Breath, Eyes, Memory Part 2

"Are you hungry?" she asked. "I am going to cook only the things you like."

At night, the huts on the hills looked like a crowd of candles. We ate supper on the back porch. My grandmother cooked rice and Congo beans with sun-dried mushrooms. She was wearing a long black dress, as part of her devil, to mourn my grandfather.

"Tell me, what good things have you been doing?" asked my grandmother.

"She has been getting all the highest marks in school," said Tante Atie. "Her mother will be very proud."

"You must never forget this," said my grandmother. "Your mother is your first friend."

I slept alone in the third room in the house. It had a large four-poster bed and a mahogany wardrobe with giant hibiscus carved all over it. The mattress sank as I slipped under the sheets in the bed. It was nice to have a bed of my own every so often.

I lay in bed, waiting for the nightmare where my mother would finally get to take me away.

We left the next day to return to Croix-des-Rosets. Tante Atie had to go back to work. Besides, my grandmother said that it was best that we leave before she got too used to us and suffered a sudden attack of chagrin.

To my grandmother, chagrin was a genuine physical disease. Like a hurt leg or a broken arm. To treat chagrin, you drank tea from leaves that only my grandmother and other old wise women could recognize.

We each gave my grandmother two kisses as she urged us to go before she kept us for good.

"Can one really die of chagrin?" I asked Tante Atie in the van on the way back.

She said it was not a sudden illness, but something that could kill you slowly, taking a small piece of you every day until one day it finally takes all of you away.

"How can we keep it from happening to us?" I asked.

"We don't choose it," she said, "it chooses us. A horse has four legs, but it can fall anyway."

She told me about a group of people in Guinea who carry the sky on their heads. They are the people of Creation. Strong, tall, and mighty people who can bear anything. Their Maker, she said, gives them the sky to carry because they are strong. These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head.

Chapter 4.

That whole week, Tante Atie left for work before dawn and came home very late at night. She left me food to eat and asked Monsieur Augustin to stop by in the mornings and evenings to check on me. When she came home, I watched, through the faint ray of light that crept across the sheet, as she tiptoed over to our bed, before going to sleep. That was how I knew for sure that she had not run away and left me.

I went to school every day as usual. After school, I went into our yard and spent the afternoons gathering the twigs and leaves that kept it from being clean.

When I came home from school Friday afternoon, I saw Tante Atie sitting on the steps in front of the bougainvillea. When she saw me, she ran towards me and swept my body in the air.

"You cleaned up real good," she said.

I had done my last cleaning that morning, before leaving for school. The dead leaves were stacked on top of fallen branches, twigs, and dried flowers.

Tante Atie kissed both my cheeks and carried my notebook inside. The living room seemed filled by the suitcase that she had bought me for the trip. While I was working on the yard, I had somehow told myself that I would be around for more potlucks, more trips to my grandmother's, even a sewing lesson. The suitcase made me realize that I would never get to do those things.

"I know I have not been here all week," Tante Atie said. "I wanted to work extra hours to get you some gifts for your trip."

She poured hot milk from a silver kettle that she had always kept on the shelf for display. Stuck to the bottom of the kettle was a small note, Je t'aime de tout mon coeur. The note read, "I love you very much." It was signed by Monsieur Augustin.

I reached over to grab the note dangling from the kettle. Tante Atie s.n.a.t.c.hed it back quickly. She held it upside down and looked at it as though it were a picture, fading before her eyes.

She turned her back quickly and placed the note on the shelf.

We sat across the table from one another and drank without saying anything. I tried to hide my tears behind the tea cup.

"No crying," she said. "We are going to be strong as mountains."

The tears had already fallen and hit my cheeks.

"Mountains," she said, prodding my ribs with her elbow.

She bent and picked up a white box from the heap of things that she had bought. Inside was a saffron dress with a large white collar and baby daffodils embroidered all over it.

"This is for you to wear on your trip," she said.

My mother's face was in my dreams all night long. She was wrapped in yellow sheets and had daffodils in her hair. She opened her arms like two long hooks and kept shouting out my name. Catching me by the hem of my dress, she wrestled me to the floor. I called for Tante Atie as loud as I could. Tante Atie was leaning over us, but she could not see me. I was lost in the yellow of my mother's sheets.

I woke up with Tante Atie leaning over my bed. She was already dressed in one of her pink Sunday dresses, and had perfume and face powder on. I walked by her on my way to the wash basin. She squeezed my hand and whispered, "Remember that we are going to be like mountains and mountains don't cry."

"Unless it rains," I said.

"When it rains, it is the sky that is crying."

When I came from the wash basin, she was waiting for me with a towel. It was one of many white towels that she kept in a box under her bed, for special occasions that never came. I used the towel to dry my body, then slipped into the starched underwear and the dress she handed to me.

The suitcase was in a corner in the kitchen. The table was covered with white lace cloth. Tante Atie's special, unused china plates and gla.s.ses were filled with oatmeal and milk.

She led me to the head of the table and sat by my side. A slight morning drizzle hit the iron grills on the door.

"If it rains, will I still have to go?" I asked her.

She ran her finger over a s.h.i.+ny scar on the side of her head.

"Yes, you will have to go," she said. "There is nothing we can do to stop that now. I have already asked someone to come and drive us to the aeroport."

She took a sip from the milk in her gla.s.s and forced a large smile.

"You should not be afraid," she said. "Martine was a wonderful sister. She will be a great mother to you. Crabs don't make papayas. She is my sister."

She reached inside her pocket and pulled out the card that I had made her for Mother's Day. It was very wrinkled now and the penciled words were beginning to fade.

"I would not let you read it to me, but I know it says some very nice things," she said, putting the card next to my plate. "It is not so pretty now, but your mother, she will still love it."

Before she could stop me, I began to read her the words.

My mother is a daffodil,limber and strong as one.My mother is a daffodil,but in the wind, iron strong.

"You see," Tante Atie shrugged, "it was never for me." She slipped the card in the pocket of my dress. "When you get there, you give that to her."

"She will not be able to see the words," I said.

"She will see them fine and if she cannot see them, you read them to her like you just did for me and from now on, her name is Manman.

Chabin, the lottery agent, peeked his head through the open door, waving his record book at us.

"We do not want to play today," Tante Atie said.

"I am here to pay you," Chabin said. "Don't you follow the results? Your number, it came out. You are a winner."

Tante Atie looked very happy.

"How much did I win?" she asked.

"Ten gourdes," he said.

He counted out the money and handed it to her.

"You see," Tante Atie said, clutching her money. "Your mother, she brings me luck."

The Peugeot taxi came for us while we were still at the table. I left Tante Atie's kitchen, my breakfast uneaten and the dishes undone.

The drizzle had stopped. The neighbors were watching as the driver carried my one suitcase to the car.

The Augustins came over to say good-bye. Madame Augustin slipped a crisp pink handkerchief in my hand as she kissed me four times-twice on each cheek.

"If you study hard, you will have no trouble with your English," Monsieur Augustin said as he firmly shook my hand.

I held Tante Atie's hand as we climbed into the back seat. Our faces were dry, our heads up. We were like sunflowers, staring directly at the sun.

Before pulling away, the driver turned his head and complimented us on our very clean yard.

"My child, she cleans it," Tante Atie said.

The car scattered the neighbors and the factory workers, as they waved a group farewell. Maybe if I had a really good friend my eyes would have clung to hers as we were driven away. A red dust rose between me and the only life that I had ever known. There were no children playing, no leaves flying about. No daffodils.

Chapter 5.

The sun crawled across our faces as the car sped into Port-au-Prince. I had never been to the city before. Colorful boutiques with neon signs lined the street. Vans covered with pictures of flowers and horses with wings scurried up and down and made sudden stops in the middle of the boulevards.

Tante Atie gasped each time we went by a large department store or a towering hotel. She shouted the names of places that she had visited in years past.

When they were teenagers, she and my mother would save their pennies all year long so they could come to the city on Christmas Eve. They would tell my grandmother that they were traveling with one of the old peddlers, but that was never their plan. They would take a tap tap van in the afternoon so as to arrive in Port-au-Prince just as the sun was setting, and the Christmas lights were beginning to glow. They stood outside the stores in their Sunday dresses to listen to the sounds of the toy police cars and talking dolls chattering over the festive music. They went to Ma.s.s at the Gothic cathedral, then spent the rest of the night sitting by the fountains and gazing at the Nativity scenes on the Champs-de-Mars. They bought ice cream cones and fireworks, while young tourists offered them cigarettes for the privilege of taking their pictures. They pretended to be students at one of the gentry's universities and even went so far as describing the plush homes they said they lived in. The white tourists flirted with them and held their hands. They laughed at silly jokes, letting their voices rise and fall like city girls. Later, they made rendezvous for the next night, which of course they never kept. Then before dawn, they took a van back home and slipped into bed before my grandmother woke up.

I looked outside and saw the bare hills that bordered the national highway.

"We are almost there," the driver said as he slowed down, almost to a stop.

We waited for a while for the car to move.

"Is there some trouble?" asked Tante Atie.

"There is always some trouble here," the driver said. "They are changing the name of the airport from Francois Duvalier to Mais Gate, like it was before Francois Duvalier was president."

Tante Atie's body tensed up.

"Did they have to do it today?" Tante Atie asked. "She will be delayed. We cannot miss our appointment."

"I will do what I can," the driver said, "but some things are beyond our control."

I moved closer to the window to get a better look. Clouds of sooty smoke were rising to the sky from a place not too far ahead.

"I think there is a fire," the driver said..

Tante Atie pushed her head forward and tried to see.

"Maybe the world, it is ending," she said.

We began to move slowly in a long line of cars. Dark green army vans pa.s.sed through narrow s.p.a.ces between cars. The driver followed the slow-paced line. Soon we were at the airport gate.

We stopped in front of the main entrance. The smoke had been coming from across the street. Army trucks surrounded a car in flames. A group of students were standing on top of a hill, throwing rocks at the burning car. They scurried to avoid the tear gas and the round of bullets that the soldiers shot back at them.

Some of the students fell and rolled down the hill. They screamed at the soldiers that they were once again betraying the people. One girl rushed down the hill and grabbed one of the soldiers by the arm. He raised his pistol and pounded it on top of her head. She fell to the ground, her face covered with her own blood.

Tante Atie grabbed my shoulder and shoved me quickly inside the airport gate.

"Do you see what you are leaving?" she said.

"I know I am leaving you."

The airport lobby was very crowded. We tried to keep up with the driver as he ran past the vendors and travelers, dragging my suitcase behind him.

As we waited on the New York boarding line, Tante Atie and I looked up at the paintings looming over us from the ceiling. There were pictures of men and women pulling carts and selling rice and beans to make some money.

A woman shouted "Madame," drawing us out of the visions above us. She looked breathless, as though she had been searching for us for a long time.

"You are Sophie Caco?" she asked, speaking directly to me.