The Farming of Bones_ A Novel - Edwidge Danticat [99]
Rosalinda too had a time line of photographs, first darker and taller above a small group of children in apronlike school uniforms, then posing like a beauty queen with a head of thick curly dark hair draping her shoulders as she was surrounded by the thirty youngsters of her court at her quince, and at last one of her leaning into the arms of a young man who carried a sword, attired in a uniform like her father’s while she wore a bridal dress.
In Rosalinda’s photographs, I could see traces of both her mother and father. She had maintained her father’s bronze complexion, had taken his height; but mostly she had her grandfather’s, Papi’s, worldly and pensive smile, with similar thought lines across her forehead.
The largest image in the room, however, was a painting of a bone-white baby boy, watchful and smiling, in an ivory pearl and satin baptism dress with a matching bonnet framing his water lily-colored cheeks.
Señora Valencia sat facing this portrait as the handmaid and I waited for her to turn around.
When she finally rose, I saw that she was wearing a hibiscus print caftan that reached down to her ankles; the outline of her frame under the dress was narrow, almost gaunt. She used her chair back as a support before starting towards us. She had a few gray streaks in her hair and had taken to Doña Eva’s old hairstyle, wearing the heavy lump of a coiled braid on either side of her face.
Once in front of me, she pushed her face at nose length from mine, then turned and marched back to her seat. I remained in my spot while she sat down and raised her coffee cup and sipped it dry, as if in her mind I had simply disappeared. The handmaid grabbed my elbow and tugged at it, encouraging me to leave.
The señora finally spoke. “You are wicked to come here and use Amabelle’s name.” Like the handmaid’s, her voice was hesitant, gasping, nervous. She lowered her empty cup to the table in front of her while still keeping her back to us. “What do you take me for? I spoke to many people who said they watched when she was killed in La Romana, with some others who were hiding in a house by the sea. Pico told me for certain that she must have been killed.”
That she did not recognize me made me feel that I had come back to Alegría and found it had never existed at all. But at the same time, without knowing it, she was giving me hope that perhaps all the people who had said that Mimi and Sebastien were dead, they too might have been mistaken.
The handmaid’s face was vacant, like mine would have been, had I been standing in her place. She gave me a tolerant nod, but we both knew that she might have to lead me away at any time, if this is what her mistress asked her to do.
I wondered where all the guards were hiding. Where was all the protection that came with her husband’s position? Perhaps soldiers would storm the room at any moment, arrest me, and drive me to the border for deportation.
Was I that much older, stouter? Had my face changed so much? How could she not know my voice, which, like hers, might have slowed and become more abrupt with age but was still my own? “I was here—there down the road—in your bedroom when your children were born,” I reminded her. “You told no one of your labor pains until the babies were nearly here because you trusted your dead mother to look after you. Your son Rafael, Rafi, named for the Generalissimo, was born first. Your daughter was born second with a caul over her face. You named her