What the Traveller Saw (16 page)

‘B
onne chance
,’ said the indefatigable Air France stewardess. She had looked after us
en route
from Martinique. Now she seemed genuinely reluctant that we should disembark at Port-au-Prince.

Inside the airport building we joined a queue which ultimately brought us to a desk at which was perched a large man of about fifty wearing dark glasses and an unseasonably thick Cheviot suit. It required no effort of the imagination to identify this senior citizen as a former member of
Les Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale
, otherwise the
Tontons Macoutes
, an organization that, with the passing of Papa Doc two years previously, was now under a temporary cloud. Some eight thousand of these Bogeymen were said to be building roads in remote places, but not all of them.

‘Visitor’s Card two US dollar!’

I told him that I had French francs, English pounds, West Indian dollars and sterling traveller’s cheques, but to each of these offerings in turn he said, ‘No! Two US dollar!’

I eventually persuaded this individual, who, apart from his dark glasses, almost bullet-proof suit and limited gift of tongue, resembled one of the larger primates, to allow me through the barriers to cash a cheque. It was a Sunday and there was no one to do it, but finally a hovering taximan gave me some dollars in exchange for pounds, which he did at an appallingly adverse rate.

Back in ‘Immigration’ I gave the ex-
Tonton Macoute
two US dollars; he put the notes in an inside pocket, not in the suitcase
in which I had watched him deposit most, but not all, of the money he received from the other temporary immigrants.

Now he showed signs of leaving. ‘Hey!’ I said, indignantly, ‘what about my Visitor’s Card?’ He gave me the sort of inscrutable look which you only get from people who wear dark glasses, then vanished through a door marked ‘No Admittance’. Also prominently displayed was a sign bearing the words, ‘
BUSINESS MEN
!
MAKE YOUR STAY IN HAITI PROFITABLE BY PUTTING ON A BUSINESS
!’

By the time we reached the customs hall the customs officers had made off, too. No need, while I was on the plane, to jettison my maps and Graham Greene’s
The Comedians.
In the hall, abandoned, I found a coffee table book entitled
Haiti. The First Negro Republic in the World. Its True Face
, printed, as the blurb said, ‘By Private Initiative’.

The one who had provided this initiative had now gone, but his totally unmemorable visage still peered out in a colour photograph from page 13, with a framed portrait of Pope Paul on the mantelshelf behind him: Papa Doc, Eighth President for Life, now officially known as ‘Le Grand Disparu’. Looking at his photograph it was difficult to imagine that he had had the head of an opponent hewn from his shoulders, flown to him from an outlying
département
in a bucket of ice, placed in a deep freeze in his palace, and then, from time to time, brought to him after office hours so that he could contemplate it in his ‘in’ tray during the steamy watches of the night.

At last, after a discussion about the fare, difficult to sustain in the red-hot wind that was blowing, and on an empty stomach (and because it was the only remaining taxi), we entered ‘my’ taximan’s taxi – the one who had changed my pounds for me – a huge, black, hearse-like Steinbergian vehicle, and were driven off down what had been intended as a triumphal avenue and eventually into Avenue Dessalines, otherwise La Grande Rue, which runs through the heart of the city, leaving on the right La Route du Fort Dimanche.

The Fort was marked on an oil company’s map, picked up free of charge at the airport, as
lieu d’intérêt.
Interesting, presumably, because few prisoners had ever emerged from it in one piece. In the middle of the night, Le Grand Disparu took his son-in-law, the husband of his eldest daughter, to the Fort and forced him to witness, as a mark of disapproval of the daughter’s marriage to such a potentially dangerous army officer, the execution of nineteen of his own friends by an impromptu firing squad composed of fellow officers.

Later, we sat on the veranda of the Grand Hotel Oloffson in Port-au-Prince, having consumed a delicious light luncheon served by an old retainer who answered to the name of C’est Dieu. As we found it impossible to hail him by this name, or even to paraphrase it, we contented ourselves with attracting his attention in the English manner, that is by raising a hand weakly and calling out, ‘Er … !’ or ‘I say … !’

This was the hotel of Greene’s
The Comedians
, and from where we were sitting we could see the swimming pool, down in a corner of the tropical garden, in which, empty in the novel, some minister or other had rather messily done away with himself. Now, full of water, it looked positively inviting.

The hotel stood on the lush lower slopes of Kenscoff Mountain, which, particularly towards evening, looms over the city in a somewhat alarming manner, as if it were about to fall and squash it flat. A truly astonishing structure – in a country in which this epithet has become meaningless from sheer overuse – the hotel was originally built to house Simon Sam, President of Haiti from 1896 to 1902 – not to be confused with his namesake, Guillaume Sam, also President, who ended up being impaled by a mob on the railings of the French Embassy in 1915, after which he was torn to pieces.

It was the embellishments of the Oloffson that made it unique. Built of almost indestructible mahogany and painted a sizzling white, from every possible and impossible vantage
point it sprouted turrets, spires, crotchets, finials and balconies, some of which appeared to have been put on upside down, all of them riddled with fretwork to such an extent that it seemed a miracle that it could remain standing. It was as if some giant, but inspired, wood-boring insect had been let loose on a solid, decent, colonial clapboard structure.

Oriental was what it was, the sort of orient suggested in Coleridge’s spectacular visions of Xanadu. The bar with the brilliant colours of the primitive Haitian paintings shining through the perpetual dusk of daytime, the dining room with its rocks and greenery could well have been the ante chambers to caverns leading down to a sunless sea, which was exactly what the visitor craved for after a morning’s sightseeing in the inferno of Port-au-Prince.

Behind the hotel was a ramshackle, circular construction with a corrugated-iron roof which was rather like an open umbrella. Below it hundreds of pairs of black and off-black feet could be seen dangling. This was a
gaguère
, a cockpit, and the owners of the feet were the spectators. Inside, it was like an engraving by Hogarth, but one in which all the protagonists were black. Large sums of money were changing hands and
clairin
, the cheapest and rawest spirit, was circulating.

Soon a main, a cockfight, began on the beaten earth of the
gaguère.
The birds did not wear steel spurs. There was no need; their own were sharpened so that they were like stilettos. We knew from accounts of the
gaguère
by other visitors to Haiti that we weren’t going to enjoy it, and when one bird had had one of its wings partly torn off and the other was eyeless we left.

The following morning, as it grew progressively hotter, we walked down into Port-au-Prince through lanes flaming with bougainvillea. Passers-by said ‘
Bonjour, blancs
’ in a friendly way, a pleasant change from Dominica where we had been told ‘Go home, whites!’ three times in fifteen minutes.

On the way we saw some of the principal sights: among
them the tomb of Le Grand Disparu, which looked like a bijou villa in an enormous dazzlingly-white cemetery, guarded by sentries who also looked after the gas cylinder which provided gas for the perpetual flame; and an enormous hoarding on which was displayed, several times larger than life, the figure of Jean-Paul Duvalier, the Doctor’s obese son, Ninth President for Life, in full evening dress, with the banner headline
L’Idole du Peuple.

Then on, past the Palace (no stopping), into the dilapidated heart of the city by the Grande Rue, the air lethally heavy with the exhaust fumes of a thousand deep-laden
camionettes
– the gaudily painted vehicles of the public bus system – to the Iron Market, having been asked by every second person in the Grande Rue if we would give them a dollar, although they showed no hope of receiving anything at all.

In the market you could buy, among other things, lampshades made of shiny tin, clay pipes which were smoked by women in the interior, and locally made brassieres. Brassieres, baseballs, textiles, instant divorces and blood plasma, bought from the already anaemic inhabitants at $3 a litre, were at that time some of the most thriving exports to the United States, from a country in which the legal wage of manual workers was $1 a day (no wonder American big business was attracted to Haiti).

Up the hill, by the cathedral, poor women dressed in white, indistinguishable from the ecstatic devotees who crowded the
tonnelles
(the Voodoo peristyles) at night, knelt on the pavement before the shrines with their arms outstretched imploringly, or else they clung to the railings as if the Devil was trying to drag them away. Or was it Baron Samedi, Lord of the Cemeteries and Chief of the Legion of the Dead, in his frock coat, bowler hat and carrying a black walking stick, who was doing the dragging? To whom were these women addressing themselves? The Christian Trinity and the saints, or the gods of Africa: Bon-Dieu-Bon, otherwise known as Le
Grand Maître, who is sometimes male and sometimes female, Ogoun Feraile, God of War, Bossu Comblamin, or the Virgin of the Seven Sorrows, or St Rose of Lima in their other guises?

In Haiti, Catholicism and Voodooism are so inextricably mixed in the minds of the people that many Catholic priests, after strenuous but totally unsuccessful attempts to destroy Voodooism by cutting down sacred trees and destroying the complex apparatus of worship, have given up trying to disentangle one from the other.

We visited one of the
tonnelles
on the outskirts of the city. Our guide was the
Houngan
, its highpriest, a tall, thin, preternaturally intelligent-looking man who spoke only Creole. The peristyle was open-sided and had a palm-leaf roof supported at the centre by a painted and decorated pole. In the surrounding huts were altars, and all the complex apparatus: bottles filled with strange substances, swords, crucifixes, bells, anthropomorphic paintings of gods and goddesses, gourds enclosed in beads and vertebrae, china pots that looked as if they ought to have contained
foie gras
tied up with beads, pincers, iron serpents, old bedsteads with horrible mattresses, and, on the walls, mystical patterns and pictures of the Virgin and the saints who have a place in the ceremonies. In the smallest hut, Le Caye Zombi, there were shackles and whips. And there was, of course, the complete equipment of the Baron Samedi, set out like a gentleman’s wardrobe by his valet, complete with bowler hat ready for the day, but mounted on a black cross. It was all very interesting, but it needed the ecstatic participants to give it meaning.

After some days in Port-au-Prince, we set off for Cap-Haïtien, the other city of Haiti, in the Département du Nord. By this time we had seen so many galleries full of primitive paintings that our heads were swimming. Some of them were in marvellous colours, gold and cobalt and splendid reds, and often
depicted unnaturally elongated peasants, the women with great baskets of Indian corn on their noddles, standing in front of what was, by a trick of perspective, a diminutive village. And we had listened, fascinated, to the Haitian version of the French language, spoken with the omission of the ‘r’ sound, something all Creoles affected – ‘Twès bien’ and ‘La Fwance de la Metwopole’.

With a
laisser-passer
signed by the Secretary-General of the Interior, without which it was impossible to travel far in Haiti, and with another addressed to the Préfet of Cap-Haïtien, we set off up the Grande Rue, the road by which we had originally arrived, in the hour before the dawn. Early morning fires were already erupting outside the shanties. On the right was the sugar cane railway which also brought the country people into town on days of obligatory ‘rejoicing’, as well as on more spontaneous occasions. To the left, now, there were mangrove swamps. Also on the right was the road which led to the Dominican frontier, sixty miles to the east, by way of the Étang Saumâtre which was full of crocodiles. Somewhere here we drove through our first road block without realizing it. We expected a bullet or two in our backs, but presumably the guards were still asleep.

On to Duvalierville, all concrete, one of the Doctor’s brain children. Its most important building was a huge cockpit, but there was also an unfinished cinema with pigs rooting at the entrance, a non-functioning restaurant, a church which had iron rods for the reinforced concrete tower, never built, a thatched nightclub, still in operation, and a number of houses – more than when Greene was there, researching
The Comedians
– all occupied.

On a stretch of coast beyond Arcadie, cement walls and metal shutters concealed the houses of the rulers. Here, a convoy of black limousines on the return journey came lurching out on to the road in front of us, escorted by jeeps and lorryloads of men with sub-machine guns, and set off for the
city at 80 miles an hour – Bébé Doc, Ninth President for Life, on the move.

We arrived at the little town of St Marc on a beautiful bay: sky and sea the colour of pearls. From it fishermen hauled a long net full of fish. The houses were old and made of wood, and there were raised sidewalks under the arcades and an eighteenth-century cannon embedded in the earth in the street. Here we drank beer in a dark, cavernous café, watched by tall, thin young men who were so black that only their eyes and shirts were visible in the darkness.