Breath, Eyes, Memory

by Edwidge Danticat

  Chapter 25

  My mother changed into a sun dress to parcel out what she had brought. Under the spaghetti straps, I could see the true unbleached ebony shade of her skin. In contrast, her face looked like the palm of a hand.

  My grandmother reached over and cupped her hands over my mother's prosthetic bra.

  "Do they hurt?" asked my grandmother.

  "No," my mother answered, "because they are not really part of me."

  She had brought cloth for my mother and Tante Atie to share. Packaged rice and beans and packaged spices for my grandmother.

  I got the diapers and underclothes that Joseph had sent for the baby, along with some T-shirts and shorts for me.

  "If you were not such a stubborn old woman," my mother said to my grandmother, "I would move you and

  Atie to Croix-des-Rosets or the city. I could buy you a bougainvillea. You would have electricity, and all kinds of modern machines."

  "I like myself here," said my grandmother. "I need to see about my papers for this land and I need to have all the things for my passing. With all my children here, this is a good time."

  Tante Atie was writing in her notebook. My mother leaned over to look. Tante Atie pulled her notebook away and slammed it shut.

  "We will see the notary about the land papers," said my grandmother. "We will do it tomorrow."

  "What will you do with the land?" asked Tante Atie.

  "I want to make the papers show all the people it belongs to."

  Tante Atie did not go to Louise's house, but spent the evening in the yard, staring at the sky.

  My mother could not sleep. She went outside and sat with Tante Atie. They looked up for a long time without saying a word.

  Finally my mother said, "Do you remember all the unpleasant stories Manman used to tell us about the stars in the sky?"

  "My favorite," said Tante Atie, "was the one about the girl who wished she could marry a star and then went up there and, as real as her eyes were black, the man she wished for was a monster."

  "Atie, you remember everything."

  "I liked what Papa said better. He thought, Papa, that the stars were brave men."

  "Maybe he was right," my mother said.

  "He said they would come back and fall in love with me. I wouldn't say that was right."

  "We used to fight so hard when we saw a star wink. You said it was winking at you. I thought it was winking at me. I think, Manman, she told us that unpleasant story about the stars to stop the quarrels."

  "Young girls, they should be allowed to keep their pleasant stories," Tante Atie said.

  "Why don't you sleep in your bed?" asked my mother.

  "Because it is empty in my bed."

  "You had flanneurs, men who came to ask for your hand."

  "Until better women came along."

  "How could you not be chosen? You are Atie Caco."

  "Atie Caco to you. Special to no one."

  "You were so beautiful, Atie, when you were a girl. Papa, he loved you best."

  "I have then the curse of a girl whose papa loved her best."

  Tante Atie rubbed the scar on the side of her head. They looked up at the sky and pointed to a blinking star.

  "You can keep the brightest ones," said Tante Atie. "When you are gone, I will have them all to myself."

  "We come from a place," my mother said, "where in one instant, you can lose your father and all your other dreams."

  Chapter 26

  My mother and grandmother left early for the notary's. Tante Atie was not in her room. Eliab was playing with pieces of brown paper, stuffing them with leaves to make cigars.

  I called him to buy me some milk from the market.

  "The new lady," he said, "does she belong to you?"

  "Sometimes I claim her," I said, "sometimes I do not."

  I gave him some money to buy me some goat milk from the market. He came back with some milk in a cut-off plastic container and a large mango for himself.

  "That young fellow, he wants to marry your daughter," my grandmother said as she and my mother walked into the yard.

  Eliab looked embarrassed.

  "Does that fellow know?" my mother laughed. "My daughter has a very old husband."

  My mother was carrying a few large bundles.

  I had never seen my grandmother so happy. My mother was glowing.

  "We are now landowners," my mother said. "We all now own part of La Nouvelle Dame Marie."

  "Did this land not always belong to you and Tante Atie?" I asked my mother.

  "Yes, but now you have a piece of it too."

  She flashed the new deed for the house.

  "La terre sera également divisée," she read the document. "Equally, my dear. The land is equally divided between Atie and me and you and your daughter."

  My grandmother pulled out a dressy church hat that she had bought for Tante Atie.

  "Sunday we go to the cathedral," said my mother. "We meet Manmans priest."

  My mother kissed the bottom of Brigitte's feet.

  "Where is Atie?" asked my mother. "I got her a hat that will make her look downright chic."

  "She went out," I said.

  "The gods will punish me for Atie's ways." My grandmother moaned.

  Tante Atie kept her eyes on the lantern on the hills as we ate dinner that night. She was squinting as though she wanted to see with her ears, like my grandmother.

  "I look forward to the Mass on Sunday," my grandmother said, breaking the silence. "I want that young priest. The one they call Lavalas. I want him to sing the last song at my funeral."

  Brigitte shook the new rattle that my mother had brought her.

  My grandmother took Brigitte from me and put a few rice grains in her mouth. My daughter opened her mouth wide, trying to engulf the rice.

  Tante Atie walked up the steps and went back to her room.

  "I don't know," my grandmother said. "Her mood changes more than the colors in the sky. Take her with you when you return to New York."

  "I have asked her before," my mother said. "She wants to be with you."

  "She feels she must," my grandmother said. "It's not love. It is duty."

  Everything was rustling in Tante Atie's room, as though she were packing. She was mumbling to herself so I dared not peek in. In the yard my mother and grandmother were sitting around the table, passing my grandmother's old clay pipe back and forth to each other.

  "Manman, will you know when your time comes to die?" my mother asked sadly.

  "The old bones, they will know."

  "I want to be buried here when I die," my mother said.

  "You should tell Sophie. She is your daughter. She will respect your wishes."

  "I don't want much," my mother said. "I don't want a Mass like you. I want to be buried the day after I die. Just like the old days when we kept our dead home."

  "That is reason for you and Sophie to be friends," my grandmother said. "She can carry out your wishes. I can help, but she is your child."

  My mother paced the corridor most of the night. She walked into my room and tiptoed over to my bed. I crossed my legs tightly, already feeling my body shivering.

  I shut my eyes tightly and pretended to be asleep.

  She walked over to the baby and stood over her for a long time. Tears streamed down her face as she watched us sleep. The tears came harder. She turned and walked out.

  My mother walked into the room at dawn while I was changing Brigitte's diapers.

  "Are you all right?" I asked.

  "Fine," she said.

  "Do you still have trouble sleeping?" I tried to be polite.

  "It's worse when I am here," she said.

  "Are you having nightmares?"

  "More than ever," she said.

  My old sympathy was coming back. I remembered the nightmares. Sometimes, I even had some myself. I was feeling sorry for her.

  "I thought it was my face that brought them on," I said.

  "Your face?"r />
  "Because I look like him. My father. A child out of wedlock always looks like its father."

  She seemed shocked that I remembered.

  "When I first saw you in New York, I must admit, it frightened me the way you looked. But it is not something that I can help. It is not something that you can help. It is just part of our lives.

  "As a woman, your face has changed. You are a different person. Besides, I have always had nightmares. Every night of my life. It was just stronger then, because that was the first time I was seeing that face."

  "Why did you put me through those tests?" I blurted out.

  "If I tell you today, you must never ask me again."

  I wanted to reserve my right to ask as many times as I needed to. I was not angry with her anymore. I had a greater need to understand, so that I would never repeat it myself.

  "I did it," she said, "because my mother had done it to me. I have no greater excuse. I realize standing here that the two greatest pains of my life are very much related. The one good thing about my being raped was that it made the testing stop. The testing and the rape. I live both every day."

  "You're not dressed yet?" My grandmother was standing in the doorway. "I am ready to go."

  My mother placed her hand on my grandmother's shoulder and signaled for her to wait. She turned back to me and said in English, "I want to be your friend, your very very good friend, because you saved my life many times when you woke me up from those nightmares."

  My mother went to my grandmother's room to dress and soon they left for the road.

  They came back a few hours later with a pan full of bloody pig meat.

  In our family, we had come to expect that people can disappear into thin air. All traces lost except in the vivid eyes of one's memory. Still, Tante Atie had never thought that Louise would leave her so quickly, without any last words.

  That night, Tante Atie had a glazed look on her face as she ate the fried pork.

  "Forgive me if I don't go to Mass ever again. I will choke on the Communion if I take it angry."

  Louise had sold her pig, taken my grandmother's money, and left the valley, without so much as a good-bye to Tante Atie.

  Chapter 27

  I asked Tante Atie if Brigitte and I could sleep in her room with her, the night before we were to return to New York. We put down some sheets on the floor and stretched out with the baby between us.

  Tante Atie turned her back to the wall as though she did not want me to see her cry. We heard my mother pacing the front room's floor, back and forth waiting for the sun to rise.

  "Louise would have found her money, somehow, someway," I told Tante Atie. "She would have done anything to make that trip. Sometimes, when people have something they want to do, you cannot stop them. Even if you want to."

  "I was a fool to think she was my friend," Tante Atie said. "Money makes dogs dance."

  "At least she taught you how to read your letters."

  "Anyone could have taught me that. A lot of good letters will do me now."

  "Sometimes I wish I could go back in time with you, to when we were younger."

  She closed her eyes, as though to drift off to sleep.

  "The past is always the past," she said. "Children are the rewards of life and you were my child."

  The next day, Tante Atie led the cart that took my mother's and my bags to the marketplace. The sun was shining in Tante Atie's eyes as she carried my daughter for me. My grandmother and my mother had their arms wrapped around one another's waists, clinging as though they would never see each other again.

  When we got to the van that would take us to Port-au-Prince, my grandmother just stepped back and let go. My mother kissed her on both cheeks and then walked over and kissed Tante Atie. Tante Atie tapped my mother's shoulder and whispered for her to be careful.

  As Tante Atie handed me my daughter, she said, "Treat your mother well, you don't have her forever."

  My grandmother tapped the baby's chin.

  "The faces in this child," she said, fighting back her tears.

  My mother paid the tap tap driver for us to have the van all to ourselves. It was all ours except for the old hunchback, whose charcoal bags had already been loaded on it.

  Tante Atie was standing under the red flamboyant tree, clinging to a low branch, as the van pulled away. Slowly, everything in Dame Marie became a blur. My grandmother and the vendors. Tante Atie at the naming red tree. The Macoutes around Louise's stand. Even the hill in the distance, the place that Tante Atie called Guinea. A place where all the women in my family hoped to eventually meet one another, at the very end of each of our journeys.

  Four

  Chapter 28

  It was a rocky ride to the airport. The old hunchback lowered her body onto a sack of charcoal to sleep, as though it were a feather mattress. My mother kept her eyes on the barren hills speeding outside the window. I wished there were other people with us, chatty Madan Saras, vendors, to add some teeth sucking and laughter to our journey.

  My mother reached over and grabbed the cloth bells on Brigitte's booties, sadly ignoring the skeletal mares and even bonier women tugging their beasts to open markets along the route.

  In the city, we were slowed down by the heavier traffic. My mother looked closely at the neon signs on the large pharmacies and American-style supermarkets. The vans hurried up and down the avenues and made sudden stops in the middle of the boulevards. My mother gasped each time we went by a large department store, shouting the names of places she had visited in years past.

  The old hunchback got off at the iron market in Port-au-Prince. A few men with carts rushed to help her unload her charcoal bags from the roof.

  She waved good-bye to us as the van pulled away.

  "Find peace," she said, chewing the end of an unlit pipe.

  "Find peace, you too." answered my mother.

  Brigitte grabbed my blouse when she woke up. While I changed her diaper, my mother held my back and her head as though she was afraid that we would both crash if she let go. Brigitte slept peacefully through the rest of the trip.

  "She's a good child," my mother said. "C'est comme une poupée. It's as if she's not here at all."

  The airport lobby was crowded with peddlers, beggars, and travelers. We tried to keep up with the driver as he dashed towards a short line with our suitcases. My mother had no trouble at the reservation desk. Our American passports worked in our favor. She bribed the ticket seller twenty dollars to change us into seats next to one another.

  I looked up at the murals on the high airport ceiling once more. The paintings of Haitian men and women selling beans, pulling carts, and looking very happy at their toil.

  My mother's face looked purple on the flight. She left to go the bathroom several times. When she came back, she said nothing, just stared at the clouds out the window. The flight attendant gave her a pill, which seemed to calm her stomach.

  "Is it the cancer again?" I asked.

  "It's my discomfort with being in Haiti," she said. "I want to go back there only to be buried."

  She picked at the white chicken they served us for lunch, while I gave Brigitte a bottle.

  "You don't seem to eat much," she said.

  "After I got married, I found out that I had something called bulimia," I said.

  "What is that?"

  "It's when you don't eat at all and then eat a whole lot— bingeing."

  "How does that happen?" she said. "You are so tiny, so very petite. Why would you do that? I have never heard of a Haitian woman getting anything like that. Food, it was so rare when we were growing up. We could not waste it."

  "You are blaming me for it," I said. "That is part of the problem."

  "You have become very American," she said. "I am not blaming you. It is advice. I want to give you some advice. Eat. Food is good for you. It is a luxury. When I just came to this country I gained sixty pounds my first year. I couldn't believe all the different kinds of apples and ice cream. A
ll the things that only the rich eat in Haiti, everyone could eat them here, dirt cheap."

  "When I saw you for the first time, you were very thin."

  "I had just gotten my breasts removed for the cancer. But before that, before the cancer. In the beginning, food was a struggle. To have so much to eat and not to eat it all. It took me a while to get used to the idea that the food was going to be there to stay. When I first came, I used to eat the way we ate at home. I ate for tomorrow and the next day and the day after that, in case I had nothing to eat for the next couple of days. I ate reserves. I would wake up and find the food still there and I would still eat ahead anyway."

  "So it is not so abnormal that I have it," I said.

  "You are different, but that's okay. I am different too. I want things to be good with us now."

  My daughter was asleep by the time we landed in New York. My mother got our suitcases while I waited in the lobby.

  "Will you spend the night at home before you go back to Providence?" she asked, struggling with our bags.

  I told her I would.

  "Don't you have someone you can call to pick us up?" I asked.

  "The only person you have to count on is yourself," she said.

  We took a cab back to Nostrand Avenue. I looked around the living room while she listened to the messages on her answering machine. There was still red everywhere, even the new sofa and love seat were a dark red velvet.

  Most of her messages were from Marc. His voice sounded softer than I remembered it.

  "T'es retourné?" Are you back?

  "Call me as soon as you get back."

  "Je t'aime."

  He even sounded excited on the "I love you." She moved closer to the machine, blocking my view of it, as though he was there in the flesh and she was standing with him and they were naked together.

  I walked up the red carpeted stairs to my old room. Aside from the bed, the room was completely bare. She had removed all the jazz legend posters that Joseph had given me. On the far end of the wall was the sketch of her and me at Coney Island. The sketch emphasized the merry-go-round but shrunk us in comparison, except for our hands, which seemed like the largest parts of our bodies.