by Alice Walker
And her mother? I asked.
That ceremony comes even earlier; it would have happened the week before. You can see that the women have already been here. The floor is swept, there is water in the water jar. The blanket is spread out on the floor. You and I will gather firewood and find food. Or you and I would have done so, he said.
Manuelito cleared his throat.
Is it satisfactory to you, Señor? he asked.
Years ago, of course, it would not have been. This hovel, I would have scoffed. This cave?
It is perfect, my son, I said.
If it is okay, he said, we can begin.
From a distance I could see something, someone moving. Nearer, I saw it was a woman, riding a black horse. Nearer still, I saw that it was Magdalena. Not Magdalena the twisted, Magdalena the furious and obese, Magdalena the grotesque. But Magdalena as she was before she began to eat so much. Magdalena the tall and supple, Magdalena the self-possessed, both willful and serene. She was incredibly beautiful; and I was shocked to think I’d never really noticed this. Her skin was very dark, the color, truly, of chocolate. Bittersweet. Her eyes very large and daring; her “big” head of hair wild as the wind. She was wearing a low-cut, very white blouse; her full green skirt was hitched up so that her thighs gleamed in the sun. It was as if I had never seen her ride before; she and the horse were one.
For a long time I watched her approach, moving very fast, but arriving very slowly.
I looked at Manuelito, whose eyes were devoted solely to the approach of my daughter, his whole face shining with love. So bright was his whole being that I felt almost burned by it, and had to look away.
There is something that I think I forgot to tell you, Señor, he said.
What is that? I asked.
It is about the five places that are kissed.
Yes? I said.
There are actually more than that. Seeing Magdalena made me remember them.
What are they? I asked.
They are the palms of the hands, because our hands serve us faithfully always. And our feet, because they carry us to our destiny. They are kissed on the arch, he added. He looked caressingly toward my daughter thundering toward us on her black horse, deliberately arriving in slow motion, I realized, for his, and her, enjoyment of the moment. It was taking so long I thought I’d make a joke.
Will she ever actually get here? I asked.
Manuelito laughed.
Not before you are ready, he said, soberly.
I’m ready, I said.
No, he said. I also forgot to explain one other thing. And that is about the light.
The light? I asked. Looking about me and realizing there was a lot of it.
Yes, he said. Remember how we kiss all the places that let in the light? And remember how you didn’t understand about the moon?
Moonlight, I said. I got it.
No, Señor, that is not quite it.
I don’t got it? I said, jokingly.
No. And it is a rather long story, now that I think of it.
My daughter looks pretty eager to be here, I said.
She is eager to be here, to be with me and with you. But she will not come before we’re ready. Please, he said, help me not to fail at my job.
Okay, I said.
In the first place, he said, you should know that my mother and father have already welcomed Magdalena, so she is really coming home. She has been kissed everywhere with much tenderness; her breasts have been blessed. This would have been done when the moon was full, and my father’s part would have been done after the kissing and the blessing. But my mother’s part would have involved telling Magdalena the story of woman and the moon. Of how woman is connected to it and shares its rhythms. That a woman’s tides, her blood tides, connect with the moon. That this is how women know in their bodies that they are a part of everything, even something so distant as the moon.
But how are men to know this? asked Manuelito, looking pensively at me.
It was my turn to shrug.
The Mundo thought long about this question, he said. And they studied the sky for a sign that they, those who were men, were connected also. You know how much we hate to be left out! He laughed.
Why do you laugh? I asked.
Because it was right there all the time!
What? I asked.
The moon! he said. The very same moon. Finally, after who knows how many millennia, they got it. And this, Manuelito said, still smiling, is what they finally got. A woman, living in nature, is full when the moon is full, no? And if a lot of women live together, they and the moon are full at the same time; when the moon releases and begins to wane, that is when they release their blood. It is powerful, this connection, no? Now, during this time, a man may not make love to a woman. She feels somewhat irritable, somewhat messy, though she does not mind, since she and the moon are sharing, as they say, a big moment. But for sure there is a period in there when woman just naturally does not want to be bothered! I remember that my mother, during such times, would actually throw things at my father!
Ah, Manuelito, I said with regret, what an idiot I feel not to have really gotten to know them.
Señora Robinson knew them, he said. She and my mother were rather alike. Anyway, he said, there is a period of recovery from the “big moment” that women have had with the moon, when men are unsure how or whether they will be received; then there is a period when sexual contact must be avoided unless one wants children, and every Mundo person knows we cannot support very many. We love to make love, though, so we are somewhat gloomy during this time. Manuelito pantomimed this condition, the corners of his mouth turned down. Then, he said, there is the dark of the moon, when not a whole lot is happening either! But then, he said, brightening, just when the men have given up hope, the moon appears again. And in our eyes, it appears as a smile! Very tentative at first, but pretty soon, a wide grin! For by now the women are totally receptive. It is a good time to make love!
Manuelito laughed merrily. We are so relieved, Señor! And this, the Mundo believe, is man’s connection to the moon. The crescent moon, which is sometimes like a bowl or a boat, is the moon smiling its light on the good lovemaking that is to come! The moon, while forever a woman, for just a little while becomes, also, a man! (That is why, when you spoke to us about a man in the moon, it was not a foreign concept.)
If you are in love, and going to meet your lover, to make love, you think of the moon as a father, happily looking down on you. For Mundo fathers are happy that their children, the girls as well as the boys, enjoy what your culture calls sex. And that is why a young girl sings, as she goes to her lover, just as does a young boy: “by the light of my father’s smile!” And that is why no one among the Mundo would marry when the moon is full, but only when it has waned and then reappears, as a smile in a dark face, in the sky!
I finally got it. That this was what my poor daughter had been singing about, all those years ago! “Por la luz … por la luz …” I could still hear her despairing cry. There had been an element of pleading in her song that I had ignored. She had been begging me to see, to witness, the light that she had found. To love and bless what she loved. But I had refused. I had brought her to a culture and a people I’d claimed to respect. She had fallen in love with them, and been betrayed when I myself stopped short. When I myself, in her eyes, had regressed.
She had been flying across the mountain slopes on the back of the shining black stallion before us, secure among these “alien” people, yearning body and soul for the shelter and passion of Manuelito’s arms, believing that the moon was with her, and so perhaps her own father might be. But she was, unfortunately, the daughter of a fool. I had failed her and without reason destroyed her life.
Manuelito, I said, I wish I were dead.
Ah, you are now ready, Señor, he said.
In the blink of an eye, the black stallion, Vado, reared in our faces, and a triumphant Magdalena jumped from his back.
Fathers
My name is Father, I said to her, when I found myself looking into her eyes. I am the father watching over you, the daughter that I love. She appeared mutely humble, hearing this, for so ebullient a soul. Her gratitude so raw that had I felt it in life, I am sure it would have made me bleed.
When the time came, and I knelt before her, I kissed not only her palms and the arches of her feet, which seemed to buzz with energy, but also her knees. Because, after all, it is to our knees that we must sometimes be driven, before we can recognize, witness, or welcome our own light.
Light
It was like Susannah to die of old age, at home, in bed, in her sleep, and while dreaming!
Of what were you dreaming? I asked her, as we watched the gathering of her friends, some with plates of food in their hands, coming into her house and into her room.
Oh, she said, smiling, I was dreaming of Anand, and the way that we met.
Anand?
Yes, she said. He is the man in the corner, with the wonderful white mustache, weeping. He is also the brother of the man I married. You recall Petros, no?
Believe me, the recollection is vague by now, I said.
She laughed.
I met Anand the day we disinterred the body of Irene’s mother and reburied it on a hillside overlooking the sea.
Susannah’s had been a life that, to my regret, and because of my own need to cause her suffering, I knew little about, no matter that the Mundo thought the dead knew everything. Curious, I urged her to continue.
Oh, it is a long story, she said, but we have a long time. I will tell it to you. By the time she got to the digging up of the trunk in which Irene’s nameless mother was buried, I was almost in tears.
Her mother’s trunk was just like the one at the foot of my bed, she said, inviting me, with a gesture, to look. Petros sold that one to me for a dollar and twenty kisses. He was ashamed of it because it was crude. But, in fact, it was crude only because he did not understand its value.
And what was that? I said, peering more critically at the large cedar chest with carved flowers and mountains and rivers all over it. While I looked, a very old woman, even older-looking than my sister, with snowy dreadlocks to her knees, sank down upon the trunk, weeping.
Ah, said Susannah, Pauline. Is there nothing I can do to solace her?
The only way to solace anyone who loved you in life is to be a good memory, I said.
No kidding, she said, reflectively.
It is large, I said, imagining Petros dragging the heavy trunk all the way from Greece.
Yes, said Susannah. And for good reason. In the old days the trunk or chest contained everything a young woman took with her when she married and left her parents’ house. It contained linen and silver, her clothes, her small spindle, even her cooking pots and pans. By attaching two curved pieces of wood underneath, that fit neatly inside the trunk when not in use, its owner could turn it into a cradle. During her marriage, and after her babies were big, she kept everything she valued inside it. When she died, she was buried in it.
And so, I said, Irene’s mother was buried in her portable coffin!
Or in her cradle, said Susannah.
On the low, simple wooden bed, Susannah wore a long green nightgown, beautifully embroidered. Her thin white hair was in a dozen plaits with red ribbon wrapped around them, and rested on her chest. In one hand was a feather, in the other a green jellybean. Several of her friends, who appeared haggard, as if they’d sat with her all night, were slowly beginning to stir. Anand rose from his vigil in the corner and approached the bed.
At first I thought he was Petros, said Susannah, looking tenderly at him. They resemble each other so much. I think I thought so all the while I watched him and the other men digging up Irene’s mother’s body. But then, when we were having the ceremony of reburial, and he joined the women dancing, I realized it couldn’t be. He was dancing and weeping, right along with us!
He weeps a lot, I said.
He’s so heavy! she said. It’s true. When we got to know each other and became lovers and then just good, comfortable old friends, I used to listen to his stories about his work among the poor and among battered women and children and in the refugee camps—apparently there are always refugee camps in Greece—and I would think how his deep concern for people, his taking on of moral burdens, which meant he could never abandon Greece, made Petros seem like Anand Lite.
She laughed. One too light, the other too heavy, she said.
And Pauline just right?
With time, yes, she said. She needed only to honor her own sovereignty and to relearn tenderness.
She should get up off the trunk, I said, so that they can put you in it.
My trunk is my house, she said. But I do care a great deal for the one Petros sold me. His mother gave it to him, even though he was a boy, because she lost all her daughters while they were babies. He lugged it off to America, but was eager to get rid of it. I had an instinct that it would have a history I would uncover someday.
Susannah did not seem at all surprised that we were having this conversation in the same room in which she lay dead.
No, she said, reading my thoughts, nothing surprises me anymore. Once you’ve smelled an orange or really seen a tree, what could surprise you?
Poor Irene, I said, thinking of her small friend.
She wanted to see her mother’s face, said Susannah. I thought it was probably not a good idea. Anand thought it was not. But she insisted. That meant opening the trunk.
She sighed.
And? I asked.
They had bound her mother’s hands and feet. She was all in black. They had placed a black shroud over her head.
Black is beautiful, I said, sarcastically.
When it is the truth, yes, said Susannah. That was its only beauty in this situation.
And Irene?
She died within the month.
No, I said.
Susannah shrugged. She was old, and frail, she said sadly. Sighing, she continued. She was so small, so alone, so fierce, so loving, and her people did everything they could to hurt her. It is beyond belief.
It is a woman’s life, I said.
As we watched, Susannah’s friends began to cover her bed, and her body, with the boughs of trees. I looked around the small room where she lay.
I thought you’d have a more splendid house, I said.
My splendid house was crushed by an even more splendid tree, she replied. I learned to live, contentedly, in the lesson I was taught by that loss.
Aren’t you curious about why I am here? I asked. Or about our parents, or Manuelito?
As she was pondering this, I thought of all of them.
Of teaching my savvy mother how to cross the river. Of the way I felt when my father blessed me. After the blessing, he simply vanished. I was left alone with Manuelito. We kissed. We were still kissing when I found myself in Susannah’s room watching her die. From the look of things, especially from the look of Susannah’s white hair and very old body, decades had passed. This meant, had to mean, that Manuelito was also gone.
Remember, Magdalena, Manuelito had told me, that it is true, as the Mundo believe, that eternity is forever. But at the same time, it is only as long as there is need.
Our eternity together had been long and blissful. Now it was over. Like any other love affair. This thought made me laugh.
What’s the joke? asked Susannah.
What’s not the joke? I replied.
Looking more closely at the contents of my sister’s room, I saw that there were stacks and piles of papers and books. Notebooks of all colors and sizes. Copies of her published books, videos, recordings of her readings. Her friends were slowly and methodically pouring oil over everything.
When it burns, said Susannah, it will smell of frankincense. She seemed delighted, like a child in anticipation of a marshmallow roast.
You can’t mean what I think you mean, I said, as we watched every person, even the little c
hildren, bring in more dry twigs, branches of fir trees, dead leaves, and straw.
She nodded.
But, Susannah, I said, this is your legacy!
Magdalena, she said, you are here because you are sorry you deliberately led me astray such a very long time ago. That is all the legacy I need.
But you won’t be remembered, I said, somewhat desperately for a ghost.
It is the need to be remembered that has caused most of the trouble in the world, she said. Most of the conquering. Destruction of what is natural. War.
Well, your books are in libraries, I said. So your gesture is symbolic.
Yes, she said. Unfortunately.
Only her face and her hands were now visible, underneath everything that had been piled on top of her. Her friends came slowly forward, a final time, to touch her and to say good-bye. Finally only Anand and Pauline remained. With a look at Anand, Pauline left the room. Out of respect, while he knelt beside Susannah, his old bones creaking, I looked away. Soon Pauline returned, and Anand left the room. Again, I looked away. When next I looked, it was to see that Susannah’s body was alone in the room, and that Pauline had cut off and left, draped across the mound of dry straw, fir branches, and leaves, the full length of her dreadlocked white hair.
The flames from her burning house were bright and reminded me of a poem:
When life descends into the pit
I must become my own candle
willingly burning myself
to light up the darkness around me.
To you, victorious
who taught me
fuzz of peach
wet of pear
light of owl
shine of
bear.
This scandalous
prayer of
