The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [98]
“She is the egg woman,” the girl said, smiling up at him. He tousled her hair and looked me up and down, searching for an egg basket.
“Is Señora Valencia still living here?” I asked. “My name is Amabelle Désir.”
After all those years, I was surprised that my Spanish was still understandable.
The young man swayed nervously and shifted his weight from foot to foot. We had four more spectators now: three gardeners and a housemaid with a folded sheet pressed against her chest. The young man lowered his head, then looked to the others as if for help.
“I knew the señora for a very long time before I went away,” I tried to assure him.
“They have a new house.”
“I will show you.” The little girl skipped out before they could stop her. The young man trailed behind her.
The new house was only a few kilometers from the old one, in a more protected area. You had to walk through a guava field before seeing the entrance. It was a large hacienda, four residences joined by a breezeway with a sun parlor and a vast garden on the side. I wrapped my fingers around one of the heart shapes in the grillwork of the gate and peeked at a row of wicker banquettes between the flame trees in the garden, which was filled with twice as many species of orchids as Papi had ever grown.
The girl rattled the gate playfully until a woman walked out on one of the front galleries and peered down at the entrance. The woman had a meaty dimpled face with round shoulders and a fleshy build. She was wearing a sand-colored uniform with a piece of faded matching cloth on her head. She called out for a manservant, but when the manservant did not come, she walked down to us herself, the dust rag still in her hand.
“What do you want?” she asked abruptly in Kreyòl-accented Spanish. Her jaws were tightly drawn, forming a perfect sorrowful ring with the rest of her face. Her voice squeaked one moment and was hoarse the next, as though she risked running out of breath at any time. She gave the girl and older boy a nod of recognition, then kept her eyes on the path behind us, as if waiting for someone to ambush her through the grill in the gate. When she stretched her neck, I saw that she had rope burns above her collarbone. They were even deeper and more pronounced than those on the woman at the border clinic, a deeply furrowed field.
“I would like to see la duefia, Señora Valencia,” I said.
“Why?” she asked, pausing for a breath. “What do you want with her?”
“My name is Amabelle Désir,” I said. “She will want to see me.”
“You can go,” she told the girl and the young man.
The young man dragged the girl away. The woman walked up the drive to the patio, with the haste of those afraid to displease at every moment of their day. Working for others, you were always rushing to or away from them.
She was out of breath and visibly uncomfortable when she returned to unlock the gate and motion for me to follow her up the drive, through a rock garden under the guava trees.
As I followed the handmaid down the long corridors inside the house, a surprising feeling of joy took hold of my body. I was beginning to feel glad that I had come, happy that I was going to see the señora again.
The place was airy, spacious, a breeze blowing in from the open terraces. Everything was polished and luminous: from the beveled brass staircase railings, to the old-fashioned chandeliers dangling from the ceilings. The woman led me through the pantry on the way to the parlor. In the center of the pantry stood a marble-topped cooking table. I slid my hand over the cooking table as I went by to wipe the dust and sweat from my palms. The table surface felt pleasantly cold, like the water in the old stream before dawn.
The parlor itself was in the middle of the house, with arches dividing it into several sections, four fans circling from the ceiling,