The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [100]
It took some time for her to turn around again. I felt I had to keep talking. “What became of your portrait of the Generalissimo, which was in the parlor in your old house, down the road? Where is Juana? Where is Luis? Did Juana go and live with her hermanas, the nuns?”
“Where did we find Amabelle?” she asked, her voice less certain.
Now it was as if we were doing battle and I knew I must win; she had to recognize me.
“Your father saw me at the side of the Massacre River,” I said. “Your father, he asked one of the children by the riverside to question me in Kreyol, asking who I belonged to, and I answered that I belonged to myself.”
I could see a bit of shame and regret in her posture as she took a few steps towards me. The awkwardness of her initial rejection, and what I saw as my coming too late, would allow for no close embrace, no joyful tears.
She took a few more steps in my direction, then hopped back as though I might be dangerous to touch. With a bashful flick of the protruding bone on her slender wrist, she motioned to the wicker sofas around the room, waiting for me to pick one to settle in.
“Sylvie, please leave us.” She flicked her wrists once more, signaling for the handmaid to depart.
I too wanted to leave at that moment, but I sat down and stayed, a small part of me rejoicing in having conquered, having gained her full attention.
“We don’t have much help anymore,” she said once Sylvie was out of sight. “So few have remained loyal over the years.”
She looked down at her hands. They were spotless, perfect and soft looking. I too looked down at my own hands, cut and scarred with scissors and needle marks. Why had I never dreamt of her? I wondered. (My dreams were sometimes my way of hoping and not hoping.) Was it because I never truly loved her? All I wanted now was for her to tell me where the waterfall was. What had become of the waterfall and the stream? They couldn’t have disappeared. Some wishes sound too foolish when uttered out loud. But this is why I had come back to this place, to see a waterfall.
“Amabelle, I beg your forgiveness for not recognizing you.” An odd pained smile never left her face, as though she were thinking of too much to say and could not find the exact words. “We all have changed so much.”
“I understand,” I said, feeling like an old ghost had slipped back under my skin.
“Where are you living now? Are you here or in Haiti?”
“In Haiti.”
“I still paint. Do you see? I painted Rafi.” She pointed to the large portrait of the bone-white baby boy in the baptism dress.
Then she told me, “Rosalinda is married.”
I felt as though she were speaking to me on behalf of someone else. I couldn’t stop thinking that perhaps an older member of her family, a dona with a similar face, similar manners, and a voice similar to hers, had come to keep me company until Valencia herself could talk to me.
When she was younger I could have easily guessed her thoughts, but now I didn’t have any idea of what was on her mind.
“You didn’t have more children?” I asked.
“Only the two you knew,” she said. “I could have no more children. And you? Do you have a husband, children, grandchildren, Amabelle?”
“No.”
“After you left, I had some bleeding for a few days. I had perhaps been negligent during my time of risk, after the children were born. Javier was the only doctor I trusted, and perhaps he could have helped me, but he vanished. Even with Doha Eva’s connections, she never found him. Pico, he says he did all he could to search for him, but nothing helped. Certain people simply disappeared.”
She called for Sylvie, who came running back into the parlor. Sylvie’s eyes circled the room to avoid meeting the señora’s gaze. Working for others, you are immediately inspected when you enter a room, as if the patrón or the señora is always hoping to catch you with some missing treasure in your hand.
Sylvie waited patiently for her orders in front of a column in the center of the room. She was soon forgotten, left to stand there.
“Papi died before Rosalinda married,” the