She’s 22, I’m 70 — she says it’s my baby… now what?
Episode 2: From here to maternity
Michael’s a 70-year-old writer and grandfather living 3 months on a rural island off Southern Haiti trying to finish a novel. After a brief affair, Danise, a 22-year-old Haitienne, comes to him, pregnant, and says the baby is his. Problem is, Michael has a field-tested, 25-year-old vasectomy and a urological condition that almost precludes fertility. Almost. His Seattle urologist writes that though improbable, it’s not entirely impossible he’s the father! Wilma, Danise’s mother, strives to make our Michael marry Dani and pay-up, (not necessarily in that order). Even after a Haitian doctor pronounces the pregnancy test positive, neither the accuracy nor the paternity are certain.The thoroughly corruptible Michael roils in conflict, doubt, and Christian moral guilt, even though he’s no Christian, and in general, suffers no guilt. Michael muses: maybe this child is born in a voudou-entangled male version of the Virgin Birth — might she be The Messiah, The Whore of Babylon? We’ll find out as the mid-October due date approaches. Meanwhile, the story unwinds. Today, sit in with Michael on the dreaded meeting with Dani’s parents.
Episode 2: Family confab
Dani kissed my cheek, sweet and soft, as Danise could be. ‘Reveye, mon amor.’ she cooed. Deep in denial, I’d drifted off to sleep a half hour before the family meeting was to begin; somewhere in my cerebral interstices, I hoped I might sleep through it or I might wake to find it postponed.
But no. Dani startled me and I opened my eyes. We hadn’t been romantic for a month — we had, in fact, split-up. Just two days ago, there’d been hot words between she, her mother and me — about money, about marriage, about paternity, about money. Frustrated, I’d thrown the hat I’d bought Dani out the window; she’d run out the door to chase it.
I felt bad about the hat, but today, she’d come, hat back on her head, and looking fetching. I acted cold and flinty to her cooing and obsequiousness.
Dani’s lanky with long legs and hair in a million little braids. Despit she was only a month along, and her belly was flat as pie, Dani wore a crocheted, off-white maternity smock. However phony, it looked great on her.
We gathered in my hill-top house in Kai Kuk: Danise and me, her parents, Wilma and Toto. Madame Jeneuve, the elder French lady from next door was sitting in to translate.
Madame Jeneuve and her husband, Jean-Paul, had volunteered in Haiti for years, having fallen in love with Haitians and the slow, island life. When he retired from his government job, they sold their larger house in Paris, moved to a suburban from apartment, and built a new house in Kai Kuk where they lived January to May volunteering in various NGO good-works projects around the island.
Dani, Madame Jeneuve and I sat on full sized straight backed chairs. Wilma and Toto sat on traditional, child-sized Haitian chairs, now an oddly coveted icon of globalization. I towered over them.
The seating arrangement was no accident. Having once had some Machiavellian-ish management training, I knew dominance in seating can make a difference in a difficult meeting. As it turns out, it made no difference whatsoever.
Dani’s eyes glanced sometimes up to catch my own, but mostly they studied the table-top. Her downturned eyes and submissiveness were of deference: every person in the room was higher in stature than Danise. She was but a little girl in this tense affair: subservient to her mother who was subservient to her father, and each subservient to the Madame and me. Dani’s job was to shut up unless spoken to.
It wasn’t really fair here with these elders, two blans, and her parents lifting up her smock, jabbering about her guts, her vagina, breasts, and belly. I was talking PAP smears, (she’d never had one) mammograms, (she’d never had one) and regular gynecological checkups. I knew little of these things, and sadly, Dani and her mother knew even less.
Madame Janeuve knowledgeably explained vasectomies to the prospective grandparents, noting that Jean-Paul himself had been snipped 20 years previous. She repeated the Haitian doctor’s pronouncement that it would be impossible for me to make a baby. She might as well have been speaking Lithuanian. Wilma, Toto and Dani jumped-up in a kreyole chorus to say they could not/would not accept any deniability from me.
Science was not a consideration. Dani’s lovely, wrinkly, smiley grandma had done a little voudou dance before me waving her arms around my “areas’” to encourage my manly potency and fertility. That in itself, in their view, could undo any surgical or urological condition and make those aged, little man-wigglers as determined as spawning sockeye.
Weeks before all this, I was at my desk one morning when an old man, knocked, slipped off his sandals and came in. Mesidié, a handsome and beguiling Lavachwaz several years my junior was celebrated locally for his fè ti bebe in his mid-60’s.
I’d told her Wilma I was too old to make babies, and she’d sent him plodding up the hill to give me confidence in my ability to sow my seed in my old age… and also in, of course, Dani. He had an easy laugh, and with wry hand signals and ironic winks he said making children in one’s dotage was the only method he knew of to stave off The Inevitable. It was a point well taken, though with my vasectomy and all, I never gave it more credence than any other funny thing out of this delightful old man, the randy old dog!
After the initial tests and before the meeting, I’d clung desperately to the hope that Dani may not even be pregnant. This wasn’t just wishful thinking — the idea of pregnancy can be a little ambiguous for Haitians. For instance: here’s a widely-held belief called Péydisyon (perdition) as described by a Haitian physician, Dr. Ken Moise: “It is believed to be a condition in which a woman carries her baby longer than the normal term, ranging from 10 months up to several years. More common in urban areas, pèdisyon is somewhat of a culture-bound, biomagical disorder believed to be associated with infertility as the fetus is kept in the uterus by a voudou (vodun) priest by way of magical forces.”
Women who aren’t pregnant sometimes have positive pregnancy tests; occasionally this “diagnosis” masks something bad like cervical or uterine cancer.
To the many Haitians who consult voudou priests more often than medical doctors, pregnancy is a fluid condition that doesn’t necessarily conform to medical science’s norms such as nine-month gestation, or the results of a pregnancy test. Could Dani be “pregnant” because she and her family wanted her to be? I don’t buy into biomagical disorders, but they are true believers and suggestion can drive powerful hormones.
Or maybe… voudou is real!
Despite this supernatural matrix or because of it, Haiti has one of the highest infant mortality rates in the world.
Meanwhile back in the meeting, I looked at Danise and said, “Maybe there was another man.”
She was slouched next to me, but at this she straightened face-to-face. Comic book steel beams shot from her gigantic Yoruban eyes, piercing mine. Then my Dani, quiet, obedient Dani stood up, leaned in and righteously erupted, “Non! Non!”
To be honest, dear reader, I’d never had reason to distrust Danise. She told me no lies that I knew of; there were plenty of opportunities to steal from me, but she never had.
We had agreed to be monogamous. If she’d been unfaithful on that fateful day of that fateful month, and this kid growing in her belly was some other guy’s and she was lying to my face, the enormity of such a mischaracterization on my part, and the betrayal on hers would have rocked me to the core.
I trusted Dani and respected her. Was I being played? My heart said no, as my head asked: if not, how could this be?
The thought of supporting a child in Haiti didn’t bother me nar.y as much as the possibility that Dani might have lied in such a straight-forward manner. Was she asking herself the same question?
But for Wilma, I loved Dani’s family from the first day. The kids — especially the two little girls, Joanna and Lovelina adored me for my stoopid faces and penchant for making myself look idiotic no matter who was looking. Because I was an adult and a blan at that, it was especially hilarious.
Wilma and I’d butted heads from the first — always about money. My money. She tried multiple ways to use me as an ATM. Ambitious, and calculating, her prim and pretty resting face belied a will of titanium. But I’m a stubborn, cheap son of a bitch with limited funds keeping me in Haiti. We were always at odds. No. it was never Dani I mistrusted, it was the mother.
I food-shopped once a week at the raucous, teeming, semi-weekly farmer’s market in Madame Bernard, the village at the other end of the Island. Wilma helped me shop there once. As the other Haitian women, she wore a nice housedress and a hat, the picture of respectability, even if barefooted to navigate in the sticky mud of the market pathways. She was ferocious when moneyballing for obéjins and pwaros. I got veggie bargains that day, but as Wilma set her eye on a certain market stand, I saw the seller steeling herself when she saw her coming. Wilma is submissive only to her husband — in keeping with Haiti’s patriarchal culture, but it’s also a culture of women warriors. This from an excellent but now extant Haitian cultural website, Haiti 360:
The African ancestry of Haitians proves to show that the Dahomey people were known as great warriors. This is shown through their abilities in throwing [in 1804] the French out of Haiti to claim their independence.”
It is without a doubt that the African culture still exists in Haiti. Haitian women still have a strong family leadership in the family bond. As did their women ancestors, they still carry the strong family foundation and are ready to protect it under any circumstances. Their ancestral women were not only in charge of keeping a strong family bond but were also trained to go into combat in the case of war to protect the homeland. Therefore, Haitian women still hold the strength of the family bond even if it means till death. As for the men, they were warriors besides the normal farming life in Africa.
Wilma’s avariciousness and ferocity is product — not necessarily of greed — but of unimaginable desperation in the poorest country in the Western Hemisphere. Hunger is the transgressor the warrior women of Haiti fight every day. It precludes shame in asking for money or otherwise shaking down blans, who may be ID’d by white skin, but whom also could be black or brown. Such strangers (or etranjes) are seen as charmed beings — lucky, wealthy, privileged, and perhaps, generous. Throughout my stay in Haiti, no one was in any way hostile to me and all my privilege, just happy to be my friend or to benefit from the appearance of same. I must also say, here — I made many true friends in Haiti.
Ninety-nine percent of blans in Haiti are wealthy compared to 99% of Haitians. Even me, an old man living on the bottom rungs of American income on Social Security. For rural people, remittances — gifts from family and friends living abroad — account for an average of 15 per cent of income.
So accosting blans and asking for money can pay-off.
During the meeting, (which seemed not to be going her way) Wilma shot me glances of fire and stone. Toto stayed easygoing, striving to stay friendly and man-to-man. Maybe it was a good cop/bad cop tactic. But between them, they asked for money for many things, and always in advance. for the roof on their church, for food, for perhaps-hospitals and maybe-doctors for Dani; shoes and food for the babies in the house, and babies yet to be born. Toto needs a car battery for his solar panel. The family always needs propane.
I’d spent much on Dani and the family already. Doctors, food, clothes, a bed, kitchen utensils, walking-around money. I was determined to pay nothing more until I got some DNA, and Madame Jeneuve, the old Haiti hand, encouraged me to stick to my guns.
Despite animation from both sides, our translator/negotiator was patient and cool until Toto and I finally struck a deal. At Toto’s insistence and against Madame’s advice, I wrote it all down in my geezerly writer’s hand, unused to writing with anything without a keyboard.
Once paternity is settled, I promised to pay birth expenses in a lump sum. If Dani needs hospitalization, or extra prenatal care, I would, of course pay. Wilma demanded money for hotel stays and restaurant meals in Les Cayes, the “mainland” town 40 minutes away by boat — in advance. Since they have family in Les Cayes, and would never stay in a hotel or eat in a restaurant, I said no, but promised money should there be prenatal problems causing Dani to be treated in Les Cayes.
Of course, if this were indeed my child, I pledged longterm support, and to bounce her on my knee on my annual treks to the island.
Upon reaching agreement, I grinned and jumped up to shake Toto’s hand. A silent scowl crossed Wilma’s face — she suspected that whatever made me smile, could not be good for her. She was mostly correct.
Nonetheless, no money changed hands that day, and all four of us signed on to the words scrawled on the grubby piece of paper ripped from the blank side of my rental agreement. Wilma grimly folded it and stuck it in her bra; they left down the hill in a line, Toto leading.
I spent the rest of my day staring out at Port Morgan across the sparkling bay, and muttering into my Fanta.
Would it be so bad if this were my child? Is it possible I might want to live out my life with this eager but alleged new family of mine? How did I get here? Could it be what seemed to you (and me) at first, a simple case of an old man buying sex has come to be increasingly complex and with mutual feelings.
Or, am I just a romantic old fool?
As we await the birth and the paternity test, let me tell you in the next episode about Dani, of us, and how we began and how we ended. Or at least how I thought it ended…
Next: Me and Dani, a like story
