Waiting for Tomorrow

by Nathacha Appanah

  A breath of magic is released and she cannot stop herself. What is it? A perfume, the memory of what it had been to write those words? Has the ghost of the old Anita just settled on her shoulder, or is it Adèle’s spirit?

  Title: The Melody of Adèle

  CHAPTER 1

  When I was little and they asked me what I wanted to do when I grew up, I used to say I’d like to work in an office. My friends always said things like astronaut, airline pilot, TV presenter, prime minister, sailor on a submarine. It seems to me that even when I was little I didn’t want anything extraordinary or unbelievable to happen to me. You see when I thought of things being “extraordinary” or “unbelievable” I’d think of my uncle who enlisted in the First World War and came back with half his face missing. When my parents and all the family talked about him they always used to say, “What he did was unbelievable!” “What a hero! What an extraordinary life!” When I knew him, he was already a very elderly gentleman and his face looked like an old black grape. He was a gueule cassée, one of those Great War veterans with bad facial injuries. That’s what Adam has told me. I didn’t know it at the time.

  But I’m going too fast.

  I was born in Port Louis at the end of the 1960s. My parents called me Melody and I’m the youngest of three. My father chose the name. He’d heard it on one of his voyages when he was at sea. “Me-low-dy,” that was the way he always said it.

  I had a happy childhood. I enjoyed the affection parents often save for their youngest child. I have memories of whole afternoons spent playing in the great wilderness behind our family home that served as a backyard. I used to watch columns of ants on the march. I saw weaver-birds building nests that hung from the branches of eucalyptus trees. I wore out my sandals skipping with a rope. Some people said I was a very good girl. Others said I was a bit odd.

  But despite those early fears and wishes of mine, my life has turned out to be quite unbelievable. At the age of twenty-nine, one Saturday morning at 9:40, I died. I mean that at that moment, Melody, the person I’d been before, died, along with her husband and her son in an old white Fiat. I so loved that car. It was upholstered inside with black imitation leather. The seats sloped back too far, and the left-hand window wouldn’t open anymore. The following Tuesday at 10:20 when the police officer came to my house and gave me the fateful news, my mother fainted with a great crash. But I didn’t fully grasp what had happened and my first thought, my first sorrow, was for the car. I realize I loved that car the way you love a domestic animal. Later, when I finally understood the whole situation, it was a different story, of course. My grief was something terribly physical and violent. It felt just as if my head and body had been blown into little pieces but each of the scattered pieces was still alive and throbbing.

  But you see, even at the worst of times you can’t escape from your true nature. I’ve always been a dutiful wife. I wanted to give my husband, Ben, and my son, Vicky, a proper funeral. In any case I was sure I wouldn’t survive them for very long. I say sure, because I didn’t see how else it could turn out. Even today, I sometimes ask myself what I’m doing, still alive, here on earth. So I ordered flowers, I chose the wood and the style for the coffins. I compiled the announcements for the paper. I chose the clothes and took them to the funeral parlor myself. I wasn’t able to see the two of them but, no matter, I was convinced I’d be seeing them soon enough, it was only a matter of hours. You go ahead of me, I’ll soon be joining you. I’ve just one more thing to do down here, my dears. One last duty to perform, here on earth, one last task. To tuck you into your wooden beds. To cover you with flowers. To slip a toy, a book under your satin pillows, surround you with prayers and tell you how unfair all this is, how unbelievable it all is.

  Unbelievable. And yet here I am, years later, still alive, inhaling the scent of wisteria and earth, waiting for my new family to come home.

  I’m no longer called Melody. One day I saw an old film poster in a cinema. The night I checked in to a hotel room, I used the name Adèle. I took it from the poster.

  I once read a story about a man who tore off one of his arms in order to escape from a mountain ravine. I’ve read about animals that bite off one of their paws to get out of a trap. Could it be that I have this same animal instinct for survival within me? I’ve killed the Melody within me and Adèle has caused me to be reborn …

  Today I’m sitting in a house in the outskirts of a forest on the shores of the Atlantic. A little while ago I saw a grass snake and for the first time in ages I thought about my mother. And only yesterday, to soothe a sudden rise in the child’s temperature, as I was giving her some medicine, I murmured a prayer. My childhood and my old ways are coming back to me. Outside, a wind has arisen, it’s starting to rain. I can hear the first drops falling on the leaves. I’m thinking about Melody now. I can say this today. I can write it. I’m thinking about my old self. I’d like to say a proper goodbye to her and tell her story. Deep inside me, I haven’t changed very much.

  CHAPTER 2

  My childhood, my adolescence. Hours, days, months, years. At 6:00 every day the kettle starts whistling. On Friday afternoons the shirts are starched. On Saturday evenings the shoes are polished as we listen to the radio. My oldest brother gets married. Six months later the younger one decides to go off to Australia. At midday on Sundays my mother cooks her famous curried fish with grilled eggplants. One Christmas Eve my father dies in his sleep in his fifty-seventh year and at 6:00 every morning the kettle goes on whistling.

  At sixteen I was accepted into a secretarial school. I was an average student, except at typing. At typing I excelled. I didn’t have many friends, no boyfriends. Why did I find it hard to form ties? Where did this nervousness come from?

  When I left school I got a secretarial job at the bank without difficulty. My mother was so pleased! At night such silence reigned in my room that I could hear my own heart beating, and my mother breathing noisily in her sleep—her regular puh puh puh. What I didn’t know was that every one of those moments was to be cherished. I didn’t know that we ought to give thanks for light, for warmth, for the blood flowing in one’s veins, for smiles, for hot meals, for a glass of cold water, for a beating heart. I didn’t know.

  I met Ben at the bank. My life took on new dimensions, just as my body did in my teens. It gained in harmony, joy, and laughter and I changed. I began to make plans. I stopped being afraid of the unbelievable. I forgot about my uncle’s fate. I forgot that if you walk in the light too much in the end you go blind.

  I’d like to rewind the course of my memory without pausing anywhere. Go back to the first time I set eyes on him, when I didn’t yet know who he really was, the husband he’d be, the father he’d be. When I didn’t know how to read his looks, his gestures, understand his silences.

  I’d like to describe him to you, how he looked, his hair, his clothes, his hands, his mouth. But I can’t manage to think about him as a stranger. I think about the way he smiled when we were married. I think about the fine white kurta that he wore for his morning meditation. I think of his hands. I think of his mouth kissing me for the first time. I know I ought to be closing my eyes. I can see his are already closed, but I’m looking at this big mouth as it approaches mine and I catch sight of a brown beauty spot on his amazingly pink lower lip, and oh, I melt. I think about our wedding. In the very church where my father’s funeral mass had been held. The benches were packed. All those aunts and cousins and uncles, all that organdy, silk, satin, lace, guipure, polyester, jersey knit, and all of it in a joyful swishing and flouncing. The singing rose and fell like a glorious, joyful ocean swell. I think about the two of us there, rising above all our faults, our class, our birth, promising to aim high, to do better.

  CHAPTER 3

  Ben worked as a cashier at a bank. It was one of the island’s leading banks for what, in those days, were known as little folk. People who did not use ATMs, and could not understand bank statements printed out by machines, people who did not
know how to make out a check. They needed to talk to someone who used a pocket calculator, who understood temporary difficulties, the good times and the bad. So you’d see a whole line of them passing through, fishermen, farmers, market vendors of fruits and vegetables, dressmakers, embroiderers, hardware dealers, and mechanics.

  Ben and I were very happy. We’d bought our Fiat, and some furniture. We were the perfect example of the new middle class, Ben and myself, along with the thousands of other young people who squeezed into the buses and streamed into the capital. Soon, like everyone else, we’d have a house built, we’d have children, we’d buy a TV and a VCR. But Ben was not much interested in such things.

  Some time before we were married he had started the Humanity movement along with four other young men—Vira, Cyril, Raoul, and Pascal. Humanity campaigned against capital punishment. The boys held their monthly meetings at our place on Saturday evenings. After our marriage we were renting a very simple house on the mountainside in the heights of Port Louis. As far as I was concerned, in the early days, they could just as well have been a group of football fans. I think I never took them seriously. But how could I have done otherwise? I knew nothing about politics and the death penalty, even though death sentences had been regularly handed down, but none had been carried out for several years.

  But after three years the authorities had decided to execute a prisoner. He was Gilles Bazerte, age thirty. He’d already been in prison for ten years. One night he had used a sword to kill his wife and her parents as they slept. He was twenty then and he’d just got married. His wife was expecting their first child. She was nineteen.

  By now Ben and I were no longer living in the house with gray plaster walls in the heights of Port Louis. We’d begun to leave behind the simple and sometimes happy-go-lucky life of a young couple, taking each day as it comes. We had what I liked to think was a joint project, but I was the one who wanted to do the same as everyone else, take out a mortgage, buy a plot of land, have a house built. Ben was very hesitant about moving, about leaving Port Louis. He loved it there so much. One day I managed to persuade him to visit a plot of land that was for sale in a village on the coast in the north of the country and Ben changed his mind. Was it the purity of the elements on the Saturday when we visited this plot for the first time? A blue sky, a sun as yellow as a lemon. The tall plants covered the plot with colors of gold. Was it that dirt and sand road winding through the eucalyptus trees, the Indian almond trees, the cactus and the thorny scrub that led to a little hollow surrounded by gleaming dark rocks? Was it the unbelievably soft feel of the seawater against your ankles? Was it the calm of life in that place, the birds in the trees, the wind in the leaves, the creaking chain of a passing bicycle, the motor horn from a cake salesman’s van, the barking of a dog?

  We were living in our new house there when the papers ran stories about the imminent execution of Gilles Bazerte. The Humanity movement sprang into action. Ben took on the role of leader, soldier, politician. Press conferences, sit-ins, demonstrations, meetings with ministers, vigils outside the prison. For three months he could talk of nothing else. But I was pregnant and more remote than ever from all this business. While Ben was fighting for a man’s life I was preparing a nest.

  He organized a big march from the capital to the Beau Bassin prison, where Bazerte was incarcerated. A silent, white-clad march that ended in a fight and two days’ imprisonment for Ben. But Gilles Bazerte was hanged all the same, early in the morning, one Thursday at the start of winter. When the telephone rang and I heard Ben weeping I was sad that he had lost his battle but relieved that all that business was over at last. My feelings for him that gray morning were simple and sincere. My actions too: a cup of tea, a chair beside his own, a hand stroking his back. I had nothing helpful to say to him, nothing to give him courage, to lift him up again. I had no knowledge, no wisdom to help him come to terms with it all. I wonder whether he missed that.

  I gave birth shortly before the end of the winter. Over there in that village in the north this was a time of cold mists in the mornings, days of hazy, faded yellow light, dark, chilly nights that suddenly swooped down. When I came home from the hospital with our little boy in my arms I noticed blue butterflies and robins in the garden. It was barely 9:00 in the morning and the summer was on its way. I remember thinking, what shall I do now?

  Oh, I should have danced around with my little Vicky in my arms. I should have laughed and sung. I should have given thanks to all the gods and all the saints and filled my house with soft and joyful music.

  But, of course, it doesn’t occur to you to do anything like this. And so this very special day when you come back home and both of you have become parents, just when you should be starting to form the bonds for this new family, this day fades into darkness and is forgotten.

  CHAPTER 4

  There was a time when I had albums filled with photographs showing us at different stages of our life.

  Coming out of the church on the stone steps, his arm around my shoulder, a gesture that made my veil bunch up around my head, his jacket unbuttoned. Our smiles.

  In the house on the mountainside in the heights of Port Louis. I’m sitting in a plastic chair beneath the mango tree. Behind me there is a cactus with orange flowers. I never knew its name.

  My mother and me in our kitchen, one Sunday. There are slices of fish on a dish, and three purple eggplants waiting to be cut up.

  Me at my typewriter in the office. I have my arms crossed over my chest, I’m frowning. No one knows why. This photograph has always made us laugh.

  Ben on the veranda, reading, between two anti-mosquito coils.

  Vicky in tears on the hood of the white Fiat. Ben, laughing, half stretched out on the hot gleaming surface, is holding him by the waist.

  Ben in front of a poster for the village elections when his movement put up three candidates.

  I also had a drawer full of compilations on tape of our favorite songs. I always had a tape ready in the recorder and whenever the radio played a piece of music I liked I pressed the red “record” button.

  Record: my life recorded in transparencies, photographs, tapes, trinkets. My life recorded on my skin, my heart.

  This evening I shall sleep in a beautiful room on the first floor. There’s a great soft bed, a warm quilt, a wooden chest of drawers, a few shelves with books on them, a pretty turquoise box on the bedside table, a lamp mounted on driftwood, old postcards of the area. My sheets smell of lavender and I have the feeling that this house is filled with wisdom, that it knows my past and my future and is helping me to recover. I like being here with them. Sometimes the four of us are all together in the living room. The two of them, the child, and me. She’s curled up in her armchair, he’s telling a story, the child laughs, and I’m with them, in the warmth, in shelter. Just outside the great window in the living room there are flowers growing, there’s wind in the trees, the stars are shining. I feel as if the world is watching us and we make up a single, selfsame heart, living and perfect. At such moments I forget Ben, I forget Vicky, I forget that I was once called Melody.

  CHAPTER 5

  They dropped me off at 8:50 outside the hall where the final exam was being held for the course in “information technology and management” that I’d been pursuing for two years in order to achieve promotion within the bank. Ben had an increasingly public career. He wrote opinion columns for the papers beneath a head shot. He’d changed jobs and now had a post in the personnel department of a private bank. In the village he’d become an influential and effective local councillor. He’d been invited to the university to give a talk on capital punishment. [I sometimes had the feeling he was growing away from me and I started to be jealous of all the intelligent young women who surrounded him. What did he say to them about me? “My wife’s a secretary.” And, above all, how did he say it?]

  It was a quick goodbye. Good luck, Melody. Good luck, Maman. We’ll come and pick you up at 3:30. I remember Vicky’s face lit u
p when Ben told him he could sit in front. They were looking forward to spending that day as boys together, by the sea.

  At about 9:10 they stop. They go into one of the old stores beside what used to be the main highway. A dark stone building with a red corrugated tin roof. Worn paving stones on the ground, a smell of rum, iron, mildew, and rancid oil, a low, L-shaped window crammed with an odd assortment of items (colored rubber bands, pens, balls, a hammer, ropes, metal cups, remnants of cloth), a huge refrigerator with bottles of soda and beer. At the back jute sacks containing rice, dry grain, and flour. On the counter a glass jar containing candles.

  In the store they order a Coke and a Fanta, which the owner’s daughter serves to them with straws. According to her the boy takes a long time to finish his drink and the man has a chat with her. He asks her questions few people ever put to her and that’s why she remembers them and the time at which they left. Ben asks her how long her family has had the store, what’s the product that sells best, whether their trade has dropped since the opening of the self-service minimarket two hundred yards down the road, whether she’ll take over the family business. He asks if they still sell cigarettes individually and when she says they do, he buys one. I know all this because the young woman called the police after the papers published the news of Ben and Vicky’s disappearance. She showed them her account book, one Coca-Cola, one Fanta, one Matinée brand cigarette, one packet of chocolate Smarties.

  Ben didn’t smoke. I asked all his friends and his father, but they all said the same thing. Ben didn’t smoke. I looked in his desk, I sniffed the clothes he wore the day before, left in the laundry basket, I looked in his shoulder bag, I searched the garden on my hands and knees. I said to myself maybe he smoked in secret at night and tossed the butts in among the plants. I didn’t find anything.