Haiti Noir - Edwidge Danticat [88]
“Alo,” Miriam said a third time, keeping one eye on her steaming pot of cornmeal. She realized by the loaded silence on the other end that it was Foufoune. Gwo Manman’s children knew each other so well that they needed to maintain at least one ocean between their respective homes. Same mother, same father, same ancestral blood in their veins, but those two had even less love for each other than a goat and a butcher. Foufoune liked to think she was accidentally switched at birth. Nothing else could explain why her blood turned to ice whenever she even thought about her sister. Hatred raged inside of them like a parasitic cancer. The disease spread over the years, taking control of their lives, until one could no longer bear the sight of the other.
“It breaks my heart that my only two children cannot get along,” Gwo Manman often lamented.
“I have no problem with my sister,” Foufoune would lie to appease her mother. But to her friends, Foufounce would say: “Miriam is jealous of me because I made it and she’s nothing.”
“Hello, Miriam?” Foufoune said timidly.
Miriam knew what her sister had called to say: their mother had died; no one needed to tell her that. Just as she was cleaning the goat the previous night, Gwo Manman had stood under the flamboyant tree and announced that she had had it with the snow, the sleet, the wind, and the crazy language that always left her mind in a jumble. Foufoune’s apartment was a jail cell she would escape, and soon.
Yes, Gwo Manman had whispered in the darkness, I’m on my way home.
“Who is this?” Miriam asked sharply. A doctor might have just signed her mother’s death certificate, but Gwo Manman had been dead for years, as far as she was concerned. The day Foufoune put her on that plane and made her say goodbye to Puits Blain was the day Gwo Manman had passed away. Taking a fish out of water suffocates it; putting a bird in the most beautiful aquarium drowns it. Every time Gwo Manman looked out of the apartment window, all she saw was sky and shapeless air—sheer torture to a woman who preferred her bare feet on a packed-dirt floor to fancy tiles, or even Foufoune’s pretty rug. As far as Miriam was concerned, Foufoune might as well have put a bullet in the old woman’s heart.
“Miriam, is that you?”
Who else could it be?
“Gwo Manman ki te nou.” Foufoune’s throat tightened around the words. Our mother has left us.
“I’ve heard,” Miriam lied. “I was about to call you when the phone rang.” With her free hand she picked up the wooden spoon and resumed stirring her cornmeal. Elderly people like Dona Malbranche died every day in the diaspora, leaving relatives to bury the truth in distant graves. Some who did not believe in cremation became sudden converts; get rid of the evidence!
“Manman nou mouri,” Foufoune’s voice broke. Our mother is dead.
“When are you bringing her body?” Miriam asked, her eyes narrowing.
Foufoune scratched her head. She saw no reason to bring the body back to the island. She could not be expected to travel all that distance every time she wanted to place a wreath on her mother’s grave. She was a naturalized citizen, an expat; the tenth department was her new patrie. Why did her sister always go out of