The Comedians (25 page)

‘Satisfied?' Mr Smith asked. He was not wholly guileless; though he had been unshaken by the beggars in the Post Office, I believe the city of Duvalierville had opened his eyes.

‘I mean,' the Minister said – he produced a box of cigars from the back of the car, ‘you will not want to be involved in endless discussions. I will represent your views to my colleagues. Take a couple of cigars, Professor.'

‘No, thank you. I don't smoke.' The driver did. He saw what was going on in his mirror, and leaning back he abstracted two cigars. One he lit and one he put in his shirt-pocket.

‘My views?' Mr Smith said. ‘If you want them, you shall have them. I don't see your Duvalierville being exactly a centre of progress. It's too remote.'

‘You would prefer a site in the capital?'

‘I'm beginning to reconsider the whole project,' Mr Smith said in a voice so final that even the Minister relapsed into uneasy silence.

IV

And yet Mr Smith lingered on. Perhaps when he went over the events of the day with Mrs Smith, the aid he had given the cripple re-established his sense of hope, hope that he could do something for the human race. Perhaps she strengthened his faith and fought his doubts (she was more a fighter than he). Already by the time we arrived at the Hotel Trianon, after more than an hour of gloomy silence, he had begun to revise his severest criticisms. The thought that he might possibly have been unfair haunted him. He had said good-bye with distant courtesy to the Secretary for Social Welfare and thanked him ‘for a very interesting excursion', but suddenly on the steps of the verandah he halted and turned to me. He said, ‘That word “satisfied” – I guess I took him up too hard. It made me sore, but then English isn't his native tongue. Maybe he didn't intend . . .'

‘He intended it all right, but he hadn't meant to say it so openly to you.'

‘I wasn't very favourably impressed by that project, I'll allow, but you know even Brasilia . . . and they have all the technicians they need . . . it's something to want a thing even if you fail.'

‘I don't think they are quite ripe here for vegetarianism.'

‘I was thinking the same, but perhaps . . .'

‘Perhaps you must have enough cash to be carnivorous first.'

He gave me a quick look of reproach and said, ‘I'll talk it all over with Mrs Smith.' Then he left me alone – at least I thought I was alone until I entered my office and found the British chargé there. Joseph had furnished him, I saw, with his special rum punch. ‘A lovely colour,' the chargé said, holding it up to the light when I entered.

‘It's the grenadine.'

‘I'm going on leave,' he said, ‘next week. And so I'm saying my adieux.'

‘You won't be sorry to be out of here.'

‘Oh, it's interesting,' he said, ‘interesting. There are worse places.'

‘The Congo perhaps? But people die quicker there.'

‘At least I'm glad,' the chargé said, ‘that I'm not leaving a fellow-countryman in jail. Mr Smith's intervention proved successful.'

‘I wonder if it was Mr Smith. I got the impression Jones would have got out anyway, on his own steam.'

‘I wish I knew what makes the steam. I won't pretend to you I haven't had inquiries . . .'

‘Like Mr Smith he carried a letter of introduction, but like Mr Smith I suspect it was to the wrong man. That was why they arrested him, I imagine, when they took it off him at the port. I have a suspicion his letter was to one of the army officers.'

‘He came to see me the night before last,' the chargé said. ‘I wasn't expecting him. He was very late. I was just going to bed.'

‘I haven't seen him since the night he was released. I think his friend Captain Concasseur doesn't regard me as sufficiently reliable. I was there, you see, when Concasseur broke up Philipot's funeral.'

‘Jones gave me the impression he was engaged on some sort of project for the Government.'

‘Where's he staying?'

‘They've put him up at the Villa Créole. You know the Government took the place over? They lodged the Polish mission there after the Americans left. The only guests they've had up till now. And the Poles departed very quickly. Jones has a car and a driver. Of course the driver may be his gaoler too. He's a Tonton Macoute. You haven't any idea what the project could be?'

‘Not a clue. He ought to be careful. To sup with the Baron you need a very long spoon.'

‘That's more or less what I told him. But I think he knows well enough – he's not a stupid man. Were you aware that he had been in Leopoldville?'

‘I think he did say once . . .'

‘It came out quite accidentally. He was there at the time of Lumumba. I checked up with London. Apparently he was helped out of Leopoldville by our consul. That doesn't mean much – a lot of people have been helped out of the Congo. The consul gave him his ticket to London, but he got off in Brussels. That's nothing against him either, of course . . . I think what he really wanted with me was to check up whether the British Embassy had the right of asylum. In case of difficulties. I had to tell him no. No legal right.'

‘Is he in trouble already?'

‘No. But he's sort of surveying his ground. Like Robinson Crusoe climbing the highest tree. But I didn't much fancy his Man Friday.'

‘Who do you mean?'

‘His driver. A man as fat as Gracia with a lot of gold teeth. I think he must collect gold teeth. He probably has good opportunities. I wish your friend Magiot would take that big gold molar out and put it in his safe. A gold tooth always attracts greed.' He drank the last of his rum.

This was a noonday for visitors. I had got into my bathing-trunks and dived into the pool only a little before the next corner arrived. I found I had to conquer some repugnance at bathing there, and the repugnance returned when I saw young Philipot looking down at me from the margin of the pool, standing just above the spot at the deep end where his uncle had bled to death. I had been swimming underwater, and I had not heard his approach. I was startled when his voice came through the skin of water. ‘Monsieur Brown.'

‘Why, Philipot, I didn't know you were here.'

‘I did what you advised, Monsieur Brown. I went and saw Jones.'

I had quite forgotten our conversation. ‘Why?'

‘Surely you remember – the Bren?'

Perhaps I had not taken him seriously enough. I had thought of the Bren as a new poetic symbol of his, like the pylons in the poems of my youth: after all those poets never joined the Electricity Board.

‘He's staying up at the Villa Créole with Captain Concasseur. I waited last night until I saw Concasseur go out, but there was still Jones's driver sitting at the foot of the stairs. The one with the gold teeth. The man who ruined Joseph.'

‘He did that? How do you know?'

‘Some of us keep a record. We have a lot of names on it now. My uncle, I am ashamed to say, was on the same list. Because of the pump in the Rue Desaix.'

‘I don't think it was altogether his fault.'

‘Nor do I. Now I have persuaded them his name belongs to the other list. The list of victims.'

‘I hope you keep your files in a very safe place.'

‘At least they have copies of them across the border.'

‘How did you get to see Jones?'

‘I climbed into the kitchen through a window and then I went up the service stairs. I knocked on his door. I pretended to have a message from Concasseur. He was in bed.'

‘He must have been a bit startled.'

‘Monsieur Brown, do you know what those two are up to?'

‘No. Do you?'

‘I am not sure. I think so, but I am not sure.'

‘What did you say to him?'

‘I asked him to help us. I told him the raiders across the border could do nothing to shift the Doctor. They kill a few Tontons Macoute and then they get killed themselves. They have no training. They have no Brens. I told him how seven men once captured the army barracks because they had tommy-guns. “Why are you telling this to me?” he asked. “You are not an
agent provocateur
, are you?” I said no; I said if we hadn't been prudent so long, Papa Doc wouldn't be there in the palace. Then Jones said, “I've seen the President.”'

‘Jones has seen Papa Doc?' I asked incredulously.

‘He told me so, and I believe him. He's up to something, he and Captain Concasseur. He told me Papa Doc was as interested in weapons and training as I was. “The army's gone,” Jones said, “not that it was any good to anyone, and what the Tontons Macoute have left of the American arms is all rusting away for want of proper care. So you see it's no good coming to me – unless you have a better proposition than the President's named already.”'

‘But he didn't say what proposition?'

‘I tried to see the papers on his desk – they looked like the plans of a building, but he said to me, “Leave those alone. They mean a lot to me.” Then he offered me a drink to show he had nothing personally against me. He said to me, “One has to earn a living the best way one can. What do you do?” I said, “I used to write verses. Now I want a Bren gun. And training. Training too.” He asked me, “Are there many of you?” and I told him that numbers were not so important. If the seven men had had seven Brens . . .'

I said, ‘The Brens are not magical, Philipot. Sometimes they stick. Just as a silver bullet can miss. You are going back to Voodoo, Philipot.'

‘And why not? Perhaps the gods from Dahomey are what we need now.'

‘You are a Catholic. You believe in reason.'

‘The Voodooists are Catholics too, and we don't live in a world of reason. Perhaps only Ogoun Ferraille can teach us to fight.'

‘Was that all Jones said to you?'

‘No. He said, “Come on. Have a Scotch, old man,” but I wouldn't take the drink. I went down the front stairs, so that the driver could see me. I wanted him to see me.'

‘Not very safe for you if they question Jones.'

‘Without a Bren, the only weapon I have is distrust. I thought that if they began to distrust Jones something might happen . . .' There were tears in his voice; a poet's tears for a lost world or a child's tears for the Bren that no one would give him? I swam away to the shallow end that I mightn't see him weep. My lost world was the naked girl in the pool, and what was his? I remembered the evening when he read his derivative verses to me and to Petit Pierre and to the young beat-novelist who wanted to be the Kerouac of Haiti; there was an ageing painter too who drove a
camion
during the day and worked at night with his calloused fingers at the American art centre, where they gave him paints and canvases. Propped against the verandah was his latest picture – cows in a field, but not the kind of cows they sold south of Piccadilly, and a pig with his head stuck through a hoop, among green banana leaves darkened by the perpetual storm coming down the mountain. It had something which my art student failed to find.

I rejoined him by the end of the pool when I had given him time enough to check the tears. ‘Do you remember,' I asked him, ‘that young man who wrote a novel called
La Route du Sud
?'

‘He is in San Francisco where he always wanted to be. He escaped after the massacre in Jacmel.'

‘I was thinking of the evening when you read to us . . .'

‘I don't regret those days. They were not real. The tourists and the dancing and the man dressed up as Baron Samedi. Baron Samedi is not an entertainment for visitors.'

‘They brought money to the island.'

‘Who saw the money? At least Papa Doc has taught us to live without money.'

‘Come to dinner on Saturday, Philipot, and meet the only tourists here.'

‘No, I have something to do that night.'

‘Be careful at any rate. I wish you'd start writing poems again.'

He flashed white teeth at me in a malicious smile. ‘The poem about Haiti has already been written once and for all. You know it, Monsieur Brown,' and he began to recite to me,

A door opened overhead and one of
les vieux garçons
stepped out on to the balcony of the John Barrymore suite. Mr Smith picked his bathing-pants off the rail and looked down into the garden. ‘Mr Brown,' he called.

‘Yes?'

‘I've been talking to Mrs Smith. She thinks perhaps I was a bit hasty in my judgement. She thinks we ought to give the Minister the benefit of the doubt.'

‘Yes?'

‘So we shall stay on a while and try again.'

V

I had asked Doctor Magiot to dine that Saturday in order to meet the Smiths. I wanted the Smiths to know that all Haitians were not either politicians or torturers. Besides I had not seen the doctor since the night when we disposed of the body and I did not wish him to feel I had kept away from cowardice. He arrived just after the electricity had been cut, and Joseph was on the point of lighting the oil lamps. He turned the wick of one too high and the flames shooting up the chimney made the shadow of Doctor Magiot unroll down the verandah like a black carpet. He and the Smiths greeted each other with old-fashioned courtesy, and it seemed for a moment that we were back in the nineteenth century, when oil lamps shone softer than electric globes, and our passions – or so one believed – were gentler too.