The Deputy Chief of Mission said, "Sit." He pointed to the wooden chair facing his desk. I sat. A few silent moments passed while we regarded one another. We'd just left an award ceremony in the Ambassador's office during which I'd received a Coast Guard Commendation Medal, and come very close to calling the Ambassador an idiot. The DCM had deflected my words, made excuses to the puzzled Ambassador, and hustled me out of the room.

The DCM leaned back in his chair and said, "I think you need a little vacation. It might be good for your career. Take a few days off. Get out of Port-au-Prince; go north toward Cap Haitien, find some little beach town. Or go to Club Med and hang out with the French and Germans. Pretend you're not in Haiti." He rose, walked around his desk and led me to the door. He said, "Don't come back until you've got your shit together."

The idea of Club Med sounded good. Real food, real people, no traffic, no insane tap-tap drivers, no clutching beggars. A travel-poster paradise, ninety minutes north of Port-au-Prince, a private world where only outsiders were permitted. No peasants allowed; no ragged boat-people with their pleading eyes.

The road out of Port-au-Prince was an obstacle course booby-trapped with sleeping dogs, straying children, abandoned carts, erupted asphalt, suicidal chickens, aimless peasants, rocks, potholes, police check-points, wandering goats, and broken-down buses painted like Gypsy caravans. It was a corridor of chaos twisted through shriveled villages turning to dust beside dried-up rivers. Every few kilometers a fatuous President-a-Vie grinned from a faded billboard. "Peace, Prosperity, Pride," he said.

The further I got from Port-au-Prince the better I felt---like surfacing from a deep dive. Thirty minutes on the road and I was no longer homicidal. Forty-five minutes and I could breathe without cursing. One hour and my blood pressure was nearly normal. Seventy minutes and I stopped to give a peasant a ride.

He stood at the side of the road looking like a small boy in a man's skin. I was suddenly struck by a revived sense of guilt, a realization that my despair had been a symptom of my blindness to the real Haiti. This scarecrow peasant was a symbol of Haiti's vast reservoir of need, a yawning chasm of need. I could begin here, now, with this man. One peasant at a time I would save Haiti. At that moment such a foolish conceit seemed possible.

I pushed open the passenger door and he got in. "Merci, m'sieu," he said. I couldn't tell his age. Somewhere between twenty and fifty. A slight man, no fat on his body. A peasant who lived close to the earth. I could smell some of that earthiness.

I exercised my awkward Creole to ask him where he was going. He named a village I'd never heard of and made an indefinite gesture up the road. Distance and direction---what do these mean to a peasant? He goes where he's going, and when he arrives he is there. Distance and direction---what do they have to do with a universe where everything is here and now? "Pas tro' loin," he said. "Not too far."

I'd just drive until he said stop. Or, if Club Med came first, I'd drop him at the turn-off to the entrance. Peasants weren't allowed on the grounds of Club Med. Club Med had decided they didn't exist.

I tried to make conversation with my passenger. I learned that his name was Desinor Tresbonne. He was married and had either six or sixteen children, I wasn't sure. He was a pig farmer but the Americans had killed all his pigs because they said the pigs were poison. So now he was a goat farmer, but he had no goats and no money to buy goats. He raised the goats in his head, he saw them in his dreams, a herd that stretched from the mountains to the sea. Dream goats. He laughed at his own foolishness.

Desinor talked about his family, about how his mother got old and older and older until one day she melted into the ground, like a rotten cabbage. He talked about his first wife, Marise, how sometimes she could reach into his head and pull out his dreams and hold them up to the sun and they would laugh together at the colors and the way his dreams made funny sounds. He told me Marise died when she was seventeen, she put her hands on her stomach and said, "It hurts," then she shut her eyes and went to sleep. Desinor talked about his life, he didn't know how many years---he thought it was very many, but time is a fuzzy thing, he said. Sometimes it tickles and sometimes it scratches, it depends. He talked as we drove, and as he talked time became a fuzzy thing. We drove out of time, into the non-dream that is the other side of a dream when you are not asleep. It is the world peasants know best. Desinor took me with him into his non-dream, and time went away.

We talked about many things, in his non-dream we spoke the same language. We talked about Jesus. We wondered whether he was black or white, or possibly mulatto, and whether he spoke Creole or English. We agreed that Jesus was black and he spoke Creole and that is why they hung him on a cross and cut up his body and treated him like a peasant. Jesus was not an elite, that was our conclusion, in our non-dream-talk where time had disappeared and the road to Cap Haitien was a bright tunnel through a world that reached out, but could not touch us.

Desinor shifted in his seat, and said, "Ici." I stopped the car. He said, "Merci, bon soir," and then pushed against the door. When it wouldn't open, he pushed harder and then looked at me. He was embarrassed. He didn't know how to open a car door. He'd never ridden in the front seat of a car before. The backs of tap-taps and buses and trucks were what he knew. Packed with three dozen other peasants, sitting on sacks of charcoal, long bunches of bananas, hog-tied goats squealing like babies, bundles of sticks, baskets of chicken feet, mangoes, pineapples, plantain, a butchered cow still with head and horns and sad eyes, a cardboard box filled with T-shirts from the CARE warehouse in Leogane. That was what he knew.

I reached across the seat and unlatched the door. He said, "Ahhh, oui," and pushed it open. He smiled, "Merci ampil, m'sieu." He lingered at the side of the road and lifted his arm as I drove toward the Club Med with its Bordeaux wines and pungent cheeses, with its rum punch by the pool, morning tennis, afternoon snorkeling, beach volleyball, choreographed evening parties where the unattached and curious launched brief liaisons that might last until breakfast or perhaps until the week is up, but certainly no longer. Desinor waved at my red Cherokee, then walked up the dusty path to his tiny village There he would tell his wife and his six or sixteen children about the ride in the gros blanc's voiture rouge. He would laugh about not knowing how to open the door, about how next time he would know. He would reach into his pocket and show his wife the ten dollar bill he got from the gros blanc. He would buy a female goat with that money, and he would promise someday they would be rich. They would have a sea of goats and it would be because God made the gros blanc in the red car stop to give him a ride.

When I reached the turn-off to Club Med I slowed, then drove on. The thought of Club Med seemed obscene. I'd keep driving until I found the real Haiti. Confront the real Haiti face to face, come to a final understanding. That was something I couldn't do in Port-au-Prince. Nothing was real in Port-au-Prince, reality had been banned by the President-a-Vie. Reality was locked away in Fort Dimanche, in a sweaty cell stinking of broken bones, rotted limbs and aborted hopes. I'd find the real Haiti somewhere off the map, far off the highway, deep in the bush where the billboard lies of Peace, Prosperity and Pride did not reach.

I turned off the main road, I turned again and again, zigged and zagged through the mountains, inched down rutted trails in low-low. I passed through pines, jungle, rain forest, desert---every kind of landscape---until I arrived on what seemed to be Haiti's Serengeti, a long, sere plain in the shadow of a ghostly mountain. A mountain far away, painted on a shimmering canvas. It watched me as though it had been waiting a long time. It was not real. I was lost.

I came to a village with no name. It was nowhere. Huts scattered in a random group, a dirt track that divided left from right. The track led to nowhere, it came from nowhere. How I found the village was a mystery. One of Haiti's gentle jokes.

Its people were nothing, peasants lost in Haiti's lost bush. They stared at me, the tall blanc with white skin. I was a freak, something from a myth, perhaps a wandering loa, confused and harmless. A little girl pulled away from her mother, touched the back of my hand, was amazed when the white didn't come off. She covered her mouth and backed into the folds of her mother's skirt. Either I was a monster or a clown or a dream.

There were no trees, only dusty cactus and the pale green spikes of agave. It hadn't rained in months. Perhaps it had never rained, and this was Mars. The ground was a powder that turned feet and ankles light brown. The nearest water was a feeble, inconsistent stream three miles away. The women walked a deep path from the village, each with an empty five gallon can balanced on her head. They carried dirty laundry in sacks tied around their shoulders. They went to the stream in the morning, when the sun was still kind, and washed their laundry in the muddy water, slapped it against the steaming rocks, shook it, folded it, returned it to the sack. Then they scooped up the brown water. Each woman filled her can, lifted it to her head, and together they walked back to the village, talking about their children and the heat and the mulatto from the Baptist Mission who said she would bring medicine but who must have forgotten.

Sweat ran down my back, sweat dripped from my chin. Flies drank my sweat, I felt feverish---disoriented; I had driven too far, left too much behind in my search for the real Haiti. I was a figment from another dimension. I felt as though I might disappear.

The peasants gathered around me, examining the Coast Guard Attaché and his dirty red Jeep Cherokee. They were polite, we tried to communicate, but my Creole was weak and their French and English were non-existent. So we smiled and pointed, and gestured. They told me they were farmers, but there was no rain. They told me they raised pigs, but the Americans killed all the pigs. They told me they were hungry but there was no food. They told me they believed in God, and they had heard about America, and was it true that Americans never die? All this from dancing hands, eyes looking up, squinting, shrugs, grunts, feet drawing canals in the powdery dirt. It was what I think they said. It could have been: Why is your skin so pale? Why do you sweat? Have you come to tell the mountain spirits to stop stealing our babies? Can you make it rain?

They led me to a sun-bleached mud hut with a roof of frayed banana fronds. It had no windows, and the low door was outlined with blue paint. Over the door was painted, "Peace." Inside, sitting on the edge of a raised pallet, was an old woman who had no teeth, who was nearly blind, whose arms and legs were black wrinkled twigs. Her body was desert and drought, a relic of sun and desiccation. But her face was alive, in the dark hut her face was light, life, a promise of relief. The air around her was strangely cool. Her hut had its own breeze, a playful pet who nosed at my hair and licked the salt from my neck. This was a home. I could stay there forever and never die.

They told me the woman was called Mama Louverture, and she was the oldest person in the world. "Two hundred years," one man gestured, nodding to assure me this was true. He stood next to me and wrote the number in the air, so that for a moment we shared the glory of the two zero zero glowing before us like holes in Time. The old woman had been the wife of Haiti's great hero, Toussaint Louverture. They showed me a faded picture in a tattered book titled "Histoire d'Haiti," the History of Haiti. The picture was of a painting of Toussaint Louverture on a white horse, he was waving a sword over his head while rebel peasants swirled at his feet, buoying him in a flood of machetes and blood revenge. Behind him the bodies of a dozen Frenchmen hanged from trees. The old woman raised her hands toward me, palms up. There were great scars on her hands, old ridges that crossed the seams of her life. The French gave these to her, as she fought beside her husband in the revolution of 1804. I was shown a medal the old woman kept on a blue and red ribbon draped around the crucifix above her bed. They told me it had been given to her by her husband after he became Haiti's first President-a-Vie. They handed it to me, I was to admire this thing, this sign of importance, this ancient honor. It was the source of the village's pride. No other village in all of Haiti had such a thing. I studied the medal, nodded my head, "Yes," I said, "Je comprends. I understand." The peasants were happy. Mama Louverture groped for my hand, pulled me closer until she could run her hand up my chest, to my face. Her two hundred year old fingers traced the emptiness of my spirit. I could not hide. She asked if I were French, if I owned slaves. I told her no, I was American, I had no slaves. She brought my face down to hers, down, until I was bent over her, poised at the edge of her antiquity. Just a little closer and I would tumble into her past, become another body hanging from another tree. She put her lips against my cheek and whispered an ageless prayer begun on distant continent, in another century. She blessed me. Forgave me.

Outside, as I walked to my Jeep, a woman offered me an overripe mango. She thought I must be hungry; I was so faded, I must be weak. She was afraid it was too hot for a blanc. I tried to refuse her gift---it may have been the only mango in the village, carried there on foot by a passing marchand on his way to someplace else---but it was not something that could be refused. In two hundred years, she would be the woman who had given a mango to the blanc from America. So I thanked her, made a show of eating the mango, the yellow juice running down my chin, making pock marks in the dust at my feet. The woman smiled, the blanc was hungry. I gave the stringy pit to the little girl who had touched my hand, and she filled her mouth with it, sucking the last traces of sweetness. She would never forget me.

As I drove away from the no name village, a teenage boy ran along side, near my open window. So close I could have reached out and touched his pumping arm, but he didn't want that---it would break the spell. When I went faster, he went faster, when I slowed down, he slowed down. He ran and ran, through the heat and the dust, over the rocks and through the rutted spines of the road from nowhere. He ran toward a far off mountain, a Kilimanjaro, floating in his head on a lake of white clouds. We were creatures of another place---not here, not this place, not this Haiti. We were somewhere else, far away, beyond the memory of the no name village, on our way to where everything began. La Source.

He ran through gazelles and wildebeests and giraffes, he ran though the lions and past whining hyenas, he leapt buzzards squabbling over the carcass of a dead zebra, he ran with the scent of tall yellow grass in his nose, the sweat on his chest drying in the trembling heat of the plain. He did not see me; what he saw was a red beast rumbling through the brittle grass, its shadow stretching toward the lip of the universe. I was some spirit come to test his strength. This was his moment, a race against all his fears and all his hopes, away from his village, toward the god who slept in the mountain that watched from mother-Africa.

I stopped my Jeep and the boy ran on, into the brown haze that swallows shapes. He melted into Haiti's brown air, he became another mirage, another thing I might have imagined.

I rolled up the window and turned the air conditioner to high. I thought about Haiti's first President-a-Vie, Toussaint Louverture, and his wife, the world's oldest woman, Mama Louverture. I could still feel her fingers on my forehead, cool fingers on my eyes, her warm breath against my face.