Le Système Routier

Madison Smartt Bell

From "Soul in a Bottle" by Madison Smartt Bell

Copyright 1997 by Madison Smartt Bell -- All Print Rights Reserved

I was determined to get up on the Central Plateau, so we started toward Le Cap by the road through Hinche, officially known as La Route Nationale 3. In June we'd planned to do this circle in the opposite direction: up La Route Nationale 1, which ran the coastal route and across the peninsula to Cap Haïtien, then back down to Port au Prince through the interior, but at Cape Haitian Jean had been prostrated with dysentery and I had been possessed by demons (two events which seemed inauspicious, if not incapacitating); moreover because it was the rainy season the road through Hinche was thought to be impassable.

Now it was dry. Once Xavier had filtered us through the Port au Prince traffic jams to Croix des Missions, we turned right onto the Hinche road. Since colonial times, Port au Prince had expanded to engulf Croix des Bouquets, so as far as that crossroads we were still in the city, but afterward all evidence of human habitation suddenly vanished and we were traversing an arid plain toward a forbidding mountain: Morne Cabrit.

The road was classic Haitian pavement, pocked with strings of malevolent potholes that were out to murder your tires, so I couldn't really look at the mountain until we were upon it. On the lower slopes, the pavement stopped; there was a dust and gravel surface over bedrock. I kicked in the four-wheel drive and began the ascent. There were mild problems with the angle of the sun (it was necessary to leave very early in the morning to be certain you would not be caught on the road at night), and I knew that anything, everything might be coming down from above-- the ill balanced overloaded tap-taps, festooned with people like a bunch of grapes, or huge hauling trucks which were likely to have no brakes. The turns were hairpin. Below (a matter of around three thousand feet), we began to see the borders of L'Étang Saumatre.

Morne Cabrit had been a killing ground for Cédras and Michel Francois during the coup, and it remained the resort of zenglendo, who blocked the road and robbed whoever tried to pass through and perhaps murdered them as well (in theory this happened only by night). Because these zenglendo were mostly former Army or former FRAPH, they were reputed to be heavily well-armed... in any case you simply hoped you wouldn't run into them. Morne Cabrit was a desert place, cragged with raw rock, almost without vegetation except for a little dust-encrusted shrubbery. Like most places in Haiti where so many people had died by violence, this area was full of spirits. Even if you were blan you could feel it-- blood of the murdered evaporating into the air you breathed.

On top of this, Xavier's respiration filled the cabin of the jeep with fear. When at last we reached the peak of the mountain two men appeared on the road ahead, long objects dressed across their shoulders. Xavier cracked. "Yo genyen fizi!" he cried, "They have guns." The extent of his terror was rather unnerving, although men were only peasants carrying hoes.

After Morne Cabrit there wasn't supposed to be anything hugely dangerous (so long as major politics wasn't happening anywhere) except of course the condition of the roads. According to the U.S. military maps I had consulted, roads in this area did not in fact exist. But there were vestiges of pavement here and there as far as Mirebalais, although it probably would have been easier on the driver if there hadn't been; the lunar landscapes of dried mud or stretches of bedrock strewn with fist-size stones were far less likely to destroy your tires. The mudscapes were so billowing that driving them was like being on a storm at sea; while the bedrock stretches, because of the canopy of scattered stones, would throw the jeep into a tooth rattling bone jangling vibration which Alex compared to a very powerful "Magic Fingers" massage. You didn't need four wheel drive for this (in the dry season) but you could hardly ever get it above second gear.

Soon after Mirebalais the Black Mountains began and we mounted through turns only slightly less wrenching than those of Morne Cabrit, until we were astonished by the appearance of a gigantic dam, La Barrage de Peligre, which was around 1500 feet high and with enough generators probably could have powered half the country. Behind the dam was the Lac de Peligre, which looked as if it held water enough to irrigate half the country, even now when the season was dry. As we passed, a woman came the other way with a string of twenty fish.

Beyond the mountains and the lake the Central Plateau unfolded to other mountains bounding the horizon on both sides. In the slavery time this area had technically been part of Spanish Santo Domingo, but it was very thinly populated, except by half wild cattle which the bands of runaway slaves (called maroons) coming out of the mountains on the French side used to provision themselves at will. From the Black Mountain pass all the way across the Plateau to the pass in the Chaine de la Grand Rivière which led through Dondon to Milot, this was all maroon territory. The limit of colonial penetration had been passed.

So had the limit of Xavier's knowledge of the road. From here on to the Citadelle, we'd have to stop for him to ask the way at every crossroads, sometimes waiting a little while for someone to appear. This taught you patience. It also taught you Kreyol.

The driving became increasingly interesting mainly because of all the little streams you had to cross. Typically there would be a very sharp descent into a body of water of unknown depth and then an equally (at least) sharp ascent on the other side. The first time I felt the need to take a close look at one of these fords, I joked to Xavier as I got out of the car that I was going to check if there were any sharks in there, but Xavier took this completely seriously: he threw a bunch of rocks in the water and then watched the surface for fins.

These situations were sort of discouraging until you began to get used to them. You got out of the car with Xavier and went down to study the terrain, paying special attention to the tracks of other jeeps that appeared to have gotten through somehow. Sometimes there were little boys who would lead you through the ford, wading ahead with grand gesticulations to show the way. Up the country they didn't want money for this service; the entertainment value of a motor vehicle with "blan" inside was reward enough in itself. If there were no such little boys there would be women washing their clothes or themselves in the river, or men watering their burros and ox-teams and their scrappy little Haitian horses. Xavier would have poetic exchanges with these people in Kreyol: "Ki bò vwati kab pase?" "Li kab pase kote-la," and so on. When a Haitian told you it was possible to cross one of these fords, he truly meant that from the bottom of his heart, but at the same time he also meant that a whole of less agreeable things were equally possible, such as getting stuck or drowning the motor or getting the whole jeep washed down the river somehow.

I started whispering little prayerlike phrases to myself in Kreyol, of which my favorite was fè confyans, , just as I was letting out the clutch. You wanted to hit second gear before you were in the water because you needed to establish a certain amount of momentum which you would require (if all went well in the water) to climb the near-rock face or mud chute on the other side; even in maximum four-wheel drive you needed some speed as (if) you came out of the water, because of course your tires were wet... on the other hand if you went too fast it caused a host of other problems. Dousman dousman ale lwen. The water wasn't really all that deep at this time of the year; with rainy seasons floodwaters the whole project would have been completely hopeless.

After I'd managed the first ten or fifteen of these fords I started getting into the groove of it all. I also started to believe I really was Mad Max, which caused some difficulties later on.

The grand expanse of the Central Plateau rolled on and on from Thomonde to Hinche, and thence to Pignon (where Alex figured out the gas gauge wasn't working and where we therefore purchased a couple of jugs of weird-looking stuff which Xavier said was supposed to be gasoline but very well might not be), St. Raphael, and finally Dondon in the pass of the de Bonnet Mountains. After Dondon was a miles-long twisted chute of red mud that flowed down from the plateau and finally spat us out into Milot. This road was essentially one-way for the moment; it was still raining around Dondon although it was supposed to be the dry season, so the mud was wet and nobody was trying to climb that chute, four wheel drive and Mad Max or not. From Milot to Le Cap the road was paved because it was the only way to get to the Citadelle, but it was also pitted with wicked little tire-killing holes so we couldn't really go much faster. But at least the road was straight and flat, most of the way to the surreal splendor of the spanking-new Shell station recently installed on the outskirts of Cap Haïtien. When we filled up we learned that we must have made the last few miles on fumes.

La Fossette was the principal kalfou of Cap Haïtien, so far as the rest of the country was concerned-- the place where all the traffic swirled around and decided where it wanted to go from there. The jams were nothing like Port au Prince, of course, but if you were intending to shoot for the capital via the coast road you were wise to get through La Fossette at dawn (so that you wouldn't be caught on the road at night). Past La Fossette the road was paved and in reasonably good condition all the way around the foot of Morne du Cap and, on the other side, through the various quarters of Limbé. On this road you could make it pretty fast, and although there were patches of nasty ill-intentioned holes I was learning to play them like a video game, so that I was able to keep the jeep in fourth gear, sometimes even fifth, until a bunch of small school children broke from a stream of others marching down to the school in the town of Cagnette. They were three, two girls and a little boy all in immaculate blue and red uniforms-- they all three seemed to be holding hands as they whiplashed across the road, not twenty yards in front of the jeep, and none of us would ever forget that image because at first it seemed like the brakes weren't going to work, and then, at last, they did.

"Fais attention!" Alex screamed, and I screamed back, "Je faisais tout attention, c'étaient les gosses!" (the only cross words between us during that whole journey). The jeep advanced in a slow trembling way as if it too were terrified, while Xavier intoned from the back (two or three times with differing word orders), If you had crushed those children, that would have been very very serious for you. The custom in these regions, as I already knew, was to haul drivers who killed children out of their cars and chop their heads off on the spot, no problem to discover the instruments because at least every other paysan walking down from the mountains carried an enormous, unsheathed cutlass. In principle I thought the people were within their rights to conduct these summary executions-- it seemed just, a life for a life-- but I didn't much want it to happen to me. Probably they'd have killed Alex too. I didn't think they'd have done that much to Xavier, though of course he would have been screwed for a ride home.

The jeep began climbing into the mountains of the Chaine du Bonnet. It was a long, long time before any one of us spoke.

But the beauty of the ascent was healing. The passage through the mountains from Limbé to the heights of Morne Pibo was one of those pockets of fertility that didn't really show up from an airplane, and yet here the land was still lush, fruitful. Tout pousse, as Jean had said, everything grows. Fast. There was a pleasant damp smell of action in the air from all the vegetation. It was Friday, market day, and all the people were coming down out of the mountains with the foodstuffs they had gathered or grown.

This fruitfulness continued up to the height of Morne Pibo, where there was a boundary that looked like it had been cut with a knife. At the crossing with the road which led westward down the mountain to Marmelade, the paysans had established the absolute last chance market for anybody headed south. Normally Xavier liked to stop here to buy cassava bread, which cost about four times as much in Port au Prince, and there'd be a kouri because we were "blan", everyone surging around the jeep, plastering their wares against the glass. Xavier had to negotiate his purchase through a two-inch gap in the window... and yet their urgency was a kind of admonition, because beyond this point was the desert.

Now road went corkscrewing down through the dry hills above Gonaives, where everything was eroded to the underlying bedrock and practically nothing at all could grow, and then below the mountains an equally arid plain, swept by sea winds which whirled around the perfectly rounded little hillock which was Morne St. Jisse, a sacred place of pilgrimages. Then Gonaives itself, a town of substantial size and political importance. During the Revolution, Toussaint Louverture had established his first power base here because it gave him access to a port; nowadays Gonaives remained like to blow up early when there was trouble, because it was the first major town assuredly out of the safe reach of the Presidential Palace in Port au Prince.

From Gonaives to Pont d'Ester there was a genuine desert plain complete with alkali flats and cactus. The road was a lacy fabric of potholes so numerous that here you hit the very highest levels of the driving video game-- actually the thing to do was follow a Haitian tap-tap driver too poor to replace his tires, who had memorized the pattern of holes and knew how to get there, doucement. After Pont d'Ester we entered the rice plantations of the Artibonite, still half-crippled by the importation of cheaper rice from America and elsewhere. Then we crossed the small peninsula through Freycineau and came out on the other side where Club Med and the beach hotels were.

Because we'd been driving all the way from Le Cap without discovering manje sauf pou blan, we stopped at Moulin sur Mer; anyway, I was curious. It was a Club-Med style vacation prison (in fact its beach was separated by only a block wall from the Club Med beach) but the architecture was more agreeable; at least you didn't have look at those bogus African huts. The restaurant overlooked the gentle water of the Port au Prince bay, where little wooden sailing boats plied back and forth to the Isle of Gonaves. In fact all the landscaping had really been beautifully done, and in a plausibly colonial manner. But everything was so regulated and orderly that after everything that had happened at Hinche and Le Cap it gave us a fairly rough culture shock.

Now we were no more than an hour or so from Port au Prince, for the road from the airport exactly as far as Club Med was perfectly maintained (a circumstance which had infuriated Jean when he noticed it on our first trip). For the moment, there were no dangers to avoid (so long as it was daylight), although we must pass between the abattoir of Duvalier père in the dry hills to the west and the abattoir of Duvalier fils, east of the road along the bay. Xavier, generally quite taciturn on the subject of landmarks and monuments (unless he were asked a question), never failed to point out these killing grounds. He did so because his father had been murdered there by the Duvaliers.

We reached Croix-des-Missions well before dark, and so completed the circle. We had only an hour or so of hellish Port au Prince gridlock to survive before we rolled safely into the enclosure of the Oloffson Hotel, giddy with exhaustion, relief, and hunger. The other guests looked at us strangely-- we were grimy and wild-looking, and tended to break out in half-hysterical laughter for no very evident reason, as we swallowed our first beers on the gallery.

The Oloffson was at least halfway safe; there you could drop your guard a little, relax a part of your attention. By comparison the voyage north had been absolutely relentless. You could never, ever, completely let down... not even while you slept.

 

Copyright © 1998 Madison Smartt Bell