1
There wasn’t much to the town, really—a triangular spit of land between a river and the sea, and shaped like the bowl of a natural amphitheater, most every street sloping down sooner or later to the azure stage of the Caribbean or guttering out inconclusively into twisting warrens of dirt paths, the houses degenerating to huts, then hovels. In the city center, old wooden houses listed at improbable angles. Energetic, prosperous people had built these houses and carefully painted them, but the salt air had long ago stripped away the color, leaving them a uniform grayish brown. There was a small town square, the Place Dumas, around which a flock of motorcycle taxi drivers circumnavigated in the course of every sunny day, maneuvering always to stay in the shade, and a filthy market where the marchandes hacked up and sold goat cadavers under a nimbus of flies. On the Grand Rue, merchants in old-fashioned shophouses with imposing wrought iron balconies sold sacks of cement or PVC pipes, or bought coffee. Jérémie had more coffin makers than restaurants. There were fewer cars on the streets than donkeys. The Hotel Patience down on the Grand Rue was said to be a bordello; word was that the ladies of the night were fat. Several little shops, all identical, featured row upon row of gallon-size vats of mayonnaise, which fact I could not reconcile with the lack of ready refrigeration, and bottles of Night Train and Manischewitz—local belief held the latter was a powerful aphrodisiac. You could buy cans of Dole Tropical Fruit mix, but you could not obtain a fresh vegetable; Jérémie was on the sea, but fresh fish was a rarity.
At midday, the dogs lay in the dusty streets panting, which is more or less what they did evening, morning, and night also, except when they copulated.
Whole days would pass discussing when the big boat from Port-au-Prince would arrive, staring out at the multicolored sea to register its earliest presence. The boat’s arrival brought a momentary flurry of excitement as the cargo was unloaded and barefoot men, muscles straining, eyeballs bulging, dragged thousand-pound chariots of rice, Coca-Cola, or cement through the dusty streets.
My wife and I lived in a tumbledown gingerbread, at least a century old and shaded by a quartet of sprawling mango trees. It was one of the most beautiful houses in all of Haiti. A cool terrace ran around the house, where we ate our meals and dozed away the hot afternoons in the shade. In the evenings it was (mildly) exciting to sit outside in the rocking chair and watch thick purple strokes of lightning light up cloud mountains out over the Îles Cayemites. It was the kind of house in which one might have found behind the acajou armoire a map indicating the location in the untended garden of hidden treasure.
The windows of the house had no glass, just hurricane shutters, and very late at night I sometimes heard coming up from Basse-Ville the manic beating of drums and women’s voices singing spooky songs with no melody. This was the only time Jérémie really came alive. My whole body would grow tense as I strained to hear more clearly this strange music, which would endure all through the night and well into sunrise. I had never before heard music like that. It was the music of a people laboring to communicate with unseen forces; it was the music of a people dancing wildly around a fire until seized up by some mighty unknown thing.
Only in these midnight dances would the languid tenor of the town change, revealing its frantic, urgent heart.
* * *
Our chef d’administration was a Trinidadian named Slim. His Sunday barbecues were animated by his personal vision of the United Nations as a brotherhood of man—Asian, African, and Occidental all seated together at plastic tables under big umbrellas eating hunks of jerk chicken. There were maybe a dozen of us there, in the dusty courtyard of his little concrete house.
I was talking to the chef de transport, Balu, from Tanzania—his long, glum face reminded me of Eeyore. Balu was unique in that in all his time in Haiti he never sought housing of his own. He kept a bedroll in the corner of his office and unrolled it at night. He had been living there for a year now.
I asked him once if this was difficult.
“I am come from African village!” he said. “This is everything good. I have electricity”—he was referring to the generators, which at Mission HQ went 24/7—“I have water. Maybe I am not even finding a house as good as this. Why should I be paying for anything more?”
Balu had been hired as local staff in Tanzania, supporting the UN Mission to Congo. He had done a good job and won himself a place in Haiti.
“I am not even number one in my village, or number two—I am number twelve!” he said. “If you ask anyone in village when I am boy where Balu will go one day, nobody will say, ‘Balu is going one day to United Nations.’ They will say, ‘Balu, he is going straight to Hell!’”
Balu showed me photos of the house that he built for his family. The house was large and concrete, surrounded by a low wall. It was the Africa the Discovery Channel never shows: Balu had a subcompact car in the driveway, and there was a flowery little garden. Mrs. Balu was a pretty lady of substantial girth in a magnolia-printed dress, and the little Balus were obviously having some trouble sitting still for the photo, all smiles and teeth and elbows. Then there were Balu’s eight brothers and sisters and their wives and their children and a congress of cousins and the elderly Mama Balu, Papa Balu having gone to his sweet reward.
I asked everyone I met on Mission to show me their families, and all the photos always looked like Balu’s: the concrete houses, the fat wives, the children, the new car, the flat-screen television. There was something reassuring and wonderful about those photos. If you understand those pictures, you’ll understand something about the world we live in.
When Balu gets back home to Tanzania, he’ll be showing Lady Balu and the Baluettes photos of his life on Mission. Somewhere in those photos there’ll be a photo of me and a man named Terry White. For reasons known only to himself, Balu insisted on taking a picture of me with Terry—he seemed to think, because we were both Caucasian American males, that we formed a natural set, like unicorns. He got the two of us lined up in a row and said, “Now you make smiles! You are beautiful man!”
Terry White! Who would believe such a name if it wasn’t his? No novelist would dare choose such a name in the context of Haiti. If you are white and walk down a Haitian street, someone will shout “blan!” at you within a minute; and if you walk for sixty minutes, you will hear sixty voices shouting “blan!” It meant “white!” and it meant “whitey!” and it meant “foreigner!” It meant “Hey you!” Sometimes it meant “Gimme money.” Sometimes it meant “Go home,” and sometimes, it just meant “Welcome to my most beautiful country!”
In the photo Balu took that afternoon, Terry the White and I are standing in a dirt field with some banana trees behind us. Terry W. had been deputy sheriff in the Watsonville County Sheriff’s Office in northern Florida, not far from the Georgia border, and nothing in his appearance ran contrary to stereotype of the southern lawman: he stood about six feet tall, with broad shoulders and a thick waist, heavy legs, and a pair of solid boxer’s hands. I later learned that he had been on the offensive line in high school, and you could see it in his chest and feel it in his calluses. In Balu’s photo, he has his arm draped over my shoulder: I remember its weight, like a sack of sand. His face was square, not handsome, but not ugly, the kind of mug that you would be unhappy to see asking for your license and registration, but would find reassuring when he pulled up beside your stalled Subaru on a dark night on a lonely road. His short dark hair was interwoven with a subtle streak of gray. He was wearing military-style boots, cargo pants, a gray T-shirt tight across his broad chest, and a khaki overshirt to conceal his sidearm. He gave the impression of brooding, powerful strength; a short, restless temper; and sly intelligence.
Terry was in Haiti as a so-called UNPOL, or United Nations Police, assigned to monitor, mentor, and support the fledgling national police force. The Mission was established in 2004, when the former president, Jean-Bertrand Aristide, fled the country in the face of a violent rebellion spreading down from the north. In his absence, the new government of Haiti, lacking legitimacy, popularity, and power, and confronted with a nation in chaos, requested the assistance of the United Nations Security Council, which responded by creating this vigorous, well-funded multinational peacekeeping mission.
The theory behind the Mission was this: In his time in power, Aristide had dismantled the military and neutered the police force, fearing, not without good reason, a coup d’état from one or the other. The coup came nevertheless; and now the future of the country and the eventual guarantor of security and domestic tranquillity would be a new police force, the Police Nationale d’Haïti (usually referred to by its acronym, the PNH), which the United Nations would train and equip. For this purpose there were about two thousand UNPOLs in Haiti, distributed about the country, of whom there were about twenty-five in Jérémie: a dozen francophone West Africans; a pair of former antiterrorist commandos from the Philippines; four or five French Canadians; a couple of Sri Lankans; a Romanian woman; two Turks, both named Ahmet, hence Ahmet the Great and Ahmet the Lesser; a Jordanian; and one American—Terry White.
Now, I should say straightaway that people either liked Terry very much or could not stand him; and when people said they couldn’t take him, I understood. He was a know-it-all: “What you gotta understand about voodoo…,” he said when I mentioned that I had been visiting local hougans. “What you gotta understand about the African law enforcement official…,” he said when I mentioned one of his colleagues. He wanted to argue politics: “What liberals don’t understand…,” he said. He didn’t let the argument drop: “So you really think…” He told me how many people he had tased, and he offered to tase me to show me how it feels. He called Haiti “Hades,” which was amusing the first time, but not subsequently. He called his wife his Lady. He was vain: I told him I got caught in a current down at the beach and came back to the shore breathless; he told me that his boat once capsized in the Florida Keys, leaving him surrounded by sharks. Even Terry White’s kindnesses had about them some trace of superiority: “If you ever hear a noise outside the house at night, just give me a call,” he said. “You stay inside. I’ll come down and check it out.” Between men, those kinds of declarations have meaning.
All that said—I liked him. He was, for one thing, a good storyteller and an effective, if cruel, mimic. When you talked to Terry, time passed very quickly. This was a kind of charisma. So when he told me about an argument he’d had with a colleague a couple of days before, I was all ears.
They’d been headed up to Beaumont, Terry said, and the whole way out, Ahmet the Great was talking about some lady they saw lifting her skirt and taking a leak on the side of the road. She was balancing this big basket on her head at the same time. There was a decapitated goat’s head covered in flies visible in the basket. “You gotta figure the rest of the goat was in the basket, too,” Terry said. Granted, maybe it wasn’t the prettiest spectacle in the world, this lady dropping to her haunches—“You probably wouldn’t paint the scene with oils and hang it on the living room wall”—but she did what she was doing with a heck of a lot of grace, for a big lady.
“What you got to realize is that those animals weigh upward of forty pounds,” Terry said. “Just try it, peeing like a woman with a goat on your head.”
In any case, it was Ahmet the Great who opened the discussion that day on the way to Beaumont.
“In my country, is big shame for lady pee,” Ahmet said. “Is never something lady do.”
Terry said, “In your country the ladies don’t pee? I can’t believe that.”
“In my country, is big shame lady pee like animal in streets. In my country, lady pee like lady.”
“And how does a lady pee, Ahmet? Riddle me that, my brother.”
“Not like cow or animal in street.”
This argument went round and round, up into the mountains and down, past seaside Gommier and pretty Roseaux and muddy Chardonette, one of those arguments that start out as banter but before long start to rankle, just two guys in a car, each thinking the other’s an asshole.
“So just where is this lady supposed to pee?” Terry said. “Just stop in the nearest Starbucks?”
“In my place, lady not make pee in side of road like animal or dog.”
“Are we in your place?”
“In my place, we have no United Nations. No peacekeepers. Lady not big shame, like here. My place is no-problem place.”
Terry looked at me. The incident had been weighing on him. There was hardly a tree in sight, a lady’s been walking since before dawn with a goddamn goat on her head, she feels the need—who the hell was Ahmet to judge her? People here gotta live in poverty, suffer from dawn to dusk, sweat rivers, and die young—and Ahmet, with his pompadour and mother-of-pearl–handled revolver and three-bedroom apartment in Ankara, is going to tell them in their own country where they can and cannot pee? What you got to understand is that this was the hajji mentality.
“So what do you think?” he said.
Here was an examination it was very simple to pass. “Their country,” I said.
“Damn straight,” Terry said. “Who the hell cares where this lady pisses?”
“Not me,” I said.
“What you got to understand is that for the towelheads—”
“I hear you, brother.”
“Those ladies—”
“They suffer, man. They suffer.”
I don’t believe Terry had expected me to capitulate so quickly. He seemed unsatisfied. We sat in silence for a moment or two, until from the other table a harsh, cruel laughter broke the early-evening calm. A couple of UNPOLs—one from Burkina Faso, the other from Benin—were trying to feed scraps of barbecued chicken to the chickens pecking under the table and were kicking away the hungry dogs attempting to steal some chicken for themselves. This was cracking the table up. Terry got a disgusted look on his face, seeing that.
“Knock it off,” he said. “You don’t got to humiliate those damn birds. It’s enough you’re eating their carcasses.”
The Africans laughed. Terry glared at his colleagues for a long time in a way that wasn’t friendly. I don’t think they understood the menace implicit in his low voice, or they thought laughter would defuse it. The guy from Benin kept feeding the chickens their kin. Terry’s stare was a prelude to standing up. It shocked me how swiftly his mood had switched from placid good humor to something nearly violent. An afternoon with Terry White was not necessarily relaxing.
Then the tension was over. The African UNPOLs backed off, still laughing, and Terry grinned at me: we were complicit, if but for a moment, on the side of justice. That gesture endeared him to me.
Terry told me that before coming to Haiti he’d been in law enforcement almost twenty years. “What you gotta understand is that a professionally conducted interrogation isn’t fair,” he said. Terry talked, he gave examples, and with a little prompting, he talked some more. Later he told me that his testimony had sent a man to death row—that’s something. How’d that feel? “Like it was the best thing I ever did,” he said, but not callously, rather as the only decent end to an all-around bad business. Terry told me that he’d been active in Florida Republican politics for years: at one point he’d taken a run for sheriff and lost. “Now, that’s a brutal game, Florida politics. Those boys don’t play.” So how’d you end up in Haiti of all places? He told me about Marianne Miller, Marianne Miller being his erstwhile rival back home. The upshot of the narrative cul-de-sac was that no one had appreciated what a terrific law enforcement official he was, not least the new sheriff, who had let Marianne Miller whisper poison in his ear, which had led to the complicated imbroglio that had led to the best interrogator in Florida being out of a job, then going broke, then ending up in Nowhere, Hades.
Terry was not interested in me. Not once did he ask what brought me to Haiti, what my work consisted of, or where my family was from. But had he pressed the issue, I would have told him that I had followed my wife here: she was a civilian employee of the United Nations, working as a procurement officer; and I would have mentioned that I intended to use my time in Haiti, after a decade working as a journalist, to complete a novel. Terry’s sole attempt to broach the conversational divide was to ask where my wife and I were living.
We rented our house on the rue Bayard from Maxim Bayard, a member of the Haitian Sénat. The previous tenant had left the Mission to return to Zimbabwe, and we had taken the keys directly from him, completing the details of the rental with the Sénateur by email. The Sénateur had left a small library of spiritualist literature, in both French and English, on the bookshelves: books on the interpretations of dreams, a volume on yoga, guides to communication with the dead, the margins filled with handwritten comments in bright red ink. This was all I knew of the man.
“Maxim Bayard is a maximum asshole,” Terry said.
It was like learning that Terry knew Mick Jagger. I leaned forward as he maneuvered his plastic fork and knife around on the table so that the fork was perpendicular to the knife, with a small gap between them.
The fork and the knife represented vehicles in the parking lot of the Bon Temps, a little hotel and restaurant not far from our house, where Terry had been at lunch with colleagues on a Sunday afternoon. “This was my car here”—he indicated the knife—“and this was a white pickup truck here.” He gestured to the fork. “And if you were backing up the pickup, maybe it’s not easy to get out, but there was plenty of space, if you don’t drive like a monkey’s ass.”
Terry had been gnawing on a chicken bone when he heard the crunch. He looked up. The fork had backed up directly into the knife.
“Whoa!” Terry had shouted, and all the other UNPOLs swung their heads around to see what the commotion was about. He was on his feet and walking toward the lot when the driver pulled forward and slowly rear-ended his vehicle all over again.
What Terry could recall about the Sénateur with overwhelming clarity was the expression of happy unconcern on his face. Terry had spent more than a little time as an ordinary traffic policeman, and he had never seen anyone cause an accident in this manner and subsequently display no trace of anxiety. “What you got to understand is that I was in uniform. I was armed. This was a UN vehicle,” Terry said.
And yet this man not only betrayed no sign of worry, he was still maneuvering his pickup to make a third try at the tricky turn. Terry figured that if he hadn’t walked over, the older fellow would have kept ramming his vehicle over and over again until sooner or later he succeeded.
“That’s my car,” Terry said.
“The wife of my driver, she is having a baby,” the Sénateur said in heavily accented English. “I cannot ask him to work, with his wife in the hospital.”
It all made sense in the Sénateur’s mind—you could tell. In his mind, there was some seamless chain of cause and effect that left him blameless and Terry’s vehicle dented. Something in his half smile suggested that to the contrary, Terry was at fault here, that Terry didn’t care enough about his driver’s wife. The Sénateur’s smile incarnated what Terry hated most: arrogance, impunity, indifference to the consequence of one’s actions. It was the smile of a man who believed—nay, knew—that he was above the law.
Then one of those crowds that seems to spring up out of nowhere in Haiti on a moment’s notice was watching Terry and the Sénateur. Terry could hear schoolchildren giggling. There is a terrible power in laughter: Terry began to sweat, and his face went red. The Sénateur began to laugh also, and he shouted something in Creole to the onlookers—the only word Terry could understand was “blan.” Terry felt humiliated in the eyes of his peers, who considered the encounter from the doorway of the hotel.
“But—,” Terry said, “but why didn’t you just stop after you hit me the first time?”
The man spread his hands out wide, palms upward.
“Mais mon cher, I had no idea that it would happen again.”
Terry looked at me. His story had captured the attention of the whole table. We all laughed except Balu, who was responsible for the Mission’s fleet.
“So that’s the Sénateur,” Terry said. “Twenty years in criminal justice, I never saw a reaction like that before.”
“That’s some story.”
“It’s some country,” Terry said.
Something in his voice—
“Do you like it?” I asked.
Terry was quiet for a long time. “What you got to understand is that Haiti is a lot like pussy,” he said. “It’s hot and it’s wet and it smells funny. You didn’t know about pussy, somebody told you about pussy, you wouldn’t think you’d like it much. Probably think it was something nasty. But you get to know pussy, you can’t stop thinking about it ever.”
Copyright © 2016 by Mischa Berlinski
Map copyright © 2016 by Jeffrey L. Ward