“You see, the houses are nothing without the threads that join them together. And what you feel in the afternoon under your tree is nothing but a thread that the village weaves and throws out to you and to your cabin.” Pointing to one of the tall trees on the edge of her drawing, she made a vague gesture and whispered in a suddenly broken voice: “That’s where Jeremiah and I used to live.”
Then she slowly lowered the lids over eyes flooded with melancholy, and, with a regular, unceasing swaying of the head, seemed to travel into another time, another world, another light. I left her, taking care not to tread on any dead twig, any dry leaf that might wake her.
From then on, thinking of the thread floating near our Chinese plum, I began to go along the street in Fond-Zombi unselfconscious and assured, despite having set up house so recently. But a certain curiosity hovered about me, and some people fussed and wanted to know more. “What exactly is the set-up, with Telumee?” Crude questions and direct admissions were not the custom. The people of Fond-Zombi restricted themselves to brief visits during which they gathered what evidence they could from a tone of voice, the resonance of a laugh, the ease of someone’s movements. Some of the women even went to Queen Without a Name to try to find out if, under her skirts, Telumee had grown thinner or fatter. But the ruse failed and they were disappointed, for Queen Without a Name showed never a chink, was absolutely true to form. Fond-Zombi would perhaps be wondering still if Elie’s friends had not decided to air the mystery, so as to know once and for all whether they should rejoice or lament, feel strengthened or weakened, when their thoughts came to rest on us. One evening they posted themselves outside Old Abel’s shop, and when Elie got back from his forest, laughter over his eyes and lips smiling, a voice addressed him:
“What a rare commodity you’ve become, friend! Join us this evening and show how much you care for us.”
“We exist, my dear Elie, we exist just as much as anyone else. Come into Old Abel’s with us and have a drink, as you used to.”
“Come now, a spot of rum, no one can refuse that,” said a third, in a voice that would take no denial. “It’s as if a sick man refused soup.”
From Queen Without a Name’s yard, where I’d taken up my position, I heard Elie laugh, the reckless laugh of a lucky gambler, and he murmured with some embarrassment:
“Friends, a Negro is always sick, but can’t you see I’m in perfect health and in no need of soup?”
“Never mind the soup, that’s not the point. The real trouble is that though you belong to the race of men, you’re getting Telumee into one bad habit after another—anyone would think she holds the strings of your will. You can’t even go home at the time you fancy any more. A man doesn’t carry on like that, for heaven’s sake—how do you expect to train her?”
Elie was wearing his usual old clothes, worn almost threadbare, but he seemed to be protected by some invisible power—armored, overflowing with confidence, immune from anything anyone might say to him. He raised his hat and gave them all a bold, innocent, invulnerable smile.
“Haven’t you learned yet, Negroes,” he said, “that among any race there are always traitors ready to play into the enemy’s hands?”
His easy and provocative way of talking, that inward glow, were irrefutable signs of a Negro who was happy. They all looked at him incredulously now, their faces brimming over with affection, and the air held a silence that seemed to herald something momentous. It was as if everyone were weighing life up, balancing the black man’s folly and inborn sadness against the mysterious contentment that comes over you sometimes looking at nature, the sea, trees, or a happy man. Lost in these reflections, people shook their heads, cleared their throats at great length—kep, kep—and shrugged their shoulders as if to say, “But what can I possibly know about all this?”
“Life is strange,” one voice commented dreamily.
“Yes, no kidding, a black man is something in this world, after all.”
Since this scene had begun, Amboise, Elie’s comrade, had stood apart from the rest of the group, following what went on with an indulgent eye. After a moment’s hesitation he said suddenly:
“I am very happy to hear what you say, but there’s one thing you still need to know, my friends, and that is that the man you see there with his head bathed in happiness and his eyes dusted with pride, he has all he needs to drink at home, strong liquor and scented rum. That’s why he looks at us and doesn’t see us, and why he doesn’t say anything.”
All eyes converged on Elie, in anticipation of a word or a sign of approbation, and for a moment my man was wrapped in the shame and awkwardness that sometimes affect those favored by fortune. Then he tossed them off and said:
“You know, fellows, it’s not good to put just any seed in just any soil, and it isn’t wise to say just anything to just any ears. There are many things, in fact, of which one shouldn’t speak. But one thing I will say, my dear friends here present: a sweeter-scented rum than that in my cabin just doesn’t exist.”
As soon as he’d finished speaking Elie paid no more attention to those who surrounded, loved, and blessed him —he was already roving among his thoughts, amid the reveries of one who is in bliss. Suddenly he set off along the road, staggering like a sleepwalker, and quickly disappeared into the dusk. Outside the shop, in the light of a storm lantern Old Abel had just hung up, the others looked as though they’d been visited and transfigured by the Holy Ghost in person. The women had been silent so far, and now they trembled, their eyes shone with wonder, and one said:
“I always knew all wasn’t lost, for a woman.”
“That’s why we bring children into the world,” said another, timidly. “Life is certainly strange.”
Looking up I saw it was a moonless night, with just a few stars. They seemed very close and warm and welcoming that evening, as tangible and comforting as the lights of some neighboring village.
During the days that followed my little cabin was never empty. Peaceful and cool in the middle of its plot, with its bunch of faded roses still on the roof, it seemed to attract the women like a lonely chapel. They had to go in, look it over, warm it with their presence, and leave some gift, if only a handful of coco plums or peas. Mostly, they didn’t even feel any wish to speak, but just touched my dress with a little sigh of pleasure, then looked at me smiling, with absolute trust, as if they were in the aisle of our church, looked down on by their favorite saint, who lit up the darkness of their souls and sent them forth to live in hope. They paid me a few vague compliments about what I stood for, there in Fond-Zombi, and left with airy dancers’ steps, as if everything—life, death, even just walking along the street—was henceforth only a ballet that they must perform as beautifully as possible. And then the rumor spread through all Fond-Zombi, even to beneath the clear waters of its rivers, that good luck had descended on my body and into my bones, and that my face too was transfigured by it. Grandmother laughed, and when people asked her what one had to do to have such a blessed old age, she would answer in a trembling, husky little voice: “I knew not what I’d sown nor what I was going to reap.” And the others would answer, with a touch of humor, “Blessed is he, little mother, blessed is he who steers in uncertainty, who knows not what he has sown nor what he will reap.”
Old Abel had lost the glum expression of an old man who doesn’t know what he’s doing there behind his counter. He now had a kind of confidence and gaiety that all his customers well understood. They teased him about his wrinkles, which seemed to have changed into fine, purely ornamental traceries. Some asked him what one had to do to get such becoming lines.
“Ah, how do you do it, Abel? Who’d have thought we’d ever see you like this, beginning a new youth?”
The old man was pensive, following, furrow by furrow, with the finger of an artist, the rich pattern of the wrinkles, and marveling at what was happening to him. All of a sudden he seemed eager to know everything; he was aware of all that went on in Fond-Zombi, and had completely lost
the detached and sometimes disagreeable look he used to have when some cane cutter was waving his arms about in front of his counter. Now he had the keen and watchful eyes of a ferret, and whatever anyone said he was passionately interested, shouting out, agreeing and disagreeing, joining in the chorus, and putting in exclamations of “What fetters, what chains!” to egg the speaker on and highlight whatever happened to be the subject. It became known that Old Abel’s ears had been unstopped, and that the black man’s troubles could enter in and make them hear. And so his shop became indispensable, the place where everyone went to organize and comment on life, to remake it nearer to the heart’s desire. A small closet was added to the shop, and to distinguish it from the back room it was called the “new bar.” Sometimes things got too much for Old Abel: his two thin green arms were not enough to sell cod and rum marmalade in the shop, and absinthe and vermouth in the two bars. Then he would let out a long shout from his stronghold: “Oo-oo, Telumee! Oo-oo!” And I’d go running, and plunge into the din, into the sea of voices and shouting and singing that echoed with curious force, submerging everything, catching me up, bewitching me, opening up new and infinite perspectives and ways of looking at things unknown to me a few weeks before, when I hadn’t yet discovered my right place in the world, and that it was right here in the godforsaken hole of Fond-Zombi. I came and went wide-eyed in the inner room, where the clumsily laid floor shook and trembled under my sturdy weight. And Old Abel couldn’t help saying to me sometimes: “One of these days, Telumee, the way you stomp about, my shop’s just going to cave in between its four rocks, crash!” And the men would laugh at the thought. I myself laughed so much I had to sit down. And when I got up and could be serious again, when my eyes opened on the world again, it was rather as if my laughter lived on in the ears of those who had heard it. And the men who were still young looked at me gravely and said with solemn brows that I was a little Negress of laughter and singing, laughter and speed. At such moments I was firmly convinced that everything might change, that nothing had really happened since the beginning of the world. And I would go back to my cabin, to my life of a woman blessed, waiting, waiting. But it wasn’t like that always. Sometimes, when I looked at myself in the glass, a fear would come over me, a disagreeable sensation, the thought that I was still the same black girl with stormy tresses, with sooty skin and roving eyes, who had hired herself out at Belle-Feuille and would not escape heaven’s vengeance. Then I wouldn’t know what to do with myself at the thought of disappointing so many—whether to go under the plum tree, into the woods, or by the river. But soon Old Abel would exorcise my folly. “Telumee, Telumee, oo-oo”—and the world would reappear, and voices would assail and surround me, opening my eyes and ears. And I would give myself a good talking to. “So, Telumee, you haven’t started to walk yet, you haven’t run and gotten out of breath, you haven’t found your toes covered with blisters, and you’re moaning and groaning already?” And so I would arrive all smiling, and pour out the absinthe and wash up the glasses and throttle my devilments. And the men when they saw me would call out: “Ah, here you are, girl—it isn’t worth calling life till you come in to serve!”
And Old Abel would come to my rescue from behind the counter, putting on one of his shows of rage:
“Let the woman alone, can’t you? She’s a woman and you’re boors. Caper about, puff and blow as much as you like, my boys, but leave her be.”
It was one of the best times of my life, the period when Fond-Zombi grew tall, bloomed, and was radiant. A little wind of prosperity blew over the village, the canefields spread, new land was cleared, the banana trees bowed under the weight of their fruit, and shippers came from Basse-Terre and bought the crops where they stood. Unemployment had gone out of fashion, the women fertilized the vanilla with needles, and the saws hummed peacefully. There were never enough planks to satisfy those who wanted them, and Fond-Zombi grew and acquired shutters on its doors, kitchens of “resolute” wood, and verandas where everyone sat and took the air, discussed the moon and stars, laughed, danced, and sped the time. In his forest, in company with his red-brown Negro, Elie sawed away indefatigably, and in the evening teams of tired oxen brought back piles of acomat, locust wood, red mahogany, and adegonde poles that vanished almost as fast as they appeared. Elie dealt them all out, singing like a thrush in a guava tree, a song that was always the same:
A day’s work Monsieur Durancinee
A day’s work
What a long day Monsieur Durancinee
What a fine day
A day’s work Monsieur Durancinee.
Nothing was too good, nothing too expensive for our cabin, and on our iron bedstead there now lay the bedspread of my dreams, with flounces and the flowers of France that looked so strange to me, and that people said were heliotropes, the ones you scent your earlobes with. I looked after Elie as a mother looks after her child. His clothes were always mended and ironed and folded away in a drawer, and when I gave him his food I always served it on a dish and never put his slice of suckling pig straight onto his plate. All day, while my man was in his woods, I whipped around seeing to my garden and my hens and my linen and my pots and pans, and on Saturdays, with Queen Without a Name, I made preserved breadfruit flowers and crab patties that we delivered to Old Abel’s shop. Every morning when I’d done the house I used to go a little way along the road and turn around suddenly for the pleasure of seeing it there on its four stones, a little cabin just the right size for us, distant, motionless, mysterious and familiar, like a tortoise sleeping in the sun. After the morning cleaning, my next favorite occupation was the washing. I hated doing it in a pan near the house and wasting the water from my jars, and however little there was to wash I used to take it down to the river. I liked to use plenty of water, and it seemed to me, when I unfolded a garment in the current, that I could see my man’s weariness fall away and be carried off with the dirt, and, with the sweat from my dresses, most of my own fancies. I was especially fond of the wood, because of its palm trees intermingled with a tangle of wild bananas and congo canes. The place had a kind of mystery, as if, in some long distant past, it had been inhabited by men who knew how to rejoice in rivers, trees, and sky. Sometimes I almost felt as if I too might some day look on one of these trees in the way it was waiting for. Once I was pounding my linen in the middle of the stream when Letitia came along, the one we used to tease about Elie when she was a little girl. She walked along the bank with her proud slow step, gliding over earth, stones, and leaves like a marauding snake. This was no longer the little thieving Letitia of old. In an instant the light in the wood began to waver, and my heart sank to see her so lovely over the water, looking at me from the rock where she sat as on a throne. With her thick yet transparent skin darkened by some strange colored sap, she made me think of a waterlily on a pond. She gazed at me for a while without speaking, then, tired of watching me at my washing, stood up, snapped off a congo cane that was growing on the bank, stripped it swiftly with a knife, sucked it, and said:
“That’s what you are for Elie, my girl—a nice succulent congo cane. But will you always have the juice to satisfy him? Not that I’m jealous of your flavor. But let me tell you this: to dance too soon is not to dance at all. So take my advice and don’t rejoice just yet.”
Very likely she waited for an answer, waited there on her rock, and seeing there wasn’t going to be one went off, for when at last I looked up Letitia had disappeared. There was the river, the trees, the sky, and, had it not been for the unhealthy sulphurous gleam of the sun I’d have thought I’d just had one of my fancies, my happy woman’s fancies. But from that day on those words haunted me like prophecies—they began to blow in the sea breeze and in the land breeze, and when the river sang it was Letitia’s words it repeated. Unable to bear it any longer, I went to Queen Without a Name and asked her by what signs one recognizes that happiness is going away. She murmured that it had never happened, at least to her knowledge, that one woman carried off all the happiness
in the world in the hollow of her bodice, and that human beings had to die sorry to leave life behind. And she said, further:
“We Lougandors don’t fear happiness any more than we fear unhappiness, which means that your duty today is to rejoice without apprehension or reserve. All Fond-Zombi is looking at you, and sees you are like a young coconut palm in the sky. All Fond-Zombi knows it is present at your first flowering. So do as you ought, my child: give us your fragrance.”
But Letitia’s words crept into the sea breeze and the land breeze and the song of the water, and my soul could no longer find rest. My bones were filled with lead and my blood with bile, and I had become all suspicion about Elie. I scrutinized everything he did, the slightest change in his expression, in order to detect treachery, weariness, or cooling affection—but in vain. In the end his laugh came to seem to me the most suspect thing, the slyest. It made my food rank, the water I drank had a bitter taste, and sometimes his fresh boyish laugh seemed to me to contain such baseness and artifice that I despised myself for sleeping beside this man, and regarded myself as nothing and less than nothing. Not having any proof, I couldn’t confide in anyone about my humiliation, and when I gave myself away by a cunning hint or allusion, Elie would at once revel in it and tease me shamelessly. One evening I thought the moment of truth had come. It was still light, Elie was on his way back from the forest followed by a team with a load of planks, and I was behind my plum tree, watching him, when Letitia went up to him right there in the street. They started to walk along calmly side by side, and my heart contracted at the thought that they no longer even sought the complicity of darkness. Letitia spoke out loud as if she wanted the whole world to hear her.
“So now you know,” she said. “When you’re tired of congo canes, remembering there are Campeachy canes too, and maybe I’m one of them.”
They were now quite close to the plum tree, and Elie, looking uneasily toward our cabin, in the shadows, answered in a whisper:
Bridge of Beyond Page 11
