Angel Medard reappeared at the end of the week, early one afternoon, and began to prowl around my cabin in ever-decreasing circles, as if the better to gorge his eyes on my distress and abandonment. But my house was more spotless than ever, the sand in the yard shone like a new sou, and I was in my Sunday best with my hair properly done and decked out from head to foot, going about my business as if to say however fiercely life used its spurs it would never pluck out my feathers. In desperation, Angel Medard went off to the shop and drank without stopping until evening, in a bar deserted by all the usual customers. When night came, a fine moonlit night, white and blue and dusted with stars, I went indoors, shut the door but did not bar it, and went to bed with the scissors open against my stomach, under the bedclothes. Soon I heard cursing and swearing coming from the direction of the road, then the door flew open to reveal an unsteady figure standing in the moonlight against a background of pale sky, bamboos bending in the wind, and mountains huddled together in the distance like a strange flock of drowsy animals. Angel Medard stumbled, lolled his mad head to right and left, raised his arms, let out an oath, then stepped forward and seized all he could lay hands on, glasses, plates, baskets of provisions, chairs, and stools, and hurled them all through the open door. I lay motionless in my bed, with the table still standing between us, between the patch of darkness where I lay and that gale of madness. From time to time he would look at me, and my stillness increased his fury: he waved his arms, yelled that he was my master and would gamble me away at dice whenever he felt like it, and that I was going to go hurtling down, me and my house and my bed, right down to the bottom of the hill, and forever. Then he suddenly rushed at me, a long kitchen knife appearing from nowhere in his hand. But he caught his foot on a chair lying overturned on the floor, went spinning through the air, and a moment later hit the corner of the table, which was driven right into his temple, just in the dancing part of his brain. He let out a terrifying grunt and remained on his knees by the table, his head held down by the wood that had been driven into it. Then there was silence.
Fearing a trick, I held the scissors open still against my chest, under the bedclothes. But after a while Angel Medard began to groan gently, like a baby, and with the scissors still in my hand I got up, lit a candle, and went over to the figure crouched by the table, in the moonlight that reached right into the middle of the room. Angel Medard was rolling his eyes in the darkness, and his hand clutched the wood of the table as if he were trying not to cry out. I went nearer and asked if he wanted me to free him, get the corner of the table out of his head. But he signaled to me not to move, that everything was all right. There was no trace of fear in his face, and his eyes were fixed on me with the astonishment of someone looking not outside but inside himself, someone who discovers, not without but within, something he never suspected till now. Every so often, abjectness would momentarily take possession again of his face, with its slack pinched mouth and eyes that were filling with murky black. It was as if little short twisted branches bristling with thorns were growing through his head, but he at once pruned them back and his eyes were once more like a clear, calm, peaceful river flowing quietly toward the sea. Now I knew what he wanted, what he had always wanted deep inside, below the sac of gall over his heart. Kneeling down, I wiped away the sweat that was streaming down his cheeks and said in a clear, distinct voice that I tried to make as peaceful as his new face: “We see the crows and we say, They speak a foreign language. But no, the crows do not speak a foreign language, they speak their own language, and we do not understand it.”
Angel Medard smiled and I held his hand till dawn, kneeling beside him, while people gathered in silence outside, gazing at the scene unfolding before their eyes and trying to puzzle out a story, a story with a meaning, with a beginning and an end, as you have to do here below if you want to know where you are amidst the chaos of men’s destinies. When morning came they helped me to wash Angel Medard, helped me dress him and lay him out properly on my bed. Someone was already measuring the corpse, and the people of the valley came and went, sprinkling the house with holy water and gazing at Angel Medard’s enormous brain under the bandages I’d tied around his head, just above his closed eyes. I sat upright on a little stool, thinking how Angel Medard had assumed the appearance of a man in the world, but he was not a man, for he had never been given a soul. He was a poisonous manchaneel tree growing on the bank, hoping people would touch him and die. I had touched him, and here he was, felled by his own poison. Everyone in this world was given two lungs thirsty for life, but they did not often get to be full of air. The first person who happened along squeezed your lungs in his hands and stopped you breathing, and if you turned yourself into a fish and went under water to breathe, people still said the bubbles your gills sent up into the sun were too bright. That was how it had been with the two of us, Angel Medard and me.
Outside, everyone was getting ready for the wake, in a hubbub of shouts and cries that stopped short at the door of the cabin. Every so often they would peer in at me sitting up straight on my little stool, and give me long curious looks, knowing, expectant, working out and weighing up I knew not what idea, what new delusion. And thus it was all through the night, all through that strange wake. But when the dawn rose on Angel Medard’s coffin, the dancing over, the violins put away, the people came to me and said, their faces full of serenity: “Telumee, dear, Angel Medard lived like a dog and you made him die like a man. Ever since you came to La Folie we have tried in vain to find a suitable name for you. Now you are very old to be given a name, but until the sun has set, anything may happen. So as for us, henceforth we shall call you Telumee Miracle.”
15
IT’S A LONG TIME NOW since I left off my battle robe, and a long time since I’ve been able to hear the battle’s din. I am too old, much too old for all that, and the only pleasure left me on earth is to smoke, to smoke my old pipe here in my doorway, curled up on my little stool, in the sea breeze that caresses my old carcass like soothing balm. Sun risen, sun set, I am always there on my little stool, far away, eyes gazing into space, seeking my time through the smoke of my pipe, seeing again all the downpours that have drenched me and the winds that have buffeted me. But rains and winds are nothing if first one star rises for you in the sky, then another, then another as happened to me, who very nearly carried off all the happiness in the world. And even if the stars set, they have shone, and their light still twinkles there where it has come to rest: in your second heart.
The town of La Ramée is set on a hill sloping down to the sea. The only hurricane-proof building is the little painted stone church near which I live. There are a few small houses clustered around it, with its modest cemetery where cassias and flame trees cast a great red human shadow over the graves. At the foot of the hill is a vast beach of black sand, which would be very fine with its almond trees and scattered fishermen’s cabins deep in foliage, were it not for the huge clouds of mosquitoes always surrounding the men and beasts that live there. The inhabitants say indulgently there never should have been such a place on God’s earth, that they made a great mistake in living there, they, their parents or their grandparents, for it is probably a bit of earth that escaped the hand of the Almighty. They have talked like that for a long time, but people are born and die, generations succeed one another and the town is still there, and so everyone has come to admit it will hold out as long as sun and moon are in the sky. La Ramée is really not only La Ramée itself, but also the whole hinterland of which it is the heart—Fond-Zombi, Dara, Valbadiane, La Roncière, La Folie—so that by settling here, with my back to the sea, I am still facing, even if only in the distance, my own great forest.
Up there, near her, near the smell of her, I couldn’t forget Sonore. Mothers sent me their daughters to wash and braid and foster, saying I’d find another Sonore there in La Folie, but some mooring that tied me to La Folie was broken. I tried to live in Bel Navire, Bois Rouge, and La Roncière, but nowhere could I find a refuge.
One day in desperation I went to Pointe-à-Pitre, but I didn’t last long there either. For anyone used to having tall trees, to having the song of a bird to apply to a sorrow, the town is a desert. Without a breadfruit tree, a currant bush, a lemon tree, I felt at the mercy of hunger and beggary, and the country called me. Then St. Anthony in person intervened and set me down here in the town of La Ramée, on a piece of land granted by the commune, behind the church, a few yards away from the graveyard. Here I have an old woman’s garden, a little stove, and a pan in which I roast peanuts to sell in the church square. I like to get up with the sun, pick a watermelon, gather up a coconut with its milk cooled by the night, arrange my paper twists of peanuts in a basket, and put it on my head and go crying and selling my wares in the street. While the sun goes about its business, I go about mine. The people here are fond of me—I have only to call a little boy as he goes by and he’s off to fetch water for me at once. Sometimes the women of La Folie come and ask me to go back there: “Mama Miracle, you are the tree our hamlet leans against—do you know what will become of the hill without you?” Then I remind them of what I really am, not a tree but an old bit of dry wood, and I tell them what they are really trying to do is stop me from disappearing under the leaves. They laugh, then go home in silence, for they know I’m only trying to keep up my position as a Negress, to keep up the way I carry my soul. And so I have reached my role as an old woman, tending my garden, roasting my peanuts, receiving visitors standing up on my two legs, and decked in starched skirts so that they can’t see how thin I am. And then in the evening as the sun goes down, I warm up my supper, I pull up a weed or two, and I think of the Negro’s life and of its mystery. We have no more marks to guide us than the bird in the air or the fish in the water, and in the midst of this uncertainty we live, and some laugh and others sing. I thought I would sleep with one man only and he abused me; I thought Amboise immortal; I believed in a little girl who left me; and yet, without quite knowing why, I don’t regard any of all that as a waste of time. It may well be that all suffering, even the prickles in the canefields, are part of the glory of man, and it may well be that looking at it in a certain way, from a certain angle, I may one day be able to grant a certain beauty even to Angel Medard. As I dream like this, night falls without my noticing, and sitting on my little old woman’s stool I look up suddenly, disturbed by the phosphorescence of certain stars. Clouds come and go, a light appears, then disappears, and I feel helpless, out of place, with no reason for being among these trees, this wind, these clouds. Somewhere in the darkness can be heard the discordant notes, always the same, of a flute; they get farther away, cease. Then I think not about death but about the living who are gone, and I hear the sound of their voices, and it is as if I saw the various shades of their lives, the colors they were, yellow, blue, pink or black, faded colors, intermingled and distant, and I try to find the thread of my life too. I hear the words and the peals of laughter of Ma Cia there in her forest, and I think of the injustice in the world, and of all of us still suffering and dying silently of slavery after it is finished and forgotten. I try, I try every night, and I never succeed in understanding how it could all have started, how it can have continued, how it can still survive, in our tortured souls, uncertain, torn, which will be our last prison. Sometimes my heart is rent and I ask myself if we are men at all, because if we were, perhaps we would not have been treated like that. Then I get up, and by my moonlight lamp I look through the shadows of the past at the market, the market where my people stand, and I lift the lamp higher to look for the face of my ancestor. And all the faces are the same, and all are mine, and I go searching, and I keep walking around them till they are all sold, bleeding, racked, alone. I shine my lamp into every dark corner, I go all over this strange market, and I see that heaven’s gift to us is that we should have our head thrust into, held down in, the murky water of scorn, cruelty, pettiness, and treachery. But I also see that we are not drowned in it. We have struggled to be born and we have struggled to be born again, and we have called the finest tree in our forests “resolute”—the strongest, the most sought after, the one that is cut down the most often.
That is how my thoughts go, my old woman’s reveries, as the night flows quietly over my fancies, then ebbs with the first cockcrow. Then I stir on my little stool, shake off the drops of dew, go to the little barrel under the gutter, and in my cupped hands I take a drop of water and rinse it around in my mouth to wash away the dreams of the night.
Life is certainly strange. You have hauled your boat up on the beach, fixed it firmly in the sand, and yet if there is a ray of sunlight you feel the warmth, and if anyone pricks this old bit of dry wood the blood still comes.
For a long time, almost half a century, every time anyone happened to speak of Elie, the son of Old Abel, I stopped my ears and walked away, not wanting to know if he was dead or alive, or that he had ever existed. Then in the last few years oblivion started to come, and I heard some say he was dead, others that he was in France, and others again that he lived by begging in Pointe-à-Pitre. Then, quite recently, I was told he was coming back here to die, to lay his bones in La Ramée churchyard, in the hope that some Negro would remember him on All Saints’ Day, come and put a candle on his grave and say a few words to him.
After I heard this I stayed home for a few days, listless, revolving all kinds of ancient thoughts, seeing again how the clear water turned into blood. And then the other week, as I was sitting on my stool getting my wares ready for next day, old Elie began to go up and down, without saying anything, by the hedge of rose laurels that separates my place from the road. I was sitting roasting my peanuts, and I saw him going back and forth past the hedge as if he’d forgotten something. I was blind, dumb, and well protected by my laurels, and I watched Elie going up and down the road like a mad ant looking for a nest, occasionally looking toward my hedge with an innocent, childlike gaze. I was sitting down, cold to the marrow of my bones, I thought all God’s sun would never make me warm again, and I let Elie go up and down the road, then go away in silence, his back bent over his gnarled stick.
And then last Sunday, as I was doing up my paper cones, I saw through the leaves the same vague ungainly figure, holding the same gnarled stick; and this time a felt hat had made an appearance on the mountain of Elie’s hair, as tousled as ever, as dancing, as full of verve and vagary in spite of the snow that covered it. Pulling down the frayed cuffs of his coat, he put his head over my pink hedge and started to call out:
“I said hallo—hallo, everyone!”
His face was all wrinkled, but, how shall I put it, they were not real wrinkles, I saw no hollow or furrow in that skin—it was like a newspaper which you’ve read and crumpled up, but which has straightened itself out again though it can never be as smooth as it was. Perhaps he had heard the sound of the wings of death and so had dragged himself to me, this man I’d loved as a fish loves the water, as a bird loves space, as the living love the earth. I opened my mouth, but a strange heaviness was on my tongue, and seeing that I went on making my paper cones and filling them with peanuts, that I continued my little routine as if only a warm breeze had blown over the hedge, Elie leaned forward and called through the laurels, “So that’s how it is, is it, Telumee?” And hearing him ask me for a word, just a word of comfort to help him bear the weight of the earth he already felt pressing down on him, I became once more, for an instant, the little girl with wild hair and tight smooth skin that I used to be, and I saw before me the Elie of the old days, the Elie who used to say to me under the flame tree at school, his khaki shorts flapping around his big knock-knees: “Telumee, if I lose my way in the forest, don’t forget that you’re the only woman I shall ever love.”
I was choked with tears. An inexplicable shame filled me. All I could say, with a lump in my throat, was:
“Yes. It’s very sad—but that’s how it is.”
Those few words I couldn’t give are the only thing I regret in my whole life.
; Today, as I listen to his knell, my “That’s how it is” becomes the sound of the bell and lashes my heart. A liquid light comes down from the sky in waves, spreading out over the earth in layers, like slats in the shutters of a cabin. Through these strange blinds I watch the funeral procession go by. The last rays of the sun fall softly on the coffin, lighting up the dark clothes, caressing the peaceful faces of the little group that follows. There is nothing superfluous or ugly. In this light the smallest pebble, the tiniest leaf in the wind seem to be playing their own tune, behaving with deep wisdom. Though I hardly know why, I am filled with a kind of joy, and I see my own death in an unaccustomed manner, without confusion or sadness. I think of Queen Without a Name, who used to say long ago with a smile: “Life is a sea without a port and without a lighthouse, and men are ships without a destination.” And she would always be breathless as she said this, as if dazzled by the splendor of human uncertainty. I wonder if people can bear this uncertainty, the sparkling brightness of death. But despite their frivolity about death, and whatever they do, in whatever direction they bustle, whether they chop or cut, sweat in the canefields, hold firm or abandon, or are lost in the night of the senses, there is still a sort of air, a panache, about them. They come and go, make and unmake, in the heart of uncertainty, and out of it all comes their splendor. That is why it seems to me God ought to be jealous even of one like Angel Medard.
I have moved my cabin to the east and to the west; east winds and north winds have buffeted and soaked me; but I am still a woman standing on my own two legs, and I know a Negro is not a statue of salt to be dissolved by the rain. On Sundays, when I meet people from Dara, Fond-Zombi, Valbadiane, or La Folie, they congratulate me on my new well and my electricity. And then they talk—about the tarred road, the cars going over the Bridge of Beyond, and the posts with electric cables coming nearer and nearer, already halfway to La Roncière, in place of the wild tamarinds and balatas. And then I am filled with nostalgia, forget who I am, no longer recognize the age I used to live in. Perhaps it will be said it was barbarous, that age, even that it was accursed, and people will deny it. But how can I care about what will be said tomorrow, when I’ve become sap in the grass?
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