The Dew Breaker - Edwidge Danticat [54]
I slowly got up and walked away, counting each step up the staircase leading to the lobby and then down the driveway where the taxi was waiting. I never looked back.
In the taxi, I lay down on the backseat and closed my eyes, shutting out everything, all the noise, the chants, the crowds out on the street. The car moved slowly and the roads were bumpy, but I didn’t care.
Given all that was happening—the looting of homes and businesses of former government allies, the lynching, burning, and stoning of the macoutes, the thousands of bodies that were suddenly being discovered in secret rooms at the city morgues and in mass graves on the outskirts of the capital—it would have been heartless of my mother to punish me, and she didn’t. Instead she yelled at Rosie and Vaval for not watching me closely enough, for letting me wander away.
“Soon after you went off,” my mother said with a severe yet knowing look, an almost kind look, “Monsieur Christophe managed to get his water turned off, but not before everyone in the neighborhood got enough to use for days in case the situation takes a bad turn and we’re all trapped inside our houses, like in the old days before you were born, under the father.”
“The father?” I asked dumbly.
I knew she meant the dictator father of the dictator son, but somehow I wanted to offer her an opening into a conversation that even then I knew we’d never have.
Though it was still light outside, I went to bed, trying to give the impression that it was the country’s political problems that were disturbing me. I’d let my mother keep her secret; I didn’t want her to feel like a liar.
That night we fell asleep to the sound of gunfire, sometimes from around the corner and sometimes in the distance. My mother and I slept on opposite sides of her room, on the floor.
When we woke up the next morning, Vaval had more news to report, this time with Rosie chiming in. A group of young men had spotted Regulus sneaking back into his house in the middle of the night to collect some of his belongings. They had cornered him, and to avoid being taken by them, Regulus had shot himself in the head.
I remained curled on the floor and I listened, hoping that Romain was too far away to ever hear of this. Lying there, I remembered something Romain had told me three days before. Rumors had been circulating that the president and his wife might be fleeing the country. The president had gone on television to deny the rumors, saying he was as “unyielding as a monkey’s tail.”
I didn’t know much about monkeys back then, except for a proverb that said if you teach a monkey how to throw stones, it will throw the first one at your head. So I asked Romain to tell me about monkeys’ tails.
Monkeys with short tails live on the ground, he’d said, and those with longer tails make their homes closer to the sky, in high trees. Some tree monkeys have tails that are longer than their bodies, tails that they use to swing from tree to tree. We’d both laughed, wondering which kind of monkey’s tail our president had imagined himself to be.
“He was a short-tailed one, but now he’s a long-tailed one,” Romain had said. “He’s looking for another tree.”
It had seemed impossible then that after fifteen years, a man who’d inherited a lifelong presidency at age nineteen would ever abandon it. But it also hadn’t seemed possible that Romain too could disappear and never be heard from again.
My mother is dead now. One day she collapsed from what was said to be a heart attack, but what I believe was her heart shattering into little pieces because, unlike me, she had loved Christophe and suffered quietly from his not loving her back. I have no proof of this, of course, for my mother was a stern and guarded woman who never would have taken a young boy, even as he became a man, as a confidant. Soon after my mother died, I left Haiti, at twenty, turning over my mother’s house to Rosie and Vaval.
I don’t know what’s become of Romain. I haven’t seen or heard from him since that day at the hotel. His aunt Vesta moved out of the neighborhood