Their speaking startled Yves out of his sleep. I asked the sanba-voiced man, “Where is your group coming from?”
He and his woman, Odette, were coming from a big sugar mill on the other side of the island, a big mill owned by North Americans, Yankis.
“We hear it’s safe in the big mills,” I said. “Why didn’t you stay there?”
“Let them say what they will,” Odette answered, cutting her eyes at me as though to reproach my ignorance. She turned in a circle and breathed in a passing breeze. Only she and her sanba-voiced man, Wilner, were from the same mill. The others they had encountered on the road, just as they were finding us now, Odette explained.
The two pumpkin-haired women and the man with the uneven arms crouched down to rest. They shared portions of foods wrapped in banana leaves and drank from old jugs and a worn-out wineskin.
“Do you have good luck?” Wilner asked Yves.
Yves laughed out loud. “Why do you want to know?” he asked.
“I like to know what type of luck a man has before I start on a journey with him,” Wilner replied.
I moved towards the man with the uneven arms. I was drawn to him in part by curiosity but also because I pitied his condition. I wanted him to explain it to me. Was it tuberculosis or a flesh disease? Did it come from cutting the cane with one arm while neglecting the other? Was he born this way?
The young man seemed to forget his malformation unless someone’s eyes lingered on it too long. He straightened his posture and pushed his chest forward to make his arms seem of one proportion.
Yves and Wilner discussed what roads to take to reach the border more quickly. Wilner had traveled through the mountains at least once before but could not remember the way clearly now. Odette recalled that there were some settlements high in the hills, which we would do well to avoid. They disagreed, though, on how long the journey should take.
“We’ll be at the border before sunset tonight,” said Yves.
“You have misjudged, my friend,” shouted the man with the uneven arms, “how long it takes for men to cross mountains! Two days,” he insisted, “and besides, we don’t want to arrive at the border at night.”
The pumpkin-haired women listened, even as they distributed their tiny portions of food and drink between themselves.
“Let’s not squander time, then.” Yves started walking. “If we stop to rest only at night, the journey will be shorter.”
“M’se Tibon,” the man with the uneven arms said, holding out his emaciated hand towards me.
“How long have you been traveling, Tibon?” I asked him.
“Five days on foot,” he said.
“Did you see others being taken?” I asked.
“I am coming back,” he said, “from buying charcoal outside the mill where I work, when two soldiers take me and put me on a truck full of people. The people who fight before going on the truck, they whip them with bayonets until they consent. After we’re all on the truck, some of us half dead, not knowing whose blood is whose, they take us out to a high cliff over the rough seas in La Romana. They make us stand in groups of six at the edge of the cliff, and then it’s either jump or go against a wall of soldiers with bayonets pointed at you and some civilians waiting in a circle with machetes. They tell the civilians where best to strike with the machetes so our heads part more easily from our bodies.” Tibon used his bony hand to make the motion of a machete striking his collarbone. “They make us stand in lines of six on the edge of the cliff,” he said. “Then they come back to the truck to get more. They have six jump over the cliff, then another six, then another six, then another six.”
I didn’t know how many groups of six he named. I shut my ears to him for a moment and tried to imagine Sebastien’s voice, telling me he was alive. I knew this would be his great worry, that I didn’t know what had happened to him and that perhaps I would think it was my fault he had disappeared. But he hadn’t disappeared; I wanted to be convinced of this, invoking his voice and face on many past occasions: the night he came to tell me that Joël had died, other nights when he had been so careworn and weary, yet so happy that I had gone to his room to see him, nights when he was bothered by the heavy smell of cane that was always with him, in his room, in his clothes, in the breeze, even in his hair, mornings when he woke up and begrudged the sound of the cane being cut because it reminded him of the breaking of dry chicken bones.
Tibon went on naming another group of six, then another.
“Last they come for me,” he said.
The others angled their necks towards him. They were paying close attention, as if they couldn’t help themselves. Yves was the only one who did not seem interested. He kept walking swiftly, fixing his eyes on the road ahead.
“When I jump off the cliff,” Tibon continued, “I tell myself not to be afraid. I say to myself, Tibon, today you and the birds become one. They say for a bird to stand on its two feet and not fly is laziness. Tibon, I tell myself, today you are a bird.”
He opened his arms and spread them, like the rare large butterfly that drifted past us now and then, testing new wings against the unfriendly currents of the mountain air.
“It’s a long way from the cliff to the sea,” he said. “I fall and fall, passing the rocks where many of the bodies land on the way down. And then me, I fall in the water. I know it too when I strike the water because it is so cold and sharp, the water, more like a big machete than water. I have many cuts on my body where the water sliced me, some tears on my ankles, which now cause me to limp.”
He raised his pants to show me the cuts on his ankle, many of them scabbed and deep, covered with the brown-red dust of all the different roads he had traveled.
“Now I’m in the water,” he said, “but when I look at the beach, there are peasants waiting with their machetes for us to come out of the water, some even wading in to look for the spots on the necks where it’s best to strike with machetes to cut off heads. I swim out into a sea cave. I hold on to a rock and fight the water until nighttime, and this is when, with another comrade who also survived, we take to traveling. My companion finds walking harder than those rocks we almost fell on, so he goes back to the mill. But me, I say now and until my last breath, if I die, I die on my feet.”
The pumpkin-haired woman next to me was crying. Her body was slumped, her face sunk into her chest; her cheeks swelled up as if she was trying not to vomit. Still her tears were silent, almost polite. She muffled them with a man’s handkerchief, embroidered with the word lie on each corner.
The other pumpkin-haired woman moved closer and put her arms around her.
When the comforter noticed me staring, she pointed to Yves and asked in Spanish, “Is he your man?”
“No,” I answered.
“I thought he was your man,” Tibon said, “the way he looks at you, like his eyes can protect you.”
“I am promised to someone else,” I said.
“Where is the man you’re promised to? Was he taken?” the woman consoling the crying one asked.
“So I was told,” I said.
“I am Dolores. This is my little sister, Doloritas,” she said after a pause. “Our mother suffered much when each one of us was being born so gave us these grave names we have.”
Doloritas swallowed a lump in her throat, removed the handkerchief from her face, and asked, “What do they call you?”
“They call me Amabelle,” I said.
“Ah, Amabelle, like a taste of cool water in a drought,” said Tibon.
“How long has your journey been?” the older sister asked in Spanish. The two sisters didn’t seem to speak any Kreyol.
“Only one day,” I said.
“The sisters have been with us three days,” Tibon said.
Doloritas covered her eyes with the handkerchief once more.
“Don’t cry so much, Doloritas,” Tibon said. “Save some of your tears to shed for joy when we find your man.”
Doloritas lowered the handkerchie
f from her face as she considered this. If Tibon, a cripple, had escaped, why not her man?
“We are Dominicanas,” Dolores explained.
“They took him,” Doloritas added. “They came in the night and took him from our bed.”
“We have yet to learn your language,” Dolores said.
“We are together six months, me and my man,” Doloritas said. “I told him I would learn Kreyol for when we visit his family in Haiti.”
“I know nothing,” Dolores said. “Doloritas was lost when they took him. She wanted to go to the border to look for him. I could not let her go alone in her state.”
“What is his name?” I asked, looking directly into Doloritas’ reddened eyes. “Your man, what is his name?”
“We called him He,” she said, pushing her wet handkerchief towards me to show the embroidering of his name. “He is a nickname for Ilestbien. He told me that it means ‘he is well.'”
We walked through the afternoon without resting. The sun teased us by occasionally seeking shelter behind a dense cloud, often for long periods of time.
The mountain air grew cooler as dusk approached. Our fatigue limited our desire for more talk. Besides, each person’s story did nothing except bring you closer to your own pain.
Now and then, Tibon would pierce the silence with his voice.
“Everyone says the Generalissimo is at the border now. Maybe he’s there, waiting to greet us.” He spat out his words, pausing for a reply, an agreement, or an argument.
Yves looked back to where I was walking next to the two Dominican women, with Tibon hobbling behind us. He had a sneer of disappointment on his face, as though he could not believe that I had forsaken him so early in our journey for newer company.
“They have so many of us here because our own country—our government—has forsaken us,” Tibon started again, but no one replied. “Poor people are sold to work in the cane fields so our own country can be free of them.”
The sun was setting, the valleys far below us fading into a void. The night brought with it a ghostly echo so that each time Tibon spoke it seemed as though you were hearing many people say the same thing at once.
“The ruin of the poor is their poverty,” Tibon went on. “The poor man, no matter who he is, is always despised by his neighbors. When you stay too long at a neighbor’s house, it’s only natural that he become weary of you and hate you.”
28
We found a point where the road widened into a broad level patch, and each person claimed the spot where he was standing when it was announced that we were stopping for the night. A few sheets were thrown open from the bundles, and we all fared well enough with something between us and the cool dirt and something else to throw over our bodies.
Wilner ordered us not to light any fires, which might make us discernible from a distance. Even a pipe, which Tibon desperately wanted to smoke, was not permitted.
There was a full moon overhead, but it was the stars that caught my attention. I had never seen them so massive and so close before. Every once in a while, one would plunge from the sky and crash someplace behind the mountains, fading from an explosion of fireballs into a hush of darkness.
Yves made his way towards me and offered two of the bananas he had bought on the road early that morning. He also gave me a block of coconut chunks, which I hadn’t seen him buy. I ate the coconut first and then one of the bananas. Putting the other one in my bundle, I saved it for later.
“If I doze, awaken me,” Yves whispered. “Don’t let me speak in my sleep.”
“Not all of us should sleep at the same time,” Wilner said as he crawled into the small space near Odette. “There should be watchers to wake the sleepers if need be.”
The three men divided among themselves the task of being sentinels. Yves was to watch during the last part of the night, into the next morning.
We all took turns sleeping and waking. Each time they woke up, the Dominican sisters had to remind themselves where they were, in murmurs, secret grunts, and mute conversations with each other.
I drifted off to sleep a few times myself, but when I woke up, it was so dark that if not for the coldness of the ground and the pebbles digging into my side, I still would have thought I was asleep.
Once when I woke up, I thought I felt the ground shaking. Powdered dust and pebbles sifted down from above us. I clung to the soil with my fingers. Then, realizing that this would be a cowardly way to die, I shook a mound of dirt off me and stood up.
Everyone rose and roamed in circles, trying to establish what was taking place. Then just as abruptly as it had started, the mountain’s shaking stopped.
The night was still after this. The fireflies disappeared from the air. Even the bats must have been stunned.
“It’s only the mountain settling,” Wilner said, breaking the silence with his voice.
“Let it not settle on top of my head,” Tibon said. Odette laughed and I was calmed.
We stayed awake for some time, waiting for the mountain to stir again. The stars stopped falling and slowly disappeared from the sky. We returned to our places, and perhaps because our bodies demanded it, most of us fell asleep.
Yves was the only one who did not sleep. Towards dawn, I saw him sitting on the edge of the hill with his body facing the road ahead. He was playing a game in which he buried a stick in a pile of dirt and then scooped away the soil until the stick was standing straight up in the least amount of dirt. When the stick fell, he would lose to himself and start the game again.
Over his shoulder, a funnel of dark charcoal smoke was rising from one of the small villages we’d left behind. Yves had become accustomed enough to the sight that he kept playing the game, only occasionally glancing in the direction the smoke was drifting before it rose high enough to thin out and become part of the air.
I tried not to wake anyone as I stood, but my movements caused more activity. Wilner’s woman, Odette, woke up, then Wilner, followed by the Dominican sisters, then Tibon. By the time I reached Yves, everyone was awake and watching the fire burning through a village a few tiers below.
There was no mistaking the stench rising towards us. It was the smell of blood sizzling, of flesh melting to the last bone, a bonfire of corpses, like the one the Generalissimo had ordered at the Plaza Colombina to avoid the spreading of disease among the living after the last great hurricane.
Yves placed the machete on his back. He tugged on the game stick, ignoring the splinters stabbing at his fingertips. Odette raised her hands over her nose. Circling her frame with his embrace, Wilner rocked Odette’s body back and forth in his arms. I felt Tibon shiver and then realized I was holding his skeletal hand.
Tibon leaned towards my left ear and whispered, “I almost kill a Dominican boy when I’m ten. I see him coming along the road in front of the mill one day and I decide to beat him to make him say that even if he’s living in a big house and I’m living in the mill, he’s no better than me.”
I pulled my hand from Tibon’s long delicate fingers. His voice grew louder as he continued. “I grab the boy by the neck. I beat him until I’m tired and he’s biting the back of my hand and he’s running. I still have the scar where he bit me. Do you want to see?”
He tried to show the scar on his normal-sized forearm, but no one looked.
“He never tells his family it’s me beating him every day. I warn him ‘I beat you worse if you tell.’ He won’t say what I want him to say, that we’re the same, me and him, flesh like flesh, blood like blood.”
“The mountains are dangerous for us now,” Wilner announced, interrupting Tibon. “I say we follow this trail down and, soon as we can, go through the forest to a place where we can cross the river to the other side.”
“We can get lost in the forest,” Yves said, “walk the same path a hundred times and not know it.”
“‘You can get lost in there,” Wilner said. “Not me. I have two good eyes.”
Wilner turned to the Dominican sisters who
were still watching the smoke and addressed them in Spanish. “You will travel with us no more,” he said.
“We cannot leave them here alone,” Tibon protested.
“They are not good for us,” Wilner said, as if the sisters had already disappeared from our presence. “I will not be roasted like lechon for them. This is their country. Let them find the border themselves. They can go to any village in these mountains, and the people will welcome them.”
“What if they betray us?” Odette asked. “What if they send their people after us?”
“They will not betray us,” Tibon said. “I can sense this.”
“We will let you choose your road, and we will choose ours,” Dolontas spoke up. “And we’ll go on to Dajabón and I’ll find Ilestbien.”
Dajabón was a place I remembered as a barely developed town, a place I had not seen since I was a child. Now I imagined it full of people like us, searching for loved ones, mistaking the living for the dead.
As we walked away from them, I wanted to argue for allowing the sisters to come with us, but the fires down below made too strong a demonstration of the danger. Besides, the sisters would not have as many obstacles as we would in Dajabón. If they were asked to say “perejil,” they could say it with ease. In most of our mouths, their names would be tinged with or even translated into Kreyol, the way the name of Doloritas’ man slid towards the Spanish each time she evoked him. Perhaps if we addressed the sisters publicly in Dajabón, someone might hear and at that moment decide that we should die.
I lingered and offered the sisters my remaining banana. They refused it, pushing my hand away. When Yves beckoned for me to hurry, I was surprised that I could yield so fast and leave them behind. But the most important task, I told myself, was to find Mimi and Sebastien.
We followed the mountain trail down, away from the fires. The sun was fully up now. And going down into the woods seemed like a prudent idea. There were many more trees to cover us there, more places to hide, probably a creek or two to drink from.