A Wedding in Haiti

by Julia Alvarez

  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.”

  Madame smiles gruffly in reply.

  July 6, on the road

  Maybe a little, yes

  The road to Ennery is as long as I remember it. But the good news is that it’s only as bad as it was last year. No avalanches of rocks caused by soft tremors felt inland during the earthquake. No further horrible disrepair, because the transportation department can’t function since the government building in which it was housed collapsed. When I remark on this to Piti, he laughs. Even before the earthquake, the roads were very bad.

  I’ve been on the lookout for the mango ladies, and not just because we’re all ready for a snack. Bill has been swearing up and down—with an adamancy that makes me want to prove him wrong—that the mango ladies’ stand is after Ennery. I say it’s before. As the kilometers roll on, and still no mango ladies, I know I should probably concede. But since we set out this morning, every time I’ve mentioned an upcoming landmark to Mikaela, Bill has corrected me. It is beginning to annoy me.

  We spot an old, toothless woman with a basket on her head. When we pull over, the woman’s face lights up with such joy. She has already made a sale as far as I’m concerned. But the fruits she shows us turn out to be the scrawniest specimens we’ve ever seen. They actually look unhealthy. “They are very good, very sweet,” the old woman assures us. We end up buying two anorexic pineapples and a bunch of finger-sized bananas to snack on until we can get our hands on some mangoes. “After Ennery,” Bill quips. If the backseat travelers weren’t there, I’d take one of those skinny pineapples and whack him over the head with it.

  Poor Eseline is sick all the time now. I dread to think of her trip back on public transport when she returns to the Dominican Republic after her cure. As to when that will be—there seems to be a difference of opinion. Piti wants Eseline to stay until he can come get her himself. But the soonest he can be back is Christmas, six months way.

  Sick as she is, Eseline won’t hear of it. A good sign, I’m pleased to see. Bill might be right in his diagnosis that the marriage is not in trouble. Eseline is just homesick. But she also doesn’t want to be parted from her husband. She is beginning to like the “good life�
�� in Jarabacoa. Since our February trip, Eseline has been riding into town with the baby on back of the motorcycle we helped Piti buy. Jarabacoa has got to be more stimulating for a young person than the remote countryside of Haiti.

  Eseline actually looks different, more stylish in her store-bought clothes with a snazzy handbag and a little faux-leather cap. Some of this is may be my doing, picking out items for her in the sales racks of our local T.J. Maxx. But it isn’t until her godmother in Gros Morne runs her hand through it that I realize Eseline has straightened her hair. In one photo with her braided little cousins, I catch an increasingly familiar gesture: Eseline swinging her doll hair.

  Eseline wants to come back with Charlie or Wilson when they return to the Dominican Republic in a few weeks. But Piti is noncommittal. Eseline scowls at him, eyes narrowed. Given my growing frustration with Bill, it’s helpful to be reminded that all couples have their rough patches. “I cannot say / that I have gone to hell / for your love,” William Carlos Williams writes to his wife in “Asphodel, That Greeny Flower,” “but often / found myself there / in your pursuit.”

  We stop at Ennery, at “our gas station.” We’ve made good time, so we’re feeling expansive, able to take the time to sit down and eat some of the snacks we brought along. The old restaurant has been boarded up, and a new one is under construction. The wrought-iron chairs and tables have been brought down to one side of the pumps. Most of them are occupied, including one table full of young people, all of them watching us.

  Bill and Piti go up to a makeshift shack where refreshments are being sold. The rest of us take what chairs we can find around the only unoccupied table.

  Piti returns with refreshments, sodas, and curious little plastic sacks you suck on full of cold water. When Bill joins us with his Prestige, he’s disgruntled again. It turns out that the woman in the shack wouldn’t give him back his change. He waited as she took other orders and just ignored him. Finally, Bill held out his hand, and the woman reluctantly slapped down his change.

  “What’s with her?” Bill asks me, as if I should know.

  Piti shrugs. “Some people, they are like that.”

  Charlie is Mister Cool behind his reflector glasses. He says nothing. But he looks like he is thinking about it.

  So, I put the question directly to him. “You think it’s because we are white?” Behind the glasses, who knows what Charlie’s eyes are doing. But in a calm voice, like a sibyl pronouncing, he says, “Maybe a little, yes.”

  Maybe a little is a lot of progress as far as I’m concerned, given our two countries’ divisive racial history.

  Piti cuts the two pineapples with a blunt machete, dicing them deftly into cubes.

  The old merchant lady was right. This is the sweetest pineapple we have ever eaten! We each take a few chunks, then pass the paper plate around to our fellow diners at the other wrought-iron tables.

  The woman at the window has been watching the plate making the rounds. When it comes back to our table, she gestures for me to bring her up a piece. “You’re going to give her some of our pineapple?” Bill can’t believe it.

  “You bet.” I go up to the window and hold out the plate. She scouts out the remaining pieces and takes the biggest chunk. Smart cookie. I laugh, she laughs. A little while later, I’m back at our table, and I glance her way. The woman nods at the one chunk remaining on the plate. I get up again, Bill meanwhile shaking his head in mock disapproval. By now, he’s enjoying how things have turned around. At the counter I hand her the paper plate. Then I stretch out my hand, palm up. She knows what I want and gives me a high five before popping the last piece of pineapple into her mouth.

  Two Mountains never meet, but two people can meet again

  After Ennery is where the road turns dusty, the tires of the pickup kicking up clouds of white powder. This time around, we don’t have the option of taking everyone inside the cab with us. Charlie and Wilson cover their noses and mouths with kerchiefs like guerrilla rebels trying to safeguard their anonymity.

  What is keeping us all going is the gratifying thought of the reunions that lie ahead: Piti with his mother, Charlie with Rozla and his daddy, Eseline with her family, and Ludy with everybody. “Dos montañas no se juntan pero dos personas sí,” the Dominicans like to say, a saying that also exists in Kreyòl: “Dé mònpa janm kontré, min dè moun vivan kontré.” Two mountains never meet, but two people can meet again.

  The reunion with the mango ladies is a sweet foretaste of what awaits us in Moustique. As we pull over and dismount, I with Ludy in my arms because Eseline has been too sick to hold her, the faces of the mango ladies light up. They laugh, nodding. We meet again. Two mountains can never do this, but two or more people can.

  Forgotten is my annoyance with Bill, which momentarily flared up when he pointed out that the mango ladies were just ahead, like he’d said. This moment’s delight casts its wide net over whatever marital rough patch we’ve hit on this road trip. The hours and days of our lives tick on relentlessly, and death will sunder us all, even me and my annoying beloved. I do not need to kill him. Time, alas, will do it for me.

  We make our purchases, Ludy greedily reaching for one of the mangos to gnaw on. This, too, delights the ladies. A hungry baby satisfied. Not something that can be taken for granted in this area of rural Haiti.

  We pile back in the pickup, honking and waving good-bye. The stop has raised all our spirits. Even Eseline has come out from under the pall of her car sickness. The Dramamine she took at lunch is taking effect. That and the imminent homecoming. The closer we get to Moustique, the happier she becomes. “Chichí, chichí,” she points out the window to the baby, giggling. Chichí is the Dominican word for baby, an interesting choice, given that Eseline has refused to speak a word of Spanish during her months in the Dominican Republic. But now, she is the returning daughter, showing off what she has learned on her travels.

  As we approach Gros Morne, Piti asks if we can make a quick stop. Eseline wants to say hello to her godmother. We detour off the main road, twisting here and there, into little alleyways that don’t seem wide enough for a car. Finally, Eseline motions for us to pull over under a scrawny tree. We’ll have to walk the rest of the way to her godmother’s house.

  As we are disembarking, two little girls come racing around the corner and hurl themselves at her. Their mother trots behind them, her arms spread. She rocks Eseline in an embrace so violent, it’s a wonder chichí isn’t knocked off her mama’s arms. The godmother pulls back to take in her goddaughter’s full measure, shaking her head, pleased with what she sees. Eseline has put on weight. She’s looking so stylish in a bright red top with a “diamond” clasp, a glossy tan skirt, and a mustard-colored handbag. But what draws the loudest exclamations: her hair!

  I remember the godmother from the wedding. She had been ready to step in had Madrina reneged on her promise and gone off to the gathering of the Thirteen Indigenous Grandmothers instead. Back then, the godmother seemed serious to the point of unfriendliness, perhaps upset with these strangers who would be taking away her goddaughter after the ceremony. Now, she is all smiles, the space between her two upper front teeth making her look even jollier.

  The godmother remembers me, Bill. She looks Mikaela over. Then points to me, to Bill. I nod. The woman laughs. She can tell: Mikaela is our daughter.

  The two little girls, joined by a third, spirit Ludy away, like a new toy. We follow them down a narrow passageway into a tiny house. The first room we enter is occupied by a large bed, where the girls have set Ludy down and given her a bald, legless, white-skinned doll to play with. Their new, live doll playing with their old, worn-out one.

  We are taken through a second middle room to a third room—and that’s the whole of the house. Some discussion ensues; I think about whether we are going to stay and eat. We seem to have lost our translators; Charlie and Piti have lagged behind our excited little clutch of women. The godmother uncovers a pot of plain white rice, perhaps just so Eseline can look
it over, then wraps it up in a cloth for her to carry.

  Piti and Charlie join us, beaming, obviously happy to be among their own. Charlie especially, for good reason. It turns out that Rozla has moved to Gros Morne to study, and this is the very house where she is living!

  Unfortunately, Rozla won’t be back from her classes until late afternoon, after we’re gone. But no matter, Charlie will be seeing her next week, hopefully with permission from her parents to propose to her.

  We hate to cut short the reunion, sweet as it is, but it is past three, and several hours of travel await us. Reluctantly, the little girls release Ludy, and we head back to the truck. I put my arm around Eseline, a not infrequent gesture of affection on my part. For the first time, Eseline reciprocates and throws her arm around me. I claimed her a year ago when she married Piti. But it’s not until this moment that she has claimed me.

  Connecting to a Higher Power

  We’re back on the main road, nervously watching the waning light in the late-afternoon sky. And it’s not just the sun setting; thunderclouds are massing in the distance. It seems the height of selfishness to wish for no rain in parched, drought-ridden Haiti. But not only will our luggage get soaked and some supplies damaged, but in the eroded landscape of Haiti, downpours often result in flash floods.

  “What’ll we do?” I ask Bill quietly, so as not to alarm anyone.

  “Nothing at all we can do,” Bill responds. So much for not alarming your wife.

  I scour the desolate landscape for some comforting T-shirt message or store sign. But Haiti has stopped speaking to me. Unless you count what happens next as another sign that this trip is going to require more from me than I want to give it. Up ahead, a crowd is milling around two trucks, each one facing in the opposite direction. Somehow, in passing, their rear sides rammed into each other, and got stuck together. Since the two trucks take up the entire width of the road, no one can get past this roadblock.