A friend of mine told me a great story about a Haitian consul. My friend, an anthropologist, was on his first trip to Haiti. He had been told in Japan that there was no visa necessary to enter the country for a short length of stay.
Now he was at the Miami airport, trying to catch a plane to the island, and there he was told that a visa was indeed required. Confused he called the Haitian consul in Miami, and the consul himself said,"I'll be there." The consul drove his own car and came immediately to the airport, took out his pen and wrote on a blank page of the anthropologist's passport in his own handwriting, admit this guy, signed such and such, Haitian consul, Miami, the date.
My friend thanked him profusely, then the consul said with a wink, "Buy me two bottles of rum (he said some specific name of the distillery) and bring it to me on your way back!"
The anthropologist told me this episode with his eternally amiable laughter, and said that he didn't fulfill the promise.
But the question remains. Was the consul really a mischievous fellow who wanted to take advantage of this opportunity for a rather trivial, selfish purpose? I kind of doubted that. Didn't the consul well know that the anthropologist would not bring him back two bottles of Haitian rum? Didn't he just say that from tenderness that the man would not feel too obliged about the great favor----much more personal than his office rightly demanded----and laugh it off as one of those jokes about the greediness of an official?
On my part, I like the consul a lot, one way or the other. If he really wanted that rum, fine, he's a jolly good fellow. And if he had in fact made that demand out of a concern for some reciprocity, knowing at the same time that his interlocutor would probably slight him for asking it, then the Haitian consul to my mind is an admirable person who can really release his own self.
