A Traveller's Life (32 page)

Day 9

Still raining but less wet than Day 8. To Cuneo which had fearful, metal projections in the streets, manhole covers which had been given a shot of fertilizer? Death to cyclists whatever their function. Perhaps that was what was intended.

Italians are nice to cyclists in conversation; entombed in their vehicles they become brutes – especially the lorry drivers in their stinking, kilometre-long diesels who simply blast one into the ditch. After vile, twenty-five-kilometre journey to Fossano, unable to stand them any more, I abandoned major roads for more vegetable ones and wound my way up in low gear through the Barolo, the wine country in the foothills of the Langhe, to Alba, tough but quiet going through country in which white truffles are found. Very good, inexpensive and therefore truffleless lunch at the Gallo d'Oro in Albi – the best plan in Italy is to approach a well-fed-looking man in the street and ask him for
un ristorante dove si mangia bene e si spenda poco
–
alla casalinga
(a restaurant where one eats well and spends little – with home-cooking), a demand which rarely fails to elicit the name of at least a couple of good ones. Then through the Monferrato vineyards to Nizza Monferrato, altogether one hundred and twenty hard kilometres. Stayed the night at Da Italo, a notable
ristorante alla casalinga
, in the market square. Ate the best
manzo bollito con salsa verde
(boiled beef with green sauce made with parsley, etc.) I have ever been offered and drank
dolcetto
and
barbera
, local red wines. Got rather drunk trying to decide which I liked best, but felt I deserved to do so after my exertions. Meal L2000, including two bottles of wine; room L1000.

Day 10

Without any trace of a hangover, which showed that Da Italo's wine had not been messed about with, raced thirty kilometres to Alessandria, which is half way between Turin and Genoa, in two hours, where I tried to have two broken spokes in the back wheel replaced, the lack of which was causing it to wobble in an alarming fashion. This involved removing the five-sprocket free-wheel block but according to the mechanic – himself a racing cyclist – being a French block there was no local instrument that could accomplish this otherwise simple feat. However, being Italian, he replaced the spokes, which was very difficult with the block
in situ
, just the same.

Because of all this I missed the train and so rode on to Novo Ligure, thirty kilometres to the south, and took a train to Sarzana, the next stop after La Spezia before Carrara, this time without my bicycle which was sent off on another train and arrived half an hour after I did.

From Sarzana it was only about ten kilometres and twenty-six hairpin bends up to my destination near Fosdinovo, and when I negotiated the final bend to the place where the house was, I found that Wanda had arrived less than half a minute before, having left Wimbledon in a Land-Rover two days previously.

Altogether I had ridden about eleven hundred kilometres and I had lost three kilos in ten days. During this ride I had been terrified to remove the piece of sticking plaster I had stuck on my bottom at Sully-sur-Loire on Day 4, fearing that some large septic crater might have developed; but when I finally plucked up sufficient courage to peel it off, underneath there was nothing at all except undamaged skin. Did I imagine those happenings near Sully-sur-Loire?

‘
Bon chance
,' said the chic air hostess. She had looked after us en route from Martinique where we had joined the plane. Now, she seemed genuinely reluctant that we should disembark at Port-au-Prince.

Thinking that we might have more
bon chance
without them, I had already got rid of the military maps of the island which I had bought before leaving London, although they were on such a small scale that they would only have been useful during a global war. With them, in the seat pocket, with the instructions of how to comport yourself in an emergency, the menu and the air sickness bags, I also left
The Comedians
by Graham Greene – whatever change the demise of Papa Doc might have brought about (and it was almost inconceivable that anything could be for the worse), I did not imagine that Greene could possibly yet be
persona grata
here. For the first time in my life I found myself reluctant to leave an airliner. At this moment to me it seemed a most desirable part of metropolitan France.

Outside on the tarmac, although half a gale was blowing, the heat was unbelievable. Borne on the fearful blast was the sound of welcoming music, produced by half a dozen Haitians, a rhythm
with a strange resonance as if some of the musicians were armed with outsize jew's-harps. This was the
meringue
, a Creole rhythm and one that arriving and departing passengers were treated to in order to raise their spirits.

Inside, we joined a queue which eventually brought us to a desk at which was perched a large man of about fifty wearing dark glasses and an unseasonably thick Cheviot suit. It required no imagination to identify this senior citizen as a former member of Les Volontaires de la Sécurité Nationale, otherwise the Tonton Macoutes, the Bogeymen, an organization now, just over a year after Papa Doc's timely demise, still under a temporary cloud. (A homecoming, rather rash Haitian ahead of me in the queue had already expressed his feeling by spitting noisily and symbolically on the floor.)

‘Visitor's card two US dollar! [78p]'

I told him that we had French francs, English pounds or British West Indian dollars but no US dollars.

‘No! Two US dollar!'

Next to him, prominently displayed, was a notice board bearing the words: ‘Business men! Make your stay in Haiti profitable by putting on a business!'

‘Can you change a sterling traveller's cheque? American Express. Very good.'

‘No! Two US dollar.'

Nor were
gourdes
any good, although
gourdes
were the local currency, with an even exchange rate with the dollar of twenty cents to one
gourde
. Not that I had any
gourdes
.

Eventually I persuaded this creature which, apart from its dark glasses, almost bullet-proof suit and limited gift of tongue, resembled one of the larger primates, to allow me through the barriers and through the chaos of the customs hall (where returning natives were being given a terrible going over by the officials), to cash a cheque.

It was a Sunday and there was no one to do it; but eventually an able fellow persuaded a taximan, who was hovering there, to give me some dollars in exchange for pounds, which he did at an appallingly adverse rate.

‘You need a taxi,' said the taximan who had just done such a good deal, in American.

‘I've ordered a car from Hertz,' I said rather smugly. I was already a bit fed up with Haiti.

‘No Hertz car here today,' he said triumphantly.

I didn't believe him.

Back in Immigration I gave the Tonton Macoute four US dollars. He put the notes in an inside pocket, not in the suitcase in which I had watched him deposit most, but not all, of the money he received from the other temporary immigrants. Now, he showed signs of leaving.

‘Hey!' I said, indignantly, ‘what about my visitor's card?'

He gave me the sort of inscrutable look which you only really get from people who wear dark glasses and vanished through a door marked ‘No Admittance'.

By the time we reached the customs hall the customs officers had made off too. No need to have jettisoned my maps or the work of the master, Greene.

Just as the taximan said, the car I had ordered by cable from Martinique was not there.

Knowing, because they had been so boringly reiterative about it, that they have to try harder because they are only ‘Number Two', I got through to Avis and a voice promised me a Volkswagen in half an hour. Triumphantly, I relayed this information to the taximan. It was now a quarter past twelve.

‘All right,' he said, ‘just you see. It won't come till three o'clock and Sunday it may never come. Just you see.'

By a quarter to two we were beginning to feel that both the
taximan and A1 Seitz, the proprietor of the Grand Hotel Oloffson, were probably right. In spite of his name Seitz had sounded like a quiet American on the telephone.

‘Don't wait for Hertz or Avis or anything else,' he said. ‘Get a taxi. Right now we're taking the children to the beach for the afternoon but when you get here tell César, the barman, to pay the taximan if you haven't got any cash. If you do pay him only give him $3.50 [£1.30] whatever he says.'

Outside, in the featureless plain, in which the Aeroport François Duvalier stands between the mountains and the invisible sea, the atmosphere was incandescent, with the brightness of a well-tended gas mantle. Beyond, the mountains looked as if they were about to explode. Occasionally, running downwind among scurries of dust, emaciated donkeys trotted past, each with a number of persons on board, on their way to some belated assignation in Port-au-Prince.

We passed the time reading a coffee-table book which I found abandoned in the deserted customs hall:
Haiti. The First Negro Republic in the World. Its True Face
. Printed in Belgium, as the blurb said, ‘by Private Initiative'.

The one who had provided the private initiative had now gone, but what would be, except for the association of ideas, his totally unmemorable visage still peered out in a colour photograph from page thirteen, with a framed portrait of Pope Paul VI on the mantelshelf behind him, and a selection of UN flags. Papa Doc, Eighth President for Life, now officially known as ‘Le Grand Disparu'.

‘In the traits of dignity and pride of the Head of the Nation, the concentration of the thinker, the impassibility of the conqueror, the true vision of the Haitian country,' ran the Mr Toad-like caption. Looking at the photograph, it was difficult to imagine that he had had the head of an opponent hewn from his shoulders,
flown to him from an outlying
département
in a bucket of ice, placed in a deep freeze in his palace and, from time to time, had it brought to him after office hours so that he could contemplate it in his in-tray during the watches of the night.

And there was a photograph of the Eighth President for Life's praetorian guard, the Tonton Macoutes, some eight thousand of whom were said now to be building roads in remote places. Not all, however, ‘Two US dollar' could scarcely be said to be in disgrace, nor Luckner Cambronne, the power behind the new President and one of the most corrupt men in this most corrupt of islands who had raised the rake-off to the level of pure art. Here, in this out-of-date book, a detachment of them was shown paraded in their bright blue uniforms, rarely worn for the dreadful tasks which they performed with such assiduity because such things were more easily carried out in the anonymity of the dark suits which were their everyday working uniforms (together with the dark glasses), on which bloodstains were less evident than on bright blue.

After a discussion about the fare, difficult to maintain in such heat, on an empty stomach and because his was the only remaining taxi, we entered ‘my' taximan's taxi, a huge, black, hearse-like Steinbergian vehicle, and were driven off down an avenue which seemed to have been intended as a triumphal way but lacked any of the panoply of triumph, through some unmemorable outskirts and into the Avenue Dessalines, otherwise La Grande Rue, which runs through the heart of the city, leaving on the right hand La Route du Fort Dimanche, the fort itself marked on an oil company's map (free to visitors) as ‘
Lieu d'Intérêt
'. Interesting, presumably, because few prisoners had ever emerged from it in one piece and because it was to this place, in the middle of the night, that le Grand Disparu took his son-in-law, the husband of his eldest daughter, Marie-Denise (herself later a contender for supreme
power), to witness, as a mark of his disapproval of her marriage to a potentially dangerous army colonel, the execution of nineteen of his friends by an impromptu firing squad composed of staff officers. At the last moment, having accepted a mandatory invitation to be present, the officers had rifles thrust into their hands and were ordered to shoot their companions in arms, who were lashed to stakes.

The taxi droned on into the city.

We sat on the veranda of the Grand Hotel Oloffson, having consumed a delicious light tropical luncheon, served by an old retainer who answered to the name of C'est Dieu. As we found it impossible either to hail him by this name – or even to paraphrase it, one could scarcely call a waiter God, even in Haiti – we contented ourselves with attracting his attention in the English manner, that is by raising a hand weakly and calling out, ‘Er …' or ‘I say …'

This was the hotel of
The Comedians
and from where we were sitting, down in a corner of the tropical garden where huge, rather rickety palm trees soared into the sky, we could see the swimming pool in which, empty in the novel, some minister or other had messily done away with himself. Now, full of water, it looked positively inviting. Meanwhile, overhead in the trees, strange birds uttered rasping cries.

The Grand Hotel Oloffson stood on the lush, lower slopes of Kenscoff Mountain which, particularly towards evening, loomed over the city in a somewhat alarming manner, as if it was about to fall and squash it flat. The hotel was a truly astonishing structure in a country in which this epithet has become meaningless from sheer over-use. Painted a sizzling white, it had been built of almost indestructible mahogany to house Simon Sam, who was President from 1896 to 1902, not to be confused with his namesake, Guillaume Sam, also President (though a short-term one), who
ended up being impaled by a mob on the railings of the French Embassy in 1915, after which he was torn to pieces.

It was the embellishments that made it unique. From every possible and impossible vantage point it sprouted turrets, spires, crotchets, finials and balconies, some of which appeared to have been put on upside down, all of them riddled with so much fretwork that it was a miracle that the building remained standing. It was as if some giant, but inspired, wood-boring insect had been let loose on what had originally been a decent, solid, colonial, clapboard structure. What it was, although it lacked a dome – about the only thing it did lack, except flying buttresses – was oriental, the sort of orient suggested in Coleridge's opium-induced visions of Xanadu. The bar with the brilliant colours of the primitive Haitian paintings shining through the perpetual dusk of daytime, the dining-room with its rocks and greenery could well have been the ante-chambers to caverns leading down to a sunless sea, which was exactly what guests craved for after a morning's sightseeing in the inferno of Port-au-Prince.

‘The darling of the literary and theatre sets,' someone said or wrote of the Oloffson – and it was true. Even a short list of personalities who had stayed there read like the formula for some deadly gas; and in what I would have thought an unguarded moment Al Seitz had had this thought for the day inscribed on the postcards which I could send home, with a picture of the hotel on the front, to Three Ther Mansions, which my mother though in failing health still kept on after my father's death. Perhaps it was not so silly, but whether it was or not did not matter because, in Haiti, communications from foreigners rarely, if ever, left its shores – not because of censorship but because the stamps necessary to export a letter were of such high denomination that as soon as they entered the sorting offices the impoverished staff immediately steamed them off.

Above my head on the walls of the balcony were a number of primitive paintings, robust enough to be exposed to the almost open air, some of them excellent. I was particularly attracted by one painted by an artist whose name was A. Bazile. In marvellous colours – gold and cobalt and splendid reds – it showed a number of giant peasants, the women with great baskets of Indian corn on their noddles standing in front of what was, by a trick of the perspective, a diminutive village.

There were no guests about and all of the twenty-eight servants, which Seitz's brochure assured me existed, had retired for the siesta, including C'est Dieu. Wanda had gone to unpack.

‘
Est-ce-que vous aimez ce tableau
?'

Far below me – I was standing on a chair pondering the problem of taking a colour photograph of this painting
contre-jour
– was a solemn-looking, owl-like, very, very, black Negro.

‘
Oui, c'est très, très bon
.'

‘
Twès bien! Excellent. Je suis Bazile
.'

He spoke with the omission of the ‘r' sound, something which all Créoles affect. It sounds attractive on a woman's lips, a little soppy, a little Woosterish, on a man's.