Boozehound - Jason Wilson [79]
As we pondered Shaquille O’Neal’s thespian work, Saintil surprised us again by saying he often longed for a day when Papa Doc Duvalier—with his voodoo mysticism and his murderous secret police, the Tontons Macoutes—would be returned to power and end the utter chaos and lawlessness. Saintil said this even though, at forty-nine, he was certainly old enough to remember firsthand the violence of the Duvalier regime. “Many people believe that Papa Doc is still alive,” he said. “No one actually saw him buried in his coffin. People say they’ve seen him, late at night, walking the streets of Port-au-Prince.”
We were on our way south to Jacmel and needed to exchange dollars for gourdes, so Saintil cut out of traffic and sped through several backstreets. He eventually pulled the truck through a metal gate at a gray, nondescript warehouse, passed several armed guards, and parked. The four of us entered a dimly lit backroom where a woman and two men were counting piles upon piles of money—gourdes, dollars, and any number of other currencies. Without a word, the woman quickly took our twenties and fifties, counted out gourdes, and handed them to us. The two men never looked up as they continued to wrap piles of bills in rubber bands. Three minutes later, we were escorted back outside and straight to the truck by one of the armed guards. “Let’s just not ask questions,” someone said. Back in the truck, we all took big swigs of Barbancourt.
The trip to Jacmel, which was only about forty-eight miles away, took over five hours, on pockmarked roads through parched, treeless, eroded mountains. After an early detour through the slums of Cité Soleil—which the U.N. has called “the most dangerous place on Earth”—we were all a little rattled and in need of another drink. When Kevin and Míchel requested a stop, Saintil pulled over at the Snack Bar de l’Immaculée Conception.
By the time we arrived in Jacmel, it was early evening. Guides, guys guarding over our truck, and people selling fruit and wooden sculptures swarmed outside our hotel. We hired a boy no older than twelve to take us around town, and almost immediately, he tried to also interest us in the services of his slightly older “sister.” Guides would continue to press many services on us over the next several days. At one point, when we needed to find a telephone, we had to hire three guides, one for each of us; then when we entered the neighborhood where the telephone office was, we had to hire another local guide for our guides. When we finally did arrive at the telephone office, we hired another guide to open the door and lead us into the building. So in the span of about six blocks, we’d placed five guides on our payroll.
Walking past the colonial buildings in the main square that night, one could almost imagine the port in the days when orange peels were exported to France to make top-shelf Cointreau. The town was Haiti’s major port in the nineteenth century—more important than Port-au-Prince. But that was all long ago. Gone from Jacmel was the sweet fragrance of orange peels drying in the sun on flat rooftops. Those citrus smells, according to Saintil, created a powerful, exotic aphrodisiac. Years ago, as a boy, he lived in one of the rural villages near here, before he moved away to Port-au-Prince. He told us this as we lounged at a beachside bar and drank fifteen-year-old Barbancourt rum and watched garbage wash up in the surf. In Jacmel’s soft breeze, you smelled something less than promising, something you couldn’t quite place: Burning garbage? Sweat? Diesel exhaust? Simply the smell of things falling apart?
Carnival began at breakfast