A Wedding in Haiti (3 page)

Although the dictatorship was still in place, my grandparents reported that the regime was loosening up. Elections were being scheduled, and a general amnesty was being extended to all exiles to return home and help build a new democracy. My father was not fooled; at least he claimed not to have been when he recounted the story to his grown daughters years later. This was a ploy by the dictator trying to ingratiate himself with the Americans who were putting pressure on him to liberalize his rule.

But Papi ended up caving in. My mother was homesick, overwhelmed with taking care of two babies, eleven months apart, with no servants to help out. Once back, my father discovered that nothing much had changed. Again, he reconnected with the underground. By the time I was ten, he was up to his ears in an imminent plot, which was cracked by the Secret Police. What saved us was a CIA contact who had promised to provide guns to the plotters. He managed to get my father, his wife, and four daughters out just in time. Four months after we left, the Mirabal sisters, who had founded the underground movement, were killed by the dictator’s henchmen.

Those first years back in New York, our family scraped by on handouts from my grandparents. Eventually, my father was able to renew his license and open a practice in Brooklyn. He worked seven days a week, getting up at four thirty, leaving the house by five thirty, before the sun had come up, returning after nine at night. He scrimped and saved wherever he could. I recall how he’d take the Queensboro Bridge when he had to drive into the city to avoid paying the dollar toll through the Midtown Tunnel. Then, twice a year, he went down to his house in Santiago and lived for a week like a rich man.

My mother was finally won over. By then, our once-lone house on the Cerros de Gurabo, the hills outside Santiago, was surrounded. The area had become an exclusive suburb of McMansions. Ours was now the oldest, and a poor relation to the others. After all, the things that had made the place so grand had been the imaginative accents: the waterfall; the sanctuary; the windmill where my father, dressed in a kind of monk’s robe, liked to climb to the little balcony on top to get inspired. He had started writing books on odd subjects: how to learn Chinese as a Dominican; how to be happy in old age (keep active, always have a project, write books, learn languages, play dominoes). He also wrote about his travels to an imaginary planet named Alfa Calendar, where all the problems that were now doing us in on earth had been resolved. (No wars, no poverty, plenty of windmills, nifty solar-powered belts to strap on and fly to your destination.)

Now, forty years later, the house has become their refuge. Shabby genteel is how I’d describe its current condition. Without constant maintenance and the infusion of funds, the tropics can do a number on buildings and gardens. Ceilings have begun to crack; a retainer wall has crumbled; one corner of the second floor tilts slightly; the plumbing is iffy. The birds have all died. The waterfall no longer works. Inside the windmill, the rats have helped themselves to my father’s library. One small blessing of Papi’s condition is that he is no longer cognizant enough to understand what has happened to his dream house.

Before I head for my bedroom, I peek in on them. They are fast asleep, holding hands as they always do across their joined hospital beds. Sometimes, Papi will wake up in the middle of the night calling out, “Pitou? Pitou?” I’ll hear Mami singing lullabies to him, as those seem to be the only songs she remembers anymore.

I try to fall asleep but the weariness after a day of travel, the excitement and uncertainty about what lies ahead, compounded by my worries, keep me up for hours. (How will we know what gas station Pablo will be waiting at? How will all six of us fit in Bill’s new pickup? What if we can’t find Piti’s house in time for the wedding?) When the alarm rings, it’s still dark outside, and I’ve driven almost to Port-de-Paix so many times in my head that it seems unnecessary to have to get up after so little sleep and actually drive there again in person.

August 19, from Santiago to Moustique

The border crossing

We wake up at quarter to five in the morning so we can be on the road by six. It’s a two-and-a-half- to three-hour drive to Dajabón, the Dominican border town, another hour to Cap-Haïtien, and then, it’s anyone’s guess how long the drive will be to wherever near Port-de-Paix Piti’s family lives.

Before our arrival in Santiago, I had asked Vicenta to pack a box with snacks and water, precautionary supplies to which she has added a cooler with cheese, ice, boxed juices, and even a bottle of wine. These go in the flatbed of the pickup, along with our backpacks and suitcases, the box of spaghetti, some tarps in case it rains. Inside the cab, Eli, Homero, and Leonardo are crammed in the backseat, Bill and I in front.

As we drive west to Dajabón, the sun rises behind us. Since Bill and I landed last night in the dark, it’s a bit of a shock to go from yesterday’s serene green hillsides of Vermont to the bright, jazzy colors and noisy clutter of the Dominican countryside. We’re all chatty, elated by the idea of the trip, the happy occasion of a wedding, the thrill of not knowing what we are going to find.

But as we near the border, we quiet down. Although it doesn’t get the attention of, say, the Middle East, there is a troubled history between the two small countries occupying this island. From time to time, these tensions have erupted in violence, most shamefully in 1937, when four to forty-thousand Haitians (the figures vary wildly) who were then living just this side of the Dominican border were massacred over the course of a few days. The massacre was the brainchild of Trujillo, who had the military use machetes to make it look like a grassroots uprising by farmers protecting their land from Haitian invaders.

Since then, relations between the two countries have never again erupted into outright violence. But conflicts persist, as undocumented Haitians cross over into their comparatively richer neighbor country, willing to do work Dominicans won’t do, often underpaid and poorly treated, a situation not unlike Mexicans who come to El Norte in search of a better life.

The border doesn’t open until nine, so we wait around for the officials to arrive to get our documents stamped and our fees paid. The first to come into the cinder-block building is a tall, plump official who takes one look at our pickup’s documents and starts shaking his head. The papers are incomplete, he explains. For us to be able to enter our vehicle into Haiti, we’ll need two more documents that we can only get in the capital (a five-hour drive away). In addition, the one document we do have is missing its stamps.

Bill and I raise an outcry. The wedding is
tomorrow
! We need to get there today! Besides, Homero, who made the inquiries, and my parents’ driver, who ran the errand, were assured that we only needed this one document. If it required stamps, their branch office in Santiago should have stamped it. So why should we be punished for their incompetence?

The official keeps shaking his head. He is very sorry, but there is nothing he can do. We can go into Haiti by showing our passports and paying the exit fee. But the pickup, a seemingly more valuable asset than the five lives within it, will have to stay behind. We may leave it parked in their yard for a fee, of course.

I can read the signs of an impending outburst on my beloved’s face, complete with an indignant rant on the bureaucratic nightmare of getting anything done in this country. We’ve faced it time and again trying to run the farm—a costly permit to cut down a few decaying pine trees, even though we’ve planted several hundred healthy shade trees to replace them; a titling process still incomplete after fourteen years. But this is no time to read the guy the riot act. There are smaller fish to fry here, and fortunately, our Dominican friend is along to show us how.

Homero begins by acknowledging that the official is right. A mistake has been made by someone else. But these Americanos have come all the way from the United States, as they are the godparents of this wedding that will take place tomorrow. Isn’t there a way to resolve this little problem here now?

The official keeps shaking his head, but it’s as if Homero has uttered the magic words. Suddenly we are following the official out to the yard to talk to his immediate superior, a tall, lean man with several gleaming gold teeth that give him a sinister smile. He also shakes his head while carrying our incomplete documents to his superior, another plump official with a clipboard, who shakes his head as well. But somehow in the midst of all this head shaking, six hundred pesos exchange hands (about seventeen US dollars). Before we know it, the paperwork is in order, our fees are paid, and we’re all back in the pickup, not yet daring to high-five each other for fear we’ll be punished for our glee and charged a further penalty.

Throughout this transaction, I’m intrigued by this ongoing visual refusal to budge (the head-shaking) coupled with the surreptitious acceptance of a bribe. It’s as if it were all a performance for hidden cameras monitoring the border, cameras that will capture only what’s going on from the shoulders up. At six hundred pesos, the bribe is ridiculously cheap compared to Homero’s visa to enter Haiti, which cost him the equivalent of eighty-five dollars—documents nobody bothers to check. Leonardo gets off the cheapest, as he has no documents, so technically, he doesn’t even exist. When I worry that without any proof, Haiti might not let him in, Leonardo smirks.

“It’s my country.”

“But how can the guards tell you’re Haitian, if you don’t have a passport?”

“They can tell,” Leonardo assures me.

He’s too young to know that during the massacre, Trujillo’s henchmen actually had trouble telling Haitians and Dominicans apart. So they devised a test. A sprig of parsley was held up for identification:
perejil
in Spanish. But the Haitians, whose Kreyòl uses a wide, flat
r,
could not pronounce the trilled
r
in the Spanish word. Whoever mispronounced the word was slaughtered on the spot. But it’s not a story I want to tell Leonardo, not now on the way to a wedding, when we are going against the currents of history, headed—so I hope—in a new direction.

The tall gates on the Dominican side open, and slowly we drive across the bridge, over the nearly dry Massacre River. Although many Dominicans believe the name came from the 1937 massacre, the river actually was christened in the eighteenth century after an especially bloody battle between the Spanish soldiers and French buccaneers. Now the river is full of women washing clothes or bathing themselves and their children.

On the Haitian side of the bridge, a white guard with a UN logo on his helmet peers into our pickup. The United Nations multinational mission has been a presence here since the last coup in 2004, replacing the Haitian army, which had already been disbanded. The soldier nods, the gates part, and just like that, we’re in Haiti, and free to proceed. No red tape, no need to wheedle our way in. Haiti will take us without blinking an eye or checking our documents.

I glance out the back window, feeling a pang like the biblical Ruth leaving behind her native land, as the gates close on the Dominican side.