Bridge of Beyond

by Simone Schwarz-Bart

  The leaf that falls into the pond does not rot the same day, and Toussine’s sorrow only grew worse with time, fulfilling all the gloomy predictions. At first Jeremiah still went to sea three times a week, but then only twice, then once, then not at all. The house looked as deserted as ever, as if there were no one living there. Toussine never left the room with the cardboard windows, and Jeremiah collected their food from the woods around—purslane, scurvy grass, pink makanga bananas. Before, the women going to market used to take a path that led by the ruined house; it was a shortcut to the main road and Basse-Terre, where they sold their wares. But now they were afraid, and they made a big detour through the forest rather than go near the pig-headed Toussine, who didn’t speak, wouldn’t even answer, but just sat staring into space, a bag of bones as good as dead. Every so often, when the conversation came around to her and Jeremiah and little Eloisine, a man would shin up a tree, peer toward the house, and report that it was still the same; nothing had changed, nothing had moved.

  Three years went by before people began to talk about them again. As usual, a man climbed a tree and looked toward the ruins; but this time he didn’t say anything, and showed no sign of coming down. When questioned he only signed for someone else to come up and look. It was the second man who announced that Toussine, the little stranded boat, the woman thought to be lost forever, had come out of her cardboard tower and was taking a little walk outside in the sun.

  Glad as they were at this news, the Negroes still waited, hesitating to rejoice outright until the kid was safely caught and tethered and they were sure they hadn’t sharpened their knives for nothing. And as they looked, this is what they saw: Toussine was cutting down the weeds around the ruined house. She shivered a moment, went in, then came out again almost at once and began to cut down brushwood and scrub with the furious energy of a woman with something urgent to do and not a minute to lose.

  From that day on the place began to be a little less desolate and the market women went back to using the shortcut to Basse-Terre. Toussine had taken her family into prison with her, and now she brought them back to life again. First Eloisine was seen in the village again, as slight and brittle as a straw. Next poor Jeremiah came down to the beach, filled his eyes with the sea and stood staring, fascinated, then went back smiling up the hill as in the days when the song of the waves sounded in his head. It could be seen plainly written across his brow that he would go back to sea again. Toussine put curtains up at the windows, and planted Indian poppies around the ruin, Angola peas, root vegetables, and clumps of congo cane for Eloisine. And then one day she planted the pip of a hummingbird orange. But the Negroes did not rejoice yet. They still watched and waited, from a distance. They thought of the old Toussine, in rags, and compared her with the Toussine of today—not a woman, for what is a woman? Nothing at all, they said, whereas Toussine was a bit of the world, a whole country, a plume of a Negress, the ship, sail, and wind, for she had not made a habit of sorrow. Then Toussine’s belly swelled and burst and the child was called Victory. And then the Negroes did rejoice. On the day of the christening they came to Toussine and said:

  “In the days of your silks and jewels we called you Queen Toussine. We were not far wrong, for you are truly a queen. But now, with your Victory, you may boast that you have put us in a quandary. We have tried and tried to think of a name for you, but in vain, for there isn’t one that will do. And so from now on we shall call you ‘Queen Without a Name!’ ”

  And they ate, drank, and were merry, and from that day forth my grandmother was called the Queen Without a Name.

  Queen Without a Name went on living in L’Abandonnée with her two daughters, Eloisine and my mother, Victory, until my grandfather died. Then, when her daughters came to have the wombs of women, she left them to steer the course of their lives under their own sail. She wanted to go away from the house where her fisher husband had loved and cherished her and kept her safe in her affliction, when her hair was unkempt and her dress in rags. She longed for solitude, so she had a little hut built in a place called Fond-Zombi, which was said to be very wild. An old childhood friend of hers, a famous witch called Ma Cia, lived nearby, and Toussine hoped she would put her in touch with Jeremiah. So Toussine lived in the woods, and came very seldom to L’Abandonnée.

  2

  MAMA VICTORY was a laundress, wearing out her wrists on the flat stones in the rivers, and her linen emerged like new from under the heavy waxed irons. Every Friday she would go down the old path of the market women to the main road, where a horse-drawn cart had left a huge bundle of washing for her to collect. She would hoist it onto her head, climb up to L’Abandonnée, and as soon as she got there start washing the clothes, singing as she worked. All the time she was washing, drying, starching, and ironing she would go on singing. For whole afternoons she would work away at a table set up under a mango tree, singing like a happy magpie. As they passed by on their way to the road her neighbors would often call: “You’re so slight you’ll work your innards out, heaving those heavy irons.” Then her eyes would smile shyly and she would answer: “A small ax cuts down a big tree, and we’ll manage, please God.” My sister Regina and I, frisking about under her feet, would hear her say to herself afterwards: “Suffering brings scorn. Better to be envied than pitied. Sing, Victory, sing!” And she would go on with her song.

  We lived outside the village on a kind of plateau overhanging the first houses. Our mother was not the sort of woman to unpack her heart everywhere: she looked on human speech as a loaded gun, and, to use her own expression, talking often felt to her like an issue of blood. She would sing, say a few words about the dead, those imprinted on her eyes as a child, and that was all. Our thirst for the present remained unsatisfied. So in the afternoon, when the air grew like limpid water, my sister Regina and I would take ourselves off to the broad terrace surrounding Monsieur Tertullien’s pit, where all the local cocks fought on Sundays. Monsieur Tertullien also kept a small bar, and people used to gather on his veranda with glasses of rum and absinthe, laughing and squabbling and speaking ill of those they thought could not stand up for themselves. One day as were there picking up tittle-tattle as usual, we heard them talking about our mother. Victory had no status and no ornament in this world—not so much as a pair of earrings, only a couple of bastards. So why did she avoid them all as if they were a pack of lepers? The words seemed to bury themselves in the depths of the earth, like a lost seed with no hope of sprouting: everyone scratched idly and cracked the joints of their fingers, tired even before they had opened their mouths. Then, with visible reluctance, the oldest inhabitant opened his lips and said very slowly: “Why won’t you people ever admit it? Everyone lives at a certain height above the ground—it’s in the blood. The Lougandors have always liked to fly high, grow wings, raise themselves up. And,” he concluded decisively, “Victory still hasn’t even reached her true height.” And then, noticing we were there, the oldest inhabitant coughed and smiled shyly at us, and the conversation shifted to other things. Back home, when we tried to question our mother, we got the same mysterious answer we always got:

  “They can say whatever they like. Some people can’t sleep easy unless they’ve spoken ill of someone else. But I am what I am, just at my right height, and I don’t go begging in the streets to fill your bellies.”

  Mama was a woman who carried her head high on a slender neck. Her eyes, always half shut, seemed to be asleep, dreaming in the shade of their thick lashes. But if you looked into her eyes well, you saw her determination to stay serene however harshly the winds might blow, and to see everything from the point of view of that head held high. No one in L’Abandonnée noticed her beauty, for her skin was very dark; it was only after my father set eyes on her that everyone else did the same. When she sat in the sun the black lacquer of her skin had glints the color of rosewood, like those you see in old rocking chairs. When she moved, the blood rose near the surface and mingled in the blackness, and glints the color of wine appea
red in her cheeks. When she was in the shade she at once colored the air surrounding her, as if her presence created a smoky halo. When she laughed her flesh grew rounded, taut, and transparent, and a few green veins appeared on the backs of her hands. When she was sad she seemed to be consumed like a wood fire; she went the color of a scorched vine, and as her emotion increased it would turn her almost gray. But it was very rare for her to be seen like this, the color of cold embers, for she was never sad in public, or even in front of her children.

  When she found herself pregnant for the third time she stopped singing by way of a reproach, and sadly told my elder sister: “After you, Regina, I agreed to have Angebert in my house, but it was only because I needed bread. And as you see, I’ve reaped body for body, first Telumee and now this one, and still there’s no bread on my table.” This confession seemed to relieve her, and, her anger gone, there came into her eyes a kind of old familiar resolution, and her lips parted in a peaceful smile. But one day when she was spreading the clothes out to bleach, she slipped on a stone, and though they carried her home and fanned her and rubbed her with camphorated rum, the child was born prematurely and died. It was a boy, fully formed, and Mama was always very proud of him. Sometimes she would pause in her ironing, run her fingers lightly over her stomach, and say: “People see me in the street, but who can know this belly has carried a man, a man to laugh and cry and become Pope if he felt like it? Who can know that, eh?”

  My father would listen attentively and watch for the quarters of the moon, hoping a similar moon would bring him a child exactly the same, a similar moon hung in the sky like the other. “And when the time comes, what’s done will be done,” he would say quietly.

  Angebert was a man who was naturally serious, but who made no effort either at laughter or gravity. He did not see life as a jungle through which one had to make one’s way by every means available. In fact, he didn’t really know where he was. Maybe it was a jungle, he would sometimes admit to a friend, but he didn’t bother about that: “Loot, break, steal—but count me out.” He was rather a small man whose aim was to go through life as inconspicuously as possible. He went about quite calmly, happy in the idea that his small concerns were getting on beautifully because no one noticed he was there. Alert to everything, he didn’t need long confabulations with his friends to know what was going on around him. “But who could imagine I see things this way?” he said to himself. And my father’s face brimmed over with placidity.

  He was from Pointe-à-Pitre, and like many others he had halted at the foot of the mountain because in those days L’Abandonnée seemed like the back of beyond. Looking into the houses as he went through the village, he had noticed, he thought, several cane-bottomed chairs that needed mending. So on the off-chance he said he was a chair mender, but he waited many long months after that and was never sent one chair to repair. He lived in the woods as peaceful as could be, setting traps for crayfish in the river, picking breadfruit, and digging up wild vegetables that he ate with a bit of salt and a drop of oil. One evening he felt like hearing people laugh, so he dressed and set off for Monsieur Tertullien’s little shop, which was always full of men and women quarreling, playing at dice, drinking, and scoffing at life and death. The veranda was too small to hold everyone, so by the side of the road, in the shadows, little groups chatted together and others temporarily alone puffed thoughtfully at their pipes. Angebert didn’t care for drinking, but he was careful not to condemn drinkers too sweepingly in his thoughts. Anyone may fall, he said: the pig dies, and he who kills the pig dies too—it’s just a question of when. He had come to hear people laugh, but it wasn’t the moment, perhaps because it was so long since the cane cutting was over. He was just about to go back to his solitude when Victory arrived with my elder sister Regina. My poor mother was quite drunk and staggered at every step. She was waving her arms about and talking to some invisible interlocutor. Suddenly, stopping opposite the little bar packed with people, she said to her ghost: “As I told you, it’s here I’m holding the dance—I’m the bride, and the one I’m marrying is Hubert. When I was up at the top of the coconut palm, I could see all heaven. My parents were at the right hand of God, and God looked at me and said quite simply, ‘Go back and get married, Victory, for the dance is about to begin with Hubert.’ ”

  According to what I was told more than twenty years after the event, Hubert was a Negro from Désirade who had stayed for several days in the ruins of the white man’s house, and then disappeared none knew where. When he vanished Victory immediately abandoned her irons and her songs and wandered about for six months, exalted with rum. A neighbor looked after my sister Regina, but one day the little girl saw her mother stagger by on the road, and from that moment she followed her everywhere she went.

  On the evening we’re speaking of, Angebert took Victory by the arm and brought her back as fast as he could to the ruin at L’Abandonnée. He put her to bed, she fell asleep at once, and he ate his supper in silence under the astonished gaze of Regina. That was how my parents came together.

  He understood about Hubert, the Negro from Désirade, and waited calmly for Victory’s grief to end, without ever raising a hand to her, even when he found her weaving about the streets drunk. It wasn’t his line to beat people, he said, and anyway he didn’t think not drinking and preferring to look at things clearly made him any better than anyone else. But a little icy mist crept further and further around his heart each time he had to put Victory to bed senseless and overcome with rum. Then he would be seized by a feeling of emptiness, nothingness, and would toss vainly on his pallet trying to find a place to lie that would not give way beneath him. This feeling of non-existence stayed with him, and later, when I was a very little girl, he would sometimes stroke my woolly braids and say uneasily, “It’s me, Angebert. Do you know who I am?”

  Father set pots in the hollows of the streams and sold the crayfish he caught to the townspeople, or to Monsieur Tertullien, who in return provided us with salt and salted cod. From time to time a man called Germain would drag his baleful body to our lonely retreat. We used to give him a hot meal, and if he was in a good mood he would go and fetch us some wood or some wild roots that he used to throw into the pig bucket to cook. He was a notorious crayfish thief, and Father was always saying to him:

  “Be sure you don’t steal from me, Germain, or you’ll pay for it. There are so many other pots in the river, all you have to do is act as if you didn’t see mine. Thieve from the others if you like, on your nocturnal jaunts, but take care not to pinch even one of my crayfish, because they’re my family’s bread. I’m serious, so be careful.”

  Germain, his eyes shining, would say nothing, and he carried on as ever, exploiting other people’s hard work. Every night, torch in hand, he visited all the rivers and emptied one pot after the other, except those belonging to his friend Angebert. Everyone knew who it was who sneaked and stole and took advantage of the other Negroes’ sweat, and more than once the culprit got himself thrashed. These punishments, though richly deserved, humiliated him deeply. He would hide in the bushes, jump out on his victim unawares, and slake his resentment as seemed to him appropriate. One day a man whose pots he had poached cursed him thus: “Runaway slave, conscienceless robber, you’ll come to such a bad end even the devil will laugh at you. You’re like a dog tied to a rope that wants to be free, but you won’t get far, your attempt won’t get you any further than jail. For the attempt is one thing, but then come weariness and collapse.” Eyes shut, head thrown back, the veins standing out on his neck, the man cursed Germain in front of the whole population of the village, attracted by the row. The unhappy prophecy did not enter into earth or sky or the trunks of the trees, nor did it mingle with the falling dusk; it stayed there weighing on the heart, and there was a feeling that something terrible was impending somewhere. From that day Germain was a different man. Every evening he would come to Angebert and say mournfully: “My life is torn apart, torn from end to end, and the stuff cannot be m
ended. Someone tosses a word in the air without thinking, and madness strikes, and men kill and are killed.” Father would take his arm and they would go together in silence, with bowed heads, to the bar, where they would down a glass of tafia in one gulp. Fortified by the rum, the two friends would sigh, look at the other customers, and join in a game of lotto. And the wind rose, sweeping before it the months, the seasons, and the dreams and lamentations of men. Then came the end of the harvest, when there was no work to be found and it was time to be smart. The Negroes’ savings had melted away more rapidly than ever that year. They were reduced to eating roots from the forest; some were relying on the crayfish they caught to see them through till the sugar cane was ready. All the pots were watched over, camouflaged, hidden in inaccessible places upstream, and emptied before Germain even got wind of their mysteries. He prowled around L’Abandonnée like a wild beast in a cage, going up and down the street alone, breast bare, or lying down in the middle of the road and shouting to the drivers of the ox carts: “Run me over! Run me over! What race do I belong to? I belong to the road, so don’t pick me up—run me over, I tell you!” And everyone stopped their ears, and shut their eyes so as not to see him who wanted to anticipate fate. Our house was quite bare now, and Mama shook the bottle of oil over our dinner of roots in vain. My father had set all his pots and was letting his catch mount up in the hope of selling it to the townspeople on Sunday morning. But that Saturday at the first light of dawn he found his recently set pots empty, and empty too the stores filled up the day before with crayfish with their long blue tails. When he got back home he found the thieving Germain, who smiled piteously and said, “Watch out for yourself today, Angebert. I’m going to kill you.” My father had been stricken by what had happened; his gaze wandered and he was running with yellow sweat, like bile. But Germain’s attack on him was so strange and unwarranted he couldn’t help laughing. “Be off,” he said at last, very gently. “Get out of my sight at once—the blood’s suffocating me.” Germain went immediately, looking grave and astonished, and my father spent the whole day sitting on his little wooden bench, his head in his hands, silent. In the evening he got up, fed the animals, put on clean clothes, and walked calmly to the bar in the village. Regina, Mama, and I followed at a distance, so as not to undermine him with our women’s fears. Germain was leaning on the counter, and my father got hold of him by the scruff of the neck, gave him a kick, and shouted, “Why did you do it, eh?” They both went out and began to fight in the semidarkness, in a patch of scrub adjoining the bar. Suddenly my father’s voice was heard: “Oh Germain, you’ve stabbed me!” And then a rattle. Everyone ran out of the bar to find my father lying in a pool of blood and Germain standing beside his victim, a penknife all slimy in his hand. Germain at once threw the knife into a thicket of acacias on the edge of the field. Someone lit a torch and Monsieur Tertullien went down on his knees among the acacias looking for the weapon that had just killed Angebert. A crowd was gathering now, everyone giving his own account of the murder. One man emerged from the rest and struck Germain a blow right in the chest. This first blow acted as a signal: people spat in Germain’s face, plucked at his flesh, tore off all his clothes to see, so they said, what a murderer looked like. I gave him a good punch myself. One woman dipped her hands in my father’s blood and smeared it all over Germain’s face, arms, and naked torso, shouting shrilly: “Murderer, you’re stained and defiled for ever by this blood! Smell it—enjoy the smell!” Insults and blows rained down, and I could no longer recognize the man I knew in the naked form covering his genitals with his hands and repeating ceaselessly, his eyes closed: “I stabbed Angebert, and you can kill me. Go on—you’ve every right. But I swear it’s not my fault. No, not my fault.” His lamentations only increased the hatred; already Germain was of a different species from the people of L’Abandonnée. The murder had taken place before their eyes, and they had not prevented it. Everyone had always known deep down that Germain was bound to kill someone sooner or later: he was born to it. Yet no one had moved when the two men went out of the bar. This thought only made them crueler, and they would probably have killed Germain if the police, summoned by no one knew whom, had not ridden up. Germain went slowly away behind them, a rope around his neck, stumbling through the darkness. After that two men picked up the body, and through the shadows a voice was heard saying: “I forgive Germain, because his will was no longer his own. Human wickedness is great, and can turn a man into anything, even a murderer—yes, I’m not joking, even a murderer.”