by Wade Davis
“The blood bought back my life,” Marcel concluded. “The banana never grew.”
“But who did this to you?” I asked.
“I had enemies. One always does when one advances.”
“The secret society?”
“No.” He glanced toward Rachel. “The people.”
“But you were judged.”
“Yes. No. In principle, yes.”
“What does that mean?”
“The plate needs the spoon and the spoon needs the plate. It is the houngan’s secret.”
I enjoyed seeing Marcel again, and his own story had been an unexpected revelation, but I didn’t plan on doing any more business with him, at least not right away. There were several things on my mind when I returned that July, following my two months back in the States. My sponsors wanted more collections of the poison. Kline, in particular, was worried that Marcel Pierre, prodded by my brash tactics, might simply have rounded up the half-dozen most toxic ingredients at hand and improvised a preparation. I didn’t share his doubts, for not only did I trust Marcel and find our evidence convincing, I also noted that the principal ingredients in his powder were the same as those in the “trap” that had brought down Clairvius Narcisse, according to his cousin. Besides, the pharmacological point had been reasonably established in lab tests.
Nevertheless, I did recognize the need for more samples. But while my backers still sought evidence of a single chemical that might explain zombification, I had become more and more impressed by a people who shared no such obsession with rational causality. I wanted to know the magic; I wanted to know what it meant, especially to its victims. And if the poison explained how a person might succumb, I now wanted to know why that person was chosen.
My first new lead came forty-eight hours after my visit to the Eagle Bar—through a contact in the capital provided by one of Max Beauvoir’s employees, a Jacques Belfort. Beauvoir had never actually hired Jacques. Several years ago he just turned up at the gate of the Peristyle de Mariani, and it happened that Beauvoir had an errand to run. Jacques offered to do it, then he returned and did another. Gradually, errand by errand, he worked his way into the life of the hounfour. Now he appeared each morning at eight, not to set about any prescribed work, but to wait for special opportunities, knowing he could get anything done. Jacques has many wives, and one of them was from Petite Rivière de Nippes, a small fishing village in the south. There, Jacques told me, she knew a mambo who might be able to put us in touch with the ones who could make the powders, both the poison and the reputed antidote, and to whom she would be prepared to take us.
The mambo lived some distance from the coast, on a small knoll rising out of a sad landscape: fields of stones, barren trees and bushes that served for neither grazing nor firewood. It was another of Haiti’s many faces, a place to find hunger.
The hounfour was deserted save for two patients awaiting treatment, and an old woman who was caring for them. Sheltered from the sun by a grass mat sat a beautiful girl, with deep almond eyes and eyelashes thick as fleece. She was dying from tuberculosis. Beside her was a small boy. The joints of mother and son stuck out like knots. Lying across from them near the entrance to the bagi was a middle-aged man whose lower leg was infected with elephantiasis.
Despite their obvious suffering, there was nothing forlorn about these people. The man laughed and welcomed us buoyantly, and the old woman, having made us comfortable in the shade, hurried to her hearth to bring coffee. The stricken man, as if embarrassed by the lack of preparation, hobbled forward and offered a share of his plate of food. I accepted and ate slowly, deliberately, hoping that he would sense my gratitude. There was so much I wanted to say, but out of respect I simply passed the plate on. It was not surprising to see such sickness in the hounfour, which is, after all, a center of healing. But to encounter such generosity and kindness in the midst of such scarcity was to realize the full measure of the Haitian peasant.
We remained with them for much of the afternoon. The mambo never showed up, but Jacques had unlimited patience, and his wife kept busy spreading the news of the capital. Some time around four, Mme. Jacques ran dry and suggested we return to Petite Rivière de Nippes and look up the mambo’s son, a houngan with the name of LaBonté, “kindness.” We found his hounfour without difficulty, and settled in for another long wait. Finally, well after dusk, LaBonté appeared and led us into the outer room of his temple, a small chamber with a single dusty bulb hanging from a cracked ceiling. He claimed to know nothing about zombi powders but offered instead a wide range of benevolent preparations that would increase our love, wealth, and fertility.
Rachel was adamant. “No. It is only one that we want.”
LaBonté countered by suggesting that we purchase a charm, which might accomplish whatever it was we needed the powder for. Throughout this rambling conversation, Jacques stood quietly by the door in his polished shoes and pressed linen, continually wiping his brow and chest with his handkerchief. His wife sat beside him, scrutinizing LaBonté. Suddenly she stepped between him and Rachel.
“Listen,” she said impatiently, “it’s simple. The blanc wants to kill someone. If you can’t give it to him, we’ll go somewhere else.” She turned abruptly, took Rachel by the arm, and made for the door. LaBonté got there ahead of her.
“Something might be arranged,” he said quietly. “But I will have to speak with some people. Come back tomorrow.”
The jeep broke down the next day, so we were delayed a day getting back to the fishing village. The hounfour was empty, and it was an hour before we located LaBonté. His welcome marked by suspicion, he called for three associates.
“You were told to be here yesterday,” he began once we were all together. “You best remember one thing. We can be as sweet as honey, or as bitter as bile. That said, we may begin the business.” It was an unexpected and, for a Haitian, uncharacteristic concern with punctuality.
To prove the efficacy of their poison, one of his associates, named Obin, offered to test a prepared sample on a chicken. An amusing interlude followed as we tried to locate a chicken healthy enough for the test. Mme. Jacques categorically refused the first four, claiming that a gust of wind would blow any one of them over. Finally, she accepted a young robust rooster.
LaBonté maneuvered Rachel and me into the inner sanctum of the temple. There were no windows; the only light was a narrow beam of sun that pierced the thatch roof. One by one the others came, passing briefly through the light and disappearing into the dark. The last figure closed the door behind him and took his place in our midst. A match was struck and the flame reached forward to light first one, then two more candles. Their soft glow revealed the points of a cross, beyond which sat the houngan. LaBonté lifted his hands to the altar and began a prayer for our protection. One of the men passed around a basin containing a pungent solution and instructed us to rub the potion into our skin. Once LaBonté was satisfied that we were safe, Obin sprinkled a small amount of the poison in a corner of the chamber. LaBonté lifted a clay jar of water from his altar and told me to pour a portion of it down the rooster’s throat. Moments later, Obin took the bird from my lap, placed it on top of the poison, and covered both with a rice sack.
From an obscure corner two voices, one gruff and the other strangely sensual, joined in a sonorous chant that filled the chamber. Beside me, the man who had passed the basin started to grate a human tibia. Sweat came to his brow, moistening the satin kerchief wrapped around his head as he too began to sing:
Make the magic Papa Ogoun, Oh!
Make the magic Gran Chemin, Ogoun,
That which I see, I can’t talk about.
Let me go,
Let me go, people!
Let me go.
Rather than die unhappy,
I’d rather die a young man.
Let me go.
I am Criminel,
I won’t eat people anymore.
The country has changed
Criminel says
I won’t eat people anymore.
With the blessing of the songs and his asson, LaBonté selected and sanctified the bottle that would hold the vital potion that would protect me when I administered the poison. I named my intended victim, and he whispered it to the bottle. A machete cracked three times against a stone. Obin pulled four feathers from the rooster’s wing and instructed me to tie them in the shape of a cross while invoking their blessing for my proposed work. The machete rang out once more. Obin led me to the cross, instructing me to make a small offering. I placed a few coins on the ground. Then, as I knelt, he inverted a bottle of clairin, causing it to bubble in a peculiar manner—a certain sign, I was told, that my desires would be fulfilled. A match dropped into the bottle exploded into flames, which for an instant illuminated the entire enclosure.
Mme. Jacques accompanied one of the men as they took the rooster to the seat to bathe its left foot. As soon as they returned, Obin threw sulphur powder into a flame, casting sparks with tails of acrid smoke that shot to all corners of the room. Then he released the rooster.
Meanwhile, the man in the satin kerchief had ground up the wood of cadavre gâté, one of the most important of vodoun’s healing trees, and mixed the dust with bits of decayed matter from a human cadaver, including the shavings of the leg bone. LaBonté placed this powder in my protection bottle, adding white sugar, basil leaves, seven drops of rum, seven drops of clairin, and a small amount of cornmeal. Then he rasped a human skull and added other materials provided by one of the men, who lived by the cemetery. LaBonté handed me three candles, three powders, and a packet of gunpowder. He told me to knead the powders into the soft wax before braiding the candles into one. A third time the blade of the machete fell on the stone, harder now, and the edge of the blade scattered sparks.
The spirits answered, mounting first the man with the kerchief, then Obin and LaBonté. LaBonté filled my protection bottle and held it to my lips, piously encouraging me to drink and breathe. This I did. The spirit led me and my companions out of the bagi, into another room where he ordered us to undress. One by one, beginning with myself, we were bathed. The spirit bound my head in red cloth, and as I stood naked in a large basin of herbs and oils he cleansed my skin, with broad soothing strokes, using the rooster as a sponge. The energy of the bird would pass to me, he promised, and by the end of the bath it would lose the breath of life. Rachel followed me into the basin, and then Jacques, and by the time Mme. Jacques was clean, the rooster lay on the ground, flaccid and quite dead.
“It is good,” Mme. Jacques said. “In Port-au-Prince the basin is terrible. Here you smell of beauty, even though you are about to kill.”
Now that we were safe, the spirit directed us back into the bagi for the preparation of the actual poison. There was a new song invoking Simbi, the patron of the powders.
Simbi en Deux Eau
Why don’t people like me?
Because my magical force is dangerous.
Simbi en Deux Eau
Why can’t they stand me?
Because my magical force is dangerous.
They like my magical force in order to fly the Secret Society.
They like my magical force in order to be able
To walk in the middle of the night.
There were four ingredients: one was a mixture of four samples of colored talc, another was the ground skins of a frog, the third was gunpowder, and the fourth was a mixture of talc and the dust ground from the dried gall bladders of a mule and a man. There was no fish, and no toad.
I glanced quickly toward the others, first Rachel, then Jacques. Both sat still and unchanged, but Mme. Jacques had shed her years like water. Her dress fell away from one shoulder, and she had crossed her legs so that a bare foot rested high on her thigh. From a wiry, grim peasant woman, she had become sultry and seductive. Her lips squeezed a cigarette, but it was the wrong way around—the lit end sizzled on top of her tongue.
Her husband caught my stare. “There is no problem,” he confided. “Often when she is taken by the spirit she rubs the juice of the chile pepper on her vagina. Listen!”
The body that had been Mme. Jacques was singing. “We are assembling, we are near the basin, we are going to work. We don’t know how it will be but we shall do the work.” The linked phrases of this high, plaintive wail merged with the rattle and whistle and bells in an ominous cacophony unlike any sound I had heard in a vodoun hounfour.
Then, speaking with a voice that was not hers, she demanded a second poison. Without argument one of the men brought forth a small leather pouch and emptied the contents into a mortar.
“These are the skins of the white frog,” the spirit intoned. “The belly of your victim will swell, and let them cut into it, it will bleed a river of water.”
I lifted one of the skins from the mortar and held it close to the candle. Even I could recognize it as that of the common hyla tree frog. Small glands beneath its skin secrete a compound that while irritating is hardly toxic.
To administer the poison, I was told, it was critical for both my own safety and the success of the work that I follow instructions precisely. On the night of the deed, I was to light the braided candle and hold it up before the evening star and wait until the sky darkened. To cast the death spirit, I would first have to beseech the star saying:
By the power of Saint Star,
Walk, Find
Sleep without eating.
Then, having saluted a complex sequence of stars, I was to place the burning candle in one of two holes dug beneath my victim’s door. Next, I was to drink from my protection bottle to imbibe the power of the cemetery. To set the trap I had merely to sprinkle the powder over the buried candle, staying carefully upwind while I whispered the name of my intended victim. Once the fated individual crossed over the poison, death would be imminent. As a final precaution, the spirit warned me to sleep with the cross of feathers beneath my pillow. That way the power of this ceremony could continue to shield me. With these final words, the spirit left.
“With this your enemy will fall,” Obin assured me as we were about to leave the hounfour. In his hand he held a small jar that contained the second preparation.
“And to make him rise again?” I asked, still clinging to the notion of an antidote.
“That is another magic. For what you have there is no treatment. It kills too completely.”
“And the other powder?” Mme. Jacques asked Obin.
“It’s the same,” he said. “With these you will kill. Is that not what you want?”
“There’s more.”
“What you have been given is explosive. Both powders shall leave your enemy but one ark, the earth that shall take him.”
“I want his body,” I said.
“For that you must return.”
“When?”
“When he is dead and you are ready.”
It was dusk and a young moon hung over the sea, but it was still hot. Jacques cracked open a bottle of rum, and we drank as we walked away. For a while no one spoke. Our clothes clung to our skin, and we smelled of the market—a combination of sweat, jasmine, and rotting fruit. The fishermen were out, two rows along the shore, and we watched the coils grow at their feet as they hauled in the ends of the great semicircles of net, which closed on piles of flotsam.
“Of course,” Mme. Jacques explained once we had reached the jeep, “there are dozens of powders. They walk in different ways. Some kill slowly, some give pain, others are silent.”
“And the ones we bought?”
“They carbonize. But it is the magic that makes you the master.”
“What of the others?”
“It is easier. In food. Or they prick the skin with a thorn. Sometimes they place glass in the mortar. It is a matter of power. If you want to learn the powders, you best walk at night.” Mme. Jacques accepted the bottle of rum. “But now,” she said, “you have known the face of the convoi. The society has touched you.”
“How d
oes she know these things?” Rachel teased, wrapping her arms around Jacques’s neck.
“Oh!” he cried, gagging on a swallow of rum and collapsing into uproarious laughter. “How might she know! They call her Shanpwel. Those men are her cousins. Obin is the president. She is the queen!”
Two men were waiting for me at Beauvoir’s that evening. One was the chief of police of a city in the north. The other I could have recognized by sound alone—by the peal of throaty laughter filtered through a thousand cigarettes until it had the edge of a rasp. He was the same man who had been waiting for us, with three others, on the night of my second day in Haiti, when we returned from Marcel Pierre’s with the bogus preparation. Then he had poured the sample onto his hand derisively. This time I learned his name—Herard Simon. He was equally blunt now.
There were at least four preparations that could be used to make zombis, and for the proper amount of money I could obtain them all. It was a substantial sum. I called New York from Max Beauvoir’s phone and received instructions to buy one powder, and if it worked on laboratory monkeys, I could return to purchase the others. I returned to Simon and halved the price. He agreed, and I gave him a deposit. He told me to meet him in the north in three days, then he left.
Our meeting had lasted scarcely longer than the time of my long-distance call, but my impression of Herard Simon carried well into the night, until it kept me from sleep. Outwardly, he seemed calm, almost sluggish, for long ago, the angles of his body had disappeared beneath a mountain of flesh. But like the Buddha he resembled, his corpulence had a purpose; beneath it there was something at once terribly wise and terribly savage, like the soul of a man who has been forced to kill. Nobody told me until much later, but already that night I knew: in meeting Herard Simon, I had met the source.