Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

She nodded.

“He’s my passport and my visa,” she said.

A passport and a visa. What you need at the border. Nothing more precious in the world.

A copper plaque on the wall of the Bibliothèque Nationale “Sténio Vincent” announced that the library had been rehabilitated thanks to a charitable intervention by the Honorable Sénateur Maxim Bayard. The Sénateur had reroofed the library, purchased chairs and tables, and installed a ceiling fan, which, owing to the lack of electricity, hung immobile, cobwebs dangling from the blades.

I have very few mementos of my time in Haiti — no art, no metalwork from Croix-des-Bouquets, no papier-mâché Carnival masks from Jacmel — but in my wallet I carry at all times my library card. The library consisted of nothing but a reading room that, in the absence of a breeze and under the Sénateur’s tin roof, grew stiflingly hot in the late afternoons, and a small back room where the stacks were maintained. There were some newspapers imported from the capital, none more current than the previous week, and a table dedicated to the poets of Jérémie, the Sénateur’s own book having pride of place. To select a book from the collection, you first consulted the catalog, a handwritten list of titles affixed to the wall with Scotch tape; then you prepared a written request for the librarian. Monsieur Duval was a man of antique vintage, gray-haired, with a pair of reading glasses so thick they might have been bulletproof. He would rise, with a thousand creaking joints, from his chair, where he had been comfortably reading the same volume since the fall of the Berlin Wall, and trundle slowly into the back room. Then you waited. I have many lovely memories of the library. They are not dramatic. There was a young man, a motorcycle taxi driver, reading Les Misérables and a young woman, her baby asleep on the floor, her legs tucked neatly under her haunches, nodding in sympathy to a tattered edition of Le Deuxième Sexe . There were high school students reciting from Le Cid . There was an older gentleman who every morning read from the library’s not insubstantial collection of Latin poetry — the high schools of Jérémie had once taught Latin as a matter of course.

Père Abraham Samedi was another regular in our ranks. I knew his name from Toussaint Legrand, who had told the judge, Terry, and me of the important role the priest played in local politics. I saw him for the first time as I read Maigret et le corps sans tête and he read, at the adjacent table, Un Américain bien tranquille by Monsieur Graham Greene. He was a tall, thick man in a clerical collar, a coeval of the librarian, with sooty dark skin, holding his book at arm’s length, as if unwilling to admit that he might be ready for spectacles. Something in his manner suggested that a conversational overture would not be unwelcome.

Thereafter, whenever I drove in the direction of Anse du Clerc, I would stop by Père Samedi’s house. He was usually able to spare me no more than a few minutes from the crush of his duties, but in those moments we would drink a cup of coffee and he would tell me some amusing tale of daily life in the forgotten stretch of the universe that lay on the southwest coast of Haiti between Jérémie and Bonbon.

This was territory Père Samedi famously patrolled on foot, until his recent bouts with gout, when he had allowed himself to be transported on muleback. Here there was little tin- or thatch-roofed house after little house, interspersed with gardens or small fields. Père Samedi, at one time or another in the quarter century since his return from exile, had slept in every one of those huts, dossing down without fuss on the stone or dirt floor. He was as likely to arrive with a substantial and well-timed present as without: for a family with a new baby, he would have a pair of squealing, healthy piglets, a glossy young goat, or a half dozen chicks; or for a family recovering from illness, a sack of seed, which he imported personally from the capital. I met one family in Anse du Clerc that had tumbled from poverty to bitter poverty by the loss of the ten-dollar diving mask that had formerly allowed the father of the family to set lobster traps. I mentioned this story to Père Samedi, who made a note of it on a scrap of paper. On my next visit to Anse du Clerc, I learned that Père Samedi had replaced the mask.

Although I had drunk half a dozen cups of gritty black coffee with him, I had not thought us friends. He required a moment each time he saw me at the library to remember me, and once, when I passed him in the marché , where he was buying supplies, he did not so much as glance at me, as if out of my usual context, I had become invisible.

So it was a surprise when my phone rang just after dawn and a gravelly voice said, “Père Samedi à l’appareil.”

“How are you, Father?” I said.

“One maintains,” he said.

He cleared his throat.

“Bring your friend Johel Célestin to visit one of these days,” he said.

“Can I tell him what this is about?”

“He’ll understand.”

* * *

Two days later, the judge, Terry, and I drove to Bonbon to meet with Père Samedi.

The judge was riding shotgun, and I got into the back.

“Either of you guys see that moon last night?” I asked.

It had been a night of almost perfect darkness when a gap emerged in the clouds to reveal, low on the horizon, the full moon. Silvery moonlight reflected off the undersides of the clouds, producing an unexpected dawn, so bright that the palms cast long, straight moon shadows. The dogs awoke and began to howl, the chickens crowed — even the songbirds began to trill. It was the precise opposite, I suppose, of the disturbing moment in a solar eclipse when the midday sun disappears, but no less unsettling.

“Nadia woke me up,” the judge said. “Spooked her out.”

“It was pretty amazing,” I said.

“She calm down?” Terry asked.

“I put her to sleep.”

Then he chuckled, his laughter greasy and suggestive, and started to talk about tobacco. What he wanted to know was why a rich, value-added crop like tobacco wasn’t being grown right here. This was tobacco country. Dominican Republic. Cuba. Same latitude, same climate, same soil. So why not here? When he had the opportunity, that was something he wanted to explore, some kind of cooperation on importing some Dominican tobacco farmers, cigar makers, exchange some skills — why not hand-rolled Haitian cigars? Wouldn’t that be fine, driving down our road, puffing on a big fat Haitian cigar?

Now we were in front of the Uruguayan military base. There was always a crowd of children and teenage girls loitering there. Sometimes the girls traded favors with the soldiers in the garbage pit behind the base. The enlisted men had no money, but they could pilfer rations and supplies from the base, which the girls gave to their mothers to sell in the market. This was a seasonal traffic: new battalion commanders arrived, industrious and idealistic, from Montevideo, and the skin trade disappeared. By the time the battalion left nine months later, the girls lounged in front of the base unabashedly.

The judge was in a garrulous mood. “You know these farmers here are eating their seed?” He wanted to talk about seed supplies and fertilizer. “Now, fertilizer — basic agricultural input. Only in Haiti does seed cost more than the agricultural output. You want to know why they don’t have vegetables around—”

“Do you ever shut up?” Terry said. His face had been drawn since the judge mentioned Nadia’s name. “Could you just give it a rest?”

The judge looked like a child reprimanded unjustly by an overtired parent.