The Farming of Bones (22 page)

In Rosalinda’s photographs, I could see traces of both her mother and father. She had maintained her father’s bronze complexion, had taken his height; but mostly she had her grandfather’s, Papi’s, worldly and pensive smile, with similar thought lines across her forehead.

The largest image in the room, however, was a painting of a bone-white baby boy, watchful and smiling, in an ivory pearl and satin baptism dress with a matching bonnet framing his water lily-colored cheeks.

Señora Valencia sat facing this portrait as the handmaid and I waited for her to turn around.

When she finally rose, I saw that she was wearing a hibiscus print caftan that reached down to her ankles; the outline of her frame under the dress was narrow, almost gaunt. She used her chair back as a support before starting towards us. She had a few gray streaks in her hair and had taken to Doña Eva’s old hairstyle, wearing the heavy lump of a coiled braid on either side of her face.

Once in front of me, she pushed her face at nose length from mine, then turned and marched back to her seat. I remained in my spot while she sat down and raised her coffee cup and sipped it dry, as if in her mind I had simply disappeared. The handmaid grabbed my elbow and tugged at it, encouraging me to leave.

The señora finally spoke. “You are wicked to come here and use Amabelle’s name.” Like the handmaid’s, her voice was hesitant, gasping, nervous. She lowered her empty cup to the table in front of her while still keeping her back to us. “What do you take me for? I spoke to many people who said they watched when she was killed in La Romana, with some others who were hiding in a house by the sea. Pico told me for certain that she must have been killed.”

That she did not recognize me made me feel that I had come back to Alegría and found it had never existed at all. But at the same time, without knowing it, she was giving me hope that perhaps all the people who had said that Mimi and Sebastien were dead, they too might have been mistaken.

The handmaid’s face was vacant, like mine would have been, had I been standing in her place. She gave me a tolerant nod, but we both knew that she might have to lead me away at any time, if this is what her mistress asked her to do.

I wondered where all the guards were hiding. Where was all the protection that came with her husband’s position? Perhaps soldiers would storm the room at any moment, arrest me, and drive me to the border for deportation.

Was I that much older, stouter? Had my face changed so much? How could she not know my voice, which, like hers, might have slowed and become more abrupt with age but was still my own? “I was here—there down the road—in your bedroom when your children were born,” I reminded her. “You told no one of your labor pains until the babies were nearly here because you trusted your dead mother to look after you. Your son Rafael, Rafi, named for the Generalissimo, was born first. Your daughter was born second with a caul over her face. You named her Rosalinda Teresa for your mother.”

It took some time for her to turn around again. I felt I had to keep talking. “What became of your portrait of the Generalissimo, which was in the parlor in your old house, down the road? Where is Juana? Where is Luis? Did Juana go and live with her hermanas, the nuns?”

“Where did we find Amabelle?” she asked, her voice less certain.

Now it was as if we were doing battle and I knew I must win; she had to recognize me.

“Your father saw me at the side of the Massacre River,” I said. “Your father, he asked one of the children by the riverside to question me in Kreyol, asking who I belonged to, and I answered that I belonged to myself.”

I could see a bit of shame and regret in her posture as she took a few steps towards me. The awkwardness of her initial rejection, and what I saw as my coming too late, would allow for no close embrace, no joyful tears.

She took a few more steps in my direction, then hopped back as though I might be dangerous to touch. With a bashful flick of the protruding bone on her slender wrist, she motioned to the wicker sofas around the room, waiting for me to pick one to settle in.

“Sylvie, please leave us.” She flicked her wrists once more, signaling for the handmaid to depart.

I too wanted to leave at that moment, but I sat down and stayed, a small part of me rejoicing in having conquered, having gained her full attention.

“We don’t have much help anymore,” she said once Sylvie was out of sight. “So few have remained loyal over the years.”

She looked down at her hands. They were spotless, perfect and soft looking. I too looked down at my own hands, cut and scarred with scissors and needle marks. Why had I never dreamt of her? I wondered. (My dreams were sometimes my way of hoping and not hoping.) Was it because I never truly loved her? All I wanted now was for her to tell me where the waterfall was. What had become of the waterfall and the stream? They couldn’t have disappeared. Some wishes sound too foolish when uttered out loud. But this is why I had come back to this place, to see a waterfall.

“Amabelle, I beg your forgiveness for not recognizing you.” An odd pained smile never left her face, as though she were thinking of too much to say and could not find the exact words. “We all have changed so much.”

“I understand,” I said, feeling like an old ghost had slipped back under my skin.

“Where are you living now? Are you here or in Haiti?”

“In Haiti.”

“I still paint. Do you see? I painted Rafi.” She pointed to the large portrait of the bone-white baby boy in the baptism dress.

Then she told me, “Rosalinda is married.”

I felt as though she were speaking to me on behalf of someone else. I couldn’t stop thinking that perhaps an older member of her family, a dona with a similar face, similar manners, and a voice similar to hers, had come to keep me company until Valencia herself could talk to me.

When she was younger I could have easily guessed her thoughts, but now I didn’t have any idea of what was on her mind.

“You didn’t have more children?” I asked.

“Only the two you knew,” she said. “I could have no more children. And you? Do you have a husband, children, grandchildren, Amabelle?”

“No.”

“After you left, I had some bleeding for a few days. I had perhaps been negligent during my time of risk, after the children were born. Javier was the only doctor I trusted, and perhaps he could have helped me, but he vanished. Even with Doha Eva’s connections, she never found him. Pico, he says he did all he could to search for him, but nothing helped. Certain people simply disappeared.”

She called for Sylvie, who came running back into the parlor. Sylvie’s eyes circled the room to avoid meeting the señora’s gaze. Working for others, you are immediately inspected when you enter a room, as if the patrón or the señora is always hoping to catch you with some missing treasure in your hand.

Sylvie waited patiently for her orders in front of a column in the center of the room. She was soon forgotten, left to stand there.

“Papi died before Rosalinda married,” the señora explained, pointing to Rosalinda’s marriage portrait. “Rosalinda wanted to marry young. She is now in medical school in the capital with her husband. They are doing well, but with the riots in the city, they may come home again with her father this weekend.”

“And how is Señor Pico?” I felt now that I could ask.

She joined her hands on her lap and hesitated before answering. “This is an unstable time for our country,” she said.

“How did you come to change houses?” I asked.

“Everything must look so different to you now,” she said. “Pico bought this house from the family of a colonel who died. They are all in Nueva York now, in North America, like Doña Eva and Beatriz.” She breathed out, then slipped into a brisk, animated song—
“Yo tiro la cuchara. Yo tiro el tenedor. Yo tiro to’ los platos y me voy pa’ Nueva York.”
It was a song of sad and joyous exile, everything lost to Nueva York. “I throw away my spoon. I throw away my fork. I throw away my plates and I’m going to Nueva York.”

“When we changed houses,” she continued in a more relaxed voice, “Juana and Luis went back to their people. They were getting old and couldn’t work anymore. I would have kept them, but they wanted to go.”

She leaned forward and squeezed my hand, pressing her fingers down on my knuckles as if trying to leave her handprints on my bones.

“Amabelle, I live here still,” she said. “If I denounce this country, I denounce myself. I would have had to leave the country if I’d forsaken my husband. Not that I ever asked questions. Not trusting him would have been like declaring that I was against him.”

“I understand,” I said.

“Do you truly understand?” Her face brightened with a kind of hope I no longer thought I could offer. “During El Corte, though I was bleeding and nearly died, I hid many of your people,” she whispered. El Corte—the cutting—was an easy word to say. Just as on our side of the river many called it a kout kouto, a stabbing, like a single knife wound. “I hid a baby who is now a student at the medical school with Rosalinda and her husband. I hid Sylvie and two families in your old room. I hid some of Doha Sabme’s people before she and her husband escaped to Haiti. I did what I could in my situation.”

What could she have expected me to say? There were no medals to be given. If there were, I didn’t know where to tell her to go to claim hers.

“I understand,” I said.

“I hid them because I couldn’t hide you, Amabelle. I thought you’d been killed, so everything I did, I did in your name.”

“I don’t see any trace of Don Carlos’ mill. Were the people there slaughtered?” I did not want to feel indebted to her.

“None of the people in Don Carlos’ mill were touched,” she said, confirming what I had suspected, that perhaps if I hadn’t told Sebastien to leave the compound and go to the church, he and Mimi might have been saved. “There are no small mills here anymore,” she said, “only residences like this one.”

Had the stream dried up when these houses were built, the rocks and the sand gathered for mortar, the water for power and lights?

“Amabelle, Pico merely followed the orders he was given,” she said, releasing my hand. “I have pondered this so very often. He was told to go and arrest some people who were plotting against the Generalissimo at the church that night, then he was detained by those people who were on the road, that young man Unèl, the one who once rebuilt the latrines for us.”

She sat perfectly still for some time, as though Unèl had appeared in front of her and she was examining him with her tearful gaze.

“We lived in a time of massacres.” She breathed out loudly. “Before Papi died, all he did was listen on his radio to stories of different kinds of … cortes, from all over the world. It is a marvel that some of us are still here, to wait and hope to die a natural death.”

All the time I had known her, we had always been dangling between being strangers and being friends. Now we were neither strangers nor friends. We were like two people passing each other on the street, exchanging a lengthy meaningless greeting. And at last I wanted it to end.

“I would like to know what became of the stream,” I said.

“What stream?” she asked.

“The one that starts at the waterfall.”

“There have been a lot of houses constructed here,” she said, “but the houses have not replaced everything. There are many waterfalls still. If you like, I can show you the closest one that remains.”

Garaged behind the main house was a wide, two-toned, green and white automobile with a yellow vinyl interior. Sylvie climbed into the back first. Then I took the seat beside the señora’s. I saw the señora stifle a gasp as she realized that because of my bad knee, one of my legs now appeared much shorter than the other.

A man came running out from one of the smaller houses when she started up the automobile.

“Señora, you are going out?” he asked, resting his arm on the door on her side.

“I will not be long,” she said.

“Should I not go with you?” he asked.

“Please open the gate for us,” she said.

The man buttoned the last two buttons of his shirt as he hastened to the gate. Even though he was running as fast as his legs could carry him, the señora’s automobile still reached the gate before he did. She waited there for him to open it for her.

“This is my daughter’s automobile,” she said, driving through the parted gates. “Our Rosalinda, Amabelle, she is so beautiful. She is my whole life. We get along very well, as it might have been with Mami and me. This car was a marriage gift from her father. She taught me to drive so I can move about by myself when I wish. He does not even know, my husband, that I can drive an automobile, isn’t that so, Sylvie?”

“That is so, Señora,” said Sylvie.

The señora drove her car almost at walking speed through the same streets I had previously traversed, then made a sudden turn that took us beyond all the large houses into wide open meadows, old cane land now filled with wheat and corn fields, the mountain ranges looming over them. We drove past clusters of casitas and small farms where children ran out to chase the car. Finally the señora added some speed, charging through a narrow trail inside a corn field that led abruptly to a long braid of water that grew wider as we climbed to its source.

The señora stopped the automobile with a sudden jolt that sent Sylvie’s chin pounding into the back of my seat. We were nearly at the cliff above a giant waterfall, watching the water slide over the ledge into a deep pool, rising and falling with white foam spray. The drop was much longer and the pool deeper than the one I remembered. Perhaps time had destroyed my sense of proportion and possibilities. Or perhaps this was another fall altogether.

We sat there and watched the cascade change colors, from tear-clear to liquid orange.

“Perhaps it’s just rained in the mountains, the fall is so strong,” she said. “I understand why you would come this very long distance to see it. When we were children, you were always drawn to water, Amabelle, streams, lakes, rivers, waterfalls in all their power; do you remember?”

I did.