A Wedding in Haiti (9 page)

Bill and Eli and I take the lead up the hillside path. It is high noon. Stopping to rest on a hilltop, we can see the small house in the clearing, the guests gathering under the awning, beginning to be served their dinner.

Below us, coming up the path is the wedding party: close friends and family accompanying the couple to the road where the pickup is parked. Pablo is carrying the suitcase in which the couple’s and the baby’s belongings have been packed. Another friend carries the two cakes, the third the bottle of champagne. In a pink dress with matching headscarf comes Eseline with her baby under a matching pink parasol. Bringing up the rear is her favorite sister, Rozla, the one who follows her in the family of six girls, one son. She is wearing a salmon dress that matches Eseline’s in every detail but color. The two sisters are the same build, the same height, similar features. In fact, an outsider who has yet to learn to look at people of a different race might mistake them for each other.

At the road, the sisters embrace. As Eseline climbs into the pickup, stony-faced, her sister collapses, weeping at the foot of a mango tree. They have no idea when they will see each other again. How will they survive this cruel separation? Two sisters who have spent their whole lives together, “two lovely berries molded on one stem, . . . two seeming bodies, but one heart,” as Shakespeare describes that intense female bond in
A Midsummer Night’s Dream
. It is not just marriage that can make one soul out of two separate beings.

Piti tries to comfort his new sister-in-law, then Pablo tries. There is no consoling her, so I don’t know why I even try. I put my arms around her, and even though she can’t understand my Spanish, I promise her that I will take care of her sister. No harm will come to her or to Loude Sendjika.

Tomorrow, when we arrive at the border, without a shred of evidence that these are Piti’s wife and child, when we are frustrated with Piti for putting his young family and us in this predicament, when the most convenient thing would be to just give them some money and let them find their own way back to Moustique or across the river with untrustworthy smugglers at night, I will remember this promise to Eseline’s sister. I will not abandon them. Not that I could have done otherwise, even had I not promised. There is a bottom line below which you cannot go and still call yourself a human being.

The long ride to Cap-Haïtien

It is way past noon by the time we’re back at Charlie’s house to collect our baggage, change into our travel clothes, and be on our way. About twenty minutes into the bumpy ride, that wedding meal we all urged Eseline to eat comes back to haunt us all.

We stop hurriedly for her to scramble out and vomit. I dig out some alcohol from my overnight case, dab her forehead, then hold the little bottle under her nose. Once she feels a little better, we climb back in the pickup. But this will keep happening throughout the eight-hour trip from Charlie’s house to Cap-Haïtien, even when there can’t possibly be any food left in her stomach. Piti reminds us that Eseline has only ridden in a vehicle a handful of times, and then only as far as Gros Morne, an hour south of Bassin-Bleu.

In her condition, she can’t possibly handle a crying infant. Loude Sendjika is handed up front to me. Unfortunately, I can’t do much to soothe the hungry baby. I think back on all those lactating mothers in Moustique. This is the first of many losses both Eseline and Loude Sendjika will feel keenly in the weeks and months to come. I, too, would be bawling if I were them.

Part of the baby’s discomfort might well be the heat. She feels damp all over, and I’ve checked; it’s not urine. I take off her knit cap, which her parents have insisted she wear, and unbutton her long-sleeved jumpsuit. Underneath, her little torso is tightly wrapped in a white cloth with safety pins in back. What on earth is this for? To keep her insides from getting jostled on the road, Piti explains. This is my first encounter with that Biblical article of wear,
swaddling clothes,
what Jesus was supposedly wrapped in when he was born and taken on a mad scramble out of Bethlehem by his terrified parents. Trotting on a donkey through a desert must be akin to riding in a pickup on the back roads of Haiti.

Bewildered as to what to do for the unhappy baby, I start singing her every lullaby sung to me as a child. A few incorporate the name of the baby being sung to. In order not to throw off the rhythm of the lyrics with the polysyllabic name, Loude Sendjika, I improvise the sobriquet, “Ludy,” and it sticks. We all start calling her Ludy, including later Eseline and Piti. Ludy quiets down and smiles up at me, her round face so clearly Piti’s.

Soon, her eyelids start to droop. Every time we go over a pothole or ford a river, I worry that she will wake up. But Ludy sleeps on. Her poor mother is not faring as well, gagging in the back seat. We can’t keep stopping, or we will never make it to Cap-Haïtien before midnight. Instead, we rearrange ourselves, giving her one of the back windows, so she can hang her head out and vomit when she needs to. Pablo and Eli and Homero decide to ride in the flatbed, preferring the dust to the risk of being vomited upon. After a while, the weary Eseline lies down on her husband’s lap and tries to sleep off her vertigo.

We stop at the gas station where we met up with Pablo and say our good-byes. From here Pablo will take a motorcycle-taxi to his front door, his hanging bag in one hand. He’ll be wearing his beautiful suit again on Sunday, when he will make a formal proposal to his girlfriend’s family for her hand in marriage. We’ve teased him that he will have to arrange for two marriages, one in Haiti, and one for his friends in the Dominican Republic. “We’re getting too old to do this kind of trip again,” Bill says half-jokingly.

We fill up with gas, and I encourage Eseline to take a walk around the station to try to shake off her dizziness. Piti remembers that there is a pill one can take. Of course: Dramamine! I usually pack it in my overnight case, but I forgot to include it among my cautionary supplies. Maybe there is a drugstore nearby?

Piti inquires and is told that if we turn around and head away from our destination, toward Gonaïves, we’ll run into a drugstore. But Bill vetoes the plan. It could be a saga of several hours trying to connect with Western medicine here in the middle of rural Haiti.

Night falls, arrival in Cap-Haïtien

Everyone is back inside the pickup: Homero in the copilot seat I’ve ceded to him, as he has done yeoman’s service, riding in the flatbed for hours. Eseline, Piti, Eli, Ludy, and I are wedged in the backseat, alternating one forward, one back, to accommodate everyone. It’s uncomfortable but a lot better than the public transport that Piti didn’t want to subject his baby or wife to. We do have air-conditioning, and we are four instead of forty, packed in tight quarters.

As the shadows lengthen and night falls, the road grows pitch-black. This is precisely what we were trying to avoid by wanting to leave right after the wedding. Piti remembers every major pothole, every washout, every impediment on the road and calmly alerts Bill to be on the lookout. I serve the opposite function, a kind of gaspometer, gasping every time we drop a foot into a pothole; or a fuel truck comes barreling around the bend, squeezing us off the road; or we swerve to avoid a washout and almost run over a child walking on the shoulder.

The road starts getting crowded—more and more buses, trucks, some cars; houses line either side. A sign with an arrow confirms that ahead lies Cap-Haïtien. By now, it is eight o’clock, totally dark, and I mean dark. This is not the urban night of a developed country with street lamps, neon signs, lit-up buildings that turn night into day. Except for a few pockets privileged with power, the road is dark, and the people are dark, and hard to spot walking on the shoulders. The gaspometer is stuck on gasp.

Finally, we arrive in Okap, as the Haitians have affectionately nicknamed their second-largest city. The streets are narrower, the houses closer, and there are more lights. What we are looking for is Hôtel Les Jardins de l’Océan, recommended by Madison, and located “in the Carenage just past the end of the Boulevard de Mer.” Foolishly, we figure these directions are enough. After all, we met up with Pablo at “the gas station on the road to Ennery” and with Piti “in Bassin-Bleu.”

But twenty minutes later, we are still twisting and turning in the boxlike grid of unmarked city streets. Where on earth is the Hôtel Les Jardins de l’Océan? The pedestrians we ask look thoughtful, as if pondering a philosophical question, finally shaking their heads. But at last, we find a young man who knows exactly where the hotel is and offers to ride with us so we don’t get lost again.

Even without knowing the city, we can tell when we’ve reached the Boulevard de Mer, and not just because it runs by the sea. Hotels, awash in lights, flanked by waving palms, line the street. Not quite Graham Greene, but there is a different feel to this area. I’m reminded of that moment in
The Great Gatsby,
when Nick wonders out loud what is so very special about Daisy’s low, thrilling voice, and Gatsby responds, “Her voice is full of money.”

Okap has known the thrill of being “full of money.” Back in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, Cap-Français, as it was known then, was the wealthy capital of the wealthiest colony in the world. But the city has also known its share of tragedies: having been destroyed three times by fire, in 1734, 1798, and 1802, then razed to the ground by an earthquake in 1842.
Sic transit gloria mundi.

But tonight, exhausted and hungry, we’re all ready for a little
gloria mundi
. According to Madison, the Hôtel Les Jardins de l’Océan is owned and run by a French woman, Myrième, and her chef son. “The restaurant is quite good,” Madison mentioned in one e-mail. Back in Vermont, I didn’t think much about this culinary tip. But now, it glows like the promise of paradise after a long stay in purgatory.

The hotel is not right on the boulevard but up a dark, twisting side street. We turn into a parking area at the base of a steep outdoor staircase leading up to the large house, built into the hill. One by one, we emerge from the pickup, a dirty, ragamuffin group. By the time we are all out of the cab, two porters have descended the steps to unload our gear and show us where to park.

We ascend to the lobby, single file, like weary mountain climbers. Past the entryway, we find ourselves in a large room, the restaurant at the far end with a terrace view of the ocean. Sitting at a long table like a spider at the center of her web is a large white woman with cropped gray hair. Not much can escape her notice: traffic in any direction must go by her post: to the restaurant ahead, to the kitchen behind her, to a staircase on her left leading up to the guest rooms. On the table beside her are three cell phones, a calculator, a record book in which she has been finishing up the accounts for the day, and a fat glass of something that might be alcoholic. Madame Myrième, I presume.

Madame’s sharp blue eyes look us over. Hoteliers must develop an instinct about who will or won’t be trouble, especially in tricky, remote areas of the world. But Madame can’t figure out our story and that has to be worrisome. Are we harmless missionaries? Aid workers? Are we running contraband? What is our connection to the young Haitians? The darling baby? Are Bill and I a childless couple looking to adopt the child? Is the young redheaded man our son? And if so, why would we want a baby? And who the hell is Homero?

The porters have finished bringing up our assortment of dusty luggage. It looks like we mean to move in for a while: three suitcases, several backpacks, a large cooler, an enormous cardboard box with our mosquito nets and other supplies spilling out of the top, two wedding cakes, an opened bottle of cheap champagne, and a plastic bag with a dirty diaper that has been doubling as Eseline’s barf bag. Is there a trashcan where we can throw it out?