For now I heard and didn’t hear, saw and didn’t see, and the wind passing over me encountered another wind.
9
THE WOMAN who has laughed is the same one as she who will cry, and that is why one knows already, from the way a woman is happy, how she will behave in the face of adversity. I’d liked that saying of Queen Without a Name, once, but now, under my Chinese plum tree, it frightened me, and above all it saddened me, for I saw clearly that I didn’t know how to suffer. When I was at my height I could show the way to be happy, but now here I was succumbing under my first burden. And yet I knew very well only she who has not filled the jar of her life during the rainy season is to be pitied, and was not it filled, my jar, with all those years with Elie? But when I told myself this no consolation came, and I stared at myself intently, and the sun set and the night fell, and the same sun rose next day, and I saw there was no longer any thread linking my cabin to the others. Then I would lie on the ground and try to dissolve my flesh: I would fill myself with bubbles and suddenly go light—a leg would be no longer there, then an arm, my head and whole body faded into the air, and I was floating so high over Fond-Zombi it looked no bigger to me than a speck of pollen in space. But it was seldom I attained such happiness; usually the most I could do was contemplate my ravaged life with serenity, watch it unfold before my eyes like a significant but harmless dream, a painful mystery that astonished and eluded me. I still clung, really, to the hope that Elie would come back to me, that his muddied soul would clear. There are muddy waters that flow majestically, and if they clear, nothing is more limpid and profound. It was that moment I was waiting for, it was for that man I watched.
Now Elie would say indulgently to anyone who cared to listen, “Telumee is a strong wind, and if she courts the clouds what can I do?” He applied this maxim rigorously, only coming to the house to cut down the grass in the yard, which sometimes got to be as tall as a man. If I was lying in the grass, floating, he would push my legs out of the way with the point of his machete and work over the place where they had been in silence, without a glance at me. He worked fast, set fire to the green grass, and went as he had come, his handsome face lit by a vague, awkward smile. I might have turned into a foaming fish or a dog without any legs, and still not have aroused the least flicker of interest in his eyes. It was as if I was already rotting underground, and I said within myself, “How one can deceive people—they think I’m alive, and I’m dead.” I no longer knew where he lived, what bowl he ate out of, or what hands washed and ironed his clothes. He had given up rum for absinthe, which hung between him and the rest of the world a veil the same color as itself, murky, shifting, uncertain, and it was through this he moved. One evening he jumped from his horse, rushed into our cabin, and collapsed on the table with his head in his hands and his eyes shut. I lit the little pink glass lamp that Queen Without a Name had given us, and saw by its light that Elie was green in the face and streaming with sweat. A wave of tenderness swept over me. It was as if I were seeing him in the middle of the Blue Pool, a boy, looking for our crayfish. I went over to mop his brow and said, “You’re a strange color, man. Aren’t you well?”
He looked up at me with eyes I’d never seen before, the eyes of another man—or were they those of a devil? They were cloudy, sad, cold, their only light a flicker of scorn:
“Your breasts are full,” he said in a slow, forced voice, “your breasts are full and your womb is deep, but you don’t know yet what it is to be a woman—you don’t know it yet.” And with this sibylline pronouncement, he got up abruptly, rammed his hat down over his eyes, and vanished into the night.
As soon as she heard the horse galloping away, Grandmother used to rush over to my cabin to see if anything had happened, and then she’d anoint my arms and legs, massage if necessary the places bruised by Elie’s fists or feet, rub my forehead, for heart and hope, and pour a little lotion of herbs on my hair to give me back scent and color in the eyes of my man. It was because of her I ate and drank; she even did all my errands, for I couldn’t bear to have people looking at me in the street and whispering, “A fallen acomat, with a vengeance.” It has always been so. Whenever misfortune touches the acomat and it falls, drops in the dust, those who used to envy its splendor cry: “It was a rotten tree from the beginning.” And that was why I never left my cabin now, but clung to it as what we call the “guilty crab” clings to its shell. When Queen Without a Name had bathed me and given me something to eat and drink, we used to spend hours just looking at each other in silence, and as soon as she started to say Elie’s name I’d put my finger on her lips, for her heart was overflowing with bitterness. I wouldn’t, wouldn’t hear it said that I’d mounted a crazy horse, a man ill-grafted in his mother’s womb, who was falling to pieces limb by limb. So, when I saw her lips tremble, I put my finger on them, and we sat there like that watching the hours, bearing our load in silence. I still hoped. I told myself the earth had never been known to have enough water, and the day would come when Elie would thirst for me again. I only had to wait, to be ready to take up my life again at the very moment where it had stopped. But that evening, after Elie’s mysterious words, my heart suddenly swelled with despair, and I asked Queen Without a Name:
“But, Grandmother, what is it that pursues him—what is he hunted by?”
Grandmother gazed intently, first at one point in space and then at another, then at my whole person, and, looking at me with the lovely tired eyes that seemed to have scanned the surface of things visible and invisible, and to have known, in their time, they too, terror, horror, and despair, she murmured very gently:
“There is boiling water and the foam on top of it, and man is both at once, water and foam. But it’s only the foam that pursues Elie, and that will not disappear tomorrow. And that’s why I say, if you don’t run away while there is still time, you’ll be submerged by it. Telumee, my little crystal glass, I beg you—as I am untangling your hair now, untangle your life from his, for it is not laid down that a woman must bear hell on earth. Where is that laid down, where? Listen—the day will come when you’ll put on your dress of life again, and everyone will see that your taste hasn’t changed. Already there’s a man who comes to my house to talk to me about you, a good man who adores you once and for all. You know him, I know him, and I can tell you he loves you as a sensible man loves a fertile piece of land, which will nourish and support him to beyond the grave. Sometimes, you see, the back dies for the shoulder and the shoulder knows nothing about it. And today I want you to know this man’s name, so I’m going to tell you.”
Surprised, I went over to Queen Without a Name and murmured, laying a finger over her lips:
“Please, Grandma, don’t go on. Do you think I like suffering, and that I’d stay with Elie if I could do otherwise? Where have you ever seen another monster like me, eh, mother?”
Queen Without a Name smiled. Her eyes lightened, as if for the first time she saw right into my depths, down to the smallest pebble lying on the bottom, and, raising her fine arched brows she said:
“My child, you have a stormy man who sleeps in the arms of darkness. But who knows? Perhaps you are right when you say muddy waters sometimes flow majestically, and if they clear, nothing is more limpid and profound. Yesterday I went up to see Ma Cia in the woods, and she told me an evil spirit had been sent against your cabin, to fill it with desolation. To begin with, the spirit entered into Elie’s body, and that is why his blood fights against itself and tears him apart bit by bit. Ma Cia told me to tell you she isn’t asleep up there in her forest, and as Elie has gone to pieces bit by bit, so she will put him together again. The first thing is to take the spell off your cabin, so that the spirit no longer has any power over you. Tomorrow I’m going to burn some herbs she gave me, to chase the spirit back at once to his master. You know, Telumee, evil is very strong, and that which breeds in the heart of man is quite enough for man’s shoulders to bear without evil spirits putting their oar in.”
First
thing the next day, Grandmother took some coconut shells and set them out around my cabin. Then she burned in them incense, balsam, vetiver roots, and magic leaves, producing a fine cloud of green smoke, slow to disperse, which soon surrounded my house with a protective halo. While she attended to this, I turned toward the red disc of earth where Ma Cia lived, and I seemed to see Elie being put together piece by piece as she had predicted. Ah, I thought, smiling in my heart, he’ll have to admit a Negress isn’t a cloud, and he is not a wind strong enough to disperse anything. And for the first time for a long while I took a comb and did my matted hair: I washed it and made it shine with oil, I started to look after myself and my house again, and that very day the place began to look as it used to. But at the end of the afternoon, Elie, informed by someone or other of what was going on, arrived foaming with rage. He kicked the smoking shells over and yelled that he wouldn’t have any witches around his house. Traps would be set all over the ground from now on, and woe betide anyone who set foot on it. After this warning he turned to me and shouted mockingly:
“You think you’re still a little girl at the Blue Pool, but if you don’t know it already I tell you you’re a grownup woman with full breasts under your dress. And soon I’m going to teach you what the word woman means, and you’ll roll on the ground and scream, as a woman does roll and scream when she’s handled right. You’re trying to get away from me, runaway Negress with no forest to go to; you leap into the air and float, but you won’t escape a man like me, and white hairs are not going to scare me.”
A group had gathered by the side of the road, and Elie strutted about as he spoke, shouting loud enough to be heard in Old Abel’s shop. He also glanced around from time to time, hoping for some sign from the spectators, some mark of admiration or contempt. But seeing that was what he wanted, the people turned their backs on him, and he and I remained alone in the middle of that strange space still traversed by small green wisps of smoke. Then Elie pointed to me with a curious gesture and began to laugh, saying, “A dried fish slung on a plate, that’s what you look like.” And as I remained silent with terror, he came at me with his fist raised, intent on scattering me like a pawpaw fallen from the tree.
“Where are your tears and cries now, spirit of the highways, flying Negress—where are they now?”
From then on he never let a day pass without seeing me, without coming to teach me what it means to be a woman. I saw him coming far off, his handsome face filled with a calm that faded as he approached the cabin. And suddenly his mouth twisted, his nostrils twitched, a kind of icy fury came over him, and he’d throw himself on me raging. “You want to run away from me, my fine crow, you think I’ll let you fly in the air, but you’re not going to court the clouds, because I’m here, and here to stay. And I can tell you this—my mother’s womb brought me forth, but it will never open for me again.” Every time, after he’d gone, when he’d finished scattering me body and soul all over the floor, I used to go and lie in the grass, close my eyes, and try to bury Fond-Zombi and myself in the depths of my memory. But the paths of the sky were closed to me, I could no longer take refuge in the air, and though I lowered my eyelids I remained below, stirring up cold, dead embers with a bitter feeling that I was still wide of the mark, the certainty that I had many more discoveries to make before I knew exactly what it meant to be a woman.
Thus did the days go by for me, growing heavy with new shames and unavowable fears, while my memories themselves gradually abandoned me and disappeared into the mist. All the beautiful words and all the things I’d thought I understood had happened to someone else, some living flesh, not this dead flesh indifferent to the knife—some woman with the heart to do her hair and dress and watch other living creatures.
But man’s mishaps have never made the sun shine any less bright, and at the year’s end, the days vied with one another in splendor. It was Advent, and songs trailed away, were lost and taken up again from cabin to cabin and hill to hill right up to the edge of the forest. The Negroes’ soul, fallow and full of thorns throughout the year, grew clear, and people passing one another in the street would look at one another jestingly. Some would even quip:
“Does not the wild pig’s tail grow bushy when it’s hunted?”
Straight came the traditional reply:
“It does indeed grow bushy, man, and what are all of us in Fond-Zombi but a pack of wild pigs on the rampage for spoils?”
Then they would smile delightedly, artlessly, pleased with their definition. And they would go on their way pensively, with the slow, grave, unconcerned tread they deemed appropriate for the last days of December.
A few days before the holiday people began to go up and down in front of my cabin without saying anything, just to prove to me that there couldn’t be a gap in the weft, and that however much I wanted to fly and become a wind I had two hands and two feet exactly the same as them. And then, when they went by my yard, it was as if they deliberately laughed louder than before, some of them even singing cheerful songs and hymns of deliverance with such zest I wondered if they were singing only for themselves. So they went to and fro in front of my cabin, and from time to time a woman would break away from a group, lift imploring arms heavenwards, and cry in a high-pitched voice, “Be born, come down to change our fates.” And hearing her I’d have the strange feeling that she was throwing me a thread in the air, throwing a light, light thread toward my cabin, and then I’d be visited by a smile. Meanwhile the weeds in my yard grew until they covered me completely, and I felt like a neglected garden, left to its brambles and thorns.
One day, Christmas Eve, there was a great to-do on the other side of the road, and I could hear hymns, faint laughter, and the sound of grass trodden on. Suddenly these human voices, this laughter, these mysterious and apparently aimless energies reached my house, my plot, the Chinese plum under which I was sitting. Straightening up a little, I could see Adriana and Ismene and other neighbors settling themselves down on the verge of the road opposite my yard. They squatted on their heels in a circle, bolt upright, just as if they were in a house, and looked in my direction without saying anything, as if to let me get used to their presence. Some time passed like this, then they began to chat among themselves, quietly and naturally, addressing the very air and wind, and the first words I heard were: “Ismene, we want only colored rum after midnight mass, so see that your syrup’s right, you lazy little louse.”
Adriana had plumped down right in the grass with her podgy arms stretched around her knees. The women around her were gathered like chicks about their mother. Suddenly the black mass of her head turned toward me and she said in a slow, deliberate voice:
“Have you heard the news, my friends? Queen Without a Name is sick and soon we shall hear her knell.”
There was a pause, then a voice answered reproachfully:
“Queen Without a Name told us not to say anything.”
“But, my dear,” said another voice, “don’t you see this person can’t hear or understand? I even wonder whether we’ll ever see her again as she used to be, in the flesh.”
“Yes, you’re right, something stops her from touching land and she could still go sailing through the air for a long time without ever setting foot on any continent.”
“You set out on a fine raft and after a while the paint goes, and the mast and the sail, and the boat starts to let in water. And it’s always like that. Why?”
“And yet she had a face that was promisingly marked, spaces between her front teeth, and features that seemed made to attract good luck. I thought for once at least everything would go well, and there’d be for once, here at Fond-Zombi, a woman’s life as light and white as cotton. Oh well, it’ll come in the end, the day when God puts his rope right around Fond-Zombi and drops it from the highest sky into the deepest ocean. And the salt will purify and dissolve it all, all the unending awfulness.”
At that point Adriana heaved herself up and I saw her enormous bulk silhouetted against the grass, the sett
ing sun making that towering flesh look like a block of granite. Opening her eyes as if reluctantly, she said in a dreamy, wistful voice:
“Do we know what we carry in our veins, we Negroes of Guadeloupe—the curse of being a master, the curse of being a slave. It’s true, you’re right, Ismene, something stops this little Negress from touching land, and she may go on a long while, a long while, voyaging like that. And yet I, Adriana, I beat my breast and tell you she will come to shore.”
“She will,” Ismene declared at once, ingenuously, “she will come to shore, she will, she will.”
Then, addressing me directly from the other side of the road, the good Adriana said in a vibrant voice that was almost a cry:
“Telumee, dear little countrywoman, you stay in your grass, there’s no need to answer us today. But one thing I wanted to tell you this Christmas day: you will come to shore.”
Adriana, having spoken, turned away toward Old Abel’s shop, and the other women rose up after her, smoothing their crackling skirts, and, chattering around her, scattered about the village. I stayed among the tall grass, under the little cage of foliage around my Chinese plum. Night was near, and somewhere in the distance singing arose, shrill voices still imploring, Be born and change our fates. And I thought of the mountain of pain I was giving Queen Without a Name, and of all the starched skirts she had to put on so that no one should see her thinness or her sorrow.
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