That night, the mother moved six cousins out of the second room so Yves could share his old bed with me. The bed was made from four posts mortared to the ground and a wooden platform that held a small mattress filled with old rags.
The room where Yves’ mother slept was separated from ours only by a rattling beaded curtain. When she went to bed, he followed her there. I sat alone on the new bed and played with my bitter orange while listening to the noises from outside. Everything the people who lived around the courtyard said or did could be heard, their caresses and arguments, their gossip, and the cries of their restless children.
“Who is this woman?” the mother asked Yves. “Where are her people? Are they here or did they all die in the killing over there?”
Yves said nothing. I went out to the yard, found the cooking fire and a basin of water, bathed myself with the bitter orange the way the woman in front of the cathedral had instructed. I could hear some of the courtyard children giggling as they peered at me through the holes in their doorways. In spite of their curiosity, I knew that my body could no longer be a tempting spectacle, nor would I ever be truly young or beautiful, if ever I had been. Now my flesh was simply a map of scars and bruises, a marred testament.
Yves was still with his mother when I came back to bed. They had moved on to talking about other things unfamiliar to me, about old friends who had died or moved to other parts of the country, about his father’s land, which had not been cultivated since Yves left.
Each time I closed my eyes I saw the river and imagined Sebastien and Mimi drowning the way my mother and father and Odette had. To escape these thoughts, I envisioned Henry Fs citadel as I had seen it again that afternoon, its closeness to the sky, its distance from the river. With my childhood visions of being inside of it, protected, I fell asleep.
The next morning, I stumbled out of bed, ashamed to have slept so soundly and so late. The mother was sitting under the traveler’s tree outside, pouring steaming hot water over the powdered grains in her coffee pouch.
“Where’s Yves?” I asked. I didn’t even know if he had come and lain in the bed with me the night before.
“He’s on his father’s land,” the mother said. “He comes out of bed this morning and says he wants to go and plant some beans in his father’s fields.”
I didn’t know what Yves had told her about me. She got up, walked towards me, clasped my face between her wet hands, and planted a kiss on my forehead.
“You call me Man Rapadou,” she said. “I know your story.”
Which story of mine did she know? Which story was she told?
“Everything you knew before this slaughter is lost,” she said. Perhaps she was encouraging me to embrace her son and forsake Sebastien, even my memories of him, those images of him that would float through my head repeatedly, like brief glimpses of the same dream.
Yves stayed in the fields until nightfall. When he came home his hands were coated with mud and he smelled like the earth had been turned inside out over him.
“I planted a field of green beans,” he announced to his mother.
“I told you. It is not the season,” she said.
“We’ll see,” he said.
“When will you pay a visit to Man Denise?” his mother asked.
He did not answer.
“It is only respectful that you go and visit with her, since you and her son left here together,” she said.
Yves walked out to the courtyard to wash himself. I went back to our room and lay down on the bed, hoping to fall asleep before he returned.
When he came in and called my name, I did not answer. He lay down and curled himself up on his side of the mattress. He did not speak in his sleep that night. Or any other night after that.
While Yves was in the fields the next day and his mother was visiting a friend, I asked some of his relations and found out where Man Denise, Sebastien and Mimi’s mother, lived. I made the promise of a mint confection to a boy who took me there.
The house was not too far from Yves’ but was in a less populated area, with bigger residences and more trees.
I walked back and forth around the property. There was no activity, except for a girl rushing in and out of the yard, carrying jugs of water on her head.
“The woman who lives there, she will not come outside,” the boy with me said. “Do you want to go inside and speak with her?”
“No,” I said. What would be the use? She hadn’t known me when her children were still hers alone, safe in her house.
Soon after that, my body began to feel better, even though I had a constant ringing in my ears and one knee would not bend all the time. Still, I walked by Man Demse’s house every day to see if anything would change. Whenever there was more noise than usual on the roads, whenever people gathered in a group, I rushed out to see if it was the homecoming that would bring Man Denise out of her house. There were new arrivals all the time, people returning from the other side, people who were settling again in our quarter and in hers.
Thinking of Sebastien’s return made me wish for my hair to grow again—which it had not—for the inside of my ears to stop buzzing, for my knees to bend without pain, for my jaws to realign evenly and form a smile that did not make me look like a feeding mule.
At night, lying next to Yves, I grew more and more frightened that Sebastien would not recognize me if he ever saw me again.
Yves spent all his days planting in his father’s fields, then lingered with his friends and neighbors for late-afternoon talk after his work.
I never saw him but only heard him undress and slip into bed at night when he finally came home.
A few weeks after his first planting, I waited for him to climb onto his side of the mattress and asked him, “Did anything come up from the ground for you?”.
Since we’d come back, we hadn’t spoken of our situation, never even talked of changing it in a way that would make us both more comfortable at night.
“Only grass might come up this quick,” he said. “And not every type of grass even.”
His scornful voice made me think that he was not a fortunate planter, or maybe he didn’t think he was one.
“I would like to go to the fields with you one day,” I said.
“Why so?” he asked.
“I want to see your father’s land.”
“It’s no different than other land,” he said.
I could hear him suddenly sitting up on the bed as if in defense of what had just been said. I reached for his arms in the dark and pressed them down to show him that I truly wanted to be quietly grateful, to cooperate, to make the best out of our burden.
“I hear there are officials of the state, justices of the peace, who listen to those who survived the slaughter and write their stories down,” he said. “The Generalissimo has not said that he caused the killing, but he agreed to give money to affected persons.”
“Why?” I didn’t think he would have the answer, but I wished he did know.
“To erase bad feelings,” he said, as if he were no longer linked to the slaughter.
“And the dead?”
“They pay their families,” he said.
I knew what he was thinking, that perhaps Man Denise should go, in case Sebastien and Mimi were already dead.
I stepped off the bed and crouched down in a corner of the room, as far from him as I could. I felt grateful that it was dark, that neither one of us could see the other’s face.
“I want to meet that justice of the peace myself,” I said.
“I don’t know if you’ll be given the money,” he said. “The authorities might try to keep it all for themselves. They ask you to bring papers. They ask you to bring proof.” But he knew that it was not money, it was information I was hoping for.
The next morning we went to see the justice of the peace. He was posted in a yellow police building that seemed to have been shaped out of one massive mountain rock. Outside was a group of more than a thousand people waiting to be allowed entry. A line of armed soldiers from the Police Nationale stood between them and the narrow entrance to the building.
As the morning went on, the waiting group became larger, so much so that when I pulled myself up and looked behind me, I could not see where the road ended and the faces began.
Yves had not said a word the whole morning. He occasionally ventured off to get water, or to help carry home some elder who had fainted from the heat.
In the afternoon, food vendors arrived and people shared their tales, as if to practice for their real audience with the government official. The man next to me had walked seventy kilometers to avoid the crowds in his own town. Another woman had come from even farther away. Others were planning to go to Port-au-Prince, which fewer survivors had yet reached.
There was only some vague order to the way people were allowed inside. The most mangled victims, the ones whose wounds had still not healed, were let in as soon as they arrived. Pregnant women entered quickly as well as those who could find some money to bribe the soldiers.
To pass the time waiting, I thought of many ways to shorten my tale. Perhaps Yves and I would go in together and make both our stories one. That way we would give someone else a chance to be heard.
The justice of the peace came to the entrance at sundown. He was plainly dressed in a light green house shirt and pants with a small watch on a gold chain dangling from his pants’ side pocket. In one hand was a large leather covered notebook and in the other a shiny black case. His presence caused a stir in the crowd. The soldiers raised their rifles for silence so he could speak.
“I can do no more today,” he said.
“Non,” moaned the crowd.
“And if I say one more, each of you will want to be that one,” he said.
“Non,” the crowd disagreed.
“I will come tomorrow,” he said.
“Tomorrow, listen faster,” someone recommended.
The soldiers surrounded the justice of the peace as he went back inside, then we saw his automobile speeding away from the protected yard behind the station.
People rushed after him, but quickly gave up the chase, for many of them could not run far because of some injury or exhaustion from being in the sun all day.
The last person who’d had an audience with him was a woman, thirty or thirty-five years old. She was dressed all in white—as though she were going off to a religious ceremony—and had a sun-bleached straw hat tied with a green ribbon under her chin.
“What did they do for you in there?” Yves yelled out to her. Others in the crowd joined in, “Did they give you money?”
She removed her hat and surveyed the faces staring up at her.
“No, he did not give me money,” she said, watching the soldiers for approval. “You see the book he had with him?” She glanced at the guards once more, then turned her face back to the crowd. “He writes your name in the book and he says he will take your story to President Stenio Vincent so you can get your money.” She kept her eyes on the crowd, no longer watching the soldiers for approval. “Then he lets you talk and lets you cry and he asks you if you have papers to show that all these people died.”
The soldiers from the Police Nationale, wearing the same khaki uniforms as the Dominican soldiers—a common inheritance from their training during the Yanki invasion of the whole island—approached the woman from behind and asked her to move away from the entrance. The crowd protested with hisses. Two of the soldiers took her by the arms and carried her down the station steps. She tried to twist out of their hands. Finally someone in the crowd pulled her from them for her own safety.
“If you make trouble,” the sergeant—the station head—announced to the crowd, “you will not be allowed to return tomorrow.”
The crowd dispersed slowly, perhaps wondering if there was any use in coming back the following day.
Yves and I went back there for the next fifteen days. New faces came and went. Some stopped coming. Some never left their places in front of the station, even when it rained.
The justice of the peace came there every day, except Sundays.
On the sixteenth day, we were waiting without hope in the back of the crowd when we saw her coming.
I knew immediately who she was when Yves leaped from his place and headed for her.
“Man Denise, you came,” he said.
“I did come, yes,” she said in a voice sharp and abrupt like her daughter Minn’s. “I want to stand here with all of you.”
She looked too young to be both Mimi and Sebastien’s mother. She was long-legged and slender, her face the color of wet terra-cotta. She wore a long tan dress that swept the floor as she walked. Bowing her long neck, she greeted those people in the crowd she knew and merely nodded to the others. She glanced at me, but she did not see me. Instead, as she stood there, she watched the soldiers. Her eyes followed the movements of their rifles from shoulder to shoulder; their offhand leanings to talk to one another about offhand things. She kept stroking her side, reaching in and out of the deep recesses of her pockets for something too tiny to be held in her hand.
At dusk, the justice of the peace did not come out to speak to the crowd. The head sergeant came out instead and announced that there would be no more testimonials taken. All the money had already been distributed. The justice of the peace had already gone away when no one was looking, knowing we would be enraged if we saw him depart.
It took some time for people to take in what this meant. Their disappointment grew as the word spread from mouth to mouth and was reinterpreted by one person for the next. There were moans and screams of protests, convulsions and faintings as rocks began to fly.
The people at the front of the crowd charged at the entrance. Trained by Yanki troops who were used to rebellious uprisings, the soldiers shot several rounds of bullets in the air.
A few of the soldiers were caught and passed from hand to hand as blows were struck, but the crowd was not really interested in them. The group charged the station looking for someone to write their names in a book, and take their story to President Vincent. They wanted a civilian face to concede that what they had witnessed and lived through did truly happen. When they did not find such a person inside, they freed the ten male prisoners who were being held in the inner rooms and walked away with a few items the soldiers had left behind: seven chairs, six canteens, two water jugs, three handkerchiefs, fourteen coiled cowhide whips, seventeen cato’-nine-tails, two sets of keys to the cells, and a giant official photograph of President Vincent.
He was a sophisticated-looking man, President Stenio Vincent, with small spectacles worn very close to his eyes. He had a pair of beautifully large ears framing his moon face, a tiny dot of a mustache over pinched pensive lips, a poet’s lips, it was said. In the photograph, he wore a gentleman’s collar with a bow tie, the end of which touched the shiny medal of the Grand Cross of the Juan Pablo Duarte Order of Merit, given to him by the Generalissimo as a symbol of eternal friendship between our two peoples. The image of the Grand Cross caught the flames first when kerosene was brought and the photo, then the police post, was set on fire, though only the wooden doors and the thin coat of paint on the building burned, for the concrete walls of the station did not even scorch.
We dodged the rocks and torches and forced our way out of the crowd. Yves took Man Denise back to her house. Her neighbors who had heard about the melee came to console her. Soon her house was filled with her friends, the girls who ran errands for her, and some traveling vendors who paid to use her empty rooms as a night stop on their long journeys.
The vendors set up mats and sheets in the two bare rooms, places Mimi and Sebastien must once have used. Man Denise had moved all their things into her own room to make it less empty, and also so that the vendors would not walk away with them, one of the errand girls explained.
In the back of the house was Man Demse’s room, containing a ring of old sealed-off oil drums filled with her own things as well as Mimi and Sebastien’s effects.
The vendors helped her climb on top of a pile of clothes on her bed. They wanted her to take off her tan dress and change into her nightdress, but she refused.
“Forgive me,” she said, excusing herself for the pile of clothes and the disorderliness of the oil drums in her room. “What a difficult day this has been.”
The neighbors offered her many cups of tea. She raised herself to take a sip from each, then buried her head in the pillow.
“Leave me,” she said, “please.”
They left her, but we could all see her from the crowded room opposite hers since her room did not have a door.
Yves returned to his mother’s house that night and I stayed at Man Denise’s. After she fell asleep, I crept back inside and lay down at the foot of her bed. I heard her breath whistling, like someone who tried even in her sleep not to disturb others.
When she woke up in the middle of the night to use her blue enameled chamber pot, she tripped and nearly fell on top of me. I moved the pot closer to her and she climbed on it without questioning what I was doing there.
The next morning before dawn, I went out and sat with the women vendors, who made themselves coffee before moving to the next station on their journey.
As they drank their coffee, the women wondered out loud whether Mimi and Sebastien had disappeared forever in the country of death—as they called it—or if maybe things had returned to normal. Maybe everyone had returned to their everyday work, they hoped.
While they were talking, I heard Man Denise call for water. I hurried inside, ahead of one of the girls who looked after her, picked up the earthen jar leaning against the wall, and handed her a cup of water. She was not fully awake when I held it to her lips. After taking a few sips, she pushed my hand away.
The room had brightened a bit with the morning light. She narrowed her eyes, as if trying to recognize me.
“Which one of them are you?” she asked.
“Amabelle,” I said.
“If you’ve come to pay for the night, put the money on one of the drums,” she said.
“I have not come to pay,” I said.
“What, then?” she asked.
I put the earthen jar and the cup back against the wall.
“I knew Mimi and Sebastien over there,” I said.
She sat up and reached for my ears, rolling my cheeks between her fingers as though my face belonged to her.
“You knew my Micheline and my Sebastien,” she said. “My Mimi and Sebastien, you knew them?”
“Yes,” I said.
Her face broadened with a pained smile. She let go of me and clapped her hands together. “I didn’t want my children to go and stay there forever,” she said. “Their father was killed in the hurricane; Sebastien had a cage full of pigeons that also died in the hurricane, and he was so sad. After the hurricane, this house was taken from us by the Yankis; they wanted to make a road of this house. It was given back to us only after they left. Because we had no house, my son went there first, and me, because I was weak in the lungs, I was to go live with my brother in Port-au-Prince. I had no money so my daughter followed Sebastien and they both sent me some. I came back from Port-au-Prince when the land was given back to us, but my children, maybe they didn’t know that the Yankis left, maybe they didn’t know that the house was ours again.”
She fished in the pocket of her dress and pulled out three painted yellow coffee beans, the kind that Mimi and Sebastien’s bracelets had been made of.