The Restless

by Gerty Dambury

  But he hasn’t approached our shores today.

  It seems his ship’s still docked!

  This isn’t the first time Émilienne has waited for him, that we’ve all waited, and that he didn’t come home.

  But we haven’t seen him since Wednesday.

  And so, since he hasn’t made up his mind to enlighten our little star and chase away the darkness, it seems we should give the floor to those who have been waiting in the dark.

  Let’s start with old Nono.

  The privilege of age. Escort the Queen!

  3.

  As far as I’m concerned, this story about the disappeared schoolteacher is hiding another one, and we’ve got to go back a long way, really far back, to understand it.

  I’m ready to accompany the child on this road because I know there aren’t many people who can tell her anything about it. I, Nono, say you mustn’t let things get lost; you mustn’t sweep away the old memories, even if they’re a bit dusty. From where I sit, my friends, I’m really in a prime position—on high, if you know what I mean. What disappears in the passage of time, what we usually have trouble discerning, that’s what I see clearly.

  I see everything: the family’s intrigues, the events, the tragedies, and the shake-ups that have taken place in this country. I see it all, understand what I see, and maybe can even foresee a few things. So, yes, the child needs to hear what I have to say, and despite everything else I have to do, I’m ready to give her all the time she needs.

  I get the feeling you’re surprised by what I’ve said. But just because I’m dead doesn’t mean I don’t have things to do. For instance, I’m having a really hard time finding a part of my body they forgot to put in the coffin—my leg, if you want to know. This probably sounds like a crazy story, but it’s true. One night I went to bed in my little house, so very tiny that you have to ask how it’s even possible to lose a dead lady’s leg in it . . . But let me start at the beginning or we’ll all get lost.

  Like every night for the more than forty years I’d been living in that house, I fell asleep on my back. I wanted to let my old bones relax a little, stretch out, because all day long I’d been bent over double just to finish the simplest task; it took me forever to walk two feet, grabbing at all the walls I could hold on to. All this to say that, in the evening, my body was tired. So, I got positioned on my back, took hold of my old Bible with the black cover—the same one since . . . Lord, I don’t know since when—and kissed the Lord’s words before reciting a Hail Mary and Psalm 23, “The Lord is my shepherd.” When I say that one out loud, I feel like I’m being rocked, rocked gently in enormous arms. Once my psalm was over, I must have fallen asleep, because the next day they found me dead, my body already stiff and an arm folded under my head. I didn’t feel a thing coming on.

  With time, patience, and a little vinegar, the Tordoncan son from the funeral home finally managed to straighten out my arm. (He’s a real sweetie but you have to wonder what he’s doing taking care of dead bodies when he should be out finding a pretty, young, and living girl to undress!) A good thing, too, because thanks to that I’ve been able to keep my arm, even though it’s weirdly separated from my shoulder and my body looks kind of crooked. Who knows what happened to my leg, but there wasn’t anything to be done. You see, the knee was bent and hard. They couldn’t get the kink out, so they had to carve up my body or else they wouldn’t have been able to put the lid on the coffin.

  They cut off my leg, and since then I can’t find it. Imagine going through something like that! I don’t know why they didn’t just bury the leg with me. But other than that, they took real good care. You can’t say the contrary. I can still smell the scent of basil on my body from the embalming. They plugged the holes up with wax, clove, and candle droppings. Can’t complain about any of that, but my poor leg, someone forgot to slip it into the coffin. And how am I supposed to dance the quadrille with only one leg?

  Dancing the quadrille is my greatest passion. You should have seen me dance with that old Gaëtan. Well, I mean, he got old, but when we were young we danced the quadrille until we were nearly dead on our feet, even if there was never, ever the slightest thing between us—other than those square-dance balls and listening to the caller cry out: “Ladies and gentlemen, time to dance the first figure, pantalon. Gentlemen, choose your ladies! Are you listening to me? Second figure: gentlemen, to your ladies. Time for l’été. Figure eights if you please . . .”

  Wherever I am, between heaven and earth, I always hear the sounds of a quadrille. It’s with me wherever I go. As soon as I hear the first measures, I try to gather up my skirts, straighten my back, and stop thinking about my missing leg. But what can I do? How can I stand? I don’t dance anymore; I can’t give myself over body and soul (what’s left anyway) to the music.

  What I ought to do now is devote myself to what was always forbidden to me as a woman: playing the accordion for the quadrille. I’m pretty good at it; I used to play when my buddy Étienne lent me his instrument. He’d even boast: “Ou ka jwé byen tou bònman!” Yes, indeed, you really can play!

  But nothing would convince him to let me accompany the other musicians. I had the right to dance, but not to enter the men’s world.

  Oh well. I loved how that quadrille jumped! Does it still swing like it used to? It’s the accordion and the triangle that made it happen. Those instruments are alert and fluid, like a long ribbon gracefully unwinding. And I loved, too, how elegantly people dressed at those balls. Back then we wore our very best clothes. You really felt like a lady, so you could hold your head high.

  I hope we can dance in the Lord’s paradise and that we’re not just going to spend our time praying! Oh, if that music exists in paradise you can be sure I’ll scrounge up some angel who’ll ditch his wings in a corner to greet me like a queen—unless, of course, I run into that old Gaëtan. I so loved dancing with him!

  You know, the quadrille is a perfect example of a group of people living in harmony. We would say, “One for all and all for one.” You could always count on the friends you had from the quadrille society.

  I really hope I can find that atmosphere in heaven. That and the rest of my body! If we must be resurrected, I hope the Lord’s angels won’t have to look for pieces of us in every corner of the world. I’d like to believe that, up there, He at least keeps track of all of us lost at sea, all those slaves whose numbers have never really been released—thousands or millions of them. I also pray that He knows where to find all those pieces of the dead that’ve been lost. If He wants to give life again to everyone who’s lived on earth, He’d better put his shoulder to the grindstone in order to find them all, to put them all back together again.

  It’s up to Him to guarantee equal treatment at the resurrection, and to make sure that nobody will be afraid to present himself because he’s missing an eye, a head, a leg, or something else!

  In the meantime, since I have no idea what the Lord wants or doesn’t want to busy Himself with, I’ve accepted the job of looking for that leg myself, and I can tell you it’s not easy given all the gussying up that’s happening in this city. Our narrow streets are being turned into broad avenues that’ll completely destroy some of the old neighborhoods, and they’re replacing our rundown cottages with tall apartment buildings. Where will we put our chickens and our pigs, our rabbits and our guinea fowl? On the balcony?

  Even my little cabin is about to be razed, so I’ve picked up the pace of my investigation. I look under the furniture they kept from when I lived there; again and again I grope under the bed. My word! It’s unbelievable how much dust accumulates under the bed of the newlyweds who moved into my place.

  I’m trying not to think badly of them because both of them work, poor souls. They don’t have children yet—thankfully, or else I might have to put up with their screaming offspring—but even so, they have no rest.

  Their weeks are dreadful. I hear them talk, and they’re saving in order to build their own little place on some la
nd the man’s father owns in Boisripeaux, in the countryside near Abymes—the next town over. They need money, and both of them go from one job to another, without even a minute to relax, except on Sundays, but then they have to go to church and visit their old father so he doesn’t change his mind about the land. It’s a fine little property with woods that are plunked down on hills dotting the surrounding plain. Kind of like the statue of a bride on a wedding cake. They really want that bit of land; they’re dreaming of the countryside, of calm, of a big cement house, solid enough to protect them against the fierce hurricane winds. Dust bunnies under the bed are the least of their worries.

  But during the day, when they’re gone, I lift up the mattress and go through the closets. They wonder sometimes about the small changes I make in their house without meaning to.

  I hear them argue, but I make sure not to intervene. Anyway, what could I do? Every day I swear to be more careful, but as I was never very organized while alive and on earth, I really don’t think that after my death I’m going to learn to pay attention to exactly how far the bed is from the closet.

  Most of the time, when they come back from work, night’s already fallen. The bats have started to circle overhead, and the trees have closed up their arms and become immobile, like they’re sleeping. It’s so dark in the streets that even when you open your eyes wide, as if you’re about to cry, you stay suspended in a kind of vast nothingness, wondering where looking stops and blindness begins.

  But what am I going on about? I should get back to the child and her family, a family I know very well. Let’s start with the father.

  He arrived in town got up like a total gentleman. A “gentleman.”

  That’s a word I really like, even if I have trouble pronouncing it, now that I’m toothless. That’s another thing they forgot to put in the coffin, my false teeth. As if somebody could use them after me. That’s a habit they can’t shake, burying people without their teeth. How ignorant! Don’t they know that in the Lord’s garden we’ll finally be able to eat the hazelnuts we were denied in our lifetime? Some have teeth, but can’t eat. Some have food, but don’t have teeth.

  Anyhow, this gentleman, Sauveur Emmanuel Absalon, looked real skinny in his suit! Yes indeed, real skinny, hardly any flesh on his bones. His clothes almost floated around him, way too big, and as they were cut from white cloth—not very expensive but white all the same (fashion was everything then)—he looked like a ghost, a real phantom.

  You know there’s still a photo of him in that immaculate suit, the only one that Sauveur Emmanuel wanted to keep from that period of pretty lean times when he was still proud of himself. Before he turned into a bourgeois.

  He was almost skeletal, and his eyes didn’t have the depth they took on later, that touch of dark sweetness in a white and pure ocean. No, in those days, he looked hungry and worried, a look he didn’t want caught on any camera, so no one could see his distress. But the photographer must have insisted: he really should look at the camera, communicate something, no matter what, even distress, to those the photo was meant for. And the photographer probably assured him his family wouldn’t see how thin he was as they’d be too busy being thrilled by the novelty of having their brother or their son living in the big city. Sauveur Emmanuel’s father, tall and silent like a tree from the deep woods—those trees that nothing can stop from growing—would harbor a smile of surprise, while his mother would laugh and hide her mouth discreetly behind her hand. His sisters would jump for joy to see him like that, all dressed in white, serious and hatted, and they’d see in that photographic pause the sign of success.

  That’s the story the photographer told Emmanuel so he’d allow his anxiety to be captured on camera, while of course trying to appear in control.

  From the beginning, he gave himself the airs of someone who’d had good luck, and it worked! He went very far for a boy who arrived with nothing in his hands except a needle and thread.

  He’s still been heard to say, “Give me a needle and thread!” when one of his children has a button loose, a hem coming apart, a torn shirt. If he’d been around at noon and seen his daughter’s dress, he would’ve made her get up on that little bench. She would have stood there in the middle of the courtyard in the full sun while he busied himself sewing her dress back up, sometimes perched on his heels, sometimes bent over, sometimes kneeling. That’s the way he is: he seems indifferent, but he’s capable of great care when he feels like it, or when he wants to show off in front of the mother.

  She’d been his apprentice, and at first he didn’t even notice her. And if he did, he didn’t mention it. He wanted to marry the daughter of a lawyer. It was his friend Bèze who convinced him that was a bad idea. “When you don’t have any customers for a month or two and when times are hard, those kinds of people will never forgive you, and they won’t help you out either. Be a little more modest in your thinking!”

  That’s what Bèze said and that’s when Emmanuel started paying attention to Emma, the child’s mother. Before that she’d just been “the girl” who’d basted the suits he’d cut, ironed the seams, and made the deliveries.

  Now that Emmanuel has sold his tailor’s shop and launched into construction, his wife says she hates sewing. But I know that’s not true. I think she has a dressmaker come over just because it exasperates her husband: “Who is this woman who won’t even sew a little dress for her children?”

  See, he doesn’t know she’s the one making all the clothes. She waits for him to leave before the fittings; she walks around her children—taking in a seam here, measuring there—perched on the same little bench in the courtyard. “Raise your arms, don’t move, you’ll make Mama stick you with her mouth full of pins.” “It needs a pocket. I’m going to add a pocket.” She wraps the measuring tape around her neck. “I wanted to make it sleeveless, but I didn’t cut enough cloth out of the bodice.” She puts the scissors in the pocket of her apron.

  She waits for her husband to leave, and then she looks for labels to sew into her designs to make it seem as if she’d bought them. She uses labels from other clothes because it drives him crazy: “Who is this woman who won’t even sew a little dress for her children?”

  “So you want me to make dresses out of dish towels?”

  They argue all the time about tailoring.

  All this to say that the wife is a former employee still rebelling against her boss. You should know that, in those days, even the least important black boss had an attitude.

  One day I heard her call him a slave driver.

  I thought she’d overdone it with that word—slave driver. It’s true he acted like a big man in his little suburban workshop, and that kind of arrogance is still part of who he is. Always will be. He called his workers idiots, deadbeats, niggers—and they hated him. But calling him a slave driver is really overdoing it. Don’t people know what words mean?

  4.

  When our teacher comes back, our joy has disappeared. It’s just like Marlyse, who’s a Jehovah’s Witness, says: “Joy has withered away, away from the sons of men.”

  The first thing to know, Papa, is that Madame Ladal arrives late that afternoon. That’s really strange. You should know she’s never late.

  We ask her, “Why are you out of breath?”

  She doesn’t answer.

  She calls us by our last names like when she takes roll: from Absalon to Zakarius. But normally, in class, she always uses our first names. She makes us come to her desk, one by one, and she hands out our report cards.

  “But madame, you always give us our report cards the last Wednesday of the month. Today’s only the twenty-fourth.”

  “Get them signed tomorrow, Thursday, and bring them back on Friday.” Normally on the Saturday after report cards, we come to school to clean our desks. We scrape off the ink stains, we wash the inkwells, and then we have finally earned our prizes.

  “Why are you handing out the report cards early?”

  This May has been really strange. Ou
r teacher has been nervous all month long, and I even failed composition.

  I’m ranked thirty-one out of thirty-two students.

  I don’t want to tell anyone at home because Émile will make fun of me: “We’re going to laugh real hard when our father’s little princess has to repeat a grade.”

  All because I failed the dictation! I tried to erase my mistakes and rubbed my paper with the hard side of the eraser, but it left blue marks. So I rubbed even harder and made a hole in the paper. I tried to recopy it but wasn’t able to finish, and I didn’t get to answer any of the questions.

  Émile is going to make fun of me: “Her first zero in spelling—Papa’s little girl.”

  And I’m afraid of disappointing my mother. She gives us practice dictation every Thursday and Saturday morning when we’ve finished cleaning our assigned part of the house. I’m in charge of the blue bathroom.

  I know I don’t deserve a prize. Books, dolls, those plastic tumblers that collapse and can be stored in a little round box—they’re not for me.

  I really wanted one of those tumblers, but not a doll. I hate them and they scare me. Annie will end up with the tumbler that everybody wants because she’s first. (Normally, “Émilienne is first, Annie second.”) I’ll just get the red blotting paper to remind me of my composition’s “awful ink spots.”

  After she hands out the report cards, our teacher opens a cupboard she calls “our own library,” where all the books she’s brought from home are kept.

  Normally, she only opens the cupboard on Saturdays. Every Saturday, we turn in the books we’ve borrowed and read the first few pages of other novels and stories.

  We’re supposed to make our choices in silence, but we whisper all the same, “Which one did you like?”

  It’s forbidden to argue. Everyone is supposed to get a chance to look at each book (but I’ve already chosen mine).