Now, on Sunday mornings, I went down to the town with the rest of La Folie, and laughed and paraded about till evening. I was in affliction, I bore my yoke, I pulled and I whinnied—was affliction to make me miserable too? So it was laughter in the square outside La Ramée church, and cheering little visits to the nearby bars, while the people from Fond-Zombi that I ran into by chance looked at me in amazement—sweating, tousled, shocking, amidst my Brotherhood of the Displaced, Olympia, Vitaline, Leonora, and the rest, whom I stuck to like glue. When the bells sounded the end of mass Olympia would lead us to the church to scare the virtuous. She would wave her arms about jeering at all respectability and shouting: “Slavery is finished—love me and you can’t buy me, hate me and you can’t sell me.” And scandalized remarks would rain down, and everyone would put in their word about Olympia, who could undo a mass as a tidal wave the ocean. Sometimes a neighbor or acquaintance from Fond-Zombi began to approach me, then at the last moment turned away with an expression of pain. Two or three times, too, I caught Amboise looking at me, with an indefinable expression of amusement, fear, and perhaps remembrance of what I used to be. He was barefoot, like me, and wore a soiled shirt and pants; there was nothing to distinguish him from the old reddish-brown Negro I’d known in my youth. But now, to me, he looked like a prince: his walk, the set of his head, his two organ-pipe nostrils—and his somber, distant gaze was exactly that of a prince. And when his eyes happened to rest on me, by chance, I turned away embarrassed, ashamed to think that such a fine man had loved me. One Sunday as I was sitting in a bar in the town, in the midst of the Brotherhood of the Displaced, I heard Amboise’s voice saying softly behind me:
“Telumee, Telumee, how is life with you?”
I felt a pang, and answered carelessly over my shoulder, without turning around, so that he shouldn’t see my new face:
“Still nothing, Amboise, I just watch it, see it passing away, that’s all.”
“Listen,” he whispered, “I’ve come for a serious talk. Are you still on your own . . . as you were before?”
“On my own, Amboise, in solitude itself.”
After a moment’s silence the well-known voice went on softly behind me:
“Remember what I said—even in hell the devil has his friends. Of course that’s just a manner of speaking, because if one of us two is a devil it’s me.”
“Many thanks, Amboise, many thanks for the word you’ve just spoken. But the trouble is, today I’m a woman without hope, and I don’t know when it will come back.”
I’d spoken very quietly, lest the drinkers around us should notice. I waited for some while, and hearing no answer turned around at last, to see an empty chair, a tobacco pouch left on the table, and by it an untouched glass of rum. I wondered what I had said to drive Amboise away, and the depth of my degradation oppressed me all that afternoon, as I knocked back one rum after another and acted in the usual outrageous fashion, laughing and strutting about worse than ever. Back at La Folie I said I wasn’t feeling well and left the drunken company, went back to my cabin, and slowly lowered the stick that barred my door. Then, lying on my pallet, I slipped out of the world to join Grandmother, sad at the thought of the line of noble Negresses that had died out with her. My ship had run into the sand, and where was the wind to come from to set it afloat again?
The next day, as I quietly occupied my place in the world in the midst of the prickles, I heard Amboise’s voice rise into the air, and bitterness smote me and my body weighed me down. Then the bitterness went, and all that was left was the surprise of hearing that voice rise among the canes, for Amboise had always said his sweat would never feed the white man’s soil. I wanted to see him but didn’t like to turn toward his voice. Up above the mountain the sun was white-hot, and the cutting had begun long before. The time had come to fight against sweat, weariness, and the soul’s rout, and suddenly Amboise started to sing a lively caladja that floated over the herd:
In those days there lived a woman
A woman who had a house
Behind her house was a Blue Pool
A Blue Whirlpool
Many, many are the suitors
But they must bathe in the Pool
Bathe for the woman
Who will win her?
And from all sides the chorus, cutters and binders, sang the refrain:
The young men who bathed there
Are in the estuary, drowned.
I hadn’t opened my mouth, for the bitterness had just returned, and I was afraid I might unwittingly spread it, let it overflow onto the shoulders bent among the canes. But suddenly, I don’t know how, my voice escaped me and soared high above the others, piercing, lively, and gay, as in the old days, and Amboise turned toward me in astonishment, and my face was bathed in tears. And he at once turned away again, and the singing went on until noon. Then came the midday break, and those who lived in the cabins belonging to the factory went home, and there remained those who had brought lunch boxes. I chose the shade of a bombax tree at the edge of the field, and Amboise followed me in silence. Once under the tree I tucked my dress up between my thighs and sat on a flat rock with my legs one on either side. I rested my elbow on my knee and balanced the box in the palm of one hand; then, with the other, I began to delve into my malanga purée with the tips of my fingers, as a woman should. I pretended not to know Amboise was there, and every now and then gave a little shake of the head as if to drive away something, some persistent thought I couldn’t place. And in this way I tried to run away from myself, and my eyes roved the sky and scrutinized the road. And Amboise saw my anguish, and was afraid it would be like that until I died. After a long silence he spoke:
“Telumee Lougandor, the Negroes sweat so much it makes the white men’s wives tired just to see it.”
It suddenly struck me he hoped to make me laugh, though he spoke in a voice that was grave and sad. This amused and distressed me at the same time, just as in the fields, before, his voice had amused and distressed me, this tall red Negro who obviously didn’t know his place. And surprised, amused, distressed, I wondered if it was myself he wanted to make laugh, Telumee, Telumee of La Folie, or the young woman without hope. And I wouldn’t let myself laugh, for I couldn’t find a satisfactory answer. And the break ended, and we went back, thoughtful, into the fire of the canes.
On the days that followed we sat in the shade of the same bombax tree, I on the flat rock and the man a little way away, propped against the smooth trunk. We ate always in the same silence. And during those bright days none treated me with disrespect, as sometimes happens in the canefields, for Amboise’s machete was my umbrella. And then, one morning, he unobtrusively put a bundle of his canes in my heap, and I couldn’t keep back my tears. And my singing soared so high that day that the overseers on horseback, some way away, made sure they had their guns in the holsters of their saddles. But I was far away from all that, far away from the sun, far away from the prickles and the foremen, and all I wondered was whether Amboise had put the bundle in Telumee’s pile, or in that of a woman in distress, or, worse still in my eyes, if it was a kind of tribute to the memory of Queen Without a Name. And that was why, later, sitting under the bombax, I broke the silence with these words:
“Amboise, I know you—you have a nature stronger than that of many men, but you are as cowardly as all men are, too.”
Amboise seemed not to have heard. He said nothing, turned a thought over in his mind, and stared at his hands as if to take them as witness to what he was about to say.
“Telumee,” he said abruptly, uneasily, “you are more verdant and more shining than a siguina leaf in the rain, and I want to be with you. What do you say? Answer.”
I looked at him for a while, thinking if men have invented love they’ll end up one day inventing life. And so here I was about to take my place, to help this man hale life from the depths and set it up on earth. But I replied extremely coldly, in a slow, reserved voice:
“Amboise, I am just a bit o
f wood already battered by the wind. I’ve seen the dried-up coconuts stay on the tree while all the green ones fell. Life is a quarter of mutton hanging from a branch—everyone thinks they’ll get a piece of meat or liver, but most of them get only bones.”
And I added, with great difficulty, afraid of looking foolish and losing what remained of my dignity:
“And it’s in the knowledge of all that, Amboise, that I accept your proposal.”
13
WE’D AGREED Amboise should come to me in three days, on which date the sky was born again and with it the moon, always favorable to new unions. Amboise wanted me to go to him, but I preferred to wait for him in my own place under my own roof. I first prepared the cabin, tidying up outside and clearing the path, and washing and scrubbing the inside as if it were a person I was getting ready, but a person who’d seen service—a woman, not a girl. At the same time I trained my heart to turn to stone, for I didn’t think it was hard enough to take a man into my home. I looked forward to living, but in a sweet sadness that perhaps belonged to the end, when the taste for living is gone. Sometimes I saw myself in a cockpit in the middle of a fight, bloody, now one bird and now the other, the spurs, the pecks, now one and now the other, and these visions always came out of the blue, at the most unexpected moments, when I suddenly started to laugh and found pleasure in the sound of my laughter, or when I bent over a verbena that grew by my cabin and suddenly found pleasure in having a sense of smell.
The last hours of the third day went by very slowly. I’d bathed myself, steeped myself in one of Ma Cia’s concoctions until the last prickle had gone from out of my skin and from under my nails. Then I’d washed my hair and done my braids with cacao lotion, put on my Sunday dress, and set some congo soup on the fire—the plop of the bubbles filled my ears as I sat on a stone in the doorway, watching the slim crescent moon that had appeared above the mountain. Silence hung over all the hill. In front of their cabins the people, warned by the spirit of the place, looked silently toward the valley, awaiting, they too, my hour. Suddenly the faint sound of a drum was heard, and the gleam of torches appeared on the slopes, forming a kind of luminous trail that wound along the road until, now, it reached the hill of La Folie. The neighbors, men and women, went to meet the visitors, while I sat still on my stone, listening to the beat of my heart, soft, smooth, singing. The crowd was in front of the cabin, with Amboise in front, lightly beating a chest drum. Behind him came a country fiddle, a rumbling sillac, and some chachas wielded by Adriana, Ismene, Filao, and several others from Fond-Zombi. They all came up and gave me a brief greeting, just a nod, as if they’d only said goodbye to me yesterday, and my life had flowed along in the same clear water, without surprises and without trouble, since the first day they’d seen me, as a child, in the house of Queen Without a Name. Amboise came up to me last, and I couldn’t look at him. I sat there on my stone, suddenly exhausted and devoid of strength. He bent forward, took my swollen hands, and stroking them gently, murmured, jesting:
“No doubt about it, woman is a cool stream that kills.”
Then he added slowly, with just that touch of mockery in the voice that lets you say things without seeming to:
“Ah, a woman like this is as high as a mountain, and if you feel you can’t rise to it, bite your tongue and hold your peace.”
Everyone started to laugh, glasses and bottles passed from hand to hand, and the crack entertainers gazed around, weighing up the audience so as to choose the right jokes. Everything was ready, the celebrations could begin. Amboise sat astride a drum, threw back his head, and slowly raised his right arm, as if all he’d ever seen or heard, everything he knew from today and yesterday was at the tips of his outstretched fingers. At that moment the rest of us disappeared from his sight, and for him it was an instant of perfect solitude. Then his hand struck strongly, and his throat let forth the traditional call to the spirits, to the living, the dead and the absent, bidding them come down among us and enter the circle hollowed out by the voice of the drum:
I tell you we are coming
We are coming, the Rhoses
I tell you we are coming.
Olympia entered the circle first, lifting up her dress generously on either side as if to indicate that she opened her womb and her bosom before the company. All round and full, she made one think of a breadfruit covered in curls, and when she started to dance she was a breadfruit that’s knocked off the tree with a pole and rolls right down the hill, along paths and tracks, falling and rising with such energy she made us forget the ground beneath her feet was really flat. Her skin glowed, a light came to her full smooth cheeks, and her eyes looked up to heaven gazing at what they had always been waiting for. Amboise followed her closely, and when she seemed about to come to earth again, triggered off his drum so that it drew her out of herself once more, freed her of her arms and legs and body, of her head and her voice, and of all the men who’d trampled and torn and slashed her charity. She whirled and bent and straightened up again, snatching away our anguish with a gesture, lifting our lives to the skies and giving them back all clear and cleansed of impurity. And then the impulse began to die away, she stopped, panting, in the middle of the circle, and another dancer at once came and led her back to her seat with a friendly gesture, then took her place and began to talk about herself and her dreams, the life she would have liked, and the life she’d had.
Amboise uttered one summons after another throughout the night, and people came and went in and out of the circle, while I sat on my stone, not wanting to resist the drum and not wanting to yield to it. Early in the morning, Olympia pushed me silently into the middle of the circle. Everyone stopped talking. I stood motionless in front of the drum. Amboise’s fingers tapped the goatskin lightly, as if looking for a sign, for the rhythm of my pulse. Seizing my skirt in either hand, I started to whirl like a top out of control, back hunched, elbows raised above my shoulders, trying in vain to parry invisible blows. Suddenly I felt the waters of the drum flow over my heart and give it life again, at first in little damp notes, then in great falls that sprinkled and baptized me as I whirled in the middle of the circle. And the river flowed over me and I bounded and surged, and I was Adriana, down and up, and I was Ismene of the great pensive eyes, I was Olympia and the rest, Ma Cia in the shape of a dog, Filao, Tac-Tac taking off with his bamboo, and Letitia with her little narrow face, and the man I had once loved and crowned, I was the drum and Amboise’s helping hands, I his little hunted watchful dove’s eyes. And now my hands were opening on all sides, taking lives and refashioning them as I pleased, giving the world and being nothing, a mere wisp of smoke hanging in the night air, the drumbeats issuing from beneath Amboise’s hands, and yet existing with all my strength, from the roots of my hair right down to my little toes.
It was my first and last dance that night, and with it the strange celebration ended. As we stood in the door and watched the people going, one of them gave a little shout and pointed to a patch of pink sky that had just appeared over the highest peak of the mountain, above the volcano. The rosy light soon spread over half the sky, and seeing it, the one who had shouted murmured as if in a dream: “And now may ugly souls be absent.”
A few laughs, a few stifled sighs, and on a last general goodnight we shut the doors of our cabin behind us.
In that fine season of my life, the root of my luck came up, and the days were like nights, the nights like days. All we planted flourished, came forth well out of that scarcely cleared patch of hillside, full of rocks and stumps that sprouted afresh every year, sending up bright green shoots above the sun-baked mass. After each harvest Monsieur Boissanville’s representative would seize half our produce, and we lived on the rest, which provided us with oil, kerosene, and a new dress or pants when necessary. I can see nothing in those years but contentment, good words, and kindness. When Amboise spoke of lemons I spoke of lemons in reply, and if I said use the knife he would use the ax as well. We enjoyed pricking out the seedlings, raising the
furrows, setting the seeds in the womb of the earth. Our plot sloped gently down to the bottom of the valley, to a little stream grandly known as the torrent. At the bottom of the slope the earth was black and rich, just right for bringing forth long yams, crisp and juicy. The nearby torrent gave us its water and the shade of its trees. Amboise dug and broke up the clods of earth, and I crumbled them into a fine rain between my fingers. Every year this out-of-the-way place appealed to and attracted us more. As our sweat seeped into the soil, it became more and more ours, one with the odor of our bodies, of our smoke and of our food, of the eternal smoke, sharp and stinging, from the bonfires of green acomats. A square of paccala yams sprang up along the bank, and all around, hundreds of bindweeds intertwined their soft yet thorny creepers, like a writhing soul producing its own fetters. The yams were surrounded by a double row of gumbos, and on another patch, just nearby, malangas, sweet corn, a few standard bananas and plantains grew in a dense tangle. The garden improved every year, and we spent most of our time there. A little arbor of coconut fronds sheltered us when it was hot, and the words we spoke seemed to perch on the leaves of the trees nearby, making them stir cautiously in the wind. There under the shelter we used to speak of all things past and present, of all our eyes had seen, of all the people we’d known, loved, and hated, in this way multiplying our own little lives and making each other exist several times. As the years went by we knew everything about each other, our deeds and thoughts, the voids within us. We often spoke of the Negro’s decline, of what had happened in ancient times and still went on now, without our knowing why or how. Amboise was then in his fifties, with red-streaked white hair, and beneath the apparent calm of his expression one sensed the effort of holding back an inner flood, a stormy torrent that he restrained with all his strength. Passionate and anxious, I asked if it mattered much to him that we were Negroes in the dirt. And turning to me he said in a voice that tried to be peaceful, reassuring, empty of all anguish: “Telumee, dear countrywoman, he who has never left the level path to fall in the gutter will never know how much he is to be venerated.”
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