by Wade Davis
“It was hard-hit,” Rachel said. Her words took in all the confusion of dust and rubble that was Gonaives. The power was out, and in the darkness the city looked unnatural, its buildings half-abandoned, yet its streets alive with people. In the market the drifters and sellers huddled around small fires, their children in clumps. Everyone seemed to be living outside, like survivors camped atop a ruin.
“They closed the port,” Rachel said.
“When the road went through?”
“Before. Duvalier wanted everything in the capital.”
“So all the business left?”
She nodded. “Turn here,” she said suddenly, and we veered onto a gravel road riddled with potholes. “It used to be in Gonaives that if you were black, the mulattos wouldn’t sit beside you.”
“Duvalier changed that?”
“The revolution did. Now there’s hardly any mulattos left here.”
“That’s convenient,” I mumbled.
“What?”
“Nothing. Say, have we been here before?”
“You don’t remember?”
Then I did. Even in the darkness you couldn’t miss the mermaid swimming along that blue-and-green wall. The woman who ran the Clermezine nightclub, and who had expressed such a low opinion of Ti Femme, was the wife of Herard Simon.
I swung abruptly into the short drive, and for an instant the beam of the headlights froze the same amorphous group of idlers against the gate of the compound.
“Hélène’s away on pilgrimage, but Herard’s probably here.” Rachel started to say something to the men sitting around, but then stopped, hesitated, and, grabbing her cigarettes, stepped out of the jeep. She drew several of the youth toward her, and then quite deliberately asked one of them for a light.
Once back in the jeep, she said, “He’s not in. They say he had business.”
“Where would that be?”
“Anywhere. Maybe in town. Sometimes he hangs out by the waterfront. What shall we do?”
“Wait.”
I pushed open the door, propped a foot on a hinge, and settled back. Some of the youths gathered around. You could tell they were thirsty, so we shared what was left of the rum. It was good to watch the bottle pass around. That’s a special thing about Haiti—everyone loves to drink, but you never see anyone drunk.
We chatted away for a while, but gradually they drifted back to the gate, finished with us and ready to sink back into their nightly routine.
“Strange,” Rachel said once we were alone. “Did you notice the one on the left, the one that lit my cigarette?”
“You recognized him?”
“Not at first. Then I remembered. He was in L’Estère with Narcisse’s sister. I’m certain.”
“What’s he doing here?”
“He’s from here. The question is, what was he doing there?”
It was about nine when a slim figure slipped up to the side of the jeep and startled Rachel. Without identifying himself, he said quietly, “The commandant is waiting at his place.” Then he walked away.
“The commandant?” I asked as we pulled out of the drive.
“Everyone calls him that. He used to be head of the militia, the VSN.” She used the official acronym for the Ton Ton Macoute.
“Of Gonaives?”
“No, all the Artibonite.”
“When was that?”
“Right at the beginning. He’s retired now, but he still runs things. My father says that his people have been watching us since you arrived.”
Herard Simon didn’t have a lot to say. He sat alone, on the porch of a simple dwelling, absentmindedly brushing the flies away from his face. We shook hands at my initiative. Sometimes, when strangers meet because they must and nothing is said, the silence is honest. But here it wasn’t. It was a statement of his authority, and I had to struggle against an urge to crack it. When he finally spoke, it was with a voice that placed a shell of double meaning on every word.
“What do you care of zombis?”
“I’m curious.”
“Curious? You pay all this money because you’re curious?”
“Someone else pays.”
“The juifs [Jews]. Of course, you are not one of them. They send you because they won’t do the work. And who will make the money?”
“From what we have arranged, it seems that you will,” I said, ignoring his swipe at Kline and my other backers. It went on like this for some time, he asking all the questions, baiting me with his knowledge of my past.
“The blancs are blind,” he said, “except for zombis. You see them everywhere.”
“Zombis are a door to other knowledge,” I said.
“To death and death alone!” he exclaimed in a suddenly strident voice. “Vodoun is vodoun, zombis are zombis.” His calm returned just as quickly. “So,” he said, “you have seen Narcisse.”
“Yes, and his family too.”
“Well?”
“He lives.”
“Yes, one who comes from the ground can be quite normal. But tell me, blanc, if you were a woman, would you ask him to dance?” That cracked him up, and once again I heard that rasping laugh.
“They say he’s got a lawyer, and he’s trying to get back his land to work it again.” This made him laugh again, even harder. “This man Narcisse is half-intelligent. As if he can get protection in the capital from his own people.” He turned to Rachel. “Beauvoir! This is enough. Bring yourself and this blanc malfacteur back in the morning. Then we will begin the work.”
That night, while Rachel and the others at the nightclub slept, I lay in bed struggling for an answer that would explain it all. It hadn’t surprised or worried me that Herard Simon knew so much about our activities; they hadn’t been secret, and there were any number of obvious sources of information. What concerned me was the man himself. I couldn’t let him be. And I had barely met him, that was the extraordinary thing. He had that kind of presence, a charisma hot to the touch. There was something frightening about him, a latent violence that was both ancient and tribal. It seemed as if he bore within him the exploding energy of an entire race; as if his skin, stretched so thin over his massive body, lay ready to split, to release some great catastrophe of the human spirit. He exuded power. I felt it that night, as I had when we first met, and I would experience it again the following morning.
The party from Petite Rivière de l’Artibonite arrived just before noon, but the reputation of their region preceded them. Among other things, I had been told that there was scarcely a bone left in their public cemetery. They were five. The two riding in the cab of the pickup, one wearing an army uniform, had the bearing of officials. The three in the back had the look of mountain peasants. The scalp of one of these was dotted with furry patches—an occupational hazard, I was told, of the malfacteur, the one who grinds the powders.
Herard Simon directed us into the outer chamber of his hounfour. The negotiations were layered with go-betweens, but with no introductions. Herard spoke first, with a few measured words that seemed to secure each person to his will, establishing himself as the principal broker, and then said little. The military official hovered somewhat paternalistically over the peasants, but they spoke for themselves, in a heavily accented Creole that betrayed their roots deep in the mountains. They had a zombi, they claimed, and they also offered to prepare a sample of the poison. The discussion flared with proposal and counterproposal, while their hairless leader tossed off figures in great flurries of bravado, as if the mere mention of such astronomical sums might, like a charm, make them come true. His two partners clearly enjoyed the whole business; they rose up and down on their haunches, urging him on. When I sliced the price, they reacted with pious indignation.
Throughout all this Herard Simon sat silently near the wall, leaning forward on a wooden chair, resting his weight on his knees, virtually immobile. A menthol cigarette burned in his motionless right hand. His very indifference kept command of the conversation. Finally, perhaps tiring of the
inconclusive banter, he lifted both his arms and turned to the soldier.
“Where is it?” he asked.
“They have it with them.”
“Then bring it forward. Perhaps a zombi will loosen the blanc’s purse.”
The one in uniform said something to the leader of the peasants. He started to argue, but stopped and, reaching into a dusty bag, pulled out a small ceramic jar wrapped in a red satin cloth. Herard started to laugh, but his laughter had the edge of anger.
“Fools!” he cried. “Not that. They want the flesh.”
The significance of his words was lost for the moment in the blur of his rage. Scattering invectives, he banished all of us from the hounfour. The peasants fled, the officials foundered, and with total contempt Herard made his way back across the courtyard to his house.
He was laughing more jovially by the time we caught up with him. “Imagine, blanc,” he said to me, “they brought you a zombi astral because they didn’t think you’d be able to get a zombi of the flesh through immigration!”
“Wait a minute …” I started to say.
The expression on Herard’s face told me he was surrounded by idiots and I was one of them. “Three days,” he answered, “return in three days.” Again I started to say something, but his thick fingers passed once before his face to cut me off.
Two types of zombis, I thought. That changed everything.
In the summer in Haiti the spirits walk, and the people go with them. For weeks in July the roads come alive with pilgrims, and we followed them.
Leaving Gonaives, Rachel and I drove north across the mountains to the lush coastal plain, calling first at the sacred spring and mudbaths of Saint Jacques, and then moving on to the village of Limonade and the festival of Saint Anne. Here they had gathered, literally thousands of them dressed in the bright clothes and colors of the spirits, fused in hallucinatory waves that flowed across the plaza.
The seething edge of the throng enveloped us even as we stepped from the jeep. We were carried, flesh to flesh, by the collective whim of the crowd. It was like being pushed through the stuffed belly of a beast, and soon we were ploughing through the throng to the nearest refuge, the stone steps of the church standing firm like a jetty above the madness.
Our senses numbed, we entered the church and were well inside the nave before we realized what was going on. It was the Mass of the Invalids, and at our feet lay the most diseased and wretched human display imaginable. Lepers without faces, victims of elephantiasis with limbs the size of tree trunks; dozens and dozens of dying people, collected from the length and breadth of the country to seek alms and redemption at the altar of this church. It was a scene of such singular horror, we could think only of escape.
Rachel stepped ahead of me toward an open door, and then gasped. There in the shadow of a cross, her head covered by a black shawl, was a single woman, and draped across her legs was her daughter, a teenage girl whose shattered legs crossed like sticks. Her skin was jet black and her head a grotesque melon, so swollen with disease that you could see the individual follicles of hair. It was a sight so terrible that we could not pass. We turned back to wade through the brown-frocked beggars carpeting the front of the church, and as we passed they tugged at our clothes. There was nothing for them, and the real horror of the moment was less their condition than our fear.
Then, on the steps of the church, the scene turned into an epiphany. A healthy peasant woman, dressed in the bright-blue-and-red solid block colors of Ogoun, the spirit of fire and war, swirled through the beggars possessed by her spirit. Over her shoulder was slung a brilliant red bag filled with dry kernels of golden corn. She twirled and pranced in divine grace, and with one arm stretching out like the neck of a swan she placed a small pile of corn into each of the begging bowls. When she was finished, her bag empty, she spun around to the delight of all and with a great cry flung herself from the steps of the church. Rachel and I watched her flow into the crowd. Wherever she went the people backed away, that Ogoun might have space to spin. Our eyes followed her until she was gone, and then without speaking we dropped back into the crowd.
Our travels during the rest of that awesome day took us back across the plain to the old colonial capital of Cap Haitien, a gentle place whose warm texture belies a bloody history. At a house built on a ruin with material taken from the sea, we rang the bell of Richard Salisbury, known throughout Haiti as the British consul.
Salisbury, from what I had been told, had an enthusiastic interest in vodoun, and we hoped that he might provide some information concerning the time Narcisse had spent in Cap Haitien immediately following his release. At first there was no response, but after a second ring, the shutters of a second-floor window flung open, and the hot afternoon sun fell harshly on the etiolated body of a middle-aged man. He had just woken up.
Salisbury received us on his veranda in the shadow of an enormous Union Jack. With his handlebar moustache, peppermint complexion, and extended belly wrapped carelessly in a silk smoking jacket, he was a character straight out of Somerset Maugham. As it turned out, his knowledge of vodoun was superficial, and in fact he had nothing to do with the British government. An accountant whose meager investments in a local sugar mill had, until recently, allowed him to live royally in Haiti, he was less a diplomat than a metaphor for the demise of the empire. Salisbury now faced a major personal crisis, and we, unfortunately, were in a position to hear all about it. Corrupt partners and a depressed international market had bankrupted the mill, and he had no choice but to return to England. There he would face the life of any other middle-class accountant, riding the subway to a repetitive, meaningless job. Returning was the last thing he wanted to do, and now given the opportunity he turned to Rachel and asked quite desperately for advice. The sight of this grown man, this European whose attributes were a bit of capital and the false status once afforded to the color of his skin, beseeching a young Haitian girl, walked the fine line between comedy and tragedy.
Close to dusk, we managed to extract ourselves from the problems of Richard Salisbury and made for a coastal beach just east of the city. There beneath the palms, with the sun turning copper, we finally rested. The day had started off in the house of Herard Simon in a confrontation with the poison makers, had led to the mudbaths of Saint Jacques and the horror of Saint Anne, and then to the anachronistic Richard Salisbury. Now it ended on a pristine, tranquil Caribbean beach. I looked past the trees and heard the shrill, incoherent cry of the gulls as they swept and snapped in the waves. Down the shore there was a pair of cormorants, pelicans too. The luxury of wild things, lush and unreasonable. And in the water, Rachel, swimming like a dolphin.
Three days later, as previously arranged, we met again with Herard Simon in Gonaives. He was where he could be found every night, near the waterfront by a dilapidated movie house, his finger on the pulse of the street. His greeting this time was surprisingly cordial. Apparently my status had shifted somewhat—in what direction, I was not certain—for in place of the anonymity of “blanc” he now addressed me as his “petit malfacteur,” his little evildoer. Herard began by emphasizing that as a houngan he had no interest in zombis; they were nothing, he insisted, compared to the profound lessons of the vodoun religion. For business reasons, however, he had made the necessary arrangements. On the morrow, he promised, one of his contacts would begin to prepare the zombi powder.
“And malfacteur,” he said just before we left him, “with what I give you your monkey will go down, it will not come up, and it will never again wag its tail.”
It took a full week to make the poison.
First Herard, as houngan, prepared the antidote, which, not surprisingly, contained a plethora of ingredients, none of which had significant pharmacological activity. It consisted of a handful of bayahond leaves (Prosopis juliflora), three branches of ave (Petiveria alliacea), clairin, ammonia, and three ritualistically prepared lemons. As in the case of the reputed antidote prepared by Marcel Pierre, there was no evide
nce that it could chemically counteract the effects of any poison.
The actual poison did have potent constituents, and critically the ingredients overlapped in significant ways with those used at Saint Marc. Herard’s man distinguished three stages or degrees to the preparation. During the first a snake and the bouga toad (Bufo marinus) were buried together in a jar until “they died from rage.” Then ground millipeds and tarantulas were mixed with four plant products—the seeds of tcha-tcha (Albizzia lebbeck), the same leguminous species added by Marcel Pierre; the seeds of consigne (Trichilia hirta), a tree in the mahogany family with no well-known active constituents; the leaves of pomme cajou, the common cashew (Anacardium occidentale); and bresillet (Comocladia glabra). The last two plants are members of the poison ivy family, and both, especially bresillet, can cause severe and dangerous dermatitis.
These ingredients, once ground to powder, were placed in the jar and left below ground for two days. Then, at the second degree, two botanically unidentified plants known locally as tremblador and desmembre were added. For the third and final degree, four other plants capable of causing severe topical irritations were mixed in. Two were members of the stinging nettle family, maman guêpes (Urera baccifera) and mashasha (Dalechampia scandens). The hollow hairs on the surface of these plants act as small hypodermic syringes and inject a chemical similar to formic acid, the compound responsible for the pain of ant bites. A third plant was Dieffenbachia seguine, the common “dumbcane” of Jamaica. In its tissues are calcium oxalate needles that act like small pieces of glass. The English name derives from the nineteenth-century practice of forcing recalcitrant slaves to eat the leaves; the needles, by irritating the larynx, cause local swelling, making breathing difficult and speaking impossible. The fourth plant, bwa piné (Zanthoxylum matinicense), was added because of its sharp spines.