To Run Across the Sea (12 page)

‘What’s your name?’ he asked in French.

‘Johnson. I run the Grand Hotel Meurice.’

‘Someone’s screwing your wife.’

‘I hardly think that,’ Johnson said.

The captain raised the baton he was carrying. ‘Say, “Someone’s screwing my wife.”’

‘Someone’s screwing my wife,’ Johnson agreed.

The officer then struck him a number of blows about the body and head, flattening his nose and breaking an eardrum and several ribs. The beating, Johnson said, was bad, and the hospital if anything worse. Luckily he was not in need of medicine because there was nothing but aspirins. Food had to be brought in, and his wife, called in to look after him, slept on the floor beside his bed. ‘That’s it so far as I’m concerned. I’m calling it a day,’ he said. But I knew him too well, and I knew that next year if I came back he would still be there, a prisoner for life of the charm of this strange and beautiful island.

Even the beating and the hospital had not been the end of Johnson’s troubles. Haiti depended for survival on US aid, most of which went to foot the bill for the salaries of fictitious generals and the military equipment they were supposed to require, leaving little over to be spent on essential services. At this moment Haiti was suffering from its worst water shortage in history. Newspapers reported that women were rising at two in the morning to walk to the mountains to carry home their water supply for the day. In Port-au-Prince robbers raided hotel swimming pools, and while Johnson had lain groaning on his bed of pain a well-organised gang, having first drugged his dog with bread soaked in rum, had syphoned away 30,000 irreplaceable gallons.

Two days after my arrival the marauders were back. Johnson rushed up literally tearing at what could be reached between the bandages of his hair to say that once again they had knocked his dog out with overproof rum, and cut down and gone off with the finest of his specimen trees. This had been planted by the rich creole who had owned the place and who collected arboreal rarities. I remembered it as having a thick glossy trunk with many wart-like protuberances, and flowers that attracted clouds of sombre-moths. The thieves had carried it away, Johnson said, to convert into charcoal, second only in value in the absence of all other combustible material, to food itself—which in any case Haitians were slowly learning to do without.

We looked down from the veranda into the swimming pool where a small snake was twisting desperately in the 18 inches of curdled water in its bottom, and then, a little to one side, at the naked stump where Johnson’s tree had once spread its opulent shade. Johnson’s single visible eye glistened in the opening of the bandages. ‘I have to get away for a time and simmer down,’ he said. The number of misinformed tourists attracted to Haiti in these days made it hardly worth keeping the hotel open; in any case his French wife who enjoyed
les affaires
could easily manage. Besides this he had a project in mind. ‘I’ve lived here 20 years,’ he said, ‘and the time’s come to put a few thoughts on paper.’ Someone had just discovered a pocket of black men who spoke Polish. They proved to be descendants of the defeated legion of General le Clerc—Bonaparte’s brother-in-law, living as charcoal burners on a mountain-top in the Departement du Nord. It sounded like promising material for his book, and when he suggested that we might run up there together, I immediately agreed.

Johnson’s pride and joy was his Facel-Vega, an ostentatious and over-elaborate French car of which only a few hundred had been made to special order. It was studded with the gadgetry of its day, little of which continued to work after exposure to the primaeval servicing arrangements provided in Haiti. The lights did not switch on, the power-steering had failed, and the electrically operated windows on which the air-conditioning depended had suddenly fallen and could not be raised. The worst trouble with the car was that the mere sight of it was offensive to the police and the miscellaneous thugs supported by those in power, who believed that only they should ride in comfort. It was inevitable that any squad car or collection of motorised tontons-macoutes noticing the Facel-Vega parked in the street should do what they could to scrape a fender as they passed. This, Johnson said, would be the first opportunity he had had to get out on the open road and put the car through its paces.

The next day, a Sunday, we set out in hope, although over-shadowed by the news that the road to Cap Haitien on the north coast, where we had hoped to stay, had become impracticable for all but a jeep. The general opinion was that we might get two-thirds of the way, but we had been driving for less than an hour and had only just passed St Marc, 35 miles from Port-au-Prince, when the road ahead disappeared among what looked like bomb-craters, and we turned back. ‘Looks as though we shan’t be seeing the Poles,’ Johnson said, and I agreed, suddenly realising that all the bare and bitter landscape of northern Haiti studded nevertheless with so many delectable, wildly coloured and ramshackle little towns such as Marmelade, Limonade, Petit Paradis, Limbo, Phaëton, Plaisance and Ditty, some of which I had seen, and some not, had passed for ever beyond my reach.

But at least St Marc was left to us, on the frontiers of the lost world, wearing its coat of many colours. Long-limbed, barefoot girls in white dresses and wide Edwardian hats roamed the streets which were painted with all the colours of yesteryear: greens to rest the eyes after the hot plain, saffron, cerulean, ultramarine, and reds in all stages of reduction by the sun to a final nostalgic sepia. The girls floated towards us as if moved by a slack tide. At the far end of the street a number of tiny Lowry figures were tugging on a rope to pull a gingerbread house upright. A man drifted past caressing the head of a fighting cock shorn of comb and wattle, carried under his arm. The street was scattered with scampering black pigs, and somewhere behind a ruined clapboard façade a piano tinkled out a hymn.

REJOICE! said the single word over the door of the bar. We went in and were instantly, and without ordering, served by a negro of huge solemnity with a fried banana apiece, upon which he ladled a dollop of shrimps. With this went blue tumblerfuls of the pale and ensnaring Haitian rum. The girls lined up in the doorway and followed our every movement with their splendid but melancholic eyes. One used her muslin scarf to polish a small area of the Facel-Vega’s wing, then smiled shyly at her reflection. Swept along by the rum, Johnson began rummaging in his stock of folklore and myth. ‘One of these days you may turn up out of the blue and find all our rooms taken,’ he said. ‘Should this ever happen let me warn you not to go to a boarding house run by a nubile woman. They have this habit of falling in love with any white man and putting menstrual fluid in his food. It works, and you’d find yourself in quite a predicament.’

In Haiti you were expected to believe anything, and no story of werewolves or enchanters was too fantastic to be true. Foreign residents like Johnson, who had done a long stint on the island, were more credulous than the natives themselves. There was something about the fey and dispirited postures of the girls at the door that prompted a question. ‘Have you ever seen a zombie?’

‘On more than one occasion,’ Johnson said, as I knew he would. ‘They are characterised by an appearance of extreme lethargy, as well as their way of speaking through the nose.’

‘Any chance of my ever seeing one?’

‘That would largely depend upon you. Ask yourself, have you an open mind? A professional sceptic is a man in blinkers. If we had the time I could show you extraordinary things, as for example a
mapu
tree that is the home of a spirit. You are bound to laugh but it is a phenomenon scientists are in two minds about. Do you remember the celebrated Ti Bossa?’

‘I’ve heard of him.’

‘This was the voodoo priest who put President Magloire in power. As you know, he had forty wives and could render a man invisible purely by pouring a small amount of a certain white powder over him.’

‘Didn’t Magloire give him a Cadillac?’

‘The island’s first. It’s still up there in the mountains. His people built a temple round it and they still sacrifice a white cock to it every Saturday.’

‘Now that’s something we should see,’ I said.

A narrow lane led down to the sea, and a boat painted with a cabalistic design, its bottom stove in, sat in its shadow on the beach. There were hardly any small boats left on the island now, and three ebony-black fishermen were just about to launch a raft to fish for sharks. Slow, rakish tropic birds joined wing-tips with their reflection in the cobalt sea. A boy sat cutting mother-of-pearl to make brooches from a pile of helmet shells. He came up with a sample of his work in the hope of a commission. A brooch carved and polished with a routine Dahomey head could be finished in the day and would cost one gourde. There were seven gourdes to the dollar.
‘Pas cher,’
he said.

Johnson suggested we might as well go back to Port-au-Prince, then take the so-called international highway up through the mountains to Belladere. We had both come to the conclusion that if we wanted to see anything of the fast-vanishing countryside of Haiti, it was now or never. The map promised us 40 miles of tarmac, but at Poste de Flande, roughly half-way, the international highway seemed about to give up the ghost.

For months not a drop of water had fallen from the skies of Port-au-Prince, but here the rain fell in sudden opaque showers between intervals of brilliant sunshine. We groped our way cautiously through streams and round landslides. Sometimes road and river-bed would be united for a hundred yards and large, greyish kingfishers went hurtling past on both sides of the car, and we could see little fish darting away from the front wheels. All the trees had been cut down and when the sun came out the tall, ragged poinsettias on the eroded hillsides made the day seem hotter. In rural Haiti only one couple in ten can afford to get married in church, but those who still do clothe the ceremony in dignity and panache. A bride on her way to her wedding who went splashing past on horseback in a great muslin foaming of veils and skirts was preceded by a dozen capering drummers. The name of this village was ‘Peu de Chose’, which in a way described it well.

The small town that followed was a piece of nineteenth-century Normandy recreated in the tropics. A clapboard version of a French church wore its spire askew like a comic hat. It was supported by a mairie, a closed-down École de Jeunes Filles, a pigmy château patched with corrugated iron, and a magnificent Parisian pissoir ennobled by its positioning at the top of a flight of wide steps. A herd of dwarf cows occupied the square, where they browsed of the fallen blossoms of the flame trees. We stopped to watch the approach of a ghostly black version of a French grandee with white Napoleon beard, cutaway coat, panama hat, spats and malacca cane. A girl had set up a stall near by, and sat smoking a cob pipe, her skirts pulled halfway up her black thighs. She sold single and half-cigarettes, olive oil by the spoonful and dried fishes’ tails at one cent apiece, and cuffed away sparrows that alighted for a quick peck at the fish. The 2,500 generals had been treated well by their backers, but these were the poorest people in the Americas.

We went into the empty Café du Centre which was fitted with booths to which strips of buttoned leather upholstery still adhered. There was a faint reek about the place of coffee and Gauloise cigarettes which I accepted as an illusion since these things were no longer to be found in such a place. Through the window we watched the Sunday afternoon formal promenade of dignified black men in winged collars and their wives who wore hats tied in place with motoring veils.

‘This,’ said Johnson, ‘is a copy of France as it once was. You won’t hear Creole spoken here. These people actually believe themselves to be French. Take that old man with the white beard we just saw. I know him. He has papers to prove he’s a descendant of the Duc de Brantôme. There’s another family here that goes back to Lamartine. Forget about Papa Doc Duvalier. This is the real Haiti. This is the heart and soul of the island.’

A small boy had brought our rum, but now I saw a woman I took to be the proprietress approach. She was an exceedingly beautiful mulatta, of the kind they described here as
jaune
with the palest of golden skin and soft chestnut hair. This was the end product of generations of selective breeding by a rich family struggling towards their white ideal. Anywhere but here she would have passed as white, and only her huge, Pre-Raphaelite eyes betrayed her racial secret. She smiled and beckoned with her finger.
‘Venez voir les oiseaux,’
she said.

We got up and followed her through the back of the bar into a garden overlooking a wide swamp spread through the valley under a black mountain. A half square mile of the swamp was covered with flamingoes, possibly a thousand of them, and at this moment—perhaps because someone had fired a gun—they were beginning to take off. Slowly, as the coverlet of birds was stripped back it was converted into a pink cloud which floated away between two low peaks and was lost to sight.

A circular thatched hut of the kind you saw everywhere in Haiti had been built in a corner of the garden. ‘Is this the place where they hold the cock fights?’ Johnson asked.

‘We do not have cock fights,’ she said. ‘The people come here for their celebrations.’ She had switched easily into English.

She went ahead and we followed her into the hut which was much larger than most. It had been decorated as if in readiness for carnival, still several weeks ahead. Cut-out paper shapes dangled from the thatch and the floor was covered with intricate designs traced out in flour, recalling the complex wrought-iron patterning of the last century. The roof was supported by a number of poles, from each of which hung large drums. Pictures of the kind that might have been painted by children with a taste for the bizarre stood on the floor all round the walls: intertwining snakes, staring eyes, a dancing skeleton, Jonah captured by his whale. ‘Voodoo,’ Johnson said. ‘In this of all places. I’d never have dreamed of it. They’re certainly advancing their frontiers.’