Serpents in the Sun

by Cave, Hugh

  Ginette's parents were nice, Lee had decided. M'sieu Beaulieu was tall, black-haired and handsome, with skin only a shade or two darker than white. His French wife was plump and blond and as bubbly as a glass of just-poured champagne—and didn't look half as old as she had to be to have a 19-year-old daughter. Ginette was their only child. As for this house—well, it didn't have seventeen rooms, like Glencoe, but it was nearly as big and much more modern. But because it was the home of people of wealth, and there were so many people in Haiti who had nothing, every window had wrought-iron bars on it. Even the second-story one at which Ginette and she stood right now. "I've a confession to make," Lee said. "Do you know I almost backed out of coming here?"

  "What?"

  "When you see him, you'll know why. His name's Terry Connor."

  "You've never mentioned any Terry Connor."

  "I know. He only just came into my life. Mother's going to plant pine trees at Glencoe, and he'll he there helping her. Six feet tall, good looking, with a good job in the Forestry Department. Wait'll you meet him."

  "You mother's going to plant pine trees now? In July? I thought—"

  "No, not now. In September. But he told me he'd be coming around a lot, helping Mother get things ready."

  Ginette feigned indignation. "Well, I'm glad you didn't let him talk you into not coming here. I have all sorts of exciting things planned for us, beginning with Cap Haitien and the Citadelle. But hey, you ready for dinner?"

  "Famished."

  "Let's go, then. Dad says a lawyer friend of his who hunts a lot gave him some guinea fowl."

  For Lee, that first dinner at the Beaulieu's home was an experience not only for its Creole cooking and mountains of food.

  An innocent remark from Ginny's effervescent mother set things in motion.

  "Lee, Ginny tells us that you live in a seventeen-room Great House there in Jamaica. How wonderful! But what a lot of servants you must need."

  "Mother," Ginny said, "they don't have as many as we do. People live differently there."

  "But we only have a cook and a maid—"

  "And a laundress and a yard boy and a driver! Lee's folks just have a live-in woman to help with the cooking and housework, and a laundress who comes . . . How often does she come, Lee?"

  "Twice a week," Lee said, laughing. "But you're forgetting we have coffee workers around all the time. If the yard needs bushing—"

  "Bushing?" Georges Beaulieu said.

  "That's an all-purpose Jamaican word, Mr. Beaulieu, for getting rid of weeds and tall grass and any other growing things that shouldn't be where they are."

  "I see. Speaking of coffee, I'm sure you know that we grow very fine coffee here in Haiti."

  "So I've read. When this was a French colony, it was a major crop. Is it still?"

  "I'm afraid not. We no longer have any plantations such as yours." Beaulieu's tone was apologetic. "We do export respectable amounts of sugar and sisal, however."

  "Where do you get these wonderful vegetables?" Lee asked. With the roasted guinea fowl on the table were platters of baked sweet potatoes, a mysterious green that tasted like spinach only better, and golden-brown breadfruit croquettes with what seemed to be little bits of salt fish in them. There was a huge platter of salad, too, topped with watercress. And the soup had been something Odette called jouroumou avec siriaue—a pumpkin soup full of tiny crabs. "I don't see a garden here. Do you have a higgler system like ours in Jamaica?"

  "Our peasants grow things in the country and the women bring produce to town," Odette explained. "Often they walk all night with such heavy baskets on their heads that you wonder how they are able to lift them. Marchandes, some people call such women, but the market women who buy the produce and resell it are called that, too."

  Waving a hand at windows overlooking the road, Georges Beaulieu said, "Almost every night you will see mountain women coming down from Furcy and beyond, with produce for Pétionville and the capital. They travel in groups for protection against nighttime spirits and the Loup-garou—the werewolf—and on dark nights they often carry bottle lamps. Do you know what a bottle lamp is,Lee?"

  "Oh, yes. A bottle of kerosene with a bit of rag stuck in it for a wick. We have those in Jamaica."

  Odette said, "We'll show you our Pétionville market. And, of course, the big Iron Market in Port-au-Prince is one of our main tourist attractions. You'll have to see that."

  "I'll show you the thunder-mug department," Ginny said solemnly.

  "The what?"

  "Peasants don't have indoor plumbing and don't like to go outdoors at night, so they keep a chamber pot under the bed. There are hundreds of them for sale all the time in the Iron Market. Along with, of course, everything else you can think of, from fresh-killed meat to ladies' undies."

  I'm going to like it here, Lee thought. It's going to be great fun. Whoever wrote that Haiti is a land of want and misery just didn't know what he was talking about.

  "We are to have an election here in September," Georges Beaulieu was saying "Are you interested in our politics?"

  "Of course."

  "It should be most interesting. Our president at the moment is Paul Magloire, as I'm sure you know. Not a bad man. But by law he cannot run again, and some interesting men seek to replace him in our Palais National. Are they known in Jamaica?"

  "I've heard of one of them. Papa Doc."

  Beaulieu nodded. "The one most likely to win, I believe. He is not without competition, however. Jumelle and Fignole can be counted out in the long run, perhaps, but Papa has a strong opponent in a planter from the south named Dejoie. It may come down to a contest between those two. But Dr. Duvalier will win, I think, because the people are behind him. The common people, that is."

  "Because he's a doctor?" Lee asked.

  "And because he is well known among the poor. Under Dumarsais Estime, who was president before Magloire, Papa Doc was Minster of Public Health and Labor. Now the wife of Estime is helping him in his campaign."

  "We were told in school that he is in charge of a campaign to eradicate yaws," Lee said. With Ginny's parents speaking such careful English, she felt that she, too, ought to do so. Were she not present they would undoubtedly be speaking French.

  Georges Beaulieu nodded. "Have you ever seen a person with yaws?"

  "No, I haven't."

  "With a face half eaten away, or—"

  "Georges!" his wife scolded. "Not at the table, please. Not while we're eating!"

  "I'm sorry, darling. Thoughtless of me. However"—he turned to Lee again—"yaws was a terrible scourge here not long ago. Many, many people were afflicted. Then in 1943 the Inter-American Affairs Commission began a campaign against it and put Dr. Duvalier in charge. He established clinics all over the country, even mobile ones, and became known to peasants everywhere as PapaDoc."

  "So they will vote for him," Lee said.

  "I feel sure they will. They are full of gratitude for what he has accomplished."

  "And will you vote for him?" By shifting her gaze, Lee included both of Ginny's parents in her question.

  "Not I," Odette replied quickly. "Not while he is married to that woman."

  Softly laughing, her husband shook his head. "It is said that Simone Ovide, his wife, is the illegitimate daughter of a businessman and a servant girl."

  "Georges, that is not what I mean, and you know it," Odette protested. "Where she came from is not the point. What she is now is the thing I have against her."

  Silence hung over the table for a few seconds. Then Odette said in an angry voice, "Everyone knows the woman is deep in voodoo! And I don't mean the simple voodoo practiced by the peasants, which is a religion I have no quarrel with. I mean the dark, ugly side of it, the kind practiced by bocors. If you ask me, the last thing we need in this country is that kind of voodoo in our National Palace!"

  3

  A trip to Haiti's north coast city of Cap Haitien was rather like an expedition, Lee discovered four days later.

&
nbsp; This one began in pitch darkness at three-thirty in the morning and according to Georges Beaulieu would probably take twelve hours or more.

  In his pajamas, M'sieu Beaulieu insisted on making certain that the Jeep contained everything Lee and his daughter might need. That included food, a jug of water, blankets, and, of course, an extra five-gallon can of gasoline. The Jeep itself was the World War II model that had become so popular with civilians whenthe war ended. But in Haiti, Ginnyexplained, one seldom lowered the canvas top. "Either the sun would eat you alive—'Soleil-la kab mange ou,' the peasants say—or the first unexpected cloudburst would all but drown you."

  Since her arrival in Haiti, Lee had already become familiar with the steep, two-lane blacktop from the Beaulieu's home to the capital. Never before had she traveled it at this hour, though. Now there were no wild-eyed taxi drivers trying to save gas by coasting down it at breakneck speed with their engines silent and a foot on the brake. No equally wild-eyed drivers trying to climb it without losing speed and having to shift to a lower gear. The little buses called camionettes were not running. An eerie stillness had replaced the daytime din.

  On the concrete porches of little roadside shops, mountain women lay sleeping with their laden baskets of garden produce beside them. Others, even at this hour, trudged in single file down both sides of the highway, some trotting to keep their heavy head-loads in balance. Yet that unreal hush hung over everything, shattered only intermittently by crowing cocks and barking dogs. The cocks crowed off and on all night, Lee knew. The dogs, Ginny told her now, barked whenever they thought other dogs would answer. "And I swear there must be more strays here than anywhere else in the world. Every now and then you'll see a notice in the papers warning people who own valuable dogs to keep their animals locked up because the authorities will be throwing poisoned meat into the streets at night. It's cruel, I'm sure, but if they didn't do something like that, the dog-packs would take over the city."

  Lee understood what her friend meant by that as the Jeep rattled through Port-au-Prince. The city was quiet at that hour, but the dogs, forlorn creatures with a predatory look, were everywhere on the prowl. With ribs showing like xylophone bars, they slunk from the gleam of the vehicle's headlights and turned silently to watch it pass, as though wishing it were something they could attack and eat. On Grand' Rue the littered sidewalks were empty, the shuttered stores as gloomy as barred dungeons.

  The road to the north was all but deserted as well, and after the pavement ended beyond the airport turnoff, it was unbelievably dusty. There came a moment when Lee, wrinkling her nose, said, "Whew! What's that awful smell?" and her companion explained, with a laugh, that they were passing sulphur flats at the head of the bay. Then above mountains that suddenly appeared on the right, crowding the coast-road into a narrow strip of flatland along the edge of the sea, the sun dramatically made its appearance. Streamers of crimson and gold shot into the sky. The peaks seemed on fire.

  "Oh, it's beautiful!" Lee exclaimed.

  "The mountains, you mean? Well, yes, they are, aren't they? But you'll hate the sight of them before we get to Le Cap, let me tell you. They make it so hard to get anywhere in this country."

  "But that's true of any place where there are mountains," Lee protested.

  "It's worse here. Even the Port-au-Prince Times said so once. It's easier to get from Port to Paris than from Port to Cap Haitien, they said in an editorial. Actually it would be just about impossible to get to Cap Haitien by car if your U.S. Marines hadn't improved this road we're on."

  Lee made a face. "This is improved?"

  "Well, not here, but when we cross the mountains. Meanwhile, don't breathe in any more of this dust than you have to. Heaven knows what it's doing to our lungs."

  The limestone dust persisted. By the time the Jeep reached the town of St. Marc it looked as though it had been driven through a cloud of flour, and no one would have guessed that the bandannas and dresses worn by its two occupants were brightly colored under their coating of white. Stopping in front of a little hotel on the St. Marc square, the two got out to beat the dust from their clothing and wipe it from eyes and ears.

  Then a few miles farther on, as if by magic, the vehicle suddenly stopped towing a maelstrom of dust. Rain must have fallen here, evidently a lot of it. The road was a river of mud through which the Jeep struggled like a bug through soft butter, with Ginny fighting the wheel and constantly shifting into four-wheel-drive when the butter became soup.

  An abandoned camion in a ditch had apparently been there all night. In rapidly flowing roadside streams native women stopped washing clothes—or themselves—and watched in silence as the Jeep slewed past.

  A second camion appeared, standing hub-deep in mud. Gaudily painted in mostly red, yellow and orange, it reminded Lee of a giant roller-coaster car with a roof. Every bench was packed with people. On the roof were piled their belongings, including live chickens and stems of bananas. How, Lee wondered, could the thing have traveled even a mile without tipping over?

  With his arms outflung, its driver stood in the road, barring their way. Ginny braked the Jeep and he hurried to it, speaking rapidly in Creole. She answered him in the same peasant patois, but with a translation for Lee's benefit.

  "He says he isn't stuck in the mud, as it would seem. His battery has gone dead."

  More Creole, more translation. "I asked if he could get a battery in Gonaives, and he said yes, but the road is very bad. I told him we'd try to get him there, and if we don't make it, he and his people won't be any worse off than they are now."

  The camion driver climbed into the back and waved to his bus-load of dejected passengers. He had left Cap Haitien the night before, he said, and was on his way to Port-au-Prince. There had been much, much rain. The road was terrible.

  "Ask him if he means all the road," Lee suggested, visioning an abrupt about face for the expedition.

  Ginny complied. "Pretty much all of it, he says, but the Jeep will get us through. I asked him about the Limbe River, too." That river, she had explained earlier, was the Great Unpredictable of northern Haiti. If it was low, you crossed it. If it was high, you turned back. No one in Port-au-Prince could tell you before you set out whether it would be high or low. Sudden rains and resultant flash floods made predictions worthless. "There the road is gone, he says. All gone. But there is a fording higher up. The people will show us where."

  They dropped the man off in Gonaives at a gas station, filled up the Jeep's tank, and went on. Like St. Marc, Gonaives was a seaport on an indentation of the Gulf of Gonâve, but there the resemblance ended. St. Marc was wholly Haitian. Gonaives, with its wide, straight roads, was to Lee a frontier town straight out of an American western movie, except that here the cowboys were black and they walked.

  Five or six kilometers beyond this transplanted Hollywood set the road became dry again, and so it stayed for hours. A break for lunch produced an audience of barefoot children who watched every mouthful and happily accepted handouts. Confident that the worst was behind them, the girls continued their journey.

  "You know about the Citadelle, I'm sure," Ginny said. "How, after the revolution, Christophe built it to repel an expected French invasion that never happened."

  "I've read about it."

  "But do you know that Cap Haitien under the French was wonderfully prosperous? Ships came from all over for stuff grown on Haiti's northern plantations. Coffee, sugar, indigo, cacao—all sorts of things. The Spanish colonies were way behind at that time. So was your country, but of course you were new then and not very big."

  "Watch out," Lee warned. "There's something in the road ahead."

  It was only a leafy branch, stuck upright in the ground. With a shrug, Ginny drove around it. Suddenly from the doorway of a caille beside the road a man yelled at them, wildly waving both arms.

  Ginny stepped hard on the brake pedal, and the Jeep squealed to a stop with its front bumper overhanging a precipice. They had reached the Limbe.

>   Back before Gonaives they had been warned by the driver of the camion with the dead battery that the road at the Limb6 was out. How right he had been was now dramatically apparent. The road had been sliced off as neatly as a block of butter, washed away by some tremendous rush of water that had now subsided.

  Ten feet under the Jeep's bumper a native woman stood staring up with her mouth agape. Suddenly, belatedly, she voiced a shrill scream and dived for safety, apparently convinced that the vehicle was about to drop on her head. A much younger woman, washing herself, snatched up her clothes at the water's edge before following suit.

  The man from the caille had reached the Jeep and was excitedly jabbering in Creole. "He's telling us we must cross the river higher up," Ginny said. "There's a by-pass road behind us. We have to back up."

  In reverse she made a face at the leafy branch in the road, now so obviously meant to be a stop sign.

  "That girl from the river seems to want something," Lee said. "She's running after us." The girl could have run faster, perhaps, had she been less modest. When startled at her bath she had been undressed except for briefs. Now she struggled to pull a wet pink dress over her head while her slim legs worked like pistons to overtake the Jeep.

  She succeeded just as it reached a pair of ruts that appeared to be the start of the by-pass. Out of breath but all smiles, she told them how they must drive down the ruts and along the river bank to a temporary fording.