“Should I tell you the truth?” he asked.
“Certainly, the truth,” replied Beatriz
“Do I like the way things are conducted here now, everything run by military men? Do I like the worship of uniforms, the medals like stars on people’s chests? Do I like this?” He looked up at Señora Valencia’s spectacularly large portrait of the Generalissimo.
“Do you like it?” Beatriz persisted.
“No,” Papi said. “I don’t like any part of it.”
“When you were in the army, did you kill anyone?” Beatriz asked.
“This is between me and my conscience,” he said.
“You did, then?”
“What good can it do you to know what evil things I have or have not been part of?”
Beatriz threw back her long braid, almost hitting Papi’s face with it. Papi was seized by another fit of coughing. Beatriz hurried to pat his back.
“You want to know what I’m writing to my grandchildren,” Papi said after catching his breath. “I’ve begun with my birth in the seaport of Valencia. My father was a baker there. There are times when he gave bread to everyone in our quarter for nothing. I was his only son but he would never let me eat until everyone else had eaten. He lived to be ninety years old only to be killed in this evil war.”
Like me, Papi had been displaced from his native land; he felt himself the orphaned child of a now orphaned people. Perhaps this was why he often seemed more kindly disposed to the strangers for whom this side of the island had not always been home.
Señora Valencia was nursing her son when I took her morning meal to her. Her husband motioned for me to enter as soon as he saw me in the doorway.
“Señorita Beatnz is here for a visit,” I told him as I put the tray down.
I took the children’s dirty linen from a corner and carried it down to the basin of rainwater that Juana kept out in the yard for the wash.
From the hill I could see some of the cane workers heading towards the fields. Kongo was at the head of the group, with Sebastien close behind. Mimi and Félice were walking with them on their way to buy provisions in the marketplace. I waved to them, but it was Doctor Javier who waved back instead as he climbed up the hill. He walked over to the washbasin before going inside the house.
“Have you given thought to what I asked?” He spoke Kreyol like a Haitian, with only a slight Dominican cadence. “Soon, I’ll be going back to the clinic for two days,” he said. “If you want, you can come with me and some others. There’ll be many children with us, perhaps ten orphans. The clinic itself is nothing more than a small house. At night some of the workers sleep there. You’ll live there in the beginning. You’ll be paid a wage, though not a big one. The mothers pay with food. Some make you the godparent. I’m godfather to twenty-six children.”
With Joel’s death, I hadn’t given myself much time to think about this, to consider returning to a place I had not seen since I was a child. The cane workers had all turned at the bend in the road. Sebastien would soon be in the fields for the first day of what he hoped would be his last harvest. He was going to work hard, too hard, to save a few pesos, hoping to change his life. Maybe I too had been waiting for an escape, looking out of the corner of my eyes for a sign telling me it was time to go on to another life, a life that would fully be mine. Maybe I had been hoping for a voice to call to me from across the river, someone to arrive saying, “I have come for you to bring you back.” Maybe this was that voice, that someone disguised as the doctor. Perhaps I should seize this chance. But not unless Sebastien was prepared to leave also.
“Javier, is this you I hear?” Señor Pico called to Doctor Javier from the parlor.
“It’s me,” Doctor Javier replied.
“Come, then.”
“Amabelle, I need you,” Juana signaled from the pantry doorway. I scrubbed my hands in fresh water and rushed to her.
“I must go and buy some things for the midday meal,” she said. “Señor Pico wants rum and cigars brought to him in the parlor. I already have them prepared.”
Señor Pico and Doctor Javier were sitting out on the lower verandah overlooking Papi’s vast orchid garden when I brought them the rum and cigars. The garden had always been a great source of pride for Papi, who had forty-eight different species of orchids growing there, including a special hybrid with wide feathery petals that glowed like Christmas lanterns, the kind Señora Valencia had been plucking for the vase at her bedside the day she and the señor, as it was often repeated, had their hearts joined together.
“You have had your first night as a father,” Doctor Javier said to Señor Pico. “I see you survived.”
“No one slept.” Señor Pico laughed as he drew on a long cigar. He handed another one, unlit, to the doctor. “Is that how it will always be, no one sleeping?”
“They grow and become calmer,” the doctor said, biting off the end of his cigar.
15
My mother’s cooking takes all day. She goes to the stream to wash our clothes and visits with our neighbors while the pot lies on the rocks, the contents bubbling up as if to make the pot talk.
I am always curious as to what is boiling inside and whether it is yet mashed into something thick and edible. Dry red beans take the longest, but I like to see them each float up to the surface and shed their skin to the water’s heat.
It takes me half a morning to make my way to the boiling pot. I start at the kowosol tree across the yard and slowly progress towards the fire. I stop on the way to jump rope, to smash marbles against each other, to watch some of the vendor women mutter to themselves as they pee under their long skirts, standing up in the middle of the road, when they think no one is looking.
Finally I am at the pot. The steam is rising, the lid clanking against the water’s force. I reach over and raise the lid from the side and immediately my forearm is scalding and I am blinded by the fog of red kidney beans.
I feel a hand descend on my burning forearm and I release the pot lid in the dust.
It is my father and he is laughing.
“Soon you will have to be near a pot every day,” he says, turning my face to show me that I am blind only when I am looking straight into the steaming pot. “For now you don’t have to be and you should not be.”
16
Sometime after Joel’s death and Kongo’s disappearance with the body, I walked into the orchid garden that on his very first day in the Dominican Republic Papi had bought, along with the house, with a gentleman’s handshake from Don Francisco, Doña Eva’s husband, and Doctor Javier and Beatriz’ father, may he in eternal peace rest. Papi was tending to the orchids in this same garden, stroking petals and yanking weeds and rocks from the earth beneath them. He was wearing his well-worn, mud-stained shirt and gardening pants, the pockets bulging with seeds. Juana had given me a large cup of water to bring to him.
“I brought you some water,” I said, “so that you’ll suffer less with this heat.”
“How kind you are,” he said, removing the old straw hat from his head and fanning his face with it. He took the water and drank.
“I have finally heard of a man dying,” he said, when he was done with the water. “Don Carlos himself told me that one of his men died some days ago. But there are so many who work for Don Carlos, he did not know the name of the man who died.”
“I have given four planks of your wood to a cane cutter who wanted to make a coffin,” I said.
He put the water cup down on a piece of open ground. Staring ahead, he moved his lips in a hurried conversation with himself.
“Even though we did not go down into the ravine,” he said, “we left the automobile and looked for his body along the incline. There were two other men with him who ran, so when we didn’t see the one we hit, we thought—I hoped—that he’d run, too.” He pressed a closed fist down on his hat, now on the ground. “The wood you took, who was it for?”
“It was for a man who was struck by Señor Pico’s automobile,” I sa
id.
“Do you know this man’s family?”
“He had only his father.”
“No brothers or sisters?”
“Only the father and a woman who had promised herself to him.”
“And is the father here?”
“He works in Don Carlos’ fields.”
Papi sank heavily onto the dirt and pushed his face down between his knees.
“You are aware, Amabelle, that I have no son,” he said, without raising his head. “I would like you to bring me to visit the dead man’s father. Will you take me?”
“To be prudent, I should ask first to see if he would like to receive you.”
“I would like to speak with him.”
“I should first request his permission to bring you there.”
“It was a frightful accident,” he said. “Please don’t tell Valencia, she need not concern herself with such things now, at her time of greatest risk.”
“I will tell Kongo you want to visit him,” I said.
“Is this the father’s name? Kongo?”
“I know he has another name, but Kongo is what everyone calls him here. I think only his son knew his true name.”
Just then the cane harvest began: the first moment saw the fires set to clear the fields, singeing the leaves off the cane stalks before they could be chopped down. Clouds of thick white smoke blanketed the sky. The smell of burning soil and molasses invaded the air, dry grass and weeds crackling and shooting sparks, vultures circling low, looking for rats and lizards escaping the blaze.
Señor Pico rushed out to watch the fires. Juana was at the open markets buying provisions and there were no visiting relations in the house, so I went inside to see if the señora needed help moving the babies, to get away from the drifting smoke.
Señora Valencia was sitting in the middle of her bed with the children sleeping next to her, their tiny rumps raised in the air.
“It’s another harvest already. They’ve set the fires.” She sniffed the air to enjoy the scent of the burning cane fronds, which smelled like roasting corn.
“Amabelle,” she said, as if her thoughts were faraway, elsewhere. “He believes, my Pico, that during one of his long evening promenades, the Generalissimo will march into our house, admire my portrait of him, and make a gift of the whole nation to him and our children.”
Rosalinda woke from her sleep with a wail. Señora Valencia rubbed her fingertips against the crocheted bootie on her right heel to try to calm her. At the same time, she leaned over to have a closer look at her son’s sleeping face.
“His sister’s cries will wake him,” she said.
His sister’s cries did not wake Rafi. There was no movement in him, no signs of life.
Señora Valencia picked up her son and held his face against her breast. The little boy was still, his tiny arms hanging limply, not feeling his mother’s embrace.
I picked Rosalinda up so Señora Valencia would not crush her as the mother thrashed around the bed trying to revive her son. Rafi’s cheeks were drawn, his jaws had collapsed, his face bore an even more pallid shade in death.
“Mijo, my son, do not leave me!” Señora Valencia shouted into the child’s face. “It’s too soon for you to go. Mami is talking to you. It’s too soon for you to leave.”
“We should send for Javier,” Señor Pico said when he ran in, peeling the señora’s fingers off her son, who, if he were alive, would have been wailing from the way her fingernails were dug into his plump flesh, trying to bring him back to life with pain. Señor Pico planted his lips on his son’s tiny mouth and attempted to breathe life back into him, succeeding in expanding the tiny chest, only to have it flatten and cave in once again.
Juana took Rosalinda to her grandfather’s room. Soon the doctor arrived and offered some of his own breath to Rafi.
“We must send for Father Vargas,” the doctor finally said.
Señora Valencia sat in the middle of the bed where her son and daughter had been sleeping not long before, and wrapped her arms around her own shaking body. Her husband pressed his head against the side of her face, and though he could not stop her from shaking, his hair did catch and soak up some of her tears. Señor Pico also appeared to want to cry, but instead kept looking at the señora’s empty hands while she opened and closed them as though something had been yanked out of them.
Señora Valencia leaped up from the bed and ransacked one of her armoires for something proper to put on the little boy’s body. She found an old lace and satin gown and matching bonnet in which she had been baptized as a child. Señor Pico took charge of changing his son into it without saying a word. The lace was browned and the satin shriveled with age, the gown too large for young Rafi.
Papi went for Father Vargas, the Dominican priest who said Masses at the chapel near the school, at the end of the almond path, a macadam road lined with almond trees. Rosalinda was awake in her mother’s arms as the priest mumbled the final words to the little boy. “Rafael, from the sadness of death rises the joy of immortality. We release you into the arms of God. May you rest in eternity with your Maker.”
“Padre.” Señora Valencia put her trembling hands on the priest’s shoulder. “Please say a blessing for my daughter, something that will protect her life.”
Father Vargas traced a cross with his thumb on Rosalinda’s forehead. The girl stirred, opening her mouth in a spacious yawn to receive the priest’s blessing as Juana threaded her rosary through her fingers calling on Santa Agnes under her breath.
“Father, can you be at the family grave site at dawn tomorrow?” Señora Valencia asked. “My son will be buried next to my mother and my brother who died while he was being born.”
The priest rested his own hand lightly on the señora’s shoulder as if to calm her maternal distress with the power of Heaven flowing from the tips of his fingers.
“Please have him ready for tomorrow then,” he said.
With the cane fire smoke still floating in the sky above their heads, the men went out to the garden to make Rafi a casket from the cedar that Papi kept piled behind the house. Señora Valencia watched from the patio as the jagged teeth of a saw drilled in and out of the wood, shaping her son’s final bed.
Once the coffin was built, Señora Valencia was determined to do something herself for her lost child. She wanted to decorate the lid with red orchids before her son could be placed inside. The men carried the coffin to the old sewing room of Rafi’s grandmother, where the body lay in repose behind the dreamy gauze of the lowered mosquito net framing the four-poster canopy bed, his hands crossed over his heart and a crystal rosary laced between his tiny fingers, the glassy beads spilling over onto the bedsheet like frozen tears.
Señora Valencia took her pencils, her paints, and her brushes out of their case and said, “Amabelle and Javier, stay. Pico, please go and see about Rosalinda.”
Señor Pico did not want to go. He looked around the room, from the plain coffin to the ceiling, to the four-poster bed where Rafi was resting. He then used the back of his hands to wipe shadows of the coffin dust and a few bubbling tears from his eyes. Before the tears fell, however, he hurried out of the room, pulling the door shut behind him.
As soon as her husband was gone, Señora Valencia asked, “Why did my son die?” She looked up at Doctor Javier, her eyes reddened, somber. “You have examined the body, Javier. I want you to tell me why he died.”
“It seems he simply lost his breath.” Doctor Javier covered his face with his hands, aware as he must have been of the weak nature of his own explanation. “He stopped breathing. I thought Rosalinda was the one in danger, but he was the one whose strength failed.”
“And Rosalinda?” She closed her eyes for a moment and rubbed her temples with her fingertips. “I know you cannot tell me if she will live or die,” she said. “You could not do this with my son. But tell me, please, is she sad? Can they be sad so young?”
“If she is sad, it will not last for long,” he said.
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“You told me the children could not see me the first week, Javier. You said they could see only light and dark. Then, he never saw my face? I know he saw my face. Many times, he looked up at me, even smiled. Is this too much to hope, that he beheld my face and smiled at me too?”
I could tell he regretted having told her that. “What I told you is not true for all children,” he said.
“I will go to his burial,” she declared while sketching a large orchid in red pencil on the lid of the coffin. The wood was still damp from the varnish; her pencils slid off the surface.
“You should stay inside and observe your period of confinement,” Doctor Javier said. “Do you want to risk your health and your daughter’s, too?”
She sketched another large orchid. The paleness of the cedar showed through in the lines where the varnish had still not dried. “Javier, go to my husband and tell him my daughter will not die. He needs your assurance.”
I stayed with Señora Valencia while she painted her father’s orchid garden upon her son’s coffin. On the sides, near the handles, she painted four small hummingbirds. Every once in a while she looked up at the mosquito net behind which her son lay, then continued with renewed devotion.
“Amabelle, today reminds me of the day Papi and I found you at the river.” She wiped her paint-stained hands leaving red finger marks on the front of her housedress. “Do you remember that day?”
I did.
“After my mother’s death, the house was so filled with her presence: her voice, her clothes,” she said. “Papi and I went to visit some of his friends near Dajabón. Papi was more adventuresome then. He took me hunting for birds and taught me to shoot a rifle, as if I were the son who took Mami’s life in childbirth. I told Papi I wanted to see the Massacre River where the French buccaneers were killed by the Spaniards in my history lesson.
“We went to the river and there you were, a bony little girl with bleeding knees. You were sitting on a big rock, watching the water as if you were waiting for an apparition. Papi paid one of the boys by the riverside to interpret for him while he asked you who you belonged to. And you pointed to your chest and said, yourself. Do you remember?”