Messengers were already plunging through the night to report Angebert’s death. The procession moved off toward the ruins of L’Abandonnée, where the wake was to be held. Unweeping, her eyes half shut, Mama walked along in the starlight, one shoulder higher than the other, dragging her feet, limping almost, as under a burden heavier than herself.
When, in the long hot blue days, the madness of the West Indies starts to swirl around in the air above the villages, bluffs, and plateaus, men are seized with dread at the thought of the fate hovering over them, preparing to swoop on one or another like a bird of prey, and while they are incapable of offering the slightest resistance. It was on Germain’s shoulder that the bird alighted, and it put the knife in his hand, and aimed it at my father’s heart. Angebert had led a reserved and silent existence, effacing himself so completely that no one ever knew who it was who had died that day. Sometimes I wonder about him, ask myself what anyone so kind and gentle was doing in this world at all. But all that is gone, and in front of me the road rushes ahead, turns, and is lost in the dark.
Part Two
THE STORY OF MY LIFE
1
TWO YEARS AFTER Angebert’s death a stranger, a man called Haut-Colbi, came to the village and altered the course of my destiny. He was a Carib very well set up, but he moved as if his natural element was water—it was as though he was swimming, he was so smooth and supple. His eyes rested on you like a silk scarf, and his coaxing mouth, his cascading laugh, and his dark, violet-shadowed skin fascinated any woman he happened to pass in the street. He came from Côte-sous-le-vent, the lee shore.
Despite her two bastards, my mother was not a fallen woman. She went through life with the same expectation, the same lightness she had when no man’s hand had yet touched her. The years had merely drawn her open a little, and now she was a vanilla pod that has burst in the sun and at last gives forth all its perfume. One morning she set out on an errand, singing as usual and with her usual grace. Then she saw Haut-Colbi and the song ceased. It is said they stood for an hour gazing at each other, in the middle of the street and in full view of all, transfixed by the astonishment that grips the human heart when for the first time dream coincides with reality. They soon set up house together, thus transforming my fate. Haut-Colbi was only passing through L’Abandonnée, our hamlet, by chance, but he saw my mother and stayed.
The fact is that a mere nothing, a thought, a whim, a particle of dust can change the course of a life. If Haut-Colbi had not stopped in the village my little story would have been very different. For my mother found her god that day, and that god was a great connoisseur of feminine flesh, or at least that was his reputation. The first thing my mother did was send me away, remove my little ten-year-old flesh to save herself the trouble, a few years later, of trampling on the womb that betrayed her. So she decided to pack me off to my grandmother at Fond-Zombi, a long way away from her Carib.
She was criticized greatly for this, and generally accused of spitting on her own womb—for whom and for what? For a coaxing mouth from Côte-sous-le-vent. But she had known life for a long time, my amorous mother with her two bastards for earrings; and she knew that almost always you have to tear out your entrails and fill your belly with straw if you want to enjoy a little walk in the sun.
Queen Without a Name had not been too pleased with the way her daughter was steering her boat on the waters of life. But when Haut-Colbi came to live in our tower she began to think Victory wasn’t such a bad sailor after all. To those who criticized her daughter’s conduct she would say in a soft, amused voice: “My friends, life is not all meat soup, and for a long time yet men will know the same moon and the same sun and suffer the same pangs of love.” In fact, she was overjoyed at the mere idea of having my innocence cast a halo around her white hair, and when she came to fetch me she went away from L’Abandonnée blessing my mother.
It was the first time I’d been away from home, but I wasn’t at all upset. On the contrary, I felt a kind of excitement, going along the white chalky road bordered with filaos with a grandmother whose earthly existence I’d thought was over. We walked in silence, slowly, my grandmother so as to save her breath and I so as not to break the spell. Toward the middle of the day we left the little white road to its struggle against the sun, and turned off into a beaten track all red and cracked with drought. Then we came to a floating bridge over a strange river where huge locust trees grew along the banks, plunging everything into an eternal blue semidarkness. My grandmother, bending over her small charge, breathed contentment: “Keep it up, my little poppet, we’re at the Bridge of Beyond.” And taking me by one hand and holding on with the other to the rusty cable, she led me slowly across that deathtrap of disintegrating planks with the river boiling below. And suddenly we were on the other bank, Beyond: the landscape of Fond-Zombi unfolded before my eyes, a fantastic plain with bluff after bluff, field after field stretching into the distance, up to the gash in the sky that was the mountain itself, Balata Bel Bois. Little houses could be seen scattered about, either huddled together around a common yard or closed in on their own solitude, given over to themselves, to the mystery of the forest, to spirits, and to the grace of God.
Queen Without a Name’s cabin was the last in the village; it marked the end of the world of human beings and looked as if it were leaning against the mountain. Queen Without a Name opened the door and ushered me into the one little room. As soon as I crossed the threshold I felt as if I were in a fortress, safe from everything known and unknown, under the protection of my grandmother’s great full skirt. We had left L’Abandonnée in the early morning and now the evening mist was about to descend. Grandmother lit a lamp that hung from the main beam of the ceiling, turned down the wick to save oil, gave me a furtive kiss as if by chance, and took me by the hand to introduce me to her pig, her three rabbits, her hens, and the path that led to the river. Then, as the mist had fallen, we went back indoors.
In the cabin there was an iron bedstead covered with the poor man’s sheet—four flour bags with the print still showing despite much washing. The bed alone took up half the available space. The other half contained a table, two chairs, and a rocker of plain unvarnished wood. Grandmother opened a can and took out two manioc cookies. Then, to wash all that dryness down, we sipped water out of the earthenware jar that occupied a place of honor in the middle of the table. By the faint light of the lamp I plucked up courage to look at Grandmother, to look her in the face for the first time directly and without disguise. Queen Without a Name was dressed in “mammy” style with a head scarf. It was drawn tight over her brow and fell down her back in three narrow, nonchalant points. She had an almost triangular face, a finely drawn mouth, a short, straight, regular nose, and black eyes that were faded like a garment too often exposed to sun and rain. She was tall and gaunt though almost unbent; her feet and hands were particularly thin. She sat up proud and straight in her rocker looking me over thoroughly as I examined her. Under that distant, calm, happy look of hers, the room seemed suddenly immense, and I sensed there were others there for whom Queen Without a Name was examining me, then kissing me with little sighs of contentment. We were not merely two living beings in a cabin in the middle of the night, but, it seemed to me, something different, something much more, though I did not know what. Finally she whispered dreamily, as much to herself as to me: “I thought my luck was dead, but today I see I was born a lucky Negress and shall die one.”
Such was my first evening in Fond-Zombi, and the night was dreamless, for I had already dreamed in broad daylight.
Grandmother was past the age for bending over the white man’s earth, binding canes, weeding and hoeing, withstanding the wind, and pickling her body in the sun as she had done all her life. It was her turn to be an elder; the level of her life had fallen; it was now a thin trickle flowing slowly among the rocks, just a little stirring every day, a little effort and a little reward. She had her garden, her pig, her rabbits, and her hens. She made manioc cookies on
a tin sheet, coconut cakes and barley sugar, and crystallized sweet potatoes, sorrel, and “forbidden fruit,” which she took every morning to Old Abel, whose shop was next to our house. I helped her as best I could: I fetched water, ran after the pig and the hens, ran after the hairy-shelled land crabs, so delicious salted, ran after weeds with the “little bands” of other children in the canefields belonging to the factory, ran with my little load of fertilizer, ran all the time with something on my head—the drum of water, the weed basket, the box of fertilizer that burned my eyes at every gust of wind or trickled down my face in the rain, while I dug my toes into the ground, especially on the slopes, so as not to drop the box and my day’s pay with it.
Sometimes there would be the sound of singing somewhere; a painful music would invade my breast, and a cloud seemed to come between sky and earth, covering the green of the trees, the yellow of the roads, and the black of human skins with a thin layer of gray dust. It happened mostly by the river on Sunday morning while Queen Without a Name was doing her washing: the women around about would start to laugh, laugh in a particular way, just with their mouths and teeth, as if they were coughing. As the linen flew the women hissed with venomous words, life turned to water and mockery, and all Fond-Zombi seemed to splash and writhe and swirl in the dirty water amid spurts of diaphanous foam. One of them, a lady by the name of Vitaline Brindosier, old, round, and fat, with snow-white hair and eyes full of innocence, had a special talent for upsetting people. When souls were heavy and everything proclaimed the futility of the black man’s existence, Madame Brindosier would flap her arms triumphantly, like wings, and declare that life was a torn garment, an old rag beyond all mending. Then, beside herself with delight, laughing, waving her fine round arms, she would add in a bittersweet voice: “Yes, we Negroes of Guadeloupe really are flat on our bellies!” And then the other women would join in with that strange laugh of the mouth and teeth, a kind of little cough, and suddenly darkness would descend on me and I would wonder if I hadn’t been put on earth by mistake. Then I would hear Queen Without a Name whispering into my ear: “Come away, Telumee, as fast as you can. They’re only big whales left high and dry by the sea, and if the little fish listen to them, why, they’ll lose their fins!” With the washing heaped on our heads and my grandmother leaning on my shoulder, we would leave the river and go slowly back to her little cabin. Sometimes she would stop, perspiring, by the side of the road, and look at me with amusement. “Telumee, my little crystal glass,” she would say thoughtfully, “there are three paths that are bad for a man to take: to see the beauty of the world and call it ugly, to get up early to do what is impossible, and to let oneself get carried away by dreams—for whoever dreams becomes the victim of his own dream.” Then she would set off again, already murmuring a song, some beguine from the old days to which she would give a special inflection, a sort of veiled irony, the object of which was to convey to me that certain words were null and void, all very well to listen to but better forgotten. Then I’d shut my eyes and grip Grandmother’s hand, and tell myself it had to exist, some way of dealing with the life Negroes bear so as not to feel it pressing down on one’s shoulders day after day, hour after hour, second after second.
When we got home we would spread the linen out on the nearby bushes and that would be the end of the day. It was the moment when the breeze rose and climbed gently up the hill, filled with all the scents it had picked up on the way. Grandmother settled herself in her rocker in the doorway, drew me beside her, up against her skirts, and, sighing with pleasure at every movement of her fingers, peacefully set about doing my braids. In her hands the metal comb scratched nothing but the air. She moistened each lock with a drop of carapate oil to make it smooth and shiny, and, deft as a seamstress, separated strands, arranged them in little bunches and then in stiff plaits that she pinned up all over my head. And, only stopping to scratch her neck or shoulderblade or an ear that irritated her, she would give a delicate rendering of slow mazurkas, waltzes, and beguines, as sweet as syrup, for, with her, happiness expressed itself in melancholy. She sang “Yaya,” “Ti-Rose Congo,” “Agoulou,” “Trouble Brought on Yourself,” and many other splendid things from the old days, many of the lovely forgotten things that no longer charm the ear of the living. She knew old slave songs, too, and I used to wonder why, as she murmured those, Grandmother handled my hair even more gently than before, as if they turned her fingers liquid with pity. When she sang ordinary songs, Queen Without a Name’s voice was like her face, where the cheekbones were the only two patches of light. But for the slave songs her pure voice detached itself from her old woman’s face, soaring up into amplitude and depth, and reaching distant realms unknown to Fond-Zombi, so that I wondered if Queen Without a Name, too, had not come down on earth by mistake. I listened to the heartrending voice, to its mysterious appeal, and the waters of my mind began to be troubled, especially when Grandmother sang:
Mama where is where is where is Idahe
She is sold and sent away Idahe
She is sold and sent away Idahe.
Then Grandmother would bend down and stroke my hair and say something kind about it, though she knew very well it was shorter and more tangled than it should be. And I always loved to hear her compliments, and as I leaned, sighing, against her stomach, she would put her hand under my chin, look into my eyes, and say, with an expression of astonishment:
“Telumee, little crystal glass, what have you got inside that body of yours to make an old Negress’s heart dance like this?”
2
LIFE AT FOND-ZOMBI was lived with doors and windows open: night had eyes, and the wind long ears, and no one could ever have enough of other people. As soon as I arrived in the village I knew who was aggressor and who was victim, who still held his soul high and who was on the road to ruin, who poached in waters belonging to his friend or brother, who was suffering, who was dying. But the more I learned the more it seemed that the main thing escaped me, slipped between my fingers like an eel.
Old Abel’s shop was on the other side of the road, a few steps away from our cabin but toward the hamlet, not the mountain. When Queen Without a Name sent me there with cassavas, coconut ice, and bags of kilibibis or crystallized fruit in exchange for some oil or salt or a strip of dried fish, I used to hang around as long as I could in the hope of discovering the grown-ups’ secret, the secret that enabled them to stay on their feet all day without collapsing. Using a plank for a counter, Old Abel dispensed oil and cod, kerosene, candles, salted meat, matches by the box or three at a time, aspirins singly or by the tube, cigarettes as required, and all the various sweet things Queen Without a Name made him to warm the cockles of his customers’ hearts. There was a bar for the men on the other side of an open-work partition; the women stayed out on the veranda, straining to hear the shouts that rose from the inner room with the evening rum, lotto, dice, fatigue, and boredom. I was usually to be found under the plank that served as counter, while Old Abel’s son, a boy of my own age, came and went on the other side, in the bar proper. As he served and cleared away he would every so often give me a long, incredulous glance, as if I were something in a dream. But I paid no attention to him—I was completely caught up with what was going on in the bar. Tongues wagged, fists were shaken for mysterious reasons, the dice went rolling loudly over the tables, and my own thoughts seemed to roll over and over one another so that I couldn’t sort them out. Sometimes a dim fear would come over me and my mind would seem to come apart, like a pearl necklace with a broken thread. Then I would say to myself, Lord, the incredible things one sees in this world.
Bridge of Beyond Page 4