The meat market in Jérémie was also our abattoir. At dawn, the goats were led here from the hills and sold. Then the marchandes would slaughter them on the spot with a machete blow, splitting the heads open. The drainage canal was like a swamp of coagulated blood speckled with fat. Goat heads with glassy eyes were displayed on the concrete benches, side by side with goat paws, the fur still attached. Goats, yet to be butchered, bleated in terror and misery. Huge swarms of flies blackened the exposed meat.
I liked the place: there was a fascination in the organs, entrails, and musculature, the rusty smell of blood; and here I was introduced to that hardiest and most enduring of human beings, the Haitian marchande. When you and I and all our kind have long since moldered away — when the last writer and the last reader have grappled each other into a shallow grave — these women’s descendants will still be in tropical markets, whacking the heads of goats with blunt machetes, laughing at the horror, and surviving.
Nadia — I did not know her name then — was at the market one morning. This was at the most humid time of the year, thundery days building toward but never reaching climactic rainfall. She was bargaining with a marchande and I was bargaining with another when her arm reached out for the table, her knees wobbled, and she sank slowly to the floor. It was such a graceful gesture that I watched her fall with unconcern. (Haitian women, by the way, for reasons I do not know, were very often fainting.) The marchandes surrounded her, someone found a chair, and someone else fanned her with the side of a cardboard box. She had landed in a puddle, and her face and hair were caked with goat’s blood. Her spooky, flaccid stare, her lips twitching soundlessly — she was not where we were.
That was how I thought of her thereafter — not as Nadia, but as the lady who passed out in the market — until I saw her again that evening at the Boucan Grégoire, trailing two steps behind her husband as they threaded their way through the crowded terrace.
And now she seemed to me a beautiful woman. Perhaps it was a matter of her hair: tonight she wore her hair in long cornrows, which she pulled back into a loose ponytail; what had been to me before a bony face with a high forehead and sharp, jutting cheekbones now seemed feline and dramatic. I had not noticed how lovely her mouth was, her fine lips sculpted. When I had seen her before, she had been dressed in jeans and a tank top that only emphasized how thin she was — her jutting collarbones, her arms as thick at the bicep as at the wrist. Tonight she wore a red dress that I knew without knowing why was both stylish and expensive. She looked as if she had spent her afternoon being groomed. She balanced easily on a pair of high-heeled sandals. Now her skinniness was like the weightlessness of a fine-boned bird. Her fragility, which before had suggested sickliness, was made delicate and desirable by the expensive room she was in.
As Johel led his wife in the direction of our table, he stopped at other tables. Nadia arrested every eye in the room. The judge shook men’s hands and gripped shoulders; women stood up, and he gave them kisses. People were pleased to see him. He was dressed, like the other men in the restaurant, in a well-pressed white shirt and blazer, and in this room his fatness, which in Jérémie seemed like superfluous bulk, now seemed masculine and important. As I watched him maneuver his way through the room, his notion that he could be a politician seemed less absurd to me. He had acquired grace and poise. The people he greeted were people with whom he was intimate and familiar. He had left Haiti as a child, but the portion of his family that remained was of old and established Port-au-Prince stock. Now I saw that his return to Haiti had been like a tributary branch of a river returning to broader waters.
Soon they were at our table, and here the judge was also at his ease. He knew some of the people, and others he didn’t. To Kay he said, “You look marvelous. I can’t believe you’re turning twenty-five. Happy birthday.” Then to Terry, who had stood up and walked around the table to shake his friend’s hand, he added, “Well done, brother. Well done.” I wasn’t sure what this meant, but Terry seemed pleased by the compliment, which seemed to evaluate positively every facet of Terry’s life. Johel shook LBJ’s hand and said, “So you’re the famous LBJ.” He kissed the French epidemiologist on the cheek. When he came to me, he said, “Brother, what a beautiful surprise.”
As he moved around the table, he introduced his wife, keeping his hand low on her back. She didn’t smile, and her voice was so quiet as to be almost inaudible. When I was introduced to her, she showed no sign of recognizing me. Her eyes drifted down to the tablecloth. Her handshake was fragile, and when I stepped forward to kiss her on the cheek, she stood absolutely still, as if I might be provoked and bite her.
Now there was a problem. The table was too small to accommodate easily the newcomers. We had already been seated elbow-to-elbow. It would have required rearranging the entire group to place two plates side by side. So chairs were moved, and the waiters somewhat clumsily inserted a pair of plates in the remote corners of the table, one plate between Kay and Baker and the other on the far side of the table, near Terry.
“Nadia, you want to sit with your husband, don’t you?” Kay asked. “Or do you mind sitting next to me?”
Nadia looked in the direction of her husband, who was talking to Terry. It was obvious that she did want to sit with him. But she said, “No, with you is fine.”
“I’m sorry, honey. I didn’t hear you.”
“It fine with you,” Nadia said.
“It’s fine?”
“It no problem.”
Kay’s buzz was fading, and she had turned surly.
Her glance strayed from me to the judge to Nadia to the table, then lingered over the large terrace filled with others just like us, enjoying the last of a long evening before going out to confront the hungry children on the street.
The rumors had persisted: my friend Toussaint Legrand, who had access to subterranean rivers of rumor, told me that when the judge was in Port-au-Prince, as he sometimes was, Terry’s car could be seen parked outside the judge’s house in Calasse. Yet that seemed natural enough to me, hardly dispositive. I thought of what Terry had told me: “If you ever hear a noise outside the house at night, just give me a call.” Here was a woman — you had only to see her slender, haunted face to know — who heard many noises at night.
“Oh, good. I’m glad it’s not a problem to sit with me. I hate to make problems.” Kay took a sip from her glass and added, “But we can make a place at the other end of the table, if you’d like. Near the boys.”
Kay was speaking quickly. She didn’t care if Nadia understood her. She wanted me and the other men to understand that her pride had been offended: she had been relegated, at her own party, to the corner of the table reserved for women and children. The center of gravity — the stories, the jokes, the masculine drama — was now at the other end of the long table.
“He’s not going anywhere,” Kay said. “Don’t worry.”
“Who?” Nadia said.
“Your husband. He’s not going anywhere. He’s right there next to my husband.”