A Wedding in Haiti (18 page)

I’m feeling impatient, as I know all about errands in our part of the world—they can take all day. With four months of planning, Piti was supposed to have everything ready at his end. “Kids are like that,” Bill reminds me. They wait till the last minute; they figure you’ll take care of stuff for them; they read their text messages instead of doing their crowd control. Bill doesn’t have to add what we’ve both realized over the course of the last year. Piti—and by extension, Eseline, and Ludy—are now our kids. Maybe it’s not as easy to have them as I thought.

Piti directs Bill to a side street where we park in front of a compound of small concrete houses surrounded by a stone wall. This is where the moneychanger/visa procurer/border smuggler has his operation. Piti needs to exchange some pesos for gourdes to leave with Eseline. He and Bill disappear inside, and after about ten minutes, I wonder if they’ve been kidnapped or what.

I climb out of the pickup, ready to go in search of them, when I happen to gaze across the street.
BANQUE PATIENCE
, the sign on a shop reads. These
banques
—which are not banks, as I first assumed, but places where you can buy lottery tickets—will turn up everywhere, Patience being a popular name for them. Patience! Okay, I tell myself, climbing back into the pickup. Minutes later, Bill and Piti emerge from the gated compound.

Throughout this trip, this will keep happening. A sign on a store front, the logo on a T-shirt, graffiti on a wall will catch my eye with a pointed message. After several occurrences, I’m convinced that Haiti is speaking to me. Most often it’s the tap-taps with their prominently displayed names. Just when I need a reminder, a tap-tap named
CONSCIENCE
will go by, or
L’AMOUR DU PROCHAIN
(Love Your Neighbor), or
HUMILIACION
, or, at the nadir of the trip, when Bill and I are bickering, a tap-tap pulls up alongside us with the name in English—I kid you not—
MY LOVE ON THE LINE
.

Next stop is a cell-phone store to buy a chip so that Piti’s phone can work in Haiti. The problem we soon encounter is that the stores don’t really have inventory, just odds and ends that fit one brand and not another. When we finally find a chip that we’re told will work, we decide to try it out before we leave the shop. I dial Señor Ortiz, who has returned to Port-au-Prince, to tell him we are now in Haiti.

He answers with caution in his voice. Since I heard his title, I’ve been wondering what exactly a
ministro consejero
does. Now I know. A
ministro consejero
deals with people like me. Pesky faux-nieces and -nephews, who are not even related to the mayor, asking for favors.

I thank him for our nice welcome at the border. How right he was about market day. And because this is my last chance to ask, I mention that we have a Haitian traveler whose visa has expired. I don’t know if the silence at the other end means Señor Ortiz’s blood pressure has again shot up or that the chip has stopped working. But finally, I hear his long sigh. “What is his status?”

Status? I have no idea. I ask Piti. He has no idea. “We have no idea,” I tell Señor Ortiz, though I suspect the answer is “illegal.” Then mercifully for both of us, the phone signal drops. About ten minutes later, as we’re driving out of Ouanaminthe, the phone rings. It’s Señor Ortiz. There is a person at the consulate in Port-au-Prince who will try to help us acquire whatever visa it is that Piti will need to reenter the Dominican Republic. He gives me her name. But we must be there first thing on Friday morning, as the office closes midday and will not reopen till Monday.

“Poor guy,” I say, handing the phone back to Piti. I swear I’ll never do this again. It’s no fun being the cause of somebody’s high blood pressure. Part of the reason I haven’t enjoyed our farm project half as much as Bill is that since I have the language, I’m usually the one delivering the bad news, firing the drunk manager, pestering the
ministro consejero
.

The little hospital with a big heart

Our first stop is Milot, twelve miles southwest of Cap-Haïtien. We’re scheduled to visit Hôpital Sacré Coeur, a small Catholic hospital where several friends who are physicians have been on mission trips. Bill was planning to volunteer even before the earthquake, now with more reason. We had told our contact that we would arrive by ten, so Bill can check out the facilities for a future trip. But by the time we pull up in front of the hospital, it’s close to midafternoon.

The hospital used to be a small sixty-eight bed facility. But in the days after the earthquake, it was turned into a triage center for the trauma victims pouring in from the capital six hours south. Both the hospital and the town vowed not to turn anyone away. As a result, the hospital now has over four hundred beds, the excess housed in tents across the street, and the town is packed with refugees and the families of the victims.

This far out—almost six months since the earthquake—many of the patients are in rehabilitation, learning to use their artificial limbs. One boy is doing his physical training exercises with the help of a perky, blond physical therapist from California. My eyes are drawn to his artificial limbs, so it isn’t until I look up that I notice the T-shirt he’s wearing:
FLY
, it reads, then an acronym, no doubt some travel company. T-shirts, too, begin to join the landscape conversation. On our fourth day in Haiti, en route to Port-au-Prince, when our spirits are flagging, and Bill and I are at it again, we will pass a woman wearing a T-shirt that reads:
STOP BITCHING: START A REVOLUTION
.

Everywhere, we spot volunteers in blue and green scrubs, nurses and doctors and occupational therapists, from the States, from Europe, from Russia, Australia. A middle-aged nurse from Ireland greets us, her hazel eyes sparkling with energy. She has been here for three months, and no, she is not going native, she jokes when she sees me eyeing her graying cornrows. “But let me tell you one of my little charges got a treat, playing with what she calls ‘doll’s hair.’ ”

Outside the children’s wing, we find three elementary schoolteachers from California, painting murals of trees and flowers and butterflies. They usher us inside to show off the cheerful murals in the ward. I come upon a skinny toddler, who doesn’t seem to have anything wrong with him—no missing limbs, no bandaged wounds. But unlike the children in the other cribs, he has no mother or other family member attending to him. I linger at his side, looking into his eyes, making a connection. When it’s time for us to go, he wails for me to stay. How on earth do people do this?

Piti joins us for part of the tour, Wilson spelling him with Eseline at the pickup. We’ve all grown quiet with a kind of reverence, and not only because we’re in the presence of suffering, but also of goodness. People have flocked here for the last six months to help. A town with very little has opened its doors to share with those who have nothing. People can be amazingly kind. Why are we so surprised? That is a victory for the cynics we also carry inside us: how we often expect people to be otherwise.

Blowout in the Gardens of the Sea

We must have some kind of bad karma with Madame Myrième that consigns us to making bad entrances at Les Jardins de l’Océan. Again, we roll into Cap-Haïtien at the end of a long day, when we’re scruffy, dirty, and out of sorts.

“Bonsoir,
Madame,
comment t’allez vous?”
I dust off my high school French. Homero is not here to translate, and I know Madame does not speak
anglais
.

Madame rattles off a greeting.

“Nous avons retournés avec nos amis,”
I say, mangling the accent.

Madame nods. She can see that we have returned, me, Bill, the young couple and the baby.

“Tell her we need four rooms,” Bill instructs me. “Ask her if she can give us a special rate.”

Is he kidding?! I’ve about used up all my French.
“Quatre chambres”
is as far as I can take us.

All rooms are eighty-five dollars a night, Madame announces. She must’ve understood Bill’s English. With an added surcharge if more than two stay in a room, she adds, eying Wilson and Charlie and Mikaela.

Bill shakes his head. Like we’re really going to get back in the pickup and go hotel bargain hunting at this hour.

Madame closes her account book, as if she’s done for the day. Two strong wills face each other off. But it’s no contest. The lady with the hotel and a French restaurant in the lobby is the winner. Give it up, Bill.

We take the rooms at Madame’s regular price, but the contest is not over. At supper, Bill ends up sitting at the head of the table, where he faces Madame at her post across the room in the lobby. The waiter did not take the feng shui course on where to seat dinner guests to minimize negativity.

It’s actually because of the waiter that the blowout happens. A thin, bespectacled young man, who is eager to please, he deserves a nice tip. But when the credit card slip comes, Bill is miffed that the total has already been filled in with no space left to include a tip. He sends the slip back. He wants a new one written up.

The waiter returns, old slip in hand. Madame cannot write another bill because the credit card slips are numbered, and she must account for each one.

Bill pushes back his chair and marches over to Madame’s post to give her a piece of his mind. Next thing I know Bill is tearing up the credit card slip, and Madame is calling him something that was never on any vocabulary list back in high school French class. Meanwhile, Mikaela and I are looking at each other with raised eyebrows, probably thinking the same thing: Unless Bill calms down, we’re going to find ourselves sleeping on the street tonight.

Bill does calm down, later in our room, after he has had a chance to fume, after I agree with him that patrons should be able to write in tips on their credit card bills. But letting his anger have its day, well, it’s just giving in to the worst side of his nature.

“I do it all the time,” I’m quick to assure him, just so he doesn’t have to remind me that I do it all the time. Why just this morning if it hadn’t been for a sign across the street from where we were parked, I would have stormed the smuggler’s compound in search of him and Piti.

Bill doesn’t get what I’m saying. “What sign?” So I tell him about the landscape speaking to me, the
PATIENCE BANQUE
, the
FLY
T-shirt, the
PEACE AND LOVE HOTEL
. Even the
GIV
beauty soap I just saw in the bathroom should remind us both of how to behave toward each other.

My beloved is now quietly watching me, as if he’s wondering if he doesn’t have bigger problems on his hands than Madame Myrième. A wife going off the deep end in Haiti.

I know there’s probably a pathology out there for people who seriously believe the world is winking at them, sending them secret messages. That’s not what I mean. I explain about details in the landscape serving as reminders. Nothing more weird than that.

When we return to the subject of Madame, it’s now a different Bill, pissed off at himself for giving in to his anger and frustration.

“So, what should I do?” It’s so seldom Bill asks me what he should do, I savor the moment a moment. I’m reminded right then and there why I love him. He’s never a done deal. He has agreed to live with me, both of us works in progress, as individuals and as a couple.

“Just apologize,” I tell him. “It won’t take anything away from you, really,” I add, because I see the annoyance returning on his furrowed brow.

Next morning we’re downstairs, surprisingly, before Madame. Maybe she had a bad night fuming about her boorish guest. When she does appear, Bill ducks his head and glumly finishes his breakfast. He’s not going to do it, I’m thinking. But as we head out of the dining area and upstairs to pack, Bill peels off to the kitchen doorway where Madame is giving orders. I see her scowl as he approaches. I hear him say, “I’m sorry.” And then—why he asked me last night how to say it in French, he adds,
“Pardonnez-moi.”