Haiti Noir - Edwidge Danticat [26]
When Aramis told me he was leaving, he once again sang the praises and expressed his affection for his aunt in Brooklyn, the one who’d always promised the son of her deceased brother she would bring him to New York for good, on a student visa. Since the papers were ready, he was to leave as soon as possible. As for Beatrice, she had no desire to immigrate to the States. Comfortable in her role as a middle-aged childless widow, she did not want to start life over outside of the country. But Aramis always seemed like he was about to take off and fly. He was always looking for an excuse to change worlds. Put him anywhere at all, he always preferred elsewhere.
He left us mothers, each one with a baby less than a month old in her arms. He left without any sign of emotion except for a teary half-smile and his eyes drunk with anticipation. He left us with our sudden disillusions; the fury of targeting each other. He left us with the rage of tearing each other’s memories away, along with any affection we might have felt for him. He left us to devour with our fingernails the breasts he had touched, the skin he had stroked, the folds of the arms where he’d buried his lips.
It finally took an international phone call from that four-bedroom apartment in Brooklyn to restore order and calm between Carrefour Feuilles and Delmas, between all those streets Aramis had walked down to go from one neighborhood to another and get into our homes, and into us, with promises and smiles and words so sweet that believing them was pure pleasure.
If I get the slightest whiff of a quarrel, I’ll stop the money transfers. No more presents for the little girls, no more anything. Beatrice transmitted the implacable message from the Brooklyn aunt with a touch of commiseration in her voice. Beatrice, with unavowed fantasies in her eyes and her bitter, frustrated hands. I pitied her a little, for her eyes often searched us for a spark of the fire that the merest mention of her brother’s name would light up, turning us into two wild beasts. Peace reigned in her house, at 15 rue Paultre, where she remained in her secure solitude and refused the rare men who were brave enough to dare measure themselves against the frozen perfection of her deceased husband.
“Why don’t you move in here?” she finally asked us both. A skillful way to watch our every move and distribute her gifts according to our behavior. “I think that solution would please TB.”
When did we mothers learn to tolerate each other? When the memory of Aramis’s caresses was too distant to give his body any human substance? When the sweet heaviness of his sex faded away under the weight of unforgiving daily life? Searching for something to eat every day, looking for a job, picking up your dignity and shoving it under your hunger. In vain. Starting over again the next day. Holding back your surges of rage and walking up and down the streets of Port-au-Prince, trying not to deposit your fear onto them. Taking your desire to hit someone and transforming it into a caress over a baby’s soft skin.
We couldn’t reject Beatrice’s invitation. She was giving us a neutral, comfortable space between our two wretched lives. Saving us from the envious mockery of our families, giving more legitimacy to our offspring. At 15 rue Paultre, in this wild, monstrous city, we found a stopover where we could shelter our shared disappointment. With Aramis gone, we found ourselves abandoned in exactly the same way. All the more so, as he quickly became too sick to talk on the phone and his destructive silence blanketed our memories with distrust. News came to us through Beatrice, who talked regularly with the great-aunt.
A few months after Aramis left, a family acquaintance brought some photos that showed us an emaciated, almost unrecognizable figure. Which of us turned her eyes away first? A hideous grin had replaced the seductive smile of the man whose lips had imposed their law on my body. His clothing floated around his tense, stiff arms and legs, as if the fabric refused to have any