She was only waiting for me to pour forth the last floods of her tenderness, to revive the gleam in her worn-out eyes. There we were in the woods, supporting each other, tackling life as best we could and as we pleased. But inside her big full skirt there was, I knew, something I myself would not suffer from—lack of love. She had found a little bamboo stick to serve as a prop to her old bones. And when she thought I wasn’t there, she would sit sighing gently in her corner, saying aloud that she was at peace with life, for when everything was taken into account she and it were quits. She lived for me, she breathed through my mouth. When I was away she would get into a state of agitation that only ended with my return. One day when I came back from the river I showed her two little bumps on my chest, almost invisible to the naked eye but just perceptible there under the skin. Her face crinkled up with joy, and off she ran along the road, her dress caught up above the knees, saying to all the women in the neighborhood: “Quick, come and look—Telumee’s been stung by a wasp!” They all came running, singing, joking, proudly lifting their sagging bosoms, fêting in a thousand ways my little budding breasts, and saying teasingly: “No matter how heavy your breasts you’ll always be strong enough to support them.” But the advent of my breasts had more serious consequences. Queen Without a Name no longer liked to see me go off for whole days planting out rows of bananas, picking coffee, or carrying buckets of fertilizer among the cane. Every day she warned me against the army of Negro boys that scoured the country. “Don’t mix with them, all they know is disrespect and no one can stop them following their own path. Leave them be, button up your lips in their presence, for they know everything, and they’re bad lots already. They can only teach you vagrancy, theft, and insult. Don’t you have anything to do with them, my little crystal glass. Just say good morning and good evening, listen to their tales and gossip if they must tell you them, but don’t answer, whatever you do. Then you’ll go on your way and stay as white as a tuft of cotton.” I didn’t quite see how I was to follow Grandmother’s advice. I wasn’t the kind that hunts in packs, nor was I a lobster with cold blood and a cold stomach. I liked the company of the other children, those who worked among the canes, those who roved about and stole, those with fathers and mothers, and those without roof or bed who wandered through life like children of the devil. The boys played among themselves, and only came near us to tease, make us look small, pull our hair, and practice for their brilliant male future by gravely competing to see who could urinate the farthest. I preferred to be with the girls, especially two of them, Tavie and Letitia. We use to play with cashew nuts in a hole in the ground; we used to play pichine with little stones; we used to gossip about the women and their plans that came to nothing—about troubles, too, and spells, and all the things that happen in a house without a man. Tavie had a thin pointed face and dancing eyes. She was always on the lookout for a chink or an open door or a hole in a fence, and her favorite delight was to steal a hen and go and eat it alone in the woods, taking good care to bury the feathers. She was a particularly godforsaken little girl. Letitia used to go from house to house, picking up in each a piece of cod, a slice of breadfruit, some other fruit, or a scrap of meat, for the whole village was her mother. She was a bright little thing with a thick yet transparent skin that looked full of wine-colored sap, like certain water flowers. She looked down at the world from a long neck that was usually supple, but which fright, anger, or triumph would suddenly stiffen like the neck of a wild goose. Like all little Negro girls, we affected the ways of grown-up women, waggling non-existent hips and breasts that were not there, strutting about, shouting at one another and waving our arms. We used to weigh up all the little boys, especially Elie, Old Abel’s son, in whom my friend Letitia took a great interest. I myself had never paid any attention to him. But one day, as I was going along the path to the river with a bundle of dirty washing under my arm, young Elie suddenly emerged out of a clump of bushes overgrown with creepers. He was laughing to himself, and at his first glance I stood still, seized with a strange curiosity. A drum of water was perched unsteadily on his head, drenching him and splashing, every time he laughed, a skin that was like a chestnut after rain. A huge pair of khaki shorts flapped around his knees like a flared skirt—and, heavens, what knees! Great swollen calloused things that looked like the result of days of penance and yet were in fact just his own natural knees. His lips looked to me even more swollen than his knees, and as if all ready to insult me, but I forgot everything else, shorts, knees, and lips, as soon as I saw his eyes—great eyes lying there above his flat cheeks like two pools of fresh water.
After a long stare, his power of speech returned. He stood where he was and called out, still laughing with his lips:
“What are you doing here? Looking for the treasure your grandfather buried in the scrub?”
“What about you, know-it-all? Laughing for nothing!”
“Not for nothing,” he said. “It’s seeing you makes me laugh.”
“What is there to laugh about in me? Is the part in my hair as crooked as a path the rats make, or is my dress inside out?”
“No, everything’s in order, as neat as a well-kept chapel. I’m just laughing because you suddenly loomed up before me like an apparition. No offense, I hope?”
I answered that there was no offense, and went on toward the river, not suspecting my first star had just appeared in the east.
At about that time an elementary school opened in the little town of La Ramée. Its premises were an old stable, and the pupils sat or stood according to how many were present, their slates on their knees or held against their chests. One teacher was not really enough for all the children of the town itself and those from the nearby villages of Valbadiane, La Roncière, Dara, and Fond-Zombi. But those who dared attempt to learn their letters were few and far between. At first, people used to waylay the pupils on the road to school and ask them anxiously: “How does it make your heads feel, little ones? Don’t your brains feel too heavy? Don’t they ever get so heavy inside you have to hang your heads?”
At daybreak we would scramble down the slopes, barefoot and carrying a lunch box done up in a cloth. At the end of the afternoon, home again, some sweaty and sleepy, others still lively under a sun veering gently to sink under the horizon. Elie and I had become friends. At noon we used to eat together under a huge flame tree that grew in a back yard not far from school. It was a cool spot, red with fallen flowers. It belonged to us, the other children only made passing visits. Elie helped himself to things from the shop, and with the aid of Old Abel’s oil even the driest vegetables slipped down our throats like silk. When the meal was over, we chatted. In the atmosphere of La Ramée, and especially in the gloomy school building, there was something staid, severe, and pointless that made us uncomfortable, and to make up for the little sticks and the letters and the endless recitations, we always ended up talking about those fine creatures the men and women of Fond-Zombi. They lived there exposed to sun, rain, and wind, they might howl, they might die, they existed in complete uncertainty. But amid all the thunderbolts, one fine day, a single gleam was enough to start them off laughing again. But we pondered a lot about the personal life of the grown-ups. We knew how they made love, and we knew too how they tore at and clawed and trampled on one another afterwards, following an unchanging course that led from the chase to weariness and downfall. But it seemed to me the balance was in favor of the men, and that even in their fall there was still something of victory. They broke bones and wombs, then they left their own flesh and blood in misery as a crab leaves his pincers between your fingers. At this point in my reflections Elie would always say gravely:
“Man has strength, woman has cunning, but however cunning she may be her womb is there to betray her. It is her ruin.”
These words troubled me, gripped my heart in a vise. I seemed to see a kind of smoke perpetually forming inside Elie, which would rise up one day and destroy him, and me with him. Dry-mouthed, I asked:
�
�Why are men like that? Tell me, Elie, tell me—does the devil live in Fond-Zombi? Oh, I wish I could know it by heart, the moment when you begin to lie to me.”
“Telumee, dear flame tree,” Elie would say, stroking my hair, “I am a man, and yet I understand nothing of all that, less than nothing. Imagine, even Old Abel sometimes seems to me a deserted child. Some nights he starts to shriek, in bed: ‘Did I really come from the womb of a human woman?’ And then he leans over and takes me in his arms and whispers: ‘Alas, where can one go to cry out? It is always the same forest, always as dense as ever. And so, my son, put aside the branches as best you can, that’s all.’ ”
So saying, Elie would smile at me out of his beautiful eyes, large, bright, a little darker than his skin, a tear held back under the heavy lids with their tufted lashes, which all of a sudden he would lower as if falling asleep where he sat. And, still without looking at me, he would add:
“Telumee, if life is as my father says, I may one day lose my way in the forest. But don’t forget—don’t forget you’re the only woman I shall ever love.”
Our talks under the tree were known to all Fond-Zombi, from the tiniest little green fruit to those already crumbling to dust. There were a thousand different versions of the business, everyone standing up for his own. In Fond-Zombi the night had eyes and the wind ears. Some had no need to see in order to speak, nor did others have to hear in order to know what was said. But Grandmother understood, and said I had inherited her luck, and how rare it was for a star to come out so early in a little Negress’s sky. She looked at Elie through the same eyes as I did, heard him with my ears, loved him with my heart. When I went into his shop, Old Abel’s usual glum indifference would disappear. His eyes would come to life again, he seemed suddenly a man, and he would ask me a thousand little questions, just, he said, to sound out the future a little.
“Are you patient, little one?” he would ask, mischievously. “If you’re not, don’t go aboard Elie’s barge, or on any other for that matter, for above all a woman should be patient.”
“And what should a man be above all?”
“Above all,” he would answer, “a bit of a swaggerer. A man should have no fear either of living or dying.” Then he would take a mint drop out of the jar, quickly, and hold it out with a smile. “May this little taste of mint make you forget my words—empty cartridges in a rusty gun.”
By common accord the Queen and Old Abel let us spend all Thursday, the weekly school holiday, together. If there’d been only Elie I’d have been a river, if there’d been only the Queen I’d have been Mount Balata, but Thursdays made me the whole of Guadeloupe. On Thursday we’d be up before the sun, and, in our own cabins, we’d watch through the chinks for daybreak. The crack of dawn saw water fetched, vegetables dug, the yard cleaned out; and at eight o’clock Elie would appear with a collection of big tins slung over his shoulder. Queen Without a Name nodded, and, as we set off, said: “Don’t be in a hurry to grow up, little Negroes. Frolic about, take your time—grown-ups don’t live in paradise.” Then Elie would hunch his shoulders, and I would fall in step, an enormous heap of the town’s dirty linen on my head. We took the path to the river, the one where he had appeared for the first time, the one where my star had risen. The river of Beyond had three branches. Instead of going to the ford that served Fond-Zombi in place of a fountain, we leaped from rock to rock until we reached a more isolated stretch of the river, where a waterfall tumbled into a deep basin called the Blue Pool. While Elie hunted crayfish, turning the stones one by one, I chose a good rock for my linen and began to pound and wring and larrup it as a torturer does his victim. Every so often Elie would let out a yell as a crayfish pinched his finger while he was putting it in the tin. The sun climbed slowly over the trees, and when, at about ten, it shone full on the river, I would splash myself with water, go back to my washing, splash myself again, and then, unable to resist any longer, jump fully dressed into the river. This happened every hour, until the whole pile of washing was done. Then Elie joined me and we’d dive together with all our clothes on, leaving our fears and youthful apprehensions deep at the bottom of the Blue Pool. Then we dried ourselves on a long flat rock, always the same one, exactly the right size to hold us, and as the words went back and forth I would be overcome by the thought that there was a small thing on earth, the same size as me, who loved me, and it was as if we had come out of the same womb at the same time. Elie would wonder if he’d get on well with his letters, because, if God willed, he wanted to become a customs clerk. He always drove before him the same dream, and I was a part of it.
“You’ll see,” he’d say, “you’ll see, later on, what a fine convertible we’ll have, and we’ll be dressed to match, I in a suit with a ruffle, you in a brocade dress with a cross-over collar. No one will recognize us. They’ll say as we go by, ‘What beautiful young couple is this?’ And we’ll say, ‘One of us belongs to Queen Without a Name and the other to Old Abel—you know, the chap that keeps the shop?’ And I’ll give a toot on the horn and we’ll whizz away laughing.”
I wouldn’t say a word or utter a sigh, in case I gave voice to some evil influence that might prevent the dream from ever coming true. Elie’s words made me proud, but I would have rather he’d kept them to himself, carefully sheltered from bad luck. And as I was silent, guarding hope, one of Queen Without a Name’s stories came into my mind, the one about the little huntsman who goes into the forest and meets—“What did he meet, girl?”—he met the bird that could talk, and as he made to shoot it, shut his eyes, aimed, he heard a strange whistling sound:
Little huntsman, don’t kill me
If you kill me I’ll kill you too.
Grandmother said the little huntsman, frightened by the talking bird, lowered his gun and walked through the forest, taking pleasure in it for the first time. I trembled for the bird, which had nothing but its song, and lying there on my rock, feeling at my side Elie’s damp and dreaming body, I too set off dreaming, flew away, took myself for the bird that couldn’t be hit by any bullet because it invoked life with its song.
Going down again to Fond-Zombi we felt as if we were still floating in the air, high above the wretched cabins and the abused, vague, fallow minds of the Negroes, and at the mercy of the wind, which lifted our bodies like kites. The breeze set us down in front of Queen Without a Name’s house, by the smooth pink earthen steps. A wide band of setting sun swept in through the door onto the old woman, sitting scarcely raised above the ground on her tiny stool, in her everlasting gathered dress, rocking slowly back and forth, her eyes elsewhere. Elie would go and fetch wood for Old Abel, I’d spread my washing out for the night, and Queen Without a Name would set about cooking a crayfish sauce fit to make you go on your knees and give thanks. Already, here and there in the distance, a few lamps were already lit, though low, and the hens were starting to go up into the trees for the night. Elie would come running back, and Grandmother turned up the wick of her lamp so that we could see to shell our crayfish. Then she would seat herself carefully in her rocker, we would take our places at her feet on old flour bags on either side of her, and after a De Profundis for her dead—Jeremiah, Xango, Minerva, and her daughter Meranee—she would bring our Thursday to a close by telling us stories. Above our heads the land wind made the rusty corrugated iron roof creak and groan. But the voice of Queen Without a Name was glowing, distant, and her eyes crinkled in a faint smile as she opened before us a world in which trees cry out, fishes fly, birds catch the fowler, and the Negro is the child of God. She was conscious of her words, her phrases, and possessed the art of arranging them in images and sounds, in pure music, in exaltation. She was good at talking, and loved to do so for her two children, Elie and me. “With a word a man can be stopped from destroying himself,” she would say. The stories were ranged inside her like the pages of a book. She used to tell us five every Thursday, but the fifth, the last, was always the same: the story of the Man Who Tried to Live on Air.
“Children,” s
he would begin, “do you know something, a tiny little thing? The way a man’s heart is set in his chest is the way he looks at life. If your heart is put in well, you see life as one ought to see it, in the same spirit as a man balancing on a ball—he’s certain to fall, but he’ll stick it out as long as possible. And now hear another thing: the goods of the earth remain the earth’s, and man does not own even the skin he’s wrapped in. All he owns are the feelings of his heart.”
At this point she would stop suddenly and ask:
“Is the court sleeping?”
“No, no, Queen, the court is listening,” we’d hasten to reply.
“Well then, children, since you have hearts and ears well set, you must know that in the beginning was the earth, an earth all bedecked, with its trees and its mountains, its sun and its moon, its rivers, its stars. But to God it seemed bare, to God it seemed pointless, without the least ornament, and that is why he clad it in men. Then he withdrew again to heaven, in two minds whether to laugh or cry, and he said to himself, ‘What’s done is done,’ and went to sleep. At that very instant the hearts of men leaped up, they lifted their heads and saw a rosy sky, and were happy. But before very long they were different, and many faces were no longer radiant. They became cowards, evildoers, corruptors. Some embodied their vice so perfectly they lost their human form and became avarice itself, malice itself, profiteering itself. Meanwhile the others continued the human line, wept, slaved, looked at a rosy sky and laughed. At that time, when the devil was still a little boy, there lived in Fond-Zombi a man called Wvabor Longlegs, a fine fellow the color of burnt sienna, with long sinewy limbs and greenish hair that everyone envied. The more he saw of men the more perverse he found them, and the wickedness he saw in them prevented him from admiring anything whatever. Since men were not good, flowers were not beautiful and the music of the river was nothing but the croaking of toads. He owned land, and a fine stone house that could withstand cyclones, but on all that he looked with disgust. The only company that pleased him was that of his mare, which he’d named My Two Eyes. He loved the mare above all else, and would let her do anything: she sat in his rocking chair, pranced over his carpets, and ate out of a silver manger. One day, up early and full of yearning, he saw the sun appear on the horizon, and without knowing why he mounted My Two Eyes and rode away. Great pain was in him, he was wretched, and let the horse carry him where it willed. He rode from hill to hill, plain to plain, and nothing had power to cheer him. He saw regions never seen by human eye, pools covered with rare flowers, but he thought only of man and his wickedness, and nothing delighted him. He even ceased dismounting from his horse, and slept, ate, and thought on My Two Eyes’ back. One day as he was riding about like this, he saw a woman with serene eyes, loved her, and tried to dismount. But it was too late. The mare started to whinny and kick, and bolted off with him far, far away from the woman, at a frantic gallop he couldn’t stop. The animal had become his master.”
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