by Alice Walker
“We thought,” says Carlotta, getting out of the tub, “that she’d been killed by counterrevolutionaries in Guatuzocan, where she grew up.” She goes over to the shower and splashes cold water over herself. Then she dashes inside the house. Moments later she reappears with a record album. She has put the record on the stereo inside, and soon chimes and bells, the music of flutes, the calling of birds fills the air, but quietly. It is as if they are in a dense green jungle. Suwelo is lying alongside the tub, his body steaming. Carlotta hands him the album.
“My mother, Zedé,” she says.
An old blown-up photograph of a scared-looking young woman and her child covers the front of the album, which is called Escuchen (Listen). On the back, surrounding this same photograph, in a family portrait, Carlotta and Arveyda and the children are grouped. They resemble a new, small nation.
The tender music, weeping and laughing, plays.
Suwelo holds the album cover closer to the light of a flickering candle stuck in an abalone shell at his elbow. He reads the story of the return to her country of Carlotta’s mother, accompanied by Arveyda. There is mention of Zedé’s job with the North American movie company. There is the story of Zedé’s search for her own mother. Suwelo reads about her death: She and her mother were ambushed by counterrevolutionaries in the mountains leading out of Guatuzocan.
“My mother and Arveyda were lovers,” Carlotta says simply. “And from their love, I have learned many things. Things my mother could not tell me herself. Things that were, somehow or other, bound up too tightly with her shame.
“We mourned for her so long and hard,” she says. “Arveyda and I. And I made him tell me over and over again every word she said to him. I even made him tell me how my mother spoke the language of love. He thought that to know these things would finish killing me; but it didn’t. I just began to see Zedé as a woman, a person, a being. Sacred. And to love her more than ever.”
Suwelo is touched. He feels himself slipping into an intimacy with Carlotta he’s never, even with Fanny, known. He is speechless, as he plunges himself once again into the tub—only this time it feels like a baptism, and he deliberately dives to the bottom of the tub, keeping his head, for several moments, beneath the warm water.
Carlotta also returns to the tub, her slender, flat-breasted body as vulnerable, Suwelo thinks, as a flower. The damp spikes of her short hair, exquisite petals.
“You don’t look like a woman anymore,” he says, impulsively. Surprised to be saying such a thing. Fearful, after he’s said it.
Carlotta only laughs. “Obviously,” she says, “this is how a woman looks.
“Anyway,” she says. “There was one part of the story that”—she laughs—“rang a bell in me. It was the story about my grandmother, Zedé the Elder, who created the capes made of feathers for the priests; the woman who taught my own mother how to make beautiful feathered things. She had been a great artist, and she had had a little chime outside the door of her hut. She would strike it, and listen closely to it, and if the sound corresponded with the vibration of her soul at the time, she would nod, once—Arveyda told me Zedé told him—and begin to create.” Carlotta leans back against the side of the tub.
“That’s how,” she says, “I became a bell chimist.”
Suwelo feels Marcia knocking timidly at the door. Knock, knock. But he is afraid his father is behind her. He pretends he doesn’t hear.
“She wasn’t dead,” says Carlotta, triumphantly. “Neither was her mother. They escaped from the counterrevolutionaries and now live in Mexico. My mother married a shaman. My grandmother became one.”
“A happy ending!” Suwelo cries, flinging his arms around her.
“MY MOTHER IS DEAD,” Suwelo says to Carlotta. It sounds as if he’s finally admitting it to himself. He sees Marcia once again timidly approach the door. She stops, her fist upraised to knock, and listens. She is so surprised to hear he is speaking of her! ‘Come in, Ma,’ he says. But she stands there frozen, in shock, her fist in the air. And, just as he feared, she looks behind her.
“She was killed ... along with my father, in something that was called a ‘car wreck.’ It was really,” Suwelo says, “a people wreck. They were driving along—my father was driving—very fast. ‘For some reason,’ as so many people phrased it later, the car ran off the road, hit an embankment, at ninety miles an hour, and they were both killed instantly.”
Suwelo recalls Miss Lissie’s voice on the tape. “Remember the last time you stood over them,” she said.
He will try.
He had taken the bus home from college, an hour away, and someone, a relative, had driven him to the funeral home. Both his parents were laid out in the same room, just as they’d been brought in. There were black and purple swellings and bruises, and deep cuts, on both their foreheads, from crashing against the windshield. His mother had crashed all the way through; his father’s progress had been blocked by the steering wheel, which had crushed his chest. They were dressed for church. His mother wore a red-and-white flowered dress that Suwelo had always liked because it made her look so girlish, and lime-green T-strap slippers. His father wore his one good navy-blue suit.
“My parents’ lives were so miserable,” says Suwelo, “that I couldn’t let myself think about it.” He feels a chakra opening at the base of his spine. Something begins to unfurl, like a tiny flag, or a sleepy snake. His mother knocks on the door with more assurance. He sees that, yes indeed, the old man, whom he hates, Louis, Sr., is behind her. Suwelo stands on his side of the door and leans against it. There is no strength in his hands.
Marcia easily pushes her way in.
“They were all explaining to me how my parents died,” says Suwelo. “All our neighbors and friends and the funeral-home people. The state trooper who’d gotten to the scene first said my father had been drunk, and speeding. I knew this was undoubtedly true. I’d seen him drunk and speeding a million times, since I was a little boy. He always seemed to be trying to run away from himself. My mother would beg him, ‘Slow down, Louis. You ought to slow down.’ He would or he wouldn’t slow down, depending on which demons he was listening to.
“It was when everybody had left and I was alone with the bodies that I realized what had happened. I went over to where they were and I looked into their faces. Daddy’s face was finally peaceful. I was actually soothed by it. But her face. It had frozen in a kind of grimace, an exaggerated version of her usual look of desperation. Even her teeth were bared, as if she were struggling to give birth. It shocked me to think that’s how she looked. And then I lifted the sheet, and I saw her hands... .”
Suwelo starts to weep. He feels Carlotta’s arms around him. He feels her kisses soaking up the tears on his cheeks. He cries a long time. But Marcia is inside, standing beside him now, and there’s Louis, Sr. still outside the door.
“Her nails were broken off, every one of them; her fingertips bloody,” he says. “Now I understood what had happened, and why they were dead. My mother was trying to get out of the car.”
He breaks down completely. He does not want his snot to fall into the tub, so he gets out, blindly, Carlotta following, and she wraps a large white towel around him and another around herself.
“I’d seen that look of desperation on my mother’s face all my life. I hadn’t understood what it was. My father, you know, had been a soldier in World War II and he’d lost half of one arm and all of his mind. But he was still a gung-ho army man. Even when I was leaving home for college, he was pressuring me to enlist. When I was in college and the Vietnam war was going strong, I refused the draft. I knew I’d rather rot in prison than have done to me what was done to him. He refused to understand this. I didn’t think he’d ever stop cursing me for taking this stand. I couldn’t understand why he would want to send me off to be maimed or killed. Did he hate me that much?” Suwelo pulls the towel closer about him, feeling his flushed body beginning to lose its heat.
“We stopped speaking. I hated my mother
for staying with him. But she was trapped. Like a bird in a cage. He wasn’t the man she married, but some kind of wounded, crazed patriot. More often drunk than sober. Frequently abusive. With his good arm, the one he had left,” Suwelo says flatly, “he held on to my mother as she struggled to get out of the speeding car.”
And now he can actually hear Marcia’s voice as she says, “Just let me and Louis, Jr. out of the car, if you’re going to drive this way.” And he remembers his father reaching across her and then into the back seat, where Suwelo sits, and locking all the doors, and cursing them, and speeding up even more.
How had he repressed so much terror? Suwelo wonders about this as he relives it. There he was, all those years, all those different times, small, then not so small, and frightened. Why did he and his mother get into the car in the first place? This he still does not understand. But at least he lets himself understand his mother’s determination, at last, to get out.
His father is standing at the door. He is not old and drunk, but young and handsome. He has two arms. “My name was once Suwelo, too,” he says gravely, holding them out. Suwelo is suddenly too tired to keep watch over the door of his heart. It swings open on its own, and this father, whom Suwelo has never seen and whom he realizes he resembles very much, walks in.
FANNY AND ARVEYDA ARE naked. After leaving the hot tub and shower, they have permitted the night air to dry them. Fanny has quickly rubbed sweet almond oil over her own body, even between her legs and between her toes, and now leans over Arveyda, who is stretched out on his stomach on the futon massage mat. They have decided to forgo the sauna, an inviting cubicle off to the side of this room they are in, which contains little besides the massage mat, a shelf full of massage oils, stacks of clean white towels, and a collection, in a corner by the door of the sauna, of straw-bottomed thong slippers.
She places her warm hands first on the center of his back; one hand is just between his shoulder blades, the other at his waist. She holds her hands there while she asks for guidance in this work she is about to do for Arveyda’s healing. She asks that Arveyda’s spirit guides be present, along with her own. She gently presses down and with an alternating pressure of her hands slightly rocks his body. Then she straddles his body and begins kneading his back and neck and shoulders.
Fanny is very patient, thorough, and slow. She listens to Arveyda’s body as she massages it. Wherever there is the slightest ache, her fingers hover, listening, and descend. Arveyda is amazed. All the pain in his body seems to be eager to show itself to Fanny, who presses points here and there that make him cry out from the pain, but which, before she touched them, felt entirely okay. And then, after she releases the pressure on these points—pressure of which he has been unaware—he feels the energy once again flowing freely in his body. He has almost forgotten what unblocked chi feels like.
It is warm in the room, and there is only the moonlight coming through the small window across from them, and the flicker of a candle on the floor.
Arveyda sinks almost immediately to another level, a very sensual level of consciousness, assured that Fanny’s touch, which never leaves his body, will hold him safe. The warmth of the room makes his mind drift to Mexico, where he and Carlotta and the children go each January to see Zedé. He recalls lying on the warm sand in the tiny village of Yelapa, where all of them, their “new age clan,” gather, and how he and Angelita and Cedrico oil each other while the three women—Carlotta and the two Zedés—walk slowly, their arms loosely around each other, back and forth, up and down the crescent-shaped beach. They are always talking and listening to each other intensely, as if whole worlds hang on their words. And they are all three perfectly beautiful. Zedé the Elder, the matriarch, stooped and brown, with her long, ash-white hair tied back from her face with a scarlet ribbon; Zedé the Younger, full of vitality and joy, bright-spirited at last, kissing Carlotta over and over; and Carlotta, the most beautiful of all, with her short hair, her string bikini, and her skinny legs, which she kicks into the air from time to time in sheer exuberance, like a gamine in a Charlie Chaplin movie.
Arveyda lies on the massage mat but he is really lying on the sand. He watches these three women and he thinks of the suffering each of them has endured. He thinks of the pain he himself has felt, and caused... . His heart, so often full, seems to brim over with the strange mixture of all that he feels. He finds in his mind words for the beginning, the middle, or the end, of a new song: “Isn’t this sadness a part of happiness?”
Fanny is stroking his body to the rhythm of one of his own guitar-and-flute melodies, from a fifteen-year-old album called Ecstasy Suite. In her mind, “Ecstasy Is the Sea” is playing, and she imagines her hands are the waves of the ocean that shape the ocean floor, and the dunes of the beach and the tiniest seashells.
She also thinks, with something like disbelief, that one of the spirits she’s loved so long is actually right beneath her, his very neck, at this moment, under her hand. Gradually, she works her way down Arveyda’s body, marveling at the beauty—smooth, glistening from the oil—of his rich brown skin. She presses points on his buns that make him squirm, then moves down his thighs and his very hairy legs. She takes her time on his feet, slipping her thumbs between his toes, working her knuckles along the arches and the balls of his feet. Arveyda groans with mingled pain and pleasure.
He has given himself up to Fanny, as if all of himself is resting in her arms. He feels there is something about her, something in her essence, that automatically heals and reconnects him with himself. He felt this even before she impulsively kissed him on the trail. He imagines making love to her, as he feels her hands sliding up his inner thighs. He thinks that if he were to join himself with her in lovemaking he would feel literally re-membered.
He utters a deep, secret sigh at this thought.
Fanny thinks of her lifelong habit of falling in love with people she’ll never have to meet. Is this how people create gods, she wonders. She thinks she has always been walking just behind (oh, a hundred to a thousand years behind) the people she has found to love, and that she has been very careful that their backs were turned.
What would she do if one of them turned around?
Fanny feels a slight quiver in her stomach. She is frightened, for a moment, as if she is about to come face to face with her own self.
She takes a deep breath. It seems to her, fortunately, that this particular spirit has nodded off. She strokes him gently, just at the back of the neck. “Time to turn over,” she whispers.
But Arveyda is not sleeping. Far from it. He is thinking of Fanny and of her kiss. Of the pleasure and pain of her touch, which seems easily to find the most buried knottedness in him. And if he turns over, she will see the results of his thoughts.
Fanny waits patiently, on her knees beside the mat. Will he turn over, she wonders, this spirit behind whom she finds herself? She wonders this sincerely, as if Arveyda is a real spirit who might simply disappear by sinking through the hardwood floor.
Fanny is terribly aroused, as she looks at Arveyda’s smooth defenseless back, his humble neck, his beautiful hands and nimble fingers, the tips of which, touching his instruments, have already given her so much pleasure.
With a sigh of brave resignation, the “spirit” turns himself over. He is embarrassed, and is looking down. “I’m afraid,” he groans, “you have lit a little candle.”
Fanny, seeing its erectness and nearly comic hopefulness, readily takes Arveyda’s “candle” into her warm hand.
When she has seated herself on it, and feels how snugly it fits, as if it has found its proper niche, she looks into Arveyda’s face. Into his very human eyes. There are tears in them, as there are in her own. They begin to rock, turning now so that they lie, their arms around each other, equitably, on their sides. Weeping, they begin to kiss.
Fanny feels as if the glow of a candle that warms but could never burn has melted her, and she drips onto Arveyda.
Arveyda feels as if he has rushed t
o meet all the ancestors and they have welcomed him with joy.
It is amazing to them how quickly—like a long kiss—they both come.
She is fearful of asking him what she must. Timidly she says: “And did you also see the yellow plum tree and all the little creatures, even the fish, in its branches? And did you see and feel the ocean and the sun?”
But Arveyda says simply, “Yes. And the moon as it moves over the ocean, and the lilacs, and mountain ranges, and all the colors of valleys. But best of all,” he says, kissing her, “was the plum tree and everything and everybody in it, and the warmth of your breath and the taste in my mouth of the sweet yellow plums.”
They lie cuddled together in sheer astonishment.
“My ... spirit,” says Fanny, at last, her face against his chest.
“My ... flesh,” says Arveyda, his lips against her hair.
Years before this day, Suwelo had had a recurring dream. He did not usually remember his dreams, but this one stayed with him. It was very brief. He was sitting at the bedside of a very old man, and, though neither of them seemed to be talking, much information was being exchanged. No, not exchanged, for even in the dream Suwelo had had little to say. He was there simply to listen to the older voice of experience, for the sake of his own present pitiful life.
As he walks up the steps to the Mary McLeod Bethune Memorial Nursing Home on a tree-lined street on the outskirts of Baltimore, Suwelo remembers his dream. He says good morning to the old people gathered in rocking chairs and around Chinese checkers tables on the porch. They are black and white together, finally, Suwelo thinks. They are so old color seems not to matter, as they shift about for seats at the various tables, or in the rocking chairs, or simply places in the sun. Nobody seems to hear very well either. A nurse walks up and down among them, directing dim eyes and faltering feet this way and that, and giving cheerful instructions in a bright hoarse voice.