It must have been a magic mountain, Kenscoff, because a storm lived on top of it. Caught in a constant clash of sea air and mountain wind, a microclimate rained on the city like a cartoon cloud pours down on a depressed or angry character. Even if you didn’t believe in Voodoo or zombies or hell, you thought again after a couple of nights at the Oloffson.
The hotel was falling to pieces and had hardly ever been cleaned, but for the fan of Graham Greene every moment spent in it sent shivers down the spine. The John Barrymore suite was unchanged from the room in which Mr. Brown’s mother died at the beginning of The Comedians. It was a rambling three-room apartment with high white walls and creaky wooden floors, and your own individual terrace with a view over the whole city and the port. There was a huge old four-poster bed in the corner, shrouded in musty mosquito netting. I lay on it that first night, literally tingling with ecstasy, as the endless rain beat down on the corrugated-iron roof. At some point it stopped as suddenly as it began, and screams, shouts and the odd gunshot drifted up from the city below.
The first clue that something was about to happen at the Oloffson was when the hotel’s matriarch grandmother made an appearance around noon, in her pink nightgown and gauge-four rollers in her hair. By mid-afternoon the normally tranquil terrace began to fill up with dusty Peace Corps volunteers who had trekked in from behind God’s back, their disco outfits in their rucksacks. Drum sets, bongos and shack-shacks began to appear out of cupboards and drawers. Eight-foot-long, oboe-shaped horn instruments wailed plaintively as the band set up in the cavernous hotel lobby, which seemed to have been hewn out of the cliff edge to which the hotel was glued.
Thursday nights were famous at the Oloffson. It was when Richard (the hotel’s owner) performed with his voodoo band Ram, and the Port-au-Prince “in” crowd, the hillside bourgeoisie, danced, drank and cruised until dawn. There was no point in going to bed because the floor literally shook with the noise of the party below. They were all fiercely anti the present Aristide administration and the place simmered with discussion, observed by undercover CIA operatives. “Ram night” started out pretty harmlessly around nine. The urban expats began to trickle down the mountain, with local beauties on their arms. It would appear that “foreign affairs” were what the charity, NGO and diplomatic worlds were all about. “Quelle surprise!” said the Idaho Indian, as the head of an aid foundation swished in with a very young bit of trade.
“Ayee!” screamed the NGO queen. “Look what the cat dragged in! You’re going to be here for my farewell party. I’m taking over in Asia next week.”
“Quelle tristesse. That won’t be nearly so much fun!” replied the first.
“Of course, I’m real cut up to be leaving Marcel, but what can you do? My wife was beginning to ask questions, so it’s probably for the best.” He squeezed his date’s thigh and the boy looked down, embarrassed.
The American ambassador, a small neat man named Dean Curran, was the central character in Port-au-Prince. When he arrived that night at about eleven o’clock, flanked by his secret service entourage with their thick necks and earpieces, there was a positive frisson around the room. He held all the power on that sorry isle.
By midnight, the place was rocking, and the sissy rum-cocos from the zombie-like hotel waiters had been replaced by shots and bottles concealed up the locals’ sleeves and under their skirts. Everyone was past caring, with the noble exception of the coiffed grandma who was left guarding the ancient cash register like a toothless poodle with cataracts. A voodoo belly dancer began to gyrate in front of me. She sprayed magical toilet freshener onto my wrists and massaged “oil of poulet” into my temples. “For sex!” she said, dragging me to my feet and onto the dance floor. She nodded her head gravely before shoving her hand down my trousers.
As the night ploughed on, clothes came off, bodies shone with sweat and the room heaved as one. Drums and horns reached a fever pitch, driving harder and harder, the dance floor turned into a giant voodoo rave. In a huddle of glistening youth swayed the ambassador. The NGO queen twirled round and round the wretched Marcel in a kind of trance. Maybe it was just the toilet freshener kicking in, but the whole writhing mass seemed to be on the move, transporting itself back to the dark continent.
Paul Farmer met us outside his clinic in the arid mountains of the central plateau four hours down a dirt track posing as the highway. He was a bit like the flying nun, with an unruly shock of black hair, wearing a white coat that flapped behind him as he swooped around. He had an astonishing energy, an effortless attention and curiosity, and he segued from laughter and idle chatter to serious concern over a patient in a nanosecond. He was worldly and other-worldly. He had a stethoscope around his neck and his hands played with it as we talked, as if they couldn’t wait to get back to work. He was an amazing character, half nutty professor, half explorer, and an uncomplicated compassion flowed from him that lit up his surroundings. He was different from everyone else. He wasn’t acting. He didn’t put on a charity face. He was himself. He had a great sense of humour, and it was lovely to watch him in action as he made his rounds of the clinic. In one of his new TB decompression rooms sat a little girl on a bed. Her hair was braided. Paul held her hand and told her in Creole that she couldn’t go back home for Easter. The girl listened in silence, then she gasped and tears poured from her eyes. For several minutes Paul sat with her, not speaking, as she wept. Finally she looked up and smiled at him through her tear-smudged face. He looked back at her with such tenderness that it quite took my breath away.
People walked for days to get to his clinic, and sometimes it was mayhem. When Paul arrived the whole place erupted. People grabbed at him, held onto his clothes as though just by touching him they would be cured. He was unfazed by this constant feverish attention. Actually, he was a kind of saint.
Later he took us to his house, which was up a steep overgrown path at the edge of the village. We ran to catch up as he disappeared over the brow of a hill, talking all the while, coat-tails billowing in the wind. His home was really no more than a hut. He had built a little Japanese pond and a tiny garden. He rummaged around and produced bottles of lethal Haitian beer, and we sat there chatting while the sun went down. Soon he was called back to the clinic for an emergency. We braced ourselves for the drive back to Port-au-Prince and said goodbye. He cut an incredibly romantic figure, waving through the back window of our van. Courageous, compassionate, brilliant and funny: he had it all. But he was a very vocal supporter of Aristide as well, and this put him in a lot of danger. “Paul should be careful,” someone growled threateningly at the Oloffson that night.
Sunday lunch was at the American Embassy. We were shown through the house and out onto a huge lawn. In the middle distance the Mambo Ambo was holding court by his summerhouse. Two beautiful retrievers jumped in and out of the pool. Port-au-Prince shimmered like a vague dream beneath us, or a forgotten saucepan on a burning hob. A table was set underneath a huge tree. Cut glass gleamed on a starched cloth. As we waded across the lawn, all those pleasant noises from the other world bled in: the murmur of polite conversation, the clatter of cutlery, the uncorking of bottles, laughter thrown into the wind. The gurgle and giggle track of Western largesse. Pretty soon I had drunk a few glasses of wine and found myself talking to an ultra-chic voodoo woman dressed in couture with a huge pair of dark glasses. She was unfathomable behind those shades. She had milk-white skin, but on close inspection she was black. Even more extraordinarily, she had seen me perform on stage in Paris. In fact she was the Minister of Culture here in cloud cuckoo land, although she looked like a Left Bank junkie from the seventies. When I expressed surprise that she was a minister, someone next to me giggled, “Well, they’d been through everyone else. She was the last choice.” It was water off a duck’s back to my new friend, who leant towards me conspiratorially and told me the one true thing of the trip. “You don’t need to believe anything anyone says here. We are all so jealous, you see.”
She caught the eye of th
e Mambo Ambo. For a second his piercing blue peepers bore deep into the black holes of the Minister of Culture’s shades. Maybe she was talking too much. She looked defiantly back at him and said with a hint of a sneer, “You should have seen the ambassador this morning with the President. I was there. It was quite something.”
Apparently there had been a set-to between the Ambo and the ex-priest that morning about the new Chief of Police, and feelings were running high. But all was forgotten as lunch cross-faded through course after course, and the sinking sun threw long shadows from the huge tree across the lawn towards the house.
I didn’t meet Aristide, but we had an audience with his wife. Inside the White House, one was suddenly back in the First World, frisked by muscle-bound mercenaries with machine-guns, and escorted across marble floors past gracious french windows. All the rumours ringing in my head, the smears of the hillside bourgeoisie—that Aristide beat his wife, that he was a devil worshipper—were confounded by Madame Aristide, who was more like an account manager at the Bank of America than a voodoo muse. She was polite, detached and tense. We were served coffee by a butler, and it was hard to join this new piece of the puzzle with the rest of Haiti. The corridors of power seemed to have nothing in common with the cracked mountains, the hungry faces, or the child prostitutes hiding in the graveyard.
Maybe they never do.
Our trip was over before it began. Suddenly we were back in the time-locked airport, this time on a magic carpet provided by Madame Aristide. We floated through the chaos to a diplomatic room where a government official did all our paperwork. Then we wandered through the airport, bought some T-shirts, had a few coffees. We were exhausted, listless. We had hardly slept but still it seemed like a mad dream. Two porters wanted to know about the war in Iraq. They were upset. They said it was bad. Their concern made you want to cry. Why should they care? Nobody cared about them.
The plane climbed through the ever-threatening clouds and burst free into the bright blue Caribbean sunshine, escaping Haiti’s clutches. Goodbye to the Aristides, to the hillside bourgeoisie, the foreign diplomats, and Paul saving the poor in the mountains. The ten-day deadline was about to expire. Would the Chief of Police survive? Who would occupy the presidential palace next week? Would the Aristides make it until the next election? Would there be a next election? One thing felt sure: the Olofson would remain, suspended in limbo, fighting off the rain, its pretty whitewashed balconies glimmering at night through the trees like something you read about in a novel long ago, a stage set for sad goodbyes. Its indispensable terrace would continue to play host to intrigue and subterfuge. Maybe one day the termites or the rain might get the better of it and it would simply crumble against the cliff to which it clung and slide slowly into oblivion.
Quelle est cette île triste et noire—c’est Cythère,
Nous dit-on un pays fameux dans les chansons,
Eldorado banal de tous les vieux garçons.
Regardez, après tout, c’est une pauvre terre.
CHAPTER 46
Viva la Diva
I stopped off in London on my way to Moscow to join Sharon and Marek for the end of A Different Loyalty, where I went to Channel 4 and the BBC and countless other establishments, trying to interest them all in a documentary about Haiti, but no one took the bait.
Why Haiti? What was so interesting about it? I tried to explain that the whole country seemed to be teetering on the edge of a precipice, that America was trying to dislodge its democracy, that nothing much had changed since Graham Greene’s time. Perhaps I was overzealous about the Greene connection but I was stumped when one television executive said, “Who’s Graham Greene?”
I got nowhere, though nine months later Haiti hit the news as the whole country exploded into chaos after a dangerous coup. Aristide was forced into exile at the hands of American marines. Paul Farmer’s valuable jeeps, which had enabled him to treat patients far afield, were commandeered by the rebels who could be seen on the TV, driving about in them and shooting at the crowds. It was too late to go back. Things were too dangerous and anyway all my contacts had flown. The Mambo Ambo had been reposted, and it looked as though Paul Farmer was moving his operations to Rwanda.
Moscow had completely changed when we arrived. There was a huge seven-floor shopping centre under Red Square, and the old babushkas who had sat with such frosty Soviet dignity on street corners in the old days, just thirteen years ago, selling their pickles and making ends meet, had now turned into deranged beggar women. They hung around the entrance to this huge underground mall, begging frantically, grabbing your clothes and shrieking for mercy. There was no place for them in Putin’s Russia. Five-star hotels had sprung up all over the town. There were restaurants and fast cars, and the rich tore through the traffic in convoys of motorbikes with flashing lights and sirens, ignoring red lights and pedestrians.
We had no permits to shoot in Red Square, and Marek particularly wanted a shot of me walking past Lenin’s tomb, so early one morning five of us snuck out and hid behind an archway until there was nobody about. When the coast was clear we all jumped out and filmed for a couple of minutes while the soldier’s back was turned. It was such fun to work this way, and we were all thoroughly invigorated by the time we got to the Lenin Library, where Sharon and I were to play a scene in which I explained to her why I had betrayed my country and her. We shot it with this incredible building behind us. The two of us walked slowly through the library, as the camera tracked along beside us, and I gave a speech of interminable length and pomposity. The night before, Marek and I had decided to cut it.
When we rehearsed the scene with Sharon, who, needless to say, had a photographic memory, I did a revised version of the endless explanation.
“What happened to the part when you explain to me why you became a communist?” she asked.
“We cut it. It goes on for too long and it’s too simplistic,” I replied. Alarm bells.
Sharon’s head swivelled around and she looked at me very close, like an alien surveying an earthling. “But my character needs to hear that, or else she doesn’t know why she’s here.” To say that her regard was becoming steely would perhaps be an understatement.
“The important thing for the audience is to keep awake,” I replied tersely. Sharon was brilliant but it never crossed her mind that a film she was in could be boring.
Marek joined the discussion. “Sharon, it’s just that from an English perspective, it feels too obvious for him to talk like that, and apart from the fact that the speech is really long, he’s telling us things we already know.”
“I don’t give a fuck. It has to stay in,” commanded Sharon.
The problem was that I hadn’t learnt it. There were two pages of dialogue, but rather than collapse into an all-out scuffle on the last day, I went to my little deckchair and learnt that speech in twelve minutes. My brain cells had a fit but on the first take I got it in one and actually the scene wasn’t too bad. Sharon was probably right. But in the end the entire film was so tedious that it was just another dull scene of no special merit.
Finally, we shot the last scene of the movie. Our two characters stood on a bridge. My people (KGB) on one side, Sharon’s (MI5) on the other. It was supposed to be the dramatic high point of the movie but we had only three hours to shoot it. Marek screamed “Action!” through the megaphone. We walked slowly towards each other across the river, stopping in the middle, searching each other’s face for the last time. I tried to imagine Rachmaninov in the background, but all I could hear was some grips and sparks from under the bridge, complaining about the catering. I said my lines. I told Sharon that I wasn’t coming with her back to the West and we said goodbye for the last time. Sharon was brilliant in the scene but I was curiously empty. I felt as though I was watching everything from a long way off. There was Sharon against a Soviet high-rise and a slate sky with thousands of miles of Russia on either side, and I felt dead. I folded my old school scarf around her neck. My hands seemed to be someon
e else’s. We stared at each other for a long moment. Sharon tried to articulate something but couldn’t. I remember thinking, who is this woman? before she turned and walked back over the bridge, stealing the brilliant Sally Bowles wave from the end of Cabaret. I watched her go, devoid of expression, and then went home to release our budgie into the freezing Moscow winter.
“He finally came in,” said Sharon as she returned over the bridge.
It was a beautiful spring day. It was strange and sad but also exhilarating being Kim Philby all those years later in the new capitalist Russia, walking through the Lenin Library with Sharon Stone on my arm, the ring of Haiti in my ears and the wails of displaced babushkas from the street below. It was strange and sad and exhilarating to be finishing another film with Marek. Twenty years separated our two spy films: the first one had established us both, and changed our lives; the second was unfortunately an ember. My acted deathliness in Moscow at the age of twenty-two was somehow more convincing than the weird feeling of emptiness I felt on the bridge and in the Lenin Library all those years afterwards.
That evening we met in the make-up room at the hotel and took off our disguises in front of makeshift mirrors in rooms that had been commandeered for the film. Everyone was packing up. It felt like the last day of school. People ran down corridors with bottles of vodka. We all got drunk. Post-mortems began, and all the petty grievances and grudges of the past three months evaporated. Sharon took off her raven wig, I shaved my head, and we looked at each other in the mirror. We were back. The possession was over. The ghosts of Kim and Sally disappeared into the white night. Sharon was like Regan at the end of The Exorcist. She was worn out, slumped in a chair, wearing a tank top. She’d had a bit of a go with the nail scissors, and a great chunk of hair had been cut from the middle of her head during some late-night meltdown, but she looked beautiful.
Red Carpets and Other Banana Skins Page 42
