Mischa Berlinski - Peacekeeping

“Rich folk eat bananas in Port-au-Prince. Poor folks don’t eat bananas. Poor folks don’t eat fruit in Port-au-Prince. You got babies going to bed hungry in Port-au-Prince because they have nothing to eat, you got babies swole-bellied here because all they eat are bananas and mangoes. You think that lady who sold me a banana for one gourde would like to sell her bananas for five gourdes? Sure she would. And you know why she can’t? Because there’s no road .”

He was quiet and I was quiet and so was Terry.

Then the judge said, “People here live on a dollar a day. They had three dollars a day, they’d be okay. Five dollars a day and they’d be great. They’d have enough money to feed their kids, enough money to pay a doctor when the kids get sick, enough money to send their kids to school, maybe even save a few bucks and start a little business. Buy some pigs. There’d be doctors and schools because people could pay for them. That’s five dollars a day, and the difference is — a road. It’s fine and dandy to build a school or some latrines or give away mosquito nets, but at the end of the day people still have just that one dollar they got to stretch out from sunrise to sunset. Look at that right there—”

And what was there on the fringe of the property but a magnificent manguier , dripping with fruit like money …

“Up north, a tree like that, you can get maybe twenty gourdes a dozen. A tree like that can give you — what? A hundred dozen in a season. That could be seventy-five bucks, just for gathering the fruit from your own mango tree. Two or three trees, and people around here don’t see that kind of cash in a year.”

Mangoes! An export fruit! Johel’s voice was sincere, eager, persuasive. A mango tree is for a small peasant like a little money machine: a mango tree and a road are school fees for your child; a mango tree and a road, and your wife has prenatal care; a mango tree and a road is a concrete cistern to gather rainwater, and that means you’re not drinking ditchwater. A mango tree without a road is a pile of fruit; a mango tree without a road is a swollen belly; a mango tree without a road is timber. And what happens to the mangoes now? They fall to the ground and rot — the pigs eat the mangoes and the kids go hungry. And why is that? Because there is no road. Farmers nowadays were cutting down these trees to make charcoal, the only thing you could transport to market in Port-au-Prince. Things didn’t change around here, soon the hills would be denuded, the topsoil washed away, and the last place in Haiti still covered in thick forest would be, like the rest of Haiti, nothing but barren hillside.

When the judge was done talking, his face was covered in a fine sheen of sweat. Terry was with him word for word, nodding when the judge nodded, shaking his head when the judge shook his.

“Good luck with all that,” I finally said — one of those rare occasions on which I have succeeded in saying just what I meant, no more and no less.

Mild days coalesced into calm weeks, and I heard nothing more from either Terry or the judge. They had their destiny and I had mine; and mine involved swaying in a hammock in the afternoon while my wife was at work — swaying just so in and swaying just so out of a hot stripe of sunlight, all the while admiring the industry of the hummingbirds. Another portion of my attention was devoted to a chicken pecking lazily at a fallen mango. I was considering writing a poem on the subject. What I had in mind was a kind of dialogue between the chicken and the hummingbird on the theme of love.

I was trying to find a rhyme for “cluck” when a voice startled me from my poetic reverie. “Anybody home?”

“On the terrace,” I said.

A blond woman with a fine, thin nose and light blue eyes rounded the corner. She was small, and walked with a graceful step. Her hair was pulled back in a sporty ponytail. She was wearing a white skirt and sandals with a bit of a heel and a pink polo shirt and a very fine gold chain around her neck.

“Cookie lady!” she said with a little laugh.

I was attempting to roll out of the hammock, and I must have looked a little ungainly because she quickly said, “Don’t get up — you look so comfy. Just stay where you are.” But by then I was vertical, and I offered her my hand, which she shook firmly — professionally, even.

“I’m Kay White. Terry — you know Terry? from the Mission? he’s my husband? He said you would be here. I made cookies.”

She said all this in one slightly embarrassed, charmingly girlish rush, and her eyes flicked downward to the plate of cookies she was carrying in her hand.

I said, “Would you like some lemonade?”

Micheline, the woman we hired to cook and clean for us, had squeezed a pitcher of juice that morning, sweetened with raw cane sugar. I went to fetch the jug and a pair of glasses from the kitchen and told Kay White to make herself at home. She smoothed out her skirt and sat gingerly in the wicker chair, saying to me as I receded into the kitchen, “Oh, I feel at home here. Your house is just lovely, so peaceful.”

“It’s over one hundred years old.”

“I love old houses,” she said.

I settled myself in the chair opposite hers. I poured two glasses of lemonade. I said, “Please.” She took her glass and sipped.

“Do you want to hear about Micheline?” I said.

“That’s just why I came.”

“She has a cookbook collection. French cookbooks from the 1950s. She looks at them every night. My wife and I were very excited when we first moved in; we thought she must be quite a cook. First night she left out the Larousse Gastronomique or whatever it was, told us to pick out whatever we liked. I think we chose a soufflé. That night she served us some rice, some beans, and some boiled bananas. We thought maybe we hadn’t understood, but the next night it was the same thing. I don’t think she can read.”

Kay looked thoughtful. “What does she do with the cookbooks, then?”

“I think she was just hoping the recipe we wanted was rice, beans, and boiled bananas.”

Kay laughed, and I asked her how long she would be staying in Haiti.

“Two weeks, and I’m not doing anything ,” she said. “I’m going to read a book and go to the beach and sleep. Maybe we’ll eat a fish if we get ambitious.”

“First time you’re down?”

“Oh, no! Fourth time!”

Her shoulders and calves were nicely toned — it was all the Pilates and yoga, I figured. The delicate tracery radiating from her eyes and thin lips had erased the first blush of youth, but she was still a very pretty woman. I supposed she was in her late thirties. At first glance she had struck me as girlish, but the serious way she held herself now suggested hidden stores of competence, as if you could entrust her with details: a complicated travel itinerary or negotiating escrow. “What you got to understand is that my Lady handles million-dollar properties every day,” Terry had told me. She was also a little sexy.

“So I guess you like it,” I said.

She had a bracelet of small turquoise stones on her left ankle. The stones flashed as she crossed her legs. Her toenails were painted a rich pink, like the fringe of a coral reef.

“Not at first. At first it just made me think about all the money I used to spend,” she said.

It makes me think of all the lovers I used to take —that was her tone of voice; and the intimacy broke the tension between us.

“I love to spend money,” I said. “I just wish I had more of it.”

“Me too,” she confessed. “I feel guilty just thinking about how much money we went through.”