Waiting for Tomorrow

by Nathacha Appanah

  This cousin of hers, a woman who worked at night and slept by day, was afraid of everything: blacks, Sri Lankans, Romanians, motorbikes, young people, elderly whites pulling their shopping carts in the mornings, dogs, and the full moon. Anita remained a prisoner in that apartment for a week and it was there she wrote her first “New Poem.” There was no bird now, no blue sky. Instead grayness, metal, sulfur, bitter smells. The very things that François Sol finds thrilling.

  Just now, having slapped that boy, having seen him put his hand to his cheek with a theatrically questioning look in his eyes (et tu, Anita?), she had muttered some words of apology and locked herself in the bathroom.

  What is the matter with her? After all, she had been eager to come with Christophe that evening, she had drunk two glasses of the excessively strong punch, she had danced, she had thought about her parents, a notion that had swollen like a balloon in her stomach, colliding gently with her heart, making her want to cry. She had kissed Christophe. She liked him (a pleasant feeling that did not take up too much space within her) but then she had ruined everything. She would have liked to be able to explain to him, run past him again the film of them fondling one another and then stop it at precisely the moment when Christophe’s hand slides up under her skirt and she becomes the incarnation of the phrase simply in self-defense. I didn’t mean to do it, she would explain, it was just a reflex.

  Anita looks around the bathroom. She does not know it yet, but this is her strength, she knows how to look: color, shade, shape, appearance, material, shadow, light, precise terms for things (mixer faucet, pedestal washbowl). Diverse objects (a large green plastic apple for storing cotton balls) take their places in a corner of her brain (that creature with a thousand lights, portals, hiding places, and passageways), go into hibernation, and are later reborn in a short story, a poem, the draft for a novel, an article.

  She stands up, catches her reflection in the mirror. If she turns her head to the left she will see her father; if she screws up her eyes and smiles, she will encounter her mother’s features. She would so much like to be spending this New Year’s Eve with them, to be sitting on the veranda looking across at her parents. They would be listening to the radio, they would be reading, her mother would have gotten the three glasses ready, and the bottle of sparkling wine, her father would have taken out the fireworks for them to set off at midnight. What is the sky like on the other side of the world? How are the stars shining? Are her parents thinking of her at this very moment?

  A bird on a branch, an innocent blue sky.

  No, of course, she has no desire to become that Anita again (she thinks about herself as of a child, tenderly). But she would like to cease being what she is now, this girl forever rushing in, exaggerating her features, violating language. She washes her face vigorously with soap, rinses it with cold water, and spreads a dab of Nivea cream, found in the cupboard above the bathtub, over her skin. She looks at herself and on her face there is a hint of what she once was. Her eyes grow misty with tears. Homesickness overcomes her again.

  Escape.

  Anita needs to escape. She feels unwell. She staggers out of the bathroom, the music seems to be erupting on all sides, she is looking for the exit. She is looking for her coat. She does not want to go onto the dance floor, she collides with bodies (Watch out, Anita! she hears). She shrinks away and ends up on a sofa. She buries herself beneath the pile of garments, covers her ears, she’d just like to hear a jazz tune played on the piano, for a long time she does not stir.

  Until.

  I don’t belong here.

  Yes, that’s it. That’s it precisely.

  It takes her a few seconds to realize that she was not the one who had said it (she thought it was the voice inside her head). There is someone else on the sofa. And this person says it again.

  I don’t belong here.

  Before the new year discovers them locked in an unexpected embrace that will turn out to be amazingly sweet and delicious (Adam will think of his father, of their wooden house, of the silence of the forest on a snowy night, he will like her scent of vanilla and freshness; Anita will think of her parents, a jazz tune on a piano, she will like his scent of timber and salt: they will feel good), before the countdown to midnight is yelled by everybody at the tops of their voices, at the other end of the house, before they look at one another for the first time, she will finally smile at that repeated “I don’t belong here” and will reply:

  Welcome to the club, my friend.

  An oddly matched couple

  YOU COULD CALL THEM AN ODDLY MATCHED COUPLE. He is very tall with fine chestnut-colored hair that turns gold in sunlight. His body is slim, knotty in places, and his long-distance-runner’s legs are superb. His face is fairly ordinary but there is something in his gaze that inspires trust, an openness, a show of innocence. She is petite with black hair that reaches to her waist. Her face is round, the color of gingerbread, her skin is as smooth as a baby’s, her brow is wide, her eyes shine when she speaks. She does not know how to swim, he does not know how to climb trees. He loves rugby, she does not begin to understand it. He talks to her about the “poilus” in the trenches, the resistance, about André and Maurice, his absolute heroes; she tells him the story of her great-grandfather arriving on the island of Mauritius to take over from the slaves on the sugar plantations. She finds it unthinkable that anyone could eat headcheese, he finds it unthinkable that anyone should eat hot peppers; he finds the expression “a woman of color” quite charming, she thinks it is the language of colonialism; he does not know what a banyan is, she would not recognize a stone pine.

  They live in a studio apartment on the third floor of a squat building behind the Gare du Nord train station. The walls are vivid yellow. Each has a corner to work in. Over here an easel, a stool, tubes of paint, palettes, brushes, canvases, over there a desk, notebooks, books, pens. They are amazed at how they are able to work and create side by side. They are convinced that this rare ease is one of the reasons why they have made the right choice, one that will endure and flourish.

  In summer the light bounces off the yellow walls and the two of them feel as if they are living inside the sun itself. They make love on the floor, they fall asleep almost naked on a quilt decorated with images of the setting sun, a fisherman, and a leaping swordfish, with perfectly arched sprays of water.

  But summer is far away now. This is early January and freezing rain is falling outside. Anita wakes up. A certain haziness envelops her, something rather like a blurred photograph. It is that special moment, delicate and fleeting, between night and the early hours before dawn. Anita places a hand upon her stomach. She is pregnant.

  From time to time bursts of freezing rain beat against the window. Anita thinks the sound resembles that made by the first drops of rain on a corrugated tin roof, but she is not certain. This doubt causes her to frown—she is used to memories, comparisons, and parallels flooding in easily, she is used to her mind functioning swiftly and well, to it traveling to and fro between here, this city, and back there, that island. Since she left Mauritius almost ten years ago, she has returned to her island only once, she went with Adam. That was three months ago, her father, Philip, had just died. For thirteen days Anita did not say a word to Adam, did not weep, and asked only questions of her mother. She would rise at dawn, take her shower, gulp down a cup of tea, and go out. Because she had not been able to see him, to touch him, because the mound of the grave, the white cross, the plants in pots, were not her father, Anita wanted to comprehend everything. She opened a new notebook and embarked on a long, exhausting investigation. She questioned her mother, the neighbors, the priest, the fisherman, Alphonse, who had found her father’s body, policemen, her mother all over again. She covered page after page with her tiny, tightly compressed handwriting. She spent almost two weeks dissecting seconds, fitting minutes together, going back over gestures, analyzing actions, stopping time. She worked like a laboratory technician, split second by split second. She wanted
to know how a man who wakes at 5:00 every morning and has followed the same rituals for decades (hot lemon juice, thirty minutes of yoga, fifteen minutes of exercises, a cold shower, breakfast on the veranda with his wife) can die like a dog in the gutter, one Sunday morning on his way to 7:00 mass.

  Philip had chosen to wear chocolate-colored pants and the white shirt with the Mao collar he was particularly fond of. He had put on moccasins and was wearing his beige panama hat with a ribbed hatband the color of tobacco. His elegance had not stopped him being mown down by a huge vehicle (a truck or a bus, no one can confirm this, but a lot of people heard a metallic clatter and the sound of a rusty engine) between 6:50—the time at which he had left the house—and 7:05, when the fisherman Alphonse had found him in the gutter. He still had his moccasins on his feet but his panama hat was found several yards away.

  Anita had read and reread her notes until she knew them by heart. She had visualized everything, ticked all the boxes, in the hope of filling the empty spaces in her head and her heart, but she would never know everything.

  She would never know how her father had observed the dawn slowly rising above the eucalyptus and mango trees. She would never know how much he had thought about her when the sunlight glowed on the dahlias, the zinnias, the hollyhocks, the pansies, the orange crocuses, the snapdragons, the viburnum, the frangipani tree, the arbor covered in white bougainvillea, the three steps leading to the veranda, the dog. She would never know what his last thoughts were before that terrible roar obliterated everything.

  On the fourteenth day, she came back home and called out to her mother, who did not hear her. Then she went into her parents’ bedroom and there, placed on her father’s desk, she saw the panama hat for the first time. Something gave way within her and she began screaming.

  Sarita, her mother, was under the mango tree, comfortably ensconced in an old wicker rocking chair, and was watching Adam repairing the other four armchairs in the set. She and Philip had bought this furniture long before Anita’s birth, long before sofas covered in velvet or leatherette had begun to fill up living rooms. The previous day Adam had spent long hours with the village carpenter and now he was scraping, varnishing, adding strips of bamboo to the bases, strengthening the legs with scraps of wood. He worked with a dexterity that his stature would never have led one to expect. His big hands, his broad shoulders, his immense legs—how did he manage to coordinate them with this mixture of grace, efficacy, and intelligence? He had dyed two bundles of raffia with indigo blue (he had told her that in French this was also called Indian blue)—what was he going to do with it? Sarita watched him with that mixture of wonder, nervousness, and curiosity normally reserved for newborn babies. During the previous thirteen days Adam had been discreetly taking things in hand: repairing the drainpipe; rubbing down the wooden balustrade on the veranda and painting it red; oiling the entrance gate; trimming the bamboo hedge; pruning the bougainvilleas; digging out weeds; mowing the lawn; fitting new padlocks; cleaning out and repainting Dog’s kennel. He would start in the morning, once Anita had gone out, and he worked with assurance, unhurriedly, as if he had always been familiar with the local materials, the local ways of doing things, the local flowers and plants. At first Sarita followed him with her eyes and kept her distance, then she would venture an opinion (red rather than blue for the veranda), a piece of advice (better to buy the padlocks at the second hardware store rather than the first). Finally she would go up to him to give encouragement, to offer him a drink, to ask him if he preferred his fish well fried or just lightly, to suggest that he have a rest, go swimming, take a walk. She was aware, even as she counted off the minutes, hours, and days that now lay between her and her husband, even though in the evenings a great gulf of grief and loneliness opened up, even though despair and helplessness overwhelmed her when she saw Anita going out every morning, she was aware of the good this young man was doing her.

  Sarita and Adam were in the garden when they heard Anita’s cry. They looked at one another but were not surprised. Simply relieved. They had never mentioned it, but while Anita was going through the same actions over and over again, following the same path back and forth, asking the same questions again and again, reading and rereading her notes, the two of them, each in their own way, in their heads, in their hearts, were waiting for her grief to come, for her tears to flow, as one waits for a ripe fruit to fall of its own accord.

  As Sarita went into the house to take her daughter in her arms at last, Adam went back to work. He threaded the strands of raffia in and out of the bamboo, and caught himself thinking that he was using the same actions here, on the shores of the Indian Ocean, as his father, when he was repairing the tarpaulin that protected his supply of logs back at home, on the shores of the Atlantic. This notion gave him a pleasant feeling of fulfillment. He felt rooted in the earth—over here or back there, it was all the same. As his hands worked without stopping, following the blue raffia, in, out, in, out, the notion itself was embodied within them, and it was as if he were working with water, sand, salt, earth, wind, and sky.

  Later on, during the night, Sarita heard the floor creak. Something infinitely discreet like a grasshopper’s feet on a mango leaf. Sarita recognized her daughter’s footsteps as she went to be with Adam in his room (the same tiny sound as when, in childhood, she had gone to finish off the chocolate cake in the fridge or to wait outside the door for Santa Claus). She smiled.

  Three months later, in her bed, Anita is breathing deeply. She no longer wants to weep for her father, for the time being she no longer wants to think about her island. There is this new life making itself known, this warm and sweet aspect of existence, she wants to concentrate on what she oddly visualizes as a kidney bean in her lower belly … She forgets about the sound of the freezing rain, which may or may not resemble the first drops falling on a corrugated tin roof.

  Without Anita being aware of it, the minor memories of her homeland are slowly fading—those intimate details that linger not in the head, but on the skin and in the pit of the stomach: the exact color of the sugarcane flowers in June, the sensation of perfectly cooked rice in one’s mouth, the taste of a water ice or a syrup ice, the sound of rain on a corrugated tin roof.

  Anita is twenty-nine and she has agreed to leave Paris to go and settle in the region where Adam lived as a child. She will not finish her internship in the editorial department of a women’s magazine, she will no longer hear the metal shutters grinding open at the grocery at 7:00 in the morning, she will no longer attend monthly lectures on philosophy in the bookstore on the rue des Écoles (near the Sorbonne), she will never be that nervous, aspiring writer arriving on foot to deliver her manuscript, no longer will she go to eat an Indian thali up near the Gare du Nord, nor join the queue for free entry to a museum on the first Sunday of the month, along with the students, penniless dreamers, impoverished intellectuals, and lonely old teachers. But isn’t it a kind of immaturity, to be thinking about such things, such minutiae, when you are being given the opportunity to make a fresh start in life? A wooden house designed by the man you love, marriage, a child! Anita bridles at this unwelcome notion, shot through as it is with guilt at submitting to tradition, to Adam, to motherhood, to the law of nature. She bridles at the prospect of becoming a woman like so many others.

  Anita turns toward Adam and is touched once more by his way of sleeping, his body straight, his knees slightly bent, both hands folded beneath his ear, his back toward her. Soon this great body she cherishes will spring into action but every night there he is, as if laid gently upon the bed, and in the morning, for several minutes, there is this perfect imprint upon the sheets. Why does she believe she does not completely deserve this man who is so tall, so responsible, so reassuring, so appealing? She thinks back to that New Year’s Eve five years ago (their frantic dash out of the house in Montreuil, wearing clothes that were not their own, a black fake fur overcoat, a woolen jacket the color of tobacco, a green scarf, a gray hat, a houndstooth-checked cap
; that marvelous moment beneath the Arc de Triomphe), and reflects that it will make a good story to tell this little kidney bean. Nothing else really matters, does it? She will be able to return to work with some local publishing company. She will have a real study and time, at last, to write a novel, she will be able to go strolling through the forest or at the water’s edge. A soft warmth envelopes her. Reassured, Anita goes back to sleep.

  A few minutes later Adam opens his eyes in his turn and looks around abruptly. Why is he so afraid that Anita may disappear from his life as suddenly as she appeared in it? All at once he thinks of their trip to Mauritius three months before and of that incredible night when Anita had finally gone to be with him in his room. He had woken up with the feeling of a body stretching out alongside his own, of a slim warm arm slipping over his stomach. Anita had loved him differently that night. Before that there had always been something she held back, a physical shyness he had learned to accept, but that night she had not closed her eyes, her gaze was open and frank. She was at home, she was within herself, as he was in her, too. She spoke to him in a new way, very softly, in his ear. And that caused a little explosion within him, one that set off colored fountains and brilliant lights for a long, long time.