A Wedding in Haiti (13 page)

At Loma de Cabrera, we stop to watch
casave
being made the old-fashioned way by Luisa and her crew. It is a long, exacting, knuckle-scraping process. Now, most of the
casave
in the country is manufactured by machines in
factorías.
But here, we’re back to pre-Colombian time, when the island was named Quisqueya, meaning “Mother of all the Islands.” The
casave
rounds, as big as pizzas, are stacked up, appealingly irregular, which makes them look fresher, more homemade than the perfectly round packaged cakes, dry and crumbling, sold in the supermarket. Hanging from a rafter is an old leather purse, used as the cash register.

All around Luisa, boys and men are working at the different parts of the laborious process (from the peeling and washing of the yuca root, to the grinding, the first soaking, the second soaking, the forming of the cake, the patting on a
burén
—a round stone on which the
casave
is baked—the feeding of the fire, on and on). The hardest of all the jobs is the grinding, traditionally done by hand with many bleeding knuckles. (The grinding is the one part of the process that Luisa does do with a gasoline-powered grinder.) This stage is the source of the expression,
“Estoy guayando la yuca.”
I am grinding the yuca, you say, when you have been working bone-achingly hard. Even with a grinder, it is a sweaty, nasty job, with the generator belching out black smoke, each yuca having to be peeled and thrust into a huge maw, the pulp collected, rinsed, the water squeezed out by hand. Again, because Haiti is on my mind, I can’t help noticing how the lighter guys are up front in the retail area, doing the light work, whereas the darker boys—Haitians?—are in back, literally grinding the yuca.

This is one life I am living—stopping and chatting and learning about different artisan crafts and sampling the results. But all the while I am wondering about Piti and Eseline and Ludy. What are they going through right now? Is the Dramamine working? Has the baby fallen asleep? And more nerve-racking, have they successfully passed through the first checkpoint, the second, the third? I keep trying to call, but every time, I get the same recording: the person I am trying to reach is not available.

“He’s probably got it turned off,” Homero wagers. A cell phone ringing inside the bus might disturb fellow passengers. When you are breaking the law, you want to be inconspicuous.

Even on these back roads, we pass half a dozen military checkpoints. Usually it’s two or three
guardias
sitting under a shade tree, shooting the breeze, a motorcycle parked nearby, just in case they have to chase down a vehicle. As we approach, one of the
guardias
stands (do they take turns?), cranes his neck, sees three white faces and one light brown man, and waves us on. But at a couple of checkpoints, as we slow down for the speed bump, the
guardias
approach and peer inside.

“¿Cómo están?”
I ask them, friendliness being the best policy, especially with armed
guardias.

“As you can see, we are grinding the yuca.”

Sitting under a mango tree, waiting for the next bribe bus—I don’t think so! But I can see, from casting a glance around them, that they haven’t apprehended any Haitians. Of course, this is not the route that Piti’s bus is taking, but I’m grabbing at good-luck straws wherever I can find them.

It is getting late, and a huge rainstorm is coming in. Halfway back to Santiago, the rain starts pouring down. The kind of drenching downpour where you can’t make out the road ahead of you. We stop and hurriedly cover the back of the pickup with a tarp, then drive on at a creeping pace, wondering how the storm might delay the bus as well. The cell phone is getting no reception now. Luckily, I was able to get through earlier to Vicenta at my parents’ house in Santiago. Please set some extra places for dinner and prepare some beds for Eli and Piti and his family. It will be too late for Eli to drive them all up to the mountain tonight, two and half hours away. They can set out fresh in the morning.

The rain stops, and as if the two things were synchronized: the cell phone rings. It’s Piti! They are already in Santiago waiting at the gas station.

“Oh my god! We’re at least a half hour away,” I tell him. “We could hardly move in that bad rainstorm.”

“What rainstorm?” Piti asks. They didn’t see any rain at all on the main highway.

“You’re kidding! No rain?” I ask about the checkpoints.

“No problem with the checkpoints.” Furthermore, Eseline didn’t get carsick. The Dramamine worked.

When we finally pull into the gas station, we spot them right away, two kids with a baby, sitting on the curb. The minute they see us, they spring to their feet, their faces radiant with relief. Even Eseline, who has been stony-faced and removed for most of the trip, comes running toward us as if we were family.

“Mèsi, Jezi, mèsi,”
Piti keeps saying. Another weird moment for an agnostic, when a prayer she has uttered on the strength of others’ faith is answered.

When we have seen a thing

When we have seen a thing, we have to tell the story.

And yet, initially, we are dumbfounded. The return is jarring. We honk at the entrance to my parents’ house. The watchman, Don Ramón, opens the tall wooden gates. He touches his Yankees baseball cap, bowing his head deferentially. It’s hard to believe that this gentle, soft-spoken man, now in his sixties, used to be in the military. Did he ever accept bribes? I wonder. Or worse.

At the top of the driveway sits the big house. In the waning evening light, its shabby features aren’t apparent. The rusted ironwork at the windows, the cracked walls, the weeds coming up between the stepping stones on the way to the pool drained because of the mosquitoes—all fade into the bigger picture: this is a huge place with a large staff for just two people.

Don Ramón closes the gates and hurries up to see if we need help unloading the pickup. “And how was Haiti?” he asks politely, turning off the little radio he keeps on by his chair under the carport. The staff at my parents’ house were all shocked that we would want to go to a country even poorer than ours. A rung or two below them on the ladder they are desperately climbing.

“Haiti was . . .” I look around at my fellow travelers. No one volunteers a comment. We need time to collect ourselves. In
The Odyssey
, there is a ritual way to welcome a traveler. The host settles him in his quarters, gives him time to wash up, feeds him, and only afterward comes the payback: tell me your story. For now, I settle on the generic “
Muy, muy interesante,
Don Ramón.”

“Sí, sí.”
He nods. Whatever I say, Don Ramón is usually in agreement.

Homero takes off, back to his family who await his stories. Will he tell his young sons how we resolved our little problems at the border? Or will he edit out those parts? What will the rest of us edit out? How to convey what we have seen? One thing is certain. Like the Ancient Mariner, we will feel compelled to tell the story, over and over. As a way to understand what happened to us.

But in the upstairs part of the house, in my parents’ apartment, the stories are unraveling. Alzheimer’s disease is breaking down their memories, undoing the narrative weave of their lives into loose, dangling threads. A stranger enters the room insisting she is our child. How can that be, when we ourselves are children? A long-dead brother returns in the eyes of a stray dog. A mirror shows a startled old woman or an old man looking back at us.

I start with the easier faces who follow me into the sitting room: my husband, Bill, whom my mother vaguely recalls; Eli, the volunteer from the United States working on our farm this year, who has been here a few times; then this young Haitian couple and their child. Piti, Eseline, and Ludy. Even to an undamaged mind, it is a complicated story to follow: borders and bribes; bad roads and great mangoes; Haitian angels and an angry woman in a town square, yelling at a white man beside a silver pickup with a black girl and her baby inside.

My father closes his eyes, exhausted with the effort of trying to understand. But my mother’s good manners are still running on automatic. She smiles her company smile. But the minute we disappear to wash up for supper, she retreats to her own bedroom. She doesn’t feel well, she says, when I try to convince her to join us at the table. What she means is that she is frightened of strangers whose stories she can’t comprehend even when we repeat them.

It’s best not to push her. Especially at night, she can become agitated, caught in the loop of the same story: She does not want to stay in this strange house. Please, please take her home.

Piti and Eseline also don’t come up for supper. Maybe they, too, are abashed, trying to make sense of this very different story: a house with enough rooms to sleep a village; a watchman guarding two elderly people who would not live to be so old had they been born in Haiti.

As I go down the stairs to fetch them, I can hear Ludy bawling away, letting it be known that she has had a hard day. That’s why they haven’t come upstairs, Piti explains. They do not want to disturb my parents. And after yesterday’s incident at the hotel, they know better than to leave the baby by herself.

I’m grateful for their thoughtfulness. A crying baby is likely to agitate not only Mami ensconced in her bedroom but Papi sitting at the table, a vague look on his face. But he can surprise you, suddenly focusing on a detail, getting worked up, until he’s in full rant. Those times, there’s a little bottle in the cupboard devoted to their medications that we can give him, three drops on his tongue, if he’ll let you, and if not, in a glass of water you hold up to his mouth with a straw.

On a recent visit, Eli and Bill and our son-in-law, Tom, were all having dinner at the table. My father kept eyeing them. “Where are all those men going to sleep, Pitou?” he asked my mother again and again. My older sister and I exchanged a look across the table. Our father was back in our adolescence, worried about males hitting on his daughters. Only after we made a show of parading the men out of the dining room did my father resume his meal tranquilly.

I go back upstairs and prepare a tray with two supper plates and, for dessert, two big slices of their wedding cake. A little later, I go down to collect the tray and say goodnight. By now the baby has quieted, lying on a padding of blankets on the floor.