The night was different. Instead of coffee it was dark cinnamon rum. Instead of jambalaya it was strawberries and warm chocolate. Instead of hard manly lust, it was passion; a whisper of words instead of the harsh bark of lewdness.
I fell into the dark inviting scent of his ancestral Spanish blood and the thick ridges of his contoured body. I could feel his hands; his tongue; his penis flickering over the curves of my body, caressing my lips; the arc of my ear, the gentle lines of my spine. Our breath and bodies mingled as we fell into a rhythm; a gentle stirring action that pushed my mind and body to feel and explore; to twist and to writhe. I could not get enough of him, of the pleasure and fire he gave me; the tide he moved in me like some cruel moon.
I clung and he caressed. I willed pauses and he brought me progression. I begged for breath and he exhaled pleasure. I pleaded escape and he gave it to me unbound; knowing I would never be able to free myself without him. And the rain continued, thrashing against the windows as the sweat and tears of my passion dampened the sheets as if we were out amongst the rocks on the patio.
A minor epiphany came to me in the night when I realized one of Charlotte’s secrets. She had never found beauty in New Orleans, only ugliness; the reflection of rancor she carried with her and splashed on the scenery. She had missed everything she had sought in New Orleans and I had found it. Had it offered to me and partook of it with a thirsty reverence I hadn’t dared thought possible.
I slept through a good part of the next day, waking only once to hear the rain still splashing against the windows and wondering vaguely what had all the angles crying so hard here in this city. Manuel was gone, but his scent remained and I had wrapped myself in it and lumbered back off into sleep.
Manuel finally woke me with gentle love making. We showered afterwards and found Nana, seeming quite pleased with herself, hovering around the stove with a air of quiet confidence. We all settled into coffee as Manuel recounted his day at the café and bartered suggestions about staff and menu changes with Nana while I simply enjoyed their presence. Nana glanced at me curiously a few times but said very little about anything other than my appearance and how well rested I looked.
Manuel glanced at his watch, claimed his required presence at the café, then, with gentle earnestness, kissed my cheek and left Nana and me to our own devices.
An instant flush zipped up from my toes and colored me red, but when I looked up Nana had discreetly turned her back and busied herself at the stove again. It wasn’t until she put a plate in front of me and settled one in front of her own stool that I realized she had made us breakfast. With a sly glance she smiled, telling me that her night had been just as lengthy and sensuous as mine.
“I want you to stay with us until you leave New Orleans,” Nana said after we finished eating.
“But I don’t know when I’m leaving.”
“No one says you have to,” she countered.
I looked at her suspiciously. “What is it? What did you find out?”
She pulled a slip of paper from her house dress and slid it to me. “Have Manuel take you. It’s in the bayous.”
“What is it? Who is it?”
“The people you need to talk to,” she answered.
“But how…?”
She shrugged nonchalantly, but tapped her nail on the paper. “This is your mother’s cross; don’t let it be yours too. Leave it alone and cherish the happiness you’ve found.”
There was her lesson. My choice. I could give up this quest and take what she offered in her grandson or I could continue with it and give up any hope of redemption.
I reached out and snatched the paper from the counter. “I have to know,” I said as I ran back to Manuel’s room and locked the door behind me.
I must have dozed with the cryptic note still in my hands because when I awoke Julia was tapping on the door.
“Sorry, I must have fallen asleep,” I said as she walked past me and sat on the bed. She patted it, asking me to sit beside her.
“Are you okay?” she asked.
“Yes, I… yes.”
“Nana says you’ll be staying with us for a while. She also thinks you’ve bewitched our Manuel.”
Denial must have raced across my features because she smiled slightly and held her hand up to stall it. “She’s delighted, but she’s cautions too. She doesn’t want him hurt.”
“He hardly seems fragile.”
“More than you realize, but that’s between you two.” She got up. “I came to see if you needed help getting your things from the hotel.”
The hotel. I had hardly even thought of it. Or clothes, or all the stupid trinkets I’d planned on filling my extra suitcase with.
Julia saw my indecision. “Nana wants you to stay, Charles. She just doesn’t want Manuel’s first bout with love to be as tragic as yours was.”
“That’s hardly possible,” I snapped at her.
“Death is, as most people understand it, a physical anomaly, Charles. But it can just as easily be the protracted severing of love,” she said before she left.
I repeated that. ‘The protracted severing of love.’ Where did this family come up with this shit? I curled it around my tongue, swirled it around in my mind. Putting the now sweat-dampened paper on the side, I realized that I had forgotten to ask her what it said. It was written in Spanish or French or some New Orlean mixture of the two, none of which I could read.
‘Protracted severing of love.’ Was that the whittling away of a small piece of birch, the carving of hickory or the subtle mauling of a pine log into an idol? It turned over and over, and kept turning as I left the house and went back to my hotel.
I stopped at the desk and handed Nana’s note to the flirtatious blonde boy behind it. He shared it with a black man that came up front, and they in turn shared with a woman who looked older than Nana. None of them could tell me what it said.
“There’s a few recognizable words here, but..” the old woman answered and shook her head. “I just don’t know.”
“Seems like a code,” the black man said.
“A code?” I asked.
“A family code. They were developed during the battle of New Orleans. People were afraid that the British would sack New Orleans and burn it like they did Washington. It was a hedge against their fear of occupation. But then Jackson defeated the Brits and they stopped worrying. I’m surprised it still exists, “the old woman said
“Lots of history still active here,” she continued. “Only the family that wrote it would be able to help you read it.”
Nana, I thought to myself. She wanted to make sure Manuel brought me to wherever this was…
But Manuel didn’t come to the hotel that day. Or the next. Or the next. And I was afraid to return.
As the days passed a blasphemous but recognizable voice crept into my head telling me that there was no use in wanting what would never be; nor in wondering if I could ever have it.
‘And why should he show?’ that voice demanded. ‘You hardly even knew these people before you dropped your pity in their lap.’
But I was desperate. I was alone and needed someone to…
‘Too easy,’ the voice reprimanded me. ‘You made him a chain that you thought would tow you out onto the full wishful road of felicity.’
Was it that delicate?
‘Only so you could stand there and be run down by the semi of reality’ her voice cackled at me.
My face churned and knotted. I knew that voice; the cold smell of her hands. “Fuck you,” I said aloud as I grabbed my things and rushed out the door. Wasn’t it Salinger who said that mothers are all slightly insane? And wasn’t it Charlotte who reinforced his ideology by wanting me to give up looking for what I had never found at home?
*****
It was still raining. A light damp drizzle that was just enough to keep the mosquitoes interested.
Manuel answered, his husky male perfume washing over me and an unexpectedly sensitive look on his face. He sighed
with relief. “Ah, you’re back. Come in. We didn’t know where you were.”
What an idiot. I had forgotten to tell them the name of the hotel. No wonder he never showed.
My head warbled fiercely with Charlotte’s voice. I put my things inside the foyer and shoved Nana’s note into his hands. “Take me now.”
He looked at the note and then at me, his hand coming up and caressing my cheek. “It’s all I can offer you. I have to finish this,” I told him.
He cupped the back of my head and pulled me into him. “You’ll come back to me when this is all done.”
“I can’t make that promise,” I told him. I couldn’t be that incomplete and inadequate person beside him. I couldn’t let my inferiority tarnish his magical charm. “I’m not even sure I’ll survive.”
He pulled away slightly and cupped my face in his hands. “You will, mon cher. And I won’t take you unless you promise me.”
“But I can’t,” I protested, tears forming at the thought of how I would taint every aspect of his life if I actually became a real part of it.
“You must. Or how can I survive?” he asked me.
We borrowed a car from one of Manuel’s friends and headed south, stopping only once to check an annotation on Nana’s instructions, then again to rent a hydroplane and a guide to get us through the bayous.
Manuel kept up a steady patter of conversation that seemed to match the drizzle, though I knew that he was really keeping me from denying him the promise I had not yet made. The code, he told me, was developed during the war just as the woman at the hotel had said. But Nana had revived it when she opened her restaurant to protect her recipes. Apparently they had been stolen once and she vowed that it would never happen again.
In his patter Manuel had explained Bourbon Street, then the St Louis Basilica I had glimpsed. The plentitude of the French Market was a subject for a while, as were the Wharfs, the Pont alba Apartments and Jackson Square.
As we moved out of the city and its fill of haggard derelicts, he explained its history some; the difference between a Cajun and a Creole, the mixing of different architectures, the importance of his own Spanish heritage and the French influence on it and the rest of the city.
“But the bayous are another world,” Manuel said when we entered them. “There’s still huge dissention over the word’s origin, whether boyau from the French or bayuk from the Choctaw language.” And he went on.
I smiled over at him, grateful for his chatter and the fact that he had forced no decision on me, but that faltered somewhat when the hydroplane we rented stopped and our guide nodded toward a mass of trees and a barely perceptible path. When we climbed from the boat Manuel grabbed my hand and spun me back toward him; our guide nearly choking on the cud he was chewing.
“Nana’s only concern is that I’ll get hurt, Charles. For me, there is no choice. I’ll wait until you finish this, no matter how long that takes.”
“How the hell can you say that?” I demanded, pushing away from him. “You don’t even know me.”
“True,” Manuel acknowledged. “But I’ve seen behind your façade, and I don’t think you even realize how precious you are.”
My defenses screamed at the fallacy of the fairy tale prince that had conjured himself up before me, yet here he was, holding my hands to make sure I stayed fully aware of the vow he made to me.
“Why?” I asked.
“I love you; inexplicable, but true.”
“Nana says I’ve bewitched you.”
“Dérèglement.” He smiled. “But she says it happily. She wants what’s best for both of us. You, to release your demons. Me, that I’ve finally found someone that will hold my interest more than one night.”
“But how long is that? A week? A year, before you get sick of me?”
The guide cleared his throat loudly and made us turn to witness his revulsion. “Ain’t got all day,” he sneered.
“Come on. Let’s get this done,” Manuel said.
Without the boat’s movement the air around us seemed impassibly hotter. We were already damp from the drizzle but now the sweat we broke out in ensured we were soaked right through.
A brown marsh rabbit jumped away from us and into the water as I stared in amazement. I turned and looked at Manuel who winked and smiled. “Only in Louisiana.”
We pushed through the moss that hung down from oak trees in dense blankets of green and sidestepped cypress trees whose trunks were ten feet in diameter and whose roots stabbed up and back into the ground like bent fingers massaging skin. Warm brown water surrounded us and it was only after I nearly fell in at the sight of an alligator, that I realized that we were on a very small cluster of islands.
The wet musty earth finally gave way to a dryer patch of ground and a shack backlit by gray omnibus clouds that peeked through the trees. An old black woman whose hair was wooly and rusted with gray sat on the porch.
She leaned forward with intense scrutiny as we approached, her eyes as crisp as white lines on new asphalt. The rocking chair groaned inexplicably under her bony knife like frame; her knobbed fingers gripping the thumb worn rests. She leaned back as we got closer and continued stroking her steady beat across the floorboards. She watched us but didn’t say a word.
I looked at her curiously and back at Manuel who had stopped at the edge of the clearing, my question asked by the subtle movements of my face. He answered with a nod to proceed; telling me without words that this was indeed the correct place.
She sighed loudly, looking off through the lush vegetation that surrounded her house as I toed the dank soil at the bottom of the stairs. “What is it young ‘un? You’ve come all this way. What’s the question?”
I felt smothered in the gnawing heat of the place but let my questions come from the pictures my past provoked. “The du Clerque’s, do you know them? I’m looking for the family of Charlotte du Clerque.”
An angry look hit her face like a thunderbolt. “Why?” she demanded, challenging me to question her again.
The woman unnerved me, obviously the question had much more meaning than I’d anticipated. Maybe that was the reason Nana had tried to warn me away. But I had made this decision long before I got to the bottom of this step and I had to go through with it. “I’m looking for my family.”
Her facial rainstorm instantly upgraded to a hurricane. “It doesn’t look like they’re here does it?” she barked at me.
“No but…,” I could think of no logical reason to continue pestering this woman. She obviously didn’t want our company and seemed upset at our intrusion. “Nana sent me.” I said finally.
Her features lightened somewhat. She nodded. “Who are you kin to young ‘un?”
“Charlotte.”
Her chair stopped momentarily as her eyes stabbed at me. “You her boy?”
“Yes ma’am.”
She seemed to inspect me a little closer, squinting at me in appraisal before she resumed rocking.
“She’s a foul woman,” she said as her eyes lit across me one last time. She pulled out a pipe and a packet of tobacco from a hidden pocket in the fold of her dress, filling it and tamping it firmly before offering it to me as an afterthought.
I took this as an invitation and sat on the bottom stair as I declined the tobacco. She slipped it back into her dress and lit the pipe with a strong thumbnail and a wooden match. The whole time strumming a steady beat on the porch as she awaited my response to her comment about Charlotte.
But she seemed so content in her silence, puffing away like some old coal fired engine, that I was reluctant to make any heartfelt declarations and ruin the moment with idle chatter.
Maybe she had worked for Charlotte’s family at some time; knew some intimate and embarrassing trivia about them. Maybe she witnessed the demise and ruination after Charlotte’s mother, Marie, left and started a new life up north with Francois. Whatever it was, I wanted all the details; the entire insipid truth that made Charlotte breathe a cloud of angry black smoke any
time New Orleans was mentioned.
But the old woman said nothing, letting her smoke fill the void of silence and space between us.
“You ain’t figured it out yet?” she asked after a time.
“No, I…,” I raised my hands and shrugged in defeat. “I’m sorry. She never told us anything about the family. I was hoping you could help me.”
“Not surprising.” She bit down on the pipe, almost as if gnawing on the stem, and splashed out a little cloud of smoke on each forward thrust of the rocker.
I was entranced by this for a moment. “She claimed to be descended from southern aristocracy,” I informed her.
The woman grunted and waved her hand dismissively. “Her mouth is filled with nothing but lies and accusations, young ‘un. ‘Course, you probably know that already or you wouldn’t be here, would you?’
I smiled, but said nothing.
“Fact is, the family was mouse poor. Never had nothing in their whole lives other than the fact that their skin was lighter than the rest of ours.” Her eyes challenged me suddenly as I looked up at her from the step. She was waiting for my reaction, but my brain didn’t process what she was telling me and I allowed my gaze to fall to the step in front of me so she would explain.
“I’m your mother’s aunt; your great aunt. Your grandmother’s maiden name was Montmarre, born of Claire Montmarre, a slave hand on one of the sugar plantations and kept for the sexual escapades of her master and his sons,” she said.
“Charlotte came looking some years back but couldn’t partake of having nigger blood in her veins and called me a lying nigger bitch and ran out of here.”
I was stunned. “But how?” I asked.
“Marie could have passed for white, and did. As soon as she was old enough, she ran off to New Orleans, found her a white man named du Clerque, and made like the rest of us never existed. Might have been her who put them notions into your mama’s head.”
“So I’m black, or part black?”
She looked at me. “You were, once.”
I burst out laughing, I couldn’t help it. The thought of that knowledge slapping Charlotte across the face left me in tears. The old woman, Rose, chuckled throatily, as if it hadn’t happened in so many years that the phlegm was making a mad dash for escape. Soon we were both in tears, her banging on the armrest of her rocking chair me pounding on the steps.
The Value Of Rain Page 10