Create Dangerously - Edwidge Danticat [15]
The trip up took us two days, but Nick and Uncle Joseph assure me that it will be faster going down since we are not stopping for the night. Besides, with gravity it is always easier to descend than to climb, even with a three-pound sack of coffee in my backpack.
My way of saying good-bye is always the same. I pretend that later in the day or the next day or the day after I will see the person to whom I am bidding farewell. It is the only way I can endure separations, large and small, without becoming totally incapacitated with sadness. Tante Ilyana’s way is more abrupt and formal and perhaps healthier. We kiss each other on the cheek as she lists the names of all the family members in New York to whom I should give her regards. She and Jeanne’s boys walk with us for a mile or so and then they stop walking and we continue on.
The journey down is, as my cousin and uncle predicted, much easier. Rather than walk in a straight line, I zigzag through the difficult roads, forming invisible Zs with my feet all over the mountain roads, which is, my uncle tells me, the way the peasants climb and descend these mountains with relative ease. This is why they don’t look as tired and burdened as I do when I finally reach Dabonne and climb with great relief into my cousin’s open-backed truck. That and the fact that they are used to it, my uncle says. “If you did this often enough you too would get used to it.”
I begin to worry about Tante Ilyana on the car ride back to the capital, imposing on her life visions of extreme comforts that are lacking even in mine. I imagine her having her own helicopter in which to travel to and from the market. I think of her bypassing the stream baths for a Jacuzzi. I see her on vacation, visiting the Statue of Liberty, Disney World, the Empire State Building, the Eiffel Tower. By some standards, she’s seen little of the world, but perhaps, I tell myself, her world is larger than all of these places. I remind myself that at least she has a simple life, which I have at different times attempted to replicate in arbitrary ways, by not buying too many clothes, too much furniture. At the same time, Tante Ilyana’s life seems far from simple. Her vocation is nothing less than to maintain our family’s physical legacy, to guard a very small house in the ancestral village, to sustain a faraway world to which we could return, if we wanted to, and find traces, however remote and faint, of who we are.
When I find out a year later that Tante Ilyana is dead, I am at my parents’ house babysitting my sixteen-month-old nephew Ezekiel, who had recently learned to run. It is no longer easy to keep Ezekiel still on my lap during serious conversations, as he wants to use his newly discovered mobility as much as possible: by skipping from spot to spot, from my father’s knees to mine, from the living room sofa to the window curtains to the television set, which, with his safety in mind, we have placed on the floor rather than on a teetering table. Ezekiel is also exercising his newly discovered oral abilities by shouting nonsensical words, and my father must compete with him as he says, “I had a call from Haiti just now and they told me Ilyana died.”
The grief on my father’s face is clouded with logistical figurations. It had taken a whole day for news of the death to travel to Port-au-Prince and then by telephone to us, which means that Tante Ilyana’s funeral has already taken place. Attending is not even an option.
Ezekiel shrieks with pride when he finally succeeds in turning on the television set by himself, and I’m grateful for the distraction, for having to run and save him from discoveries for which I fear he’s not ready.
Ezekiel squirms as I hold him in my lap and try to quiet him down, and I find in my efforts to keep him still—whispering his name in his ear, promising him sweets he’d never get, singing the alphabet song he loves so much—that he is the one who is momentarily saving my father and me from our sadness.
There is little to say,