Heading South

A Country Wedding

I’D COMPLETELY FORGOTTEN about the exhibition, the latest paintings of the artist Jacques Gabriel that are being shown in this tiny gallery in Pétionville. Even though my friend Carl-Henri has been going on and on about Gabriel for some time. Jacques this and Jacques that. To him, Jacques Gabriel is a kind of demigod: talented, modern, iconoclastic, liberated. He’s also possessed of a pair of finely tuned antennae when it comes to picking up the tiniest political nuances, a trait that served him well (living dangerously on the edge as he does) during the strange universe of the Duvalier years. He maintains a complex network of friends, scattered here and there around the world, who keep him in touch with the latest movements in art (although he remains faithful to the frigid surrealism of Max Ernst). And he seems able to cross the barriers of social class with ease. He is equally at home with the wife of the French ambassador as with the young prostitute he picked up in the Macaya Bar, and who goes everywhere with him. He treats the prostitute as though she were a grand lady, and the ambassador’s wife as though she were a prostitute. And both of them seem delighted by the novelty of it.

When I get there the reception (at least the official party) is over, but a few people (a restrained group of the artist’s personal friends and admirers) are hanging around on the sidewalk, in front of the gallery.

Carl-Henri welcomes me with a conspiratorial smile, and introduces me to Jacques Gabriel. Tall, shaved head, insolent mouth, a man who intimidates from the word go. But the next second he favours me with a warm look that makes me reconsider my first impression.

“The vernissage is over,” he says, brusquely enough.

“I didn’t come to see the paintings. .”

Carl-Henri turns pale.

“No?” says Gabriel, taken aback.

“I suppose I’m a bit old-fashioned. .”

“Meaning what?” Gabriel tosses back, his tone hard.

“Well, meaning I like to meet the man before I get to know his work.”

Gabriel looks at me in astonishment, then smiles.

“Me too! I’m the same way. . If I don’t like the man, I’m not interested in his work no matter how brilliant it is. . It’s a pleasure to meet a young man who knows how to think for himself. .”

“Now you sound like a old asshole. .”

Carl-Henri turns a shade paler. I feel sorry for his poor heart.

“Jacques,” puts in one of the women, “it looks as though you’ve met your match. .”

“Shut your face!” Gabriel bays at her. “And stop thinking with your vagina. . You couldn’t care less whether he’s my match or not. . All you want to know is whether you can take him home with you tonight. .”

“Oh! Jacques!” she says in her pretty, pouting voice.

Everyone laughs (even the woman who’s been attacked). The iconoclastic painter Jacques Gabriel has just used the old, tried and true trick of insulting a member of the bourgeoisie in order to bring the rest of the crowd over to his side.

“He’s not always like this,” Carl-Henri whispers.

“We’re going to Croix-des-Bouquets, do you want to come?” Gabriel asks me, almost defiantly, or at any rate in a tone of voice different from the one he uses to address the others, even Carl-Henri.

“I’ll come.”

A generous burst of laughter from the painter.

“Good, let’s go! Everyone to the cars. Carl-Henri, you,” (he nods to me with an irresistible smile) “Fifi,” (the little prostitute) “M.R.” (a Parisian journalist who is doing a profile of Gabriel for her magazine) “. . you all come in my car. The rest of you can make your own way there,” he adds, laughing.

Jacques Gabriel drives without the slightest regard for the rules of the road. Fortunately, we get through Port-au-Prince without incident, unless you count the daggers drawn between the journalist (very pretty, but a total snob) and the painter! The second car falls farther and farther behind.

“What do you think about power?” she asks him point blank.

“I’m not interested in generalities,” Gabriel replies.

“I’m talking about the way you yourself use power.”

Brief silence.

“Would you care to be more specific, madame?”

“Sure,” she says, taking a deep breath. “Just a few minutes ago, with that young woman.”

“What did I do to her?”

The journalist looks somewhat astonished at the painter’s disingenuousness.

“You insulted her.”

“I simply told her the truth. . It’s what I thought she was thinking.”

“Ah, so you really believe women think about nothing but that?”

The car swerves sharply towards the side of the road.

“Never use generalities when you’re speaking to me. That’s the last time I’m going to tell you!”

The darkness is total. We’re driving through a complete blackout. Every now and then we pass a truck with a load of passengers. Jacques Gabriel’s game seems fairly simple: he heads straight for the truck as it comes towards us, forcing it to move over to make room for us to pass. At first I thought he didn’t know how to drive, or that he was drunk, but now I realize he knows full well what he’s doing. It’s a trick invented by truck drivers a long time ago, and Gabriel is simply giving them a taste of their own medicine. We’ve completely lost sight of the second car.

“What about you, how do you use power?” Gabriel says roughly.

“Who?” says the journalist, surprised.

“You.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says tautly.

“I was watching you earlier at the gallery.”

“But I didn’t do anything! What did you see?”

“Exactly!” Gabriel shouts, and gives a brief burst of a laugh. “You did nothing!”

“So?” asks the journalist, still tense.

“You know very well, my dear, that you don’t need to do anything. That servile bunch of bourgeois in Pétionville are ready to throw themselves at your feet. . Those know-nothings would sell their first-born to be talked about in Paris. To them, talking to a special emissary from a big magazine is like talking to Paris itself. . But I can assure you, madame, that the rest of the country is quite different. . We’re neither French living in America nor Africans living in exile. We’re Haitians, know what I’m saying?. . No, there’s no way you could understand. Maybe you’ll catch on eventually. .”

Just as the journalist leans forward with fire in her eyes to say something in reply to Gabriel’s accusation of colonialism (the worst thing a Parisian leftist journalist can be accused of), the car runs over something with a dull thud.

“Oh! Vierge Marie!” cries the little prostitute.

“It must have been a wild goat or something crossing the road,” says Carl-Henri.

Jacques Gabriel pulls the car over. When he gets out, he finds that he has indeed hit a wild goat. There is the odour of hot blood. But rather than get back in the car, Gabriel walks off into the canefield with the dead animal in his arms.

“What’s he doing?” gasps the journalist.

“Lal fé poul sa’l gin poul fé,” says the little prostitute.

The journalist looks at Carl-Henri.

“What did she say?”

“She said that Jacques Gabriel is doing what he has to do.”

The journalist makes a scornful face.

“You don’t believe in invisible forces?” I ask her.

“Sorry,” she says with a smile. “I’m not the least bit superstitious.”

“It’s not necessarily superstition,” says Carl-Henri.

“As far as I’m concerned,” she says, “this car has run over a wild goat.”

“Cé sa ou pensé,” says the little prostitute, who understands a bit of French but doesn’t speak it.

The journalist jumps as though her body has received an electric shock. Without knowng exactly what the prosititute has been saying in Creole, she is convinced that the woman has been speaking to her and that her words are filled with venom. She suspects that Carl-Henri has been discreet in his translations. On the surface of it, the little prostitute hasn’t said anything particularly vindictive. She simply said: “That’s what you think.” Nonetheless, the journalist has good reason to be suspicious: it’s a safe bet that if they were in a dark alley somewhere in Port-au-Prince the little prostitute wouldn’t hesitate for a second to slit her throat. Why? Because, daughter of the Gonaïves that she is, she has always known who her enemies are. To test this theory, M.R. (the woman, not the journalist) turns to the little prostitute, who is sitting behind her, but cannot bring herself to stare into the flame of pure hatred that burns in her eyes.

And then Jacques Gabriel comes out of the canefield with the goat across his shoulders. With a shrug he drops the animal into the trunk at the back of the car.

“What a strange man,” the journalist says. “A moment ago he was carrying the goat in his arms as though the car had run over a child, not an animal, and now here he is just dumping it into the trunk.”

“Now,” says Carl-Henri, “it’s just so much meat. .”

“What happened between then and now?” asks the journalist, intrigued.

“Ah, that you’ll have to ask Jacques.”

Jacques Gabriel settles himself behind the wheel. The journalist wisely decides not to question him about the goat. We drive for ten or fifteen minutes before turning left onto a redochre road that climbs fairly steeply up a slope and ends at a small shack with a thatched roof.

“Everyone out,” says Jacques Gabriel. “This is where my friend the Prophet lives. . Wait here, I’ll go in first.”

We wait for ten or fifteen minutes and then Gabriel comes out accompanied by a tall man with a grave expression on his face.

“This is my friend the Prophet. He’s a great painter. . Blessed by the gods of voodoo. . He dwells in the depths where gods speak directly to men. .”

The Prophet smiles. A smile of infinite sadness.

“I knew you were coming,” he says simply, then turns and goes back towards his house.

Jacques Gabriel gets the goat and gives it to a young man who has appeared suddenly among us. The young man takes it and vanishes as swiftly as he appeared.

“The Prophet’s working,” says Jacques Gabriel. “He’s making a painting to celebrate our arrival. He’ll join us later.”

The young man comes back with a few straw chairs that he arranges in a semicircle on the verandah. While he’s at it, I see an enormous woman passing, accompanied by a dozen young girls in white robes with their heads wrapped in white kerchiefs.

“The Prophet is first and foremost a voodoo priest,” Jacques Gabriel explains. “He started painting by making an altar to attract the gods. One day a man named DeWitt Peters, an American who was into Haitian painting, came by, and spent the whole day looking at the portraits of voodoo gods that the Prophet had painted on the walls of his house, and in the end came to the conclusion that the Prophet was the most authentic artist he had ever encountered.”

“How does that differentiate him from you?” asks the journalist, who has just remembered she has to write an article about Jacques Gabriel.

Gabriel drags a chair closer to the door and sits down. This is going to take a while.

“The Prophet isn’t his real name. . He’s been called that since he was nine years old. He was living in Dondon, a commune near Saint-Raphaël, with his mother and his younger sister. His father had left to cut cane in the Dominican Republic. At that time he still hadn’t learned to talk. He couldn’t read or write. When he wanted to tell someone something, he drew it.”

“Interesting,” says the journalist, “but not particularly unique.”

“He has another gift. He can draw the future.”

“How’s that again?” I ask.

Jacques Gabriel smiles. The fish has taken his bait.

“One day he comes home from school. His mother is making dinner. He refuses to touch the food. He takes out his pocketknife and draws a headless man lying on a large mahogany table. His mother is amazed. ‘It’s my father,’ he says simply. An hour later a messenger arrives with the news that his father is dead. ‘How did he die?’ the mother asks. She’s told that there was a violent argument with another worker in a canefield at San Pedro de Macorís, and that the other man cut off the father’s head with a single swipe of his machete. A week later, the boy draws a house in flames. That same night a fire completely destroys the house next door. Another time he draws his cousin with a single leg. The cousin lived in Saint-Raphaël. The next day his leg gets caught in a piece of mill machinery and has to be cut off to prevent the rest of the body from being pulled in. The mother refuses to allow the boy to do any more drawings. Then one morning, before going to the Ranquitte market to sell her vegetables, the mother says to him, ‘Why don’t you draw any more pictures?’ To which the boy replies, ‘But Mama, you told me I couldn’t!’ ‘Ah, yes, I forgot! Make me a drawing now.’ So the boy goes into the house and makes the drawing. When he comes back out, she has already left for the market. The drawing shows a woman lying in a coffin. After her death, the villagers in Dondon start calling him the Prophet. He’s travelled pretty much all over the country, but eventually settled here in Croix-des-Bouquets. He serves his gods, lives with these women, indifferent to fame. His art is celebrated the world over. So that’s the Prophet, the only completely free man I know.”

“Why is that?” Carl-Henri asks, almost timidly.

“Well! Every time he takes up a paintbrush he knows that he might be about to paint his own death scene, and yet his hand never trembles.”

The young man comes out with a large bowl balanced on his head. Behind him come the girls, in single file, with the large woman bringing up the rear. He sets the bowl down among us. It is filled with food — goat stew, peeled bananas, white rice, yams, breadfruit, carrots, beets, eggplant and cream sauce.

“No utensils!” Jacques Gabriel cries delightedly. “We eat with our fingers, our good old fingers. .”

Brief silence.

“Won’t it be too hot?” asks the journalist.

“It’ll be fine!” says Gabriel, plunging his hand into the middle of the bowl.

That’s the signal. We are all, it seems, famished.

I don’t know if it’s all these happenings, or the strange atmosphere (the starless night, the light breeze, the distant beating of a drum), the tender flesh of the goat (was it an animal or something else entirely?), or the subtle aroma of the yams, the taste for breadfruit that I definitiely thought I’d lost. . Or maybe it’s the combination of all of it that makes me think this is the best meal I have ever had in my life. I once saw on television (the usual scene) a family of lions devouring a young antelope. When they were finished there was nothing left but white bones, without a trace of flesh left on them.

We can see the bottom of the bowl before we know it. At the same moment, a song splits the air. I can see the young man’s throat swelling and deflating, like a lizard’s. A formless emotion grips my heart. I feel as though I’m in another world. Somewhere far from Pétionville and its mundane concerns. The young man is leaning against a post and singing about a woman from Artibonite whose husband (Solé or Soleil or something) is gravely ill. A choir of young voices accompanies the woman in her distress. The man hovers between life and death, between night and day. But the woman is brave, she fights to save her man. Then the young man goes on to sing several folk songs that tell about the misery of peasants’ lives.

Suddenly there is a sacred song: “Papa Legba ouvri baryé pou mwen. .” I sense a new energy flowing from the choir. The girls’ voices climb higher and higher, as though announcing the arrival of an eminent personage. In fact it’s the Prophet, who has just appeared at the door (as the Prophet, or Legba) wearing ceremonial robes. His face is even graver than it was at our arrival. The voices reach their highest pitch and then descend slowly into silence.

“The painting is finished,” the Prophet says laconically, making a sign to the young man to bring it out.

The fat woman begins to dance, although there is no music. We hear only the heavy sound of her bare heels on the ground. Suddenly she breaks into a sacred chant. A warrior’s chant, although I can’t make out the words. Most of them seem to be of African origin. Her flesh ripples. She scowls menacingly. The Prophet follows her with his eyes, looking vaguely disturbed. A terrible god is knocking at the door. He cannot break into our circle. Suddenly the woman slumps down in a corner, exhausted. She looks like an unstrung marionette. The audience breathes. Ogou, the terrible god of fire, couldn’t spoil the party. The young man comes out carrying the Prophet’s painting. It is covered with a mauve cloth. One of the young girls comes over and removes the cloth, and the magnificent but terrifying painting is revealed to us. All in mauve. The Prophet’s colour. The figures and their surroundings are all mauve. All of us are in the painting. The young man, the girls in their white robes, the fat woman in mauve, the little prostitute, Carl-Henri and me. There are three figures at the centre: the Prophet in the middle, Jacques Gabriel on his left and the journalist, wearing a white wedding gown, on his right. The girl who uncovered the painting goes over to the journalist and drapes the mauve cloth over her head. All the blood has drained out of the Parisian journalist’s face.

“You are witnesses to the mystical marriage of the Prophet Pierre, living and domiciled in Croix-des-Bouquets,” says Jacques Gabriel in a serious and authoritative voice, “and of M.R., living and domiciled in Paris. This marriage is performed by the will of the gods, some of whom are here present.”

Hysterical howling from the young girls.

SOME TIME LATER.

“No one asked me what I thought!” says the journalist, still in a state of shock.

“Voodoo gods aren’t democratic,” Jacques Gabriel replies, not missing a beat.

“Nevertheless, I find it scandalous.”

“But if you don’t believe in voodoo, it’s just an amusing spectacle.”

“Of course I don’t believe in voodoo, whatever you. .”

“Listen,” says Gabriel, cutting her off. “You are going to return to Paris and forget what happened tonight.”

“I want to go back to my hotel.”

And she goes and sits in the car.

“Was it just an amusing spectacle?” I ask Carl-Henri, already half-knowing what he’ll say.

“It was real. More real than anything that takes place in a church. Wherever she goes, she’ll have the gods with her. She belongs to us now.”

“Still,” I risk, “it’s a bit scary.”

“On the contrary, Fanfan. Now nothing can touch her. No one can ever come up to her with the intention of hurting her. From now on she is protected. She’s the wife of a very powerful member of the voodoo pantheon.”

“What?” I say, astonished. “You mean it wasn’t the Prophet she married?”

“No.” This time it’s Jacques Gabriel who answers. He is heading towards the car. “It wasn’t the Prophet, it was Legba, the god who guards the border between the visible and invisible worlds.”

M.R. DIDN’T SAY a word the whole way back. Neither did the little prostitute.