Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

Maybe three days into his trip, LBJ told me, he got to watching a local carpenter making a child’s coffin. He stopped in the sun and watched the carpenter working. He had never seen a child’s coffin before — that’s a beautiful fact right there about American life, that you can live an ordinary American life and never see a carpenter making a child-size coffin. An undertaker in the States has to special-order that cruelest box. But this carpenter in the Haitian hills that day was talking with some other fellow and laughing, painting the varnish on this coffin, making it pretty. Brother — how many of those things you make a month? Too many, too many.

On his last night in the mountains, LBJ told me, he got himself a bottle of the local rotgut. He’d been holding out all right until then, more for appearance’s sake than anything else, but that last night in Haiti one of the local guys offered him a tot and he was off to the races. This stuff was raw white rum, strong like the call of Satan and as mean as an alley cat. He was halfway through the bottle when he had the thought that would change his life — that he, Larry Bayles Jameson, was in possession of everything necessary to improve the lives of the inhabitants of Fond Rouge, Haiti. What they lacked, he had. He could give them water if he wanted to, and if they had clean drinking water, nobody would be making child-size coffins; and if they didn’t have water this time next month, next year, or however long it took — it was because he, Larry Bayles Jameson, chose not to give it to them.

Now, twenty years, LBJ said — that’s a long time. Lots of twists and turns in that time, and he wasn’t going to pretend he never touched another drink or was always a fine husband or a perfect father. But come hell or high water, twice a year every year, three weeks in winter and three in summer, he was down here digging a well or capping a spring, making sure someone who didn’t have water had some.

“Now, that’s just sheer goodness,” Kay said. “Is there anybody who doesn’t want to be a good person deep down?”

LBJ smiled modestly and took a sip of his sparkling water.

From Terry’s side of the table there were raucous bursts of laughter. Terry said, “The whole thing?” and the man beside him, who I believe came from Brazil, spread his arms out wide. Terry said, “That’s not so big.” On my side of the table, Kay remained engrossed in conversation with her French friend; and Baker, to my right, was hunched over his phone, tapping out a long description for his Facebook page of the experience of sitting at this table. At one point I started to ask him a question, and he said gently, “I’m sorry — just a minute,” and were I to have said something else, I would have been considered an irritant or a scold.

LBJ started talking to Kay about a band they both liked. Only in Haiti do you meet people who find it a diversion to build infrastructure. But in Haiti you meet people like that all the time . One hundred percent true story: Fellow makes a fortune down in Texas building big-box retailers. Buys a bulldozer, ships it down to Haiti. Starts building roads. Ends up medevaced out of the country after driving that bulldozer off a cliff. Who just shows up in a sovereign nation with his own private bulldozer and builds roads? How many people do you know who have built a charitable hospital? In Haiti, I met three. Orphanages, latrines, and wells? I lost track. And because in Haiti you meet people like that all the time, it comes to seem normal. That’s why so many outsize schemes and megalomaniac ambitions were hatched in Haiti, because it is a place where nobody ever says no.

I had been in poor countries before I came to Haiti, but never in a place — not India, not Africa — where nearly everyone was poor. Walking around Haiti, I sometimes felt like one of those Saudi sheiks who install gold-plated hot tubs in their retrofitted 747s, wealthy beyond imagination or hope. I too had visited villages that, like the village of Fond Rouge in LBJ’s story, were without clean drinking water; and like LBJ, I had seen carpenters cutting, sawing, sanding, and planing lumber into a child’s coffin. But then I had let the matter slide. Deep, deep inside me there was a voice that said, Let them walk for their water . There is no other way to put it: had the voice said anything else, and had it been loud enough, I would have acted. My ability to remain happy while intimately aware of the sufferings of others was a discovery about myself.

Now it was time to order. This proved complicated. Some people at the table had yet to open their menus, and others could not read French; some people were very hungry and wished to order full meals, while others were treating dinner as an opportunity to snack and drink. In the delay and hesitation and confusion you could feel the mood of the table souring. So Kay suggested ordering an assortment of appetizers to be shared. In this way, people could consider the menu at their leisure. Terry from his end of the table said, “You go, girl,” which made our end of the table laugh. Then Kay spoke with the waiter, who was glad to have a single interlocutor from this large and demanding group. She ordered efficiently and lavishly: plates of deep-fried okra and bruschetti topped with diced tomatoes and basil, and little bite-size portions of this and that.

I was still waiting for Baker to finish sending his message when Johel and Nadia arrived.

I had told Kay that I had never seen her, but I was wrong: I had seen this woman many times in Jérémie, but I had not known that she was Nadia, the judge’s wife. I had never made the connection between them. From Kay’s stories I had been on the lookout for a woman with a certain kind of beauty. But the woman I had seen at the market or at the boulangerie was plain. She was neither tall nor short, but slender, almost willowy, which in consumptive, malnourished Haiti is rarely considered attractive. Her skin was very dark, almost greenish — I had imagined Nadia as cocoa-colored, like the judge. Kay had mentioned her striking eyes, but I had not noticed them. Indeed, I might not have noticed her at all — fixed her as a face and person — if it had not been for one incident.

The meat market in Jérémie was also our abattoir. At dawn, the goats were led here from the hills and sold. Then the marchandes would slaughter them on the spot with a machete blow, splitting the heads open. The drainage canal was like a swamp of coagulated blood speckled with fat. Goat heads with glassy eyes were displayed on the concrete benches, side by side with goat paws, the fur still attached. Goats, yet to be butchered, bleated in terror and misery. Huge swarms of flies blackened the exposed meat.

I liked the place: there was a fascination in the organs, entrails, and musculature, the rusty smell of blood; and here I was introduced to that hardiest and most enduring of human beings, the Haitian marchande . When you and I and all our kind have long since moldered away — when the last writer and the last reader have grappled each other into a shallow grave — these women’s descendants will still be in tropical markets, whacking the heads of goats with blunt machetes, laughing at the horror, and surviving.

Nadia — I did not know her name then — was at the market one morning. This was at the most humid time of the year, thundery days building toward but never reaching climactic rainfall. She was bargaining with a marchande and I was bargaining with another when her arm reached out for the table, her knees wobbled, and she sank slowly to the floor. It was such a graceful gesture that I watched her fall with unconcern. (Haitian women, by the way, for reasons I do not know, were very often fainting.) The marchandes surrounded her, someone found a chair, and someone else fanned her with the side of a cardboard box. She had landed in a puddle, and her face and hair were caked with goat’s blood. Her spooky, flaccid stare, her lips twitching soundlessly — she was not where we were.