Bob Shacochis - The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

But she did not want to philosophize about photography or altruism or ways of seeing and his own impulse toward abstractions seemed suddenly not passionate but tedious and didactic.

Can I ask you something? she said. Do you know about voodoo?

Know what about vodou ? he repeated skeptically but thought, aha . With her question, the brooding enigma of Jacqueline Scott seemed to deflate into the banal. He guessed she wanted to hear the drums, sweat in the pagan heat and immerse herself in Haiti’s timeless theater of light and darkness. If you could not explain what you were doing in a place like Haiti, here was a genuine reason that required no attachment of war or revolution or screaming horror or saintly crusade. You were, you could tell yourself, a tourist of the spirit. You were drawn by the mysteries, such as they were.

Is it a real thing? she asked, and Tom found it somewhat disconcerting, the repellent pained transparency of need in the way she asked the question.

I’m not sure what you mean.

I mean, it’s a religion, right?

A religion, yes, I suppose. Another way of looking at the universe, a way to try to understand what’s in God’s mind. If you choose to see it that way.

How do you choose to see it? she said.

With due respect. A way of looking at, and trying to understand, power. Spiritual power, political power — they’re inseparable anyway, aren’t they?

Which was not to say vodou, much like Catholicism, had not burdened many of its practitioners with superstition and fear, he explained. The potions and powders, some of them anyway, were real; zombies, however rare, were real; spirit possession, he could assure her, was no joke, unless you were a species of white fraud hoping to bluff your way into the melodrama of it. And yet still, in its daily manifestations, vodou was a strong, good thing, he told her — it was Haiti’s only strong, good thing, the expression of the abiding spirit of the people, the expression of survival. Whatever it was beyond that expression, or beneath it, was not for Tom or any blan to say, and existed if at all as a curiosity for educated men and women, the theater of the African genesis, at best an anthropological pursuit. Or, shamelessly, a type of neoprimitive entertainment, a game of the occult that whites played with blacks, perhaps to scare themselves, to flirt with the macabre, perhaps to feel liberated and unrestrained in their contempt for the answers their own world had provided, or failed to provide.

To see herself anew — and what was the American dream if not this? — was that what Jacqueline Scott wanted? Or to find herself in mankind’s ancient past, and see herself clearly, as she always was and would be? Transcend, or descend, or howl at the magic of the freaking moon? Tom had no idea. Americans were not built to take these matters seriously until their faces were rubbed in the awfulness they sometimes made when they were seized by the exalted passion to remake the world.

Her request, her original request, was predictable, what any tourist might crave in Haiti if Haiti had tourists — she wanted to meet priests, the houngans . Of course he readily agreed and she accepted his proposition of a daylong excursion out to the countryside, where she had never been, rather than spend their time gagging in Port-au-Prince’s traffic, crawling over the frying-pan heat of the road to Carrefour to visit Max Beauvoir — a cyberliterate houngan who spent more time on the Internet than in his peristyle — or patrolling the stack of Bel Air’s sinister maze of neighborhoods, cousin by cousin, trying to track down Abujah, the video cameraman, a stringer for the networks, who had become the heir apparent to vodou ’s throne. Instead Tom suggested a short trip via Route Nationale One to Saint-Marc, a port an hour and a half up the coast on Gonave Bay, where, on the town’s outskirts, a temple, padlocked and shuttered during the occupation, had, he noticed on his last expedition into the northern mountains, raised its flags and repainted its exterior murals and presumably was back in service, come one come all.

The only tricky detail was they had to leave that minute to be back by dinnertime but Jackie said, Let’s go! Good girl, Tom replied, relieved to have finally inspired her spontaneity. Everything about her so far, especially her callow questions about vodou —he thought she could have read a book, for Christ’s sake, before she got on the plane — had impressed him as naive and untested, though for the first time she offered him her smile. Not warmly, though, it was as if mocking his approval of her readiness, her implicit availability, his little pat on the back.

They hoisted their shoulder bags and moved into the assault of sunlight and he was already sweating out his half-dozen cups of coffee by the time they descended the Oloffson’s steps to the car park and his rental. At the end of the driveway Tom pulled over and collected Gerard from beneath the coconut palms, the happiness draining from his face when he realized he had been demoted to passenger. He slid stiff-limbed into the backseat, not his regular place and certainly not his preferred, but he was intuitive enough to decline when Jackie, who showed no interest in him otherwise, offered to switch.

By the time Tom had navigated through the wretched chicken coop of a city to its leafy outskirts and the open road, he had begun to feel joy, the most appropriate response to escaping Port-au-Prince.

Jackie did not say much, and Tom considered her silence a virtue. He was perfectly at ease driving for hours without sharing a thought with whoever his companions might be, and he generally found talkative passengers distracting from the manifold hazards of the road. Nor did he talk about Jackie to himself — he was not willing anything to happen between them, but letting things happen as they may. He was little more than a harmless parasite on her beauty, which seemed so dismayingly separate from her other traits — a paradox but an irrelevance as well and not so troubling as the wide margin for error we grant those among us who are beautiful and nothing else.

They drove out into the glare of the barren coast, the mangrove swamps and copses of thorn acacia of Tintayen sloped uninvitingly toward the bright sea, along the alluvial plain of a valley funneling upward to the mountains of the interior. She rummaged with increasing frustration in her camera bag for sunglasses and Tom was glad she could not find them because already her eyes were inscrutable. Instead she settled for lemon drops, turning in her seat to pass the bag to Gerard and then pausing for a short conversation with him that seemed more curt than polite. Did he have a family? Yes, a wife and two children. Did his wife work? No. How old were the children? Were the schools satisfactory? Where did he learn English? Tom waited for her to plumb the angry shadows of Gerard’s feelings, but she did not ask him anything that would not appear on an application for a visa or a bank loan.

Nor did she offer any comment on the ever more rugged spectacle of the countryside or the hapless peasants trudging the rut of footpaths following the road, and Tom wondered if she was overwhelmed by the strangeness of Haiti, or even stunned by its unexpected though ravaged magnificence. Whatever preoccupied her, she would allow almost nothing to penetrate its envelope, which made her a rather ideal traveling companion, accepting without complaint or censure the heat, the roughness of the road, his hell-bent driving, the fate of the Haitians. Still, she exerted a slight but constant counterweight against Tom’s own happiness, a humorless neurotic, no more carefree than a penitent, which he supposed she was, and the trip seemed less and less like a lark than a task or mission, which was exactly what he had hoped to avoid this day in Haiti, the outsider’s relentless sense of obligation.