Bridge of Beyond

by Simone Schwarz-Bart

  I had the feeling Adriana had said something about Grandmother—but what? I couldn’t remember. Only a vague dread arose in me at the thought. Every so often the singing stopped and an accordion took over, and the rambling, melancholy sounds filled me with pity. Then I wondered what I was in this world for, what I was doing under this Chinese plum. I’d gone hunting, I’d lost both the dog and the hare, half of my soul was broken and the other half debased. By now the moon had come out, and its serene, sparkling light dulled and killed the beauty of the stars. The whole countryside was as clear as day, but the cool and mystery of evening rose on all sides, and over there among the shining grass at the side of the road the trees’ shadows danced in the wind. In the moonlight a broad shape with two heads appeared, coming from Old Abel’s shop. It advanced toward me like a spirit, gliding along slowly without touching the ground. Now it was brushing the grass in my yard, and as it thus approached I shut my eyes, overcome with fear. Suddenly there was the whisper of human voices, and the enigmatic countenance of Letitia appeared among the weeds, on top of a long thin neck like that of a wild goose. Letitia was bending over me, her arm hooked around Elie’s waist, and she murmured, in a languid, caressing voice:

  “What a heart she has, this little woman, and how well she knows how to bear suffering.”

  “What are you doing in my house, Letitia?”

  “Your house?” she said carelessly.

  “Elie, Elie, what is she doing in my house?”

  “You wouldn’t see,” said Elie in a vexed tone, his eyes lost in a dream. “Didn’t I tell you over and over to find a hole to hide in, my poor little crab without claws? Why have you stayed here as if you were tied by the ankle? Every day I goaded you more, and still you didn’t leave. Why?”

  “Why?” repeated Letitia sourly.

  “She’s a little Negress that flies,” Elie then said in a strange voice half cruel and half gentle, “she wouldn’t see. But perhaps this evening she will learn what it means to be a woman.”

  And, suddenly overcome with irritation:

  “Are you still there, you headless crab? You haven’t any hole on the earth to go and hide in? But you’ve got to vanish from this house—backwards, limping, or flying, you’ve got to go. Now, right away.”

  Letitia listened to him with half-closed eyes, as one listens to heavenly music. Then she came nearer to me and said pityingly:

  “You can see you have to go now.” Then she added softly, smiling: “But if you want to stay, we’ll give you a blanket and you can lie down at the foot of the bed. Only you’ll have to try to stop your ears with cotton wool, because I make a lot of noise at night.” And she writhed her beautiful guitar-like body in front of me.

  Elie clasped her tight, and they both began to laugh. They’d already forgotten me.

  I hurried to my cabin, lit a candle, and hastily began to gather my things together in Queen Without a Name’s tablecloth, for I could see I had to get every smell of myself out of the place as soon as possible. Away in the village I could hear the buzz of voices, and then came accordion music that made me clasp my hands to my breast, for it pierced me to the heart. But I had to manage to see it all as though it were happening to someone else. This thought consoled me, and I put my bundle on my head and went calmly out of the house. But at the last moment I couldn’t help saying to Letitia:

  “Won’t anything in the world really please you except my place and my house?”

  She seemed genuinely astonished.

  “Little coconut flower,” she said woefully, “where have the bells been ringing for you? Your house? What house is that? You’re no more at home here than anywhere else. Didn’t you know the only place on earth that belongs to a Negress is in the graveyard?”

  She smiled sadly, and I remembered the little roving girl, everybody’s child, who knew every house in Fond-Zombi. But suddenly terror seized me and I started to run. I ran through the tall grass to the road, and went along it, still running as if pursued by a spirit, in the light of a moon that now changed, taking on reddish hues and swelling and thrashing in the sky like an octopus under attack. Then, when I came to the Bridge of Beyond, I felt tired, and sat down on a mound by the support of the bridge and wept.

  The sun never tires of rising, but it sometimes happens that man is weary of being under the sun. I have no memory of the days that followed. I learned later that I was found next morning sitting on a stone in Queen Without a Name’s back yard, completely bemused. I stayed there several weeks without moving, no longer even able to tell day from night. Queen Without a Name fed me and brought me in at night, like a chicken that has to be protected from mongooses. When anyone spoke to me I was silent; they said that of all things in the world speech had become the most alien to me. Three weeks went by like this. So as not to weaken in front of me, Queen Without a Name went, for the first time, to speak her grief in the street: “My child, my child, her mind has gone, her mind has gone.”

  One day, coming up to me without a word, she suddenly pulled a needle out of her bodice and pricked my arm.

  “You see,” she said, “you’re not a spirit—you bleed.”

  Then, raising her arms to heaven and moving her old bones with difficulty, she went back indoors. As she bent near and pricked me, her face had seemed quite flattened and crushed, without mouth or nose or ears, a sort of shapeless lump from which nothing emerged but her lovely eyes, which seemed to exist independently of all the rest. A little while later Grandmother heard me singing at the top of my voice, standing up on my rock, singing so loud it was as if I was trying to drown another voice that was singing at the same time, the voice of someone whose singing I refused to hear. Still singing, I ran to the river and jumped in, immersing myself again and again. Then, dripping wet, I went back to the cabin, put on dry clothes, and said to Grandmother: “Queen, Queen, who says there is nothing for me in the world, who says such foolishness? At this very moment I have left my grief at the bottom of the river. It is going downstream, and will enshroud another heart than mine. Talk to me about life, Grandmother. Talk to me about that.”

  10

  WHAT REALLY CURED ME were all the visits, all the attentions and little gifts people honored me with when my mind came back from where-ever it had been. Madness is contagious, and so my cure was everyone’s, and my victory the proof that a Negro has seven spleens and doesn’t give up just like that at the first sign of trouble. People came to Queen Without a Name’s, filling the house with their chatter, bringing me fruit, aromatic herbs, and incense for having escaped the claws of evil. And then they looked at me with screwed-up eyes, as at one who has come back from far, very far away. “Ah,” they said gravely, “here is the stout one, the Negress with seven spleens, four breasts, and two navels. Right, right, stay as you are, woman—don’t go buying a pair of scissors to stick in his heart, for that fellow’s not worth a pair of scissors.” I would laugh, and acquiesce in silence, and all these words, this laughter, these marks of attention, helped to lift me back in the saddle, to hold my horse’s bridle with a firm grip.

  Sometimes old thoughts arose in me, shooting up like whirls of dust raised from the road by a herd of wild horses galloping by. Then Grandmother would try to whistle up a wind for me, saying we should soon be going away, for the air in Fond-Zombi didn’t agree with my lungs now. Since my return it was as if she’d suddenly sprouted wings, as if, at last, she was going to be able to fly. She was still rather tired from all the recent trouble, and had to be helped into her rocker. But her eyes flashed, thrilled at the thought of all the fine things awaiting us. “Ah,” she’d say, her cheeks bright with excitement, “ah, there are so many places in Guadeloupe, and as soon as I’m better we’ll put our cabin on Amboise’s cart and put it down on La Folie hill, on Monsieur Boissanville’s estate. I used to know him, he won’t refuse us a bit of land. And when your peas and yams start to yield, you’ll be a woman and a half.”

  And so through all her last days Grandmother was whistling
up a wind for me, to fill my sails so that I could resume my voyage. And listening to her, I would come to believe in her mirage, and add a veranda to our future home for the pleasure of seeing the Queen rocking there in the cool and just snuffing up the wind. And the days went by, and I forgot I was a fallen acomat, and began to feel the beauty of my own two woman’s legs again, and started to walk. At first Queen Without a Name laughed about it. “You walk crooked, Telumee, but you do walk.” Then she stopped smiling and pointed out that I’d taken on the walk of a woman . . . the walk of a woman who’s suffered, she said finally.

  “And how does one recognize it,” I asked, “the walk of a woman who’s suffered?”

  And Grandmother answered:

  “By the special, incomparable air that belongs to someone who’s said to herself one day: ‘I’ve helped men to suffer enough, now I must help them to live.’ ”

  Queen Without a Name had always said that the day she took to her bed it would be to die. I joined in her projects for the future, pretending to think her invulnerable, but all the time she was getting weaker, and the candle she had caused to shine for us was about to go out.

  As her face grew thinner her eyes had suddenly grown larger, as if to take in every nuance that reached her of people and things—a hen, the shadow of a bamboo swaying in the wind, fine rain made transparent by bright sunlight. When she looked at you it was as if you were being given a little piece of her knowledge, a morsel without bitterness or hatred, ringed about with a halo of gaiety that stayed with you long after you’d left her. One day I found her in bed, very ashamed at not being able to get up. She had complained of bedsores recently. I settled her on her couch, and after she’d made me twist and turn in front of her so that she could look at me, as on that first day when she’d brought me from L’Abandonnée, she asked for some dittany custard flavored with vanilla. As I bustled about with pots and pans, blew up the fire and crushed some dried dittany, the dark came down with the usual splendor of evenings in Fond-Zombi, alighting like a caress between the houses and the trees. Grandmother’s hair, spread out on the white pillow and damp with sweat, surrounding her wrinkled brow with pale, watery gleams that made her look as if she were wearing a crystal diadem. But deep in her eyes there was a mischievousness, a boundless comfort, a gaiety that made her very much alive—perhaps more alive than ever, as in the bloom of her youth. After she’d eaten her custard I took her head in my lap, and she talked to me of the balance of nature and the planets, the permanence of the sky and the stars, and of suffering, which after all is only another way of existing. The window was wide open, and from our bed we could see the sky and the highest peak of the mountain still in sunlight: the light seemed to make everything larger, revealing a tree or a bamboo stem to us in its eternity. Turning toward me, Grandmother whispered: “Telumee, my little ember, although you see me so glad, don’t think I’m just rejoicing at death. No. I must make you a confession: for three months Jeremiah has been with me. He hasn’t left me day or night. You see, knowing my time was almost come, he couldn’t wait any longer and came to be near Toussine.”

  “Where is he now? Is he in this room?”

  “He’s sitting by my pillow, and from time to time he strokes my hair, and wipes my brow, and when I’m too hot he fans me with his breath.”

  I could feel the presence of something strange, of approaching death, but stare as I might into the darkness I could see nothing unusual. As we were talking, completely happy, thinking of nothing but our joy in being together, night suddenly fell, enveloping all the disorder of the world. Then Grandmother began to breathe very calmly, and after a few sighs of pleasure:

  “You see,” she said, “I have found rest again with Jeremiah. He has prepared a comfortable place for me, and I’m going away to fill it. As for you, my child, you mustn’t stay in Fond-Zombi. Your eyes mustn’t go on seeing that man and that house. If you go away perhaps your heart will recover, and the root of your luck will grow and bloom again.”

  “I’m to abandon my ship, Grandma, and let it sink alone?”

  “Ah, Telumee Lougandor, you mustn’t think it’s your fate to feed the fire of hell. Don’t let that be recorded in your book of life, for it’s something man and heaven and the trees all hold in horror.”

  I promised I’d leave behind the dust of Fond-Zombi, and we stayed a long while without speaking, she with Jeremiah and I seeking my woman’s heart in the shadows. Outside, the stars looked as if they were dancing around the moon, and it was as if all beauty and even life itself had taken refuge in the heavenly bodies. The sky seemed alive, swept by waves, emanations, and you had the feeling it was a realm that excluded men but whose mere existence was enough to comfort them. Suddenly Grandmother grew lively: propping herself up on her elbows, she started to talk about her youth, and of her mother, Minerva, as sharp as nails, she said: “Yes, a real tease, and I’ll tell you why I say so. Long ago, when Jeremiah started courting me, he used to come to the house every afternoon. He’d go straight into the kitchen, and there the two accomplices would tell each other all sorts of things about me. Mama was never as radiant as she was at that time, and my Jeremiah would go into her kitchen and they’d spend whole afternoons together. Jeremiah told her about how he’d like to live with me, what he thought of me, and what I meant to him. And poor Minerva drank up his words like honey, because, as she told him, she could see he was a sensible man, capable of appreciating God’s wonders at their proper value. But there was one thing I hated: as soon as my fiancé had left she’d come out of the kitchen, spread out her full skirt with yellow dots, and sing:

  I want a fisherman for a husband

  To catch me a fine sea bream

  I don’t know if you know

  But I want a fisherman

  Oh oar before, he pleases me

  Oh oar behind, I die.

  Queen Without a Name had a little thin thread of a voice, diaphanously light, which almost hurt to listen to; but her face glowed as it had done long ago when Minerva teased her. Then suddenly her voice broke, and I began to weep without knowing why, sparse tears that ran in silence down my cheeks.

  One day I found Queen Without a Name lying down clutching her heart with both hands, like someone trying to hold back a runaway horse. After a moment her breathing grew quieter and she fell into a heavy doze. Streaks of shadow chased here and there over the hamlet, and there were threatening clouds. High up in the sky one white star twinkled like a pearly shell on a beach of black sand, and suddenly, seeing the star, my grief grew lighter. Grandmother opened astonished eyes and, quite revived by her little nap, tried to sit up. She looked as if she were just about to make one of her little jokes, but suddenly she fell back and beckoned me nearer, nearer, nearer still, until my ear was right by her lips, to hear her say: “Today and tomorrow will have the same sun and the same moon, but I shall be no more—” and at that instant she smiled. My heart smote me to see her smile, and I asked her, in a voice that in spite of me held a note of reproach:

  “So, Grandmother, you’re leaving me and you smile.”

  She took hold of my face and put her lips right against my ear.

  “It’s not death I’m so pleased about,” she said, “but what will come after. The time when we’ll never leave each other again, my little crystal glass. Can you imagine our life, with me following you everywhere, invisible, and people never suspecting they have to deal with two women, not just one? Can you imagine that?”

  Word by word, Queen Without a Name’s face was shrinking. I didn’t know how to tell her to be quiet, and she went on whispering in my ear, pointing to the soft rain falling from the sky. “It’s not tears, just a light mist, for every human soul is bound to regret leaving life.” And an extreme gentleness came into her voice as she murmured on: “Listen—people watch you, they always count on there being someone to show them how to live. If you are happy, everyone can be happy, and if you know how to suffer, the others will know too. Every day you must get up and say to
your heart: ‘I’ve suffered enough, and now I have to live, for the light of the sun must not be frittered away and lost without any eye to enjoy it.’ And if you don’t do that, you won’t have the right to say ‘It’s not my fault’ when someone seeks out a cliff and throws himself in the sea.”

  I could hear laughter outside, human voices. It was raining gently, and I couldn’t believe Queen Without a Name was dying. She closed her eyes, was silent for a while, then whispered to me to put some water on the fire to warm, for she wished to attend to her own laying out. When she’d finished I helped her put on her pink nightdress, her best, kept ironed and folded ready for a long while, for she’d always wanted to make a rose-colored entrance into the other world. As I was putting her into the nightdress she signaled to me that time was getting on, and this amazed me: I’d never imagined dying could be like this, so quiet. When she was dressed and powdered and her hair done, she seemed really pleased with herself and the world. Her eyes went slowly around the room, and she said: “Telumee, sorrow exists and, everyone has to take a bit of it on his shoulders. And now that I’ve seen you suffer I can close my two eyes in peace, for I leave you with your own panache, your own air. And now, as soon as there’s no more mist on the mirror, go and fetch Ma Cia—she’ll see to everything. Above all, don’t go lamenting, for if you do that for me, what is a mother to do who survives her child? And don’t go being frightened of a corpse . . . don’t go being frightened . . .”