Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

The years that followed the massacre were the happiest of Sanette Balmir’s life. She soon moved into the Bayard house, together with her menagerie of flunkies, followers, lovers, and acolytes. The large Bayard library was fed, sheet by sheet, to the flames to start cooking fires. Sanette was too fat to fit in Evelyne Bayard’s clothes, but the dresses of the Bayard women were cut open and stitched together to make nightclothes for her. She enjoyed the feel of Evelyne Bayard’s soft sheets against her ample skin at night. She drank her way through the Bayards’ excellent collection of wine imported from France, and she was known for the rose she inevitably wore in her hair.

There were other photographs on the walls of Père Samedi’s study: Père Samedi leaning on a knee, surrounded by a large crowd of somber children — the orphans he harbored in the orphanage he had constructed at Bonbon. Père Samedi had restored the lovely church at Abricots, and Père Samedi, hard hat on his head, stood looking over an architectural blueprint with the French architect who had volunteered his time (at Père Samedi’s suggestion) to oversee the project. In another photo, Père Samedi was holding a shovel, digging out the ceremonial first scoop of dirt at his health clinic; and in another he was arm in arm with three blans at the prow of one of the fishing boats that Québécois Catholics had donated to Père Samedi’s parishioners following the passage of a hurricane.

I had been looking at the photographs on Père Samedi’s wall for five minutes or more, the room quiet and animated only by the swirling dust motes, when the priest finally spoke: “Let me see your teeth.”

“I’m sorry?” said the judge.

“I want to see your teeth.”

The judge bared his teeth — neat, square, small, and regular. They were neither attractive nor unattractive, and in no way particularly notable.

“Open wide,” Père Samedi said.

“Why?” he said.

“Open.”

The judge did as he was ordered. The priest peered inside his mouth carefully, as if looking in very much the wrong place for a lost button. Then Père Samedi stood up. He stood tall, like some complexly articulated skinny spider, and he ambled over to Terry. He said, “Now you. Show me yours.”

“These are for me and Dr. Stern,” Terry said.

“Show me your teeth,” Père Samedi said, and his voice was so mild that Terry smiled and opened his mouth wide.

The priest looked inside Terry’s mouth attentively. I could see Terry’s pink tongue. Terry’s eyes were smiling: one more Haiti story to tell back home.

“Now you,” the priest said.

He held my chin gingerly between an old leathery forefinger and an old leathery thumb. He looked at my tongue and my gold-capped molars. His examination lasted a long time. Then he released my face, returned to his place, and shouted, “François!”

After a moment, the gardener ambled in.

“François, show the men your teeth, if you please. It’s very important.”

With no hint of embarrassment, François opened his mouth.

We sat in our seats, nodding, until Père Samedi said, “No, gentlemen, I insist. Come and look at these teeth. Look .”

“It’s okay,” said the judge, embarrassed for François.

“François doesn’t mind,” said Père Samedi.

François didn’t seem to mind. His smile suggested that he might even take a perverse pride in the condition of his teeth. There were teeth in his mouth, technically speaking, but very few. It was a cul-de-sac of dental destruction. It was like looking at a rose garden after a hurricane rips through. François was opening his mouth wide and leaning over the judge’s face, and the judge was trying to maintain a neutral aspect, not wanting to alienate a voter.

Terry leaned over and whispered to me, “What the hell are we doing here?”

“Looking at François’s teeth,” I said.

Père Samedi lit a cigarette, and Terry took that as permission to do the same. Then Terry offered François one from his pack; he accepted it happily.

“I sometimes wonder what His intentions were in giving us these fragile mouths,” Père Samedi said. “Surely He was aware of the conditions we would face. Why add yet another burden to our shoulders?”

The judge was thinking about those billable hours. He said, “So you need a dentist.”

“François needs dentures,” Père Samedi said.

“I imagine a lot of folks around here need good dental care,” said the judge.

“The children,” Terry added.

“Not just the children, everyone,” said the judge.

“We had a dentist once,” Père Samedi said.

“What happened to him?”

“He died!” Père Samedi began to laugh, a dismaying caw. “It was a long time ago. He drilled a cavity, somebody bit him, the blood became infected, and he died!”

“Doesn’t sound like he was much of a dentist,” said the judge.

“He wasn’t,” Père Samedi agreed. “He treated François.”

“Maybe we could find you another one,” said the judge.

Then the judge began to talk. It was as if he’d been thinking about rural Haitian dentistry for months. In Jacmel, he’d seen a volunteer dentistry program. Real model for how it should be done. An American dentist flew in every month or two for a marathon of oral care. Cavity. Boom. Extraction. Boom. Saw more patients in three days than he probably saw up north in a month. Now, if Père Samedi could supply a working space, nothing fancy, just a room, and maybe a place at the guest house, then Johel was betting he could find the dentist. Somebody who’d love to take his hygienist down to the little hotel at Anse du Clerc, fill cavities in the morning, snorkel in the afternoon, boff the hygienist at night — excuse my language, Father — why this could really work.

This could be the start right here of a lot of good things.

* * *

There was one photograph not on Père Samedi’s wall that well belonged there, but it exists only in my imagination. It is a portrait of an immensely fat woman dressed in a green silk gown hiked up around her waist. She is wearing no underwear. The woman, her skin the color of wet mud, is lying in a patch of wet mud, being nosed by a snowy white sow. Her arms and legs are askew, in a position that the viewer, not knowing why, knows immediately is unnatural. Her head lies a meter away from her body. Her mouth is open, and her tongue lolls out. In her eyes there is a wide-eyed, unblinking stare of perfect terror.

Stories circulated still about Père Samedi in the year immediately after his return from exile. Papa Doc and Baby Doc were only recently gone, and the parish was still divided between those who had supported the dictatorship and those who had opposed it: everyone knew which way their neighbor had gone. Père Samedi, returned to his parish after so many years away, now attracted vast crowds with his furious sermons. He urged his parishioners to rough-and-ready justice. It was said — whispered, hinted — that Père Samedi himself led bands of men armed with machetes to lonesome houses where once-powerful Macoutes now trembled. They said that the priest made lists of his friends and lists of his enemies, and he scratched names off one list and inserted them on the other. It was around this time that the head of the aged Sanette Balmir was discovered in a pigsty.

They say that it was Maxim Bayard, returned from exile also, who tempered Père Samedi’s righteous anger. Both men had suffered the depredations of the dictator: nobody understood Père Samedi’s anger so well. Maxim had spent his exile in Paris, driving a taxicab. Not a day had passed when he did not feel the sadness and longing that only an exile can understand. The very day that Baby Doc fled Port-au-Prince, Maxim Bayard came home. He swore that he would never again sleep in the house that Sanette Balmir had profaned, and he built himself a small hut on the edge of his large property. Then he sought out his old friend Abraham Samedi. The two men, together with half a dozen like-minded men in various districts of the Grand’Anse, devised a plan for justice. Soon Maxim Bayard was Sénateur Maxim Bayard, and Père Samedi spoke to him as an equal.