Breath, Eyes, Memory: Chapter 35 Summary & Analysis

When Sophie arrives home, Brigitte is sleeping in Joseph’s arms. He puts her down in the bedroom, then comes back into the room and plays Sophie a message off the answering machine. It is from Marc, for Sophie, urging her to call him about Martine. Marc’s voice is quivering. Sophie immediately panics, telling Joseph that her mother was planning on having an abortion today. Joseph urges Sophie to keep calm and call Marc, but when she does, she gets only his machine. The next morning at 6:00, Marc calls back—sobbing, he tells Sophie that Martine is dead.

Sophie asks Marc to tell her what happened, and Marc explained that in the middle of the previous night, he woke up to find Martine out of bed. He went back to sleep, not thinking anything of it, but several hours later when she was still not back, he went to look for her in the bathroom. He found her on the floor, covered in blood, with a “mountain of sheets” laid out on the floor—Martine had stabbed herself in the stomach, with an “old rusty knife,” 17 times. Martine died in the ambulance on the way to the hospital, after telling the paramedics that she could not carry the baby. 

Sophie screams at Marc for sleeping through her mother’s suicide, but Marc protests that he tried to save her and then asks where Sophie was when her mother needed her most. Sophie hangs up the phone and falls into Joseph’s arms. Moments later, she runs upstairs and begins packing for New York, while Joseph agrees to stay behind with Brigitte.

At Martine and Marc’s house, Sophie finds an odd air of calm—but is disturbed by the trail of blood left behind on the stairs. Marc tries to talk to Sophie about the plans for Martine’s burial in La Nouvelle Dame Marie, but Sophie is determined not to breathe a single word to Marc.

That night, Sophie calls Joseph and tells him she needs to go to Haiti—alone—to bury her mother. That night, in her mother’s apartment, Sophie fights off “evil thoughts.” In the morning, Marc suggests she pick out an outfit for her mother to be buried in—she picks out a bright-red suit. Marc balks at the choice, but Sophie is firm. After a viewing at a local funeral home, Sophie calls Joseph one last time before getting on the plane to Haiti. She asks if Brigitte is sleeping, and he says that she’s not sleeping so well without Sophie.

Marc accompanies Sophie to Haiti. They do not sit together on the plane, though they ride in the hearse together from Port-au-Prince to La Nouvelle Dame Marie. At the market in the village, Marc is wide-eyed and frightened of the Macoutes—but the villagers greet Sophie “as though [she has] lived there all [her] life.”

As Sophie approaches Granmè Ifé’s house, she sees her grandmother sitting on the porch. She wonders if Granmè Ifé has been sitting there since she got the telegram warning her of the news—but as she hugs her grandmother, she tells Sophie that she knew of Martine’s death in her bones before the letter came, and even sensed her pregnancy. Tante Atie, dressed all in black, embraces Sophie too. That night, Marc, Sophie, Granmè Ifé, and Tante Atie have a private wake. As they sing mourning songs, Sophie realizes that the “mother-and-daughter motifs” of the stories she grew up with don’t come from the women in her family—rather, they are something “essentially Haitian.” That night, Sophie sleeps alone in her mother’s bed.

After collecting Martine’s body at the funeral home and looking at her face one last time, the group follows her coffin up the hill and through the market to the cemetery. A small procession joins them, and by the time they reach the gravesite, many villagers and mourners shake gourd rattles, blow conch shells, and beat drums as the priest sings a funeral song. As the rites end and men begin shoveling dirt into Martine’s grave, Sophie runs away from the cemetery, tearing her dress as she speeds down the hill. She runs into a cane field, attacking the sugar cane with her shoes until her hands bleed. Soon, she hears her grandmother’s voice shouting for her, and Tante Atie’s voice echoing the call: “Ou libere?”

Sophie reflects on the place she comes from, and the stories the women there tell their children—stories that “frighten and delight them.” Sophie thinks of the lanterns in the hills, and the beloved faces that “recreate the same unspeakable acts that they themselves lived through.” Here, nightmares are passed down “like heirlooms,” and the past is something women carry through the ages. Sophie thinks of all the tales of butterflies, birds, and women who could not stop bleeding. She decides that her mother was the woman from the latter tale, a woman just like Sophie herself.

In the cane field, Granmè Ifé approaches the distraught Sophie and tells her of a place “where the daughter is never fully a woman until her mother has passed on before her.” In this place, she tells Sophie, if one listens closely in the night, one can hear one’s mother telling a story. At the end, she will always ask the same question: “Ou libere?” Granmè Ifé calms Sophie, assuring her that now, she knows how to answer.