Climbing the rugged mountain trails on a borrowed mule at high noon, my uncle thought he’d never make it to the village. The mule was hiking at a steady gait, but my uncle was hot, thirsty, and covered with sweat and his head and backside ached. Still, all he could think of was seeing Marie Micheline and the baby again. He blamed himself for letting Tante Denise send her away when she was pregnant. Why hadn’t he forced her to annul her marriage? He should have been more diligent, much more suspicious. Who marries a pregnant girl-as Leone had asked-even one as pretty and smart as Marie Micheline, unless there’s something else behind it? In Pressoir’s case, that something seemed to have been cruelty and madness.
When he reached the village, my uncle walked to the house of its highest official, the section chief, a toothless old man, who in his own starched denim uniform and dark reflector glasses reminded him of the much younger Pressoir.
“A man whose eyes you can’t look into is not a man you can ever trust,” his father, Granpe Nozial, had often said.
The macoutes had a synchronized look, a coarse veneer that made the thin ones seem stout, the short ones seem tall. In the end they were all equally intimidating because they represented the government. Whether it was Pressoir or this old man, each one had the power to decide whether or not my uncle lived or died, whether or not his daughter lived or died.
Fearfully putting his hand on the old man’s shoulder, my uncle said, “Father, for your hair is white enough and you’re old enough that I can call you father, please help me, another father, free my daughter from her bondage.”
He gave the old man the equivalent of five U.S. dollars, which he wished he could get back when the old man said, “Pressoir’s a real big chief now, a city macoute. None of us can cross him. Your daughter isn’t the only girl he has in this condition. There are many others. Many.”
“Then please, father,” my uncle pleaded while trying to maintain his calm, “do me only this favor. Forget you ever saw me, but I’m not leaving without my daughter and her child.”
“I won’t say anything to him,” the old man said as he pocketed the money. He then reluctantly gave my uncle directions to the one-room house where Marie Micheline was living.
My uncle found the house on a nearby hill, then secured a secluded grazing spot for the mule, where he too rested until dusk. As the moon started peering out of the sky, he watched Pressoir leave in full uniform, perhaps to attend a meeting. His heart began to race. What if there was someone else in there? What if Pressoir came back? What if he failed and only made things worse for Marie and the baby?
Finally he built up enough courage to walk up the hill and into the tiny house. Marie Micheline was lying on her back on a woven banana leaf mat, which aside from a small earthen jar and a kerosene lamp was the only thing in the small shack. The limestone walls were covered with sheets of newspaper, snippets of fading bulletins that he imagined she’d read over and over again to keep herself hopeful, and calm.
“Vini,” my uncle said, reaching down and pulling her up into his arms.
“Papa, is it really you?” she whispered. Now he could see that her legs were covered with pus-filled blisters, open and discolored wounds. Her gaunt face was hot and moist. She had a fever.
“He beat me. He beat me on my legs, with a broom, with fire stones when I tried to escape.” She began to cry, her tears even warmer on his arm than her skin.
“Where’s Ruth?” he asked.
She pointed out the door, toward another hill. The baby was with a family down the road, she whispered.
“They’re good. They will give her to me,” she said.
“Let’s go, then.” As they walked out the door, she stumbled, catching herself just in time before falling nearly flat on her face. He wrapped her body in his arms, thinking that she felt the same to him now as when her father had placed her in his arms as a baby, trusting that he would look after her, that he would always keep her from harm.
Outside, the night sky was full of stars, the kind of stars that he rarely took time to look up at and examine in the city, the way he had nearly every night when he was a boy.
“Papa,” she whispered, her mouth now so close to his ears that her breath burned his lobes. “Papa, even though men cannot give birth, you just gave birth tonight. To me.”
The Return
One afternoon in October 1976, when I was seven years old, Bob, Nick and I were sitting on my uncle’s front gallery, memorizing, just like every other schoolchild in Haiti, our usual rote lessons for the next school day, when we saw some strange figures turn the corner from Rue Tirremasse and head down the alley toward us.
One was a man in a brown three-piece suit that looked like it was getting its first wear. He was carrying a briefcase in one hand and grasping a boy’s elbow with the other. A plump woman followed with a baby in her arms. Immediately trailing them was a taxi driver and a few other young men who carried four large suitcases up to the gallery and set them at our feet.
The first thing I noticed when I looked up from their outsized, outstretched luggage was the man’s smile. It was huge, cavernous, two of his top front teeth golden.
“Edwidge, it’s Papa,” he said, pressing that extensive smile against the side of my face. He smelled of a cologne whose fragrance I couldn’t recognize, of travel and faraway places.
Was he really my father, I wondered, this thin, happy man with a thick dark beard that caressed his collarbone when he lowered his head? He kept his eyes on me, letting them wander for only a few seconds while he reached into his pocket to pay the driver and the young men who’d helped with the bags.
Until that moment, aside from the butter cookies and restrained words of his letters, my father had mostly been a feeling for me, powerful yet vague, without a real face, a real body, like the one looming over the pecan-hued little boy who was looking up at Nick, Bob and me.
“Edwidge?” My mother stepped onto the front porch, plugging the remaining hole in the circle that was now all of us.
“Come and kiss your manman,” she said.
She looked heavier than I remembered, and her copper-colored skin was a few shades lighter. The baby in her arms was sleeping.
“Manman?” Bob’s jaw dropped. He ran to her and planted a kiss on the first place his lips reached on her body, the woolen plaid skirt covering her legs. Balancing the baby with one arm, she reached down and with her other hand stroked his head, gently, softly, for a long time. He in turn remained glued to her skirt, burying his face deep into it as though he were crying and didn’t want the rest of us to see.
I thought he had forgotten her. She’d left when he was two, the age I was when my father left, yet whatever was drawing him to her-yearning, pain, curiosity-was keeping me away from him.
“Bob.” My father reached over and gently pulled him away.
Bob turned to my father’s lowered face and kissed his cheek. My father was pleased, rubbing Bob’s head with his palm.
“This is your brother Kelly,” my father said, introducing him to the little boy by their side.
It was thanks to Kelly that our parents had been able to return to Haiti. Even though they had overstayed tourist visas, Kelly’s birth in the United States had instantly made them eligible for permanent residency, which is no longer possible today.
