Was she, I asked, still afraid of the effects of the magic curse?
"Oh, no!" she said. That was all finished.
We gave her the money, but things didn"t work out as well as we had hoped: Madame Lafrance invested half her funds in the lottery and the remainder in a large stock of garlic. Madame Lafrance did not win the lottery. The garlic failed to move in the market and then rotted. When we asked her what happened, she explained that her enemies had- once again! -used black magic to curse her and her market stall.
We kept trying to help the Lafrances. There is only one upside to living on 50 cents per day: it shouldn"t be that hard to reach $1.50 per day. That"s the difference between the bitterest poverty and what Haiti"s former president Jean-Bertrand Aristide called "dignified poverty." We were willing to try most anything short of giving them a large wad of cash. What follows is a nonexhaustive list of various schemes we employed to help them: Venance wanted to sell coconut water on the beach, at the big party the local population held every August to celebrate Jeremie"s patron saint. I fronted Venance the capital to acquire the coconuts, but he forgot to bring his machete. When he went back home to get his machete, people stole all his coconuts.
...And then there was the time Madame Lafrance wanted to sell clothes on the street at Christmas. This scheme, too, was a failure, as Madame Lafrance bought ugly clothes. Also, we later learned, she gave away half the clothes to her relatives.
...And then there was the time my wife and I came back from New York with a suitcase stuffed with merchandise that we"d found in a dollar store in Chinatown-a dozen toothbrushes for a dollar; children"s toys; little clocks; cheap cosmetics; and so on. Madame Lafrance and Venance got to squabbling about just whom this merchandise was intended for. Both insisted that the other would waste the profits: Venance told us that his mother would spend the money on the lottery and magic; Madame Lafrance predicted that Venance would buy himself new clothes. Venance eventually dropped out of school to sell the merchandise himself. All the stock was sold at a loss, and Venance never went back to school, although he did acquire a nice wardrobe.
This last failure was what convinced us to leave the Lafrances to their own destiny. Our small experiment in social engineering had done more harm than good, and the Lafrances were as poor when we were done as when we started.
Port-au-Prince after the quake abounded in conspiracy theories. Many people were convinced that the United States military had caused the quake, using advanced high-technology weapons. Apparently such weapons had once been featured on the Discovery Channel. The earthquake was said to be either the result of an experiment gone awry, or the prelude to an invasion. Why would you want to invade Haiti? I asked. Who wants this place? It seemed I was naive: people told me that Haiti possessed vast mineral wealth and untapped oil reserves. All this jibed nicely with a central facet of the Haitian worldview-namely, that the great nations of the world all yearned to dominate plucky little Haiti.
A cartoon in the standard fifth-grade textbook, Histoire de Mon Pays, ill.u.s.trates the thesis nicely. Haiti is shown not as a small island in the Caribbean, but as a huge and swollen territory sprawling from the reaches of the North Pole to the equator. Four figures, ostentatiously white and with rapacious grins, stretch from the four corners of the globe to lay huge hairy hands on Haitian soil. They are labeled France, the United States, England, and Germany.
If all the world were conspiring against Haiti, then your neighbor was probably conspiring against you. Truckloads of fifty-five-pound sacks of rice were being given away every day throughout Port-au-Prince after the quake, a program organized by the World Food Program, working with a consortium of international NGOs. These NGOs were staffed by foreigners and relied on the cooperation of Haitian staff to decide who should receive a.s.sistance and who shouldn"t. It was a commonplace of tent-city life that the Haitian staff had rigged the game: they were giving out rice only to their own families, or they were demanding kickbacks for the ration cards. People took me aside to level accusations at their neighbors, who were said to have counterfeited their card; or sold their rice on the black market at exorbitant prices; or feigned extreme poverty to receive aid, but were secretly wealthy.
The mood of suspicion was contagious: after a little while, I got suspicious too. People everywhere asked me for help. In the claustrophobic camp on the Route de l"Aeroport, one woman insisted that she had never received rice because she had been a partisan of the deposed President Aristide. Sitting inside her house in plain view were two full bags of rice. When I pointed them out, the little crowd around us began to laugh appreciatively. n.o.body thought this lady had done anything wrong. Neither did I. Getting by isn"t a sin.
About a year after I met Venance, he moved to Port-au-Prince. He was eighteen years old, and he went without so much as a gourde in his pocket.
In Venance"s way of thinking, the world was like a series of concentric circles, the absolute center of which was Carrefour Prince, the village where he was born and where his grandmother still lived. You might not eat as much in Carrefour Prince as you"d like, but you"d always have something: there was (almost) always breadfruit from the breadfruit tree. But you were absolutely trapped. Life today was like life yesterday and like life tomorrow. The next circle outward was Jeremie. This was the life journey his mother had made: to leave the countryside. Venance had explored every narrow alley of the town and gotten nowhere. He had discovered only the world of his mother-small, provincial, mistrustful, and suspicious. This was a world in which the best you could aspire to was just sc.r.a.ping by, in which either your enemies were plotting against you or you were plotting against your enemies; a world dominated by the fear of magic. But Port-au-Prince-that was the outer circle of this particular human being"s universe. It was the place to go in Haiti if you were young and excited about life.
Port-au-Prince was the only place in all of Haiti commensurate with Venance Lafrance"s ambitions-to live decently, to eat copiously, to dress sharply, all without having to work very hard.
Shortly after Venance left Jeremie, my wife and I moved to Port-au-Prince also.
Venance was no longer a daily fixture in our life, but he made a point of staying in contact with us. He"d call every week or two, and from time to time we saw each other. A call from Venance Lafrance is a unique act of telephonic communication, because Venance, having no money to make a telephone call, will call-and hang up-until you call him back. There is no relenting and no choice. He might continue to call-and hang up-for an hour. Then he will take a break, perhaps to play dominoes or take a nap. He will then begin to call-and hang up-all over again, until finally you call him back. Venance is, above all, patient.
My Port-au-Prince was behind high walls and tinted windows: I shopped in a supermarket surrounded by a twenty-foot wall topped with barbed wire, and a squad of shotgun-toting toughies patrolled the parking lot. Venance"s Port-au-Prince ran parallel to mine and was there always, but without Venance was invisible to me. Venance could hardly walk a block downtown without slapping hands with another acquaintance. He knew how everyone on the street earned their living, every scam, dodge, and swindle. Venance could tell me the latest jokes (I never found them very funny) or the latest Creole slang. He told me gossip from Cite Soleil, the slum where he lived: apparently the president of Haiti, Rene Preval, had spent an evening there not long before, drinking rum on the stoop. Every time I left Venance, I gave him a few bucks, and I considered the money well spent.
Venance was getting by in Port-au-Prince. He had sc.r.a.ped together the money to buy a portable telephone, and he wandered the city selling phone calls-anyone who wanted to make a call could use Venance"s phone. Half of the young men in Port-au-Prince have the same job, but Venance was unusually good at it: Venance was social and knew everyone, and people liked to use Venance"s phone. In the course of a long day strolling the city, he might make a hundred gourdes-about $2.50. This is why Venance had come to the big city. His job took him all over town: he could walk over to the sprawling neighborhood of Carrefour on the south side, with its narrow twisting lanes heaped high with garbage-he had family there-or he could park himself on the Champ de Mars out front of the National Palace. He could just sit on the corner with his buddies playing dominoes.
Venance"s hold on the city, though, was tenuous at best. He was robbed at gunpoint and lost his phone and income. Then the cousin he was staying with evicted him from his shack and Venance was forced to mooch off a succession of different, more distant relations, who tolerated him for a short time, then got tired of feeding his perennially hungry mouth. At one point he thought he found a job as a houseboy: a childhood acquaintance had become a police officer and needed somebody to watch over his car and dogs. This fell through when the police officer was transferred to the northern city of Cap Haitien. The last of Venance"s relatives was sick of him. Venance had just about exhausted his options in Port-au-Prince when he met Cousin Maxo.
Venance met Maxo Pierre on the Champ de Mars. Maxo made a living selling barbecued chicken there in the evening. It turned out that Maxo came from Chambellan, not far at all from Jeremie. Both Venance and Maxo were proud sons of the Grand"Anse province, so there was a bond between them. Thereafter, on seeing Maxo, Venance always asked after Maxo"s bad foot, a kindness Maxo noted. Sometimes Venance pa.s.sed all day with Maxo down on the Champ de Mars telling stories. This was about the time when Venance was out of a job and home, and he opened his heart to the bearded older man. Maxo said, "Venance, barbecue business is good business. Tomorrow if you want you can become a big barbecue entrepreneur. Keep it up. Venance, stay with me for a long time. That way you can get ahead."
Chicken was a good business for Venance, not only on account of the fact that it suited his temperament and he was a good chicken cook, but also because he was observant and a fast runner. You needed to run fast if you were going to make it in the chicken game-the police would impound the barbecue of anyone caught grilling out on the Champ de Mars. That"s why Venance was so useful to Cousin Maxo: Maxo had the bad foot, but when the police came down, Venance could grab that "cue and fly. Together they made a good team, Venance and Cousin Maxo-Cousin Maxo teaching the young man the secrets of the Champ de Mars BBQ game, showing him the special Maxo chicken sauce; Venance protecting the BBQ from the police; the two of them sociable fellows, flirting with the ladies and grilling up the birds and laughing and joking until the early hours of the morning.
Not only did Maxo bring Venance into his business, but he invited this lanky kid off the street into his home, giving him a place to sleep right on the floor with his own kids. That"s when Venance started calling Maxo "Cousin Maxo," as a sign of respect and affection. Venance appreciated the fact that Cousin Maxo treated him like a man, but treated him like family, too, showing him kindness, never telling him what to do, just letting him be.
In Maxo, Venance found something he"d been looking for all his life. His father had been a sorcerer named Destine Paul. Destine Paul quarreled with an unsatisfied client. The client swore he would take his revenge on Destine Paul. Which he did-Venance"s father died, a victim himself of magic, when Venance was just five months in the womb.
Each morning Maxo would give Venance a little money for coffee and bread. Venance saved a bit of that every day and soon was able to invest in a chicken breast or two, which he put on the grill. The profit was his own, and he turned it around into more chickens. What he was looking forward to and working toward was the day he could buy himself a whole case of chicken. Break up the birds, boil "em. Rent refrigerator s.p.a.ce. Get himself a barbecue of his own. Buy cabbage and bananas and manioc. Go out on the Champ de Mars at night, pay to plug a light bulb into the generator, and call himself a chicken man, too.
Venance had been out every day with Cousin Maxo for about six months, selling chicken and earning, when Venance got it into his head that he wanted to spend the hot month of August back home in Jeremie. He had a little cash in his hand and he wanted to flaunt it, show the girls back home the success he was making of himself in Port-au-Prince. Cousin Maxo told Venance that this was a poor idea, that if he had a good thing going, he should stick with it. But Venance ignored Cousin Maxo and went home.
The National Palace had been a source of considerable pride. I was standing in front of its vast, very white edifice when a young man approached and asked me if it was true that the National Palace, before its collapse, had been the most beautiful building in the world, as he had learned in school.
"It was very beautiful," I said, looking for a diplomatic answer.
The conversation attracted, as often happens in Haiti, a crowd of kibitzers, all wanting to throw in their own two cents. Two Haitians can converse, but three is an argument. Some maintained that the presidential palace was the most beautiful building in the world: others that it was the most beautiful presidential palace in the world. The argument was not about aesthetics but about the precise recollection of a fact that had been memorized in a schoolbook. The conversation got quite heated, and in the end one man had to be taken away before he slugged somebody.
In a city of remarkable piles of rubble, the presidential palace rubble was particularly spectacular. In its collapse it looked as if it had been constructed originally with Legos, then smashed by the hand of a very large child. It was somewhere between fracture and kraze-it all depended on whether one looked to the wings, which were almost intact, or to the center. Certain portions of the rubble expanse could even be described as penche.
A large tent city had cropped up directly in front of the gates of the palace, and then metastasized to the palace"s flanks. Each of Port-au-Prince"s tent cities had its own character, as any small town will, and here the mood was surlier and more aggressive than in other refugee camps. I asked somebody why the mood in this particular camp was so rough, and was told that it was due to the presence of the many escapees from the National Penitentiary, which was just a few blocks from here-although I found this explanation unlikely. Surely if anyone had cause to rejoice these days, it was the escapees.
Just three days before the world came to an end, Venance Lafrance slunk back into Port-au-Prince like a beaten dog. His return to Jeremie had been disastrous. His mother had gotten sick. His brother had gotten sick. And then he"d gotten sick too. He had almost died. All the capital he had accrued in the chicken game sweating over a hot barbecue, he had lost. He"d gone home to Jeremie to show off what a big man he"d become. But now, just to get back to Port-au-Prince, Venance had visited a local politician and agreed to sell her his vote in the upcoming parliamentary elections in exchange for a place on the big Trois Rivieres, the weekly ferry to the capital.
The next morning, Venance made his way on foot (not even a gourde to take a bus) up to Cousin Maxo"s little concrete house in Bel Air.
"Venance, I didn"t know you were coming!" Cousin Maxo said, happy to see him.
Cousin Maxo wasn"t just happy to see Venance on account of Venance being Venance, but also because Cousin Maxo needed Venance Lafrance. Madame Cousin Maxo gave Venance some bread and coffee, and then Cousin Maxo told Venance the bad thing that had happened in his absence. It was just a couple days back. Madame Maxo had been out grilling on the Champ de Mars when the police had come round. She wasn"t fast enough. The police had seized the family barbecue and all the chicken on the grill, too. She had gotten away with just a bowl of raw bird.
Cousin Maxo sent Venance out to buy some water for the house. Venance came back with five five-gallon buckets. After he had bathed, Venance lay down on the floor of the house and went to sleep for the rest of the morning.
Venance was finally home. Venance was finally needed.
The Rue Dalencourt winds down then up the steep valley between the Avenue John Brown and Canape Vert. Before the quake, this had been a shady street of small houses and apartment complexes. The largest of these apartment complexes, a homicidal five-story monster, had come down. A few surviving relatives-a young woman, her brother, some friends-had hired a group of young men to do the dangerous work of pawing through the rubble. I sat outside and watched the diggers for a few minutes. Not far from us on the ground was a charred spinal cord and skull. The smell of decomposing flesh was quite strong in the air. Later, the diggers came up with the body of the young woman"s sister-a large woman, to judge by the six men needed to carry her. Haiti is a country where women take pride in their voluptuous displays of grief-there exists an entire profession of paid mourners, whose copious tears and loud wailings are taken as a tribute to the qualities of the departed. I had been at a funeral not long before the quake where distant lady friends of the deceased had attempted to throw themselves bodily into the coffin. Now this young woman walked over, identified her sister, and walked back with a cool smile on her face.
This was like another country than the one I thought I knew.
On Tuesday, January 12, in the late afternoon, Venance Lafrance was playing dominoes out front of his friend Alfred"s house. The board was balanced on the players" knees. They"d been slapping the bones for hours-days even. There was a big crowd around the board waiting to get in on the game. The board started shaking. The tiles started sliding. One of the fellows said, "Who"s shaking the board?" Another fellow said, "Not me." Then the bricks started falling- ka-choo, ka-choo, ka-choo! Venance heard a noise like ten thousand trucks roaring up a steep hill. The street itself started making waves. Some of the fellows who"d been waiting to play dominoes started running-but Venance didn"t run; he just stood his ground, watching the houses shaking and the street swinging up and down like a rubber hose, rolling up, down, left, and right. The dominoes that had been on the board were on the ground, clattering like they were dancing. Right in front of Venance a two-story brick house leaned over on its side in a big cloud of dust, like it was tired and needed a break- penche.
When the ground stopped shaking, Venance"s first thought was Cousin Maxo. He ran home through the streets. He pa.s.sed collapsed house after collapsed house; the entire population of Port-au-Prince was in the streets.
Cousin Maxo"s two-story house lay on a little alley. The cinder-block walls had given way and buckled outward. The first floor had come down, exploding ma.s.sively as it made contact with the concrete foundations. Then the roof had come down also, staying largely intact. The house that had been two stories, or about twenty feet tall, was now just concrete slab on a waist-high pile of rubble. Kraze net.
Madame Maxo was outside. She was showing up at the house just as Venance was getting there. She was saying, "Where"s Maxo?" Then she was saying it all over again: "Where"s Maxo?" And again, "Where"s Maxo?" Venance knew where Cousin Maxo was. When Venance had left to play dominoes earlier that afternoon, Maxo had gone upstairs to take a nap.
"Maxo"s inside," he said.
"Are you sure?" Madame Maxo said. "Is it true?"
Venance thought a second. But he knew Maxo had been sleeping. He was sure of it.
"Yes," he said.
"Then he"s dead," she said.
Venance Lafrance stood with Madame Maxo out front of the rubble that buried the body of Cousin Maxo. She began to cry. Now the neighbors were drifting out front of the collapsed house. Madame Maxo collapsed into their arms. All that evening and night, Madame Maxo lay on the sidewalk on a cardboard box out front of her collapsed house with her head in Venance Lafrance"s lap. She didn"t know yet-n.o.body knew-that the city was destroyed; she thought it was just her house that had collapsed. Venance ran his hand through Madame Maxo"s hair to calm her. The radio announced that there would be another quake in the night, and the radio was correct: there were aftershocks all through the night. In the distance there was the sound of sirens.
Venance stayed with Madame Maxo for two days in front of the ruined house. For two days he didn"t sleep. Neighbors cooked and pa.s.sed around food-only Madame Maxo didn"t eat. Venance had never been responsible for anyone before. Now he washed the children and made sure they ate, and kept far from the rubble, and stayed far away from the burning bodies. When Madame Maxo cried, he consoled her, as best he could. Madame Maxo had a little money in her pocket when the quake hit-that"s what kept the family going. Venance himself didn"t cry for Cousin Maxo. The tears wouldn"t come. He felt light in his head-like he had been transported to some strange new world.
Behind the eglise Sacre-Coeur-kraze-there was a little garden, with benches and a small statue of the Madonna. Both a school and a rectory had collapsed here, and many priests had died, their bodies decomposing not far from where we stood. A middle-aged man with a trim beard and spectacles approached me and asked in French if I had noticed the amazing particularity of the Madonna.
"No," I said. The Madonna had neither fallen nor was it weeping.
He looked at me a long time, as if I couldn"t possibly be as dense as I seemed.
"She"s turned to the east," he finally said.
"To the east?"
"To the east."
The Madonna, on further examination, had shifted slightly, several degrees off the horizontal.
The man went on to claim that all of the Madonnas of Port-au-Prince had shifted to the east. He had gone around and examined them, he said. I asked him what was the significance of this unusual fact.
"This could not be an accident," he said.
Venance Lafrance, wearing sandals, stepped on something soft and squishy-a lady"s arm, just lying out on the Champ de Mars. Venance Lafrance, whose fast feet had made him a natural in the chicken game, sprinted off. Bodies. Bodies starting to smell, bodies rotting in the sun. Fat dead people. Skinny kids. Big strong corpses, corpses built from lifetimes of lifting, toting, and hauling. Bodies of families. Bodies of naked old ladies. Bodies of naked old men. All the bodies puffy and gray. A guy saying, ""You got to see this," then a big crowd watching a couple of dead kids having s.e.x in a hotel room on the Grand Rue. More bodies. Some covered. Some not covered. Bodies in flames-the smell of meat cooking. Still more bodies. A tractor loading up bodies, scooping the bodies into a dump truck. Venance figured, based on the numbers of bodies he saw in the streets, that most all of Port-au-Prince was dead. That"s what Venance saw on the way from Cousin Maxo"s house in Bel Air to my house. When he got to my house, it was closed, locked, and empty. Then Venance kept walking, all across town, to his niece"s house in Carrefour. On the way he saw two young men, handcuffed, splayed out on the ground, sticky blood running river-like from their heads. Shot by the police. The folks watching them called them voleurs -thieves. When Venance got out to his niece"s house, it was gone, collapsed, like all the others.
On the radio they had announced that the government of Haiti had arranged free transport to the provinces by all available means. Venance left Madame Maxo and her children on the street beside the rubble of the house they had occupied: he was just another mouth to feed. Cousin Maxo"s body still lay trapped under the crushed cement-a few days later he would be pried out and burnt on the street. Venance left Port-au-Prince with nothing but the clothes that were on his back when the quake struck.
The return to Jeremie was not easy. Others had the same idea as Venance, and the Wharf Jeremie was packed. The wharf was not large, and great nervous crowds jostled for position. There was no place to stand or sit. Venance heard snippets of conversation: "Let me go! Let me pa.s.s! I didn"t die on Tuesday, I"m not going to die in Port-au-Prince!" People carried what possessions remained to them in huge bundles on their heads and in suitcases. Venance spent almost three days trapped on the wharf. The pier itself had collapsed, and access to the Trois Rivieres was only by private canoe or dugout: those who could pay found a place onboard. Venance had no money; the big boat left; and he waited. He didn"t eat. Water was his priority. He found some.
By the time the ferry returned, barges had been stacked to create a makeshift dock. He found a place on the boat-n.o.body knows just how many were onboard, but every available inch of the boat was packed: the aisle, the stairs, the decks. The mood was tense. A large aftershock hit, and from the boat you could see the city rise and fall. The pa.s.sengers began to stampede back to solid ground. Venance shouted, "You"re on the boat, you"re on the sea! Why are you running? If you run on the ground, you could die!" But n.o.body listened. When the ground calmed down, they came back on the boat.
Then, finally, the boat set sail, and Venance Lafrance watched Port-au-Prince recede into the distance.
Venance"s story has an epilogue, of sorts.
When Venance called me very early in the morning, it meant that he was alive-and that he wanted money.
He told me that he had big plans: he wanted to start his own business barbecuing chicken in Jeremie, and he was looking for an investor. I gave him a hundred dollars. Later, I learned that he spent it on a couple of pairs of jeans and some shoes. When I remonstrated with him, he explained that n.o.body wants to buy chicken from a chicken man who looks like a b.u.m.
Where there"s life, there"s hope; and where there"s hope, there"s life.
Long live Venance Lafrance.
My Year at Sea.
Christopher Buckley.
FROM The Atlantic.
CALL ME WHATEVER. I went to sea in 1970, when I was eighteen, not in Top-Siders, but in steel-toed boots.
I was deck boy aboard a Norwegian tramp freighter. My pay was $20 a week, about $100 today. Overtime paid 40 cents an hour, 60 on Sundays. Not much, I know, yet I signed off after six months with $400 in my pocket. My biggest expense was cigarettes ($1 a carton from the tax-free ship"s store; beer was $3 a case). I"ve never since worked harder physically or felt richer. The Hong Kong tattoo cost $7 and is with me still on my right shoulder, a large, fading blue smudge. Of some other sh.o.r.e-side expenses, perhaps the less said, the better.
The term gap year wasn"t much in use then, but I"ve never thought of it as a gap year. It was the year of my adventure. I was "shipping out," and there was romance in the term. I"d read Conrad and Melville at boarding school. It"s tricky-or worse, boring-trying to explain an obsession. Mine had something to do with standing on the ice out on Narragansett Bay, watching the big ships making their way through the ragged channel toward open sea. Maybe it makes more sense just to quote from the first paragraph of Moby-d.i.c.k: Whenever it is a damp, drizzly November in my soul ... then, I account it high time to go to sea ... If they but knew it, almost all men in their degree, some time or other, cherish very nearly the same feelings towards the ocean with me.
I went around the world. Our itinerary wasn"t fixed-a tramp freighter goes where the cargo is. The Fernbrook ended up taking me from New York to Charleston, Panama, Los Angeles, San Francisco, Manila, Hong Kong, Bangkok, Singapore, Sumatra, p.h.u.ket (then still an endless white beach with not a building on it), Penang, Port Swettenham, India, and, as it was still called, Ceylon.
The final leg-Colombo to New York, around the Cape of Good Hope-took thirty-three days, longer than expected owing to a Force 10 gale in the South Atlantic. I remember the feeling of barely controlled panic as I took my turns at the helm, the unwelcome knowledge that thirty-one lives depended on my ability to steer a shuddering, heaving 520-foot ship straight into mountainous seas. When the next man relieved me, my hands were too cramped and shaky to light a cigarette. Even some of the older guys, who"d seen everything, seemed impressed by this storm: "Maybe ve sink, eh?" one winked at me, without detectable mirth.
They were Norwegian, mostly, and some Germans and Danskers (sorry, Danes). The mess crews were Chinese. I was awoken on the first cold (November, as it happened) morning by a banging on my cabin door and the shout "Eggah!" It took me a few days to decipher. Eggs. Breakfast.
This was long before onboard TVs and DVD players. Modern freighters, some of which carry up to twelve pa.s.sengers, come with those, plus three squares a day, plus amenities: saunas, pools, video libraries. If I embarked today as a pa.s.senger aboard a freighter, I"d endeavor not to spend the long days at sea-and they are long-rewatching The Sopranos. I prefer to think that I"d bring along a steamer trunk full of Shakespeare and d.i.c.kens and Twain. Short of taking monastic vows or trekking into the Kalahari, a freighter pa.s.sage might just offer what our relentlessly connected age has made difficult, if not impossible: splendid isolation.
You can"t tell what"s aboard a container ship. We carried every kind of cargo, all of it on view: a police car, penicillin, Johnnie Walker Red, toilets, handguns, lumber, Ping-Pong b.a.l.l.s, and IBM data cards. A giant crate of those slipped out of the cargo net and split open on the deck as we were making ready to leave San Francisco. A jillion IBM data cards, enough to figure out E = mc2. It fell to me to sweep them into the Pacific. I reflected that at least they made for an apt sort of ticker tape as we left the mighty, modern U.S. in our wake and made for the exotic, older-world Far East.
The crossing took three weeks. I didn"t set foot onsh.o.r.e in Manila until four days after we landed. As the youngest man onboard, I had drawn a series of cargo-hold watches. My job, ostensibly, was to prevent the stevedores from stealing, a function I performed somewhat f.e.c.klessly. On the last day in Manila, after I"d stood a seventy-two-hour watch, another huge crate slipped its straps and crashed to the deck. Out poured about five thousand copies of The Short Stories of Guy de Maupa.s.sant intended for Manila"s public schools. The stevedores seemed confused as to whether these were worth stealing. By now I was beyond caring. I yawned and told the foreman, "Good book. Go for it."
At sea in those lat.i.tudes, temperatures on the ship"s steel decks could reach 115 degrees. During lunch breaks, I"d climb down the long ladder to the reefer (refrigerated) deck at the bottom of Number Two Hold. There were mounds, hillocks, tons-oh, I mean tons-of Red Delicious apples from Oregon. I would sit on top in the lovely dark chill, munching away, a chipmunk in paradise. One day I counted eating eight. I emerged belching and blinking into the heat, picked up my hydraulic jackhammer, and went back to chipping away at several decades of rust and paint.
I remember standing in the crow"s nest as we entered the misty Panama Ca.n.a.l, and the strange sensation as the four-thousand-ton ship rose higher and higher inside the lock. I remember dawn coming up over the Strait of Malacca; ragam.u.f.fin kids on the dock in Sumatra laughing as they pelted us with bananas; collecting dead flying fish off the deck and bringing them to our sweet, fat, toothless Danish cook to fry up for breakfast. I remember sailing into Hong Kong harbor and seeing my first junk; steaming upriver toward Bangkok, watching the sun rise and set fire to the gold-leafed paG.o.da roofs; climbing off the stern down a wriggly rope ladder into a sampan, paddling for dear life across the commerce-mad river into the jungle, where it was suddenly quiet and then suddenly loud with monkey-chatter and bird-shriek, the moonlight lambent on the palm fronds.
Looking back, as I often do, these ports of call seem to me reachable only by freighter. Mine was a rusty, banged-up old thing, but I suppose there"s no reason a shiny new container ship wouldn"t do the trick.
A Girls" Guide to Saudi Arabia.
Maureen Dowd.
FROM Vanity Fair.
I WANTED TO KNOW ALL ABOUT EVE. "Our grandmother Eve?" asked Abdullah Hejazi, my boyish-looking guide in Old Jidda. Under a glowing Arab moon on a hot winter night, Abdullah was showing off the jewels of his city-charming green, blue, and brown houses built on the Red Sea more than a hundred years ago. The houses, empty now, are stretched tall to capture the sea breeze on streets squeezed narrow to capture the shade. The latticed screens on cantilevered verandas were intended to ensure "the privacy and seclusion of the harem," as the Lebanese writer Ameen Rihani noted in 1930. The preservation of these five hundred houses surrounding a souk marks an attempt by the Saudis, whose oil profits turned them into bling addicts, to appreciate the beauty of what they dismissively call "old stuff."
Jidda means "grandmother" in Arabic, and the city may have gotten its name because tradition holds that the grandmother of all temptresses, the biblical Eve, is buried here-an apt symbol for a country that legally, s.e.xually, and sartorially buries its women alive. (A hard-line Muslim cleric in Iran recently blamed provocatively dressed women for earthquakes, inspiring the New York Post headline SHEIK IT!) According to legend, when Adam and Eve were evicted from the Garden of Eden, they went their separate ways, Adam ending up in Mecca and Eve in Jidda, with a single reunion. (Original sin reduced to friends with benefits?) Eve"s cemetery lies behind a weathered green door in Old Jidda.
When I suggested we visit, Abdullah smiled with sweet exasperation. It was a smile I would grow all too accustomed to from Saudi men in the coming days. It translated into "No f-ing way, lady."
"Women are not allowed to go into cemeteries," he told me.
I had visited Saudi Arabia twice before, and knew it was the hardest place on earth for a woman to negotiate. Women traveling on their own have generally needed government minders or permission slips. A Saudi woman can"t even report hara.s.sment by a man without having a mahram, or male guardian, by her side. A group of traditional Saudi women, skeptical of any sort of liberalization, recently started an organization called My Guardian Knows What"s Best for Me. I thought I understood the regime of gender apartheid pretty well. But this cemetery bit took me aback.
"Can they go in if they"re dead?" I asked.
"Women can be buried there," he conceded, "but you are not allowed to go in and look into it."
So I can only see a dead woman if I"m a dead woman?