Caribbean (135 page)

“I’m totally at a loss.”

“Everything I’ve said is true. Verifiable. She’s the fourth incontrovertible case I’ve had, but never before with such splendid photographs.”

When Tessa asked how all this was possible, he said: “Let’s walk along this country road. What I have to say will sound more plausible with the trees and the ancient fields about us.”

There had always been in Haiti, he explained, native necromancers or priests or holy men, or what scientists accurately call shamans and what Haitians call bocors. One found them in many primitive societies, but in Haiti they seemed to have special power, for they inherited from canny old men who had practiced the art in Africa a knowledge of secret and powerful poisons and drugs which in combination had the capacity to induce in targeted human beings a suspension of life functions: “Like ether or chloroform, but more powerful and with even stranger consequences. What’s in the mixture? I’ve worked on this for years, but have found only two bocors who would talk honestly with me, and I’m sure they’ve told me only part of their trickery.”

He found a fallen tree and invited Tessa to sit with him: “I know they use powder obtained from the desiccated body of a bufo frog. I sent one to the medical laboratories at Johns Hopkins, and they reported: ‘We’ve known about the bufo for decades. Favorite animal of poisoners, but your Haiti version is incredible. A virtual repository
of at least sixteen intricate poisons.’ And our bocors also use the blowfish, called by some the poisonous puffer. You may have read about it in Japan, where they call it the
fugu
. I’m told, but have never had it verified, that the bocors also have a fatal cucumber, plus a kind of pepper from the Orinoco and a particular snake from the Amazon jungles.”

“Sounds like that mix would kill a horse.”

“It would. But that’s not the purpose. The bocor becomes highly skilled in administering just the right amount to throw his victim into a kind of suspended animation. The corpse is buried in all solemnity, and two days later, at dead of night, the bocor digs it up, stops feeding it salt, and has himself a zombie.”

“Are the services of the bocor available to anyone?”

“That I don’t know. In fact, there’s a great deal I don’t know. How frequently this happens, for example.” Then his voice firmed, and he said with great resolution: “But that it’s happening, in the year 1989, I have no doubt whatever,” and from his wallet he took photographs of three living zombies who had been declared dead, were buried, and then dug up.

“They live with me in St.-Marc. Government pays for their keep. And it’s important that your young woman Lalique come home with me. Government will demand it.”

Tessa prodded: “I’m interested in the zombie-maker. How does he become one?”

“Like a bishop in the Catholic church, who can claim a straight line inheritance from Jesus Christ, he’s a straight-line descendant of some notable native doctor in Africa. But he has to be extremely skilled in making nice distinctions. Too much of his magical powder, the target dies. Too little, the target does not pass into perfect suspension, comes awake too soon, suffocates in his grave. Just right,” and he pointed to Lalique, who was again squatting in her old position against the trunk of a tree.

Apparently word of her discovery and whereabouts had reached the capital, for an urgent message had been delivered to Dr. Briant’s office in St.-Marc and forwarded to Tessa’s village:
ACQUIRE GUARDIANSHIP LALIQUE HÉBERT IMMEDIATELY
.
MINIMUM PUBLICITY
.

So that afternoon the bedazed young woman—normal girl for seventeen years, dead for two days, zombie for eleven years, normal again for the rest of her life—left Tessa’s care. “It could be three or four years before she returns fully to life,” Briant said as he helped
Lalique into his car. “Salt will help. Vitamins will be needed. Contact with others. A human life being reborn.”

When the car disappeared, it left a bewildered Tessa Vaval. At Port-au-Prince she had been dismayed by the political corruption; at the villages to the north, by the unrelieved poverty and despair; and now, by the perpetual mysteries of her homeland. Haiti was an island not to be perceived from a distance nor understood by inquiring young men at Harvard. In fact, she was discovering, even a girl born on the island lost her intuitive comprehension if she moved to a foreign country and alien society: Heavens! I know nothing about Haiti. I’ve lied to others and myself about this island, and my ignorance terrifies me!

It was then that a crazy idea first tangled itself into her brain: Perhaps it would be better if I spent my life here, trying to make things better for others, trying to probe the mysteries of this place and maybe, in the future, writing about Haiti as generations of my family have experienced it.

For two days she wrestled with images that were more writhing and real than those of a boa constrictor: she was tormented by zombies and mountains denuded of trees and hordes of peasants living worse than slaves, for they had no food, and persistently she saw the unanswered question passing before her eyes in flaming red letters: “Is this what a black republic after nearly two centuries of self-rule comes to?” And she was so obsessed by these images that she went to St.-Marc, where she sought Dr. Briant and the three zombies who were domiciled with him. Overjoyed at seeing that Lalique after only these few days in his care was returning from the living dead, she threw herself on Briant’s guidance and said: “I have this terrible compulsion to give it all up—appointment at Wellesley … certainly my marriage to the white fellow I’m engaged to. My life is here in the Haiti of my fathers.” Trembling, she asked: “Would there be a place here, working with you on the abiding problems?”

She was fortunate in that she had come to the one man in Haiti best qualified to speak to the precise situation in which she found herself. “At about your age,” he said quietly, “I faced the same dilemmas. Passed my medical exams, had a running start at a good job in the States, chucked it all because I was drawn back to Haiti. Wanted to save the world. Tried to open an advanced medical office in Port-au-Prince. Duvalier wouldn’t permit it. His henchman controlled medicine on that level and they wanted no interference with new
ideas from anyone like me. But I was filled with whatever it is that fills you when you’re twenty-five. Besides, I knew Haiti needed what I had to give, so I forged ahead.” He stopped, laughed at himself, and asked ruefully: “Dr. Vaval, have you ever been interrogated by the Tontons Macoutes? Seen your office smashed to bits? Been left flat in a corner bleeding and with your case records torn in bits and thrown over you like confetti?”

He led her to a kiosk, where they shared an iced drink as he concluded: “The Tontons are still with us. Same men, same mission, different name, and they still interrogate in the same manner. A young woman with your ideas, and your family name … in their hands you’d last ten minutes.”

“How do
you
survive?” for she had seen that he was an exceptional man.

“I work things out. I have my clinic, pitiful though it is. I write my papers.
New England Medical Journal
is printing one on tropical diseases.” He looked about. “And I keep taking my notes on zombies, and maybe twenty years from now when the Tontons wouldn’t care, I’ll publish them, probably in Germany.” As placid as a man of fifty could be who had seen his life slip away, he said: “So, Madame Professor of the Caribbean, please go on to Cap-Haïtien and your ship …” Then his voice broke, and he looked wildly at her and screamed there in the sunlight: “And get the hell out of Haiti!”

The hundred and thirty-seven advanced college students who would be enrolling in the “Cruise-and-Muse” seminar had assembled two weeks earlier at classrooms in the University of Miami, where three able young assistant professors from different universities had given intensive instruction on the Caribbean and provided basic outlines and maps. They had now flown to Cap-Haïtien to board the Swedish
Galante
, and they had one free day for which Tessa was responsible.

When she met them—two-thirds white, one-third black, with representatives from six foreign nations—she experienced that reassuring sensation which good teachers encounter each September when they first see the young people they will be teaching through the coming year: They look so bright! So eager! Oh, if I can only send them forward! She thought that this one could become an editorial writer for
The New York Times
, that girl a doctor at Mass General, that one
a surgeon in Chicago, and that saucy girl a political leader for sure. Then her enthusiasm sobered as she ended her speculation with the truths that have prevailed for millennia: If only they develop character, and use the brains they have, and somehow catch fire.” Looking at their smiling faces from Colorado and Vermont and Oregon, she promised herself: If there’s any tinder in any of them, I will set it ablaze.

Tessa had arranged for jeeps to carry them inland to that incredible mountain fortress built by one of Toussaint L’Ouverture’s black generals, with whom her ancestor, César Vaval, had often served. Henri Christophe, a fiery individual with no training and assisted by no architect, had built in the early 1800s one of the brooding masterpieces of the world. She had to chuckle when they arrived there, for the local peasants had through the years been successful in stopping all governments from building a jeep road to the top; if you wanted to see Christophe’s magical fortress atop its mountain, you climbed aboard one of their donkeys, and for a hefty fee rode up as their ancestors had done since 1820.

The painful ride was amply rewarded, for at a lofty altitude above the sea the students broke out of the jungle to see looming mysteriously above them a huge stone mass, frighteningly tall, with towers and ramparts soaring above them. When they had climbed laboriously to the top, Tessa said: “Probably the most impressive building ever erected by a black man with no white assistance.” When a student spoiled the effectiveness of her statement by asking: “Erected to what purpose?” she had to reply: “No one ever knew … then or now.”

Overawed by the power of this raw structure built by a black, she withdrew from the students to stand alone at the far end of the parapet, from where she could look down upon the green mystery of this unspoiled corner of Haiti. She felt a throbbing identification with this land and she could hear voices of Haitians she had met on this visit calling her by her real name,
Thérèse
, and it echoed in her brain in two syllables of enchanting beauty: Tay-rez!

Rejoining her students, she said hesitantly: “You’ve been calling me Dr. Theresa, but it’s really Thérèse … more musical and feminine, don’t you think?” and on the mountaintop they approved her rechristening.

When the newly reborn Thérèse returned to Cap-Haïtien she was confronted by a wrenching tragedy, for along the waterfront there was noisy commotion centering upon a United States Coast Guard cutter that was delivering to local authorities thirty-two of the forty or so would-be émigrés she had watched departing from St.-Marc. As she had foreseen, the leaky craft had proceeded only a few leagues northward when it began to sink, and as she moved among the survivors she heard their dismal story.

“Too many in the boat … waves washed over us … sharks followed …”

“The boat should never have been allowed out of St.-Marc harbor.”

“We would all have perished if the Americans had not rescued us.”

But Thérèse wondered if the word
rescue
was proper, for these unfortunates were now not only back in a place they had tried to flee but actually worse off, for they were on police lists as fugitives who had tried to leave Haiti. When she left them huddled on the docks she felt a great soul sickness, which prepared her for the humiliation she was about to experience.

When the time came to board the
Galante
she found that its Swedish crew had brought their ship not to Cap-Haïtien, a typical brawling black port, but to a tidy enclave some miles to the east where the company had leased a large tropical acreage of great beauty—low mountains, spacious white beaches—and had completely enclosed it with a sturdy fence running for thousands of yards. In the space thus protected from the general population of Haiti, the Swedes had constructed an almost flawless vacation spot which merited its name, Le Paradis. More than a hundred employees kept the beach spotless and the recreation areas free of debris. Neatly tended gardens were full of Caribbean flowers in profusion and trees swayed in trade winds as they displayed their luscious treasures: coconuts, breadfruit, mangoes, limes and papayas. For vacationing shoppers, clusters of neat kiosks with grass roofs were tucked beneath the trees, while in a cleared area seven green-topped tennis courts invited players, and a nine-hole golf course stood ready to test the ship’s passengers with its tree-lined fairways and gleaming white sand bunkers. To complete the Eden-like quality of the retreat, a fair-sized stream of clear water wound through the enclave on its way to the Atlantic.

Nearly five hundred years ago, during their first voyage of discovery,
the three caravels of Christopher Columbus had anchored off this spot for their crews to replenish their water barrels prior to the long run back to Spain, and the sailors had declared the place to be a “fair paradise gifted with all the fresh water and fruit we needed.” And so it still was, Thérèse concluded when she finished inspecting the place, but one with an appalling flaw, which she identified for her students: “It’s perfect, except that white people can come here from Cleveland and Phoenix, enjoy the tropics, see the beauties of Haiti, and escape coming into contact with the blacks who form the major population group of the Caribbean.” She spoke with some bitterness of the clever way in which this paradise had insulated itself and its wealthy clients from the realities of Haiti, ugly though they might be: “Is this what the classic travelers of history sought?” she asked. “I mean the intrepid souls who went out from London and Paris and the German cities to explore strange lands and people equally strange? I think not. If this collection of tennis courts and golf links is indistinguishable from Shaker Heights or Westchester County, why should one bother …?”