A Rendezvous in Haiti

by Stephen Becker

  “A remarkably handsome wardroom,” she assured him.

  “Swabbies,” he said. “I wish we were at the hotel. I’d like very much to put my arms around you.”

  “I think I’d like that too,” she said.

  And they arrived not at Olofsson’s, which was full of Marines, but at the Grand Hôtel de Paris et de Port-au-Prince, which was small and clean and quiet, and they climbed the wooden stairs together, and crossed the broad threshold together, and walked arm-in-arm to the balcony to look out over the city. They kissed, tentatively and then with passion, and they stood embraced. The tambors followed them even here, and in some black alley a child wailed. McAllister drew back to look carefully at his lady’s face.

  “Don’t you dare say goodnight.”

  “You’re exhausted. I’m a brute.”

  “No, you’re not. I’d call you homely but honest.”

  “That’s me,” he said.

  “You’re still not sure.”

  He released her. “I make two thousand dollars a year plus two hundred overseas bonus.”

  “But your quarters allowance has risen to four hundred and thirty-two dollars,” she said.

  “I told you not to be clever. Anyway I still have to buy my own uniforms. How do you like my dress whites?”

  “Unbearably handsome.”

  “Ten seconds ago I was homely. You’re as confused as I am.”

  “I’m a bit confused about our tomorrow,” she said, and retrieved him, “but I am not the least confused about tonight.”

  On the Wednesday—what was Wednesday? Here the days flowed, merged; perhaps Sunday would orient them, churchbells—they joined Father Scarron to attend a public function. “By all means wear your medals,” the priest had said. “Be resplendent. Don’t come to Saint Rita’s; I’ll meet you at your hotel.” Now they were strolling the boulevard in the general direction of the Champ-de-Mars, Caroline and Scarron in white, McAllister in khaki; Caroline carried a parasol and wore a wide-brimmed straw hat. “It is the first school to be dedicated in over a year. Le tout-Port-au-Prince will be there. A chic woman will lose an earring. Sleek men will murmur assignations. Elegant polyglots will sweat like pigs. There will be no refreshments and in the end we will drift out of the courtyard and go our ways.”

  McAllister grumbled, “Why drag us along?”

  “A demonstration of progress. Also, you paid for it. And your uniform will create good will among our upper crust, whom you are defending from soulless revolutionaries.”

  “You’re making fun of everyone,” Caroline said.

  “Yes. I’m sorry. I spend too much time in the company of God. It leads to snobbery.”

  “Is your Martel soulless?”

  “Not a bad question. Without a soul he would not rebel; but to rebel, one must sell one’s soul. He has sold his to that Fleury, up north.”

  “How very Gallic: a French Lucifer. What color is Martel, of the thirty-two?”

  “Quite black, and his people are on the whole far blacker than the aristos here. Yet Fleury, his principal support, the Engels to his Marx, is an ivoire, a backwoods populist sugar magnate who yearns for the purest democracy. I believe shade is a matter of indifference to Martel; a useful weapon now, but he has promised himself and others to abolish those silly distinctions.”

  “Not Lucifer, but Robespierre.”

  “No, not Robespierre either: Charlemagne. He was named—though I am not sure by whom—Charlemagne Masséna Martel. Martel was a great king, and Charlemagne was his grandson, and Masséna was one of Napoleon’s favorite marshals.”

  “He was the Prince d’Essling,” McAllister told them, “and Napoleon said he was the Revolution’s favorite son.”

  “Le fils chéri de la … wasn’t it victory’s favorite son?”

  “Well, I don’t recall now,” McAllister said.

  “I’m impressed,” Caroline said. “You may ask me to dinner.”

  They had left the boulevard and now entered a flowered courtyard through a gateway in a stone wall higher than a man. In the courtyard buzzed a crowd of starchy, formal appearance, and at its deep end stood the school. There was an improvised stage, and before it stood some forty folding chairs of the kind McAllister associated with tent shows and Fundamentalist corroborees. Behind the school there seemed to be another street: roosters crowed, dogs barked. “Many of these guests are politicians,” Father Scarron said, “but the level of manners will be high. There will be no assassinations.”

  Caroline said, “The scents are wonderful.” Many of the women wore jewels and flowers. McAllister bobbed bows left and right. Men consulted in grave metropolitan French, with many a “formidable” and many an “évidemment.” A handsome bespectacled black-haired woman in a blue linen suit greeted them; Caroline recognized the anthropologist, whose name now proved to be, rather oddly, Langlais. Caroline asked, “I suppose this is a parochial school?”

  “Well, they all are, you see.” Madame Langlais seemed apologetic.

  Not so Scarron, who said, “And why not?”

  McAllister laughed. “Catholic or voodoo?”

  Madame Langlais said, “I wouldn’t joke about vodun.”

  “Yes, I’m sorry, you’re right,” McAllister said. “I tell my own men not to joke about it. Some of them say they’ve seen files of zombies.”

  “Nothing to do with vodun,” Madame Langlais said briskly. “Your men saw them in farm country?”

  “I suppose so, yes,” McAllister said.

  “What you call zombies are catatonic hebephrenics, touched in the head and very often kept on a doped diet. Malnutrition, cretinism, superstition—and a traditional source of slave labor. Horrible. Vodun, on the other hand, is a religion. A real religion.”

  “Indeed,” said Scarron.

  “Farm country,” Caroline said. “It sounds so peaceful.”

  “It’s not dull,” McAllister said.

  Scarron asked, “When must you go back?”

  “Day after tomorrow,” McAllister said. “It’s just patrols.”

  “And while you enjoy the countryside,” Caroline said, “I languish in my room.”

  “I shall show you the big city,” Father Scarron said.

  The school was a white wooden shed with a corrugated iron roof also painted white. The shed was perhaps thirty feet by twenty, and the playground or courtyard about thirty feet by fifty: here the children would kick a ball, beat one another, scream and shout and sulk. Within the shed, Father Scarron explained, they would glance for a few minutes a day at some outlandish text, surely French in origin. “Some day we’ll teach in Creole. For now they will learn, or be exposed to, the life of Toussaint, the highlights of the French Revolution, the alphabet and some arithmetic. They will hear a few of La Fontaine’s fables and will be reminded again and again that Haiti is the only country in the world to have revolted, abolished slavery and expelled the former masters.”

  There was of course no electricity for this school, but that would arrange itself quite soon.

  There was of course no plumbing but that too would arrange itself quite soon.

  There were no books but that was irrelevant because there were no students.

  “Any Haitian who can afford unemployed ambulatory children can afford the lycée,” Father Scarron said. “But the Americans paid for this public school, and we Haitians are a polite people—cette fameuse politesse française, after all—so it has been constructed and advertised and every effort will be made to seat at these small desks deserving Haitians between the ages of six and twelve. And one of them will some day be a cabinet minister and it will all have been worth it.”

  The audience straggled to its wooden chairs and applauded politely at the mention of France, the United States, and the Haitian government. The school was described. It was to be observed that the east and west walls were mainly shutters, so that the presence or absence, indeed the very velocity, of the trade winds could be taken advantage of. A plaque would in time be erec
ted, commemorating the generosity of the American people, who were the friends and benefactors of all the world now that war had been abolished.

  “It is that sort of function,” Scarron murmured. “Everything is in the passive voice. Oh dear God,” he went on.

  They followed his gaze, toward the gate. A beggar was entering, almost unnoticed. Caroline took McAllister’s arm.

  The beggar was not old, but toothless, apparently, and one-eyed, and lacked a left foot.

  An Excellency was stressing the French heritage of this great country.

  The beggar was wearing a tattered tunic and hopping on one wooden crutch. What added zest to the occasion was the beggar’s sex and prominent breasts and, for the moment, the audience’s sublime unawareness.

  Caroline experienced a rush of affection for McAllister. She tried to thank him—for existing, for being there with her—but it was a wry smile.

  The woolly beast advanced. She plucked at a sleeve. A muffled cry wavered through the hot courtyard. Her mossy hair was crowned with lint, leaves, a green insect.

  His Excellency was praising Henri-Christophe, Napoleon when young, and Woodrow Wilson.

  The beggar continued along the outside row of chairs. Her eye gleamed. The occupants of those chairs shrank, fiercely attentive to the orator. A chorus of locusts chirred from beyond the wall. The breeze had dropped. The beggar approached the first row, and attempted to pass between the speaker and the spoken to. Gasps were uttered. His Excellency saw her in detail then, and faltered. The beggar hopped from dignitary to dignitary.

  His Excellency was equal to the occasion. He did not quiver in fury, nor did his voice rise. At his simple gesture a squad of police sprang up, as if he were Jason sowing dragon’s teeth. Almost before they converged, the beggar raised her free arm defensively and hopped once or twice toward the gate. Then they were upon her, two raising her off the ground while another clubbed at her and three or four more shielded sensitive observers from the necessary indelicacy. The audience returned its attention to His Excellency. Within seconds the beggar had vanished, translated to some other state of being.

  The ceremony ended at last, in a buzz of mutual congratulation. Greetings and farewells were exchanged. A few Haitians caught McAllister’s eye, bowed and grimaced; they were apologizing for the brief display of bad taste. Le tout-Port-au-Prince, chatting and chuckling, sauntered from the schoolyard like churchgoers dismissed. A man in gold pince-nez kicked a wooden crutch beneath the schoolhouse in passing. The anthropologist made her adieux. Father Scarron walked beside Caroline and McAllister; it was obvious that he wanted to speak and could find nothing to say.

  Caroline was wondering what sort of school this was without a jakes, or at least a hole in the ground where “deserving Haitians between the ages of six and twelve” could faire pipi.

  Nights were muggy, and the electric power ebbed and flowed, died, flickered to life; most of the city lived without it, and bulbs and fans were playthings of the aristocracy. Caroline and Bobby made slick love, and caressed each other with rubbing alcohol and sat quietly in the dark on the small jutting balcony. They held hands and enjoyed the street sounds: cocks crowing at midnight, shrieks of laughter, the shuffle and clop of donkeys. “You could extend your leave,” she said. “After all, a colonel’s daughter.”

  “That’s just why I can’t. And nobody knows it better than a colonel’s daughter.”

  “Yes. But how will I live? Two whole weeks. And I don’t like people shooting at you. Has it been rough?”

  “Some. When you lose men. The worst is, it doesn’t seem to do much good. This is a big country for one brigade. We’re lucky the Haitians squabble. There’s at least half a dozen ambitious rebels and some of them hate one another more than they hate us. You have no idea. Family feuds. Provincial warlords. Rich idealists like that Fleury. I shouldn’t complain. If they got together we’d be in real trouble.”

  “Let’s go inside. I waited a long time for you.”

  “You won’t believe this,” he said, “but I waited longer for you. I was never brave enough for fleshpots or rich enough for grand bordellos.”

  “A poor virgin, but mine own,” she said.

  “Well,” he said.

  “That’s right. I don’t want to know. Farm girls and haystacks. Inbred half-witted southern belles.”

  “I like you jealous.”

  “You were less smug before your promotion. Oh, Robert, yes.”

  Before he returned to Hinche they decided to marry when his Haitian tour was over; money be damned. Simply to look at him, awake, asleep, naked, clothed, stopped her breath. And she was immensely flattered by the change she worked in him: with her he seemed to live in another air, one of perpetual and imbecile bliss, of stunned witless amazement at his own good fortune. She never said, “Don’t let yourself be killed.” He was a serving officer, and even in a war that was not a war, with no brass bands and no headlines, his work was more than a duty: it defined his life and gave him purpose, and she would not have him other. After all, that work had brought them together. He would not marry her now, only to send her away; nor would he leave her a young widow. Very well: what could she do but wait? Meanwhile he would have seventy-two hours every fortnight. It would have to suffice. Perhaps she could not do as virtuously as Pop wanted, but she would excel them all in fidelity.

  4

  Louis Paul Blanchard did not make for the border. San Domingo was of no interest: more Marines, strutting Spanish bandits, and no old friends. He had disembarked in San Domingo almost two years earlier, after a voyage of three weeks from Lisbon on a stinking rusty tramp, a sugar boat returning to San Domingo city half in ballast. He learned that raw sugar, pulped sugar, stank; not merely an odor but a nauseating odor, and the runoff was called bagasse and if all those ladies with their pinkie up could smell it once they would never again say, “Two, please.”

  He knew no Spanish, and soon boarded a coaster for Port-au-Prince; in Haiti his talents might be useful. His cabin-mate was a businessman, poisoner and pimp, Haitian-Jamaican, who talked forever about himself and Haiti in a bastard French that was not quite Creole. Blanchard did not like his cabin-mate and lost him upon arrival, but was grateful for the introduction to Haitian ways.

  He then spent three bizarre days on a new planet, after which he felt very much at home. Port-au-Prince embraced him. He came ashore amid the mingled aromas of hides and fish, on the dock, and blossoms, great banks of them halfway up the hill. Men and women smiled. Working men wore bald heads or narrow hedges of kinky black hair down the middle of the scalp. Working women wore kerchiefs. The bosses wore straw hats. These bosses were lighter in color and fanned themselves often with their hats. Some had wavy hair, glossy in the sunlight. People said hello as he passed; a woman would stop beating her child to say B’jou.

  Blanchard did not give a damn whether these people lived or died in poverty or wealth, but they were not measuring him, either for a swindle or for a coffin, and he appreciated that. He rarely spoke; he listened; when he did speak, it was good country French and soon a fair Creole. He was warm, and coughed less. The bread here was like French bread. He could not believe the prices. He was carrying eighty-five British pounds, some of it blood money, some stolen from corpses and some won at cards, and he reckoned it would last him a year and a half if he never earned another farthing.

  Soon he found women, and he found cockfights, and he found the kind of work he was trained to do. He was twenty-four years old, and he decided he would remain, until fate directed him elsewhere, in this land of cheap rum and cheap life. He could not understand why these people laughed so much and so happily, but perhaps time would teach him.

  So he did not make for the border after the ambush at Deux Rochers. He sat apart for a time and cleaned his weapons. He endured the fit of coughing that followed high emotion. He returned to his men for a cup of rum; he praised them. He enjoyed a grand dinner of roast goat, rice and beans, with pawpaw for dessert, and his men
were exhilarated and soon blind drunk on clairin. They had earned their binge. He watched their teeth flash in the firelight and wondered what he might accomplish if faction ever ended, if the Haitians ever set aside their squabbles—families! color lines! blood feuds!—and gathered under his command. Let Martel be king, emperor, god, and let that Fleury be philosopher or treasurer or whatever, but let Blanchard be commander in chief. Today his men had fought with intelligence and discipline. But he would never be commander in chief and his men would, on another day, fight like cowardly squabbling bandits.

  In the morning he dispatched a runner with a verbal report to Martel and added that he was taking a week or two of leave. He made for Port-au-Prince, pushing along the hillsides, picking his way, hungry and pausing often for yams or cassava, or to hear the drums. On the ridges he would be noticeable, and in the valleys were villages and farms; the memory of roast goat made his mouth water, but he settled for a river fish. There was plenty of forage for his mount. Blanchard was now twenty-six, and owned four hundred and forty dollars in gold plus all that was on his and his horse’s backs. In a scabbard at his saddle he carried a Lee Enfield carbine; in a holster at his belt, a revolver, the Colt .45 of 1917; in a sheath hung a long slaughtering knife and in a pocket nestled a smaller clasp knife. He carried ammunition in his belt and in bandoliers. He liked money and wanted more. In other respects he considered himself prosperous. The sun and rain fell soft upon him; what he ate tasted good, and he bathed in pure streams.

  He called his horse Sammy because the French liked that name for animals. He had once been fond of a dog called Sammy. He had no idea what the horse had been called by its former owner, a huge blustering Caco chief who had believed that shouting and caracoling would scare Blanchard to death. The saddle was old, and did not count in Blanchard’s financial estimates. It might be a French saddle from long ago, a hundred years or more, that had lain unused in a shop or attic or tack barn for decades. The silver was tarnished but he was polishing it bit by bit, and the leather had sprung back nicely, sucking in bean oil and gleaming with new health. Or Spanish. He did think some about that: it might be Spanish. A high pommel. He was not sure that the French used high pommels in the old days.