Eating Mud Crabs in Kandahar Read Free Page B

arm as she shuffles to the car. I insist on driving. Their own driving is insanely slow and they notice absolutely nothing on the road that’s not directly in front of them, slow-moving, and very large. I make a point of sticking to the speed limit, which requires some effort. They both tell me to slow down anyway.
    The restaurant is busy with early birds: retirees who favor pastel sport shirts, beltless pants they call slacks, and white patent leather shoes with rubber soles. Sun streams in the restaurant windows. It doesn’t feel like dinnertime, but I have a huge appetite nonetheless. The early bird special—country pâté set on a nest of hydroponic lettuce, poached lobster dabbed with a jarring citrus glaze, gooey chocolate mousse crowned with a maraschino cherry—is Floridian French. It’s a bizarre hybrid, and a weird send-off. The next morning I get a southbound flight, and in a few hours I amaway from south Florida’s strip malls and sprinklers and shuffling retirees. Suddenly, I’m in another world altogether.
    On my very first trip to Haiti, I take a walk along the seafront a few blocks from downtown Port-au-Prince. A traffic jam fouls the air with clouds of exhaust fumes so thick I have to breathe through my shirtsleeve. The streets teem with legless beggars and deformed, hollow-eyed children whose rust-tinged hair suggests malnutrition. The open sewers emit a dizzying stench. Rats big as housecats skitter through piles of trash, and sweating, sinewy men crouch in shade where they can find it, their eyes bloodshot and hooded.
    As I walk, soaking up the sparkling expanse of sea and the closer chaos of street commerce, I finally come across the traffic jam’s source. A remarkable roadblock traverses the boulevard, rudely fashioned of tree limbs, piles of garbage, a broken bicycle, and, as its centerpiece, a dead body. The corpse is that of a middle-aged man. He is shirtless and shoeless. He wears pants, but the zipper is down and his genitals are exposed, as if they’ve been yanked from his pants. This weird tableau is what has brought traffic to a halt.
    Haiti is the most mind-boggling place I know—a country where, as an American ambassador once said, you can believe nothing of what you hear and only half of what you see. I crisscross the country on repeated trips, driving on dried-up riverbeds to follow rumors of massacres, covering coups d’état so frequent they might be thunderstorms, writing about the competing epidemics of AIDS, boat people, deforestation, corruption, hunger.
    Amid all this misery, there is a tiny, French-speaking elite that enjoys a tight grip on the relatively few profit-making enterprises in the country. At the American embassy, these oligarchs are referred to as MREs—“morally repugnant elites.” They drive Land Rovers, reside in palatial villas, and have second homes in Miami and New York. In the cool, leafy precincts of Pétionville, which overlooks Port-au-Prince like a gargoyle, chic restaurants cater to them, and the food is terrific.
    At one of the city’s most fashionable places—dazzling white walls hung with tastefully framed paintings, tables draped with starched linen, a tempting menu of Creole specialities—the owner is notorious for her temper. She approaches me one evening, agitated that one of my colleagues, a correspondent from the
New York Times
, has portrayed the Haitian dictator of the moment as a bit of a thug. (I have too, but she has not seen my paper.) “The
salaud!
” she says, furious at the
Times
man. My French is good enough to know that Madame has just called my colleague a bastard.
    â€œYou know what I will do?” she says, shaking her big finger at me. I do not know, and say so. “The next time he comes in here, I will poison his pumpkin soup.”
    I laugh, and am promptly scolded by Madame.
    â€œYou don’t think so? Just watch!”
    Madame is formidable.