was most suspicious. Biodynamic plant preparations, be they poisons or hallucinogens, are inherently subversive—the poisons because they kill surreptitiously and the hallucinogens because they expose the frail, ambivalent position of man, perpetually on the cusp between nature, society, and the spirit world. When the shamans in the Amazon prepare and imbibe their potent hallucinogens, they usually leave the village and take their patients with them. Similarly the curare, or arrow poison preparations, are often made in the forest. Haiti is not the Amazon, but I was certain that Marcel Pierre, whatever his reputation, would not make such a deadly, topically active poison so close to his temple and the homes of his people. That would make no sense. Yet if Marcel knew the correct formula, how were we to persuade him to give it to us?
I did have one advantage. Other investigators had assumed that the formula of the zombi poison had to be an esoteric secret. I wasn’t so sure, and anyway I had come not to believe in secrets. For years in the Amazon I had sought information that though not explicitly termed secret was nevertheless closely guarded by Indian peoples. In my experience, success depended less on the inherent status of the information than on the relationship one managed to establish with a knowledgeable informant. Every society has codes and rules, but individuals within a society bend them with zeal. Secrecy may be a rule, but gossip, after all, is the international language.
The purpose of secrets is to protect a society’s interests from threatening outsiders. If a relationship can be established that renders one no longer a threat, the need for the protective veil vanishes. Sometimes such a relationship can take months to establish. Once I spent two seasons attempting to record some tribal myths from an old Tsimshian Indian in northern Canada. I had completely given up, concluding, as he had implied, that the tradition had been lost. Then one day, simply as a gesture, I shot and butchered a moose for him for his winter meat. Bringing game to an elder is a traditional sign of respect, and with my action I had, quite by chance, come to ask my question in the correct manner. That night I began to record a full cycle of tribal myths.
While trust naturally grows slowly, very often a relationship pivots about a single moment, at which time one can proceed only by instinct and inspiration. Andrew Weil, also an ethnobotanist and writer, told me a story from his time among the Yaqui, a notoriously tough and belligerent tribe of northern Mexico. The Yaqui dances are horrendous ordeals, with the endurance of the participants tested by a week of nonstop line dancing. Andrew is one of the few whites to have been invited to participate. The first time he went he was approached by a tough, extremely proud, and apparently antagonistic Yaqui. They squared off, and the Indian pounded his enormous chest as he bellowed “Soy Indio”—“I am an Indio.” Indio in Spanish is pejorative, so the fellow was essentially saying, “I’m a spick and what are you going to do about it?” Andrew, who happens to be Jewish, suddenly smashed his own chest and yelled “Soy Judeo.” Then the Yaqui answered with “I’m a filthy Indio,” and Andrew countered with “I’m a greedy Jew,” and so it went until the two of them had exhausted every conceivable derogatory phrase. Then suddenly they collapsed in laughter, and for the rest of the festival Andrew had this man for his companion and mentor. The point is, the Yaqui had in some sense to display his “Yaqui-ness” to the visiting white, and by returning his own ethnic bravado, exposing its foolishness, Andrew had cleverly deflected a potentially nasty situation and established a true bond.
My challenge, of course, would be to establish a similar bond with Marcel Pierre.
The bar was deserted, but when Max Beauvoir and I entered the hounfour there were three of them, sitting with their backs to the ochre walls of the bagi. Marcel still hid most of his face, offering only the same cold plastic stare. I greeted him. He made a place for me beside him, near a table.
“Well,” he said.
“It didn’t work,” I told him. Beauvoir lit a cigarette and repeated my words in a low voice. I added, “Ten days I waited and nothing happened.”
Marcel showed disbelief.
“Your poison is useless,” I said. Then I looked around him at his two companions and asked why they bothered to hang out with a charlatan. One of them made a move toward me. Beauvoir ordered him to sit.
Marcel flushed, and then for the first time the words poured out of him. He called me a liar in a dozen ways before moving indignantly into the bagi. Beauvoir dismissed the onlookers. Marcel came back with a bag containing the same white aspirin bottle he had shown us the first day. As he crossed in front of me I grabbed the bag from his hand, tore off the top of the bottle, and, with my hands above his line of sight, pretended to pour the brown powder onto my hand. It did not touch my skin, but Marcel was certain that it had. I pretended to examine the poison and then
to return it to the bottle. I replaced the top and, as I passed it back to him, cleaned my left hand on the leg of my trousers.
“Sawdust,” I said contemptuously.
Marcel fell back, momentarily silent. Flies like huge particles of dust danced up and down a shaft of light that cut across his face. Looking first at me and then at Beauvoir, he said simply, “He is a dead man.”
I got to my feet slowly. “Tell me, then, when will I die?”
Marcel sensed his advantage. “A day, a week, a month, a year. You shall die from handling that powder.”
I drew a breath and felt the hot air sink into my chest. I could only maintain the ruse. “So what are you trying to tell me? Everyone must die sometime.”
For the first time, Marcel laughed, revealing a row of perfect teeth. Looking toward Beauvoir he said, “This white of yours is a brave man,” and after a pause, “but he is also very stupid.” Only later would I discover that the small white jar contained the real poison.
Moments later the subject of money rekindled Marcel’s fury. It was one thing to question the quality of his preparations, it was quite another to demand the return of money that he had already spent. By now several of his women had slipped back into the hounfour. This time when he flew into the bagi, it was with a small black vial that he returned. He placed it delicately, almost reverently, on the table between us. Rage still marked his face, and rivulets of sweat ran across his hairless brow.
“Blanc,” he yelled, “you and your kind come a thousand miles to get my poison. Now you tell me my powder is not good. Why do you waste my time? Why do you insult us?” He paced and slashed the air with his arms. His women formed a cordon around him. Then he stopped.
“If you do not think I make good poison,” he said, gesturing toward the table, “drink this and I promise you will not walk out of here alive.”
The circle of faces challenged me. Beauvoir could do nothing. Marcel came so close I could feel his breath, smell it like a buzzard’s. The silence was unbearable, yet only I could break it.
“Marcel,” I said finally, assuming a conciliatory tone, “it is not a question of whether or not you can make good poison. I know that you can. That is why I came a thousand miles to get it. All I am telling you is that what you made me is worthless.” I stood up and moved away from the table, rubbing my face with my hands. “You may think that the money I paid you is a lot, but for me it was nothing, for it wasn’t my money. To my backers it was so little money that they will not even notice that it’s gone. But if you send me back to New York with that useless powder, you will lose the potential to make thousands and thousands of dollars from us in the future.”
They seemed stunned. There was a quiver. Then everybody stiffened and held their breath for a silent minute. Some perhaps thought of the money, others may have weighed the insult. Marcel said nothing.
“So you think about that,” I said, “and I will be back in the morning.” At that Max Beauvoir and I walked out of the hounfour, slowly pushing our way through Marcel’s women like men fording a river.
The next morning Marcel greeted Rachel and me at the entrance to his hounfour and invited us into the bagi. It was a small chamber—I could touch a wall in every direction. The air smelled of old newspapers, candle smoke, and earth. Marcel flung open the shutter of the single window, and a shaft of limpid light fell on the altar, turning the colored bottles into jewels. Then he knelt, working a toothpick busily along his gleaming jaw. From beside the altar he lifted a rum bottle and held it to the light. He passed it to me, his gesture a challenge. The bottle was filled with seeds, wood, and other organic debris. The smell was acrid, like rotting garlic. There is an adage in Haiti that warns one never to partake of an open bottle in an unknown temple. I took a drink.
Marcel began to laugh and turned to Rachel incredulously. “How did he know there was nothing in it?”
“He didn’t,” she replied.
Now Marcel was dumbfounded. “Why is this blanc not afraid of me?”
“Because he is afraid of no man,” she said flatly. I glanced at her. Though a lie, it was the perfect answer.
At that moment my relationship with Marcel Pierre changed. As we quit the temple I noticed what would turn out to be ingredients of the proper zombi poison drying on the clothesline. Just before we reached our jeep, Marcel mentioned something to Rachel. She turned to me uneasily. “He wants you to return tonight alone. He says it is time to get the poison.”
There was no moon, and the clouds blocked the stars. A tremendous thunderstorm had cracked open the dusk sky. Now, shortly after midnight, by the roadside several miles north of Saint Marc, the dark clouds remained menacingly on the horizon.
There were five of us—Marcel, myself, his assistant Jean, and two of his women. We left the road on foot and followed a narrow trail that crisscrossed up an eroded draw, weaving through spindly, brittle vegetation. Here, it was pitch-dark. There was one flashlight, but its fading light was of little use. Marcel carried it in front, stumbling and laughing in a morbid glee thoroughly seeped in rum. Behind him came Matilde, her long white dress running behind her in waves as she walked. I followed, and the other woman, Marie, took my hand. It wasn’t very helpful, for in the darkness she was as clumsy as I, yet I appreciated the human contact. Jean was the last, and he seemed to have night vision. He moved slowly, steadily up the draw, his senses keen, taking in every sound or movement. Slung over his shoulder were a shovel and a pick.
On a dry knoll, with the hills all around like a finely placed shroud, the air tasted damp and decayed. The rain was coming. Sheet lightning flashed in bursts of distant light that revealed shadows on Marcel’s face. In his dark glasses, worn by night as well as day, I saw reflections of the two women—Marie in red, Matilde in white, her dark skin glowing out of all that white cloth. Far below, the headlights of passing cars and trucks skimmed the roofs of the hamlet. The people there were asleep, while we were about to steal one of their dead.
The tomb was unmarked, just a slight rise in the soil. Jean slipped away to contact a confederate he had in the community. We waited, staying low, our arms linked gently. The silence strained my ears. I felt a flush of fever and fought off the spasms. Jean returned after twenty minutes, panting, his eyes shining, his lips preserving silence. Marcel handed him a couple of cigarettes, and Jean carried them into the shadows to the confederate. When Jean struck a match, the bold light momentarily flooded their faces.
The shovel didn’t dig, it scraped the compacted soil from the grave. The pick broke it off in lumps. Deeper and deeper, and from behind the muffled laughter of the women, like the distant cackle of ravens on the coast at the end of day. From the grave the strong, distinct smell of moist earth.
I held the torch and followed the progress in its narrow beam of light. Some four feet down, the blade of the shovel tore into the reed mat that lined the recesses of the tomb. Beneath the mat were several layers of cotton cloth, the brilliant colors scarcely faded. Then came the hollow thud of steel upon a wooden casket. Jean stopped to cover his face with a red cloth and rub a liniment on all exposed parts of his body. We did the same. Marcel came forward and had us inhale a viscid potion that smelled of ammonia. Cautiously Jean scraped the loose dirt from around the coffin. Leaning as far away from the grave as possible, he reached one arm into the ground and with the pick attempted to pry the coffin from the base of the tomb. The coffin splintered. He stopped, and dug some more with the spade. Finally he crept into the grave, tied a rope to one end of the coffin and hoisted it out of the ground.
It was short, a mere three feet long. Jean cracked the edge of a narrow plank. It took some time for my eyes to grow accustomed to the color of dust and death. Then I felt the horror. I saw a small shrunken head, lips drawn back over tiny yellow teeth, eyes squinting in toward each other. It was a child, a baby girl, her bonnet intact, stiff and gray-brown. As Jean and Marcel carefully placed a large hemp sack over the coffin, I wandered from coffin to tomb. Like a
wound, the gaping hole drew me back in strange fascination. Matilde stayed close beside me, stopping me once to wipe my damp brow with the fringe of her skirt. I was dismayed. Bodies decompse rapidly in such a climate: this child could not have been in the grave a month. Jean lifted the coffin onto his head and began to walk down the draw. The others went with him. I came last, following the sugary movements of a whore’s hips.
No one paid much attention to us as we unloaded the coffin in front of the Eagle Bar. A few clients leaned over the concrete railing, but the music covered our voices. Jean took the coffin out of the back of the jeep and carried it around to Marcel’s bagi. Marcel ordered soft drinks. I bought a couple bottles of rum. I had a few drinks with him, and as I left, I heard Jean working the shovel behind me, burying the coffin in the court of the hounfour. There it would remain until I returned.
Thus we had collected the first and, according to Marcel, most important ingredient of the zombi poison.
I drove south swiftly, my headlights stripping off the final layers of the Haitian night. Beneath the steep slopes that reach the sea near Carrius, with daybreak coming, the pastel sky brightened and luminous clouds revealed great gaps in the sky. Streamers of brilliant light backlit the mountains. Impulsively I made for the sea. Along a pure and virgin shoreline, I felt an irresistible desire to bathe. I shed my clothes on a beach above a fishing village and waded out into the chilling waters. Shapes began to emerge with the dawn—across the water, the shimmering reflections of distant coral atolls, and south along the beach, toward the settlement, the glistening black bodies, piratelike, shouting morning songs. I was glad to be cold. Then I felt the warm breeze fall off the land and caress my cheek. I remembered something the stranger at the Ollofson had said: “Haiti will teach you that good and evil are one. We never confuse them, nor do we keep them apart.”
Three days later Marcel led Rachel and me up a broken tract, past a wattle-and-daub house where an ancient woman lived alone, to a draw that opened on a grim wash studded with cacti and brush. Jean was with us, and he and one other assistant carried a metal grill, a cloth sack, and a mortar and pestle. Marcel had a vinyl briefcase, splitting at the seam. We stopped when we reached a small flat, partially shaded by a massive stand of caotchu, a wretched succulent with contorted limbs and a viral look. Like everything else in this wasteland, it was sharp and pointed and had sap that burned.