The note that Beirut tags on at the end of ‘Akká, I think it should say that there is no morality without a surplus. I don’t know how Beirut would put this. Despite everything he’d gone through, Pasha somehow had more than he needed, and to his credit was struggling to give some of it to others. Beirut, on the other hand, is just sorry and falling far short … there’s a note of belligerence in her admission, though—she knows that as soon as she hits her stride she’ll blow him right out of the water.

– Radio-Guinée plays voodoo music 24-7
– www.mcm.net?

I feel like I’ll have little to say during the weeks I spend at Farhad’s. Very little genuine stimulus asides Disney movies. Strikes me as funny, though, that when I go to foreign countries, my notebooks always fill up more with my own fiction, &c., then with material on the place I’m actually in. I must be pretty oblivious. I see everything through a filter of my own imagination.

[Missing a half page: sketches of paintings for The Patchwork Girl of Oz, and the beginning of my description of Risson]

with a chip missing from his front teeth. Streetwise: he took perfect care of me on the trip up and now that we’re here he makes jokes about me in Creole for his friends. He always enters a room singing at the top of his lungs.

Fanfan is quieter, drooping eyes and a long nose somehow commensurate with his being a brilliant drummer. He slides his forefinger around the hide as he plays, making the tamtam talk. He always sits beside his walkman, and this morning I turned around to see him and Winzeler with their hands to their hearts for the national anthem.

[Fanfan in a “Mr. Dope Manners” T-shirt, and a half-erased sketch of Myriame]

Myriame has the backswept profile of an ancient Egyptian child. She’s the intelligent, capable, sweet older sister of an obnoxiously beautiful girl, Christelle, who in turn wears prim glasses and shoulder pads at the age of 18. 2nd generation Bahá’ís. I don’t really get it.

There have been no sweeping landscapes to draw here. The school has a soccer field like any in Canada, except that the goals and rough poles crooked in cinder blocks, and the whole thing is lined with palm trees. I like it out there, but a second away you come to the road, and it’s broad and parched and with goats. The same icing-sugar grit coats everything, kids on the street have their legs smudged all over with the same dry white dust. The road goes on, there’s the odd breaking-down pickup, and then only crappy buildings with flaps in front for shade and no trees at all, anywhere. Level and eventless.

For Ichiban Woman: the opening rock song has Ava knockin back apple brandies, trying to work up the nerve to go up to the alien elegant stranger, or else get so blasted that she thinks he’s coming over to her. Already multiple.

For Patchwork Girl: what is it with black men and moustaches?

[Mathieu pontificating with maracas in his hand, and Édriss writing in a book]

I’m experiencing my first real discomfort since my arrival, and it’s just exacerbated because it’s coming from a quarter that’s been nothing but generous to me. Glen split for the States yesterday, and I’ve moved to the Khozouees’. Looking at my body after my shower this morning, I was covered in red welts, on my chest, my abdomen, legs and hands. Every room of this house is infested with mosquitoes. I’ve been sleeping under a shroud, they fly right into our ears, if you’re lucky enough to catch one between your hands the crushed grey body leaves a 3-inch plume of blood flowing from brown to red. It’s a strange existence to me here, all physical torture and no books. I asked Farhad if he had any, and he pointed to the 40 above the TV, saying that the one on Dr. Muhajir “is not too hard.” (!!!) Instead of going to bed with criticism of black literature by Henry Louis Gates, Jr., like I could at Glen’s with his imposin’ library, here I go to bed just to escape the HBO. To hide under my shroud from the bugs. Rrgh. And still, Farhad is an embarrassingly conscientious host.

Spent yesterday with Phadoul up in Kenscoff, up in the clouds. It’s a seven-gourde bus ride up into the mountains SE of Pétionville, cold and vertiginous, pine trees over ravines. Phadoul showed me around the orphanage where he works … it impressed the hell out of me, and I thought if I ever have a few months to blow I could do a lot worse than there, tho now I think maybe it was just the kids.
Cadences of Haitian speech: Mon chè! Mezami! Talkin about dust in Burkino Faso: E otobus yo e motosik yo… —Pousiè? —Ah! (Accompanied by head turning slowly and hands being raised in resignation.)
One Mrs. Blackwell, 95 or close to it, is holed up in a back shed of the centre. She and her husband were Knights of Bahá’u’lláh back in 1940, opening Haiti to the Faith. She has chosen to return to be bed-ridden, and she’s very upset about the turn the Faith has taken here.

It would make sense that Inch should return to incantations against her, that she should complain to Layli that she feels like a zombie.
When I get back I really need to make a concerted effort to get to the Goethe Institute, say with Catherine or Caroline or even Elena. I should see The Promise. I need to solidify my conception of Dieter’s (that can’t be right) his childhood. Dresden—“City of the Unknowing,” because only it couldn’t pick up West German TV?
Show Inch with a baby in America. Where? Whose?

I was thinking of leaving Inch (she could have been “Pouce” as a child?) alone at a Paris café like Thérèse Desquéroux, saint for poisoners, look that up. (Look up “pouce” in the Creole-French dictionary, and Léogane for Queen Anacoana.) But now I think that Jim will have booked her a final concert in Haifa, nodding back to the first place in all the world he’d chosen to escape to, and so the place where he chooses to escape from all the world.

This pages fall out too easily. And so Inch is left on the final page at an Israeli café: and flees into the bazaar, so:

[Panels of Inch twisting right and left: “and wide-eyed with terror sees the Shrine we cannot see (or from shin level?)”]

Saint-Pierre de Lafcadio Hearn
Les rues descendent vers le port par de vieux degrés de pierre moussue et elles sont si escarpées, qu’en regardant en bas vers l’eau bleue, on a l’impression d’être sur une falaise. Par certaines échappées dans la rue principale—la rue Victor-Hugo—on a une vue à vol d’oiseau du port et des navires.

Cristoph, a 4-month Bahá’í just swinging through, winningly telling me about his trip to Senegal: « Dakar, c’est Port-au-Prince. »

Read some Caryl Phillips: Vintage has Cambridge, Higher Ground, The Final Passage also. Also, The European Tribe.

[Praise had bled my lines white of any more anger, and snow had
inducted me into white fellowships,
while Calibans howled down the barred streets of an empire that began
with Cædmon’s raceless dew,
and is ending in the alleys of Brixton, burning like Turner’s
ships.
– Derek Walcott, Midsummer, 1984

Cædmon? Brixton? Turner? For that matter, Caliban? This is downright fraught..]
[Notting Hill riots of 76?]

Good Lord, Glen has a good library. The Serpent & the Rainbow, Wade Davis.

Okay. Caryl Phillips can end a friendship, at 8, because of a single misunderstood (by the teller) racist remark. Search for identity. Fury at even innocent jokes that blur what sense of it you have. Imagine Inch, whose life was thrust on her wholesale? Her resentment, confusion, must be shattering.

Native Son by Richard Wright.

Jim dances around Europe, for his own reasons denying Inch the right to face kolon blan yo. Must have gone to Africa though. At her insistence.

In 85, rural Haitians either served the loa or did not. This copy of The Serpent & the Rainbow is in Glen’s possession because a Jean Edouard of Vilnius was scared of voodoo, and tattooed it with wards before ridding himself of it altogether. Epigraph, Paracelsus: “Everything is poison, nothing is poison.”

Harvard’s Botanical Museum – “Against one wall beside a panoply of Amazonian dance masks was a rack of blowguns and spears. In glass-covered oak cabinets were laid out elegant displays of the world’s most common narcotic plants. Bark cloth covered another wall. Scattered about the large room were plant products of every conceivable shape and form—vials of essential oils, specimens of Para rubber, narcotic lianas and fish poisons, mahogany carvings, fiber mats and ropes and dozens of handblown glass jars with pickled fruits from the Pacific, fruits that looked like stars.”

Remember that people de drugs in Inch’s world: one kind is a phosphorescent eyedrop that makes your eyes glow like a jackal’s.
–ayahuasca, the vision vine
–the Darien Gap
–“I began to feel like a crystal of sugar on the tongue of a beast,” describing a jungle trek
–Heinz Lehman of McGill? psychopharmacology
–Blacks have no pallor of death?
–Grenada commie till ’83?
–winklepickers?

Names of businesses I like here: “César et Fièvre, Advocats,” “Épicerie Thor.” Local superstition: if you lick the tire of a car that made you puke, you’ll never be carsick again.

Good news for Scratch: inserting metal balls in a sick girl’s gut is exactly the sort of thing to occur to a Siberian ex-pat doctor. What word would she use to describe the scar? “A caramel millipede patting along my belly.”

Bad news for Scratch: having experienced needles scratching against her vinyl hood seems unlikely. Not impossible though. Her mother had bought her a pink raincoat with ducks on each breast, which she wore to distraction until the age of 6, rarely wearing any shirt underneath. Palm fronds can have needles. I love the exaggerated degree of reality achieved by placing the familiar in a tropical hut—“No, Inch, you shouldn’t be here alone” becomes wonderful when the fiancé brought over to keep her company has a pig on a leash and few teeth in.

A long talk with Glen tonite re spiritual responsibility vs artistic. Why the hell do I feel responsible to something as implausible as a religion? Why do I need to feel I am doing my duty to dead mystics? These are not things a sane person has in mind in.

Night club on the road called “Fulmoun.”

Glen's

Getting very frustrated with my dreams … the best thing to come out of last night was my family planting trees throughout a graveyard where the gravel pit should be.

Loving the Haitian custom of girls kissing guys goodbye with a peck on the cheek. From 10-year-olds it’s all in stride, but it’s damn nice from a graduated Hawaiian like Iris.

I think Robbie’s in a town called Oacha, on the off chance I get to the Dominican Republic. Look at some history of the island. Don’t forget. This whole name-swapping thing has my interest.

Also: local superstition that eating ants is good for the voice (and the digestion). Up till now I’d thought at least the first paragraph of Scratch was a keeper, but this seems too good to pass up.

Having re-read this, need to syncopate my writing more. Is this drone really how I see the world?

All the grand old houses here [beat] have tile floors. Linda Gershunny’s was open to the street [beat] on one whole side. The huge patio had maybe four tiny things from South America [beat] on its walls, all [beat] except for the massive gilded rococo mirror standing in [beat] a corner.

On the CD player over supper tonite: an African, a beautiful, quailing, immaculate English. Next up: inscrutable Glen.

It didn’t even occur to me to write anything about him until tonight at seven, when I was still without food and went looking for him. The last I’d seen, he’d crashed face-down on his bed after work. On the NSA, secretary for this, translator for that. As my host too close to notice. I found him in the pitch-black livingroom, and murmurs told me that Gabrielle was there too. Did she have the spiritual beauty he said he prized higher than a pretty face? But this is who he is—a man with a gaunt face and a trim moustache and a hairline unfortunately like mine who feels the need to insist on that morality. A Harvard grad who worries he speaks too much on committees. He laughed his shrill nervous laugh from the darkness and told me I could heat dinner (a maid, Marieloud, cooks it during the day) for everyone. Told me which spoon to use, etc. I said it was like taking instructions from a ghost, and his thin whiteness emerged from the shadows to help me out. This is my host. I like Gabrielle a lot. I hope she sends me her story to English anonymously. He’s a good man too, man enough to second-guess the bravura of the Moros of Jacmel. Child enough to desperately miss his mother. I may win a Booker some day but I will not ever make an NSA.

[Shanties beneath the bridge in Pétionville]

[The terraced bourgeoisie a few blocks later]

Jacmel - Port-au-Prince

Jacmel and a shower. Before I forget too much of La Vallée, I should mention the way people talk to one another when they meet on the paths. They talk quietly. They walk slowly. It’s as if the slightest whisper would make them expire. I like it all right.

Winzeler just revealed to me his love for the girl Erick couldn’t keep his hands off of. Love all over is exactly the same. I’ll be sticking to my patchwork girls for a while, tho.

Last night in a dream I was at another Concordia film screening. Ian and Matt had redome my bio the night before, all without telling me, and all of a sudden I was face to face with 60s footage of my mom. (Freud would love these dreams of mine … I’m a little unsure about even recording ’em, but they seem harmless enough, even funny.) The opening animation merged with a medieval Persian illumination of Sufis doing hard drugs. My mom’s voice overtop, describing a controversial paper she wrote on this painting. Cut to an interview with her, caught wading waist-deep in a lake, young and belligerent and smugglin. The interviewer is a 60s hunk, also waist-deep and with a snorkel around his neck. I’m watching this and thinking, huh, my mom was pretty hot and everyone here knows it, I wonder what expression I should have on my face in case anyone looks? Then a wave comes up and wets her shirt, when she notices, she laughs and covers herself. She ends the interview by passionately kissing the 60s hunk and mockingly swims off-screen. He puts on his snorkel and follows. Cut to me, an old man in a roomful of dioramas displaying the night’s other dreams, begging the audience to see that I am unlike my mom. Apparently I also fought in WWI, in Austria. Watching the film, I am touched by my improbable genæology. I think this’d make a good film … I like the idea of making fake 60s documentary footage.

Jacmel is all colonnades and balustrades. Hard to imagine it as the town Gottfried abandoned his life for.

[Mansion-fronts in Jacmel]

The man jammed in next to me on the bus home was an awful old black Mr. Neumar. He had a live chicken in his lap—it took me a while to realize it was bleeding all over his shirt. The bones were sticking out of its armpit. The fumes didn’t quite overcome me, but the woman in front of me didn’t fare so well … She puked all over herself and the floor. All in all a bad ride.

Musac, Haiti

Can’t forget to send Winzeler his English text [and for Fanfan, bourses québecois] and whatever I can find on long-distance education [Télélumière].

B.P. 1247 Centre National Bahá’í Port-au-Prince, HAÏTI

[Also, the committee for Haïti, Guadeloupe, Martinique, French Guiana]

In his words, our walk today was “extra”—for extravagant. One of his favourites. All the same, I’d like to buy myself an extra Coke.

My dream last night was disjointed, common. Parties and good compilations; a turnstile stand-off defused by a double-crossin’, tommy-gunnin’ Colin Christensen; finally an auditorium of displays for computer games. You climb out of a post-apocalypse valley into the endless glaciers that surround it. Cathedrals hewn out of the ice. Twilit cobalts and ultramarines. I don’t get it.

Neglected to rocks around here. They say they’re not pumice, but they’re as pock-marked and crumbling as if some obscene Japanese had replaced any good earth here with Zen garden. Houses are built from them and fall apart , pits are dug and piles left.

Late, late at night (well, a quarter after nine). Awash in sweat and with only a flashlight to see by. Erick’s propped it up in an oil lamp. Just wanted to say that we just came back from the house of several beautiful Haitian girls—Erick and I both express ourselves with our hands, but his touch the girls directly, and mine are only in contact with my thoughts.

Musac, Haiti

Nightmare last night. Dreamt I was told I could go home to Montreal for a break … had a good time, met a lot of friends, but then I realized I didn’t have the money to get back. Couldn’t call for help since my address book was full of DJs. Stood and gripped my head and gave out a “NOOO!” worthy of Captain Kirk. Awoke relieved to be surrounded by poverty, disturbed to have to go on a run with Winzeler. It was my guilty subconscious trying to escape, I guess. After maybe a mile I felt like puking.

Saw my first traces of voodoo yesterday on the walk to Terre-Blanche. At a crossroads someone had left a sacrifice of 70 American pennies.

A Swiss named Gottfried something-or-other (too much disrespect? can’t think of a substitute) is on the Haitian NSA. We had an amazingly colonial conversation over tea one afternoon. Talked about local writers and Nobel winners, and then I disappointed him by not loving chess. Apparently he helped form an Olympic chess team here, with the full contingent of Siberian doctors, etc. Said doctor gave out too much free medication, so his colleagues took advantage of the last upheaval to hire thugs to break his fingers and rape his wife. His 12-year-old son escaped under gunfire, and can do little about it until he grows older, makes connections. The father died of chagrin soon after. Makes me reflect on Glen’s statement that you have to be unusual to move overseas. Overseas, maybe not, but to Haiti, it just might be. Gabriel Garcia-Márquez might be a strict realist.

Been thinking about Inch, whose sudden transubstantiation into a natty-haired woman who carries water jugs on her head can only strike me as a healthy move away from silly caricatures of myself. And a move toward other more serious portrayals of myself, I suppose. It’s a good change because it heightens the county-city contrast, the rich-poor contrast. It offers a reason for her having fallen out of touch with her sisters, makes her return (through thunderheads, of course) that much more prodigal. There is a battery lying in the yard in front of me, and I think that would distress her. She’d tell Layli she can’t leave that kind of thing lying around … she’s changed, the village doesn’t know how to relate to her anymore. Regan’s haircut still stands. It also adds a level of cool sorcery (read cool million; pace Oana) to her having smashed the figurine and carrying its hand in her mouth.

It would mean that Jim/Dieter/whoever will have to have gone on one hell of a world tour to find her. It makes sense, I guess—after the crash he returned home (Dresden, wherever), married the girl his mom always wanted him to marry, had a few kids, and then couldn’t take any more of it. Packed his bags and swore he’d be back. Holy Land, Zagros mountains, the Afar, around Africa and then to St. Helena … a Rio stopover on the way to Venezuela. I t was in a café in Jacmel that he heard her voice; turned to be pleased that she was pretty, too; and swore that he would find her happiness. I wonder what he wrote home in explanation.

I’ve never articulated my dreams of money ... they bother me; I don’t know why I should be interested in it, not in wealth per se, but in the actual stuff of it, in coinage—why should I dream of entering storerooms, of being entrusted with ingots? Why do I puzzle, even in a dream state, at odd-valued coins or strange impressions? Last night it was a seven-sided coin with two queens facing chin to crown. I couldn’t figure why they should be so crude when the Queen herself looked even older than She does today, and finally dismissed them as British. My point is that similar dreams could bother Inch … I know she isn’t after money, but so much of the story is about wealth.

Can she say that she’d forgotten how the palm trees assume animal characteristics? How they consist of manes and leather and disarticulated bones? Or am I insisting on the unfamiliar in a place where there is none? Whites have always imagined themselves onto the jungle.

E.g. my Tarzan toothbrush.

Market was today (Saturday too). Remember the unfinished cinder-block buildings, like in Simferopol, but with rebar rising high out of every column, into the air. The little booths that serve as banks were something like “Banque St. Antoine”—the Christian tradition here leads to all sorts of ridiculous names: “Bar Dieu A Voulu,” “Lotto Fils de Dieu,” or “Coiffures Dieu Seul Juge.”

After talking with Winzeler, notes for Scratch: the meaning of wealth—kaleidoscopic; its relationship with success—impossibly volatile. Greed as a good thing.

Musac, Haiti

Coconut avoided. I want to remember how the houses are built here, it seems more and more that I’ll be reappropriating Haiti for my stories. (Osborne is Haitian, Inch, Gaetan’s NY mural. God, I gotta get out more.) House walls here seem like cobwork, though I can’t place the stuff exactly, and reach only up to the gables, where rough, open beams let the breeze through. Furniture is as ornate and gaudily painted as fairy-tale furniture from Russian сказки. Clocks that bring in the hour with failing “Oh, Susannas” and logos for “siempre Coca Cola.”

The patios—“concrete biers” seems apt, even though I don’t know exactly what a bier is, maybe something nautical and funereal, I’ll have to look it up—are filled with clotheslines and waterpipes, spare boards, tiny patches of drying almonds. I know hardly any of the fruit here. Everything on the table is kept under plastic strainers to keep out the flies—avocados, plates of spaghetti, etc. The kids are singing now. I’ll see if I can pluck up the courage to look in on them. Everything has been “circumspect” to me lately, from the taste of an avocado to my own self. Lordy, I gotta learn Creole.

Oh, and what I least wanted to forget—the doorways are all hung with fluttering, diaphanous cloths instead of doors. And the walls, inside and out, are powdery with watercolours—stripes and birds and “Nous sommes des Bahá’ís.”

My dream last night was thick with erotic imagery. Stills on TV of a byzantine Paris folly. Hadn’t really occurred to me to like that kind of thing, but the woman was short-haired and hard-breasted and the entire stage was infused with sienna’d sweat, right to the tops of its Babylonian columns.

The best concrete here goes into the graves. Everyone has a tomb. On my first day here, several people told me about the father of the Triffon family, a huge figure in the Bahá’í community here, dead now for two (?) years. Seems like a kind of religious Walter, respected and leaving his mark. It had never occurred to me that travel-teachers could be anything be ephemeral, flitty.

[Views of a back yard]

[A domino game]

Musac, Haiti

[Palm leaves lying like spikes on the road]
[Flowered taptaps thank God]
[Pine needle suspended from the forest by an invisible thread]
[Thunder from every tiniest crack in the clouds. On the way in through darkened thunderheads]

No end to the chickens here. Lot of goats, too. Riding the bus to Jacmel you could see them on every rocky ledge. And then we get off at some random river-crossing in the hills to ride truck-back to a village where Nabil precedes me. Hell, we talked about Juliette in Creole on the way up. Or they did, at least. The houses are couple-room affairs on the concrete biers dotted along the slopes. It gets darker and darker, but no lights are turned on except around the domino table. Walking cigarette embers leave purply streaks on the retina. The brick-red earth has turned black. And oh no, it looks like tomorrow I might have to eat another coconut.