Afterward Nadia says, “You can’t stop now.”
She has been thinking, calculating. She senses the child, the precarious little thing inside of her: its presence is not yet weight, but heat. She still dreams at night about the men and the golden watch. Sometimes the Sénateur comes to her in the night, and she can feel his cool breath, hear the ticking of the watch. Sometimes Ti Pierre comes, and she can feel his heavy hands holding her down, the watch’s clasp scratching her back. She sees the watch sinking in the water.
“This is all I want,” the judge says. His voice is languorous.
“I know,” she says. “But they won’t let us stop now. There was a moment—”
“We could go back.”
“To where?”
It’s the same problem, the eternal problem: a passport and a visa.
“We could go away,” he says.
Nadia knows from her dreams that the wheel of possibility has turned. “We can’t.”
“We could have everything,” he says.
“Only if we win.”
The judge runs his hands over her shoulders, amazed as always by the knots of marbled muscle under her smooth skin.
“You are the wave,” Nadia says. “Remember what you are. The wave that sweeps and washes clean the shore.”
The judge thinks, Or breaks, crashes, and is heard no more.
* * *
The airport was closed, and Kay was trapped in Jérémie until it opened again. So, at my invitation, she dropped by the Sénateur’s mother’s house daily, sometimes having breakfast with my wife and me, sometimes spending a quiet hour in the afternoon reading and dozing in the hammock, and almost every evening, eating with us.
I admired Kay’s courage. She never came by the house unless she was carefully groomed, with a bright, false smile on her painted lips. One day she made us a cake, and the next day she spent the morning chopping fruit to produce a salad. Jérémie had remained more or less tranquil throughout the crisis, but there had been a few moments of disorder: the day before, a few dozen of the judge’s supporters, inspired by the events in Port-au-Prince, had decided to seize city hall. They had been rebuffed by the police with tear gas. Kay nevertheless came zipping up the hill to our house on a motorcycle taxi.
“If I stay home and just stare at the walls, I’ll go insane,” she said.
My wife had just left for work, and Kay and I decided to make a second pot of coffee.
“Terry told me they’re almost out of money,” she said.
“You guys are talking?”
“We’re texting,” she said. “Andrés Richard told them he’s not paying for anything else until he sees some results. Terry said that Johel came out of the meeting with the SRSG all fired up. But last night he started talking about sending everyone home. Then he started shivering and vomiting and saying he couldn’t breathe.”
“Maybe it’s over,” I said.
“I wouldn’t mind if it were.”
The coffee was ready. By now Kay was comfortable enough in the house that she said, “I’ll get it.” She went into the kitchen and came back out to the terrace with two cups. She even knew how much sugar I liked.
“You know who I just don’t get?” I said. “Like the person in this story who I can’t figure out?”
“She thinks he’s going to take her away.”
“No, that’s not who I meant. I know what she’s thinking. I meant you.”
Kay smiled, as if she had been complimented. “What do you mean?”
“I can’t figure out how a sensible woman like yourself got mixed up in a mess like this.”
She sipped her coffee.
“I wish we had ice,” she said.
“They say cold drinks just make you hotter. In the tropics—”
“You do it for the money,” she said.
The word “money,” when Kay said it, was like the kiss of a woman one has long desired. It was something serious and exciting. It made you nervous.
I said, “I thought you wanted to build the road and sell mangoes and fish and—”
“Maybe that’s how it started, but those two win this election, there’s so many things we can do.”
“You think?” I said.
“You might be the only person in Haiti who doesn’t think so. My God, we’re sitting on some of the most lucrative real estate in the Caribbean. Everyone knows what this is all about.”
“Even Terry?” I asked.
Kay stood up and walked over to the little mirror that hung on the wall. She stared at her reflection, fixing her hair and wiping away a smudge of dirt.
She said, “Terry likes to tell himself a lot of stories, I guess all men do. Women are different — we have to be, we have to live with you people. A man will tell himself he’s building a road. Or saving an orphan from a burning building. Or whatever the hell he’s doing with that woman. And if the story is good enough, a man will tell himself it’s okay to go to bed at night. But truth is, men don’t have a clue. Terry doesn’t even know why he gets out of bed in the morning. But I sure know why I do.”
* * *
At the hotel, Terry and Nadia get the judge dressed and walking. Maybe around the second pot of coffee he’s roaring like a lion. He’s sloughing off the doubts like old skin. He had the idea in the shower, comes bursting out of the bathroom wearing nothing but a towel.
“I don’t need to see that, brother,” Terry says.
“What do you think—”
“I think you should get that thing covered.”
“We’re going to walk to the CEH.”
CEH headquarters is still being held by the loose coalitions of thugs, students, and paid protesters, maybe a hundred young men holed up in there. Every hour, every day a few are drifting out the back stairs.
What the judge is proposing is a march from the Presidential Palace right to CEH headquarters, carrying boxes of food and supplies for the Democracy Warriors (the phrase came to the judge in the shower) holed up inside. Then the judge will give a speech, right out the window of the CEH, to a crowd of demonstrators assembled in the street below.
He’s on the phone, and by early afternoon there are two thousand men and women ready to march. This is the last of their money, on the street. There are drums and a pickup truck packed with loudspeakers. And walking slowly, at the head of the march, is the judge, microphone in hand.
It doesn’t matter what Johel says, because no one can hear him over the roar of the crowd.
The press is there, both the Haitian press and the international press: at the start of the riots, there were a handful of foreign reporters; now there are more than a dozen, mainly photographers, some print, couple of camera crews. It’s nice to shoot Haiti in a crisis — just four hours from New York, two from Miami. Especially in cold weather up north it’s a good gig: you can shoot civil unrest in the day and drink rum sours at night poolside at the Hotel Oloffson. Rumor has it that the correspondent for CNN has a Haitian lover — he’s been down since day two of the crisis, doing stand-ups in front of the Presidential Palace, wearing a bulletproof vest and helmet.
Nobody wants a peaceful protest. The journalists can’t sell pictures of a peaceful protest, and if the journalists can’t sell pictures, what is the point of protesting? The Nigerian riot police backed by Brazilian soldiers don’t want peace: If there is peace, what are they there for? The kids in the crowd have been paid to throw rocks. The PNH have been paid to fire back tear gas.