The Sénateur was quiet. I thought the conversation was over. But then he said, “You know that this is a city of poets, don’t you?”
“I saw the sign at the airport.”
The dirt landing strip was carved into the fields of sugarcane and bananas like a scar. The airport itself was a one-room cement hut. A sign read BIENVENUE À JÉRÉMIE. LA CITÉ DES POÈTES. Seeing that sign had been the first hint that I would love this place.
“Do you enjoy poetry?” the Sénateur pursued.
A verse began to round out in my brain, something from high schooclass="underline" Hear the voice of the Bard / who present, past, and future sees.
“Of course,” I said.
His face brightened.
“Then you will know Docteur Révolus. Jean Joseph Vilaire. Callisthènes Fouchard. General Franck Lavaud. Félix Philantrope. All men of Jérémie — these splendid poets. And those are only some of our more famous poets. When I was a boy, you could not find a man in Jérémie who did not reckon himself a poet. They called us quite correctly the Athens of Haiti.”
Hear the voice of the Bard / who present, past, and future sees; / Whose ears have heard / The Holy Word—I couldn’t remember the last line of the stanza. That walk’d—and what?
“I too am a poet,” he said.
The Sénateur paused. He was waiting. He had an almost shy look on his face.
“Perhaps I might read your poems someday,” I said.
“What an honor that would be for me! What a pleasure that would be! Then you would know my soul. Pierre!”
“Maître!”
“Bring the man the book.”
Pierre went off into some inner room, locking eyes with Fidel on his way out. He came back with a small book. There was a portrait of the Sénateur on the cover, in profile and black-and-white, in a high turtleneck sweater, looking mournful and serious. The book was titled Les chansons de l’aigle.
“I very much look forward to this,” I said.
“Please do not judge me too harshly.”
“I’m in no position to judge anyone when it comes to writing poetry.”
“I’m afraid the poems reveal the man.”
He said this with such unexpected humility that I felt the first stirrings of fondness for him. By now I had long forgotten electricity.
I was at the top of the stairs when I said, “Sénateur?”
The Sénateur was already talking with the next of his visitors, giving him all the attention he had offered me.
“My friend?” he said.
“Would you mind signing your book?”
His face exploded in a huge, ugly smile. “Pierre!”
“Maître!”
“Bring me a pen!”
He wrote in the book in perfect cursive, almost calligraphic handwriting:
For an American friend—
welcome to my country,
this place of joy and sadness,
where the days shall pass swiftly,
the nights in pleasure,
and to which you will owe no less than your heart.
with all respect and affection,
Sénateur Maxim Bayard.
That evening, nestled under the mosquito net and listening to the drums beating out messages to the other world, I remembered the last line of my stanza. It had been worrying me. Hear the voice of the Bard / who present, past, and future sees; / Whose ears have heard / The Holy Word / That walk’d among the ancient trees.
PART TWO
1
Here is Haiti, by every statistical measure the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere, but don’t be surprised by the Boucan Grégoire, which would not be out of place at all in Paris or New York, not in its elegance, not in its food, not in its prices. Out front of each arriving car, the young boys gather. Half begging, half menacing, they offer to watch the car as you eat: “Blan! Remember me! I’m Fanfan. I’ll give you good security! Best security!” At the entrance to the restaurant there is a man with a shotgun. A man with a shotgun stands at the entrance to every place the wealthy in Port-au-Prince cluster — at the supermarket; at the bank, of course; in the driveways of the villas of Pétionville. After a while you no longer see the man with the shotgun, but you know he’s there; you wouldn’t feel right if he wasn’t.
So you sit at the bar of the Boucan Grégoire and look at the other customers. The patrons have plush, oily skin; their well-fed bodies glow. Everyone is quiet, and they lean close over their plates to talk: the world of the wealthy in Haiti is intimate, suspicious, inbred. These people know one another and hate one another; they have green cards and apartments in Miami and cars with bulletproof glass. They live behind high walls topped with barbed wire. What is it Kapuściński wrote? “Money in a poor country and money in a rich country are two different things.” Nobody understands money like a rich man in a poor country. A wealthy man in America, in Singapore, in Norway, has a bright, happy, satisfied face. Fortune has favored him; his pleasures are endless.
But if you are wealthy in a poor country, that is something different. You are a fat sheep in a land of wolves. You are always alert, always watchful; the worst is always yet to come. You live on a small island where uncertain winds are blowing. A wealthy man arrives at middle age in Haiti stripped down to a tough, resilient, unsentimental core. A wealthy man in Haiti has narrow, shrewd eyes. You can never relax. Tomorrow somebody might kidnap your beloved nephew — he’s careless, that one, coming home from the discothèque by motorbike in the early hours of the morning. Tomorrow there might be mobs on the street, throwing rocks at your car or trying to storm your office. Tomorrow the government might fall — there could be a coup d’état — and you might need to flee again into exile. Soon there will be an election, and elections are precarious: the former president once spoke of placing burning tires around the necks of the wealthy. Such a man could be in office again. Do you send the children abroad for their education? Your father died of a heart attack. There are no facilities to treat a coronary in Haiti. Sometimes you are out of breath when you climb stairs. Your wife says, “Miami.” She says, “Jean, now is really the time for Miami.” But what would you do in Miami? Sell used cars like your brother-in-law? No, you have your dignity. Do you know what it means to do business in a country such as this one? Tomorrow the Americans might discover a worm in the mangoes, and then where will you be? Tomorrow the president might appoint your enemy as customs inspector. Then where will you be? You will be poor. There is nothing worse than being poor. You know what poverty is: you live in Haiti. How do you live with anxieties like that? You take your wife out for dinner at the Boucan Grégoire. You wave to your friends. You order a rum sour and another, and then — why not? — the smoked salmon with its crème fraîche.
* * *
The evening had been made possible by Facebook: it was Kay’s birthday, and she had invited all her multitudinous Facebook friends to join her for drinks and dinner.
I arrived at the restaurant early and nursed a glass of rum until Kay’s pretty cheek brushed up against my own and Terry’s hard hand palpated my shoulder, and their perfumes, like lemons, roses, and musk, settled in a pleasant cloud around me.