“Stay down,” the driver commanded.
In spite of what he said, I kept my eyes at the bottom edge of the window. The border guards expressed regret for the wait and quickly opened the car gates for the driver.
“Until tomorrow night,” the driver said as he handed the guards more money.
I slept through most of the military checkpoints leading towards Alegría. Sleep had been a comfort to me for the last two decades. It was as close to disappearing as I could come.
The sun had risen when I woke up. The car was speeding along a dirt road between two walls of violet cane. The driver had removed the red bandanna from his face, but still had the cap tilted on one side of his head. He was watching me through the raised mirror in front of him, and I in turn examined his eyes. They were deep set and far apart, the color of clouded amber.
When he saw me looking at him, he removed his cap and turned away. He was a young man, younger than Sebastien when he had disappeared. His hair was braided in long thin plaits, dropping over his ears.
“So it is fitting now,” I said in Kreyol, “for me to look at your face?”
“This is dangerous, what I am doing for you,” he said. His voice was jubilant and loud. “Even with the Generalissimo dead, things are still not tranquil here. There are protests and riots in the capital. I believe there’ll be another Yanki invasion soon.”
The cane fields stretched for some distance, the stalks all crammed together like a crowd at carnival. He stopped the jeep in the middle of the fields and motioned for me to move to the seat next to him. As I climbed in, he disappeared inside the cane, then came out pulling his pants up by the belt.
“Why are you making this journey?” he asked, speeding down the road again.
“Are you certain you know the road to Alegría?” I asked.
“I will meet you in the square there, to take you back this afternoon,” he said.
“And you? What will you do this morning?”
“I will not be in Alegría,” he said.
We came out of the cane onto an asphalt road that led to a closed park across from a yellow government edifice.
“Here it is, your joyful land.” He stopped in front of a cluster of frangipani with white and yellow blossoms, shading wooden benches at the entrance onto the square. “Wait for me here this afternoon. Try not to arrive early, or you might be mistaken for a beggar.”
He climbed back into the jeep and sped down a wide boulevard, keeping one hand out, waving until he turned a corner and disappeared.
The main avenue rose upward towards several narrow streets with rows of palm-shaded sidewalks. Alegría was now a closed town, a group of haciendas behind high walls cemented with metal spikes and broken bottles at the top. Flamboyants towered over these walls and old men crouching in cane-back chairs guarded the gates. Every house was a fortress, everyone an intruder.
As I walked back and forth along the cloistered cobble-stoned streets, in the shadow of these walls, I felt as though I was in a place I had never seen before. There were only a few markers I recognized: three giant kapok trees, which showed their age by their expanse, and the row of almond trees—but perhaps they were newer ones, on perhaps a newer almond road.
I stopped to rest my knees and watched the streets fill with schoolchildren and their parents, pantry maids starting out for fresh food, vendors marching up to the gates to tempt the gatekeepers, and husbands leaving in chauffeured automobiles with curtained back windows. I was lost. The park where the driver had left me was perhaps where Father Vargas and Father Romain’s church had been. The cane mills and compounds seemed to have vanished, and even after half a day’s wandering, and being too proud (and perhaps too frightened) to inquire about them, I couldn’t find either the stream or the waterfall.
I didn’t know what Señora Valencia’s life situation was, save for what I had heard from a woman I’d sewn a dress for, one who traveled back and forth across the border to peddle her wares, that both the señora and her husband were still alive. Her husband was now an official in the government. He was mostly in the capital, but she stayed in Alegría with her daughter. Though still married, the señora and her husband were living their own lives, the way things had always been. In any case, when I couldn’t find the stream and the waterfall, I decided to test the señora’s promise to stay in Alegría, near the graves of her mother and son, bound as we are to the places where our dead are lain.
After mistakenly appearing at more than two dozen gates, I finally found a house that looked like the one I’d been told belonged to Señora Valencia now. A large wrought-iron gate had been erected where Juana and Luis’ house might once have stood. A cobbled drive wound its way up through a new stone-studded garden towards a pink washed patio.
A little girl in a brown school uniform ran up to the gate as soon as I got there.
“Are you the egg woman?” she asked.
“The egg woman?”
“My mami told me to watch for the egg woman.”
“Who is your mami?”
“Mami.”
“Who is the egg woman?”
“You are.” The girl smiled; she was missing four of her front teeth, two at the top, and two at the bottom. By the time an older boy arrived, she had already lifted the latch and opened the gate for me. The young man rushed forward to undo what she had done, but I had already stepped into the garden.
“She is the egg woman,” the girl said, smiling up at him. He tousled her hair and looked me up and down, searching for an egg basket.
“Is Señora Valencia still living here?” I asked. “My name is Amabelle Désir.”
After all those years, I was surprised that my Spanish was still understandable.
The young man swayed nervously and shifted his weight from foot to foot. We had four more spectators now: three gardeners and a housemaid with a folded sheet pressed against her chest. The young man lowered his head, then looked to the others as if for help.
“I knew the señora for a very long time before I went away,” I tried to assure him.
“They have a new house.”
“I will show you.” The little girl skipped out before they could stop her. The young man trailed behind her.
The new house was only a few kilometers from the old one, in a more protected area. You had to walk through a guava field before seeing the entrance. It was a large hacienda, four residences joined by a breezeway with a sun parlor and a vast garden on the side. I wrapped my fingers around one of the heart shapes in the grillwork of the gate and peeked at a row of wicker banquettes between the flame trees in the garden, which was filled with twice as many species of orchids as Papi had ever grown.
The girl rattled the gate playfully until a woman walked out on one of the front galleries and peered down at the entrance. The woman had a meaty dimpled face with round shoulders and a fleshy build. She was wearing a sand-colored uniform with a piece of faded matching cloth on her head. She called out for a manservant, but when the manservant did not come, she walked down to us herself, the dust rag still in her hand.
“What do you want?” she asked abruptly in Kreyòl-accented Spanish. Her jaws were tightly drawn, forming a perfect sorrowful ring with the rest of her face. Her voice squeaked one moment and was hoarse the next, as though she risked running out of breath at any time. She gave the girl and older boy a nod of recognition, then kept her eyes on the path behind us, as if waiting for someone to ambush her through the grill in the gate. When she stretched her neck, I saw that she had rope burns above her collarbone. They were even deeper and more pronounced than those on the woman at the border clinic, a deeply furrowed field.
“I would like to see la duefia, Señora Valencia,” I said.
“Why?” she asked, pausing for a breath. “What do you want with her?”
“My name is Amabelle Désir,” I said. “She will want to see me.”
“You can go,” she told the girl and the young man.
The young man d
ragged the girl away. The woman walked up the drive to the patio, with the haste of those afraid to displease at every moment of their day. Working for others, you were always rushing to or away from them.
She was out of breath and visibly uncomfortable when she returned to unlock the gate and motion for me to follow her up the drive, through a rock garden under the guava trees.
As I followed the handmaid down the long corridors inside the house, a surprising feeling of joy took hold of my body. I was beginning to feel glad that I had come, happy that I was going to see the señora again.
The place was airy, spacious, a breeze blowing in from the open terraces. Everything was polished and luminous: from the beveled brass staircase railings, to the old-fashioned chandeliers dangling from the ceilings. The woman led me through the pantry on the way to the parlor. In the center of the pantry stood a marble-topped cooking table. I slid my hand over the cooking table as I went by to wipe the dust and sweat from my palms. The table surface felt pleasantly cold, like the water in the old stream before dawn.
The parlor itself was in the middle of the house, with arches dividing it into several sections, four fans circling from the ceiling, and staircases with metal banisters leading to the top part of the house. The walls were covered with photographs of the señora and her family. I slowed my steps to gaze at them, trying to learn as much as I could before I saw her, in order to avoid any inevitably painful inquiries about those who were no longer in existence or who were no longer considered members of the family. All of her husband’s pictures were taken in his uniform. The medals had grown larger and more numerous on his chest. Time had fattened him up, softened his youthful scowl. From frame to gilded frame, he had slowly turned into an old man.
Rosalinda too had a time line of photographs, first darker and taller above a small group of children in apronlike school uniforms, then posing like a beauty queen with a head of thick curly dark hair draping her shoulders as she was surrounded by the thirty youngsters of her court at her quince, and at last one of her leaning into the arms of a young man who carried a sword, attired in a uniform like her father’s while she wore a bridal dress.
In Rosalinda’s photographs, I could see traces of both her mother and father. She had maintained her father’s bronze complexion, had taken his height; but mostly she had her grandfather’s, Papi’s, worldly and pensive smile, with similar thought lines across her forehead.
The largest image in the room, however, was a painting of a bone-white baby boy, watchful and smiling, in an ivory pearl and satin baptism dress with a matching bonnet framing his water lily-colored cheeks.
Señora Valencia sat facing this portrait as the handmaid and I waited for her to turn around.
When she finally rose, I saw that she was wearing a hibiscus print caftan that reached down to her ankles; the outline of her frame under the dress was narrow, almost gaunt. She used her chair back as a support before starting towards us. She had a few gray streaks in her hair and had taken to Doña Eva’s old hairstyle, wearing the heavy lump of a coiled braid on either side of her face.
Once in front of me, she pushed her face at nose length from mine, then turned and marched back to her seat. I remained in my spot while she sat down and raised her coffee cup and sipped it dry, as if in her mind I had simply disappeared. The handmaid grabbed my elbow and tugged at it, encouraging me to leave.
The señora finally spoke. “You are wicked to come here and use Amabelle’s name.” Like the handmaid’s, her voice was hesitant, gasping, nervous. She lowered her empty cup to the table in front of her while still keeping her back to us. “What do you take me for? I spoke to many people who said they watched when she was killed in La Romana, with some others who were hiding in a house by the sea. Pico told me for certain that she must have been killed.”
That she did not recognize me made me feel that I had come back to Alegría and found it had never existed at all. But at the same time, without knowing it, she was giving me hope that perhaps all the people who had said that Mimi and Sebastien were dead, they too might have been mistaken.
The handmaid’s face was vacant, like mine would have been, had I been standing in her place. She gave me a tolerant nod, but we both knew that she might have to lead me away at any time, if this is what her mistress asked her to do.
I wondered where all the guards were hiding. Where was all the protection that came with her husband’s position? Perhaps soldiers would storm the room at any moment, arrest me, and drive me to the border for deportation.
Was I that much older, stouter? Had my face changed so much? How could she not know my voice, which, like hers, might have slowed and become more abrupt with age but was still my own? “I was here—there down the road—in your bedroom when your children were born,” I reminded her. “You told no one of your labor pains until the babies were nearly here because you trusted your dead mother to look after you. Your son Rafael, Rafi, named for the Generalissimo, was born first. Your daughter was born second with a caul over her face. You named her Rosalinda Teresa for your mother.”
It took some time for her to turn around again. I felt I had to keep talking. “What became of your portrait of the Generalissimo, which was in the parlor in your old house, down the road? Where is Juana? Where is Luis? Did Juana go and live with her hermanas, the nuns?”
“Where did we find Amabelle?” she asked, her voice less certain.
Now it was as if we were doing battle and I knew I must win; she had to recognize me.
“Your father saw me at the side of the Massacre River,” I said. “Your father, he asked one of the children by the riverside to question me in Kreyol, asking who I belonged to, and I answered that I belonged to myself.”
I could see a bit of shame and regret in her posture as she took a few steps towards me. The awkwardness of her initial rejection, and what I saw as my coming too late, would allow for no close embrace, no joyful tears.
She took a few more steps in my direction, then hopped back as though I might be dangerous to touch. With a bashful flick of the protruding bone on her slender wrist, she motioned to the wicker sofas around the room, waiting for me to pick one to settle in.
“Sylvie, please leave us.” She flicked her wrists once more, signaling for the handmaid to depart.
I too wanted to leave at that moment, but I sat down and stayed, a small part of me rejoicing in having conquered, having gained her full attention.
“We don’t have much help anymore,” she said once Sylvie was out of sight. “So few have remained loyal over the years.”
She looked down at her hands. They were spotless, perfect and soft looking. I too looked down at my own hands, cut and scarred with scissors and needle marks. Why had I never dreamt of her? I wondered. (My dreams were sometimes my way of hoping and not hoping.) Was it because I never truly loved her? All I wanted now was for her to tell me where the waterfall was. What had become of the waterfall and the stream? They couldn’t have disappeared. Some wishes sound too foolish when uttered out loud. But this is why I had come back to this place, to see a waterfall.
“Amabelle, I beg your forgiveness for not recognizing you.” An odd pained smile never left her face, as though she were thinking of too much to say and could not find the exact words. “We all have changed so much.”
“I understand,” I said, feeling like an old ghost had slipped back under my skin.
“Where are you living now? Are you here or in Haiti?”
“In Haiti.”
“I still paint. Do you see? I painted Rafi.” She pointed to the large portrait of the bone-white baby boy in the baptism dress.
Then she told me, “Rosalinda is married.”
I felt as though she were speaking to me on behalf of someone else. I couldn’t stop thinking that perhaps an older member of her family, a dona with a similar face, similar manners, and a voice similar to hers, had come to keep me company until Valencia herself could talk to me.
When she was younger I
could have easily guessed her thoughts, but now I didn’t have any idea of what was on her mind.
“You didn’t have more children?” I asked.
“Only the two you knew,” she said. “I could have no more children. And you? Do you have a husband, children, grandchildren, Amabelle?”
“No.”
“After you left, I had some bleeding for a few days. I had perhaps been negligent during my time of risk, after the children were born. Javier was the only doctor I trusted, and perhaps he could have helped me, but he vanished. Even with Doha Eva’s connections, she never found him. Pico, he says he did all he could to search for him, but nothing helped. Certain people simply disappeared.”
She called for Sylvie, who came running back into the parlor. Sylvie’s eyes circled the room to avoid meeting the señora’s gaze. Working for others, you are immediately inspected when you enter a room, as if the patrón or the señora is always hoping to catch you with some missing treasure in your hand.
Sylvie waited patiently for her orders in front of a column in the center of the room. She was soon forgotten, left to stand there.
“Papi died before Rosalinda married,” the señora explained, pointing to Rosalinda’s marriage portrait. “Rosalinda wanted to marry young. She is now in medical school in the capital with her husband. They are doing well, but with the riots in the city, they may come home again with her father this weekend.”
“And how is Señor Pico?” I felt now that I could ask.
She joined her hands on her lap and hesitated before answering. “This is an unstable time for our country,” she said.
“How did you come to change houses?” I asked.
“Everything must look so different to you now,” she said. “Pico bought this house from the family of a colonel who died. They are all in Nueva York now, in North America, like Doña Eva and Beatriz.” She breathed out, then slipped into a brisk, animated song—“Yo tiro la cuchara. Yo tiro el tenedor. Yo tiro to’ los platos y me voy pa’ Nueva York.” It was a song of sad and joyous exile, everything lost to Nueva York. “I throw away my spoon. I throw away my fork. I throw away my plates and I’m going to Nueva York.”