Bob Shacochis - The Woman Who Lost Her Soul

The entourage — several producers and assistants, a screenwriter and her husband from Santa Monica, a local driver who tripled as an interpreter and bodyguard — had already taken seats around a long table on the patio, cocktails in hand, robust and mirthful, cosmopolitan, the men in their black jeans and linen shirts, the women in flowery sundresses. Had they gathered in the Seychelles or Saint-Tropez, they would have appeared no different, and perhaps to Harrington’s discredit it had long since ceased to offend him that even the worst places on earth somehow managed to cater to the appetites of the well-heeled. He was offered the flattery of the one remaining chair at the head of the table, lowering himself on a cushion of exchanged compliments, the director to his right, a balding impish producer to his left.

Tell me, the director said, about Jacques Lecoeur.

Where the rutted track stopped at the bank of an aquamarine river flowing out from the rugged and still timbered mountains of the northwest lived Jacques Lecoeur — without meaning to, Tom made it sound quite like a fable. Lecoeur, a cocoa farmer and labor organizer turned, in reputation at least, guerilla chieftain, provided the tyrants with their only form of resistance in the years after the coup d’état. The generals had sent their army marching day and night up the valley where Lecoeur’s people — peasants, cultivators — resided, burning houses and schools, shooting whoever proved too slow to flee. Lecoeur and his men and their families retreated into the refuge of the high mountains, living in caves, scavenging for roots, lost to the world in the most paradisiacal landscape Tom had ever seen anywhere in the tropics. Certainly this much was true: the tyrants’ obsession with hunting down Lecoeur; and after the invasion, the Special Forces’s obsession with outtricking Lecoeur, which they were never able to accomplish in Lecoeur’s endless game of hide-and-seek. In this way, Lecoeur had become an enigmatic celebrity, perhaps the only one Haiti had to offer the world. Because the U.S. military’s intelligence units listened without discrimination to any voice that would whisper a confidence into their many ears, their profile on Lecoeur was confounding, fragmented, and contradictory: one week Lecoeur was a freedom fighter, the next a bandit and a murderer; he was a warrior messiah, or maybe a gang leader; he and his men were weaponless save for Lacoeur’s own pistol and a few M1s they had lifted from the Haitian army; on the contrary, a Special Forces intel officer once told Harrington, the Cubans were shipping them arms.

In the course of his mission, four times Harrington had hiked up through that burnt-out valley and into the mountains to document the former regime’s crimes in the region, twice unsuccessfully with American commandos, twice with various journalists who were also Tom’s friends. When Lecoeur finally allowed himself to be found, appearing wraithlike out of the jungle to sit with them in a clearing and endure their questions, Tom didn’t know what to think about this unassuming man. He was shy, well-educated, articulate without being dogmatic — Tom theorized he was perhaps nothing more than a modern-day maroon, a runaway, a man who had refined the feral art of saving his own skin. No hard evidence suggested otherwise but, even now, months later, the bloody reports crackled down from the northwest mountains: overrun outposts, attacks on garrisons, summary executions and assassinations and torchings, each incident of vengeance attributed to the wily, bearded Lecoeur, Haiti’s Che Guevara, her Robin Hood. Personally, Tom believed none of it, but the appeal of the myth was not lost on him. Lecoeur had what moviegoers would recognize as star power.

The director was intrigued, engaged by these accounts of a true son of the land, a reincarnation of the slave chieftains who had defeated, two hundred years earlier, the slave owners, Napoleon, and the French.

I want to meet this guy, said the director. He wanted Harrington to take them up there.

Who? Tom asked, mildly alarmed. All of you? Around the table, their optimistic faces bobbed excitement. It was possible, Harrington said, but the request made him uneasy. He had a mental image of leading the sweaty troupe on a ghost chase around and around the mountains, doused by squalls and roasted by the sun, their energy never flagging, surrounded by a mosquito-cloud of ragged, mesmerized children. These were not timid or naive people who readily balked at obstacles, yet when Tom explained the expedition would take a day or two to arrange and two more to accomplish, with, of course, no guarantee of safety or success, that was the end of the scheme, there was not enough time to squeeze in the adventure. The entourage groaned their disappointment and picked up their forgotten menus; the director turned to the screenwriter and began a separate conversation; the waiter came and the table ordered and the director followed him back to the kitchen to say something to the chef.

Sighing, the producer leaned toward Tom and laid his chin in the palm of his hand. We’ve touched a nerve here, said the producer. Oliver Stone’s been to Chiapas, you see, to meet Subcommandante Marcos.

Harrington did not think more or less of the director for this explanation; famous people, powerful people, were drawn to each other, compelled to sniff out the scent of their peers and judge them equal or inferior, look into the mirror of their own importance, and he did not feel the compulsion was necessarily shallow or gratuitous or insincere, only inevitable. There was no glory left in Haiti that wasn’t hollow anyway; the grand campaigns, the highest principles, had all decayed or would soon fail, but all of them were still pretending that their swords remained sharp, that their crusades held meaning. It was simply the way you had to be in Haiti until the day arrived when you could not be that way ever again.

And then there was a blast outside the Kinam, the concussion sending the faintest kiss of air across the cheeks of the diners, who collectively tensed and caught their breath. Excuse me, Harrington told the producer and slid back his chair. Someone nearby out in the darkness had fired a gun and Tom had been conditioned by Haiti and its predecessors to appreciate the coincidence of right time, wrong place. Now it was pure curiosity; before that, in El Salvador, pure paralyzing fear. The driver stood up with Tom and Harrington could see the butt of his pistol like a broken hip bone jutting out from his waistband. Everyone else stayed in their seats. If there was a story, they could hear it later.

But there was no story to bring back to them with their meals. The hotel manager and the director were already on the sidewalk by the time the driver and Tom came out to peer into the darkness of Petionville’s decrepit plaza, empty but for a few hardened shadows passing underneath the vault of trees, a lone cook fire near the corner where the tap-taps stopped for the hordes of passengers during the day. They listened carefully for any further trouble but the streets were almost serene with the emptiness of their secrets. A few police milled about on the apron of the station across the block at the top of the square and it was there, the manager guessed, the shot had been fired. Sometimes, he said, these fools even shoot themselves accidentally, playing with their weapons.

The four men returned to the patio in an expansive mood, the director asking the solicitous manager for a bottle of Barbancourt Special Reserve to be delivered to the table. Their food was served in a steamy cloud of garlic and chili vinegar and grilled fish and the talk turned to the year Tom Harrington had spent on the island investigating its massacres. Had he seen much of the American commandos who controlled the countryside? What did Tom think about the various pundits who were saluting or decrying America’s rehabilitation of the warrior culture ? And then — Tom shouldn’t have been surprised but he was — the discussion turned to moviemaking. The people at the table were planning to make a soldier movie set in Haiti.