A Wedding in Haiti by Julia Álvarez Read Free Book Online Page A

to discuss his plans with her beforehand.

August 20, a long wedding day & night
Preparations
    I wake up to one of the pleasures I remember from childhood: sleeping under a mosquito net like a princess or some other precious being who needs to be veiled from the world.
    For a while in my half sleep I’ve been hearing a rhythmic sound, not the patter of rain or anything mechanical. A human rhythm. I peek out the door and see one of Charlie’s sisters sweeping the dirt yard with a broom made of straw. It hasn’t rained in months; the ground is hard and dry, a grayish color. She sweeps away the fallen leaves, smoothes out any clumps. By the time she is finished, the yard is a tidy, uniform pale gray, except for one embarrassing darker spot where I, unwilling to walk all the way to the outhouse in the middle of the night, peed just outside the door. I recall a lecture given by Woody Tasch, author of Slow Money , in which he claimed that there are two kinds of people in this world: “those who shit in drinking water and those who don’t.” I’ve now added a third kind: people who pee in other people’s front yard.
    The rest of the family is still lying on mats under a tree in the backyard. Our own stirring wakes them, and preparations begin. The wedding will start at eight thirty, but since Bill and I are the official godparents, Piti wants us there at seven thirty. To get there, we will have to drive about twenty minutes, park the pickup on the side of the road, and hike in to the bride’s family’s house. Given those directions, I briefly consider wearing the same practical black jeans and I LOVE MY BARRIO T-shirt from yesterday, instead of the fancy outfit I packed when I thought this was going to be a church wedding—a long, flouncy, pale yellow skirt and jacket, a black camisole with lace edging, and impractical black sandals.
    But Piti is getting married, and I’m going to his wedding in style! There is no mirror, but when I come out of the house all gussied up, I can see myself reflected in my hosts’ eyes. I must look as strange as the proverbial British colonial in his starched white suit and safari hat sitting down to tea in the middle of the jungle.
    Perhaps because there is no mirror—or none we can see—the men shave each other. Meanwhile, Piti’s sister-in-law, Tanessa, irons her husband’s white shirt on the bedding still lying under the shade tree. She uses a contraption I’ve never seen before: a heavy, hinged iron with hot coals in the inside compartment. I’m as intrigued by her iron as she is by my outfit. When she offers to iron my wrinkly skirt, I shake my head. I’m going to a wedding in rural Haiti, after all, not to high tea in a British colony.

    It’s already seven fifteen! Quickly, our group grabs a breakfast of cereal and evaporated milk, along with some of the mangoes from yesterday’s stop. We’re ready to roll! But our hosts insist on serving us breakfast: the leftovers from last night—a pot of rice, a bowl of brown bean juice, a small bowl of goat’s meat. Only Pablo seems to have enough appetite for a whole second breakfast.
    On the drive over, Bill again notes how, unlike the Dominican countryside, we don’t see any mounds of trash on the road. It seems nothing is thrown away here in Moustique. I recall seeing the lid of one of the evaporated milk cans I opened being used by the two young girls to cut off a piece of rope for washing the morning dishes. That cut piece was unraveled, the strands bunched together for a scrubber. Meanwhile, the rest of the rope was threaded through a hole in the door of the kitchen to serve as a handle.
    We finally pull over under one of those precious commodities in Haiti, a tree with shade. The horrible erosion we’ve read about is borne out by the brown hillsides everywhere we turn. We can see why. Here and there, fires smolder, trees being burned for charcoal, which provides 80 percent of the energy used in the country. What else are