“It couldn’t seem any worse.”
After Johel went home, I followed my own prescription. I dreamed that I had been assigned by the Red Cross to teach the second grade. No matter what I did, no matter how I shouted, I could not get the kids’ attention, and they wandered one by one out of the room until just two remained, a boy and a girl. They were monstrous little creatures. In the morning, my wife told me that I had writhed and moaned in my sleep.
3
In the context of Haitian politics, handing out small cash payments to potential voters was not considered a disreputable practice. Although giving a few dollars to a potential voter in no way guaranteed his loyalty, failure to do so was perceived as an insult. Things might have been better for both the Sénateur and the judge had they mutually agreed to quit the practice, but the Sénateur, having distributed cash in each of his previous elections, did not feel that he could now stop. Voters, relying on the privacy of a secret ballot, accepted cash from both candidates, and voted their conscience.
But voters also sold their votes to a particular candidate. The challenge for the voter and the candidate was to find some way to demonstrate to the satisfaction of the candidate that the promised vote had, in fact, been delivered. Many schemes were devised to defeat the secrecy of the ballot box.
In past elections in Carrefour Charles, for example, the poll workers would examine the ballot, and if a voter’s X had been placed in the Sénateur’s box, they would paint his pinkie, not his forefinger, with indelible ink. The voter could then present himself later at the house of the local juge de paix, who represented the Sénateur in Carrefour Charles. In Beaumont, voters simply showed up at the voting center on election day, signed the electoral register, and walked away. The electoral officials would then complete the ballot and deposit it in the appropriate ballot box.
Somewhat more complicated was the scheme in Les Irois, where Mayor Fanfan in elections past had “rented” willing voters’ voter identification cards, which he would then distribute to his followers. Again, complicit election officials were required who would overlook the miracle that restored Monsieur François Simonard, age seventy-six, to the bloom of youth. The advantage of this scheme was that voters, who might be frightened to venture out on election day, could stay home.
All of these schemes required the cooperation of the local electoral officials.* The Haitian system of elections gave these officials tremendous power: in addition to administering the vote, they were responsible for counting the vote. At the end of election day, the urns were opened on the spot and the votes tallied in the presence of the public, neutral electoral observers, and partisan observers from the camp of each candidate.
Local electoral officials had lots of opportunities, then, to sway an election one way or another. The most prevalent practice was ballot stuffing — officials simply filling out ballots and shoving them into the ballot box, then counting them at the end of the day. You’d be surprised how many ballot boxes turned out 400–0 for one candidate or another; and even if all the votes didn’t end up for one candidate or another, it was easy for the officials to slip in a few extra votes for their patron in the course of election day. That could be enough, distributed across an entire commune or department, to sway the election.
Counting the votes also gave the local election officials the opportunity to fudge the numbers. In Jérémie, for example, I heard this story: The Sénateur had won a particular ballot box in the last election by a ratio of 137 votes to 100. But the president of the Voting Bureau, having verbally announced the correct total to the assembled crowd, hand-corrected the tally sheet to read 337 votes to 100, which nobody noticed until soldiers from the Mission had taken away both ballot box and tally sheets.
If Johel led the public campaign on his own behalf, Nadia led his private campaign to hand out cash to voters, buy votes, and influence local election officials. At first he had been reluctant to involve her in this aspect of his affairs, but he quickly came to rely on her political sense and judgment: she knew the back roads of Haiti better than anyone on his staff. Precisely because she was from the village, she was the only person the judge’s counterparts trusted to show up at their homes and offices to discuss these very sensitive matters.
Soon Johel was sending Nadia around the Grand’Anse with a car and driver. More suspicious than her husband, she had a fine instinct for who could be counted on and who was trying to swindle the judge and his campaign. More than once, Nadia told Johel that someone’s claim to control a bloc of a thousand votes was only so much bluff and bravado. If, on the other hand, Nadia told Johel that someone had made a fair offer and was serious, he trusted her instincts, and quickly the deal was done.
* * *
The only person who didn’t approve of the judge’s private campaign was Terry. He overheard the judge negotiating some arrangement on the phone, and his beefy face went dark red.
“You’re crossing the line,” Terry said.
The judge looked up from his laptop, confused.
“A man’s got to have a line,” Terry continued. “And that’s my line, right there. Those poor assholes don’t have anything, not even enough to eat, not enough to pay for their kids’ school, living on mangoes — what he’s got is a vote and a pulse, and I’m not touching either one.”
The judge rubbed the bridge of his nose.
“What good is it to have some line if the other guy just walks all over it?” he said.
“You still have the line. The line is the line. That doesn’t go away.”
“And what happens if on election day we lose because the Sénateur crossed the line and we didn’t do anything? We just sit and stare at our line and tell ourselves what a great line it is?”
“They don’t break all the mirrors the night they announce the results. You still got to wake up and see yourself.”
The judge rubbed his stubbly face.
“I’ve never been one for looking in the mirror myself,” he said. “There are no lines. You’re old enough to hear the truth, son. You got some other guy out there crossing the line, and if you don’t do the same thing, you might as well stay home.”
Terry couldn’t find the flaw in the argument. But he wasn’t convinced either.
“Most men don’t know where right and wrong are, but you and I — we know,” the judge said. “Don’t tell me we don’t know, because we do. That’s what it means to have power. That’s what this is all about. You get to be the one who decides.”
* * *
That evening, Terry went for a swim after dark. There was enough of a moon to keep an eye on the shore, and Terry thought that if he didn’t move, the humidity, mosquitoes, and small-town claustrophobia might eat him alive. He was grateful for the water, just cool enough to bite, and for the waves, bigger that evening than normal, high enough that he could wrestle with them. The waves came in rhythm: two or three small ones, easy to ride out, then a big one, surprising him in the darkness, picking him up and sending him crashing shoreward.
That afternoon, he had decided to tell Johel that he was headed home, that this wasn’t the way he wanted to play the game. But the words wouldn’t come, because he knew that if he left, he wouldn’t see Nadia again. It was that simple. When Johel had told him that Nadia had used love powder long ago to ensnare him, Terry had laughed. “More like poontang powder,” he said. Now he wondered whether there wasn’t something to the story.
Terry rode the waves for an hour or so, letting himself float and splashing. When he finally got to shore, he discovered that someone had stolen his pants, shoes, and shirt. The keys to his vehicle had been in his pants. His phone and wallet were locked in the car. Terry stood there cursing. He was facing a long walk back to the base, barefoot, in his dripping swimsuit, and he was aware for the moment of the ridiculous figure he would cut on the road.