Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [17]
“I don’t play chess since I was a boy. The match with you, that was the first time in fifteen years.”
“But you’re brilliant!”
The mulatto shrugged. “I was third in the national championship the year I was twelve, and when my father found out he threw away my chess set and all my chess books. He said there is no place in the world for a Haitian chess player.”
“But if you were good enough—”
“He said I would never be. And he was probably right, my father was a very smart man.”
Mason hesitated; the past tense was always loaded in Haiti. “What was he?”
“Doctor. Opthalmologiste.”
Again Mason hesitated. “Under Duvalier most of the doctors left.”
“My father stayed. He was an eminence. The last Haitian to deliver a paper to the International Congress of Opthalmology.” He fell silent for a moment, seemed to gather himself. “If you were noted in your field, that could protect you, but this also meant that Duvalier perceived you as a threat. You could be famous but you could never slip, show that you were vulnerable in any way. One slip, and they’d take you.” The mulatto paused again. “My father never slipped, but I think it made him a little crazy. He kept a gun in the house—we lived on the Champ de Mars, and at night we could hear the screams of people being tortured in the palace. One night he took this gun, my father, he held the bullets in his hand and he said to me: This bullet is for you. This one is for your brother. This one for your mama. And this one, for me. Because if they come they are not going to take us alive.”
What could Mason say? Any sympathy or comfort he might try to offer would be false, because he’d lived such a stupid life. So he kept his mouth shut and listened, though on nights when the mulatto seemed especially bleak Mason insisted that he sleep on the couch. Sometimes he did; by morning he was always gone. Mason would straighten up the couch, eat his toast and mango jelly, then drive over to the office and get his detail for the day. Some days he drove around in his white 4Runner with the powder blue O.A.S. flag rippling in the breeze: “showing the blue” this was called, letting the de factos know that they were being watched, though after a time Mason realized this was a strategy that assumed some capacity for shame on their part. Other days he was assigned to the storefront office that took complaints of human-rights abuses. Not much happened on those days; it was common knowledge that the building was watched, and walk-in complaints were depressingly rare.
Once a week he’d drive over to Tintanyen and make a count of the bodies dumped out there, and often these were horrible days. Tintanyen was a wide plain of shitlike muck held together by a furze of rank, spraddling weeds. You entered through a pair of crumbling stone portals—the gates to hell, Mason couldn’t help thinking—and stepped from your car into a pressure cooker, a blast of moist, dense, unwholesome heat, silent except for the whine of flies and mosquitoes. The mosquitoes at Tintanyen were like no others, an evil-look ing, black-and-gray jacketed strain that seemed to relish the smell of insect repellent. Mason and his colleagues would tramp through the muck, sweating, swatting at the murderous bugs, hacking away the weeds until they came on a body, whatever mudcaked, hogtied, maggoty wretch the de factos had seen fit to drag out here. From the shade of the trees bordering the field a pack of feral dogs was always watching them, alert, anticipating a fresh meal. Those dogs, the Haitian driver once confided in a whisper, were de factos.
“The dogs?” Mason asked, wondering if his Creole had failed him again.
Sure, the driver explained. They were zobop, men who could change into animal form. Those dogs over there were de facto spies.
Mason nodded, squinting at the distant dogs. M’ tandé, he said. I hear you.
Each week Mason photographed the bodies, drafted his report, and turned it