Edwidge Danticat - Breath, Eyes, Memory

"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?"

"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.

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.

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."