To Run Across the Sea (16 page)

‘This man’s dying,’ I said.

The would-be patient, who had collapsed into a disembowelled armchair and was bleeding darkly, gave a loud groan, and took his hands from his neck to expose his wound. The old man looked at it. ‘Superficial,’ he said. ‘Take him to number 10 rue de Réunion. They’ll fix him up. I have to give you a note, and the fee will be five gourdes.’

The man in the rue de Réunion was a sail-maker who carried out the small repair necessary in ten minutes. ‘I don’t make sails any more these days,’ he said. ‘The hospital sends me all the business I can handle. I get a better result than any surgeon when it comes to sewing them up. It’s the practice that counts.’

The third incident sprang from multiple beginnings all rooted in the misadventures of my friend Johnson. Previously I had always stayed at his hotel, the Meurice, but now he had closed down so I was forced to put up at the Splendide. As soon as I could I went over to listen to his troubles, arising from a long-standing feud with the authorities, which he could only lose. For the fiftieth time he assured me that he was at the end of his tether. At the time of my last visit three years before, he had been beaten by an army officer almost to within an inch of his life for sounding his horn in protest after the officer had knocked in a fender of his car. Johnson’s fatal mistake had been to complain to the Ministry of Justice, since when he had never been left in peace. Now, when we met again, I was shocked at his appearance. I saw him for the first time since the bandages had been removed. His head hung slightly to one side; one eye was half-closed in a sad imitation of a wink. He told me that he found it physically impossible to smile.

Although it was midday, his formerly energetic wife was still in bed. She had nothing left to do with her life, he said, and had given up. We went into the garden where the last of his beautiful specimen trees had long since been cut down by invaders for transformation into charcoal. Everything was now smothered with weeds, many of them producing striking flowers. The swimming-pool, although there was no one to use it, was nearly full and remarkably clear. ‘Don’t they steal the water these days?’ I asked.

‘Of course,’ he said, ‘about 500 gallons a night.’

‘You could empty the pool,’ I suggested.

‘I’m not allowed to.’

‘I should have thought the pool chemicals make the water undrinkable?’

‘They’ve invented a new law against them. It’s called wanton intoxication of resources.’

‘What happened to your old Facel-Vega?’

‘It had to go in the end. They had an army jeep going round the streets looking for it. Every time I left it parked anywhere they backed into it. A general bought it for 2,000 gourdes.’

‘Theft under another name,’ I said.

‘The price of a good bicycle. If ever I open up again, the general says he’ll be happy to go into partnership with me.’

‘What made you close down?’ I asked.

‘They kept up the pressure,’ he said. ‘In the end they had a policeman out in the street all day keeping the place under surveillance. Every time a guest showed at a window he exposed himself.’

‘So you’re pulling out at last?’

‘I have to,’ Johnson said. ‘The only thing that’s been keeping us here is my step-daughter. She works with one of those aid organisations up in the north. Place called Marmelade. I hoped you’d come. We had bad news this morning. There’s a bridge on the point of collapsing, and they’re stopping the bus service the day after tomorrow. That means she’ll be cut off. We have to find some way of getting a message through to her. I’d go myself, but they won’t let me leave town. We’re in a terrible jam.’

The bus left the bus station at five o’clock in the morning—in Haiti the most active hour of the day. Johnson had protested. ‘Why should I drag you into this?’ But in reality I had nothing better to do with my time. It was an excuse to see a part of the country that was new to me, and I was happy to be able to do something for this poor, martyred man to whom I had taken a liking.

A placard was propped against the bus’s side.
Dernière Visite à Marmelade
, and for the benefit of those who couldn’t read, a vigorous crayon-drawing beneath the lettering explained why. It showed a bridge sagging askew over a river with a bus upside down in its bed. A row of survivors wept and gesticulated on the bank and torrents of their blood ran down to mingle with the water. The dramatic incident thus illustrated had never happened, but it was something that
might
. Travellers waiting to be borne away to other destinations had gathered to admire the notice and take farewells of operatic solemnity of those condemned to confront the perils of this particular trip.

Ten hours followed through the exhausted sun-varnished landscape of Haiti before we reached Marmelade. The clouds piled over the gunmetal mountains were as rounded and solid as plaster fruit, but never covered an implacable sun. Negroes with famished bodies and iron faces watched motionless as the bus rattled past through the streets of villages where they sold bisected cigarettes and advertised coffins for hire. The passengers crossed themselves, sweated and groaned, and the chickens, hanging in bundles from the roof-rack, slowly died. At the suspect bridge everyone got out and crossed on foot, and the bus followed, nudging its way cautiously over the sloping surface. When we were about to set off, a passenger wrenched a chicken from one of the bundles and threw it to the driver as a reward.

I tracked Claudine Johnson down in her office in a parched, wooden street, paralysed in the hard afternoon sun. The office was an oasis of cheerfulness and endeavour in the wilderness of a small town that had turned its face to the wall. ‘She needed a cause,’ her father had said of her. ‘She believes she’s found one and nothing matters to her but that. She provides a respectable front for a racket. The US sends in hundreds of tons of aid—chicken wings, second-grade beef, used clothing—all of which goes on the black market. My daughter’s allowed to distribute dried milk which nobody wants. They’re making a laughing-stock of her.’ She was small, neat and precise, with a ready smile, well-kept hands, every hair in place. A beaker full of powdered milk stood on her desk. She told me that she carried out an analysis on a sample taken at random from each delivery. ‘It’s something I’m very particular about,’ she said.

She had read her father’s letter and I spoke of her parent’s anxiety at the fear of her increasing isolation, stressing their hope that she could get away for at least a short visit to Port-au-Prince on the bus leaving next day.

‘How long are they likely to take over the repair of the bridge?’ she asked.

‘Things don’t move fast in Haiti,’ I said.

‘No, they don’t,’ she said. ‘Still, it’s surprising how much you can learn to do without. For example—electric light, the telephone, and water most of the time. I suppose if it comes to it we can do without the bridge. There’s always a way round. We have a lot going on here at the moment. In a few minutes I have to go off for talk with Aide Catholique. They’re the Haitians we work with. We’re on the point of a breakthrough. There’s a fair chance of being allowed to expand our operation into the Departement du Nord.’

‘That sounds like good news.’

‘My organisation will go on handling the dried milk as before for the time being, and I’m taking over the distribution of discarded spectacles. Clothing and meat are coming through nicely now, but we leave that to the Haitians. It’s good for them to share the responsibility. I might conceivably be able to get away for a few days, but no more.’

‘As a suggestion, you could take the bus tomorrow, and catch a plane back via Cap Haitien.’

‘It’s a possibility,’ she said. ‘I’ll have a word with the people I work with and see what can be done.’

She left to go to her meeting, and I to check in for the night at a hotel absurdly entitled Le Relais du Grand Duc, the only solid building in Marmelade. It dated from the time when the stony, emaciated fields surrounding the town had produced, in the late seventeen hundreds, the richest crop of sugar in the world. The dukedom in which it had been included, conferred on one of his favourites by the Haitian Emperor Christophe, had been seen as ludicrous even in those days. The Relais possessed thirty-eight rooms, but I was the only guest. It was perfumed throughout by the dark, ancient wood panelling all its walls. There were cut crystal handles on the doors, and four-poster beds, and its façade was decorated with a time-worn and faded coat of arms depicting a negro in a cocked hat, wearing a sword and riding on the back of a pig.

A chicken wing from Oklahoma, fried up with a local plantain, constituted an unexceptional evening meal, but it was washed down with fragrant and delicate Babancourt, the island’s only product of distinction, and arguably the best rum to be found anywhere. While savouring a flavour inherited from the imperial days of old, a sound caused me to glance up and find a fair-skinned and well-dressed young Haitian smiling down at me. He gave me his hands, introducing himself with a bow as Winston L’Agneau. A neatly engraved card described him as
Chef du Secteur
,
Milice Populaire François Duvalier
. From this I gathered that in this remote corner of the country the tontons-macoutes maintained, even officially, a presence. The beautifully laundered white shirt, open at the neck, allowed a glimpse of a small gold cross on a chain. When the smile faded his expression seemed tinged with melancholy. ‘It is my great pleasure to welcome you to Marmelade,’ he said. His accent suggested schooling of the better class in France, some acquaintance with the policies of Richelieu and the poetry of Lamartine. ‘I am a petty functionary,’ he said, ‘charged temporarily, due to the absence of a colleague on sick-leave, with the tiresome milice formalities in our town.’

He had arrived for a purely routine inspection, as he put it, of my passport. This he hardly glanced at before handing back. He then asked for my laissez-passer, which, he said, he was compelled to stamp. I told him I had no idea that they were still required.

‘Normally that is so,’ he said. ‘Unfortunately they see fit to designate this a military zone. For reasons we do not understand these regulations are still in force. We think that it is because they have forgotten to change them.’

‘What do I do about it?’

‘It is no more than a formality, but I would be compelled to hold your passport while you go to Cap Haitien to apply for this document.’

‘I have to take the last bus to Port-au-Prince tomorrow. Do you see any hope of my getting there and back in time.’

‘No,’ he said. He laughed apologetically. ‘The office is already closed. Tomorrow is Saturday. Here we have the English weekend. It will open again on Tuesday. I will write a note so that you will be attended to immediately. I am really sorry. It is so ridiculous for you.’

‘You know Miss Johnson, don’t you?’ I asked.

‘Who does not know Miss Johnson for the good work she does among our people? She is admired and respected by us all. Miss Johnson is a lady we all love. Every man and woman in our town.’

‘And does she need a laissez-passer before she travels anywhere?’

‘Even Miss Johnson will require one. I must tell you our country is tied hand and foot by bureaucracy. These officials are like flies round a honey pot. We Haitians suffer from them as much as our friends who visit us from other countries.’

It was a situation in which a skilfully proffered bribe might provide the only solution, but bribery itself was a fine art to be left strictly alone by those unpractised in its protocol. ‘Monsieur L’Agneau,’ I said. ‘It’s impossible to explain to you how much it means to me to catch that bus. I’m booked on a flight to Europe on Monday. Is there nothing you can suggest?’

The smile changed his face again; now it was a cautious, secret one. He caressed the ball of his thumb with the tips of his first and second fingers in a delicately suggestive Mediterranean gesture. ‘Please realise I am sympathetic,’ he said, and I wondered if he was using the word, as persons with a French background often did, in a way that failed to reproduce its English meaning. His eyes wandered from my face momentarily to take in the emptiness of the room, then returned. ‘You are officially in this town only because your name is in the hotel register,’ he said.

‘But it isn’t,’ I said. ‘They gave me a slip to sign.’ At this moment I was struck with the thought that a way of escape might have been left open for me.

‘That is interesting,’ he said. ‘In a bureaucracy there are bureaucratic muddles. Perhaps no entry has been made in the book. If this is so, I think that for you something could be done. You are unknown—a stranger passing through. For Miss Johnson it is different. She is in everyone’s eye. Many people would be sorry to see her go. We hope she will stay.’

At almost exactly the same time next evening, Johnson and I drank a rum together by the side of his emptying pool.

‘You’ll have to resign yourself,’ I said. ‘You won’t be seeing her for a while.’

‘You mean they won’t let her go?’

‘Not easily, no. The real fact is she doesn’t want to go. If it’s possible to imagine anyone coping with life in the Haitian backwoods, she probably even enjoys herself.’

Johnson threw up his hands in one of his acquired French gestures, signifying surrender and resignation. ‘Well, at least we know. What do I owe you for the bribe?’

‘Think nothing of it,’ I said. ‘It was only a small contribution to the fellow in the hotel reception. The one tense moment was when it looked as though I might be stuck in the Cap for a week.’

‘That would have been quite an experience.’

‘Yes,’ I said. ‘Not one to be forgotten in a hurry.’

T
HAILAND, UNTIL 1953 GENERALLY
called Siam, went modern just before my first visit there, later that year. The order went out that the nation was to cease looking to the past and to take the future in a firm embrace. Hat Yai, a provincial town in the south within a few miles of the Malaysian frontier, was chosen for an experiment in instant modernisation, and I went there to see what was happening. There was a tendency in Siam for the words ‘modern’ and ‘American’ to be used interchangeably, so, when the decree was published for Hat Yai to be brought up to date, most Thais accepted that it was to be Americanised. Little surprise was aroused when the model chosen for the new Hat Yai was Dodge City of the eighteen-sixties as revealed by the movies.