Brief Encounters With Che Guevara_ Stories - Ben Fountain [19]
“I can see you’ve thought about it.”
“Of course. In Haiti we are forced to think about it.”
Which was true, Mason reflected as he made his rounds, Haiti shoved it in your face sure enough. During the day he’d drive through the livid streets and look for ways to make the crisis cohere. At night he’d lock his doors, pull down all the shades, spread twenty or thirty canvases around his house, and wander through the rooms, silently looking. After a while he’d go to the kitchen and fix a bowl of rice or noodles, and then he’d wander around some more, looking as he ate. It was like sliding a movie into the VCR, but this was better, he decided. This was real. With time the colors began to bleed into his head, and he’d find himself thinking about them during the day, projecting the artists’ iridescent greens and blues onto the streets outside his car, a way of seeing that seemed to charge the place with meaning. The style that seemed so primitive and childish at first came to take on a subversive quality, like a sly commentary on how the world had gone the last five hundred years. In the flattened, skewed perspectives, the faces’ confrontational starkness, he began to get the sense of a way of being that had survived behind the prevailing myths. The direct vision, the thing itself without the softening filter of technical tricks—the vision gradually became so real to him that he felt himself clenching as he looked at the paintings, uneasy in his skin, defensive. An obscure sophistication began to creep into the art; they were painting things he only dimly sensed, but with time he was starting to see a richness, a luxuriance of meaning there that merged with the photos, never far from his mind, in the mission’s files of the Haitian dead.
Life here had the cracked logic of a dream, its own internal rules. You looked at a picture and it wasn’t like looking at a picture of a dream, it was passage into the current of the dream. And for him the dream had its own peculiar twist, the dream of doing something real, something worthy. A blan’s dream, perhaps all the more fragile for that.
He packed sixty-three canvases in a soft duffel bag and nobody laid a hand on him. He had to face the ordeal all by himself, with not a soul to turn to for comfort or advice. There hadn’t even been the consolation of seeing the mulatto before he left, the last sack of paintings delivered by a kid with a scrawled one-word message: Go. But Mason was white, and he had a good face; the whole thing was so absurdly easy that he could have wept, though what he did do on getting to his hotel room was switch on the cable to MTV and bounce on the bed for a couple of minutes.
He’d gone from Haiti to the heart of chic South Beach. His hotel rose off the sea in slabs of smooth concrete like a pastel-colored birthday cake, but for a day Mason had to content himself with watching the water from his balcony. When the call finally came, he gathered up the duffel bag and walked three blocks to The Magritte, an even sleeker hotel where the men were older, the women younger, the air of corruption palpable. Well, he thought, here’s a nice place to be arrested, but in the room there was only the Frenchman and a silent, vaguely Asian type whose eyes never left Mason’s face. There were no personal items about; they might have taken the room for an hour. Mason had to sit and watch while the Frenchman laid the paintings across the bed like so many bolts of industrial cloth. He was brisk, cordial, condescending, a younger man than Mason expected, with a broad, coarse face only slightly refined by a prissy mustache and goatee.
They wore dark, elegant suits. Their hair was smooth. They looked fit in the way of people who obsess over workouts and what they eat. New wave gangsters—Mason sensed a sucking emptiness in them, the void that comes of total self-absorption. It made him sick to hand the paintings