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By Root 1098 0

beautified their homes. Needless to say, Aunt Solange was wealthy. Her primary residence was in the old neighborhood of Pacot, an area full of splendid clustered gingerbreads and terraced villas that looked as though they had been sculpted out of the neighboring hills. Lovely antique furniture filled the house as in a museum. Some rare pieces from Europe and Asia made Aunt Solange’s collection one of the most valuable in the country. Paintings with themes ranging from female nudes to carnival, pieces by famous Haitian artists—including Préfète Duffaut, Bernard Séjourné, and Edouard Duval-Carrié—added the final touches. Parked in her garage were two silver cars: a Mercedes-Benz and a BMW. One would have sworn that these vehicles had never been driven through the streets of Port-au-Prince, since they remained so shiny and clean all the time, thanks in part to Solange’s young driver Da, who treated them as though they were his own.

“Ah! This omelet is so good,” Rosanna declared, sitting across an elaborately carved dining room table where she and her aunt often ate breakfast overlooking a lush hibiscus and azalea garden. “Melanie is the master of omelets.”

“Melanie is the mistress of everything,” her aunt playfully corrected her. Melanie had been cooking for Aunt Solange for more than twenty-five years now, longer than Rosanna has been alive. Melanie had started working for Solange back when Rosanna’s parents had fallen in love while pursuing their studies in engineering at the École des Sciences. They had married soon after and a year before graduation Rosanna was born. One Saturday morning, they’d decided to take a day off from studying and parenting and had left six-month-old Rosanna with Solange, who was also the baby’s godmother. A fine rain was falling on the road as they returned from the beach in the dark. The surviving passengers from the camion that hit them claimed that they never had a chance. The camion driver did not see their small jeep until the last minute; as the justice of the peace report put it, the vehicle was as flat as a communion wafer.

Solange was grateful that her brother and his wife had been wise enough to leave the child with her. Having never married and with no children of her own, she saw it as a sign that she was meant to look after the girl for the rest of her life, which is why Rosanna’s sudden desire to go on a trip alone to Les Cayes to research her mother’s roots alarmed Solange to no end. When Rosanna’s parents died, everyone had agreed that Solange was the best person to raise the girl. But now that she was a stunningly beautiful young woman—as beautiful as the corpulent nudes by Solange’s famous painters—everyone would want to claim her, including her mother’s family, who had barely even visited during the twenty-one years that Solange had been taking care of her.

Simply looking at Rosanna was a pleasure for Solange. The girl had her father’s smooth black skin and her mother’s brown-streaked curly hair, making her what in Haiti they would call a marabou, the kind of dusky beauty who poems are written about. Even when she was just a teenager, grown men would admire her as she strolled down the street, and Solange often got the impression watching her niece that an invisible orchestra was playing just for her. Solange was very proud of the job she had done raising Rosanna. The fact that Rosanna even desired to make this visit to Les Cayes to see family members who had shown little interest in her was proof of it. Very simple pleasures, not Solange’s wealth, were what had always seemed to appeal to Rosanna; she preferred swimming in rivers to swimming in pools, gorging herself on mangoes and avocados to sushi and foie gras. And Solange could tell that even while inhaling her favorite omelet, Rosanna was itching to head to the Portail Léogâne bus station to catch a camion—as she had begged her aunt to let her to do—on her own.

“It’s the best way for me to see the country,” Rosanna had successfully pleaded her case the night before. “I want to travel like the regular people of this