A Wedding in Haiti

by Julia Alvarez

  The baby gets handed around. Ludy has got to be what I call a “Buddha baby”: taking in all the excitement with a bemused expression. Ho-hum, another day in the human race. She is carried away by three of Eseline’s little sisters, who range in age from eight to eleven, still at the stage to be playing with dolls. But the little sisters don’t confine themselves to one small doll. They’ve also taken Mikaela with them, down a path to the other houses that surround this one. “What were they up to?” I ask later when she has been returned.

  Mikaela herself isn’t sure. “They took me from house to house and showed me to their families. They also wanted to play with my hair.” A petite young woman with a head of curls and blue eyes—dolls don’t get any prettier.

  Later, when asked about my family, I’ll pull out a wallet photo of my own two pretty, blonde-haired granddaughters. Lanessa takes the photo in her two hands, poring over it. She says something to Piti, who translates. “Can she please, please have it to keep?” I feel a little disconcerted. Lanessa doesn’t even know who these girls are! But owning their picture is a way of having them, at least to look at. I let her keep it. I have plenty more where that came from.

  While the little girls are off playing dolls with Ludy and Mikaela, Bill and I are led by the hand under the awning and sat down on two cane chairs like older dolls ourselves. Piti and Eseline chatter away with her parents, while Bill and I look on, pleased to see them all so happy.

  Periodically, Eseline’s mother turns to me and utters an exclamation with lifted arms in the manner of a believer at a tent revival. I start to get the feeling I should respond in kind. “We love Piti, we love Eseline, and Ludy—” Loude Sendjika, I have to remember to call her here. And while I’m at it: “We love Charlie. Charlie, c’est un bon homme.” Bill flashes me a look. Hold the gush, before you ruin everything. Charlie hasn’t spoken up yet, and the parents might get upset at a romance begun without their blessing.

  Just as with Infancia, it’s difficult to visit when you can’t carry on a conversation. An activity helps. Luckily, Eseline brings out the wedding album of photos I put together for her. The little girls have rejoined us, clustering around as I turn the pages. They get a kick out of identifying faces in the photos, or looking down shyly when someone points them out, as if there is something embarrassing about being caught by a camera’s lens.

  After we’ve gone through the album several times, the girls who were at the periphery of our circle cart it away, to pore over themselves. Perhaps thinking that if one book brought such pleasure, another book will work as well, one of the little sisters brings out Lanessa’s school notebook for us to review. Lanessa snatches it, narrowing her eyes at her little sister. “I’d love to look through it,” I tell Piti to tell her. I’m curious to see what students are are being taught here in rural Haiti.

  Her parents nod sharply at Lanessa to hand over her notebook. What else can they offer their visitors? Lanessa obeys, but then disappears inside the house, as if she is the one now embarrassed to be caught learning.

  Seconds later, she peeks coyly out the doorway at me. I smile at her, and hold the notebook to my heart, pantomining that I’d like to look through it. She smiles back. I think that means permission granted.

  It is an education to go through the pages of her notebook. Rote learning is alive and well in Moustique. Each entry consists of a question and an answer—a kind of catechism, I take it, of what a young person should know. Lanessa’s handwriting is barely legible, and there are many misspellings, which might have originated with whatever text the students were given to copy. The lessons are an odd mix of sex education (A list of the symptoms of AIDS is followed by a list of three ways to prevent getting AIDS in the first place: protect yourself, only one sexual partner, and, a favorite with teens, abstinence); of geography (The “grandes pais dan le mondial,” the great countries of the world, are listed as Israel, Great Britain, Japan, France, Canada, and “l’Allemagne de l”ouest,” West Germany, which hasn’t existed since 1991; a pointed omission—no United States); and of global politics (The great problems of the world are: hunger, poverty, pollution, racism, war, and, finally, erosion. Fair enough. The ensuing question asks students to “propose a solution for each one.” Not surprisingly, the pages after this last question are blank).

  After a good hour of visiting, I’m wondering if the Charlie conference is ever going to take place. It’s closing on four, and Bill and I already set four-thirty as the hour of our departure. That will give us enough time to walk back to the pickup and get to Charlie’s before dark. We don’t want a repeat of last night.

  Later, I’ll realize how astutely Piti managed the timing of Charlie’s petition. Since the wedding, and now with this return, Piti has become a gwo nèg, a big man in the family. But this is a new role, and Piti has to play his cards just right with his jealous father-in-law.

  Piti nods to Eseline, who goes inside, and comes out with a plastic bag. Back in the Dominican Republic, Piti had asked to stop at a farm supply shop for a gift for his father-in-law: two dozen yards of thick red rope, enough to tie down any number of loads on any number of donkeys.

  The minute Piti pulls it out, Eseline’s father leaps up, grabs the rope, grabs Piti, rocking him in an embrace, howling with joy. Together, they measure out the rope, then coil it up in neat loops. More embraces, more exclamations. Sensing the moment has come, Piti murmurs something to his father-in-law, who glances over at Charlie. Then, the three men walk off to a clearing up a slight incline beside the house.

  “Just the men,” I grouse to Bill, as if it being his gender, he’s responsible.

  Eseline’s mother stays behind, smiling widely, whenever we look at her. She, too, like Infancia, is missing most of her teeth. I’d love to ask her questions, find out her name, how it’s been for her this year with her eldest daughter gone. But our translator has more important matters at hand. We can hear his soft-spoken voice wafting down to us. Eseline’s father responds with an explosion of words, loud and emphatic. I recall his long peroration at the end of the wedding. He seems an excitable man with strong passions. Look how he went crazy over that rope. Meanwhile, Charlie says not a word.

  I don’t know if Eseline’s mother is growing impatient herself. But fifteen or so minutes into the conference, without warning, she gets up and walks uphill to the gathering. We exchange a look all around, a look that throws Eseline into a fit of giggles.

  I assume that her mother will cut to the chase and the group finally descend with a verdict. But it’s a case of sending one messenger after another, and neither one returns. Finally, using the same remedy for impatience as when we waited on the road for the stuck trucks to come unstuck, I invite Mikaela to meditate. Surprisingly, given his dismissal of all things New Agey, Bill asks to join us. By way of explanation to Eseline and her sisters, I put my hands together in prayer and close my eyes. I figure prayer, meditation, what’s the difference? Eseline and Piti have asked me on more than one occasion if we are missionaries.

  We set up our chairs at the side of the house, facing the incline where the marriage discussion is going on. We meditate for a good twenty minutes—or rather Mikaela and I do. I can hear Bill’s soft snores. So that’s why he wanted to join us!

  Finally, I hear movement and open my eyes. The group is coming down the hill. I lift my eyebrows at Charlie, who returns a small smile. No flashy grin, or thumbs-up cockiness—but then effusiveness would not be Charlie’s style. We’ll just have to wait until the walk back to the pickup to find out the outcome of his petition.

  It’s time to go. Eseline’s family walk us down the path. When we get to the hilltop where we first spied them, they stop. Piti gathers his baby in his arms, but Ludy is more intrigued with the piece of coconut meat one of her young aunties gave her than in returning a good-bye kiss.

  Piti and Eseline’s farewell is so matter-of-fact, I’m left wondering if they just can’t give themselves the “luxury” of feeling sad. In her essay, “Dau
ghters of Memory,” the Haitian-American writer Edwidge Danticat asks, “Is all suffering equal . . . when the people who suffer are not considered equal?” It’s an unsettling question that makes me remember this moment in Moustique as well as Piti’s occasional bemusement at my surprise that he should have to undergo something I would forgo as too difficult or taxing or painful. You, his look says to me, you have the choice to do otherwise.

  Mortal traffic

  There’s no fooling ourselves, it’s raining now. The walk back to the pickup is a no-nonsense trot and not the moment to go into details of the marriage meeting. Briefly, both Piti and Charlie agree it went well. But their very lack of elation leaves me thinking that there must have been some caveats. Maybe the idea of earrings was marched out again? Maybe upped to both a pair of earrings and a couple of rings?

  Once we’re safely in the pickup, with the rain drumming on the roof, we hear the details. As I thought, there is a caveat. It turns out that there is an even bigger big man in the family than Piti: an uncle who is working in the Bahamas. This uncle is probably the key diaspora relative who sends money back to the family. Charlie must call Rozla’s uncle and get his approval before the lovers can proceed.

  As we’re talking, Charlie pulls out a small, dog-eared photo from his pocket. I’m thinking it’s a picture of his beloved Rozla, so it takes me a moment to register the tiny figure in a blue dress engulfed in the satiny interior of a large, white coffin. “My mommy,” Charlie explains. It is an odd moment to bring her up.

  The photo makes its rounds, all of us responding with respectful silence. What can you say about a picture of somebody’s mother in a coffin? Perhaps for Charlie, as for Lanessa with the picture of my pretty granddaughters, having a photo of his deceased mother is a way to have her, if only to look at.

  I think of my own parents, and how I still have them, however compromised that having now is. At ninety-five and eighty-five, they are incredibly old, especially by Haitian standards, but even by Dominican ones. Most of their contemporaries have died or are falling fast. It seems every month I get a call: another aunt, uncle, older cousin, fond family friend is gone. The losses keep mounting. The world keeps filling with strangers.

  I find myself feeling like that donkey, on a metaphysical level: loaded down with the burden of the mystery, the what’s-it-all-about-Alfie feeling that can pull me down into depression for weeks on end. To distract myself, I look out the window, which itself is tearing with raindrops, and what do I see? Three little boys squatting in the rain under an umbrella, flying a kite. Haiti is again talking to me.

  “Piti, remember when I first met you?” I ask him. “You were flying a kite. “He was not much older than the three boys looking over at us. Now Piti is a man with a wife and a daughter. This is what life offers as a compensation for the old ones going out: the young ones coming in. The mortal traffic can be dizzying, especially when yours is the next generation on its way out. But as a friend once told me, after fifty our job is to keep our spirits up, so as not to scare the ones who are coming after us. The kite dives but then recovers and soars again. How heavy a rainstorm will it take to bring it down?

  Songlines

  By the time we get back to Charlie’s, the rain is so loud on the roof of the pickup that we have to shout to hear each other. Inside the house, we exchange one echo chamber for another, with the rain now drumming on the zinc roof.

  Tonight, Jean Kelly—for whose recovery I traded this rainstorm—is lively, kicking his little feet, and smiling. Bill thinks the baby probably had some intestinal bug, not uncommon in rural Haiti where potable water is hard to come by. It’s why we brought our own, and why we’re being especially careful with what we drink and eat. At supper, however, Bill loses his resolve and ventures into a bowl of some stewed meat Charlie’s family is chugging down. “What is it?” I ask him. He isn’t sure. “And you’re going to eat it?”

  “They eat it,” Bill replies, shrugging.

  After supper, we decide to turn in early. The rain on the roof is acting like a soporific, that steady hum of a white-noise machine. Charlie’s family and Piti wander off to the back room. Suddenly, we hear greetings, laughter, exclamations. Some visitors have arrived at the back door. After some conversation, Piti begins strumming his guitar and singing the hymns that his band used to play up at the farm.

  Bill and Mikaela and I peek in at the doorway, hoping to join the impromptu gathering. The visitors turn out to be Piti’s oldest sister and her husband, as well as Infancia, who has come to collect her gifts. In a heavy rainstorm? More likely, Piti’s mother was missing him, and this is one last opportunity to see him before he departs with us at dawn.

  We all pile on the one bed, singing along as Piti plays hymn after hymn. Then—I don’t know what propels us—but Infancia and I both get up and begin dancing together, while the others look on. There’s life in the two old women yet!

  Soliana and Tanessa are the first to break into the circle, then Mikaela. Soon all the females in the room have joined hands, and we are dancing on whatever available floor space we can find. The men sing to us, celebrating the female generations, from Rachel to Infancia, sunrise to sunset.

  When the song is over, we pile onto the bed and cede the floor to the men: Charlie; and Tanessa’s husband, Jimmy; and Daddy, who must have heard us singing and crossed over to the party. Piti keeps playing his guitar, the women singing, the men holding hands and dancing. Something is in the air, we can feel it, humming inside us, outside us, as the rain keeps coming down.

  Later in bed, Bill whispers in my ear, “Wow, that was . . . something.”

  I, too, don’t know what to call what happened that night in Moustique. The Australian Aborigines believe there are invisible songlines holding the world together, lines that have to be sung afresh with each generation to keep the land and the people alive. That night in Moustique, we were singing and dancing them. Just shy of six months after the earthquake, we were putting Haiti back together again, however briefly, in our imaginations.

  July 8—On the road to Port-au-Prince

  An earthquake, a flood, a river gang, a fight

  In the middle of the night, I wake up to a high-pitched humming. Next thing I know the roof of the small house is flapping like a loose wing that might fly off. I think of waking Bill. But just as suddenly as it came, whatever it was is gone.

  We wake up early to a glorious, sunny morning. Outside, everyone is talking about the tremor last night. So that’s what it was: an earthquake! It seems these slight tremors are common, but now people can’t help wondering if, this time, the tremor will turn into a real earthquake.

  We eat a hurried breakfast, eager to get on the road and face whatever we’re going to have to face. This time around, packing the pickup is quick and easy, as our load is gone. Mikaela, Bill, Piti, and I climb in and wave back to our hosts, who have come down to the road to say good-bye.

  We haven’t gone far when we begin to experience the results of yesterday’s heavy rains. The road to the river is a mud slick, with water running in deepened ruts on either side. Bill is finding it hard to steer, as the pickup doesn’t have mud tires. At one point, he slides into a thick hedge of bayonet cacti, which luckily catches us and prevents us from plunging off the road and into a ditch. But as he puts the pickup in reverse, trying to extricate himself from the net of thorny branches, there’s a horrible tearing sound.

  Bill gets out to inspect damage, and I can tell it’s not good news. It turns out the front fender has snapped loose, and the sideview mirror is bent at a weird angle. This is Bill’s relatively new pickup, which he debated buying, as he’s not a guy to get the latest model if the old one still works. I stop myself from trying to comfort him. (“Now you don’t have to worry about that first dent.”) I know how annoying comfort can be when all you want to do is vent.

  With Piti’s help, Bill somehow manages to manipulate the mirror and the fender back in place—though periodically the fender swings loose
, and we have to stop and secure it again.

  We’re back on the road, holding our breaths whenever we come to a particularly muddy patch. I can see now that we should have waited to set out until later in the day when the mud would have had a chance to dry and harden. Another thing I shouldn’t bring up. But this time my nerves get the better of me. I try to mitigate the insult of suggesting an alternative by addressing my question to Piti in Spanish.

  “What do you think, Piti?” I ask him. “Should we wait awhile?” We could just stop right here, hold an extended meditation session inside the pickup, while Bill naps.

  “I am not worried about the road,” Piti replies, but before I can feel reassured, he adds, “What worries me is the river.”

  It is amazing that, with my overactive imagination, I have not yet worked out what happens when a heavy rainstorm swells a river, actually a confluence of three rivers. But I make up for my oversight now by imagining the worst-case scenario: all of us carried away by the current, in a big, dented, silver casket. And nobody to take our picture.

  “Piti says the river will be high,” I translate for Bill. No response. I’m about to repeat myself on the unlikely chance that he didn’t hear me. But as we round the last bend, there is no need to. Before us lies the river, a big, bloated beast. Piti’s intake of breath is audible. On the far bank, people have gathered, waiting for the river to go down before crossing.

  Just as he must not have heard me, Bill must not have seen the river, because when he gets to the edge, he steps on the gas.

  “What are you doing?” I scream as we lunge into the water. “Are you crazy?” What a time to ask!

  “Calm down,” he snaps. “It’s shallow here.”

  Mikaela and Piti are silent in the backseat. Who can blame them? I’m the one who’s crazy, fighting with a madman who has our lives in his hands.