Waiting for Tomorrow

by Nathacha Appanah

  Adam studies Anita as she sleeps, her hands folded over her stomach, and a marvelous feeling of well-being steals over him. That’s it! They are leaving Paris! They are expecting a child! No longer will Adam wake up in the middle of the night feverish and uneasy. He has had enough of the badly paid work in that architectural office. All the time tidying up sketches, limply taking part in the rearranging of a middle-class living room, estimating costs, finding solutions that provided what were called “good spatial connections.” Every day Adam devoted a disproportionate and perfectly useless amount of energy to fitting into the complex mechanism that is the office, there among the men, women, things, ambitions, desires, and backbiting. He knows he will never quite manage it. He is not outgoing, flamboyant, ambitious enough. His stature is an illusion. He is much too old-fashioned, too shy. Now that they have made the decision to move, Adam is happy. He can visualize perfectly the house he is going to build at the edge of the forest on the Atlantic shore. A wooden structure located in a clearing, a simple cube, with a veranda at the front, broad bay windows set in dark iron frames that will offer views of the forest in rectangular segments like a series of natural pictures. A red floor with broad planks for the veranda, a big farm table in the kitchen, a study for Anita on the western side, a vegetable garden, fruit trees, a studio for himself, apart from the house. Yes, he will finally be that Adam, the one he has always wanted to be, a man who designs his own house, who chooses the timber, the nails, the colors, the curvature of the staircases, a man who fashions the furniture where his child will sleep, where his wife will work, from which they will eat as a family. A man who will sustain his home, with all his strength and intelligence, and who, at his office in the town, will design other houses, other places of work, other structures that bring people together, an old-fashioned man, yes, and one who will keep a low profile alongside the talents of his wife (a poet! a journalist!), alongside her special, exotic beauty. Adam is strong, he feels invincible. He has the impression that the space he occupies in the world is growing, his size is asserting itself, and all this, far from choking him, reassures him. He is an ancient tree, his roots deeply embedded in the earth, his branches thrust high into the sky, casting a broad and reassuring shadow. Adam is, in short, a man. He goes back to sleep, satisfied.

  Some months later he is walking along the road that leads to his house. His footfalls are muted by pine needles, sand, and piles of grass. As he often does, Adam is scanning the forest edge on the lookout for a pinecone. He does not know why but for as long as he can remember he has always kept a sharp lookout for the perfect pinecone. If anyone had asked him to describe it he would not have been able to do so, he simply knows that in its color, its shape, the angle of the scales, the weight of it in the hand, the combination of rough and smooth to the touch, he would find in it what for him was the incarnation of perfection. He inhales deeply the smell he loves so much, a mixture of mown grass, salt spray, sweet sap, and freshly turned earth. Adam is home. He is joining his wife, whom he married two hours earlier at the town hall, his father, a few friends. He reaches the end of the path and the house is exactly as he had dreamed it. He has succeeded. Are not his hands more callused? Is not his back still aching? Is not his skin more deeply furrowed, like that of the people from these parts, like that of his father, who had also long ago built his house with his own hands? Adam remembers how, as a child, he loved to spend time on the construction site for their house while it was being built, playing amid all the tools, the freshly dug earth, the noise of the machinery, the masculine talk of the workmen. André, his father, never made a big song and dance about that house, he spoke about it as if it were something very simple to do: to be able to fit together logs, planks, rafters, beams, and tiles and shape them into something that holds together, that lasts and endures.

  Adam hears music, laughter, he hears Anita calling him. He has pins and needles in his legs, and a bounding heart, he wants to run up to her, to take her in his arms, to fly with her, to swallow her whole, her and the child, don’t they say that to love is to consume? But here she comes now, his wife (my wife! my wife! he says over and over again in his head, as if he had won the lottery, as if something extraordinary had happened to him). Wearing a pearl-gray silk dress, tight bodice, flowing skirt, round belly. She has let down her curly hair, which reaches to her waist. She had said she did not want flowers but had changed her mind at the last minute and had stopped on the way to gather wildflowers, which she has pinned here and there into her hair. She smiles at him, and holds out her hands. They are a happy couple who firmly believe that all their dreams have come true.

  “It’s the wedding cake moment,” she says with a laugh.

  “Now it’s up to us.”

  Anita takes his hands and looks at him solemnly.

  “Yes, it’s up to us now.”

  The studio apartment with its vivid yellow walls is just a memory. The city is far away. The island is far away. Childhood is over. We are in spring, on the Atlantic shore, where the pine forests come to a halt at the foot of the sand dunes. In a little while Adam and Anita will take a walk along the vast, broad beach that looks as if it were made from the gold of the sunset. In a few weeks’ time their daughter, Laura, will be born. Yes, now, more than ever, it is up to them.

  A stay-at-home mother

  ANITA IS THIRTY-TWO. She is as light as a feather, with all the delicacy and competence of a perfect homemaker. She has set up a big table in the garden and covered it with what is known as a “Basque” tablecloth—white with red stripes. Since living in the country she has learned the names of these unfamiliar—and even strange—things. Basque tablecloth, Gien porcelain, Louis XV armchair, land left fallow, smoothing timber, national forest versus locally owned forest, cyclamen flowers, stone pines, reeds, sedges, cépage grapes, frog ponds, land breezes, “saints de glace” (Saints Mamert, Gervase, and Pancras, on whose saints’ days, May 11, 12, and 13, late frosts often occur). When she identifies these things, or, better still, when she succeeds in incorporating them into the decor of her daily life, or mentioning them in a sentence, she feels proud.

  Nothing escapes her, so strong is her desire to be of the here and now. It is not that she has forgotten her own country, her culture, and her traditions, but she dreads being frowned on as uncultured, ignorant, foreign. She reads, she absorbs, she observes. She would like to be able to answer any question her daughter, Laura, might ask her, to be able to give her the correct names of plants, birds, insects, to say to her tirelessly look, listen. Look, that is the eguzkilore, the wild cactus flower, the flower of the sun. Listen to the blue tit, come and look at the firebug on the wild rose. She wages relentless war on her foreign accent. It creeps in when she is tired and as soon as its sibilant undertones can be heard in what she is saying, she takes the start of each sentence slowly, sits up straight, is extra vigilant about her dropped r’s and those ends of sentences left trailing, and the genders of French nouns when they become hazy (“le manche,” a handle; “la manche,” a sleeve; “le poêle,” a stove; “la poêle,” a frying pan).

  Anita has hung a banner between the cherry tree laden with gleaming red but terribly tart fruit and the lilac tree with its delicately perfumed clusters of flowers.

  Happy Birthday Laura.

  It is early summer and their daughter is about to celebrate her second birthday. Two cakes are baking in the oven—one chocolate, the other vanilla. Anita routinely wipes the table, rearranges the racks where the cakes will cool. She has put in orangeade and apple juice to chill. She has already made a lemon cake for the grownups and iced it. The sink is clean, but she rinses it. She checks the timer on the oven, another twenty minutes. Twenty minutes, twenty minutes, twenty minutes, twenty minutes. Without being aware of it she starts massaging her hands, as if they could not bear to be left to their own devices, with nothing to do. Anita is aware of these times when she is no longer a light, delicate, competent woman. She feels as heavy as a watermelon, as clumsy as
a crude wooden doll. Everything around her takes on a bloated and ungainly aspect. Her breathing is a roar in her chest, her heartbeats are strokes of a gong, the ticking of the timer fills the kitchen with its clamor. Anita claps her hands, once, twice, in an attempt to extricate herself from this odd hypnotic state, but that does not work. She makes haste to go up to the second floor and there, on the threshold of Laura’s bedroom, hey presto, she recovers her composure, her poise.

  The room is primrose yellow. On the floor a carpet, toys, a chest against the wall. There is also a wardrobe, and a big giraffe woven from knotted straw. At the center of the room a magnificent child’s bed made of wood, painted in soft yellow, the palest that exists. Laura is asleep, her arms raised above her head. This bedroom is Adam’s creation—apart from the toys, he has made everything. Anita sits right down on the floor and inhales the innocence and calm that this room gives off.

  A few minutes later she hears the timer on the oven. And at the same moment her child wakes up. And Anita once more becomes that light, competent woman, the woman who feeds, washes, cleans, sweeps, polishes, shines, tidies, cooks, laughs, provokes laughter, plays, gardens, shops, loves her husband, her daughter, her house.

  Nobody asked her to become this woman. Her husband, her dear Adam, always seems satisfied—with what he has on his plate; with the way she looks after their daughter; with the arrangement of the flowers in the vase; with what she grants him when they are intimate together. Deep inside her there is, as it were, a little pocket of emptiness, and when she gets up in the morning, this pocket whistles, as do cavities hollowed out of rocks. And then she spends her time eager to fill this space. Each task accomplished to the full (all the housework, potato puree made by hand, the books in alphabetical order, each nursery rhyme) brings her closer to the feeling of being complete—being completely a woman, completely a mother, completely a wife. She can no longer turn her back on the reality, the weight and volume of her life. Her daughter = 28 pounds; her house = 30 by 36 feet floor area; the number of diapers used daily = 7; the number of potatoes for a puree = 2; the number of measures of powdered milk needed for a five-ounce baby bottle = 5; the correct temperature for a drink = 82 degrees Fahrenheit; the furrows between her eyebrows = 1; white hairs above her right ear = 3; the income she brings in each month = 0; the hours in her day = 24.

  Sometimes Anita has the feeling she is tirelessly reliving the same day, but she does not seek to make any changes at all, on the contrary, she catches herself wanting to do exactly the same thing at the same time, bath, meal, housework, games, taking a walk, looking, listening. Perhaps through this repetition she will finally discover what it is that eludes her, recover what she has lost (but what was it?), find the solution (but to what problem?) or the answer (but to what question?).

  At night she wakes up, goes up to the attic, and opens old cardboard boxes. What she finds there is notebooks, poems, articles she wrote when she was on her internship, countless ideas for novels; she rereads the letters her parents sent her when she was a student. She studies everything attentively and absorbs her own dreams, her own desires, her own fantasies, so as not to lose touch completely with that other Anita, the one who wanted a career out in the world, the one who wanted to write a novel.

  Occasionally she has enough energy left to open a notebook. Then she writes about her daily life, the birthday, the well-laid table, the cake, her child’s downy skin, the incredible elasticity of the hours of the day … On occasion something mysterious arises out of her words, something almost as palpable as a caress, and then she finds this new path she is following has some meaning, far away from her former dreams. Then Anita becomes convinced that this new life is no less courageous than that other one out in the world with its bus journeys, nannies, and day cares. No, her life is no less honorable than that other one amid the world’s noise, a life of listening, talking, thinking, writing.

  A man who paints

  NIGHT HAS FALLEN ON THE FOREST, the house breathes softly like a great animal in a deep sleep. Adam is washing the dishes. On the table lie newspapers, mail, papers of various kinds, a doll, a teddy bear, a bunch of keys. Two felt pens without their caps. Faded peonies stand in brownish water that gives off a smell of sickly sweet decay, their petals scattered around the vase.

  He hears Anita coming downstairs but does not turn around. She opens the refrigerator. She is muttering. I had to read three stories. The comfort blanket had got lost. I’ve left the light on.

  Adam clenches his teeth. Every day it’s the same old story. Every day the house is in chaos. He turns off the tap and looks out through the bay windows, but they are too dirty for him to be able to catch a glimpse of anything at all. When did things change here, in this house? Whatever became of that sweet and comfortable feeling of the first years? His wife and child safe and warm in the house he had built while he himself was out in the world. He would come home in the evening and something would be simmering on the stove, there would be a partly eaten cake under a glass cover on the table, he would hear laughter in the well-ordered living room. In the evening his wife would talk to him and listen to him, admiring and loving. In those days words flowed like honey. Was that a dream?

  “What are you doing, Anita?”

  “There was a piece of cheesecake in the fridge.”

  “I just threw it away.”

  “You did?”

  “It was a week old, Anita. Could you put the plates away, please? Or clear the table? Or throw out those goddamned flowers?”

  “Hey, take it easy. I’m just going to eat a yogurt and then I’ll do it.”

  Adam turns around and for a fraction of a second he feels he is in the presence of a stranger. What has become of his wife with her long hair and shining eyes, her long colorful skirts and her scent of vanilla? The woman leaning nonchalantly against the door of the fridge is thin and dressed in faded, limp clothes. Although there is so much to be done in this house she is slowly consuming a yogurt while eyeing him furtively as if she were a teenager. But she is no longer a teenager, she has a daughter, she has a husband, she has a house, she has a home, and she cannot make do with a yogurt for supper!

  “Anita, how long is it since we last sat down to a proper meal together? Have you seen yourself? You’re all skin and bone. Do you eat any lunch on your daily tours of the countryside?”

  “Yes, I eat lunch.”

  “Who are you kidding? How much longer is this going to go on?”

  “What? How much longer is what going to go on? Precisely what are you talking about?”

  Anita’s question disconcerts him for a moment. Precisely what is he talking about? Is it really all about her losing weight, about meals not eaten together, about dishes to be washed and windows to be cleaned? What is it about his wife that irritates him so much?

  “Do you think I’m wasting my time, is that it? You’d like me to stay home, like a good little girl, cook the meals, do the housework, and spend my time waiting for you, looking after the house. Oh my, there’s such a lot to do here. Oh my, this lovely house! Oh my, this lovely prison!”

  “Anita!!”

  Adam smashes a plate against the edge of the sink. It breaks with a dull, sly noise, like their argument. He had hoped for something a little more theatrical, but, even so, Anita is surprised. He points a piece of the broken plate at her and then makes sweeping gestures with this fragment of white Limoges porcelain, the Taj Mahal series, a wedding present.

  “How can you say that? How can you think that I want to keep you locked up, that I want to turn you into a—what—into a mere stay-at-home mother? That’s what you’re insinuating, isn’t it?”

  “I don’t know, I don’t know anymore.” Anita clasps both hands to her head, as if seeking to rearrange and concentrate her thoughts. She senses that this is a battle lost in advance. And yet when she is in her car, bowling along the country lanes, she knows exactly what is in her mind, what she wants, what she longs for. But here, in their house, facing her
husband, the words elude her, the sounds are out of sync, her sentences feeble. Now her immigrant’s nervousness comes to the surface, her doubts about language, her hesitations in thought. In the old days, when they were in Paris, Adam used to experience the same hesitations, the same fleeting, nervous feelings, but he has forgotten them. He has forgotten that he was once regarded as a typical provincial, while she is still seen as a typical foreigner.

  “I don’t understand. You’ve become obsessed by this region. You’re doing research on the game of pétanque, for God’s sake!”

  “But I have to prove myself.”

  “Oh no, for pity’s sake! Spare me all that. It was for a match between two clubs and for a piece you were not even allowed to sign! I thought you wanted to write books, novels. You were always talking about it. You wanted to be a journalist. You wanted to write proper articles, didn’t you? Is that what these are, proper articles?”

  Anita stares at him, her hands clasping her head again, looking completely lost. Adam lowers his voice a little, takes a step toward Anita. This is the moment for him to strike home with all the things he has already said before: give up this dead-end job, these days spent plowing back and forth across the countryside, these pieces buried in the middle of the paper. It is the moment to make her understand that she must come back home, become his wife again and the mother of their child. Adam would like her to grasp the extent to which he is, in point of fact, a modern man. He is offering her time and freedom, for heaven’s sake! She has no need to work. She could write, she could read, she could leave to him the trouble of getting his hands dirty out in the world.