A Wedding in Haiti (2 page)

When I call the number, Piti is giggly with good news. The baby was born back in April. Piti is leaving for Haiti within days to meet his infant daughter and to marry the mother, Eseline, on August 20. Will my husband and I be coming?

This is short notice indeed. And very inconvenient. In fact, the very week of the wedding, I’m scheduled to be at a five-day gathering of the International Council of Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers. A Latina friend told me about the group and urged me to attend the conference. She and a contingent of her Latina friends are going. (This is during the height of the Sotomayor hearings, when the term
wise Latina
has gone to some of our heads.) I’m ripe for such a gathering. I need to connect with wise elders. As both my parents continue their decline into Alzheimer’s, I’ve become the parent of my parents. I need an infusion of grandmotherly wisdom as I transition into being an elder myself. In addition, my registration has been paid, and there is a penalty for canceling.

“
Ay,
Piti, I’m so sorry. I can’t,” I try explaining.

But now there’s a pebble in my shoe, even at night when I’m barefoot in bed. I go back and forth in a tizzy of indecisiveness. I pile up the reasons against changing my plans, a long list that includes the grandmothers, the conference cancellation penalty, the penalty to change my plane ticket, and more importantly, the lost opportunity for psychic help on the caretaking road ahead. On the pro side is Piti’s round, boyish face, grinning at my long-ago promise that I’d be at his wedding. Sometimes a conscience is an inconvenient thing to have, and costly. But not to follow it exacts an even greater cost, having to live with the hobbled person you become when you ignore it.

Getting there from here

In a subsequent phone call, I ask Piti where in Haiti his wedding will take place. “You go almost to Port-de-Paix,” he explains.

On the map, Port-de-Paix is clear across northern Haiti as the crow flies, but unfortunately, there are no direct roads there. Piti can’t take us there, because he himself will have left for home before our arrival in order to make preparations for the wedding.

I e-mail my friend Madison Smartt Bell, who has written extensively about Haiti and whom I consider an authority on all things Haitian. Does he have any suggestions on how to get there from here? Madison says our best bet is to hire a guide. He recommends one based in Cap-Haïtien with the reassuring name of Handy. But Handy’s English e-mails are not only not handy, they’re incomprehensible.
A large Bonsor especial for you and your husband,
one of them reads.
Now I just write you for a great Remerciment especial . . . Please I am still the only for you an answer of your compreansion your answer please thank you please?

My husband, whose Spanish is only a little better than Handy’s English, suggests I call Piti back and just ask for his address in Haiti. “We’ll find him,” Bill says confidently.

Piti laughs outright when I put the question to him. “An address? It is not possible that way.” A comment that shakes my confidence, always in much shorter supply than my husband’s.

But Piti comes up with his own solution. A Haitian friend who has been working with him in the Dominican Republic is from the same area in rural Haiti. Leonardo hasn’t been back home in two years, but for a fee and his return passage (he’s undocumented so he will have to pay a
buscón
to smuggle him back across the border), he’ll take us right to Piti’s doorstep.

Leonardo turns out to be a young man of about twenty who looks like a rap star, with a big silver crucifix blazoned on his black T-shirt, mirror sunglasses, a cocky smirk, and a thick chain with a Che Guevara medallion. (Leonardo isn’t sure whose image it is but guesses a famous rapper.) This tough guy appearance makes me a little wary at first, until I find out that along with his small suitcase, Leonardo is bringing a box full of spaghetti for his mother.

Midway on the trip, we’re to pick up Piti’s old friend, Pablo, who is already in Haiti visiting his own family. (“He’ll be waiting for you at the gas station,” Piti has told Leonardo.) Also along for the adventure is a Dominican friend who works as a coffee researcher for an agroforestry institute run by the government. Homero, another promising name, is curious about everything. What he doesn’t know, he’ll go out of his way to find out. Which is why he wants to go with us. “Haiti is like a brother I’ve never gotten to know.”

I agree with Homero. Except for a brief trip to Port-au-Prince with my aunt and uncle twenty-five years ago, I’ve never set foot next door. Haiti is like a sister I’ve never gotten to know.

Our volunteer from Middlebury, Eli, asks if he can join us. He only just arrived in the DR three weeks ago, and I, anyhow, am a little worried about how he will fare in the year ahead. To begin with, Eli is a redhead with fair skin, a challenging complexion type in the tropics; and we are that much closer to the sun’s burning rays on our mountaintop. Eli also comes with an incredible résumé: head of the student government at Middlebury, a year’s teaching position at a prestigious private school, a just-completed masters in Spanish in Madrid. But those same spiffy achievement skills might prove a handicap in a remote farming village where male ambition is pretty much confined to cockfights and mistresses.

“So you really want to spend a year on a coffee farm with no electricity, no hot water, sometimes no water at all, no Internet, no museums, cafés, restaurants, movie theaters?” Bill had asked during a phone interview while Eli was still in Spain. The guy had said “Yes”! We had to pinch ourselves in Vermont. Mid-September, Eli will be returning stateside to take his Law School Admission Test (LSAT) for law school. At one point during the trip, I pick up his heavy backpack and joke, “What have you got in here?” Sheepishly, Eli admits he brought along his thick book of LSAT exams. Our first evening in the Haitian countryside, in the waning light, I’ll catch Eli sitting under a mango tree taking a practice exam. By the trip’s end, I’ll have no doubts at all: Eli will do just fine this year at Alta Gracia.

August 18, Santiago, Dominican Republic; los pitouses

We arrive in Santiago the night before we’re to set out. All flights are on time, no cancellations or delays. A good thing because in order to be at the wedding two days from now, we have to get up at dawn tomorrow to make the journey to Piti’s in one day.

Eli and Leonardo are already waiting for us when we get in from the airport. We’re all spending the night at my parents’ house; then at dawn, Homero will join us, and we’ll be off, picking up Pablo at his gas station, and on to Piti’s.

Because we get in so late, I don’t bother waking my parents, already asleep in their bedroom. The night nurse slips out to give me her report: both had a good day, both ate well, both played a little dominoes—a compromised game with slippery rules, and a single objective: letting my mother win. Losing can throw a pall over the rest of her day, long after she has forgotten having played dominoes in the first place.

She has also forgotten that she no longer lives in New York. In 2002, after forty-three years in the United States, my parents decided to move back “home,” and just in time. Within the year, my father’s erratic behavior and faltering memory were diagnosed as Alzheimer’s. My mother followed soon thereafter.

Since the Dominican Republic is a country without institutionalized elder care, we four daughters have had to cobble together our own facility. My older sister has virtually moved down there to help run what amounts to a small business, with a social worker, Vicenta, to oversee a staff that includes a cook, a chauffeur, a person to clean the house, two gardeners, a night watchman, a night nurse, and a three-person replacement weekend crew. Good thing my parents have the resources to pay for what is not cheap care if you do it right: a decent hourly wage, an eight-hour workday, a five-day workweek, two week’s paid vacation, and health insurance for employees and their large families. All those enlightened concepts their daughters were taught in good schools their money also paid for.

Good thing also that they had this house to come back to. Actually, the house was my father’s idea, built with his money. My mother was dead set against it. I imagine a vaudeville act not unlike Bill’s and mine over the coffee farm. It was the early seventies; we were living in the States with no plans to move back. We didn’t need another house, my mother argued. But my father went ahead with his dream house. And since my mother had washed her hands of it, he didn’t have to rein in any of his wild ideas. He ordered a windmill. (He loved the scene of Don Quixote tussling with one.) Inside, he housed his growing library on shelves you could access as you went up the winding stairwell. Since he also loved birds, he dug out a hollow on the hillside for a sanctuary, covered with a netted structure. Underneath, he planted trees and vines, special varieties that bore fruits the birds liked. A waterfall splashed down into the sanctuary, and the waters ran through it, then were pumped back up to the top of the falls by the windmill.

My sisters and I had theories about the house. Built on a hillside for all to see, it was Papi’s way of showing off to Mami’s family that he had made it on his own. He had proved himself worthy of my mother’s hand, after all.

Theirs had been a legendary love. As a young medical student in Santiago, my father had joined un underground group of classmates who were disaffected with the dictatorship. Unfortunately, the group’s revolutionary agenda never evolved beyond the level of a schoolboy prank: strewing nails on the dictator’s motorcade route from the capital to Santiago. It was a naïveté some members paid for dearly with their lives, but my father managed to flee. He arrived in New York City in 1939, thinking he could get a job. Of course, no hospital would recognize his Dominican medical degree.

He decided to head for Canada, where he’d heard some Dominican doctors had found work. By then, he had forty-five dollars left in his pocket. On the train, he met a Canadian who asked if my father wanted to see the country and earn some money while doing so. It turned out the man owned a logging camp, a remote operation of fifteen-hundred men up near Hudson Bay. He was looking for a resident doctor for the winter. The owner didn’t care where my father had gotten his degree, just as long as he could set a broken limb or tourniquet a slashed arm. My father accepted on the spot.

How this was a way of seeing Canada, I don’t know. It still gives me a pang to think of him, a young man with no experience of northern winters, taking off to such a cold, desolate place. But my father always considered himself a fortunate man. “My friends in Canada call me McAlvarez, because they say I have the luck of the Irish,” he used to brag, laughing. Just counting the number of times he barely escaped death at the hands of the dictatorship, I’d have to agree with them.

After the snows melted, my father collected his salary (less than he had been promised) and settled in Montreal, where he took night courses at the medical school, while also working full-time during the day. Over the next eight years, Papi managed to reearn his medical degree, at one point selling his blood to pay for his credits. (The stories were marched out whenever any of his daughters brought home a report card with a grade lower than an A.) Papi became fluent in French, and had girlfriends we sometimes heard about when Mami was out of earshot or he’d had too much to drink.

During his time in Canada, Papi took a trip to New York City to attend to a dying nephew, who’d been brought to the States in a desperate attempt to save his life. While there, my father was invited to a party, thrown by a distant cousin who fixed him up with her best friend, my mother, who was then on a shopping trip with her parents. They happened upon each other at several subsequent gatherings. By the time she had to return home, and he to Canada, they were both smitten.

During the ensuing separation, they wrote to each other every day, long letters, supplemented by cards, phone calls, telegrams. At some point, they began using a pet name for each other,
pitou
, which my father had picked up in Canada—from one of those girlfriends, I suppose.

Initially, my mother’s parents did not approve of my father. They were from the oligarchy, people who could afford shopping trips to New York. Papi was a struggling doctor, his foreign degree considered second-rate, however subsequently beefed up by his Canadian credentials. He would not be able to give my mother the lifestyle she was used to. Furthermore, Mami was ten years younger, a beauty who turned heads wherever she went. The dictator’s son was said to be after her—perhaps that’s why she had been whisked away to the States on a shopping trip. “Are you Katharine Hepburn?” she was often asked on New York City streets. Not that Papi was any slouch in the looks department. Those Canadian girlfriends didn’t call him
pitou
for nothing.

My grandparents had hoped that distance would snuff out the romance. But it just served to stoke the young couple’s determination and ardor. There was no keeping apart
los pitouses
, as they soon came to be known in the family. My grandfather finally relented and gave his approval, my grandmother reluctantly complying. My parents were married in New York City and set up housekeeping there. Soon after my sister and I were born, my grandmother began lobbying for the family to move back, where my mother’s parents and their money could help fill in the financial gaps.