by Frank Wynne
‘All right, next Thursday I’ll take you to the Soufrière. We’ll leave as soon as it’s light. I’ll take Jessica along too. It will do her good to get away from the twopenny romances by Delly and Max du Veuzit! Larissa, you’ll prepare a picnic hamper for us.’
Larissa did not even bother to reply and went on checking the cook’s accounts. ‘A bunch of mixed vegetables for the soup. A bunch of chives. A box of cloves.’
I did not hold it against my father for not keeping his promises or for not turning up for his appointments. He was usually fast asleep when we were to leave at dawn. Or else he did not come home until midnight when we were supposed to go out in the evening.
No, I did not hold it against him.
If it had not been for him I would never have dreamed, imagined, hoped, or expected anything.
If it had not been for him I would never have known that mangoes grow on mango trees, that ackees grow on ackee trees, and that tamarinds grow on tamarind trees for the delight of our palates. I would never have seen that the sky is sometimes pale blue like the eyes of a baby from Europe, sometimes dark green like the back of an iguana, and sometimes black as midnight, or realized that the sea makes love to it. I would never have tasted the rose apples after a swim down by the river.
He actually only took me out once. One Saturday afternoon Larissa and Jessica had gone to pay a visit to the family and I was languishing away with one of the girl domestics who was as scared as I was in this old wooden house where the spirits were simply waiting for nightfall to haunt our sleep. My father burst in and stared at me in surprise.
‘You’re all alone?’
‘Yes, Larissa and Jessica have gone to Saint-Claude.’
‘Come with me.’
A woman was waiting for him on the other side of the Place de la Victoire: jet black with her lips daubed bright red and loops dancing in her ears.
‘Whose child is that?’ she asked in surprise.
‘It’s mine.’
‘Larissa is really going too far. It wouldn’t kill her to buy two yards of cotton! Look how the child’s got up!’
My father looked at me and perhaps saw me for the first time in my Cinderella rags. ‘You’re right,’ he said, puzzled. ‘How about buying her a dress at Samyde’s?’
They bought me a salmon taffeta dress trimmed with three flounces that clashed with my plimsolls which nobody thought of changing. While we walked along, the woman undid my four plaits greased with palma-christi oil that were knotted so tightly they pulled back the skin on my forehead, and rearranged them in ‘vanilla beans’. Thus transfigured, I took my seat in the motor coach, Mary, Mother of All the Saints, that rumbled off to Saint Rose.
Sabrina, who was heavy with child through the doings of Dieudonné, master sail-maker, was being married off. The priest, who was a good old devil, had closed his eyes to the bride’s ‘hummock of truth’ and agreed to give the nuptial blessing.
The wedding ceremony was being held in a spacious house circled by a veranda and built somewhat negligently amidst a tangle of bougainvillea and allamanda a few feet from the sea that gave a daily show under the sun. A table several feet long had been set up under an awning of woven coconut palms stuck here and there with little bouquets of red and yellow flowers. In each plate the women were arranging piles of black pudding, as big as two fingers, together with slices of avocado pear. A band was already playing under a tree and the flute of the hills answered the call of the ti-bwa and the gwo-ka. I did not mix with the group of children as I thought their games quite insipid. I preferred to listen in on the conversation of the grown-ups whose coarse jokes I guessed without understanding them. That’s how I found myself beside my father whose tongue had been loosened by too much rum:
‘We don’t get two lives Etiennise. Down there under the ground there are no wooden horses and the merry-go-round has stopped turning. We’re all alone, cramped in our coffins, and the worms are having a feast day. So as long as your heart keeps beating make the most of it. Don’t take any notice of people who say: “Ah, what a bitch life is! A crazed woman who knows neither rhyme nor reason. She hits out right, she hits out left, and pain is the only reality.” Let me tell you, that woman….’ Unfortunately somebody intervened and I never knew the end of the story. When my father returned his mind had turned to other things.
‘My parents used to tell me: “We are mulattoes. We do not frequent niggers.” I never understood why. My best friends are niggers you know. The first woman I made love to was a negress. What a woman! Ah, what a woman! When she opened her legs she swallowed me up! Your mother was the same. What a woman! Mme Delpine recommended her to Larissa for the ironing as she did wonders with her instruments. And not only with them, believe me! Unfortunately, she had a serious frame of mind. Father Lebris had filled her head with all sorts of tomfoolery about Mary and virginity. She used to sleep in the attic. The afternoon I set upon her like poverty laying hands on the pauper she was reading “The Imitation of Our Lord Jesus Christ.” You should have heard her beg me: “Let me be, Monsieur Etienne, God will punish you. Let me be!” You bet if I let her be….’
And instead of rebelling against the calvary of my poor ravished albeit raped mother, I uttered a raucous laugh. I laughed chickenheartedly.
‘Each time it was one hell of a job. I’m sure it was all pretense and she enjoyed it as much as I did. And then one morning she disappeared. Without a word of explanation. Without even asking for her wages. Larissa was furious….’
Another crime to add to my list: I showed no signs of pity for my mother; neither for the terror of her discovery and her flight to her native island nor for the family lamentations, the neighbors’ malicious gossip, and that pathetic gesture to cover my illegitimacy, the name of Etiennise, daughter of Etienne.
When we got home on Sunday around three o’clock in the afternoon, Larissa, who had never raised a hand against me, gave me a thorough beating, claiming that I had lost my best school dress. I know what infuriated her, it was this growing intimacy with my father.
My mother saw it immediately. Hardly had I set foot on the jetty where she was waiting than she ran her eyes over me significantly and said: ‘You’re very much his daughter now!’
I didn’t answer. I spent the Christmas holidays barricaded behind the hostile silence that I had raised between us, the unjust cruelty of which I only understood too late, much too late.
I didn’t realize to what extent she was suffering. I didn’t see the taut features of her face droop and slacken. The wheeze in her respiration, keeping back the grief, escaped my attention. Her nights were wracked with nightmares. In the mornings she would plunge into prayer.
*
The intimacy with my father soon took an unexpected turn from which I obviously did not dare shy away. He entrusted me with little notes to hand to all the girls at the lycée who had caught his eye.
‘Give this from me to that little yellow girl in the fourth form.’
‘And this one to the tall girl in the second form.’
It soon became a genuine commerce of billets-doux. You would never imagine how ready they were, these young girls from a reputable family seen at church on Sundays, closely chaperoned by father, brothers, and mother and stumbling with beatitude on their return from the altar, how ready they were to listen to the improper propositions of a married man with a reputation.
I devised a daring technique. I would approach the coveted prey while she was chatting with her classmates in the school yard. I would stand squarely in front of her and hand her the note folded in four without saying a word. Somewhat surprised, but unsuspecting, she would take it from me, open it, start to read and then blush deeply as far as the color of her skin would let her. My father did not exactly treat the matter lightly:
MY LITTLE DARLING,
Ever since I saw you on the Place de la Victoire I have been madly in love with you. If you do not want to have a death on your conscience meet me tomorrow at 5 p.m. on the sec
ond bench in the allée des Veuves. I’ll be waiting for you with a red dahlia in my buttonhole….
Waiting for an answer in which I hope you will accept.
The effect of such an epistle was radical. Before class was over the victim would hand me a folded sheet accepting the rendezvous.
While I was in form three a new pupil arrived, Marie-Madeleine Savigny. She had just arrived from Dakar where her father had been a magistrate and her African childhood had given her an aristocratic languor. She called her sandals ‘samaras’ and her mother’s domestics ‘boyesses’. Every able-bodied man in Pointe-à-Pitre was eaten up with desire for her, and my father more than the rest.
When I brought her the traditional billet-doux she cast her hazel eyes over it and without a moment’s hesitation tore it up, scattering the pieces of paper at the foot of a hundred-year old sandbox tree. My father did not consider himself beaten. With me as the go-between he returned to the attack the next day and the next. By the end of the third week Marie-Madeleine had not given an inch while my father was an absolute wreck. Back home on time he would be watching for me from the balcony and then rush down the stairs as impetuous as a teenager.
‘Well?’
I shook my head. ‘She won’t even take the letter from me.’
His face dropped and he became the outrageously spoiled little boy he had once been. He had been his mother’s favorite, his grandmother’s; his father’s sisters and his mother’s sisters, who showered him with kisses, turned a blind eye to his caprices and called him voluptuously ‘Ti-mal’. In June Marie-Madeleine caused a stir by not entering for part one of the baccalauréat. A few weeks later we learned she was to marry Jean Burin des Rosiers, the fourth son of a rich white creole factory owner. Great was the stupor! What! A white creole to marry a colored girl? And not even a mulatto into the bargain! For although he was a magistrate, Mr Savigny was but a common copper-colored nigger! As for the mother, she was halfcoolie! Such an event had not occurred since 1928, the year of the terrible hurricane, when a Martin Saint Aurèle had married a Negress. But the family had turned their backs on him and the couple had lived in poverty. Whereas the Burin des Rosiers were welcoming their daughter-in-law with open arms. The world was completely upside down!
Everyone had just regained their calm when Marie-Madeleine, who no longer needed to lace herself up in corsets, exhibited at least a six-month-old belly in her flowing flowery silk dresses.
My father joined in the rush for the spoils. In the middle of a circle of lecherous listeners I heard him recount, without ever trying to deny the fact, how he had tasted Marie-Madeleine’s secret delights but unlike Jean had not let himself be caught red-handed.
I spent an awful summer holiday on Marie-Galante. Since I was soon to enter the lycée in the rue Achille René-Boisneuf and take physics and chemistry with the boys, my mother got it into her head to make me a set of clothes. She went down to the Grand Bourg where she bought yards and yards of material, patterns, marking crayon, and a pair of tailor’s scissors…. Every day when she came back from the hospital there were the unending fitting sessions. I could not bear the touch of her fidgety hands and her grumbling: ‘This side hangs all right. Why doesn’t the other side do the same?’
On Sunday, August 15, I refused to accompany her in the flared dress she was so proud of. She looked me straight in the eyes: ‘If you think he worships you why doesn’t he pay for your dresses?’
It was true that for the three years or so I had been living with my father I had never seen the color of his money, except for Larissa’s two little brand-new notes. I was doomed to gaze from afar at the books in the bookshops, the perfume in the perfume shops, and the ice creams at the ice-cream parlor.
Whenever she had the opportunity, my mother sent me two or three dirty banknotes with a note that always read: ‘I hope you are keeping well. Your affectionate maman, Nisida.’
I was thus able to buy my exercise books and pens and fill my inkpot with blue ink from the seas of China.
*
When school started again in October my father stopped his traffic of billets-doux. I felt so frustrated, deprived as I was of my mean little mission as a go-between, that I would have gladly drawn his attention to the pretty chicks (that’s how he used to call them) who scratched around untouched in the school yard. I soon discovered the key to the mystery. He had fallen head over heels in love with the very pretty wife of a Puerto-Rican tailor by the name of Artemio who had opened his small shop on the rue Frébault. Lydia was a righteous woman. Or perhaps quite simply she did not like my father. She talked freely to her husband of these constant advances that troubled her, and the husband, hotheaded as Latins are wont to be, resolved to give the brazen fellow a lesson he would not forget. He hired the services of three or four bullies, one of whom was a former boxer nicknamed ‘Doudou Sugar Robinson’. They lay in wait one evening for my father while he was striding across the Place de la Victoire and left him lifeless at the foot of a flame tree. Around midnight Larissa was presented with an inert, bloodstained body. Transfigured, she swooped down on her husband, who was finally at her mercy. For weeks it was a constant traffic of herb teas, poultices, frictions with arnica and pond leeches destined to suck out the bad blood. Once the doctor had turned his back carrying off his sulfanilamides, in came the obeah man with his roots. Every Sunday after the high mass the priest popped in to describe the flames of hell to the notorious sinner.
My father never recovered from this misadventure. In his enthusiasm, Doudou Sugar Robinson had fractured his eyebrow, crushed his nasal bone and broken his jaw in three places. All this knitted together again very badly and the good souls of Pointe-à-Pitre shook their heads: ‘God works in mysterious ways! And he used to be such a handsome man!’
But above all, it was his pride and his morale that took a beating. My father realized he had become a laughingstock. He became easily offended and susceptible. He quarrelled with his best friends. He lost that vitality that had made him so popular with the ladies. He became sad, vindictive, and whimpering.
As for me, with the typical cruelty of teenagers, I hastened to keep my distance from the hero who was no longer a hero and who shuffled around harking back to his former conquests. I began to look at him in a new light. What exactly was he worth?
I was pondering upon this when I learned that my mother had been taken to the hospital.
Less than one year later she died of cancer, having hidden the first symptoms from everyone.
A WOMAN LIKE ME
Xi Xi
Translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt
Xi Xi (1938–). Zhang Yan was born in Shanghai and moved with her family to Hong Kong at the age of twelve. She worked for many years as a primary school teacher, and was an outspoken advocated for teachers’ rights. She edited a number of literary magazines, including “Plain Leaf Literature”. Under the penname Xi Xi, she is an accomplished poet, novelist, and essayist, but is perhaps most famous in her native country as a screenwriter, and one of the pioneers of experimental film in Hong Kong. Xi Xi is an ardent soccer fan – in part because her father is a ticket checker at a bus station, who also worked as a team coach and referee.
A woman like me is actually unsuitable for any man’s love. So the fact that the emotional involvement between Xia and me has reached this point fills even me with wonder. I feel that the blame for my having fallen into this trap, from which there is no escape, rests solely with Fate, which has played a cruel trick on me. I am totally powerless to resist Fate. I’ve heard others say that when you truly like someone, what may be nothing more than an innocent smile directed your way as you sit quietly in a corner can cause your very soul to take wing. That’s exactly how I feel about Xia. So when he asked me: Do you like me? I expressed my feelings toward him without holding back a thing. I’m a person who has no concept of self-protection, and my words and deeds will always conspire to make me a laughingstock in the eyes of others. Sitting in a coffee shop wit
h Xia, I had the appearance of a happy person, but my heart was filled with a hidden sorrow; I was so terribly unhappy because I knew where Fate was about to take me, and now the fault would be mine alone. I made a mistake at the very beginning by agreeing to accompany Xia on a trip to visit a schoolmate he hadn’t seen for a long time, then later on, by not declining any of his invitations to go to the movies. It’s too late for regret now, and, besides, the difference between regretting and not regretting is too slight to be important, since at this very moment I am sitting in the corner of a coffee shop waiting for him. I agreed to show him where I work, and that will be the final chapter. I had already been out of school for a long time when I first met Xia, so when he asked me if I had a job, I told him that I had been working for several years.
What sort of job do you have?
He asked.
I’m a cosmetician.
I said.
Oh, a cosmetician.
He remarked.
But your face is so natural.
He said.
He said that he didn’t like women who used cosmetics and preferred the natural look. I think that the reason his attention had been drawn to my face, on which I never use makeup, was not my response to his question but because my face is paler than most people’s. My hands too. Both my hands and my face are paler than most people’s because of my job. I knew that as soon as I divulged my occupation to him, he would jump to the same erroneous conclusion that all my former friends had. He has already assumed that my job is to beautify the appearance of girls in general, such as adding just the right touch of color to the face of a bride-to-be on her wedding day. And so when I told him that there were no days off in my job, that I was often busy Sundays, he was more convinced than ever that his assumption was correct. There were always so many brides on Sundays and holidays. But making brides-to-be beautiful is not what I do; my job is to apply the final cosmetic touches to people whose lives have already come to an end, to make them appear gentle and at peace during their final moments before leaving the world of man. In days past I had brought up the subject of my occupation to friends, and I always immediately corrected their momentary misconception, so that they would know exactly what sort of person I am. But all my honesty ever brought me was the loss of virtually all my friends. I frightened them all off; it was as though the me who was sitting across from them drinking coffee was actually the ghost of their own inner fears. And I never blamed them, for we all have an inborn, primitive timidity where the unknown mysteries of life are concerned. The main reason I didn’t give a fuller answer to Xia’s question was my concern that the truth would frighten him; I could no longer allow my unusual occupation to unsettle the friends around me, something for which I could never forgive myself. The other reason was my natural inability to express what I think and feel, which, over a long period of time, has led to my habit of being uncommunicative.