The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [32]
The neighbors listened, nodding their heads in agreement as the Generalissimo’s voice rose, charged with certainty and fervor.
“The liberators of the nation did their part,” the Generalissimo went on, “and we could not ask more of them. The leaders of today must play their parts also.”
Doctor Javier got up to leave, excusing himself to his mother by whispering in her ear. Beatriz’s eyes narrowed as she mouthed many of the Generalissimo’s words, which it seemed she had heard recited before.
Papi slumped down in his chair and nodded off to sleep. Señor Pico stood staunch and erect as though about to charge across a field of battle. Juana threaded her rosary through her fingers while Luis, outside, listened through the shutters.
“My best friends are workers!” the Generalissimo shouted. “I came into office to work, and you will find me battling at every moment for the earnest desires of my people.”
Kindly, the neighbors did not stay for long after the Generalissimo’s radio broadcast ended. They filed out in small groups until only Señora Valencia and her husband were left.
Juana was entrusted with the care of Rosalinda, and the señor and señora sat in their room most of the evening. As he held her, she groaned now and then, trying not to cry too loudly. He did not know how to ease her pain, not very well in any case; he kept shifting as she tried to find a comfortable nook to claim for herself, her own place to sink into, within his arms. He was silent while she sobbed, not offering a word. Perhaps he was suppressing his own tears, but his silence seemed to me a sign of failure for this marriage, the abrupt union of two strangers, who even with time and two children—one in this world and one in the other—had still not grown much closer. The short courtship and the even shorter visits after marriage had not made them really familiar with each other. The señora did not know him well enough, nor he her. He was still learning his role now, and she hers, and perhaps neither of them imagined that this test would arrive to transform them from a newly joined pair to the parents of a dead child.
Finally she said, “You should bury his clothes before we bury him. This is something I would like you to do for me.”
If he thought this strange, he raised no question at all. He got up abruptly and stretched.
“I will have to leave for the border soon,” he said, “for that operation I spoke of earlier.”
If she thought this a strange development, she too said nothing at all.
19
You walk half a morning to get there, a narrow cave behind the waterfall at the source of the stream where the cane workers bathe. The cave is a grotto of wet moss, coral, and chalk that looks like marble. At first you are afraid to step behind the waterfall as the water in all its strength pounds down on your shoulders. Still you tiptoe into the cave until all you see is luminous green fresco—the dark green of wet papaya leaves. You hear no crickets, no hummingbirds, no pigeons. All you hear is water sliding off the ledge and crashing in a foamy white spray into the plunge pool below.
When the night comes, you don’t know it inside the cramped slippery cave because the waterfall, Sebastien says, holds on to some memory of the sun that it will not surrender. On the inside of the cave, there is always light, day and night. You who know the cave’s secret, for a time, you are also held captive in this prism, this curiosity of nature that makes you want to celebrate yourself in ways that you hope the cave will show you, that the emptiness in your bones will show you, or that the breath in your blood will show you, in ways that you hope your body knows better than yourself.
This is where Sebastien and I first made love, standing in this cave, in a crook where you feel half buried, although the light can’t help but follow you and stay.
I have always