A Return to Jacmel

Abstract

Doctor Herve Braget arrived in Jacmel one Saturday afternoon on a big red motorcycle with sparkling metal and making the noise of an assault tank. He took a turn around the little southwestern Haitian city before stopping at the Place d'Armes in front of the villa that his father had just turned into a clinic for him. Dr. Braget was the first Haitian from Jacmel to bring back from the University of Paris the title of hospital intern. His arrival at the handlebar of a Harley Davidson was seen as scandalous. People had been expecting to see him return home in his father's Buick. At the very least, they would have accepted seeing him come back in a taptap. They would have understood it if a young doctor wanted to mingle with the common people, chickens, and other animals using that means of transport. The young cyclist's costume was another reason for indignation: the son of Timoleon Braget, the honored coffee exporter, was wearing golf pants, a salmoncolored shirt with a polka-dot bow tie, black stockings, dark aviator's glasses, and leather gloves. In that attire, nobody could recognize the studious young man, the athlete of serious elegance that they had seen leave ten years earlier. In Jacmel that night, Mistress Scandal did not sleep on an empty stomach. On the benches of the Place d'Armes as in living rooms, she drank as much as she fed. No doctor who has interned in the hospitals of Paris can travel on a motorcycle in such an outlandish costume, with stockings matching his dark glasses. Herve Braget must have picked up such habits in the gutters of Barbes-Rochechouart. His apparel confirmed the rumors that had circulated from time to time about the student's