AIDS IS NOT AN INCURABLE DISEASE, announced the big hand-lettered billboard on the road twisting up from the waterfront slums into the hills above Port-au-Prince.

"Fever, bronchitis, intestinal pain, palsy . . . After 22 days you will be cured.'' Several of the r's and s's were printed backward. This sign was the work of an illiterate, but the title which Daniel C. Claude, "Healer of AIDS," had conferred upon himself was rendered in impeccable French. He was "SAUVEUR DU MONDE," the billboard announced.

An arrow pointed down a ravine to the Savior of the World's one-room hut. I clambered down, clinging to vines and roots. The first question I asked him was whether he was a doctor.

"I have been a doctor since the age of twelve,'' he answered. "At that time a loa mounted me, and I have been a doctor ever since." A loa is a voodoo god; when a loa possesses someone in Haiti, the god is said to "mount" the person being possessed in the same sense that a rider mounts a horse. I asked Dr. Claude how he had discovered the cure for AIDS.

"God came to me in a dream," he answered, "and showed me the cure."

I asked if I could see it.

The hut was small, about eight by ten feet. It had no toilet or running water. Besides many potions, stored in unwashed soft-drink bottles, it contained Dr. Claude's bed, upon which he sat— also (even though there was no electricity to run them) an empty refrigerator, a silent phonograph, and the blind, blank eye of a TV set, which stared at us like a voodoo Cyclops. He reached under the bed and pulled out a covered five-gallon white plastic bucket.

The Savior of the World removed the lid of the bucket and the pungent sweet stink of corruption filled the room. A mass of decomposing clotted vegetation floated in fecal-colored water.

I asked him if he had cured anyone of AIDS.

"Many," he replied. "I charge Haitians $8,000 and foreigners $10,000, more if they can afford it. If a life isn't worth a lot of money, it isn't worth saving, is it?"

The heat was a presence, an object, a force; still, I regretted I'd worn only sandals, not shoes and socks, because fleas were biting my ankles, and while I knew medical opinion derided the theory that insects can transmit AIDS, I knew something else. The virus was in that room, was what I knew. It was there as surely as the stench rising from that bucket.

"Show me the people you have saved," I said. "Then I can report your cure to the world."

"That's the problem," he answered. "I cure them, and because they are cured, I never see them again. There is a man in Les Cayes," he went on. Les Cayes is far off, in southwestern Haiti. "You could rent a jeep and take me there." He was staring into my sweating white face; I knew what he saw there. He saw money.

"Why bother with Les Cayes?" I said. "Produce three people you've cured of AIDS and I'll fly you, them, and your potion to New York, and we'll hold a press conference. You will make thousands and thousands of dollars."

Dr. Claude stared at me in disbelief. "Half a billion dollars," he said. "Half a billion is my price for saving the world." Then he replaced the lid on the bucket and shoved the bucket back under his bed.

Back at the Hotel Oloffson, I went swimming in the pool because my doctor had told me, before I left for Haiti, that chlorine was great for killing the virus. In Graham Greene's classic novel of Haiti, The Comedians, the Oloffson is much more than a locale; it is a central protagonist of his story. The swimming pool in which I now did laps was the same one where, in the novel, Dr. Philipot—secretary for social welfare until he incurs the wrath of the Tonton Macoutes—slits his wrists in order to cheat Papa Doc's torturers.

As I swam I tried to think: Haiti was all of a piece. Something in Dr. Claude's promise to save the world from AIDS connected with another piece of Haiti. What was it? The sun was setting as I tried to remember. Bats swooped low over the swimming pool.

Eighteen, nineteen, twenty, twenty-one: counting laps helped me make the connection. It was the Savior of the World's promise that "after 22 days you will be cured."

Twenty-two was Papa Doc Duvalier's lucky number. On September 22, 1957, Duvalier was elected president— plunging Haiti into the living death which still grips it thirty-one years later. On November 22, 1963, Papa Doc's arch-enemy, John F. Kennedy, was killed. In his mausoleum-white National Palace, Duvalier celebrated with a champagne d'honneur for the baka, the avenging demons, who had heeded his voodoo plea for the murder of the president of the United States.

"Morally, General Avril is the true heir to the Duvaliers."

Then, in 1971, Papa Doc himself died just in time for his three-hundred-pound, nineteen-year-old son, Jean-Claude Duvalier, to become Haiti's child dictator on April 22 of that year. Standing watch over Papa Doc's body, notes a history of Haiti titled Written in Blood, "was a guard of twenty-two soldiers and twenty-two miliciens."

Dr. Daniel C. Claude, from his shack in the ravine, proclaimed himself Savior of the World. By sovereign proclamation of the Haitian Constitution, Papa Doc, a real medical doctor, had been Supreme Chief of the Haitian Nation, Uncontestable Leader of the Revolution, Apostle of National Unity, Renovator of the Fatherland, Chief of the National Community, Worthy Heir of the Founders of the Haitian Nation, and President for Life.

And just as the Savior of the World presided over his plastic bucket of putrefaction, so Duvalier now presided in death, as he had in life, over a putrefying nation.

Dr. François Duvalier, President a Mort, I thought later as I stood on the immense white veranda where I slept every night. You may be gone. Baby Doc may be gone. But your other children are everywhere.

This veranda overlooked the city; from it, when there was a coup d'état, you could monitor the troop movements by watching the tracer bullets. But no one could see you, because the veranda was perched among the treetops; it was shrouded in leaves—countless silent Haitian leaves that make not the slightest movement as they wait for the rain.

That night, as most nights, while I stood there engrossed in those leaves, I heard what sounded like mortar fire. But it was only the sound of the mangoes, ripe and heavy as cannonballs, falling on corrugated-tin roofs.

"I have seen the zombies awake! There were tens of thousands of them laughing and dancing... I'll never forget the rage in those eyes."

There are Doberman-pinscher dictatorships; there are pit-bull dictatorships. Then there are mangy-cur dictatorships.

A mangy-cur dictatorship wastes no money on weapons systems. It uses machetes. It does not organize itself around dark totalitarian theorems. Theft is its sole ideology, so mostly it is content to gnaw on the nation the way a mangy cur gnaws on a decomposing carcass. Only when the screams of the tortured grow too vexatious, or some rival snatches at the pickings, does it rouse itself from its feast, bare its teeth, and attack.

Haiti has been making headlines for three years, yet two sentences suffice to sum up what all the massacres and coups d'état so far have meant: A historic window of opportunity for the people of Haiti opened on February 7, 1986, when fleshy, slow-witted Baby Doc Duvalier and his flashy, kleptomaniac wife, Michele Bennett Duvalier, fled the country. That window slammed shut on November 29, 1987, the day free elections were supposed to be held, when Haitian democracy was bludgeoned to death in its cradle.

Women, one carrying her baby in her arms, were hacked to pieces as they tried to vote. Churchgoers, forced to kneel and beg forgiveness for voting, were machine-gunned. At one polling place in Port-au-Prince, chopped-off hands were still clutching ballots. According to many knowledgeable Haitians, the slaughter was personally approved by both General Prosper Avril, now Haiti's newest president, and his immediate predecessor, General Henri Namphy. Other high-ranking Haitian military men, including the late Colonel Jean-Claude Paul, infamous for his drug-trafficking indictment by the U.S., directed the killings.

The military, having murdered democracy, then turned its corpse into a zombie—the exact definition of a zombie, according to eminent ethnologist Harold Courlander, being "a creature .. .disinterred from the grave, dispossessed of its soul, and made to work for a malefactor." On January 17, 1988, zombie elections were staged and zombie ballots counted. Through this charade, the military installed its handpicked candidate, an academic named Leslie Manigat. But even this arrangement proved too troublesome when Manigat began to try to act like a real president.

Last June, soldiers of his own presidential guard broke into Manigat's house during an official dinner, arrested most of his Cabinet, and hustled Manigat himself out of the country at gunpoint. General Namphy went on television, waved a submachine gun at the cameras, and proclaimed himself president. Military unity, however, proved even shorter-lived than zombie democracy. On September 17, Namphy himself was deposed by the same presidential guard that had ousted Manigat. In two months and twenty-seven days, Haiti had had three presidents, not one of them freely chosen by the Haitian people.

The official explanation for the latest coup was that the junior officers and NCOs were ''sickened by the way Haiti had been governed," but General Avril, the new president they installed, may be the most corrupt figure in the entire Haitian armed forces. ''Avril's profited from every racket in Haiti," one well-informed Haitian told me. "Morally, he is the true heir to the Duvaliers. He's stolen countless millions over the years."

Anywhere else, Avril's elevation to the presidency would have been a catastrophe. But, as is often the case, what would be disaster elsewhere actually marked an improvement for Haiti, for one simple reason. Avril is by far the cleverest occupant of the National Palace since Papa Doc Duvalier died nearly eighteen years ago, and quickly showed it by telling both the Haitian people and Haiti's potential foreign-aid donors, especially the United States, what they yearned to hear. Avril proclaimed that his goal was to establish ''an irreversible democracy in Haiti." He also removed more than a hundred corrupt military and civilian officials, including Colonel Paul, from office.

Simultaneously, though, the general refused to provide a timetable for free elections, and appointed a number of extraordinarily shady figures to replace the thugs he'd fired. No one in the military was arrested or tried for corruption, though five weeks after his dismissal Colonel Paul died under mysterious circumstances. The mangy curs might continue to turn upon each other, but with Manigat and Namphy in exile, and Paul dead, Avril had become Haiti's newest strongman.

Louis Déjoie, a former presidential candidate, posed the question which now dominates Haiti's immediate future: "Is it possible to clean house with a dirty broom?" Meanwhile, Haiti's peasant agriculture is crumbling, its tiny industrial sector dissolving. After years of repression, chaos, and betrayed hopes for the future, Haiti is subsisting on the margins of starvation and national disintegration.

What explains these calamities? Some cite Haiti's poverty and total lack of a democratic tradition. Others point out that the problem mns far deeper than rampaging men with guns. "It's not just the military," said Gérard Latortue, Manigat's foreign minister, who was first thrown into prison, then forced into exile. "The entire country is corrupt."

But in her new book, Haiti: The Duvaliers and Their Legacy, Namphy's Canadian sister-in-law, Elizabeth Abbott, suggests an additional cause. Shortly before Baby Doc and Michele fled Haiti, she writes, they ordered that two unbaptized male infants be brought to the National Palace.

After procuring the unbaptized infants, a houngan, or voodoo priest, named Ernst Simon conducted the ouanga à mort, the voodoo blood sacrifice, while the Duvaliers looked on. "Hours later, the incantations and prayers chanted, the sacrifice offered and accepted, houngan Simon tiredly bundled up for secret burial the dead infants, reeking and sticky with blood and rum and pocked with morsels of chopped herbs." These ritual murders enacted, the Duvaliers, according to Abbott, left Haiti "secure in the knowledge that they had doomed anyone trying to usurp the place that was rightfully theirs."

I'd known that Haiti's rulers trafficked in every scrap and fiber of the country that could make them money: not just drugs, but toxic waste, tainted blood, cadavers stolen from funeral parlors and sold to foreign medical schools. I'd thought no new revelation could astonish me, but after reading this passage, I realized I was wrong. So I contacted Elizabeth Abbott and asked her a question: How could any human being possibly commit—there seemed no other way to describe it—such a sin?

"That was why it was so important to get unbaptized babies," she replied. "The houngan who killed them explained to me that so long as they weren't baptized God wouldn't mind."

Her matter-of-factness, even more than what she described, conveyed the true nature of Haitian reality—a reality far darker and deeper than the coup d'état headlines and TV images of people being hacked to death can possibly convey. For Haiti is not simply one more of those tropical dictatorships where to rule is to steal, and headless bodies are found by the road.

Haiti contorts time; it convolutes space; it reshapes reason if you are lucky—and obliterates it if you are not. Haiti is to this hemisphere what black holes are to outer space. Venture there and you cross an event horizon. The loa nation possesses you.

I asked Dr. Claude how he discovered the cure for AIDS. "God came to me in a dream," he answered, "and showed me the cure."

I met many of Papa Doc's children at a beach party given by Colonel Acédius St. Louis, a member of the military's inner circle.

In Haiti, the military elite seldom socialize with outsiders, so people were impressed by my invitation. "It's a rare opportunity for a foreigner," a European diplomat said. "You'll see Haiti's rulers as they really are."

The main social event of the morning was a courtesy call made by a killer. A politician and friend of the host, this man, a week earlier, had been attending a voodoo festival at Saut d'Eau, the sacred waterfall in the central highlands, when he spotted someone he disliked. So he shot him dead, right then and there, in front of hundreds of people.

Colonel St. Louis's beach party was very casual. Everyone wore a bathing suit. Only the killer—in shiny black loafers, dark-gray slacks, and a gray-and-white long-sleeved shirt—was more formally attired. As he gravely shook everyone's hand, including my own, he had the air of a man on a mission. He would never be tried, let alone convicted, but as a Haitian doctor remarked, "he should not have done something like that in front of so many people. Now he must make the rounds, to ensure he stays in favor."

The afternoon was much more festive. We were finishing a late lunch of fried pork, curried goat, and spiced crab when, to smiles and waves from one and all, General Avril himself drove up. Long before becoming president, Avril was already one of the most powerful men in Haiti. A favored protégé of Papa Doc's, and later Haiti's unofficial minister of corruption, Avril had helped Baby Doc ship at least $120 million—estimates go as high as $800 million—in stolen money out of the country. He'd also helped Michele Duvalier smuggle her art collection to Europe. "General Avril," one of his admirers told me, "is the class act of our military elite."

A man of considerable refinement by Haitian military standards, Avril was living in a lavish, old-fashioned mansion on a mountain high above Port-auPrince. One night, a friend took me to see the house, which stands behind a high wall. It looked just like the gingerbread mansions downtown, most of which are falling apart. But Avril hadn't bought and restored one of those old houses. At far greater expense, he had constructed an entirely new "antique" mansion on this isolated site, where his personal guards could provide security. As we drove past the house, an unmarked jeep appeared. Lights off, it followed us.

"What would they have done," I asked when we were back on the main road, "if we'd stopped to look at the house?"

"It depends on whether, in the dark, they could see you were a white foreigner," my friend replied. "In that case, they might not have hurt us."

In another country, a notable like Prosper Avril would have arrived at the beach party in a limousine. But in Haiti all the highways, like all the arable soil, are washing down the mountains into the sea, and so big, high-axled, four-wheel-drive Japanese station wagons have become the cars of choice for the ruling elite. General Avril arrived in a convoy of three such vehicles, and so provided an example of how the politics of theft impoverishes even the richest and most powerful. The roads are not repaired because the money for repairing the roads is stolen. Therefore, even those who steal the money must rattle around in ungainly wagons that in other countries would be used to carry servants or freight.

Accompanied by one of his mistresses, a handsome, fair-complected woman who looked more Asian than mulatto, Avril also greeted everyone personally, but with a difference. The killer had been seeking acceptance. With a firm handshake and eye-to-eye contact, Avril conferred it. He will not pull out a gun and shoot you, I thought as General Avril stared into my eyes. These are the eyes of a man who knows how to wait.

After receiving Colonel St. Louis's invitation, I asked a knowledgeable Haitian for a capsule profile of my host. He provided a generic curriculum vitae of those who, every day in Haiti, decide who will live and who will die: "Incompetent, brutal, a thief. For him, the world beyond Haiti does not exist."

Yet it turned out the colonel and I had something in common. We both loved to snorkel.

"Come on," he said, after a ten A.M. rum and tonic, "I'll show you my coral reef." We stripped off our shirts and strode across the hot boulder beach to the water. The colonel was wearing tennis shoes, and I had on rubber sandals. But the underling who scurried after us was barefoot; his face tried to conceal the pain as, struggling to keep up, he stubbed his feet against the rocks.

The three of us strapped on masks, clamped snorkels in our mouths, and swam straight out into the ocean toward the distant shadow of the Île de la Gonâve. We were in about twenty feet of water when I noticed the underling couldn't snorkel; he could hardly swim. Every few yards he'd pop to the surface floundering and choking. "Turn back," I called to him. "You won't do your boss any good if you drown."

He gazed past me, looking for the colonel's permission. But the colonel was surging ahead like a half-submerged dolphin. The man seemed unable to decide which would be worse: to risk the colonel's displeasure or drown. Then, head above water and gasping, he paddled back toward shore.

The coral reef was like the deforested mountains on the coast road from Port-auPrince. This coral reef was dying, just as the trees were dead on the mountains. On the mountainsides of Haiti you'd see peasants struggling, on half an acre, to cultivate, with no fertilizers, plows, or hybrid seeds, enough maize or manioc to feed families of eight or ten. Here the fish were as scrawny as those peasants. The land was dead and the sea was dying. For the first time since he'd plunged into this absolutely transparent, sterile blue water, the colonel's head bobbed to the surface. He motioned me toward him, and pointed down.

I swam alongside just in time to see the heel of the colonel crush a sea urchin to death. Suddenly the fish were like the beggars in Port-au-Prince when they see a tourist. Countless thin little fish converged in a devouring panic, all on one spot. Outside, a sea urchin is tough and spiny. But crack it open and you see it's as soft and vulnerable as life inside. In seconds, there was nothing but dead, broken shell and hungry, milling fish.

The colonel crushed another sea urchin, then returned to shore. When I got back, I talked with the man who had almost drowned. He was hungry. There was a bowl of fruit on a table where the colonel's wife and others sat talking, but he was afraid to ask for some. So I went over, took some oranges, and gave them to him. As he ate, I asked him how he had become a supporter of Haiti's military regime.

"I was a journalist," he said, "and in Haiti, journalists don't make much money. One day Baby Doc called me to the palace. We talked about the articles I wrote, and at the end of the audience, he opened a drawer, took out $2,000 in cash, and gave it to me.

"From then on," he said, "whenever I was going to write something, I figured out what Baby Doc would want to read, and wrote it. Later I got to go to Europe and America, and before each trip I'd go to the palace. At first Baby Doc gave me cash. Later he'd take one of his cards and write, 'Pay $5,000,' or whatever I needed, and say, 'Take this to such and such a bank.' At the bank, they'd hand over the money.

"Things were terrible right after Baby Doc was overthrown," he went on. "I lost my job. I had no money, but since November 29," he said, referring to the Election Day massacres, "everything's been fine."

A civilian friend of the colonel's drove me back to Port-au-Prince. At the town of Cabaret there was a cloudburst. It seemed the whole country, not just the road, was washing away. Immense torrents surged down the mountains, covering the highway axle-deep in rushing, thick, clay-colored water. Wherever there was a pothole, the flood was much swifter and deeper, and drenched children in rags would besiege the car, asking for one gourde, twenty cents, to guide us through. 

There were no trees to provide shelter here, and for most Haitians an umbrella is—like fresh milk, medicine, or a condom—an unthinkable expense. So in this downpour, you saw mile after mile of people trudging toward their destinations, soaking wet.

Cabaret is aptly named. The country's whole degeneration paraded onstage here; but still more apt is the town's other name, Duvalierville. Nearly thirty years ago, Papa Doc chose this quagmire to be his Brasilia. Grandiose plans were drawn up, millions of dollars appropriated. Of course, the plans fell apart; of course, the money vanished.

Under any other dictatorship, a magnificent ruin or two would glower in the mud, immortalizing the dictator's megalomania. But this was Haiti. So it was not in concrete but in the entire generation of Haitians he corrupted that Papa Doc left his true monument. Under him, and countless protégés like Avril, commerce, administration, education, industry, medicine, agriculture—everything, not just government, became a ouanga à mort. On the entire journey back to Port-au-Prince I did not see a single pharmacy, clinic, hospital, or school.

Even after the floods subsided, I couldn't get the statistics of Haiti out of my head. Per capita income: $333 a year, ninety-one cents a day. Literacy: four out of five Haitians unable to read or write. Nearly five million peasants trying to scratch a living out of a desertifying mountain moonscape one-third the size of the state of Maine. A million and a half more people crammed into urban slums, where the unemployment rate was 80 percent. The highest infant-mortality rate and the second-lowest life-expectancy rate in the Western Hemisphere.

As we got closer to Port-au-Prince, the man driving the car noticed I was looking at the mountains. "I see what you see," he said. "Haiti is washing into the ocean, and do you know why? Haiti is dying because we do not worship the loas properly anymore. The young people care only about stirring up trouble, not propitiating the gods, so the loas are leaving us. " This man had lived in the United States; he spoke fluent English. With complete sincerity he concluded, "If we cannot stop the loas from going back to Africa, Haiti will have no hope."

That night I sat up talking with some friends. One was a painter, another a teacher, another a businessman. One was a musician; I never could figure out exactly what another one did.

Since the government provided nothing, the businessman had privately organized a rehydration program for infants dying of dysentery. I asked him what, realistically, was the most that could be hoped for for these children, if their lives were saved.

"That they should be so lucky as to live so long as to die of AIDS," he replied.

"When kids first came to me and begged me to teach them English," the teacher said, "I thought of how they'd become doctors and engineers and build up the country. I wanted them to have technical vocabularies. I'd teach them slowly. Now," she went on, "I teach fast. Ghetto American in five weeks. In case U.S. immigration police challenge them, I teach them to say, 'Fuck, man, you say in' I ain't American just 'cause I ain't white like you?' If they can get out of here," she said, "if they can just survive the boats, and get to someplace like Harlem or Miami, then there's hope."

We were sitting under an immense oil painting of Baron Samedi, the voodoo god of cemeteries. Jesus Christ was also in the painting, but over on the far lefthand side. Baron Samedi dominated, he possessed, this immense, dark canvas. He was beckoning Christ toward him. He was saying to Him, "Welcome to my world."

"It's a good thing I have a grate on my bedroom window," the painter was telling us, "because Baron Samedi keeps trying to get to me. He keeps pressing his face to the window. He keeps asking the same question."

"What's the question?" I asked.

" 'What do you want?' " he answered. "Baron Samedi keeps asking me what I want."

"You all believe in voodoo," I said. Then I crossed the room, and walked up the old circular staircase slowly. I'd forgotten my key, but it didn't matter. All I had to do was lean hard and the great, tall mahogany doors to my room in the Hotel Oloffson would spring open.

The longer I stayed, the clearer it became: Baron Samedi had gotten to practically everyone in Haiti. Not even Americans were immune, I realized one morning when I ran into a young anthropologist named Elizabeth McAlister who was returning to the United States that day. She was an intelligent woman with eyes as deep and tranquil as jungle pools, but this morning those eyes were wild and troubled.

"Every time I try to leave Haiti," she said, "I go to pieces. It's the voodoo gods trying to hold me here."

Nor did the loas seem to respect diplomatic immunity. The U.S. ambassador to Haiti, Brunson McKinley, was acting in a manner that would have seemed very strange anywhere else.

Even before arriving in Port-au-Prince, I'd telephoned a U.S. Information Service official named Jeffrey Lite, to request interviews with the ambassador and other embassy officials. When, after two weeks in Port-au-Prince, not a single embassy appointment had been scheduled, I telephoned Lite and asked what was going on.

"The ambassador will not speak to you," he said. "He will not speak to anyone."

I asked which embassy officials I would be seeing.

"None," he said. "No one will speak to you."

Curious, I asked if there was any reason for this. "Not that I can understand," Lite replied.

In fact I did get to see Ambassador McKinley. An acquaintance was going to a reception at the ambassador's residence, and he took me along.

It was a most unusual gathering—and only in part because not one of the guests seemed to have a kind word for the host. People said things, and did things, that simply would not have been said or done at a diplomatic function anywhere else. For example, one guest, a U.S. businessman, spent the entire evening ranting about Ambassador McKinley's shoes.

The formal invitation, written in French, had specified "Tenue de Ville." So the guests, in the heat of Port-au-Prince, had put on dark suits and ties before coming up to the ambassador's house. Their host, however, was attired in a gold-buttoned blue blazer, immaculate white trousers, white socks, and white shoes on which there was not a single scuff.

"Ambassador McKinley looks like the commodore of a yacht club who has lost his cap," said the businessman, evidently not caring who heard.

"So what?" I asked.

"Those white shoes," he explained venomously, "sum up this embassy's whole response to the Haitian catastrophe. Every action, every gesture has been maladroit."

A sense of obligation stirred in me. After all, we were drinking the ambassador's scotch. "This is Haiti," I said. "Could anything he did have made a difference?"

"Maybe democracy would have been destroyed whatever happened," another American who lived in Haiti broke in, "but thanks to this embassy's incompetence, we'll never know. We didn't have to trust the military," she said. "We didn't have to fool ourselves. In order to support democracy, we didn't have to give millions to the people who were plotting to destroy it."

"This is an embassy of cowards," said another American, as though this too were a normal conversational gambit. "One member of the Haitian electoral commission had to have his leg amputated because he was on the military's death list and this embassy wouldn't expedite a visa, and if he went to a local hospital he'd be killed. When he finally was able to get out of the country, diplomats from other embassies escorted him onto the plane." This woman, who ran a humanitarian-relief agency, gestured to the U.S. officials around her. "We pleaded for help," she said. "We explained this man would lose his leg if the embassy did not help, and these cowards would not lift a finger."

"You don't make a man in white shoes," the businessman reiterated, as though making an entirely new point, "ambassador to a country awash in blood."

Upon excusing myself from this group, I ran into Jean-Claude Bajeux, a leader of the democracy movement. He too stared balefully in the direction of the man in white shoes. "I assumed I received this invitation because Ambassador McKinley was being replaced," Bajeux said. "Unfortunately that seems not to be true."

I asked him to characterize U.S. policy.

Bajeux gazed from the ambassador's terrace down into the formal garden. There was a swimming pool there. "Pas sérieux," he said. "These are not serious people. They do not understand Haiti. They do not understand themselves. They talk to no one and listen to no one except people with swimming pools."

In the garden, a Haitian official and a U.S. diplomat sat talking. He glistened with gold. She was dressed for success. They smiled at each other while they conversed in perfect diplomatic French. It was the most extraordinary exchange between a representative of the United States and the representative of a foreign government I had ever heard.

"Your aid cutoff achieves nothing politically," the Haitian said, smiling. "You are only taking food out of the mouths of Haitian children."

"Oh, you know nothing we give ever reaches children," the American smiled. "You know, because you steal it all."

He beamed back: "I hear you are leaving. When?"

"Maybe tonight." She beamed.

"Excellent," he said. "Feel free."

"I do feel free," she said, "now that I'm leaving."

"Where are you going?" He smiled.

"To the United States." She smiled.

"Good," he said. "You belong there."

The reception broke up early. Many who were invited had not come; others made only the briefest appearance. Now, as the sun disappeared, the last few guests were leaving too.

For an instant Ambassador McKinley interrupted his social duties and stood by himself on the terrace, looking out at the view. The spectacle was amazing. From here, in the last of the sunset, with white-coated waiters passing silver salvers in that formal garden, Haiti did not look like Haiti. It looked like the French Riviera.

The businessman was still discoursing on his chosen subject. "His name may be Brunson," he said as I left, "but he'll always be 'White Shoes' McKinley to me."

"Ambassador McKinley has systematically refused to cooperate with U.S. citizens concerned about the situation in Haiti, including members of Congress," a Washington-based official later told me. "He seems particularly contemptuous of members of the Congressional Black Caucus. On one occasion, when we were urging the embassy to protest the political murders in Haiti, we pointed out that Walter Fauntroy of Washington, D.C., and other members of the caucus strongly supported such a stand. The reply was: 'Well, they certainly aren't our favorite congressmen.' "

"When we investigated political murder in Haiti," added Kenneth Roth, deputy director of Human Rights Watch, one of the most respected human-rights organizations in the U.S., "Ambassador McKinley refused all cooperation."

"When he finally did consent to see us briefly," added Marina Kaufman, an Americas Watch board member, "we asked him why he did not protest human-rights abuses. Ambassador McKinley replied, 'We have no proof of such violations.' "

"When we pointed out that Haitian human-rights organizations could provide proof," Roth went on, "Ambassador McKinley replied that he found protesting such things as political murder 'boring.' "

In Port-au-Prince, people provided other examples of unprecedented behavior.

"Just days before the massacres," an American who has since left Haiti told me, "I attended a meeting with the ambassador. Independent radio stations were being attacked, a presidental candidate had been murdered in broad daylight, but McKinley and his staff weren't concerned in the slightest. 'You've probably heard shooting in the night,' we were told, 'but it's nothing to worry about. It's only Haitian security guards shooting into the air, to scare away thieves.' "

"Less than a week before the election," said Gérard Gourgue, the educator and politician who many believe would have been elected president of Haiti had a free vote been allowed, "Ambassador McKinley told me he was '90 percent certain' the elections would not be disrupted."

"I was curious as to why Ambassador McKinley was so confident," another influential Haitian told me, "so I asked him how he could be so sure. 'The highest echelons of the military,' McKinley told me, 'have given their word that they will take care of things.' He said this quite arrogantly, as though I were the fool."

Since the ambassador would not answer any questions, I contacted the U.S.I.S. official again, and put some questions to him.

Did the U.S. Embassy have any foreknowledge of the latest coup?

"None whatsoever," he replied. "We were caught entirely unawares."

What had U.S. intelligence been doing?

"I don't know," he replied.

What was the reaction inside the embassy to finding itself impotent to understand, let alone influence, events in Haiti again and again and again?

"Anger, betrayal, depression, despair, anguish, fatigue, shock, disappointment," Jeffrey Lite replied. "That is the reaction."

Like many other U.S. officials, Lite would be leaving Haiti soon. Indeed, according to another American source, "a total collapse of morale" had occurred inside the embassy. Nearly a dozen key officials were being pulled out; new recruits were being flown in.

"Haiti has chewed up all those Americans," this person observed. "Now it is spitting them out, one by one."

Government and politics are literally voodoo to most Haitians, for the people are not ruled in their own Creole language. The politicians speak, the military decrees are proclaimed, and even the news is broadcast in a foreign language, French, which not one Haitian in twenty can understand. So when the latest Savior of the Nation appears on TV orating in French, the average Haitian hears him ranting mystical incantations in a mumbo-jumbo language which, while it may contain words he knows, conveys a meaning he can never understand.

Even more completely, economics is voodoo. Indeed, Dr. Daniel C. Claude might have been Haiti's economic czar, I realized one day in a stationery shop in Port-au-Prince, when a man walked in carrying a white plastic bucket. It might have been the Savior of the World's plastic bucket, though all it contained were some dying lobsters.

"How much for the lobsters?'' I asked.

"Seventy-five dollars,'' he replied. All day he'd been carrying that bucket of lobsters around. They'd be dead soon, but those lobsters were to him what the Haitians themselves were to their rulers. Better to let the lobsters die if he couldn't make a killing.

Haiti was more than a nation possessed by baka with Uzi submachine guns. The voodoo demons were masters of each and every aspect of life, and this presented certain journalistic difficulties. How, for example, to question the chief of state, when the real chief of state, Papa Doc Duvalier, was not answering questions anymore? And how to discuss politics, when everywhere you tried to discuss politics—even at Bato Fou, the fashionable nightclub in Pétionville—people talked about zombies?

Pétionville, in the hills above Port-au-Prince, is the one town in Haiti that might, just conceivably, be located in the rest of the world. In Pétionville there are espresso bars and shops selling compact discs. The supermarkets sell new Beaujolais, old copies of Paris Match, and, in this country where every fruit could flourish in abundance, imported grapes and frozen TV dinners. Even Pétionville has its beggars, but they don't ask for a gourde, they ask for ten dollars.

At the Bato Fou nightclub the cover charge, all drinks and food extra, was seven dollars a person, a week's income for the average Haitian, and the place was packed with men wearing Reebok jogging shoes, and women in hairdos from which every natural curl had been expunged, because the famous Haitian chanteuse Toto Bissainthe was back from Paris. A Haitian filmmaker and I were there to hear her sing.

A waiter brought us aperitifs and a little bowl of salted nuts. The salt on the nuts was what turned my companion's mind to zombies. "The diet of zombies," he told me, "is most important. No salt. No fish. No meat. The zombie must be fed only bananas, yams, and legumes, or else the zombie will regain his memory. He will awake, comprehend his enslavement, and so forsake death."

"What's wrong with forsaking death?" I asked.

"Oh, that would be fine for the zombie," he said, "but think of the master. The master would lose his mastery if the zombies awoke."

A few days later I was talking about zombies, too, as the monstrous stone face of the La Ferrière fortress stared down on me. A friend and I were on a trip to northern Haiti; we were climbing the last hundred yards up the mountain to King Christophe's Citadelle, the most stupendous work of man Haiti has ever produced.

The Citadelle sits on the summit of a peak 2,600 feet high. Built entirely by forced labor, it took most of Christophe's reign, which lasted from 1811 to 1820, to construct. The paved road had ended half a mile below this precipice, so we'd come the rest of the way up on stunted horses. I'd climbed the last part on foot because I wanted to examine this inhuman structure from a human perspective.

That proved impossible. The Citadelle's stone-block turrets are as tall as fourteen-story buildings; its gun galleries, paved with stone blocks, are as long as football fields. I tried to budge one of the bronze cannon that lay scattered everywhere. I could not. I was able, just barely, to lift one of the thousands of cannonballs that lay resting in the same pyramids where they had been stacked 170 years ago. As I dropped it, I tried to imagine what it would be like to carry only that one cannonball up this mountain. I could not.

"According to that filmmaker in Pétionville," I was saying, "every nation has a myth that defines its national condition. For instance, most Americans never have lived and never will live in log cabins, but the myth of the frontier expresses what we are as a nation.

"He told me the zombie personifies the Haitian condition," I went on. "He said it is through belief in zombies that the Haitian mythopoeically expresses the truth he is not allowed to express politically, which is that Haiti is a nation in the midst of living death. What do you suppose would happen," I asked, "if the zombies awoke?"

My friend swung around violently. "I have seen the zombies awake! There were tens of thousands of them laughing and dancing. But even when they were laughing, you could see the rage in their eyes. It was February 7, 1986," he said, "the morning after Baby Doc fled, and I'll never forget the rage in those eyes. Everyone celebrated for a few hours," he said. "Then the dechoukaj began."

Dechoukaj, like so many words that describe Haiti, is untranslatable. In Creole, it means "uprooting" or "to pull up by the roots," but that does not begin to hint at its fury.

"I watched them stone a Tonton Macoute to death," he said. "The first volley of stones knocked him flat on his back, but he kept trying to sit up as the stones kept hitting his head. They tore open the crypts in the cemetery beside the soccer stadium. The people tearing the corpses out of their graves were illiterate; at most they could make out a few letters of the alphabet. So if they were looking for someone named 'Montblanc' who, before he died, had tortured them, and they found a tombstone with the name 'Montbren' on it, they'd tear that corpse out of its grave and desecrate it.

"If only they'd been able to find Papa Doc's corpse—just imagine what might have happened! But they say when the Americans sent the transport plane to fly Baby Doc and Michèle off to France they took Papa Doc's corpse with them, along with Michele's chinchilla coats."

In other countries you might not need a history lesson. But how else to understand a nation zombified by history except by its history? The truth is, Haiti wasn't just written in blood. It was conceived in blood; it was baptized in blood at a Black Mass.

On an August night in 1791, a slave insurrectionary and houngan named Boukman raised his knife in the firelight and, with the ritual assistance of the mambo, the voodoo priestess, he slit the throat of a pig. The gathered slaves knelt in reverence as Boukman pronounced the invocation that marked the birth of a nation. The god of the blancs, the white god, "commandeth crimes," he told them, but the god of the noirs, the black god, "seeth what the whites have done.

"The Good Lord hath ordained vengeance," Boukman proclaimed. Then all raised their gourd chalices and, vowing to exterminate every blanc on the island, drank the pig's blood.

The French owners of these slaves fought back with every atrocity, because Haiti, today the Western Hemisphere's poorest nation, was then the richest colony on earth. Its exports, mosdy of sugar and coffee, exceeded in value those of the thirteen American colonies combined. These riches derived from mass murder, for, as one historian notes, "French planters preferred to work their slaves to death and buy new ones rather than allow them to survive and reproduce themselves naturally."

As a result of this practice, Boukman and his followers were new arrivals uprooted from Africa, not a people acclimated to the New World. The rage in those eyes was not a rage to "liberate" Haiti as George Washington or Simon Bolivar would have understood it. This was a war to overthrow the blanc god, and place the voodoo gods in power.

The French crushed Boukman. They betrayed and imprisoned Haiti's next great revolutionary leader, Toussaint L'Ouverture. But they could not kill Ogun, voodoo god of war. No one could stop Ogun from mounting countless Haitians, who burned the blancs' plantations and pillaged their cities.

"Damn sugar! Damn coffee! Damn colonies!" shouted Napoleon when news reached Paris of the final catastrophe. Out of a total of 55,131 French men and officers, 50,270 were dead. Napoleon lost more troops in Haiti than he would at Waterloo. So ended the only successful slave revolt in history, but this war of noir against blanc was not exclusively a black-and-white affair. French concupiscence had injected a second human factor into the catastrophe, in addition to black rage. It took the form of a tiny mulâtre elite— mixed-race people whose descendants still largely dominate Haitian economic and political life.

King Christophe's obsessive fear—the obsession which built the Citadelle—was that blanc armies would return and reimpose slavery. To defend Haiti from slavery, this remarkable black leader enslaved Haiti. Before, the noirs had toiled in cane fields under the white man's whip. Now black men on horseback whipped the toiling gangs who, on their naked backs, carried those three-ton cannon up the mountain.

It was an epic of futility. Europe had forgotten Haiti. The blanc armies never returned. Defeat, as always in Haiti, came from within. In October 1820, paralyzed by a stroke, and with rebel troops advancing, Christophe shot himself through the heart with a silver bullet. This, not the defeat of the French, was the true moment of Haiti's liberation—the moment when the voodoo pantheon triumphed. For Christophe had constructed schools, roads, and irrigation works as well as fortresses and palaces. This tyrant had understood what Haiti's later rulers, up to the present, have never grasped. True liberty can come from only two sources: education of the people and the production of wealth. But that was not how other Haitians defined it.

Within hours of Christophe's death the Citadelle was abandoned. His schools, plantations, and foundries were abandoned too. Thereafter, Haiti's mulatre elite, generation after generation, would steal whatever there was to steal—then squander what was stolen on white man's baubles: tinsel regalia, chinchilla coats.

The noir definition of freedom would prove equally tragic, because for them it was not just the freedom to escape the slave ship and the whip. It was the freedom to escape—and here was the tragedy—to an Africa which had never existed in Africa, into a voodoo dreamland which was only a hallucinatory metaphor for what history had stolen from these people. Namely, any true understanding of what or who or where they were.

Because the white man's technology was slavery, the white man's plow was thrown away. Because the white man's export crops were slavery, freedom meant abandoning his plantations. Above all, freedom meant escape from the lowlands where the blancs had worked them to death into those mountains which, back then, seemed so green, so forested, and so immense as to be infinite—those same Haitian mountains that today prove even the New World is capable of infinite degradation.

Dèyè morne ginyin morne.

Beyond the mountains, more mountains. Of all the proverbs in Creole, a language as rich in proverbs as voodoo is in gods, this is the most revealing because it reveals the belief, totally false, running through the entire Haitian value system, that—whether with a coup d'état or a ouanga à mort—actions can always be divorced from their consequences. If one mountain is deforested, there will always be another mountain to deforest. Once this money is stolen, there will be more money to steal.

This double dechoukaj produced, and continues to produce, a truly astounding degeneration. In 1789, as one history book puts it, Haiti "ran its mills and ground its grains by water power. In 1971—an anthropological regression measurable in centuries—the water wheel and flume were forgotten, and the Biblical ox and beam prevailed." By the time Papa Doc died in 1971, Haiti's total exports were less than they had been in 1788, 183 years earlier.

Megalomania has never ceased to flourish in this dying landscape. According to historians Robert and Nancy Heinl, there were no fewer than "102 civil wars, revolutions, insurrections, revolts, coups, and attentats" between 1843 and 1915 alone.

In 1915 a chief of state named Vilbrun Guillaume Sam was removed from office in a manner notable even for Haiti. Angry mobs vivisected President Sam. "When a man disentangled himself from the crowd and rushed howling by me, with a severed hand from which the blood was dripping, the thumb of which he had stuck in his mouth," an American eyewitness reported, "I knew that the assassination of the president was accomplished."

The United States reacted to these outrages in the same way some today urge it to react—it invaded Haiti. The Marines occupied the country until 1934. For nearly twenty years, U.S. officials organized Haiti's finances, and improved communications and public health. For nearly two decades the Marines built roads. But the Americans, like the French before them, were utterly defeated, as a single example will show: when the Marines pulled out in 1934, they left Haiti with more than 1,200 miles of all-weather roads. Today fewer than two hundred miles remain.

Those vanished roads, however, only manifest a far deeper defeat. To visit any other country the United States has occupied is to visit a country profoundly shaped, whether for good or ill, both by America's corruptions and by its ideals. But on the heart, mind, and soul of Haiti, the U.S. occupation left not a trace, not a single trace.

Driving over rain-slashed mountains, I'd seen peasants struggling to keep their com crops from washing away. In the lowlands, I'd seen rice paddies abandoned because one of the military's most lucrative rackets was smuggling foreign rice into Haiti and then selling it at below the cost of local production. Then, at Gonai'ves, the city where the demonstrations that overthrew Baby Doc began, I saw thousands of people inhabiting a mountain range of garbage.

The garbage at Gonaïves wasn't only Haitian garbage. Some was American garbage. For the right amount of money, the right person in the military had permitted a ship to sail into Gonaïves harbor and dump tons of U.S. ash on Haiti's secondlargest city.

I'd thought Haiti could not get any worse, because, after Gonaïves, I'd thought nothing could be worse short of famine or war. Then I decided to attend the festival at Saut d'Eau, the sacred waterfall. It was a week before I would shake hands with the killer at the beach. The man he killed was not dead yet, though he would be soon. As the jeep clawed its way up the mountain precipices, I realized: You have not begun to imagine the full extent of the dechoukaj yet.

Even in the poorest places I'd been to in Haiti, the graveyards were always attractive. Now the jeep passed a graveyard so sad and scrawny it might have been a living slum, but it wasn't this dying necropolis that made me stare speechless at what I saw.

The jeep downshifted round a curve. People beside road, read the lurching notes in my notebook. How to describe people???

"Talk to me," the man driving said. "Describe it all to me. I can't look around too much. I've got to keep the jeep on the road. "

"On each side of the road," I said, "as far as I can see, there are men and women lining the road. They are wearing rags. There are hundreds, thousands, of them. They are shouting and waving their arms at us. Their faces are contorted as they shout at us."

I turned to him. I said, "What are they shouting at us?"

Keeping his right hand on the wheel, he used his left hand to lower the window on his side a few inches.

"Money," he said. "They're shouting at us to throw them money."

For most of thirty miles, standing at intervals of from five to fifteen feet, people lined the road, waving their arms at us, shouting at us to throw them money. And more astonishing than the shouting and the waving and the desperation was the way these people failed to coalesce. Each stood apart on his own little section of the road. There was something about these people that failed to connect.

When we reached the base of the waterfall, thousands of people were milling around in viscous yellow mud. Thousands more, having pulled off most of their clothes, were climbing up the face of the waterfall.

This was supposed to be the most joyous festival in Haiti, but what impressed me most was that so few people smiled or laughed as they struggled up through the thundering cold mountain water.

"Did you hear a shot?" my friend asked as we headed back. "Some people said they heard shots. They said someone high-ranking was involved." But I hadn't heard anything except the thundering water.

We drove back to Port-au-Prince in the dead of night, and in this darkness there was one sole point of light, one sole locus of sound. The sound was the electric generator which produced the light. Both were located in a squat cinder-block villa painted, inside and out, entirely in hospital green. As we passed this house I looked inside. Bare light bulbs hung from loose electrical fixtures. The ugliness intrigued me.

"Whose house is that?" I asked a man by the road.

"That belongs to a very important colonel," he answered. "His name is Colonel Jean-Claude Paul."

Colonel Paul's wife was standing in front of the house. She was lighting a long row of voodoo votive candles.

"The house seems very new," I said to the man.

"They bought the land a year ago," he told me. "They promised to pay $8,000, but then no money was paid, so some villagers went to talk to that lady." He nodded in the direction of the woman lighting the candles. "They explained they had no money; they needed money. She said, 'Very well. Go into that room. Take some money, but never come here again.'

"In the room," he went on, "was a table piled high with American dollars. They took what they could, but they were very scared."

Shortly before Colonel Paul's untimely—if not lamented—death, I decided to pay a visit to his Port-au-Prince headquarters. Outside the yellow-and-maroon Casernes Dessalines, I took out my press pass and held it up.

In most countries a press pass counts for nothing, but Haiti is not most countries. It is a country where even the men with submachine guns can't read, so I was now going to use this press pass like a voodoo talisman, to propitiate the powers of life and death.

Smiling, speaking only English lest they understand what I was saying, I walked up to the gate of the Casernes Dessalines and said, "I'm here to find out all I can about Colonel Paul."

At the mention of Colonel Paul's name, a soldier with an Uzi opened the gate. I was walking down a broad alleyway between two buildings, and the important thing now to decide was whether to turn right or left. I turned right and, sure enough, there was the inner sanctum, with three guards at the door. "I am trying to find the office of Colonel Paul," I said. They saluted.

According to the U.S. Drug Enforcement Administration, Colonel Paul was Mr. Essential, the Haitian linchpin connecting the Colombian cocaine wholesalers with the jobbers who turned the big brown shipments into the little white packages the retailers in New York and Miami would sell for billions.

"Colonel Paul's main operation," a South American diplomat told me, "is at a ranch up by the Dominican border. It works like this: The big planes fly up from Colombia, unload there, and fly back. The stuff's then put in the little planes, and goes on its way. The fee is $30,000 a cargo. Of course, the whole operation is run out of the Casernes Dessalines."

Inside the Casernes Dessalines, at one in the afternoon, soldiers were aimlessly banging on drums and tooting on trumpets. They were running girls in there— tall, beautiful girls, with teased hair, wearing high heels, strands of costume pearls, and flimsy fake-silk dresses. The girls were lining up for the soldiers for the same reason the businessmen were lining up for any lieutenant or major they could bribe. If you made a deal with one of Colonel Paul's men, people would throw you money.

Inside Colonel Paul's office, incense was burning all around the darkened room. Votive candles flickered beneath a statue of the Virgin, which stood next to an unopened bottle of champagne. On the neighboring table sat vases filled with red roses and white dahlias; on each vase was pasted a picture of the Virgin. On Colonel Paul's desk, next to his submachine gun, stood another statue of the Virgin.

There were crucifixes and more pictures of the Virgin, and more vases, these filled with plastic flowers. From high above the colonel's desk, a picture of the martyred Christ looked down on this scene. His brow pierced by thorns, He gazed down at the submachine gun, through the smoke the incense cast, His eyes filled with anguish.

My visit ended after an officer stopped me and asked what I was doing. I knew it was over because, as he examined my press pass, I could tell this man could read. He was carefully noting my name and nationality. Under "Adresse en Haiti," it showed where I was staying, and he was writing that down too.

"Why is Colonel Paul not in his office?" I asked.

"He has had to go to his ranch," the officer replied.

"Can I see him tomorrow?"

He glanced at the address again. "He will know where to find you."

As I left, some soldiers were drilling in the courtyard. They couldn't keep their rifles in sync, and every time they tried to pivot, they couldn't stay in step, and this called to mind the most astonishing of Haiti's statistics: this nation of 6.3 million people was possessed by an army that numbered seven thousand men. Of the 7,000, at most 4,500 actually carried guns that could fire.

Colonel Paul never found me. Instead, Baron Samedi found Colonel Paul. The official story was that the forty-nine-year-old colonel had died of a heart attack. His family said poison, and the pumpkin soup he'd been eating was packed off to Miami to be tested. At the American Embassy, there was jubilation, for a change. But when I heard the news, it seemed to me that in death, even more than in life, Colonel Paul summed up the continuing danse macabre of the Haitian condition. All the money he had stolen, all those votive candles his wife had lighted on the road from Saut d'Eau, all those totems of salvation in his office had not saved Paul from leading a typical Haitian life. I remembered Graham Greene's epitaph for the corpse in the swimming pool at the Hotel Oloffson: "Violent deaths are natural deaths here."

At first, all I'd wanted was to get out of Haiti. Now I could not imagine leaving, because each day I saw things that once would have been unimaginable to me.

Back when I'd gone to the colonel's beach party, for example, I'd assumed Haitians never carried umbrellas because they could not afford umbrellas. But then I started to notice: even people who could afford watches did not carry umbrellas. Wearing their watches, they walked in their drenched clothes through the rain just as though the sun were shining. And so I came to understand that in this country full of things, like loas and baka, which I could not see, even the things I could see did not necessarily exist. Certainly to these Haitians, the downpour I was watching did not.

It was the same way with life and death. One night before the September coup—and General Namphy's hasty departure for the Dominican Republic—I returned very late to the Hotel Oloffson to find a shadowy figure waiting for me in the garden. "Namphy is dead," he announced.

Namphy was not dead, but that fact hardly seemed to matter. In Haiti, even the living might not be alive, and the corollary to this was that the dead were not necessarily dead. Had not Papa Doc, just as he was about to be interred, escaped his coffin and, in a swirling cloud of dust, like the baka he was, flown back to the National Palace to continue ruling in the person of his President for Life son?

One very feared politician named Clément Barbot had been famous, before his enemies set fire to a sugarcane field and shot him as he fled the flames, for being able to change himself into a black dog whenever he needed to escape his pursuers. He was killed in that cane field twenty-five years ago, but even now when some people see a black dog, they know it's not really a black dog. They know it's Clément Barbot.

Other Haitians know better, such as the man driving the taxi the day I passed the National Palace and saw a truly extraordinary sight. There was a black dog in front of the palace. As we drove past, it was walking in such a way that it appeared the dog had come down those great white steps straight out of the presidential office.

"Was that Barbot?" I asked.

"Of course not," he answered. "It had a white paw." Then this man asked me a question: "Will you return to Haiti for the next elections?"

"When will they be?" I asked, thinking he had political information I did not.

"In thirty years," he answered, and I realized: just as Haitians hacked into pieces not only their living enemies but also those who were dead because, for them, no essential distinction between life and death existed, so for this man what had happened two hundred years ago and what would happen decades from now were not events separated by an abyss of time. Namphy might be dead, but Boukman still lived, just as the twenty-first century was simultaneous with that white-pawed dog we'd just seen.

Everything was of a piece in Haiti, and the principal reason I now could not imagine leaving was that it was so fascinating to see the pieces connect. One day, at the Lalue supermarket on John Brown Avenue, I had to borrow paper and pen from a stranger, lest I fail to note the connection between the madwoman and the red plastic dog dishes.

This woman formerly had sold avocados in the parking lot of the Lalue supermarket, making one dollar a day. She had gone mad, her fellow vendors explained, because her sister in the countryside had sent her her five-year-old son, saying there was no way she, the child's mother, could feed him. And so the woman who sold avocados had calculated: she would need $1.50 a day to feed both herself and the boy. And—this was the calculation that drove her mad—she calculated there was no way, no matter how hard she tried, to get that extra fifty cents.

So she now sat there all day, not speaking, with a piece of cardboard held over her head. The red plastic dog dishes were just inside the door of the supermarket. And the connection between them and the woman driven mad by the lack of fifty cents was that those dog dishes were "on sale" that week for two dollars each.

So many previously invisible things had become visible, and so many things once visible to me had disappeared. Insensibly the voodoo nation had possessed me, and the curious thing is that I had no inkling of this whatsoever, even when an O.A.S. official from Washington named Christina Cerna asked me if I liked Haiti.

"Like Haiti!" I exclaimed. "I will not even answer a question containing such a ridiculous verb." How could anyone, even a fool like her, use such a namby-pamby word to describe the kind of emotions Haiti aroused? I was appalled at her shallow presumptuousness, and told her so.

After she left, a friend said, "You were railing at that woman."

Even when I picked up the telephone and dialed the airline office, I still had no inkling. For one thing, I could not imagine really leaving. After all, this was Haiti: The airline number would not connect, or if it did connect, the line would be busy. Or no one would answer. And even if the airline office did answer, the flight to New York would be fully booked. Or else the flight would have been canceled, so there was nothing to fear.

And, indeed, when the reservation clerk answered, and confirmed, first in French, then in English, not just the airline reservation but the reality that soon I would no longer be in Haiti, fear was not what I felt.

I felt terror, absolute terror, along with the dread of losing something irreplaceable. Baron Samedi had gotten to me too.

The day before leaving, I invited a foreign development official I disliked to lunch. Others might see Haiti as a human tragedy, or as the triumph of the baka, but for this man Haiti was numbers, digits, ciphers. That was why I disliked him, also why I needed him—as an antidote to Baron Samedi.

"Fifty percent," he said as the waiter served us lunch on the veranda. "That's the key educational-political correlative. Until at least 50 percent of the people are literate, you cannot expect effective mass organization. And do you know something? Probably even the most honest government could not increase the literacy rate to 50 percent in less than a generation. After Baby Doc was overthrown, the Catholic church launched a nationwide literacy drive. The Americans gave them lots of money. The whole thing collapsed in a matter of months."

In economics, it seemed, the governing correlative was the ratio of one to one. "You invest a dollar here," he said, "and you get back sixty cents. Until Haiti has an economy where you can at least get back what you invest, people will go on stealing—not because they're corrupt or stupid, but because in a society that destroys rather than creates wealth, theft is, microeconomically speaking, the only viable strategy."

"So there's no hope?" I said.

"Hope?" he said, as though it were a word in a foreign language he had not heard spoken in many years. "In the Third World, it is possible to speak of hope. But Haiti is not the Third World. It is a Fourth World, where the possibilities you find in even the poorest countries do not exist."

As I watched this man consume a lunch which cost approximately what an average Haitian earned in two months, I was astonished. This last full day in Haiti, like all the others, contained its revelation: even he seemed capable of human emotion.

"No," he said as the waiter cleared away his Écrevisses Royales and poured him a final glass of wine, "I see no basis for hope, barring some miracle, and Haiti is not a country where miracles seem to occur."

Richard Morse, proprietor of the Hotel Oloffson, drove me to the airport. For one month this stranger had shown me kindness, and given me help with a graceful stoicism it was beyond my capacity to repay. Yet as we drove through the streets of Port-au-Prince for the last time together, I did not speak to him. Each skinny street vendor waving a bottle of whiskey, and every spindly woman balancing a load on her head, was being wrenched from me.

I could not find words to thank him, because I could not find any words until we passed the Lalue supermarket. The madwoman was still crouched there, holding that piece of cardboard over her head.

I waved at her out the car window, using both arms. "Good-bye!" I called out. "Good-bye." I now started to say thank you to Richard Morse, but my voice broke, so he spoke.

"Everyone who lets Haiti touch them feels that way," he said.

I always thought this story would end at that moment, with the madwoman holding that piece of cardboard over her head as though a piece of cardboard could deflect every pathology of history. But time lends meaning just as distance brings things closer, so later it seemed this story actually ended far away from the madwoman—up on the American ambassador's terrace.

In this ending the terrace faces west, as it actually does. Beyond the swimming pool the garden ends, and the mountain drops away to reveal a sumptuous vista: an astonishing red sunset over the Gulf of La Gonâve, just as there had been the night of the diplomatic reception.

The reception is almost over, and for an instant the American ambassador interrupts his social duties. He stands by himself on the terrace; he looks out at that view. Though night is now falling, it is a scene full of color: the very last red sliver of the setting sun is redder than the red in the American flag; the ambassador himself is dressed all in white and blue.

No doubt, after the last guests left that evening, Ambassador McKinley went inside. But in this ending he stands there permanently. He peers permanently across the gathering darkness to that last little spot of remaining light on the distant horizon. And as he stares at that light, he is no longer a figure of derision. Like the madwoman, he is profound and powerful, because Ambassador McKinley personifies a profound and powerful truth.

For hundreds of years the money thrown on Haiti has been like the rain, washing away the very possibilities it is supposed to nurture. For centuries Haitians have been defeating foreigners, all foreigners. It is one of the many ways they defeat themselves. The truth which Ambassador McKinley embodies, as he stands there in his commodore's outfit, is that everyone who comes to Haiti, for whatever reason, is and always has been a sailor lost on a darkening shore.

The ambassador never goes inside his residence, because the sun never quite sets, and that is why this cannot be the true ending—it leaves even a little bit of light.

To see the real ending you would have to fly, like the winged baka, from the ambassador's terrace out to where that last red sliver of sun is disappearing into the ocean, and then look back.

Though I am not a baka, I flew and I looked back. As the plane soared away, I looked down on Haiti and there, "barring some miracle," was the ending: total darkness.

There are no more mountains beyond the mountains, nor any hope beyond the despair, nor any possibilities beyond the devastation, except escape. I knew this because when I asked the development official how much it would cost to bring Haiti's dead agricultural land back to life, even he had been unable to quantify the cost. "Inestimable billions," he replied. "It would be cheaper to transport all six million Haitians to homesteads in Africa than do that."

The other airline passengers seemed not unhappy with this ending. They laughed and talked as the crowded plane left Haiti behind, and I knew the reason for this too.

"Of course no one in Haiti will go to Africa," the official had added. "As Haiti dies they will go to America."

After being so very far away for so long, I soon would encounter a reality for which Haiti left me unprepared. It takes just three hours and eleven minutes to get from Port-au-Prince to New York.