Breath, Eyes, Memory Read online

  I heard my mother's voice coming through the thin walls.

  "I am not having the short breath anymore, but every so often, I do find myself dreaming the bad dreams. I thought it would end, but lately it seems to be beginning all over again."

  Brigitte was still awake, even after my grandmother fell asleep. I wrapped her in a thick blanket, took her outside to show her the sky. Tante Atie was sitting on the steps feeding the pig.

  "Is it male or female?" I asked.

  "What difference does it make to the pig?" she asked.

  "I want to give it a name."

  "Call it Paul or Paulette, Jean or Jeanne. The pig will not protest. You do not have to name something to make it any more yours."

  "Are you in a sour mood?"

  "My life, it is nothing," she said.

  "What is the matter? Do you miss Croix-des-Rosets?"

  "Croix-des-Rosets was painful. Here, though, there is nothing. Nothing at all. The sky seems empty even when I am looking at the moon and stars."

  There were drums throbbing in the distance. Some staccato conch shells answered the call.

  "I wish I had never left you," I said.

  "You did not leave me. You were summoned away. We must graze where we are tied."

  "I wish I had stayed with you."

  "You must not go back and rearrange your life. It is no use for what has already happened. Sometimes, there is nothing we can do."

  "Do you want to go back to Croix-des-Rosets?" I asked.

  "I know old people, they have great knowledge. I have been taught never to contradict our elders. I am the oldest child. My place is here. I am supposed to march at the head of the old woman's coffin. I am supposed to lead her funeral procession. But even if lightning should strike me now, I will say this: I am tired. I woke up one morning and I was old myself."

  She threw a small green mango at the pig.

  "They train you to find a husband," she said. "They poke at your panties in the middle of the night, to see if you are still whole. They listen when you pee, to find out if you're peeing too loud. If you pee loud, it means you've got big spaces between your legs. They make you burn your fingers learning to cook. Then still you have nothing."

  The pig jumped up in the air to catch an avocado peel. The jump tightened the cord around its neck, nearly causing it to choke. Tante Atie rushed over and loosened the rope.

  "Take your baby inside," she said. "I know you have heard them, the frightening stories of the night."

  The pig oinked all night. Tante Atie woke up several times to check on it. My grandmother got up to see what all the commotion was about.

  "That Louise causes trouble." My grandmother turned her wrath to Tante Atie. "Everything from her shadow to that pig is trouble."

  "Don't trouble me tonight, old woman." Tante Atie strained to control her voice.

  The pig started a slow nasal whine.

  "I will kill it," said my grandmother. "I will kill it."

  My daughter woke up with a sharp cry.

  I fed her and rocked her back to sleep. The pig, it was still crying, but there was nothing I could do.

  Louise was out of breath when she ran up to the house the next morning. Her face was reddened with tears and her blouse soaked with sweat.

  My grandmother motioned for me to take the baby inside the house. I backed myself into the doorway while clinging tightly to my daughter.

  I watched from the threshold as Tante Atie gave Louise a cup of cold water from the jug beneath the porch.

  "Li allé. It's over," Louise said, panting as though she had both asthma and the hiccups at the same time. "They killed Dessalines."

  "Who killed Dessalines?" asked my grandmother.

  "The Macoutes killed Dessalines."

  Louise buried her head in Tante Atie's shoulder. Their faces were so close that their lips could meet if they both turned at the same time.

  "Calm now," said Tante Atie, as she massaged Louise's scalp.

  "That's why I need to go," sobbed Louise. "I need to leave."

  "A poor man is dead and all you can think about is your journey," snapped my grandmother.

  "Next might be me or you with the Macoutes," said Louise.

  "We already had our turn," said my grandmother. "Sophie, you keep the child behind the threshold. You are not to bring her out until that restless spirit is in the ground."

  In the fairy tales, the Tonton Macoute was a bogeyman, a scarecrow with human flesh. He wore denim overalls and carried a cutlass and a knapsack made of straw. In his knapsack, he always had scraps of naughty children, whom he dismembered to eat as snacks. If you don't respect your elders, then the Tonton Macoute will take you away.

  Outside the fairy tales, they roamed the streets in broad daylight, parading their Uzi machine guns.

  Who invented the Macoutes? The devil didn't do it and God didn't do it.

  Ordinary criminals walked naked in the night. They slicked their bodies with oil so they could slip through most fingers. But the Macoutes, they did not hide. When they entered a house, they asked to be fed, demanded the woman of the house, and forced her into her own bedroom. Then all you heard was screams until it was her daughter's turn. If a mother refused, they would make her sleep with her son and brother or even her own father.

  My father might have been a Macoute. He was a stranger who, when my mother was sixteen years old, grabbed her on her way back from school. He dragged her into the cane fields, and pinned her down on the ground. He had a black bandanna over his face so she never saw anything but his hair, which was the color of eggplants. He kept pounding her until she was too stunned to make a sound. When he was done, he made her keep her face in the dirt, threatening to shoot her if she looked up.

  For months she was afraid that he would creep out of the night and kill her in her sleep. She was terrified that he would come and tear out the child growing inside her. At night, she tore her sheets and bit off pieces of her own flesh when she had nightmares.

  My grandmother sent her to a rich mulatto family in Croix-des-Rosets to do any work she could for free room and board, as a rèstavèk. Even though my mother was pregnant and half insane, the family took her in anyway because my grandmother had cooked and cleaned in their house for years, before she married my grandfather.

  My mother came back to Dame Marie after I was born. She tried to kill herself several times when I was a baby. The nightmares were just too real. Tante Atie took care of me.

  The rich mulatto family helped my mother apply for papers to get out of Haiti. It took four years before she got her visa, but by the time she began to recover her sanity, she left.

  Tante Atie took me to Croix-des-Rosets, so I could go to school. And when I left, she moved back here, to Dame Marie, to take care of my grandmother.

  Somehow Dessalines's death brought to mind all those frightening memories. My grandmother would not let me take Brigitte outside until Dessalines was laid to rest in the ground. That night, I opened the window to listen to the night breeze rustling through the dry tcha tcha bean pods in the distance.

  Tante Atie was talking to Louise. Her voice was muffled, her breathing quickened, as she sobbed loudly.

  "It is the calm and silent waters that drown you. I never thought it would make me so sad to look in Sophie's face."

  The pig gave a sudden cry as Louise rushed away. Tante Atie slipped inside the house through a side door.

  "Nothing should have taken you out into that black night." My grandmother was waiting inside. "Did a bird nest in your hair? You seem to have lost your mind."

  "Maybe a good death would save me from all this," Tante Atie said.

  I heard a thump, like a slap across the face.

  Tante Atie stormed out of the house and marched out to the porch.

  When I came out, Tante Atie was sitting with a lamp and her notebook on her lap. I folded the flaps of Joseph's shirt between my legs and sat on the top step next to her.

  "Do you ever visit
Mr. Augustin?" I asked.

  "No," she said. "Sometimes people just disappear from our lives and it is not a bad thing."

  We sat silently and looked at the stars for a while.

  "I am going to excuse myself and go back inside," I said. "I do not want to leave the baby alone for long."

  "The old woman, she is going to send word to your mother that you are here," she said.

  "My mother does not concern herself with where I am."

  "You are judging her much too harshly."

  "When Joseph and I first married, I used to write her every month. I have sent her pictures of Brigitte. She keeps the letters, but makes no reply."

  "She will come," said Tante Atie.

  "Come where?"

  "She will come here. She has promised for a long time to come and arrange the old woman's funeral and the old woman will place on the cassette words begging her to come, so you can settle this quarrel."

  Brigitte got up early the next morning, ready to bounce and play. I lay her on the bed and tried to make her do some baby exercises.

  In the next room, my grandmother was recording her reply cassette to my mother.

  "Martine, ki jan ou yé?" How are you? "We are doing fine here, following in the shadow of Father Time. I am well, except for the old bones that ache sometime. Dessalines has died. Macoutes kill him. Do you remember him? He was the coal man.

  "I don't even need to talk about Atie. She is carrying on like she has got a pound of rocks on her chest. Sadness is now her way of life. You needn't worry about Sophie. Could be she is on a little holiday. The bird, it always returns to the nest."

  My grandmother stopped to clear her throat. Brigitte grabbed my fingers and held them tightly as she rolled on her side.

  "Is Atie in her room?" yelled my grandmother.

  "She is out!" I shouted back.

  Brigitte shrieked, trying to scream along.

  "Is there something you want to say to your mother?"

  "No!"

  The recorder clicked to a stop.

  "Any more you want to say?" asked my grandmother.

  "I think we've already said enough."

  In the distance, the bells tolled, announcing Dessalines's funeral. Tante Atie stumbled into her room, her body rocking from side to side. She lowered herself to the ground, her large feet barely sidestepping my outstretched leg and Brig-itte s toes. Tante Atie's eyes were red; she blinked quickly trying to keep them open. She snapped her fingers and made faces at Brigitte, to get her attention.

  "Are you all right?" I asked her.

  "Fine, good."

  Her breath smelled like rum. She stretched her body out on the floor and within a few seconds, fell asleep.

  She woke up at noon with a panic-stricken look in her eyes.

  "My notebook?" she asked. "You seen it?"

  I shook my head no. Brigitte was asleep on the bed. I was afraid that Tante Atie's sudden movements would wake her up.

  "Maybe the book's in my room," she mumbled, heading for the door.

  "Were you drinking?" I asked.

  "I drink a little to forget my troubles," she said. "It's no more a vice than the old woman and her tobacco."

  She walked out to the yard, splashed some water over her face, then started towards the road.

  She came back in the very early morning hours. The voices in the yard kept me awake.

  "You can go now," said Tante Atie.

  "Let me see you enter," insisted Louise. "That calf of yours, go and rest that calf of yours."

  "People do not die from aching calves," said Tante Atie. "You think I am an old lady. I do not need a walking cane."

  "Be pleasant, Atie. Go inside."

  I heard Tante Atie walk inside.

  The bed squealed under her body as she crashed on it. Louise walked home alone in the fading dusk.

  Chapter 22

  The next morning, a pack of rainbow butterflies hovered around the porch. I was sitting on the steps, watching the sun rise behind the shack spotted hills.

  My grandmother's face was powdered with ashes as she left the house. Walking past me, she tapped my knee with the tip of her cane. She lowered a black veil over her face as she twirled a rosary between her fingers.

  The baby let out a sudden cry from Tante Atie's room. I rushed back in. Tante Atie was pacing as she carried her around the room. Brigitte stretched out her hands when she saw me. She pressed her face down on my neck when I held her against my body.

  "Did the old woman leave for the cemetery?" Tante Atie asked.

  "Is that where she's going?"

  "She is going to pay her last respects to Dessalines."

  Brigitte clawed my neck with her fingernails.

  "You and Louise, you are very close, aren't you?" I asked Tante Atie.

  "When you have a good friend," she said, "you must hold her with both hands."

  "It will be hard for you when she leaves, won't it?"

  "I will miss her like my own skin."

  My grandmother had her veil on her arm as she walked back towards the house. Eliab ran to her and took a heavy bundle from her hand. He pulled out its contents, sniffing the coconuts before setting them down.

  "Did you have a nice visit to the cemetery?" I asked.

  "There are two ways to go to the cemetery. One is on your two feet, the other is in a box. Each way, it is a large travail. Where is your Tante Atie?"

  "She is visiting with Louise."

  "Why do I even ask?"

  She picked up a machete from under the porch and chopped a green coconut in half. Eliab pushed an open gourd beneath the coconut and caught the cloudy liquid flowing out of it. My grandmother carved out the flesh with a spoon and stuffed it in her mouth.

  She chopped another coconut and brought it over to me. The coconut milk spilled all over my chest as I raised the shell to my lips.

  My daughter reached up to grab the coconut. My grandmother and Eliab sat on an old tree stump, sharing the soft mush inside the coconut. My grandmother threw some at the pig, which it leaped up to swallow.

  . . .

  Tante Atie did not come home for supper. My grandmother and I ate in the yard, while Brigitte slept in a blanket in my arms. My grandmother was watching a light move between two distant points on the hill.

  "Do you see that light moving yonder?" she asked, pointing to the traveling lantern. "Do you know why it goes to and fro like that?"

  She was concentrating on the shift, her pupils traveling with each movement:

  "It is a baby," she said, "a baby is being born. The midwife is taking trips from the shack to the yard where the pot is boiling. Soon we will know whether it is a boy or a girl."

  "How will we know that?"

  "If it is a boy, the lantern will be put outside the shack. If there is a man, he will stay awake all night with the new child."

  "What if it is a girl?"

  "If it is a girl, the midwife will cut the child's cord and go home. Only the mother will be left in the darkness to hold her child. There will be no lamps, no candles, no more light."

  We waited. The light went out in the house about an hour later. By that time, my grandmother had dozed off. Another little girl had come into the world.

  Chapter 23

  A rooster crowed at the next morning's dawn. I peeked into Tante Atie's room. Her bed was still made, without a wrinkle on it. She had not come home at all the night before. My grandmother made herself some bitter black coffee with a lump of salt to prepare her body for the shock of bad news.

  I sat out on the porch with Brigitte waiting for the food vendors to come by. They trickled by slowly, each chanting the names and praises of their merchandise.

  My grandmother bought some bananas, boiled eggs, and hard biscuits, Louise and Tante Atie came up the road. Tante Atie was ahead. Louise marched a few feet behind her.

  My grandmother looked up without acknowledging their presence. Louise walked into the yard, charged towards the tree, untied her pig,
picked it up, and walked away.

  "Why? What are you doing?" I called after her.

  She did not turn back.

  "What is the matter with her?" I asked Tante Atie.

  "Manman told her to come get the pig or she would kill it," Tante Atie said.

  Tante Atie was carrying a small jar of water with three leeches inside.

  "Is it true Grandme Ife? Did you say that?" I asked.

  "We need a pig, we buy a pig," said my grandmother.

  "I will buy it," I said.

  "Non non," Tante Atie jumped quickly. "The money, it will surely go for her boat trip to Miami."

  "You think you can keep money out of her hands?" asked my grandmother.

  "I do not want to push her into the ocean," Tante Atie said.

  She raised the leech jar towards the sun. The animals squirmed away from the light, their black slippery bodies coiling into small balls. She raised her skirt and stretched out her calf. Opening the jar, she tipped it over so that the water was soaking her skin. The leeches slowly crawled out of the jar and climbed on a lump on her calf.

  She ground her teeth when one of the larger leeches bit into her skin. She leaned back against the porch railing, pulled her notebook from her sack, and began writing her name. She wrote it over and over, following a pattern at the top of the page.

  The leeches sucked the blood out of her lump, until they were plump and full. She pulled them away one by one, slid her fingers down their backs, and pumped the blood into an empty jar. I felt my head spinning, my stomach about to turn inside out. Tante Atie noticed the pained expression on my face.

  "It's no loss, angel," she said. "It's only blood, bad blood at that."

  I asked my grandmother if I could cook supper for us that night.

  Tante Atie offered to take me to a private vendor where food was cheaper than the maché. She put the leeches in some clean water and we started down the road.

  "What are you making for us?" she asked.

  "Rice, black beans, and herring sauce," I said.

  "Your mother's favorite meal."

  "That's what we cooked most often."

  We followed a footpath off the road, down to a shallow stream. An old mule was yanking water vines fromtheedgeof the stream while baby crabs freely dashed around its nostrils.