“Papa Doc is sick and close to death.”
Papi warned Mami not to go to Haiti with Abuelo Beto.
They talked about the island republic at the dinner table, when the newspapers reported that a rogue general had bombarded the capital city of Port-au-Prince in a failed coup against the dictator.
“The country is a tinderbox. It’s not safe for you, for the children, or for the likes of us.”
Papi whacked the table with his daily paper. It was folded four ways thick, making the tabletop wobble and my water goblet spin in place, like a silver coin.
“I’m sorry, dear, but I must accompany Papá.”
After Abuela Cita died, Mami had taken over some of the duties of First Lady, and she wanted to join Abuelo Beto on his first official visit to Haiti.
“We’ll be protected by his bodyguards.”
Papi shut his mouth tight and took a deep breath.
Mami continued, “Haiti is rich in history, fables, and myths. As Mamá liked to say, ‘A single trip is worth a hundred days in school.’”
I wasn’t sure Abuela Cita had Haiti in mind when she said that, but Mami was right; it was one of her favorite sayings.
Mami talked to us as if she were Miss Mundo, teaching a geography lesson in school. “Puerto Ricans have more in common with Haitians, than with Latin Americans, let alone Americans.”
Papi scoffed and shook his head. He unfolded his newspaper and put a barrier between himself and the rest of us.
A week later, Mami took me and La Nena on the trip to Haiti with Abuelo Beto, but left Güicho behind in the Ojeda house with Tita and Papi.
No airlines flew directly from San Juan to Port-au-Prince, so Captain TP piloted us across the Mona Passage in Abuelo Beto’s Cessna.
We took off in the morning and landed on the neighboring island one hour and a half later, arriving at our hotel soon after that.
In the evening, Abuelo Beto and Mami went to the National Palace for a State Dinner. La Nena and I stayed at the hotel, with the promise that we would fly to Cap-Haitien in the President’s plane.
The next morning, I was expecting a new Boeing 747. I was not prepared for the DC-3 propeller plane waiting for us on the tarmac. It was decorated with the coat of arms of Haiti and had words in French on the side.
“What does it say, Mami?”
“There’s power in unity.”
She went up the boarding stairs first. Abuelo Beto followed. Then La Nena. I had to use a special box to reach the first step. The air stewardess helped me up.
La Nena buried her nose in a book during the airplane ride from Port-au-Prince to Cape-Haitien.
We liked to tease and call La Nena “La Brain.”
At the end of the year, the nuns of Academia Perpetuo Socorro would send us home with our grades in sealed manila envelopes.
At night, we would line up outside Mami and Papi’s bedroom, the only time during the year when we were allowed into their Sanctum Sanctorum.
Mami’s voice came through the closed door, “Come in.”
We’d open the bedroom door, march-in single-file, and give Mami our sealed envelopes. Papi didn’t really care about our grades.
The story was always the same. La Nena had perfect grades, and her envelope was padded with academic prizes and honors. Güicho’s grades were reliably bad. Mine were middling. Never terrible, but always coming up short.
The story of the porridge and the three bears didn’t seem to apply to me. The middle was never a good place to be.
Mami would lecture me and stare me down every time. Often, I was sent to my room without supper. Güicho was off the hook because he was too little to know better. And La Nena was never praised. Mami and Papi simply expected her to be a genius, La Brain.
The plane ride to Cape-Haitien was turbulent. We were flying straight, and suddenly the plane dropped down until our stomachs came up to our throats. Could God be playing yo-yo with us? Around the World, Rock the Cradle, Walk the Dog?
I wished for longer and deeper falls, anticipating the next drop. But my stomach wasn’t thrilled.
Mami didn’t like to fly. On the Eastern Airline Whisperjets, she would take a pill, put on her mask, and fall asleep.
We were always the last ones to deplane. Not because we didn’t want to go out with the rest of what Mami called “the cattle,” but because it took her time to wake up, and get her land legs back.
The plane ride to Cape-Haitien was short, so Mami must have figured she didn’t need to take her sleeping pills. Now, she was paying for her decision. Her eyes were shut tight, and she was white-knuckling the armrest.
Abuelo Beto calmed her down with his soft voice. “All will be well, Mija, you’ll see.”
I turned to La Nena and, for the first time, I saw that books were good for something. They made her calm. She was lost to the world inside her novel.
La Nena’s bathroom closet/library was her secret cocoon in the Ojeda House. That’s where she kept Mami’s collection of red, leather-bound, fairy tales, together with The Count of Montecristo, David Copperfield, and The Three Musketeers.
The sandalwood-lined closet was L-shaped and had two large white French doors with fake jalousies on the outside and two full-length mirrors inside. By opening both doors simultaneously, she made the closet into a safe room, a perfect square with infinite mirrors.
When Tita looked for La Nena, I knew where she would hide.
Back in the plane, I raised my voice. “What are you reading?” The sound of the propellers almost drowned my words.
“It’s a book about Haiti that Mami said I should read before the trip.” La Nena showed it to me. “It’s called The Kingdom of this World.”
I’d never heard of the book, and its religious-sounding title confused me. “I thought that Haiti was a superstitious place, where people believed in magic, like Voudou.”
“Well,” La Nena used her big-sister voice, “Voudou is a religion. It’s just different from ours.”
La Nena was only eleven months older than me, but she knew things I would have never guessed in a hundred years.
The rattling of the old plane made me raise my voice again. “Do you know anything about the places we’re visiting today?”
“We’re going to the palace and the fortress of the first king of Haiti, an evil dictator according to my novel.”
The image of the King of Voudou in his mighty fortress added a new layer of excitement to the trip.
“Henri Christophe made his subjects build him a palace that he called Sans-Souci, ‘without a care’ in French,” she said.
I looked out the porthole searching for any sign of the building. Abuelo Beto had told us that the DC-3 cabin wasn’t pressurized, and that we would fly low, and under the cloud cover.
“Later we’ll go up a mountain to the fortress of the King, called La Ferrière, ‘The Iron Lady’ in French,” she continued.
I saw roads and towns nestled in the thick, green jungle, but no sign of what La Nena was talking about.
When we landed, the air stewardess opened the door to let us out of the plane. The boarding stairs of the DC-3 made my legs wobble. I jumped from the last step on to the tarmac. My heart was racing.
Papi also knew about the DC-3s because his father, Abuelo Carlos, was the owner of a regional airline. He had told us the story of the plane. It was the work horse of WWII, and the first successful commercial airplane, due in part to its “perfect” safety record. But that was only because every time a DC-3 crashed, they simply gave it a different name. Very clever.
When we got off the plane, I asked Mami if we had flown in a “Dakota.” From her smile, I could tell she got the joke and appreciated my dark humor.
A Black chauffeur in a double-breasted jacket, cap, and black riding boots, picked us up at the airport, and drove us to the palace of Sans-Souci.
In the limousine, Abuelo Beto explained that the building used to be the Governor’s Mansion, Haiti’s La Fortaleza, but it was now a ruin, after an earthquake and fire had destroyed it.
“The ruler was a cook who became a dictator and proclaimed himself King for Life,” he said smoothing his moustache with his fingers. “He was so hated, he had to kill himself when the people rose up against him.”
When we arrived at Sans-Souci, I ran across the manicured lawn to the ruined palace, climbed the stone steps and the wide staircase. Two steps at a time, all the way to the top of the building. Before me, a thick forest gave way to mountains that loomed large. I imagined “the King for Life” looking over his kingdom.
From the top, I could see Mami, Abuelo Beto, and La Nena walking slowly toward the building. Ants making their way to the anthill, single file.
I imagined the King in his military uniform, wearing a two-cornered Napoleonic hat and a scabbard with a golden sword hanging from his hips. He must have looked down at the mob storming his palace. I’m sure he defied them saying, “you’ll never catch me alive!”
I pictured the King taking out his musket gun and putting a bullet through his head. He must have fallen from the rooftop of Sans-Souci, his lifeless corpse landing at the feet of his beloved, the Iron Lady.
“There’s a lesson in his rise and fall,” La Nena warned me when we got back to the limousine. “Henri Cristophe’s hubris was his undoing,” she said.
To me, the King was a Frankenstein martyr.
The limousine drove the three miles from Sans-Souci to La Ferrière. La Nena and I sat next to each other during the ride.
She said that she was surprised when her novel compared La Citadelle La Ferrière to a nest of termites.
La Nena and I were both familiar with the creepy insects. There was a nest of comején in the mango tree of the Ojeda house. A brown blob about the size of a large beach ball sitting on one of the branches of the tree. Brittle tunnels the size of my pinkie ran up and down the trunk.
I liked to take my Swiss army knife to them. I watched the white and brown termites panic and scatter.
Oliver Exterminating made regular visits to the Ojeda house to fumigate and prevent the comején from spreading. But the plague of insects was indestructible. The nest only grew bigger with every visit.
“How does a fortress become a nest of termites?” La Nena asked nobody in particular. “I don’t think the novelist liked the kingdom of Haiti very much.”
We arrived at the town near the fortress. We stepped out of the limousine, and I looked up the seven miles to the top of the Bishop’s Hat. The mountain was one of Haiti’s highest peaks.
I understood what the novelist meant when he called the people termites. Four-legged black dots climbed up the mountain’s switchbacks.
I asked Mami, “Are we getting on horses?”
“They’re donkeys.”
Mami dug around her purse for change as we approached the stables. “We’ll ride a Jeep for the first half, and donkeys for the last stretch. The climb’s too rocky and steep for Jeeps.”
I looked at La Nena because she had been thrown by a horse when she was little. She wasn’t listening. She was looking down at her novel. Cocooned in its world.
After a couple of miles by Jeep, we arrived at the stables.
La Nena told me the king climbed the Bishop’s Hat during the construction of La Ferrière. “He rode on a golden throne strapped to the back of one of his strongest men.”
She read from the novel. “From his chair, he’d look back at the long lines of men, women, and children.” It painted me a picture. “Each one brought one red brick to the top of the mountain to help build the fortress.”
“I guess they were termites bringing one grain of dirt to the nest.” I was thinking of our comején.
La Nena finished her lesson about evil. incarnate “If one of the people moved too slow, the king ordered his guards to push them off the cliff.”
A portrait of the “King for Life” was on the cover of the book. His majestic gold epaulettes, Napoleonic hat, and red sash, appealed to me, no matter what La Nena said.
We mounted on our donkeys and started the difficult climb. I sat up strait on the saddle, pretending I was wearing a Napoleonic hat.
Mami went first. She rode the only mule of the bunch, personifying an animal story that Abuelo Beto liked to tell.
“In the African Savanah, after the kill, the Papá lion eats. Then the Mamá lioness. And then, and only if there are any leftovers, the cubs can sit down to eat.”
Mami had taken Papi’s place in the story. Even Abuelo Beto followed her on his little burro.
I missed Papi.
I turned around, holding on to the back of my burro‘s saddle, and asked La Nena: “Why do they call the fortress The Iron Lady?”
“The king built it with bricks held together with a mix of mortar and blood from bulls sacrificed on its grounds.” La Nena continued as our burros climbed the side of the Bishop’s Hat. “The blood made the walls super strong, indestructible even.”
“Wow, that must be some book you’re reading!” I looked down the cliff from the narrow switchback.
“The King’s men carried 365 molten iron cannons up the mountain for year-round protection.”
I tightened my legs around my burro‘s belly, but he didn’t seem to mind. We went up slowly at his own pace.
When we arrived at the top of the Bishop’s Hat, I looked up another hundred feet. The stone prow of La Ferrière rose skyward, high above the clouds, a battleship riding waves of air.
I held on to my burro, and to my stomach.
Mami jumped off her mule. She took long strides through the pyramids of iron balls stacked at both sides of the ramp leading to the fortress.
Abuelo Beto followed her, slowly. The donkey ride had been rough on him.
I climbed down from my burro, overtook Abuelo Beto, and tried to run past him. But Mami grabbed me by the arm and slowed me down.
“It’s too dangerous, Noti. Walk with me.”
I walked with Mami through the gates of La Ferrière.
I liked to be the first through the gates of the Ojeda house. They were painted black and decorated with golden pointed spears.
After Papi’s signal, I jumped out of the Pontiac, lifted the locks of the gate, and pushed them open to let the car into the yard.
The gates were heavy. Inertia turned them into a Carnival machina.
Papi joked that I was the gate keeper of the family.
“Remember Noti, there’s power in unity,” Mami said as we entered the fortress. “In our house, there are no favorites, everyone is just like everybody else. We rise and fall together.”
Abuelo Beto’s voice echoed in the dark tunnels of the building. “This is where the king thought he would make his last stand. He didn’t know what was coming.”
We went up and down stone steps. In and out of humid rooms, corridors black with mold, a comejen’s nest defended by cannons pointed every which way.
“The motto of the King was ‘God, my cause and my sword.’ Fifteen thousand men lived with him, and they wanted for nothing.” I could hear the weight of responsibility in Abuelo Beto’s voice.
“That may be so,” Mami interrupted his lesson.
“But that was only while his strength lasted. When he became weak, the gates opened and the waters rushed in.” Mami gave me, and La Nena, her Miss Mundo look.
She turned back to Abuelo Beto. “What was it the Roman’s said before their empire fell?”
Abuelo Beto put his head down, and rubbed his eyes, catching his breath.
“The Barbarians are at the gates!”
”Perhaps they were barbarians, but the Romans had it coming in spades!” Mami said.
“After me, the Flood,” Abuelo Beto replied.
Mami took me and La Nena to have a closer look at the cannons of La Ferrière.
“Each one has its own name.”
She walked up to the first. “This one is named after a famous Roman strategist, this one after a powerful Greek statesman, and this one after the African General who conquered Southern Spain.”
She stopped in front of the last, which lay on the side of a broken chassis. A phrase in Spanish was written across the molten iron. She read it aloud, “Faithful but miserable.”
We went back to the airport, flew to Port-au-Prince, and took a taxi to our hotel.
Les Habitations Leclerc was in the middle of a neighborhood of rickety houses made of driftwood. Many homes were on stilts and had corrugated zinc planks for roofs. The shanty town zipped past the closed windows of our car.
We stopped at a traffic light and children came up to us begging for help, palms wide open, speaking a muffled language I didn’t understand. I closed my eyes, pretending to be the monkey that saw no evil.
Back home, I also closed my eyes when we crossed the bridge over the Caño Martín Peña. Below the Pontiac, the misery of El Fanguito, San Juan’s poorest shanty town was extreme. Its rickety homes were also built on stilts, in the middle of a marsh that overflowed every time it rained. And it rained buckets in Puerto Rico.
We drove through the misery and into the grounds of Les Habitations Leclerc. We crossed the hotel’s cement barrier crowned with jagged shards of broken glass. A black top through a lush tropical garden led us to the front door.
La Nena explained that the hotel was named after the sister of Napoleon Bonaparte, another character in her novel. “A young woman of lose morals,” she warned.
Les Habitations Leclerc had everything the children outside its walls wanted. It had several swimming pools including one with a corkscrew staircase and a cement waterfall. White-washed villas with private verandas opened to the forest and far away mountains.
A basket overflowing with fresh fruit welcomed us. A breeze came down from the mountain tops, through the lattice of the large French double doors. The restaurant was ready to serve us exotic food: escargots, cuisses de grenouilles, coq au vin.
I changed into my bathing trunks and ran to the swimming pool.
The next day, Abuelo Beto went to the National Palace for meetings with the President, and Mami organized an excursion into the city to buy local artwork and oil paintings for the Ojeda house.
She invited me and La Nena to join her, but I said no. I preferred to stay at the hotel. I didn’t want to return to the city streets. Better to play in the swimming pool, away from the eyes of the Haitian children.
La Nena left her novel in our hotel room and went to the city with Mami. She was coming out of her cocoon.
Later, at dinner, a Puerto Rican mourning dove hunter stopped by our table to say hello to Abuelo Beto and Mami. He told the story of his hunt earlier that morning.
“There were ten of us on the Mercedes. When we arrived at the hunting field, a mob of forty or fifty Haitians surrounded the bus, and rocked it, side to side, screaming ‘Jobs, work!’ We shot a gun in the air to scare them. They allowed us to go, but only after we agreed to hire a few men for the hunt.”
I struggled to keep down the frog legs. Vo-mi-ti-tos.
We flew back home the next day and arrived at the Ojeda house with the setting sun. Papi was waiting for us.
I ran to him and gave him a hug. He embraced me and La Nena and kissed Mami on the cheek. He opened the boot of the taxicab.
“I see that you brought some paintings home, honey.”
Our fare left after Papi helped us to unload the trunk. The kraft paper covering the largest painting ripped during the unloading process. The picture showed through.
Papi and I did a double take.
It was the Garden of Eden. But it was a very different Paradise from the one I was used to seeing hanging from the walls of the chapel at Perpetuo Socorro.
This garden was a thick, green jungle with animals from Africa. They peeked from behind large trees and fantastic leaves. The painting was colorful, but it was also child-like. Its figures were drawn in the innocent style of Sunday morning cartoons.
In the center, Adam knelt in front of Eve and took a bite of the cursed apple. Both Adam and Eve were Black, and they were buck naked.
I moved closer to the painting, drawn in by the strange Eve, towering over Adam, feeding him the forbidden fruit, a priestess from another world.
Papi put his hands on my shoulders holding me in place. I turned around and saw him first look at the painting and then look at Mami. His mouth wide open.
Mami looked at him with steely eyes. “If you don’t like what you see, dear, maybe the next time you should join us.”
She grabbed the painting with one hand and La Nena with the other, storming the Ojeda house. Tita and Güicho were waiting at the door for them.
Papi started toward the house. He stopped, turned around, and looked at the setting sun past the open gate.
“Better close the gates and check the padlock, Noti.”
I walked to the barrier, distracted by the noise of the chicharras, growing louder as I went.
After leaving the cocoon of their imagoes, the adult cicadas sang a deafening song.
I closed the gates, brought down the latch, and locked the bolt. But I wondered if the iron gates of the Ojeda house could stop the changes that were coming.