Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [16]
“You must,” the mulatto said in a peremptory voice, and yet his eyes were as pleading as the sorriest beggar’s. “For decency’s sake, you must.”
Mason turned as if to study the canvases, but he was thinking about the worst thing that had happened to him today. He’d been driving his truck through La Saline, the festering salt-marsh slum that stretched along the bay like a mile-wide lesion splitting the earth. At his approach, a thin woman with blank eyes had risen from her squat and held her baby toward him—begging, he thought at first, playing on his pity to shake loose some change, and then he saw the strange way the baby’s head lolled back, the gray underpallor of its ropy skin. The knowledge came on like a slow electric shock: dead, that baby was dead, but the woman said nothing as he eased past. She simply held out her baby in silent witness, and Mason couldn’t look at her, he’d had to turn away. With the embargo all the babies were dying now.
“Okay,” he said, surprised at the steadiness of his voice. “I’ll do it.”
It turned out that the mulatto wasn’t really a doctor. He’d had two years of medical school at the University of Haiti before being expelled for leading an anti–Duvalier protest, “a stupid little thing,” as he described it, he’d done much worse and never been caught. As far as Mason could tell, he eked out a living as a dokté fey, a kind of roving leaf doctor and cut-rate houngan who happened to have a grounding in Western medical science.
He’d cached stolen paintings all over town. Mason never knew when he’d turn up with the next batch, a bundle of wry Zephirins or ethereal Magloires to be added to the contraband in Mason’s closet. But it was always after dark, almost always on the nights when the shooting was worst. He’d hear a single knock and crack open the door to find the mulatto standing there with a green trash bag, his hair zapping in all directions, eyes pinwheeling like a junkie’s. Mason would give him a beer and they’d look at the paintings, the mulatto tutoring him on Haitian art and history.
“Something incredible is happening here,” he might say as they sat in Mason’s kitchen drinking beer, studying pictures of demons and zombies and saints. “Something vital, a rebirth of our true nature, which is shown so clearly in the miracle of Haitian art. ‘Ici la renaissance,’ how strange that this was the name of the bar where Hyppolite was discovered. Ici la renaissance—it is true, a rebirth is coming in the world, a realization that the material is not enough, that we must bring equal discipline to the spiritual as well. And Haiti will be the center of this renaissance—this is the reason for my country, the only slave revolt to triumph in the history of the world. God wanted us free because He has a plan.”
He could spiel in this elevated way for hours, forging text in his precision English like a professor delivering a formal lecture. If Mason kept popping beers, they’d eventually reach the point where paintings were scattered all over the house; then the mulatto would pace from room to room explaining tricks of perspective and coloration, giving historical reference to certain details. “But the dream is dying,” he told Mason. “Those criminals in the palace are killing us. As long as they have the power, there will be no renaissance.”
“They’re tough,” Mason agreed. “They’ve got all that drug money backing them up. The CIA too, probably.”
“But they’re cowards. Fate demands that we win.”
He wouldn’t tell Mason his name; he seemed to operate out of an inflated sense of the threat he posed to the regime. Some nights Mason was sure he’d fallen in with a lunatic, but then he’d think about the chess, or the reams of Baudelaire and Goethe the man could quote, or the cure he’d prescribed for Mason’s touchy lower bowel—“You must drink a glass of rum with a whole clove of garlic.” Mason did, and the next day found himself healed. If at times the mulatto seemed a little erratic, that might have something