Haiti Noir_The Classics

  Mason stood back as the mulatto began pulling rolls of canvas from the bags, stripping off the rag strings, and laying the canvases on the bed. “Hyppolite,” he said crisply, as a serpentine creature with the head of a man unfurled across the mattress. “Castera Bazile,” he said next, “the crucifixion,” and a blunt-angled painting of the nailed and bleeding Christ was laid over Hyppolite’s mutant snake. “Philomé Obin. Bigaud. André Pierre. All of the Haitian masters are represented.” At first glance the paintings had a wooden quality, and yet Mason, whose life trajectory had mostly skimmed him past art, felt confronted by something vital and real.

  “Préfète Duffaut.” The mulatto kept unrolling canvases. “Lafortune Felix. Saint-Fleurant. Hyppolite, his famous painting of Erzulie. There is a million dollars’ worth of art in this room.”

  This was a lot, even allowing for the Haitian gift for puff. “How did you get it?” Mason felt obliged to ask.

  “We stole it.” The mulatto gave him an imperious look.

  “You stole it?”

  “Shortly after the coup. Most of the paintings we took in a single night. It wasn’t difficult, I know the houses where they have the art. A few pictures came later, but most of the items we took in the time of the coup.”

  “Okay.” Mason felt the soft approach was best. “You’re an artist?”

  “I am a doctor,” said the mulatto, and his arrogance seemed to bear this out.

  “But you like art.”

  The mulatto paused, then went on as if Mason hadn’t spoken. “Art is the only thing of value in my country—the national treasure, what Haiti has to offer to the world. We are going to use her treasure to free her.”

  Mason had met his share of delusional Haitians, but here were the pictures, and here was a man with the bearing of a king. A man who’d gutted his best chess game in thirteen moves.

  “How are you going to do that?”

  “There is a receiver in Paris who makes a market in Haitian art. He is offering cash, eighty thousand American dollars if I can get the paintings to Miami. A shameful price when you consider this is our treasure . . .” The mulatto looked toward the bed and seemed lost for a moment. “But that is the choice. The only choices we have in Haiti are bad choices.”

  “I guess you want the money for guns,” said Mason, who’d been in-country long enough to guess. There were fantasts and rebels on every street corner.

  “Certainly guns will have a role in this plan.”

  “You really think that’s the solution?”

  The mulatto laughed in his face. “Please, have you been drinking today?”

  “Well.” Like all the observers, Mason was touchy about appearing naive. “It took the army a couple of million to get Aristide out, and they already had the guns. You think you can beat the army with eighty thousand dollars?”

  “You are American, so of course everything for you is a question of money. Honor and courage count for nothing, justice, fear—those people in the palace are cowards, okay? When the real fighting starts I assure you they will run. They will pack their blood money in their valises and run.”

  “Well, first you have to get the guns.”

  “First the paintings must be carried to Miami. You are an observer, this is the same as diplomatic immunity. If you take them no one will search your bags.”

  Mason laughed when he realized what was being asked, though the mulatto was right: the couple of times he’d flown out, customs had waved him through as soon as he flashed his credentials.

  “What makes you think you can trust me?”

  “Because you lost at chess.”

  “Maybe I’m just bad.”

  “Yes, it’s true, you are very bad. But no one is that bad.”

  Mason began to see the backward logic of it, how in a weird way the chess games were the best guarantee. This was Haitian logic, logic from the mirror’s other side, also proof of how desperate the mulatto had to be.

  “You must,” the mulatto said in a peremptory voice, and yet his eyes were as pleading as the sorriest beggar’s. “For decency’s sake, you must.”

  Mason turned as if to study the canvases, but he was thinking about the worst thing that had happened to him today. He’d been driving his truck through La Saline, the festering salt-marsh slum that stretched along the bay like a mile-wide lesion splitting the earth. At his approach, a thin woman with blank eyes had risen from her squat and held her baby toward him—begging, he thought at first, playing on his pity to shake loose some change, and then he saw the strange way the baby’s head lolled back, the gray underpallor of its ropy skin. The knowledge came on like a slow electric shock: dead, that baby was dead, but the woman said nothing as he eased past. She simply held out her baby in silent witness, and Mason couldn’t look at her, he’d had to turn away. With the embargo all the babies were dying now.

  “Okay,” he said, surprised at the steadiness of his voice. “I’ll do it.”

  * * *

  It turned out that the mulatto wasn’t really a doctor. He’d had two years of medical school at the University of Haiti before being expelled for leading an anti-Duvalier protest, “a stupid little thing,” as he described it, he’d done much worse and never been caught. As far as Mason could tell, he eked out a living as a doktè fèy, a kind of roving leaf doctor and cut-rate ougan who happened to have a grounding in Western medical science.

  He’d cached stolen paintings all over town. Mason never knew when he’d turn up with the next batch, a bundle of wry Zephirins or ethereal Magloires to be added to the contraband in Mason’s closet. But it was always after dark, almost always on the nights when the shooting was worst. He’d hear a single knock and crack open the door to find the mulatto standing there with a green trash bag, his hair zapping in all directions, eyes pinwheeling like a junkie’s. Mason would give him a beer and they’d look at the paintings, the mulatto tutoring him on Haitian art and history.

  “Something incredible is happening here,” he might say as they sat in Mason’s kitchen drinking beer, studying pictures of demons and zombies and saints. “Something vital, a rebirth of our true nature, which is shown so clearly in the miracle of Haitian art. ‘Ici la renaissance,’ how strange that this was the name of the bar where Hyppolite was discovered. Ici la renaissance—it is true, a rebirth is coming in the world, a realization that the material is not enough, that we must bring equal discipline to the spiritual as well. And Haiti will be the center of this renaissance—this is the reason for my country, the only slave revolt to triumph in the history of the world. God wanted us free because He has a plan.”

  He could spiel in this elevated way for hours, forging text in his precision English like a professor delivering a formal lecture. If Mason kept popping beers, they’d eventually reach the point where paintings were scattered all over the house; then the mulatto would pace from room to room explaining tricks of perspective and coloration, giving historical reference to certain details. “But the dream is dying,” he told Mason one night. “Those criminals in the palace are killing us. As long as they have the power, there will be no renaissance.”

  “They’re tough,” Mason agreed. “They’ve got all that drug money backing them up. The CIA too, probably.”

  “But they’re cowards. Fate demands that we win.”

  He wouldn’t tell Mason his name; he seemed to operate out of an inflated sense of the threat he posed to the regime. Some nights Mason was sure he’d fallen in with a lunatic, but then he’d think about the chess, or the reams of Baudelaire and Goethe the man could quote, or the cure he’d prescribed for Mason’s touchy lower bowel—“You must drink a glass of rum with a whole clove of garlic.” Mason did, and the next day found himself healed. If at times the mulatto seemed a little erratic, that might have something to do with being a genius, or the stress of a childhood spent in Duvalier’s Haiti. One night Mason suggested a game of chess, but the mulatto refused.

  “I don’t play chess since I was a boy. The match wi
th you, that was the first time in fifteen years.”

  “But you’re brilliant!”

  The mulatto shrugged. “I was third in the national championship the year I was twelve, and when my father found out he threw away my chess set and all my chess books. He said there is no place in the world for a Haitian chess player.”

  “But if you were good enough—”

  “He said I would never be. And he was probably right, my father was a very smart man.”

  Mason hesitated; the past tense was always loaded in Haiti. “What was he?”

  “Doctor. Ophtalmologiste.”

  Again Mason hesitated. “Under Duvalier most of the doctors left.”

  “My father stayed. He was an eminence. The last Haitian to deliver a paper to the International Congress of Opthalmology.” He fell silent for a moment, seemed to gather himself. “If you were noted in your field, that could protect you, but this also meant that Duvalier perceived you as a threat. You could be famous but you could never slip, show that you were vulnerable in any way. One slip, and they’d take you.” The mulatto paused again. “My father never slipped, but I think it made him a little crazy. He kept a gun in the house—we lived on the Champ de Mars, and at night we could hear the screams of people being tortured in the palace. One night he took this gun, my father, he held the bullets in his hand and he said to me: ‘This bullet is for you. This one is for your brother. This one for your mama. And this one, for me. Because if they come they are not going to take us alive.’”

  What could Mason say? Any sympathy or comfort he might try to offer would be false, because he’d lived such a stupid life. So he kept his mouth shut and listened, though on nights when the mulatto seemed especially bleak Mason insisted that he sleep on the couch. Sometimes he did; by morning he was always gone. Mason would straighten up the couch, eat his toast and mango jelly, then drive over to the office and get his detail for the day. Some days he drove around in his white 4Runner with the powder-blue O.A.S. flag rippling in the breeze: “showing the blue” this was called, letting the de factos know that they were being watched, though after a time Mason realized this was a strategy that assumed some capacity for shame on their part. Other days he was assigned to the storefront office that took complaints of human-rights abuses. Not much happened on those days; it was common knowledge that the building was watched, and walk-in complaints were depressingly rare.

  Once a week he’d drive over to Tintanyen and make a count of the bodies dumped out there, and often these were horrible days. Tintanyen was a wide plain of shitlike muck held together by a furze of rank, spraddling weeds. You entered through a pair of crumbling stone portals—the gates to hell, Mason couldn’t help thinking—and stepped from your car into a pressure cooker, a blast of moist, dense, unwholesome heat, silent except for the whine of flies and mosquitoes. The mosquitoes at Tintanyen were like no others, an evil-looking, black-and-gray-jacketed strain that seemed to relish the smell of insect repellent. Mason and his colleagues would tramp through the muck, sweating, swatting at the murderous bugs, hacking away the weeds until they came on a body, whatever mudcaked, hogtied, maggoty wretch the de factos had seen fit to drag out here. From the shade of the trees bordering the field a pack of feral dogs was always watching them, alert, anticipating a fresh meal. Those dogs, the Haitian driver once confided in a whisper, were de factos.

  “The dogs?” Mason asked, wondering if his Creole had failed him again.

  Sure, the driver explained. They were zobop, men who could change into animal form. Those dogs over there were de facto spies.

  Mason nodded, squinting at the distant dogs. M tande, he said. I hear you.

  Each week Mason photographed the bodies, drafted his report, and turned it over to his boss, the increasingly demoralized Argentine lawyer. They were all lawyers, all schooled in the authority of words, though as their words turned to dust a pall of impotence and futility settled over the mission. The weakest on the team gave themselves up to pleasure, taking advantage of their six thousand tax-free dollars a month to buy all the best art, eat at the best restaurants, and screw strings of beautiful, impoverished Haitian girls. The best lapsed into a simmering, low-grade depression: you had to watch, that was your job, to observe this disaster, a laughable, tragically self-defeating mission.

  “What does it mean?” Mason asked the mulatto one night. They were sitting in Mason’s kitchen during a blackout, studying Hyppolite’s Rêve Haitien by candlelight. The picture was taped to the back of a kitchen chair, facing them like a mute third party to the conversation.

  “It is a dream,” said the mulatto, who was slumped in his chair with his legs thrown out. The first beer always went in a couple of gulps, and then he’d sag into himself like a heap of wet towels.

  “Well, sure,” said Mason, “Haitian Dream, you told me that.” And the colors did have the blear look of a dream, the dull plasma blush of the alternating pinks, the toneless mattes of the blues and grays, a few muddy clots of sluggish brown. In the background a nude woman was sleeping on a wrought-iron bed. Closer in stood an impassive bourgeois couple, the man holding a book for the woman to read. The room was a homely, somewhat stilted jumble of curtains, tables and chairs, framed pictures and potted plants, while in the foreground two rats darted past a crouched cat. As in a dream the dissonance seemed pregnant, significant; the sum effect was vaguely menacing.

  “I can’t make heads or tails of it,” said Mason. “And that thing there, by the bed,” he continued, pointing out what looked like a small window casement between the bed and the rest of the room. “What’s that?”

  “That’s part of the dream,” said the mulatto, almost smiling.

  “It looks like a window.”

  “Yes, I think you are right. Hyppolite puts this very strange object in the middle of his picture, I think he’s trying to tell you something. He’s telling you a way of looking at things.”

  On these nights the gunfire seemed diminished, a faint popping in their ears like a pressure change, though if the rounds were nearby the mulatto’s eye would start twitching like a cornered mouse. Here is a man, Mason thought, who’s living on air and inspiration, holding himself together by force of will. He was passionate about the art, equally passionate in his loathing for the people who’d ruined Haiti. You don’t belong here, Mason wanted to tell him. You deserve a better place. But that was true of almost every Haitian he’d met.

  “You know, my father thought Duvalier was retarded,” the mulatto said one night. They were looking at a deadpan Obin portrait of the iconic first family, circa 1964; Papa Doc’s eyes behind his glasses had the severe, hieratic stare of a Byzantine mosaic. “It’s true,” he continued, “they worked together treating yaws during the 1950s, every week they would ride out to Cayes to see patients. Duvalier would sit in the car wearing his suit and his hat and he would never say a word for six hours. He never drank, never ate, never relieved himself, he never said a word to anyone. Finally, one day my father asked him, ‘Doctor, is something the matter? You are always so quiet—have we displeased you? Are you angry?’ And Duvalier turned to him very slowly and said, ‘I am thinking about the country.’ And of course, you know, he really was. Politically, the man was a genius.”

  Mason shook his head. “He was just ruthless, that’s all.”

  “But that’s a form of genius too, ruthlessness. Very few of us are capable of anything so pure, but this was his forte, his true métier, all of the forms and applications of cruelty. The force of good always refers to something beyond ourselves—we negate ourselves to serve this higher thing. But evil is pure, evil serves only the self of ego, you are limited only by your own imagination. And this thing Duvalier conceived, this apparatus of evil, it’s beautiful in the way of an elegant machine. An elegant machine that may never stop.”

  “I can see you’ve thought about it.”

  “Of course. In Haiti we are forced to think about it.”

  Which was true, Mason reflected as he m
ade his rounds, Haiti shoved it in your face sure enough. During the day he’d drive through the livid streets and look for ways to make the crisis cohere. At night he’d lock his doors, pull down all the shades, spread twenty or thirty canvases around his house, and wander through the rooms, silently looking. After a while he’d go to the kitchen and fix a bowl of rice or noodles, and then he’d wander around some more, looking as he ate. It was like sliding a movie into the VCR, but this was better, he decided. This was real. With time the colors began to bleed into his head, and he’d find himself thinking about them during the day, projecting the artists’ iridescent greens and blues onto the streets outside his car, a way of seeing that seemed to charge the place with meaning. The style that seemed so primitive and childish at first came to take on a subversive quality, like a sly commentary on how the world had gone the last five hundred years. In the flattened, skewed perspectives, the faces’ confrontational starkness, he began to get the sense of a way of being that had survived behind the prevailing myths. The direct vision, the thing itself without the softening filter of technical tricks—the vision gradually became so real to him that he felt himself clenching as he looked at the paintings, uneasy in his skin, defensive. An obscure sophistication began to creep into the art; they were painting things he only dimly sensed, but with time he was starting to see a richness, a luxuriance of meaning there that merged with the photos, never far from his mind, in the mission’s files of the Haitian dead.

  Life here had the cracked logic of a dream, its own internal rules. You looked at a picture and it wasn’t like looking at a picture of a dream, it was passage into the current of the dream. And for him the dream had its own peculiar twist, the dream of doing something real, something worthy. A blan’s dream, perhaps all the more fragile for that.

  * * *

  He packed sixty-three canvases in a soft duffel bag and nobody laid a hand on him. He had to face the ordeal all by himself, with not a soul to turn to for comfort or advice. There hadn’t even been the consolation of seeing the mulatto before he left, the last sack of paintings delivered by a kid with a scrawled one-word message: Go. But Mason was white, and he had a good face; the whole thing was so absurdly easy that he could have wept, though what he did do on getting to his hotel room was switch on the cable to MTV and bounce on the bed for a couple of minutes.