by Alice Walker
“Actually, he was a proper match for Lissie.”
“LAST NIGHT I DREAMED I was showing you my temple,” said Miss Lissie. “I don’t know where it was, but it was a simple square one-room structure, very adobe or Southwestern-looking, with poles jutting out at the ceiling line and the windows set in deep. It was painted a rich dust coral and there were lots of designs—many, turquoise and deep blue, like Native American symbols for rain and storm—painted around the top. It was beautiful, though small, and I remembered going there for the ceremonies dressed in a long white cotton robe. I was tall then, and stately, with thick black hair that I wore in a bun. The other thing my temple made me think of was the pyramids in Mexico, though I’m satisfied it wasn’t made of stone but of painted mud.
“Anyway, my familiar—what you might these days, unfortunately, call a ‘pet’—was a small, incredibly beautiful creature that was part bird, for it was feathered, part fish, for it could swim and had a somewhat fish/bird shape, and part reptile, for it scooted about like geckoes do, and it was all over the place while I talked to you. Its movements were graceful and clever, its expression mischievous and full of humor. It was alive! You, by the way, Suwelo were a white man, apparently, in that life, very polite, very well-to-do, and seemingly very interested in our ways.
“My little familiar, no bigger than my hand, slithered and skidded here and there in the place outside the temple where we sat. Its predominant color was blue, but there was red and green, and flecks of gold and cerise. And purple. Yes. Its head was that of a bird. Did I say that already?
“Skittering about the way that it did was so distracting while we talked that I took it up into my hands and carried it some distance from us and placed it on the ground with a clear-glass bowl over it. As soon as I’d come back and sat down, however, I heard a noise like a muffled shot. I went over to the bowl, and, sure enough, the familiar had broken through. There was a small hole in the top. I looked about and found another bowl, a heavy white one, very slick and with very thick sides. My familiar was lying looking up at me curiously, resting up from its labor. It did not try to run as I put this white bowl on top of it. Almost before I sat down I heard another noise. When I went back, my familiar was rushing furiously about in the snow. Everything was suddenly now very cold. It was as beautiful as ever though, my familiar. How or even why I would do what I next did is beyond me, but I think it was a stupid reflex of human pride. For I understood quite well by now that all of this activity on the familiar’s part was about freedom, and that by my actions I was destroying our relationship. In any event, not to be outdone—and suddenly there were dozens of your people, white people, standing about watching this contest—I next imprisoned my beautiful little familiar under a metal washtub. I paid little attention to the coldness or the snow and did not even think how cruel and torturous for it this would be. Surely it would not now be able to escape. I went back to where we were seated, you and I, and attempted to carry on with our conversation, which was about temples, and about my temple in particular. The sun was just setting, and it bathed the small, shiny coral structure in gold. It was a splendid sight. I felt such happiness that it was mine and I thought of the peace that came over me, deep, like sleep, when I entered its doors.
“Next we heard a rumbling, as if from a volcano, under our seats. As if power was being sucked along in streams from everywhere and converging at one spot under the snow. All of us, you, me, the white people dressed so strangely in high heels and fur coats, were drawn to the quaking washtub, which seemed now to be on the bottom steps of an enormous white stone building in a different city and a different century. We could not believe that a small creature, no larger than a hand, could break through metal with its fragile birdlike head. We gazed in amazement as, with a mighty whoosh, and as if from the very depths of the sea, the little familiar broke through the bottom of the tub and out into the open air. It looked at me with pity as it passed. Then, using wings it had never used before, it flew away. And I was left with only you and the rest of your people on the steps of a cold stone building, the color of cheap false teeth, in a different world from my own, in a century that I would never understand. Except by remembering the beautiful little familiar, who was so cheerful and loyal to me, and whom I so thoughtlessly, out of pride and distraction, betrayed.”
“THERE WERE FLIES EVERYWHERE.” That is what Arveyda told Carlotta about the place where she was born.
“And what do you think?” he asked.
She didn’t know what to think. Arveyda was back, but not her mother. She tried not to think of Zedé.
“They were shooting a film there! In Guatuzocan!” he said.
Carlotta had never heard the name.
“It was about an ancient Indian goddess,” he continued, “tall and blonde, like Bo Derek, who falls in love with a modern white anthropologist who had stumbled through a cave entrance and into the prehistoric era in which the goddess lived. It was very funny once you understood there was nothing you could do about it but laugh. Your mother found one of her old friends, a woman who looked a hundred years old, though she was no older than Zedé, and they sat under a tree watching the production of the movie most of the day. Her friend, Hidae, very dark and very wrinkled, had been hired as an extra and represented the ancient ignorant Indians from whom the smart blonde ‘Indian goddess,’ apparently an albino, had sprung. They were in stitches over how the goddess was dressed. In a bikini made of the pigeon feathers that are sold to the tourists. And fingernail polish and lipstick that looked like blood. On her head she was required to wear a colossal headdress, and in this headdress there were fleas. The goddess scratched her head, fanned flies, drooped from the humidity and boredom, grew sallow from the bologna sandwiches, and watched the white anthropologist steal all her people’s treasures without lifting a finger, because ... she loved him!
“But it was a job. I mean, for Zedé and her friend and for the others in the village. Because Zedé spoke English, she got a job on the production crew. She translated. The prison the place had been when you and your mother were there had indeed become a village. Or I should say had become once again a village, since it had been a village that belonged to your father’s people, los indios. As in Australia, where convicts eventually became a country, the guards and slaves who had been settled in Guatuzocan to grow papaya had become a village.
“Only Hidae and six others remained of the slaves your mother had known. The rest had succumbed to the poor food, hard work, the heat and jungle diseases, plus the terrorism of the guards. Most of the women who’d borne children for their captors were dead, but their captors were not. They raped each new batch of slaves and made slave wives of the ones they preferred, ignoring the old and battered ones for whom they no longer felt lust. These women produced children. This placed the guards in the curious position of being masters over their own and each other’s offspring, and where there used to be harmony in their power over so many helpless people, now there was hatred and disgust. Each captor, you see, inevitably begat a favorite son, and this son he did not want either to acknowledge or to have mistreated by any other person in authority other than himself. Then, too, there was the inevitable rape of his daughters by buddies trained not to care about her resemblance to him. Sometimes he did not recognize it himself. A hell.
“The papaya fields were yielding good crops, and the money from their sale poured in to the plantation owners from Europe and North America; the work continued hard, though it was not as horrendous as the clearing of the jungle and the planting of the trees had been. At first it puzzled us why the movie-production company was making a movie about pregringo historic Indian life in the middle of an enormous, modern, rigidly rowed papaya plantation. But when Zedé asked the movie director, he pointed out that he was making a nonstereotyped, progressive movie about the Indians, something very unusual for Americans to do; the plantation showed that the Indians had been not lazy at all, but industrious, even from earliest times. ‘So th
ere!’ your mother said, when she reported this to me and the other wrinkled Indians. And we all laughed.
“The captors and the captives found themselves to be something like a family, and the children born in the village grew up in the gray area of believing themselves half-slave and half-free. They understood neither the contempt in which their fathers held their mothers nor their fathers’ deep fear of these women who were so helpless; nor did they understand the bottomless hatred their mothers felt for their fathers, whose missions of rape among the women became ever more camouflaged as affection as the bastard offspring began to grow. The earliest memories of these offspring were of the muffled screams of their mothers, and the scraping of what they thought must be their mothers’ backbones against the floor.”
“It does not matter if you love me or not,” said Arveyda. “Perhaps I don’t deserve even to see you or my children. But I want to give you the gift of knowing your mother—which I don’t think you would have without me, because she couldn’t tell you herself; she was too ashamed—and I want to give to you exactly what I wish someone could give to me, and what, since my mother is dead, no one ever can.”
Carlotta felt she hated men; their disappearances and their absences and their smugness on return. She thought of the foolish Angel Clare and saw herself as Tess. She thought of Tea Cake and saw herself as Janie. She was convinced Helga Crane was a fool. She decided the only man in all of life and literature worth her admiration was Leonard Woolf. But of course she and her class had not yet started to read his A Village in the Jungle. Perhaps she shouldn’t hold her breath.
Arveyda had wanted to tell her about Zedé somewhere outside under trees. Outside in the open air. If you can see all of the sky, no message, not even from someone who despises you, can destroy you. But Carlotta sat in her cheaply furnished living room, arms folded, slim legs crossed. She was not hearing him. She could not make sense of what he said. It was as if they were both drunk. Besides, a funny Roadrunner cartoon was on and the children were clapping their hands and laughing.
In this atmosphere, Arveyda stopped speaking. He looked at his children lying on the floor ignoring him. He did not blame them. Who was he, this man who had deserted them, after all? Besides, it seemed important to them to see whether the Roadrunner would make it to where it was headed after so many cruel attempts on its life.
When the cartoon was finished, Arveyda, over their outraged objections, turned off the TV. He carefully closed the wooden doors of its cabinet, and taking his guitar from where he’d set it behind the front door, he seated himself in front of it, in a straight chair from the kitchen. He began to tune the guitar, as his children, glaring at him and faking yawns, huddled on the sofa with their mother. They looked at him as if at an intruder. He plucked the strings of the guitar. Its old name was Selume, in ancient African divination, the bone or rune denoting youth. He felt he must, after all his travels, think of something new.
He had an idea.
“Do you have the three little stones your mother gave you?” he asked Carlotta.
At first she did not answer. She was thinking how she hated him and then trying to remember three little stones Zedé had given her and then trying to remember where they were.
“Will you get them?” Somehow he did not doubt they would be produced.
Maybe they contain diamonds and rubies at their core, Carlotta thought, annoyed at her own docility, as she left the room.
Her dresser drawers were neat and orderly, as usual. She really had no trouble finding the three small rocks. They were always kept in a straight line at the back of the lingerie drawer. She took them up and returned to the living room.
Arveyda put out his hand, and she dropped the rocks into it.
He leaned over his guitar and put the rocks on the floor, not in a straight line, but in the shape of a pyramid.
“That is the way they belong, like the symbol for a fallout shelter,” he said. “They are a gift to you from your father and his people.”
This sounded pretty meaningless, actually, not to say bizarre. Carlotta’s mind drifted. She wondered how it was she hadn’t lost them; she’d never kept them in the bag Zedé made for them. Somehow she must have thought of the plain little rocks as her jewels and wanted them on display. She’d kept them on view on top of her dresser when she was growing up. “These are muy especial,” Zedé had said, touching them with emotion at night when she came into Carlotta’s room and tucked her into bed. “These stones have meaning for you.” But she’d never told her what the meaning was.
Arveyda was experiencing something amazing as he sat over the stones, beginning to strum his guitar. He knew, he finally knew, why he was capable of falling in love so easily, even with his own wife’s mother. It was because he was a musician, and an artist. Artists, he now understood, were simply messengers. On them fell the responsibility for uniting the world. An awesome task, but he felt up to it, in his own life. His faith must be that the pain he brought to others and to himself—so poorly concealed in the information delivered—would lead not to destruction, but to transformation.
He began to sing ever so gently, to his wife and children. A song about a country that wore green as its favorite dress; a land of rivers and of boats that from a distance made one think of the pods of dried vanilla beans. He sang of the people who came to this country long ago, from a land called Sun, how they’d discovered the river that flows through the ocean—and knew also of the one that flows through the heavens but had no means to travel it—and of how they met the people already there and how some of them ran off together to share each other’s understanding of the world, and founded great civilizations almost by accident, though great civilizations never notice or boast about whether they are great; and how, over time, these fell, and the people went off in all directions and lived the simple life of small peoples everywhere. Hunting and fishing and praying and making love and having babies. He sang of the red parrot feathers in their ears—for they had brought the parrot with them; it was their familiar, symbolic of their essence—and the long rough hair that made a pillow for their heads. He sang of the coming of the enslavers and the cruel fate of the enslaved. He sang of two people who loved for a moment and of one of them who died, horribly, with nothing to leave behind but his seed that became a child, and some red parrot-feather earrings and three insignificant stones. He sang of the confusion and the terror of the mother: the scars she could never reveal to the child because they still hurt her so. The love for the child’s wild father, a bitter truncheon stuck in her throat.
The children had long been asleep by the time Arveyda came to the part Carlotta most wanted to hear. Arveyda sang softly of how much the mother, far away still, loved and missed the child. How grieved she was that she had hurt her. How she prayed the child would forgive her and one day consent to see her again. He sang of how the mother missed her grandchildren. He sang of the danger the mother was in now in her old country because, working with the gringo movie-production crew as a front, she was trying to find her own mother, whom she had not seen since the soldiers came to her poor little escuela de los indios many, many years ago and dragged her away. This was the only reason she was not this moment embracing her hija, if her hija would only permit it. He sang of Zedé’s courage, of her pride in not burdening her child with an unbearable history. He sang of her true humbleness. He sang until Zedé, small and tentative, was visible, a wisp, before her daughter.
Carlotta had not dreamed her numbed heart could be broken still more, or that breaking the heart opens it.
Arveyda was back. Yes. Singing as never before. Carlotta could see that now he would need neither feathers nor cloak.
Under her piercing, tear-filled gaze Arveyda closed his eyes, so as to ask nothing for himself. He knew he was singing for their lives. A true artist, the one whom God shows, he knew he dared not doubt the power of his song.
ECSTASY IS UNCUT FOREST and the Smell of Fresh-Baked Bread. Suwelo strained to hear the warm,
lush music over the telephone, between the icy bars of Fanny’s words. That is what she is still listening to, he thought, surprised. That old album of Arveyda’s. She must have bought a new one after she moved out; the one they’d bought together was one long groove scratch. She’d worn it out playing it. And he remembered how she held the record album to her chest, an album on which there was nothing but a large redwood tree, with a loaf of bread beneath it, and how she swayed in rapture to every note, and how she sometimes became so filled with the sweetness of the music that she cried. And he had watched her as she tottered and danced and wept. The music carried her higher, he thought, than anything else in her life. It was all ecstasy to her.
And once, when Arveyda came to town to play a concert, he’d bought tickets for them. Finally they would see him. And at first Fanny had been very happy, and he’d laughed at her fumble-fingered excitement as she dressed. All her best things. Everything shades of lavender, deep indigo, and gentian. How beautiful she is, he’d thought.
“You might get a glimpse of him,” Suwelo had teased. “He’ll be onstage, and the tickets I bought should get us good seats. But he won’t be able to see you except as a pinhead in the audience.” She’d laughed, dousing herself with a perfume she made that smelled amazingly like fresh water.
But then, just as they were leaving the flat, just as they were entering the hallway, she stopped, and nothing he said would induce her to go further. When he took her arm, she appeared to be rooted to the spot. When he pretended to drag her, she clung to the door frame with a force that broke one of her nails.
