The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [101]
“And how is Señor Pico?” I felt now that I could ask.
She joined her hands on her lap and hesitated before answering. “This is an unstable time for our country,” she said.
“How did you come to change houses?” I asked.
“Everything must look so different to you now,” she said. “Pico bought this house from the family of a colonel who died. They are all in Nueva York now, in North America, like Doña Eva and Beatriz.” She breathed out, then slipped into a brisk, animated song—“Yo tiro la cuchara. Yo tiro el tenedor. Yo tiro to’ los platos y me voy pa’ Nueva York.” It was a song of sad and joyous exile, everything lost to Nueva York. “I throw away my spoon. I throw away my fork. I throw away my plates and I’m going to Nueva York.”
“When we changed houses,” she continued in a more relaxed voice, “Juana and Luis went back to their people. They were getting old and couldn’t work anymore. I would have kept them, but they wanted to go.”
She leaned forward and squeezed my hand, pressing her fingers down on my knuckles as if trying to leave her handprints on my bones.
“Amabelle, I live here still,” she said. “If I denounce this country, I denounce myself. I would have had to leave the country if I’d forsaken my husband. Not that I ever asked questions. Not trusting him would have been like declaring that I was against him.”
“I understand,” I said.
“Do you truly understand?” Her face brightened with a kind of hope I no longer thought I could offer. “During El Corte, though I was bleeding and nearly died, I hid many of your people,” she whispered. El Corte—the cutting—was an easy word to say. Just as on our side of the river many called it a kout kouto, a stabbing, like a single knife wound. “I hid a baby who is now a student at the medical school with Rosalinda and her husband. I hid Sylvie and two families in your old room. I hid some of Doha Sabme’s people before she and her husband escaped to Haiti. I did what I could in my situation.”
What could she have expected me to say? There were no medals to be given. If there were, I didn’t know where to tell her to go to claim hers.
“I understand,” I said.
“I hid them because I couldn’t hide you, Amabelle. I thought you’d been killed, so everything I did, I did in your name.”
“I don’t see any trace of Don Carlos’ mill. Were the people there slaughtered?” I did not want to feel indebted to her.
“None of the people in Don Carlos’ mill were touched,” she said, confirming what I had suspected, that perhaps if I hadn’t told Sebastien to leave the compound and go to the church, he and Mimi might have been saved. “There are no small mills here anymore,” she said, “only residences like this one.”
Had the stream dried up when these houses were built, the rocks and the sand gathered for mortar, the water for power and lights?
“Amabelle, Pico merely followed the orders he was given,” she said, releasing my hand. “I have pondered this so very often. He was told to go and arrest some people who were plotting against the Generalissimo at the church that night, then he was detained by those people who were on the road, that young man Unèl, the one who once rebuilt the latrines for us.”
She sat perfectly still for some time, as though Unèl had appeared in front of her and she was examining him with her tearful gaze.
“We lived in a time of massacres.” She breathed out loudly. “Before Papi died, all he did was listen on his radio to stories of different kinds of … cortes, from all over the world. It is a marvel that some of us are still here, to wait and hope to die a natural death.”
All the time I had known her, we had always been dangling between being strangers and being friends. Now we were neither strangers nor friends. We were like two people passing each other on the street, exchanging a lengthy meaningless greeting. And