Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

When citizens heard the judge was coming, they would take the furniture from their huts and assemble couches, beds, chairs, and tables by the side of the road. This was their way of saying, Judge, my house is your house. Then they would dress themselves in their best clothes, the ones they reserved for church services and baptisms and funerals, and sit themselves down on their ratty old furniture, just waiting for his convoy to pass. It was a bad day for the goats, chickens, and pigs when the judge came to town, because it seemed that every family in the Grand’Anse had prepared a meal for him, stewing up something, on the grounds that he might just be hungry from his drive. Johel insisted on taking a bite or two from every pot. Long after Terry couldn’t stand the smell of another boiled chicken, the judge would still be moving from house to house and table to table, accepting a small plate or drinking another glass of rum, tucking some scrawny old lady under his big shoulder, and declaring that this was surely the finest goat meat he’d ever tasted.

For the last week of the campaign, at every rally, the judge changed his peroration. He’d had some of the guys at campaign HQ stitch him up something that looked like a ballot, and he’d wave it in the air.

“Swine flu is our ignorance!” he said. “Swine flu is our poverty! We’re broker than pigs in this country; the pigs ought to be worrying about catching our disease!”

He waved the ballot.

“There’s just one remedy for our disease! You don’t get better from our disease at the hospital!”

“Non, monsieur, non!” shouted someone.

“Don’t get better at no doctor’s office!”

“Uh-huh!”

“Don’t ask the leaf doctor brew you up some tea, make you feel all right!”

“C’est vrai!”

“This here is the medicine you want to cure our disease,” he said, waving the ballot. “I hear people say that this ballot is poison. But this ballot here is our medicine! This ballot here is poison only if you want to keep folks ignorant! This is poison only if you want to keep folks poor! This ballot here is poison only if you want to keep our people down, down lower than dogs and pigs! This ballot here is poison for Maxim Bayard and medicine for the rest of us! Look here—”

The judge ripped off a corner of that ballot and shoved it into his mouth.

“Mmmm-hmmmm good!” he said. “That ballot tastes good! Li bon, oui! That ballot tastes freedom! That ballot tastes progress! That ballot tastes hope! Gimme more of that ballot, I could eat it twice!”

In the course of that campaign the judge must have eaten a couple of dozen ballots, and you’d have thought nothing ever tasted better each time he wadded one down his throat.

* * *

I awoke to find the Sénateur, dressed in white linen, sitting on the terrace of his mother’s house. It was like finding a bear rummaging through your campsite.

“Sénateur, this is a surprise,” I said.

In the years my wife and I had lived in his house, he had never before visited us, although his own cement bungalow was no more than minutes away. From time to time I saw his caravan of black SUVs drive by on the back road that connected his house to the rue Bayard: that’s how I knew he was in town. Lately they had been rumbling out at dawn to campaign in the far corners of the département and coming back well after midnight.

“I have been having a lovely conversation with your cat,” the Sénateur said. “She has been telling me extraordinary things. For example, she has told me that you are good friends with Johel Célestin.”

The treacherous cat was curled up in the wicker chair adjacent to the Sénateur’s, staring attentively at his ugly face.

“Would you like coffee?” I asked.

“With plenty of sugar.”

I went into the house to make coffee, and when I came back with two cups, the cat had crawled onto the Sénateur’s lap and was allowing her head to be stroked gently.

“You never told me how you liked my poetry,” he said. “I awoke in the night concerned that I might be lodging a critic. I was awake very early and determined to know your true opinion.”

“They were beautiful poems,” I said.

It was true: they were beautiful poems, elegiac and wistful. The Sénateur wrote in a charming but difficult admixture of French and Creole that took me hours to puzzle out. “La fesse de ma fille” —that’s how he titled a sonnet praising his lover’s derriere. A longish history of the town of Jérémie in couplets. There was a successful plea from a fish on a line; the fish liberated from the hook proved to be a god and rewarded the fisherman with a castle. “The Baron’s Lament,” in the voice of Baron Samedi, lord of the underworld.

“I am so relieved that you enjoyed them,” he said.

We sat without talking for a minute or two. There was a woodpecker hammering away, and although it was well past dawn, when the wind shifted, the last drumming from a bal vodou down in Basse-Ville came in on the breeze and filled the terrace with its melancholy, frantic song.

“There was nothing we cared for as youth but poetry,” the Sénateur said. “We sat on this terrace. There was a group of five or six of us. We called ourselves the Héliotropes — we were a generation of innocents! I remember Georges Clérié, with his yellow bow tie; and Fernand Martineau, who sang; and Roger Boncy, who had such a beautiful sister — what was her name? Marcelle, and her friend Paulette Martineau … You have no idea, young man, what time has done to us. But we were once as optimistic as you and your — your friend. I know of your long interest in our Jérémie poets, our history. That’s why I thought this morning that I would come and talk to you.”

“I appreciate the visit,” I said.

“I will be the last of the Bayards to sit on this terrace and discuss the miracle of literature. My grandfather built this house — and I am not a young man! I heard it said from my mother that he was the tallest man in the Caribbean, and for that reason he insisted on these high arched doors. He would not stoop entering his own home! It is a family trait.”

He stared past me at the winter flamboyant just coming into bloom, a crimson cloud.

“I was in exile for twenty years,” he said. “For twenty years I didn’t see this house. I would wander through it in my dreams. When I came back, it was much smaller than I recalled it.”

He leaned forward and put his hand on my forearm.

“You think I will lose, don’t you?”

There was no such thing, of course, as public opinion polling in the Grand’Anse, and it was impossible to know for sure who was likely to win the election. But I had the sense — the Sénateur must have shared it also — that the electoral winds were blowing in the judge’s favor. People seemed to smile when the judge’s name was spoken and frown when the name Maxim Bayard was uttered. Both men had been campaigning vigorously, crisscrossing the département from morning till night, holding two or even three rallies in the course of a day. But the judge’s rallies were better attended.

The Sénateur didn’t wait for my answer. He said, “Tell your friend I wish to speak with him. Informally. A friendly chat. He need not be frightened. This is a private conversation. I have never had the pleasure of shaking his hand.”

* * *

When the Sénateur and the judge finally met, not that evening but the next, I was reminded of large animals sniffing each other. They were almost shy, as if, having imagined and supposed the worst about each other for so long, they could not quite wrap their heads around their adversary’s corporeal reality.