A Wedding in Haiti

by Julia Alvarez

  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.

  Although the dictatorship was still in place, my grandparents reported that the regime was loosening up. Elections were being scheduled, and a general amnesty was being extended to all exiles to return home and help build a new democracy. My father was not fooled; at least he claimed not to have been when he recounted the story to his grown daughters years later. This was a ploy by the dictator trying to ingratiate himself with the Americans who were putting pressure on him to liberalize his rule.

  But Papi ended up caving in. My mother was homesick, overwhelmed with taking care of two babies, eleven months apart, with no servants to help out. Once back, my father discovered that nothing much had changed. Again, he reconnected with the underground. By the time I was ten, he was up to his ears in an imminent plot, which was cracked by the Secret Police. What saved us was a CIA contact who had promised to provide guns to the plotters. He managed to get my father, his wife, and four daughters out just in time. Four months after we left, the Mirabal sisters, who had founded the underground movement, were killed by the dictator’s henchmen.

  Those first years back in New York, our family scraped by on handouts from my grandparents. Eventually, my father was able to renew his license and open a practice in Brooklyn. He worked seven days a week, getting up at four thirty, leaving the house by five thirty, before the sun had come up, returning after nine at night. He scrimped and saved wherever he could. I recall
how he’d take the Queensboro Bridge when he had to drive into the city to avoid paying the dollar toll through the Midtown Tunnel. Then, twice a year, he went down to his house in Santiago and lived for a week like a rich man.

  My mother was finally won over. By then, our once-lone house on the Cerros de Gurabo, the hills outside Santiago, was surrounded. The area had become an exclusive suburb of McMansions. Ours was now the oldest, and a poor relation to the others. After all, the things that had made the place so grand had been the imaginative accents: the waterfall; the sanctuary; the windmill where my father, dressed in a kind of monk’s robe, liked to climb to the little balcony on top to get inspired. He had started writing books on odd subjects: how to learn Chinese as a Dominican; how to be happy in old age (keep active, always have a project, write books, learn languages, play dominoes). He also wrote about his travels to an imaginary planet named Alfa Calendar, where all the problems that were now doing us in on earth had been resolved. (No wars, no poverty, plenty of windmills, nifty solar-powered belts to strap on and fly to your destination.)

  Now, forty years later, the house has become their refuge. Shabby genteel is how I’d describe its current condition. Without constant maintenance and the infusion of funds, the tropics can do a number on buildings and gardens. Ceilings have begun to crack; a retainer wall has crumbled; one corner of the second floor tilts slightly; the plumbing is iffy. The birds have all died. The waterfall no longer works. Inside the windmill, the rats have helped themselves to my father’s library. One small blessing of Papi’s condition is that he is no longer cognizant enough to understand what has happened to his dream house.

  Before I head for my bedroom, I peek in on them. They are fast asleep, holding hands as they always do across their joined hospital beds. Sometimes, Papi will wake up in the middle of the night calling out, “Pitou? Pitou?” I’ll hear Mami singing lullabies to him, as those seem to be the only songs she remembers anymore.

  I try to fall asleep but the weariness after a day of travel, the excitement and uncertainty about what lies ahead, compounded by my worries, keep me up for hours. (How will we know what gas station Pablo will be waiting at? How will all six of us fit in Bill’s new pickup? What if we can’t find Piti’s house in time for the wedding?) When the alarm rings, it’s still dark outside, and I’ve driven almost to Port-de-Paix so many times in my head that it seems unnecessary to have to get up after so little sleep and actually drive there again in person.

  August 19, from Santiago to Moustique

  The border crossing

  We wake up at quarter to five in the morning so we can be on the road by six. It’s a two-and-a-half- to three-hour drive to Dajabón, the Dominican border town, another hour to Cap-Haïtien, and then, it’s anyone’s guess how long the drive will be to wherever near Port-de-Paix Piti’s family lives.

  Before our arrival in Santiago, I had asked Vicenta to pack a box with snacks and water, precautionary supplies to which she has added a cooler with cheese, ice, boxed juices, and even a bottle of wine. These go in the flatbed of the pickup, along with our backpacks and suitcases, the box of spaghetti, some tarps in case it rains. Inside the cab, Eli, Homero, and Leonardo are crammed in the backseat, Bill and I in front.

  As we drive west to Dajabón, the sun rises behind us. Since Bill and I landed last night in the dark, it’s a bit of a shock to go from yesterday’s serene green hillsides of Vermont to the bright, jazzy colors and noisy clutter of the Dominican countryside. We’re all chatty, elated by the idea of the trip, the happy occasion of a wedding, the thrill of not knowing what we are going to find.

  But as we near the border, we quiet down. Although it doesn’t get the attention of, say, the Middle East, there is a troubled history between the two small countries occupying this island. From time to time, these tensions have erupted in violence, most shamefully in 1937, when four to forty-thousand Haitians (the figures vary wildly) who were then living just this side of the Dominican border were massacred over the course of a few days. The massacre was the brainchild of Trujillo, who had the military use machetes to make it look like a grassroots uprising by farmers protecting their land from Haitian invaders.

  Since then, relations between the two countries have never again erupted into outright violence. But conflicts persist, as undocumented Haitians cross over into their comparatively richer neighbor country, willing to do work Dominicans won’t do, often underpaid and poorly treated, a situation not unlike Mexicans who come to El Norte in search of a better life.

  The border doesn’t open until nine, so we wait around for the officials to arrive to get our documents stamped and our fees paid. The first to come into the cinder-block building is a tall, plump official who takes one look at our pickup’s documents and starts shaking his head. The papers are incomplete, he explains. For us to be able to enter our vehicle into Haiti, we’ll need two more documents that we can only get in the capital (a five-hour drive away). In addition, the one document we do have is missing its stamps.

  Bill and I raise an outcry. The wedding is tomorrow! We need to get there today! Besides, Homero, who made the inquiries, and my parents’ driver, who ran the errand, were assured that we only needed this one document. If it required stamps, their branch office in Santiago should have stamped it. So why should we be punished for their incompetence?

  The official keeps shaking his head. He is very sorry, but there is nothing he can do. We can go into Haiti by showing our passports and paying the exit fee. But the pickup, a seemingly more valuable asset than the five lives within it, will have to stay behind. We may leave it parked in their yard for a fee, of course.

  I can read the signs of an impending outburst on my beloved’s face, complete with an indignant rant on the bureaucratic nightmare of getting anything done in this country. We’ve faced it time and again trying to run the farm—a costly permit to cut down a few decaying pine trees, even though we’ve planted several hundred healthy shade trees to replace them; a titling process still incomplete after fourteen years. But this is no time to read the guy the riot act. There are smaller fish to fry here, and fortunately, our Dominican friend is along to show us how.

  Homero begins by acknowledging that the official is right. A mistake has been made by someone else. But these Americanos have come all the way from the United States, as they are the godparents of this wedding that will take place tomorrow. Isn’t there a way to resolve this little problem here now?

  The official keeps shaking his head, but it’s as if Homero has uttered the magic words. Suddenly we are following the official out to the yard to talk to his immediate superior, a tall, lean man with several gleaming gold teeth that give him a sinister smile. He also shakes his head while carrying our incomplete documents to his superior, another plump official with a clipboard, who shakes his head as well. But somehow in the midst of all this head shaking, six hundred pesos exchange hands (about seventeen US dollars). Before we know it, the paperwork is in order, our fees are paid, and we’re all back in the pickup, not yet daring to high-five each other for fear we’ll be punished for our glee and charged a further penalty.

  Throughout this transaction, I’m intrigued by this ongoing visual refusal to budge (the head-shaking) coupled with the surreptitious acceptance of a bribe. It’s as if it were all a performance for hidden cameras monitoring the border, cameras that will capture only what’s going on from the shoulders up. At six hundred pesos, the bribe is ridiculously cheap compared to Homero’s visa to enter Haiti, which cost him the equivalent of eighty-five dollars—documents nobody bothers to check. Leonardo gets off the cheapest, as he has no documents, so technically, he doesn’t even exist. When I worry that without any proof, Haiti might not let him in, Leonardo smirks.

  “It’s my country.”

  “But how can the guards tell you’re Haitian, if you don’t have a passport?”

  “They can tell,” Leonardo assures me.

  He’s too young to know that during the massacre, Trujil
lo’s henchmen actually had trouble telling Haitians and Dominicans apart. So they devised a test. A sprig of parsley was held up for identification: perejil in Spanish. But the Haitians, whose Kreyòl uses a wide, flat r, could not pronounce the trilled r in the Spanish word. Whoever mispronounced the word was slaughtered on the spot. But it’s not a story I want to tell Leonardo, not now on the way to a wedding, when we are going against the currents of history, headed—so I hope—in a new direction.

  The tall gates on the Dominican side open, and slowly we drive across the bridge, over the nearly dry Massacre River. Although many Dominicans believe the name came from the 1937 massacre, the river actually was christened in the eighteenth century after an especially bloody battle between the Spanish soldiers and French buccaneers. Now the river is full of women washing clothes or bathing themselves and their children.

  On the Haitian side of the bridge, a white guard with a UN logo on his helmet peers into our pickup. The United Nations multinational mission has been a presence here since the last coup in 2004, replacing the Haitian army, which had already been disbanded. The soldier nods, the gates part, and just like that, we’re in Haiti, and free to proceed. No red tape, no need to wheedle our way in. Haiti will take us without blinking an eye or checking our documents.

  I glance out the back window, feeling a pang like the biblical Ruth leaving behind her native land, as the gates close on the Dominican side.

  To Limbé and Ennery, and the meeting with Pablo

  The first city on the Haitian side is Ouanaminthe, a name so rich in vowels that I half expect those luxuriant sounds to spill over in wide avenues, verandas with bougainvillea pouring over trellises, ladies with parasols parading their finery.

  But Ouanaminthe is a hot, dusty town of wooden huts lining the road, punctuated by the occasional concrete house—not unlike any number of towns on the other side. “It looks like the Dominican Republic,” I keep saying.