to have the family mausoleum cleaned, to the florist to order the wreaths, to the photocopier to have the funeral programs printed. And of course I followed them both everywhere. My father was just beginning to show signs of shortness of breath, which we took to be an allergic reaction to the dust in Port-au-Prince, panting every now and then as we zigzagged through the sweltering, jam-packed streets. But as each errand brought my uncle closer to his final farewell to his wife, it was he who often stopped to rest. Finding a lamppost on the occasional street corner, he would wrap his arms around it and weep.
Tante Denise had died the week before Haiti’s national carnival would begin. On the eve of carnival celebrations, her neighborhood, her city, was loud and boisterous, with carnival tunes blaring from nearly every other house but hers. We were still two days from Tante Denise’s funeral when, wanting a bit of peace and quiet, my father decided to accompany Tante Zi’s son, my cousin Richard, the director of the funeral cooperative in charge of Tante Denise’s burial, to another funeral in Grand-Goave, a small town south of Port-au-Prince. I offered to go with them.
I didn’t realize how complicated the Grand-Goave burial would be until we went to pick up the coffin. After parking the car on a pebbly and hilly street and walking down a damp, slippery alley, then climbing a wobbly ladder up to a second-story workshop, we found the coffin maker putting the last touches on a cedar casket, stapling a piece of white cloth to the inner lining and adding a velvet-draped sponge to serve as a pillow. As soon as the casket was done, Richard climbed down to the ground floor and the coffin maker and his apprentice lowered the cedar coffin down to him, carefully balanced on ropes.
Our next stop was a private morgue on Rue de l’Enterrement-Burial Street-that was used by Richard’s cooperative. It was the same morgue where Tante Denise’s body was being kept. A few days later I would see her there too, just as I was seeing this naked, white-haired stranger being dressed and powdered before he was placed in his brand-new casket.
As we edged into the busy traffic with the coffin and its occupant roped to the roof of the car, my father, still shocked, whispered to my cousin, “No hearse?”
He couldn’t get one in time, my cousin explained, and for such a long trip. But he assured us that Tante Denise would have one for her journey to the cemetery.
I could imagine what my father was thinking. It was a hot day. Won’t the sun spoil the corpse? I, in turn, was worried about the coffin slipping through the ropes and the body falling on the ground and my cousin having to pick it up and put it back and in his haste not removing every speck of dust from the old man, adding to his family’s anguish at the viewing. But the old man stayed put through the ninety-minute journey and we arrived in Grand-Goave without incident.
After he’d dropped the body off at the church, Richard took us to the house of a female colleague for lunch. As they discussed cooperative business under a giant avocado tree in the cactus-fence yard behind her house, I realized that Richard was not just an undertaker but also an aspiring politician, whose work was indirectly connected to President Aristide.
After leaving office in 1996, the former priest had won a second term in 2000, in an election whose results were contested by a coalition of opposition parties. Three years later, in 2003, with international funds still frozen over the outcome of the elections, there were massive demonstrations demanding his resignation. His supporters, a large number of them from Bel Air, also rallied in huge numbers, sometimes resulting in deadly clashes between the two groups. An active member of several anti-Aristide groups, Richard, like most future politicians, was hoping to barter for goodwill with good works. This put him in direct conflict with some of the pro-Aristide gangs in Bel Air, many of whom, Richard casually noted to his colleague, wanted him dead.
There were signs, though, that things might be turning around for him, Richard explained. A few weeks back he was coming home late one night when someone flagged down his car, ordered him to roll down the window and pressed a gun to his temple. He heard the slow clicking of the trigger and quickly identified himself. When he heard Richard’s name, his would-be assassin begged his forgiveness saying, “Chief, I’m sorry. I didn’t realize it was you. You buried my mother a few months back.”
Through the entire funeral service for the old man in Grand-Goave, with family members crying and wailing around him, Richard, who had told the story of his near assassination in such a calm, even amused voice, sat with my father and me in the last pew and with his head leaning against the wall, he slept. Afterward he drove us back to Bel Air at breakneck speed so he could make it to his house before the gangs had a chance to ambush us in the dark.
There was no wake for Tante Denise. Fearing that some of the neighborhood gangs might take advantage of a wake to storm the house, Uncle Joseph sent all his visitors home at eight o’clock and locked his doors.
After everyone left, my father and I stayed up with Leone and Tante Denise’s brothers, George and Bosi. They passed around a few pictures of Tante Denise looking stylish in many of the dresses she’d sewn herself over the years. My father, Leone, and Bosi and George looked at these pictures and reminisced late into the night about Tante Denise’s love of clothes and her making her own, rather badly sometimes when she was in a hurry.
As I dozed off, their laughter startled me again and again.
“Denise, that old goat,” Leone said and laughed. “She was a stubborn one.”
The morning of Tante Denise’s funeral, I took a few pictures of my father and Uncle Joseph getting dressed in the room that my uncle and Tante Denise had shared. As he pulled a navy suit from their shared mahogany armoire, Uncle Joseph waved my father over.
“First time I’m wearing this suit,” he told my father.
My father reached for the suit and, like the tailor he once was, expertly examined the material between his fingertips. It looked like silk but was actually a combination of cotton and Lycra, which my uncle had chosen because it allowed the jacket to stretch without losing its shape.
“The next time I wear it,” said my uncle, “will be at my own funeral.”
When I look at those pictures now, if not for my father’s and uncle’s solemn faces, I can almost imagine that my father was simply helping his brother with the knot in his tie. Maybe this was something they’d done when they were younger, help each other dress for joyful and sorrowful occasions. But had they? They’d both worked so hard when they were living in the same country that they’d had little time for camaraderie and leisure. Then they’d spent so many years apart that they’d shared very few moments that many other brothers might take for granted.
My uncle assigned me the job of carrying to the morgue the exquisite white, pearl-beaded, two-piece suit that Tante Denise had chosen a few weeks back for her burial.
When I got to the morgue, I hesitated before entering the small dressing room. But hadn’t I, just two days before, watched the undertakers place a suit on a total stranger on the very same metal table that Tante Denise would now be lying on?
Laid out naked, in a perfectly straight line, her body rigid, her eyes sealed shut, Tante Denise actually looked like she was sleeping. But when my eyes wandered down from the folds on her neck to the larger folds on her belly and farther down to her still dark and thick pubic hair, the illusion was gone. The dresser, a cross-eyed young man who looked like he was barely out of his teens, reached between her thighs and brusquely spread her legs apart. He then lifted her arms, letting them drop with a thump once he’d placed her gloves on them. Her head fell back as he slipped her undershirt over it and I reached for it, quickly
