The man poked his hand out from underneath the heap of shirts he was carrying and gave Yves a joyous handshake.
“They didn’t take you, eh,” he said. “They couldn’t take you. No more than the Yankis could take me.”
The man with the tourist shirts talked endlessly about events that had taken place since Yves had left, how the Yankis had gone back to their country three years before, how Yves’ mother was well, though always heart-crushed, anxious for him.
The house was one of many constructed from mismatched pieces of timber and rusting tin. Yves leaped towards a low step that led to his mother’s front door. A large woman was standing on the doorstep, struggling to push her arms through the short sleeves of her rainbow-striped blouse. Her fingers were snarled in the fabric and she tore at it fiercely to free herself. Her chest was bare, the skin of her breasts the color of molasses. She was about to step into the road without the blouse when Yves jumped in front of her. He guided her clenched fists through the sleeves and calmly buttoned the blouse for her. She watched as he did this and rocked herself all the while, saying his name. When he was done, she grabbed his head and pressed it against her neck, then wept into the scabs on his scalp.
The woman did not see me standing there on the edge of a growing crowd of curious onlookers. I spun the orange in my hand and tried not to squeeze it too hard from anxiety.
“Man Rapadou, you’re so happy to see your son, no?” said the man with the pile of tourist shirts in his arms.
Yves walked over, took my hand, and brought me out of the crowd.
“You have a woman. This is your woman?” his mother asked.
“Don’t be so rash, Man Rapadou,” Yves said.
The mother opened her arms and nodded her head, beckoning to me. I wasn’t certain how to respond, so I stood there next to Yves, pretending I didn’t understand what she’d said. She yanked my hand and pulled me into her arms. The gathering of observers laughed. The mother waved them off with a turn of her face.
“Her name is Amabelle,” Yves said. Hearing him say it, listening to the mother repeat it, made me feel welcomed.
“Inside now,” the mother said, waving good-bye to the onlookers. She was wearing one shoe on her foot. The other she had left inside in her haste to run out and greet her son.
We were in the first room of the house. The back room led to a courtyard shared among many families. It reminded me of the compound at Don Carlos’ mill.
Yves went out to greet his relations who lived around the courtyard. They brought a chair out for him to sit in beneath a tree in the middle of the yard, a tall, vibrantly green traveler’s tree with the palmetto branches spread out like the fingers on a hand.
The mother served us a hot cup of salted coffee. The inside of my mouth was scalded as I sipped, but I struggled not to spit it out because the saline taste washed out the taint of parsley and blood that had been on my tongue since the beating at the square.
Yves’ relations from the yard put together and cooked a large meal for him. They fried and stewed all his favorite foods: goat meat and eggplants, watercress in codfish sauce, corn mush, and black beans.
Yves ate everything placed in front of him. Now and again his mother would interrupt his eating to tell a story about how much he had eaten as a boy, not only food and sweets, but also moist dirt from bean plant roots, which he liked to rub against his gums until they bled.
Yves stopped to listen to his mother’s stories as though he too was hearing them for the first time. The mother was telling her tales, I realized, to stop him from eating too quickly, to force him to rest his mouth and stomach.
“Remember a man who was put in prison.” The mother stood in a corner rubbing her large belly. “After nothing but bread and water for thirty days, they let him out of prison and he brought himself home. First thing I do is cook him all the rich food he had dreams about in prison. He ate until he fell over on his plate in the middle of eating. He died eating,” she told the relations with a deep long laugh. “Please, don’t kill my son. A man can die of hunger, but a man can also die over a plate of food.”
Yves put his spoon down and pushed his plate away. His mother chortled, even though no one was cackling along with her. She seemed to be the only one who could laugh out of sadness, a sadness that made the laughter deeper and louder still, like the echo of a scream from the bottom of a well.
The mother stroked her hairy chin with her long thick fingers, still laughing. She reminded me of the old women at the cane mill with their cheeks split in half, the flesh healed because it had to but never sealed in the same way again.
I remembered what my father used to say as he would hurry off with a knapsack of bottles filled with leaves and warm rum, as he raced to a birth or to a death, thinking of ways to encourage or halt the event. “Misery won’t touch you gentle. It always leaves its thumbprints on you; sometimes it leaves them for others to see, sometimes for nobody but you to know of.”
The mother looked liked she’d had her own share of misery. The only thing it hadn’t touched was a mouth full of perfect white teeth, curved like the round edges of an enamel cup, none of them her own.
My own mouth was still too bruised for hard foods. A full plate of fried goat meat remained on my lap. Yves’ mother walked over to me and asked, “Some soup for you? It won’t be too hot or too thick.”
She took the full plate from my lap and came back with a small bowl of pumpkin soup. While the others watched, she fed me the soup with a tiny spoon as though I were a sick, bedridden child.
32
That night, the mother moved six cousins out of the second room so Yves could share his old bed with me. The bed was made from four posts mortared to the ground and a wooden platform that held a small mattress filled with old rags.
The room where Yves’ mother slept was separated from ours only by a rattling beaded curtain. When she went to bed, he followed her there. I sat alone on the new bed and played with my bitter orange while listening to the noises from outside. Everything the people who lived around the courtyard said or did could be heard, their caresses and arguments, their gossip, and the cries of their restless children.
“Who is this woman?” the mother asked Yves. “Where are her people? Are they here or did they all die in the killing over there?”
Yves said nothing. I went out to the yard, found the cooking fire and a basin of water, bathed myself with the bitter orange the way the woman in front of the cathedral had instructed. I could hear some of the courtyard children giggling as they peered at me through the holes in their doorways. In spite of their curiosity, I knew that my body could no longer be a tempting spectacle, nor would I ever be truly young or beautiful, if ever I had been. Now my flesh was simply a map of scars and bruises, a marred testament.
Yves was still with his mother when I came back to bed. They had moved on to talking about other things unfamiliar to me, about old friends who had died or moved to other parts of the country, about his father’s land, which had not been cultivated since Yves left.
Each time I closed my eyes I saw the river and imagined Sebastien and Mimi drowning the way my mother and father and Odette had. To escape these thoughts, I envisioned Henry Fs citadel as I had seen it again that afternoon, its closeness to the sky, its distance from the river. With my childhood visions of being inside of it, protected, I fell asleep.
The next morning, I stumbled out of bed, ashamed to have slept so soundly and so late. The mother was sitting under the traveler’s tree outside, pouring steaming hot water over the powdered grains in her coffee pouch.
“Where’s Yves?” I asked. I didn’t even know if he had come and lain in the bed with me the night before.
“He’s on his father’s land,” the mother said. “He comes out of bed this morning and says he wants to go and plant some beans in his father’s fields.”
I didn’t know what Yves had told her about me. She got up, walked towards me, clasped my face between her wet hands
, and planted a kiss on my forehead.
“You call me Man Rapadou,” she said. “I know your story.”
Which story of mine did she know? Which story was she told?
“Everything you knew before this slaughter is lost,” she said. Perhaps she was encouraging me to embrace her son and forsake Sebastien, even my memories of him, those images of him that would float through my head repeatedly, like brief glimpses of the same dream.
Yves stayed in the fields until nightfall. When he came home his hands were coated with mud and he smelled like the earth had been turned inside out over him.
“I planted a field of green beans,” he announced to his mother.
“I told you. It is not the season,” she said.
“We’ll see,” he said.
“When will you pay a visit to Man Denise?” his mother asked.
He did not answer.
“It is only respectful that you go and visit with her, since you and her son left here together,” she said.
Yves walked out to the courtyard to wash himself. I went back to our room and lay down on the bed, hoping to fall asleep before he returned.
When he came in and called my name, I did not answer. He lay down and curled himself up on his side of the mattress. He did not speak in his sleep that night. Or any other night after that.
While Yves was in the fields the next day and his mother was visiting a friend, I asked some of his relations and found out where Man Denise, Sebastien and Mimi’s mother, lived. I made the promise of a mint confection to a boy who took me there.
The house was not too far from Yves’ but was in a less populated area, with bigger residences and more trees.
I walked back and forth around the property. There was no activity, except for a girl rushing in and out of the yard, carrying jugs of water on her head.
“The woman who lives there, she will not come outside,” the boy with me said. “Do you want to go inside and speak with her?”
“No,” I said. What would be the use? She hadn’t known me when her children were still hers alone, safe in her house.
Soon after that, my body began to feel better, even though I had a constant ringing in my ears and one knee would not bend all the time. Still, I walked by Man Demse’s house every day to see if anything would change. Whenever there was more noise than usual on the roads, whenever people gathered in a group, I rushed out to see if it was the homecoming that would bring Man Denise out of her house. There were new arrivals all the time, people returning from the other side, people who were settling again in our quarter and in hers.
Thinking of Sebastien’s return made me wish for my hair to grow again—which it had not—for the inside of my ears to stop buzzing, for my knees to bend without pain, for my jaws to realign evenly and form a smile that did not make me look like a feeding mule.
At night, lying next to Yves, I grew more and more frightened that Sebastien would not recognize me if he ever saw me again.
33
Yves spent all his days planting in his father’s fields, then lingered with his friends and neighbors for late-afternoon talk after his work.
I never saw him but only heard him undress and slip into bed at night when he finally came home.
A few weeks after his first planting, I waited for him to climb onto his side of the mattress and asked him, “Did anything come up from the ground for you?”.
Since we’d come back, we hadn’t spoken of our situation, never even talked of changing it in a way that would make us both more comfortable at night.
“Only grass might come up this quick,” he said. “And not every type of grass even.”
His scornful voice made me think that he was not a fortunate planter, or maybe he didn’t think he was one.
“I would like to go to the fields with you one day,” I said.
“Why so?” he asked.
“I want to see your father’s land.”
“It’s no different than other land,” he said.
I could hear him suddenly sitting up on the bed as if in defense of what had just been said. I reached for his arms in the dark and pressed them down to show him that I truly wanted to be quietly grateful, to cooperate, to make the best out of our burden.
“I hear there are officials of the state, justices of the peace, who listen to those who survived the slaughter and write their stories down,” he said. “The Generalissimo has not said that he caused the killing, but he agreed to give money to affected persons.”
“Why?” I didn’t think he would have the answer, but I wished he did know.
“To erase bad feelings,” he said, as if he were no longer linked to the slaughter.
“And the dead?”
“They pay their families,” he said.
I knew what he was thinking, that perhaps Man Denise should go, in case Sebastien and Mimi were already dead.
I stepped off the bed and crouched down in a corner of the room, as far from him as I could. I felt grateful that it was dark, that neither one of us could see the other’s face.
“I want to meet that justice of the peace myself,” I said.
“I don’t know if you’ll be given the money,” he said. “The authorities might try to keep it all for themselves. They ask you to bring papers. They ask you to bring proof.” But he knew that it was not money, it was information I was hoping for.
The next morning we went to see the justice of the peace. He was posted in a yellow police building that seemed to have been shaped out of one massive mountain rock. Outside was a group of more than a thousand people waiting to be allowed entry. A line of armed soldiers from the Police Nationale stood between them and the narrow entrance to the building.
As the morning went on, the waiting group became larger, so much so that when I pulled myself up and looked behind me, I could not see where the road ended and the faces began.
Yves had not said a word the whole morning. He occasionally ventured off to get water, or to help carry home some elder who had fainted from the heat.
In the afternoon, food vendors arrived and people shared their tales, as if to practice for their real audience with the government official. The man next to me had walked seventy kilometers to avoid the crowds in his own town. Another woman had come from even farther away. Others were planning to go to Port-au-Prince, which fewer survivors had yet reached.
There was only some vague order to the way people were allowed inside. The most mangled victims, the ones whose wounds had still not healed, were let in as soon as they arrived. Pregnant women entered quickly as well as those who could find some money to bribe the soldiers.
To pass the time waiting, I thought of many ways to shorten my tale. Perhaps Yves and I would go in together and make both our stories one. That way we would give someone else a chance to be heard.
The justice of the peace came to the entrance at sundown. He was plainly dressed in a light green house shirt and pants with a small watch on a gold chain dangling from his pants’ side pocket. In one hand was a large leather covered notebook and in the other a shiny black case. His presence caused a stir in the crowd. The soldiers raised their rifles for silence so he could speak.
“I can do no more today,” he said.
“Non,” moaned the crowd.
“And if I say one more, each of you will want to be that one,” he said.
“Non,” the crowd disagreed.
“I will come tomorrow,” he said.
“Tomorrow, listen faster,” someone recommended.
The soldiers surrounded the justice of the peace as he went back inside, then we saw his automobile speeding away from the protected yard behind the station.
People rushed after him, but quickly gave up the chase, for many of them could not run far because of some injury or exhaustion from being in the sun all day.
The last person who’d had an audience with him was a woman, thirty or thirty-five years old. She was dressed all in white—as though she were going off to a reli
gious ceremony—and had a sun-bleached straw hat tied with a green ribbon under her chin.
“What did they do for you in there?” Yves yelled out to her. Others in the crowd joined in, “Did they give you money?”
She removed her hat and surveyed the faces staring up at her.
“No, he did not give me money,” she said, watching the soldiers for approval. “You see the book he had with him?” She glanced at the guards once more, then turned her face back to the crowd. “He writes your name in the book and he says he will take your story to President Stenio Vincent so you can get your money.” She kept her eyes on the crowd, no longer watching the soldiers for approval. “Then he lets you talk and lets you cry and he asks you if you have papers to show that all these people died.”
The soldiers from the Police Nationale, wearing the same khaki uniforms as the Dominican soldiers—a common inheritance from their training during the Yanki invasion of the whole island—approached the woman from behind and asked her to move away from the entrance. The crowd protested with hisses. Two of the soldiers took her by the arms and carried her down the station steps. She tried to twist out of their hands. Finally someone in the crowd pulled her from them for her own safety.
“If you make trouble,” the sergeant—the station head—announced to the crowd, “you will not be allowed to return tomorrow.”
The crowd dispersed slowly, perhaps wondering if there was any use in coming back the following day.
Yves and I went back there for the next fifteen days. New faces came and went. Some stopped coming. Some never left their places in front of the station, even when it rained.
The justice of the peace came there every day, except Sundays.
On the sixteenth day, we were waiting without hope in the back of the crowd when we saw her coming.
I knew immediately who she was when Yves leaped from his place and headed for her.
“Man Denise, you came,” he said.
“I did come, yes,” she said in a voice sharp and abrupt like her daughter Minn’s. “I want to stand here with all of you.”