I remembered.
Magenta-colored paint dripped on the floor as she added more to the coffin. We heard voices coming from the parlor, people arriving in small groups.
Señor Pico walked into the room and moved towards the carved posts on the old bed.
“Where’s Rosalinda?” she asked him.
“Javier is examining her again,” he said, moving closer to inspect the rainbow orchid paintings on the coffin.
“We cannot put him in the ground in this coffin,” he said. “We have to make another.”
“No, this is the one he’ll have,” she said. “He’s a child. The coffin should be playful. I will drape something over it for the burial, one of Mami’s lace tablecloths, one she never used. A beautiful one made from a fine French lace, Valenciennes lace.”
“Many of our neighbors are here,” he said, averting his eyes from the bed.
“I don’t want them to see him,” she said. “I don’t want a wake for him. No wake, Pico. It would be too sad for such a short life.”
“No wake.” He bent down and kissed his wife on the side of her face.
“You go to them now,” she said.
He shut the door and walked out to greet his neighbors.
“Do you believe in paradise, Amabelle?” she asked me.
I shrugged. I wasn’t sure.
The coffin was now covered with a whirl of colors, one seeping into the other, like a sky full of twisted rainbows.
“Amabelle, I was so joyful when Papi said I could bring you to live with us,” she said. “After my mother died, I was desperate for someone my age to come live with us in this house.”
The mixed smell of wood varnish and different-colored paint made my head throb, and I imagined it did hers too. I removed the brushes from her fingers and pulled her hands away from the coffin. Somehow I envied her. At least she could place her hands on it, her son’s final bed. My parents had no coffins.
17
I am in my room listening for music in the trees, the flame tree pods flapping against each other as the hummingbirds squawk back in fear. They know the sound of flame tree pods in motion, the hummingbirds do, but it is a sound that shifts all the time, becoming muted or sharp with the strength of the wind.
I close the door and lock out the tame night breeze that barely reaches my bare body, naked because Sebastien has made me believe that it is like a prayer to lie unclothed alone the way one came out of the womb, but mostly because I am hoping to feel the sweat gather between the cement floor and the hollow in my back, so that when I rise up, there will be a flood of perspiration to roll down over my buttocks, down the front and back and between my thighs, down to my knees, shins, ankles, and toes, so that there will not be a drop of liquid left in me with which to cry.
18
Doña Eva’s birthday celebration became Rafi’s unofficial wake. All of Doña Eva’s guests from the Mass came to offer their felicitations for the child they could see and their silent condolences for the lost one. In spite of her earlier insistence that there would be no viewing of her son’s body, Señora Valencia allowed anyone who asked to file past the bed where he lay, looking as proud of him in death as she would have been in life. During those moments when the friends and distant relations peeked through the mosquito gauze, sniffing with sadness and crossing themselves as they caught a glimpse of the pale round face of the boy child, Señora Valencia, sat alone in her room with her daughter in her arms, as if guarding her from bad thoughts and omens. And there I saw a stillness in her eyes similar to the dead boy’s face, something like the shadow of a lost dream entering and leaving through her vacant stare.
In the parlor, Juana wore her rosary around her neck as she and I served cafecitos to the visitors. Many of the neighbors had not seen Rafi in life and were lamenting to one another the loss now marked on Señor Pico’s face.
It was easy to tell how much Señor Pico wanted to be with his son, in the last hours that he could look at his face, hold him in his arms before he had to lay him in his coffin.
With a shiny black feather decorating her cloche hat, Doña Sabine’s gaze stayed on Señor Pico as he looked towards the room where his son lay. Every now and again the señor’s eyes would circle the room he was in, with no interest in what was being said. His eyes grew wider when someone smiled at him or addressed him by name, and occasionally he closed them and covered them with his fingers.
“You’re so brave, both of you.” Doña Eva’s voice rose above the others. Doña Eva bore a great resemblance to both her daughter Beatriz, and her son, Doctor Javier—or rather they did to her—except Doña Eva’s hair was crinkled like sawdust and mostly gray. Doña Eva strove against the natural curl of her hair by parting it in the middle and then coiling her tresses into two knots, one above each of her ears.
Señor Pico accepted Doña Eva’s compliment about their bravery with a gracious but tired smile. Don Carlos, the mill owner, who was quite thin, was sitting on a wicker banquette between his wife and Doña Eva. Don Carlos had an abundance of veins showing under the surface of his sheer white skin. Sebastien had joked that if Don Carlos had as much money as he had veins bulging from his right hand alone, then he would own the whole island.
I tried not to look at his hands as I served Don Carlos his cafecito. Papi strolled to the radio and turned it on. A merengue by La Orquesta Presidente Trujillo came on and silenced the voices in the room. After three long patriotic songs, an announcer introduced fragments from a series of old speeches given on different occasions by the Generalissimo.
Señor Pico motioned for everyone to be quiet. He walked over to the radio and increased the volume, as though seeking comfort for his personal loss from the most powerful voice in the land, a voice that for all its authority was still as shrill as a birdcall.
“You are independent, and yours is the responsibility for carrying out justice,” the Generalissimo shrieked. A buzzing hum intruded at many points, and some words, sometimes even whole phrases, were lost to the distance the transmission had to travel to Papi’s radio.
“Tradition shows as a fatal fact,” the Generalissimo continued, “that under the protection of rivers, the enemies of peace, who are also the enemies of work and prosperity, found an ambush in which they might do their work, keeping the nation in fear and menacing stability.”
The neighbors listened, nodding their heads in agreement as the Generalissimo’s voice rose, charged with certainty and fervor.
“The liberators of the nation did their part,” the Generalissimo went on, “and we could not ask more of them. The leaders of today must play their parts also.”
Doctor Javier got up to leave, excusing himself to his mother by whispering in her ear. Beatriz’s eyes narrowed as she mouthed many of the Generalissimo’s words, which it seemed she had heard recited before.
Papi slumped down in his chair and nodded off to sleep. Señor Pico stood staunch and erect as though about to charge across a field of battle. Juana threaded her rosary through her fingers while Luis, outside, listened through the shutters.
“My best friends are workers!” the Generalissimo shouted. “I came into office to work, and you will find me battling at every moment for the earnest desires of my people.”
Kindly, the neighbors did not stay for long after the Generalissimo’s radio broadcast ended. They filed out in small groups until only Señora Valencia and her husband were left.
Juana was entrusted with the care of Rosalinda, and the señor and señora sat in their room most of the evening. As he held her, she groaned now and then, trying not to cry too loudly. He did not know how to ease her pain, not very well in any case; he kept shifting as she tried to find a comfortable nook to claim for herself, her own place to sink into, within his arms. He was silent while she sobbed, not offering a word. Perhaps he was suppressing his own tears, but his silence seemed to me a sign of failure for this marriage, the abrupt union of two strangers, who even with time and two children—one in this world a
nd one in the other—had still not grown much closer. The short courtship and the even shorter visits after marriage had not made them really familiar with each other. The señora did not know him well enough, nor he her. He was still learning his role now, and she hers, and perhaps neither of them imagined that this test would arrive to transform them from a newly joined pair to the parents of a dead child.
Finally she said, “You should bury his clothes before we bury him. This is something I would like you to do for me.”
If he thought this strange, he raised no question at all. He got up abruptly and stretched.
“I will have to leave for the border soon,” he said, “for that operation I spoke of earlier.”
If she thought this a strange development, she too said nothing at all.
19
You walk half a morning to get there, a narrow cave behind the waterfall at the source of the stream where the cane workers bathe. The cave is a grotto of wet moss, coral, and chalk that looks like marble. At first you are afraid to step behind the waterfall as the water in all its strength pounds down on your shoulders. Still you tiptoe into the cave until all you see is luminous green fresco—the dark green of wet papaya leaves. You hear no crickets, no hummingbirds, no pigeons. All you hear is water sliding off the ledge and crashing in a foamy white spray into the plunge pool below.
When the night comes, you don’t know it inside the cramped slippery cave because the waterfall, Sebastien says, holds on to some memory of the sun that it will not surrender. On the inside of the cave, there is always light, day and night. You who know the cave’s secret, for a time, you are also held captive in this prism, this curiosity of nature that makes you want to celebrate yourself in ways that you hope the cave will show you, that the emptiness in your bones will show you, or that the breath in your blood will show you, in ways that you hope your body knows better than yourself.
This is where Sebastien and I first made love, standing in this cave, in a crook where you feel half buried, although the light can’t help but follow you and stay.
I have always wished for this same kind of light on the grave of my parents, but now I wish it also for both Joël and Rafael.
20
Señora Valencia’s face became as pale as a bleached moon after her husband left her and went to bury their son’s clothes. After much cajoling from Juana, she left her daughter in her cradle where she was sleeping and slipped into the bed where both her children had been conceived and born. Juana sat on the edge of this bed, stroking the señora’s hands to soothe her to sleep. I stood near the patio doors and watched through a tiny opening in the louvers as Señor Pico dug a hole under the flame tree to bury Rafi’s layette.
Doctor Javier held the kerosene lamp while the señor shoveled up another pile of dirt and threw it over his shoulders. A flow of muddy perspiration rolled from Señor Pico’s forehead down to his chest. Some of the area boys gathered around to watch and offer help, thinking perhaps there might be a vigil, if not an all-night wake. Señor Pico declined their offer. He wanted to carry out the task himself, not allowing even Luis to dig, as would have been expected. He stopped to take a breath, then, glancing up at the stars, which seemed to be blinking and falling a lot more frequently that night, he removed his shirt and undershirt, and laid them on one of the lowest branches of the flame tree before proceeding with the digging.
“I would like to go to my son’s burial,” the señora told Juana.
“Do not concern yourself with this now,” Juana said. “Put your mind on the girl child. The other one is already lost.”
“Juana, please talk to me of Mami,” Señora Valencia said.
Juana looked around the room, at the old Spanish clock that no longer chimed the hour but still showed the time correctly after so many years. She stared at the armoire with the orchids and the hummingbirds carved on the front, at the crucifix hung above the bed to protect the house from evil.
“There is too much to tell,” Juana said, stroking the señora’s hair.
“Tell me,” the señora pleaded.
“She was so shy when she became a wife, your mami. She was almost frightened of your father, who was some years older. But this changed very quickly after she became friends with the other young wives like Doña Eva and Doña Sabine. And of course when you were born, your mother and father were completely happy. Your father was so very unhappy when your mother died. It had been a joyful time with the hope of a new brother for you, but your mother’s labor was difficult. It was a breech birth and both your mami and the child lost their strength.”
“More of Mami,” she said. “Tell me more.”
“Your mami was kind,” Juana continued. “She was always patient with me, with Luis too. She treated us not like servants but the same way she did her friends. She was a good-hearted lady, your mami, and she cherished you very much.”
Outside, the evening breeze blew out the kerosene lamp held by Doctor Javier. Luis cupped his hand around a long wooden match and lit the lamp again.
Señor Pico dropped Rafi’s layette in the hole, a bedsheet and three frocks, each of which I had sewn and which young Rafi had worn only once.
“I have had dreams of what my son’s face would look like,” Señora Valencia said, “first at one, then at five, then at ten, fifteen, and twenty years old.”
“I always had similar thoughts about you, Señora,” Juana said. “I am so pleased to have seen you at all those ages.”
“I feel sometimes,” said Señora Valencia, “that I will never be a whole woman, for the absence of Mami’s face.”
Señora Valencia was asleep by the time her husband came into the room. I did not want to leave that night, but I knew that Sebastien would not come to visit me if the dead child was in the house. I had to go to him. Besides, Juana had chosen to spend the night at the foot of the four-poster canopy bed, to keep company with Rafi.
Luis walked back to his and Juana’s house alone, though on this night more than any other he seemed to want his woman to himself. Papi remained in the parlor near the radio, listening for news of the war in Spain. Another Spanish city had fallen while young Rafi’s coffin was being made.
I walked out into the night, past the ravine into which Joel had been thrown. Lemongrass and bamboo shoots lined the road. A breeze raced down the incline, the rustle growing louder as the grass blades bent towards the gorge at the bottom of the ravine.
In Don Carlos’ compound, children roamed, circling a wooden food stand run by a Dominican woman named Mercedes and her two sons: Reinaldo and Pedro. Mercedes was said to be a distant relative of Don Carlos, a peasant woman with city ways.
A group of cane cutters stood in front of Mercedes’ stand, buying liquor and joking with her and her sons. The older son, Reinaldo, worked as a guard in the cane fields during the day while his brother Pedro operated the cane press inside. Mercedes—and consequently Don Carlos, at least by rumor—had some relations from the interior campos who lived in the compound and worked as cutters in the fields, but Mercedes never openly claimed these people. “They are peasants who fell blind into this life of the cane,” she said to anyone who asked. “They have no reason to live like pigs. This is their country.”
The compound children hopped around Mercedes’ stand near the chatting men who shoved them away from adult conversations with slaps on their bottoms and orders for them to go find their mothers, whether they had mothers or not. The children then ran off to play, dashing back and forth behind the flowered curtains that served as doors for some of the rooms. Women were cooking on blackened boulders and sticks behind the cabins, pouring cups of water over naked infants to wash them before the evening meal. They were singing work songs, but their voices were so tired, I could hardly make out the words or the melody. Some men were dozing off in their doorways. They startled themselves awake when anyone walked by. I squeezed myself between two young lovers seeking a comfortable dark corner, their usual sapodilla tree taken over by a small group of m
en arguing over a domino game. The game was stopped now and again so a player could defend a bad choice or a loss. Sebastien’s friend Yves, who was with Sebastien and Joel when Joel was killed, was one of the domino players. Yves shaved his head to keep cane ticks out of his scalp. His Adam’s apple was as large as a real apple, his legs too short for his lanky body.
I motioned to a boy who was playing with pebbles on the ground at their feet. He was a beautiful child with a long manly face. He skipped from foot to foot, fidgeting while standing in front of me. I handed him the goat bones Luis had cut for me the night Señor Pico had come home. He smiled as he thanked me, pulled on the unraveling hem of his short pants, then ran off to show the other children his prize.
Félice was sitting on the doorstep in front of Kongo’s room, her fingers trembling as she picked at the birthmark beneath her nostrils.
“Kongo here?” I asked.
She nodded.
“Why don’t you go inside and sit with him?”
“He won’t receive me,” she said.
I peeked through the bit of palm frond that served as Kongo’s door. The room was dim, except for an oil lamp at his feet. There were two old mats facing each other on the dirt floor and a pile of half gourds and earthen jars in the middle. Kongo sat on his own mat, squeezing a rare, precious, ball of flour dough in and out of the spaces between his fingers. He cursed the flour, murmuring that nothing ever took shape the way one wanted it to.
Félice motioned for me to go to Kongo. “I know he will receive you,” she said.
“Old Kongo?” I called from the doorway. “It’s Amabelle, come to see you.”
Kongo moved aside the scrap of palm frond and let me in. I walked over to the mat where his son Joël had once slept. A pair of clean dark pants and a bright yellow shirt were laid out as though Joël had set them down to be grabbed in a hurry. I leaned towards the old man to better see his face.