A Rendezvous in Haiti (19 page)

“You know what I told him. I was quite cold.”

“Cold. Do you remember how you used to go on about winter? You were a famous bore about winter.”

“Was I indeed?”

“Oh yes. You were persuaded—against your will, you said, by the weight of history, you said—that winter, the threat of death by freezing and starving, made men think and do. Made them build houses and store foods and sew thick garments and keep promises.”

“Was I wrong?”

Martel shrugged. “Schoolboy philosophies. Look at our people! Heirs to glory, survivors of unutterable brutality, and now worse than peasants. Tribesmen, worshipping reptiles and storms. Their reality is all superstition.”

“How tactless, to a priest.”

“They are barely acquainted with the wheel,” Martel said stubbornly, “and they love me for my bullwhip, and do you know what they want from me? They want me to lead them to a kind of heaven: a place full of fat fish and livestock, mahogany and cassava, and no cities. By God, maybe the Americans
should
win!”

“Toothpaste and telephones?”

“Yes, and manners and sanitation—no! To this village good manners are sacred, and before my armies trooped in it was a clean little spot, eternal. No, by God, your winter is a delusion, the white man's boast. The Egyptians never knew winter. They wove cloth-of-cold and wrote books and built the pyramids.”

“With slaves.”

“Quick as ever, Ti-Jean. Yes. With slaves. The blood of generations poured into monuments to superstition.”

“Like our Citadelle.”

“You will provoke me. You're worse than a Jesuit.”

And later: “I have no idea where the woman is. My Caco blanc, my trained house-boy,” and Scarron was startled by the hot current of hatred, “has doubtless ravished her and will bring her to me as an offering.”

“He fears you so?”

“Of course he fears me! He's a killer but a thinker, my Caco blanc. All Frenchmen are thinkers, hey? With their
cogito
and their Rights of Man. Already I know his mind: he brings me a gift, so I will owe him one. As long as I hold that girl, the Marines will be immobilized. They will not dare attack. I shall have her seen at various spots, and rumored at others. I tell you, he is a smart bugger. A tough son of a bitch, and I don't like him any more than I like your lieutenant, but he is a smart bugger. In return for this dangerous favor he will ask to mount a general offensive. That is what I want; but it must seem his idea.”

“History will snicker. ‘Martel maintained power by the judicious use of helpless women.'”

“You provoke me again. Listen: I am fighting a war, and I have my majors and my captains; but I see beyond the war, and they do not. I want to
govern
, and all I can do is skirmish. I need a city. A large town or city to man and hold. Without that I cannot coordinate, you understand? I use drums! runners! smoke signals! Nonsense, in modern war! And I need an offensive—I want to strike at every major gendarmerie in central Haiti, and let the Marines react in all directions, with the whole countryside lying in ambush. And soon! Men are falling sick. Fevers, fluxes, epidemics!”

“Like the yellow fever that destroyed the French.”

“Never!” Martel roared.
“We
did!” And then, “I should never have let you ford that stream. In my whole life no one ever angered me as much or as quickly as you always do. From the very start.”

Scarron told him, “We are not too different, you and I.”

Martel groaned. “I knew you would say that. Let's go visit your white friend, before you drive me crazy.”

But he changed his mind, and sent Scarron alone. “I'll see him tomorrow. I'll send for him.” The priest blessed two armed guards and found McAllister fallen upon luxury and corruption. In Blanchard's hut were crackling pallets stuffed with straw, and bowls, coconut halves, with lighted wicks floating on palm oil. In corners or on low platforms were a human skull, a pair of goat horns, and three or four tunics, red, blue, white. And a hammer, a small drum and a larger drum, a wooden snake, and a heap of small skin bags—ouanga bags to be. Goatskin, perhaps moleskin, snakeskin.

McAllister was drinking from his canteen cup, and waved it mournfully. “Not a word about Caroline, and they've forced rum on me. An old friend, an old woman in a blue tunic. She remembered me.”

“Martel did not lie: he has no idea where Caroline is. I'll take a drop.”

“There's your gear. This stone jug is rum. At the moment I am very damn depressed. Un vrai cafard.”

Scarron poured, added water, stirred with his index finger. “Me too: Hope deferred maketh the heart sick. On the other hand it's late in the day and we're tired, and hope makes a good breakfast but a bad supper. Martel is a worried man, I can tell you that much. He did not order the abduction and he does not like this Blanchard and he is rather tired of war. He has other educations he would rather make use of. A hell of a day, you're right, a hell of a day. Listen, my boy—”

“Your what?”

“Lieutenant.”

“That's all right,” McAllister said. “‘Boy' will do fine. I'm not much of a hero today.”

“I was only going to suggest that you drink up and pour another. They'll send in food, and take us to the stream, but we cannot hurry matters.”

“I asked her if the women made the rum and she said no, the men and the zombies. Did you see any zombies?”

“No. The rum is good. They add guavaberries.”

“That's wonderful,” McAllister said. “How broadening is travel, as the man said. Maman speaks slowly and I understand her. She asked if I needed a woman.”

“Easy does it. Drink up.”

“Dutch courage?”

“No. You'll sleep better.”

Later the old woman returned, and she was not alone. Scarron and McAllister stared; the priest drew a deep breath, and smiled to see the war on McAllister's face. With the old woman was a very young woman wearing only a breech-clout. It was obvious that the lieutenant found her disturbing: his lips parted, his expression was suddenly brutish, he could not take his wide eyes from her body. The priest found her beautiful, either more or less than human: frizzy hair like a helmet on the round head, the nose of no race, the lips voluptuous, the neck and shoulders framing flawless breasts. Obscure dangers singed him, too sharp and transient to be the monk's old bane, morose delectation. Her waist was slim and supple, her motion was dance, her buttocks were high and round, her thigh was long, her calf was full. For a tremulous long moment he suffered the truth of lust, and almost gasped. He called upon Christ, and all was well.

“Belle ti, ça,” maman agreed. “She is Faustine, the blanc's woman. Also the hen-girl at the Petro service, and the goat-girl and once the bullock-girl.”

Faustine spoke little, maman said, and was believed to inhabit another world, among the gods.

The two Haitian women served them goat chops and the inevitable beans and a bitter flat breadfruit cake. Maman chattered on: Faustine had gathered firewood as a child, and tended kids with a switch, and was fond of sucking at cane. She scrubbed the smaller vessels with sand. She worked fresh goatskins and pounded grain. She also crafted small snakes and birds and Christs on the cross, and sacred trees and suns and full moons and the horned goat. It was she who chanted and hummed the old invocations: prayers for rain, and for not too much rain, for the health of donkey's hoofs; for no sandstorms; for fecundity among the domestic animals, or for the immediate fertility of one; for the victory of a fighting cock; against invasion by the small people from the east.

And the charms and curses: against bellyache, sterility, pregnancy, cramps, rape; against murrain and the death of valuable beasts; against faithless men, labor pains, the police and the blancs; against smallpox and yellow fever. Against untimely marriage; for timely abortion. And more curses: to kill, to disquiet the freshly dead, to strike down a rival in love. And potions: for love or sleep or slow death.

McAllister said, “My God.”

“The Haiti no blanc ever sees.”

McAllister said, “I know so little about Haiti.”

“Does she rouse desire, this young one?”

“Oh yes,” McAllister said. “I try not to lie to myself.”

Scarron inspected him again, this lord of the world, this blanc, the new hero, democrat-aristocrat, eternally youthful and not unintelligent. “He is not a bad man. He is in fact a rather good man”: yes. But history was made by bad men. Without Judas, where was Jesus? Or was Judas God's agent for good?

Who was the Judas here, he wondered, and who the Jesus.

Later the guards marched them to the stream and back, and McAllister stretched and groaned and yawned and cursed. Father Scarron whispered his evening prayers like a child, adding a fervent plea for Caroline; he felt less empty and more Christian in these pagan hills.

No woman came to the hut that night, and Martel himself woke them in the morning. Scarron struggled to the surface of a dream, and before he was properly awake heard the deep raging voice, “You're in luck, Marine. That French macaque is on his way, and he has made his mistake, and he is all yours.”

10

Caroline and Blanchard rose to a fine clear yellow dawn. Blanchard was silent, Caroline sullen: new fears. Perhaps time should stop here, events never better, never worse, a safe eternity. Blanchard tended to the animals, patting his horse and murmuring, “Sammy.” Finally he said, “Hot coffee'd go nice about now.”

“Bacon and eggs,” she said. There might be awful journeys to come. Perhaps she would look back wistfully on her days with Blanchard.

“Won't be long,” he said. “Can be done, you know, bacon and eggs. Mountain hog fattens easy here. Suckling pig one time: damn good. For now, plantain and water.”

“I'll live,” she said. Doves settled to peck at their scraps.

They were high in the hills, and half that morning they descended rolling ridges. It was a day full of doves: they cooed like little owls, oo-coo, oo-coo. Wood rats peered from the brush, unafraid, curious. Placid wisps of black smoke or white rose miles off—homes, farms.

Blanchard was all talked out. But what he had told her worked in her now, and spoiled even Paris. Bobby in the Tuileries, Bobby in the Bois, and the saucers and filtres and horse-cabs, and thanks to Blanchard it was all dying, the ashes of civilization settling like dirty snow on the great cities. Blanchard's lips pressing her own: she groaned in shame but the groan did not deceive her.

“Listen,” he said, “I'll stick by you.”

“Thanks. My buddy.”

They paused for clairin and water. It was like the end of a season: over. The last petal. The first snow.

“I'd best have that pistol,” he said.

She passed it to him. She had killed a man! For three hours she had ridden these hills and that had not once crossed her mind. I have killed a man. She said it again: it was without real meaning.

Once in the lowlands they rode faster, across a patchy plain, dried grasses, stands of cane; mongooses fled, like great savage alien squirrels.

“I hope they come out to meet us,” Blanchard said. “Every damn stand of trees looks like bandits.”

“How would they know?”

“They know.”

Yes: they knew everything. The tambors. The ambush at the ford. “Blanchard,” she said.

“What?”

“Nothing. I never said your name before. Louis Paul Blanchard.”

“Caroleen Barbour.”

“Caroline.”

“Caroline,” he said comfortably. “My girl Caroline.”

“What's your other one's name? Or the two.”

“In the village, Faustine. In town, never mind. The woman in town is my friend,” he said.

They rode, and the breeze died, and the sun lay heavy. Blanchard's eye roved, but the plain was deserted. “There,” he said at last, and she saw a wooded morne, imposing, rising vast and bluff from the plain, a gentle humped range of mornes beyond it; she saw a darkish dazzle, a stream; miles yet to go.

The small Haitian sat across the fire from McAllister, and all four men swallowed hot coffee from wooden bowls. Women waited upon them, and one was the girl Faustine. The little man said, “Fleury heard her crying out and went to the wagon. There was a scuffle and then a shot, oh it was loud, like thunder in the night, and I dashed for the bush and took cover. I heard them talking afterward, the two blancs.”

The smoke of fresh fires hovered. Villagers hovered too, at a distance. The little man was filthy and red-eyed, and spoke through mouthfuls of sweet potato.

Martel spat into the flames. “That fool Boniface!”

“Your friend,” Scarron said.

“My friend! To let Fleury's son die!”

“Fleury's son on the left hand.”

“So, a bastard. We are all bastards here. Fleury doted on the boy—boy! already a man! They called him Gros-Cul because he chewed tobacco.”

McAllister did not understand.

Scarron said, “It means rough-cut tobacco but also Fat Arse.”

“So I have no choice,” Martel said. “Well, I don't mind seeing Blanchard dead but I thought Boniface was shrewder. Unless—no. Boniface is one of us. But to send the boy with Blanchard! The boy could read and write!”

“Blanshar,” the little fellow said. “Brrr.”

McAllister asked him, “Did you wait for morning?”

The Haitian squinted at this blanc; not at him, not quite; and said, “I waited. I hid myself and waited and in the morning when the wagon was gone I went to see, and I found Gros-Cul.”

“The blanche,” McAllister said. “Did you see her?”

“I did not.” To Martel the little man said, “This is one of the blancs. Why do we parley with him?”

“He will be gone tonight,” Martel said, “one way or another. Can you find Gros-Cul again?”