The box of medical books that had secured the floorboard had been moved to one side. These were oversized books that did not fit on the shelves, and because they had a lot of pictures, I assumed that Yo had been scavenging through them. The floorboards had been lifted and then not fitted back exactly the way I would have done it. But the wrapped parcel was wedged firmly in place, and so taking great gulps of air to calm my beating heart, I convinced myself that I was safe. My cache had not been discovered. But for sure I had to get rid of the gun as a precaution in case the SIM came to search the premises.
Somehow my wife found out about that gun—or maybe I told her? One way or another, she figured out that I was involved in the underground again. She became tragic. Afternoons, she lay in bed with terrible migraines full of presentiments. We were on the eve of our extermination! The SIM were at the door! We would be at the bottom of the Rio Ozama by dawn! She was on the edge of hysteria, and it was the children who felt the brunt of it. Yo especially seemed often to be in her pajamas and banished to her room for offenses that when my wife recounted them to me seemed very minor.
Mostly it was her storytelling that got her in trouble. One time—I can laugh about it now—her grandparents went off to New York as they often did on the pretext of some illness only American doctors could treat. My Yo spread the story among the maids that her grandfather and grandmother had been sent away to have their heads cut off. By the time we cleared it up, the cook had fled in terror that she, too, might be decapitated for fixing the meals of traitors.
“You must not tell such stories!” My wife shook her by the arm. By now, my wife could see the harm that had come of that crazy storybook. It was not just the stories themselves, but the habit of storytelling that our little Yo seemed to have picked up from the lady with the bra and baggy pants.
Soon after that wild story was when it happened. That Saturday night we were headed for a big party at Mundo’s house next door. A big party meant there would be a perico ripiao band, lots of food and dancing, and at least one drunk jumping into the swimming pool in an attempt to prove he could walk on water. The girls were still over at the general’s watching their cowboy movie as we got dressed. My wife had put on the red organdy dress that she had not worn since her Waldorf Astoria days, and suddenly she was the sneezing señorita all over again. For the first time in a long time, she was relaxed and playful. In fact, we had used the empty house and the peace and quiet to get reacquainted under the covers. We were just getting ready to cross over to Mundo’s when we heard the girls and Milagros coming up the driveway.
They came thundering in the room after only a little knock, which we had taught them was good manners. Of course, they always forgot the second part of the lesson, waiting for permission. Only Yo, I noted, was hanging back at the door. “How is my little doctora?” I teased for I was in a good mood and pleased with all five of my beautiful girls.
That was when Carla blurted out, “Ay, Papi, you should hear the story Yoyo told.”
“Yes,” said Sandi. “General Molino told her she must never say things like that!”
My wife’s face drained of color so that the rouge stood out unnaturally on her cheeks. In the calmest voice possible, she said, “Come tell your mami what it is you told General Molino.”
By now Milagros was at the door, wild-eyed, and shaking her head at the child. “Doña Laura, that child. I tell you. I don’t know what devil gets in her mouth. Dios santo, keep us from trouble, but that girl is going to get us all killed.”
Yoyo’s face was a picture of shock. It was as if she were finally realizing that a story could kill as well as cure someone.
It took some calming down before we could get the story out of that riled-up old woman. It seems the general and his wife and Milagros and the girls had been watching a cowboy movie. Yo was on the general’s lap—which surprised me as Yo did not take to the general the way the others did. She was always coming home and saying that the general had too many rings on his fingers that scratched her, that he tickled her too much and trotted her too hard on his knee. Anyhow, this Saturday, when the cowboy shouldered his rifle to shoot the outlaws, the general had commenced his baiting. “Ay, look at that big gun, Yoyo!” He was poking her here and there with his forefinger. And Yo came back with a child’s boast, “My papi has a bigger gun!”
“Oh?” says the general.
And Milagros reported she made eyes at the child to unsay what she had said. But no. Once Yo was inside a story, you couldn’t stop her. “Yes, my papi has many many big guns hidden away where no one can find them.”
“Oh?” says the general.
“Don Carlos, the man’s face was white as that sheet there on your bed.”
“Yes, Milagros, keep going.”
“Then this one, she says, my papi is going to kill all the bad people with those guns. And the general says, what bad people, and this one says, the bad sultan ruling the land and all the guards who protect him in his big palace. And so the general says, you don’t mean that, Yoyo. And this one gets like she can get, you know, and gives the general a big serious liar’s nod and says, yes, and El Jefe, and maybe you, too, if you don’t stop tickling me.”
There was a wail that came out of my wife’s mouth the like I had never heard before. Terror flashed in my children’s eyes. The three innocents began to cry. The culprit tried to dash out of the door.
But Milagros caught her by the arm and brought her over to me. “Milagros,” I said, “would you please take the other children to their baths.” By now, the girls were clinging to their mother, who sat at the edge of the bed, sobbing into her hands. They shrieked and pleaded that they did not want to go with Milagros. Finally I had to stand up and take my belt off and threaten them with a pela if they didn’t stop their crying and get washed up. This threat was as far as I’d ever gone in carrying out a punishment.
When the door shut, we went at Yo like an interrogation team. What exactly had she said to the general. Nothing, she wailed. She had said nothing. “Let us go over it again,” my wife said, her voice a mixture of fury and fear. “Do you want your papi to give you a pela you’ll never forget?” But imagine, the child was just a child, and once alerted that she had done some terrible wrong, she was too frightened to speak except safely to repeat the lines we suggested to her.
And we were frightened, too. We could already hear the little coughing sound of the Volkswagen, the bang at the door with the butt of a revolver, the shouts as a gang of thugs flooded the house knocking things over. We even went so far as to think it through—that we should not go to the party next door and implicate my wife’s family. We could see ourselves being shoved into that black Volkswagen, my wife in her red organdy dress that would stir up who knows what ugliness in these animals, my children screaming, rounded up as hostages to elicit confessions from me.
And all because of a child’s goddamn fairytale!
I think that’s when I saw that the child had to be taught a lesson.
We took her into the bathroom and turned on the shower to drown out her cries. “Ay, Papi, Mami, no, por favor,” she wailed. As my wife held her, I brought down that belt over and over, not with all my strength or I could have killed her, but with enough force to leave marks on her backside and legs. It was as if I had forgotten that she was a child, my child, and all I could think was that I had to silence our betrayer. “This should teach you a lesson,” I kept saying. “You must never ever tell stories!”
She sunk her head in her mother’s lap, bracing herself against the next belt lash. She was sobbing, her little shoulders shaking. I, too, felt like crying.
But my fear was greater than my shame. I stormed out of the bathroom to my office where the incriminating rifle lay hidden. Under the pretext that I was going to attend to an emergency at the hospital, I drove that gun over to the house of a certain compañero. To this day I persist in my secrecy and do not mention his name. I suppose it is one of those lingering habits of the dictatorship w
hen we censored all our stories. That is what I explain to my Yo. She has to understand about her mother and me. When she writes a book, the worst she worries about is that it will get a bad review. We hear beatings and screams, we see the SIM driving up in a black Volkswagen and rounding up the family.
That night was probably the longest night of my life. When I returned, I found my wife sitting at the edge of the bed, rocking herself back and forth. Hour after hour, we waited in the dark bedroom, lifting the jalousies every time we heard a car drive by the road below. Next door, the band started up, there were happy shouts, a splash in the swimming pool. Sometime around eleven, a maid came over with a message from Don Mundo to get ourselves over there. We thought up some excuse: my wife had a sore throat, I had an emergency. We did not sleep a wink. When dawn came and it looked like the SIM were not going to show up after all, my wife finally dozed off. The old general must have decided to let the incident pass as a child’s silly story.
But now that the fear had diminished, the remorse grew in my heart. I went down the hall to the girls’ bedroom where Yo lay sleeping, her thumb in her mouth, her hair twisted into a cowlick on top of her head. She had kicked off the sheets during the hot night, so I could see the ugly marks on her legs. I sat down on the edge of her bed, and I tried but I could not speak. It was as if the injunction of silence I had laid on her had fallen also on me.
She must have felt a presence beside her because she stirred awake. Raising her head a little, she focused on me, and what her face showed was terror, not delight. She backed away when I reached for her, and when I forced her to come to my lap, she began to cry.
Perhaps I told her back then that her papi was so sorry for what he had done. I don’t know. In my memory of the moment, there are no words. I hold her and she cries, and then, in a furious flash, forty years go by, and she is on the other end of the phone, tearful, saying how can she be sure it is her destino to tell stories.
I have promised her a blessing to take the doubt away. A story whose true facts cannot be changed. But I can add my own invention—that much I have learned from Yo. A new ending can be made out of what I now know.
So let us go back to that moment. Let us enter that small, green-tiled bathroom that will have a fictional hidden closet behind the toilet in stories to come. I am turning on the shower. Her mother sits down on the toilet seat to hold Yo for me. It sounds like Isaac pinned on the rock and his father Abraham lifting the butcher knife. I lift the belt, but then as I said, forty years pass, and my hand comes down gently on my child’s graying head.
And I say, “My daughter, the future has come and we were in such a rush to get here! We left everything behind and forgot so much. Ours is now an orphan family. My grandchildren and great grandchildren will not know the way back unless they have a story. Tell them of our journey. Tell them the secret heart of your father and undo the old wrong. My Yo, embrace your destino. You have my blessing, pass it on.”
Published by
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© 1997 by Julia Alvarez. All rights reserved.
All of the characters and events in these stories are entirely fictional, inventions drawn from imagination and experience. No reference to any living person or real event is intended or should be inferred.
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E-book ISBN 978-1-61620-100-5
We hope you enjoy this special preview of Julia Alvarez’s latest book,
A Wedding in Haiti,
coming soon in paperback from Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill.
Author’s Note
In telling this story, I am not claiming to be an authority on Haitian matters. This is a book about a friendship with a young Haitian, Piti, who happened into a farm and literacy project my husband and I set up in my native country, the Dominican Republic. Through that friendship has come an opportunity to discover my neighbor country, who was and still is “the sister I hardly knew.” But these two journeys to Haiti are only the beginning of an evolving relationship, which has deepened with the writing of this book. My friendship with Piti and Eseline and little Ludy and their extended families and friends back in Haiti also continues to evolve and teach me how much is possible when we step outside the boundaries that separate us one from the other.
Julia Alvarez
September 2009–October 2011
con la Altagracia a mi lado
ONE
Going to Piti’s Wedding in Haiti
Circa 2001, the mountains of the Dominican Republic
My husband and I have an ongoing debate about how old Piti was when we first met him. I say Piti was seventeen at the most. My husband claims he was older, maybe nineteen, even possibly twenty. Piti himself isn’t sure what year we met him. But he has been working in the mountains of the Dominican Republic since he first crossed the border from Haiti in 2001 when he was seventeen years old.
Bill and I might have forgotten the year, but we distinctly remember the first time we met Piti. It was late afternoon, and we were driving past the barracks-type housing where he lived with half a dozen other Haitian workers on a neighboring farm. On the concrete apron in front, the group was horsing around, like young people having fun all over the world. Piti, whose name in Kreyòl means “little one,” was the smallest of the group, short and slender with the round face of a boy. He was putting the finishing touches on a small kite he was making.
I asked Bill to stop the pickup, as I hadn’t seen one of these homemade chichiguas since I was a child. I tried to explain this to Piti, who at that point didn’t understand much Spanish. His response was to grin and offer me his kite. I declined and asked if I could take his picture instead.
On the next trip, I made a point of finding Piti so I could give him the photo in the small album I’d brought as a gift. You’d have thought I was giving him the keys to a new motorcycle. He kept glancing at the photo, grinning and repeating, “Piti, Piti!” as if to convince himself that he was the boy in the photo. Or maybe he was saying thank you. “Mèsi, mèsi” can sound like “Piti, Piti,” to an ear unused to Kreyòl.
A friendship began. Every trip I sought him out, brought him a shirt, a pair of jeans, a bag in which to cart his belongings back and forth on his periodic and dangerous crossings of the border.
What I felt toward the boy was unaccountably maternal. Somewhere in Haiti, a mother had sent her young son to the wealthier neighbor country to help the impoverished family. Maybe this very moment she was praying that her boy be safe, earn good money, encounter kind people. Every time I spotted the grinning boy with worried eyes, I felt the pressure of that mother’s prayer in my own eyes. Tears would spring up and a big feeling fill my heart. Who knows why we fall in love with people who are nothing to us?
A coffee farm or a mistress?
Over the years, Bill and I got to see a lot of Piti. Whenever we could get away from our lives and jobs in Vermont—short trips of a week, longer trips of a few weeks—we headed for the Dominican mountains. We had become coffee farmers.
Every time I get started on this story, the curtain rises on that vaudeville act that long-term couples fall into: who did what first and how did we get in this fix.
It began in 1997 with a writing assignment for the Nature Conservancy. I was asked to visit the Cordillera Central, the central mountain range that runs diagonally across the island, and write a story about anything that caught my interest. While there, Bill and I met a group of impoverished coffee farmers who were struggling to survive on their small plots. They asked if we would help them.
We both said of course we’d help. I meant help as in: I’d write a terrific article that would bring advocates to their cause. Bill meant help, as in roll-up-your-sleeves an
d really help. I should have seen it coming. Having grown up in rural Nebraska with firsthand experience of the disappearance of family farms, Bill has a soft spot in his heart for small farmers.
We ended up buying up deforested land and joining their efforts to grow coffee the traditional way, under shade trees, organically by default. (Who could afford pesticides?) We also agreed to help find a decent market for our pooled coffee under the name Alta Gracia, as we called our sixty, then a hundred, and then, at final count, two hundred and sixty acres of now reforested land. I keep saying “we,” but, of course, I mean the marital “we,” as in my stubborn beloved announces we are going to be coffee farmers in the Dominican Republic, and I say, “But, honey, how can we? We live in Vermont!”
Of course, I fell in with Don Honey, as the locals started calling Bill, when they kept hearing me calling him “honey, this,” “honey, that.” The jokey way I explained our decision to my baffled family and friends was that it was either a coffee farm or a mistress. Over the years, I admit, I’ve had moments when I wondered if a mistress might not have been easier.
We were naïve—yes, now the “we” includes both of us: We hired a series of bad farm managers. We left money in the wrong hands for payrolls never paid. One manager was a drunk who had a local mistress and used the payroll to pay everyone in her family, whether they worked on the farm or not. Another, a Seventh-Day Adventist, who we thought would be safe because he wouldn’t drink or steal or have a mistress, proved to be bossy and lazy. He was el capataz, he boasted to his underlings, the jefe, the foreman. He didn’t have to work. Every day turned out to be a sabbath for him. His hands should have been a tip-off, pink-palmed with buffed nails. Another manager left for New York on a visa I helped him get. (Like I said, it takes two fools to try to run a coffee farm from another country.)