by Marvin Kaye
trickles of hair fell all round her in a deluge of gilded rain. Thunder was the colour
of her eyes, a dark that was not dark, some shade that could not be described
visually but only in other ways. All of her was a little like that. To touch her limpid
skin would be like tasting ice cream. To catch her fragrance like small bells heard
inside the ears in fever.
When her dress brushed by him as she first crossed the room, Jeanjacques
inadvertantly recoiled inside his skin. He was feeling, although he did not know it,
exactly as Justus had felt in the northern garden. Though Justus had not known it,
either. But what terrified these two men was the very thing which drew other men,
especially such men as Gregers Vonderjan. So much was plain.
The dinner was over, and the women got up to withdraw. As she passed by his
chair, Vonderjan, who had scarecely spoken to her throughout the meal (or to
anyone), lightly took hold of his wife's hand. And she looked down at once into
his eyes.
Such a look it was. Oh God, Jeanjacques experienced now all his muscles go
to liquid, and sinking, and his belly sinking down into his bowels, which
themselves turned over heavily as a serpent. But his penis rose very quickly, and
pushed hard as a rod against his thigh.
For it was a look of such explicit sex, trembling so colossally it had grown still,
and out of such an agony of suspense, that he was well aware these two lived in a
constant of the condition, and would need only to press together the length of
their bodies to ignite like matches in a galvanic convulsion.
He had seen once or twice similar looks, perhaps. Among couples kept
strictly, on their marriage night. But no, not even then.
They said nothing to each other. Needed nothing to say. It had been said.
The girl and her black companion passed from the room, and after them the
housekeeper, carrying a branch of the candles, whose flames flattened as she went
through the doors on to the terrace. (Notes: This will happen again later.)
Out there, the night was now very black. Everything beyond the house had
vanished in it, but for the vague differential between the sky and the tops of the
forest below. There were no stars to be seen, and thunder still moved restlessly.
The life went from Jeanjacques's genitals as if it might never come back.
"Brandy," said Vonderjan, passing the decanter. "What do you think of her?"
"Of whom, sir?"
"My Anna." (Playful; who else?)
Jeanjacques visualized, in a sudden unexpected flash, certain objects used as
amulets, and crossing himself in church.
"An exquisite lady, sir."
"Yes," said Vonderjan. He had drunk a lot during dinner, but in an easy way. It
was evidently habit, not need. Now he said again, "Yes."
Jeanjacques wondered what would be next. But of course nothing was to be
next. Vonderjan finished his cigar, and drank down his glass. He rose, and nodded
to Jeanjacques. " Bon nuit."
How could he even have forced himself to linger so long? Vonderjan
demonstrably must be a human of vast self-control.
Jeanjacques imagined the blond man going up the stairs of the house to the
wide upper storey. An open window, drifted with a gauze curtain, hot, airless
night. Jeanjacques imagined Antoinelle, called Anna, lying on her back in the bed,
its nets pushed careless away, for what bit Vonderjan's horses to death naturally
could not essay his wife.
"No, I shan't have a good night," Jeanjacques said to Vonderjan in his head.
He went to his room, and sharpened his pen for work.
In the darkness, he heard her. He was sure that he had. It was almost four in
the morning by his pocket watch, and the sun would rise in less than an hour.
Waveringly she screamed, like an animal caught in a trap. Three times, the
second time the loudest.
The whole of the inside of the house shook and throbbed and scorched from
it.
Jeanjacques found he must get up, and standing by the window, handle himself
roughly until, in less than thirteen seconds, his semen exploded onto the tiled
floor.
Feeling then slightly nauseous, and dreary, he slunk to bed and slept gravely,
like a stone.
Antoinelle sat at her toilette mirror, part of a fine set of silver-gilt her husband
had given her. She was watching herself as Nanetta combed and brushed her hair.
It was late afternoon, the heat of the day lying down but not subsiding.
Antoinelle was in her chemise; soon she would dress for the evening dinner.
Nanetta stopped brushing. Her hands lay on the air like a black slender
butterfly separated in two. She seemed to be listening.
"More," said Antoinelle.
"Yes."
The brush began again.
Antoinelle often did not rise until noon, frequently later. She would eat a little
fruit, drink coffee, get up and wander about in flimsy undergarments. Now and
then she would read a novel, or Nanetta would read one to her. Or they would
play cards, sitting at the table on the balcony, among the pots of flowers.
Nanetta had never seen Antoinelle do very much, and had never seen her
agitated or even irritable.
She lived for night.
He, on the other hand, still got up mostly at sunrise, and no later than the hour
after. His man, Stronn, would shave him. Vonderjan would breakfast downstairs in
the courtyard, eating meat and bread, drinking black tea. Afterwards he might go
over the accounts with the secretary. Sometimes the whole of the big house heard
him shouting (except for his wife, who was generally still asleep). He regularly
rode (two horses survived) round parts of the Island, and was gone until late
afternoon, talking to the men and women in the fields, sitting to drink with them,
rum and palm liquor, in the shade of plantains. He might return about the time
Antoinelle was washing herself, powdering her arms and face, and putting on a
dress for dinner.
A bird trilled in a cage, hopped a few steps, and flew up to its perch to trill
again.
The scent of dust and sweating trees came from the long windows, stagnant
yet energizing in the thickening yellow light.
Nanetta half turned her head. Again she had heard something far away. She did
not know what it was.
"Shall I wear the emerald necklace tonight?" asked Antoinelle sleepily. "What
do you think?"
Nanetta was used to this. To finding an answer.
"With the white dress? Yes, that would be effective."
"Put up my hair. Use the tortoiseshell combs."
Nanetta obeyed deftly.
The satiny bright hair was no pleasure to touch, too electric, stickily clinging to
the fingers—full of each night's approaching storm. There would be no rain, not
yet.
Antoinelle watched as the black woman transformed her. Antoinelle liked this,
having only to be, letting someone else put her together in this way. She had
forgotten by now, but never liked, independence. She wanted only enjoyment, to
be made and remade, although in a manner that pleased her, and which, after all,
demonstrated her power over others.
When she thought about Vonderjan, her husband, her loins clenched
thoughts of him. During their meals together, she would hardly look at him, hardly
speak, concentrating on the food, on the light of the candles reflecting in things,
hypnotizing herself and prolonging, unendurably, her famine, until at last she was
able to return to the bed, cool by then, with clean sheets on it, and wait, giving
herself up to darkness and to fire.
How could she live in any other way?
Whatever had happened to her? Had the insensate cruelty of her relations
pulped her down into a sponge that was ultimately receptive only to this? Or was
this her true condition, which had always been trying to assert itself, and which,
once connected to a suitable partner, did so, evolving also all the time, spreading
itself higher and lower and in all directions, like some amoeba?
She must have heard stories of him, his previous wife, and of a black mistress
or two he had had here. But Antoinelle was not remotely jealous. She had no
interest in what he did when not with her, when not about to be, or actually in her
bed with her. As if all other facets, both of his existence and her own, had now
absolutely no meaning at all.
About the hour Antoinelle sat by the mirror, and Vonderjan, who had not gone
out that day, was bathing, smoking one of the cigars as the steam curled round
him, Jeanjacques stood among a wilderness of cane fields beyond the house.
That cane was a type of grass tended always to amaze him, these huge stripes
of straddling stalks, rising five feet or more above his head. He felt himself to be a
child lost in a luridly unnatural wood, and besides, when a black figure passed
across the view, moving from one subaqueous tunnel to another, they now
supernaturally only glanced at him, catlike, from the sides of their eyes.
Jeanjacques had gone out walking, having deposited his itinerary and notes
with Vonderjan in a morning room. The clerk took narrow tracks across the
Island, stood on high places from which (as from the roof) coves and inlets of the
sea might be glimpsed.
The people of the Island had been faultlessly friendly and courteous, until he
began to try to question them. Then they changed. He assumed at first they only
hated his white skin, as had others he had met, who had refused to believe in his
mixed blood. In that case, he could not blame them much for the hatred. Then he
understood he had not assumed this at all. They were disturbed by something,
afraid of something, and he knew it.
Were they afraid of her—of the white girl in the house? Was it that? And why
were they afraid? Why was he himself afraid—because afraid of her he was. Oh
yes, he was terrified.
At midday he came to a group of hut houses, patchily colour-washed and with
palm-leaf roofs, and people were sitting about there in the shade, drinking, and one
man was splitting rosy gourds with a machete, so Jeanjacques thought of a
guillotine a moment, the red juice spraying out and the thunk of the blade going
through. (He had heard they had split imported melons in Marseilles, to test the
machine. But he was a boy when he heard this tale, and perhaps it was not true.)
Jeanjacques stood there, looking on. Then a black woman got up, fat and not
young, but comely, and brought him half a gourd, for him to try the dripping flesh.
He took it, thanking her.
"How is it going, Mother?" he asked her, partly in French, but also with two
words of the patois, which he had begun to recognize. To no particular effect.
"It goes how it go, monsieur."
"You still take a share of your crop to the big house?" She gave him the
sidelong look. "But you're free people, now."
One of the men called to her sharply. He was a tall black leopard, young and
gorgeous as a carving from chocolate. The woman went away at once, and
Jeanjacques heard again that phrase he had heard twice before that day. It was
muttered somewhere at his back. He turned quickly, and there they sat, blacker in
shade, eating from the flesh of the gourds, and drinking from a bottle passed
around. Not looking at him, not at all.
"What did you say?"
A man glanced up. "It's nothing, monsieur."
"Something came from the sea, you said?"
"No, monsieur. Only a storm coming."
"It's the stormy season. Wasn't there something else?"
They shook their heads. They looked helpful, and sorry they could not assist,
and their eyes were painted glass.
Something has come from the sea.
They had said it, too, at the other place, farther down, when a child had
brought him rum in a tin mug.
What could come from the sea? Only weather, or men. Or the woman. She had
come from there.
They were afraid, and even if he had doubted his ears or his judgement, the
way they would not say it straight out, that was enough to tell him he had not
imagined this.
Just then a breeze passed through the forest below, and then across the broad
leaves above, shaking them. And the light changed a second, then back, like the
blinking of the eye of God.
They stirred, the people. It was as if they saw the wind, and the shape it had
was fearful to them, yet known. Respected.
As he was walking back by another of the tracks, he found a dead chicken laid
on a banana leaf at the margin of a field. A propitiary offering? Nothing else had
touched it, even a line of ants detoured out onto the track, to give it room.
Jeanjacqucs walked into the cane fields and went on there for a while. And now
and then other human things moved through, looking sidelong at him.
Then, when he paused among the tall stalks, he heard them whispering,
whispering, the stalks of cane, or else the voices of the people. Had they followed
him? Were they aggressive? They had every right to be, of course, even with his
kind. Even so, he did not want to be beaten, or to die. He had invested such an
amount of his life and wits in avoiding such things.
But no one approached. The whispers came and went.
Now he was here, and he had made out, from the edge of this field,
Vonderjan's house with its fringe of palms and rhododendrons (Blue View) above
him on the hill, only about a half hour away.
In a full hour, the sun would dip. He would go to his room and there would be
water for washing, and his other clothes laid out for the dinner.
The whispering began again, suddenly, very close, so Jeanjacques spun about,
horrified.
But no one was there, nothing was there.
Only the breeze, that the black people could see, moved round among the
stalks of the cane, that was itself like an Egyptian temple, its columns meant to be
a forest of green papyrus.
"It's black," the voices whispered. "Black."
"Like a black man," Jeanjacques said hoarsely.
"Black like black."
Again, God blinked his eyelid of sky. A figure seemed to be standing between
the shafts of green cane. It said, "Not black like men. So black we filled with terror
of it. Black like black of night is black."
"Black like black."
"Something from the sea."
Jeanjacques felt himself dropping, and then he was on his knees, and his
forehead was pressed to the powdery plant-drained soil.
He had not hurt himself. When he looked up, no one was in the field that he
could see.
He got to his feet slowly. He trembled, and then the trembling, like the
whispers, went away.
The storm rumbled over the Island. It sounded tonight like dogs barking, then
baying in the distance. Every so often, for no apparent reason, the flames of the
candles flattened, as if a hand had been laid on them.
There was a main dish of pork, stewed with spices. Someone had mentioned
there were pigs on the Island, although the clerk had seen none, perhaps no longer
wild, or introduced and never wild.
The black girl, who was called Nanetta, had put up her hair elaborately, and so
had the white one, Vonderjan's wife. Round her slim pillar of throat were five large
green stars in a necklace like a golden cake-decoration.
Vonderjan had told Jeanjacques that no jewelry was to be valued. But here at
least was something that might have seen him straight for a while. Until his ship
came in. But perhaps it never would again. Gregers Vonderjan had been lucky
always, until the past couple of years.
A gust of wind, which seemed to do nothing else outside, abruptly blew wide
the doors to the terrace.
Vonderjan himself got up, went by his servants, and shut both doors. That
was, started to shut them. Instead he was standing there now, gazing out across
the Island.
In the sky, the dogs bayed.
His heavy bulky frame seemed vast enough to withstand any night. His
magnificent mane of hair, without any evident grey, gleamed like gold in the
candlelight. Vonderjan was so strong, so nonchalant.
But he stood there a long while, as if something had attracted his attention.
It was Nanetta who asked, "Monsieur—what is the matter?"
Vonderjan half turned and looked at her, almost mockingly, his brows raised.
"Matter? Nothing."
She has it too, Jeanjacques thought. He said, "The blacks were saying,
something has come from the sea."
Then he glanced at Nanetta. For a moment he saw two rings of white stand
clear around the pupil and iris of her eyes. But she looked down, and nothing else
gave her away.
Vonderjan shut the doors. He swaggered back to the table. (He did not look at