Wade Davis - The Serpent and the Rainbow

Mme. Jacques accompanied one of the men as they took the rooster to the seat to bathe its left foot. As soon as they returned, Obin threw sulphur powder into a flame, casting sparks with tails of acrid smoke that shot to all corners of the room. Then he released the rooster.

Meanwhile, the man in the satin kerchief had ground up the wood of cadavre gâté, one of the most important of vodoun’s healing trees, and mixed the dust with bits of decayed matter from a human cadaver, including the shavings of the leg bone. LaBonté placed this powder in my protection bottle, adding white sugar, basil leaves, seven drops of rum, seven drops of clairin, and a small amount of cornmeal. Then he rasped a human skull and added other materials provided by one of the men, who lived by the cemetery. LaBonté handed me three candles, three powders, and a packet of gunpowder. He told me to knead the powders into the soft wax before braiding the candles into one. A third time the blade of the machete fell on the stone, harder now, and the edge of the blade scattered sparks.

The spirits answered, mounting first the man with the kerchief, then Obin and LaBonté. LaBonté filled my protection bottle and held it to my lips, piously encouraging me to drink and breathe. This I did. The spirit led me and my companions out of the bagi, into another room where he ordered us to undress. One by one, beginning with myself, we were bathed. The spirit bound my head in red cloth, and as I stood naked in a large basin of herbs and oils he cleansed my skin, with broad soothing strokes, using the rooster as a sponge. The energy of the bird would pass to me, he promised, and by the end of the bath it would lose the breath of life. Rachel followed me into the basin, and then Jacques, and by the time Mme. Jacques was clean, the rooster lay on the ground, flaccid and quite dead.

“It is good,” Mme. Jacques said. “In Port-au-Prince the basin is terrible. Here you smell of beauty, even though you are about to kill.”

Now that we were safe, the spirit directed us back into the bagi for the preparation of the actual poison. There was a new song invoking Simbi, the patron of the powders.

Simbi en Deux Eau

Why don’t people like me?

Because my magical force is dangerous .

Simbi en Deux Eau

Why can’t they stand me?

Because my magical force is dangerous .

They like my magical force in order to fly the Secret Society .

They like my magical force in order to be able

To walk in the middle of the night .

There were four ingredients: one was a mixture of four samples of colored talc, another was the ground skins of a frog, the third was gunpowder, and the fourth was a mixture of talc and the dust ground from the dried gall bladders of a mule and a man. There was no fish, and no toad.

I glanced quickly toward the others, first Rachel, then Jacques. Both sat still and unchanged, but Mme. Jacques had shed her years like water. Her dress fell away from one shoulder, and she had crossed her legs so that a bare foot rested high on her thigh. From a wiry, grim peasant woman, she had become sultry and seductive. Her lips squeezed a cigarette, but it was the wrong way around—the lit end sizzled on top of her tongue.

Her husband caught my stare. “There is no problem,” he confided. “Often when she is taken by the spirit she rubs the juice of the chile pepper on her vagina. Listen!”

The body that had been Mme. Jacques was singing. “We are assembling, we are near the basin, we are going to work. We don’t know how it will be but we shall do the work.” The linked phrases of this high, plaintive wail merged with the rattle and whistle and bells in an ominous cacophony unlike any sound I had heard in a vodoun hounfour.

Then, speaking with a voice that was not hers, she demanded a second poison. Without argument one of the men brought forth a small leather pouch and emptied the contents into a mortar.

“These are the skins of the white frog,” the spirit intoned. “The belly of your victim will swell, and let them cut into it, it will bleed a river of water.”

I lifted one of the skins from the mortar and held it close to the candle. Even I could recognize it as that of the common hyla tree frog. Small glands beneath its skin secrete a compound that while irritating is hardly toxic.

To administer the poison, I was told, it was critical for both my own safety and the success of the work that I follow instructions precisely. On the night of the deed, I was to light the braided candle and hold it up before the evening star and wait until the sky darkened. To cast the death spirit, I would first have to beseech the star saying:

By the power of Saint Star,

Walk, Find

Sleep without eating .

Then, having saluted a complex sequence of stars, I was to place the burning candle in one of two holes dug beneath my victim’s door. Next, I was to drink from my protection bottle to imbibe the power of the cemetery. To set the trap I had merely to sprinkle the powder over the buried candle, staying carefully upwind while I whispered the name of my intended victim. Once the fated individual crossed over the poison, death would be imminent. As a final precaution, the spirit warned me to sleep with the cross of feathers beneath my pillow. That way the power of this ceremony could continue to shield me. With these final words, the spirit left.

“With this your enemy will fall,” Obin assured me as we were about to leave the hounfour. In his hand he held a small jar that contained the second preparation.

“And to make him rise again?” I asked, still clinging to the notion of an antidote.

“That is another magic. For what you have there is no treatment. It kills too completely.”

“And the other powder?” Mme. Jacques asked Obin.

“It’s the same,” he said. “With these you will kill. Is that not what you want?”

“There’s more.”

“What you have been given is explosive . Both powders shall leave your enemy but one ark, the earth that shall take him.”

“I want his body,” I said.

“For that you must return.”

“When?”

“When he is dead and you are ready.”

It was dusk and a young moon hung over the sea, but it was still hot. Jacques cracked open a bottle of rum, and we drank as we walked away. For a while no one spoke. Our clothes clung to our skin, and we smelled of the market—a combination of sweat, jasmine, and rotting fruit. The fishermen were out, two rows along the shore, and we watched the coils grow at their feet as they hauled in the ends of the great semicircles of net, which closed on piles of flotsam.

“Of course,” Mme. Jacques explained once we had reached the jeep, “there are dozens of powders. They walk in different ways. Some kill slowly, some give pain, others are silent.”

“And the ones we bought?”

“They carbonize . But it is the magic that makes you the master.”

“What of the others?”

“It is easier. In food. Or they prick the skin with a thorn. Sometimes they place glass in the mortar. It is a matter of power. If you want to learn the powders, you best walk at night.” Mme. Jacques accepted the bottle of rum. “But now,” she said, “you have known the face of the convoi . The society has touched you.”

“How does she know these things?” Rachel teased, wrapping her arms around Jacques’s neck.

“Oh!” he cried, gagging on a swallow of rum and collapsing into uproarious laughter. “How might she know! They call her Shanpwel. Those men are her cousins. Obin is the president. She is the queen!”

Two men were waiting for me at Beauvoir’s that evening. One was the chief of police of a city in the north. The other I could have recognized by sound alone—by the peal of throaty laughter filtered through a thousand cigarettes until it had the edge of a rasp. He was the same man who had been waiting for us, with three others, on the night of my second day in Haiti, when we returned from Marcel Pierre’s with the bogus preparation. Then he had poured the sample onto his hand derisively. This time I learned his name—Herard Simon. He was equally blunt now.