She still moved her lips, trying to speak, but her tongue was heavy and she said no more. Her head was resting in my lap; I stroked it. After a moment she began to drowse, breathing feebly, more and more feebly. Her hands, her breast, gradually ceased to move, and I realized that she was dead.
As I was sweeping the floors, twilight crept over the sky and a light rain, almost a mist, covered the earth. I’d always heard it said that a virtuous soul never leaves the world without regret; and that was why this dew was falling—dew, not rain; not tears, but only dew. A little while before I’d gone down with a torch in my hand to announce Queen Without a Name’s death. While matters were taking their course, I busied myself putting the house in order, cleaning and scenting it so that everything would be as it should be when people started to come. From time to time I looked at Grandmother, but without fear, just wondering if her soul had left her body yet, and whether she was with me now. Calm thoughts came, strangely peaceful: it was as if some force were entering into me; life seemed amazingly simple. For the first time I began to think about the life I had lived with Elie without trying to distinguish, without trying to keep the good and throw away the rest. There weren’t two separate parts—they had taken place in one and the same person, and it was well, and I rejoiced at being a woman. I felt light and decided. I fixed some torches, lit the lamps, and welcomed in proper style the people who began to flock to pay homage to Queen Without a Name. They brought cups, glasses, pots, roasted coffee, and vegetables for the soup at daybreak; and everyone went over for a moment to pray and look at Grandmother’s face. She looked as if she were sleeping; there was a faint smile on her lips. After making the sign of the cross and sprinkling holy water in the four corners of the room, everyone wondered:
“What can she have seen, the Queen, to make her look like that?”
After a brief exchange of observations, some of the women set about hanging embroidered sheets from Vieux-Fort on the walls. Those whose function it was to pray arranged themselves busily on either side of the bed and began to fill the room with litanies and the De Profundis. Now and then one would get up from her chair to go and fix a flower on the wall, and then the praying would begin again. Outside in the yard some men were putting up an awning and setting out tables, stools, and little individual benches, and a group of neighbors were chopping up the vegetables for the soup and gossiping desultorily:
“There must be something in the air today . . . Jeremiah must be in raptures this evening, and Lord! after such a long separation.”
Under the awning one man sat nonchalantly on his drum, while others talked, guffawed, drank whenever they felt like it, and got up some gambling. There was dice, dominoes, and a rock that one group passed from one to another while chanting a rough, monotonous song:
Accursed one, accursed one
Even if your mother’s accursed too
Say a prayer for her.
And the rock went from hand to hand, faster and faster, each player banging it on the ground before passing it on to his neighbor. The rhythm accelerated, the noise of the rock grew louder, and the tune could barely be distinguished when a man got up and said:
The Queen is dead, gentlemen. Did she ever live?
We do not know
And if tomorrow it is my turn, shall I have lived either?
I do not know
Come, let’s have a drink.
A sea breeze had arisen and bright clouds were invading the upper reaches of the night. I had sat down on a bench in the midst of all this commotion and was tapping a rock diligently against the wood on my own account, trying not to let anyone see how lost and heartbroken I felt without Grandmother’s little lantern. Adriana appeared, and Ma Cia immediately after, without a torch, as befitted a habitué of the dark, and with a parcel wrapped in newspaper tucked carefully under her arm. She cast a look all around, screwed up her eyes in some kind of satisfaction, and said:
“It’s as if the Queen were alive and watching over everything with her fine white Negress’s eyes.”
Going through the rows of benches she greeted the entire company and went into her friend’s room. She stroked her hair and gazed at her for a long while in astonishment. “There you are, and yet where are you now? She was an enigma, that woman,” she said smilingly.
It was now black as pitch, without moon or stars, and our house seemed alone in the world, surrounded by darkness. The flames of the torches flickered to and fro in the evening breeze, and people’s faces became shifting and uncertain. The preparations were over and a kind of torpor weighed down on everyone’s spirits. We were seated in a circle in deepest silence, balancing the weight of the dead and that of the living: the atmosphere was one of deep uncertainty. I was between Ma Cia and a woman whose eyes were covered with a blue film. It was Ismene. She was very slight, with a round dimpled face; her intensely black skin had faded with age, so that sometimes it seemed not to be colored at all. She was a contemplative kind of woman, who examined people coolly and yet always shut her eyes when she spoke to you, as if she couldn’t talk and size up a human face both at the same time. She wasn’t keen on speaking at all, so we were very surprised when she said in a hesitant, questioning voice: “To see so much misery, be spat at so often, become helpless and die—is life on earth really right for man?”
Ma Cia lit her old pipe, lowered the lids over her fine eyes of faded velvet, and said tranquilly:
“I beat my breast before Queen Without a Name, and say: there are some whose life makes no one rejoice, and there are those whose death, even, comforts people. That’s a fine stone in your garden, isn’t it, Queen?” she ended, smiling at Grandmother.
“How good her death is,” little Ismene went on, eyes shut, in her everlasting voice that was half tears half laughter,” and how I wish I’d known her in the days of her youth. I would have told you about her . . . if I’d known her.”
A thrill ran through all present, and all eyes turned toward Ma Cia, who had her hand up to her eyes as if she were gazing dazzled into the past.
“It’s true,” she said. “To know the Queen properly you need to have seen her at L’Abandonnée, in Jeremiah’s time. Her body was a whole catalogue: two legs like two flutes, a neck more flexible than the stem of a milkweed. And what can I say about her skin? And then she was always blinking her eyes as if she was right in the sun, and that was why everyone in L’Abandonnée said: ‘Toussine? she will become a rainbow and leave her mark on the heavens.’ ”
“That’s right, that’s right, Queen,” said a man, turning toward Grandmother’s bed.
Madame Brindosier was sitting near the door, in the background, her hands resting demurely on her ample stomach, while her great artless eyes roved from one to the other, from face to face, on the lookout for a weakness. Judging the time had come, she preened herself in her chair and said in a soft, insinuating voice:
“Unfortunately, though, rainbows come one after another and none lasts any longer than a falling star. If one knew one would never get out of the calabash again, would one ever go in? If you ask me, God’s blame is on every living creature, and in the end, for Him, goodness and wickedness are all the same—He kills you.”
“What’s all this about blame?” said Ma Cia, vexed. “If God blames and kills, let Him. But He can’t prevent a Negro showing Him the weight he accords to the soul of another Negro. The truth is, Ismene, man belongs as much to heaven as to earth. No, man is not of the earth. And that is why he looks, why he searches for another country, and there are some who fly at night while others sleep.”
Ismene was aglow, and in her excitement she started to speak, staring at the whole assembly, in her curious hesitant voice, sure of nothing but its own insignificance:
“Ma Cia, have you ever seen another country when you were flying about at night?”
“Alas, little chimera, I can’t tell you about anything like that, but though we are almost nothing on the earth, I can tell you one thing: however beautiful other sounds
may be, only Negroes are musicians.”
Then we felt the soul of Queen Without a Name, and we sang until morning, and said what Queen was, and recalled all the events in her life, and everyone knew exactly the weight she had been accorded here in Fond-Zombi. And the next day, at her funeral, just after the last shovelful of earth, we all thought she was going to sprinkle us with her regrets, for there were clouds flying low over the graveyard. But it was only pretense, the last little dodge she played on us, and that day it was in a rose-colored sky that the sparkling sun sank into the sea on the edge of the horizon.
11
MAN IS NOT A CLOUD in the wind that death scatters and destroys at a blow. And if we Negroes at the back of beyond honor our dead for nine days, it’s so that the soul of the deceased should not be hurried in any way, so that it can detach itself gradually from its piece of earth, its chair, its favorite tree, and the faces of its friends, before going to contemplate the hidden side of the sun. And so we talked and sang and drowsed for nine days and nine nights, until Queen Without a Name’s soul should cast off the weight of the earth and take flight. On the tenth day the people took away their handsome Vieux-Fort sheets, their cups and plates and benches. Grandmother’s last party was over, all the voices were still, and I was alone in the vague light of dawn as it grew yellow on the heights and backfired on the tops of the trees. I felt naked, I found a voice, and it was that of Ma Cia. “Telumee, my girl, know that I shan’t die like Queen Without a Name, my eyes bewitched by the light of the sun. For in reality I am blind and see nothing of the splendors of the earth. And yet I tell you, he who loves you has eyes for you even when his sight is extinguished. Let us go up into my forest, woman—it will warm you and soothe the regrets of us who are left behind.”
Thus did I leave Fond-Zombi and follow Ma Cia into her forest, to live in the cabin where she lived with the spirit of her dead husband, Wa. She did a bit of gardening, massaged the sick who came to see her, took the spell off the Hunted Ones, turned away the evil eye. Close to her, I felt myself become a spirit. Every morning I woke up drenched in sweat, resolved to leave the forest and live in my own body and woman’s breasts. After four weeks I went down back to Fond-Zombi. Going by the Chinese plum, I saw Elie’s cabin deserted, the yard overgrown with weeds, abandoned. Old Abel made no mention to me of his son’s departure, and suggested he should come with me to Pointe-à-Pitre to ask Monsieur Boissanville for a piece of land, as Queen Without a Name had suggested. He had to go into town himself to buy things, and, seeing my lack of enthusiasm, he agreed to go and see Monsieur Boissanville on my behalf. I went back to Queen Without a Name’s cabin, flung open the doors and windows, and began to sweep the floor with a passion and energy that made me smile. Next day Amboise presented himself on my doorstep with a beautiful white caplao yam in his hand. I had been expecting him, and seeing him standing there so proud in the doorway, yet with a strange little gleam like that of a hunted dove in his eyes, I remembered what Queen Without a Name had said to me on her deathbed: “He’s loved you for a long time, Telumee, and just remember Amboise is a rock that can’t be moved, and who’ll wait for you all his life.” For me he had been like Elie’s shadow at the time when they both sawed planks in the forest. And as he stood by the door, a great tall reddish-brown man with anxious eyes, deep wrinkles, and nostrils like two organ pipes, I smiled inside myself and thought that instead of inventing love these great lumps of men would have done better to invent life. Meanwhile Amboise took a step forward, put the yam gently in my arms, and said:
“Hallo, Telumee. How is life with you?”
“It isn’t. I just watch it pass away.”
“A wounded woodcock doesn’t stay at the side of the road,” he said.
“Where does it go then?” I asked.
“Yes, indeed, where does it go?” he laughed.
Then he added gravely, in a way that suddenly touched me:
“I just wanted to say . . . even in hell the devil has his friends.”
He gave an awkward little laugh, turned on his heel, and vanished. I didn’t see him again until a week later, the day my cabin was moved to La Folie.
The cart set out at dawn—four oxen drawing two long beams with wheels on which was perched Queen Without a Name’s cabin, emptied of everything that could not stand the journey. A crack of the whip and the team moved off, Queen Without a Name’s cabin started out and went through the village, followed by all her other worldly goods—her table, her rocker, her two round baskets full of plates and saucepans, all balanced on the heads of the neighbors who were accompanying me. After the Bridge of Beyond the procession turned into a muddy gully leading directly up toward the mountain. By the end of the day, shouting, swearing, wedging the wheels at every halt, the men brought the cabin onto a little plateau of sharp-edged grasses with woods in front, woods behind, and a few animals’ droppings scattered about nearby. Once the cabin was set up on four stones, everyone drank and joked and said how lucky I was, and after all this to-do, intended to hide their sadness, the Negroes of Fond-Zombi went off down the hillside, leaving me to solitude and night. Suddenly one shape turned back. I recognized Amboise, and was filled with emotion at his tall figure and the already furrowed face from which the eyes looked out without bitterness. A deep constraint swept over him, and he made a gesture as if to wipe away the wrinkles from his face and the graying hair that separated him from me. Then he smiled and said tranquilly, in a perfectly steady voice:
“Telumee, you have put on your robe of courage, and it would be ungracious of me not to smile at you. But what is going to become of you here, in this corner out of reach of the hand of God?”
“Amboise, I don’t know what is going to become of me, the flame tree, the poisonous manchineel, but there is no middle way, and this hill will speak and tell me.”
“This hill will speak,” said Amboise.
I watched him go, then went back unafraid to the unknown shadows of the hill, for that evening uncertainty was my ally.
The next day, after my first night as a free woman, I threw open my door and saw that the sun was the same color as at Fond-Zombi, and I left it to roll through the sky and scorch the root of my luck or make it sparkle, as it should decide. The place in which I’d set down my cabin was particularly lonely, and when I looked east across the green undulations of the canefields, I saw a kind of impenetrable barrier of huge mahogany and balata trunks holding back the world and preventing it from reaching me. Two or three wooden cabins and less than a dozen mud huts were scattered about the neighboring slopes, among clumps of wild acacias and groves of mountain coconuts with ceaselessly churning leaves.
La Folie hill was inhabited by wandering Negroes, the motley rejects of the island’s thirty-two communes, who lived there exempt from all rules and without memories, surprises, or fears. The nearest shop was nearly two miles away. Without one familiar face or smile, the place seemed to me unreal, haunted. The inhabitants called themselves the Brotherhood of the Displaced. The wind of misfortune had deposited them there on that barren soil, but they tried to live like everyone else, to thread their way as best they could between lightning and storm, in everlasting uncertainty. But higher up the mountain, right in the depths of the forest, there lived some souls who were really lost and who were called the Strayed. These people did not plant seeds, did not cut cane, and neither bought nor sold. Their only resources were a few crayfish, a bit of game, and wild fruit, which they exchanged at the shop for rum, tobacco, and matches. They disliked money, and if anyone slipped a coin into their hand they would look offended and drop it on the ground. Their faces were impassive, with eyes that were impregnable, powerful, immortal. And a strange force unfurled in me at the sight of them, a sweetness made my bones grow weak, and without knowing why I felt I was the same as them, rejected, irreducible.
The most mysterious one among them was a certain Tac-Tac, so called because of his voum-tac, the great bamboo flute slung forever over his shoulder. He was an old
Negro the color of scorched earth, with a flattish face from which two deep-set eyes opened on you in wary surprise, constantly astonished at seeing animals and men again. He lived farther away than the others, at the very top of the mountain, in a little shanty up in a tree, which he reached by means of a rope ladder. His little shanty, his bamboo flute, and his garden in a clearing, that was all—every two months he would come down to buy rum, and in between he wasn’t to be visited. He didn’t like it, didn’t open his lips to anyone, hadn’t time, he said. But every morning, when the sun had barely appeared in the tops of the trees, we heard the tooting of a flute: it was Tac-Tac taking off with his huge bamboo, eyes shut, veins standing out on his neck, it was Tac-Tac starting to speak, according to him, all the languages on earth. And he blew with his whole body, in fits and starts—long, short, short, long, short, long, long, long long, long—which traveled straight through the vault of the forest and into our bosoms, in shudders, in sobs, in love. And it lifted you straight up off the earth, as you opened your eyes. He was up already, standing up in front of his long bamboo flute, and you couldn’t help hearing him, for it kept coming back—voum-tac, voum-tac—and it got you just as you were opening your eyes, and so there it was, nothing to be done, Tac-Tac took off with his bamboo, pouring out all that had filled him, all that he’d felt.
All through the week I turned my little plot over and over, pulling up weeds and burning them, burning the big trees down where they stood, planting immediately the land thus reclaimed from the forest, putting in roots and boucoussou peas and gumbos. And on Sunday I would set out toward the red disk of Ma Cia, who had been calling me since dawn from over on the other side of the valley.
Instead of taking the road down the hill, which would mean going up again through Fond-Zombi, I cut straight across to Ma Cia’s part of the forest by a shortcut that ran among the uncultivated slopes and along by the canefields of the Galba refinery—by the factory with its vats of juice, its four culverts, its white chimney towering over a landscape of canefields belonging to the factory, of cabins belonging to the factory, and of Negroes inside the cabins, also belonging to the factory. I went as fast as I could because of the smell of cane trash and sweat, and once I’d forded the river I was in the blue shade of Ma Cia’s part of the forest. She was never in the clearing when I got there, but there was always a big earthen pan waiting for me outside her cabin, in the sun, full of water dark with all kinds of magic leaves—paoca, calaba balsam, bride’s rose, and power of Satan. I would jump straight into the bath and leave behind in it all the fatigues of the week, making sure to cup my hands together and ladle the contents nine times over the top of my head. When I’d gotten out I’d put on a pair of pants and sit in the sun, glancing around from time to time to make sure the undergrowth didn’t suddenly sprout eyes. Then I dressed, and did my hair by a mirror fixed to the trunk of a mango tree. And suddenly I’d hear a little dry cough behind me, and without turning my head I’d say, “There you are, Ma Cia—it’s you, isn’t it?” and she’d clear her throat, a deep hem-hem, and I was right, there she was.
Bridge of Beyond Page 15