He pushed his body down, farther into the mattress, as though our speaking together had made him feel like he was more entitled to do so.
After a long silence, he added, “The night when Joel was hit by the automobile, it was almost me who died.”
“I think Sebastien felt like this, too,” I said.
“No, no,” he said. “Joel, Sebastien, and me, we were walking on the road together. Joel was in the middle, and Sebastien and me, we were on either side of him. I was on the side closest to the road. We saw the light and heard the automobile in the same instant. By the time we turned around, it was almost on my neck. Joel pushed me aside, so he had no time to run himself. He was struck and thrown into the ravine.”
I listened for signs that Man Rapadou was in a deep sleep in the next room, her loud snoring and occasional shifts on the bed.
“Then the automobile stopped and the people came out,” he said. “I didn’t see Sebastien. I didn’t know where he was. I thought he was hit, too. I ran off to hide behind a tree in the dark. The old man wanted to stay and look for us, but the other one, the son-in-law, was in a great haste.”
I wanted to tell him that he was right to run, brave even, that perhaps it was Joel’s day to die, that there might have even been a worse death waiting for Joel in the slaughter. I wanted to say most of those things that never comfort the person hearing them, but only the one saying them.
“It could have been me too at the church with Mimi and Sebastien if I hadn’t gone to sell the wood.” He continued. “Yes, I saw them put Sebastien and Mimi and all the others on a truck. I saw it all from the road. They made them stand in groups of six and then forced them to climb. The priests asked to stay with the people, but they took the priests separately, and then they took the doctor and the people together. If he wanted to be a Haitian, they told Doctor Javier, they would treat him like a Haitian. I saw Mimi climb when her turn came. Sebastien was in line behind her. Her knees went weak when she was climbing, and she almost fell. The doctor offered his hand to her, and Sebastien supported her from the rear. I saw all this from the road where I was hiding. I wanted to do for them what Joël had done for me, but I didn’t. I couldn’t. Even in the river, with Wilner, I couldn’t. The thought came to me that I should swim across the river again, collect his body to be buried on this side. All the soldiers. All the guns. I couldn’t. I have not been able to do for anyone what Joël did for me. And I never will. No. Never. Because the more I see people die, the more I want to guard my own life.”
I reached over and placed my hand on his sweaty trembling leg, to keep him quiet, to keep him still. My fingers crept up his thighs with his hands guiding mine. I felt for his face in the dark and touched his large Adam’s apple, which bobbed up and down as though about to slide out of his mouth.
He turned over on his side and slipped my nightdress off my shoulders. For a while we both lay on our backs staring at the darkness above us. What now? What then? Who else did we know to turn to?
“It could have been me too at the church with Mimi and Sebastien,” I said. “If I hadn’t noticed two bloody spots on the back of the señora’s dress and stayed a while longer with her. And maybe Odette died in the river because I pressed down on her nose too hard, though this was not my intention.”
“Odette died when Wilner died,” he said. “They killed her when they killed him.”
And for this I was grateful. More grateful than he knew.
His body immediately leaped up to meet mine when I climbed on top of him. I was probably lighter than he expected, bonier and smaller framed than he’d thought. For a while I felt as though he was carrying me, the way Señora Valencia had carried her son and daughter in her womb, the way Kongo might have carried his son Joël, after he’d died, the way first he and then the stranger had carried Odette. Then it was me carrying him. After a while it was as though we were both afloat at the same time, joined in a way that we could never be speaking together, or even crying together.
For several months, as I’d imagined Sebastien’s return, I’d wondered whether my flesh could feel anything but pain. Perhaps Yves had wondered the same about his own.
His breathing was loud and fast like the vapor raising the lid off a steaming pot. Then his body froze abruptly and became heavier and I thought that his heart had stopped, that he had died right there on top of me. He ground his teeth and mumbled to himself, trying to push out everything that wanted to remain safely hidden in him. In the end, all he let out was a flash flood of tears, tears that rolled down my forehead, stung my eyes, made me sneeze when they slipped into my nostrils, and tasted like my own when they fell on my tongue.
As he rolled back on his side of the bed, I felt an even larger void in the aching pit of my stomach. I put on my nightdress and slipped under the sheets. He stepped off the bed, put on his pants, and went outside, leaving the door half open. Sitting under the traveler’s tree, he examined the sky and opened a new pack of La Nationale cigarettes.
In the moonlight, I could almost see the silhouette of bones pushing themselves out in his back. After smoking a few of the cigarettes, he threw the rest of the pack against the side of the house and came back inside. When he climbed onto the bed, I pretended to be asleep—or even dead.
35
The next afternoon, when I went back to Man Denise’s house, the doors were bolted shut and one of the girls who had been looking after her told me that Man Denise had buried some coffee beads in the yard and then returned to her people in Port-au-Prince.
“Do you know where in Port-au-Prince her people live?” I asked.
She shook her head no, turned her back to me, and looked towards the lime-colored hills on the other side of the house.
“Maybe she was tired of being told the same thing, in so many ways,” the girl said. “Might be she went someplace where only her children would find her if they come back.”
She was mending a blouse that didn’t need mending at all, something she was making smaller to fit her own body. I offered to fix the blouse for her, but she would not let it out of her hands. So I watched as she stitched her uneven seams and sewed it too narrow for her shape.
“Better you go,” she said. “She is never coming back to this house. Her people will travel from Port-au-Prince to sell the house, is what she said. But she herself will never set her foot here again.” The girl tore out the new seams she had sewn for the blouse and started making darts in the lining. I wished I could have been with Man Denise much longer. I wish I could have done more for her. But some sorrows were simply too individual to share.
“Better you go now,” the girl said.
So I went to the Cap’s cathedral, where a late afternoon Mass was being held. A group of consecrants lined up to accept the Eucharist at the feet of a giant crucifix that was bleeding crimson paint for blood.
I stood in the back near a slanted wall of votive candles and watched the whole assembly march to the altar and then back up again, crossing themselves and bowing to the crucifix one last time before they turned their backs to it.
A woman slipped in next to me with her hands outstretched towards the candles and a transparent window of La Vierge, whose dress was made of sun sieved through blue glass.
“No communion for you?” she asked, looking away from the Virgin’s downcast eyes.
“No communion,” I said.
“No confession?”
“No confession.”
“Even as you say one simple word,” she said, with an open-mouthed smile, “I know the sound of your talk. Did you just return?”
“Some time ago,” I said.
“Me too. Some time ago,” she said. “I used to have a little trade of my own, selling things there, but now I work for the priests here, cleaning the church, and cooking for them.”
I looked her over for a mark, a scar, some damage that I could see. She was looking at my legs, wondering perhaps if that was the only way in which I’d been hurt.
“Wher
e did you live there?” she asked.
“Alegría,” I said.
“Never went there,” she said.
“Where did you live?” I asked her.
“Higüey,” she said. “Was it cane country where you were?”
“Small cane, small mills.”
“The place where you lived, is Alegría what it was called officially or did our people christen it this way?”
“I’ve always heard it called this,” I said.
“People I was with, they’d christen places. And the name they gave these places nobody outside knew. Was there much joy where you were, that they’d call it Alegría?”
For as long as I could remember, people had always called the cluster of rich homes and mountains, streams, and cane fields that surrounded Señora Valencia’s house, Alegría.
“Maybe the people who called it this were jesting,” I said.
She let out a laugh too noisy for any sacred place.
“You here to talk to the priests about the slaughter?” she asked. “Father Emil, he’s the one who listens to the stories.”
She pointed out Father Emil. He was the shorter and fatter of the two priests standing at the altar. The other one was older, French, and white, with hair like a mare’s forelock falling into his eyes.
“You will have to wait some,” she said, “until after the Mass and all the alms are given for the day.”
After the Mass, the priests went out on the steps in front of the cathedral and distributed bread to the poor waiting outside. The woman ran to a back room and came out with two rolls of bread. She placed them in my hand without a word so I would not be shamed by accepting them.
As the fathers walked past us on the way back inside, she grabbed Father Emil’s cassock and said, “Father, this one here has been waiting a long time to see you.”
Father Emil looked down at the bread in my hand and gave me a nod of pity. The woman pressed her hands against my back and shoved me towards him.
I followed him to a room behind the altar. The room had a wide desk, two cane-back chairs, a small cross on the wall, and a glass case full of books for the school the priests ran behind the church.
“You’ve come to talk about the slaughter?” he asked, offering me one of the fragile cane-back chairs. He slipped behind the desk and sat down. “To all those who tell us of lost relations, we can offer nothing, save for our prayers and perhaps a piece of bread. So we have stopped letting them tell us these terrible stories. It was taking all our time, and there is so much other work to be done.”
“Father, I have not come to tell you a tale,” I said. “And I’ve already received a piece of bread.”
“Then how can I be of service to you, my child?”
“I want to know if you have heard of Father Romain or Father Vargas, who lived and served on the other side of the river?”
He joined his hands together and pushed his body forward, towards my chair.
“In churches all over this land, we have prayed for them,” he said, glancing up at the simple cross on the wall behind me. “Word of their struggle has reached us through our other brothers in the faith.”
He seemed pleased that there was at least something he could do for me.
“So they are not dead?”
“They suffered much in prison, but they are still alive. Some members of the church approached the Generalissimo on their behalf and they were both liberated. After he was released, Father Romain was asked to leave the other side, even though he wanted to stay and help those of our people who have remained there.”
I reached across the desk and squeezed his joined hands.
“Did you know them?” he asked.
“I did know them, yes.”
“Father Romain is living near the border, in Ouanammthe, in a tiny shack with his younger sister, not a nun, a blood sister.” He smiled. “A singer. The house is near an old grange where a clinic was erected during the crisis. He wanted to be as close to his old parish as possible.”
“You are a miracle, Father,” I said, kissing the still warm rolls of bread rather than him.
36
That night, I wrote a simple note to give to Father Romain if I saw him. My words were written for Doctor Javier, who, if he was not still in prison, might visit Father Romain at the border.
Por favor—Doctor Javier,
I would be most grateful for your guidance
as to where to find Michehne Onius and
Sebastien Onius, who are said to have
perished in Santiago at the time of
the slaughter. Desiring to know if you
have seen and know this to be true.
Signed,
Amabelle Désir
I added the location of Man Rapadou’s house, along with the street number of the merchant on the quay who sold us most of our sugar and flour. If Doctor Javier was ever handed my note, he would know where to find me.
When Yves came to bed that night, he kept himself on the far end of the mattress and took great pains for our skins not to touch. Before he fell asleep, I told him I would be going to the border the next day to visit Father Romain.
The following morning, he started early for the fields, but left ten gourdes with his mother, some of it for me to pay for the camión to take me there.
During the journey back to the border, I was struck by the size and beauty of the mountains, their hiplike shapes becoming clearer as we drove alongside them.
The camión stopped in front of a field of dust-feathered grass surrounding the grange where the old makeshift clinic had been. As I approached the grounds where the dead and wounded had lain, I thought of Odette and my stomach churned.
The ground was slipping beneath my feet; the sun seemed to be moving closer until I felt like it was stationed next to my face, melting my skin and blinding my eyes. The rocks on the ground become as large as pillows and finally I fell, making of the earth a warm bed.
I knew I should call for help, but there was no one coming and going, alive or dead. Besides, I felt so rested, I did not want to be disturbed. Above me spun a sky full of grass and the planks nailed in twos across the grange door.
I remembered once, when I was a girl, watching an infant boy my mother and father had midwifed into this world. A month later, the mother left the boy with us when she went to market. While he was sleeping, he rolled himself into a ball and spun around on the bed. I watched him do this for some time before I called for my father, who was cutting wood outside, and my mother, who was washing clothes behind the house.
“I think this baby has the evil in him,” I told them.
My father laughed and slapped the little boy’s bottom, which made him stop his spasms. Then he explained, my father, that sometimes in the first year, babies remembered their births with their bodies and had to repeat it many times before they could forget. When they did this, you were to help them recollect the whole thing, especially their coming out, by tapping them on their bottom as had been done to them after their birth.
Some time later, I woke up and stumbled to my feet. Miraculously, I had not hurt myself. I wiped my face with the back of both hands and walked to a limestone house in the distance, a solitary lodging in a large open field. An old woman sat crouched in the doorway, shelling peas on her lap. Her thumbs dashed in and out of the soft green pods, thrusting out perfectly round green peas into a half filled bowl.
“I’ve come to see Father Romain,” I said.
She pointed down the field to a boxlike clapboard shack with a zinc roof.
The front door was open, but I knocked anyway. A young woman came to the door, wearing a flowered sundress, the top of which barely covered her small flat breasts. She was fanning her face with two long flame tree pods that made a haphazard melody as she waved them back and forth.
“Is Father Romain here?” I asked.
“Who wants him?” She continued to swing the pods, making it hard for me to hear her voice above the clatter.
r /> “They call me Amabelle,” I said. “I knew him in Alegría.”
Swinging the pods even harder, she said, “I do this when I’m not in view of my brother so he knows where I am. It comforts him.”
Stepping out of the doorway, she motioned for me to walk inside.
“Do not be saddened if he does not remember you,” she said. “So many people have come to him asking about their relations, but when he was arrested, he was always kept with the other priest, Father Vargas. He was never with the Haitian prisoners.”
She stopped the rattling and led me through a bare room, then out to the yard, where Father Romain was sitting on a rocker beneath a cluster of mango trees.
“Jacques!” she shouted. “You have a visitor, someone who knew you in Alegría.”
Father Romain was wearing a straw hat that covered most of his face. A thicket of sable hair peeped through the open collar of his long roomy shirt. His hands trembled as he squinted, fumbling to tie a piece of thin orange paper around the skeleton of a small kite. When his jaws quivered, he reached up and stroked his cheek to control the twitching.
“Who has come?” he muttered. Spittle was glistening from either side of his mouth. Though still young, he had the look of those who no longer recognized anything, people for whom life was blending into one large shadow, their vision clouding over as they surrendered their sight to very old age.
The sister left the yard, went into the room, and brought out another set of chairs. Father Romain’s eyes traveled up and down, from the trunk of the mango trees and then back to his sister, before he saw me.
“Speak loudly and tell him what you must tell him,” she said. “His mind wanders.”
“Father, my name is Amabelle Désir,” I said.
“Yes, Amabelle Désir.” His voice was a distant mumble as he held the kite up to his face.
“Father, do you recognize me?”
He shook his head from side to side.
“You don’t remember me?”
“No,” he said.
“Father, I need to know if perhaps you encountered Mimi and Sebastien Onius before or after you were in prison.”