“When we changed houses,” she continued in a more relaxed voice, “Juana and Luis went back to their people. They were getting old and couldn’t work anymore. I would have kept them, but they wanted to go.”
She leaned forward and squeezed my hand, pressing her fingers down on my knuckles as if trying to leave her handprints on my bones.
“Amabelle, I live here still,” she said. “If I denounce this country, I denounce myself. I would have had to leave the country if I’d forsaken my husband. Not that I ever asked questions. Not trusting him would have been like declaring that I was against him.”
“I understand,” I said.
“Do you truly understand?” Her face brightened with a kind of hope I no longer thought I could offer. “During El Corte, though I was bleeding and nearly died, I hid many of your people,” she whispered. El Corte—the cutting—was an easy word to say. Just as on our side of the river many called it a kout kouto, a stabbing, like a single knife wound. “I hid a baby who is now a student at the medical school with Rosalinda and her husband. I hid Sylvie and two families in your old room. I hid some of Doha Sabme’s people before she and her husband escaped to Haiti. I did what I could in my situation.”
What could she have expected me to say? There were no medals to be given. If there were, I didn’t know where to tell her to go to claim hers.
“I understand,” I said.
“I hid them because I couldn’t hide you, Amabelle. I thought you’d been killed, so everything I did, I did in your name.”
“I don’t see any trace of Don Carlos’ mill. Were the people there slaughtered?” I did not want to feel indebted to her.
“None of the people in Don Carlos’ mill were touched,” she said, confirming what I had suspected, that perhaps if I hadn’t told Sebastien to leave the compound and go to the church, he and Mimi might have been saved. “There are no small mills here anymore,” she said, “only residences like this one.”
Had the stream dried up when these houses were built, the rocks and the sand gathered for mortar, the water for power and lights?
“Amabelle, Pico merely followed the orders he was given,” she said, releasing my hand. “I have pondered this so very often. He was told to go and arrest some people who were plotting against the Generalissimo at the church that night, then he was detained by those people who were on the road, that young man Unèl, the one who once rebuilt the latrines for us.”
She sat perfectly still for some time, as though Unèl had appeared in front of her and she was examining him with her tearful gaze.
“We lived in a time of massacres.” She breathed out loudly. “Before Papi died, all he did was listen on his radio to stories of different kinds of … cortes, from all over the world. It is a marvel that some of us are still here, to wait and hope to die a natural death.”
All the time I had known her, we had always been dangling between being strangers and being friends. Now we were neither strangers nor friends. We were like two people passing each other on the street, exchanging a lengthy meaningless greeting. And at last I wanted it to end.
“I would like to know what became of the stream,” I said.
“What stream?” she asked.
“The one that starts at the waterfall.”
“There have been a lot of houses constructed here,” she said, “but the houses have not replaced everything. There are many waterfalls still. If you like, I can show you the closest one that remains.”
Garaged behind the main house was a wide, two-toned, green and white automobile with a yellow vinyl interior. Sylvie climbed into the back first. Then I took the seat beside the señora’s. I saw the señora stifle a gasp as she realized that because of my bad knee, one of my legs now appeared much shorter than the other.
A man came running out from one of the smaller houses when she started up the automobile.
“Señora, you are going out?” he asked, resting his arm on the door on her side.
“I will not be long,” she said.
“Should I not go with you?” he asked.
“Please open the gate for us,” she said.
The man buttoned the last two buttons of his shirt as he hastened to the gate. Even though he was running as fast as his legs could carry him, the señora’s automobile still reached the gate before he did. She waited there for him to open it for her.
“This is my daughter’s automobile,” she said, driving through the parted gates. “Our Rosalinda, Amabelle, she is so beautiful. She is my whole life. We get along very well, as it might have been with Mami and me. This car was a marriage gift from her father. She taught me to drive so I can move about by myself when I wish. He does not even know, my husband, that I can drive an automobile, isn’t that so, Sylvie?”
“That is so, Señora,” said Sylvie.
The señora drove her car almost at walking speed through the same streets I had previously traversed, then made a sudden turn that took us beyond all the large houses into wide open meadows, old cane land now filled with wheat and corn fields, the mountain ranges looming over them. We drove past clusters of casitas and small farms where children ran out to chase the car. Finally the señora added some speed, charging through a narrow trail inside a corn field that led abruptly to a long braid of water that grew wider as we climbed to its source.
The señora stopped the automobile with a sudden jolt that sent Sylvie’s chin pounding into the back of my seat. We were nearly at the cliff above a giant waterfall, watching the water slide over the ledge into a deep pool, rising and falling with white foam spray. The drop was much longer and the pool deeper than the one I remembered. Perhaps time had destroyed my sense of proportion and possibilities. Or perhaps this was another fall altogether.
We sat there and watched the cascade change colors, from tear-clear to liquid orange.
“Perhaps it’s just rained in the mountains, the fall is so strong,” she said. “I understand why you would come this very long distance to see it. When we were children, you were always drawn to water, Amabelle, streams, lakes, rivers, waterfalls in all their power; do you remember?”
I did.
“When I didn’t see you, I always knew where to find you, peeking into some current, looking for your face. Since then I can’t tell you how many streams and rivers and waterfalls I have been to, looking for you.”
We watched the pool until it was a perfect mirror of the sky, where the sun was about to set. Sylvie cleared her throat several times, a signal, perhaps, that she thought it was time for us to leave. When we didn’t move, the anxious frown became more pronounced on her face; she wiped her sweaty palms on her lap and tried to temper the audible racing of her breath.
“What is it, Sylvie?” asked the señora. “Are you ill?”
Sylvie’s upper lip was sweating, turning darker, and for a moment the outline of her face reminded me of Joel’s lover, Félice, who’d had a beet-colored birthmark where she would have had a mustache had she been born a man.
“A question,” Sylvie said, her voice rising and falling quickly, beyond her control. “If I could ask a question?”
The señora reached for a handkerchief from one of the hidden compartments in the automobile and handed it to Sylvie to wipe her face.
“What is your question, Sylvie?” she asked. “Please, calm yourself.”
Sylvie took a few deep long breaths as she used the señora’s handkerchief to wipe the perspiration from her upper lip.
“Why parsley?” asked Sylvie.
“What?” responded the señora.
“Why did they choose parsley?”
For some reason, it had escaped me before, I hadn’t noticed, how young Sylvie was. She must have been just a child when the señora borrowed her from the slaughter.
The señora turned to me and raised her eyebrows. She tried to smile, but an uneasy expression kept creeping back into her face. “Do you know, Amabelle, that we have never spoken before of these things, Sylvie and me?”
br /> Sylvie lowered her head, and rocked it back and forth.
“There are many stories. This is only one,” the señora said, turning her eyes back to the waterfall. “I’ve heard that when the Generalissimo was a young man, he worked as a field guard in the cane fields. One day one of his Haitian workers escaped into a nearby field where many things were growing, among them, wheat and parsley. So the Generalissimo would not see him, the Haitian worker crawled through those fields to hide. After the Generalissimo grew tired of chasing him, he called out to the Haitian man, ‘If you tell me where you are, I’ll let you live, but if you make me find you, I’ll take your life.’ The man must not have trusted the Generalissimo, so he kept crawling, but he took the Generalissimo seriously enough to cry out the names of the fields as he passed through them. In the wheat, he called out ‘twigo’ for trigo. And in the parsley he said ‘pewegil’ for perejil. The Generalissimo had him in plain sight and could have shot him in the parsley, but he did not because the Generalissimo had a realization. Your people did not trill their r the way we do, or pronounce the jota. ‘You can never hide as long as there is parsley nearby,’ the Generalissimo is believed to have said. On this island, you walk too far and people speak a different language. Their own words reveal who belongs on what side.”
She concluded almost too abruptly. Sylvie was still shaking her head, apparently not satisfied with the señora’s explanation. Perhaps there was no story that could truly satisfy. I myself didn’t know if that story was true or even possible, but as the señora had said, there are many stories. And mine too is only one.
“Come back to the house with us and stay tonight, Amabelle,” the señora offered.
Sylvie raised her head and wiped the tears from her eyes. “I have always wished, Madame,” she said to me, “for an answer.”
“I must go back to the square in town,” I said. I didn’t want the young man to leave without me.
“Amabelle, can you not stay longer?” the señora asked.
“I cannot stay at all,” I said. “Someone is waiting for me.”
She drove very quickly back to the square, where the young man was waiting. While he waved his arms over his head, motioning for me to hurry, we sat there unmoving in the silence of the señora’s daughter’s automobile.
“You will come again, Amabelle?” the señora asked.
I did not want to part with a lie. We left it simply at a clumsy awkward handshake, which, after a moment, she embellished with a fast kiss on my left cheek. I opened the car door and stepped out.
“Amabelle, it was generous of you to visit,” the señora said.
“Go in peace, Sylvie, Señora,” I said.
The young man offered me his hand to help me into his jeep. The señora stepped out too and leaned on the front door of her daughter’s car and waved. With a distant gaze, Sylvie stood devotedly at her side. And in Sylvie’s eyes was a longing I knew very well, from the memory of it as it was once carved into my younger face: I will bear anything, carry any load, suffer any shame, walk with eyes to the ground, if only for the very small chance that one day our fates might come to being somewhat closer and I would be granted for all my years of travail and duty an honestly gained life that in some extremely modest way would begin to resemble hers.
Go in peace, Señora.
The driver started back to the border at great speed. He had a rendezvous and wanted to arrive before morning. He knew how to avoid the military checkpoints, he said, to save time.
I closed my eyes during the whole journey. I could still hear the thunderous waterfall crashing down inside my head, feel the spray against my face, even though we never got out of the car. Sebastien, I didn’t find. He didn’t come out and show himself. He stayed inside the waterfall.
After some time, the young man tapped my shoulder and asked, “Are you dead there? You can’t be dead. It will not be good for me if you are dead.”
I could smell Presidente beer and chewing tobacco on his breath. Without opening my eyes, I said, “No son, I am not dead.”
“Why do you sleep so much?” he asked. I could tell he desired some conversation, a voice to help keep him awake and in control of the car. “Did you not find the people you went to see?”
We drove in silence for some time until his fingernails drummed my shoulder again.
“It’s the middle of the night now,” he said. “You can open your eyes and not see anything.”
“Are we far from the border?” I asked.
“Not far,” he said.
“What work do you do?” I closed my eyes again. “You do more than lottery, do you not?”
“I help bring workers into La Romana for the sugarcane,” he said.
“Why do you do this?” I asked.
“The people here need their sugarcane and other things cut,” he said, “and people suffer for lack of work in our country.”
“Do you know of the big slaughter some years ago?” I asked.
“My mother ran from it with me when I was a baby,” he said. “My father died in it.”
“So you lived it?”
“If that is what you want to say.”
We said nothing more until we were at the bridge crossing. The guards did not even glance at me as we drove through the gate. I tried, in vain, to catch a glimpse of the river, a sliver of moonlight flashing on the surface of the water, a reduced shadow of the sky.
I asked him to let me out before we reached the Haitian customshouse and the open road. He stopped the car and turned off the lights. “Just leave you here? I cannot do that,” he said. “I know it’s the same time of year as when the kout kouto happened. If you want to stop for a moment, say a prayer, and light a candle, I will wait for you, but not for long because I have an important rendezvous.”
“I want you to go now,” I said.
“What will you do here?”
“My man is coming for me,” I lied. “If he’s not waiting at the customshouse now, he will be there soon, and even if he does not come, the guards will let me sleep out front. Besides, it is not long until dawn.”
Perhaps pretending to believe me eased his conscience. He was in a hurry and did not want to argue with me any longer. Maybe he was even afraid of ghosts. Every now and then, I’m told, a swimmer finds a set of white spongy bones, a skeleton, thinned by time and being buried too long in the riverbed.
“You are certain you want to stay here all night?” the young man asked.
“Certain,” I said.
He spat a clump of chewing tobacco out of the side of his mouth as he considered this. “You are a crazy one,” he said.
As he drove off in his car, I walked down to the bank of the river, trying not to trip over my own feet. In the coal black darkness of a night like this, unless you are near it, the river ceases to exist, allowing you to imagine just for a moment that all of them—my mother and father, Wilner, Odette, and the thousands whose graves are here—died natural deaths, peaceful deaths, deaths filled with moments of reflection, with pauses and some regret, the kind of death where there is time to think of what we are leaving behind and what better things may lie ahead.
The day my parents drowned, I watched their faces as they bobbed up and down, in and out of the crest of the river. Together they were both trying to signal a message to me, but the force of the water would not let them. My mother, before she sank, raised her arm high, far above the pinnacle of the flood. The gesture was so desperate that it was hard to tell whether she wanted me to jump in with them or move farther away.
I thought that if I relived the moment often enough, the answer would become clear, that they had wanted either for us all to die together or for me to go on living, even if by myself. I also thought that if I came to the river on the right day, at the right hour, the surface of the water might provide the answer: a clearer sense of the moment, a stronger memory. But nature has no memory. And soon, perhaps, neither will I.
I heard something flap out of the water, like
rice rising and falling on a winnowing tray, the tiny husks separating from the grains. A shadow slipped out of the stretch of water before me, a ghost with a smile on his face, his cheeks grainy from the red-brown sand, his eyes bright red like the inside of a flame.
It was the professor, with his three layers of clothing padded with drenched straw, the river dripping from him as he stopped for a moment and stared blankly at my face. He sucked in his breath through his nose, perhaps taking in a few tiny sand grains with the night air as he did. He scratched his tangled beard, then continued down the riverbank, his foam sandals flopping between the sand and the soles of his feet.
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine the fog, the dense mist of sadness inside his head. Would the slaughter—the river—one day surrender to him his sanity the same way it had once snatched it away?
I wanted to call him, but only by his proper name, not by the nickname, Pwofese, the replacement for “crazy man,” that he had been given. I wanted to ask him, please, to gently raise my body and carry me into the river, into Sebastien’s cave, my father’s laughter, my mother’s eternity. But he was gone now, disappeared into the night.
I removed my dress, folding it piece by piece and laying it on a large boulder on the riverbank. Unclothed, I slipped into the current.
The water was warm for October, warm and shallow, so shallow that I could he on my back in it with my shoulders only half submerged, the current floating over me in a less than gentle caress, the pebbles in the riverbed scouring my back.
I looked to my dreams for softness, for a gentler embrace, for relief from the fear of mudslides and blood bubbling out of the riverbed, where it is said the dead add their tears to the river flow.
The professor returned to look down at me lying there, cradled by the current, paddling like a newborn in a washbasin. He turned around and walked away, his sandals flapping like two large birds fluttering damp wings, not so much to fly as to preen themselves.
He, like me, was looking for the dawn.