A Rendezvous in Haiti (8 page)

Cleo was also a professional, and he responded to that: a madam of skills and graces, and a canny, reliable friend. She was perhaps forty, a woman of oval face and sinewy body. She and Blanchard could be calm together. They could talk. Haitians tended to be indirect, but Cleo was straightforward with Blanchard. Among the men anything more complicated than the purchase of a small tot of rum required silences, appraisals, grumbles, half promises, second visits. This wearied Blanchard, who had learned to appreciate plain blunt talk and to despise roundaboutation. Cleo would not say, “There is a spot of mildew on the matting,” only to arrive at her point some exchanges later; she would simply say, “We have a small leak in the roof. Can you plug it and paint it?” The roof was of galvanized metal and the heat played hell with it; but for a year now Blanchard had mended it patiently. He had stolen paint from the Marines, and a set of tools. These were his contribution to the household. He was young to be head of a family.

Cleo returned, a fine dark woman of the color they called griffe, her hair kinky and her nose aquiline. “Some Frenchman a century ago,” she liked to say. “An aristo.” Today she brought millet, dried fish, herbs and spices, ten eggs and a sack of fruit, mango and papaya and local apples.

“You spent all my money,” he said.

“Half a dollar,” she said, “including this,” and she revealed a bottle of clairin. The label proclaimed “Chevalier,” so the bottle had once contained hair tonic, perhaps a hundred liters of rum ago. A smug white man with a copious head of shining black hair was still visible, though perhaps the hair shone dimmer these days. “Party tonight. Ça va?”

“Sure,” he said, “but I think I'll just waste the day.”

She kissed him. “Not altogether, serpent blanc.”

The party was nothing special: a Haitian had been hired by an American bank, and was treating two of his friends. Blanchard holed up in Cleo's room. He had joined a party once and only once: the Haitians dried up and drank in silence, smiling every few minutes and asking him how he liked Haiti, and how long he planned to stay, and how he had acquired such fluent Creole. Cleo had driven him out of the house; he had taken it with good humor and strolled down to Boniface's for the cocking.

Tonight he tried to think but the revelry was shrill. The host had been hired not merely as a sweeper but as janitor of janitors. He was to receive eighty gourdes each week, and—this he confided in a shrill, exulting cry—there would surely be small change on the floor, in corners and cracks. His cronies jubilated. Blanchard could picture the scene. The house illuminated by coconut lamps, a hollow half-shell with a wick floating on an inch of oil; shadows on the whitewashed walls; the girls' gowns vanishing, and only the panties left, Cleo's notion of grand luxe, silk panties, and the girls' breasts brushing the men's faces as Cleo made friendly murmur and served out clairin. Then a sophisticate, perhaps the new bank clerk, would suggest a song, and Clarisse, that was her name, plump and pretty, would sit in a corner on a cushion and chant a rhythmic plaintive country tune.

A lizard scuttled across Blanchard's ceiling. Sammy whickered; Blanchard rolled to the window; nothing. He waited; nothing.

He slept until Cleo joined him, and he cried out at the taste of her, and they coupled, and laughed, and coupled again, and swore they were lucky, and slept snuggling.

“So,” he said next morning, “if there isn't yet a price on my head, there will be. Maybe just a little medal for the man who does me in.”

“Le Caco blanc,” she said. “So! My man will have a price on his head.”

“Le Caco blanc. I hope they aren't cheap about it.”

“A white man can do much that a black man cannot.”

“Not for long,” he said. “The black men fought like lions this time.”

“They come here, you know.”

“Who comes here?”

“A Caco, now and then.”

He mulled this. It occurred to him for the first time that Cleo might one day betray him. He did not enjoy the notion but all things were possible. “Any Marines?”

“Never.”

Blanchard was amused. For a moment he saw that lieutenant plain: patriotic and heroic, the sugar of the earth. “Like to be a colonel and command a regiment,” he said. “Surprise the Marines. Drive them into the sea. Saw one the other day I wanted to kill with my own two hands.” He was bewildered again by a surge of emotion, and wiped his mouth with the back of his hand.

“A colonel?”

“No. A lieutenant.” He frowned. “Saw him before somewhere. Here in town, maybe.”

“Another aristo,” Cleo said. “One of them has a young woman who has chased him here.”

Blanchard said, “Haw! You mean a white girl?”

“In Port-au-Prince,” Cleo said. “Everyone talks of her. You know how we love our gossip.”

“Your gossip scares me,” Blanchard said. “You know how I love my privacy.”

Occasionally Blanchard considered taking ship and sailing to some other war. Stinking rusty tramps, like the one he knew, plied the Caribbean and the South American coast, and smoked into Port-au-Prince or Gonaïves every few days. But he dismissed the idea. He would not skip out of Haiti. He would not leave his friend Cleo. He would not leave French for Spanish or Portuguese. And he would not abandon Sammy. Who could be trusted to care for Sammy?

Saturday night was Cleo's big-money night. Blanchard talked to Sammy for a while, and fed him a handful of cane, and when lamps pricked out the dark city and he could feel a fever rise from the alleys and shacks, he ambled off toward Chez Boniface. He had discovered the arena many months back by asking the first Haitian he saw wearing shoes, “B'jou, monsieur. Dites-donc, pour les concours de coqs?” The Haitian bowed, as if to an authority, a connoisseur of cocking, and answered in what sounded to Blanchard like Parisian French, and poetical at that (“Just past a clump of frangipani aswarm with noble green larvae” was almost too much for the soldier). They shook hands; they bowed again.

The walk to Chez Boniface was Blanchard's favorite promenade. He could remember snowy streets (and did, in this darker world), the dazzle of lamps, the cloud of his own breath; and endless fields and dense forest; rabbit scut and deer scut bounding from muddy trails; hay in summer, the ice breaking up in spring; but here the night was denser and the scents were richer, and the constellations seemed new. He strolled through a dense garden of murmuring aromatic Haitians; the streets were thronged.

Chez Boniface was a spacious circular fair-weather arena with a wooden shack, about two feet off the ground on four sturdy legs, midway along the eastern curve. This shack was Boniface's residence and it was roofed. The entrance was simply a break in the circle from a boulevard to the north, and fifty feet to the west, along the scruffy grass ring, or gaguerre, was the bar. This consisted of barrels, bottles, planks and cups, plus one or two cheerful bartenders. The circle consisted of a tall palisade of branches, reeds, slats, poles, planks and other improvisations. During the rains Boniface retired to his garconnière with a keg of rum and his fiancée of the moment; the bar closed down; and the gaguerre dissolved to mud. In fair weather every night was amateur night, but Saturday nights were serious. A good cock was to Haiti what a good bull was to Spain.

When in session, Chez Boniface was the noisiest stadium in Port-au-Prince. There were plenty more gaguerres in the city, some operating all day and taking entry fees from, as Boniface said, “anybody with a canary.” Country boys would come twenty miles with a handsome stud chanticleer bred for the pot and not the pit: they would fight him and bet their last gourde on him and wander disconsolately home with the corpse. The poor Haitian rube! Blanchard was almost sorry for them, with their future coq au vin and their dreams of winning a hundred gourdes.

Boniface himself was a prosperous man and looked it—a jovial, opportunistic old pirate, eyes roving but not shifty. Blanchard almost liked him. As they chatted, Boniface would observe, scan, inspect; but when Blanchard spoke of a price or a stake, Boniface's eyes aimed into the soldier's like the double barrels of a shotgun, and their intensity was like a small blast. “V'là Gérald,” he would say. “Triste, li. Ti-Noël made off with his Juliette.” He heard everything and talked freely about everything—or so it seemed. God only knew what secrets he kept. Blanchard had never heard a word about himself that could be traced to big round Boniface. But he had kept the fat man's secret: Boniface was a Caco of talent and conviction, who served as contact, conduit, spy, behind his gossip's disguise. “Lots of clap at Monique's place,” he would tell a crowd. “Stay out of there a while. V'là c'cochon de Roger. He goosed his black last week, with a nail. Highly illegal but nothing could be proved. The bird flew into a rage, you figure it, and demolished Blot's zinga.” A zinga was a gray or a speckled gray.

Boniface was rarely without a bottle in his hand; he nipped parsimoniously but with regularity. He was one of those fortunates who grow round and rich in a limited area, and are quite close to absolutely happy. (Blanchard had once known a baker of similar attainments.) This terrain was Boniface's. The establishment was honest, and was frequented by Haitians of high estate and low, who never saw Boniface truckle to a rich mulatto or play the lord with a landless peasant down to his last gourde.

When Blanchard arrived, one main had already been fought. He slipped through the entrance, dropped a gourde into a waiting hand, and sidled along the outer wall toward the bar. The obligatory drink was clairin, with or without rainwater. Whiskey was a foreign decoction of exorbitant price. Gin was known as a Dutch poison. Beer was available: local beer was hogwash and foreign beer an extravagance. But rum! Clairin! The island was awash in the stuff.

The handlers, in fact, sprayed their cocks with an airy mouthful of rum just before the match. Ruffled, the indignant birds would raise their hackles and flap their wings and strut complaining until they had worked themselves into a murderous mood. The handlers were entitled to ullage—one for the cock and one for themselves. They would further infuriate the contestants by immobilizing them while a specialist filed the spurs that made them lethal. Once the spurs were filed, there was no turning back; all bets were on, and scratches were forfeits.

There were peckers and slashers. Peckers took a while to do their work, like boxers jabbing a victim to death over ten rounds. Slashers leapt high and came down hard, the spurs flashing and sometimes blinding an enemy eye or penetrating the enemy brain; they were like fighters with a vicious hook in either hand, who could end matters early.

Blanchard ordered clairin à l'eau. This was handed him in a capacious wooden cup. He then toured the gaguerre, and heard talk more appropriate to racing: “That black is slow starter but comes on strong at the finish,” or “The red has won his last three times out; hardly worth a bet at tonight's odds,” or “The brown doesn't look like much but I know his trainer. If the price is right I go for ten.” The air was full of admonitions, curses, greetings and cigar smoke. Most of the men wore the familiar white or blue cotton trousers and loose shirt; many were barefoot; but a few wore collarless dress shirts or imported pants. The women seemed to be whores; he saw none of the moon élégan', no Near Eastern empresses or Queens of Sheba. It was a good noisy cheerful black crowd. He was at home and almost happy in this mob of rumbustious Haitians.

The betting was moderate. There were a few professional bookmakers but mainly it was man-to-man. Bettors were offering as little as one gourde. The highest sum called in Blanchard's presence was fifty. He would bet twenty—a dollar, give or take a few cents. He had come for the entertainment and the company, and his profession had taught him the dangers of gambling.

As usual, every time he saw a flash of scarlet in someone's get-up his mind said “Caco.” But that was habit, not fear. This evening he had no enemies. He was cheering impartially for two peckers. The flow of blood was impressive. It mingled with remembered flows, faint confused images from his several pasts. The red had lost an eye, but the remaining orb gleamed like a ruby as he attacked, attacked, hopped sideways and attacked again. It was, as cockfights go, classic. If either bird had flapped his way into the air and come down with a well-placed spur, the match would have ended; but they were peckers.

He gulped clairin. He was thirsty and sober. “Vas-y le rouge!” he shouted. Startled faces gleamed at him. “Messieurs-dames,” he said, and hoisted his cup in general greeting.

“‘Soir, le blanc,” a voice called.

“Tout le monde!” Blanchard responded. The crowd was growing shrill, its nighttime roar swelling. Men stamped and cursed. The red was wearing down his foe. That was a waste. Suppose he won? A one-eyed cock would never fight again anyway, but boil up nicely with onions. Simmer for some hours, please. These were tough little birds. The loser was reddish too, more orange, and he stabbed back gamely, but he was being forced to give ground and circle. it was not that he lacked heart; only that he was smaller. His handlers were not permitted to touch him except to keep him within the ring. Each time he hoped to flee, they herded him back to his doom.

Now the orange was hard-pressed, and the pit was all feathers and shouts. Along the palisade, lanterns flickered from the sheer force of sound. The red closed in hard and the din was fierce, but by God the orange gave them their gourde's worth: fought back standing, fought back beaten to a sit, down on his tail; braced and strained himself into one more flurry and went over on his tail-feathers again, doomed and battling, and at the last second he fetched red a roundhouse swipe with one spur and the lone ruby eye dimmed. They died like that, the red with his beak in the orange and a spur in his brain, and the cheering was fierce. Men and women roared and yodelled and applauded and clacked their wooden cups together in rhythm, and in the corner by Boniface's little dwelling a tambor rataplanned, and a deafening hooraw went up for Mince Serpen' and Cheche Crachat, or Skinny Snake and Dry Spit, who were the birds embraced in death, and for Achille and Charlot, who were the owners embraced in life. All bets were off, and the camaraderie was like warm mist.