Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

“I was scared for him. For us,” she said.

“Why?”

“Terry and I see someone at home,” she finally said. “She’s an older lady. She has — powers. And when Terry got the offer to come to Haiti, we visited her, like we do. Madame Roccaforte saw two birds. She saw an eagle and a hawk. And the hawk was attacking the eagle. And after that, Madame Roccaforte told me not to let him go.”

Électricité d’Haïti supplied us with electricity just three times a year — for the festival of the city’s patron saint, Saint Louis; for Christmas; and for Carnival — and by electricity I mean two or three hours every evening for a week or so. The rest of the year, the big generator on the rue Abbé Hué lay idle — no fuel — and the city lay in darkness. The house we rented from the Sénateur, though, like the houses of all the wealthy, had a generator, an array of car batteries, and an inverter, and so maintained an autonomous electrical supply, sufficiently powerful for a few lights or even a small refrigerator. A couple of weeks after our arrival the generator groaned, the inverter sparked, and the batteries burst into flames. We stumbled around by candlelight thereafter as a series of increasingly agitated emails to our landlord went unanswered.

Not long after I met Kay White, a caravan of three black SUVs delivered the Sénateur back from Port-au-Prince. He was home to meet with his constituents. The next morning I wandered down to his concrete cottage, on the same large property as our house but separated from us by a bamboo grove.

The Sénateur’s cottage was neither so imposing as to frighten the peasants nor so humble as to make his wealthier patrons ill at ease. It was just right. The clay water basins, filled from a muddy well, told the regular folk of Jérémie that the Sénateur lived not much better than they did. A dozen citoyens were waiting to see him, all dressed in their Sunday best, the ladies in faded calico dresses, the gentlemen in oversize suits and black ties. A few carried offerings for the Sénateur: some mangoes or avocados or a large sack of beans. One woman was carrying a big silvery fish. When the others saw me, they made little murmuring noises and somebody said, “Blan,” indicating a space on the bench beside him. It was warm in the early-morning sun. I waited with the others for perhaps half an hour until somebody else said, “Blan.” Then I was summoned up the stairs. Now I realized I had passed only from the first waiting area to the second, but here at least I was in sight of the Sénateur.

Maxim Bayard was a scion of one of the town’s famous but now disappeared mulatto families: I never met a Haitian man with lighter skin. He had tight curly hair, gone gray. His nose was large and fleshy, bulbous at the end and bumped in the middle. It was an ugly face, as goofy and grotesque as a children’s clown. He was a large man, and bulky also, broad-shouldered, round-gutted, thick-handed, long-limbed. He had a gold chain around his heavy neck and wore a white linen shirt.

The Sénateur conducted his business in a wicker chair, leaning close to one of the regular folk, the two of them talking quietly. On a stucco wall, just above the Sénateur’s head, a younger version of the Sénateur was shaking a younger version of Fidel Castro’s hand, both of them smoking fat cigars. Behind him now were the Sénateur’s goons, three large men in black blazers playing cards at a little table, holstered sidearms visible under their jackets. The rest of us sat farther out, our faces in the shade but our backs in the sun.

It was a joy to watch the Sénateur. It really was. It was a pleasure to watch him in the way it is a pleasure to watch any thoroughly competent professional, a major-league shortstop shading toward second base, or a sous-chef in a top restaurant disemboweling a chicken. I watched him dealing with three or four supplicants before my turn came up. I tried to imagine the things people wanted from him: My well has gone dry. A landslide wiped out my fields. A rich man wants my house. My donkey is ill. My enemies have used magic against me and I need to buy some expensive magic to punish them.

To each of these complaints, the Sénateur listened patiently. His eyes were by turns focused, kind, authoritative, sympathetic, wise, amused, intelligent, and cruel. From time to time he nodded. You can’t fake that level of attention. At the end of each interview he’d hand the supplicant a wad of cash from his wallet or say something to one of his goons or just seize the man’s hand between his own and hold it there.

Then finally it was my turn to sit with the Sénateur.

Before he said a word to me, he glanced at his watch. Then he looked into my eyes. I introduced myself and offered him my hand, which he accepted with a handshake that began limply then gained force until his grip was almost painful. His hand swallowed mine. All the while he pulled me nearer to him, until we were very nearly touching. He was much stronger than I was, although I reckoned he was twice my age.

“Maxim Bayard,” he said. “Enchanté.”

I could smell his breath — it was unexpectedly sweet and minty from behind those yellow, crooked teeth. He held on tightly to my hand until he squeezed out of me an admission that I was enchanted also.

Only then did he let my hand go, and I finally had the chance to speak.

“Sénateur, I’m sorry to bother you.”

“Bother me! Nonsense! You delight me! Pierre, bring coffee for our American friend. Or would you prefer juice?”

“Neither, Sénateur. I’m only here a minute or two.”

“I would be offended if you won’t try our coffee.”

“Coffee then.”

“Pierre, make our friend’s coffee strong and with plenty of sugar.”

“Thank you,” I said.

“This is our Haitian hospitality. With a guest we share nothing less than our hearts.”

The Sénateur leaned back in his small wicker chair. He cracked his knuckles. It sounded like padlocks springing open.

“The people from Venezuela were here last month.”

It was a statement of unexpected familiarity, as if we were gathering up a thread of an old conversation.

“The mayor of Caracas was sitting in your chair. You know he still has the president’s ear. We had an argument — a discussion. He warned me to be on the lookout for the North Americans. He said you would be coming. I said, ‘We must be friends with the Americans. They are kindhearted beasts.’ And as the philosopher reminds us, the only absolutely good thing in this world is a good will. Do you agree with me?”

“Bien sur,” I said.

Pierre brought the coffee to me with a grunt. It was very strong and unpleasantly sweet.

The Sénateur leaned forward until he was at a distance where he could have easily sprung forward and bitten off my nose.

“Then why do you oppress us like this?”

His voice was as friendly as one can be in asking such a question. I thought for a moment that he was referring to my conversation with Terry White and the judge; I thought of innocent-faced Cherie, listening to us.

Then the Sénateur said something about birds. That morning he had been surprised to find in his garden a pair of western Caribbean warblers. The Sénateur wanted to know if I enjoyed also the pleasure of our aviary companions. He mentioned birds in the poems of Ronsard and spoke of hunting birds as a young man with a slingshot — Goliath on the trails of David! — and how, if I were to take the time and opportunity that a man in his position no longer possessed, I would find in the hills other young men today still hunting in this manner. The hills, he said, were like rich museums of the Haitian past: men and women still lived not several hours’ walk from where we sat, in the very manner of the men of the revolution. This was at once Haiti’s strength and her tragedy. If I was to understand Haiti, I must understand her history. “We have had such a tragic history,” the Sénateur said, and he spoke of the crack of the slaver’s whip, the whispers of long-ago slave revolution around the flickering campfire. These were our ancestors, mon cher , brave men! In all of human history, the only successful revolution of slaves — the casting off of chains — our glorious land of freedom.