As we climb closer and closer to the snow, we know that now they are watching us from behind rocks and from cliffs overhead. Then, after a long while of climbing, we emerge from a narrow defile, and before us, beneath a long, pale yellow ridge and in a large wedge of shadow, there is suddenly a mound of snow in the path, hard, old snow the shape and size of a collapsed tent, and we see the bodies in the snow, a woman and two men and a child, throats slashed, old blood pinking the whiteness around them, clothes partially wrenched off and torn back from frozen bodies, bags and cases opened and scattered, papers, clothing, household utensils tossed aside in an angry hunt for coins.
You see now, we say to the brother-in-law. They are poor.
He pulls thoughtfully at his mustache, and the boy comes up alongside him and sees the Afghans lying in the snow, and frightened, he turns in a slow circle, searching the rocks and crevices around us.
There are plenty more Afghans coming, the brother-in-law says in a low voice. But … perhaps another day would be better, he adds, and we turn and commence making our way back down the mountain to the village.
The brother-in-law is a fool. And we are a fool for not believing what we know is true, what we know with our deepest brain, the one embedded in the very center of our skull, where we know that forever, from the beginning of time, the only outsiders who have come through here and have needed us to help them have been poor, sad, frightened creatures running from some army.
Yes, there are more coming, we say, when soon the descent is not so difficult and we can walk alongside one another again. And they will keep on coming until after we are gone and the boy is gone and even after that. And they will always be poor. You cannot help the poor, not when you also are poor. Let the bandits have them, we say.
I suppose you are right, the brother-in-law murmurs, which pleases us, but we say nothing of it to him.
Systems and sets, subsystems and subsets, patterns and aggregates of water, earth, fire and air—naming and mapping them, learning the intricate interdependence of the forces that move and convert them into one another, this process gradually provides us with a vision of the planet as an organic cell, a mindless, spherical creature whose only purpose is to be born as rapidly as it dies and whose general principle informing that purpose, as if it were a moral imperative, is to keep moving. Revolve around points and rotate on axes, whirl and twirl and loop in circles, ellipses, spirals and long curves that soar across the universe and disappear at last at the farthest horizon of our human imagination only to reappear here behind us in the daily life of our body, in our food, shit and piss, our newborn babies and falling-down dead—just keep on moving, keep breeding and pissing and shitting,
keep on eating the planet we live on, keep on moving, alone and in families and tribes, in nations and even in whole species: it’s the only argument we have against entropy. And it’s not truly an argument; it’s a vision. It’s a denial in the form of an assertion, a rebuttal in the form of an anecdote, which means that it’s not a recounting, it’s an accounting; not a representation, a presentation.
The universe moves, and everything in it moves, and by transferring its parts, it and everything in it down to the smallest cell are transformed and continue. Water, earth, fire and air. To continue, just to go on, with entropy lurking out there, takes an old-fashioned, Biblical kind of heroism. That the seas move, that the waters flow from gulfs across whole oceans along continents and back again, is marvelous. That the continents themselves move, that they separate from one another, regroup and gather themselves into mountain ranges, plateaus, vast savannas and grassy veldts, is a wonder. That for beneath the deepest seas the grinding of the plates that carry those continents generates sufficient heat to melt rock and erupt in fiery volcanoes, making high, conical islands appear in the North Atlantic and South Pacific where, before, dark water for millennia rolled uninterruptedly, this is truly worthy of admiration. And what is marvelous to us, what fills us with wonder and admiration, we must emulate, or we die. If the stubborn determination of the Somali tribes to find food, water and peace, even though they must cross deserts alone to get there and must often perish along the way, seems to us marvelous, and if the Afghans’ willingness to face ice and snow and murderous bandits in the high passes of the Hindu Kush rather than let government soldiers enter their villages and shoot them for having given shelter one night to a few ragtag local mujahedeen guerrillas, if their decision to move away and start over elsewhere seems wonderful to us, and if the flight of a half-million starving Khmer peasants out of Kampuchea into Thailand, where they are greeted by sympathetic but terrified Thai officials who drive the Khmer back to where the Vietnamese army wages war against the scattered remnant of Pol Pot’s suicidal regime by burning the few remaining rice fields, if that persistent, relentless
determination to go on knocking at the Thai gate until someone finally opens it moves us to admiration, then we must do the same. We must cross deserts alone and often perish along the way, we must move to where we can start our lives over, and when we get there, we must keep on knocking at the gate, shouting and pounding with our fists, until those who happen to be keepers of the gate are also moved to admiration and open the gate. We are the planet, fully as much as its water, earth, fire and air are the planet, and if the planet survives, it will only be through heroism. Not occasional heroism, a remarkable instance of it here and there, but constant heroism, systematic heroism, heroism as governing principle.
A curious trait in humans, one that gives aid and comfort to the dark angels of entropy and makes it all the more difficult to establish here on earth once and for all a Heroic Age, is the ease with which we take everything personally. At sea level, we cannot even see the Gulf Stream; yet if it benefits us, we think it’s only right it does so. And standing on the earth, we cannot feel it move beneath our feet, but if we could, we would wonder what we had done wrong this morning and say ten Hail Marys, just in case. All the more, then, when a hurricane, namely familiarly Jean or Hattie or Allen, spins slowly north from the coast of Guyana, gathers force and moisture from the warm waters off Trinidad and Tobago, crosses the Lesser Antilles, destroys everything in its path and chews its way toward us, here, in the Greater Antilles, let’s say, for this we
can see, this we can
feel: the skies in the southeast darken slowly as ten-mile-high towers of cumulonimbus clouds cross the horizon, the air pressure drops so rapidly our heads ache, seabirds fly inland and disappear behind dark green jungle-covered hills, and the onshore breeze replaces the offshore breeze as if rushing from the island to greet the approaching wall of gray clouds: and it’s because we can see the hurricane with our eyes and feel it with our bodies (though it’s caused by something no more concerned with us and our individual and paltry fates than is the rotation of the earth) that we nevertheless take it personally. We make it “our” hurricane,
and when we talk with tourists from America, we speak of “our” weather, just as the New Englanders among them speak with wry pride of blizzards and Californians brag about sunshine.
If, however, we are a poor, middle-aged woman with five children living in a daub-and-wattle cabin in the hill country of Haiti a few kilometers west of Port-de-Paix on the north coast, we know the hurricane comes because the loas have not been properly fed. It’s not that we have been bad; it’s that the quality of our attention has waned. We’ve forgotten the dead,
les Morts
, and
les Mystères
, we’ve neglected to feed them, and it’s not we alone who have been neglectful, this poor, solitary woman, let’s say, a woman with a husband gone off to America in a boat, not we alone, but all
les serviteurs
, all of us who serve the loas. It’s true, for a long time now we have not fed the loas, so today the hurricane comes to remind us that it is we who live for the dead and not the dead who live for us.
In early August our side of the island was struck by a hurricane. We learned too late that it was coming—not that we would have done anything differently had we known about it sooner, for it was too late to stop it, the waters had already been stirred. We would deal with the loas later, we said, for that is how it has been done in the past. There have been other hurricanes, and after they have passed over us, even before we have patched up our houses and repaired our gardens, we have fed the loas. This year, however, when the hurricane came, it was different, for things got confused. And though we did not think we were a part of the confusion, we watched it and slowly got drawn into it and soon began to behave as if we, too, were confused. Here is how it happened:
Our settlement is called Allanche and it is located behind the first line of hills on the northwest coast a few kilometers off the road from Port-de-Paix to Saint Louis du Nord, which, because Allanche is too small to be a market town, is fortunate, for the women can carry their baskets of yams, mangoes and breadfruit, their apricot mameys and jamelacs, over the ridge on narrow pathways down to the coast road early on the morning of market day, and if they cannot hail a truck or
car or wagon for a ride into Port-de-Paix, it is still not too late to walk the other way to the smaller market town of Saint Louis du Nord and arrive there in time to sell most of their goods.
First it rained for several days, a breezy, late summer rain, warm and various, turning the leaves of the trees, like wet, silver-palmed hands, this way and that, as the breeze off the sea tumbled against the hills. All the wood got soaked through, and when their cookfires went out, the people slept long and late inside their houses and shops, waking to talk in low voices and to peer out the door again and again at the red ground still riddled and puddled from the stoop to the lane, dribbling down the lane and down the hillside in new streams that ran red as blood all the way to the sea. These were long, boring days of waiting, gossiping, thinking of food and of the past, fussing with children’s hair and guessing and arguing lightly about when the rain would stop and wood dry out so cookfires could be lit and yams baked again, damp clothes dried, bedding spread in the sunlight, children sent scurrying to the fields for greens and to the shop for a can of tinned beef or a box of yellow cheese. A few people in the settlement, Aubin, the police chief, Chauvet, the shopkeeper, and Placide, who owns a small truck, have kerosene stoves and were able to cook inside their houses. Soon the smell of their food cooking in the morning and again late in the day drifted through the settlement and set our stomachs to grumbling and made it difficult to keep our hearts from tightening with anger against everything—against our neighbors with their stoves, against our restless children, against the pair of uncooked yams in the corner on the floor, against the pair of chickens under the cabin scratching in the dirt and clucking quietly to each other, against the cold chunks of breadfruit crumbling in our mouths. We smelled a stew, a dense tangle of threads of tomato, chicken, onion and greens, and we looked across the dark room at each other’s faces, the small children lying on the bed, the boy by the window, the sister-in-law and her baby in the chair by the window, and it was difficult for us not to hate the world so much that we hated even each other, we who must live in this world.
Then the rain stopped. The wind died, and the sky seemed to lift: and lighten to a milky white. We smiled and stepped to the open doorway and looked at the yard, where everything dripped and glistened, as if the entire valley had all at once been plucked from under the sea by a gigantic hand and set down there between the blue-green mountains inland and the pearly sea beyond the hills. It was beautiful and newborn.
Then, before we could stop him, the boy darted around us and ran down the path, quickly gone, eager to see his friends and walk with them to Port-de-Paix, where they follow older boys and men who teach them how to make a little money doing things we will not permit them to do here in Allanche. We cannot keep them here, where they have no land to raise a crop and yet have no other way than farming to earn money for their families or themselves. These days all the boys soon go away to the towns and cities, even to Port-au-Prince, where, without their mothers and fathers, they become drunkards and pimps and beggars and even worse. Most of them never come back.
Aubin—the chief of police, he’s called, though he has no assistant—came down the lane from his office, which is also his home, and as he passed the cabin, he called out, You should shutter your window, ladies, and lock your door! This is the start of a hurricane!
He came to the window and peered in at us. He was wearing his cap and the jacket of his uniform, so we knew this was official business, this warning, even though he often called on us or shouted hello when he passed by, for the sister-in-law, Vanise, is the mother of his child and he enjoyed keeping track of the child, although he no longer cared for the mother, who, despite her youth, had grown thin and sour-faced and silent, except when she talked to us or to her baby.
It’s a big one, a strong blow, he said, and puffing his round brown cheeks, he blew a gust of wind into the darkness of the cabin—
pfff
!—and laughed.
Then he was serious, for he saw we were frightened and alone, and he said he’d heard it on his radio. Everyone should just stay inside their cabins and wait out the storm, he said. It’ll pass over the island
in a few hours. Where’s your boy? he asked us, and when he learned that the boy had left as soon as the rain stopped, he seemed concerned for a second. The roads have washed out, he said. He’ll have to turn back. There’s no road to Port-de-Paix anymore, it’s buried in mud off the hills, he said. I heard it on my radio.
We listened in silence to him, and so he said, Pray he gets back before the hurricane strikes. Or he’ll come home dead in a box. He said this with a cheerfulness we have grown used to, for he does not want the boys to come back at night, or ever. He wants them to disappear into the towns and not cause him trouble anymore.