Читать книгу Lydia Bailey - Kenneth Roberts - Страница 13

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Haiti, the French part of San Domingo, is like the back of a man’s right hand when he holds it before his face, forefinger and little finger extended to the left, the two middle fingers folded against the palm, and the thumb pressed out of sight against the hidden fingers. The knuckles are the dividing-line between the French part of the island and the Spanish part. The space between the two fingers is the seventy-mile-wide, pale green, pale blue Bight of Léogane. The extended little finger, almost touching the outstretched nose of Cuba, is the Great North Plain, with the capital city of Cap François at the upper edge of the large joint. The depression between the down-folded middle fingers is the valley of the Artibonite, walled by mountain chains whose names are as fantastic as their shapes. At the base of the index finger, where it joins the down-folded second finger, is Port-au-Prince, a hundred miles south of Cap François across a stormy sea of mountains. And between the knuckle and the first joint of the outstretched index finger are the rich sugar, rum, and coffee sections of Léogane, Jacmel, and the Cul de Sac.

We made port at Cap François—the very harbor into which Columbus had sailed to establish his first settlement in the New World; and I felt that I knew it from Columbus’s own description:

“The high and rocky mountains on either side of the harbor rose from among noble forests and swept down into luxuriant plains and cultivated fields, and the rich and smiling valley between the two mountains ran far into the interior. The air was mild as in April, and the sailors were enraptured with the beauty of the country, which surpassed, as they said, even the luxuriant plains of Cordova.”

I was excited, too, by the crumpled mountains that seemed to be suspended from the clouds like a vast theater curtain painted by an artist with a liking for violent colors; by the city of blue, pink, and white houses grouped around a shining white Plaza on the waterfront; by the fleet of American brigs and schooners that lay at anchor in the cup-shaped harbor, their bows headed into a hot southwest wind perfumed with flower odors. Somewhere beyond those purple mountains I knew I’d find Lydia Bailey. Harriet Faulkner could insist that Lydia was dead as often as she liked, but she was so alive that I could almost hear her calling to me from beyond those mountain-walls.

As we glided through the fleet of American vessels, Lee gave me the lay of the land. “That white Plaza at the edge of the harbor,” he said, “is all white stone, and so are the roads for miles into the country. The long white building high on the left, that’s Christophe’s palace. He’s the black general that keeps order in these parts.” He looked at me oddly. “Don’t get the idea that black generals are anything like white generals. They ain’t exactly human when they get excited.”

“Those stone buildings at the edge of the Plaza, they’re warehouses and government offices built by the French before the blacks drove ’em out. That’s where the stores and taverns are, too: the Plaza.” He sighed ecstatically. “Wait till you see that Plaza filled to the scuppers with niggers!” He lowered his voice. “And full of women! By God, Hamlin, you can talk about women, but you don’t know anything about ’em till you’ve had colored ones!”

His face, as he described the more delectable points of those women, grew red and sweaty; he constantly licked his upper lip by protruding the lower, as if feeling for an imaginary mustache; his eyes roamed from the shore to my face and back again as if hopeful of discovering in me an excitement equal to his own.

“You can have any shade you want,” he said, leaning close to me so that I was conscious of his breath, which wasn’t pleasant. “Some like ’em pure black, and God knows there’s enough black ones. But take my word for it, the best of the lot are the sacatras. They’re about three shades lighter than the mulattoes—seven-eighths French and one-eighth nigger; keep their carriages just like regular ladies, and buy their perfume straight from Paris. By God, Hamlin, there ain’t anything like ’em anywhere in the world!”

He gazed at me complacently, as though he had been the first to discover the women he described. Not having a ready answer, I raised my eyebrows and made sounds of amazement.

“I’ll tell you what,” he resumed. “Wait till I’ve got my papers in order. Then I’ll go ashore with you and make you acquainted with a piece of yellow goods you’d be a week finding.”

“Oh,” I said, “I won’t put you to all that trouble, Captain. You know I’ve got business to attend to——”

“Let it wait,” Lee said. “That’s what everyone does in San Domingo. Women and rum come ahead of everything.”

“My business won’t wait,” I said. “Don’t worry about me, Captain. I’m figuring on living ashore, anyway.”

Lee looked irritated. “This girl’s clean, if that’s what’s worrying you,” he said. “You’d better trust my judgment. If you depend on your own, you’ll go home with a fine case of yaws.”

He seemed almost insulted because I wouldn’t follow his suggestion, and I was hard put to it to explain to him that I had nothing whatever against his choice of women.

It never occurred to me, when I bade Lee good-bye and set off for shore with my carpetbag and my neatly corded bundle of gold braid, that my path and his might cross again; but I know now that we’d all get on better in this world if we assumed that we’ll be sure to have further dealings with everyone we meet.

I truly believe there never was a city anywhere in the world as strange or as odd-smelling as Cap François in that January of 1802. What Paris looked like, I didn’t then know; but it seemed to me that Cap François was a Paris such as one might see in a nightmare—a Paris with one side open to the blue and emerald waters of a palm-fringed harbor; a Paris filled with black, brown, and yellow Parisians chattering a hardly understandable French; a Paris filled with generals straight out of a delirium: generals as black as the underside of a stove-lid, wearing swords twice as long as swords should be, muffled to the throat in long-skirted military jackets of colors far from military—pinks, light blues, pale purples—and crowned with chapeaux so overwhelming that the black faces beneath them seemed dwarfed and wizened, like those of apes with their heads in bushel baskets.

When the Hope’s longboat nosed its way through the scores of lighters and ships’ boats packed against the front of the quai that ran the full length of the Plaza, I felt I might be smothered; for a score of jet-black porters struggled for possession of my carpetbag and my bundle of gold braid. One of them, by persistent use of a hoarse voice and threatening gestures, took possession of them and of me at the same time, shepherding me up the steps of the quai and onto the white-paved Plaza, where it seemed to me that all the Negroes in the world were congregated.

There were Negroes of every gradation of color, and in every imaginable form of dress and undress: Negro roustabouts; Negro grandees; jet-black men, shoeless, tattered, with flattened noses and enormous banana-shaped lips; pale-brown elegants with aquiline features, little crinkly whiskers such as Frenchmen wear, and garments grotesquely exaggerated in style and cut.

There were fat Negresses in brown dresses like nightgowns, carrying baskets filled with short lengths of sugar cane, which sold for an infinitesimal copper coin and in such numbers that the whole Plaza seemed to be covered with the chewed fragments; skinny old witch-like Negresses, in shapeless gunny-sacking, selling charms, philters, and powders from wicker trays hung by cords from their scrawny shoulders; buxom black prostitutes, in waists and dresses slit to show enormous breasts and thighs; and—most noticeable of all—innumerable slender, coffee-creamy-colored mulatto women, every last one richly if not startlingly dressed, all of them in carriages, all carrying scarlet parasols, all freely and openly making advances to the pale-brown elegants, to American sea captains, even to all the American sailors scattered through the crowd.

Around and among these gaudily dressed black, brown, and yellow people ran naked little boys and girls, their dark skins glistening with perspiration, screaming as if all hell were after them, bumping into passersby, diving beneath horses, rolling in the chewed sugar cane that littered the white paving stones.

The smells of the place were unexpected and startling: odors seemed to lie upon the Plaza in thick, undulating layers. Most powerful of all was the scent of coffee and of sugar, sticky-sweet and reminiscent of my boyhood days in Portland, when I’d lean down into the sugar barrel to filch a scoopful. Blended with the coffee-sugary odors was a musky, animal smell that I took to come from the dark-skinned thousands all about me. Weaving through those odors came the stench of human excrement from open sewers that ran across the white Plaza to empty themselves into the harbor; the smell of decaying fish; and, whenever one of the slender, coffee-creamy Negresses or one of the pale-brown elegants came near, a scent of perfume so violent as to smother every other smell, even the foulest.

My squatty porter went surging on before, bellowing hoarsely and making useful play with my bundle of gold braid against the rumps of idlers who obstructed his progress. In thick Creole he bawled for permission to make road for a Blanc—which is how all Negroes in Haiti invariably address a white man. “Bon jour, Blanc,” they say. “How do you do, White.”

This obstreperous guide led me to the heavy stone arcades that formed three sides of the garish, hot, odorous Plaza. Beneath the arcades were shops selling jewelry, lace nothings, boots, wines, bonnets—fripperies for men and women, but fripperies more elegant and costly than anything New York or Philadelphia had to offer.

I think my guide would have ignored me if I’d tried to divert him from his purpose, for seemingly he was determined that there was only one place in Cap François that an American could go; and so I found myself in the foyer of the Hôtel de la République—a hotel so magnificent, so glittering, and so much more sumptuous than anything I had ever before seen that I could hardly believe my eyes.

The lobby was crowded with important-looking black men, some in those same fantastically colored uniforms I had seen on the Plaza; others dressed with almost startling elegance—skin-tight pantaloons, long-tailed satin coats, ruffled shirts, flowered weskits, enormous cocked hats, and beribboned canes as tall as their shoulders.

There was a porters’ room off the main lobby, and when my porter led me there to leave my bag and bundle, I thought I’d stumbled into a school; for the room was crowded with small black boys on benches, each boy clutching a package or two. From the chief porter I learned that these were the private package-carriers of the generals and the dark-skinned elegants in the lobby, all of whom were waiting for the doors of the dining-room to be opened.

I think the thing that impressed me most about all the black men in the lobby, next to the dazzling colors of their garments, was their show of politeness. There was a perpetual hand-shaking, bowing, chapeau-flourishing, a constant calling of titles, such as Mon Général, Mon Amiral, Mon Cher Commissaire, Mon Cher Ministre. Yet, when the doors of the dining-room were thrown open, this mass of black men moved so suddenly forward that I expected to see some of the smaller ones trampled to death.

They surged into the long dining-room like a brightly colored wave, treading on each other’s heels and calling out, “After you, mon Général.” “Pray do me the honor to precede me, M. le Ministre.”

There were a dozen long tables in the room, laden with platters of bread, bowls of pickles, jars of honey, legs of lamb, and enormous fish resting magnificently on long wooden platters. The floor was sanded, perhaps to give diners a better foothold when they ran for their seats.

Those black men threw themselves on the food like a horde of giant locusts, all conversation ceased, and the room was clamorous with the clanking of knives and forks against plates and the noisy champing of all those black jaws.

I paid off my porter, found an official of the hotel at a desk, explained that I wished to dine, and was waved into the dining-room, where I speedily found there was still plenty to eat upon the tables in spite of the ravenous inroads already made upon the heaped platters; then gave a little more attention to my surroundings.

Beneath the generous platters the tablecloths were sadly soiled and covered with sketches, hen-tracks, and diagrams of fortifications evidently made with anything handy, from knives to cigar-ash. Crawling on everything—tablecloth, platters of food, the diners’ knives and forks, even on their hands and faces—were flies by the countless thousands: big, noisy flies with shiny blue bellies. Other thousands hovered dartingly around the chandeliers, or crawled meditatively upon the ceiling.

I couldn’t take my eyes from the dazzling uniforms all around me, and it was more than I could do to keep from being an eavesdropper to the magniloquent speeches that came fragmentarily to my ears.

Sitting near me were two black generals. One wore a purple uniform encrusted with gold braid, its folded collar high around his ears, so that to turn his head he was forced to turn his upper body. The front edges of that bedizened collar were thick with grease where his lips had rubbed when he turned his head incautiously. His companion wore a uniform coat of black velvet frogged with silver. His breeches were bright yellow leather, mostly concealed by shiny black jackboots whose tops reached a foot above his knees.

The smaller general, in a crow’s voice, was holding forth impressively to his companion on the subject of a review of troops in which he had that morning taken part. “Ah, mon Général, it was magnificent! The appearance of those troops was without parallel! Never do my troops appear upon the field without causing me an indescribable sensation.” He struck himself upon the chest, coughed chokingly, and seemed about to strangle.

The taller general sympathetically reached inside his coat and brought out two pale, thin cigars. The two generals lit them and draped their arms across the backs of their chairs with an air of profound importance and worldliness.

“I also have that feeling, mon Général,” the taller general said. “When I lead my troops upon the field, thoughts pass through my head with such rapidity that I could weep. I think of their loyalty, their bravery, their love for this great land of ours, and I know that no troops in all the world could stand for a moment against our army.”

The smaller one puffed pale cigar smoke whose odor resembled that of lightly salted hake—that powerful effluvium which poisons the air of Maine in the autumn. “Your thought is understandable, mon Général,” he rejoined. “The tenue, the discipline of these brave men reflects the spirit of their officers. They have never been conquered, nor can they ever be conquered. The English have tried it without success. The Spaniards have tried it without success. No other soldiers in the world have the magnificent qualities of our soldiers—none! Not for a moment would I hesitate to engage any army in the world!”

The tall general raised a simian eyebrow. “Most certainly not, mon Général! I have thought often and often that I shall soon take a regiment of these brave men of ours to Paris and arrange for a demonstration. It is possible that I may go next month.”

The smaller general looked doubtful. “I had planned to go to Paris next month myself, mon Général, but only to display my horses. The expense of transporting a regiment—that would be épatant!”

The taller general shrugged his shoulders. “If the Treasury should prove unwilling, I would arrange the matter myself. I, too, have horses, as you know, mon Général. You had planned to display your horses in France?”

“Only to review the troops, mon Général, and to let Bonaparte see that a general of Haiti is the equal of any officer in Europe—that there is nothing Europe can do that we cannot do better.”

The taller general nodded understandingly. “An excellent idea, mon Général. It was my plan to race my horses in a few of the great races. No other horses in the world are as fast as those horses of mine, mon Général—except perhaps your own.”

“That is true, mon Général.” The smaller one leaned his elbows on the table as if considering whether he, too, should enter his horses against the finest products of Europe’s stables.

I shot a quick look around the table to see whether others had heard this modest exchange; but those near me were busy with their own important conversations. So far as I could see, everyone at the table was on the verge of exploding with importance, barring two ununiformed black men at the far end. One—short, gray-haired, partly bald, and wholly worried-looking, who wore a simple suit of wrinkled white linen—was fixedly regarding the ceiling with a sort of melancholy detachment. His companion, a hulk of a man, also in white linen, had a velvety black face and shoulders so broad that his bullet-head seemed strangely dwarfed. He was biting into a leg of lamb, and so huge was the bite that his own eyes were closed by the distention of his jaws.

As the big man completed his colossal bite, his eyes opened and looked straight into mine, almost as though he’d been waiting to catch my attention. I had an uncomfortable feeling that he’d watched me listening to the conversation of the two generals, and had read my thoughts, which had been neither sympathetic nor complimentary. I even felt that he was about to come around the table to speak to me. If this had been his intention, however, he was distracted from it.

A few seats removed from him sat a young and gaudily clad Negro general hunched over a plate on which were piled slices of bread covered with honey which he was shoveling into himself in dripping gouts and gobbets. Suddenly he stopped, clapped both hands to his mouth, and shrieked horribly, as if stung by a thousand hornets. He leaped to his feet, moaning and swallowing convulsively, and looked wildly about him; then ran to the big black man who had been watching me. From the anguished expression of the sufferer, I knew what had happened: he had a bad tooth, and the honey had been too excruciatingly much for it.

The big Negro peered inquiringly into the other’s mouth, nodded his understanding, and examined his own fingers doubtfully; then he leaned over and rubbed them on the sanded floor, obviously to remove the juices of the leg of lamb. Then he gripped the sufferer’s hair with one hand, thrust the sanded thumb and forefinger of the other hand into the mouth, looked ruminatively at the ceiling—and twisted, as one twists a key in a lock. The sufferer howled again and started back convulsively. The big man’s thumb and forefinger emerged, as from a cavern, holding a tooth the size of a small carrot.

I wondered how in God’s name any man could possess such strength in his fingers; and while I wondered, the big man dropped the tooth on the floor, wiped his fingers on the tablecloth, picked up his leg of lamb, and raised it to his lips. Again his eyes met mine—and again I became acutely aware that I was too openly betraying my thoughts. As I left the table to get my little portrait of Lydia from my bag, I told myself that I must be more guarded in this singular country if I wished to keep out of trouble.

I wanted a quiet place in which to sit alone and plan what to say to the American Consul when I should go to him about Lydia, as I knew I must. I thought I’d found that quiet place around the corner from the Hôtel de la République. On a comparatively cool and quiet side street, a few doors from the Plaza, I saw tables and chairs on the sidewalk, all of them empty, and had the thought that here was a haven where I could sit peacefully over coffee and rum and lay my plans.

There was nobody inside the café except a languid, light-colored mulatto waiter whose skin had a sort of greenish-yellow cast. So far as I could see, he was doing nothing but study himself in a mirror, first profile, then full face, throwing back his head proudly and moving his lips in silent speech. He paid no attention to me until, after waiting an unconscionable time, I called to him that if he weren’t too busy I’d like coffee and rum.

On this he favored me with a glance so offensively contemptuous that I wondered what ailed him. He came reluctantly to the door and looked down his nose at me; then, in an almost hating voice, he asked in Creole what sort of coffee I wanted.

It seemed to me he was deliberately trying to make me feel ill at ease, so in my best French I said curtly that I naturally wanted the best.

He told me superciliously that in Haiti one should do as others of importance do: name the sort of best desired.

In the midst of his mumblings, a procession of Negro boys came out of the Plaza toward us. There were seven of them, eight or nine years old, dressed in short cotton pants over which hung striped cotton shirts. The larger boys carried bundles on their heads, the smaller ones had lesser parcels, and all the parcels put together wouldn’t have made the tenth part of a load for a sick donkey. They passed us single file, flat black feet slapping the pavement and eyes rolling whitely. The last boy, who was also the littlest, had two packages which seemed to be causing him trouble, for he shifted them constantly from one hand to the other, and his saucer-like eyes looked worried.

As the last boy passed, the sulky waiter spat at him and kicked his ankle, as if to take out on him the spleen he had begun to vent on me. The boy tripped and fell, his parcels flying among the chairs and tables. A lightning-quick flick of the waiter’s shoe sent one of the parcels spinning into an opening in the outer wall of the restaurant—a sort of drainage pipe. Then the waiter shouted indignantly at the boy and kicked him again.