"It's hard enough to deal with, without giving him a face."
"Your mother never gave him a face. That's why he's a shadow. That's why he can control her. I'm not surprised she's having nightmares. This pregnancy is bringing feelings to the surface that she had never completely dealt with.
You will never be able to connect with your husband until you say good-bye to your father."
"I am seeing my mother this weekend," I said.
"You are establishing relations again."
"Joseph and I are going to visit her so we can get to know her friend."
"You mean her lover, the father of her child."
"Yes."
"Is it hard for you to imagine your mother sexually?"
"I've never really tried."
"Do it now."
"Do what?"
"Imagine her in the sexual act," she said.
I tried to imagine my mother, wincing and clenching her teeth as the large shadow of a man mounted her. She didn't like it. She even looked like she was crying, even though her lips were saying things that made him think otherwise.
"Do you imagine that it's the same for her as it is for you?"
"I imagine that she tries to be brave."
"Like you."
"Maybe."
"Do you think you'll ever stop thinking of what you and Joseph do as being brave?"
"I am his wife. There are certain things I need to do to keep him."
"The fear of abandonment. You always have that in the back of your mind, don't you?"
"I feel like my daughter is the only person in the world who won't leave me."
"Do you understand now why your mother was so adamantly against your being with a man, a much older man at that? It is only natural, dear heart. She also felt that you were the only person who would never leave her."
We stopped at a bench overlooking the river. Two swans were floating along trying to catch up with one another. The crew team was rowing towards the edge of the river.
"During your visit, did you go to the spot where your mother was raped?" Rena asked. "In the thick of the cane field. Did you go to the spot?"
"No, not really."
"What does that mean?"
"I ran past it."
"You and your mother should both go there again and see that you can walk away from it. Even if you can never face the man who is your father, there are things that you can say to the spot where it happened. I think you'll be free once you have your confrontation. There will be no more ghosts."
Chapter 33
My mother met us on the stoop outside the house. She was wearing a large tent dress with long puffy sleeves. She looked calmer, rested. Her skin was evened out with a powdered mahogany glow.
Joseph had driven in our station wagon, while I brought Brigitte in my mother's car.
"Ca va byen?" My mother kissed Joseph four times on the cheek. "I brought your wife and daughter back in one piece."
She took the baby from my arms and shoved Marc forward to introduce himself.
Marc was a bit fatter than I remembered. He was squeezed into a small gray jacket and a large pair of pants held up by suspenders.
Marc recited his full name as he shook Joseph's hand.
"Marc has a lot of the old ways," my mother said to Joseph.
The kitchen smelled like fried fish, boiled cabbage, and mayonnaise.
"What have you been up to?" my mother said, curling Brigitte up in her arms. Brigitte reached up to grab my mother's very short hair.
"She said Dada," Joseph announced proudly.
"Even when she grows up and gets a doctorate," Marc said, "it will not count as much."
Marc wrapped an apron around his waist and turned over the fish in the skillet.
My mother took Joseph on a tour of the house, the tour he had never gotten. He followed her obediently, beaming.
She moved us into the backyard where she had placed her picnic table near her hibiscus patch. She stood over Joseph's shoulder, to show him how to sprinkle chopped pickled peppers on his plantains.
"What kind of music do you do?" Marc asked Joseph as we sat down to eat.
"I try to do all kinds of music," Joseph said. "I think music should speak not only to the ear, but mostly to the soul."
"That's a very vague answer," my mother said.
"I think they want to know if you get paid," I said.
"We're not being as graceless as that," Marc said. "I was thinking more in terms of merengue, calypso, soka, samba?"
"Is there money in it?" asked my mother.
"I do okay," Joseph said. "I play with friends when they need someone, but trust me, I have a little nest egg saved up."
My mother winked for only my eyes to see. She had prepared for this, was set to make Joseph love her. "I have something to tell you," she said to me. "I have made a decision."
Turning back to Joseph, my mother asked, "Is that how you bought your place in Providence?"
"Sure is," Joseph said.
"I really was asking more about your opinion of music," Marc insisted.
"We hear you," said my mother.
"He has much of the old ways," she whispered again in my ear.
Marc pretended not to hear.
"Where are your roots?" my mother asked Joseph as she fed plantain chunks to the baby.
"I was born in the South," he said. "Louisiana."
"They speak some kind of Creole there," she said.
"I know it," he said. "Sometimes I try to talk the little I know with my wife, your daughter."
"I feel like I could have been Southern," my mother said.
"We're all African," said Marc.
"Non non, me in particular," said my mother. "I feel like I could have been Southern African-American. When I just came to this country, I got it into my head that I needed some religion. I used to go to this old Southern church in Harlem where all they sang was Negro spirituals. Do you know what Negro spirituals are?" she said turning to Marc.
Marc shrugged.
"I try to get him to church," my mother said, "just to listen to them, but he won't go. You tell him, Joseph. Tell this old Haitian, with his old ways, about a Negro spiritual."
"They're like prayers," Joseph said, "hymns that the slaves used to sing. Some were happy, some sad, but most had to do with freedom, going to another world. Sometimes that other world meant home, Africa. Other times, it meant Heaven, like it says in the Bible. More often it meant freedom."
Joseph began to hum a spiritual.
Oh Mary, don't you weep!
"That's a Negro spiritual," said my mother.
"It sounds like vaudou song," said Marc. "He just described a vaudou song. Erzulie, don't you weep," he sang playfully.
"I told you I could have been Southern." My mother laughed.
"Do you have a favorite Negro spiritual?" Joseph asked my mother.
"I sure do."
"Give us a rendition," urged Marc.
"You'll regret asking," said my mother.
"All of you will help me if I stumble." She rocked Brigitte's body to the solemn lift of her voice.
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.
Sometimes I feel like a motherless child.
A long ways from home.
We all clapped when she was done. Brigitte, too.
"I want that sung at my funeral," my mother said. "My mother's got me thinking this way; you've got to plan for everything."
The day ended too soon for my mother. We never got a moment alone for her to tell me what she had decided. That night as we said good-bye, she wrapped her arms around my body and would not let go.
"She will come back," Marc said, separating us.
"Us Caco women," she said, "when we're happy, we're very happy, but when we're sad, the sadness is deep."
On the ride back to Providence, Joseph kept singing my mother's spiritual, adding some bebop to the melody, as thoug
h to reverse the sad tone.
"Your mother's good folk," he said. "I always understood why she didn't like me. She didn't want to give up a gem like you."
My mother had left two messages on our machine by the time we got home.
"We had a nice day, pa vrè?" she said when I called back. "Did Joseph enjoy himself? The two of you, you go very well together. Marc thought he was old for you, but he liked meeting him anyway."
She stopped to catch her breath.
"Are you really okay?" I asked.
"It was wonderful to see you."
"The nightmares, have they stopped?"
"I didn't tell you what I had decided. I am going to get it out of me."
"When did you decide?"
"Last night when I heard it speak to me."
"Are you sure?"
"Yes. I am sure, it spoke to me. It has a man's voice, so now I know it's not a girl. I am going to get it out of me. I am going to get it out of me, as the stars are my witness."
"Don't do anything rash."
"Everywhere I go, I hear it. I hear him saying things to me. You tintin, malpròp. He calls me a filthy whore. I never want to see this child's face. Your child looks like Manman. This child, I will never look into its face."
"But it's Marc's child."
"What if there is something left in me and when the child comes out it has that other face?"
"You mean what if it looks like me?"
"No, that is not what I mean."
"Marc has no children; he must want some."
"If he wants some badly enough, he can have some."
I heard Marc asking who she was talking to.
"I'll call you tomorrow," she said before hanging up. "Pray to the Virgin Mother for me."
Chapter 34
I had a late afternoon session on the bare floor of Rena's office. Through her smoked French doors, the river looked a breathless blue.
"How was the visit with your mother?" she asked.
"I am very worried about her state of mind," I said. "It was like two people. Someone who was trying to hold things together and someone who was falling apart."
"You feel she was only pretending to be happy."
"Deep inside, yes."
"Why?"
"That's always how she's survived. She feels that she has to stay one step ahead of a mental institution so she has to hold it together at least on the surface."
"What has she decided to do with the baby?"
"She is probably taking it out as we speak."
"What do you mean she's taking it out?"
"Losing it. Dropping it. I can't say it."
"An abortion?"
"Yes."
"Why?"
"She says she hears the baby saying things to her. He says hurtful things, this baby."
"Your mother hears a voice?"
"Yes."
"Has she always heard voices?"
"When I lived with her, it was just the nightmares, her reliving the experience over and over again."
"And now she hears these voices?"
"Yes."
"If she's afraid of therapy, perhaps your mother should have an exorcism."
"An exorcism?"
"I am not joking. She should have a release ritual. The kind of things you do with the sexual phobia group. You can help."
"She is afraid to deal with anything that would make this more real."
"It has to become frighteningly real before it can fade."
"It's always been real to her," I said. "Twenty-five years of being raped every night. Could you live with that? This child, it makes the feelings stronger. It takes her back to a time when she was carrying me. Even the time when she was living with me. That's why she is trying to get the child out of her body."
"I think she needs an exorcism. Has she told her lover that she wants to abort?"
"I wish you wouldn't call him that."
"Why not?"
"It sounds—" I hesitated.
"Sexual?"
"Yes."
"Too sexual to be linked with your mother? I think you have a Madonna image of your mother. Part of you feels that this child is a testimonial of her true sexuality. It's a child she conceived willingly. Maybe even she is not able to face that."
"I just want her to be okay," I said.
"Does her lover know that she doesn't want the baby?"
"The way my mother acts, he probably think it's the best thing that's ever happened to her. I don't think she's ever really explained to him about how I was born."
"Do you think he would want her to have the baby?"
"Not if he knew what it was doing to her. I don't think so."
"And you think she's aborting right now?"
"Before I came here, I called her and she wasn't there. I called her at work and she wasn't there."
"So she's going to do this on her own. Without her lover."
"I think she'll lose her mind if she doesn't."
"I really think you should convince her to seek help."
"I can't convince her," I said. "She's always thought that she was crazy already, that she had just fooled everybody."
"It's very dangerous for her to go on like she is."
"I know."
I drove past Davina's house. She was at work, but I had my own key to our room. I went in and sat in the dark and drank some verbena tea by candlelight. The flame's shadows swayed across Erzulie's face in a way that made it seem as though she was crying.
On the way out, I saw Buki's balloon. It was in a tree, trapped between two high branches. It had deflated into a little ball the size of a green apple.
We thought it had floated into the clouds, even hoped that it had traveled to Africa, but there it was slowly dying in a tree right above my head.
Chapter 35
Joseph was on the couch, rocking the baby, when I came home. She was sleeping in his arms, with her index and middle fingers in her mouth. Joseph took her to our room and put her down without saying a word. He came back and pulled me down on the sofa. He picked up the answering machine and played me a message from Marc.
"Sophie, je t'en prie, call me. It's about your mother."
Marc's voice was quivering, yet cold. It seemed as though he was purposely forcing himself to be casual.
I grabbed Joseph's collar, almost choking him.
"Let's not jump to any wild conclusions," he said.
"I am wondering why she is not calling me herself," I said.
"Maybe she's had a complication with the pregnancy."
"She was going to have an abortion today."
"Keep calm and dial."
The phone rang endlessly. Finally her answering machine picked up. "S'il vous plait, laissez-moi un message. Please leave me a message." Impeccable French and English, both painfully mastered, so that her voice would never betray the fact that she grew up without a father, that her mother was merely a peasant, that she was from the hills.
We sat by the phone all night, alternating between dialing and waiting.
Finally at six in the morning, Marc called.
His voice was laden with pain.
"Sophie. Je t'en prie. I am sorry."
He was sobbing.
'What is it?" I asked.
'Calme-toi. Listen to me."
'Listen to what?"
'I am sorry," he said.
'Put my mother on the phone. What did you do?"
'It's not me."
'Please, Marc. Put my mother on the phone. Where is she? Is she in the hospital?"
He was sobbing. Joseph pressed his face against mine. He was trying to listen.
"Is my mother in the hospital?"
"Non. She is rather in the morgue."
I admired the elegance in the way he said it. Now he would have to say it to my grandmother, who had lost her daughter, and to my Tante Atie, who had lost her only sister.
"Am I hearing you right?" I asked.
"She is gone."
Jos
eph pressed harder against me.
"What happened?" I was shouting at Marc.
"I woke up in the middle of the night. Sometimes, I wake up and she's not there, so I was not worried. Two hours passed and I woke up again, I went to the bathroom and she was lying there."
"Lying there? Lying where? Talk faster, will you?"
"In blood. She was lying there in blood."
"Did she slip and fall?"
"It was very hard to see."
"What was very hard to see?"
"She had a mountain of sheets on the floor. She had prepared this."
"What?"
"She stabbed her stomach with an old rusty knife. I counted, and they counted again in the hospital. Seventeen times."
"Are you sure?"
"It was seventeen times."
"How could you sleep?" I shouted.
"She was still breathing when I found her," he said. "She even said something in the ambulance. She died there in the ambulance."
"What did she say in the ambulance?"
"Mwin pa kapab enkò. She could not carry the baby. She said that to the ambulance people."
"How could you sleep?" I was screaming at him.
"I did the best I could," he said. "I tried to save her. Don't you know how I wanted this child?"
"Why did you give her a child? Didn't you know about the nightmares?" I asked.
"You knew better about the nightmares," he said, "but where were you?"
I crashed into Joseph's arms when I hung up the phone.
It was as if the world started whirling after that, as though I had no control over anything. Everything raced by like a speeding train and I, breathlessly, sprang after it, trying to keep up.
I grabbed my suitcase from the closet and threw a few things inside.
"I am going with you," Joseph said.
"What about Brigitte? Who will look after her? I can't take her into this."
"Let's sit down and think of some way."
I didn't have time to sit and think.
"You stay. I go. It's that simple."
He didn't insist anymore. He helped me pack my bag. We woke up the baby and he drove me to the bus station.
We held each other until the bus was about to pull out.
I gave Brigitte a kiss on the forehead.
Breath, Eyes, Memory Page 15
