Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

(Last but not least was the absence of decent roads. Here the judge’s speech, which I was to hear in its entirety many times, mounted to a manly peroration. Lack of a road massively inflated the price of all commodities entering the Grand’Anse and made it impossible for perishable goods to exit the province. Should a small farmer in the mountains, suffused with entrepreneurial zeal, through industry, luck, talent, and foresight produce a brilliant green salade of a garden, brimming with bloodred tomatoes and magnificent aubergines, he still had no way to transport his wares to market but on the back of his donkey.)

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Père Samedi’s ecclesiastical residence, if the grandest house in Bonbon, was nevertheless modest: a bungalow of stucco and cement, receded from the dirt road and surrounded by a high wall. On earlier visits, the cottage was abuzz with visitors and life. The curé was well tended by a flock of servants: the toothless gardener who opened the broad gate and would send me home with a bag of fresh mangoes or limes; a washerwoman who sang hymns as she hung linens; and a housekeeper, a fleshy, bosomy young woman with the placid, tranquil face of a being unequivocally secure in His love. There was in addition a large herd of children, the older ones in school uniforms, the younger ones naked, shrieking maniacally and darting about like geckos.

The house, which I had always thought a cheerful place, seemed now infected by some sorrow. The gardener had opened the gate for us with a forlorn tread. When I asked the washerwoman how she was, she had replied with a stoical “ Nou là ”—we’re there. She seemed to expect some gesture of commiseration, and when none was forthcoming, she shambled off on heavy legs to dunk dirty clothes in gray wash water.

We were ushered into the house. There was a crucifix on the wall and ceramic knickknacks on the bureau shelves. Other rooms and a staircase were hidden by lace curtains that ruffled and waved in the gentle breeze. The place smelled of incense and rice. The highly polished mahogany table in Père Samedi’s parlor reflected four faces: my own, looking confused; Terry’s, still looking distinctly irritable; the judge’s, solicitous and intelligent; and finally the cadaverous reflection of our host.

The old priest stared now for a long time at his own reflection in the dark table. He was unshaven, his light gray beard sparse on his dark skin. The judge inhaled deeply, held his breath a moment, and exhaled. The room in which we sat was close and humid and uncomfortable.

There was a sepia photograph on the wall that on my earlier visits had aroused my curiosity. It depicted two young men standing on the steps of the Sénateur’s mother’s house. One man was dark-complected and the other light; both were handsome. They looked as if they might have been wrestling on the front porch or playing lawn tennis when someone called them to the camera: there was a high sheen to their skin, and a bit of color in the cheeks of the paler man. Their faces were creased with smiles.

I had asked Père Samedi about the photo.

“This was me,” he said. “And this was Maxim Bayard.”

Then I could start to see the faces: where the wrinkles had set in or the ears drooped or the nose, in the case of the Sénateur, had elongated. The Sénateur over the years had acquired jowls, and from Père Samedi’s neck had swollen out a large, bobbing Adam’s apple. Père Samedi then was thick across the shoulders. But the change that haunted me was in the men’s eyes, although just what changed and how escapes my vocabulary of adjectives. They were not deadened now, nor had they grown somber — I would in fact have noted a zestful glint in the Sénateur’s current eyes. The eyes in the photograph did not shine with youthful innocence now dimmed, because they were not innocent then. But drastically changed they were, proving once again the wisdom of proverbs and clichés, such as the one that describes the eyes as the windows to the soul.

Abraham Samedi first met Maxim Bayard early in his career at the Lycée Saint Louis. Abraham was the discovery of a Jesuit missionary in Dame Marie who had noted the young boy’s intelligence and discipline and arranged for this son of an illiterate fisherman to be educated in Jérémie, as the Jesuits did every year for two or three of the brightest children of the remote provinces, particularly those whom the fathers suspected of harboring a vocation.

Abraham would not have survived the first weeks of school at the intimidating lycée were it not for the assistance of Maxim Bayard. At the beginning of every week, students at the lycée were given ten cards. Any student who caught another speaking Creole had the right to demand his card. At the end of the week, students with the most cards would be rewarded, while the student with the fewest cards would be flogged. Young Abraham could read and write French with all the fluency of his wealthier classmates, but never having been exposed to French as a living language, he found himself spontaneously bursting into Creole when attempting to address his peers and teachers. Nobody in Samedi’s family had ever spoken French or understood the language, and during the first month of Samedi’s career at the lycée, he suffered the double indignity at the conclusion of each week of watching his classmates cheerfully eat rich slices of homemade chocolate or komparet , the spicy ginger cake that was the town’s specialty, while he himself was struck a dozen times across the knuckles with the rigoise .

With every passing week, Abraham Samedi found it more difficult, not easier, to speak French. He was utterly unsure what language would come out of his mouth at any time, so great was his anxiety. Even when he had composed and practiced a sentence in French, under the stress of performance a Creole word was capable of emerging, and that would be sufficient for one of the students or another, ever eager to amass another card, to spring up and shout, “Donnez-moi vot’ cat’!”

The tension of the situation so overwhelmed young Samedi that after six weeks or so, he considered leaving school and returning to his father’s fishing boat. The past week had been particularly difficult. Nine times he had been caught speaking in Creole; the other boys sat staring at him now like the hungry vultures who circled the fields, waiting for him to slip up so they could pocket one more card. At night in the dormitory, Abraham remembered the days on the fishing boat with his father and brothers, telling stories and jokes about the sea, and the pleasant evenings with his mother and sisters, mending lines and salting fish, the hours passing swiftly in a babble of words.

Abraham begin to pray for deliverance morning, afternoon, and night. He imagined his heavenly Father as a kindly village father, and he spoke to him in Creole, certain the Lord spoke all languages with equal facility. He demanded that his Savior remove the terrible stones that had been placed in his mouth, which prevented him from expressing himself in the language of the blan and threatened to impede a life in His great service. He asked the Lord for the gift of simple speech.

It was just before school began, the hour when the Jesuit fathers demanded that each student present his cards to be counted, when Maxim Bayard first approached Abraham Samedi.

Although the two boys shared a common nation and a common language, they might have been from different continents, so different were their childhoods. Maxim was a product of Haute Ville, the elegant old mulatto aristocracy. His father owned a guildive , a distillery, producing the raw clear rum called taffia ; he traded in coffee, cocoa, and rubber. The Bayard men dressed in English twills imported directly from the manufacturer and cut by the best tailor in Jérémie. The future Sénateur had been the middle child of six, four daughters and two sons, all living in a riotous confusion of amateur theatricals, declaimed bits of homespun poetry, or the scratching of the Sénateur’s brother’s ill-tuned violin, accompanied by Maxim’s mother’s far more accomplished performance on the piano. The garden was a profusion of the Sénateur’s mother’s roses: every marriage, feast, and burial in Jérémie was garnished with her ‘Paul Néron,’ her ‘Frau Karl Druschki,’ or her ‘Radiance.’ In the evening the children gathered on the terrace at the feet of Maxim’s father, who read aloud in his mellifluous tenor from Balzac, Zola, or Hugo.