Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

The lecture went on for quite a while, and the Sénateur’s deep voice mingled with the high buzzing of the bees; the minutes passed neither slowly nor quickly; I was aware only of the sweat stains slowly expanding from my armpits and a fly crawling across the Sénateur’s knuckle, which I restrained myself with effort from shooing away. Then the Sénateur startled slightly. Something had snapped him out of his reverie. He looked at me as if he had never seen me before.

“And what can I do for you, mon vieux ?”

“It’s a little thing,” I said. I produced our rental contract from my backpack and handed it to him, explaining that we had rented a house with electricity (gasoline at the charge of the tenant) and now occupied a house without electricity. It was in paragraph two, clause three, the relevant objects clearly listed as functional in the état des lieux .

The Sénateur took the papers in hand. He found a pair of spectacles on a side table and settled them down on the bridge of his nose, the gesture lending him a mandarin air. He looked through the papers slowly, for a very long time. He read every line of the document, turned the pages over to see what was written on the back. His ugly face was quivering like a molded aspic by the time he had flipped the last page around and come back to the first. Then he ripped the pages up — once, twice, three times, scattered them on the floor.

“This is my home,” the Sénateur said. “If you’re not happy in my home, you can leave.”

I attempted to speak, but the Sénateur cut me off. He stood up.

“You are my guest. This is not how a guest treats his host. Pierre!”

“Maître!” Pierre cried.

“Would you come to a man’s house and accuse him?”

“Jamais!”

“Would you thank him for his hospitality, take his hand, promise him help and kindness?”

“Bien sûr!” Pierre said. “That is basic. That is to be polite.”

All the goons were smiling now, enjoying the specter of a blan humiliated. The regular people in their seats in the sun were laughing too. They’d go home to their villages and families and tell them how the Sénateur treated me. Thus the story would go out into the world. The Sénateur was a very good politician.

I got up from my seat and offered him my hand. I said, “Thank you for the coffee, Sénateur.”

He ignored my hand. “Sit again,” he said. Then, after a moment, “We don’t have time in this short life for quarrels. Not between friends. I want to be your friend. I have too many enemies. In Creole, we say, ‘Only cats have time to fight.’”

Then the Sénateur winked and I sat down.

We sat in silence as a thick cloud covered us in shadow. Finally he said, “I admire the coolness of your blood. Here in Haiti we have hot blood. A foreign scientist has studied the matter. This gentleman discovered that the average Haitian has a temperature of between ninety-nine point seven and one hundred degrees. I myself am never less than that. I have measured! It is a scientific fact.”

He fanned himself. He leaned back in his wicker chair. He made a gesture to Pierre, who poured a tall glass of water from a pitcher, placed the glass on a small plate, centered the plate on a wooden tray carved and painted to resemble an eggplant, and brought the ensemble to the Sénateur. The Sénateur sipped from the glass, swished the water in his mouth, and spat on the deck.

“I will give you a story,” he said.

He pulled his chair very slightly back and addressed not just me, but everyone on the deck.

He had received the Sacrament of Holy Baptism, he told us, from a priest named Jean Vincent Brierre. Père Brierre was in his day a celebrated man, on account of an incident in his youth, when the great President Sténio Vincent decided to allow the Rara bands to circulate on the feast days of the Church, so long as the bands did not enter the cities themselves. Père Brierre was a man of fierce conviction, and when he saw the peasants leaving their fields, turning their backs on prayer to dance and drink all through the holy days, he was outraged. He sent a telegram to the president himself denouncing the president’s decision.

“And, you understand, he used certain words…” The Sénateur coughed. Pierre brought him another glass of water. The Sénateur took a drink and continued.

The president sentenced Père Brierre to die by firing squad should he fail to apologize for the offense to the state and the outrage to the presidency. Père Brierre would not do so. He announced from his pulpit that he was defending the soul of his parish and the honor of the Haitian people, and he declared gallantly that he would prefer to die by bullet than to renounce his words. He requested of the president only the honor when in front of the firing squad to cry “Fire!” himself.

The privilege was so granted.

The Sénateur began to chortle.

Père Brierre was arrested and brought in chains to Port-au-Prince, where he demanded the opportunity to exercise his presidential privilege. But the army would not shoot him. The generals declared that it was an outrage to the honor of the army for any soldier to receive an order except from an officer. No civilian would ever order a member of the Forces Armées d’Haïti to fire a shot.

And so nobody would shoot Père Brierre. After a while he was allowed by the army to return to his parish and continue preaching — there was no reason to waste a good priest — until such time as the president would rescind the curé’s privilege and the army could shoot him properly.

The Sénateur’s chortle had progressed to a guffaw. The peasants were laughing with him. “Alors,” he said. “In 1939 my father was crossing the great Grand’Anse on his horse in a storm, when the river was full, when the beast was startled by a lightning stroke and bucked my father off into the raging waters. My father would certainly have drowned had Père Brierre, who was returning from a Mass in Roseaux, not dove into the waters and saved him. Shortly after that, I was conceived. That is why my father asked Père Brierre to baptize me — because I owe my very existence to him. And so I tell you now, so there is no confusion — I too am the kind of man who reserves the right to cry ‘Fire!’ myself when in front of the firing squad! And mon cher , you ask me now to cry ‘Fire!’ but I’m not ready!”

The Sénateur laughed until his face was a menacing purple. Then he leaned in very close, so close I could smell his clean, minty breath. The ordinary folks faded away, and it was just the two of us, alone on the deck. “You can tell your friends also, the kind of man I am,” he said. “Let them know that I’m not ready.”

The Sénateur was quiet. I thought the conversation was over. But then he said, “You know that this is a city of poets, don’t you?”

“I saw the sign at the airport.”

The dirt landing strip was carved into the fields of sugarcane and bananas like a scar. The airport itself was a one-room cement hut. A sign read BIENVENUE À JÉRÉMIE. LA CITÉ DES POÈTES. Seeing that sign had been the first hint that I would love this place.

“Do you enjoy poetry?” the Sénateur pursued.

A verse began to round out in my brain, something from high school: Hear the voice of the Bard / who present, past, and future sees.

“Of course,” I said.

His face brightened.

“Then you will know Docteur Révolus. Jean Joseph Vilaire. Callisthènes Fouchard. General Franck Lavaud. Félix Philantrope. All men of Jérémie — these splendid poets. And those are only some of our more famous poets. When I was a boy, you could not find a man in Jérémie who did not reckon himself a poet. They called us quite correctly the Athens of Haiti.”