Then in the utmost silence we’d shell coffee beans, dig up the day’s vegetables, and give the hens some boiled bananas. Noon soon came, for I liked working beside her, in the light of her eyes. We would sit down under the mango tree for a meal that was always the same: rice and red beans that had been simmering since dawn, and a sempiternal pig’s tail. As she ate in a dream and seemed to be elsewhere, I’d say:
“To see you, Ma Cia, anyone would think you were at your last gasp.”
And she, tranquilly:
“I’m not at my last gasp, I’m thinking.”
Then she’d take a glass of rum, toss it off, smack her lips with satisfaction, and give a little trill of laughter deep down in her throat:
“Speaking like that to an old woman like me—haven’t you any respect for gray hairs?”
She’d shake her head, bend on me the dazzling yet painful beam of her aged glance, and we’d get up and go for a walk in the forest, where Ma Cia initiated me into the secrets of plants. She also taught me the human body, its centers, its weaknesses, how to rub it, how to get rid of faintness and tics and sprains. I learned how to set people and animals free, how to break spells and turn sorcery back on the sorcerers. But whenever she was at the point of telling me the secret of metamorphosis, something held me back, something prevented me from exchanging my woman’s shape and two breasts for that of a beast or flying succubus, and so there the matter rested. At the end of the afternoon our conversations came to take on a certain tone, always the same, at once mysterious and disappointing. We were bathed in light, which came in waves through the wind-stirred leaves, and we’d look at each other amazed at certain words, certain thoughts we’d had together; and suddenly Ma Cia would lean forward and ask roughly, point-blank, “Have they succeeded in breaking us, crushing us, cutting off our arms and legs forever? We have been goods for auction, and now we are left with fractured hearts. You know,” she’d add, with a deprecating little laugh, “what’s always worried me is slavery—the time when barrels of rotten meat were worth more than us. However much I puzzle over it, I cannot understand.”
And she’d shake her head hotly, and her eyes flashed, and little spurts of saliva would come into the corners of her mouth, as with children when they start to gabble before bursting into tears. A sadness veiled the light of her eyes then, and she uttered all kinds of mysterious phrases in the angry, plaintive, childlike voice she sometimes had since the death of Queen Without a Name. One evening just as I was about to leave she signaled to me to wait. “Telumee,” she said, “don’t panic, don’t faint with shock, if instead of finding me a Christian you find me in the shape of a dog.”
“Why would you do that, Ma Cia? Have you seen everything, then, as a woman?”
“Over and over. But that wouldn’t make me change out of human form. It’s just that I’m tired, you see—tired of my two feet and my two hands. So I’d rather go about like a dog and have done with it.”
I kissed her goodbye with a heavy heart. Since she’d started to wear those strange childish expressions, solitude hadn’t agreed with Ma Cia.
The next day, as I was at home digging a furrow in the garden, lo and behold a big black dog appeared, with a tail surprisingly small in proportion. I wasn’t thinking about dogs or men in the shape of dogs, and I calmly went on scratching away at my plot. When the furrow was finished I put down my hoe, and found the dog straight in front of me, still looking at me with the same curiosity. I paused to examine him in my turn, and was struck by his eyes—brown, with a peculiar sheen, they gazed straight at me without a flicker, just like Ma Cia’s eyes. A cold sweat began to trickle down my neck, and I asked softly: “O dog, are you just passing by, or was it me you wanted?” Since the dog didn’t move, I shouted, “Off with you! Go on!,” broke a branch from a nearby medlar tree, and gave him a whack. He let out a yelp and disappeared among the grasses.
I went back into the little cabin and lay down on Queen Without a Name’s bed, sweating, trembling, weeping. When Sunday came some force drove me to the enchanted forest, and I found the house empty, the doors and windows open to the wind, and the black dog lying at the foot of the mango tree that bore my little mirror. Ma Cia was waiting for me, her forepaws crossed one over the other, and as I came near I recognized her curious mauve, fluted nails. She looked at me in her usual manner, not lowering for an instant her light transparent eyes, with their deep gleams of irony. I sat on the grass and stroked my old friend, weeping. “What do you want of me, Ma Cia? Tell me! What do you want? And why have you turned yourself into a dog—they can’t speak! Why have you put an end to our little talks? See, see how you frighten me, lying there as if you weren’t a human, born of a human womb.”
As I spoke my grief grew easier and went away, until at last I only felt a little sad. It was as if I wasn’t on earth any longer, in the cool of our mango tree, but in some solemn place where time had ceased and death was unknown. Ma Cia began to run around me licking my feet and hands with relish. Already I was beginning to get used to her new shape, and I said, smiling: “Since you’re like that now, Ma Cia, stay that way, and I’ll come back next Sunday and shan’t forget to bring you some sausage.”
I suddenly felt like going for one of our usual walks, and Ma Cia came with me, frisking about and yelping happily. A bit later, on the stroke of eleven, I went back to her cabin and put on the rice and beans to simmer, and we ate it as we had always done, in the cool shade of the mango tree. It was the same on the Sundays that followed. I arrived early with a little bit of manioc sausage, her favorite dish, and gave it to her on a clean plate, saying always: “You see, Ma Cia, I haven’t forgotten you—but where are my red beans and my rice?” And she would frisk about and lick my hands at great length, and go with me everywhere I went, and in her beautiful brown eyes there was a kind of deep, dumb appeal that put my heart to rout. I talked to her, recounted the events of the week, told her all I hadn’t liked to tell her before, when I felt I was just a little girl come into the world by mistake. Then one Sunday when I went up to see her as usual, with a bit of sausage, I didn’t find her in her customary place under the mango tree. I went into the house; I searched the undergrowth all around it; I went into the forest and called her until late in the night. But she had gone, and I never saw her again. Gradually the little creatures took over her cabin, and it collapsed one day, eaten up by wood lice, termites, and suchlike.
12
EVER SINCE I’d come to La Folie I’d been supported by the presence of Queen Without a Name, who wielded half my hoe, held half my machete, and bore half my troubles, so that thanks to her I really was a Negress that was a drum with two hearts. At least that was what I thought, until Ma Cia changed into a dog and disappeared. Then I realized that the protection of the dead can’t replace the voice of the living. The swamp was under my feet, it was the moment to be light, agile, winged, if I didn’t want life to be a failure just because of one woman.
All the things I’d planted had come up, they’d be ripe for the next harvest, and I could already see myself going down with a round basket on my head to the market at La Ramée. Meanwhile I missed the root vegetables from Ma Cia’s garden, the oil and salt and kerosene and boxes of matches she used to get in exchange for her services as a witch, and which she used to share with me every Sunday. If I didn’t want to die of hunger before the harvest I’d have to go and work in the canefields belonging to the factory. But I feared the cane worse than the devil, so I lived on wild fruit, which made me go yellow and gave me strange fancies, hallucinations. One fine morning when I opened the door of my cabin, I saw a calabash of rice at my feet. In the days that followed it was malangas, a little jar of oil, and even two or three pieces of preserved tamarind. One night, posted behind my cabin, I saw a shape cross the road furtively, like a thief. A few seconds later it reappeared against a shaft of moonlight, and I recognized the little narrow-brimmed straw hat belonging to Olympia.
She lived just below me, on the other side of the
road, and when she didn’t stay indoors I caught vague glimpses of her through her variegated hedge of kawala bushes. That day, when she came back from the canefields, a sweetness was in all my limbs and, dropping my hoe, I went down the slope toward her cabin. She was sitting on a little bench under her arbor, her face severe and rather stiff, as if to warn me from the outset that she wasn’t of the same age or order as I, and I wasn’t to think myself by any means on the same shelf. She sat there motionless, looking me over, appearing to study my every step as I walked toward her. But this tactic, disconcerting as it was, had been employed by more than one of the women in Fond-Zombi, and refusing to be intimidated I introduced myself, telling her in due form who I was, and the name of the woman who’d brought me up, ending up by saying I’d come to ask her to tell me about the canefields, for I was to start work there the next day.
Olympia looked at me intently.
“I know everything, everything,” she said in a strange voice. Then, thinking better of it almost at once, “No, I don’t know everything.”
She seemed to have forgotten me, gazing first at the hill, then at the mountain, and finally at the sea, which at the end of the afternoon was visible as a thin silver strip. Suddenly she got up, went into her cabin, and after a moment came out again carrying another little stool. Inviting me to sit down, she gravely told me she was called Olympia, and offered to let me come and fetch embers first thing in the morning to light my fire. She gave them to everyone, for her it was a kind of duty, yes, a duty, she insisted. And as I thanked her and said that from now on I would be like the others and come and fetch embers from her too, the ice gradually began to melt between us. Bending on me eyes wide with curiosity, she began by saying that this was the first time I’d been away from my usual surroundings—wasn’t it?—whereas she’d left many places behind before ending up on this hill, in the middle of the Brotherhood of the Displaced. Oh, but it wasn’t the quietness that had attracted her, nor the wildness of the people, for both were found side by side here as everywhere else. What had pleased her about La Folie was the quality of the spectacle it presented: “All color, all flame, all ready to confront the eyes of Christ,” she concluded admiringly, laughing softly at the thought of the fine sight the Negroes of the hill offered Him. And leaning toward me she spoke to me of this one and that, of Tasia, who never minced her words, of Vitaline and Leonora, who lived in the same house and loved the same man, of all who came into her head, showing them off to me with the eagerness, delicacy, and detail of an embroideress unfolding her finest work. Lastly, beaming, she pointed to the curtain of balatas and mahogany trees covering the head of the mountain. “But all that’s nothing,” she whispered. “It’s up there that the most lost of our displaced ones lives, the man with the voum-tac. He can justly say he knows all the languages in the world, languages as they ought to be spoken. At any rate, when he takes his bamboo flute it’s not a lying dog’s words he tosses into the air, it’s actual truths that rise up to heaven, I can tell you that.” And still gazing at the curtain of trees beyond the canefields, she murmured as if to herself: “And you, little girl—what do you think of words?”
Olympia’s eyes went from the sky to my face, from her little multicolored hedge to my face, and finally she said as if by way of conclusion that I was right not to accord importance to speech. She seemed pleased with me, and even said I was very young to be an equal member of the brotherhood. I looked at her in surprise, waiting for a sign, for some explanation of these mysterious words, but none came. Night was approaching and I could scarcely see her face. She had become just an ordinary shape sitting rather stiffly on a bench; perhaps it was the half light that gave me the courage to ask her again about the canefields.
Then Olympia stood up, filled a glass of rum to the brim, and said apologetically: “Oh, the canefields.” Then she drank her rum, lit a pipe, and said no more.
The next day while it was still dark, I went down to Olympia’s and she gave me some embers to start my fire, as she was to do for many years, until I left La Folie. Then, when we’d each cooked something to put in our lunch boxes, we set out in silence along the road that led down to the valley and the canefields belonging to the sugar factory. We walked along in the fading light of the stars, both followed and preceded by workers going in the same direction—a procession of dim and haggard ghosts, with here and there the flash of a machete, or a mouth laughing in the darkness, or the sparkle of a ring in the ear of the woman just in front of us, who moved along like a somnambulist, carrying her sleeping baby in a basket on her head. Others had whimpering children trotting along with them, sometimes two or three clutching the same skirt and being dragged through the dawn like fish, eyes shut, lips puffy with sleep. Olympia walked along calmly, her machete carried flat over her shoulder like a gun, a bottle of rum on her head and her legs completely covered with rags tied on with creepers. I walked beside but a little behind her, as if to show her superiority. And seeing the children of the canefields, I wondered where my own were all this time? In my belly, hanging onto my guts, that’s where they were, and that’s where they’d stay until further orders, I thought to myself.
Down in the valley the canefields undulated in the breeze, and the cutters arranged themselves in a line to attack the wave with one movement of a hundred machetes. They were followed by the binders, who separated the spikes, the straw to be used for fodder, and the sections full of sap, tying up the latter quickly and piling them up behind their appointed cutter. Already, by the edge of the field, a little sugar train was heading fully laden toward the tall chimneys of the factory, glowing red in the distance. A foreman told me what my job was, and I found myself plunged at a blow into the heart of malediction. The machetes skimmed low, the stems fell, and the prickles flew everywhere, like splinters of glass, into my back, my nose, my legs. On Olympia’s advice I had put tight bandages on my hands, but the infernal prickles stuck into the cloth, my constricted fingers wouldn’t obey me, and soon I tore off the bandages and entered outright into the fire of the canes. Olympia laid about her with her machete like a man, and I collected up behind her, running bent over, tying up bent over, sorting out and heaping up as fast as I could so as not to be left behind the other women performing their task around me without a murmur, anxious to complete the twenty piles that made up one day’s work—twenty piles of twenty-five bundles, representing ten thousand sweeps of the machete, and representing also several bits of zinc with the factory initials on, dried cod, oil, salt, “France” flour and rum from the factory, molasses from the factory, unrefined sugar from the factory at the factory-imposed price, abracadabra, two sous where there was only one before. Gradually I entered into the malediction, made myself accursed, and a few days later I was no longer tying up the canes but going in among them with my old machete, among the flying prickles and the swarms of bees, and the hornets that rose with the sun, attracted by the heavy, intoxicating fumes of fresh cane sap. I already worked at the same pace as Olympia, doing the same turn as the men, and I soon realized that Mama Victory’s wrists, the ones she’d put at the ends of my arms, were of steel. We started work at four in the morning, but it was not till nine that the sun was high enough to fall on us in earnest, piercing through straw hats, dresses, and human skins. There amid the fire of the sky and the prickles, I sweated out all the moisture my mother had ever put in my body. And I understood at last what a Negro is: wind and sail at the same time, at once drummer and dancer, a first-class sham, trying to collect by the basketful the sweetness that falls scattered from above, and inventing sweetness when it doesn’t fall on him, and at least he has that if nothing else. And, seeing that, I began to take little nips of rum, then big glasses of it to help the sweat flow out of my pores. And I folded up a leaf of tobacco and filled my pipe, and started to smoke as if I’d been born with it in my mouth. And I thought, it’s here, in the midst of the cane prickles, that a Negro ought to be. But in the evening, when I got back to La Folie in my sacking apron, my fa
ce and hands all torn, I’d feel a faint, smiling sadness come over me, and then I thought that groveling about like that in the canefields I’d turn into a beast and even the mother of men wouldn’t know me. I’d push open my door, eat a bit of something hot, light a stub of candle for the Queen and say the Lord’s Prayer, then I was on my pallet with my eyes closed to it all. Sometimes I didn’t even undress, just fell like a stone. And the sun rose, and I set out again with the sweat of the day before, the prickles of the day before, and I got to the fields belonging to the factory, and I wielded my machete, and I lashed into my affliction like everyone else, and someone would start to sing, and the affliction of us all would flow into the song. And that was life in the canefields. And from time to time I’d stop and try to put things in order in my mind, and I’d say to myself, already smiling and soothed, “There’s a God for everything—a God for the ox and a God for the carter.” And then I’d tell my body again, peacefully, “This is where a Negro ought to be.”
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