A HEART TOO MANY

There will never be a monument to commemorate his life.  Those who do good works are too selfless to be remembered and would probably shrink at the idea of it.  Besides, we are too prone as a nation to memorialize our wars and the people who fought them, as well as their leaders in the government, to raise a statue or install, even, a plaque to remember those whose lives are spent in the daily rounds of cleansing the wounds of the spirit.  Oh, he was no Jesus-sprite walking among us.  Don’t get me wrong.  But that fact is what makes him all the more rare in our lives.  He was that rarest of things, a man with a conscience.

     He told me a part of his story years ago─how he had lost himself in a swamp of self-pity and felt creep over him that dark night of the soul in which we are certain of our damnation; and over the years I have mulled it over as a kind of paradigm of what’s wrong with our age.  I had met him every once in a while─at one or another city function, at this or that restaurant (I often dined alone in those days and so did he), at the theater, and, since we favored the same types of bars or lounges (quiet places), we often ran into each other late in the evenings and sipped a scotch together--we would find an out-of-the-way corner somewhere and talk.  We’d order drinks, and though I never plied him with questions about his life, our talk got round to it, anyway.  I sometimes wonder he had such faith in me to tell me the things he did.  I couldn’t talk to him about myself like that; I mean, even if I did have anything interesting to say.  It seemed to me at the time and does so even now when I think about him that he was without ego--not that he was self-effacing, like he might disappear into the woodwork or something.  Not at all.  If you think about it, one has to be something of an egotist to be self-effacing, a kind of egotist in reverse, an unhealthy egotist.  What he lacked was exactly that kind of self-consciousness.  He was always utterly and helplessly himself.  But he was a force, an energy, sometimes more than humanly so (when I think of what he did on the side of that mountain, the Pic De La Selle, deep in that sweltering terrain of mud villages and subsistence farms and of old cedar and mahogany trees on the knees of the mountain itself, where this story is going to take us, I am convinced of it), and I felt like I had been appointed his spiritual confessor. 

     He was a public servant in the old-fashioned sense of that term, working first from the church but later from within the political base of the city.  He brought a degree of social responsibility to an otherwise self-serving organization that resulted in genuine and lasting improvements in the city’s care of its less fortunate residents.  He was from the start a decent man.  But his story really begins when he was dumped by the woman he was going to marry.  That was the trauma that changed him.  What he did in response is what many men might do--but some of us not so dramatically.

     I can see him, as he described it, walking late at night across the small parking lot to the entrance of the pier carrying that bundle.  It looked like a pillowcase filled with small objects with rather sharp angles and protrusions, for the bundle was jaggedly stuffed, and at its bottom it sagged heavily with an object that swung like a pendulum as he walked.  Once on the wooden planks of the pier, his footsteps resounded, knock-knock, knock-knock, as he made his way steadily out to the gazebo-like shelter at its very end.  The sound of those footsteps almost unnerved him he said.  The pier jutted a hundred yards into the bay, and along its sides were moored small and large boats alike, and over them shone the pole lamps that lit up the slips for late-comers and those who came to work on their boats at night or to party or just sit around in them.  But it was very late, and the pier was now lonely and deserted.

     Knock-knock, knock-knock, he made his way steadily, holding up the bundle as best he could, those footsteps sounding like loud announcements of some nightmare doom at the worst, but of his presence and purpose at the very least, making him feel conspicuous enough to constantly look over his shoulder, giving him an appearance of guilt, so that he hurried along as fast as he could, his shadow lengthening out in front of him as he passed a pole lamp.  When he reached the shelter at the end of the pier, he rested the bundle on a settee, put his hands in his pockets, and stood at the very edge, surveying the night sky over the bay and then the blackness of the water below, still and smooth, though disturbed here and there by an insect or a fish, which made the water’s surface reflect the pier lights in sharp disappearing glints.

     It was a bitter thing he was doing.  Even his going there was a part of the bitterness, the late hour itself intensifying the feeling and making it all the more tangible, like an external thing.  I remember him sipping his drink telling me about it, and my feeling both of wonder and shame that he could talk about it at all.  It wasn’t like he was obsessed; rather, talking about it seemed his way of comprehending it, of making sense out of it.  For me, listening was sometimes obsessive, though.  I wanted to listen to him. 

     Anyway, after a while, he turned to the bundle, lifted it, and tossed it far out over the water, watching it arc out and down and splash and submerge, a pale white-green cloud rapidly fading as it sank into the blackness.  At first he turned away, but then he paused and turned back and looked again at where he guessed the bundle hit the water.  All was calm as before except for a slight rocking of the water that was rapidly diminishing.  It was done.  Something--remnants of a life--seemed to have passed virtually out of existence, and he breathed a sigh of relief.  The bitterness was lessened but not gone.  It would never be gone. 

     As he walked back along the pier, he felt empty, emotionless.  The resentment and ill-will, the feeling of betrayal, the sense of loss, the hurt--all went over the pier and sank with the bundle.  He hoped as permanently.  But the residue of bitterness would remain.  He was changed and he knew that he would never trust again, that he would never let himself sink again with utter abandon into his feelings for another.  It was not just his relationship with her that was over.  What was over, he felt, permanently, was his capacity to love--that unreserved, unguarded, wholly submissive feeling of union with another who as unreservedly and unguardedly gave herself to the same feelings for him.  This change in him was the cause of his bitterness.  He spoke frankly about these feelings, on and on in a half analytical, half contemplative voice, pausing only to sip his scotch, and I had to listen, because they were not my feelings and I was absorbed by them, by their intensity; yet I was all a-blush.  Odd, how unaware he was of me; how unaware he was of the strangeness of it, of himself as well, so immersed in it all. 

     “I’m forty years old!” he said to himself as he drove home.  “And I’ve done a lot of growing up tonight.” 

     “I’m forty years old,” he said to himself again, and he thought, “What the hell have I done with my life?”  He drove slowly in a meditative mood, in no hurry to get home, where he would only throw himself on his bed and lie sleepless, sinking into unhealthy feelings, the worst of which would be the loneliness he fended off by driving. 

     In fact, he had accomplished a great deal in his life.  But it was at this moment he had turned away from it. 

     I had not seen him again for many years.  And I have to admit I made no attempt to look him up.  We weren’t close-- it was always the chance encounter that brought us together.  He had dropped out, apparently, and not seeing him around, I just forgot about him.  But on that last night, he had drunk quite a bit, more than was usual for him, and I thought I understood why, given the story he told me.  But as with many other things, I was quite wrong.  I found out afterwards--one always finds out afterwards--that he had been losing a grip on himself for some time.  What he didn’t talk about that night was the revolt on the city council over his efforts to use the utility board profits to invest in public housing.  He not only lost that fight, but he had squandered his reputation in the effort and made enemies out of friends and supporters.  The personal betrayal, however, is what pushed him over.  Politics is always nasty business, the one vocation in which the most admirable among us are least likely to succeed, for the price of honesty and faithfulness of purpose is almost always rejection.  But if politics is nasty business, romance is worse, especially for someone in the public eye.  And this was his lot.

II

I next heard of him, almost five years later, under the strangest of circumstances.  I had flown to Port au Prince to do a follow-up story on Haiti after the withdrawal of US troops there and the turn over of oversight to the UN.       That was years ago now, and I have grown old.  But time gives one insight as well as infirmity, insight if not wisdom, and I think I can see things now about myself and about him that I was unable to see when I was still in my prime.  I had gotten to the hotel, checked in, and headed for the bar.  I had arranged to meet a contact there, one René Artaud, a former student at the university in Port au Prince, who had organized an underground movement to  resist—to assassinate, really, but also to attack publicly, as though by spontaneous mob action, and kill openly on the streets—the Tontons Macoutes, the infamous dictator François Duvalier’s secret police whose business it was to murder anyone who voiced complaint or acted independently and who were still intimidating and brutalizing and murdering during the Cedras period and after Aristide’s return.  I had gotten a message to him through another contact at the university, and together we were going to head for the countryside where we could talk, for the city was dangerous for him.  I half expected him to send someone and not come himself, but then he said in his reply that he would meet me.  Assuming he had meant that literally, I hoped Haiti was settling down and becoming a less dangerous place.

     But when I came into the bar, there was no one around who looked like he might have been sent by Artaud, and Artaud himself was not there.  So I got a drink and took a table by myself near the windows, where I could watch the approaches to the hotel.  There were half a dozen men in the bar, all of them correspondents, I thought, with maybe a UN representative among them, though it was hard to tell; I didn’t recognize anyone.  I sat, sipping a gin and tonic, thinking of the last time I had been in Port au Prince--during the dark days of the embargo, when people were literally starving, before Carter came.  I was shaken from the reverie by the name--two men were talking about C. Ariel Minturno.  It was odd to hear that name there, in a three-quarter’s-empty bar in the middle of the afternoon in this dingy, beautiful, poverty-stricken, cheerful, blue-and-gold-columned marketplace, white-marble, catholic city with its Moorish turrets and iron gates and forbidding vista of the South Atlantic.

     C. Ariel Minturno--the C stood for Carlucci, a name given to him, he once told me, in a fit of matriarchal pride, it being the surname of his mother’s people, which he never used, even when he was a boy, preferring to be called Ari, which is how I knew him and everyone else, I suppose.  How many C. Ariel Minturnos were there in this world?  Could there be another, I wondered?  So I went over to these men and asked who they were talking about.

      He was my Ari all right.  But the story I heard was disturbing, and I knew as I heard it that my plans and my purpose for being there were going to change.  This was another and a different story, a much more compelling one, and one which I had something of a personal stake in.  All my instincts told me I needed to become involved.  At first, I thought of it mainly as an opportunity to get a better story than anything I had dreamed of when I planned to come here, for that was a common work-a-day story, one that others could and would, in time, do as well or better than me.  But this was my story.  That’s what I thought at first.  Ungenerous as I am.  But I got by this journalistic crassness, and I like to think I had some small role in what turned out to be one man’s story of personal redemption, a story of salvation that I hope has rubbed off a little of its celestial balm on me. 

     Ari had left New York and come to Port au Prince with a church mission during the dark days of the Cedras regime.  With others he had worked in a food distribution program, staying non-political at first, for that is always a survival necessity in such circumstances.  But Ari couldn’t stay non-political.  It just wasn’t in his nature.  It wasn’t the poverty, nor the cruel domination of ninety-five percent of the population by the elite, nor even the brutal suppression of dissent by the agents of the regime that drove him into losing his objectivity. 

     He had taken into his care a family that had been brutalized by the Tontons Macoutes--a mother and four children, three girls and a boy, all very young.  The husband had been murdered while cultivating his little plot of white beans and corn, his decapitated corpse bleeding into the earth his lifeblood, so that the children had a few quarts of beans that summer that were truly watered by their father’s blood, sweat, and tears.  Ari had taken a little bungalow on the outskirts of town where he housed the family and lived himself, or rather, where he went in the evenings to wash and sleep before another long day.  One evening, returning to the pale-blue painted shack, he stepped on something at the threshold when he entered, and, looking down, feeling around with the toe of his shoe, pushed into the moonlight that shone through the door a severed hand, a child’s hand.  The whole family had been butchered.  It was, as far as he could tell, an absolutely motiveless crime--for these people represented no danger to anyone.  It was just a message.  A telegram.  “This is what happens when you come to market with your pathetic bushel of corn and peck of rice and complain.  We are watching.”     After that he disappeared.  The church mission thought at first he too had been killed, but that it would have been counterproductive for the regime to let the body be found.  So everyone assumed he was dead.

     But then stories began to circulate that a demon prowled the city at night, that it entered homes through windows and back doors and while people were sleeping stole the hearts out of their bodies.  At first, the demon entered the homes of suspected agents of the regime, but then it began to enter the homes and steal the hearts of the mulatto elite, scaling walls, penetrating locked fences, squeezing through the bars on windows, evading, because it was a demon and a ghost, the alarm systems the wealthy wired into their homes. Every death during those days was attributed to the demon, though nothing was ever reported openly, and word of its depredations spread by mouth, always in whispers, from one quarter of the city to another, and from thence into the countryside, even to the remotest villages.  Voodoo rituals in the soil-eroded hills late at night around the dancing fire invoked the demon over and over to exact revenge against the oppressors, and counter rituals were held behind closed doors to ward off the evil.  Eventually, reprisals began to become irrational and terrifying, and after a while the whole situation exhausted itself and the demon was never heard from again.

     How many people died as a result of the hysteria caused by the demon will never be known.  But some thought they knew who and what was at the bottom of it all, and that he had killed exactly two people: those agents who butchered the family.  The rest was pure hokum, a fantasy attributable to the hysteria.  But many people died.  Years passed, and C. Ariel Minturno dropped from public consciousness and was forgotten.  However, word has come from the countryside that there is a tall white man living on the Pic de la Selle, the highest mountain in Haiti, about fifty miles south east of Port au Prince, and speculation is running rampant.  Everyone knows it’s him.

     As it turned out, all the men in the bar were correspondents.  The two who told me Ari’s story were Americans; of the other four, two were French, one was from Caracas, the other from Santo Domingo, and they had all paired off.  The others had stopped talking, however, and began listening.  The story was not news to them; they seemed more interested in me and my reaction to it.  After introductions, one of the Frenchmen, a short, squarish man with a neat, thin mustache, who puckered his lips as he spoke, asked me if I had anything new to add to the story.  I told him I had last been in Haiti just before Cedras took his leave, and that by then the whole affair must have died down, because I knew nothing about it.  In those days, anticipation of Aristide’s return dominated the country and focused our leads like nothing else in Haiti’s recent history.  I did not, of course, let on that I knew Ari before he came to Haiti and had, thus, an inside line to his life and story.  I had already resolved to go into the countryside and find him.

     I guess my thoughts were pretty obvious, for the Frenchman puckered up and sang out, “On ne peut pas va, mon ami,” making a forward motion with his arm, “dans la compagne,” pausing and then finishing in English, “it is deadly, how do you say, fatal?” 

     “Why is that?” I asked.

     “À cause des terroristes,” he began to explain, but the American sitting to my left, an older man with long graying sideburns whose name was Jaffe, waved his hand and interrupted, saying that there was a secret war still going on, involving efforts to clean out the old Tontons Macoutes not only from the civic life of the city, but from wherever they had fled, and the countryside was not safe.  Rumors of violence and bloodshed were everywhere, though no official recognition of them was forthcoming and nothing was ever reported in the media.  A correspondent trekking through the countryside would threaten to expose this dirty little war, and he wouldn’t last out there.  “It’s vengeance-taking pure and simple,” Jaffe said, “and they don’t want us mucking about in it.”

     My thoughts returned then to Artaud, who I suspected was more than a little involved in this “vengeance-taking.”  If he were, and if he were already quartered in the countryside, as I expected he was, he might well be my means to get to Ari.  Artaud was an organizer, a natural, and I could imagine his having a network of informants and agents ready to act in all the villages, which were sparsely scattered along the old and now-dilapidated US-built road system and the rivers and valleys and foothills of the heavily mountainous interior.

     We had all gathered round one table, the others pulling chairs up and holding their drinks in their hands.  The Frenchmen both smoked and began to offer cigarettes around, and I took one and lighted up.  Stories about the dangers in the countryside were shared, with the Domingan telling a harrowing tale about one of the Libón river crossings between Haiti and the Dominican Republic and the bodies of what looked like three families, children and all, found washed up in the river’s eddies there--people trying to cross into the political safety of the only other country on the Island.

     Talk had returned to Minturno, with the Venezuelan wondering why the church-worker had not fled the country instead of sheltering in its humid, hot, poverty-stricken interior, and why he has been there so long, especially since the collapse of the Cedras regime and the occupation by the US--events which should have induced him to come out.  We all had another round of drinks when the same squarish Frenchman said, “But that is the story, c’est ça, what makes us wonder, what makes us all want to go find him, n’est pas?” 

     “Of course,” Jaffe said.  “Why the hell would he, I mean if he really is living on the Pic de la Selle, Why?  It can’t be anything but misery.  We’d all like that story.  But I’m afraid we’d be disappointed if we risked going out there to get it.”

     “Why?” I asked him, interested in his view, for I had a feeling that I was not going to be disappointed when I finally hooked up with Ari.  Nothing about that man was disappointing.  Unless, maybe, you were a woman.  And I didn’t really know her story. 

     “Because we’d find either that it wasn’t him, or that if it was, he had merely gone crazy or something.  That would be a story in itself, but not the one any of us would risk going out there to get.”

     “I see,” I said, “You’re probably right.”  I could see the interest in their eyes begin to flag.  They had probably discussed this among themselves and were not surprised to find that I agreed with Jaffe’s judgment.  They were ready to go on to other topics, and I felt it was time I tried to find out what happened to Artaud.  I took my leave, and as I walked away, I heard the Frenchman say, meditatively, in English, “On the other hand, Jaffe, those who sit on the sides of mountains learn things, no?  Things that change their lives?”  I felt my stomach go hollow, for the words were spoken almost without accent and the sense of pretense darkened my mood, but also the words had sparked a premonitory flash in which I saw Ari and the Frenchman and myself; we were sitting together in the dark, and Ari and the Frenchman were deep in talk, and although I was there, I was cut out.  The flash filled me with a sense of urgency, and I set about finding Artaud by deciding first to head for the university.

    

III

There was a taxi service in front of the hotel, and the cab sitting there was an old rusted Citroen with its windows rolled down and its driver sound asleep behind the wheel.  I regretted having to wake him, but just as I was about to shake his shoulder through the window, someone hailed me from the hotel, waking the driver, who popped up, got out of the cab, and opened the passenger door.  A call had come for me inside.  I apologized to the driver, telling him I probably wouldn’t need his cab after all.

     It was not Artaud but a go-between.  Someone would come by shortly.  I should wait in the lobby.  Be alone.  That was all.  The caller was abrupt.  It made me uneasy.  My purposes had changed.  Artaud, when he heard from me, agreed to a meeting because he wanted to use me to tell a very different kind of story than the one being told through the conventional media.  I was aware that would be the case when I decided to contact him, and I had, after what I learned in the bar, a pretty good idea of how he wanted to spin Haiti’s contemporary situation.  I was not only willing to give myself to his cause, because I knew him and trusted him, but I was willing to go further and propagandize for him as well.  I wondered now, however, how he would react to my changed purposes.  I hoped he wouldn’t just dismiss me, lose interest and walk away.  If that happened, I would never get near Ari.  Somehow, I had to do René’s bidding and get him to do mine.     

     It took about half an hour, but a car finally pulled up.  It was an ancient Ford, a late forties or early fifties model, two-door, black with a visor over the windshield outside, and tires so worn the white canvas liners showed beneath the rubber.  I got in, doubtfully.  But the driver eased into the road with a big smile on his face and in a few minutes we were coasting along happily at about twenty miles an hour.  The driver said he was taking me to a town just east of the city called Pétionville and from there someone else would take me the rest of the way.  It was getting late when we reached the town, and the driver didn’t stop but drove a little way past till we came to another car waiting on the road for us. 

     This one was in no better condition, a French model, I think a Renault, but I didn’t care much anymore, since I was getting tired and anxious with night coming on.  We drove without headlights in the deepening dark for about another hour and a half, over what looked like a cow path rather than a road, or a footpath, since there weren’t enough cows in Haiti to make any kind of path, coming at last to a village.  The buildings were small huts made of sticks and mud with thatched roofs, with animal pens at their sides and garden plots behind them.  There was a great deal of commotion when we arrived.  There were two large buildings in the village, one of them a wood-frame structure appearing to be a church and the other a cinder-block building that could only be a clinic.  People were gathering excitedly around the church, and this is where the car stopped and let me out. 

     After the car pulled away, a very old and wrinkled man came to me, stooped, keeping himself up by leaning on a cane, and put his frail hand on my arm and said something I didn’t understand, for the Creole spoken in the countryside is made up of various African languages and colonial French, and I had not been exposed to it very much.  But he seemed to anticipate this and took hold of my arm and gestured with the cane in his other hand that I should follow him, which I promptly did.  The others gathered alongside us, and together we made our way, more or less at the old man’s pace, through the dark to a place outside the village where a great fire was burning and where I could see many other people milling around and sitting.  

     As we neared, the crowd around the fire had at first fallen into silence and then began to organize itself.  On the far side an object had been placed, something made out of a rice sack and looking for all the world like a little ghost.  A stake had been shoved into the ground and over it the sack had been shaped like a human figure, standing perhaps two feet high.  Sitting next to it was Artaud, and as the people circled the great fire, they laid mats on the ground and sat on them.  The old man, still holding onto my arm, guided me round the fire and pointed to a mat next to Artaud, who looked up at me and gestured I should sit, which I did, crossing my legs to keep them out of the heat of the fire.  The old man then passed his cane to someone standing next to him, and with the help of two women, sat on a mat next to me.

     Immediately, he began to chant, his eyes closed and his hands clasped in front of him in an attitude of prayer.  He chanted for a long time, so long that, sitting beside him with my own eyes closed, I began to feel his voice as a pulse, my own pulse, or, at any rate, as something indistinguishable from it.  The people listened at first in silence, as we typically do during a church service when the priest is saying the mass. 

The combination of the sitting, the strangeness of the surroundings, the fire, the effigy in front of us, the almost suffocating heat, and the lilting, unvarying rhythm of the old man’s voice induced in me a hypnotic suspension of critical judgment that made it difficult for me to note what was going on, so that I have no idea how much time had passed before I began to hear others adding their voices to the old man’s, now taking the lead, and now falling behind the old man’s, then others swelling up in little groups, first on the other side of the fire, then on this, then on the left side, and then on the right.  It seemed like a kind of storytelling in Gregorian chant, except the rhythms weren’t Gregorian, with first one participant adding to the narrative and then another, and then groups of three or four intoning together another part of the tale.  I had, of course, no idea what the chanting was about.

     Then I heard a hissing percussive sound, as of someone shaking a maraca, or a pair of them, or a hundred of them (I never saw where the sound came from), in time with the rhythm of the chant, and a woman rose and began to dance, near her mat at first, but then moving, her eyes closed, round the fire.  Her dance was hypnotic, as though she were in a trance, being moved by a force or power other than herself, for, indeed, she never opened her eyes, but shook herself from her shoulders down to her feet in a rhythm that now began to be controlled by the instruments, which increased in tempo, and continued to increase, until I could no longer fathom how the woman could move so. 

But she continued, and continued, and vibrated round and round the fire, singing out once in a while, at first harmoniously, but then erratically and strangely.  And she went on.  And she went on, shrieking and shaking.  Her clothes had become saturated with sweat, her face shone, her bust, which had become exposed from her tearing at her clothes and from her gyrations and contortions, dripped with perspiration, and her hair hung wet and gleaming on her neck and shoulders.  I was fascinated and bewildered, psychically fatigued, and wondered what the ceremony meant and why I was there.

     And then it was over.  The silence hung thickly as the two women who helped the old man sit came to him now and helped him rise.  The dancer had fallen to her knees just beyond the ring of people about a quarter of the way round the fire, and the women walked the old man to her.  One of them placed his mat in front of the dancer, and then they helped him sit.  He began to talk to her, gently wiping her face with a cloth he took from his pocket, and she responded, still in her trance, sometimes in a word or two, but sometimes in what seemed to be a disquisition, to which the people sitting near would respond in exclamations of understanding or intonations of bewilderment or surprise. 

     All during this time I had not spoken to Artaud, but now I turned to him and asked why I was here.  He only gestured with his head toward the old man and said, “The houngan will tell you.  Soon, now.  It won’t be long.”

     The story I heard that night from the old man was shocking and dramatic, and I was convinced at the time of the existence of powers that our materialistic science and rationalism could not explain.  Speaking through Artaud, the old man told me of Ari’s struggles since he left Port au Prince.  These struggles were of deep concern to those who lived among the Massif de la Selle, for Ari had come to be known as a demon, and his presence was a threat, spiritually and physically, to any who, in what they considered an ultimate misfortune, caught sight of him.

 The old man knew Ari’s feelings, state of mind, his sense of alienation and isolation, his desperation, and, what most concerned me, his nearness to and disturbance by a deep and profound mystery which had manifested itself to him in his lonely watches on the Pic de la Selle.  The old man knew, also, that I was a friend of the demon on the mountain and told me that although death was closing in on him it was still possible to save him.  His death on the mountain would be a catastrophe to all who lived in this part of Haiti, and I was charged with the task of going to the mountain itself, finding him, and taking him away.

     I asked Artaud to question the houngan about this mystery that disturbed Ari.  The old man seemed most upset when talking about it, and Artaud had to struggle with words when trying to translate what the old man said.  Silence had fallen.  Everyone concentrated on the old man.  We had been sitting for a long time, so long that the fire had almost burned itself out, and as its light diminished, the stars overhead gleamed more brightly, and the night air became chill, for we were in an open plain on the valley floor, with the shadows of the mountains at our backs and sides, and a light breeze swept over us, stirring the fire and raising scarlet-glowing embers, which swirled over the heads of those leaning towards the little group we made about the old man.  His face was wrinkled like a prune, his skin as dark, but his eyes grew round and fearful.  He spoke in a low whisper, Artaud lowering his head to catch his words.  When he was done, Artaud took a long time before explaining.

     “The houngan says,” he finally began, “that all people, all beings, are bound to their lives and to the earth like a child is bound to its mother in the days after birth.  What binds us is not a material thing, like a rope. . . ,” and here he paused and spoke again with the old man.  Then he turned to me again and continued, “Unlike a child, who learns to break the binds that keep it tied to its mother, we can never be free of them,” and he paused again, spoke again to the old man, who answered without inflection in his voice, waving his hand in a negating gesture.  Artaud stopped many times in this effort to translate the houngan’s  meaning, always receiving that gentle wave, as though the old man didn’t want to explain, and it had to be dragged from him.  “These binds are a way of being,” Artaud went on, “a feeling that carries us all through life, and we cannot break them. . . .  This is so for animals as well as humans.  It is so for all beings. . . .  The houngan says we cannot know the truth about our own lives because of these binds, which hide from us, like a blindfold over the eyes, the truth about existence, of which our lives are but a very small part. . . .  For if we knew this truth, we would not wish to live.  God made it so. . . .  This blindness is God’s gift to all living things. . . .  Sometimes, though, as with the demon on the mountain, these binds break all on their own before our time to die comes, and we live for a while able to see the truth about life, about existence.  When this happens, we are no longer human. . . .  We become something else.  This is the mystery. . . .  The houngan says you don’t want to know more, and he doesn’t want to say more, for it is not good for anyone to think such thoughts.”  

     The houngan’s face was itself a mystery, stony in its impassiveness, his many wrinkles seeming hieroglyphic in their etched depths, his eyes shining, betraying in their round wondering a knowledge that filled me with another kind of chill.  Many thoughts raced through my mind, many questions rose in connection with them, and for a long time I sat, contemplating the old man, contemplating Ari, the pier in New York where he tossed away his life, the image of the child’s hand in the moonlight at the threshold of the door to his blue-painted shanty, swollen bodies caught face down along the banks and in the eddies of the Libón River, and I wondered if I had, after all, the nerve to go to that mountain and find him, speak to him, save him. 

     But then, the fearfulness draining from his eyes and his face relaxing into gentleness, the old man, no longer a houngan, smiled and said something to the women at his side, who rose and helped him to get up; and then, retrieving his cane, he gestured for me to get up as well.  He took my arm, smiling still, and said something to Artaud, who said to me that the old man was taking me home for the night, for he liked me and wanted to feed me.  So, we all headed, again at the old man’s pace, back to the village.

IV

Artaud was very black, a man about my height--five foot ten--but unlike me he was lithe and very strong, with heavily muscled arms protruding from a lemon-yellow T-shirt that had an emblem of the Moorish gates on its front.  He had long thick nappy hair twisted into numerous braids that were fastened at their ends with twists of copper wire.  His muscularity and the massiveness of his head, with those wire-trimmed ropes for hair, gave him a commanding presence which, even if he was silent, intimidated.  We had gone to the church which had a large room or hall in the back, and here we sat at tables and had our evening meal.  We sat together, Artaud and I, and we finally had a chance to talk.  I had many questions, but the one that most occupied me was how the old man knew that I knew Ari. 

     “Did you tell the old man?” I asked him.

     “No,” he said, with a smile.  “How could I if I didn’t know it myself?”

     “Then how could he know?”

     “He is the houngan.  He knows.  Or he finds things out.  The woman told him.  Anyway, everybody has been obsessed with the man on the mountain and the houngan has been thinking about him for a long time.”

     “Why did you bring me out here, then?”

     “This is the nearest I come to Port au Prince.  Even in Petionville I am not safe.  The ceremony was not my idea.  The houngan is his own master.  There are no more priests.  Since Cedras they have been gone.  Look over there,” he pointed to the wall across from us, where a crucifix hung.  “Jesus hangs in his misery.  The old man worships him in his own way, for he knows that that man’s misery is everyone’s misery, even yours.  Even the man on the mountain’s.  People say the old man, in his dreams, sleeps on the cross.”

     I looked at the old man then, and he seemed happy and content, sitting back after his meal, talking with the women.  I had no doubt he was his own master, but he seemed like anybody’s grandfather to me.  I didn’t buy it.  Artaud was hiding something.  I could feel it.  I had a very strong impression that I was being used, or was going to be used, and I didn’t know to what end.  I didn’t like it.  But it bothered me that they all knew I was a friend of Ari’s.  If they knew that, what else did they know?

     “What’s next?” I asked Artaud.  “It seems like the old man has given me a mission--to get Ari off the mountain.  Do we stay here and talk, which was our plan?  Do we go to the mountain?  If I go, Artaud, are you coming with me?”

     That was the question I had really come here to ask, though in very different circumstances.  Everything had gone strange.  I didn’t know when I left the hotel how I was going to broach the subject of Ari.  Now I found myself in the middle of it.  It was all too strange--and that business of Ari no longer being human!  I was not only in a strange place, but it seemed like reality itself had shifted--or what I took for reality--making everything stranger still.

     “I will go with you.  If I don’t go with you, how will you get there?  Who do you know who could take you but me?”

     He said this in something of a pique, like he resented my having to ask, as though it was naturally expected that he should go with me.

     “This is all unexpected, Artaud.  I didn’t come here to go mountain climbing, and I didn’t know Ari was in Haiti.  I am a friend of his, but not a close friend.  He left New York a long time ago, and no one knew where he went.  At least, no one I knew.  I came here to talk with you.  You know about what.  But I do want to go to the mountain and find Ari, and I need you to help.”

     “We were both at the fire sitting in front of the mountain god.  His spirit went into the woman and through her he spoke to the houngan.  I was there, so this involves me as much as you, and it was not my plan either, for I have other things to do.  But I must now do this with you.”

     He seemed sincere, seemed really to believe in the ceremony and in the houngan.  I was moved.  All right, then.  I was glad.  I needed him.  I wanted him to come with me.  We went to bed early that night to get an early start in the morning, and as I waited for sleep, I thought of the mountain god, and I thought of Ari, and I wondered how they were getting on together.  Absurd, I know.  But I couldn’t help feeling they weren’t getting on that well.  

     Artaud and I had been led to one of the little houses or huts and given water to wash, and then we were shown a room where two cots had been set up for us.  We were up before dawn, had eaten something made of rice and eggs, and were on the road, or footpath, by first light.  I had a backpack with my tape recorder and writing pads and pens, and in this we stowed some mealy cakes and fruits and a gourd of water, enough to last us all day.  We would be passing through a number of villages before coming to the mountain, so we didn’t worry about supplies.

     There was no large-scale agriculture in this region, for the soil was mostly eroded away and what was left was dry, being in the rain shadow of the mountains as it was.  It was once heavily forested with cedar and mahogany trees, but these were harvested and the soil made barren by plantation farming long ago.  People eked out a living, though, and the landscape was dotted with little farmsteads widely dispersed. 

     We were nearly in the foothills of the Massif de la Selle when we set out, and the walking was at first easy, but it became more arduous as we began to climb.  Towards evening we were close to the peak, which dominated the landscape, catching the setting sun with its grand rocky upper reaches that glowed pink and were deeply grooved with dark vertical gashes of shadow.  The top of the peak was flat, and the side facing us had two spurs, one on each side, that seemed like companion peaks, only considerably lower in height.  Trees grew on its slopes, which made it seem invitingly green and vegetal up to about a third of its height.  At about two-thirds up, however, the peak narrowed greatly, and at that place there were many deeply cleft, almost horizontal ledges jutting from its side.  These seemed quite large, large enough for someone to build a hut on; even, if one could get soil up there, large enough to put a kitchen garden on.  It was on one of these that I expected we would find Ari, for that is what the villagers said, and it certainly made sense.

     In the last village we passed through, we had got food for the evening and the next day and talked to the people about Ari, asking them where he might be found on the mountain and how best to climb up to him.  The villagers knew Artaud, but even so, they were reluctant to talk about Ari.  The mention of him produced fear and silence, and Artaud had to prod and cajole them to find out how to reach him.  I remembered the talk at the hotel about the “dirty little war,” and wondered if Ari was involved, and how much Artaud was involved, and whether the war had anything to do with the people’s fear.  Could Ari be coming down off his mountain at night and prowling the countryside, killing men, women, and children fleeing the threat to their lives in Port au Prince or Petionville or any of the other cities and towns?  It seemed impossible for anyone to cross this country unobserved, so I didn’t know if this region was involved in the vengeance-taking.  Artaud was silent about these things.

     We had come to the place where the villagers told us to try, and now that it would soon be dark, we began to take thought about making a camp.  We were close to the tree line and decided to climb onto the mountain and get in among the trees so as to be able to make a fire and use the trees themselves for shelter.

     “Do you suppose,” I asked Artaud, crossing my legs in front of the little fire we had got started, “that he knows we’re here?  He could easily have seen us approaching.”

     “If he was watching, he knows we’re here.  I just hope he remembers you if he comes during the night.”  He had a big smile on his face.  He was digging in the backpack for the food the villagers had given us, taking out a round loaf of cornbread and a large chunk of white crumbly cheese.  “Maybe you should stay awake just in case.”

     “You’re joking, Artaud, I hope.  Do we have anything to fear?  I mean, he might really know there’s someone here looking for him, for who else would anybody come for?”

     “Don’t worry, be happy.  You’re a white man.  He can see that.”

     “What about you, Artaud.  Does he know you?”

     “Of course.  Who doesn’t know me?”

     “What does he know about you?”

     “Everything.”

     “Is that good or what?”

     “I’m not afraid, if that’s what you’re asking.”

     “So, we don’t have anything to fear.  Is that what you’re saying?”

     “Eat up, my friend.  Don’t be afraid.  Tomorrow it’ll all be over.”

     “So, what is everyone afraid of?  The old man said Ari is no longer human.  What does that mean?  Is he right?  Why were the villagers so frightened when we mentioned him?  And how are we going to find Ari anyway?  There’s no way up that rock face that I can see?”

     “So many questions!  Tomorrow will answer all of them.”

     He put some twigs and leaves in the fire, which flared up instantly, and then rested a large branch on the flames, which, dry as it was, began to burn almost as instantly.  There was a moment when we were with the old man that I mistrusted Artaud, but it passed.  Now I was feeling it again.  He knew more than he was letting on.  Worse, he was using me.  For what?  Bait?  I lay down and rested my head on the ground, squirming to get comfortable.  I was very tired.  I was also afraid.  Not of Ari, but for him.  I set my mind, waiting again for sleep, on the mountain god.  I wished I could have a conversation with him.  Everything was confusing as hell.

     I was wakened by a gentle shaking on my shoulder, and then a hand clasped over my mouth.  Someone leaning over me then pulled me up and helped me stand.  It was very dark among the trees.  The fire had burned out.  I couldn’t see a damn thing, not even Artaud, who was sleeping next to me.  My heart was pounding from the fear, for I really thought it was the demon.  I tried to whisper, “Ari,” but a hand came over my mouth again and I was pushed and guided silently away from the camp.  We had gone some distance and slipped between the low-hanging branches of a great cedar tree, inside of which there was another person, standing silently, apparently waiting for us. Ari whispered, “What the hell are you doing here?”

     “Ari?” I gasped.  “Ari, is it you?”

     “Yes,” he said.  “Keep your voice down.”

     “You saw us coming?”

     “No, she did,” he said, reaching for the other person who was now standing beside me, almost up against me.  “I’ve been away.  But we can’t talk here.  We have to climb up the peak.  There we can talk.”

     “How can we climb in this dark, Ari.  We’ll kill ourselves.”

     “Just follow me.” 

     We left the hiding place in the tree and set out in single file, Ari first, me behind him, and the woman behind me.  I tried to stay very close, for it was so dark I couldn’t see more than a few feet, and I was scared as hell.

     As we climbed, the mountain became steeper and steeper, until finally we came out of the trees.  We were very high, and once out of the trees I could look over the land lying under the stars.  But Ari and the woman hastened me upwards.  The mountain rose straight up, a sheer rock wall rising several thousand feet.  There was a collar of clear space about a hundred yards wide between the trees and the rock wall, slanting much more than forty-five degrees.  This collar was made of rocks and boulders and gravel that the years have spilled off the higher elevations.  As we neared the rock wall, I was still climbing and reaching forward to hoist and pull myself, so that when I looked up I saw Ari slip into a seam in the rock wall and disappear.  The woman reached the rock face and disappeared too.

     The seam was a crevice that rose vertically so far up the rock wall that as I tilted my head back to view it I almost fell over.  It was narrow, also, and I had to turn sideways to enter it.  Ari took my shoulder and pulled me in to where he made me feel a rope ladder. 

     “I’m going to climb first, then you follow,” he said.  “It’ll take about twenty minutes, maybe longer for you.  Rest along the way if you need to.  At the top, shin yourself onto the ledge.  If it’s windy--but don’t worry about that, it shouldn’t be tonight--keep low and make for the rock face.”

     It was so dark in the crevice that I couldn’t see down as I climbed, but I could feel the woman coming up behind me.  At the top, my legs felt like lead, and I slid myself onto the ledge and just sat there rubbing the tops of my thighs.  We were about two-thirds up the side of the mountain, on a ledge that one couldn’t see from below the trees.  Ari came and squatted beside me, and when the woman’s head rose over the ledge, Ari reached out for her hand and hoisted her straight onto her feet.  They helped me get up then and guided me to a hut built against the wall.  No starlight penetrated its roof, and there was no window.  

Then Ari closed the door.

     “I have questions, Ari.  My head is buzzing with them.  People are afraid of you.  Why?  What have you been doing?  Why are you here in the first place?  What has this mountain done to you. . . ?” 

     “Stop,” he said, “Stop.  I know.  It all seems strange.  It’s a long story.  But we have to leave this place in the morning, it’s no longer safe, and you’re in as much danger now as I am.  Right now we have to sleep.  In the morning we have to get out of here.  Then we’ll talk.”

     “But I can’t sleep, Ari.  Knowing nothing.  Five minutes.  Give me five minutes, then we’ll sleep.”

     “What do you want to know that I can tell in five minutes?”

     I didn’t even hesitate when he asked me that.  I foolishly stammered out what I most feared after the night with the old man--not in the sense I believed it was literally true, but that I believed there was a mystery in which in some sense it was true: “Are you a demon?”

     He laughed out loud at that and told the woman what I had said, and she laughed too.  We were huddled against the wall of the peak rising over us, resting comfortably on aromatic beds of cedar needles in a stick and mud shelter that must have taken long hours of labor, gathering, hauling, and climbing to make. 

     “What do you think?  Do you believe in demons?”

     “I don’t know what I think anymore.  I’ve had some experiences of my own, Ari, and I have to say I’m bewildered.”

     “I’m the same person you knew in New York,” he said sarcastically. I didn’t understand at the time what that tone of his meant.  I was disoriented and confused.  But later I realized it meant a good deal. 

     “I don’t believe that,” I said, overwhelmed by the climb and the whole adventure in the dark.  “Of course you’re different.  I want to know how, that’s all.”

     He sat silently, invisible in the darkness of the shelter, for we didn’t light a fire.  The woman was beside him, just another voice.  They both were merely voices to me, hers unintelligible, his familiar with that charged sense of nostalgia one feels for the long-ago that comes suddenly back into one’s life.

     “I’m not a demon,” the voice said.  “Absurd to ask such a question.”

     “How many people have you killed?” I said, as much invisible to him as he was to me, the darkness in fact inflaming my sense of absurdity and making the whole thing seem nightmarish, for there was a tone in my voice that made it seem normal to be sitting in absolute darkness on the side of a mountain in the Caribbean asking an old friend if he was a demon and how many people he had killed.  I hoped he would take the question as a reporter’s attempt to get the facts and not as an expression of what I believed--the kind of thing I would feel if I had asked him that question in a bar on Long Island.

     “Ah,” he replied, in a long low exhale of breath.  “You’ve been hearing stories.  I can imagine.  No wonder you’re so worked up.  I’ve killed no one.  You’ll just have to believe that.”

     “Why the stories, why is everyone so afraid of even the thought of you?”

     “I’ve been a convenient cover for others.  I don’t know all the details myself.  There have been killings, and I’ve been involved, but not as you think or imagine.”

     “Well, tell me.”

     “But that’s the story, and it’s too complicated and involved.  We’re in real danger here.  You, too, because you’re with me now.  We have to rest and tomorrow spend all our energies getting off the island.  This is a bad time for a visit, old friend.  If you had waited another week, we could have met in one of our old haunts on Long Island.”

     “At least tell me who the woman is,” I asked, finally, for he hadn’t introduced us or even said anything about her.

But he refused, saying that she is part of the story and there was nothing he could say about her that wouldn’t take an hour to make me understand.  

     “You’re still human!” I blurted out, and I could tell he sensed the disappointment in my voice, for he replied condescendingly, “Still human,” and I felt hopelessly stupid.

     “Sleep now,” he said, and I could hear him and the woman stretch out together and in a few moments seem to fall asleep, so I lay down and turned on my side and tried to sleep myself.  But thoughts of the houngan kept coming back, and of the fire and the ring of people, the dancer, and that talk about the mystery.  I felt gullible and angry with myself.  Yet it all seemed so real.  The old man himself was so much the real thing that I couldn’t see him as a fraud.  Did Artaud orchestrate the whole thing, even the old man?  Even the talk about the mystery?  I couldn’t believe it.  It all had too much the feel of discovery, of spontaneity, of life. 

V

I was wakened by a sound I knew I recognized but which at the moment of wakening seemed so weird and out of place as to make me feel I was still dreaming.  It was a drumming hup-hup, hup-hup that came with a corresponding whir of an engine.  Ari burst up and leaped out of the hut screaming for us to follow.  The woman crawled right over me, and I rolled and got to my knees and sprinted out behind her, and just at that moment the hut exploded in a fiery black-smoke concussion that shoved me off my feet as I lurched forward.  Ari reached the edge and dropped into the crevice and the woman followed, and a second later I dropped into the crevice too, hanging onto the rope ladder and scurrying down as fast as I could.

     And then we heard the stutt, stutt, stutt.  The chopper was hovering in the flat morning light just in front of the rock wall and someone was firing an automatic weapon into the crevice.  I doubted the pilot could see us dropping down, and thus keep at our level, for it had to be nothing more to him than a blackness inside the crevice where we were.  But the shots that entered banged around and splintered the rock, firing shards in all directions, which were as lethal as the shells themselves.  We scurried down the rope ladder as fast as we could, keeping our heads tucked into our shoulders.  Ari reached the bottom long before the woman and me and had raced into the cedar and mahogany trees, drawing fire from the crevice. 

     When I had finally hit bottom, the woman held me back, pushing against my chest with both her hands, all the while looking out and into the trees.  She was scared as hell, and I was simply in a state of shock.  Finally, she saw what she was looking for.  Ari was there, signaling to her, pointing towards the east and shaking his head up and down.  Then he came out of the trees long enough for the chopper to spot him and spin round in his direction.  He took off along the edge of the tree line, deliberately drawing fire, and the woman and I raced safely down across the open ground to the trees.  Just as we reached them, I could see Ari turn into the trees and disappear.  It was an incredibly brave thing he had done.  At the time, everything had happened so quickly that I didn’t think about it.  It was only later that I realized how much like Ari the act was--how typically unselfconscious of him.  Could I have done it?  I was mindless with fear and couldn’t even have thought it, no less done it.  If it wasn’t for the woman, I wouldn’t even have made it to the trees.

     After the chopper had gone, the woman, slight as she was, guided me further down the slope by hanging onto my shirtfront and after a while, the day grown bright and sunny above the trees, turned us eastward on what seemed a trail.  Ari and the woman must have come often this way to have made it. 

     This was the most maddening time of all, for I couldn’t speak to her, and we had plenty of time to talk as we walked, most of the day in fact.  When we came off the mountain, we turned south and came out of the forest into an open valley where there was a good deal of agriculture, for we were on the other side of the mountains here and there was good rainfall.  The area was more populated and there was a blacktop road with quite a bit of traffic.  We walked along this road for a while, but she felt uncomfortable on it, exposed, I guess, for she ignored the little small talk I tried to make and kept us always just off the shoulder, ready to flee into the fields. 

     But then we began to cut across the fields, sugarcane mostly, but also through fields of some crop I didn’t recognize called sisal, and then more fields, hitting narrow paths between them and heading always in the same  direction--south.  Once off the road she became more talkative.  She already knew my name, for Ari had told her.  But I learned that hers was Cécile Cochet and that she was born in a village on the northern peninsula and was thirty-two years old, had been married, and never had children.  My French was rudimentary, and I had no Creole at all, but she understood some English and a bit more French.  We laughed at our gestures, trying to make each other understand, and what little bit we communicated only served to make us more comfortable with each other.  She had a lively sense of humor, which I much appreciated under the circumstances, and an affability and knowingness that made her a wonderful companion, in spite of the language barrier.

     I was, however, not a fit companion to be wandering around on foot with--I am not the type, physically.  We had no food and water, and that made it all the harder.  And she, Cécile, was very much aware of all this, often finding places for me to sit and rest while keeping us out of sight as much as possible.

     We came about noon to a farm where Cécile knew the people, and they fed us and gave us water and let us rest a good while.  There was a great deal of talk, which I could make nothing of.  These people were more prosperous than those among whom Artaud and I had stayed that first night.  The house was a wood-frame building for one thing and had furnishings, and the farm compound had several other buildings and pigs and goats in pens and chickens scratching the dirt everywhere.  There was a conspiratorial air about the people, and Cécile seemed very much to expect it and be a part of it.  She seemed very sophisticated in their presence, and they were deferential towards her, submissive in the way they spoke, and seeming to take pleasure in her attentions to them. 

The family was large, three generations, and they were all gathered around us, even the children, watching me eat, looking out the windows, talking, talking, talking, till I thought I’d go nuts.  Finally, they packed us some food in an old canvas bag with a makeshift rope sling, and this I took and hung on my shoulder as we set out again.  By late afternoon we reached a town called Belle-Anse, which I knew was on the south-east coast and which had a good harbor. 

     I expected it was from here that we would leave the island and that we would do that by boat.  I was sore and tired and emotionally drained when we entered the town.  Cécile must have felt the same.  She was short and extremely thin with a medium dark brown complexion that lightened slightly around her cheek bones.  We both had not bathed for a long time and stank, my mouth was foul from not brushing my teeth, and I hadn’t passed a comb through my hair in three days.  She looked and felt no better.  We were both a mess.  But even still, she was pretty.

     Belle-Anse is smaller than Port au Prince, but still a large town.  It felt good to be among people, to walk in crowds, to see automobiles and buses and taxis and hotels.  Cécile led the way to the southernmost parts of the town where the docks and piers were, and here, in the market area, she found an old ramshackle tenement into which she led me.  We climbed two flights of dark and steep stairs and came to an apartment. She fished out a hidden key from somewhere under the stairway’s handrail and opened the door.  Inside, there was nothing but a bed, a chair, and a small table, with a tiny kitchenette off to the side.  The bed was covered with old, wrinkled sheets, and the chair had a worn cushion and was placed beside the window that looked out onto the street from which we entered.  There was no bathroom, and I was thinking how I could ask her about it when she gestured for me to stay here, making a motion like she was going to leave.  Throwing the now-empty canvas bag onto the table, I made motions like I was washing my face and brushing my teeth and raised my shoulders to question her, and she laughed and pointed downstairs from the doorway where she was hanging onto the doorknob, about to shut the door and take off.  She tossed the key to me, then, made a gesture that I should lock the door, and was gone.

     I fell into the chair beside the window and closed my eyes.  These were three extraordinary days.  I knew Ari was in danger, but I didn’t feel that it spilled over to me.  And I certainly didn’t appreciate how much Cécile was in danger as well.  So, sitting there, feeling at ease, and gazing for a moment out onto the street where people were strolling by unselfconsciously engaged in the daily activities of everyday life, I resolved to do an absolutely foolish thing.  Having my wallet still in my pocket filled with American dollars which I knew I could spend, I decided to leave the apartment and see if I could buy some underwear and socks, a pair of trousers and a shirt, and, most importantly, toothpaste and a toothbrush, then come back, find the bathroom, clean myself up and, if they hadn’t come by then, lie down and take a nap.

     Outside, the street was crowded and seemed like a Main Street in an old American frontier town--the street itself was of dirt and gravel and was bordered on either side by wooden walks under awnings protruding from the faces of the shops.  The buildings themselves were brick and stone and wood, with that flat fronted look of towns in the Midwest, but unlike them were painted gay pastels--blue and flamingo and yellow.  Along both sides of the street people gathered in knots and clumps examining the wares of vendors who laid out their stuff on tables and sat behind them--everything from food to clothing to pots and pans.  Women walked gracefully down the center of the street with baskets on their heads, holding bags in their hands, dressed in sandals and light shifts.  The smell of the cooking wafted over the street, and people chatted and argued with vendors, and emptied their pockets of what little they had.  Although it was late, the sun was fierce, making the shadows under the awnings black as pitch.  It all seemed wholesome and normal to me, and I began to search for the things I wanted with a certain sense of pleasure and excitement.

     This market area was only a block from the harbor and had a section devoted to the fish mongers under the awnings just across from where I was standing.  I was curious to take a look, having gotten already both the underwear and the things to brush my teeth, feeling, as a consequence, less pressured.  I crossed over to one of the shops, which had tables with boxes on them containing fish and shrimp and other things I was curious about--varieties of conch, for example.

     As I crossed, two things happened.  I caught sight of Cécile, whose eyes were wide with fear, standing behind an awning pillar made of brick, her back pressed up against it like she was hiding, and off to my left, moving quickly out of sight behind a wagon loaded with sacks of rice, was Artaud.  A thrill of fear shot through me and I froze, looking back towards Cécile.  She was gone.  What the hell should I do now? I thought. 

     But before I could decide, Artaud was on me.  He came out of nowhere, being just there right in front of me.  He was still wearing that lemon-colored T-shirt and was as unshaved and unwashed as I was.  

     “Hello,” I said weakly, trying to seem unfrightened and matter of fact.  “Where’ve you been?  We got separated and I wondered how you were getting on.”

     He grabbed my arm and spun me round into the street and walked me out into the middle where the foot traffic flowed in both directions.  Letting go, he walked beside me in the direction from which I had come.

     “You don’t know what you’re doing,” he said.  “That woman, you don’t know her.  Let me tell you.  She’s a blood sucker, the wife of one of Cedras’ agents, those who butcher innocent people for complaining about their misery.  She ate blood, that woman, lived on blood, the blood of the people.  She’s a cannibal, man, I’m telling you the truth.  She’s one of those vampires who sucked the meager substance of the poor in order to keep them too beaten down to throw that monster Cedras out of power.  Haiti can’t become a human place to live until she and her kind are gone.”

     His little speech sounded rehearsed, and I wasn’t convinced.  Artaud was a hero of sorts.  One of those people who defied all kinds of danger to fight against oppression.  He was the reason I came to Haiti, and this was the story I was willing to propagandize for him, the story of combating Haiti’s power elite in the name of social justice.  But now he seemed weary and fanatical.  His impressive head, full of those dreadlocks, seemed to me more expressive of craziness than of determination and will, as it usually did.  When I looked at him, the fanaticism in his eyes made me recall images of Medusa from illustrations of Hawthorne’s Tanglewood Tales: Medusa of the snaky locks. 

     I had only known Cécile for one day, and during it I  hadn’t been able to talk with her very much, but I had observed her, been close to her physically, depended on her throughout the day almost like a child, and I had seen nothing to suggest she was anything but an ordinary person, like any of the others in the street around us.  She was brave and quick to assess a situation and knew people.  At least she seemed so from all I had seen of her that day.  And in addition to all that, she was a sweet woman--open and caring and ready to laugh--and most importantly she was involved with Ari, which was enough for me.  But what they were up to together I didn’t know.  She was charged by him with guiding me to this place, which she did.  And now her life was in danger.  The image of her pressed up against the pillar, eyes wide in fear, came back.  That image laid a duty on me.  I had to do something to distract Artaud.

     So I said, mildly, trying to keep the sense of rising fear out of my voice, “How do I fit in, Artaud?”

     “Now, now,” he said placatingly, obviously sensing the fear.  “I want you to tell the story.  That’s how you fit in.  We’ve talked before.  You know me and you know our history.  We’ve been sucked dry for generations.  Where else in this hemisphere do five percent of the people own everything and the ninety-five own nothing?  And where the ninety-five are indiscriminately butchered if they complain?”

     “How does Ari fit into all this?” I asked, for I realized that as yet I knew nothing of what he had been doing.  I still didn’t know why he was on that mountain.  Stopping and turning him towards me I asked, “Was that you in the helicopter this morning?” looking at him closely, trying to read his body language.  But he was either very good at lying or really didn’t know about the helicopter, for he seemed surprised and asked me to tell him what happened.  So I told him, and as we walked, we passed the tenement, and I did nothing to let on that I was familiar with it. 

     He led me finally to an alley between two buildings, and as he entered, he lured me into it by saying he wanted to show me something that would explain what Ari was up to.  It was dark in the alley, and I was suspicious, and then I became frightened.  As of yet, although I was suspicious of Artaud, he had not revealed himself to me, so I was uncertain about him.  I felt if I could just keep him away from Cécile, Ari, in the end, would take care of matters.  And that’s what I thought I was doing by going into the alley with him.  But now, I was really afraid of him and stopped, turned around, and started out.  He yelled after me, and I shouted over my shoulder that we could talk in the street.  That’s when I felt the pain in my back.  Then his hand was over my mouth and he was pushing it in.  The knife.  It was a sharp, searing, cutting pain, and when he withdrew the blade, he put it under my chin.  He was standing behind me, holding me up from under my left arm, his right hand reaching over my right shoulder with the blade. 

     I don’t really know what happened next.  I heard Artaud gasp and felt him fall backward.  I think he was hit in the head with a rock, for I heard a thud, but I was in too much pain to tend to what was happening.  I stumbled against the building, wheezing for air, realizing he had punctured one of my lungs.  I tried holding myself up by putting both hands against the building, but then my knees crumpled and I fell.  Someone was beside me then, helping me to get back on my feet, and just then Artaud came back, struggled with the person, and then fled towards the rear of the alley.  I was transfixed by the pain and the struggle to get air, feeling my lung on the right side gurgling as I inhaled.  Over the next few minutes, the sharpness of the pain began to subside, and I began to go numb.  I saw Cécile, then, lying in the dirt against the building.  I dropped down, lifted her head, but she was gone.  I put my ear to her heart, and came away with the side of my head full of blood. 

     I sat there for a while, falling back onto my butt, not knowing what to do.  I was going stiff and was losing blood, still, for I could feel it oozing down into the small of my back, warm at first, but then becoming cool, making the wet uncomfortable.  I dreamed of wetting the bed when I was a child and began to slip into the feeling that I was in my bed next to my brother and my mother would have to come and change the sheets.  But the pain brought me back, and I realized I had to make myself feel it to stay conscious.  So I twisted my torso, and sure enough a shock of pain shot through me, clearing my mind.  Again I saw Cécile, lying in the dirt against the building.  And again I was overwhelmed with not knowing what to do.

     But I had to stop the bleeding.  That I knew.  So I took my handkerchief out of my pocket and pulled up my shirt and put the folded cloth over the wound and moved toward the building and turned and pressed my back against it as hard as I could.  I pressed and held.  Normal breaths made my lung gurgle, so I tried to take short shallow ones, but doing that made me dizzy, so I breathed normally again and put up with the gurgling.  I stayed like that for what seemed a long, long time--probably fifteen minutes, though I really don’t know.  I pulled away, and the handkerchief stayed in place on my back, so I tried to get up on my feet.  I took a last look at Cécile, cursed myself, cursed Artaud, and said a little prayer for her.  When I tried to walk, the action of my legs brought sharp, searing pain in the lung and in my back, but I could stand it. 

     When I reached the street it was dark and there were few people around.  The tenement was only half a block to my right, so I headed for it.  I looked around for Artaud, to see if he was following me or watching me and realized he could do that without my seeing him, so I didn’t bother to conceal my entering the building.  I hoped Ari was there.  I felt all that was happening was understandable to him and he would know how to deal with it. 

     Cécile had said that the toilets were downstairs, so instead of going to the room, I tried to find them.  I made my way through a dark hallway alongside the staircase.  But all the doors seemed to be to rooms or apartments.  At the end of the hallway there were no more doors.  But under the rise of the staircase there was another door which I discovered by feeling, for it was so dark there I couldn’t see at all.  I tried the knob and the door opened.  Feeling inside along the jamb I found a switch and light flooded a bathroom.  There were two shower stalls, two sinks, and a single commode.  I shut and locked the door.  Over the sinks was an old cracked mirror, but it was enough.  I looked horrible.  My face and hair on the right side were bloody, I had three days of stubble on my cheeks and chin, and my face was dirty, smeared with grime.  I used the commode, then washed myself as best I could, scrubbed my teeth with water and my finger, and was about to take a long drink, hoping the water wouldn’t do what Artaud had tried, but decided in my weakened condition not to risk it.

     Climbing the stairs was an ordeal.  Only the thought of the bed kept me going.  When I entered the room, it was dark, and clearly Ari was not there.  I didn’t turn on any lights but fell on the bed and in a moment I was asleep.  It was morning when I woke, and the pain in my back was throbbing. The first thing I thought is that the wound was infected.  If I didn’t get help soon, I thought, I would be in real trouble.  I had to get to a doctor or a hospital and I couldn’t wait.  Again, I was paralyzed by not knowing what to do.  So I decided to just go out into the street and ask whomever I saw first for help.    

     Getting out of bed was an agony--I had to sit in the chair beside the window to rest.  I noticed from the effort, however, that the gurgling in my lung was gone.  Even if I breathed deeply it didn’t gurgle now.  I took that for a good sign.  Also, I began to pay attention to my sensation of cold.  Realizing I wasn’t shivering, I knew I didn’t have a fever, and that was an even better sign.  My sense of urgency was passing, and I began to run over the events of yesterday. 

     Where could Ari have gone?  Why is he so long in getting back to us--Cécile and me?  Why did Artaud try to kill me?  What could he have gained by that?  I know why he wanted to kill Cécile.  Did he also want to kill Ari?  I didn’t understand any of it.  But most of all, I didn’t understand why he wanted to kill me.  Obviously, he couldn’t have intended to kill me from the beginning, for he had ample opportunity to do that anytime during the first day and even the night before.  So it has to be for something he thinks I learned while I was with Ari and Cécile--or, and this troubled me most, for I suspected it early on, he used me to get to Ari, and, failing in that, had no other uses for me.  I was better off dead than alive merely because then I could not write about him, unlikely as it was anymore that I would have propagandized his cause.

     The thought filled me with outrage and embarrassment.  I was not a man of my time, I realized, so much as a child of it.  We in the US, with our hyper moralistic sensibilities, never were good at fathoming the horrors of political fanaticism.  We excel at theorizing--even still about Marxism, socialism, and communism; but also now about global capitalism, the inhumanity of free-market economies, skin-head fascism, racism, patriarchy, homophobism, and on and on; always disconnected as we are from the consequences of our speculation; our daily lives deodorized and sanitized by our conventions of civility; free in our academic cubicles and the neatly bounded spaces of our newspapers and magazines to argue with and condemn each other; priding ourselves for our service to whatever ideology binds us.  Many of my colleagues, myself among them formerly, would applaud Artaud’s struggle, regarding a few murders along the way as a necessary evil; and we would find ample justification in the local history and the ethnocentrism and racism of the Haitian mulatto elite to “balance” any crime against humanity, and this in the name of “social justice.”  It took the stab in the back and Cécile’s blood on my face to shake me out of my stupidity, and it took Ari.

     I was feeling desperate and alone.  Ari’s not coming made me feel anxious and fearful and helpless and vulnerable.  Going into the street to ask someone to help me get to a hospital or a doctor seemed at first like a good idea.  But I had no idea if Artaud was still out there, if he was alone or had spies around looking for me, or even if anyone would help a foreigner in the kind of trouble I was in.  I was hungry and thirsty, too.  In spite of it all, I decided to go out.  I couldn’t sit here.  But it was still very early, and, looking out the window, I could see that few people were about.  Then I saw Ari.  He was across the street, in the shadows of the awning.  He caught my eye immediately because of his whiteness.  I couldn’t make out his face, but I knew it was him.  He seemed to be staring up at this window, so I put myself squarely in it so he could see me.  It worked, because as soon as he saw me, he stepped back and disappeared into the shadow. 

     I felt a surge of relief.  He’d be here soon.  His melting into the shadow and not crossing the street right away gave me an even greater sense of relief.  He knows what he’s doing.  He’s not taking foolish risks.  If only he had come yesterday, Cécile would still be alive.   I tried to get up but fell back into the chair.  The pain was bad and I worried about what we’d do next. 

VI

The wait was terrible.  It took him almost an hour to get here, so that when he tapped on the door, I felt a rush of emotion.  I struggled up and let him in.  He shut and locked the door and when he turned again I was almost in tears.  I must have been a sight, stiff-backed, my shirt and slacks covered with blood, standing there like a lost soul.  He reached out gently and helped me back to the chair, asking what happened.  I blurted out that Cécile was dead, and that stunned him, causing him to drop onto the edge of the bed, looking as defeated as I felt.  For a long time we were both silent.  Then he sighed and said, “Tell me.”

     I told him everything that happened.  He listened and didn’t interrupt.  When I told him about Artaud stabbing Cécile in the heart, his face had turned ashen, and he looked so deeply grieved I couldn’t say anything more.  But after a while I told him I felt like I was healing OK and that I could bear the pain.  What else could I say?  I was ready for whatever he wanted to do, I assured him.

     But he wanted to take a look at the wound.  He helped me remove my shirt and undershirt, both of which were crusty with dried blood.  He gently peeled the handkerchief off, but it stung deeply as it pulled away the scab that had been forming, and blood rushed out again.  He tamped and pressed the wound and said he shouldn’t have pulled the handkerchief off.  But the bleeding stopped and he inspected the skin around the wound and said it didn’t look bad.  He had a first aid kit in a drawer in the little kitchen area with bandages and antibacterial salve and a plastic bottle of rubbing alcohol.  He washed the wound with the alcohol, which was so piercingly cold it made my goose-bumped flesh shrivel, applied the salve, and taped a square of gauze over it. 

     The sink in the kitchen was a little metal basin about twelve inches square with only a cold water tap.  I asked him if the water was safe to drink and he said probably not.  But he took my shirt and stuffed it into the basin and ran the water over it.  When it was soaked, he wrung it out and soaked it again.  He did this a couple of times as I watched him.  I’m quite certain he never gave a thought to what he was doing.  When he was finished wringing the shirt for the last time, he hung it on the cabinet door.  I was deeply moved by this.  It was an unreflective act, a kind of paternal care that I had no right to ask for or expect, and it was an expression of his decency as a man.  I turned away towards the windows for fear that I’d choke up if I stayed near.  He told me then to sit down and try to relax and threw himself on the bed, saying that I should let him sleep for an hour.  In a few minutes he was sound asleep. 

     Later, when he woke, he asked me how I felt, and I told him I was really quite fine, that he shouldn’t worry about me.  “What do we have to do now?” I asked.

     “What we have to do,” he said, “is get to the boat.  It’s a modified Donzi Z-25, a racer.  She’s provisioned and ready to go.”

     “But go where?  How far can we go in a racer?”

     “To Santo Domingo.  It’s only a few hundred miles.  We have gas enough to get to the nearest marina once we’re across the border.  The big thing is getting across.  It’s only about thirty miles.  But Artaud will be looking for us.  He’s probably already out there patrolling the coast, because I haven’t seen or heard of him this morning.”

     “What’s a Donzi Z-25?”

     “It’s a light compound-hull, inboard-outboard racing boat.  It’s made for speed, but it’s also large enough to be stable in the open ocean, and it’s been modified to carry several people and enough provisions for our purposes.  I had a contact in Port au Prince bring it over from Miami about three years ago.  We used it to help families targeted by Artaud to escape this side of the island, and we’ve kept her under wraps here.”

     “Escape?”

     “Yes.  I know, you want to know what I’ve been doing.  Well, we’ll talk on the boat.  It was also for Cécile and me, you know.  The boat.  The time had come when we were finally going to use it.  We had done all we could.  Artaud was becoming too fanatical.  He anticipated our attempt to get out.  Damn him.  And he made good use of you.  He’s very smart.  Well, Haiti is his world.  And it’s time for us to leave.”

     He rose from the bed and helped me out of the chair, then opened the door and surveyed the hall and the stairs, went down them and in a few minutes whispered up that I should come.  I put my shirt back on, a little damp yet, and let it hang over my trousers to help hide the blood stains.  We went to the bathroom first.  Thank God.  But the last door in the hall, which yesterday I thought was to another room or apartment actually opened into a rear foyer which opened out upon the back of the building.   There was a gravel and sand lot there, with weeds growing tall and wild, and debris from the tenants--garbage and trash scattered everywhere.  The back of the lot pushed up against a wall made of brick.  This wall crossed all the yards on either side of us and had a smoothened concrete slab for a cap.  Ari boosted me up but I couldn’t pull myself onto the slab.  So we crossed over into the next yard and into the yard after that where there was a copse of palm trees beside the wall.  These helped me to get over OK.  The drop was very painful, but that was the last time I had to do anything that aggravated the wound.

     The other side was like another world.  The wall separated the market area from what appeared to be official and public space--there was a wide lawn bordering an asphalt road lined with palm trees on either side, and two large official-looking buildings, with parking lots in their rear, which faced us, of course.  We walked back along the wall and crossed the lawn to the parking lot of the westernmost building.  Ari pointed to a small sub-compact car, black, two-door, of a make I didn’t recognize.  He unlocked the door on my side and let me in and then got in on the driver’s side and we took off.

     We left the city going east.  After a while we got off the main road onto a gravel track along the coast and came to a place where there was a sheltered cove.  In the midst of a copse of palms there was a hut, rather like the ones in the village beyond Petionville where I met Artaud and the old man, except it was larger.  We parked alongside this building and Ari went to one side and pulled at the edge of the front of the hut, and the whole front--door, window, step--came swinging away on hinges fastened at the other side. 

Inside was the boat on a trailer.  Ari backed the car up, hooked the trailer to the ball on the bumper and pulled the boat out, made a wide swing around, and backed it into the water.  When the trailer was in deep enough, he told me to hit the release, and the boat slid into the water and bobbed like a cork.  Ari pulled the car back to the hut, put the trailer in, closed it up, and parked the car along the side.  We then waded out to the boat.  Ari boosted me aboard, and in two minutes we were heading out of the cove into open water. 

     “This is where it’s going to get dangerous,” Ari yelled at me over the roar of the engines.  “Keep your eyes seaward, fore and aft,” he yelled, and reached into a box fastened to the bulwark beside the steering wheel and pulled out a pair of binoculars.  I took these and scanned the horizon.  I shouted back that I saw nothing, there was just nothing out there.  And he pointed to the shore and I scanned that as well.  There was plenty to see along the shore: villages, small marinas, beaches, small and large fishing boats cruising their grounds, the fishermen dropping nets or pulling them up, lowering traps, all the usual things one sees along a coast, but I saw nothing that should worry us. 

Ari told me to take the controls and took the glasses himself and surveyed the coast.  We were racing along full throttle, going forty miles an hour at the least, about two miles off shore where the water was relatively flat, so that the prow kept at a steady angle.  We left long stretches of coast behind us every minute.

     After an hour Ari throttled back and the boat’s prow settled into the water.  He gave me the controls again and went into the stowage under the prow deck, backing out with a carton filled with provisions.  He gave me a liter-sized carton of orange juice, a mango, and a chunk of cheese and took the same for himself.  I could see in the box another ration of those items, but neither of us touched them.  I peeled the mango with my teeth and never ate anything so delicious.  It was the first food I had had since Cécile and I finished the scraps we carried away from the farm yesterday afternoon and the first fluids since that evening in the streets of the market.

     With the engines cut, we putted along at less than half the speed, and Ari was worried.  He expected Artaud to try to stop us from crossing over into the Dominican Republic.  But there was no sign of him.  Or of anyone else.  No one was giving chase, and no one was out here blockading the border.  We should be crossing over soon, Ari said, and once we were in Dominican waters we would be safe.  We would, at least, be out of Artaud’s reach.  And so we crossed without incident.  It took us just over two hours, going full throttle for only half that time, so that we were doing better with gasoline than Ari expected.  Nevertheless, we put in at the first marina.  Here, everyone spoke Spanish.  It was a gay and happy place, though just as poor as any of its equivalents along the Haitian coast.

     Our lives were made simpler at this point by the good fortune of my still having my wallet and passport in my pocket--in spite of all that had happened: currency and papers are the two necessities of life when one steps off one’s own soil.  Being near the border, the marina had a customs officer, who came over as soon as we tied up to the gas pumps.  Ari showed him our passports.  The man spoke the Haitian Creole, and he and Ari seemed to know each other.  While we were filling our tanks, the man left and returned, having stamped our passports for us.  I noticed a shop facing the docks that seemed to be a supply store and told Ari I was going to check it out for some new clothes.  We went together, however, after paying for the gas and moving the boat to a slip in front of a little eatery. 

     I got more than a change of clothes there.  I managed to shave and brush my teeth and wash as well.  We both did.  Feeling refreshed and renewed, we relaxed at the eatery with a plate of rice and beans and a bottle of beer.  We sat at a table beside the dock, shaded from the sun by a trellis hung with wisteria, and it was here, in the wisteria’s comfortable green shade during the heat of the day that Ari told me his story.

     As we ate our rice and beans, I told him what I had heard in the bar at the hotel and about the ceremony with the old man, about the old man saying that he was no longer human, about the god of the mountain, and about the old man knowing that I knew him.  Ari listened to all this with a seriousness I didn’t expect, for I felt it was all straight-up evidence of my own gullibility and stupidity.  But he never cracked a smile. 

     “As for Artaud not knowing you are a friend of mine, that’s simply not true, for I told him about you a long time ago.  You see, I’ve known Artaud since his student days, since before Aristide returned.  I first met him not long after you did.  You had been here covering the refugee story during Cedras’ time and met Artaud then, for he was already a social activist.  I came with the church mission shortly after you left.”

     “Yes, that would have been my first time in Haiti.  That’s when I met Artaud.  He was impressive.  The people were like sheep, thoroughly cowed, but he was a troublemaker, a force for change, even then.”

     “And for his pains, Cedras’ agents murdered his brother-in-law, because they couldn’t get their hands on him.  It was to protect him that I took his sister and her children in.  I bought that cottage in the city to house them and stayed with them nights, for we expected they would go after them too.  Anyway, Artaud showed me one of your stories, one in which you mentioned him.  And we talked about you.  He knew of our friendship from then.

     “They got to his sister, though, in spite of the protection I offered.  And they would have gotten me, too, that night, if I had been there.  Some protection!  I was in over my head in those days.  I had no conception of those people, of what they were prepared to do to hold onto power, and of the brutality they were capable of.  I was late getting back to the cottage because of a planning meeting at the mission, and when I did get back, maybe twenty minutes late, they were already slaughtered--that’s the only word one could use.  It was terrible.

     “Artaud was beside himself.  That’s the incident that made a terrorist of him.  They paid, though.  They paid many times over for that killing.  And they’re still paying.  And they will go on paying, for Artaud won’t stop.”

     “So, that was his sister!  But you, what happened since then that turned him against you?”

     “I left the cottage and went back to the mission, where I spent the night.  The next day, I moved back into the boarding house where I had been staying previously with other members of the mission.  One of the young Haitians who stayed with us was able to find out the next day the identities of the men who did the killings.  There were two of them, and they were so arrogant as to believe themselves beyond reprisal.  I didn’t know whether Artaud had found them out yet, but I had seen what they had done, and it changed me.  I was mad, I think, crazy mad, insane mad.  They hadn’t just killed those kids.  They had dismembered them and scattered their parts over the cottage.  They had arranged their four little heads on the table, like place settings.  You can’t see a thing like that and not be changed by it.  You look at people with a different eye afterwards.  Meanings change.  Life changes.  I don’t know if one sees into the truth of things, as Artaud was telling you, or merely into one dark, ultimately avoidable corner of life.  But it was worse during the time of Papa Doc, you know.  I guess one could understate the case by saying that I had parted company with reason: I wanted to kill those men.

     “But I was not very experienced as a killer.  I found myself the next night standing at the door of one of those men, intending to go in and commit murder.  But I had no weapon.  I was that crazy.  But standing there, I noticed that the door was ajar, and pushing on it very lightly, it swung open.  So I went in, tip-toe, and crossed the front room to a tiny hallway where there was a doorway to the bedroom.  I stepped into it, and, in spite of the closet-sized closeness of the room, there was enough moonlight coming through the slats in the window to make out a figure kneeling at the bedside.  It was a man holding a large-bladed knife over the chest of a sleeper, and just as I caught sight of him, he plunged the blade into the sleeper’s chest.  The sleeper hissed out a breath and didn’t inhale.  Then the killer cut into the chest, reached in his hand and pulled out the dead man’s heart.  This he cut free with his blade and stuffed into his shirt front. 

     “But there was another person in the room, the dead man’s wife, sleeping beside him.  She wakened and looked at the figure beside her husband, just looking, not, apparently, processing what she was seeing.  Then she sat up with a jerk.  Her husband was already dead.  Realizing what was happening, she grunted in fear and shrunk off the bed into the corner of the room.  The killer stepped round the bed, grabbed her by the hair, pulled back her head, and was about to ram the blade into her chest, when I reached over the bed, kneeling onto the dead man’s abdomen, and grabbed the back-thrust arm.  The figure gave a hideous shout, leaped into the air and over the bed, hit the floor in the hallway running, and sped out of the house.

     “The killer was, of course, Artaud; the dead man the first of the two to die for murdering his sister’s family.  The woman was Cécile.”

     “I guessed that,” I said, and told him about Artaud’s speech in the marketplace at Belle-Anse.

     “It doesn’t surprise me,” Ari said.  “Artaud probably rehearsed that justification over and over in his mind.”

     “I think I see now why there were rumors about a demon, too.  I’m sorry about Cécile,” I said, earnestly, “but why in the world did you take up with her?”  He frowned and became thoughtful. 

     “I came to love her,” he said.  “She was gutsy, braver than most men I’ve known, and selfless.  She was dirt poor, like everyone else, uneducated, and married to a man who turned out to be a monster.  For you don’t do those sorts of things if you’re not.  Like all the wives and families of the Tontons Macoutes, her survival depended on her husband.  Haiti is a Catholic country, a poverty stricken Catholic country.  In such places, people don’t divorce.  Those kinds of choices are just not open to them, women especially.  She was a victim of everyday life in that country just as much as Artaud’s sister was, as much as Artaud is himself, if he could only see that.”

     “And the Pic de la Selle?” I asked.  “What about the man on the mountain?  The demon?”

     “Well, things got bloody after that.  Artaud spread the rumors about the demon, for he didn’t know it was me who grabbed his arm.  He really thought it was a demon.  In spite of his education, Artaud is Haitian, and superstition runs deep in that country.  But in the end the demon story only gave him cover to carry out his plan of vengeance.  In the countryside especially the demon prowled, for that’s the first place his victims fled to.  He found out about Cécile, though, and I had to get her out of the city.  Those people who you stayed with on your way to Belle-Anse are the family of that young worker at the mission.  Through him I got her out of harm’s way.  Later, we used the farm as a safe house to hide families who were at risk of Artaud’s vengeance. 

     “But it was too dangerous to keep families there for long.  The mountain was a perfect hideout until we could move families to the coast and speed them away on the boat.  We brought them to the airport in Santo Domingo and flew them to Miami.  I had arranged for immigration counselors to meet them and help tell their stories.  None of them were turned back, for our mission here confirmed those stories.  And that’s about it.  Cécile and I rescued about thirty women and more than twice that many children.  And even so, Artaud got to nearly that many.  There are few people in Haiti with so much blood on their hands.”

     “But what about you during this time?  In Port au Prince there was a lot of speculation about a man living on the mountain.  People think you’re dead, but some think it was you on the Pic de la Selle.”

     “Oh, it was me all right.  I nested up there for three years with Cécile, when we weren’t on the Belle-Anse-to- Santo Domingo run.  The story about the demon is true--in part.  We often had to come down at night to steal food and water from the villagers.  I would leave tokens of our presence--often money--at their doors.  But sometimes to pass time I whittled trinkets out of cedar branches.  You know, figurines, airplanes, cars, things like that.  Sometimes I’d leave these instead.  After a while, people began to leave food and water for us at their doors.  Artaud had spies trying to catch us, and he scared the people out of their wits to keep them from feeding us.  But they were more afraid of the demon than of Artaud, and he never came near us.  He never did figure out how Cécile and I disappeared when we came to the mountain.  The other day he must have followed us and then gone off to Belle-Anse during the night.”

     “So that was him in the helicopter.”

     “I don’t know who else it might have been.”

     “People who live on mountains,” I shot at him rather suddenly, “think strange thoughts.”  I had mentioned earlier the remark the Frenchman made as I was leaving the hotel, and this was, I had hoped, an opening for him to talk about it.

     But he leaned back and sipped his beer, keeping whatever he was thinking to himself.  The sharp angles of his face softened as he turned inward.  He said only that on the mountain he lived like a man and that those were happy years.  It was then I understood the sarcasm of the remark he made that night on the mountain about his being the same man I knew in New York.  And that made me think about home.  Ari was a couple of years older than me, and I suspected going home meant something very different for him.     

     And so this story comes nearly to an end.  Ari had financed this rescue operation out of his own pocket.  None of the people he rescued knew who he was, and the whole operation took place underground, so that the new regime in Port au Prince never took official notice of it.  The old order is crumbling now in Haiti, and most of those who could tell this story are dead or gone.  Artaud won’t rest until Cedras himself is dead, preferably at his own hands, and Colonel François, infamous head of the Tontons Macoutes. 

     Ari had arranged with the customs officer at the marina to take possession of the boat, apparently a deal they had made in order to smuggle those families to the airport.  Once there, Ari had made other arrangements to get them onto international flights.  As for ourselves, we made our way over land to Santo Domingo, and two days after crossing the Haitian-Dominican border we were back in New York.  Ari expected Artaud to make an attempt on us, out of desperation, along the way to Santo Domingo, and even at the airport, so we traveled nervously and kept alert, but we saw no sign of him.  And once back in New York, we felt finally done with the whole affair. 

     Sadly, however, that was not the case.  About a month after our return, Ari’s housekeeper, only two days on the job, found him in his bed with his chest cut open and his heart neatly placed atop it.  When I read the news, I felt a light had gone out.  I went to a bar and found myself a spot alone and thought again of Artaud, of the story he told around the fire about how the ties that bind us to this life--that bind all creatures--keep us from seeing the truth, and how suddenly for some of us these ties may drop away, and that those of us to whom this happens are no longer human. I knew then Artaud was really talking about himself.  I shivered and grieved for Ari.  Those days that followed were the hardest.  I dare to hope at the present that the vengeance-taking has come to an end, but there is no way to know, since none of it has ever been reported, at least, not for what it was.