Back of Beyond (7 page)

I was tempted to turn back. The road had become little more than a mud and dust path playing hopscotch with an abandoned narrow-gauge railroad track, a remnant of the old days when this vast fertile valley was one huge sugar plantation. But occasional tantalizing flashes of sparkling water between the palms kept me going and going until, without any warning, the track ended in green salt marshes and I had arrived.

After all the banging and crashing over ruts, railway lines, and boulders, the silence buzzed in my ears. The air was limpid, and it was hot. Very hot.

I heard voices, chattering and singing. A path meandered through clumps of succulent bushes, and I followed it into a broad open meadow below a line of towering mountains and crags. The voices stopped. Ahead, scores of naked and half-naked women stood staring at me. The water of the lake glinted and rippled gently behind them. The ground was a patchwork quilt of sheets and clothes, sparkling like splashed paint in the afternoon sun. The women showed no sign of confusion or embarrassment. Their bodies glowed amber and they stood proudly, hands on hips, waiting for my next move. There were no other men about. I had obviously trespassed on their private laundering and bathing turf. I decided to withdraw as gracefully as I could, waving and mumbling inanities, until the bushes once more hid them from view.

I found the perfect private spot a little while later after skirting the marshes. Three large palms cast a pool of shade on clusters of pond apple and buttonwood and I sat down to enjoy the lake.

The challenge of reaching many of Haiti’s most beautiful places doubles the reward of their beauty. Lake Saumâtre stretched out before me, purple-blue against the sage-green mountains enclosing the northern edge. Along the southern shore, rolling foothills rose slowly to the Massif de la Selle. Its surface was still now; the mountains were mirrored flawlessly. Way at the far end were the hills and ranges of the Dominican Republic, shimmering in the heat. At my end of the lake, only a few yards from where I sat, a tricolored heron stood stick still, gauging just the right moment to select his later afternoon tidbits. Two white egrets posed coyly on the back of a horse, let out to pasture on the salt marshes; grebe, teals, and terns flurried through the shallows, restless, lacking the grace and patience of the statuesque heron.

I’d heard the lake was a favorite haunt of Cayman crocodiles but today there was no sign of them.

But the pink flamingoes were there for me. Hundreds of them, scattered about in rosy clusters, heads down, endlessly scooping through the shallows. Only when alarmed would they raise their heads in orchestrated formation and walk slowly in single file on those ridiculously skinny legs, all their necks and bills pointing in the same direction, until they had selected a safer grazing place. They made no sound as the line of bodies passed me like a funeral procession.

They were comical and regal at the same time, mesmerizing in their measured movements. A delicate horizontal of pink and white against the purple lake and the soaring silver-gray crags.

From way in the distance the chatter and singing of the bathing women were carried toward me in soft waves by the breeze. Smoke from charcoal fires in the village, hidden behind a hazy line of bushes and palms, curlicued into the evening sky. Children laughing; three women gliding between the trees carrying bundles of clean laundry home on their heads to a tiny kays among mango and banana trees.

And the feeling that came so often to me in Haiti, when I saw the simple, enduring, self-sustaining rhythms of these secluded villages far from the clamor and flash point frenzy of the cities, was a feeling of wholeness and completeness. Ancient patterns. Still strong, still sound. Still Africa.

“You won’t believe our history.”

“I won’t?” I was back in Port-au-Prince, sitting on the verandah of Haiti’s most famous hostelry, The Grand Hotel Oloffson, talking to a thick-set, middle-aged Haitian who claimed to have once been “a pretty well-known opponent to the Jean-Claude Duvalier government.” He introduced himself obliquely—“They call me Jacques”—so I left it at that. In the ghostly gingerbread fantasy of the Oloffson, mystery and intrigue seem appropriate. Graham Greene captured it perfectly in his book
The Comedians:
“It had the air at night of a Charles Addams house in a number of
The New Yorker
. You expected a witch to open the door to you or a maniac butler with a bat dangling from the chandelier behind him.”

The hotel has recently been saved from terminal decay by Richard Morse, a descendant of President Sam (ruler of Haiti for five months in 1915), whose brother built the place around the turn of the century. Now it sits in all its restored Victorian glory on a rocky hill shaded by a junglelike profusion of royal palms, banana trees, and flowering magnolias. Suites named after Mick Jagger, Sir John Gielgud, Marlon Brando (one of the largest beds I’ve ever seen), and Graham Greene reflect its celebrated clientele, and you can still sense its reputation as a center for whispered rumor mongering and revolutionary intrigue.

“No—you won’t believe this little country,” Jacques continued. “You know how big we are? We’re about…we got about six million people. M’be more now. They coming back again. They coming back because things got quieter a bit—not much—never gets real quiet in Haiti. Not for las’ twenty years anyway.

“We had everyt’ing—massacre, revolutions, more revolutions, dictators, generals, civil wars—thirty-five rulers since we got free in 1804, and almost every one of them executed, blown up, assassinated or kicked out in revolutions. Ev’n the Americans took us over once for thirty years, till 1934! We had starvation, corruption like nobody’s business, bankruptcy—I mean, the whole country’s been bankrupt since I was a kid and longer—every time the top guy gets kicked out—if he’s not dead—he takes all the cash he can grab. One guy—this minister—tried to carry off his own computer system—the whole thing, one hundred computers! Don’t know why he bothered, they never worked!”

The mood at the Oloffson seems to encourage this kind of exchange. You feel safe here, even though you’re only a mortar shot away from the enormous Presidential Palace. Couched in this pretty neighborhood of old delicate gingerbread mansions, you sense neutral territory. Rare for a city that has had its fill of
pèzé-sucé
(“squeeze and suck” tactics of governments, a popular phrase named after a frozen stick of sweet-flavored ice) and when
brigandes de vigilance
still patrol the slum
bidonvilles
of La Saline and Cité Carton, seeking out informers and the resilient remnants of Papa Doc’s Tontons Macoute.

“It’s a crazy place. We battled them all to get out of slavery and colonization—French, British, Dutch, Americans, Dominicans. Then when we beat ’em, we start in on ourselves—blacks against mulatto, poor against rich, bureaucrat against peasant, voodoo against priests, and now general against general. Jean Claude [Duvalier] even sold off thousands of our peasants as slaves to work sugar plantations over in the Dominican Republic. Most never came back. They died there.”

Two rum cocktails arrived courtesy of Richard Morse. He’s always hovering around with his baby-face smile, a lanky catalyst, making introductions, easing the exchange of whispered gossip, an indispensable resource for journalists, with his fingers deep in Haiti’s multiflavored (and very sticky) pies.

“The Duvaliers were a mess,” Jacques continued. “You wouldn’t believe. But they held the country together for a while—terror, voodoo, torture, execution, massacre—old Papa Doc playing Black Baron Samedi, the voodoo loa of the graveyard. ‘I’m an immaterial being,’ he said, and they believed him. When we finally got ’em out we didn’t know what would happen. There’s been some nasty stuff but…I don’t know, maybe it’s coming together. May not seem like much of a free place to you but it’s our freedom—and it’s all we’ve got. And when you get that close to nothin’, you give a lot to keep the bit you got….”

The recent film
The Serpent and the Rainbow
(a very free and spirited adaptation of the rather scholarly book of the same name by Wade Davis) began as follows:

The film deals with the much-publicized (and much misunderstood) cult of voodoo zombiism in Haiti (on which more later). But the words also seem, in an ironic way, to suggest the dilemma of Haiti herself—“trapped in a terrible place”—bound by the tentacles of a savage, grotesque history, voodoo mysteries and magic, the power of the
bogons
(witch doctors), and a grindingly hopeless economy crushed by markets way beyond the control, or even comprehension, of Haitian politicians and bureaucrats.

Some pundits wonder aloud whether Haiti can ever break loose from its tangled web of chaos. The cynical fringe even claim that Haiti has got so used to being the Western Hemisphere’s whipping boy and socioeconomic basket case that it has come to rather enjoy the game playing, particularly with the United States, and the benevolent cash and technical assistance handouts of international institutions and agencies.

One CARE worker suggested to me it’s the
Mouse That Roared
syndrome—make a lot of noise and threats and wait for peace-at-any-price loans and grants. His ultimate scenario was another U.S. “benevolent takeover” (less repressive than the 1915 escapade—more like the Panama debacle instead), during which much of the physical infrastructure would be refurbished once again (Haitian minor roads are unbelievably bad) and the economic system put on something of a solid footing. At the opposite end of the scale there are those who believe that one more bloody rebellion, accompanied by all the familiar gory reprisals (plus one or two “accidentally involved” tourists, Peace Corps workers, or priests), and the world will fling up its collective hands in exasperation and turn its back, once and for all, on this hapless horror story of a nation.

“There are indeed those, sir, who delight in poking fun at Haiti as an example of the hopelessness of blacks trying to run their own country. Not only here, but virtually anywhere on the face of this troubled globe.”

Aubelin Jolicoeur sat in his customary position on a high barstool at the Oloffson bar, immaculate as always in a crisp, cream linen suit, silk tie, and gold-handled cane, carefully placed on his lap. You have to love the man. He’s the epitome of postcolonial pomposity but with a sly self-deprecating humor; his manicured pose matches his meticulous fingernails and carefully primped moustache on his honey-skinned face. He is a slice of history, a real-life
Comedians
character, still as frisky and gossip hungry as he was as Petit Pierre in Greene’s put-down of the notorious Duvalier era.

Beyond the Oloffson’s shady gingerbread tracery, the streets were a tumult of shouting, laughing people. It was the first day of a two-day strike by the populace to protest the illegal imprisonment and torture of three electoral candidates by the current government of General Prosper Avril.

Aubelin Jolicoeur continued. “You see, my dear sir—and I say ‘dear’ in all sincerity, for I feel that anyone who travels as freely as you do about our beautiful country either has the most nefarious of purposes or the dearest, most optimistic outlook on life. And you, sir,” he rubs the handle of his walking stick with long fingers and leans forward, smiling, “you undoubtedly fall into the latter category from the sparkle in your eyes and your enthusiasm as we discuss my unfortunate country.”

All this slides out as smoothly as soft skin on a satin pillow. Aubelin pauses to sip his rum cocktail. (They’re still pretty good here. César, the barman, has been making them for over thirty years at the Oloffson and hasn’t lost his touch.) He pats his moustache with a neatly pressed handkerchief and begins again in his conspiratorial tone. “We have a Creole saying here in Haiti: ‘Deye mon, gen mon’—‘Behind the mountains, there are mountains.’” Another dramatic pause and flourish of the handkerchief. “One can interpret this on so many levels. Topographically—geographically—it is certainly true. Emotionally it suggests a somewhat pessimistic outlook, an expectation of disaster on the part of my countrymen. But most important—spiritually, philosophically—that is where the significance of this phrase becomes most pronounced. Everything here is so complicated.” He sighs a long sigh and gives a sad smile. “You see—the lines go back so far. When you think you’ve found the right answers you realize that you’ve merely been asking the wrong questions. Remember sir: Nothing in Haiti is what it appears to be!”

For a moment Aubelin became utterly serious. I had heard of his reputation as the ears and eyes of whichever ruler happens to be in power and wondered if I was receiving some kind of subtle warning. But then his self-parody returned and he laughed—an infectious laugh. A man who tempered his truths with a finely honed blade of irony and humor. I couldn’t help chuckling with him, even as he ordered himself another rum punch and charged it to my bill.

“Nothing is what it appears to be.” I’d heard a similar phrase from my friend Ed Duffy as we traveled the wilds of Inner Mongolia. But Aubelin Jolicoeur was right. It seemed to apply in Haiti as well, and there were two events in particular that revealed the contradictory spirit of this unusual country.

The first occurred on my third or fourth day. I had driven into a small town, attracted by its rather prominent church. On closer inspection I realized the prominence was due more to its sheer size than any semblance of architectural refinement. Rusty tin roof, broken stucco and brick exterior, and gloomy mold-blue interior with a few sad plaster sculptures of saints and madonnas. Bit of a letdown.