Brother, I'm Dying - Edwidge Danticat [30]
“Papa,” she whispered, her mouth now so close to his ears that her breath burned his lobes. “Papa, even though men cannot give birth, you just gave birth tonight. To me.”
The Return
One afternoon in October 1976, when I was seven years old, Bob, Nick and I were sitting on my uncle’s front gallery, memorizing, just like every other schoolchild in Haiti, our usual rote lessons for the next school day, when we saw some strange figures turn the corner from Rue Tirremasse and head down the alley toward us.
One was a man in a brown three-piece suit that looked like it was getting its first wear. He was carrying a briefcase in one hand and grasping a boy’s elbow with the other. A plump woman followed with a baby in her arms. Immediately trailing them was a taxi driver and a few other young men who carried four large suitcases up to the gallery and set them at our feet.
The first thing I noticed when I looked up from their outsized, outstretched luggage was the man’s smile. It was huge, cavernous, two of his top front teeth golden.
“Edwidge, it’s Papa,” he said, pressing that extensive smile against the side of my face. He smelled of a cologne whose fragrance I couldn’t recognize, of travel and faraway places.
Was he really my father, I wondered, this thin, happy man with a thick dark beard that caressed his collarbone when he lowered his head? He kept his eyes on me, letting them wander for only a few seconds while he reached into his pocket to pay the driver and the young men who’d helped with the bags.
Until that moment, aside from the butter cookies and restrained words of his letters, my father had mostly been a feeling for me, powerful yet vague, without a real face, a real body, like the one looming over the pecan-hued little boy who was looking up at Nick, Bob and me.
“Edwidge?” My mother stepped onto the front porch, plugging the remaining hole in the circle that was now all of us.
“Come and kiss your manman,” she said.
She looked heavier than I remembered, and her copper-colored skin was a few shades lighter. The baby in her arms was sleeping.
“Manman?” Bob’s jaw dropped. He ran to her and planted a kiss on the first place his lips reached on her body, the woolen plaid skirt covering her legs. Balancing the baby with one arm, she reached down and with her other hand stroked his head, gently, softly, for a long time. He in turn remained glued to her skirt, burying his face deep into it as though he were crying and didn’t want the rest of us to see.
I thought he had forgotten her. She’d left when he was two, the age I was when my father left, yet whatever was drawing him to her—yearning, pain, curiosity—was keeping me away from him.
“Bob.” My father reached over and gently pulled him away.
Bob turned to my father’s lowered face and kissed his cheek. My father was pleased, rubbing Bob’s head with his palm.
“This is your brother Kelly,” my father said, introducing him to the little boy by their side.
It was thanks to Kelly that our parents had been able to return to Haiti. Even though they had overstayed tourist visas, Kelly’s birth in the United States had instantly made them eligible for permanent residency, which is no longer possible today.
Before things were finalized, however, they had to file the paperwork at the consulate in Port-au-Prince; only then could they petition for Bob and me to join them in New York.
“Any granmoun here?” my father asked, gently patting my shoulder with his hand.
It was late afternoon, the near-dinner hour. The water women had just filled up their buckets at the municipal tap near the Lycée Pétion and were calling out in a singsong that we sometimes listened for when our supply was low.
Dlo, dlo, dlo pou vann.
I have water for sale!
At the turn where the alley curved toward the street, Boniface, the blacksmith, was hammering an oil drum into a thin sheet of metal that he would then mold into a metal wreath to sell at the cemetery. Two of the Pradel brothers were taking turns