"I know he has another name, but Kongo is what everyone calls him here. I think only his son knew his true name."

Just then the cane harvest began: the first moment saw the fires set to clear the fields, singeing the leaves off the cane stalks before they could be chopped down. Clouds of thick white smoke blanketed the sky. The smell of burning soil and molasses invaded the air, dry grass and weeds crackling and shooting sparks, vultures circling low, looking for rats and lizards escaping the blaze.

Senor Pico rushed out to watch the fires. Juana was at the open markets buying provisions and there were no visiting relations in the house, so I went inside to see if the senora needed help moving the babies, to get away from the drifting smoke.

Senora Valencia was sitting in the middle of her bed with the children sleeping next to her, their tiny rumps raised in the air.

"It's another harvest already. They've set the fires." She sniffed the air to enjoy the scent of the burning cane fronds, which smelled like roasting corn.

"Amabelle," she said, as if her thoughts were faraway, elsewhere. "He believes, my Pico, that during one of his long evening promenades, the Generalissimo will march into our house, admire my portrait of him, and make a gift of the whole nation to him and our children."

Rosalinda woke from her sleep with a wail. Senora Valencia rubbed her fingertips against the crocheted bootie on her right heel to try to calm her. At the same time, she leaned over to have a closer look at her son's sleeping face.

"His sister's cries will wake him," she said.

His sister's cries did not wake Rafi. There was no movement in him, no signs of life.

Senora Valencia picked up her son and held his face against her breast. The little boy was still, his tiny arms hanging limply, not feeling his mother's embrace.

I picked Rosalinda up so Senora Valencia would not crush her as the mother thrashed around the bed trying to revive her son. Rafi's cheeks were drawn, his jaws had collapsed, his face bore an even more pallid shade in death.

"Mijo, my son, do not leave me!" Senora Valencia shouted into the child's face. "It's too soon for you to go. Mami is talking to you. It's too soon for you to leave."

"We should send for Javier," Senor Pico said when he ran in, peeling the senora's fingers off her son, who, if he were alive, would have been wailing from the way her fingernails were dug into his plump flesh, trying to bring him back to life with pain. Senor Pico planted his lips on his son's tiny mouth and attempted to breathe life back into him, succeeding in expanding the tiny chest, only to have it flatten and cave in once again.

Juana took Rosalinda to her grandfather's room. Soon the doctor arrived and offered some of his own breath to Rafi.

"We must send for Father Vargas," the doctor finally said.

Senora Valencia sat in the middle of the bed where her son and daughter had been sleeping not long before, and wrapped her arms around her own shaking body. Her husband pressed his head against the side of her face, and though he could not stop her from shaking, his hair did catch and soak up some of her tears. Senor Pico also appeared to want to cry, but instead kept looking at the senora's empty hands while she opened and closed them as though something had been yanked out of them.

Senora Valencia leaped up from the bed and ransacked one of her armoires for something proper to put on the little boy's body. She found an old lace and satin gown and matching bonnet in which she had been baptized as a child. Senor Pico took charge of changing his son into it without saying a word. The lace was browned and the satin shriveled with age, the gown too large for young Rafi.

Papi went for Father Vargas, the Dominican priest who said Masses at the chapel near the school, at the end of the almond path, a macadam road lined with almond trees. Rosalinda was awake in her mother's arms as the priest mumbled the final words to the little boy. "Rafael, from the sadness of death rises the joy of immortality. We release you into the arms of God. May you rest in eternity with your Maker."

"Padre." Senora Valencia put her trembling hands on the priest's shoulder. "Please say a blessing for my daughter, something that will protect her life."

Father Vargas traced a cross with his thumb on Rosalinda's forehead. The girl stirred, opening her mouth in a spacious yawn to receive the priest's blessing as Juana threaded her rosary through her fingers calling on Santa Agnes under her breath.

"Father, can you be at the family grave site at dawn tomorrow?" Senora Valencia asked. "My son will be buried next to my mother and my brother who died while he was being born."

The priest rested his own hand lightly on the senora's shoulder as if to calm her maternal distress with the power of Heaven flowing from the tips of his fingers.

"Please have him ready for tomorrow then," he said.

With the cane fire smoke still floating in the sky above their heads, the men went out to the garden to make Rafi a casket from the cedar that Papi kept piled behind the house. Senora Valencia watched from the patio as the jagged teeth of a saw drilled in and out of the wood, shaping her son's final bed.

Once the coffin was built, Senora Valencia was determined to do something herself for her lost child. She wanted to decorate the lid with red orchids before her son could be placed inside. The men carried the coffin to the old sewing room of Rafi's grandmother, where the body lay in repose behind the dreamy gauze of the lowered mosquito net framing the four-poster canopy bed, his hands crossed over his heart and a crystal rosary laced between his tiny fingers, the glassy beads spilling over onto the bedsheet like frozen tears.

Senora Valencia took her pencils, her paints, and her brushes out of their case and said, "Amabelle and Javier, stay. Pico, please go and see about Rosalinda."

Senor Pico did not want to go. He looked around the room, from the plain coffin to the ceiling, to the four-poster bed where Rafi was resting. He then used the back of his hands to wipe shadows of the coffin dust and a few bubbling tears from his eyes. Before the tears fell, however, he hurried out of the room, pulling the door shut behind him.

As soon as her husband was gone, Senora Valencia asked, "Why did my son die?" She looked up at Doctor Javier, her eyes reddened, somber. "You have examined the body, Javier. I want you to tell me why he died."

"It seems he simply lost his breath." Doctor Javier covered his face with his hands, aware as he must have been of the weak nature of his own explanation. "He stopped breathing. I thought Rosalinda was the one in danger, but he was the one whose strength failed."

"And Rosalinda?" She closed her eyes for a moment and rubbed her temples with her fingertips. "I know you cannot tell me if she will live or die," she said. "You could not do this with my son. But tell me, please, is she sad? Can they be sad so young?"

"If she is sad, it will not last for long," he said.

"You told me the children could not see me the first week, Javier. You said they could see only light and dark. Then, he never saw my face? I know he saw my face. Many times, he looked up at me, even smiled. Is this too much to hope, that he beheld my face and smiled at me too?"

I could tell he regretted having told her that. "What I told you is not true for all children," he said.

"I will go to his burial," she declared while sketching a large orchid in red pencil on the lid of the coffin. The wood was still damp from the varnish; her pencils slid off the surface.

"You should stay inside and observe your period of confinement," Doctor Javier said. "Do you want to risk your health and your daughter's, too?"

She sketched another large orchid. The paleness of the cedar showed through in the lines where the varnish had still not dried. "Javier, go to my husband and tell him my daughter will not die. He needs your assurance."

I stayed with Senora Valencia while she painted her father's orchid garden upon her son's coffin. On the sides, near the handles, she painted four small hummingbirds. Every once in a while she looked up at the mosquito net behind which her son lay, then continued with renewed devotion.

"Amabelle, today reminds me of the day Papi and I found you at the river." She wiped her paint-stained hands leaving red finger marks on the front of her housedress. "Do you remember that day?"

I did.

"After my mother's death, the house was so filled with her presence: her voice, her clothes," she said. "Papi and I went to visit some of his friends near Dajabon. Papi was more adventuresome then. He took me hunting for birds and taught me to shoot a rifle, as if I were the son who took Mami's life in childbirth. I told Papi I wanted to see the Massacre River where the French buccaneers were killed by the Spaniards in my history lesson.

"We went to the river and there you were, a bony little girl with bleeding knees. You were sitting on a big rock, watching the water as if you were waiting for an apparition. Papi paid one of the boys by the riverside to interpret for him while he asked you who you belonged to. And you pointed to your chest and said, yourself. Do you remember?"

I remembered.

Magenta-colored paint dripped on the floor as she added more to the coffin. We heard voices coming from the parlor, people arriving in small groups.

Senor Pico walked into the room and moved towards the carved posts on the old bed.

"Where's Rosalinda?" she asked him.

"Javier is examining her again," he said, moving closer to inspect the rainbow orchid paintings on the coffin.

"We cannot put him in the ground in this coffin," he said. "We have to make another."

"No, this is the one he'll have," she said. "He's a child. The coffin should be playful. I will drape something over it for the burial, one of Mami's lace tablecloths, one she never used. A beautiful one made from a fine French lace, Valenciennes lace."

"Many of our neighbors are here," he said, averting his eyes from the bed.

"I don't want them to see him," she said. "I don't want a wake for him. No wake, Pico. It would be too sad for such a short life."

"No wake." He bent down and kissed his wife on the side of her face.

"You go to them now," she said.

He shut the door and walked out to greet his neighbors.

"Do you believe in paradise, Amabelle?" she asked me.

I shrugged. I wasn't sure.

The coffin was now covered with a whirl of colors, one seeping into the other, like a sky full of twisted rainbows.

"Amabelle, I was so joyful when Papi said I could bring you to live with us," she said. "After my mother died, I was desperate for someone my age to come live with us in this house."

The mixed smell of wood varnish and different-colored paint made my head throb, and I imagined it did hers too. I removed the brushes from her fingers and pulled her hands away from the coffin. Somehow I envied her. At least she could place her hands on it, her son's final bed. My parents had no coffins.

17.

I am in my room listening for music in the trees, the flame tree pods flapping against each other as the hummingbirds squawk back in fear. They know the sound of flame tree pods in motion, the hummingbirds do, but it is a sound that shifts all the time, becoming muted or sharp with the strength of the wind.

I close the door and lock out the tame night breeze that barely reaches my bare body, naked because Sebastien has made me believe that it is like a prayer to lie unclothed alone the way one came out of the womb, but mostly because I am hoping to feel the sweat gather between the cement floor and the hollow in my back, so that when I rise up, there will be a flood of perspiration to roll down over my buttocks, down the front and back and between my thighs, down to my knees, shins, ankles, and toes, so that there will not be a drop of liquid left in me with which to cry.

18.

Dona Eva's birthday celebration became Rafi's unofficial wake. All of Dona Eva's guests from the Mass came to offer their felicitations for the child they could see and their silent condolences for the lost one. In spite of her earlier insistence that there would be no viewing of her son's body, Senora Valencia allowed anyone who asked to file past the bed where he lay, looking as proud of him in death as she would have been in life. During those moments when the friends and distant relations peeked through the mosquito gauze, sniffing with sadness and crossing themselves as they caught a glimpse of the pale round face of the boy child, Senora Valencia, sat alone in her room with her daughter in her arms, as if guarding her from bad thoughts and omens. And there I saw a stillness in her eyes similar to the dead boy's face, something like the shadow of a lost dream entering and leaving through her vacant stare.

In the parlor, Juana wore her rosary around her neck as she and I served cafecitos to the visitors. Many of the neighbors had not seen Rafi in life and were lamenting to one another the loss now marked on Senor Pico's face.

It was easy to tell how much Senor Pico wanted to be with his son, in the last hours that he could look at his face, hold him in his arms before he had to lay him in his coffin.

With a shiny black feather decorating her cloche hat, Dona Sabine's gaze stayed on Senor Pico as he looked towards the room where his son lay. Every now and again the senor's eyes would circle the room he was in, with no interest in what was being said. His eyes grew wider when someone smiled at him or addressed him by name, and occasionally he closed them and covered them with his fingers.

"You're so brave, both of you." Dona Eva's voice rose above the others. Dona Eva bore a great resemblance to both her daughter Beatriz, and her son, Doctor Javier-or rather they did to her-except Dona Eva's hair was crinkled like sawdust and mostly gray. Dona Eva strove against the natural curl of her hair by parting it in the middle and then coiling her tresses into two knots, one above each of her ears.

Senor Pico accepted Dona Eva's compliment about their bravery with a gracious but tired smile. Don Carlos, the mill owner, who was quite thin, was sitting on a wicker banquette between his wife and Dona Eva. Don Carlos had an abundance of veins showing under the surface of his sheer white skin. Sebastien had joked that if Don Carlos had as much money as he had veins bulging from his right hand alone, then he would own the whole island.

I tried not to look at his hands as I served Don Carlos his cafecito. Papi strolled to the radio and turned it on. A merengue by La Orquesta Presidente Trujillo came on and silenced the voices in the room. After three long patriotic songs, an announcer introduced fragments from a series of old speeches given on different occasions by the Generalissimo.

Senor Pico motioned for everyone to be quiet. He walked over to the radio and increased the volume, as though seeking comfort for his personal loss from the most powerful voice in the land, a voice that for all its authority was still as shrill as a birdcall.

"You are independent, and yours is the responsibility for carrying out justice," the Generalissimo shrieked. A buzzing hum intruded at many points, and some words, sometimes even whole phrases, were lost to the distance the transmission had to travel to Papi's radio.

"Tradition shows as a fatal fact," the Generalissimo continued, "that under the protection of rivers, the enemies of peace, who are also the enemies of work and prosperity, found an ambush in which they might do their work, keeping the nation in fear and menacing stability."

The neighbors listened, nodding their heads in agreement as the Generalissimo's voice rose, charged with certainty and fervor.

"The liberators of the nation did their part," the Generalissimo went on, "and we could not ask more of them. The leaders of today must play their parts also."

Doctor Javier got up to leave, excusing himself to his mother by whispering in her ear. Beatriz's eyes narrowed as she mouthed many of the Generalissimo's words, which it seemed she had heard recited before.

Papi slumped down in his chair and nodded off to sleep. Senor Pico stood staunch and erect as though about to charge across a field of battle. Juana threaded her rosary through her fingers while Luis, outside, listened through the shutters.

"My best friends are workers!" the Generalissimo shouted. "I came into office to work, and you will find me battling at every moment for the earnest desires of my people."

Kindly, the neighbors did not stay for long after the Generalissimo's radio broadcast ended. They filed out in small groups until only Senora Valencia and her husband were left.

Juana was entrusted with the care of Rosalinda, and the senor and senora sat in their room most of the evening. As he held her, she groaned now and then, trying not to cry too loudly. He did not know how to ease her pain, not very well in any case; he kept shifting as she tried to find a comfortable nook to claim for herself, her own place to sink into, within his arms. He was silent while she sobbed, not offering a word. Perhaps he was suppressing his own tears, but his silence seemed to me a sign of failure for this marriage, the abrupt union of two strangers, who even with time and two children-one in this world and one in the other-had still not grown much closer. The short courtship and the even shorter visits after marriage had not made them really familiar with each other. The senora did not know him well enough, nor he her. He was still learning his role now, and she hers, and perhaps neither of them imagined that this test would arrive to transform them from a newly joined pair to the parents of a dead child.

Finally she said, "You should bury his clothes before we bury him. This is something I would like you to do for me."

If he thought this strange, he raised no question at all. He got up abruptly and stretched.

"I will have to leave for the border soon," he said, "for that operation I spoke of earlier."

If she thought this a strange development, she too said nothing at all.

19.

You walk half a morning to get there, a narrow cave behind the waterfall at the source of the stream where the cane workers bathe. The cave is a grotto of wet moss, coral, and chalk that looks like marble. At first you are afraid to step behind the waterfall as the water in all its strength pounds down on your shoulders. Still you tiptoe into the cave until all you see is luminous green fresco-the dark green of wet papaya leaves. You hear no crickets, no hummingbirds, no pigeons. All you hear is water sliding off the ledge and crashing in a foamy white spray into the plunge pool below.

When the night comes, you don't know it inside the cramped slippery cave because the waterfall, Sebastien says, holds on to some memory of the sun that it will not surrender. On the inside of the cave, there is always light, day and night. You who know the cave's secret, for a time, you are also held captive in this prism, this curiosity of nature that makes you want to celebrate yourself in ways that you hope the cave will show you, that the emptiness in your bones will show you, or that the breath in your blood will show you, in ways that you hope your body knows better than yourself.

This is where Sebastien and I first made love, standing in this cave, in a crook where you feel half buried, although the light can't help but follow you and stay.

I have always wished for this same kind of light on the grave of my parents, but now I wish it also for both Joel and Rafael.

20.