A Wedding in Haiti (28 page)

Authors: Julia Alvarez

BOOK: A Wedding in Haiti

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After two hours of driving around, Leonard directs us to the road that will lead us out of the city to the border. He himself will get out here and take a motorcycle taxi to his meeting with the journalist.

How can he bear to do this again? Leonard shrugs. Actually, he is grateful to God for the extra income he is earning. He has been able to help his extended family and friends rebuild their lives. There is money to be made in the ruined city—not just in high-end hotels and restaurants. And not all of this money ends up lining a full pocket. Some of it helps fill an empty stomach.

As we drive away from the city center, I remind Bill about lunch. “You know, at the Oloffson?” I say it matter-of-factly. All grievance has washed out of me. What is left is a great, familiar tiredness at the ways we keep failing each other.

“I’m not hungry,” Bill murmurs. He, too, feels chastened, I can tell.

The road to the border is a breeze. It’s the main artery between the two countries; the one politicos use when they are deposed and the Toussaint L’Ouverture Airport is closed; the road that big transport trucks travel, bringing in supplies from the Dominican Republic and taking back undocumented Haitian workers; the road that four weary, heavyhearted travelers are now on, headed home, all of us too overcome to have much to talk about.

As we are leaving Haiti, I look out my window, and there, beside an excavated mountainside, two stone slabs rise out of a pile of rubble like hands steepled together in prayer. Haiti is still speaking to me. I had forgotten our conversation.

By the time we cross the border, evening is coming on. It’s a long drive north to Santiago from this southern entry point, so we decide to spend the night at a small seaside hotel. At supper, Bill asks Piti if he’ll play some songs for us and the other patrons at the restaurant. We’re all feeling raw after the day in Port-au-Prince, hoping for a repeat of the magical night in Moustique.

But it doesn’t happen, which surprises me. You’d think Piti’s gospel songs would appeal to the group of eighteen missionaries sitting at a long table in the middle of the restaurant. They’ve just arrived from a small town in Georgia to repair a church on the border they built six years ago. Not one turns his chair around. Not one sings along. Not one gets up to dance.

If not here, I find myself hoping, let it be happening back in Haiti. Let there be another free concert going on outside one of the tent cities. Let someone wear that red dress and dance to the sounds of a famous band, maybe RAM. Let there be singing and dancing again, even if it keeps someone awake all night or causes a fight.

Back in our room, Bill and I get ready for bed. Through the open window, we can hear the waves crashing on the cliffs, a sound that always makes me think of Matthew Arnold’s “Dover Beach,” a poem I so loved in college I learned it by heart and can still recite it. In the poem, a man is listening to the ocean at night, and a wave of despair washes over him. All he can hear in its grating roar is “the ebb and flow of human misery.” The world seems a darkling plain without joy or certitude or help of pain. In the final lines, overcome by an apocalyptic vision, which has to be one of the bleakest in English poetry, he calls his beloved to the window. “Ah love, let us be true to one another,” he begs her. That much they can posit together.

“Are you feeling a little better?” I ask tentatively, because it is and it isn’t the question I want to ask.

“A lot better, especially after that supper.”

Any further inroads into trying to mend fences feels premature. And so, not knowing what to say, I say too much: “Would you marry me again if you had it to do over?”

Bill turns to me, his face in a scowl, as if I’ve asked the most ridiculous question in the world. “What do you mean? You’re my life.”

I’m almost in tears with gratitude to him for being able to see me clearly, and still love me—another critical survival skill I’m struggling to learn. “But it gets so rough some times!”

“No it doesn’t,” Bill pronounces. And this time I am so glad for his sturdy certitude, I keep my mouth shut. On this rock I have built my marriage.

Back in his own room, Piti is strumming his guitar. I wonder if he is missing Eseline and Ludy on this, his first night away from Haiti.

He has no way of knowing that within a month, they will be back, having crossed over with Wilson. Eseline will be feeling fine, happy to be coming home to her husband and little house. Meanwhile, Ludy will be walking, reaching for everything, putting it in her mouth. (Oh dear, how to babyproof a humble
casita
?) She will also be talking a blue streak, saying
ma-ma, pa-pa,
making those nonsense syllables that sound eerily like
goudou, goudou
, but refer only to the wonders she is seeing and learning to name in this world.

A Shannon Ravenel Book

Published by

Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill

Post Office Box
2225

Chapel Hill, North Carolina
27515-2225

a division of

Workman Publishing

225
Varick Street

New York, New York
10014

Some names have been changed to protect the privacy of individuals.

The photographs in this book are credited as follows: Isaías Orozco Lang,
page
3
; Nicole Sánchez,
page
10
; Bill Eichner, pages
38
,
39
,
74
,
82
,
83
,
100
,
200
,
216
,
219
; Homero, pages
54
,
55
,
66
,
67
,
69
,
104
,
123
; Carlos Barria (Reuters), page
143
; Mikaela, pages
199
,
207
,
210
,
235
; Ana Alvarez, page
173
;
Thony Belizaire (AFP/Getty Images), page
242
. All others by the author, except for page
25
, from the author’s collection.