by Ben Fountain
On Thursdays he went to the Oloffson to hear the band, and on weekends he toured the hotel bars and casinos in Pétionville. Otherwise, unless it had been such a grim day that he could only stare at his kitchen wall and drink beer, he would get his chess set and walk down to the park, past the weary peddler women chanting house-to-house, past the packs of rachitic, turd-colored dogs, past the crazy man who squatted by the Church of the Sacred Heart sweeping handfuls of dirt across his chest. There in the park, which resembled a bombed-out inner city lot, he would pick out a bench with a view of the palace and arrange his pieces, and within minutes a crowd of mouthy street kids would be watching him play that day’s challengers. Mason rarely won; that was the whole point. With the overthrow and exile of their cherished president, the methodical hell of the army regime, and now the embargo that threatened to crush them all, he believed that the popular ego needed a boost. It did them good to see a Haitian whip a blan at chess; it was a reason to laugh, to be proud at his expense, and there were evenings when he looked on these thrown games as the most constructive thing he’d done all day.
As his Creole improved he came to understand that the street kids’ jibes weren’t all that friendly. Yet he persisted; Haitians needed something to keep them going, and these games allowed him to keep a covert eye on the palace, the evening routine of the military thugs who were running the country—the de facto government, as the diplomats and news reports insisted on saying, the de factos basically meaning anybody with a gun. Word got around about his evening games and the zazous started bringing chess sets for him to buy, the handcrafted pieces often worked in Haitian themes: the voodoo gods, say, or LeClerc versus Toussaint, or Baby Doc as the king and Michèle the queen and notorious Macoutes in supporting roles. Sometimes during these games the crowd grew so raucous that Mason feared drawing fire from the palace guards. And, regardless of the game, he always left in time to get home by dark. Not even a blan was safe on the streets after dark.
Late one afternoon he’d barely set up his board when a scrap of skin and bones came running toward him. Blan! the boy shouted, grinning wickedly, veni gon match pou ou! Mason packed up his set and followed the boy to a secluded corner of the park, a patch of trees and scrub screening it from the palace. There on the bench sat a mulatto, a young Haitian with bronze skin, an impressive hawk nose, and a black mass of hair that grazed his shoulders. His T-shirt and jeans were basic street, but the cracked white loafers seemed to hint at old affluence, also an attitude, a sexually purposed life that had been abandoned some time ago. He simply pointed to the spot where Mason should sit, and they started playing.
The mulatto took the first game in seven moves. Mason realized that with this one he was allowed to try; the next game lasted eleven moves. “You’re very good,” Mason said in French, but the mulatto merely gave a paranoiac twitch and reset his pieces. In the next game Mason focused all his mental powers, but the mulatto had a way of pinning you down with pawns and bishops, then wheeling his knights through the mush of your defense. This game went to thir teen moves before Mason admitted he was beaten. The mulatto sat back, eyed him a withering moment, then said in English:
“All of these nights you have been trying to lose.”
Mason shrugged, then began resetting the pieces.
“I didn’t think it was possible for anyone to be so stupid, even a blan,” said the mulatto. “You are mocking us.”
“No, that’s not it at all. I just felt…” Mason struggled for a polite way to say it.
“You feel pity for us.”
“Something like that.”
“You want to help the Haitian people.”
“That’s true. I do.”
“Are you a good man? A brave man? A man of conviction?”
Mason, who had never been spoken to in such solemn terms, needed a second to process the question. “Well, sure,” he replied, and really meant it.
“Then come with me,” said the mulatto.
He led Mason around the palace and into the hard neighborhood known as Salomon, a dense, scumbled antheap of cinderblock houses and packing-crate sheds, wobbly storefronts, markets, mewling beggars underfoot. Through the woodsmoke and dust and swirl of car exhaust the late sun took on an ocherous radiance, the red light washing over the grunged and pitted streets. Dunes of garbage filled out the open spaces, eruptions so rich in colorful filth that they achieved a kind of abstraction. With Mason half-trotting to keep up the mulatto cut along sidestreets and tight alleyways where Haitians tumbled at them from every side. A simmering roar came off the closepacked houses, a vibration like a drumroll in his ears that blended with the slur of cars and bleating horns, the scraps of Latin music shredding the air. There was something powerful here, even exalted; Mason felt it whenever he was on the streets, a kind of spasm, a queasy, slightly strung-out thrill feeding off the sheer muscle of the place.
It was down an alley near the cemetery, a small sea green house flaking chunks of itself, half-hidden by shrubs and a draggled row of saplings. The mulatto passed through the gate and into the house without speaking to the group gathered on the steps, a middle-aged couple and five or six staring kids. Mason followed the mulatto through the murk of the front room, vaguely aware of beds and mismatched plastic furniture, a cheesy New York–skyline souvenir clock. The next room was cramped and musty, the single window shuttered and locked. The mulatto switched on the bare light overhead and walked to an armoire that filled half the room. That too was locked, and he jabbed a key at it with the wrath of a man who finds such details an insult.
“Is this your house?” asked Mason, eyeing the bed in the corner, the soiled clothes and books scattered around.
“Sometimes.”
“Who are those people out there?”
“Haitians,” snapped the frustrated mulatto. Mason finally had to turn the key himself, which went with an easy click. The mulatto sighed, then pulled two plastic garbage bags out of the armoire.
“This,” he announced, stepping past Mason to the bed, “is the treasure of the Haitian people.”
Mason stood back as the mulatto began pulling rolls of canvas from the bags, stripping off the rag strings, and laying the canvases on the bed. “Hyppolite,” he said crisply as a serpentine creature with the head of a man unfurled across the mattress. “Castera Bazile,” he said next, “the crucifixion,” and a blunt-angled painting of the nailed and bleeding Christ was laid over Hyppolite’s mutant snake. “Philomé Obin. Bigaud. André Pierre. All of the Haitian masters are represented.” At first glance the paintings had a wooden quality, and yet Mason, whose life trajectory had mostly skimmed him past art, felt confronted by something vital and real.
“Préfète Duffaut.” The mulatto kept unrolling canvases. “Lafor-tune Felix. Saint-Fleurant. Hyppolite, his famous painting of Erzulie. There is a million dollars’ worth of art in this room.”
This was a lot, even allowing for the Haitian gift for puff. “How did you get it?” Mason felt obliged to ask.
“We stole it.” The mulatto gave him an imperious look.
“You stole it?”
“Shortly after the coup. Most of the paintings we took in a single night. It wasn’t difficult, I know the houses where they have the art. A few pictures came later, but most of the items we took in the time of the coup.”
“Okay.” Mason felt the soft approach was best. “You’re an artist?”
“I am a doctor,” said the mulatto, and his arrogance seemed to bear this out.
“But you like art.”
The mulatto paused, then went on as if Mason hadn’t spoken.
“Art is the only thing of value in my country—the national treasure, what Haiti has to offer to the world. We are going to use her treasure to free her.”
Mason had met his share of delusional Haitians, but here were the pictures, and here was a man with the bearing of a king. A man who’d gutted his best chess game in thirteen moves.
“How are you going to do that?”
“There is a receiver in Paris who makes a market in Haitian art. He is offering cash, eighty thousand American dollars if I can get the paintings to Miami. A shameful price when you consider this is our treasure…” The mulatto looked toward the bed and seemed lost for a moment. “But that is the choice. The only choices we have in Haiti are bad choices.”
“I guess you want the money for guns,” said Mason, who’d been in-country long enough to guess. There were fantasts and rebels on every street corner.
“Certainly guns will have a role in this plan.”
“You really think that’s the solution?”
The mulatto laughed in his face. “Please, have you been drinking today?”
“Well.” Like all the observers, Mason was touchy about appearing naive. “It took the army a couple of million to get Aristide out, and they already had the guns. You think you can beat the army with eighty thousand dollars?”
“You are American, so of course everything for you is a question of money. Honor and courage count for nothing, justice, fear—those people in the palace are cowards, okay? When the real fighting starts I assure you they will run. They will pack their blood money in their valises and run.”
“Well, first you have to get the guns.”
“First the paintings must be carried to Miami. You are an observer, this is the same as diplomatic immunity. If you take them no one will search your bags.”
Mason laughed when he realized what was being asked, though the mulatto was right: the couple of times he’d flown out, customs had waved him through as soon as he flashed his credentials.
“What makes you think you can trust me?”
“Because you lost at chess.”
“Maybe I’m just bad.”
“Yes, it’s true, you are very bad. But no one is that bad.”
Mason began to see the backward logic of it, how in a weird way the chess games were the best guarantee. This was Haitian logic, logic from the mirror’s other side, also proof of how desperate the mulatto had to be.
“You must,” the mulatto said in a peremptory voice, and yet his eyes were as pleading as the sorriest beggar’s. “For decency’s sake, you must.”
Mason turned as if to study the canvases, but he was thinking about the worst thing that had happened to him today. He’d been driving his truck through La Saline, the festering salt-marsh slum that stretched along the bay like a mile-wide lesion splitting the earth. At his approach, a thin woman with blank eyes had risen from her squat and held her baby toward him—begging, he thought at first, playing on his pity to shake loose some change, and then he saw the strange way the baby’s head lolled back, the gray underpallor of its ropy skin. The knowledge came on like a slow electric shock: dead, that baby was dead, but the woman said nothing as he eased past. She simply held out her baby in silent witness, and Mason couldn’t look at her, he’d had to turn away. With the embargo all the babies were dying now.
“Okay,” he said, surprised at the steadiness of his voice. “I’ll do it.”
It turned out that the mulatto wasn’t really a doctor. He’d had two years of medical school at the University of Haiti before being expelled for leading an anti–Duvalier protest, “a stupid little thing,” as he described it, he’d done much worse and never been caught. As far as Mason could tell, he eked out a living as a dokté fey, a kind of roving leaf doctor and cut-rate houngan who happened to have a grounding in Western medical science.
He’d cached stolen paintings all over town. Mason never knew when he’d turn up with the next batch, a bundle of wry Zephirins or ethereal Magloires to be added to the contraband in Mason’s closet. But it was always after dark, almost always on the nights when the shooting was worst. He’d hear a single knock and crack open the door to find the mulatto standing there with a green trash bag, his hair zapping in all directions, eyes pinwheeling like a junkie’s. Mason would give him a beer and they’d look at the paintings, the mulatto tutoring him on Haitian art and history.
“Something incredible is happening here,” he might say as they sat in Mason’s kitchen drinking beer, studying pictures of demons and zombies and saints. “Something vital, a rebirth of our true nature, which is shown so clearly in the miracle of Haitian art. ‘Ici la renaissance,’ how strange that this was the name of the bar where Hyppolite was discovered. Ici la renaissance—it is true, a rebirth is coming in the world, a realization that the material is not enough, that we must bring equal discipline to the spiritual as well. And Haiti will be the center of this renaissance—this is the reason for my country, the only slave revolt to triumph in the history of the world. God wanted us free because He has a plan.”
He could spiel in this elevated way for hours, forging text in his precision English like a professor delivering a formal lecture. If Mason kept popping beers, they’d eventually reach the point where paintings were scattered all over the house; then the mulatto would pace from room to room explaining tricks of perspective and coloration, giving historical reference to certain details. “But the dream is dying,” he told Mason. “Those criminals in the palace are killing us. As long as they have the power, there will be no renaissance.”
“They’re tough,” Mason agreed. “They’ve got all that drug money backing them up. The CIA too, probably.”
“But they’re cowards. Fate demands that we win.”
He wouldn’t tell Mason his name; he seemed to operate out of an inflated sense of the threat he posed to the regime. Some nights Mason was sure he’d fallen in with a lunatic, but then he’d think about the chess, or the reams of Baudelaire and Goethe the man could quote, or the cure he’d prescribed for Mason’s touchy lower bowel—“You must drink a glass of rum with a whole clove of garlic.” Mason did, and the next day found himself healed. If at times the mulatto seemed a little erratic, that might have something to do with being a genius, or the stress of a childhood spent in Duvalier’s Haiti. One night Mason suggested a game of chess, but the mulatto refused.
“I don’t play chess since I was a boy. The match with you, that was the first time in fifteen years.”
“But you’re brilliant!”
The mulatto shrugged. “I was third in the national championship the year I was twelve, and when my father found out he threw away my chess set and all my chess books. He said there is no place in the world for a Haitian chess player.”
“But if you were good enough—”
“He said I would never be. And he was probably right, my father was a very smart man.”
Mason hesitated; the past tense was always loaded in Haiti. “What was he?”
“Doctor. Opthalmologiste.”
Again Mason hesitated. “Under Duvalier most of the doctors left.”
“My father stayed. He was an eminence. The last Haitian to deliver a paper to the International Congress of Opthalmology.” He fell silent for a moment, seemed to gather himself. “If you were noted in your field, that could protect you, but this also meant that Duvalier perceived you as a threat. You could be famous but you could never slip, show that you were vulnerable in any way. One slip, and they’d take you.” The mulatto paused again. “My father never slipped, but I think it made him a little crazy. He kept a gun in the house—we lived on the Champ de Mars, and at night we could hear the screams of people being tortured in the palace. One night he took this gun, my father, he held the bullets in his hand and he said to me: This bullet is for you. This one is for your brother. This one for your mama. And this one, for me. Because if they come they are not going to take us alive.”
What could Mason say? Any sympathy or comfort he might try to offer would be false, because he’d lived such a stupid life. So he kept his mouth shut and listened, though on nights when the mulatto seemed especially bleak Mason insisted that he sleep on the couch. Sometimes he did; by morning he was always gone. Mason would straighten up the couch, eat his toast and mango jelly, then drive over to the office and get his detail for the day. Some days he drove around in hi
s white 4Runner with the powder blue O.A.S. flag rippling in the breeze: “showing the blue” this was called, letting the de factos know that they were being watched, though after a time Mason realized this was a strategy that assumed some capacity for shame on their part. Other days he was assigned to the storefront office that took complaints of human-rights abuses. Not much happened on those days; it was common knowledge that the building was watched, and walk-in complaints were depressingly rare.
Once a week he’d drive over to Tintanyen and make a count of the bodies dumped out there, and often these were horrible days. Tintanyen was a wide plain of shitlike muck held together by a furze of rank, spraddling weeds. You entered through a pair of crumbling stone portals—the gates to hell, Mason couldn’t help thinking—and stepped from your car into a pressure cooker, a blast of moist, dense, unwholesome heat, silent except for the whine of flies and mosquitoes. The mosquitoes at Tintanyen were like no others, an evil-look ing, black-and-gray jacketed strain that seemed to relish the smell of insect repellent. Mason and his colleagues would tramp through the muck, sweating, swatting at the murderous bugs, hacking away the weeds until they came on a body, whatever mudcaked, hogtied, maggoty wretch the de factos had seen fit to drag out here. From the shade of the trees bordering the field a pack of feral dogs was always watching them, alert, anticipating a fresh meal. Those dogs, the Haitian driver once confided in a whisper, were de factos.
