A Rendezvous in Haiti (7 page)

“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.

The taste of anger was still strong, but it was a habitual taste. For many years now the rage had been working in him. That was a phrase he had acquired somewhere, a book or a magazine or maybe a preacher: the rage was working in him. He turned his mind to Cleo and immediately cheered up. He did not smile, but he patted Sammy. Cleo's was an establishment of quality, with a wooden floor, walls and a true roof. The house was set upon four stone footings. Cleo kept four women and kept them strictly.

He entered the city by night, walking Sammy through familiar alleys, and was challenged only once: a shadow emerged from shadows, and Blanchard saw the faint gleam of a blade. He asked, “Ou v'lay balle dans lobwi?” and the shadow fled down a lane. A handy phrase, condensing much foolish conversation: “Would you like a bullet in the belly-button?” Blanchard moved along amid the odors he remembered, wood-smoke and grease, filth and poverty, dried fish; but also an unquenchable waft of forest and blossom, slipping down these leeward hillsides on the confused trade winds.

Cleo's house marked the edge of the true city, with buildings of stone and wood rather than huts of plank, withe, sheet metal and oil drum. Within the wall and behind the house stood a shed; he led Sammy there, and pumped water into the trough. He heard motion in the house, and Cleo's voice, sharp: “Qui moon?”

“C'est moins,” he said. “Ouvri p'r moins. I'm hungry.” The Creole was musical and reminiscent on his tongue, crooning and purring as if it were his cradle talk.

Cleo showed open pleasure: “Oh my Blanchard! Welcome home!” She pronounced his name the French way, and he liked that; and if her love was purchased, the friendship in her voice was free. “Eggs and bread?”

“And coffee.”

“I have tripes too.”

“No jokes before sunrise.”

He heard her issue commands, heard other voices. He was pleased. He was home. He hung Sammy's tack and gathered his bedroll and weapons, and climbed the three wooden steps to his town house.

He woke with the sun high: no shadows in Cleo's little room. He slipped into a pair of loose cotton trousers and padded out to the jakes, and then to the pump. This pump was why the fence: thieves respected Cleo and kept their distance, but ground water was a valuable commodity, and women would have come a kilometer with buckets. Gift of a grateful politician, the pump was. So much was, here: life from the grateful rich, death from the ungrateful.

Clean and awake, he turned to Sammy. Cleo had been at work: a truss of hay, and the horse munching at a generous heap of it, and water in the trough. He entered the house and greeted the girls: four, each with her own cubicle, and he never bothered with names. They changed. “Bread and coffee,” he said. “Is there confiture? And where is Cleo?”

“Yes, and she is at the market.”

With windows open at the east and west, the little breeze took heart, and almost whistled. Blanchard stood before the pier glass. This was Cleo's purchase, and no gift. The four women swept and scrubbed, washed the earthenware cups and plates and also washed themselves, frequently, and on gala nights they wore short tunics of bright hue, and spent long moments before the pier glass applying cosmetics and perfume. Cleo's was a modern establishment, with a cache: floorboards, the rifle oiled in its scabbard, the pistol oiled and holstered, the slaughtering knife, accessories. Blanchard did not favor weapons in Port-au-Prince: only the clasp knife. Old-fashioned courtesy wrought miracles in Haiti, town or country. He had considered a very small pistol, a .32 perhaps, but had decided against it. Never had he quarreled in Port-au-Prince. And if he should? When he was not working he did not kill. He was a professional.