She looked too young to be both Mimi and Sebastien’s mother. She was long-legged and slender, her face the color of wet terra-cotta. She wore a long tan dress that swept the floor as she walked. Bowing her long neck, she greeted those people in the crowd she knew and merely nodded to the others. She glanced at me, but she did not see me. Instead, as she stood there, she watched the soldiers. Her eyes followed the movements of their rifles from shoulder to shoulder; their offhand leanings to talk to one another about offhand things. She kept stroking her side, reaching in and out of the deep recesses of her pockets for something too tiny to be held in her hand.
At dusk, the justice of the peace did not come out to speak to the crowd. The head sergeant came out instead and announced that there would be no more testimonials taken. All the money had already been distributed. The justice of the peace had already gone away when no one was looking, knowing we would be enraged if we saw him depart.
It took some time for people to take in what this meant. Their disappointment grew as the word spread from mouth to mouth and was reinterpreted by one person for the next. There were moans and screams of protests, convulsions and faintings as rocks began to fly.
The people at the front of the crowd charged at the entrance. Trained by Yanki troops who were used to rebellious uprisings, the soldiers shot several rounds of bullets in the air.
A few of the soldiers were caught and passed from hand to hand as blows were struck, but the crowd was not really interested in them. The group charged the station looking for someone to write their names in a book, and take their story to President Vincent. They wanted a civilian face to concede that what they had witnessed and lived through did truly happen. When they did not find such a person inside, they freed the ten male prisoners who were being held in the inner rooms and walked away with a few items the soldiers had left behind: seven chairs, six canteens, two water jugs, three handkerchiefs, fourteen coiled cowhide whips, seventeen cato’-nine-tails, two sets of keys to the cells, and a giant official photograph of President Vincent.
He was a sophisticated-looking man, President Stenio Vincent, with small spectacles worn very close to his eyes. He had a pair of beautifully large ears framing his moon face, a tiny dot of a mustache over pinched pensive lips, a poet’s lips, it was said. In the photograph, he wore a gentleman’s collar with a bow tie, the end of which touched the shiny medal of the Grand Cross of the Juan Pablo Duarte Order of Merit, given to him by the Generalissimo as a symbol of eternal friendship between our two peoples. The image of the Grand Cross caught the flames first when kerosene was brought and the photo, then the police post, was set on fire, though only the wooden doors and the thin coat of paint on the building burned, for the concrete walls of the station did not even scorch.
We dodged the rocks and torches and forced our way out of the crowd. Yves took Man Denise back to her house. Her neighbors who had heard about the melee came to console her. Soon her house was filled with her friends, the girls who ran errands for her, and some traveling vendors who paid to use her empty rooms as a night stop on their long journeys.
The vendors set up mats and sheets in the two bare rooms, places Mimi and Sebastien must once have used. Man Denise had moved all their things into her own room to make it less empty, and also so that the vendors would not walk away with them, one of the errand girls explained.
In the back of the house was Man Demse’s room, containing a ring of old sealed-off oil drums filled with her own things as well as Mimi and Sebastien’s effects.
The vendors helped her climb on top of a pile of clothes on her bed. They wanted her to take off her tan dress and change into her nightdress, but she refused.
“Forgive me,” she said, excusing herself for the pile of clothes and the disorderliness of the oil drums in her room. “What a difficult day this has been.”
The neighbors offered her many cups of tea. She raised herself to take a sip from each, then buried her head in the pillow.
“Leave me,” she said, “please.”
They left her, but we could all see her from the crowded room opposite hers since her room did not have a door.
Yves returned to his mother’s house that night and I stayed at Man Denise’s. After she fell asleep, I crept back inside and lay down at the foot of her bed. I heard her breath whistling, like someone who tried even in her sleep not to disturb others.
When she woke up in the middle of the night to use her blue enameled chamber pot, she tripped and nearly fell on top of me. I moved the pot closer to her and she climbed on it without questioning what I was doing there.
The next morning before dawn, I went out and sat with the women vendors, who made themselves coffee before moving to the next station on their journey.
As they drank their coffee, the women wondered out loud whether Mimi and Sebastien had disappeared forever in the country of death—as they called it—or if maybe things had returned to normal. Maybe everyone had returned to their everyday work, they hoped.
While they were talking, I heard Man Denise call for water. I hurried inside, ahead of one of the girls who looked after her, picked up the earthen jar leaning against the wall, and handed her a cup of water. She was not fully awake when I held it to her lips. After taking a few sips, she pushed my hand away.
The room had brightened a bit with the morning light. She narrowed her eyes, as if trying to recognize me.
“Which one of them are you?” she asked.
“Amabelle,” I said.
“If you’ve come to pay for the night, put the money on one of the drums,” she said.
“I have not come to pay,” I said.
“What, then?” she asked.
I put the earthen jar and the cup back against the wall.
“I knew Mimi and Sebastien over there,” I said.
She sat up and reached for my ears, rolling my cheeks between her fingers as though my face belonged to her.
“You knew my Micheline and my Sebastien,” she said. “My Mimi and Sebastien, you knew them?”
“Yes,” I said.
Her face broadened with a pained smile. She let go of me and clapped her hands together. “I didn’t want my children to go and stay there forever,” she said. “Their father was killed in the hurricane; Sebastien had a cage full of pigeons that also died in the hurricane, and he was so sad. After the hurricane, this house was taken from us by the Yankis; they wanted to make a road of this house. It was given back to us only after they left. Because we had no house, my son went there first, and me, because I was weak in the lungs, I was to go live with my brother in Port-au-Prince. I had no money so my daughter followed Sebastien and they both sent me some. I came back from Port-au-Prince when the land was given back to us, but my children, maybe they didn’t know that the Yankis left, maybe they didn’t know that the house was ours again.”
She fished in the pocket of her dress and pulled out three painted yellow coffee beans, the kind that Mimi and Sebastien’s bracelets had been made of.
I tapped them with the tip of my fingers and watched as they bounced against one another in her palm.
“These are mine,” she said, closing her hand around them, “from my own bracelet, which broke long ago. I made one bracelet for each of my children and one for myself, but when I was anxious over the children, I tugged too hard at the bracelet and the thread broke. This is all I have left of the beads from my bracelet.”
I wanted her to let me touch the beads again. She reached into the pocket of her dress and lay them there.
“Sit for a moment,” she said.
I moved closer and sat on the edge of her bed.
“So you knew my Micheline?” she asked.
“I did.”
“She was always untamed for a young girl,” she smiled. “Her father gave her the name Micheline. Did she ever tell you this?”
“No,” I said. “She never did.”
“But Sebastien, you knew more about him? You knew him well.”
&nb
sp; “Very well,” I said.
She smiled a knowing smile, Sebastien’s smile, her cheeks ballooning, then caving down on the sides of her lips.
“I named him Sebastien myself,” she said, “after the saint. You know of Saint Sebastien, who died not once, but twice.”
“No, I didn’t know.”
“The first time, soldiers shot arrows at his body and left him for dead. A widow found him and saw he was alive. The widow carried him to her house and treated his wounds. When he was healed, Saint Sebastien went back to the soldiers to show them the miracle of love that was his life; this time the soldiers beat him with sticks until he was truly dead.”
She held her head between her hands as though it were an unfamiliar thing, a load now too heavy for her. Reclining, she clutched the pillow under her head.
“I named him Sebastien,” she said, “because I knew it would be wise if a man could have two deaths. The first one comes quick enough, so it’s good to have another one in reserve.”
I moved towards her and adjusted the pillow beneath her head. I pressed my palm down on her forehead as she looked up, staring directly into my eyes. I could tell that she trusted something about me, even though she herself might not have known what it was.
“A young man came here to see me some days past.” She reached up and pressed down hard on my hand as it was resting on her forehead. “He came here to see me on his way to Port-au-Prince. He said he saw my children killed, in a courtyard, between two government edifices there, in a place he called Santiago. He said he saw them herd my children with a group, make them lie face down on the ground, and shoot them with rifles.”
I felt my fingers stick to her forehead as she pressed down harder on my hand. Her body was shaking, but she was not crying.
“In my place, would you believe this?” she asked.
“No, I would not believe this,” I said. But in my heart I kept thinking, how could I not? Wouldn’t Sebastien have come home already if he was still alive?
“You knew my Micheline. You knew my Sebastien. Do you believe it for yourself?” she insisted.
“No, I do not believe it for myself,” I said.
But I did. I believed it because of what I had seen, in Dajabón, because of what I had heard of La Romana, because of what the people said in the clinic that day about those who’d died in Santiago.
“Leave me, please,” she said, releasing my hand.
“I wish to stay,” I said.
“Leave me.”
As I was going, she stopped me in the doorway and asked, “Did you ever see my children wearing these bracelets I made for them?”
“They were never without them,” I said.
“This is what they say, the people who come here to bring the word to me. It is not just one traveler, but many. They say that my children died with my bracelets on their wrists.”
Pushing her hand inside her pocket, she pressed the beads against the side of her thigh.
“Those who die young, they are cheated,” she said. “Not cheated out of life, because life is a penance, but the young, they’re cheated because they don’t know it’s coming. They don’t have time to move closer, to return home. When you know you’re going to die, you try to be near the bones of your own people. You don’t even think you have bones when you’re young, even when you break them, you don’t believe you have them. But when you’re old, they start reminding you they’re there. They start turning to dust on you, even as you’re walking here and there, going from place to place. And this is when you crave to be near the bones of your own people. My children never felt this. They had to look death in the face, even before they knew what it was. Just like you did, no?”
I nodded yes. Mostly because I knew she wanted me to.
“I wish people would stop coming to tell me they saw my children die,” she said. “I wish I had my hopes that they were living someplace, even if they never did come back to see me again.”
“Maybe those who came with the word, maybe they are mistaken.”
“They are always strangers, the people who come,” she said. “They do not know me. Before they died, either alone or together, my son and daughter told them to come here and tell me about their fates.”
She pushed her hands into her pocket and pressed them down on the beads.
“Leave me now,” she said. “I’m going to dream up my children.”
I strolled like a ghost through the waking life of the Cap, wondering whenever I saw people with deformities—anything from a broken nose to crippled legs—had they been there?
I followed the road from Man Denise’s house out to the quay, where ships entered the harbor with horns blaring while others were being unloaded as they wobbled against the piers. The sacks of rice, beans, and sugar were being distributed among the merchants as a line of bare-chested young men waited with wheelbarrows to carry the stacks off for them. These men, with more than the weight of their bodies in sugar on their heads, shouted in an uneven chorus of rage in order to be allowed to pass through the streets.
34
When I went back to Yves’ house, he had already left for the fields. I sat in the yard with my arms around the traveler’s tree, trying not to pound my head against it.
Man Rapadou came out to the courtyard in her nightdress, smiling. She carried a low chair from her room and sat down next to me.
“You don’t need the justice of the peace,” she said. “You don’t need a confessor. I, Man Rapadou, I know your tale.” She pressed her face close to mine and whispered so the others in the courtyard couldn’t hear. “I asked my son why there is no love between you and him, and he told me about Sebastien.”
As I watched her flawless smile grow wider on her face—which should have been a lot sadder than it was—I stroked the traveler’s tree, not sure what else to do with my hands. I reached up and touched the frilled yellow-green palmetto branches; the narrow stems had woven themselves together like the inside of an enormous wicker basket. I wanted to cry, but I couldn’t. I wanted to scream, but summoning the will to do it already made me feel weak.
“When my son left here, I planted this traveler’s tree, and now look how it’s grown,” Man Rapadou said. “Yves told me you can make dresses and help give birth to children. Since I’m not to have children anymore, maybe you can make me a dress.”
Kindness prevailed on Man Rapadou to let me spend the rest of the day inside, in her son’s bed, by myself. She did not call me to eat, even when the mid-afternoon meal was ready. Instead, she whispered from outside the door that she was saving a plate of food for me to have whenever my stomach felt at ample ease.
As I lay in bed with my arms and legs coiled around myself, I ached inside in places I could neither name nor touch. I could not accept that I’d never see Sebastien again, even though I knew it was possible, just as I would never see my mother and father again, no matter how many times I called them forth both with my own loud voice and the timid one inside my head. When it came to my parents, the older I became, the more they were fading from me, until all I could see were the last few moments spent with them by the river. The rest blended together like the ingredients in a too-long-simmered stew: reveries and dreams, wishes, fantasies. Is that what it would also come to with Sebastien?
I feigned sleep when Yves came to bed that night, but unlike the other times he was not convinced by my frozen pose.
“My beans have sprouted,” he announced. “Looks like I’ll see a harvest.”
I did not want to move. Perhaps he didn’t know about Mimi and Sebastien, and I wasn’t certain how to tell him.
“I hear,” he said, “that the priests at the cathedral listen and mark down testimonials of the slaughter.” This was his gift to me, like the gift the earth had given him in pushing his beans back up in a different form.
“They don’t promise you money.” His voice staggered between high and low, as though he were beginning to think that I might really be asleep. “They’re collectin
g tales for newspapers and radio men. The Generalissimo has found ways to buy and sell the ones here. Even this region has been corrupted with his money.”
I turned on my back, opened my eyes, and tried to find the silvery lines of rusting tin on the ceiling.
“Will you go yourself to see these priests?” I asked.
“I know what will happen,” he said. “You tell the story, and then it’s retold as they wish, written in words you do not understand, in a language that is theirs, and not yours.”
“Will you go?”
“I have already gone and they looked in their books. Their names are not there. There are good days now waiting for me in the fields. This means we will start to have money. You can buy cloth and thread, sew for people, and make money on your own.”
At that moment the future seemed a lot more frightening than the past. Perhaps working the earth, making beans sprout out of dry hard seeds and dust, could make him believe that he had forgotten. But I couldn’t trust time or money to make me forget.
Sometimes I conjured up the group from the border clinic, especially Nounoune’s man, who had woken up in the cadaver pit, and the woman with the large appetite and the rope burns on her neck. I imagined them going forward in their lives, cultivating their gardens, taking their animals to the stream, skipping out of the road to avoid speeding trucks, calling their children in for an evening wash, making love to the people they’d been reunited with.
I wanted to bring them out of my visions into my life, to tell them how glad I was that they had been able to walk into the future, but most important to ask them how it was that they could be so strong, what their secret was, how they could wash their lives clean, if only for brief moments, from the past.
“How did you keep on with the planting, even when nothing was growing?” I asked Yves.
I could hear him breathing loudly, tapping his tongue against the roof of his mouth, trying to find the right phrasing for his answer. “Empty houses and empty fields make me sad,” he said. “They are both too calm, like the dead season.”