by André Alexis
— Where’s your husband? she asked.
— He couldn’t make it, said Clara.
— Well, it was nice that you and your friend here could come to your father’s funeral. Too bad your husband couldn’t make it.
One of Clara’s aunts approached. She was in a violet pantsuit and wore a dark, black lace veiled hat. Brushing at her clothes as if there were crumbs on her chest, she looked mistrustfully at Bernard.
— Who’s this? she asked.
— None of your business, answered Clara.
— Well, for God’s sake, Clara. Can’t you keep a civilized tongue?
— You know how she is, said Clara’s mother. She’s had such a difficult life, she doesn’t remember how to be polite.
— That’s right, said Clara.
Turning her back on her daughter, Clara’s mother said
— What’s wrong with you, Belle? You get dirt on your clothes or you just rubbing your tits?
— No, no, said Belle. Arty fell asleep on me in there. I got his hair all over me. When he goes on night shift, he falls asleep all over the place. Honestly, it’s like having one of those long-haired dogs around the house.
They walked away from Clara, to stand with the rest of the family at the foot of the church’s steps. No one else expressed any interest in Bernard. No one spoke to Clara. The family stood by the church to shake the priest’s hand or, as one did, to clap him on the back. Then they left for the cemetery.
Clara walked away from the church.
— You’ve been really kind, she said. I wish we could have met in different circumstances.
— Aren’t you going to the cemetery?
— No. I’ve done enough. My husband thought it’d be good to make peace with my father, but I shouldn’t have come.
At the door to the bed and breakfast, Mrs. Andrews turned and said
— Thanks again.
Her face was expressionless and she did not wait for Bernard’s response. As if she were embarrassed about something, she climbed the stairs and left him in the entrance hall. It was a moment before he came back to himself and then, bewildered, he returned to the outside world. The sunlight was only occasionally impeded by clouds, shadows moving briskly over the face of the earth, and it was warm enough to leave his overcoat unbuttoned.
Bernard walked without a destination, trying to tire himself out. As he came to the centre of town for the third time, he recognized Clara’s mother. She was beside a lemon yellow car. She wore the same clothes she’d worn to the funeral: all dark. Seeing him, she stood up straight. Her face was heavily made up, pinkish, powder-scored, and, as the sun was behind her, in shadow. Her eyes reminded Bernard of her daughter’s. Her lips were flat and fire red.
— My husband was a good man, she said. I don’t know what Clara told you, but her head’s been filled with nonsense since she went to Toronto. Everything’s memory this and memory that. Clara’s always going on about it. But the way I see it, the past is for people who don’t have better things to worry about. That’s just the way I see it.
Bernard said
— Well, yes . . .
but Mrs. Johnson turned, locked the door to her car, and walked away. She did not wait for him to finish speaking.
That evening, Bernard and Mrs. Vetiver were alone in the dining room. The bed and breakfast was almost empty. Mrs. Vetiver had prepared pork hocks in a cranberry reduction, sweet potatoes mashed with a rosemary-infused olive oil, and drunken chocolate cake for dessert.
— Did you like it? she asked when they had finished.
Though it had been an unexpected confluence of flavours, he said
— Yes.
— Why don’t you stay another night, then? I’ll make coquille Saint-Jacques.
— I wish I could, but I’ve got to be at the hotel with my crew. We start work tomorrow.
Bernard helped her with the dishes, and wished her goodnight.
Outside his window, the last rays of sunlight turned the sky a reddish blue and made the trees appear darker than they were. He stood before the window thinking of nothing. And then, apropos of nothing, he thought of the funeral. Its details came to him: the church windows, the faces of the mourners, their dark clothes, the smell of candles and pews, the priest’s long fingers. How odd it all had been: subdued, and difficult to read. It had been unlike any funeral he’d attended and yet, standing alone in the room that had once held Mrs. Vetiver’s children, staring out at the northern sky which slowly brought forth the moon and the evening star, he was suddenly at another funeral, Elizabeth’s: the tall-ceilinged church, the dark panels of the stations of the cross, the sound of a breath caught and held, his mother-in-law, her rosary wrapped so tightly around her hand he thought its beads would fly off, the grief of some sixty people, their emotions deep and unmistakable.
Two more unlike versions of a sacrament one could not have imagined. At the memory of Elizabeth’s funeral, sadness rose up and overwhelmed him. Whatever Clara’s father had been, however monstrous or kind, his funeral was erased by Elizabeth’s. In fact, all funerals were one to Bernard, still all one: they were all Elizabeth’s. The past was not a luxury, nor a shadow, nor even a black star.
And yet his grief passed after a moment. After a moment, he returned to himself, as a bank of clouds moved between the moon and the tops of the night-blackened trees. He was alone and in the dark, but his thoughts were not about darkness or solitude. He thought about Clara and her mother. He wondered if he was as mysterious to them as they were to him, wondered if the living are more mysterious than the dead, wondered, finally, if the dead are as restless as the living.
Then, as happened only rarely now, a moment from his life with Elizabeth surfaced, whole but brief: beads of water on her neck and shoulder blades, as he moved a bar of soap (a white eraser) across her white back. Where was she, he wondered, and could she still feel what he felt for her? He sincerely hoped not, hoped she was untroubled. He hoped the chaos of this world was a screen between here and the hereafter.
And with these small hopes in mind, he turned on the bedside lamp and, almost as a matter of course, sought refuge in a book that brought, eventually, only sleep.
PART TWO: RECONCILIATIONS
IVAN ILYCH: A TRAVELOGUE
Anyway . . . yesterday, we saw a big hawk devouring what looked like a bluebird in our backyard, under the lilac tree. This went on for about an hour, until Kim could hold off no longer, and started shovelling snow, at which point the hawk listened carefully for about ten minutes, then took off with what was left of its prey.
— Roo Borson (January 7, 2009)
When we were in Trinidad recently, my mother left a hambone out on the kitchen counter. The hambone was covered in tinfoil, waiting to be boiled with split peas, dumplings, cassava, and onions: split pea soup. It was Christmas, so we’d all eaten more ham than usual. I felt like I’d eaten a pig’s hindquarters all by myself. As no one was really interested in the ham, we were less vigilant than we should have been. The hambone was left out for two days.
You can’t leave food out for that long, in 30-degree weather. But I was still surprised when I lifted the foil and found a clump of maggots, the size of my fist, writhing over one end of the hambone. Suppressing my disgust, I threw the ham and its hosts out, cleaned the counter with boiling water, and reminded my mother to be more careful, though she was the one who’d warned me, on our first day in Petit Valley, to keep the kitchen clean lest we be overrun by maggots.
It isn’t as if, as a Canadian,1 I don’t know about flies and rot. It’s just that, on that score, Ontario’s climate is slightly more forgiving in summer, and much more so in winter. It takes food less time to rot in warm places. And, in fact, that’s one of the ways I know I am in Trinidad, and not at home.
Emotionally, however, things aren’t q
uite so neat. Rot and maggots bring death immediately to my mind, but I first learned about death as a child in Trinidad, and I’ve never managed to shake the feeling that death itself is Trinidadian.
____
A man is walking alone down a narrow lane. It’s late at night, quiet and dark. No street lamps, only the moon and stars for light. But the lanes are so familiar that the man could find his way home blindfolded or blind drunk. A breeze blows through San Juan. From time to time, the moon is lost in the folds of a long, fat cloud, but otherwise the night is starlit and bright. Then someone is walking towards him. A woman. He has lived in San Juan all his life, but he doesn’t recognize her. She has on a lovely hat that half hides her face. And she is beautiful. In fact, he is so struck by her beauty that when they pass each other he’s too flustered to say a word. He simply bows and walks on, wondering where she lives and if he will see her again. Half a mile farther along, another woman approaches. Feeling he’d been impolite to the first one who passed, he is about to greet this second woman when he sees it is the same woman. This time, when they pass, he’s not flustered. He’s frightened. He lowers his head and walks faster. A quarter of a mile farther on, he sees the same woman again. He recognizes her at once and looks down and sees that she has one normal foot and one cloven foot, like a goat. And he is terrified. He understands that this is La Diablesse and he runs for all he’s worth. He can’t hear anything, save his own footfalls, but he can feel her behind him, there, keeping up, getting closer and closer. Now he’s running for his life. His heart is pounding. His ribs ache. His house is only 50 yards away, but it takes every shred of will to reach it, to open the gate and slam it behind him, to run to his own door. Turning around, he sees La Diablesse on the other side of the gate, her white face like a block of moonlight carved into a mask of frustration and rage.
— Is a good t’ing yuh ain’ say a word, yuh heah?
And with that mysterious, disdainful sentence, she vanishes.
— But what would have happened if he’d said anything? (is what I always asked.)
— La Diablesse would have carried his soul away. (The usual answer.)
Not a helpful answer. I had no idea what a “soul” was when I first heard these stories. Nor could anyone really enlighten me. So, for the longest time, “soul” was one of those words that hid more than it revealed. Death is what I imagined when I heard the word “soul,” in this case death by a mysterious but beautiful woman. In fact, it was always said that La Diablesse was beautiful, but beautiful only to men. Her beauty had no effect on women, and she wore a hat for the same reason she wore long, elegant skirts: to hide something. The skirts were to hide her cloven hoof, the hat to hide a white, cadaverous face. This beauty — to men (who, by this folk reasoning, are attracted to death) — seemed an unavoidable aspect of La Diablesse, a way to know she was wicked, and my younger self always assumed that a dark-night encounter with a plain woman was perfectly acceptable.
Equally fascinating were stories about Dwens:
— You know, Mrs. So-and-So was minding her two children, a boy and a girl. The children were in the yard playing when the boy fell and cut himself. The child made so much noise, she took him inside to fix his cuts and bruises. She left the girl alone in the yard, playing. It was late in the day, but it wasn’t dark and she wasn’t gone long. It was only a minute. But when she came back outside she couldn’t find her daughter at all. She called the neighbours. They searched all over the neighbourhood, but the child was gone. Well, you can imagine her distress. But this woman turned out to be one of the lucky ones. Towards evening, her next-door neighbour, who worked in San Juan, brought her child home to her. How did he manage to find the child? Pure chance. That day, the weather was good and he had decided to walk home. He was walking by the river when he saw two children in front of him. Nothing unusual about that, but for some reason, he was looking down in the sand and he noticed two sets of footprints: one set going forward, the other set going backwards. And yet: both children were walking forward. It made no sense. He called out to the children and they both looked back at him. When they turned around, he recognized his neighbour’s child, but the other child, the one that had the footprints back to front, had no face.
— No face? How could it have no face?
— It had no eyes, no mouth, no nose, nothing. And the child vanished as soon as the man saw it. And as soon as it vanished? It was like the woman’s child came out of a trance and started to cry. You see what I’m telling you? If you hear some child call your name, make sure you look down to see if its feet are turned right way around. If the feet are back to front? That is a Dwen.
— What’s a Dwen?
— A Dwen is a child who died before it was baptized. It has no face. Its feet are backwards, and it leads children into the forest to get lost and die or into the river, where they drown. It’s only children they want to play with. But sometimes at night, you can hear the Dwens crying. It’s most annoying.
And then there were stories about Soucouyants. A Soucouyant is an old woman who can change shape. At night, she sheds her human skin and travels about — often as a ball of fire — turning people into animals or sucking their blood. (There is a great calypso called “Suck meh, Soucouyant” about a man who leaves his windows open at night so the Soucouyant can fly in and, well, suck his blood.) The thing is, the Soucouyant has to get back into her human skin before the cock crows. It’s her weakness. If you want to kill a Soucouyant, you have to put salt in her skin so that it will shrivel and wither. When the Soucouyant then tries to put her skin back on, she is unable to and so she dies. There are other interesting details about Soucouyants. For instance, should you want to know if there’s a Soucouyant in your neighbourhood, all you have to do is go to a crossroads and dump out 100 pounds of rice. The Soucouyant — an old woman by day — will be compelled to pick up all the rice one grain at a time. She may be the only obsessive-compulsive evil creature known to man2 or, perhaps, the most monstrously frugal.
The fact that the Soucouyant is obsessive-compulsive is interesting, but the detail, in stories about Soucouyants, that puzzles and fascinates me is this: if you manage to put salt in her skin, the Soucouyant, before she dies, will cry out over and over
— ’Kin, ’kin yuh nah know me? ’Kin yuh nah know me?
(Or, to translate: “Skin, skin don’t you know me?”)
imploring her skin to recognize her and to let her back in. This is the thing I can’t stop thinking about when I think about Soucouyants: a creature pleading with her now-estranged, salt-infested skin. There is, despite the grotesquery, something touching in this. Why? Why should a story of evil include such a pathetic moment, a moment in which one — if one is like me — feels for the evil creature? Why should this detail be so important?
I can think of a number of answers to that question:
1. As they knew in the eighteenth century, the sublime and the grotesque are inextricable, and the moment of identification with the Soucouyant is sublime.
2. I am an immigrant. Symbolically, my original skin no longer fits.
(In which case, I am myself a kind of Soucouyant . . .)
3. Touching details of this sort are precisely what keep a story (or warning) in mind.
Any of those answers would be good fodder for an essay, but I’m interested in the feeling those stories instilled in me, in the force of the details: the tears of the Dwens, the pleading of the Soucouyant, the white face of La Diablesse. I remember an intense pleasure in hearing those stories, but at the same time, I had a near obsessive need to hear them over and over again, because the stories created an unbearable tension that could be relieved only by hearing them. It was as if stories about La Diablesse, Dwens, and Soucouyants came ever so close to revealing something essential, something you couldn’t quite catch but needed to. I listened to these stories until the (adult) storytellers grew bored or tired, but their secret
meaning, if there was a meaning, always eluded me. The “something” they contain that holds you and eludes you at the same time is, I think, death — the idea of it, the sense of it, a presentiment of what may come.
As an adult, I have experienced that presentiment most vividly while reading two stories: Henry James’s The Turn of the Screw and Tolstoy’s The Death of Ivan Ilych. And it was while reading Ivan Ilych again, recently, that I began to wonder if the death Tolstoy has Ivan Ilych Golovin experience is anything like the intimation of “death” (or the “beyond”) I first caught while imagining children with no faces and women flying across the sky as balls of fire. That is, I wondered if Tolstoy’s nineteenth-century conception of death was similar or demonstrably different from my own.
____
Though both were written in the nineteenth century, The Turn of the Screw (1898) and The Death of Ivan Ilych (1886) belong, at least on the surface, to different genres. Both stories are fixated on the permeable border between life and death, but they were written by men with very different sensibilities. Henry James did not think War and Peace was very good — he referred to it as a “loose, baggy monster” — while Tolstoy, if he was familiar with James’s sensibility would, likely, have been annoyed by James’s hypertrophy of the aesthetic sense. (Tolstoy felt a kind of exasperation for those who went on about the descriptive genius displayed in Anna Karenin. And in the end, he began to mistrust his own creative genius, finding it showy and useless in his struggle to strengthen the moral sense of his readers.) And yet, these two stories have some fundamental things in common, the first and most obvious being that they are both ghost stories, though Ivan Ilych is rarely thought of as such.
At the beginning of both The Turn of the Screw and The Death of Ivan Ilych, the character whose story we will follow is dead. There is an element of irony in both cases. The unnamed Governess of The Turn of the Screw is obsessed with the reality of the ghosts who may (or may not) be haunting her young wards, while her story — from beyond the grave — is the one that haunts the story’s listeners and the book’s readers. In Tolstoy’s case, Ivan Ilych Golovin is dead when the story opens. His body is lying in before its burial. After the first chapter, The Death of Ivan Ilych becomes a retelling of Ivan Ilych’s life, but the life recounted by Tolstoy is a death-in-life. Ivan Ilych does not come to real awareness — and thus life — until the moment of his death, which ends the story. Almost literally, Ivan Ilych haunts his own life. He is his own ghost.
