“I want to help Johel,” she said. She meant it. She had been building something too. We could hear people chanting the judge’s name out front of headquarters.
I said, “Have you ever met the guy who owns this place? Ti Blan François? I got to talking to him once. He’s a deportee, he’s been back a decade. I asked him what happened, and he said, ‘I driving drunk and I kill my wife.’ He spent five years in jail for vehicular manslaughter, then got sent back here. You know what he told me? He said it was the best thing that ever happened to him.”
“Oh, God, that’s awful.”
“But you know what? The man is happy. He sold his house in Miami, lives like a king here, has a pretty, young girlfriend, just a perfectly fine life.”
When Kay didn’t say anything, I said, “I don’t know if you want to hear this, but I don’t think I’d count on a man’s conscience to make sure that things work out the way you want them to. And I’m a man. You don’t want to end up like Ti Blan François’s wife, roadkill on the way to Terry’s new life.”
That came out rougher than I intended. Kay looked a little stunned, and wiped the sweat from her forehead. Some kids came in and ordered a Coca-Cola. The waitress explained that there wasn’t any. Then it happened again a few minutes later.
She said, “Terry told me today that he’s never going back. I said, ‘What are you going to do? Stay here forever?’ He said, ‘Maybe.’ It would be so much easier if I just knew what he was thinking.”
“I don’t know,” I said.
“I just don’t get what he sees in her.”
“He’s fallen in love with some story he’s telling himself.”
“What story is that?” Kay said.
“An ordinary man with an ordinary life sees a burning house and hears a child crying and he runs inside.”
Kay looked at me. She was such a pretty woman when her pale face was reddened by a touch of anger.
She said, “He didn’t have an ordinary life — he was married to me. Being married to me is wonderful.”
“I’m sure it is,” I finally said. “You have many charms as a woman. But you’re not a helpless child crying in a burning house. Terry knows that you’re perfectly capable of opening a window and climbing out all by yourself. By the time he showed up, you’d have put out the fire, remodeled the house, and sold it for a profit.”
* * *
By early afternoon the crowd filled the Place Dumas. Kids were shinnying up electrical poles to see the judge. Women fanned themselves with scraps of cardboard.
The crowd was Toussaint Legrand’s doing. It was Toussaint’s job to turn out bespoke crowds on the judge’s behalf, masses of enthusiastic paid supporters. It wasn’t the strangest profession that I came across in Haiti — that was the femmes pleureuses, the women who were paid to weep at funerals. Haitian funerals aimed for a malarial fever of high emotion with god-awful wailing, breast-beating, rending of garments, and eventual hysterical collapse, women carried out of the funeral parlor face-first, writhing and moaning. Toward this end, the pleureuses would amp the emotional temperature up past scalding by sobbing convulsively until a frenzy of mourning spread contagiously through the crowd. It was a gesture of respect for the dead.
I later learned that Toussaint had paid five hundred young men and women to come and manifest their loyalty to the judge, but there were many more who came of their own initiative. The paid supporters that day were not so very far in their passion from the femmes pleureuses, and the effect on the crowd was the same: men grew soberly angry, but soon the women began to wail. “Amway!” they cried, an untranslatable Creole word that meant something like “Disaster!”
Here was my introduction to Haitian politics. I had no idea what kind of place Haiti was until I saw that crowd. The intensity of the day reminded me of something I had seen years before, when I attended the funeral of a revered guru in Tamil Nadu. Mourners that day were convinced that by throwing themselves under the chariot conducting the swami to his funeral pyre, they too would escape the cycle of suffering; the police held the crowd back with whips. Both the demonstration on the Place Dumas and the funeral in India produced the same sound, like the vastly amplified buzzing of a hive. On both days I saw something human beings ordinarily keep hidden. Both encounters left me frightened and exhilarated, as such encounters inevitably do.
Soon the shabby, malnourished crowd was chanting for the judge. They were waving little photos of him that Toussaint had distributed, or green boughs, making a small forest; women banged on pots and pans, the drumming assembling spontaneously into complicated, hectic rhythms. They chanted, “What we want, is to vote.” Women were dancing, singing, clapping.
I don’t know how long we waited before the judge and Terry drove up in the judge’s black SUV. This was the moment the crowd had been waiting for. Now the drumming came to a crescendo, and the wailing intensified. I noticed that I was grinding my teeth as I watched the judge get down from his car, the crowd surging around him. “Come on,” I said to myself. Johel was in a dark suit, Terry in his uniform. At first the judge looked pleased by the crowd, waving and smiling, but then he seemed frightened as people pressed so tightly against him that he couldn’t move. Terry put his arm up, and the judge took a step, and another. Still, it took him almost ten minutes until he could work his way across the street.
When the judge and Terry were finally inside HQ, the dark room was filled with light as the flash of one cell phone camera exploded and then another.
Terry came and stood beside me. His beefy face was flushed. He was almost shaking with adrenaline. He was bouncing on the balls of his feet.
“God damn,” he said. “You ever see something like that?”
“Kay’s looking for you,” I said.
He blinked, as if startled by the name. He looked around the room, through the doors of the HQ, where the crowd was seething in a mass. It wasn’t like a person, that crowd, or like a thousand people. It was just its own kind of thing.
“That man is a rock,” Terry said. “What you got to understand is, that man has some big-ass balls. We’ve been preparing for this for weeks.”
“Why’d they do it?”
“The way Johel’s guy heard it, the Sénateur paid the head of the CEH.”
“What are you going to do?”
“We’re headed to Port-au-Prince this afternoon. You know he’s not alone in this.”
“And what about — Nadia and Kay?” It seemed almost wrong to say their names in the same sentence.
“They’re coming too,” he said.
“Both of them?”
But I don’t think Terry heard me over the roar of the crowd. Johel had stepped out onto the upstairs balcony.
* * *
“We’ll get there,” the judge finally said. “We’ll get there.”
I submit that there is a natural sympathy between certain languages and certain forms of speech. Sibilant, formal French is certainly, in my experience, the language of seduction and diplomacy, the language of lies; bouncy Italian, with its diminutives, is ideal for conversation with children. Attic Greek does triple duty as the language of epic, tragedy, and philosophy. I would go into battle with any commander who spoke Latin, so brutal and so punchy; and I can’t really imagine why anyone would ever wish to write a novel in anything but English, with its massive vocabulary and remarkable ability to leapfrog effortlessly between the lyric and the vulgar, the raw and the fucking sublime.