A Traveller's Life (33 page)

I was delighted to meet him – my first primitive painter, and all to myself. Exclusive! We ended up by having a long conversation on the balcony of our room while I fed the three of us rum punches. He told us the kind of paintings he liked to paint and the materials he employed. His father, he said, had been the great Bazile whose murals form part of the famous decoration of the Episcopalian Cathedral of the Holy Trinity in Port-au-Prince. In one mural,
The Last Supper
, by another Haitian painter named Bottex, Judas is a white man in an otherwise all-black cast.

‘I am not as good as my father,' he said, modestly.

We talked of the foreigners he had met.

‘
Vous connaissez, naturellement, Connolee
?' he said.

I said that I did not naturally know Cyril Connolly, but that I had read his books, had bought his magazine
Horizon
in 1939 and 1940, and that he contributed to the
Sunday Times
and was famous.

He told me that he had always wanted to have one of his paintings reproduced in a magazine in colour.

‘If I painted one would you have it produced in your magazine [The
Observer Magazine
]?' he asked. ‘Of course it would be completely free.'

I insisted on paying, but he would not hear of it.

‘It will be slow coming because I am a slow painter,' he said, ‘and because it is too expensive to send these pictures with their frames by air.'

I asked him how much it would cost to send it by surface mail. He said about $12 (£4.60). By this time I had acquired a $20 bill but I still had no smaller change and because I did not want to embarrass M. Bazile, now negligently sketching the sort of daisy in my notebook that I would have drawn if I had been called upon to sketch a daisy, and who knew M. Connolee, I gave him $20 (£7.60).

When I told Al Seitz back from the beach with his wife and children he roared with laughter. I had imagined him from his voice on the telephone as being about thirty and outfitted by Brooks Brothers. He turned out to be a cigar smoking presence of fifty-plus. ‘That must be the Tonton Macoute who used to keep tabs on the hotel. Solid bone from the feet up. Couldn't spell his own name let alone write it. About the only thing he could paint would be a hearse. He's coming on. It's obviously doing these boys a lot of good having to fend for themselves.'

Before we left Port-au-Prince we bought two of the real M. Bazile's paintings. We also visited, out of curiosity, the
rue
in which the
faux
Bazile said he lived – a pitch-black lane full of potholes
in a weird suburb to the west of the city beyond the red-light quarter – only he and his house were missing.

Behind the hotel was a ramshackle, circular construction with a corrugated-iron roof which looked like an open umbrella, below which we could see hundreds of black and off-black feet dangling. This was a
gaguère
, a cockpit, and the owners of the feet were the spectators. Inside, it was like an engraving by Hogarth, but one in which all the protagonists were black. Huge sums of money were changing hands;
clairin
, the cheapest and rawest spirit, was circulating; the cocks were being anointed with rum and having their feathers dampened by their owners, who filled their mouths with water and squirted it on to the birds, which were also being admired and criticized by the punters; and the air was filled with the sound of their crowing. There were no women present, and although I was the only white man, the atmosphere was distinctly friendly.

Soon a main began on a floor of beaten earth. The birds did not wear steel spurs. There was no need; their own were sharpened so that they were like stilettos. I knew from reading accounts of the
gaguère
by other visitors to Haiti that I was not going to enjoy it, and when the main reached a point when one bird had had one of its wings partly torn off and the other was eyeless I left.

That evening, and every evening, César the barman began circulating the rum punches around six-thirty: to those members of the literary and theatre sets who called the place darling; to exquisite and beautiful members of the local smart set whose patrician countenances ranged in pigmentation from the jet-black of Africa to the palest of pale colour of the mulatto
sangmêlées
, down from the heights of Pétionville for a night out (nowhere else in the Caribbean, rich or poor, could you see such beautiful people). And there was M. Aubelin Joliecoeur – the Petit Pierre of Greene's novel – a tiny, posturing, chocolate-coloured journalist
and PR man to the regime, who must have been more clever than he looked or sounded to have survived at all, although according to those who disliked him, of whom there were large numbers, he was by then down to his last white silk suit. There he was calling people he had never seen before ‘darling', kissing their hands, waving a little cane, popping in and popping out again to bully his wretched, abject chauffeur, here, there and everywhere, night and day, all over the town; and there were two leathery US Marines in sweaty civilian suits, over from Florida to train
les Léopards
, the new regime's successors to the Tonton Macoutes. In addition, there were a number of more conventional visitors, of whom we were a pair, who looked at the other guests, the gleaming paintings, the whole exotic set-up, with frank curiosity and ate the delicious, outlandish food with relish. And presiding over this motley lot was Al (Garcia Vega) Seitz, who had bought the place from a Frenchman without descending from the taxi to view it because it was raining at the time, and his willowy wife Sue, from Bucks County, Pennsylvania, whom he had married in the bar using a cigar band for a ring because he had mislaid the real one.

These Firbankian impressions (did Firbank really say ‘They tell me the president's a perfect dear' before setting out for Haiti?) persisted into the early hours of the following morning, which were the most supportable of the day in Port-au-Prince, when, through a frame of tropical vegetation, we saw the cupolas of the cathedral rising from the mist that covered the city; listened to the bells calling the people to early mass; heard the jaunty trumpet calls from the Caserne Dessalines in which so many unsuccessful coups had been either hatched or nipped in the bud, and the distant roar of
camionettes
, the gaudily-painted vehicles of the public bus system with names such as Sauve-qui-peut, Toujours Immaculée and Grace-à-Dieu, as they thundered through the town, at ten cents a ride – apart from shared taxis, the
camionettes
were the only way of getting about the place without being skinned and by far the best way of meeting the inhabitants.

Later, as it grew progressively hotter, we walked down into Port-au-Prince through lanes flaming with bougainvillea in which passers-by said in a friendly way, ‘
Bonjour, blancs
' – a pleasant change from some other, at that time, British islands in the Caribbean, such as St Lucia, where we had been told: ‘Go home, whites.'

On the way into Port-au-Prince we saw some of the principal sights: the tomb of le Grand Disparu, what looked like a
bijou
villa in an enormous, dazzlingly white cemetery, guarded by sentries who also looked after the cylinder which provided gas for the perpetual flame; and an enormous hoarding on top of a grandstand on the Champ de Mars on which was displayed a several times larger than life figure of Jean-Claude Duvalier, the Doctor's obese son, Ninth President for Life, in full evening dress with the banner headline, ‘L'Idole du Peuple'.

‘
Il est un bon garçon
,' a loyal passer-by said as I stopped to photograph this extraordinary advertisement, ‘
un twès, twès, bon garçon
.'

On past the strategically situated Caserne Dessalines, next door to the palace, painted a rather overpowering shade of orange, with the sounds of a military band floating out through sun-blinded windows; on past the palace – no stopping here, not even for tourists (if you did a sentry shouted to you to keep moving) – none of the locals ever came here unless they were given some sort of inducement anyway; on into the dilapidated heart of the city by the Grande Rue now, at this hour, with the iron riot doors of its shops flung open, the arcades in front of them jammed with street tradesmen, the air in this heat lethally heavy with the exhaust of a thousand deep-loaded
camionettes
; on as far as the Iron Market built in 1889 by President Hyppolite, one of Haiti's more
distinguished presidents, by this time having been asked by every second person in the Grande Rue, young and old, to give them one dollar, but with a complete lack of hope of receiving anything at all, however little. These were not professional beggars – the professional beggars, including the mutilated ones, had been whisked away, one wondered where. They had been whisked away before at the whim of successive ministers of tourism. They always came back, or others like them. Those who had temporarily taken their place were just ordinary people, desperately poor.

On sale in the market were pretty but difficult to transport lampshades made of shiny tin, clay pipes which were smoked by women in the rural interior, locally-made brassieres – brassieres, baseballs, textiles, ‘quickie' divorces and blood plasma bought from the already anaemic inhabitants at $3 (£1.15) a litre were some of the most thriving exports to the United States from a country in which the legal wage of a manual worker was $1 a day (no wonder American big business was attracted to Haiti) – and there were oleographs of the Virgin of the Seven Sorrows with a bare and transfixed, blood-red heart, which in voodoo is the emblem of Erzulie Freda, the Dahomeyan Goddess of Love and of St Rose of Lima, St James the Major and St Charles Borromeo, just a few of the Christians who are also part of the voodoo pantheon and hang above their altars in the
tonnelles
, the voodoo peristyles.

Up the hill, by the cathedral, poor women, dressed in white, indistinguishable from the ecstatic devotees who crowd the voodoo
tonnelles
at night, knelt on the pavement before the shrines with their arms outstretched imploringly or else they clung to the railings as if the Devil was trying to drag them away. Or was it Baron Samedi, Lord of the Cemeteries and Chief of the Legion of the Dead, in his frock coat, bowler hat and carrying a black walking stick? To whom were those women addressing themselves – the Christian Trinity and the Saints, or the Gods of Africa;
Bon-Dieu-Bon, otherwise Le Grand Maître who is sometimes male and sometimes female; Ogoun Feraile, God of War; Bossou Comblamin; or the Virgin of the Seven Sorrows or St Rose of Lima, in their other guises? In Haiti Catholicism and voodooism are so inextricably mixed in the minds of the people, while the Houngans, the voodoo priests, take what they want from the Church that many Catholic priests, after strenuous but totally unsuccessful attempts to destroy voodooism by cutting down sacred trees and destroying the complex apparatus of worship, have given up in despair trying to disentangle one from the other.

From the cathedral it was only a short distance to a shanty town in which the houses were little more than packing-cases, the corrugated-iron roofs by day almost red hot, the streets narrow ditches. Yet here, where the poorest of the urban poor lived and where the
tonnelles
were thickest, visiting them at night you were, according to the local inhabitants, safe.

It was a pity that the time we spent in Haiti coincided with Easter, a close season for genuine voodoo, and the drums were silent throughout the island. Instead, what were known as Raras, wild-looking bands of revellers carrying kerosene lanterns and playing long bamboo pipes roamed the streets and lanes, each with a Rara king dressed in a tunic embroidered with thousands of sequins, the Haitian equivalent of Pearlies.

Although it was the close season for voodoo we visited one of the
tonnelles
on the outskirts of the city. Our guide was the Houngan, a tall, thin, praeternaturally intelligent-looking man who spoke only Créole. The peristyle was open-sided and had a palm-leaf roof supported at the centre by a painted and decorated pole which played an important part in the ceremonies. In huts round about there were altars and all the complex apparatus of voodoo: bottles filled with strange substances, swords, crucifixes, bells, anthropomorphic paintings of gods and goddesses, gourds
enclosed in beads and vertebrae, china pots that looked as if they ought to have contained
foie gras
, also tied up with beads, pincers, iron serpents, old bedsteads and, on the walls, mystical patterns and pictures of the Virgin and the Saints who had a place in the ceremonies. In the smallest hut, Le Caye Zombi, there were shackles and whips. And there was, of course, the complete equipment of The Baron, set out like a gentleman's wardrobe, ready for the day, but on a black cross. It was all very interesting, but it needed the ecstatic participants in the rites to give it any meaning.

In the autumn of 1973 I left
The Observer
, but only after much heart-searching and against the advice of Donald Trelford, who subsequently became editor, and many other friends who worked for it. It was the only job I ever had in the whole of my life that I was genuinely sorry to leave and I still continue to write for the paper from time to time. I gave it up because in the nine years I had been its travel editor the mechanism of travel had changed out of all recognition.

The great majority of travellers, myself included, were now moved around the world en masse, rather like air freight, and just like freight when they reached their destinations they were lifted out of the bowels of the aircraft and delivered to their hotel rooms. It was not that people really wanted to be treated like this but this, it was emphasized, was the most economical way of travelling, and it was largely true.

‘I suppose there ought to be a staircase,' Evelyn Waugh makes Professor Silenus say gloomily in
Decline and Fall
, contemplating the immense country house he is constructing for Mrs Beste-Chetwynd. ‘Why can't the creatures stay in one place? Do dynamos require staircases? Do monkeys require houses?'

By the 1960s no such residual doubts clouded the minds of those who designed and furnished hotels. By then a staircase was something put in to satisfy some regulation. Movement from one floor to another was effected in hot little, neon-lit boxes which were filled with Muzak unless the current failed in which case the occupants were marooned indefinitely.

The new hotels were built of concrete. Expensive ones were unnecessarily solid like a blockhouse in the Atlantic Wall built by Todt slaves. If less expensive they shook like a jelly when one got into bed and you could hear the most unbelievable things going on all around you. There was the room itself, with its view or non-view through what are intended to be permanently sealed windows, its walls adorned with absolutely characterless pictures. And there was the lighting, which was impossible to read by. Indeed, the lighting's only function seemed to be to cast, if you had someone to cast it with, an erotic shadow. It was certainly impossible to write at the attenuated, so-called desk. Round the corner, in the even more attenuated bathroom, was a bath so short that somewhere, one felt, there must be a circular saw with which to convert oneself into two or more submersible parts. Next to it was the lavatory basin, its seat decorated with what looked like a drum majorette's sash, bearing the legend ‘It's sanitized', which suggested the possibility that nameless acts may have been performed in revenge by those who had to drape it in this demeaning fashion. And downstairs was the restaurant with its ‘international specialities' and pastiches of local ‘specialities', in which no local ever ate unless trying to conclude some deal with a visitor.

Entombed in such places I thought with nostalgia of Japanese inns in which some of the pleasures were decidedly unexpected. The silence of the Pera Palace, shattered only once it is said by a Bulgarian whose suitcase, full of bombs, blew up in the hall as he
was registering; the romantic decrepitude of the Bela Vista at Macau; the sleaziness of the Cavendish in the days of Rosa Lewis; the inspired improbability of the Oloffson at Port-au-Prince; and the friendliness of a certain pub on the estuary of the Kenmare River. I felt, too, and I felt myself responsible having for years written about lonely places, that the time was not far off when there would be no place on earth accessible to ordinary human beings in which they would be able to feel themselves alone under the sky without hearing the noise of machines.

By far the greatest menace to the lonely places was the bulldozer. With the bulldozer roads could be made, through the wilderness and over mountain ranges, in a few months, which would previously have taken years to construct and would never have been built at all because of the cost. Most of these so-called ‘panoramic roads' were not intended for the convenience of the inhabitants. They were made for tourists in motor cars who never got out of their vehicles at all. No one who lived in a remote place and enjoyed doing so was safe from the panoramic road. By 1973 they had already destroyed the solitude of the high Apennines which I knew and loved so well.

Even worse will be the day, which has not yet come, when the desire to be alone has finally been extinguished from the human heart.