On the River Styx (11 page)

“What is it you call yourself?” the Turk hissed finally. “Horse ass?”

“Hor-ace,” said Horace. “An upright Christian name.”

“With a
W?
” Hassid inquired archly, directing this question to me. He winked just to bedevil Horace, knowing the missionary would not acknowledge such a joke even if he got it. From that point on, as the friend of these two enemies, I served them as both referee and foil, tossing in small provocations just to keep things lively.

“Turk,” mused Horace, chewing carefully.

“Whore-ass,” Hassid murmured here and there during the meal, shaking his head in gloomy wonderment, while the two Britons huddled over their food.

O
UR SHIP SAILED OUT
that evening into North Atlantic storms, and by next day Hassid’s soiled complexion had turned sickly. Propped up at the mess table, he looked embalmed. At the noon meal, Horace informed him that he looked “poorly,” at which Hassid put his whole face in his hands. “I been noticin them li’l beads of sweat on yo’ upper lip,” Horace continued, just before Hassid bolted from the table. “Smell that fish?”

Horace complained about the fish smell in the galley. He
could not bear the sight or smell of fish. The Lord ate fish, I reminded him, stirring things up to rally Hassid, who was losing their struggle by default, but Horace put me nicely in my place.

“He probably liked it,” Horace said, and Hassid had the ingratitude to smile.

The Turk did his best to appear at meals, since the Chief had told him that food was the best cure for seasickness. The long days of rough seas had “knocked us back a bit,” in the Chief’s phrase. The slow pace exasperated Hassid when he was well enough to feel emotion, since he’d already missed a swifter ship owing to the operation on his nose. If he got “indisposed” even once again, he’d quit this ship of fools at the next port and fly to Belém.

“How to kill this time?” Hassid begged each day, rolling his soft eyes heavenward in supplication. “How to kill this time?” He was the only man I ever knew who tore his hair—I thought this habit had gone out of fashion. In fair weather, he crouched up in the bow, staring away toward southern destinies, in hope of nothing. The Chief responded to his ceaseless plaints by saying that a man had best be patient about arriving anywhere. “What is a day, a week, even a month, after all?” he once inquired—an old, sad, touching observation that the Turk misconstrued in his great misery as an affront.

The Chief was an amiable old Scot, gone bald and a bit bleary with hard use. Though scarcely garrulous, he doubtless was considered so by the First Mate, whom we never saw except across the table. The First was a rufous, blocky man who detested anything not known in Liverpool, but happily he talked little while he dined. Having stuffed his gob with thick bread gobbets until his soup was set before
him, he proceeded doggedly through the little menu, taking all choices in the order listed, plate after plate, like somebody packing a bag. The one dish he would not consume was “American mutton,” a weekly entrée which lent our menu its one hint of international cuisine. (I asked him once what distinguished “American” mutton. “Different animal altogether,” huffed the First.)

In Bermuda, our first port of call, Horace passed the day at a small white table in an ice-cream parlor, writing sappy postcards to his wife and drinking soft, sweet drinks. Hassid sat with him, head in hands, in an ennui that would persist another fortnight, all the way, in fact, to Port-au-Prince. “Got your sea legs yet?” Horace would ask him every little while, and wink at me. I suggested reading as a cure, but the Turk’s sole interests were young girls and commerce. Reading, he said, made him nervous, and as it happened, a dislike of books was the one thing he and Horace would agree upon. Despite their enmity, he had acquired a taste for Horace’s company, having doubtless perceived that his dark dream of undoing this man’s moral superiority was all that stood between him and his monstrous boredom. For his part, the missionary clung to some fond hope of redeeming the sybaritic Turk, whom he preached to nightly.

And so, to amuse myself, I set one upon the other, confident that both secretly enjoyed this. “Their claws,” as someone once remarked of a somewhat more auspicious pair, “were set so deep into each other that if they pulled apart, they would soon bleed to death.”

B
OUND FOR
H
AITI
, our freighter trailed smoke south through the horse latitudes, where in other times dead horses were heaved overboard from ships becalmed in the
Sargasso Sea. Horace, still cheerful to a fault, had held the upper hand on the bounding main of the North Atlantic, but in the pewter calms of the horse latitudes his companion began to stir into dull life, and ashore in Haiti, where seasickness no longer stayed him, Hassid moved very quickly to the fore. Scarcely had his slippered foot touched land—and land, moreover, where his favorite tongue was the official language—when he stood full-blown before us, a true
bon vivant
whose delicate French and urbane manner made him the natural leader of our little party. Who then if not the bold Turk dismissed Port-au-Prince as unworthy of our custom? No, no, quoth he, we would hire a conveyance and escape the sea,
à la campagne, à la montagne
! So enchanted was he by this inland prospect that he waved his arms in fine Gallic abandon, inadvertently inciting to near hysteria the hordes of jobless Haitians who rushed along with us, desperate to attend to every need.

The human din, the forceful smells, the ribald colors of the waterfront juxtaposed with grinding poverty and filth, drove Horace to condemn the Roman Church, which he blamed—with bitter looks at Hassid—for the plight of this beautiful, unhappy country. Politically oblivious, Hassid ignored him, having commenced dealings with a sober-suited native who had persevered so with his winks and hisses as to commend himself at last to the Turk’s attention. Even now our new Haitian acquaintance was revealing the existence of another friend, almost as dear to him as we were, who knew more about Haiti than anyone since Toussaint l’Ouverture. As luck would have it, this same friend was the master of a splendid car designed perfectly for whatever purpose
les gentilshommes
might have in mind. This friend, said he, might be engaged upon short notice,
and sure enough, a spavined Ford came forward even as he spoke, honking and backfiring along the curb. Its clairvoyant chauffeur turned out to be none other than Charles (
“Tous mes amis Americains m’appellent Shar-lie”
), the international authority on Haiti, who swore he would place his awesome expertise at our disposal for a
prix d’ami
that was nothing short of laughable. In proof of this he laughed, more or less merrily, hurling his car door wide to show us in.

Gold-toothed and fragrant in a many-colored shirt, Charlie was as festive as Pierre was somber, and his black skin shone in the very places where Pierre’s old hide looked gray and dull. Adjusting his tone from the first instant to the whims of Hassid, he said, Yes! Yes! We would make a
tour de ville
, and afterward
un petit séjour à la campagne, à la montagne
—and afterward? Here Charlie permitted himself a discreet pause, an elevation of the eyebrow, recognized at once by the worldly Turk, who fetched poor Horace a whack across the back. It now transpired that Charlie’s rate had been set so ludicrously low owing to his confidence that
après?
… his new friends would refresh themselves at a private
club
of his acquaintance where nice clean girls of eighteen were awaiting us.

“Cloob?” Horace whimpered.

“Maison de rendezvous!”
Hassid exulted, embarking at once on a spirited discussion of what lay in store for us. “They don’t call you Whore-ass for nothing!” he told the missionary—for my benefit, since Horace would never in a month of Sundays understand this subtle
jeu de mot
.

“Well, this boy’s not ronday-vooin at no durn
cloob
,” Horace hollered. “Gonna ronday-voo right back to that durn
boat
!”

Fearful—as I thought at first—of losing his advantage, the Turk assured the highly agitated missionary that this talk of cloobs meant nothing whatsoever. “I suppose I’m used to folks who speak the truth,” said Horace, with a sniff of pinch-nosed sanctimoniousness that collapsed Hassid in silent harem mirth. He had not seen Horace wink at me.

Negotiations concluded, we set off in Charlie’s car, accompanied by the glum Pierre, who wished to keep an eye on his investment. Honking his way up the main street, our guide stopped at every shop to extol its ethnic wares. Only Horace bought a few peculiar odds and ends, to perk up his mission in Brazil, and Charlie’s repute must have suffered in these places. Relieved to whisk us from the city, he drove off in a scattering of dogs and children for Pétionville, up in the mountains.

At a quaint hostelry decked in poinsettias, Charlie disappeared into the kitchen, hoping we would decide to eat while we awaited him. He did not bother his head about Pierre, who perched his cadaverous frame on a kind of dunce’s stool just by the doorway, the better to watch our consumption of lean steak and local greens. Even the hard heart of Hassid was touched by Pierre’s mournful demeanor, but our offer of sustenance was declined with dignity. He required no food for himself, Pierre intoned, but if we wished, he would accept a monetary offering with which he might hope to feed his hungry children.

Charlie emerged, wiping his mouth, and we drove on. Burping a little, he discoursed freely on the subject of the ex-slave Dessalines, as well as on Pétion, Henri Christophe, Toussaint l’Ouverture—“Dat is my hero
à moi
,” said Charlie, pointing at himself—and other champions of Haitian independence. Not infrequently during our journey,
this enterprising man with the gold incisor would shout
pow-pow-pow!
in wild patriotic fervor, to demonstrate how the Haitians of old shot down the French. Why modern Haitians did not do as much for their modern despots he would not say.

From atop a mountain, we gazed down upon Port-au-Prince and the great Gulf of Gonave, assailed the while by five musicians who stepped from a bush to coax hideous sounds from hollow gourds and other unpromising implements. Our freighter, loading a cargo of grain meal across the bay, was a mere white speck in the blue distance. At a shop which enjoyed our guide’s unqualified approval, the curios, though more costly, were otherwise identical to those in Port-au-Prince—sisal and mahogany, real voodoo fetishes, real voodoo drums conveniently inscribed “Souvenir of Haiti,” stuffed hawksbill turtles, crafted seashells, and other useful Caribbean gewgaws. The whole display was enshrined on film by Horace, who made the tortuous journey down the mountain more exciting by shouting at Charlie to stop on each blind turn so that he might “snap” the bright-clothed native women, the fruit baskets and flower-bedecked burros, swaying down against the sky and distant sea.

S
INCE
C
HARLIE
had flattered us as
types sportifs
, we permitted him to transport us to the cockfights, which were held on Saturdays and Sundays in a rickety arena on the city’s outskirts. The vivid plumage of cock and man was intensified that afternoon by the tropic sun that came pouring like gold air through the slats as through a stained-glass window—or so, at least, I read aloud to Hassid from what I was writing on the “local color” page in my field
Horace, diverted momentarily from the fights, the bets, the reek of cane liquor, the wicked happy laughs of “fallen women,” denounced my irreligious simile in no uncertain terms as he changed film.

“Should a missionary witness such things?” Hassid asked Horace. “Blood sports and gambling? Scarlet women?”

“Lord Jesus did,” Horace informed him, adjusting his pink bow tie.

The cocks, shorn of combs and tail plumes, were rangy little roosters of starved and hard-bitten demeanor. Prior to the fight, their leg horns, or spurs, had been rasped to two sharp points, and water was now spat copiously upon them, lest they expire of heat prostration before winning money for their owners. For the first suspenseful moments, the two birds circled, beak to beak and taut as arrows. Then the doomed things jumped and fluttered, pecked and spurred until one dropped. The loser never learned from hard experience but went right on flailing at the stronger bird. When finally it toppled from exhaustion and loss of blood, the victor, itself close to death, squatted down and blinked.

Feeling ran high at the cockfight, each telling coup greeted with stamps and hoots, or loud cries of
Bis, bis!
—Again, again!—and another round of reckless betting. Between fights, the bird owners crowded pell-mell into the tiny ring, insulting one another at the top of their lungs as if to invigorate their charges. The cocks, which were wedged beneath their arms, facing backward, missed no chance to go at each other
en passant
.

The crowd of sinners made a glorious spectacle.

“Most of these poor lost souls are your feller Catholics,” Horace told Hassid, not bothering to come out from behind his camera. “We’ll title this one ‘Sodom and Gomorrah.’ ”

“You seem to be enjoying this as much as they are,” Hassid nagged Horace.

“Have mercy, Lord”—
click
—“they know not what they do.”

“I hate you,” Hassid said, with sudden feeling.

“Forgiveness is divine,” said Horace. “I forgive you.”

From the cockfights we repaired once more into the countryside, to the coastal villages and bright green rice paddies along the southern shore of La Gonave. The haunted appearance of thin country folk, the strangled graveyards on the silver bay, made me ask Charlie if any real voodoo was still practiced. After some muttering about “way back in de mountain,” Charlie changed the subject, not because I had struck a hidden vein of native folkways but because he had been distracted from his purpose, which very shortly came to light.

Without warning, he ran the old Ford off into a rutted side road, nearly killing an old woman who was trying to cross. Ignoring Horace’s frantic queries, he drove up smartly to a villa on the shore where a large group of lightly clad young ladies (members of the
cloob
, I assured Horace) were taking the air of afternoon under the palms.