Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

I was hired as an election day observer by the Organization of American States, which put in place a three-hundred-member observation team distributed throughout the entire country. I was assigned to the mountain town of Chambellan, about forty-five minutes from Jérémie on the road to Dame Marie.

Haiti was a good teacher in the arts of gratitude, and only the coldest hearts would have remained unmoved by the long lines of solemn voters, dressed in their Sunday best, congregating from dawn onward at the Lycée Jean Rabel, a one-story concrete block house. I hadn’t expected to see anyone come and vote, on account of the swine flu, but the line stretched out through the schoolyard and down the side of the mountain. The morning had a chill, and the voters shifted from side to side to stay warm, with that remarkable capacity for fortitude that those who do not know Haiti well confuse with patience. The villages around Chambellan had been heavily contested by both the Sénateur and the judge; both men had rallied more than once in the town. The voters today weren’t just braving swine flu. The short history of Haitian democracy had been punctuated by many elections that degenerated into violence. At any time, a gunshot could ring out, and who would stand in line then?

In Chambellan, only one incident threatened to disrupt the calm of the day.

It must have been midmorning when the voters in line began to shout. An elderly man was lying on the ground, looking dazed. He was wearing a bow tie and a neatly pressed suit, and the folks in line were insisting that the man was dead.

What happened was this.

The man on the ground, whose name was Berthillus Simeon, had been a partisan of the Sénateur’s in this election and in elections past, a member of the older generation whose loyalty to the Sénateur could not be shaken by any promise of a road or riches, and he had made no attempt to hide his scorn for the younger voters of the village who had come to admire the judge. He was an ornery old cuss whose ultimate answer to any political argument was to spit on his opponents’ shoes.

It was just two days’ back that Monsieur Simeon had drunk himself a bottle of clairin and died in the night. Given his age and fragile health, no one in the village was much surprised by the man’s demise, not even his children or his wife. Until the coffin was ready, the family was keeping the cadaver right in his bed, with an iron on his chest to keep him from rotting. They were proposing to bury him that day or the next — which is why his presence on the voting line was arousing considerable agitation.

Not only was old Monsieur Simeon present, he was insisting that he be allowed to vote. The judge’s supporters, sensing trickery, had surrounded him, and he had responded by hocking a wet loogie at his antagonists’ feet. The subsequent pushing had gotten to shoving, and in this way Monsieur Simeon ended up on the ground, looking dazed.

So the questions for the election officials were complicated: Was this in fact Monsieur Simeon? If so, was Monsieur Simeon dead? If he was dead but still capable of voting, was his vote valid?

Voting was suspended for almost an hour as the election officials treated the case of Monsieur Simeon. Partisans of the judge were soon shouting that the whole election was fraudulent — who knows how many of the dead had been allowed to vote? — while partisans of the Sénateur were yelling that the election was a fraud, too, one man waving a copy of the Haitian Constitution in the air and demanding to know just where it said that only the living were entitled to vote.

The second secretary of the Voting Bureau was a skinny schoolmistress brought in from Dame Marie, who gave Monsieur Simeon a glass of water and asked him if he was dead. But Monsieur Simeon seemed to think the question was offensive and wouldn’t answer.

A voice in the crowd proposed that this monsieur was a ringer, someone who had taken the deceased’s voter identification card and was proposing to cast a ballot in his name. The only problem with this theory was that first, the man calling himself Monsieur Simeon and the man on the voter identification card were very nearly identical; and second, there were at least two dozen citizens in line insisting that this was Monsieur Simeon, only he was dead.

As it happened, one of the ladies in line worked as a nurse at the clinic in Chambellan, and she was enlisted to ascertain whether Monsieur Simeon was, medically speaking, alive or dead, a fact whose juridical relevance remained uncertain. A hush came over the crowd as this lady, clearly more accustomed to laboring women and newborns than walking cadavers, pressed two fingers to the old man’s scrawny neck and sought out a heartbeat. She waited a minute, felt the faint tapping of the man’s old pulsing blood, and said, “He’s alive.”

A roar went up from half the crowd as the other half shouted wildly: even zombies had heartbeats. Out on the margins of the crowd, the debate was philosophical, as so often in Haiti, folks wondering just what life consisted of. Someone was sent for a mirror, on account of the widely known fact that a cadaver doesn’t have a reflection, but no one could seem to find one.

The situation threatened to explode out of control. The president of the Voting Bureau was trying to reestablish order, the muscles in his neck straining as he shouted at the voters to get back in line; and the first secretary was on the phone with the PNH, asking them to send a vehicle. But the PNH were overwhelmed, on account of the situation in Marfranc, where a brace of toughs, armed with machetes, had been hired by a local candidate for député to storm the polling center. By the time the PNH responded to the disorder, the ballots and the ballot boxes were in flames. The violence had nothing to do with either the Sénateur or the judge — they were equally collateral damage to the disorder — but the effect was that no voters voted in Marfranc that day for any candidate whatsoever, and the PNH had neither vehicle nor officers to spare.

The day was saved by the arrival of Monsieur Simeon’s son. The son of Simeon had the thick hands and flat feet of a true scion of the Haitian soil. He said that he didn’t know for sure if his papa were alive or dead, but he could confirm that all and sundry had sincerely believed the old man dead for the past two days. This morning, he continued, he had gone into the bedroom where the cadaver was reposing, expecting to salute his deceased father, only to find the bed empty. So either his daddy had risen from death or he hadn’t been dead at all, and he expected it was the latter.

But there was an easy way to know for sure if the old man was a zombie. Zombies couldn’t abide the taste of salt, so if Monsieur Simeon was willing to taste salt, then he should be allowed to vote. Everyone seemed to think this was fair except Monsieur Simeon himself, but by now most folks’ patience with Simeon was limited, and it was decided to make him eat salt whether he wanted to or not. Soon one of the marchandes selling deep-fried plantains was enlisted to produce a specimen glistening with grease and salt, of which Monsieur Simeon, looking around nervously at the crowd, took a healthy bite and then another.

When fifteen minutes passed and Monsieur Simeon wasn’t dead of salt poisoning, the president of the Voting Bureau made his official ruling: Monsieur Simeon was not dead, had never been dead, and was therefore entitled to vote. Monsieur Simeon, like all other voters, was escorted into the polling center, where his documents were inspected, and he made his mark on the voting sheet. He was handed one ballot for the senatorial race and another for the local deputy race, and was escorted to the private voting booth. A few minutes later he handed the ballots, folded neatly, to the second secretary of the Voting Bureau, who placed them in their respective boxes. Monsieur Simeon’s fingernail was painted with black dye.