The Other Side of the Sun

by Madeleine L'engle

  On the next page I read: “If I refuse to let Kitty leave her baby here with us in Illyria it is not because I do not love him. It is not good for Kitty to want to throw off the responsibility of her child. I do understand that Therro and Kitty, Hoadley and silly little Irene, have reason to rebel against the old ways. All they led to was a war which we have lost and no one has won. If one looks at Theron’s and my generation there’s nothing but a defeated people and a ravaged land. So it is not unnatural for the young to think that all the rules by which we tried to live—honor and fidelity in marriage and friendship—can have been no good. For what have they brought us?”

  I put the journal down, blew out my light. I was suddenly and irrationally angry because my husband had sent me to Illyria without him; because he had sent a letter to Cousin James and not to me.

  Worn out with anger and longing, I slept. And dreamed. Was it because of Saintie’s tea? It was not my habit to dream, and it seemed that while I had been in Illyria the nights I dreamed were the nights when Honoria fixed me a posset, and now Saintie. This dream plunged me into the dark continent where Therro and Kitty lived. They were at a dinner party, with many candles, and gleaming silverware and crystal, and afterwards dancing. Kitty was flirting, first with one man, then with another, finally giving dance after dance to a dark, smooth-talking Yankee, and Therro got more and more angry. After the dance there was a scene in their bedroom where he was shouting at her; this was not the first time, he accused, and he called her names, and she flung a silver-backed brush at him and struck him on the forehead, and then she was sobbing in his arms. Then I saw Therro and Hoadley on horseback, riding under an interlocking canopy of trees, riding along the edge of a dark creek, riding into the scrub. Then I heard Hoadley calling Kitty names, vile names, whore and harlot, and I could see the horses and the dark trees no longer. All I saw was Kitty in Hoadley’s arms, in a passionate embrace.

  Then I saw Hoadley lying on the beach, weeping bitterly as I had not known a man could weep.

  Time is not a straight and one-way road. It curves back upon itself. There are intersections and loops. It is like the kind of mathematics the twins understand. I woke up with sun-and-sea light shimmering on my ceiling and walls, and in the moment of waking I did not know where in time I was.

  After breakfast I went out of doors and lay in the dispassionate embrace of a sand dune, in the shadow of a palm, lay there in an agony beyond tears. I had not yet traveled far enough to weep as Uncle Hoadley had wept.

  The palm shadow moved, deepened, was Ron. “Mrs. Renier, it’s too hot for you out here.”

  I sat up and looked, blinking against the morning light, at his acerb expression. There was in him, I thought, a change, a calm; but this may have been a trick of light. He lowered himself to the sand beside me, speaking out to the ocean. “I was gone from Illyria more than half my life, and when I came back there wasn’t anything really changed. Everybody was maybe a little more the same. But you’ve come and all the waters which were quiet—on the surface at least—are all churned up. You haven’t been here long enough to do all that.”

  “I haven’t done anything. Not anything.” I reached out and plucked a long, golden plume of sea oat. “Anyhow, one thing Illyria has taught me is that time doesn’t work that way, in days and hours. It’s been at least a century since my husband left me. Illyria has changed everything for me, not the other way around. It’s like—oh, it’s more than a different continent. I’m sure Kairogi couldn’t seem more strange to me than Illyria.”

  “Can’t leave Kairogi alone, can you?”

  “My husband might be there …” I turned away from him. The wind blew across the water, salt and damp, brushed against my eyes, across the tears I would not shed. I tried to smile, squinting against the sunlight. “And yet—I feel that I’ve known Illyria forever.”

  Perhaps Ron had seen that I was near tears. His voice was gentle. “Illyria does not accept everybody. At least Illyria accepts people only on Illyrian terms.”

  My thoughts flickered across my mind like the fireflies at night. “Tron?”

  “Sharp, aren’t you? Illyria and Tron will always be at odds.”

  “One could never call him Tronnie,” I said. “How odd. What about you and Illyria?”

  He picked up a handful of sand, sifting it, sifting it, and I remembered reading in one of Mado’s journals, written one Christmas at Nyssa during the war, that she had dyed sand for the children, red and blue and green and yellow, and put it in little boxes for them, so they would have something under the Christmas tree. I wondered if she had done the same thing for Terry and Ron when they were little boys in Illyria, and if Ron were remembering this now. “Illyria takes me in spite of myself. In Illyria I am young Ronnie, and I am loved as Ronnie—you’re right about Tron. I never thought of it.”

  “What about Uncle Hoadley and Aunt Irene?”

  “They are at odds.”

  “With each other?”

  “I’m not sure. With Illyria.”

  “And Finbarr and the kitten.”

  “They are Illyrian. My grandmother says they are Guardians.”

  “What does that mean?”

  “Ask her.”

  “Ron—” I wanted to reach out and touch his thin hand. “Do people forget that Illyria belongs to Honoria?”

  His laugh was harsh. “Does it?”

  “Legally—”

  “Because of Mr. James. And Mr. James notwithstanding, do you think we could live in Illyria, a white man’s house on a white man’s beach, if it weren’t for the old ladies?”

  “Does Tron resent this? Does he think Illyria ought to belong to you and to him?”

  Ron stood up. “It’s too hot out here. You should go in.”

  “Please don’t be angry, Ronnie.”

  “Mrs. Renier, you will have to stop treating me this way, as though—”

  “As though what?”

  “As though Illyria were the world. Illyria would like to make peace between you and me, but it can’t.”

  “Why shouldn’t we be at peace?”

  “Because it is not the world. Illyria would like to have you and me be Dr. Ron James and Mrs. Stella Renier, two human beings free to love or hate or be indifferent—but free. And we are not free. Not in this world.”

  “Why not?”

  “Now listen to me.” His voice had a doctor’s authority. “You keep forgetting that I am a Negro. I understand now that you truly don’t even see it. You aren’t one of these whites of stupid good will. You really forget it. But I don’t. Free, are we? Free for what? I’m free to hate you, maybe. There’s nothing like a good, clean hate to give people a sense of identity. I’m closer to Tron in our mutual hating than I am in the sharing of our mother’s blood.”

  Silence lay between us, silence that was the deeper because it was filled with the sounds of the beach, the wind in the sea oats, the sluff of shells being sucked out to sea, the slow pounding of surf, the rattling of palm fronds, shrilling of insects, booming of frogs back in the lagoon.… I looked at Ron as he stood, leaning against the palm tree. A large bluebottle fly lit, buzzing, on the end of his nose, and he swatted it away furiously. But the foolish daring of the insect freed me to speak. “Honoria was talking about Mado, and how she lost everything in the war, and how she had to move through all her feelings of anger and hate until she could—until she could love again. Is that what you mean? That you can’t go around your resentment any more than Mado could? You have to go through it. Only on love’s terrible other side—”

  He moved towards me. “You make it sound so easy, with your clear English voice.”

  “You have one yourself.”

  “I’m losing it as fast as I can. It does me no good. Listen to Mado’s words. Love’s terrible other side. Terrible. She knew it was terrible all right, old Mado. But you, Mrs. Renier? Do you have any idea of the enormity of the fiery darkness of the sun we have to go through before there can be any other side?”


  “Can’t we help each other?”

  “We have to go through it alone.”

  “What about Honoria and Clive?”

  “You can’t talk about Mado, or about Honoria and Clive, as though they’re representative. Mado didn’t give a hoot what kind of impression she made on anybody. But most of you whites can’t bear to have anybody dislike you—not your friends, relations, servants. You think of the Negro as less than human, but you can’t bear it that we don’t like you. You try to smother our anger with kindness, and you simply fail to see that what we need most of all right now is an object on which to pour out our resentment and our sense of frustration and anguish, and most of all our feeling of non-value which you’ve beaten into us all these years—”

  “Ron, stop it! Perhaps I should have known before I came here about black people and white people, but I didn’t. Maybe the Carthaginians and the Romans felt this way about each other. Or Jews and Samaritans. But I don’t—I’m sorry. It’s out of context.”

  He looked at me in the glaring light of the sun. Sweat was running down him. His face glistened. “You are incredible. You’d better get yourself into context if—” He stopped. Then, “Mrs. Renier, it is much too hot for you out here. Please go back to the house.”

  I obeyed.

  FIVE

  1

  Friday afternoon: Aunt Mary Desborough suggested that I go with her and Clive to San Feliz to meet Uncle Hoadley, and I was glad of the excuse to get away from the house, and myself. At the little shed which was called the station, Aunt Mary Desborough gave me two pins to put on the track. When the toy-like train puffed into the station, the pins were flattened and made into a small silver cross.

  “Put it in your pocket,” Aunt Des said. “Keep it.”

  “Why, Aunt Des?”

  “Oh—for fun.”

  “But it’s superstition.”

  “Perhaps for you. But for me it is not. So do it because I ask you to.”

  I put the little cross in my pocket.

  Clive and Uncle Hoadley had been loading boxes of food from Jefferson into the carriage; I had thought Aunt Irene and I had bought enough for a month. “Auntie,” Uncle Hoadley sounded amused. “What are you up to?”

  “Just playing, Hoadley. Olivia and I still have fun with all the things we used to do to amuse you when you were children.”

  “All right, Auntie.” He was tolerant. “It’s good for you to have fun.”

  When we got back to Illyria, Ron had carried Aunt Olivia out to the veranda and set her down in pillows in her rocker. Honoria and Clive had put everything out for the Friday evening ritual. Aunt Irene mewed over Uncle Hoadley like a gull; Aunt Olivia chewed a sprig of mint; and Aunt Des tangled herself up in a skein of reminiscences. “… and I remember another of Mado’s evening dresses, sent from Paris, ivory satin, and showed off her figure superbly. One summer she gave me a black ostrich-plume fan—how I loved it! Oh, and Livvy, do you remember our games of croquet, and battledore and shuttlecock? Those were such happy times. The beautiful Spring House at Nyssa was designed by Thomas Jefferson, Stella, and it’s gone now, gone.”

  “So are many other things, Auntie,” Uncle Hoadley said, “yet we manage to survive.”

  “Sometimes I wonder how we ever did survive? One summer when there was yellow fever in Charleston, Papa took us to Uncle Will Desborough’s mountain camp on Tennessee Bald Mountain—”

  “The plowing was done up there with a steer and a horse hitched together,” Aunt Olivia said. “Theron rode the steer, and James the horse, and Mark and you and I were jealous. Mark and you really were. I only pretended to be. I’d have been terrified to ride the steer.”

  “Do you remember that spring?” But Aunt Des wasn’t really asking anyone. “Cousin François Desborough asked Grampa to give him a job in the bank. He was a fussy little man, Cousin François, and Grampa thought he was a sissy. When the fever came, Cousin François wanted to leave, he was in absolute mortal terror. Grampa told him if he left he was a coward and he couldn’t come back to his job. So Cousin François stayed and caught the fever and died. Grampa never forgave himself. It was awful, Cousin François, his father, and his uncle, all died within three days of each other, and our Cousin Eliza, Cousin François’s mother, stayed without a tear by the bedsides of her husband and son and brother and sang them hymns.”

  “No wonder they died.”

  “Livvy!”

  “At least, Stella,” Aunt Olivia said, “these are cousins you don’t need to worry about remembering. They’re all safely dead. Anyhow, Des, Cousin François died more of fright than fever.”

  Aunt Mary Desborough did not argue this. “When we got back to Charleston the quarantine was lifted, and we went to stay with Grandma and Grampa Desborough—just you and me, Livvy. Grampa had had the fever, too, but he got over it, and afterwards the room he’d been in was fumigated, and the fumigation turned the blue morning-glories on the wallpaper to lavender, I couldn’t get over it, even as a little girl.”

  “Auntie,” Irene said, “perhaps Stella—”

  I held out my hands towards Aunt Des as though warming them at a fire. “No, no, I love hearing it all, it’s like fairy tales—”

  “Some of it is fairy tales,” Aunt Irene murmured.

  But Uncle Hoadley came to the defense of the old aunts. “No, my dear. The aunties remember things like this with great accuracy.”

  Aunt Olivia was still in pain; her voice was sharp. “We remember accurately as long as it’s not something you’d rather forget.”

  “That’s enough, Auntie,” Uncle Hoadley said. “Here is your julep. You should not be having it, but I’m too tired to argue with you.”

  Instantly the old aunts’ concern was all for Uncle Hoadley. The subject of memory was at once abandoned.

  After dinner I went, stubbornly, for my ritual walk on the beach. I was frightened, but I would not give it up. The ocean and sands were lit by the moon, lopsided now, but bright enough to cut a wide swath of diamonds across the water. Finbarr had stayed on the porch with Aunt Olivia, but Minou followed me along the sand, tail erect, paws delicate, prancing along and occasionally bristling and switching as a small wave lapped too close to his toes.

  What looked like a shadow in a curve of dune moved, rose, came to meet me. It was Belle Zenumin.

  Minou gave his most raucous miaow, and streaked up-beach towards the twins’ house as though something were chasing him.

  Belle Zenumin walked her beauty and her strange odor across the sand to me. “Mrs. Renier, my friend, and how be the world treating you?”

  It was not a question which required an answer. Belle was smiling; her voice was quiet; but she held a barely controlled violence which I had never seen in her. “Belle, what’s wrong?”

  “Why, nothing, ma’am!” She embraced me, patting my hair, stroking me. “Why you ask such a thing? You mad at Belle?”

  “No, Belle, no—”

  “You pull away.”

  “I’m sorry—in England we just don’t—” I did not know what to say. Despite her display of affection I felt that she was the one who was angry.

  “Mrs. Renier, ma’am, I come tonight because there be something I has got to say to you. Belle loves her boys. When you has your baby you come to understand the way Belle loves her boys.”

  I still did not know what to say. I waited.

  “Mrs. Renier, Miss Stella, ma’am, you be new to this part of the world, you don’t understand our ways.”

  “No. I don’t. But I hope to learn.”

  “You been seeing too much of my Ron.”

  “What do you mean!”

  “My Ron be a doctor. He be as good as any white man. But he not a white man, and it not good for you to be together.”

  “I don’t understand.”

  “Belle just been telling you, you don’t understand.”

  “I understand that Ron is my friend.”

  “Miss Stella, you got to promise me to leave Ro
n alone.” She reached for my wrist. I pulled away. Suddenly her beauty was gone and she no longer looked younger than Aunt Irene.

  “Ron’s taking care of Aunt Olivia. There’s nothing to leave him alone about.”

  “Granddam warn me. She warn me, and I say, Miss Stella my friend.”

  “I am.”

  “Mrs. Renier, ma’am, what kind of spell you use?”

  I started to turn away.

  She caught my wrist again. “Can’t let you go, Mrs. Renier, till I find out. Granddam be mad at me.”

  “Let go.”

  “You tell me first.”

  “How can I tell you when I don’t know what you’re talking about?”

  “Your magic, Mrs. Renier, ma’am. Did Honoria teach you? Is it something to do with the ring?”

  I jerked my hand away and held it firmly closed. “There isn’t any magic in the ring! You know I wouldn’t use magic! I’m afraid of it!”

  Belle’s laugh sounded like breaking glass. “Granddam say you put your magic on Ron. Nobody can witch one of my boys and not pay. Reniers got to remember when they play with fire they has to pay with fire.” Suddenly the storm within her was released, seeming to jump like a wild beast from the beautiful body. Still holding me with one hand, with the other she clawed, first at my face, then at my hair so that the pins fell out and the heavy coils dropped loosely about my shoulders. I gave a cry of pain and terror.

  “Ashes, ashes, we all fall down!”

  My cry turned to a sob of relief. Willy ran up and began pulling at Belle Zenumin’s arm. She gave a sharp yank and I let out another cry as some of my hair came out.

  Willy began to hit her; I think Harry bit her. I was faint with shock and terror. When she flung herself away from the twins, she turned and spat at me. Then she ran up over the dunes. I fell to my knees on the sand.

  I suppose the twins carried me to their cottage, but I knew nothing clearly until I was lying on a hard, short bed, and Ron was bending over me.