He’d gone from Haiti to the heart of chic South Beach. His hotel rose off the sea in slabs of smooth concrete like a pastel-colored birthday cake, but for a day Mason had to content himself with watching the water from his balcony. When the call finally came, he gathered up the duffel bag and walked three blocks to The Magritte, an even sleeker hotel where the men were older, the women younger, the air of corruption palpable. Well, he thought, here’s a nice place to be arrested, but in the room there was only the Frenchman and a silent, vaguely Asian type whose eyes never left Mason’s face. There were no personal items about; they might have taken the room for an hour. Mason had to sit and watch while the Frenchman laid the paintings across the bed like so many bolts of industrial cloth. He was brisk, cordial, condescending, a younger man than Mason expected, with a broad, coarse face only slightly refined by a prissy mustache and goatee.
They wore dark, elegant suits. Their hair was smooth. They looked fit in the way of people who obsess over workouts and what they eat. New wave gangsters—Mason sensed a sucking emptiness in them, the void that comes of total self-absorption. It made him sick to hand the paintings over to these people.
“And the Bigaud?” the Frenchman asked in English. “The Bathers?”
“He couldn’t get it.”
A quick grimace, then a fond, forgiving smile; he was gracious in the way of a pro stuck with amateurs. He acted like a gentleman, but he wasn’t—it was only since he’d lived in Haiti that Mason found himself thinking this way. Only since he’d met the first true gentleman of his life.
They gave him the money in a blue nylon bag, and he made them wait while he counted it. Later, perversely, he would think of this as the bravest thing he’d ever done, how he endured their stares and bemused sarcasm while he counted out the money.
When it was finished and he’d zipped up the nylon bag, the Frenchman asked: “What will you do now?”
Mason was puzzled, then adamant. “I’m going back, of course. I have to give him the money.”
The Frenchman’s cool failed him for the briefest moment. He seemed surprised, and in the silence Mason wondered, Is my honor so strange? And then the smile reengaged, with real warmth, it seemed, but Mason saw that he was being mocked.
“Yes, absolutely. They’re all waiting on you.”
* * *
At the house in Pacot he stuffed the cash up a ten-dollar Vodou drum he’d bought months earlier at the Iron Market. Then he settled in and went about his business, staying up late at night to listen for the door, going down to the park in the afternoons to take his daily drubbing at chess. He realized he was good at this kind of life, the lie of carrying on his normal routine while he kept himself primed for the tap on the back, the look from the stranger that said: Come. Meet me. Late at night he could hear machine guns chewing up the slums, a faint ghost-sound, the fear a kind of haunting. During the day he would look at the mountains above like huge green waves towering over the city, and he’d think, Let it come. Let it all crash down.
He missed the paintings with the same kind of visceral ache as he’d missed certain women who’d meant something to him. He missed the mulatto in a way that went beyond words, the man whose aura of purpose burned hot enough to fire even a cautious blan. My friend, Mason thought a hundred times a day, the phrase so constant that it might have been a prayer. My very good friend whose name I don’t even know. The air felt heavy, thick with delay and anticipation, though the slow sway and bob of palm fronds seemed to counsel patience. Finally, one evening, he’d waited long enough. He carried his chess set past the park into the Salomon quarter, an awful risk that the mulatto would surely scold him for, but he couldn’t help himself. He had trouble finding the street and had almost given up when it appeared in the ashy half-light of dusk. He turned and walked along it with a casual air. Just a glance at the house was all he needed: the green walls streaked with soot, the charred stumps of the trees, the blackened, empty windows like hollow eye sockets. Just a glance, and he never broke the swing of his stride, never lost the easy rhythm of his breathing.
The next day he went back with his truck and driver, poking around under the guise of official business. He knocked on doors and explained himself; the neighbors shuffled their feet, picked at their hands, glanced up and down the block as they talked. Lots of shooting one night, they said, people shooting in the street. Bombs, and then the fire, though no one actually saw it—they’d rolled under their beds at the first shot. The next morning they’d edged outside to find the house this way, and no one had gone near it since.
When did it happen? Mason asked, but now the elastic Haitian sense of time came into play. Three days ago, one man said. Another said a month. Back at the office Mason went through the daily logs and found an incident dated ten days earlier, the day he’d left for Miami. The text of the report filled a quarter of a page. They had the street name wrong but otherwise it fit, the shooting and explosions and ensuing fire, then the de factos’ response to the O.A.S. inquiry. Seven charred bodies had been recovered from the house, none identified, all interred by the government. The incident was characterized as gang activity, “probably drug-related.” Mason winced at the words. The line had grown to be a bad joke around the mission, the explanation they almost always got whenever a group of inconnus turned up dead.
Still, Mason hoped. He made his rounds each day through the stinking streets, past old barricades and army patrols and starving street kids with their furied stares, and every afternoon he wrote his report and watched storms roll down the mountains like the hand of God. Finally, he felt it one day as he was driving home, he just knew: his glorious friend was dead. It caught him after weeks of silence, a moment when the cumulative weight of days reached in and pushed all the air from his chest, and when he breathed in again, there was just no hope. False, small, shabby, that’s how it seemed now, the truth washing through him like sickness—he’d been a fool to think they’d had any kind of chance. Inside the house he got as far as the den, where he took the Vodou drum from its place on the shelf and sat on the floor. Wearily, slowly, he rocked the drum over and reached inside. The money was there, all that latent power stuffed inside the shaft—something waiting to be born, something sleeping. He cradled the unformed dream in his hands and wondered who to give it to.
HEADING SOUTH
BY DANY LAFERRIÈRE
Kaliko Beach
(Originally published in 2006)
Translated by Wayne Grady
Brenda
My husband and I both come from the same small town north of Savannah. The middle of nowhere. I won’t even bother telling you its name. I’ve never met anyone who’s even seen it on a map. I’ve known my husband since we were little children. We don’t come from the same religious backgrounds. He’s a Methodist and I’m a Baptist. The way I see it, it doesn’t make any difference what you call yourself as long as you believe in God. That’s what my husband told me after we got married, and now we’re both Methodists. I talk about it, anyway, but I haven’t been confirmed yet. If my husband were here, he’d say, “That’s Brenda all over!” His name is William, but he likes to be called Bill. Actually, Big Bill. Oh, I almost forgot: you don’t have to know what to call him, because he didn’t come with me on this trip. That was my idea. I didn’t think I could ever do it, leave him alone up there like that. This isn’t the first time I’ve been to Port-au-Prince. It’s the second. The first time, Bill came with me. I’ve been wanting to come back for two years. Pamela, I call her Pam, she’s my best friend, she says that I’ve been like a drug addict in withdrawal for two years. I tell her that no drug addict ever went through what I went through. My whole body suffered, my head, my chest, my blood, every possible pain you could ever imagine, I suffered. For two years. Every day. Every night. Every hour. Can you imagine such a thing? I don’t think anyone who isn’t called Brenda Lee, and who didn’t come from a tiny little town north of Savannah, and who hasn’t lived for twenty-five years with a man named Bi
ll who hasn’t touched her more than a grand total of eight times in all those years, could ever understand what I went through.
Ellen
I’ve always been attracted by the South, but I never thought of coming to Port-au-Prince. As far as I was concerned, Port-au-Prince was for nymphos. Not for me. One big sex park. Anyway, I’ve been coming here now for five years. I come down every year and spend the whole summer. My courses end the last week of June, and generally a week later I fly to Port-au-Prince. I always stay at this hotel. It’s quiet, it’s clean, and it’s on the beach. This is how you know you’re getting old: you want everything close at hand. Port-au-Prince. Who would have guessed that this is where I would spend my holidays? I went to a private school, and for the past twenty-five years I’ve been teaching at Vassar. I teach stuck-up little bitches to keep their knees together so they can trap husbands. And if you think things have changed in that regard you’ve got one very long finger stuck like this in your eye. [She makes the gesture.] Actually, I’m supposed to be teaching contemporary literature, but all they want to know is how to go about making the best of what the good Lord gave them to work with. A tidy little mouth, two little tits that they check for signs of growth every day, blond hair, and a pretty little ass. Scrumptious little packages. And who can blame them? The boys are worse. Complete ninnies who don’t deserve any better. I hate that country, even if it is my own. You can’t imagine how much I loathe those little sluts and their asshole boyfriends. All they think about is getting laid and producing litters of more brats and, when they’ve bought as much junk as they can at their supermarkets, washing up on a beach somewhere in the Caribbean like so many overstuffed sperm whales. Always with their hair in curlers, always wearing sunglasses, always shoving their shopping carts into your legs at the checkouts. So will someone please tell me what the hell I’m doing here, where that’s exactly the type of person who forms the majority? [She motions with her chin to the line of her compatriots covered in sunscreen trying to get a tan on the beach.]
Sue
I’ve tried every diet known to science and I still look like a blues singer from Harlem. And I’ve never set foot in Harlem. I never go anywhere where there’s more than ten blacks. It’s not that I’m afraid of blacks, it’s just that black men aren’t my thing. Now you’re going to say that I’m not making any sense, because I’m really crazy about Neptune, and Neptune is as black as the ace of spades. But Neptune is Haitian. To me, when I say black, I mean American black. All American blacks think about is cutting white throats, and we do everything we can to help them do it. You’re shocked, hearing me say that, aren’t you? Well, that’s what I think. Who built all those schools American blacks go to? Not them! Well, I say that, but I’ve also got to say that I can’t stand white American males, either. They never look at a woman like me. If you want to get an American white male to notice you, you have to weigh less than a hundred and twenty pounds, and I weigh twice that. I’m still light on my feet. I work in a factory and there isn’t a man there who works harder than me. I can carry a heavy box a long way. I’m strong as an elephant and light as a butterfly. If he knew how to handle me, a man could do anything he wants with me. He could make me his slave. But those idiots, all they want is some anorexic bimbo. They have no idea that under all this fat I’m as thin as a razor. Neptune is the first man who ever paid me a compliment about my weight. To him, being big isn’t a fault. It’s a quality. He’s a fisherman. He has a little sailboat. He fishes not far from here, near the Île de la Gonâve. His philosophy is very simple: fish, eat, drink, sleep like a baby, and fuck like a lion. Not a bad life, eh?
Brenda
I’m going to tell you what happened the first time we came here, my husband and me. I wanted to wait a bit before opening up to you like this. If my husband were here, he’d say: “Brenda, you’ve never kept a secret longer than a day.” But that’s not true. There are many things about me that he doesn’t know, and that he’ll never know. That no one will ever know. Well, you, but it’s not the same with you. I don’t know you. It’s good to talk like this to someone you don’t know. I get the feeling you’re very young to be doing this; this kind of thing requires a certain amount of experience. I’m not finding fault or anything, but back home, inspectors are usually older men. And I also don’t see what use all this information will be to you. I must admit that I’m still a bit surprised, even though, as you reminded me, each country has its own ways. It’s also true that people who come from rich countries tend to want to impose their ways of doing things. I apologize again for getting mixed up in things that don’t concern me. I usually avoid politics like the plague . . . Well, to get back to my story, it all started when my husband took pity on this young man who hadn’t had anything to eat for two days. A young man from Ouanaminthe, a small village in the north. You must know him, surely. His name is Legba. His mother called him that because it seems he was the first of her children to survive after six miscarriages. The name suited him. In any case, my husband asked him to join us at our table. Albert—that’s the maître d’ at the hotel—he wasn’t all that pleased. My husband told him that if we’re paying for a room we can invite anyone we want to our table. And my husband added in a lower voice, so only Albert could hear him, that he wasn’t going to let any nigger stop him from doing what he wanted. That’s the way he talks, my husband, but he isn’t racist or anything. In our town that’s how everyone talks about black people. Anyway, Legba came over and ate with us at our table. He didn’t look like he was more than fifteen years old. Right off I noticed his gleaming white teeth and his radiant smile. My husband told him he could order anything he liked. I’ve never seen a human being eat so much in my life. When he went to the toilet, my husband said, “He’s a nice young man.” Albert was still making signs to us to get rid of the boy, but my husband pretended not to notice. From the first, Legba made me think of a lost dog. Anyway, he wasn’t bothering anyone, because that day we were the only guests in the dining room. But even if there had been others it wouldn’t have made any difference to my husband. Methodists are like that, they’ll walk all over anyone who tries to stop them from doing what they think is right. Not me, I was born Baptist. I only became a Methodist because of my husband. But in some ways I’m still a Baptist. I would have found a way to get food to Legba without offending Albert. But my husband isn’t like that. Like I said, he’s a Methodist. Sometimes I think people shouldn’t marry outside their religion.
Ellen
If I had my way I’d rid the earth of everything that’s dirty, and there’s more of what’s dirty here in this town than anywhere else I’ve ever been. So why, dear God, did you plant, in this dungheap, a flower as radiant as Legba? I turned fifty-five last month. I can tell you there are worse things in life. And this young man is as beautiful as a god. Do you think I could find anyone like him in Boston? Don’t tell me I could because I’ve been in every bar in that snobbish whore of a town a hundred times, and believe me, there is nothing in the North for women over forty. Nothing, nothing, nothing, you bunch of bastards!
Sue
People bring their illusions with them when they come to Port-au-Prince. Even Fat Sue. There is sun here. Fresh fruit, grilled fish, the sea.
And I have a lover.
Brenda
My husband and I got into the habit of having every dinner with Legba. He seemed shy at first. Every night we’d spend hours talking to him about his life, his family, his future. It’s like we adopted him, and he seemed to have accepted us too. One day we suggested he join us for an afternoon on the beach. My husband knew an isolated spot. The three of us were stretched out in our bathing suits on this enormous rock, facing the sun. Legba’s body fascinated me: long, supple, delicately muscled. His skin glowed. I could hardly take my eyes off him. I drank him in, trying not to be too obvious about it. It didn’t take long for my husband to notice the state I was in, though, and when Legba got up to walk lankily down toward the water, my husband gave me a
wink that I took as a kind of permission. When I pretended not to understand what he was on about, he told me straight out that he didn’t have any objections to me giving in to my obvious inclinations. I tried to look offended, but just then Legba came back and my husband only had time to whisper, “I want you to.” I was totally taken aback by his behavior; it was the first time he’d ever acted like that. I completely lost my head. Legba was lying beside me on his back, with his eyes closed. I didn’t dare look his way. My husband elbowed me and made me look at Legba’s young, almost naked body. So I let my eyes travel over his flat, sleek stomach, his long legs, his bathing suit with its enticing mound. From then on I was in a kind of trance, hypnotized by Legba’s firm yet trembling skin. I was irresistibly drawn to this body that seemed like it was being offered to me on a platter. My husband took my hand and guided it toward Legba’s torso. When he let go, my hand fell on his chest and I kept it there. Legba briefly opened his eyes and then shut them again. Encouraged, I moved my hand down to his stomach. I felt an incredible thrill of pleasure traveling up from the young man’s soft skin through my fingertips. My hand was trembling. I tried to stay calm but couldn’t. Legba didn’t move a muscle. It was as though he was making me a gift of his body. I slid two fingers under his bathing suit and took hold of his penis, which quickly began to harden in the palm of my hand so that it poked out under the string of his bathing suit. Seeing his black cock, so long, so tender, made me completely lose control of myself. My lungs were on fire. I felt waves of heat flooding between my legs. I feel awkward telling you about such an intimate experience, but believe me, it’s been two years and I haven’t been able to tell a soul, and yet I’ve relived each moment a thousand times in my head. I remember each second as though it happened yesterday. I’m not ashamed of it anymore. I am a very sensual woman. I hadn’t known that about myself, but now I totally accept who I am. I’m a good Christian, but why else had the Good Lord put me in this degrading situation? I had absolutely no control over my desire. It was as if someone had thrown gasoline over my whole body and then lit a match. I tried, oh yes, I tried, but I couldn’t stop myself. I turned into a sexual animal. Look at me—even telling you about it I’m breaking out into a sweat. [There is a long pause.] Do you want me to go on with my story? All right, but I still don’t understand how it’s going to help you find the man who did this. Yes, you’re right, man or woman. I’m a bit lost, I’m afraid . . . Oh yes, with his arms lying by his sides, Legba was barely breathing, but regularly. I looked around quickly to see if anyone was coming our way, then I gently spread Legba’s legs apart and knelt between them with my face above his penis. I took it in my mouth. I breathed up and down its length, covering it with my saliva. Then I took it into my throat as far as it would possibly go. When I couldn’t stand it any longer I sat up, took off my bathing suit, and impaled myself on his rod. It tore so deep into me I couldn’t hold back a howl. It felt like it was piercing me all the way up to the middle of my chest. I hadn’t even recovered from the shock of it, the pain and pleasure all mixed together, before I started going up and down on him. He was breathing harder now, almost panting. But still he didn’t move. My husband was lying right next to us, taking it all in. His eyes were riveted on the long black sword that was splitting me in half. I was going faster and faster, knocking my forehead against his chest, making his cock go in farther, deeper. I think I was crying out constantly. The sight of his young body drove me even crazier. Finally, I felt powerful jets of hot sperm deep inside me. They went on and on. I came too, almost at the same time as him, completely out of my mind. I clutched at his fresh and fragile chest like a woman possessed, and jammed myself one last time on his cock, as deep as I could get it in, and held it there for a long time. He opened his eyes. He was as exhausted as I was. His eyes were red and timid and a bit frightened. Moved by a wave of gratitude, I threw myself on him, kissed him everywhere, and cried like a baby. It was my first orgasm. I was fifty-five years old . . . I feel so tired now. Would you mind if I went and lay down for a bit . . . ? Thank you . . .