The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [97]
“This is dangerous, what I am doing for you,” he said. His voice was jubilant and loud. “Even with the Generalissimo dead, things are still not tranquil here. There are protests and riots in the capital. I believe there’ll be another Yanki invasion soon.”
The cane fields stretched for some distance, the stalks all crammed together like a crowd at carnival. He stopped the jeep in the middle of the fields and motioned for me to move to the seat next to him. As I climbed in, he disappeared inside the cane, then came out pulling his pants up by the belt.
“Why are you making this journey?” he asked, speeding down the road again.
“Are you certain you know the road to Alegría?” I asked.
“I will meet you in the square there, to take you back this afternoon,” he said.
“And you? What will you do this morning?”
“I will not be in Alegría,” he said.
We came out of the cane onto an asphalt road that led to a closed park across from a yellow government edifice.
“Here it is, your joyful land.” He stopped in front of a cluster of frangipani with white and yellow blossoms, shading wooden benches at the entrance onto the square. “Wait for me here this afternoon. Try not to arrive early, or you might be mistaken for a beggar.”
He climbed back into the jeep and sped down a wide boulevard, keeping one hand out, waving until he turned a corner and disappeared.
The main avenue rose upward towards several narrow streets with rows of palm-shaded sidewalks. Alegría was now a closed town, a group of haciendas behind high walls cemented with metal spikes and broken bottles at the top. Flamboyants towered over these walls and old men crouching in cane-back chairs guarded the gates. Every house was a fortress, everyone an intruder.
As I walked back and forth along the cloistered cobble-stoned streets, in the shadow of these walls, I felt as though I was in a place I had never seen before. There were only a few markers I recognized: three giant kapok trees, which showed their age by their expanse, and the row of almond trees—but perhaps they were newer ones, on perhaps a newer almond road.
I stopped to rest my knees and watched the streets fill with schoolchildren and their parents, pantry maids starting out for fresh food, vendors marching up to the gates to tempt the gatekeepers, and husbands leaving in chauffeured automobiles with curtained back windows. I was lost. The park where the driver had left me was perhaps where Father Vargas and Father Romain’s church had been. The cane mills and compounds seemed to have vanished, and even after half a day’s wandering, and being too proud (and perhaps too frightened) to inquire about them, I couldn’t find either the stream or the waterfall.
I didn’t know what Señora Valencia’s life situation was, save for what I had heard from a woman I’d sewn a dress for, one who traveled back and forth across the border to peddle her wares, that both the señora and her husband were still alive. Her husband was now an official in the government. He was mostly in the capital, but she stayed in Alegría with her daughter. Though still married, the señora and her husband were living their own lives, the way things had always been. In any case, when I couldn’t find the stream and the waterfall, I decided to test the señora’s promise to stay in Alegría, near the graves of her mother and son, bound as we are to the places where our dead are lain.
After mistakenly appearing at more than two dozen gates, I finally found a house that looked like the one I’d been told belonged to Señora Valencia now. A large wrought-iron gate had been erected where Juana and Luis’ house might once have stood. A cobbled drive wound its way up through a new stone-studded garden towards a pink washed patio.
A little girl in a brown school uniform ran up to the gate as soon as I got there.
“Are you the egg woman?” she asked.
“The egg woman?”
“My mami told me to watch for the egg woman.”
“Who is your mami?”
“Mami.”
“Who is the egg woman?”
“You are.” The girl smiled; she was missing four of her