by Alice Walker
“Mija, mi corazon,” they all began. (My daughter, my heart.) And there was the sound of Zedé weeping. But as the letters continued to arrive, Carlotta, reading through the evaporated teardrops, which had left puckered circles on the pages, sensed an animation in her mother’s spirit she had never felt before.
Arveyda and Zedé traveled through countries of incredible natural lushness. Zedé had never seen such rivers, such fish ... there was a fish that mated for life, she wrote; when they caught one from the boat and prepared it for dinner, its mate swam furiously around and around the boat and actually followed it for miles ... such trees, fruits, birds, and sky.
Carlotta imagined her mother at the railing of a ship, relaxed against Arveyda’s body, the sun finding white glints in her once-again straight black hair.
“The food, every bit is good. Muy delicioso!” she wrote. And Carlotta remembered the crab sautéed in onion and peppers her mother liked and how that had been their once-a-month treat after her mother began selling the feathered things. Now she thought of her eating the food she liked all the time, growing sleek and maybe a little plump, the wrinkles around her eyes and on her forehead filling out. Her skin losing its sallowness and becoming tan and vibrant. She realized she had never known Zedé at peace. Always, she had been anxious, worried, frantic over the requirements of life for the two of them.
They’d slept together only once, Arveyda and Zedé, before Carlotta was told.
Arveyda had brought the children for Zedé to keep for the weekend, as she often did. Their brown, warm little bodies did magical things to her. She held them, squirming and wriggling or drowsy and contented, in her arms, and her cares seemed far away. That day they had been playing on Zedé’s big bed, the children in the middle, she and Arveyda on the edges. It was a gray, rainy day, and her bedroom was all pink. Soft music was playing, by a man, Sidney Bechet, she liked. The children drifted off to sleep. As Arveyda lifted their limp bodies to take them into the other room, nearly asleep himself, she’d felt, as she did so often and as often tried to hide, a deep longing for him. But he is so young, she thought. El padre de mis nietos. El esposo de mi ninita. My son-in-law. Here she giggled, because she always confused the word “son” with “sun.”
Arveyda looked at her, the sleeping baby in his arms, one plump arm flung wide in peace. Longing was like a note of music to him, easily read. He knew.
When he came back, he sat on the floor beside the bed. His voice shook. “We can’t do anything about it, right?”
“No,” she said, her voice also trembling. She tried to laugh. “I am grandmother. That’s it.” She meant, “That’s all.”
“I love you though,” he said. “Not like a grandmother ... maybe a little like a mother.” He apologized with his smile, which was in his voice. His face was still turned away from her. “No,” he said, “like a woman. Zedé. I love Carlotta; don’t worry. I also love you.”
How long had it been building between them, she wondered. Since the first day, since meeting. She’d smelled the scent in his hair as he bent toward her hand. The spiciness of it, the odor of her village flowers. She’d taken back her hand and hidden it, flaming, from him. After all, he was Carlotta’s. Carlotta had found him.
“Nothing we can do, yes,” she said, firmly. But with a glowing point of light, hot, growing in her heart, and between her legs she was suddenly wet.
Her hand trembled as she touched his hair, and the scent of him—the scent of safely sleeping, well-fed babies—reached her nose. His hair. There were flecks of gray. Glints of red and brown.
Kinky, firm, softly rough. Exactly the feel of raw silk. The only hair like this—pelo negro—in the world. Running her fingers through it, tugging. Trying for the light, resigned touch. Trying to be la madre. Trying to be friends. Her womb contracted so sharply she nearly cried out.
She prayed Arveyda wouldn’t turn and look at her. He did. His eyes inches away. His white teeth, his mustache and beard. His brown eyes that seemed so pained. His sweet breath. Like coconut. She smiled to think this about the coconut; she was such a campesina! He leaned forward to kiss the smile. She drew back.
“And you, Zedé?” he asked. “Am I just the son-in-law? I know we can never do anything ... but I want to know.”
“Ah, me,” she said, attempting a little laugh that denied the hot heart and the light in her womb, the wetness nearly on her thighs. The laugh, so false, so incapable of all the deceit required of it, turned into tears. Arveyda took her face in his hands. It had become younger since he’d known her. The birdlike eyes didn’t dart about so, the twitch was gone. Only the sadness of the dispossessed of love remained. He would kiss it away.
Zedé had made love only twice before in her life. Until she met Arveyda she hadn’t thought about sex; she was too busy and her memories were too painful. Though she had had sex, it had been brief. Sometimes her daughter was the only proof that a man had made love to her. Now it was as if she had a new body. Arveyda was kissing all of it, the way she would have wanted someone she loved to kiss it when she was embarazada. Under his lips she felt the flowering of her shriveled womb and under his tongue her folded sex came alive. The hairs on her body stood like trees. In truth, the light that she felt inside her in womb and heart now seemed to cover all of her; she felt herself dissolve into the light.
Lying in bed later, exhausted from orgasms that shook her core, Zedé traced round and round the black mole on Arveyda’s right breast. They were both relaxed and frantic.
“It won’t happen again,” she said. “It can’t.”
Her lips were drawn to the mole. She kissed it without knowing she did.
“No,” said Arveyda. “I’m sorry. All my fault.” His face was lost in her hair. He grew large again against her thigh. She grew wet.
“Mamacita. Daddy.” It was the oldest child, Cedrico, calling, waking up.
For months they avoided each other. But she loved his music and played it on the stereo all the time, so she cheated. He never left her, though he was away performing in other cities and other countries. She listened to the music and sometimes she cried. Sometimes, crying, she lay back on her pink bed, her hand between her legs. There was one piece of music, especially, in his last album that moved her to her knees. She knew he had written it while thinking of her. She could come just listening to it.
Arveyda lived in the clothes she made for him, earning himself finally the nickname “Bird,” or, as he loved to translate it, “Charlie Parker the Third.” Wrapped in his feathered cape, his winged boots, he sent his soul flying to Zedé while holding his body, his thought, his attentions on Carlotta, whom he did not cease to love. Only, now he began to think it was Zedé he loved in Carlotta. Scrutinizing Carlotta’s face he looked for traces of Zedé. When he found them he kissed them with reverence.
How do you tell someone you love that you are in love with her mother, as well? It was probably illegal, moreover. Arveyda thought and thought about the problem; his music, so mellow and rocking, became tortured and shrill. Sometimes in rehearsal and even in performance he played his guitar in a trance.
Arveyda’s music was so beautiful no one minded how long he played. There he stood, his slim legs in soft jeans, his brown suede feathered boots glowing in the strobe lights, a sliver of his narrow chest revealed; his face, the face of a deeply spiritual person, intense behind guitar or flute. It was not without cause that he was rich and famous: Arveyda and his music were medicine, and, seeing or hearing him, people knew it. They flocked to him as once they might have to priests. He did not disappoint them. Each time he played, he did so with his heart and soul. Always, though he might be very tired, he played earnestly and prayerfully. Even if the music was about fucking—and because he loved fucking, a lot of it was—it was about the fucking the universe does through us as it joyfully fucks itself. Audiences felt this so much that there was a joke about how many Arveyda babies were conceived on full-moon concert nights.
He played for his dead mot
her and for the father he’d hardly known; the longing for both came out of the guitar as wails and sobs. There was a blue range in his music that he played when he was missing them. Carlotta was yellow. The young, hopeful immigrant color, the color of balance, the color of autumn leaves, half the planet’s flowers, the color of endurance and optimism. Green was his own color, soothing green, the best color for the eyes and the heart. And Zedé—Zedé’s color was peach or pink or coral. The womb colors, the woman colors. When he played for her he closed his eyes and stroked and entered her body, which he imagined translucent as a shell. He remembered making love to her and imagined himself the light within the translucent pink shell. He often wept while he played.
Carlotta could not believe the beauty of the new music, discordant as it sometimes was, and wailing. She would sit in the audience watching him play and, though she lived with him, it was as if he were a stranger, far from her, far from anyone. If she had managed to drag Zedé to a performance, she would turn to her in her excitement over a new riff. But Zedé inevitably held her head down. Carlotta could never recall later how she first became aware.
For months Arveyda and Zedé barely saw each other. This, Carlotta knew. Arveyda was traveling; often Carlotta went with him. Zedé remained in her house and cared for the children. Every night while they were away, Carlotta called to check on them. Was Cedrico eating? Was Angelita wetting the bed? Were she and Arveyda missed? Zedé answered her questions with energy and enthusiasm. Yes, Cedrico missed them, but he was “un niño muy grande.” Sure, Angelita wet the bed, but there was luck in this (some superstition from the old country, Carlotta assumed, and Zedé never explained), and they were both eating like crazy. And so on. After a rundown of her own activities in whatever town they were staying, and after Zedé had mentioned any small news she had, there was an awkward silence.
“Don’t you want to know about Arveyda?” Carlotta would have to ask.
“Oh, yes, very much,” her mother would say. But then Carlotta had the distinct impression that her mother was not listening. She could not know that every word about Arveyda was a dagger.
Each night she reported to Arveyda about the children. He never asked a word about Zedé. “Don’t you want to know about my mother?” she’d once said angrily, scorning his indifference to the sacrifice her mother made in keeping the children.
“Sure I do, sure I do,” he’d mumbled absently and then looked distractedly and moodily at the door.
At first she thought it was hatred. But how could they hate each other? These two best friends of hers who, she thought, had loved each other on sight.
When they picked up the children, after weeks of absence, Arveyda hardly bothered to thank Zedé. He barely glanced at her. Zedé, for so dark a person, looked extremely pale.
At dinner one night in a restaurant Carlotta finally spoke up. They’d sat like sticks the whole meal.
“What have I done to deserve the exquisite torture you two are inflicting on me?” she said in what she hoped was a joking tone.
“What do you mean?” her mother said quickly.
Carlotta looked at Arveyda.
“You never talk to, or even look at, each other anymore. It’s hell for me. What is the matter? Come on, look at each other at least.”
She thought she saw panic in her mother’s eyes. But Zedé raised her head and looked at Arveyda. Arveyda, however, excused himself, got up from the table with a frown and left.
She watched them struggle until she, too, was worn out, and one day she forced the whole story out of her shockingly young-looking, vulnerable, inexperienced, terrified, and pale-as-ashes mother.
When she confronted a weary Arveyda, too listless now to think of creating new work and looking about, Carlotta suspected, for drugs, he said only: “The Greeks would know how to handle this. I don’t. Zedé and I are guilty of falling in love.”
“But she’s my mother,” she hissed.
“Tell me about it,” he said.
“She’s older than you!”
“No!” he said, mockingly.
“But she’s a grandmother,” Carlotta said.
“She is also an artist,” said Arveyda.
“How can you love her?” she cried.
“Don’t you?” he asked.
They could manage, she thought, if Arveyda and her mother had never made love. But when she asked him, he was direct.
“We made love once,” he said. “We have no intention of doing it again.” He paused. “To ask your understanding and forgiveness seems corniness personified.”
But what of her dignity?
Zedé came to see her, wrapping her arms around Carlotta’s legs, face pressed against her knees, her tears so profuse they soaked Carlotta’s skirt.
“I date now. Soon, I promise, I will marry someone I love. We will go away. To Mexico, maybe. I will try to get out of your hair.”
Carlotta’s heart was breaking. She felt it swell with tears and then crack. What does anyone know about anything? she thought. The scene with her mother emptied her of knowledge. Once again, as when she was a small child, she felt she knew nothing. That if the chair on which she sat suddenly became a canoe that floated out the window on the river of Zedé’s tears, she would not be surprised.
A CURIOUS FEATURE OF Suwelo’s face was his eyebrows. They were exaggerated crescents over his bold black eyes, and they were prematurely graying, which gave him at times an owlish look. He had this look now as he sat by the window of a train on his way to Baltimore, his tall, slightly overweight body hunched to take advantage of the last of the afternoon light coming over his shoulder. He tugged absentmindedly at his full and shapely bottom lip, while attempting to read a new novel by a former acquaintance of his:
“Forcing back Jackie’s head, he rammed his ... into her waiting ... Half an hour later he was on top of her, making her moan with pleasure, as he galloped his horses to a heavenly finish.”
Impatiently he flipped the pages, looking for more news of Jackie, some word on the development of this unappealing relationship, but there was nothing. At other points in the novel she was seen dressing, gossiping with her girlfriends, and going out to do the grocery shopping. Although she was the main love interest of the book, she was not even made love to again, probably much to her relief, Suwelo thought, as he scanned the hero’s chilling seduction scene with a schoolgirl a third his age, in which drugs figured prominently.
His generation of men had failed women—and themselves—he mused, taking off his tortoiseshell glasses and stroking the ridge of his generous and somewhat shiny nose. For all their activism and political development during the sixties, all their understanding of the pervasiveness of oppression, for most men, the preferred place for women had remained the home; the preferred position for women, wherever they were, supine.
He threw the book aside; then picked it up again as he thought to ask himself what it was really about. It was about a robbery, the trial of the accused man, the hero, his conviction and execution (because all witnesses to the crime had been killed), and the realization by the town, later, that the man executed was innocent.
But he wasn’t innocent entirely, Suwelo thought. He had violated Jackie, even if, as Suwelo now saw, on the last page there was a note from the hero to the grieving Jackie reminding her of all the good times they’d had and of how happy he was to have had her as “his woman.”
Suwelo yawned. Then smiled wryly as he thought of his own failed attempts to make “his woman” out of either Fanny or Carlotta.
His great-uncle Rafe had already been cremated when Suwelo arrived at the house. There was a short, quiet ceremony that remembered Rafe as unobtrusive, helpful to the community, a man of peace. Looking about the small room, Suwelo was startled to see mostly women, old, bent, pale, and powdered women, a dozen or so of them, and only a couple of men, in the moss-green and snuff-colored suits peculiar to old colored men, leaning on their canes and appearing to wonder whether they were next. His great-u
ncle’s ashes were presented to him in a fake antique apothecary jar that looked familiar; he thought he might have seen the original in a museum. After the friends left, Suwelo remained alone in the house, which Uncle Rafe had left to him. It was a small row house, typical of old Baltimore, on a street that had been, over the past few years, ruthlessly gentrified. His uncle’s place had been gentrified on the outside, presumably to placate the new yuppie neighbors, but inside, it was the same as it had been when Suwelo was a boy. Tall ceilings, dark wood, mote-filled parlors, heavy old furniture, a huge scratched dining-room table with lion-paw base. There was still a working dumbwaiter, which for years his uncle had used to haul coal up from the cellar.
As he walked through the house, spotlessly clean, its white antimacassars and starchy doilies fairly glowing under the soft light of the antique chandeliers, Suwelo realized it was not so small, after all. He began to climb, to investigate its three stories. The banister had been recently oiled; it gleamed under his hand. There were pictures everywhere, the faces so vivid he found himself stopped by them as if by the arresting faces of strangers on the street. He recognized other relatives: his grandfather, his other great-uncles, his aunts. There was his cousin Rena. Her husband, Mose. His own mother, sitting with a daunted, disillusioned look in a lawn swing, beside which his father stood. His father. His father had lost an arm in World War II. In the photograph, his sleeve pinned up, his cap at a cocky angle, he was still proud of this. But he wouldn’t be for long. Suwelo sighed, deeply and wearily, as he read the inscription: “To Unk, love, Louis and Marcia.” And, sighing, he passed his father’s brash look, his mother’s air of helpless captivity, and moved up the stairs. He could not, would not think of them; he wanted to be happy. It was strange and pleasant owning a house, even though he intended to sell it right away. The money Uncle Rafe had also left him would last about a year, long enough, with the money from the sale of the house and the time it bought, for him to sort himself out.