Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

And Evelyne Célestin, sitting up at the front table, she’s prouder than a victorious general on parade, looking like an overripe fruit sitting in the sun, a big, shiny lady, retiring this very year after forty years of working as a maternity nurse. Not that she needed the money the last few years, mind you: one son a doctor, the other a lawyer, and the family owns four parking lots upstate.

“And she tell this boy, she going to whip him if he loses. She lose her money, she going to whip him until he crying rivers.

“And so this boy, he come to me before — how you call it, the championnat ? The shampyon sheep ? What you call it? I don’t know. I don’t care. And he say me, ‘Tomorrow I go lose, Tonton , and you give me half de monee, okay?’ And I say, ‘Boy, you got a deal.’ And I think, Dis boy, he some real Aye-eesyen . But the next day he make me a big sooprees, and he win everything. That night, I say, ‘Boy, I thought we had a deal.’ And he says, ‘My mamma, she offer me soixante-quarante !’”

And now the room is drunken chaos, everyone pounding on the table, hooting and hollering, clapping and whistling. That’s when the band arrives, but no one notices but Johel. The band is nine men and a woman, all of them dripping from the late-February rains.

“And so dis boy, when he meet dis bay-oo-tiful girl, I make another bet with his maman . I say, ‘Evelyne, he going to marry that girl before it make one year.’ And she say, ‘Not my Johel. She too bay-oo-tiful for my Johel. She say no, she run away laughing. Ti belle fille comme ca! ’ And I say, ‘One hun-erd dollars,’ and she say, ‘Okay.’ Now what we say in Creole, we say, ‘Money makes a dog dance.’ Now this dog, he dancing because Johel and I this time we go sixty-forty!”

Sixty-forty! That had them on their feet applauding, whistling, cheering. “He one real Haitian dog!” shouts Tonton Alphonse, to which the senior partner replies, “He’s one real Yankee lawyer!”

But Johel Célestin, who is greeting the band in the back and shaking hands with the bandleader and the rest of the band, he’s not listening at all — he’s hardly hearing a word, not thinking of his opportunity to earn sixty dollars — he’s staring into a pair of blue-green eyes set in a sculpted, unsmiling face, the most beautiful face he’s ever seen.

* * *

After the party, Erzulie L’Amour wants their money, and Johel doesn’t want to give it to them.

Not that they didn’t work hard for the money; not that they didn’t deserve it; not that there was a man or woman in the room of any color, constitution, or ethnicity who didn’t feel the rhythm slip into their bones and oscillate there until they grabbed the nearest grateful lady or were gratefully grabbed and headed to the dance floor.

What you have to imagine is Evelyne Célestin’s sheer bulk, her massive bosom, her broad behind, her huge thighs, all of it shaking like a maraca or a wild animal as the mama tambour beats faster than a hummingbird’s heart.

What you have to imagine is Johel’s mentor and guide, the gray-haired senior partner, his Charvet shirt soaked with sweat, mopping himself down with a fringe of tablecloth, spinning like a top across the dance floor.

What you have to imagine is the rhythm slowing and two dozen lawyerly hands venturing down over two dozen rounded and grabbable buttocks of African descent in a slippery one-two, one-two, those Haitian derrieres gliding up and down. That’s what this kind of music is all about when the rhythm gets slow. It’s the kind of music that invites you to explore a little.

What you have to imagine is Johel sipping a cold beer, his first of the night at his own bachelor party, watching Nadia onstage in her silver lamé dress. Then, late in the evening, Nadia settles herself on a stool, legs crossed, and she and the guitarist offer a little soft troubadour together, to calm the evening down and send everyone out into the cold night warm and happy. The ladies drape their arms around the men’s necks and hang there happily, bodies rubbing up against bodies while Nadia sings Creole love music in her thin, sweet voice. On every table there is a candle, and the flames keep time to the slow music as the wax slips down drop by drop and Nadia sings what she knows about the suffering and sweetness of love.

When the band is done and the guests are all gone and the waiters have taken off their ties and are eating plates of leftover griot and plantains, Nadia and the guitarist get to fighting. Johel wants to pay them, and Nadia is telling Johel to give her half to her directly because she doesn’t ever want to see or talk with this lying dog again.

Johel has no problem with that. But Ti Pierre, the guitarist who leads the band, is looking at Johel with laughter in his mouth but menace in his eyes, telling him— Mon cher, mon frère, mon vieux —that he’s the leader of the band and she’s a little folle , if you know what I mean, clearly hoping to resolve this whole situation homme à homme .

So Johel the contract lawyer, mediator, third-year associate, and champion speller is telling the two of them to work it out between them, and he’s not unaware that Nadia’s green eyes are piercing him like two daggers of contempt. Nor is he unaware that Ti Pierre has scars on his face and hands, the kind you get from knife fights. So he wanders back to the bar to let them work out their troubles, and soon Ti Pierre is saying to Nadia, “Be quiet, woman, or I’ll break your face,” to which Johel says, “Calm down, brother,” and Nadia says, “Break my face, go on” and adds something about his breath, like the smell of Ti Pierre’s mother’s hairy cunt. Then Ti Pierre slaps Nadia hard across the face, hard enough to send her reeling out of her chair and onto the floor, where, crouched on all fours in her silver lamé dress, she glares at the men like a wounded animal.

Johel is not a small man, but it’s easy to miss that under the jovial layers of blubber. Because he smiles easily and often and chuckles frequently, it’s easy to miss or not understand that he had some unyielding kernel of courage and rectitude — or maybe he didn’t even know he possessed it himself until that moment.

He says to Ti Pierre, “Don’t touch her again, brother.”

Here is how calmly he says it: Will you please pass me the salt? Or: And how are you this morning, Fred? But he frightens Ti Pierre. Ti Pierre is a man of the world, a man of experience, and he knows that in this country it is men like Johel who have the power: men who know how to speak the language, who know the law, who don’t speak with an accent. He looks at Johel’s eyes and knows that this is a man who will not forget, will not forgive. Ti Pierre knows that in this country, when the police come, it is Johel who will talk and it is Ti Pierre who will end up in a cell. Life has taught Ti Pierre to be afraid of men like Johel.

Johel says, “It was a wonderful night. I’ll pay everything I owe.”

That’s the prudent lawyer speaking, the one who knows the value of settling early, even at a cost to one’s pride, of resolving problems quickly and efficaciously.

Everything Haitian is always cash business. People who overstay their visas by a decade don’t open bank accounts. Johel has cash on hand for Ti Maurice, cash for the food, cash for the bartenders, cash for the drinks. Thousands and thousands of dollars in cash. He puts Ti Pierre’s full fee on the table, which Ti Pierre counts and pockets. Then he puts half again more on the table, and he says, “That’s for her.”

Ti Pierre says to Nadia, “Let’s go.”

Nadia starts to get up, and when she gets to her feet, she is small and fragile. She has lost a shoe: it has skittered across the nightclub floor. Johel stares at the shoe, its sole scuffed and tarnished. Then he looks at Nadia’s tiny stockinged foot.