Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [13]
How does it feel? Spasso was shouting in his ear. How does it feel to be free? They were rising, rising, they might never stop—Blair closed his eyes and let his head roll back, surrendering to the awful weightlessness. Like dying, he wanted to tell them, like death, and how grieved and utterly lost you’d feel as everything precious faded out. That ultimate grief which everyone saves for the end, Blair was spending it, burning through all his reserves as the helicopter bore him away.
Rêve Haitien
In the evenings, after he finished his rounds, Mason would often carry his chessboard down to the Champ de Mars and wait for a match on one of the concrete benches. As a gesture of solidarity he lived in Pacot, the scruffy middle-class neighborhood in the heart of Port-au-Prince, while most of his fellow O.A.S. observers had taken houses in the fashionable suburb of Pétionville. Out of sympathy for the people Mason insisted on Pacot, but as it turned out he grew to like the place, the jungly yards and wild creep of urban undergrowth, the crumbling gingerbread houses and cobbled streets. And it had strategic position as well, which was impor tant to Mason, who took his job as an observer seriously. From his house he could track the nightly gunfire, its volume and heft, the level of intent—whether it was a drizzle meant mainly for suggestive effect or something heavier, a message of a more direct nature. In the mornings he always knew where to look for bodies. And when war had erupted between two army gangs he’d been the first observer to know, lying in bed while what sounded like the long-rumored invasion raged nearby. Most of his colleagues had been clueless until the morning after, when they met the roadblocks on their way to work.
On Thursdays he went to the Oloffson to hear the band, and on weekends he toured the hotel bars and casinos in Pétionville. Otherwise, unless it had been such a grim day that he could only stare at his kitchen wall and drink beer, he would get his chess set and walk down to the park, past the weary peddler women chanting house-to-house, past the packs of rachitic, turd-colored dogs, past the crazy man who squatted by the Church of the Sacred Heart sweeping handfuls of dirt across his chest. There in the park, which resembled a bombed-out inner city lot, he would pick out a bench with a view of the palace and arrange his pieces, and within minutes a crowd of mouthy street kids would be watching him play that day’s challengers. Mason rarely won; that was the whole point. With the overthrow and exile of their cherished president, the methodical hell of the army regime, and now the embargo that threatened to crush them all, he believed that the popular ego needed a boost. It did them good to see a Haitian whip a blan at chess; it was a reason to laugh, to be proud at his expense, and there were evenings when he looked on these thrown games as the most constructive thing he’d done all day.
As his Creole improved he came to understand that the street kids’ jibes weren’t all that friendly. Yet he persisted; Haitians needed something to keep them going, and these games allowed him to keep a covert eye on the palace, the evening routine of the military thugs who were running the country—the de facto government, as the diplomats and news reports insisted on saying, the de factos basically meaning anybody with a gun. Word got around about his evening games and the zazous started bringing chess sets for him to buy, the handcrafted pieces often worked in Haitian themes: the voodoo gods, say, or LeClerc versus