The Restless

by Gerty Dambury

  Our teacher doesn’t want to see us forming any groups by neighborhood, courtyard, or skin color. Every time we invent little excuses (“Pauline is too poor”), she dismisses them calmly, without punishment.

  Wednesday, after her evaluation, after the report cards, she leads us to the cupboard, takes out all the books, and puts them on a table. As she does this, we all stare openmouthed.

  She stacks the books into little piles, thirty-two little piles, gathered with no rhyme or reason, two books or three books to a pile. She puts a blue ribbon around each, thirty-two blue bows. She lines them up on another table and asks us to come up, in alphabetical order. First name, first pile, second name, second pile, until nothing’s left on the table.

  Nobody asks the right question: “Why are you doing this, teacher?”

  Only: “What did you get?” or “Can we trade?”

  For once, there isn’t a first or last place. I’m not going to say anything. I won’t say anything. I’m not thirty-first of thirty-two students.

  I can show my books, my prize, first. And afterwards, but only afterwards, I’ll admit the truth about the report card—n’avoue jamais, jamais, jamais, jamais—and about my ranking and having failed dictation. I tell myself somebody’s going to have to sign the report card, even if it means I’ll get yelled at.

  5.

  You’re thinking that old Nono talks too much, aren’t you?

  But if I were to tell you the story of my life, my modest life amounting to not much at all, it would be obvious that every life, as mediocre as it may seem, can teach us something about history, about difference, about exclusion and illusion. I could tell you a whole lot of truths, and you’d see that the story of the disappeared schoolteacher is only a fine mist, a fifine, compared to what rained down on our heads when I was young. And cross my heart, if I’m lying, I’ll die a second time.

  You have to realize that, to know what happened before, you have to look behind.

  1967. They’re in 1967 and they don’t have a clue about what happened in the past! They don’t see how the suffering and the tribulations they’re experiencing now are connected to what happened before.

  Because her teacher, her pretty little mulatto teacher . . . How do I know she’s mulatto? From the child herself, when she was speaking to her sister Emmy: “We like to touch her hair . . . !” I’ve never seen that child come touch the old white hair under my head wrap. Too hard, maybe, too wired, as they say. In this world, you only touch “good” hair!

  Anyhow, that teacher is lucky to have only disappeared. Maybe they sent her to another school or to another country. Who knows? Maybe she’s already crossed the ocean or is about to.

  But before that, I mean way before, what do you think they would’ve done with her?

  Yeah, nobody asks that question! I could tell you things, but I’d be accused of always bringing up the past. “É wè finn épi sa!” That’s what they say, “Oh yes, my dear, you have to stop that!”

  Standing here on just one leg, I don’t feel like shutting up, because when I was a child, not only was I tossed into the hands of an old established family but they tried to marry me off! They wanted to pick the man I would wed.

  I worked at their house all day long and all night too. You should’ve heard them talk about how I was part of the family, and what would they do without me, all that usual crap. While they were still in bed, I was already up, and when I went to sleep, they’d already been in bed a long time. In any event, school was never an option for me.

  Just let me continue: one fine day my employers decide to marry me off—as if nothing had changed at all! Because that had already happened to my mother and to my mother’s mother before her.

  I was twenty-five years old, and they’d started to worry I was getting too old to get married. Old—that sure makes me laugh when you know I didn’t die till I was ninety-eight! They had no idea I’d last for almost one hundred years. Hah!

  Well, they brought this guy around, a much older man, at least forty. I can’t tell you his exact age, but let’s just say he was no spring chicken! They invited the two of us to eat with them.

  Even I couldn’t believe it; they gave me the day off! I hadn’t cooked, I hadn’t done the housework, not a thing. They hired somebody else’s services. I wonder if it wasn’t even my cousin who came in to substitute.

  They told me to put my white dress on. A white dress that had belonged to God knows who and that they’d given me to wear until it fell apart.

  That man and I were fed like royalty, and after lunch they allowed us to stroll alone on the plantation. Cacao beans. A beautiful cacao plantation that the 1929 hurricane razed to the ground—just like what happens to the hair on a boiled pig!

  A stroll through the plantation, like a real lady with that man at my side . . . But we had nothing to say to each other. I’d never seen him before, and he’d never seen me. Not too ugly, that fellow, not ugly, but hungry, ready to take advantage of any situation. He was looking at the plantation like it’d belong to him one day. He stared at the mango trees. That year there’d been so many mangoes we didn’t know what to do with them all. So many that, even before the trees had finished bearing all their fruit, new little white flowers were already sprouting from the ends of the branches. And he, that fiancé they’d found for me, wanted to gather mangos. I said no. I thought we were already too much in their debt. We had to have some dignity.

  And then, at some point, that so-called fiancé moved a little way off from me. I was tired of the whole thing: the white dress, the shoes, my stomach full to bursting, the stroll in the sun. I’d stopped and sat down, but he’d kept on going. Not too far, but I couldn’t see him anymore. And all of a sudden, I wondered where he’d gone! I couldn’t tell how long he’d been missing; I’d even forgotten what he looked like. I got up to look for him and found him crouching behind a tree eating an apricot. A big fat apricot with a double pit. You know how big our apricots can be, but still stay sweet and juicy.

  That guy had just eaten lunch: a starter, a fish course with green peas, a meat course, rice and pasta, dessert—sorbet and all the rest—but he was still afraid of not having enough. Always afraid of not having enough! So when he saw the apricot on the tree, really fat and ripe, he didn’t think. He just hid, so he could eat it.

  At the time, I thought it was just about that, about not having enough. But since then I’ve dwelled on it, and I’ve come to the conclusion that those white folks set us up to have only one idea in our heads: the idea of having more than our brothers and sisters, of being above them, ready to sell them yet again for a fat apricot with a double pit. I couldn’t see myself with someone like that for a whole lifetime. He would’ve eaten the stars out of my eyes! So I said no—no wedding, and enough of working for them! Enough of being a maid for those folks! I left for La Pointe; I left Basse-Terre. Yeah, I’d been living with that family in Basse-Terre.

  That was what it was like in those days, and sometimes even worse. I was lucky. They were good but too good, a kind of goodness that weighs on you. You have to understand what it was. A kind of fake goodness, nicey-nice, where you always end up feeling guilty. You can’t live your own life with people like that. You’re always running, chasing after a sense of equality.

  6.

  We’re happy with our books, but it’s still a really strange day. Our teacher leaves the room; she abandons us after handing out our prizes. “Read silently; don’t make any noise. I’ll be back.”

  We behave ourselves. Nobody pinches anyone; nobody tries to grab someone else’s book. Absolute calm, as she likes to say. We even smile, to reassure her.

  “Of course, teacher, you can count on us.”

  “Have we ever not done what you told us?”

  “We’ll be good.”

  “I’ll make sure things stay quiet in this classroom!”

  But all this is making us sick to our stomachs. Nothing’s what it’s supposed to be on Wednesday, May 24.

&n
bsp; The truth is, when she leaves, we all start to whisper:

  “A week ahead of time.”

  “What are these prizes all about?”

  “Maybe she’s sick?”

  “Maybe she’s going to die.”

  “Stop saying stupid things.”

  “Doesn’t she seem a little uptight today?”

  “No hugs.”

  “And she got really upset.”

  “Like at the beginning of the month.”

  Tanya, yes, it’s Tanya who murmurs something: “I’m afraid.”

  Elizabeth yells, “It’s your fault, Moësa and Lycaon.”

  “What did we do?”

  “You had a fight in the courtyard.”

  “That’s history!”

  Papa, we call each other by our last names because we’re mad. Everybody’s mad. But why?

  Moësa and Lycaon protest, “It’s always our fault.”

  I don’t want us to quarrel. “Say you’re sorry, Elizabeth. You hurt their feelings.”

  “I’m sorry.”

  “Now let’s just shut up and wait.”

  When our teacher returns, she has a tray in her hands and a basket full of bottles and aluminum tumblers in every color you can think of hanging from one arm.

  “Our concierge, Madame Parize, made a cake for us. For a little celebration, our last celebration together.”

  “Teacher, teacher, what are you saying?”

  “Stay calm, children. Calm down. I have to tell you something. The man who came this morning—”

  “That white guy!”

  “That’s not polite, Émilienne, don’t say ‘that white guy.’ It’s not because he’s white. He thinks that—”

  Elizabeth repeats, “That white guy.”

  Madame Ladal sighs and then says, “Children, I must leave you. I’m not sure when. But by the end of this month, for certain, I won’t be here with you any longer. That’s why I gave you your report cards and your books. They belong to you now, but I hope you’ll continue exchanging them among yourselves. Don’t ever lose your love for books.”

  7.

  Since I’ve been dead, I’ve noticed that on the way home from school little girls linger all by themselves on La Place de la Victoire, and nobody pays any attention to it. I notice, too, that their sadness, the tears running down their cheeks, doesn’t bother anyone, not even their mothers, who, after the first incident, tell themselves it’s just because fathers spoil their daughters.

  These days, the trees on La Place—the ones used to watching children play after they leave school, the ones who know their secrets—those very same trees, the sandbox trees on La Place de la Victoire whose carpels sound like the beautiful crowing of a rooster, lean towards one another and intertwine their leaves. Cock-a-doodle-do! I can feel that those trees—having borne the weight of hanged bodies for days on end—are anxious. They’re whispering that there’s a lot more than childish fancy to this story of the vanished schoolteacher; somebody should help investigate, help the little girl sitting alone in the dark who’s waiting for answers to all her questions.

  And I, too, ask if it’s possible in such a small country for someone to disappear just like that—not even one of those people that everybody hates (and by God who cares if they leave in chunks, devoured by dogs or carried off by the sea and reduced to a kind of sticky green algae that fish like to eat).

  No, we’re talking about a person some thirty-two children love. How is it possible not to care about that?

  Things really have changed these last two years, because in the old days, at the least sign—a door that’s still closed in the morning, an outside light that stayed on all night over an open door, the sound of coughing coming from a rear courtyard—we’d all run over to ask, “Hey, neighbor, what’s going on?” or “It looks like you’ve kept watch all night,” or “Marguerite, are you sleeping or what? Why haven’t you opened your door this morning?”

  Together we have to find out the reason behind the teacher’s disappearance!

  That child, poor little devil, thinks her father can explain the whys and wherefores of the matter. She’s planning to talk to a man who might not even give her the time of day, a show-off whose story she doesn’t even know, the story of a voyage that made him what he is today: somebody thirsty for social recognition, or rather, somebody who submits to the desires of the powerful. A man who always dreamed of being treated like a prince, and besides, wasn’t that exactly how it was with all his sisters scurrying around?

  A prince! Princes don’t really bother with lowly subordinates. Does the child understand that? A prince come to town to lose himself there after having left the bush behind, who sees himself as a maharaja emerging from the forest on an elephant’s back. That’s at least how his daughter imagines it! That child reads too many books. Elephants, princes and princesses, servants and slaves, everything gets all mixed up—books and reality.

  We need to get back to common sense: the child’s father may have used his own two feet to get to town, even if such a journey seems impossible, forty or sixty kilometers, maybe even more. But whatever the distance, it’s a lot to cover on foot if, in addition, you’re bringing with you a bunch of things that’ve been poorly wrapped—just newspaper and string. And nostalgia weighs a lot as well, and only gets heavier the closer you get to town, as home gets farther away, as the noonday sun makes even the trees and the shadows of their branches disappear. Sure, you did right by leaving at the crack of dawn, but the sun always catches up with you on the way. It’s honestly pretty cruel.

  I can’t remember anymore how Émilienne’s father, Sauveur Emmanuel Absalon, managed to get far enough away to land where we were. I have to work at remembering. Maybe he took the dinghy that used to ferry people between Bouillante and La Pointe. Maybe we should imagine some old white guy giving him a ride because his mother was in service to him, or maybe it was his auntie who was the servant, or a neighbor who dared ask the guy for a favor, just a tanprisouplé, whispering a little prayer to secure the car. “For Pointe-à-Pitre, sir. He’s a very good boy, very serious.”

  Yes, I think that’s it. The father came to town in a car, seated to the right of an old man with his mustache and ivory-colored hat, in an old black jalopy that couldn’t go more than thirty kilometers an hour and that, chugging along, took its time on the road, apparently admiring the placid mountains right after Capesterre. Yes, I see him there, seated in a motorcar that spluttered its way to Goyave, barely pulled itself together in Petit-Bourg, and slowly picked up speed before chewing up the last flat kilometers from Baie-Mahault onwards.

  That’s how we saw him come to town.

  A prince come up to the capital . . . He already had the look.

  One day we saw him arrive in the commune of Les Abymes, the outer ring, our outskirts, a cesspit unashamed of its canal—that dirty stream between the grass and the sidewalk, covered by a succession of blackened planks thrown here and there to form a bridge over the brackish, stinking water.

  I was sixty-eight years old at the time; he was maybe twenty-four. I could’ve been his grandmother, because in those days we already had children when we were fourteen or sixteen. Even if I’d had a child at eighteen and my child had followed suit, I would’ve still been a grandmother.

  Yeah, I could’ve been his grandma, and I was one of the first to greet him when he showed up from nowhere. Really from nowhere, because back then Bouillante was a backwater, with only woods and thickets. And why am I saying “back then”! Even today, in the year of our Lord 1967, Bouillante is still the place where dogs bark out their asses.

  Even worse, Emmanuel came out of the Bouillantine woods—the forest of the forest, you might say. No running water and no electricity, just a river below the house and oil lamps—but we don’t need to go over all that. It’s old news. He showed up from nowhere with the clear intention of becoming the greatest fashion designer in Guadeloupe, a kind of Jean Patou, the man who created Joy, “the most expensive pe
rfume in the world.”

  That’s what the advertisements claimed, and everybody was speaking about Patou, the fashion designer who’d become a perfume maker. The child’s father imagined himself climbing the ranks, from suburban tailor to fashion designer, finally with his place in the sun. He saw himself in his workshop helping great ladies choose what they wanted from his collection, all of it archived in a huge catalog.

  And though he changed professions, he was never able to completely rid himself of the vestiges of his dream of becoming a great fashion designer. You know, under the staircase, only a few feet from where the little girl is waiting on that bench, lie hundreds of notebooks, samples of cloth the father still prides himself on. The mother yells at him almost every day about the mess under there.

  The mother: “It’s attracting mice. The little nasties are having a wild party in your samples.”

  The father: “Which just goes to show you, it’s only mice who understand me.”

  It can go on like that for hours. Then the mother tries to throw all his sample books (which, it’s true, stink of mold) into a big box, and her husband lunges at her, violently pushing her away in order to protect the precious cloth he stacks by category and in alphabetical order: alpaca, Bedford cord, cashmere, chenille, cotton . . . The mother clutches a pail of cold water, adding in several capfuls of bleach. Donegal tweed, drill, felt . . . He’s sitting on the ground, his samples between his legs. He holds the cloth between two fingers, weighing it, considering its quality, caressing it.

  Flannel, gabardine, Harris Tweed, linen (sheer), madras . . . She takes a step forward, empties the pail on the ground, and manages to soak his behind. He doesn’t move.

  Mattress ticking, military cloth, moleskin, nylon, percale, pinstripe, poplin . . . She seizes a broom and energetically sweeps the floor, hitting him every time the broom gets too close. She sweats; her upper arms flap a little (she’s already forty-five years old).