When I return to the inner yard, Piti and Homero are sitting under an enormous shade tree whose roots probably extend into Haiti. By the looks of it, they are having a serious discussion. At first I think Homero is letting the young man down easy, delivering bad news that Eseline and Ludy will have to return home. But in fact, Homero has found out that there is a solution.
No one has stopped Eseline here at the entry, in large part because of the chaos of market day. The problem will come—as he predicted—at the checkpoints. An individual vehicle with a Haitian inside will be stopped. But there are buses that travel between Dajabón and other parts of the island, and, for a special fee, they will take a few undocumented Haitians along with other passengers. At each checkpoint, the driver then passes on part of that fee to the guards who waive checking everyone’s documents.
It’s actually a win-win situation because the Dominicans on the bus—whom, you’ll recall, do not have the waiting gene—would not want to endure the long delays of having everyone’s documents checked. As for what that certain extra fee is, Homero will have to check at the bus station down the street. First, Piti has to decide to take the risk, as in a few cases, not every crew at every checkpoint on a particular day is on board with this arrangement. But there aren’t a whole lot of other options.
Piti listens carefully, and then something happens to his boyish face. A manly gravity descends on his features. It’s as if he has suddenly realized what he has done. I don’t mean the irresponsibility of placing his young wife and child in this predicament. I mean this is the moment when he grasps what it means to become one with his wife and child.
A friend recently told me how she asked a new colleague from Kenya if he had any family. “Yes, indeed,” the man replied, “I have a large family, cousins, and aunts, and uncles, and grandparents.” My friend explained that she meant family the way we use the term in this country, meaning a wife, children, the nuclear family. The man looked surprised. “But that is me.”
Eseline and Ludy are Piti now. He nods, agreeing to take the risk for all of them. He is a boy-sized man, taking on a man-sized burden. I wish I could help him out, beam him my mantra, Tranquilo, tranquilo, but so far I can’t say it has done much to still my own anxious heart.
Lunch with Castro at the Gran Hotel Raydan
We stop at the Gran Hotel Raydan. It’s on the main drag in Dajabón, diagonally across the street from the bus station—and according to Homero, who has eaten there before, it has a decent restaurant. Out front on the patio, the few cast-iron tables and chairs are deserted. It’s the hot time of day, when sensible folk are indoors in the dark, air-conditioned interior. But we’re already a long ways from being a sensible bunch. We wait outside, baking in the sun, while Homero and Piti cross over to the station to make arrangements.
They come back excited, nervous, full of news. A bus is leaving in a few minutes. Initially, the dispatcher quoted twenty-five hundred pesos for taking the undocumented Eseline to Santiago. Somehow—he’s getting alarmingly good at this—Homero talked the guy into accepting two thousand for Eseline. Piti, being documented, will pay the usual fare, two hundred pesos.
We hurry to get them ready. Their luggage will stay with us, but we put together a plastic bag with necessities: Ludy’s bottle, a couple of Pampers from the packet we just bought, some crackers and cheese, and a bottle of water. Eseline takes the last Dramamine. Eli lends Piti his cell phone, just in case . . . We leave that sentence unfinished and skip over to a happy ending. We will meet them in Santiago. Call us the minute they get there. Eli punches my number into his cell phone and hands it to Piti.
Meanwhile, Homero, Eli, Bill and I will follow in the pickup, taking an alternate route on back roads. The fear is that if we tail the bus, the guards at the checkpoints might get nervous and decide to put on a law-abiding show for the Americanos in the pickup. Best to give the bus wide berth. Since it will be making stops along the way to load and unload passengers, we’ll grab a bite at the restaurant first. We should arrive in Santiago around the same time for our rendezvous.
Homero and I accompany Piti, Eseline, and Ludy, but just as we’re crossing the street, a bus is pulling out. We hurry over to the dispatcher, whose face drops the minute he sees us. Our bus just left. Furthermore, now there’s an added problem. “You didn’t say anything about a baby. I’d rather take ten men and as many women as take a baby.”
“But why?” I’m puzzled. If the point is keeping out Haitians who will take jobs away from Dominicans, Ludy has a long ways to go before she’ll be any kind of competition.
I never do get an answer as to why a baby is such a big issue. Later, Homero will surmise that the dispatcher had been willing to take twenty-two hundred because a bus was about to leave—a kind of fire-sale price. But now, with more time, the dispatcher has some elbow room to dicker. We end up paying an additional thousand pesos for the baby. The family will be on the very next bus, the dispatcher confirms, pocketing the bills.
When will that be?
“When it fills,” he tells us. Meanwhile, so as not raise suspicions, Piti and Eseline should go stand out of sight at the back of the station. He gestures with his chin. He will come get them when it’s time. He turns to Homero and me with a look that says, Scram.
While Homero waits, I walk back with Piti and Eseline, both big-eyed and nervous. We embrace, and something about our arms around each other, the baby in the middle, feels like a moment requiring spiritual punctuation. But what to say and to whom? It is an interesting moment when an agnostic feels compelled to lead a prayer. “Please, God, keep this family in your loving gaze. Bring us safely together in Santiago.” When I open my eyes, Piti and Eseline have bowed their heads, their eyes closed, their foreheads fervently creased. Only Ludy is looking at me, a little smile playing on her lips. I suppose if there is a God, this is how he would make a visitation, on the sweet face of a child.
Back at the dark, wood-paneled restaurant in the Gran Hotel Raydan, Bill and Eli have already been seated at a table, noses buried in their menus, as if reading two engrossing novels. Our waiter, a portly, middle-aged fellow whom Homero remembers from previous visits, is named Castro. “¿Cómo está la revolución?” I joke with him.
Castro sighs. He must hear this a lot. He has a tired, humorless face, a man who expects the worst and is not often disappointed. He, too, has had a long day, and it’s only two in the afternoon. And we are a complicated foursome: two vegetarians (Eli is a flexible vegetarian—so as not to cause a problem, he’ll eat meat if that’s all there is); a man who wants chivo as good as the one he ate in Moustique (Bill); and another who wants the delicious plate he ate the last time he was here, but he can’t remember what it was (Homero). In the silence after our order is finally settled, we clink glasses.
“To Piti and Eseline and Ludy!”
A half hour later, as we ourselves are driving away from the hotel, we see another bus pulling out of the station across the street. I try to make out faces, but the windows are tinted so I can’t see who’s riding inside. But since this might be the bus that carries Piti and Eseline and Ludy, I give it a lucky name as it roars away, God Bless, Merci Jésus, like the tap-taps we saw earlier today.
Mèsi, Jezi, mèsi
The trip back to Santiago seems endless, and later, I figure out why: I am living two parallel lives.
In one life, I am riding in a silver four-wheel-drive 2009 Toyota pickup, stopping at some of Homero’s favorite haunts, all having to do with food. In keeping with his name, Homero is the kind of companion you want to take with you on a journey. At first glance, he might not look the part—a family man with three young children, a wife, a government office job—but once he hits the road, he turns into a free spirit and bon vivant. He’ll show you a hell of a good time. And when need be, he can morph into Daniel in the lion’s den or undercover haggler finding you the best bargain on bribes going.
Vianela and her son, Nelson, on the road to Loma de Cabrera, sell us
dulce en yagua, a kind of thick fudge made with milk, sugar, and any number of other ingredients (orange, cashew fruit, coconut), then wrapped in yagua, the husk shed by a palm tree. We buy one and a half pounds, and when she weighs the wedge on her old-fashioned hanging scale, she says, “Le falta conciencia para ser una y media.” It lacks a conscience to be one and a half pounds. I’m taken with this roadside moralist of what amounts to ounces. And maybe because we are so close to the border, I find myself wondering how such a fine moral sensibility would have responded to the 1937 massacre.
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.
A Wedding in Haiti Page 8