The Catherine Lim Collection

by Catherine Lim

  “Mary, if you don’t wish to marry Lai, I will not force you,” he said ever so gently. And when her mother began to scold her shrilly for disobedience, he rose from the table to intervene. The girl’s eyes filled with tears though she did not once raise her hand to wipe them.

  On his next visit, she served him as usual, with eyes downcast. He looked steadily at her and wondered what went on in her mind and heart, this intense, outwardly serene girl-woman. At one point, she looked up briefly to say, not without a certain resoluteness, “I will marry Lai,” and then withdrew into her world of silence and private thoughts again. Father Monet was more than a little troubled and wished to speak with her further, to satisfy himself that the girl was not being coerced into a union that was indissoluble in the eyes of God. But she gave the impression that she wanted no more said on the matter.

  She married Lai shortly, in the little wooden Catholic church. It became a matter of urgent duty to Father Monet to ascertain that she was happy since he felt partly responsible for her marriage. He continued to visit the Lai home frequently in the first few months. After a while, he was satisfied.

  Mary was apparently contented with her lot. The in-laws were very fond of her, and as for Lai, there was no husband who doted more on his wife. It seemed as if a wife were all he needed to get him out of his sullenness and ill temper. His was a possessive, all-consuming love. Never once did he let his beautiful young wife out of his sight. In the openness of the big house which he shared not only with his parents but with his relatives as well, propriety and fear of being laughed at prevented him from always wanting to be close to her, to look at her, to touch her. In the privacy of their room, the largest and most comfortable in the house, there was no more need to rein in the passion and the desire to possess completely.

  Father Monet found it most troubling indeed as he watched them while pretending to be absorbed by the food they had laid before him or the antics of the relatives’ small children playing nearby, for it could not escape his notice that Mary winced at her husband’s every touch and look. It was hardly perceptible, but the shrewd priest saw it all. His immediate reaction was to give Mary a good lecture at his first opportunity about performing her wifely duty.

  The opportunity came soon after; it was evening and the priest had come to join in the family rosary. He came a little earlier, and found Mary alone in the sitting-room, mending a tear in her husband’s trousers. The sight was somehow rather reassuring to Father Monet, and he began to compliment her on her dutifulness as a wife, unaware that as he went on, she had begun to cry and was already unable to control the tears that fell freely on the garment now lying on her lap.

  “Why, Mary, what’s the matter? Tell me,” he asked in consternation, moving towards her as her sobs gathered into a paroxysm that shook her slight frame. He placed his hands on her shoulders, suddenly full of pity for this strange, gentle woman, so unlike other young women in the town who would have been glad of half her good fortune.

  In the ensuing months, he did not see her cry any longer, but did notice her husband’s return to his sullenness and peevishness, a natural consequence for a man who, ardently offering love, continually finds it repulsed.

  Then began a period of intense jealousy; the younger Lai believing that his wife preferred the white-skinned priest to him. Did she not always want to be the one to serve him the food and drink, although his mother or the relatives could perform the duty just as well? And did she not always somehow find an excuse to come out of her room or the kitchen whenever he came by?

  Tortured by such thoughts, he withdrew yet further into his grimness, and watched her, and watched him. Although he could see nothing to torment him further, his mind would not let him rest, but suggested to him dark and direful possibilities. And then, almost like a godsend, his wife became pregnant; a new softness came over her features, and she actually appeared content as she quietly went about her work in the house.

  When Lai announced the news to Father Monet, it was in the warm confidentiality of friendship fully restored. He waxed loquacious in the expression of hopes for a boy – the first grandson for the grandparents on both sides. Father Monet was too relieved for words. He left for France shortly after that, giving them the promise that he would return in time to baptize the infant.

  The period of waiting was marked by extra visits to church, extra prayers, more works of charity; Lai was ready to take any precaution against mishaps. He engaged the best midwife to attend to his wife, and on the evening of the birth, stood outside the locked door of the room, aware of the footsteps of the midwife inside, the low moans of his wife, the bustling about with basins of hot water and wads of absorbent paper. He waited, tense and quivering, and at the first cry of the child, knocked on the door and fairly shouted, “Is it a boy?”

  “It is a boy,” said the midwife after a pause.

  “Let me come in then,” he said, his heart suddenly swelling with joy, and he knocked yet louder, ready to look upon the face of his first-born.

  The door was at last opened and he strode in, heart pounding. His wife was lying on the bed, face pale as a ghost. Beside her was the child wrapped in a towel. The midwife stood nearby, her hands still wet with the blood and with such a stricken look on her face that, sensing something amiss, he strode to the bed, flung aside the towel covering the child and then recoiled in horror. The child was all white and pink: its hair was white, its eyes were pink; it was not his. He stood staring at it, speechless. Then he looked at his wife who looked back at him; and then at the midwife who turned away with a sob.

  “In all my years as midwife, I have not delivered a child like this.”

  The pounding in his brain and heart allowed no other feeling except a numbing sensation that something had gone very wrong. When the pounding had ceased sufficiently for other feelings to rush in, rage swelled and took possession with such force that he found himself roaring at the top of his voice and looking around for something to break, to crush and destroy.

  The porcelain basin was smashed onto the floor, spilling the water red with the blood. He hit one of the bedposts, smashed a wooden stool against the wall, and yet his anger was not assuaged. Uppermost in his mind was the fact that the priest whom he had trusted and the woman whom he had married and assumed virtuous had betrayed him. The pain would overpower him until he stopped smashing things, broke down and wept into his hands.

  The midwife had run out of the room, screaming for help; his wife continued to lie motionless on the bed. And now her look of placidity aroused him to a new pitch of rage, and he began shouting “Whore! Whore!” at her. He wanted to strangle her with his bare hands. Something in her expression prevented him from doing so, and he could only stand at a distance, his half-clenched fingers straining towards her in impotent fury. Suddenly, as if inspired by an idea that would put an end to all the misery, he grabbed the child and ran out of the room.

  “Oh, do be careful –” cried his wife, showing agitation for the first time, but he was gone.

  With the bundle in his arms, he ran through the darkness of lanes and paths, all the way until he reached the church. He ran to the back where the priest’s sleeping quarters were (a tiny room with only a plank bed and a table and chair) and pounded the door furiously with one hand while holding the bundle with the other.

  “Open up – open up this very minute!” he gasped. When the priest appeared, blinking uncertainly in the haziness of roused sleep, he pushed in and confronted the priest.

  “Take what’s yours,” he said, thrusting the bundle at the priest. The priest barely had time for an audible gasp before the bundle was flung at him. Fortunately he caught it and discovered, for the first time, that it was a new-born child, naked and beginning to squall.

  “What – ” he began, his mind still unable to give meaning to the night’s strange happening, and then he found himself fighting off blows with his right arm, while he held and protected the baby with his left. The blows were savage, but
he could still fight them off and not let any touch the child. But when he saw the wooden chair lifted and descending on him, he sank to the floor and covered the child with both arms as well as his arched body. A terrible pain seemed to explode through his whole body – and then all was, mercifully, darkness.

  They later found the child dead in the towel, the priest, battered and soaked with blood. They found Lai in the far corner, taunting the priest with a maniacal glee as he kept repealing, “Take back your bastard! Take back your white-skinned bastard!”

  Whether he was sent to prison or not, nobody could quite remember, but it was said his mind had come unhinged, and it seemed his father kept him locked up in a special room at home. Till the end of his days, he could not or would not understand what had happened; even his old mother tried to tell him that the child was his, that in her time she had come across several instances of these poor unfortunate white-skinned children with the white hair and pink eyes, and they were no less loved by their parents. But he would not listen; he would only-shake his head and say, “Whore!” or “A white man’s bastard,” and “A foreign hairy devil’s bastard.”

  As for Father Monet, the incident left him permanently blind and paralysed. He was to have been sent back to France, but died before arrangements could be made.

  Mary returned to her parents, and it was said that she ran to the hospital one night to see the priest, but he was already beyond recognizing anyone. Not only was he blind, but his eardrums had been badly damaged. Rumours arose about there having been something between the French priest and the beautiful Chinese woman who loathed her husband and secretly loved the priest.

  The circumstances of Mary’s death were shadowy. Some said she died after an illness, some said she killed herself in grief after having seen the priest.

  When I passed the church that evening and saw – or thought I saw – the priest, Mary and the child in the bundle – they must have lain in their graves for at least 50 years.

  Once, not so long ago, I paid a visit to the modern church that now stands where the old one was, and asked the priest, a very friendly and talkative rosy-cheeked fellow, if he kept records of all the priests who had served in the church, including the old one. He said he did not have any that went as far back as 50 years.

  “Is the story of Father Monet true?” I asked. He replied: “I too have heard of the strange story of Father Monet and of people who claimed to have seen his ghost and the other ghosts. But I assure you this church has been blessed with holy water. No ghosts will ever be seen in its precincts.”

  Grandfather’s Story

  Grandmother died when I was about 10. I had always been in awe of her, mainly because of the stories I had heard relatives and servants whisper about her atrocities towards the many bondmaids she had bought as infants, and reared to work as seamstresses and needlewomen in her rapidly expanding business of making bridal clothes and furnishings.

  Grandmother’s embroidered silk bed curtains and bolster cases, and beaded slippers for bride and groom were famous and fetched good money. The more nimble-fingered of the bondmaids did the sewing and beadwork; the others were assigned the less demanding tasks of cutting, pasting, dyeing, stringing beads, or general housework.

  It was rumoured that one bondmaid had died from injuries sustained when grandmother flung a durian at her. The story had never been confirmed, and as a child, my imagination had often dwelt on the terrible scene, giving it a number of interesting variations: grandmother hurled the durian at the bondmaid’s head and it stuck there; the durian was flung at the bondmaid’s stomach, thus disembowelling her; the durian thorns stuck in the bondmaid’s flesh like so many knives and caused her to bleed to death.

  Whatever the circumstances surrounding her death, the bondmaid was certainly dead at 15 and quietly buried at night in a remote part of the huge plantation in which stood grandmother’s house.

  Grandfather, who had been separated from grandmother for as long as anyone could remember, often said, “Look at her hands. Look at the strength and power in them. The hands of a murderess.” And he would go on to assign the same pernicious quality to each feature of her body: her eyes were cold and glittering, her mouth was thin and cruel, her buttocks which by their flatness deflected all good fortune, so that her husband would always be in want.

  I think I unfairly attributed to grandmother all those atrocities which rich elderly ladies of old China committed against their servant girls or their husbands’ minor wives and concubines. Thus I had grandmother tie up the ends of the trousers of a bondmaid close to the ankles, force a struggling, clawing cat clown through the opening at the waist, quickly knot the trousers tightly at the waist to trap the beast inside, and then begin to hit it from the outside with a broom so that it would claw and scratch the more viciously in its panic.

  I never saw, in the few visits I remember I paid grandmother, any such monstrosity. The punishments that grandmother regularly meted out were less dramatic: she pinched, hit knuckles with a wooden rod, slapped and occasionally rubbed chilli paste against the lips of a child bondmaid who had been caught telling a lie.

  Grandmother did not like children. I think she merely tolerated my cousins and me when we went to stay a few days with her. When in a good mood, she gave us some beads or remnants of silk for which she no longer had any use.

  I remember asking her one day why I never saw grandfather with her and why he was staying in another house. Not only did she refrain from answering my question but threw me such an angry glare that from that very day I never mentioned grandfather in her hearing. I concluded that they hated each other with a virulence that did not allow each to hear the name of the other without a look of the most intense scorn or words of abuse, spat out rather than uttered.

  Indeed, never have I seen a couple so vigorously opposed to each other, and I still wonder how they could have overcome their revulsions to produce three offspring in a row, for according to grandfather, they had hated each other right from the beginning of their marriage. It was probably a duty which grandmother felt she had to discharge.

  “It was an arranged marriage,” said grandfather simply, “and I never saw her till the wedding night.” But he did not speak of the large dowry that grandmother brought with her, for her father was a well-to-do pepper merchant who had businesses in Indonesia. As soon as her parents were dead and she had saved enough money to start a small business on her own, she left grandfather, took up residence in an old house in a plantation that she had shrewdly bought for a pittance, and brought up her three children there. Her two daughters she married off as soon as they reached 16; her son, who turned out to be a wastrel, she left to do as he liked.

  She had put her life with grandfather behind her; from that day, he was dead to her, and she pursued her business with single-minded purpose and fervour, getting rich very quickly. She had a canny business sense and invested wisely in rubber and coconut plantations.

  Grandfather took up residence with a mistress; he had her for a very long time, almost from the time of his marriage. It was said that she was barren, and he was disappointed for a while, for he wanted sons by her, but his love remained unchanged.

  There were other mistresses, but they were merely the objects for grandfather’s insatiable appetite, while this woman, a very genteel-looking, soft-spoken woman whom I remember we all called ‘Grand aunt’, was his chosen life companion. I saw her only once. She was already very old and grey, and I remember she took out a small bottle of pungent-smelling oil from her blouse pocket and rubbed a little under my nose when she saw me cough and sniffle. She died some three years before grandfather (and a year after grandmother).

  Grandfather howled in his grief at grand aunt’s funeral, and was inconsolable for months. In all likelihood, he would not have attended grandmother’s funeral even if she had not objected. As it was, she had stipulated, on her death-bed, that on no condition was grandfather to be allowed near her dead body. She was dying from a terrible cancer
that, over a year, ate away her body.

  “Go, you must go,” urged grand aunt on the day of the funeral, “for in death, all is forgotten.” But grandfather lay in his room smoking his opium pipe and gazing languorously up at the ceiling.

  When grand aunt died – quite suddenly, for she was taking the chamber pot up to their room when she slipped, fell down the stairs and died – grandfather was grief-stricken and at one point, even blamed the sudden death on grandmother’s avenging spirit. He became withdrawn and reticent, and sometimes wept with the abandon of a child in the silence of the night.

  The change was marked, for grandfather was by nature garrulous and, on occasion, even jovial. He liked to tell stories – especially irreverently obscene tales of monks. In his withdrawn state, all storytelling ceased, except on one occasion when he emerged from his room, to the surprise of the relatives who were sitting around idly chatting after dinner, and offered to tell a tale.

  “Once upon a time,” said grandfather, grey eyes misting over and the wispy beard on his thin chin (which he always tied up tightly with a rubber band, much to the amusement of us children) moving up and down with the effort of story-telling.

  “A very long time ago, perhaps a thousand years ago, there lived in China a farmer and his wife. He loved her dearly, for she was a gentle, loving woman who would do anything to make him comfortable and happy. They had no children; the woman’s barrenness, which would have compelled any husband to reject her, did not in the least irk him. He worked hard to save for their old age, knowing no sons would be born to look after them, and he and his wife watched with satisfaction the silver coins growing in the old stone jar, which they took care to hide in a hole in the earthen floor.

  Now near the farm was a nunnery, and the head nun, a most cruel and mercenary woman who spent all her time thinking of how much in donations she could get out of the simple peasants, began to eye the growing wealth of this farmer and his wife. She knew that they were an extremely frugal couple and surmised that their savings were a goodly sum.