Over the years, his father’s land had grown into more than two dozen acres of bean fields. The more he produced, the more land he bought. His family now owned rice paddies, sorghum and wheat plots, coffee, cacao, and yam lots. He had also built himself a cinder-block workhouse near a creek where he consulted with his workers, ate his midday meals, and took siestas during the late afternoons. The creek itself was surrounded with mango, avocado, and papaya trees, under which roamed guinea fowls and wild pigeons that everyone in the area was free to hunt, just as they were to help themselves to the ripening fruits on all of Yves’ trees. In his mother’s old rocker, though, he was simply a poor man alone, sipping from a bottle of the Gardere family’s Reserve du Domaine and dozing off now and again between glances at the sky. Before swallowing a mouthful, he would spill the costly rum on the ground, forming a circle of bubbled dust for the ones we don’t see, the untouchables, the invisibles.
He and I both had chosen a life of work to console us after the slaughter. We had too many phantoms to crowd those quiet moments when every ghost could appear in its true form and refuse to go away.
As I sat on a white plastic bucket and watched him from my doorway, I regretted that we hadn’t found more comfort in each other. After I realized that Sebastien was not coming back, I wanted to find someone who would both help me forget him and mourn him with me. Perhaps this was too great a gift to ask of a man who was in search of the same thing for himself.
The plastic bucket slipped out from beneath me as I got up. Yves turned around and watched me stumble, trying to maintain my balance on my bad knee. By the time he reached me, I was already on my feet. He let go of my hand and walked back to the rocking chair, picked up the bottle of rum, and went into his room.
Once he went, Man Rapadou crossed the yard and came to my sewing room. She had a cold compress on her forehead and was trying to keep drips of water from sliding into her eyes. She dropped her wide body down on a long skirt to which I was adding some last pleats before going to bed.
“Man Rapadou, you are not sleeping well?” I asked.
“It’s all this walking in the sun today,” she said. “I should not have walked so long in the sun today.”
“Are you sick?”
“Not sick, but very tired.” She lay back on my bed, which was a plain cotton mattress kept purposely low, close to the ground.
“Amabelle, my life, like yours, has always been rich with dreams,” she said. “My head barely touches the pillow at night when I dream that I’m falling.”
“Falling?”
“I dream often that I am falling,” she said. “And they get bigger, the things I’m falling from. First I am an infant falling out of my mother’s body. Then I’m falling off my mother and father’s house, a wooden house in the middle of a coffee grove. Then it’s the house of Yves’ father I’m falling from. Then I’m falling off little hills and cliffs. Then it’s mountains; I’m falling off mountains. The next thing to fall from after mountain is the clouds, non?”
“When you fall, where do you come to land?” I asked. Perhaps it was an unnecessary question, but one I needed an answer to, to prepare myself for the time when I would be having these same kinds of dreams myself.
“I always wake up before I come to land,” she said, “even if I see myself getting closer to the ground every day.”
“What do you make of this type of dream?”
“When I was a girl,” she said, searching with her coarse bent fingers for the contour of her own face, now buried under many layers of crow’s feet and wrinkles, “my skin was so dry that sometimes it peeled off in scabs pink with blood, like fish scales. I was very clumsy because my feet were weak, but I knew how to slip into a fall, how to not fight the force of the earth pulling me down. When I became a young woman, somehow my feet got stronger and I never thought about falling again, until now.”
I tried to gather her into my arms, which was impossible to do, given the breadth of her figure, so I patted the flesh on her back, between her neck and her waist as if burping a growing child.
“It’s a hard thing to know that life will go on one day without you,” she said.
I too felt and lived my own body’s sadness more and more every day. The old and new sorrows were suddenly inconsolable, and I knew that the brief moments of joy would not last forever. When I saw a beautiful young man I tried to pair him up with my younger self. I dreamed of the life without pain that he might have brought me, the tidy parlor and spotless furnishings that our young children would not be allowed to touch, except to dust off on Saturdays.
“Old age is not meant to be survived alone,” Man Rapadou said, her voice trailing with her own hidden thoughts. “Death should come gently, slowly, like a man’s hand approaching your body. There can be joy in impatience if there is time to find the joy.”
“How long has it been, Man Rapadou, since a man touched your big belly?” I asked, to make her laugh.
“Not as long as since one had touched yours,” she said, measuring the length of her own smile with the edge of her fingertips. “From time to time, life takes you by surprise. You sit in your lakou eating mangoes. You let the mango seeds fall where they may, and one day you wake up and there’s a mango tree in your yard.”
I knew she meant this as a compliment to me, a kind word for my sudden arrival at her house some years before.
“I have not told this to anyone,” she said, her hands patting her too wide hips, “but I believe there are many who suspect, even my son. The Yankis had poisoned Yves’ father’s mind when he was in their prisons here; he was going to spy on others for Yanki money after he left their jail. Many people who were against the Yankis being here were going to die because of his betrayal. And so I cooked his favorite foods for him and filled them with flour-fine glass and rat poison. I poisoned him. Maybe this is why I am falling in all my dreams. I’m going to him soon and I’m afraid. What will I say to him in the life after? ‘Love is only pleasure; honor is duty.’ I cannot simply say this thing that I told myself then. It is not enough now. I should not tell you this about me. You might do the same to my son. But then you do not love him like I did Yves’ father, but greater than my love for this man was love for my country. I could not let him trade us all, sell us to the Yankis.
“I often hear that silence is holiness, and still I’m not holy,” she said, wiping a tear from the side of her face. “I believed then that fortune would favor the brave. How young I was. There are cures for everything except death. I wish the sun had set on my days when I was still a young, happy woman whose man was by her side, with joy in his eyes and honor in his heart.”
The next morning, I left Man Rapadou asleep, with her sorrows, in my bed, to go climb up to the uneven cobblestone road that led to the citadel. There, on the outer galleries, I walked among a group of tourists who were wandering through, photographing the barracks, the stone walls, the rusting artillery, and the vaulted ceilings.
Using broken phrases in various tongues, local boys offered themselves as guides for individual tours through the interior corridors. One of the special guides was a very large Haitian man wearing a long-sleeved white shirt and a black tie. He was leading a group of twelve young white foreigners in beach attire.
With a sweep of his fingers, the man guided his group to the edge of a low wall to show them the ruins of the Palais Sans Souci, the king’s old official residence down below.
Pointing to the goat-grazed hills of reddish grass in the direction where my parents’ house used to stand, he said, “It was not unusual for people to live here, before the constant earthquakes drove most of them away. You could feel even the smallest earthquake in those hills.” I couldn’t recognize anymore any place that resembled where our house had been, nor did I want to. Land is something you care about only when you have heirs. All my heirs would be like my ancestors: revenants, shadows, ghosts.
I wasn’t certain why I had picked that particular group of white foreigners and Haiti
an guide to follow until I realized that both the guide’s talk and the things that members of the group were whispering to one another were m Spanish.
I trailed them to the open courtyard on one of the top tiers of the citadel. It was a place I had always avoided going as a child. In the middle was a raised block of concrete shaped like a coffin, a place sometimes believed to be the grave of Henry I.
As the group circled the concrete block, the guide told the story of Henry I.
“Henry Christophe was at first a foreigner here,” he said. “He was born a slave in the Windward Islands and during his life made himself a king here.” The large man tugged at the end of his tie as he spoke. Then either to caution his young charges against vainglory—or to be fair to history—he added, “The king was sometimes cruel. He used to march battalions of soldiers off the mountain, ordering them to plunge to their deaths as a disciplinary example to the others. Thousands of our people died constructing what you see here. But this is not singular to him. All monuments of this great size are built with human blood.”
To make clear his sentiment, he tapped the mortar pile with his fists, reminding the group of the most unforgivable weaknesses of the dead: their absence and their silence.
“When the king was fifty-three years old,” he continued, “he had a sudden apoplexy, which left him paralyzed. His enemies organized a revolt against him, and, rather than surrender, he shot himself with what some say was either a silver or a gold bullet. It is said that he was buried in this palace, many believe in this spot, but there is some mystery as to whether or not he is really under here. He could be anywhere in this palace or nowhere here at all.”
As they moved away from the mortar, the man inspected the faces in the group to determine that everyone was still there with him. “Famous men never truly die,” he added. “It is only those nameless and faceless who vanish like smoke into the early morning air.”
40
This past is more like flesh than air; our stories testimonials like the ones never heard by the justice of the peace or the Generalissimo himself.
His name is Sebastien Onius and his story is like a fish with no tail, a dress with no hem, a drop with no fall, a body in the sunlight with no shadow.
His absence is my shadow; his breath my dreams. New dreams seem a waste, needless annoyances, too much to crowd into the tiny space that remains.
Still I think I want to find new manners of filling up my head, new visions for an old life, waterless rivers to cross and real waterfall caves to slip into over a hundred times each day.
His name is Sebastien Onius. Sometimes this is all I know. My back aches now in all those places that he claimed for himself, arches of bare skin that belonged to him, pockets where the flesh remains fragile, seared like unhealed burns where each fallen scab uncovers a deeper wound.
I wish at least that he was part of the air on this side of the river, a tiny morsel in the breeze that passes through my room in the night. I wish at least that some of the dust of his bones could trail me in the wind.
Men with names never truly die. It is only the nameless and faceless who vanish like smoke into the early morning air.
His name is Sebastien Onius. Seven years before his own death, he saw his father die. Death to Sebastien Onius was as immense as a tree-tossing beast of a raging hurricane. It was an event that split open the sky and cracked the ground, made the heavens wail and the clouds weep. It was not for one person to live alone.
Perhaps there was water to greet his last fall, to fold around him and embrace him like a feather-filled mattress. Perhaps there were ceremonial words recited in his ears: “Ale avek Bon Dye,” “Go with God,” “Go in peace,” a farewell not so solitary and abrupt, a parting like the dimming of the twilight, darkening the sky for shadows and stars at play.
His name is Sebastien Onius and his spirit must be inside the waterfall cave at the source of the stream where the cane workers bathe, the grotto of wet moss and chalk and luminous green fresco—the dark green of wet papaya leaves.
Sometimes I can make myself dream him out of the void to listen. A handsome, steel-bodied man, he carries a knapsack woven from palm leaves as he walks out of the cave into the room where I sleep.
“Amabelle, it is Sebastien, come to see you,” he says. “I have brought remedies for your wounds. I’ve brought citronella and cedarwood to keep the ants and mosquitoes from biting your skin, camphor, basil, and bitter oranges to reduce your fevers and keep your joints limber. I’ve brought ginger and celery, aniseed, and cinnamon for your digestion, turmeric for your teeth, and kowosol tea for pleasant dreams.”
He stands over my bed, fills his lungs with the cloud of lint in the room. I reach over and try to touch him, but he scatters with my reach, like a stream of dust caught in a strong beam of noontime sunlight.
I sense that we no longer know the same words, no longer speak the same language. There is water, wind, land, and mountains between us, a shroud of silence, a curtain of fate.
“Tell me, please, Sebastien,” I say. “I must know. Did you and Mimi suffer greatly?”
He breathes in more of the cloth dust in my room, as though he wants to inhale me and everything there too.
“Sebastien, the slaughter showed me that life can be a strange gift,” I say. “Breath, like glass is always in danger. I chose a living death because I am not brave. It takes patience, you used to say, to raise a setting sun. Two mountains can never meet, but perhaps you and I can meet again. I am coming to your waterfall.”
41
At first glance, the Massacre appeared like any of the three or four large rivers in the north of Haiti. On a busy market day, it was simply a lively throughway beneath a concrete bridge, where women sat on boulders at the water’s edge to pound their clothes clean, and mules and oxen stopped to diminish their thirst.
The tide was low for October. So low that when the washing women dipped in a bucket, they came up with half of it full of water and the other half full of red-brown sand.
“You see how the river looks now,” one of the women said as she threw a handful of sand back into the flow. “When the current rises, the water can kiss the bridge.”
On the bridge, young soldiers whose faces looked too youthful to hold a past marched back and forth, patrolling the line marked by a chain that separated our country from theirs. They wore dark green uniforms, carried their rifles on straps on their shoulders, and drummed the ground with their shin-stroking laced boots. Our soldiers stayed farther back, away from the bridge, in the customshouse near an open road, the better to watch for invaders.
The border had lost a number of its trees. Holes were still too evident where the trees had been plucked out and replaced with poles that held up doubled strands of barbed wire. All along the walls of spiked metal were signs that cautioned travelers not to cross anba fil, beneath the wires.
A tall, bowlegged old man with a tangled gray beard, wearing three layers of clothing padded with straw, walked up behind me. His clothes and hands were covered with dirt, but his face was clean, smelling of vanilla and coconut. His eyes seemed a bright cerise, lush and dense like velvet. The washing women called him “Pwofese” and cackled as he circled his arms around my waist.
“Where are you going, Pwofese?” they took turns asking, as though playing a game of chant.
“Grass won’t grow where I stand,” the professor whispered in my ears, in a voice that I could tell was rarely used, except perhaps on frolicsome occasions like this one. “I’m walking to the dawn.”
Before I could drag myself away, the professor planted a damp kiss on my lips. I scrubbed the kiss off, reaching into the river for a fistful of water to cleanse my mouth. The washing women threw their heads back, opening their mouths to the sky to laugh.
“The professor’s not been the same since the slaughter,” one of them said. “Don’t rub it off. Leave his kiss on your lips. Don’t you know that if you are kissed by a crazy man, it brings you luck?”
/> As the professor ran off into the open plains, I walked towards a bare-chested boy who was sitting on the riverbank scribbling in a small drawing book. I had been told that he could help me find someone who could take me across the edwidge danticat river. Squatting beside him, I dipped my feet in the water. The current bubbled, gently pulsing beneath my soles, like a baby’s fontanel.
“Do you know someone who can help me cross the border without papers?” I asked, keeping my eyes on the water. The boy said nothing until he finished writing a whole phrase in jumbled schoolboy lettering.
“If you want to cross the border without papers, it will have to be at night,” he whispered.
“Can it be tonight?”
“Perhaps,” he said.
That night, I was met on the road before the bridge by a man in a black jeep. The man, the sole driver and occupant, ran a lottery along the border area—at least that’s what the boy had told me. He wore a denim cap on his head and a red bandanna over half his face, starting at his nose.
Stepping out into the night, the man showed me the place he had reserved for me in the back of the car, a small hollow beneath a heavy blanket behind the front seat.
“They know me at the crossing,” he mumbled in Kreyol. “They won’t trouble with me.”
I squeezed myself into the cramped space, trying hard to ignore the stabs of pain coursing through my knee. Keeping my head down, I reached out and gave him the payment that he and the boy had agreed on. He eased the side door shut and we started on our way.
There was only a brief pause at the first border crossing. The driver slowed the car at the Haitian customshouse to deliver a bribe to the night guards.
We came to another stop at the Dominican post on the bridge. I heard voices, lifted the sheet, and raised my head to one of the side windows.