Andrés Richard recounted all of this, then, despite the heat of the day, began to shiver.
“I don’t recommend dying, young man,” said Andrés Richard. “It is an unpleasant business.”
“I will try to keep that in mind,” Johel said.
“Are you at peace with your Savior?”
“We’re cordial.”
Andrés Richard began to laugh. His laughter drew the attention of his bird, who from his cage regarded the old man with alarm.
“That will not be sufficient, young man. That will not do! You see things clearer when the end is near. You see the necessity of things. I do not wish to confront my Maker with unresolved affairs here on this earth. You will see as you grow older that the walls of Hell are thick like mountains.”
The parrot began to squawk. Its perch began to swing. It flapped its broad wings, revealing a confusion of reds and blues.
“And how can I help you with your problems, Monsieur Richard?” Johel asked.
Monsieur Richard shook in his chair.
“Why, I thought it was obvious! I thought that was as clear as day!”
At the altitude at which the château was situated, the day was indeed immensely clear.
Andrés Richard lifted up his bony hand, which calmed itself as if by the force of the old man’s will into something like a staff or rod. He extended his forefinger until it pointed directly at Johel’s heart.
“I am going to make you the next sénateur of the Grand’Anse,” he said.
Then, exhausted by the gesture, the hand flopped down into Andrés Richard’s lap, and the old man closed his eyes.
2
They had been a threesome: Sénateur Maxim Bayard, Père Abraham Samedi, and Docteur Auguste Philistin. The Three Musketeers of the Lycée Saint Louis, the three survivors. Once a year they had met on the anniversary of the death of François Duvalier to drink a pair of toasts: the first was to their dead, tossed by the Macoutes into unmarked graves; and the second, to the Hell-Fiend who supervised the eternal torment of their enemy. Père Samedi’s defection meant that the table was set for two, just the Sénateur and his physician.
(Dr. Philistin himself later recounted to me the details of his last dinner with the Sénateur. Our appointment came about in the following manner. Some months after the election and the terrible events that followed, Dr. Philistin published in Le Nouvelliste a short appreciation of the Sénateur’s life, and included his email address, inviting others who had known the Sénateur to exchange reminiscences. He was gathering material for a biographical essay. We met at Dr. Philistin’s art-filled house in the hills above Port-au-Prince. He had only recently retired when I met him, but his firm handshake, his energetic manner, and his unlined face all suggested to me that had he wished to, he might have continued his practice a good deal longer. On the coffee table was an edition of the Sénateur’s poems. The volume, I noticed for the first time, had been dedicated to “Auguste Philistin, Master of the Healing Arts and Friend of Liberty.”)
Dr. Philistin had accompanied Maxim throughout his political career. Both were men of the Left, firmly convinced that the only solution to Haiti’s poverty and backwardness was in an ideology of their deriving, which they called Caribbean Socialism, hashed out by them in a hundred letters when Maxim was in exile. The chief tenet of their philosophy was a conviction that the river of wealth, so long flowing from the Haitian peasantry to the Great Powers, needed to be rerouted in the opposite direction, avoiding the bloodsucking mulatto elites like Andrés Richard. When Maxim returned from exile, Dr. Philistin had encouraged him in his political ambitions and then had revealed himself over the years a shrewd, well-informed adviser. It was Dr. Philistin who had the unfortunate duty of informing the Sénateur that Andrés Richard had decided to invest his resources in Johel Célestin’s campaign.
Dr. Philistin told me that he had never seen the Sénateur so agitated as that night at the Boucan Grégoire. The Sénateur’s bladder was spasmodic when its owner was anxious, and the Sénateur excused himself to the toilet three times even before the main course arrived. Then he sharply reprimanded the waiter when he allowed a few drops of the wine to stain the tablecloth. A telephone rang too long at a neighboring table, and the Sénateur’s face curled into snarl. Only the doctor’s calm hand on the Sénateur’s forearm had prevented him from confronting the offending device’s owner.
“I am being devoured alive by gnats!” the Sénateur exclaimed.
The judge was not the Sénateur’s only opposition in the coming election. A dozen candidates had presented their credentials to the electoral authorities. There was Emile Villesaint of the old Villesaints — he ran in every election and was always opposed, as in this election, by his daughter Emmanuelle. Old Emile must have been pushing eighty and Emmanuelle fifty: they lived in Miami and flew back to Jérémie just for elections. There was a Protestant preacher named Erasmus Callisthenes, who, it was said, could preach the Gospel twenty-four hours straight. Thibault Antoine Erick of the well-known clan out of Dame Marie was in the race as part of a wager with his brother-in-law: three hectares of arable land said he could take ten thousand votes. A lady doctor from Jérémie whose intentions were said to be honorable registered herself at election headquarters surrounded by a hundred children dressed in white.
But the judge, Dr. Philistin reckoned, was certainly Maxim’s chief opposition. That was the significance of Père Samedi’s defection. That news had infuriated the Sénateur. The notion that years of friendship be tossed aside for — for what? Père Samedi had not so much as called the Sénateur to explain himself. It was not only the loss of the priest’s solid block of votes, it was the signal it sent to the Sénateur’s other allies that the old man was weak.
Dr. Philistin was too politic to remind the Sénateur that he had predicted the priest’s treachery. The priesthood, he had long insisted, was a reactionary force.
The doctor studied his friend’s face. It had never been a handsome face, but its blunt, large, ill-proportioned features had communicated that unbridled energy, that enthusiasm for this curious business of being alive that was the essence of Maxim Bayard. He could remember Maxim’s first campaign all those years ago. Mon Dieu, the man was tireless: up at dawn, out on foot, stopping at every hut and hamlet, shaking hands, kissing ladies — and with every footfall so gaining in strength and energy that Dr. Philistin had to actively dissuade him from campaigning through the night as well, for fear of disturbing his constituents. The Sénateur had been determined to meet each and every voter and present his vision of the socialist paradise the Grand’Anse could become. Two or three hours of sleep a night, often on the floor of some peasant’s hut, half a mango for breakfast, a boiled banana for lunch: that was all the Sénateur needed as he marched across the great Grand’Anse. He had won that election in a landslide.
This evening, though, there was no doubt: the Sénateur was tired. Dr. Philistin noticed him yawning. This was not Maxim. At one point during the meal he closed his eyes and held very still. His skin had the pallor of ash.
“Are you sleeping at night?” the doctor asked.
“A few hours.”
“When was the last time, my friend, that you saw the inside of a doctor’s office?”
“Are you proposing to bleed me, Doctor, or apply leeches?” asked the Sénateur.
No evidence could dissuade Maxim from his intimate belief that the leaf doctors in the hills were infinitely more capable healers than the doctor and his white-coated peers. There was a variety of yam that grew in the Grand’Anse, the so-called English yam, that was said to enhance the virility of men and give to all and sundry the energy of a young ram. It was in a daily boiled English yam as a cure-all that the Sénateur reposed his confidence.