Smell the Devil, or Dirty Black People, or My Life as a Missionary

Yes, it's ugly.

And foul.

This mind. These walls. This wallpaper. The curtains in my brain.

I remember being told that the first thing out of a person's mouth is usually the truth. It is the subsequent obfuscation that does the real damage.

And Truth is hard to swallow.

If you're a rat.

Or a dung beetle. Pushing dung up a steep, steep hill.

I saw that once, you know. In Haiti, climbing up the cobblestone pathway to the Citadel, where Napoleon was beat back by the blood of Haitians, black skinned, and evil, like the Devil, like the Devil's own children, sold into slavery and voodoo and sin. Baptized into evil. I saw the pond, the muddy water, where the voodoo curse was consummated, and they were drowned into death. To escape the white man. To bury their faces in the hairy chest of the Devil, and to breathe in his fatherliness and love and protection like the sweat of a horse.

The hashish dealer was so skinny and gaunt, like the terrier that hadn't eaten for three weeks, or months. It is hard to tell when a dog is so skinny. How long could it possibly live?

I don't know. But I also saw one that was fat and bloated, lying dead by the side of a road. And it was hot, and the animal was fat like a dead hog, full of puss and vinegar. Satiated by Death.

He looked at me with desperate eyes and opened his palms to me (The man, or the dog? you ask.) and he offered me the drug, brown and dirty, like a ball of dung. To be smoked. But he did not understand that I did not want to forget like he wants to forget. He thought he would do me a favor, but I wanted to do him the favor instead. But I didn't know how, except to offer him a smile, and to pray for his soul when he offered me hashish.

In the garbage, in the dump, in the last light of dusk and glow of kerosene lamp, and surrounded by the smell of hot and sweat and human body both clean and unclean and desirable and repulsive and sexual and holy and sickening. Surrounding me, they were, the black devil faces, and the white eyes and the yellow kerosene flame fading into darkness at the back of the shack in the back of the dump where we accessed the road over paper and banana peels and refuse and little food.

There.

It is there in my brain.

And I turn softly
and tenderly
to myself
and to they who were there.

I am sad that I did not love them, but brought love to them: it is a very Christian thing to do.

Yet not fulfilling, nor good.

But there was a girl, who was 16 and beautiful and perfect like the sunset. The tarantulas skittered across the grass and sometimes floated, under moonlight. And she came to me in white dress with citron and banana chips. Skin soft, delicate, imperfect and smooth and perfect. But she did not know me or the words I spoke.

Procim. Merci, beaucoup.  J'aime beaucoup les enfants. Je suis. Oui, merci. Ou est la piscine?

It is not French anyway. It is a bastard language, of colonizer and slave. Of France and Afrika. Jesus and Lucifer. To kiss the Devil, or his daughter, would be a very disturbing thing to do, wouldn't it?

Yet she was beautiful. Though, I imagine, twenty years hence, she is not. Only was. Yet could be, or still is. Or was. Or will be?

No. I suppose it does not matter as much now as it did then. In retrospect it was not much good at all.

But it still is, and must continue to be, despite itself.

Truth, too.