Twenty Dollars by Madison Smartt Bell Lyrics
In the southwest corner of the square was a new monument Doctor Oliver had not seen before, a different style from the venerable statues: three curving husks of polished aluminum, grouped together and standing about man-high. When he approached he saw there were inscriptions on the inner curves; the sculpture was arranged so that he had to step inside the grouping to try to read them. The effect was obscurely menacing, like standing inside some sort of iron maiden that had not yet been completely shut. Doctor Oliver did not feel well. He needed to take off his teardrop sunglasses to read and the burst of reflected light worsened his headache, which might have been brought on by sun or by early stages of narcotic withdrawal. The inscriptions were in Creole, which he had trouble puzzling out; he was more functional in French.
Gradually he absorbed the idea that each silvery husk memorialized a martyr of the Revolution who had died on this spot. Doctor Oliver recognized their three names from histories he had read. One had been burned at the stake and the other two broken on the wheel. This information seemed to be borne to him by some sort of voice-over narration, but surely that could not be real. Yet there was a Creole phrase being repeated in an angry monotone: Blan! Pa gade dokiman m! And a person saying it, a long scarecrow who’d detached himself from a niche of shade at the corner of the church and was walking toward Doctor Oliver in a jittery stride, obsessively repeating the words the doctor now understood to mean,
Doctor Oliver put his sunglasses back on but that did not make him feel any safer. He felt dizzy and sick and unsure of himself. Normally this part of town was perfectly safe, but there were always exceptional days. The week before, an election had gone wrong somehow and since then demonstrators had sealed off the approaches to the town with burning barricades. Though those phenomena existed comfortably far away from the central square, the aggression hurling itself his way now seemed to partake of the same spirit. Doctor Oliver opened his dry mouth and found he could not frame a placating phrase in the right language.
Then someone else had put a hand under his elbow and was steering him gently away, and at the same time speaking to the other man with the calm fluency Doctor Oliver had been unable to summon: Oke monchè, nou prale, nou pa gen pwoblèm ak sa wi?
They turned a corner and there was shade. Immediately Doctor Oliver felt a little better. With his free hand he checked the nearly empty pill bottle in his pants pocket. He was in the company of Charles Morgan, a white American like himself, known to the locals as Charlie Chapo. Their soft tongues elided the “r” and took the crunch out of the consonants, turning Charlie into Shawlie.
“You don’t want to be out in this with no hat,” Charlie Chapo was telling him now. They passed the grilled gateway of the Hotel International. Charlie’s battered Montero was parked across the street, and in the heavy dust on the back window someone had scrawled the name MAGLOIRE. An air conditioner rumbled in a window of the hotel restaurant and Doctor Oliver automatically moved toward the door, but Charlie nudged him past, to the “popular” bar beside it, which catered to the less prosperous locals and had no air-conditioning.
“You’ll get pneumonia in that cold,” Charlie said, “come in here first,” and he assisted Doctor Oliver when he tripped on the step into the popular bar, which was, unusually, stone empty. Charlie rapped on a hatch in the side wall and someone passed two bottles of beer through it, releasing a puff of frigid air before the hatch slapped shut.
Charlie Chapo took off his hat, which was the reason for his sobriquet, and set it on the chest-high counter where both men leaned. It was a nondescript straw hat of the sort the peasants wore, shaped like a Panama and as finely woven, with heavy sweat stains at the brow. Beneath the hat Charlie had, as always, a red bandanna covering his head and tightly knotted at the nape of his neck. The ensemble made it look as if he were affecting Indiana Jones, though if asked Charlie would say that he’d adopted the rig from pictures of the colonial planters and that it worked very well to protect his head—from heat and sun, presumably, though Doctor Oliver also knew that the red head-rag meant something or other among practitioners of Vodou, of whom Charlie Chapo was rumored to be one. At the embassy they sneered that he had “gone native,” which struck Doctor Oliver as peculiarly quaint in the twenty-first century, a line out of Somerset Maugham.
Gradually he absorbed the idea that each silvery husk memorialized a martyr of the Revolution who had died on this spot. Doctor Oliver recognized their three names from histories he had read. One had been burned at the stake and the other two broken on the wheel. This information seemed to be borne to him by some sort of voice-over narration, but surely that could not be real. Yet there was a Creole phrase being repeated in an angry monotone: Blan! Pa gade dokiman m! And a person saying it, a long scarecrow who’d detached himself from a niche of shade at the corner of the church and was walking toward Doctor Oliver in a jittery stride, obsessively repeating the words the doctor now understood to mean,
Doctor Oliver put his sunglasses back on but that did not make him feel any safer. He felt dizzy and sick and unsure of himself. Normally this part of town was perfectly safe, but there were always exceptional days. The week before, an election had gone wrong somehow and since then demonstrators had sealed off the approaches to the town with burning barricades. Though those phenomena existed comfortably far away from the central square, the aggression hurling itself his way now seemed to partake of the same spirit. Doctor Oliver opened his dry mouth and found he could not frame a placating phrase in the right language.
Then someone else had put a hand under his elbow and was steering him gently away, and at the same time speaking to the other man with the calm fluency Doctor Oliver had been unable to summon: Oke monchè, nou prale, nou pa gen pwoblèm ak sa wi?
They turned a corner and there was shade. Immediately Doctor Oliver felt a little better. With his free hand he checked the nearly empty pill bottle in his pants pocket. He was in the company of Charles Morgan, a white American like himself, known to the locals as Charlie Chapo. Their soft tongues elided the “r” and took the crunch out of the consonants, turning Charlie into Shawlie.
“You don’t want to be out in this with no hat,” Charlie Chapo was telling him now. They passed the grilled gateway of the Hotel International. Charlie’s battered Montero was parked across the street, and in the heavy dust on the back window someone had scrawled the name MAGLOIRE. An air conditioner rumbled in a window of the hotel restaurant and Doctor Oliver automatically moved toward the door, but Charlie nudged him past, to the “popular” bar beside it, which catered to the less prosperous locals and had no air-conditioning.
“You’ll get pneumonia in that cold,” Charlie said, “come in here first,” and he assisted Doctor Oliver when he tripped on the step into the popular bar, which was, unusually, stone empty. Charlie rapped on a hatch in the side wall and someone passed two bottles of beer through it, releasing a puff of frigid air before the hatch slapped shut.
Charlie Chapo took off his hat, which was the reason for his sobriquet, and set it on the chest-high counter where both men leaned. It was a nondescript straw hat of the sort the peasants wore, shaped like a Panama and as finely woven, with heavy sweat stains at the brow. Beneath the hat Charlie had, as always, a red bandanna covering his head and tightly knotted at the nape of his neck. The ensemble made it look as if he were affecting Indiana Jones, though if asked Charlie would say that he’d adopted the rig from pictures of the colonial planters and that it worked very well to protect his head—from heat and sun, presumably, though Doctor Oliver also knew that the red head-rag meant something or other among practitioners of Vodou, of whom Charlie Chapo was rumored to be one. At the embassy they sneered that he had “gone native,” which struck Doctor Oliver as peculiarly quaint in the twenty-first century, a line out of Somerset Maugham.