I couldn’t remember how long I had been asleep. But when I woke up this time, the nuns came through the room and handed out plates of corn mush with black bean sauce and a slice of avocado. I refused by shaking my head, but they left the plate near me anyway.
As they ate, people gathered in a group to talk. Taking turns, they exchanged tales quickly, the haste in their voices sometimes blurring the words, for greater than their desire to be heard was the hunger to tell. One could hear it in the fervor of the declarations, the obscenities shouted when something could not be remembered fast enough, when a stutter allowed another speaker to race into his own account without the stutterer having completed his.
“It was Monday, the last two days in September,” a man began, as though giving an account to a justice of the peace. “I went to the fields in the early morning. When I came home at noontime, the Guardia was in my house. I’d heard talk, rumors of all these happenings at night. I took precautions not to lag outside. But this was the daytime. The soldiers came, picked out some chickens in my yard, and told me I was a thief. I tell you many a man was taken falsely as a thief.”
Another group of voices argued for the right to speak next, as if their owners had been biting their tongues while this last man was speaking.
“Only a few paces from me,” shouted a woman, “they had them tied in ropes and Don Jose, who has known me my whole life, went at them with his machete, first my son, then my father, then my sister.”
My skin felt prickly, as if my blood had been put in a pot to boil and then poured back into me. Or maybe the tin roof was melting and streaming down on me in a light silver rain.
A man who had taken a bullet in the stomach told how he had run for half a day, not realizing he’d been shot. He thought a bullet, especially one from a rifle like the Krag, would hurt worse. He was lucky to have been shot from a distance, he said. At first it felt like an insect sting, a bee sting, not even a wasp bite, which can be deadly to some people.
Another man spoke of how he was hiding behind a tree when a group of soldiers stormed a horse farm. They were so angry not to have found any Haitians there that they shot all the horses.
“I was there in Santiago,” a voice shouted from the other side of the room, “when they shut seven hundred souls into a courtyard behind two government houses. They made them lie facedown in the red dirt and shot them in the back of the head with rifles.”
In the heat’s haze, the ceiling seemed to split in two, the pieces rising on silver wings to the sky, except there was no sky above, just a daytime darkness where a sun should have been.
“I was there,” echoed a young woman with three rings of rope burns carved into her neck, “when they forced more than two hundred off the pier in Monte Cristi.”
I felt my breath racing as if everything inside me was boiling, even though my body was still. Perhaps I had a fever, like my childhood fevers, but if I did have a fever, would the back of my hot hand know to discern its own heat from that of my forehead?
The next man who spoke had been struck with a machete on the shoulder and left for dead. When he awoke the next morning, he found himself in a pit surrounded by corpses.
“I felt like my woman on our first night together,” he said. “She woke up in the middle of the night and started screaming. I said to her, ‘Am I so ugly that you should scream so loud the first night you are with me?’ She looked at me hard and said this was her first night outside her mother’s bed and she’d plain forgotten where she was.”
The group grew impatient with that one. He took too long to arrive at the center of his tale.
“I thought of my woman when I woke up that morning in that pit with all the dead faces around me and all the vultures overhead,” he said.
“Oh, the vultures,” everyone chimed in. They could not get enough, those vultures, covering the daytime sky like a midnight cloud. If you were not walking fast enough, they would try for your eyes, those vultures. It was as if they could sniff the scent of death on you, those vultures.
“It wasn’t always just the vultures,” someone added, “the ‘good birds’ became man-eaters too: the swallows, the warblers, even the tiny hummingbirds, they all wanted the taste of flesh.”
“Waking up among the dead, I started screaming,” the man from the cadaver pit went on. “And then I thought of my woman and our first night together, and in spite of all the corpses, I smiled.”
The people around him smiled, too, at the beauty of such an innocent moment, when a young woman wakes up in her new man’s bed for the first time and forgets how she came to be there. Had there ever been a time when such a thing as being a stranger in someone’s bed could startle a person?
“Where is your woman now?” someone asked.
The man clapped his hands together and shrugged, a gesture of not knowing.
“It would take too much to kill me,” bragged the next speaker. “I’m one of those trees whose roots reach the bottom of the earth. They can cut down my branches, but they will never uproot the tree. The roots are too strong, and there are too many.”
“Who said this?” someone asked. “Wasn’t it General Toussaint Louverture?”
“A smart man,” someone said. “In those times we had respect. When Dessalines, Toussaint, Henry, when those men walked the earth, we were a strong nation. Those men would go to war to defend our blood. In all this, our so-called president says nothing, our Papa Vincent—our poet—he says nothing at all to this affront to the children of Dessalines, the children of Toussaint, the children of Henry; he shouts nothing across this river of our blood.”
A woman was singing, calling on the old dead fathers of our independence. Papa Dessalines, where have you left us? Papa Toussaint, what have you left us to? Papa Henry, have you forsaken us?
“Freedom is a passing thing,” a man said. “Someone can always come and snatch it away.”
They went on to debate the wisdom of having traveled the forested valleys rather than the mountain roads. They wondered what would happen to their relations who had disappeared. Some had traveled in large groups and the nearly dead had to be left behind. They looked back and reordered the moments—second vision, hindsight. What could have been done differently? Whatever became of our national creed, “L’ union fait la force”? Where was our unity? Where was our strength? And how can we not hate ourselves for the people we left behind?
At the same time, they dreamed of the first meals their mothers and sisters, who they had not seen for many years, would cook for them. They dictated step by step what the first domino games and cockfights with their fathers and compadres would be like, the first embraces given to lovers and children.
“It all makes you understand that the flesh is like everything else,” the man who had been in the pit with the cadavers said. “It is no different, the flesh, than fruit or anything that rots. It’s not magic, not holy. It can shrink, burn, and like amber it can melt in fire. It is nothing. We are nothing.”
The woman with the rope burns engraved on her neck asked if she could have my food. I nodded and went back to sleep.
When I woke up again, the nun with the square jaws was tapping her fingers against the itchy wound dressings on my head.
“Do you know how long it has been?” she asked.
I shook my head no.
“Three days,” she said. “You have slept for three days and three nights. You did not look bad as some, but you had such a fever, I was afraid you would die.”
I tried to part my lips and smile to show her that I was far from dead, that I didn’t want to die; Odette and Wilner had already died for me.
“Do you have a place to go to now?” she asked.
I shook my head no.
“Can you speak?” she asked.
No.
She motioned for me to open my mouth. I felt my face splitting apart as I did.
“What of the man who came, washed, and dressed you as you suffered through the worst of your fever?”
“Who?” I raised my eyebrows to ask.
“It must be someone you know.”
I felt the large veins in my neck rise, the air catching in large bubbles in my throat. His name is Sebastien Onius.
“He said his name was Yves,” she remembered.
Yves came to see me what must have been a few days later. I wanted to thank him for caring for me during my fever. But how?
He looked better now except for shreds of gauze taped in odd shapes on different sections of his head. His hair had grown in tufts around the gauze. He saw me staring at the tufts and said, “I can’t yet shave my head.”
I wanted to tell him that he looked well. He didn’t need to have his head shaved. He seemed to be healing.
“I sleep outside with the moon,” he said. “It’s good unless it rains.”
Good. Good. I nodded.
“I’ve been looking every place I can for Sebastien and Mimi.” I could tell from the suddenly much graver expression on his face that he thought I was looking too hopeful. “The priests and the bishop try to question people and take their names. I have asked them about Sebastien and Mimi.”
And now? I raised my shoulders to ask. “Nothing,” he said. “Nothing at all. Maybe they passed through another border post. Maybe they were well enough to go directly to their mother’s house.”
In spite of my own wishes, I felt myself sliding back towards sleep. It was either cry or sleep. That’s all my body seemed to be able to do.
His visits were like one conversation carried out over many days. Some of them I remembered and others I didn’t.
“I’m going back to my land tomorrow,” he said when he came another time. A little more hair had grown around his bandages, which were smaller now. “Tell me with a nod if you would like to come with me.”
I tried to say yes, I would go with him. I would go with him wherever his home was, try to forget everything that had taken place on the journey, and wait for Mimi and Sebastien to return.
“Good,” he said. “We will let you sleep tonight, and I will come for you tomorrow.”
It rained all that night, and most of the people who were sleeping outside came running inside. The shutters above me were opened, letting a steady drizzle into the room. Someone finally woke up to close them, but by then I was drenched.
Yves made his way towards me and sat in the dark, with his back against a wooden beam nearby.
“I will take you to Sebastien’s house,” he said, “where you can sit with him and Mimi and his mother and talk about all this like a bad dream.”
“How long now since we have been here?” My throat felt like it was tearing from the effort of trying to speak.
“Six days,” he said.
“What did I do when I had the fever?” I asked.
“Sleep and wake, again and again,” he said. “But mostly sleep.”
“And you have been caring for me?”
He nodded.
“With the rain, the river will overflow,” I said. “And if Mimi and Sebastien are crossing, it will not be good.”
“They say the killing has stopped,” he said.
“There is a dream I have often,” I said, “of my parents in the river, in the rain.”
“Sebastien told me more than once about it,” he said.
Someone shouted from the other side of the room. It was the man who had woken up in the cadaver pit. He said he heard his woman calling him from the river, and he wanted to go save her.
While Yves and a few other men restrained him, the nuns awoke from their sleep and forced him to swallow a few spoonfuls of a syrup that along with his grief made him suckle his thumb and cradle his body like an infant for the rest of the night.
The next morning, Yves went along with the priests, the doctors, and the others whose work it was to collect corpses along the riverbank. The work took the whole morning, even though the nuns too told us that the killing had ceased and there were hardly any more corpses to bury.
The room was full beyond its measure now, with everyone seeking shelter from the mud outside.
I looked for my face in the tin ceiling above me as I waited for Yves to return. With everyone lying face up and with their bodies so close together, I couldn’t tell which face was mine.
The man from the cadaver pit lay on his mat all morning, mumbling his woman’s name. Nounoune, Nounoune. Next to him was a crippled Dominican who could console him only in Spanish.
“Calmate, hombre,” mumbled the Dominican. He was black like the nun who came to re-dress his wounds. He’d been mistaken for one of us and had received a machete blow across the back of his neck for it.
There were many like him in the room, I was told.
31
The sky was smeared with gray—gray like the inside of a broiled fish—when Yves and I finally left the clinic in a camión one afternoon. In that part of the country, the indigo mountains, cactus trees, large egrets and flamingos were great spectacles for the eyes, visions that made the people feel obligated to twist and contort their hurt bodies to peer outside and shiver with gratitude for having survived to see their native land.
Yves and I were pressed into a corner near the back of a crammed row; I knew my knee was pressing into his side, but I could find no room to shift into. Yves had not found Mimi and Sebastien that morning, and for this he was regretful. For this he was silent, watching his own twirling fingers with downcast eyes and grimacing, but not complaining, each time my knee rammed into his side during a sudden stop. Perhaps he thought I hated him and was tormenting him for being there instead of Sebastien; maybe he even thought that he deserved some kind of punishment for not being his friend.
The Cap was still an old new city when we returned to it, a city burnt to the ground many times for its own salvation. These were tales that all the local children knew, for proof was sometimes found buried in their land: a gold coin, a silver saucer, which the ground would vomit up when it rained, like the bones of those laid to rest without caskets in shallow ground. The dream was to find a ja, a chest full of gold that a French plantation owner had buried along with the slaves he had killed and interred next to it so the slaves’ souls could be the guardians of the treasure.
To the French generals who returned in fleets to reclaim these treasures and the souls of their slaves, Henry I had said, “I will not surrender the Cap until it’s in ashes. And even then I will continue to fight on these ashes.” He had given the signal to start the fires by torching his own house first.
The houses that were now built along the Place Toussaint Louverture—under a statue of Toussaint, where the camión left us—the houses of the Cap were now less grand, two stories at best, with wooden railings, double doors, and galleries on top. Not like the old vast plantations that were meant to last for centuries.
As soon as we descended from the camión, Yves parted from all the others. I followed him, looking up and searching the sky.
The giant citadel, Henry I’s treasure, was leaning down towards the city from inside a wreath of sun-filled clouds. I wondered if Yves thought about such things. Or if he even noticed what was inside the shops as we ventured along the cleanly paved streets among small groups of men and women ambling past the shoe and fabric shops on the Rue du Quai. I was trailing far behind him with my face to the skies, trying to ignore the throbbing in my knees. The small bones of my bare feet were grating each other raw. Every movement required a pause, a thought to what I was doing, where my legs were going as opposed to where they were supposed to be.
Some of the merchants and shopkeepers and their workers moaned as we moved among them. They recognized us without knowing us. We were those people, the nearly dead, the ones who had escaped from the other side of the river.
I dragged my feet along, feeling now and then like other people were standing on them, people whose eyes were only a flutter away from mine, whose hands and fingers wandered freely towards me, whose lips shouted, “Podyab, poor devil,” in my ear. br />
“Come, come,” Yves called as we walked past the trellised doors of the old Hotel New York, and then past a sidewalk where someone was demonstrating the use of a phonograph and a sewing machine from a shop on La Rue A. Yves seemed to be searching for some place to enter while walking in circles as if he was lost and didn’t even know it.
On La Rue B, he stood in the middle of an open tourist market, scratching the scabs on his unshaven head as he waited for me to catch up. When I reached him, he asked me to stand there, holding on to the front post of a pharmacy as he ran inside and bought a pack of La Nationale cigarettes. He smoked nearly the whole pack by the time we reached the cathedral.
In front of the cathedral, a woman moved so close to me that I could smell the chewing tobacco on her breath, the sweat that dried and then poured out again from her forehead, and the bitter thick-skinned oranges piled in a basket standing by itself on her head. Without looking where her hand was going, she reached up and pulled an orange from the basket and gave it to me.
“You warm this orange on an open fire,” she said, “Let it burn until the skin turns black.”
“I thank you,” I said.
“I am not finished,” she said. “When the skin turns all black, you know it’s ready. Then you cut it open while the juice is still hot, slap the insides against your flesh, then you take a warm bath and wash the orange flesh away. All your cuts will heal. Your bone aching will stop.”
I grasped the orange tightly so it would not fall. She walked behind me, then gave another orange and the same commands to someone else.
Yves was now keeping pace beside me. A few people recognized him as we walked down a gravel road, away from the commercial area. A man with a pile of embroidered tourist shirts on his arm followed us and announced to the people living in the small crowded limestone houses along the gravel road, “It’s Man Rapadou’s boy, Yves. He’s returned from over there.”