Not Dead Yet

by Herbert Gold

  “Is that a critical, Herb?”

  “Oh, no, nothing like that.”

  He paused to gather his thoughts. “It's time for the black shits to get something from the brown shits.”

  I never summoned up enough rudeness to question his multifaceted art dealing: buying, promoting, selling, donating, insuring, and burning. If I did, he would call all my tennis drives out instead of only the ones close to the baseline. “Like to place a little bet, make things a little more interesting in this heat?” he gently inquired in the soft monotone he used for understated, well-bred persuasion.

  We bet five gourdes, which at that time in the late sixties was fixed at a dollar. For me, it was worth five gourdes to see how the bet affected his serve. With a dollar at stake, he served with both feet over the baseline. He probably could have beaten me anyway, but for Whitley, winning wasn't enough; playing the game according to the rules of others was a violation of his personal code. He needed to show me, the world, and the ghosts of his history who was boss. He also liked taking the five gourdes; a person can always find something to do with them. This baby was a winner.

  Only in Haiti would Whitley and I have been tennis partners, even something like buddies. We were two blancs on an isolated island, sharing an interest in tennis, primitive art, and the tragicomedy of Haitian history. Under the circumstances it seemed like a lot to have in common, even though we had little in common.

  Today my friend Whitley was more than usually exasperated. He had given the benefit of his expert counsel to the stupid captain and the stupid captain had still said no. He just stood there. He looked at Whitley, impenetrable. He seemed not to understand anything Whitley explained about investment in artistic genius and future resale value. Whitley hated it when a person persisted in his own irrelevant distractions while Whitley was giving him the lowdown on indigenous culture.

  “Perhaps after I think about this,” said the captain.

  “Personally, I don't think you will,” said Whitley.

  Some people have no esthetic judgment, nor do they want any help. Not young anymore, Whitley retained the urgent, rosy, youthful glow of a person who needs to get his own way and occasionally doesn't, but at least he could feel good about not abasing himself. He didn't have to pretend anymore. He could abandon himself to his natural pleasure in disliking someone who didn't come up to his standards.

  He seemed to have reservations about me, too, and I couldn't blame him. He asked: “Maybe I'm wasting my time being your friend?”

  I didn't answer.

  “You're saying you're not my friend, Herb?”

  “I didn't say anything.”

  He gazed at me with mild, almost amorous satisfaction. “At last the lad speaks. That's what you're telling me, am I right?” He grinned and stared, his lips slightly parted as if he were out of breath. “And I can hear your footsteps trotting away, very clearly, trot-trot, trot-trot, although you think you're still standing right here. Isn't that what a true artist does? Or a true critic of art who devotes his life to it? Hear or paint what hasn't happened yet?”

  Maybe the spirit of decency was prowling around Whitley, making it difficult for him to be what he was; or if not decency, at least tenderness, a vibration of hurt and need that expressed itself as hurt, need, and anger. Once meeting him for tennis, I came to his gallery and found him touching a sculpture by André Dimanche—a crucifix with Agoué, the god of water, soldered across it—caressing Agoué lightly with his fingers. He muttered, “Caught,” with an embarrassed little laugh, as if he knew what I was thinking: He must really care for it! He does!

  “This one I might not sell,” he said. “It belongs in my permanent collection, semi -permanent, because I might not live forever, pal.”

  “I'm sure you will.”

  “Ha-ha. How about the one who loses a bet on that pays for the rum punches at the funeral of the other? And maybe the horse doovers, too.”

  Hors d'oeuvres. He was still embarrassed, hiding behind his Princeton boy kidding. He didn't like to be considered softhearted, although there wasn't much danger of it. Instead, I was wondering if he regretted the temptations of an insurance fire. He may have had a sneaking affection for me, as he did for the sculptor André Dimanche. He'd mind if I went out in flames; there was no reason to insure my survival. But as to the Norwegian captain—that boy could just go fuck himself and his walls in Oslo, which were probably decorated with sailing prints, maps, and a compass.

  It happened that Whitley and I were visiting the village of Jacmel, across the peninsula to the south of Port-au-Prince, at the same time. Jacmel was once a major coffee exporting port, and with land communication as poor as it was, people used to say it was easier to get from Jacmel to Paris by ship than from Jacmel to Port-au-Prince by road. Known for its grace and elegance, its isolation, a provincial sweetness, Jacmel occasionally—not often—enjoyed the convenience of electricity. A few jeeps or all-terrain vehicles bounced through the streets scattering donkeys, children, and Mesdames Saras, market women, their burdens on their heads. For more than fifty years, Préfète Duffaut was painting his dream images of the town—mountain, sea, winding paths, wooden gingerbread houses with vines curling toward jeweled towers. The coffee trade has vanished, but art miners still come to visit and carry away ironwork crosses, fish, and images of Damballah, the great snake god, or lamps, chandeliers, and toys made of milk cans, or paintings by Préfète Duffaut and all the little Duffautlings who imitate the master (Duffaut was imitating himself these days, too).

  It didn't matter what Whitley thought of me and I thought of him. We were two white Americans in this faraway village, and therefore we looked to each other something like colleagues. I had rented a jeep for a climb into the countryside to visit the shrine of Ci-va-Dieu, the pool and waterfall that was a voodoo Lourdes, a holy place of prayer, healing, and reconciliation. Whitley asked to go with me; how could I not take him? We were sitting in the open vehicle outside the Pension Croft when the warmhearted proprietor, everybody's auntie, came running out into the sun, something she normally avoided, not wanting to darken her coffee-colored skin. One of her ancestors was a French-woman, Caroline Levy, whose straight hair grew almost to her ankles. Madame had proved this to me with a faded photograph, but then said it was easy for her grandmother to grow her hair so long—“elle était petite petite petite, et si mignonne, regardez, Monsieur.”

  Now an important matter had brought her out into the morning sun. “That European, the blanc in the front room,” she said.

  “I already know him,” Whitley said.

  The blanc was standing at the little iron balcony, staring out toward the sea—a thin old man, once tall, now less tall, with his fringe of yellowish beard and a visored woolen cap of a sort, which made no sense in this climate, the dark wool drawing heat into the head. He looked over and past us, not asking any notice from his two fellow blancs in the jeep. Madame said: “He is waiting for nothing. He has been here a month now, that's all he does. He waits and stands there—ça m'agace. Please, you have room in your jeep, take him with you.” And she leaned forward to whisper: “His wife died. He came to Haiti to try to forget.”

  People did this, folks used Haiti in this way, alcoholics, addicts, victims, criminals on the lam, people who were suffering and wanted to escape to a place that made no connection with anything they had known before. After his wife died, the Norwegian captain came to stand on a balcony in Jacmel.

  Whitley looked at me, incredulous, as I jumped out of the jeep. I called up toward the balcony, “Sir? May I come upstairs?”

  The door was ajar, but he seemed to have forgotten I was on my way. He was still standing at the cast iron railing with its eroded and salt-rusted fretwork. He was gazing past the harbor toward the open sea, beyond where I had stood when I called to him. Perhaps the door was open only to draw the breeze, not to invite me in. “Sir?” I said.

  There were photographs in frames stationed about the room and an unframed photogr
aph lying on the bed. His wife had been a plump, round-cheeked, elderly woman, not a Viking princess. I stepped into the room and found myself looking at the photograph next to the pillow with the solicitous indifference of someone pretending to admire baby pictures. “Sir,” I said, “you might like to visit this place. They think it's magic. There are ceremonies, they bathe and invoke the gods.”

  Slowly he turned the bony face with its straggle of beard toward me. He was aware, but it was as if he were moving under water, not swimming but turning in the tug of tide.

  “It's called Ci-va-Dieu,” I said.

  “Here comes God,” he answered.

  “You speak Creole?”

  “Some words are very like French. Dieu va ici. Ci-vaDieu. But it means there goes God or here comes God?”

  He followed me down the narrow stairway that led into the ground floor reception area where breakfast would be served if one took breakfast, where street musicians played in the evening if Madame invited them in to play. Whitley sat in the jeep, expressing impatience by not taking comfort in the shade while he waited for me. He was wearing a floppy tropical travel hat to protect his heavily freckled face.

  The Norwegian captain said, “Thank you very much, sir. Yes, thank you.”

  When he climbed into the back, Whitley seemed to decide he only spoke Norwegian. Whitley asked, “Who's paying for this jeep?”

  “I am, don't worry, you're not,” I said. I had rented it for the day.

  “Well, he should pay his share anyway.”

  I was thinking of the prices I had paid for things, thinking of my own loss, which had brought me to Haiti this time, a divorce, a debit that was drastic for me but so much less than the Norwegian captain's loss.

  “He's out there just when we're going someplace interesting. What a coinkydink.”

  “Coinkydink. Was that a Nassau Street word in your time?”

  “My second wife liked to say that. No girls at Princeton when I was there—how the devil can anybody learn anything these days? We were only crazed on weekends, I suppose now they're crazed all the time. Figures, doesn't it?”

  I felt startled and sunstruck by this irritable rambling about suspicious coincidence, origin and pronunciation of a word or cute babytalk for a word, the passing of the tradition of all-male colleges, the many marriages of my buddy Whitley. He had been at Princeton when only gentlemen could be found there. Now here he was having to deal with an island of non-gentlemen and an imperfectly civilized individual from his own country. He pulled at the soft brim of his sun hat, tugging it down around his forehead and ears. I decided not to point out that it resembled an oversized yarmulke, and having made my decision, then heard myself cheerfully remarking to him: “Israelis wear a hat looks just like that.”

  The moment of falling in love sometimes strikes like an accident of tropical storm—her hand brushes mine in passing and then falls away and then swiftly returns. Similarly, the moment when spite changed to something like pity for Whitley came when he complained, insisting, “Then he must pay for his share of the jeep!” Though the cost was mine, Whitley felt personally aggrieved. He had given up on the captain. He wanted me to himself during this outing when he hoped to overcome my unhidden dislike of him and perhaps his of me. Maybe he only wanted an ally in the business of art promotion, not a friend, but nevertheless he seemed pinched and bereft. He, too, was sensitive to loss.

  Between Whitley and me there was the bond of travelers, on edge, wide-awake, a little lonely. Dr. Duvalier, the crazed Président-à-Vie, had lent him a jeep and now I did, too, but my loan wasn't free and clear. He had to share it with that dreary Norwegian who had made really bad choices in life, wearing a stupid black woolen cap, refusing to invest in terrific works of art, and loving a wife who died. “Hey, change your mind maybe?” Whitley called over his shoulder, but the captain didn't seem to hear him.

  The noise of rattling vehicle and rushing wind drowned our conversation as we bounced on a dried-mud road, grinding in low gear up a steep slope past little clusters of caillepailles, the peasant mud and straw huts. Naked children, bellies forward, chased us, screaming with laughter. Droning of wind, high-pitched laughter, shrieks of it; and the Norwegian captain silent on the metal seat in the back of the jeep. Madame from the Pension Croft had given us a bag of crab sandwiches and bottles of water; I worried about what crab-meat and mayonnaise would find to do in this heat.

  * * *

  Often in Haiti, history and accidents just seem to occur, growing out of volcanic hillsides like the rocks that suddenly come to birth one morning, glinting in the sunlight after the slow churning of night. It's not magic; it just happens again and again. A cooperative work rite, the coumbite, labors to clear the land with a crew of diggers and haulers, an admiral to blow a whistle or pipe the bamboo tube, a general to beat the drum. Work is better done with music; the musicians solemnly perform their part of the task. The last time I visited Ci-va-Dieu, years ago, there had been a coumbite on the slope nearby; there was one now, too, gathering the rocks for a fence and making room on a hillside for corn to grow. “They sing,” said the Norwegian captain. Whitley scowled under his floppy hat, his mood compounded of heat, sweat, and annoyance with our guest's banality.

  Suddenly the air changed, freshened. I pulled the jeep to the side of the path, and we continued on by foot toward the waterfall with its sweet shedding of coolness from high in the hills at Cap Rouge, or from coursing down the stream of La Gosseline, or from the Étang—I'm not sure of the geology here. Folks were bathing, there was the chime of song, the pleasant chirping and laughing of children, their smiles intensified by freshness, the blessing of water, especially this sanctified water. A lovely young girl, droplets pearling on her skin, gleaming, stood in a pool, holding her newborn child and crooning to him. I thought it was some sort of blessing, but then heard the words: “Fais dodo, Kola mon petit frère, fais dodo, tu auras du gâteau.” Sleep my child, little brother Kola, go to sleep, and later you'll eat cake. Not a blessing but a children's song; a blessing anyway.

  “She's not singing in Creole,” Whitley said. It was a complaint, as if he were somehow foiled. “It's pidgin French. It's old French. Where'd she learn those words?”

  “In another life,” I suggested, “or maybe from her mother or her mother's mother.”

  “Or the radio,” Whitley said. “Transistors all over the map.”

  The Norwegian captain turned his face from Whitley to me and then back to the girl singing naked in the pool. After a while we headed back single file on a narrow path of rocks and trampled mud. A little crowd had gathered around the jeep, poking it with their hands as if they were testing an animal. “Bonjour blancs! bonjour blancs!” They stared and smiled and scrambled off the path as I navigated the slope to get the jeep facing the way out. They shouted advice, urging me backward and forward, and then stood laughing and waving and enjoying our departure as they had enjoyed our visit.

  “I like this merry place,” the captain suddenly said in his English that seemed to be learned from an old children's book. “As a ghost, it's so bright, I am happy to haunt this place.”

  Whitley looked amazed. “Hey, that's the picture,” he said. “I could ask one of my artists to paint that scene. You could be Agoué. Your hat. Would you like to commission such a painting?”

  The captain looked up. He wasn't sure he understood.

  “The god of the sea,” I said. “Agoué is Neptune, maybe, or Moses, or Saint Christopher—something like that.”

  “Those are not the same thing at all,” said the captain severely. He squinted at me in the sunlight, seeing a man whose gods were in a jumble. Then he took to staring at a little compound of caille-pailles, cooking fires burning with the smells of cane and charcoal, voices gathered in the shade of palm trees. The children howled with joy at the jeep thrusting and jumping with its disheveled passengers, dusty and foolish, one wearing a floppy Abercrombie yarmulke. “Bonjour blancs! Bonjour blancs!”

 
As we bounced down the road, really just a rutted dried-mud path, Whitley took pleasure in chatting with me in a way that firmly excluded the Norwegian captain. Our passenger sat gazing out at the palms, the scrub and vines, the caille-pailles, and the people who stood by, calling out “Blanc, blanc.” “The important thing used to be finding emotion in painting. Modern art leaves that out. It doesn't even tell the story anymore, so consumers buy whatever they think…” A child stepped in front of us and I had to brake suddenly as the naked girl with her distended belly put her hand out, saying, “Fi-cens, blanc, gee mee fi-cens.” Whitley went on as soon as we were back in gear: “Poor people hang cheap kitsch, rich people buy expensive kitsch or pretend they really want high art at the level they can afford. They hire experts. They don't know what they like, but they know what's good.” He snorted with his joke. “Outsider art—so what's the opposite? Insider art? But I'll tell you, dear colleague, there's something honest in naïve—folk—primitive—what the fuck, it's real, so what shall we call it?”

  The captain was staring into the scrub as if he wanted it made clear that he wasn't eavesdropping on us. Reddish dust glistened in his reddish white beard.

  “—and I'm lucky enough to do pretty well professionally, besides. How many can say that?” Whitley smiled thinly, the dust smearing his lips, changing to a smear of mud as he licked and spat into a cloth. “As well as I can.” More smile; wiping of mouth. “Better all the time.”

  “Do you care for Haitian painting?” I called into the wind, turning my head toward the captain.

  “I believe so,” he said, and I didn't ask what question he thought he was answering. Then we were all three, even Whitley, distracted by a large black junk bird hopping from low bush to low bush with a part of its wing and a piece of a leg chewed off by some predator. No one said anything until the jeep was safely past and the captain said, “A cat, I think.”

  “More likely a rat,” said Whitley.