Paternity

The Sun Burned through the summer dust of Port-au-Prince, road grit and charcoal smoke. The consoling sway of palm was stilled at midday. With total confidence, Fritz emerged from the shop and set an unwrapped quart of ice cream on the floor of his Fiat. It would go too fast for mere melting. I said; it would explode--fissionable chocolate, the first Haitian atomic bomb.

"Wrong again, my friend," he said. "It's mocha. And I know from experience of my many years how nicely it will last from this creamery to my villa."

In the back seat the child, Marie-Claude, said, "Joujoux." Toys.

"It is every Saturday like this," Fritz explained. "Only usually, not you or any other friend, although sometimes her real father comes for a sandwich at bedtime on Sunday. I keep her toys at my villa, a bath suit, a bathing suit. Now she must bathe at once. She smells"--sniff!--"chérie, tu sens le pipi."

"It's just a little-girl smell," I said.

"I suppose you would be the expert, dear friend."

I have known him for 20 years now. For Fritz, tall, elegant, a blond, blue-eyed, coffee-colored Haitian who has delighted three continents and many islands with (continued on page 226) Paternity(continued from page 127) his lazy grace, adopting this lovely black child seemed very odd. It was a responsibility, and others had always felt responsible for him, for the pleasure he gave, for the sweet lightness of his smiling presence. Responsibility had never, in Paris, Rome, London, New York or Port-au-Prince, been one of his fields of endeavor. It seemed to me like the end of something, the end of the last boy of my age, but he was not in mourning for himself. Once again he was happy. He loved her. She was four and three months, he told me, more than four years, and he had adopted her legally. It was the beginning of something for Fritz, a new life with his delicious daughter. Already she knew enough to speak French, not Creole, with him, because although he sometimes became angry in Creole, he always smiled upon her in French.

"You'll like my pool," he said. "Well, you will tolerate my pool. I share it with three others of my sort. We live in Bois Verna." He lifted his shoulders in the classic international driver's shrug at the impossibility of life, of traffic, of the heat, of time passing. "My pool is cleaner than it looks. Filtered. Chérie! Don't touch! No fingers! You'll have cream after your bath."

And to me: "Don't worry. I'll explain. And the ice cream will endure, my friend."

• • •

We sat by the pool. His cottage reminded me of the brave, seedy, plaster-and-stucco digs of poor writers and actors in Los Angeles--falling apart and the envy of millions. There were bougain-villaea, great carnivorous red blossoms, darting hyacinths, palm trees shedding and a mass of tropical plants I couldn't identify. The water in the pool was gray-green. Lizards slipped across the cracks of concrete, swelled up their necks, darted at mosquitoes. There was thunder from far away, perhaps Kenscoff, but it wouldn't rain here today. The child played, murmuring softly to herself. Like a good father, Fritz didn't press at her shyness at the beginning of the weekend, at her father's strange visitor. And he said he would explain and he did.

"Since we are such old friends and I know how good we are friends, I tell you the story. The grandfather of this child was a famous beauty. However, when I was a boy and first learned who I was, he had already become, perhaps, a little less beautiful. His hair, you know, as mine now. The forehead in a beautiful person should be a little lower."

He touched his crown. I mumbled but didn't really know how to console him. He still looks like one of the tall, straight, tennis-playing young leading men of the Fifties, with only that creamy skin to say he is Haitian. But he didn't need my diplomacy: He knows what he is and how old he has become.

"So when the grandfather have a good chance to travel to Italy with an Italian count, naturally, he seek to achieve this wish. The Italian adored him and I was only a child. We never consummated his desire for me. I was too proud, I think. Then, in a few years, the grandfather returned to Port-au-Prince. He married. He had this son, Marc-Albert. And I watched him grow up. First he was pretty, then he became an angel. However, he loved mostly women, although, naturally, he took his pleasure sometimes like his father. He was so immature. I watched. I waited. He was capable, I thought, of pleasure but not of passion. and I waited. I loved him so, I wanted only passion when finally we met.

"It did not happen. We were friends only. He knew, but he teased me, oh, very bad, and then he married. He had this child. The mother is crazy and beat her. Marc-Albert found a new woman. Oh, he is less beautiful now, anyway, but I still remember and perhaps I no longer even feel desire for him. But I love him. He is nearly thirty now, you know, and I am nearly fifty."

He offered me a rum and soda. He showed me the crisp nut from a nearby tree and told me its name in Creole. He watched Marie-Claude making tea with water from the swimming pool in her tin tea set and carrying it back and forth, spilling it out, making more tea. She was at home here. She called him Papa. Her hair, the color of mahogany, very curly but long, was held by pink elastic with little bells jingling. He had dressed her in the pale-green swimsuit he kept for her. During the week, she boarded with friends--"It is good she have a kindly mother, it is good she have many fathers"--but during the weekends, he gave up his other lives to be her father.

"So since I was neither enjoyed by the grandfather nor did I enjoy the father, I adopted the child. A girl," he said, smiling, the winking, amused shrug of a man bent on joy who has become a kindly ironist because what else is there at this time of life?

What else to do was to set the table for the two of them. I was not invited for dinner. Two plates on two straw mats, under a sun umbrella; forks, spoons, knives, cups and a red flower floating in a glass. He admired her preparations. He straightened the mats and touched the flower so that it turned slowly in the water.

"How lucky I have always been. And now to participate in history like this. How happy you must be, dear friend, at my good fortune. To have a descendant, and this sweet little person, who reminds me of so much." He looked at me with his hands clasped in front of his bikini and his shoulders slightly stooped, in none of the stop-action displaying postures that his body still often took. "It is rare to be so fortunate, to give pain, to suffer pain, and then to receive nothing but so much pleasure as this child brings me."

"You'll find being a father brings other things, too."

"I believe I am ready, my friend."

The child played sweetly, we watched her, it was very peaceful under the palm trees, we had a swim in the pool. That inevitable male sagging at the middle--two plump creases when he bent to give Marie-Claude a kiss on the top of her head--was his only visible mark. He could still have passed for 28, and I thought of telling him. But I recalled that he thought this another age of loss and decay.

We returned to our chairs and he counseled me about Haiti. "I am not stupid," he said. "I left for New York during the worst times of Papa Doc. And then I knew when to come back." He described the decline of the golden elite, and particularly of his subclass, the clever boy-lovers. They had always had things a good way for them, a way that did no harm. They treasure boys of deeper color than their own. They search "des numéros." "des grains." as he called them: Perhaps it could be translated "numbers," "trade." All young men are for hire in Port-au-Prince, he assured me; all are available for money; this is easy work and it means nothing to them. He was speaking of the poor and of those smiling angels who sometimes emerge from the slums of La Saline or from the caille pailles, the mud-and-straw houses that fill the interstices of the city. "We have all the advantages," he said, sighing his acceptance of this minor social injustice.

But now the rich Americans have discovered Port-au-Prince. They come to steal away the sweetest grains and take them back to Manhattan to walk around nude in steam-heated, well-decorated apartments, and give them Haitian goatskin drums to play with while the master works in his advertising agency or design studio or airline office. The master invites guests to envy him: not everyone possesses a Haitian boy. No one through flimsy American walls complains about the sound of the lonely drum all day, because, in fact, the boy never touches it except when the master has guests. He is busy with The Guiding Light, the storm-door and Brillo advertisements, the white magic of daytime television. Then next winter he develops sinus trouble, homesickness, he steals a shirt, when the graphic designer would be glad to give him all the shirts he can wear, his nose runs, he runs away. Fritz emitted a short angry laugh. "It's an old story. Nobody can help."

My friend sighed. "I am now out of this combat, thank God," he said. "I love this child more than anyone, she will be my heir, you will see how she speaks French like a little French doll. Six months ago, she spoke only Creole. Now, you will see, she goes babababa in French. Only she is a little shy with you, blanc."

• • •

I think we dozed in our chairs. Marie-Claude was touching my arm. She offered me her tea made of swimming-pool water and mud. I pretended to drink. "Merci, merci, ti-moune." I said.

Fritz awoke with a start. "Oh! Marie-Claude! Que tu sens le pipi! First you will bathe, you will see, and then you will have crême, tu comprends?"

She was afraid of the pool.

"Must!" he said sternly, and he arose from his chair with that lazy grudging gesture of the dutiful father. He seized her arm and pulled her with him to the pool. "Un, deux, trois," he said, "you're ready?"

She smiled with a sudden brilliant submissive pride that this man had loved now through three generations. "Oui, Papa," she said.