Claire of the Sea Light

by Edwidge Danticat

  As he walked toward her in the washroom that afternoon, she did not rush to greet him. The plastic coat she was wearing was weighing her down, he thought, or maybe it was something else.

  He could hear above him, around him, the creaking and echoes coming from other parts of the house, the loud footsteps and muffled conversations from the offices upstairs. Next to the room they were in was the showroom, with the sample coffins lined against the wall. Next to that was the chapel with a stained-glass window of the Last Supper, made locally, with brown faces, by a Ville Rose artist.

  His wife removed her work coat, letting it fall at her feet. Underneath she was wearing her favorite dress, a bell-shaped parrot-green dress that she had sewn herself. Her hair was neatly brushed, the cornrows lined up like roads on a map to some mysterious land. Her hands were folded over her breasts and she closed her eyes, looking as though she were sleeping on her feet. He wondered if this was what she’d been doing before he’d come in, listening with her eyes closed to everything around her.

  “We are no longer two. Now we are three,” she said. He opened his eyes wide. Her childlike face, her usually serene childlike face, was tied in an inexplicable knot as though she were fighting back tears.

  “How do you tell someone you’re pregnant in a funeral parlor?” he asked when she was done speaking. He was too delighted not to laugh. He rushed over and grabbed her, then stepped back for fear of crushing her. She was laughing too when he threw his arms around her. Then he was a bit sad, and his sadness, mingled with intense joy, made him hold her tight again. How does life itself, as much as you must want it in your body, not feel futile when you have seen so many dead?

  She’d told him about pregnant mothers that she’d dressed for their burial with the babies still inside them. How could this not have been on her mind that afternoon?

  “I told Msye Albert,” she said, “that I won’t be washing and dressing the dead anymore.”

  He had grown used to the dead being part of her life. Because she had touched so many corpses, some of their friends and neighbors wouldn’t even allow her to shake their hands or wouldn’t eat the food she cooked. But he was happy to live with all of that, if it meant living with her. Sometimes he could even smell the dead on her, in the embalming fluids and disinfectant. The hands that stroked the faces of the dead stroked his. He ate from those hands. He kissed them. He loved them. He loved their constellations of scars from all the sewing she did without thimbles. He loved how rough her fingertips could feel, how like a tiny grater, even when she was gentle. And he knew that her sympathy for the dead, her compassion for everyone, would make her a good mother, a great mother.

  That afternoon in the funeral parlor, it was as if life had sprung up to embrace him, even in this place of death. He raised her dress to her waist, bent down and pressed his ear against her still-flat stomach and held it there, listening for some faint new sounds.

  “I told the baby not to tell you anything yet,” she joked.

  After she died, he would remember seeing her body laid out on the cot where they had slept together since she had come to live with him. He was shocked to see that, in death, though the baby was no longer in it, her stomach was still round like a frigate bird’s bill.

  The midwife had put that same parrot-green dress on his wife and it looked small, too tight on her body. Her dead hands were folded over her chest in a way that had reminded him of how she’d been standing against the wall in the funeral parlor the afternoon he’d learned that she was pregnant. When he bent over and pressed his ear against her belly in the wash-and-dress room, she kept muttering, “Sa se pa nou. Se pa nou. This is ours. Ours. Ours. Ours.”

  Claire de Lune

  Sometimes Claire Limyè Lanmè Faustin would dream about the day she was born. In her dream, it was a gray morning and the sky too was pregnant, with rain. On one side of the room was a brand-new sisal broom, which, as in many home births, a midwife would brush across her mother’s bare stomach to help “sweep” her out. On the other side of the room would be a chair with a yellow baby sheet draped over it. A breeze would flow under the sheet, making it rise and fall along with her mother’s breath. The echo of the heart that had been thumping so loudly above her head would stop as two hands would free her shoulders, then yank her out.

  “A revenan,” she would hear the midwife saying. “She is a revenan.”

  This would mean, of course, that her mother had died.

  Soon after she was born, the midwife would wash her body, plunging her into a pot of blood-warm water, then the midwife would use the same water to wash her mother. In the dream, Claire would glimpse her mother as the midwife raised her out of the water. Her mother is bony and long and laid out on her father’s cot in a leaf-colored dress. Her mother’s face is turned sideways, showing the highest peak of a cheekbone. Over her mother appears her father’s face and the furrows of concern carved into it, like miniatures graves.

  Then she would dream of breasts, full, cushiony, pillowlike breasts, whose tips would turn from flesh to rubber, and she would dream of her feet becoming dusty when she walked on the ground, and of rivers becoming muddy when she stepped into them, and she would wake up wishing that she could stay asleep forever, just so that she could see more of these things in her dreams and fully understand them. And finally she might understand why in her real, waking life she had to wash herself in buckets beside the latrines behind the shacks when there was water everywhere, although it was seawater and if you bathed in seawater, you would get a layer of salt on your skin that looked like ash and dust and when you put your tongue on your arm you would taste salt like you tasted salt when you secretly ran your tongue over your father’s gutted and salted fish and your tongue would bleed from rubbing against the salted scales and the salt would sting where you had cut your tongue, making the salt even more delicious.

  Salt was life, she would often hear the adults say. Some of the fishermen’s wives would throw a pinch of crushed salt in the air for good luck, before their men left for the sea. (Some would also refuse to eat, or wash, or comb their hair until their men came back.) When zombies ate salt, it brought them back to life. Or so she’d always heard. Maybe if she ate enough salt, she would finally understand why her father wouldn’t let her wander, flannen. She would always try, though. Sometimes while her father was at sea, she would walk through the open market and pretend that she was one of those children sent to buy provisions to bring home to a mother. And she would pick up things at the market and put them down, raising, then crushing the hopes of the vendors, who would mumble under their breath as she walked away.

  Every now and again one of the vendors would shout, “Just like her mother!” and she would ask herself what else she might do to make them say even more often that she was just like her mother. Besides dying, that is.

  Aside from hearing the vendors say that she was just like her mother, she liked walking through the market because everything there was mixed in, the braying goats, the cackling chickens, the vegetables in season, her favorite of which was breadfruit, because people called breadfruit lam veritab, veritable souls. She would have liked to have flannen into the seaside eating places and hotels too, the ones where the women were said to spend days and nights in their bras and panties and the men walked in the doors quickly as if they were too frightened of being seen. But these places were not for children, and she’d heard her father say, when he’d been told that she’d wandered too far off course and had approached one of those places, that a girl who went into a place like that might not come out the same. She might enter a girl and someone might put a hand over her mouth and she might come out bleeding between her legs and people would start calling her Madame, because she would no longer be considered a girl. If she went anywhere near those places, her father had told her, people would whisper behind her back that she was the Madame of many men. There had been a girl in school like that, who’d had someone put his hands over her mouth, someone who had made her ble
ed between her legs. The girl had to leave school after that. People in town talked about the schoolmaster’s son like that too. They called him a Madame, another kind of Madame, they said. They also said that he had stolen (vòlè) or he had violated (vyole) a girl who had (vole) flown away. Vòlè vyole w, ou vole. The girl who had vole, flown away, wasn’t a girl anymore but a woman, a woman who later had a child by the schoolmaster’s son. It was like one of those stories Madame Louise George used to read to the preschool matènèl classes when Madame Louise was still coming to the school. In Madame Louise’s stories, everything was organized a certain way; everything was neat. Things would start out well, but would end up being bad, then would be well again. Claire didn’t believe stories like that, even when she felt like they were aimed at her, even when they were meant to defend her or teach her some kind of lesson. She disliked people too sometimes. She felt them moving around her, exchanging places. Sometimes she wished people, especially adults, were trees. If only trees could move. With trees, you’d have to be the one who moved around them. But trees didn’t cry. They didn’t complain.

  People liked to complain. Even her father, who was usually so quiet. Yet most people thought they were smarter than trees because they could talk. But talking wasn’t everything. Who cared if you could talk, if you decided to get up and leave? That was why the smartest person she knew was Madame Josephine.

  Madame Josephine had no voice, so she made up a new language with her hands. It was a more direct language than the one the other adults spoke. Her father knew this hand language, and people could understand Madame Josephine because of him. It was as if her father and Madame Josephine could have been twins, born at the same hour on the same day. She wondered what people would have said if she and her mother had died on the same day. For a while they were twinned, when she was inside her mother’s body. But she never dreamed of being inside her mother’s body, except in that last moment when she had to come out and that last moment always made her think of water.

  Sometimes when she was lying on her back in the sea, her toes pointed, her hands facing down, her ears half submerged, while she was listening to both the world above and beneath the water, she yearned for the warm salty water to be her mother’s body, the waves her mother’s heartbeat, the sunlight the tunnel that guided her out the day her mother died. From the sea, even while lying on her back, she could see her home on the beach and above it the houses on the hill and the Anthère lighthouse and above that all the densely packed ferns of Mòn Initil. At night, it was impossible to see Mòn Initil. Even when a full moon was parked right above it and it attracted dozens of shooting stars, Mòn Initil still looked like a blank spot at the foot of the sky. This was just as well, because people were afraid of Mòn Initil.

  One story that Madame Louise had read to the class when Claire was smaller said that people were afraid to go to Mòn Initil because that’s where in the olden days the slaves who had escaped the old Abitasyon Pauline had gone to hide, and some of them had never made it out. The bones of our ancestors, Madame Louise had said in her croaky voice, still litter the grounds of Mòn Initil, and their ghosts still haunt its trees.

  In the daytime, though, and from the water, Mòn Initil looked harmless, even inviting. The ground was naturally terraced so the trees were neatly lined up in rows, each one taller than the last. The Anthère lighthouse was ugly in the daytime, and sometimes, with the sun shining overhead, it was all rocks sticking out of cement when it did not look washed out altogether. But at night, especially nights when someone was missing or dead, it was lit up like a super moon. And it glowed.

  She had never been up to the top of the Anthère lighthouse, in the gallery, but she imagined that if ever she were to go, it would be to say good-bye to her father if he were lost at sea. It would be to light a lamp or swing a flashlight one night, hoping that he would see it from the water.

  “A few moments earlier and it would have been me,” her father had told her that very morning. And what would she have done if it had been him? Where would she have gone if the fabric vendor had said no yet again? Who would have taken her in for the rest of her life? There were the relatives in the mountain village, her mother’s people, who showed up at Christmas sometimes with yams and breadfruit, which they knew she liked. But aside from that, she never saw them. They would appear again and she would have to follow them up to the mountain and she would have to leave her school and the one or two children in her class who spoke to her. But would she see her father again? He was giving her away to the fabric vendor, the woman whose breasts were the first she had suckled, as he liked to remind everyone. Why hadn’t he just given her to this woman after she had suckled her breasts? she wondered. She would have known no other life. She would have used her first word to call this woman “Manman.” She would have cried for her when she was sick. She would have pouted at her when she was scolded. She would have held her hand on the way to and from school. She would have known the woman’s dead child as her sister and she would have had a sister to mourn, rather than a mother. It might have been all the same. She would not have remembered much about the sister either. All she would know would be the empty space that this sister would have occupied, without being able to define it. She had no idea what it was to have a mother rather than a string of motherly acts performed by different hands: the aunt in the mountains—who’d had her the first three years of her life, the neighbors, including Madame Josephine, who’d motion for her to come out of the sea when she’d been in there too long. Her father often took her to the cemetery to visit her mother, but if it had been up to her, if she had had a say, they would have been visiting her mother at sea, because her mother would have been buried at sea. It was clear that her mother had liked the sea. Both her mother and father must have loved the sea to have given her that name. If only he spoke more, her father. If only he would share with her the pieces of her mother he had enjoyed. If only those pieces of her mother could be placed in a box for her to open every day. One moment would suffice, one important moment that involved more than the word “Vini” that she’d heard him tell people about.

  “It was my wife’s last word and it was to Claire,” he liked to say. “And yet by the time Claire came her mother was already gone.”

  The way he told the story always made her feel like someone who had shown up uninvited somewhere, as if she shouldn’t have come. As if her mother’s death were her fault. Other times he seemed so happy that she was here. She could sometimes see him watching her while she was doing her homework. He would pretend he was repairing a net or sharpening a stick into a toothpick while sitting on his cot across the room, but he would be watching her, as though he were looking for something, something he could never find. Maybe he was looking for her mother. The women who combed her hair, the vendors whose products she picked up and laid down, all said that she looked like her mother. “Like two drops of water,” they said. She must walk like her mother too, and when she was a woman, a true Madame, when her adult voice came in, would she sound like her mother too? Or would she continue to confuse with her presence the people who had known her mother? Maybe they would take her for her mother, when her body was filled in, when her chest had fully grown, when she became a woman.

  Now she would have a mother, but not a mother whom she looked like. Only for one moment, for one word (“Vini”), had she had the mother she looked like anyway.

  While playing wonn, when she held hands with other girls, either at school or on the beach, when they swayed their arms up and down before taking off in their circle, when they were deciding which way to play or which song to sing, she would always think of the same song. Sometimes she suggested it and it was shouted down, and other times she kept it to herself, and whatever the other girls were singing, she would sing that one particular song in her head. She even sang it when she jumped rope, when no one was singing anything. And whenever she sang it, it was as if someone else were there with her. When there were five other girls playin
g, if she moved faster than anyone else, she would see seven shadows on the ground.

  Lasirèn, Labalèn

  Chapo m tonbe nan lanmè

  Lasirèn, The Whale

  My hat fell into the sea

  The other girls didn’t always like this song because it was not a real wonn song. It was a fisherman’s song. Although the melody was cheerful, the words were sad. You never got back things that fell into the sea. She was surprised that the granmoun, the adults, were not singing this song all day long. So much had fallen into the sea. Hats fell into the sea. Hearts fell into the sea. So much had fallen into the sea. So much could still fall into the sea, including Msye Caleb, who fell in that morning, and all the men like her father who went there to look for fish. She was always afraid that one day she might have to sing that song every moment of every day. Not about a hat, but about her heart, about her father. And this is why she sometimes wished the sea would disappear. If the sea disappeared, she would miss its ever-changing sounds: how it sometimes sounded like one long breath. And sometimes like a cry. She would miss thunderclaps and how the lightning that came with them momentarily brightened the farthest-out reaches of the sea. She would also miss the sea’s colors: the turquoise in the distance and its light-blue ripples up close, the white foam at the peaks of the waves. She would miss the surge of high tide and the retreat of low tide, the milky or rosy clouds of dawn and the orange mists of sunsets. She would miss driftwood, sea glass, seashells, especially the baby ears and buttercups. She would miss throwing stones into the sea and seeing how far they would go. She would even miss the slimy seaweed that the sea spewed out, more during the warmer months of the year. She would also miss smelling the sea, which sometimes reminded her of wet hair. Sure, if the sea disappeared, there might be no fish to eat and she might not be able to lie on her back in it and look up at the hills from the water and sometimes see the magic of how it could be raining up in the hills and be perfectly sunny where she was. But maybe if the sea disappeared her father wouldn’t have to go there anymore, and the crazy waves might not get him like they got Msye Caleb. There were more seas elsewhere, and if he left her, he might go to these other seas. They might be even stronger, crazier, more powerful seas than the one outside her front door. But in those other places he might have a bigger boat, one that was big enough for the two of them to live in, and she might be able to go with him wherever he was going and there they would live together where the crazy waves would not get them. And maybe if she sang this song all the time it would keep bad things from happening and it would keep her father from leaving, and if he stayed, from dying in this sea. But during those times when she went in and lay on her back, her face aimed at the sky, while he was in another part of this sea, someplace where she could not spot his boat, she hoped that if the sea disappeared at that moment, she would disappear with it too, and she wouldn’t have to miss him and he wouldn’t have to be sad and she wouldn’t have to wonder all the time where he was chèche lavi, looking for a better life. But what if there was no better life? How could he not know this? How could granmoun, grown people, not understand such things? How could they not understand everything?