The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [93]
“When you fall, where do you come to land?” I asked. Perhaps it was an unnecessary question, but one I needed an answer to, to prepare myself for the time when I would be having these same kinds of dreams myself.
“I always wake up before I come to land,” she said, “even if I see myself getting closer to the ground every day.”
“What do you make of this type of dream?”
“When I was a girl,” she said, searching with her coarse bent fingers for the contour of her own face, now buried under many layers of crow’s feet and wrinkles, “my skin was so dry that sometimes it peeled off in scabs pink with blood, like fish scales. I was very clumsy because my feet were weak, but I knew how to slip into a fall, how to not fight the force of the earth pulling me down. When I became a young woman, somehow my feet got stronger and I never thought about falling again, until now.”
I tried to gather her into my arms, which was impossible to do, given the breadth of her figure, so I patted the flesh on her back, between her neck and her waist as if burping a growing child.
“It’s a hard thing to know that life will go on one day without you,” she said.
I too felt and lived my own body’s sadness more and more every day. The old and new sorrows were suddenly inconsolable, and I knew that the brief moments of joy would not last forever. When I saw a beautiful young man I tried to pair him up with my younger self. I dreamed of the life without pain that he might have brought me, the tidy parlor and spotless furnishings that our young children would not be allowed to touch, except to dust off on Saturdays.
“Old age is not meant to be survived alone,” Man Rapadou said, her voice trailing with her own hidden thoughts. “Death should come gently, slowly, like a man’s hand approaching your body. There can be joy in impatience if there is time to find the joy.”
“How long has it been, Man Rapadou, since a man touched your big belly?” I asked, to make her laugh.
“Not as long as since one had touched yours,” she said, measuring the length of her own smile with the edge of her fingertips. “From time to time, life takes you by surprise. You sit in your lakou eating mangoes. You let the mango seeds fall where they may, and one day you wake up and there’s a mango tree in your yard.”
I knew she meant this as a compliment to me, a kind word for my sudden arrival at her house some years before.
“I have not told this to anyone,” she said, her hands patting her too wide hips, “but I believe there are many who suspect, even my son. The Yankis had poisoned Yves’ father’s mind when he was in their prisons here; he was going to spy on others for Yanki money after he left their jail. Many people who were against the Yankis being here were going to die because of his betrayal. And so I cooked his favorite foods for him and filled them with flour-fine glass and rat poison. I poisoned him. Maybe this is why I am falling in all my dreams. I’m going to him soon and I’m afraid. What will I say to him in the life after? ‘Love is only pleasure; honor is duty.’ I cannot simply say this thing that I told myself then. It is not enough now. I should not tell you this about me. You might do the same to my son. But then you do not love him like I did Yves’ father, but greater than my love for this man was love for my country. I could not let him trade us all, sell us to the Yankis.
“I often hear that silence is holiness, and still I’m not holy,” she said, wiping a tear from the side of her face. “I believed then that fortune would favor the brave. How young I was. There are cures for everything except death. I wish the sun had set on my days when I was still a young, happy woman whose man was by her side, with joy in his eyes and honor in his heart.”
The next morning, I left Man Rapadou asleep, with her sorrows, in my bed, to go climb up to the uneven cobblestone road that led to the citadel. There, on the outer galleries, I walked among a group of tourists who were wandering through, photographing the barracks, the stone walls,