The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [103]
“What is your question, Sylvie?” she asked. “Please, calm yourself.”
Sylvie took a few deep long breaths as she used the señora’s handkerchief to wipe the perspiration from her upper lip.
“Why parsley?” asked Sylvie.
“What?” responded the señora.
“Why did they choose parsley?”
For some reason, it had escaped me before, I hadn’t noticed, how young Sylvie was. She must have been just a child when the señora borrowed her from the slaughter.
The señora turned to me and raised her eyebrows. She tried to smile, but an uneasy expression kept creeping back into her face. “Do you know, Amabelle, that we have never spoken before of these things, Sylvie and me?”
Sylvie lowered her head, and rocked it back and forth.
“There are many stories. This is only one,” the señora said, turning her eyes back to the waterfall. “I’ve heard that when the Generalissimo was a young man, he worked as a field guard in the cane fields. One day one of his Haitian workers escaped into a nearby field where many things were growing, among them, wheat and parsley. So the Generalissimo would not see him, the Haitian worker crawled through those fields to hide. After the Generalissimo grew tired of chasing him, he called out to the Haitian man, ‘If you tell me where you are, I’ll let you live, but if you make me find you, I’ll take your life.’ The man must not have trusted the Generalissimo, so he kept crawling, but he took the Generalissimo seriously enough to cry out the names of the fields as he passed through them. In the wheat, he called out ‘twigo’ for trigo. And in the parsley he said ‘pewegil’ for perejil. The Generalissimo had him in plain sight and could have shot him in the parsley, but he did not because the Generalissimo had a realization. Your people did not trill their r the way we do, or pronounce the jota. ‘You can never hide as long as there is parsley nearby,’ the Generalissimo is believed to have said. On this island, you walk too far and people speak a different language. Their own words reveal who belongs on what side.”
She concluded almost too abruptly. Sylvie was still shaking her head, apparently not satisfied with the señora’s explanation. Perhaps there was no story that could truly satisfy. I myself didn’t know if that story was true or even possible, but as the señora had said, there are many stories. And mine too is only one.
“Come back to the house with us and stay tonight, Amabelle,” the señora offered.
Sylvie raised her head and wiped the tears from her eyes. “I have always wished, Madame,” she said to me, “for an answer.”
“I must go back to the square in town,” I said. I didn’t want the young man to leave without me.
“Amabelle, can you not stay longer?” the señora asked.
“I cannot stay at all,” I said. “Someone is waiting for me.”
She drove very quickly back to the square, where the young man was waiting. While he waved his arms over his head, motioning for me to hurry, we sat there unmoving in the silence of the señora’s daughter’s automobile.
“You will come again, Amabelle?” the señora asked.
I did not want to part with a lie. We left it simply at a clumsy awkward handshake, which, after a moment, she embellished with a fast kiss on my left cheek. I opened the car door and stepped out.
“Amabelle, it was generous of you to visit,” the señora said.
“Go in peace, Sylvie, Señora,” I said.
The young man offered me his hand to help me into his jeep. The señora stepped out too and leaned on the front door of her daughter’s car and waved. With a distant gaze, Sylvie stood devotedly at her side. And in Sylvie’s eyes was a longing I knew very well, from the memory of it as it was once carved into my younger face: I will bear anything, carry any load, suffer any shame, walk with eyes to the ground, if only for the very small chance that one day our fates might come to being somewhat closer and I would be granted for all my years of travail and duty an honestly gained life that in some extremely modest way would begin to resemble hers.
Go in peace, Señora.