Back of Beyond (9 page)

“Look, can I take you somewhere—to the nearest village? Anywhere?”

“No. I must stay with the machine.”

“What about the ladies?”

“They must stay with me. We are fine, thank-you.”

“Why don’t you stay in the shade? You could be here quite a while. It’s very hot.”

“No. I am used to this.”

All very odd. I walked around the Land-Rover to look at the wheel. A painted insignia on the door was still visible beneath a thick coating of dust:
MISSION OF GOD, FIRST CONGREGATION COLLEGIATE UNIT
.

“Oh, you’re with a mission? I wondered why you were out in this wilderness.”

“Yes, a mission.”

“I’m just traveling. Thought it may be interesting down this way.”

“And is it?”

“Interesting? Well—so far it’s been different. Fascinating.”

“Ah.”

I began to get the feeling that he would be happier left alone. There was something otherworldly in the way he kept looking over my head, turning his neck like a cockerel about to crow, staring at things beyond the thornbushes and the hills.

“Look. I really feel I could be doing something to help. I’ve got a jack in the Jeep. Maybe we could use yours and mine together and get the wheel—”

“All will be well, sir. Help is coming. Please don’t worry about us.”

“I’m going to Bombardopolis. I’ll see if anyone’s coming down this way…”

“Thank-you, but that really will not be necessary.”

He reminded me of another of Graham Greene’s characters in
The Comedians
—the evangelistic vegetarian determined to transform the eating habits of all Haitians. Along with regular infusions of fast-buck buccaneers that have plagued this little country, there have always been the “higher agenda” exponents seeking to bring enlightenment, either religious or communistic, to a nation still shrouded in the ancient African mysteries of voodoo.

Just before my meeting with the missionary I’d been dialing my way through the static on the Jeep radio and had found only two intelligible stations. One was wall-to-wall proselytizing programs beamed in from Grand Cayman island, mainly featuring Billy Graham’s crusade messages. The other was Radio Cuba (Cuba is only fifty miles to the west of Haiti), which combined Latin pop music with regular dousings of Castro himself, pounding out his philosophy of social equality with a never-flagging fervor. Not a flicker of good old rock n’ roll anywhere on the dial. No wonder most rural Haitians seem to prefer their own companionship and quiet conversation in the shade of their kays to all this endless rhetoric. The country’s had its fill of rhetoric, no matter how well-intentioned. Everyone seems to know what’s best for the Haitians but the Haitians themselves….

The missionary had walked off down the road to look for his “help.” The four women had not said one word or shown the slightest interest in their predicament or my presence. They were now asleep under the thornbush. Four Henry Moore figures in the shade.

“God is good,” say the voodoo
houngans
(priests). “He provides all your needs.” In a nation that seems to have so little left to give to itself, maybe that’s the only remaining dream—leaving God to work it all out.

The road rolled on, sometimes over high dry desert plateaus, sometimes down into luxuriant oasislike clefts, occupied by little villages with their verdant gardens of maize, millet, sweet potatoes, mangoes, custard apples, bananas, and breadfruit.

There were no other vehicles around. I had the land all to myself again and was enjoying the solitude and sense of self-containment. And then, in the early evening and with no warning, came Bombardopolis. A huge cemetery appeared out of the bushes, hundreds of hefty stone sarcophagi (the heftier the better, according to Haitian beliefs, to keep the deceased well and truly in the ground and prevent the emergence of the dreaded “living dead”—the zombies), crammed together over four acres of bare land at the edge of town.

As towns go in Haiti, this was quite small, but after all those wide-open spaces it felt like a teeming metropolis. A long main street, lined with a mix of concrete block and mud-and-thatch houses was dominated at the far end by a dainty, pastel-painted church. The weekly market was still in full swing on the main plaza in front of the church. Scores of women in brightly colored dresses and scarves sat cross-legged by blankets and plastic sheets on which were displayed all the traditional wares of country markets—from staple foods, fruits, and dried fish to long bars of domestic soap purchased by the inch, little piles of sundried coffee beans, hairpins and combs, round brown paper packages of unrefined brown sugar, tiny packages of sea salt, even tinier twists of wrapped tobacco and clay pipes, Marlboro and Kent cigarettes sold singly, piles of boxed matches, and bottles of cheap and potent crude rum known as
clairon
.

I bought some small straw-woven baskets, beautifully crafted by two young men who sat weaving together near the water fountain as the women came to fill their plastic containers for the evening meal.

“
Kouman ou yeh?
” (“How are you?”) was my attempt at a greeting to the curious faces, which broke into smiles and giggles at my hesitant Creole. Children scampered up, stared in disbelief at my beard and cameras, and rushed off to bring more children. Old men approached gracefully and offered a handshake in welcome. For a while I became the feature attraction of the afternoon. “We do not see many blans,” explained one young man in hesitant English. “I hope you like my town, thank-you-very-much.”

I nodded enthusiastically. I did like his town. It had life, vigor, and color. I wandered around as the evening sun turned the whole place orange and gold. By the time I returned to the square in twilight, the market was gone, but the little pink, green, and white church still glowed. A full moon rose up behind the belltower.

As for a place to stay, I was in luck. CARE had a modest guest house near the cemetery, and for a few dollars I was given a bed and an evening meal of saltfish, plantain fritters, sweet potatoes, rice, and beans—a regal repast for a rather weary traveler.

I couldn’t resist a last stroll before turning in to the cemetery, of course, spiritual center of the Haitian psyche. The stone coffins, silvered by the moon, seemed larger than they did during the day. They were set in apparently haphazard fashion, wherever a bit of spare land existed, some even encroaching on the road itself. I was the only person around and, in spite of the bright moonlight, I felt uneasy. All those voodoo tales of zombies and the crushing of old bones for spiritual potions…I didn’t hang around long.

After a breakfast of superb French-roasted Haitian coffee, fried eggs with more plantain fritters, a huge flat round of cassava bread, and orange juice fresh squeezed from oranges grown in the guest house garden, I was ready for the road again.

And the road was ready for me too. A mile or so out of Bombardopolis I had my first puncture on a particularly rocky stretch in the middle of a wilderness of thornbushes. I thought I’d have to go through the whole arduous business of tire changing all by myself, but hardly had I climbed out of the Jeep when I was surrounded by helping hands—children, young strapping men, and old pipe-smoking grandfathers, full of advice and encouragement. They seemed to appear from nowhere (an experience I later got used to in Haiti). The job was done in no time. I had to drive back to the town to fix the punctured tire (crossing this country without a reliable spare is a guaranteed catastrophe). I sat bemused for half an hour as the inner tube was pried out, patched, and then heat-sealed using a “make-do” device of metal clamp and iron pot in which kerosene was burned to create the heat to heat the clamp to seal the patch. Ingenious innovations everywhere in Haiti.

The first two hours or so after dawn in Haiti are idyllic—early-morning perfumes, dewy blossoms on corn tassles, the haloed tops of tall millet plants, the curling smoke of new fires, the sounds of cocks, donkeys, sleepy dogs. After that the heat increases by the minute, and by 8:30
A.M.
, I’m usually a pathetically dripping wretch seeking shade wherever I can find it. I drove with the windows wide open, choking in the dust but finding some relief in the humid breeze. Usually there are trees around or buildings, but in the deserty northwest cactus and thornbush provide little relief from the hammering heat.

It was hard to believe here that Haiti was once almost covered in rain forest. Although deforestation is not a new phenomenon, it was a problem even at the end of the nineteenth century, when the peasants, liberated from the old French plantation system (the island was one of the richest colonies on earth under its European occupiers), began clearing their own land in the mountain foothills for small-farm cultivation. This, coupled with the still extensive use of charcoal for cooking, has resulted in a situation today where less than four hundred square miles (about three percent of the country) still have viable tree cover. Elsewhere erosion, abandoned farms, and lost irrigation potential have led to a semidesert transformation of much of the island. Later in my journey I passed through one of the last remaining rain forests, a powerful reminder of how this poor nation has wasted one of its greatest natural resources.

Beyond a remarkably large church, the remnants of a stone fort and magnificent white sand beaches, Môle St. Nicolas seems to have little else to boast about. Vacant lots, abandoned buildings, a small harbor whose main source of income is the transport of charcoal (one wonders how charcoal is made from the stumpy vegetation on the dry hills all around)—the town has certainly seen better days.

“But we are famous, M’sieur. Very famous.” A rotund middle-aged storeowner, trying to sell me beer at twice the going rate, became adamant about his home town.

“The famous Christopher Columbus came here, M’sieur, in December 1492. This was the first place he saw in the New World after leaving Spain. We are very proud.”

“Did he stay long?”

“Oh well. Not so very long. Just a few hours maybe. But he liked it very much.”

“Where did he go?”

“Oh, off down the coast towards Cap Haitien. And then he got stuck at Limonade. They were all drinking with the Arawak Indians. He let a young boy steer his ship, the
Santa Maria
, and he smashed it into a reef!”

“And then?”

“Well…” his voice became conspiratorial. “Very strange. No one really knows. Columbus left thirty-nine of his men behind to build a fort and get gold from the Indians and he went off in the
Ni
a
for about a year. When he came back he found the fort and houses burnt down and all his men gone…”

“Where were they?”

“Ah, no one knows…. They were never found…. The Indians had gone too…. Very strange, M’sieur.”

I gave him a cigar. He paused to light it with exacting care.

“Haiti has so many stories like this, M’sieur,” he said. “And where are you going now?”

“East. Through Jean Rabel and Port-de-Paix. Hopefully to Cap Haitien.”

“It’s a bad road, M’sieur.”

“I’ve got a good Jeep.”

He paused again, undecided about something. Then he leaned across the counter, pushing the bottles of beer aside.

“What do you know about Haiti voodoo?”

“Not very much. No one talks about it—except for foreigners!”

“Yes, that is so true. Those who know least always talk the most. Isn’t that true about so many things?”

We chuckled together and his face disappeared in a cloud of cigar smoke.

“This is an excellent cigar. I have not had one for over two years now. I thank you.”

He became serious and conspiratorial again. “Today is Saturday. When you get to Anse à Foleur—it’s a small village about halfway between Port-de-Paix and Cap Haitien—ask for Jean-Claude.”

“Okay. Why?”

“Tell him Jules at Môle sent you and give him one of your cigars. Maybe give him two.”

“And then?”

“Who knows? Maybe he’ll show you a few things…”

A wink, followed by more billows of smoke. “Haiti is a very strange country, M’sieur. Full of surprises….”

I thanked Jules and loaded the beer into the Jeep.

“M’sieur,” he seemed a little embarrassed, “Is it possible that you have just one more cigar for me?”

There were times when I really questioned the sanity of this journey. True the scenery was magnificent, the beaches, the sky, that purple-blue ocean, but the track along which my poor Jeep bounced and crashed was idiotic. It seemed that an army of workers had carefully cleared all the adjoining land of boulders and rocks and then thrown them, higgledy-piggledy, across my road.

It was a barren brittle terrain of limestone crags and broken strata, holed like Swiss cheese, gleaming white under a searing sun. At first glance it seemed utterly devoid of people and vegetation. But then, peering through the heat shimmers, I began to see mud and straw kays among the boulders, and tiny patches of tilled earth. Something was being grown here. Four-foot high plants surrounded by piles of rocks. They looked like fledgling trees. I’d heard that CARE had forestation projects in the northwest but surely not here, not in this wilderness?