Krik_ Krak! - Edwidge Danticat [24]
At night, I could rock her alone in the hush of my room, rest her on my belly, and wish she were inside.
When I had just come to the city, I saw on Madame's television that a lot of poor city women throw out their babies because they can't afford to feed them. Back in Ville Rose you cannot even throw out the bloody clumps that shoot out of your body after your child is born. It is a crime, they say, and your whole family would consider you wicked if you did it. You have to save every piece of flesh and give it a name and bury it near the roots of a tree so that the world won't fall apart around you.
In the city, I hear they throw out whole entire children. They throw them out anywhere: on doorsteps, in garbage cans, at gas pumps, sidewalks. In the time that I had been in Port-au-Prince, I had never seen such a child until now.
But Rose. My, she was so clean and warm. Like a tiny angel, a little cherub, sleeping after the wind had blown a lullaby into her little ears.
I picked her up and pressed her cheek against mine.
I whispered to her, "Little Rose, my child," as though that name was a secret.
She was like the palatable little dolls we played with as children—mango seeds that we drew faces on and then called by our nicknames. We christened them with prayers and invited all our little boy and girl friends for colas and cassavas and—when we could get them— some nice butter cookies.
Rose didn't stir or cry. She was like something that was thrown aside after she became useless to someone cruel. When I pressed her face against my heart, she smelled like the scented powders in Madame's cabinet, the mixed scent of gardenias and fish that Madame always had on her when she stepped out of her pool.
I have always said my mother's prayers at dawn. I welcomed the years that were slowing bringing me closer to her. For no matter how much distance death tried to put between us, my mother would often come to visit me. Sometimes in the short sighs and whispers of some-body else's voice. Sometimes in somebody else's face. Other times in brief moments in my dreams.
There were many nights when I saw some old women leaning over my bed.
"That there is Marie," my mother would say. "She is now the last one of us left."
Mama had to introduce me to them, because they had all died before I was born. There was my great grandmother Eveline who was killed by Dominican soldiers at the Massacre River. My grandmother Defile who died with a bald head in a prison, because God had given her wings. My godmother Lili who killed herself in old age because her husband had jumped out of a flying balloon and her grown son left her to go to Miami.
We all salute you Mary, Mother of God. Pray for us poor sinners, from now until the hour of our death. Amen.
I always knew they would come back and claim me to do some good for somebody. Maybe I was to do some good for this child.
I carried Rose with me to the outdoor market in Croix-Bossale. I swayed her in my arms like she was and had always been mine.
In the city, even people who come from your own village don't know you or care about you. They didn't notice that I had come the day before with no child. Suddenly, I had one, and nobody asked a thing.
In the maid's room, at the house in Pétion-Ville, I laid Rose on my mat and rushed to prepare lunch. Monsieur and Madame sat on their terrace and welcomed the coming afternoon by sipping the sweet out of my sour-sop juice.
They liked that I went all the way to the market every day before dawn to get them a taste of the outside country, away from their protected bourgeois life.
"She is probably one of those manbos," they say when my back is turned. "She's probably one of those stupid people who think that they have a spell to make them-selves invisible and hurt other people. Why can't none of them get a spell to make themselves rich? It's that voodoo nonsense that's holding us Haitians back."
I lay Rose down on the kitchen table as I dried the dishes. I had a sudden desire to explain to her my life.
"You see, young one, I loved that man at one