Soucouyant

by David Chariandy

My brother abruptly left the table and we soon heard the front door slam hard. The rest of us began to play a game with rules that never seemed clear to me. Suits and numbers … your turn now … here, let me see what you got. Mother was explaining how I should have played my cards when we both noticed the drops of water on the table. Me reaching up to brush my wet face. Father showing his teeth, but in a strange and unhappy way.

  ‘Is just a game,’ Mother whispered to me. ‘Don’t be silly now.’

  FINE. I COULD see their point. A cause is not a condition. And a condition is not in any real way your loved one. My parents never felt satisfied with how the medical specialists were articulating Mother’s new being. I too never felt satisfied after recovering the pamphlet from the trash. The stench that seemed to cling to words like aphasia and agnosia and apraxia …

  ‘… although the SWR or the Standard Word Recall test may offer preliminary indications of the condition, one must be cautious. Depression and certain post-traumatic states may produce false positives. One must especially be cautious when dealing with the uneducated and/or ethnic minorities. Often enough, an SWR test administered to these people will result in a clear positive when, strictly speaking, cognitive dementia as discussed is not truly in effect.…’

  I couldn’t use this. I couldn’t go further. I put the pamphlet back and joined Mother in the living room, determined to see her my own way.

  I GUESSED RIGHT that first evening of my return. Touch has remained important to Mother. It steadies her to an increasingly alien world and jars her to recollection when sight and sound fail to do so. Mother may not always be able to remember me. Not always. But she instantly remembers physical quirks like my trick knee. She’s also able to read something on the bumps of my spine and in my hair, a texture somewhere between the soft and tight curls of her own and the spiny quills of my father’s. She recognizes the odd oblong shape of my skull and that my ears stick out.

  ‘Like teacup handles,’ she says, laughing.

  Smell too is a trustworthy sense. Mother recognizes the smell of a green deodorant soap on me and warns me that it causes rashes. She also quickly notices when she soils herself. She gets defensive and asks me if I have a problem, if I’m sure I don’t have to make a trip upstairs, her voice getting increasingly stern with each repetition of the question. Her hearing is good, but her comprehension has suffered. Mother often forgets the meaning of the most basic words. I ask her to pass me the butter and she pretends that she cannot hear me, her eyes shifting about the table. I ask her if she can see the bird perched outside on the electric wire and she moves her head to better see the plastic bag dancing fatly over the railway tracks. But when I begin humming a song by Nina Simone, she quickly joins in.

  ‘My name is … Peaches!’ she cries loudly. This is the end of a song entitled ‘Four Women’ in which the final and most ominously described woman announces her sweet name to a frightening orchestral crescendo. Mother still gets the joke. She laughs.

  ‘Your name isn’t really Peaches,’ I say a bit later.

  ‘No, dear. It isn’t.’

  Sarcasm? Is she still capable of sarcasm?

  ‘WHERE’S MY HAT?’

  ‘On the counter, Mother.’

  ‘Where’s my hat?

  ‘On the counter.’

  ‘Where’s my hat?’

  ‘Mother?! I’ve already said it! It’s on the counter!

  ‘Where’s the … counter?’ she asks, softly.

  ‘You’re standing right beside …’ I begin, my voice trailing off.

  WE HAVE VERY difficult moments together too. Mother might accuse me of stealing the avocado ‘pear’ that was ripening in the fruit bowl when there was never one there to begin with. She’s disappointed with me but apparently forgiving. She just wants me to be a little more honest about things. At other times, her accusations are edged with violence. On an afternoon of weak light, she stands in the kitchen watching me intently, looking away when I attempt to speak to her.

  ‘Are you hungry, Mother? Can I get you something?’

  She doesn’t answer but moves to the cutlery drawer and pulls out a steak knife. She holds it ready, looking slightly down with that wide-gazed look which allows you to take in all surrounding action. She doesn’t want to suggest that she’s hoping for a fight, but she’s prepared to fight if she must. Her knuckles are shiny but do not tremble, and there’s suddenly so little room in this kitchen for us each to move about. If she were to act, would she understand the result? The red oil leaking from the young man’s body. His widened eyes and the thick and longing noises coming from his throat. What’s wrong with this man? What could he possibly want? Why can’t men just try a bit harder to communicate their feelings…?

  ‘It’s me, Mother.’

  ‘Yes. Of course. Me,’ she says, still holding the knife. I slowly back away from her and out of the kitchen. I close my bedroom door and contemplate how it might be wedged shut at night. I wonder why the young woman is taking so long with the groceries.

  When I creep downstairs an hour later, it’s to a powdery white haze that’s filled the entire kitchen. Mother is vigorously shaking flour out of several dishtowels. She’s been baking something that’s required her to sift dozens of cups of flour onto the kitchen floor. Scatter pitted olives upon this lunar surface. Add the zests of lemons and grapefruits as well as whole banana peels. She’s arranged five egg yolks on a baking sheet, the only object in the kitchen that isn’t lightly floured. The blender is full of eggshells, an empty tuna fish can, a dollop of mayonnaise. A recipe has slipped a few times in Mother’s head. Becoming sweet, then savory. A dessert, then a main course. Cumin sands and peppermint air.

  She notices me. Then smiles, holds open her dusty arms.

  ‘Come,’ she says.

  EVEN MORE DIFFICULT moments. One evening just after the young woman has retreated to her room for the night, Mother and I sit in the living room listening to some ‘oldies’ show on the radio.

  Birds do it.

  Bees do it.

  Even educated fleas do it.…

  Mother has been humming along with the music. She now stands and beckons me over.

  ‘Dance? We can dance?’

  ‘I don’t remember, Mother.’

  ‘Oh you remember, child. Don’t be silly.’

  She moves me briskly about the room. I struggle to keep up, astonished both by her energy and her memory of the moves. We’re having fun together for the first time since my return. A genuine, playful type of fun. The music comes to a close and a man on the radio begins to inform us of the softness of a particular brand of facial tissues, but we’re laughing already. We hug each other warmly and then Mother closes her eyes and kisses me passionately on the mouth.

  ‘… because you deserve a little spoiling …’

  I jerk violently free. Mother seems shocked and perhaps even a bit hurt. She is about to say something, but then another song comes on that she recognizes. She closes her eyes and performs some waltz-like steps alone, humming softly to herself and holding her palm low to her stomach. Lower on her stomach and lower still before I flee the room, bumping into the young woman on my way out and shaking my head no.

  AND HER STORIES.

  Mother is sitting bundled in a blanket on the front porch, her cornmeal porridge and tea now cold. The leaves from a sugar maple make dancing patterns on her arm, and she strokes her pretty new skin before pausing, a hurt in her face. Her eyes are far and she speaks in a slow voice.

  ‘It happen …’ she begins. ‘It happen one fore-day morning when the sun just a stain on the sky. When the moon not under as yet. Me, I was a young girl running from home. Running ’pon paths so old that none could remember they origin. My ankle paint cool, cool by the wet grasses. I run and stumble into a clearing with an old mango knotting up the sky with it branch. The fallen fruit upon the ground. They skin all slick and black. The buzz of drunken insect.…’

  ‘You saw a soucouyant, Mother.’

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nbsp; ‘Child?’ she shouts, ‘Is I telling this story or you?’

  ‘Sorry, Mother.’

  She sucks her teeth loudly and cuts her eye once more at me. She composes herself by patting her hair, marveling for a moment at its texture. She looks at me again.

  ‘Where was I…?’

  ‘I think you were just trying to finish your breakfast.’

  ‘Oh yes. I telling you about mangoes. You should know about mangoes. There are forty-nine different types of mango, child. Exactly forty nine. Mango julie and mango rose. Mango calabash and mango starch.…’

  ‘Are you finished with your food, Mother?’

  She continues to name more types of mangoes. I bring her bowl inside to the kitchen and scrape the congealed porridge into the trash, but not before discovering that Mother has sometime earlier pulled out a sack of flour from the cupboard and scattered this all over the floor. I spend fifteen minutes sweeping up the mess. When I return to the front porch, she is still naming some damn fruit.

  ‘Mango graham and mango vere. Mango teen and mango zabicco. And mango starch and mango zabicco. And mango julie and mango zabicco.…’

  ‘Are you cold , Mother? Would you like to come in?’

  ‘Mango rose and mango graham. Mango calabash and … mango calabash. And mango calabash and mango calabash. Mango calabash mango calabash. Mango calabash mango calabash mango calabash.…’

  ‘Can you shut up and tell me, Mother? Can you please just shut up for a moment and tell me?’

  This stops her, this young man’s irrational outburst. Her posture suddenly becomes regal, but her eyes again have that wide and watchful look. She picks at some crust of food on the sleeve of her blouse. She scratches her wrist and then stirs her tea needlessly. Dull china chime of her nervousness. I’m embarrassed now for raising my voice. I sit gently beside her and take her hand in mine. Her cool hand. I hear her whisper something without looking at me. I lean closer.

  ‘Calabash … calabash … calabash.…’

  Please, Mother. Please.

  THERE ARE THE ironies, of course. Mother can string together a litany of names and places from the distant past. She can remember the countless varieties of a fruit that doesn’t even grow in this land, but she can’t accomplish the most everyday of tasks. She can’t dress herself or remember to turn off taps and lights. Increasingly, she can’t even remember the meaning of the word ‘on,’ or the function of a toothbrush, or the simple fact that a waste-paper basket isn’t a toilet.

  ‘It happen …,’ she tries again. ‘It happen one fore-day morning when the sun just a stain on the sky. When the moon not under as yet. Me, I was a young girl running.…’

  ‘I know, Mother. It doesn’t matter. You’re here now.’

  ‘You’re here now…?’

  ‘You arrived, Mother. You told me the story, remember? There were lights.…’

  SHE HAD TROUBLE arriving. The plane banked around the airport for almost an hour and the pilot had announced that an ice storm was hitting the city and that the ground crews were clearing the runway. An ice storm, she thought. What on earth could that be like? What fearsome beauty, falling jewels of ice? When the plane banked a last time for the approach, she looked out of the window to see the city once more. No buildings at all, only countless dazzling lights. A land of lights.

  She came here as a domestic, through a scheme that offered landed status to single women from the Caribbean after a year of household work. This was in the early sixties, before the complexion of the cities and suburbs of this land looked anything like it does today. The administrators of the domestic scheme set her up in a small apartment above a building housing a butcher’s shop and a Negro hair-cutting salon, hoping that she would feel at home, realizing that no other person would be willing to put her up. It was smelly and the cockroaches ran and ran when the overhead bulb was turned on, but she didn’t mind. Everything seemed wonderful to her, even the scraggly trees and slushy sidewalks. The snow-accented trees.

  The snow.

  She awoke one morning to see it falling from the sky and covering the sidewalks and the muddy grass of her street. She walked outside without a coat, hoping to feel it touch her. Manna, she thought, disappointed at its tastelessness when it fell upon her tongue, and then suddenly conscious of the fact that she, a grown woman, was walking about the streets with her tongue curled up and out to the world. She continued to dare things. When nobody seemed around, she slipped off her shoe and carefully inched her bare foot into a coverlet of snow. No feeling at all until, slowly, a tingle and then, unexpectedly, not cold but heat. The magic of this place.

  Every morning she took the streetcars to the home of her employers in Forest Hill. She loved these massive houses like castles and the lamplight and the pure white snow that seemed specially imported for them alone. Her employers, the Bernsteins, were a quiet but kind and reliable family. They always paid her on time, and they trusted her with the sorts of things she’s never been trusted with before while working as a maid for rich folks, white and coloured, in her birthplace.

  There were challenges too, though. The Bernsteins’ oldest boy was seven and he had come home from school with his tie out of sorts and his jacket creased and an angry bruise on his cheekbone. It had happened before, and there had been letters and complaints with no effect. This time, as before, he didn’t want to talk about it, and he sulked about the house while Adele went about her house-work.

  ‘It hard sometimes, isn’t it?’ Adele eventually asked.

  ‘You’re just trying to make it worse,’ he replied softly but angrily. ‘People are always trying to make it worse.’

  She knew, of course, how ever more conspicuously different she was. People everywhere would offer cold cutting glances on streetcars and sidewalks, or wrinkle their noses and shift away, or stare openly at the oddity that she had become in this land. She did her best to ignore it or smile back when people seemed genuinely curious, but it sometimes was just too much, too heavy. Except to go to work, she rarely left her place above the butcher’s shop, surviving on oatmeal and stewed prunes and milk, and dreading the time when these would run out and she would have to voyage out into the city streets to a store. Her change always placed on the counter and never in her hands.

  Not far from her place, there was restaurant with a cheerful red door and a large glass window. The window displayed many desserts and often a lusciously tall lemon meringue pie. Meringue. She’d read the word before in magazines and heard it pronounced in movies and on the radio, but she’d never tasted it. A fluffy sweetness as exotic as snow. After work, each day leading farther down the darkening corridor of fall toward winter, she would pass by the restaurant window, eyeing the pie as it grew smaller and smaller with each slice sold away until a whole new pie was set in its place. In the week leading up to the holidays, after the Bernsteins gave her her last payment for the month in advance and then left for the States to spend time with their relatives, she built up her courage and decided that she would buy a piece.

  She enters to the chiming of bells on the door of the restaurant and then the shushing of sound and the dead weight of disapproval in the room. She knows that there are many people sitting in the restaurant, she knows this from looking in the window, but now she can’t seem to make out details of any single person. She holds her handbag with two hands in front of her for strength, but also to show that she’s a lady. There are giggles from deep in the room and around and behind her too. The men pushing back their chairs in preparation for trouble. The wooden grating of heroic men.

  ‘Look what just walked in,’ a voice says.

  Nobody comes to seat her. She’s not sure what to do, and so she moves toward an empty table. She sits down and still nobody comes. Finally, a man with salt-and-pepper hair and a nice white shirt slides into the seat. He asks if she wants to fuck. He asks again, and she hears but doesn’t hear, and she looks around again. She becomes embarrassed by this, embarrassed for the others in the restaurant who
would have to hear this language. The man leaves and another man approaches. He’s the owner and he softly explains that this is a family restaurant and that no coloureds or prostitutes are allowed to eat here, though he knows of other places on another street where she would be welcome. He knows that she hasn’t come to his country to cause trouble and he hopes that she will understand and respect the rules of this here place. She shakes her head yes, she shakes her head no, and then leaves through the noisily chiming door.

  SHE’S BECOME TOO sensitive, she tells herself. She’s living the dream of countless people in her birthplace, stuck back there with the running sores of their histories. She’s been given a chance in a new land. She’s one of the lucky ones. She must always remember that.

  CHRISTMAS EVE arrives suddenly. She’s only been here a couple of months and she has no friends or family, though she tells herself this is fine. She has none of the things that remind her of Christmas, the parang music, the punch-o-crème and rum punch too. She sees instead a blanket of snow. A white Christmas. They really exist. On Christmas Eve, she makes a lunch of sardines and a dinner of macaroni and then cleans up and decides to go to mass. She waits for the subway and boards a train before realizing that it’s far too early. She travels up and down the route, sitting in the corner of the cab and not caring anymore if people stare at her. Back and forth, her chin buried in her scarf.

  Union and King. And Queen and Dundas. And College and Wellesley. And Bloor and Rosedale.…

  ‘Last stop,’ says someone. She nods and the train moves again.

  And Eglinton and Davisville. And St. Clair and Rosedale. And Bloor and Wellesley.…

  ‘Last stop,’ someone else says. Over and over again.