THE OLD MEN still remember that strike; they called it the Strike of Death. It went on for several days and then petered out, like a wave that comes and goes, leaving a scrap of foam behind it on the sand. As the Negroes had come to their senses and gone back of their own accord, the factory announced that the two sous were granted. For a little while longer the lambis shells kept the earth fresh, damp and shining around the three new graves. Then the sun, the sweet beak of the birds, and the careless feet of children reduced those graves to the common destiny of all. It had all happened too quickly—the deaths of some, the return of the others to the canefields, to life; and heaven sent down disfavor on Fond-Zombi, La Roncière, Valbadiane, and La Folie. There was one waterspout after another, followed by a red sun that burned off the skin in lumps. And in the morning there were never any of those marks as long as a man’s body and as light as a child’s tread that bear witness here below to the passage of God. Every night you could hear the clanking of chains dragged by the dead, slaves murdered here in Fond-Zombi, La Roncière, and La Folie, where Amboise had bravely perished. And when disease entered the mouths of the domestic animals, people shook their heads and were silent. They understood.
My eyes were two tarnished mirrors that no longer reflected anything. But when people brought me cows foaming at the mouth, their withers covered with black scabs, I did what Ma Cia had taught me, and, first one and then another, the animals began to want to live again. The rumor spread that I knew how to do and undo, that I knew secrets, and with a vast waste of saliva I was raised in spite of myself to the rank of seer and first-class witch. People climbed up to my cabin to put in my hands the grief, confusion, and absurdity of their lives, bruised bodies and bruised souls, the madness that screeches and the madness that is silent, the woes undergone in dreams, all the mist that enshrouds the human heart. I watched them coming with boredom and lassitude, still imprisoned in my own grief, and then their eyes would intrigue me, their voices wake me out of my sleep, their sufferings draw me to them like a kite extricated from the topmost branches. I could rub and massage, I could send back certain darts whence they came, but as for being a soothsayer I was no more a soothsayer than I was the Virgin Mary. Yet people pressed and begged me, forced me to take their troubles on my shoulders, all the woes of body and soul, the shame and scandal of wasted lives. Then I’d light a special candle and make signs, some that I’d learned from Ma Cia and others I’d heard about, and others again that came to me out of nowhere, because of the foam and the cries.
One day there came to my cabin, from the commune of Vieux-Habitants at the other end of the island, a middle-aged woman carrying in her arms a little girl of four or five whose body was covered with running sores. The weather that day was uncertain, with a leaden cloudless sky hanging low over the dark mass of the trees, and I was disturbed by the presence of this woman so afflicted and so far from home. With her eleven children, she had, she said, done enough to increase the world’s woe, and this one, the last, might have taken root somewhere else than in her womb. But this seed wouldn’t die, although it was the very scrapings of her bowels, and she’d called her Sonore so as to be sure of hearing her and not neglecting her breath of life. She had grown fond of this obstinate little thing, and now. . . . So she had brought her to me, and was handing her over into my charge.
I began to ponder, thinking on my own entrails, which had not born fruit, of the leaden sky, and the woman’s distress. And, receiving her child from her hands, I felt something inaudible and long forgotten stirring inside me: it was life. The woman sighed with relief and went away. I started to treat the child with senna, santonica, and the sap of herbs. I gave her baths of cassia lata, put garlic on her joints, rubbed her gently from head to foot. She expelled the worms that had been devouring her, her feeble mewings became real cries, and gradually the abscesses became scabs, then just pink scars that I washed in water warmed in the sun. The child could scarcely stand, but already she tried to follow me everywhere, her face wreathed in an indescribable shy smile. A year went by like that. The mother came to see her and went home alone, reassured. Sonore stayed with me, my young shoot: she put forth all her leaves, she stretched herself out in the light, and when evening came she would sit quite quiet in my lap by the lamp, listening to me tell old tales: Zemba, the bird and its song, the Man Who Tried to Live on Air, and a hundred others—and then all the stories of slavery, of hopeless battles, and the lost victories of the woman called Solitude that Grandmother had told me long ago sitting in the same rocker where I was sitting now. I had begun to grow young again, and several people tried their luck, leaving offerings of crayfish or peas outside my door. But I only laughed and tied ribbons on the little girl’s braids: she went down the hill to school now, and would say gravely to anyone who asked her about me: “She is steel grass, my mother, for she bends before no man.”
Sonore had soft, chubby flesh, and when I touched it I felt as if I had the taste of mango in my mouth. This surprised me, for I’d never heard of such a thing, of any woman having in her mouth the taste of any child. Those who saw her for the first time saw nothing but a soft little sun-charmed animal. She seemed to be made to live, just to live, as the birds sing and the fish swim; her very nostrils inspired such thoughts—quivering nostrils opened wide on the world, perfectly shaped for breathing the air and making her live. But there was something fragile about her still, in the nape of her neck, for example, in the transparent tips of her fingers, in the still hesitant walk that made you think of an infant still, though it was only a hesitation of the soul, a little inner trembling before life. Her frailness, her dependence, her infinite richness astounded me. She was very proud of my talents as a witch, and when I explained my ignorance, my inability to decipher the spirits’ messages, she would remain deaf and dumb, thinking it was some kind of ruse. I tried in vain to shed my reputation, restricting myself more and more to rubbing, preparing potions, and helping the little ones into the light with my own hands. I wouldn’t take any payment, and people were disappointed and stayed away, thinking that, as sometimes happens, I’d lost the greater part of my power. Then I could get back to my garden, and there I soon noticed that the plants appreciated my influence, apart from the corn and the Angola peas, which didn’t like my hand, and certain male trees that need to be looked after by a man. I had produce to sell all the year round, and I was already thinking of adding an extra room to Queen Without a Name’s cabin, the first step toward the shop that would one day save Sonore from the canefields. She had left school and taken over from me, washing, cooking, ironing, going everywhere, weeding, knowing everything, ignorant of the world’s evil. I had white hair now and dewlaps under my chin. I had fads too, old woman’s maunderings, revolving one idea all day long: the hope that is contained in a child. Meanwhile Sonore had acquired certain curves, and I teased her about her “splendors,” as I called her little breasts and buttocks. I told her she was just as everyone who’d seen me said I used to be when I was thirteen: shaped like a guitar. This idea amused her greatly, and she didn’t omit to ask me what sort of sound I made when I was played for the first time. And as she bent on me the straight clear beam of her childish gaze, with perhaps a tinge of mischief in the depths of the bright black candid eyes, I grew confused and muttered evasively, in a dream: “Ah, cunning little octopus! The music was over long ago.”
Curiously enough, since I’d abjured witchcraft some of the local women accused me of paralyzing people’s wills and stealing the fruit of their cows’ bellies: in short, I had invented and created all man’s suffering, I was one to be feared. But Sonore was still with me, and in the evening, at sunset, she would always have a good word to reassure me: “Well, Ma Tel-Tel, all they say about you is nonsense. People don’t know you, they don’t know the way you breathe.”
Then she’d come close and put her arms around me protectively: “Ma Tel-Tel, is it we who weep for loneliness in the evening when we’ve shut the door behind us?”
; She murmured this in a strange, comforting voice, the voice of an adult to a child, and as we started to laugh in the darkness, for pure pleasure like a couple of rascals, I thought within myself that she set off the whole village, as the red canna sets off the whole forest.
At about this time a wanderer from Côte-sous-le-vent built a bamboo cabin on the other side of the torrent bounding the plot granted to me by Monsieur Boissanville. He was an old man with a dull sooty skin, and bleary eyes with reddish streaks that lit up innocently at the least sight of a human being. Taken in isolation his features were unremarkable, but they didn’t fit one another: you couldn’t see what that short flat nose was doing with these delicate feminine eyebrows, this thin indrawn mouth, this perfectly round smooth face, these few tendrils of white hair dotted about the round skull. With his little thin arms that he was always flinging about, he looked rather like a bat; one always expected some strange shrill squeak to issue from his nostrils. He said his name was Medard, but the people of La Folie, with a sort of spontaneous mockery, immediately called him Angel Medard, and this name stuck. He planted a few vegetables, set nooses for raccoons, and presumably lived on grass and fresh air. When, in the evening, a thin column of smoke rose on the other side of the stream, Sonore would say unhappily, “I wonder whether he’s not cooking a pot of stones just to make us think he’s having supper too.”
A few days after his arrival rumors began circulating about him. The only name that really suited him was the one given him by the people of his own village: the man with the dancing brain. It was only a play on words, but it gave away the secret of one born to evil. God had made Angel Medard to corrupt the world, and that was why the world had set its mark on him, its own inescapable claw mark. It happened in La Boucan, his native village. One day after some sordid squabble his brother had stabbed him, laying open all one side of his skull: you could still see the place throbbing under the hair. People said that if his head had been whole and the stem of his thighs able to stand and shoot some shining trail into woman’s womb, the spread of evil would have known no end. But God himself had set limits to the power He had given him. As soon as this rumor became known, it drove everyone away from him: as they went along the road the children threw stones at his bamboo cabin. Seeing him slink along in his darkness, his head tilted toward the side that was cut open, like a wounded bird, Sonore would say very quietly: “Ma Tel-Tel, he can’t just disappear off the face of the earth, and I beat my breast and tell you these people won’t be satisfied until he does.” I didn’t quite know what to think, and I said to myself that the wickedness of the Negro is like a gun loaded with blanks, while the wickedness of life is a gun loaded with bullets that pierce and kill you. Shortly afterward, when I went into the new shop in La Folie, Angel Medard was standing at the counter trying to buy a bottle of rum. A dusty, silvery light was falling from the sky, and somewhere, near the river perhaps, a woman was singing, in a very sweet voice, the story of a deserted lover. Two or three Negroes were chatting on the veranda, glasses of anisette in their hands. The waitress winked at them, then, laughing, put a bottle full of kerosene on the counter. “Have one,” she said to Angel Medard, offering him a glass. He looked confused and turned gray, and seeing this the others laughed all the more. I had asked for a liter of rum, and when Rose-Aimee brought it I pushed it along the counter toward Angel Medard. Meanwhile a thin, disagreeable thread of a voice came out of my mouth and said: “You haven’t ever looked at me properly, do you know that? Haven’t you ever noticed I’ve got a dancing brain too?”
Medard gazed at me out of his dull eyes, in which there arose a little flame of incredulity. Next day he came and stood in our yard, introduced himself, sat down, said nothing, and went away. Gradually he unfroze and used to cut wood for us and bring Sonore wild medlars. He spoke, and no animal howls came out of his throat. He would roam about near us now like a domestic pet that is always under your feet but not in the way. Every morning he would come to our place to drink his coffee, dig a few vegetables, make a furrow, fasten the roof where it had come loose in the wind. Little by little I came to do his washing and ironing, and to leave a place for him at our table. Later, when the rains came and I knew he must be wet as a dog in his bamboo cabin, and I saw him with water running off him every morning and his eyes fierce with lack of sleep, I fixed up a curtain dividing our house in two, and put a mattress down in a corner by the door for Angel Medard. When he came to live in my place the local people thought the world had come to an end, and that this was a sign of the times. An almost imperceptible shudder ran through them when they came near me, and beads of sweat stood out on their upper lip when they talked to me about him, saying he was a well of the world’s crimes. Why did I have to go fishing in those troubled waters, when there were so many that were clear and limpid? The people of La Folie knew better than I did, they knew all there was to know about the existence of evil, they could look at one plant and say, “Water it,” and at another and say, “Burn it.” Evil was in the world long before man, and would still be there long after the human race was annihilated. Thus this particular case had a significance far beyond La Folie itself; it had slipped out of their control, but they would watch the consequences carefully, so as not to go against the will of God. Who I was they no longer knew, but if asses didn’t die, what would the vultures live on?
Angel Medard started to surround Sonore with a web of delicate little attentions, green coconuts, pet chicks for her to raise, crayfish, malacca apples, sandals woven by a man’s hand that she woke to find waiting by her bed. He gave her dream names, he could transform everything: when it was raining he’d say the sky was blue and go on saying it till the child clapped her hands and said what a beautiful day it was. Sonore’s feet, fingers, and eyes were those of a fairy. No dresses or ribbons were too dear, he’d say, scouring the mountains for whole days to bring back a hare or a pair of doves or hearts of cabbage palm that he would exchange at the shop for some trinket. He invented a bird language, and sometimes she would hold out sesame seeds in the palm of her hand and he would peck at them with funny little cries and twists of the head that made her peal with laughter. Then Sonore would stroke his cheek, and he would turn to me and say plaintively that he’d suffered the unpredictable assaults of life, that monster without saddle or bridle, but nothing had ever stuck to his flesh or entered his blood, everything was always new to him and each vile trick retained all its power of surprise, because he had kept the heart of a child. By slow degrees he came to have whims and fancies, imaginary illnesses, gluttonies, all sorts of childish demands I didn’t like to refuse because of Sonore’s affectionate indulgence toward him. If I was angry he would tell me to relieve my nerves on him to get relief. I was a person of luck, he said, and to contemplate me was all his delight, he, a dead man without happiness. But meanwhile the food would be badly cooked, the mattress scratched him all night, and even his shirts weren’t ironed as they used to be. If I swept the floor I deliberately swept the dust in his eyes; if I served something piquant it was in the hope of taking the skin off the roof of his mouth; and when I did Sonore’s hair he said I pulled her braids as hard as I could because I was jealous of how beautiful they were. I didn’t know what to do—I didn’t want to keep him in the house, and I didn’t want to turn him out, because of Sonore. People had always avoided him, so that, like a violinist without a violin, he hadn’t had a chance to show what he was really like. And now because of me he had an instrument. An early riser, he would use what was left of his brain to hatch tricks that would make me wish I’d never been born. That was his only object really, for life was of no importance to him on his own account. He no longer cut any wood, never pulled up the smallest tuft of grass, kept his precious sweat intact in the marrow of his bones. And if, when Sonore wasn’t there, I brandished a knife over his head, he’d repress a smile and take heaven to witness, saying tearfully that a man cannot prevent anything, either his coming into the world or his death. And so as the days went by
my brain gradually crumbled, and I could never catch Angel Medard with his hand in the bag of his villainy. I learned later that he’d talked to Sonore in secret about her foster mother Telumee, who got up and lay down with spirits. I was a charmer of children, I only wanted to make use of her in her innocence, delivered over body and soul, hair and sweat into my witch’s hands. Who knew whether her mother had left her here, entrusted her to me, of her own free will?
He had harnessed fate’s chariot to the child’s shoulders, and all he had to do now was crack the whip. One evening when I came in from the garden I found the house empty. While I was slaving down in the valley he had gotten my child’s clothes together and taken her to the main road, where they caught a bus to the commune of Vieux-Habitants. I never saw Sonore again. People say she’s living peacefully in her native village, still as bright and smiling as ever, despite armfuls of children. There is a time for carrying a child, a time for bringing it forth, a time for watching it grow and become like a bamboo in the wind. And what is one to call the time that comes after that? The time for consolation. But that evening, sitting alone in my cabin, I didn’t yet indulge in such thoughts. I didn’t weep, I didn’t touch my bottle of rum, I only thought that the door of grief is never shut.
The next day I went down to Rose-Aimee’s shop and bought the largest pair of scissors there was, tailor’s scissors with big handles so that you could get a good grip. Olympia happened to be in the shop, disheveled, her eyes red-rimmed with rum, her eternal narrow-brimmed hat askew on her head. Seeing what I was buying she came over uneasily and stammered, ashamed like the rest at not having said anything while there was still time:
“Telumee, dear friend, don’t soil your hands for an empty bubble. Medard is nothing, less than nothing. It’s I, Olympia, who tell you so.”
I gave no answer. I had become a red ant, and I spoke only in the depths of my bowels.
Bridge of Beyond Page 19