The Seeds of Fiction (14 page)

‘Perhaps he was deaf and dumb,' Graham suggested as we watched him go.

Bajeux and I didn't believe so, yet we couldn't explain the youth's strange behaviour. The incident remained one of those ineffable Caribbean mysteries. In Haiti the mysterious stranger would have been considered a zombie. Nevertheless I suggested to my two sharp-eyed companions that they relax their Macoute watch', as Graham called our constant paranoia.

Jiman', the main Dominican border town through which Dominican forces were expected to storm into Haiti during the 1963 crisis when the two countries nearly went to war, was fast asleep. It was siesta time. We were hungry and thirsty. The government hotel was closed for repairs, and the old woman who ran the local eating house was asleep. Her young maid was terror-stricken when we suggested she wake her up, so we went into a
colmado
and
purchased three tins of miniature sausages, several stale bread rolls, a box of toothpicks and room-temperature soft drinks.

‘There must be a brothel where we at least can get a cold drink,' Graham said, unhappy about our lunch arrangement.

‘Dominican brothels close down for siesta,' I said. I was not about to go racing around the stifling hot, awful little border town in the middle of the day in search of a whorehouse.

Graham glanced at me. I could tell he was sceptical, but he said nothing.

My main concern was getting over our final mountain range before nightfall. The prospect of this last section of the border made me nervous. Anything could happen. We sat under a thorny
bayonde
tree that offered a few speckles of shade and opened the first can of sausages. A horrible smell rose up and invaded the still air. Bajeux plucked out one of the little morsels with a toothpick and offered it to Graham. He reacted to the taste with revulsion. None the less our hunger drove us on; we held our breath and devoured the
saucissons
until the little cans were empty.

‘And to think,' said Graham, still grimacing and chewing on a piece of bread to rid himself of the pungent taste of the sausages, ‘in a few days I'll be dining at the Tour d'Argent in Paris.'

His comment angered me, but I said nothing. It took Graham out of our world. His thoughts were of eating at the pricey Parisian restaurant while our concern was providing survival food for the Kamoken and other Haitian refugees. For the past three months I had been transporting sacks of grain, flour and tins of oil from the Catholic Relief and CARE to keep them alive. I was reminded that Graham didn't belong to these surroundings after all.

We washed our meal down with the warm drinks and returned to the car under the scorching sun.

‘We could be at the Oloffson in an hour if the border guards let us cross,' I said trying to make light of lunch. ‘I'm ready for one of Caesar's rum punches.'

‘It would be your last,' Bajeux said.

‘Indeed,' Graham muttered.

The joke went down like a deflated balloon.

Past the salt flats, just across the border from the town and glued to the foot of a mountain, was the Haitian military post of Malpasse. In the late 1950s I had begun to cover the Dominican Republic from Haiti. During those last years of Trujillo's thirty-year reign I was one of the few travellers returning to Haiti to cross the border at Jiman'. It was only a fast hour's ride to Port-au-Prince, road and politics permitting. Once, when I was returning from the Dominican Republic, I slept in the little Malpasse jail after the Haitian army chief ordered the sergeant in charge not to allow me and my car to re-enter Haiti. I was returning to Haiti in my Volkswagen. At Malpasse a new
sergeant took my passport, and, expecting a short wait, I kept the engine running — that is, until this bright sergeant showed me my passport and told me it was no good as my visa to travel back and forth to the Dominican Republic did not have the police stamp. (All such visas were difficult to get and a friendly pastor working in the passport division who read my newspaper had issued it, but I knew I would not get a police stamp.) No one had noticed. The sergeant did. The officer in charge was an old friend, but he could do nothing but wait until evening to contact headquarters. The reply came back: Don't let the
blan
pass. I chose my bed in the empty prison and kept the door open even after the officer tried to close it to make sure I didn't take off to Port-au-Prince. In the dark I noticed the door closing slowly and pushed it back open and sent the officer tumbling down the embankment in his underwear.

In the morning I raced back to Santo Domingo full of mosquito bites and the memory of a nightmare about Trujillo's 1937 massacre of poor Haitians along the border. I caught the noon plane to Port-au-Prince and breezed through immigration. In the days that followed I had my car driven to the Dominican side and asked my the sergeant friend to drive me across the border. I invited him to toast my Beetle with several cold Presidente beers.

The saline flats are a no man's land between the two countries. It's the devil's oven. In December 1958 Duvalier signed a ‘peace pact' with Trujillo — having kept him waiting for more than an hour in the steaming heat. While photographing El Benefactor as he sat in the 38-degree heat in a three-piece business suit waiting for Papa Doc, I noted rivulets of perspiration eroding his pancake makeup. The droplets trickled down his flabby jowls. When Papa Doc eventually arrived, he and El Jefe exchanged saccharine smiles. It was the first and last time the two tyrants of the island met. Each promised to refuse safe haven to the other's enemies. Trujillo vowed in particular to protect Duvalier if the bearded rebel leader in Cuba's Sierra Maestra across the Windward Passage from Haiti should come to power. A month later the bearded one, Fidel Castro, was in Havana and the Cuban dictator, General Fulgencio Batista, was in exile in Ciudad Trujillo.

With the Dominican sausages growling in our digestive tracts, we began the climb up the last mountain range. As we came to round the first leg of the road the back of our little Volkswagen sank into the gravel. I raced the engine, but the Beetle refused to budge. A huge thorn had punctured a tyre through to the inner tube. It was a miracle we'd managed to get this far without car trouble. We replaced the flat tyre with the spare, but since it would have been foolhardy to try to climb the mountain range without another tyre we backtracked to a construction camp where, with the help of workmen, we patched the punctured tyre and tube.

As we toiled up into the cool Sierra de Bahoruco, it became familiar ground
for Bajeux and me. He pointed out a steep hillside where the thatched hut that Fred Baptiste's Kamoken had used as a shelter and rendezvous for incursions into Haiti stood. It remained there, abandoned like some arcane symbol of defeat. From there the road branched off to El Aguacate, but we decided not to tempt fate further and avoided the Dominican army post there despite Graham's wish to see it. Bajeux and I knew members of the garrison might recognize us and be hostile.

At the summit we were greeted by fog and an afternoon drizzle. Graham surveyed the rugged landscape as Bajeux sat transfixed, gazing at the Haitian side of the frontier. This section of our narrow route was paved with large shiny rocks. It was more like a washboard than a road and was slippery in the rain. We met a group of scowling soldiers manning a small Dominican army post. Bajeux stepped out of the car and got to work. He asked the suspicious troops whether they had any Haitian ‘guests'. They didn't answer, but when Bajeux identified himself as a priest — he was dressed as we were — the soldiers allowed him to enter the post. The single cell at the post was empty.

It was a jolting, sliding, bumpy ride down to Pedernales. Closer to the lowlands giant trucks, their tyres taller than our car, rumbled along their own red-dirt roadway parallel to the one we were travelling on. They were transporting bauxite, the red earth and raw material for aluminium, from the mines to the Alcoa docks at Cabo Rojo for export to the United States. Our rough little road eventually led into the wide well-graded bauxite-transporting road.

We arrived in Pedernales at dusk. At our request, Dominican army officers gave us a gratifyingly comprehensive tour of the city's prison facilities. We spoke with several jailed Haitians, but the charges against them were non-political; none was one of the missing Kamoken.

The few hotels in Pedernales didn't look inviting, so I suggested that we go to Cabo Rojo, to the big Alcoa bauxite complex where I knew the manager, an American named Pat Hughson, who had often extended an invitation to visit when I met him socially in Santo Domingo. Graham and Bajeux thought it was a splendid idea: the prospect of a drink, dinner, a shower and a good bed at Cabo Rojo appealed to them. Hughson, I explained, had once been either a pilot or an aviation mechanic who had been brought down from the United States by Trujillo to work with the Dominican air force. He married a Dominican and was now employed by Alcoa. He had seemed a friendly, hospitable and affable enough fellow.

It was dark when we arrived. The Beetle's lights lit up the sturdy high chain-link fence, and we followed it until we came upon a padlocked gate. The enclosure looked forbidding. It was situated in the remote extreme south-west corner of the Dominican Republic; we had travelled from ocean to ocean. A
man in uniform stepped out of the guardhouse with a flashlight and asked us to state our business. He made no move to open the gate. I identified myself as a good
amigo
of the boss. I needed to talk with him.

He took my name and told us to wait, then he disappeared inside the guardhouse. We could hear his muffled voice as he made a call. There was a long silence. We waited. Graham looked at me, his eyebrows arched quizzically.

‘Do you see a water tap?' Father Bajeux said. We were all terribly thirsty. I felt uncomfortable. I called to the guard. He told me again to wait. Finally he came back to the gate, beckoned to me, unlocked it and opened it just enough for me to slide through. He pointed to the guardhouse phone, the receiver resting on the side of the table.

I took the phone. ‘Hello?'

‘Yes?' It was Patrick Hughson, and there was nothing friendly in his voice. I thought perhaps we had interrupted his dinner.

‘Hello, Pat. Could you put us up for the night? There are three of us.'

‘This isn't a hotel. You can find a hotel in town,' he said.

So much for the jovial Hughson I'd met on the Santo Domingo cocktail circuit. Still, I explained that we'd been out in the boondocks all day travelling from San Juan de la Maguana, adding, ‘I thought you had said to drop in and visit if …' If I hadn't been with Graham and Bajeux, both of whom deserved a good night's sleep, I would have told Hughson to go to hell and gone for any of the decrepit lodging places in Pedernales — even the prison.

Finally Hughson relented. ‘Put the guard on,' he said. I handed the phone to the guard, who received his orders. He unlocked the gate again, and we drove into the compound. But once more we were told to wait. The additional delay was infuriating. Finally an unarmed guard on a motorcycle wearing a shiny silver hard hat arrived. We were issued visitors' badges and ordered to follow the bike.

A mountain of red earth loomed next to the adjacent Caribbean Sea. A long low-slung bauxite cargo ship was berthed at the dock. ‘This is right out of
Dr
No!' exclaimed Graham. ‘Dr who?' Bajeux and I chorused. Neither of us was familiar at the time with the James Bond thriller set in Jamaica at a bauxite port much like this.

‘And this is obviously Dr No himself,' Graham laughed when we drove up to the main house where Hughson, a large heavy-set man with a rotund girth, awaited us on his spacious open veranda.

I apologized to Hughson for not calling in advance, explaining that we hadn't known we would make it over the mountains, but he did not appear to be in a forgiving mood. He gave us a cool reception, making us feel like intruders, suspicious at our sudden night-time arrival. I could see that Graham was equally dubious of Hughson and his inhospitable manner. I introduced
my two companions, mumbling their names, but Hughson was not interested in who they were.

‘You missed dinner,' Hughson said, sounding almost pleased.

‘We've been travelling all day from San Juan de la Maguana. It's been a long tough trip,' I explained, but he was not impressed.

He sent orders to prepare cold sandwiches for us. Later Coca-Colas arrived. Graham was mortified. ‘You wouldn't have a whisky?' he asked. Graham was never shy when it came to asking for a drink. Hughson must have seen the plea in Graham's pale blue eyes. Three whiskies arrived, a single drink each. Graham drained his with such obvious relish that any reasonable host would have quickly ordered a refill — but not Hughson.

When the dry ham-and-cheese sandwiches arrived, without condiments, we wolfed them down. As we ate Hughson sat back, seeming to find us a little disgusting. There was a little small talk. With no whisky refill in the offing, we thanked him and said goodnight.

Again we were taken under escort and were deposited at the junior executives' billet where we would spend the night.

‘What a bloody awful fellow!' Graham exploded. ‘The man has no humanity. Dreadful chap.'

But even Graham's latent anti-Americanism, which Pat Hughson had caused to flare up like a fever, was soon lost in the sheer comic relief of the moment. Graham and I had to share a room. Despite our long day on the road neither of us was ready for sleep. Like two English schoolboys we sat up talking and laughing as long as our dry vocal chords would permit about this strange encounter and Graham's imaginary comparison with
Dr No.
Graham thought up all kinds of sinister plots that could be going on around us at Cabo Rojo. He told me about his stay at Ian Fleming's Goldeneye residence on Jamaica's north coast. He hadn't liked the housekeeper, Vivian, whom he accused of putting the ‘evil eye' on him. I realized much later the depth of Graham's superstitious nature. Fleming, he said, had offered to loan him Goldeneye rent-free if he would do the foreword to an omnibus of his James Bond books. ‘I told him I'd rather pay the rent than write the foreword.'