The Best American Travel Writing 2011 Read online

  Venance Lafrance had only one real asset in life—but it was considerable. Despite every disadvantage that he suffered, despite every self-inflicted wound, Venance was nevertheless making his way in the world with radiant, unwavering optimism. One day he bought a hen whom he named Catalina. This was to be the start of a chicken-breeding empire. Then his family got hungry and ate Catalina. Venance was undismayed. He asked me for money to buy another starter chicken. If you gave Venance 50 gourdes, he'd give half to the kids on the street to buy candy—Venance saw himself as somebody who could afford to be generous. When he told us he wanted to be an artist, I think he chose the word almost at random from a list of grand words that to Venance were synonymous with hope. He would tell me later that he wanted to be a preacher, a doctor, an engineer. Step by step he went forward toward an opaque future that he was sure—absolutely, unquestionably sure—would one day be glorious.

  In the meanwhile, he got by.

  Walking around Port-au-Prince after the quake and talking to people, I learned all sorts of ways to describe in Creole just how a building fell down. A house that had held was said to have kembé, or hung tight, thank God. This was the case with my own house, in which not even the wineglasses had broken. A house with a crack or two or a hundred was fissuré, generally considered to be alarming depending only on the depth of the crack or its location. Sometimes a crack could be so wide as to admit sunlight and rain. Still more severe was a house that was fracturé, or fractured. This was the case with our immediate neighbor's house, whose walls split open to reveal the steel skeleton buried in the reinforced concrete. Some houses split in two—half the house coming down completely, the other half perfectly intact, leaving little windows into the occupants' lost worlds: a table still set for meals, books on bookshelves, a toilet. Even more dramatic than the fractured house was the house that was penché, or tilted. We saw such oddities all over town—houses that had suffered little or no apparent damage but were now tilting at extreme angles to the horizontal. The gravest category of destroyed home was said to have been krazé, or wiped out. If you wanted to add emphasis, you'd say that the house had been krazé net —the word net in this case meaning 100 percent, down to the ground, nothing left whatsoever but a pile of cement and twisted rebar.

  The Lafrance family had not always been poor. Venance's mother had once been a successful merchant. When Venance was twelve, his little brother Frandi got into a fight with a neighborhood bully. The other child was the son of a prominent Jérémie sorceress. Madame Lafrance and this other lady got to words. The other lady said, "Evelyne, you're too rich! You won't have money again!" Various magical curses were thus effected, and after that Venance's mother no longer had the strength to go to the market. That's how the Lafrance family fell on such hard times.

  A couple of months after we met Venance, his mother came to visit us. Madame Lafrance was a slender, pretty woman in an ankle-length skirt who never smiled—she looked a little like she was suffering at all times from a very bad stomachache. She wanted, she told us, to start a little business buying vegetables wholesale off the boat from Port-au-Prince, then reselling them in the market, and she asked if we would be willing to invest in her enterprise.

  Was she, I asked, still afraid of the effects of the magic curse?

  "Oh, no!" she said. That was all finished.

  We gave her the money, but things didn't work out as well as we had hoped: Madame Lafrance invested half her funds in the lottery and the remainder in a large stock of garlic. Madame Lafrance did not win the lottery. The garlic failed to move in the market and then rotted. When we asked her what happened, she explained that her enemies had— once again! —used black magic to curse her and her market stall.

  We kept trying to help the Lafrances. There is only one upside to living on 50 cents per day: it shouldn't be that hard to reach $1.50 per day. That's the difference between the bitterest poverty and what Haiti's former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide called "dignified poverty." We were willing to try most anything short of giving them a large wad of cash. What follows is a nonexhaustive list of various schemes we employed to help them:

  Venance wanted to sell coconut water on the beach, at the big party the local population held every August to celebrate Jérémie's patron saint. I fronted Venance the capital to acquire the coconuts, but he forgot to bring his machete. When he went back home to get his machete, people stole all his coconuts.

  ...And then there was the time Madame Lafrance wanted to sell clothes on the street at Christmas. This scheme, too, was a failure, as Madame Lafrance bought ugly clothes. Also, we later learned, she gave away half the clothes to her relatives.

  ...And then there was the time my wife and I came back from New York with a suitcase stuffed with merchandise that we'd found in a dollar store in Chinatown—a dozen toothbrushes for a dollar; children's toys; little clocks; cheap cosmetics; and so on. Madame Lafrance and Venance got to squabbling about just whom this merchandise was intended for. Both insisted that the other would waste the profits: Venance told us that his mother would spend the money on the lottery and magic; Madame Lafrance predicted that Venance would buy himself new clothes. Venance eventually dropped out of school to sell the merchandise himself. All the stock was sold at a loss, and Venance never went back to school, although he did acquire a nice wardrobe.

  This last failure was what convinced us to leave the Lafrances to their own destiny. Our small experiment in social engineering had done more harm than good, and the Lafrances were as poor when we were done as when we started.

  Port-au-Prince after the quake abounded in conspiracy theories. Many people were convinced that the United States military had caused the quake, using advanced high-technology weapons. Apparently such weapons had once been featured on the Discovery Channel. The earthquake was said to be either the result of an experiment gone awry, or the prelude to an invasion. Why would you want to invade Haiti? I asked. Who wants this place? It seemed I was naive: people told me that Haiti possessed vast mineral wealth and untapped oil reserves. All this jibed nicely with a central facet of the Haitian worldview—namely, that the great nations of the world all yearned to dominate plucky little Haiti.

  A cartoon in the standard fifth-grade textbook, Histoire de Mon Pays, illustrates the thesis nicely. Haiti is shown not as a small island in the Caribbean, but as a huge and swollen territory sprawling from the reaches of the North Pole to the equator. Four figures, ostentatiously white and with rapacious grins, stretch from the four corners of the globe to lay huge hairy hands on Haitian soil. They are labeled France, the United States, England, and Germany.

  If all the world were conspiring against Haiti, then your neighbor was probably conspiring against you. Truckloads of fifty-five-pound sacks of rice were being given away every day throughout Port-au-Prince after the quake, a program organized by the World Food Program, working with a consortium of international NGOs. These NGOs were staffed by foreigners and relied on the cooperation of Haitian staff to decide who should receive assistance and who shouldn't. It was a commonplace of tent-city life that the Haitian staff had rigged the game: they were giving out rice only to their own families, or they were demanding kickbacks for the ration cards. People took me aside to level accusations at their neighbors, who were said to have counterfeited their card; or sold their rice on the black market at exorbitant prices; or feigned extreme poverty to receive aid, but were secretly wealthy.

  The mood of suspicion was contagious: after a little while, I got suspicious too. People everywhere asked me for help. In the claustrophobic camp on the Route de l'Aeroport, one woman insisted that she had never received rice because she had been a partisan of the deposed President Aristide. Sitting inside her house in plain view were two full bags of rice. When I pointed them out, the little crowd around us began to laugh appreciatively. Nobody thought this lady had done anything wrong. Neither did I. Getting by isn't a sin.

  About a year after I met Venance, he moved to Port-au-Prince. H
e was eighteen years old, and he went without so much as a gourde in his pocket.

  In Venance's way of thinking, the world was like a series of concentric circles, the absolute center of which was Carrefour Prince, the village where he was born and where his grandmother still lived. You might not eat as much in Carrefour Prince as you'd like, but you'd always have something: there was (almost) always breadfruit from the breadfruit tree. But you were absolutely trapped. Life today was like life yesterday and like life tomorrow. The next circle outward was Jérémie. This was the life journey his mother had made: to leave the countryside. Venance had explored every narrow alley of the town and gotten nowhere. He had discovered only the world of his mother—small, provincial, mistrustful, and suspicious. This was a world in which the best you could aspire to was just scraping by, in which either your enemies were plotting against you or you were plotting against your enemies; a world dominated by the fear of magic. But Port-au-Prince—that was the outer circle of this particular human being's universe. It was the place to go in Haiti if you were young and excited about life.

  Port-au-Prince was the only place in all of Haiti commensurate with Venance Lafrance's ambitions—to live decently, to eat copiously, to dress sharply, all without having to work very hard.

  Shortly after Venance left Jérémie, my wife and I moved to Port-au-Prince also.

  Venance was no longer a daily fixture in our life, but he made a point of staying in contact with us. He'd call every week or two, and from time to time we saw each other. A call from Venance Lafrance is a unique act of telephonic communication, because Venance, having no money to make a telephone call, will call—and hang up—until you call him back. There is no relenting and no choice. He might continue to call—and hang up—for an hour. Then he will take a break, perhaps to play dominoes or take a nap. He will then begin to call—and hang up—all over again, until finally you call him back. Venance is, above all, patient.

  My Port-au-Prince was behind high walls and tinted windows: I shopped in a supermarket surrounded by a twenty-foot wall topped with barbed wire, and a squad of shotgun-toting toughies patrolled the parking lot. Venance's Port-au-Prince ran parallel to mine and was there always, but without Venance was invisible to me. Venance could hardly walk a block downtown without slapping hands with another acquaintance. He knew how everyone on the street earned their living, every scam, dodge, and swindle. Venance could tell me the latest jokes (I never found them very funny) or the latest Creole slang. He told me gossip from Cité Soleil, the slum where he lived: apparently the president of Haiti, René Preval, had spent an evening there not long before, drinking rum on the stoop. Every time I left Venance, I gave him a few bucks, and I considered the money well spent.

  Venance was getting by in Port-au-Prince. He had scraped together the money to buy a portable telephone, and he wandered the city selling phone calls—anyone who wanted to make a call could use Venance's phone. Half of the young men in Port-au-Prince have the same job, but Venance was unusually good at it: Venance was social and knew everyone, and people liked to use Venance's phone. In the course of a long day strolling the city, he might make a hundred gourdes—about $2.50. This is why Venance had come to the big city. His job took him all over town: he could walk over to the sprawling neighborhood of Carrefour on the south side, with its narrow twisting lanes heaped high with garbage—he had family there—or he could park himself on the Champ de Mars out front of the National Palace. He could just sit on the corner with his buddies playing dominoes.

  Venance's hold on the city, though, was tenuous at best. He was robbed at gunpoint and lost his phone and income. Then the cousin he was staying with evicted him from his shack and Venance was forced to mooch off a succession of different, more distant relations, who tolerated him for a short time, then got tired of feeding his perennially hungry mouth. At one point he thought he found a job as a houseboy: a childhood acquaintance had become a police officer and needed somebody to watch over his car and dogs. This fell through when the police officer was transferred to the northern city of Cap Haitien. The last of Venance's relatives was sick of him. Venance had just about exhausted his options in Port-au-Prince when he met Cousin Maxo.

  Venance met Maxo Pierre on the Champ de Mars. Maxo made a living selling barbecued chicken there in the evening. It turned out that Maxo came from Chambellan, not far at all from Jérémie. Both Venance and Maxo were proud sons of the Grand'Anse province, so there was a bond between them. Thereafter, on seeing Maxo, Venance always asked after Maxo's bad foot, a kindness Maxo noted. Sometimes Venance passed all day with Maxo down on the Champ de Mars telling stories. This was about the time when Venance was out of a job and home, and he opened his heart to the bearded older man. Maxo said, "Venance, barbecue business is good business. Tomorrow if you want you can become a big barbecue entrepreneur. Keep it up. Venance, stay with me for a long time. That way you can get ahead."

  Chicken was a good business for Venance, not only on account of the fact that it suited his temperament and he was a good chicken cook, but also because he was observant and a fast runner. You needed to run fast if you were going to make it in the chicken game—the police would impound the barbecue of anyone caught grilling out on the Champ de Mars. That's why Venance was so useful to Cousin Maxo: Maxo had the bad foot, but when the police came down, Venance could grab that 'cue and fly. Together they made a good team, Venance and Cousin Maxo—Cousin Maxo teaching the young man the secrets of the Champ de Mars BBQ game, showing him the special Maxo chicken sauce; Venance protecting the BBQ from the police; the two of them sociable fellows, flirting with the ladies and grilling up the birds and laughing and joking until the early hours of the morning.

  Not only did Maxo bring Venance into his business, but he invited this lanky kid off the street into his home, giving him a place to sleep right on the floor with his own kids. That's when Venance started calling Maxo "Cousin Maxo," as a sign of respect and affection. Venance appreciated the fact that Cousin Maxo treated him like a man, but treated him like family, too, showing him kindness, never telling him what to do, just letting him be.

  In Maxo, Venance found something he'd been looking for all his life. His father had been a sorcerer named Destiné Paul. Destiné Paul quarreled with an unsatisfied client. The client swore he would take his revenge on Destiné Paul. Which he did—Venance's father died, a victim himself of magic, when Venance was just five months in the womb.

  Each morning Maxo would give Venance a little money for coffee and bread. Venance saved a bit of that every day and soon was able to invest in a chicken breast or two, which he put on the grill. The profit was his own, and he turned it around into more chickens. What he was looking forward to and working toward was the day he could buy himself a whole case of chicken. Break up the birds, boil 'em. Rent refrigerator space. Get himself a barbecue of his own. Buy cabbage and bananas and manioc. Go out on the Champ de Mars at night, pay to plug a light bulb into the generator, and call himself a chicken man, too.

  Venance had been out every day with Cousin Maxo for about six months, selling chicken and earning, when Venance got it into his head that he wanted to spend the hot month of August back home in Jérémie. He had a little cash in his hand and he wanted to flaunt it, show the girls back home the success he was making of himself in Port-au-Prince. Cousin Maxo told Venance that this was a poor idea, that if he had a good thing going, he should stick with it. But Venance ignored Cousin Maxo and went home.

  The National Palace had been a source of considerable pride. I was standing in front of its vast, very white edifice when a young man approached and asked me if it was true that the National Palace, before its collapse, had been the most beautiful building in the world, as he had learned in school.

  "It was very beautiful," I said, looking for a diplomatic answer.

  The conversation attracted, as often happens in Haiti, a crowd of kibitzers, all wanting to throw in their own two cents. Two Haitians can converse, but three is an argumen
t. Some maintained that the presidential palace was the most beautiful building in the world: others that it was the most beautiful presidential palace in the world. The argument was not about aesthetics but about the precise recollection of a fact that had been memorized in a schoolbook. The conversation got quite heated, and in the end one man had to be taken away before he slugged somebody.

  In a city of remarkable piles of rubble, the presidential palace rubble was particularly spectacular. In its collapse it looked as if it had been constructed originally with Legos, then smashed by the hand of a very large child. It was somewhere between fracturé and krazé—it all depended on whether one looked to the wings, which were almost intact, or to the center. Certain portions of the rubble expanse could even be described as penché.

  A large tent city had cropped up directly in front of the gates of the palace, and then metastasized to the palace's flanks. Each of Port-au-Prince's tent cities had its own character, as any small town will, and here the mood was surlier and more aggressive than in other refugee camps. I asked somebody why the mood in this particular camp was so rough, and was told that it was due to the presence of the many escapees from the National Penitentiary, which was just a few blocks from here—although I found this explanation unlikely. Surely if anyone had cause to rejoice these days, it was the escapees.