Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [18]
“What does it mean?” Mason asked the mulatto one night. They were sitting in Mason’s kitchen during a blackout, studying Hyppolite’s Rêve Haitien by candlelight. The picture was taped to the back of a kitchen chair, facing them like a mute third party to the conversation.
“It is a dream,” said the mulatto, who was slumped in his chair with his legs thrown out. The first beer always went in a couple of gulps, and then he’d sag into himself like a heap of wet towels.
“Well, sure,” said Mason, “Haitian Dream, you told me that.” And the colors did have the blear look of a dream, the dull plasma blush of the alternating pinks, the toneless mattes of the blues and grays, a few muddy clots of sluggish brown. In the background a nude woman was sleeping on a wrought-iron bed. Closer in stood an impassive bourgeois couple, the man holding a book for the woman to read. The room was a homely, somewhat stilted jumble of curtains, tables and chairs, framed pictures and potted plants, while in the foreground two rats darted past a crouched cat. As in a dream the dissonance seemed pregnant, significant; the sum effect was vaguely menacing.
“I can’t make heads or tails of it,” said Mason. “And that thing there, by the bed,” he continued, pointing out what looked like a small window casement between the bed and the rest of the room. “What’s that?”
“That’s part of the dream,” said the mulatto, almost smiling.
“It looks like a window.”
“Yes, I think you are right. Hyppolite puts this very strange object in the middle of his picture, I think he’s trying to tell you something. He’s telling you a way of looking at things.”
On these nights the gunfire seemed diminished, a faint popping in their ears like a pressure change, though if the rounds were nearby the mulatto’s eye would start twitching like a cornered mouse. Here is a man, Mason thought, who’s living on air and inspiration, holding himself together by force of will. He was passionate about the art, equally passionate in his loathing for the people who’d ruined Haiti. You don’t belong here, Mason wanted to tell him. You deserve a better place. But that was true of almost every Haitian he’d met.
“You know, my father thought Duvalier was retarded,” the mu latto said one night. They were looking at a deadpan Obin portrait of the iconic first family, circa 1964; Papa Doc’s eyes behind his glasses had the severe, hieratic stare of a Byzantine mosaic. “It’s true,” he continued, “they worked together treating yaws during the 1950s, every week they would ride out to Cayes to see patients. Duvalier would sit in the car wearing his suit and his hat and he would never say a word for six hours. He never drank, never ate, never relieved himself, he never said a word to anyone. Finally one day my father asked him, ‘Doctor, is something the matter? You are always so quiet—have we displeased you? Are you angry?’ And Duvalier turned to him very slowly and said, ‘I am thinking about the country.’ And of course, you know, he really was. Politically the man was a genius.”
Mason shook his head. “He was just ruthless, that’s all.”
“But that’s a form of genius too, ruthlessness. Very few of us are capable of anything so pure, but this was his forte, his true métier, all of the forms and applications of cruelty. The force of good always refers to something beyond ourselves—we negate ourselves to serve this higher thing. But evil is pure, evil serves only the self of ego, you are limited