Answer:
Step-by-step explanation:
Short story about a Haitian sculptor and her father who travel south from Brooklyn to Florida to drop off her first sale, a statue called “Father”, at the home of a formerly-jailed and tortured Haitian dissident, and his daughter, a television actress... The sculptor wakes up in a motel room on the morning of the delivery, and discovers her father, also a Haitian refugee, has disappeared with her sculpture... She talks with police... Once, when I was twelve, I overheard my mother telling a young woman who was about to get married how she and my father had first met on the sidewalk in front of Fort Dimanche the evening that my father was released from jail. (At a dance, my father had fought with a soldier out of uniform who had him arrested and thrown in prison for a year.) That night, my mother was returning home from a sewing class when he stumbled out of the prison gates and collapsed into her arms, his face still bleeding from his last beating. They married and left for New York a year later. When the actress calls, she lies to her and tells her she will deliver the sculpture tomorrow... The woman tells her “Papa kept track of days there by scraping lines with his fingernails on the walls of his cell. One of the guards didn’t like this, so he pulled out all his fingernails with pliers.” I think of the photo spread I saw in the Haitian Times of Gabrielle Fonteneau and her parents in their living room in Tampa. Her father was described as a lawyer, his daughter’s manager; her mother a court stenographer. There was no hint in that photograph of what had once happened to the father. Perhaps people don’t see anything in my father’s face, either, in spite of his scars. “We celebrate his birthday on the day he was released from prison,” she says. “It’s the hands I love so much in your sculpture. They’re so strong.” When the sculptor’s father returns, he takes her to a pond where he disposed of the sculpture...... “Annie, when I saw your mother the first time, I was not just out of prison. I was a guard in the prison. One of the prisoners I was questioning had scratched me with a piece of tin. I went out to the street in a rage, blood all over my face. I was about to go back and do something bad, very bad. But instead comes your mother. I smash into her, and she asks me what I am doing there. I told her I was just let go from prison and she held my face and cried in my hair.” “And the nightmares, what are they?” “Of what I, your father, did to others.” “Does Manman know?” “I told her, Annie, before we married.” They have lunch with the celebrity despite not having the sculpture, and the woman is puzzled when they break the news to her... I want to promise her that I will make her another sculpture, one especially modelled on her father. But I don’t know when I will be able to work on anything again. I have lost my subject, the father I loved as well as pitied. In the garden, I watch my father snap a white orchid from its stem and hold it out toward Mrs. Fonteneau, who accepts it with a nod of thanks. “I don’t understand,” Gabrielle Fonteneau says. “You did all this for nothing.” With each step her father rubs the scars on the side of his face. Perhaps the last person my father harmed had dreamed this moment into my father’s future—his daughter seeing those marks, like chunks of warm plaster still clinging to a cast, and questioning him about them, giving him a chance to either lie or tell the truth. After all, we have the proverb, as my father would say: “Those who give the blows may try to forget, but those who carry the scars must remember.”