The Woman Who Lost Her Soul Hardcover

by Bob Shacochis

  But then François Colon ended a sentence Tom did not quite hear with a phrase that jarred him. The spell snapped and he made himself focus on the light-skinned lawyer, the last scion of a family annihilated by the dictator Papa Doc while Colon was away at university in Paris. He was an elegant, green-eyed mulatto with the fluffy manners of a Creole aristocrat who had made a fortune protecting other people’s fortunes from the internecine cupidity of the ruling class, and Harrington did not care for his smug superiority or his list of clients.

  Sorry, he said. What was that?

  I said, Don’t you?

  Don’t I what?

  Believe in mass graves for the right people.

  You don’t know what you’re saying, François, Tom responded, and by the time Colon explained his point, Harrington found himself buried under the edifice of the principles that had defined him, first as a correspondent and now as a lawyer and activist, not vague notions but once-clear ideas battered into merciless diffusion by Haiti.

  He had come to understand that we choose the lies in which we participate and, in choosing, define ourselves and our actions for a very long time, perhaps forever—Haiti invited such participation, Haiti was a feeding trough for the manifest appetites of egos and illusions and simple schemes of rescue, Haiti offered its players a culture of impunity not just for the atrocities that devoured body and soul, but for the self-deceptions best described as crimes of enlightenment. Tom Harrington understood this, understood that the notions of civilization he had devoted himself to were mostly myths meant to replenish one’s inventory of motivations, and if power could be used for moral purposes, he had seen very little of it in the world. Justice was the blood sport of kings, human rights were the toilet that powerful men shit in. Am I wrong or right? demanded François Colon. The rights of man—was that the benediction he recited as he stood over the freshly opened pits, counting the bones?

  Somewhere along the line, standing over the graves watching the bones boil up to the surface, Harrington had lost a firm sense of the value of life and, knowing that was the case, fought for its value with more ferocity but less inner faith in the battle and in himself, a humanitarian wandering around hell in a stupor. Now it seemed he would be tested again.

  For some months the bourgeoisie in the north, the big landowners in the mountains west of Cap-Haïtien, had begun to return quietly from exile in Miami and New York and the Dominican Republic to live in the democracy created by the Americans. Colon himself had encouraged them, assured them—your fields are fallow, your coffee beans unpicked, your workers unpaid, your prayers unanswered: be patriots, rebuild your homeland, restore its dignity and beauty. Yes, there were troubles between the families and the peasants in the past; yes, there was oppression; yes, there was exploitation; yes, bloodshed; but Haitians were one people sharing one destiny and would, perforce, accept the new order. And, monsieur, how do you suppose it has been for them since they have returned to their country? asked Colon. What in their birthplace did they find to lift their spirits? Merde. Shit. Instead of democracy, anarchy. Instead of police, bandits. Instead of new friends, old enemies. Instead of harmony, revenge. Instead of human beings, animals. Instead of peace, death.

  François Colon asked Tom to remember back to the second week of the invasion when American marines had occupied Cap-Haïtien. You know, of course, of the massacre by Jacques Lecoeur and his men in the countryside during that time, said Colon. The houses of the chefs du sections razed to the ground, the men and their families nowhere to be found, two FAHD caserns attacked and overrun by Lecoeur’s gang, the soldiers unaccounted for.

  You investigated these massacres yourself, monsieur, I recall.

  I heard the rumors, yes.

  Rumors!

  You’re right, I did investigate. No bodies, no graves, no witnesses. And yes, the chefs du section’s houses were burned, but these men were macoutes—

  Ah, monsieur, I’m happy you make this point, because it answers my original question: You believe in mass graves for the right people . . . the so-called bad people, yes?

  That’s not at all what I’m saying, Harrington protested. I mean they were men hated by their communities, by the people, and they abandoned their houses and abandoned their posts and ran away.

  Perhaps we must think of it as justice, when bad people are killed by vigilantes, said Colon, offending Harrington, because advocates like François Colon, men of his position, men with no apparent use for the inconveniences of process and transparency, were the ones who had maneuvered adamantly behind the scenes to thwart the Commission for Truth and Reconciliation.

  Yes, I admit as much, said Colon, but now I am here to help.

  But it’s over, Harrington wanted to say. Talk to me about it, he said instead.

  On a page he removed from a yellow legal pad, Colon gave Harrington the names and last known location of six men and one woman—all members of families notorious for plundering Haiti generation after generation—and Tom read the names and stared at the piece of paper. Where are these people? asked Colon. He wanted Tom to find them. You know how to do this, he said. Arrangements had been made. Find their bodies or find their killers, he said, and doors that are closed shall open.

  But it’s over, Harrington again wanted to say but knew he couldn’t, and his vacant gaze drifted up to the veranda and settled on Jackie, the gabled and spired backdrop of the hotel like a haunted house in the moonlight, and the longer he looked at her the more he felt a stranger to himself, sensing she would stalk the periphery of his life if he did not know her.

  His return to the table interrupted a debate about the wisdom of disbanding the collection of brutes and idiots formerly known as the Haitian army, Jackie wagging her fork at Eville to make a point Tom imagined she had picked up from the newspapers. The conversation stopped, the two of them studying the change in Tom as he sat back down. There’s a situation, he said, his brow furrowing. Something’s come up. It wasn’t his nature to be evasive and his reluctance to explain himself, acting as though he had something to hide, made him uncomfortable. He looked at Jackie, her eyes quizzical, her expression waiting for him to speak, and could not resist the impulse to tell her everything. Neither she nor Burnette seemed to understand or care about the moral ambiguity of his mission to the north.

  What’s this Lecoeur like? Burnette wondered, impressed that Tom had hiked into the mountains and tracked down the guerilla leader, a goal that had eluded the Special Forces.

  I doubt very much that he’s a killer.

  He’s a warlord.

  Bad intel, said Tom. He’s a freedom fighter.

  How can you be a so-called freedom fighter and not a killer? said Master Sergeant Burnette. Explain that one to me.

  Can I go with you? Jackie said to Tom and though he hesitated and said he wanted to think about it and Eville thought it was a bad idea to take her up into the wild heart of the mountains, again it was not possible for Tom to tell her no.

  Eville said thanks for the night out and wished them luck and Tom walked him down to the car park and there was Gerard still hanging about with his crowd of fixers, playing dominoes. He gave Gerard the keys to drive the sergeant back to his base and told him he could take the car home for the night but be back early to go to the airport. Gerard asked if he was leaving for Miami and Tom said, no, Le Cap. Gerard wanted to know if he should pack an overnight bag but Tom told him he was flying up with the UN and Gerard knew what that meant, no Haitians except gros negs and murderers. If you’re ever in Fayettenam, said Eville Burnette. They shook hands and Tom felt they had both come a long way in the past year toward respecting each other’s place in the world but doubted they would ever see one another again.

  Jackie had left the veranda—Tom could see that as he walked back toward the wall of sound coming from the Oloffson, the air fragrant with potential,
anxious to be alone with her again. Maybe someone had asked her to dance he thought and pushed his way into the bar and searched the cramp of dancers out on the floor but there were only two white women there among the heave of black bodies and she wasn’t one of them. He waited by the line to the WC until a man came out and then he went to the front desk and asked to be connected on the house phone to her room but the line was busy and still busy when he tried again after squeezing back through to the bar for a cognac, then back again for another as the band unplugged and the place began to empty down to Tom and the bartender and a lost pair of unlucky whores, one with four or five strands of billy-goat hair on her chin. He phoned one last time and she picked up with a sharp, Yes? He said, You just disappeared, and Jackie said in a bothered tone that it really been a long day and she’d see him in the morning. When he went back to the bar to sign his bill he heard pistol shots outside the high walls but that was normal and he went to bed.

  Of all the things he might have said to her he said the worst, telling her she looked pretty as she thumped across the floorboards of the veranda toward him the next morning shortly after dawn. Her face was open and fresh and painfully young, without makeup except the slightest bit to enlarge her eyes. What she could pull back of her hair was banded in a ponytail, what she couldn’t pull back hung to the sides like a dog’s floppy ears, a black baseball cap on her head sans logo or lettering, her tan photographer’s vest over a white V-neck T-shirt, the same baggy many-pocketed pants he had seen her in before, hiking boots, camera bag, the straps of a nylon day pack pushing her breasts together into a pronounced greeting. Her sleepy expression hardened as she lowered her bag and removed her pack and sat across from Tom at the table bringing a whiff of talcum and skin lotion to his nose. She looked right through him and he could see she was this other woman again, severe and bilious and bitchy, the one he knew first and still most expected.

  Is that why you’re taking me? Because I’m pretty?

  Forget it, he said, shaking his head. He had been at the Oloffson long enough to enjoy early morning kitchen rights, permission to make coffee before the staff arrived. Would you like some? he asked, holding the pot over an empty cup and she nodded.

  No, really, she said, unwilling to not challenge him. That’s the reason, isn’t it?

  You sure run hot and cold, don’t you?

  What do you mean? she said archly.

  He drank his coffee because he wasn’t going to say any more. Yesterday he had put aside his identity to be with her but today he had folded himself back into the resolve of his profession and could not let himself be distracted by a neurotic woman. They sat for several minutes without speaking, listening to the flute of birdsong below in the gardens, Jackie’s head bowed, the purse of her lips inches from the rim of her cup. Finally she sighed and raised her eyes and looked at him, her mouth gradually forming a half-smile of contrition.

  Sorry. Okay?

  What we have to do is very difficult. You have to trust me. We have to get along. It will be a serious mistake if you go and you don’t trust me and we don’t get along.

  I know, Jackie said, reaching across the table to take his hand and squeeze it with reassurance. We will. Just don’t underestimate me because I’m a female. That would be a mistake too. That’s all I meant to say.

  Our friends in the Special Forces will appreciate that.

  Oh, my God, that woman beat the shit out of those guys, didn’t she, and they both laughed and Tom felt more at ease.

  Gerard arrived and they drove to the airport and then to the opposite perimeter of the compound where the UN had established its headquarters and Gerard waited while Tom and Jackie went inside to add her name to the flight manifest but immediately there was a problem. No matter how many times Tom waved his documentation in the face of the flight operations manager and insisted that the photojournalist be allowed to accompany him on his official mission to the north, the ops manager repeated mechanically that Jacqueline Scott had not been properly accredited and was ineligible for free rides on military helicopters. The argument brought the public affairs officer—a friend of Tom’s who tried to help—out from his cubicle but when Jackie couldn’t produce any ID affiliating her with a media outlet or NGO, there was nothing he could do but smile cockeyed at Tom and his little friend.

  Walking back to the SUV Tom asked her how bad she wanted to go and she said how bad do you think and he hated to see her crestfallen and felt a sudden strong need not to disappoint her. Okay, he said, let’s talk to Gerard and see if he’s up for a trip, but Gerard took him aside and confessed he did not want to drive all day alone with this foo white woman who had lost her soul and he didn’t understand why Tom wanted her along when he already had a taste of what a problem she could be.

  She’s a photographer, this could be an important story. She wants to work, and you want to work. True?

  I don’t know. I don’t trust this woman, but Gerard nevertheless agreed to take her north.

  Jackie thanked Tom but Tom said thank Gerard. He promised they would all ride back together in the SUV in two or three days. They drove out on the tarmac to the Chinook helicopter the UN leased from the Americans and Tom walked around under the tail of the bird and handed his rucksack to the cargo chief who checked his name on the manifest and handed him earplugs. Tom looked at the clipboard and up the ramp of the Chinook into the tubular cave of its interior, its center deck loaded with palettes of supplies and the seats along both sides of the fuselage unoccupied but for a squad of Caricom policemen and three civilians he assumed were contract employees. He turned back to the cargo chief and said not many passengers.

  We pick them up in Gonaïves.

  Tom nodded toward the SUV where Jackie and Gerard were still standing. See that girl over there?

  Yes, sir.

  Let’s take her along.

  No can do. Bird’s full after Gonaïves.

  She’ll sit in your lap, man, he said.

  I wouldn’t make it through the flight, sir.

  He walked back to tell her he had tried and that he would reserve rooms for both of them at the Hotel Christophe and see them there at cocktail hour. Out of the habit of Haitian manners, he leaned forward to peck Jackie on the cheek farewell but she jerked her head away and down so that the kiss fell awkwardly where her baseball cap met her ear. In his seat at the rear of the helicopter he buckled into his safety harness and the rotors began to whine but he couldn’t get the image of her unnecessary rejection out of his mind, and as they lifted into the air he told himself of course it was out of her control and slowly he forgave her.

  On the flight across the Bay of Gonave the Chinook speared through the top of a squall, bumping in and out of the storm’s cluster of cells, purple whirlwinds of rain opening into brilliant white celestial amphitheaters of billowing cumulus, then slamming back into the tempest, the rain shearing off into calm blue fields scrubbed with sunlight, then shearing back into a dark whip of chaos, and when it was over Tom felt spiritually alive and filled with gratitude. Then they descended to the infested wasteland that was Gonaïves.

  The three blan civilians disembarked, as did the police, and Tom walked across a soccer field sown with broken glass and garbage to a line of vendors behind a chain-link fence. He bought a Coca-Cola from an old woman squatting next to a filthy plastic bucket of melting ice and a banana fritter from another woman just like her and stood with them in the blistering sun and listened to the merchants’ scrape-bottom litany of proverbs and misery and jokes while he waited for the ground crew to offload a palette of bottled water and another of canned food and vegetable oil and meals ready to eat. A pair of white pickup trucks arrived at the landing pad, their beds lined ten each with Pakistani troops crammed together on wooden benches, and Tom watched them file onto the ramp of the Chinook with their heavy rucksacks and their rifles, thinking th
ey seemed more geared up and professional than the typical Central Asian cannon fodder. Finally the cargo chief waved him back and Tom strapped himself in and they waited for the better part of an hour without any explanation and then took off.

  At the airstrip in Cap-Haïtien, he was met by a Pakistani aide-de-camp who drove him a few hundred yards to the UN bivouac where he sat down in the officers mess for an early lunch of dahl and rice, fried cauliflower, and chicken with Colonel Khan, the base commander for the northern district. The colonel’s briefing took Tom by surprise. Now that the Americans had left, said Colonel Khan, he had been successful in his attempt to coax Jacques Lecoeur out of the mountains for a negotiation. To negotiate what? asked Tom.

  What else is there to negotiate? said Khan. To lay down their arms and join the political process, inshallah, said the colonel.

  When was this? asked Tom.

  One month ago.

  And?

  Mister Lecoeur agreed. But he has not turned in his weapons. He has not come out of the wilderness.

  Tom asked the colonel about the reports of people missing from the big families.

  It’s difficult to know, said the colonel. Some are gang members, very slippery characters. Some might have returned to the States or gone to the capital without telling anybody. But you are here to solve the mystery, I am told. You are the expert, the one people will talk to.

  Not everyone.

  You promise them what you can’t give them and they come to you like children.

  What do I promise?

  Justice.

  What do you promise?

  The wrath of God. The divine right of kings. And failing that, then order. Have you ever been to Pakistan? the colonel asked.

  No.

  These people who can’t control themselves. In Pakistan, we know what to do with them.

  I’ve heard that’s true. Such an orderly nation, Pakistan.