The Autobiography of My Mother (11 page)

It had grown dark one Sunday when she was returning from her clandestine meeting with him. They had met in a place between Massacre and Roseau, they had kissed, he had been on top of her, they were both half clothed, she had gasped, he had groaned, she had said to him that she loved him, he had not said such a thing to her, but she did not notice; he had withdrawn himself from her, she still clung to him. The way he pleased her when he was inside her, his body just that part between his waist and his knees, moving away from her as if forever and then inside her as if forever, was so glorious to my sister that she thought this sensation was unique to her being with him; she did not know she could have this sensation with anyone else, including her own self. She was in love with him, and what did that mean? It was something I hoped never to know, for she made it look like the definition of foolishness itself. She was rounding the bend on her bicycle, the sharp bend, the bend that was so sharp it felt that way even when you were walking slowly, returning from her meeting with him that Sunday afternoon. She was going at too fast a pace and she went off the road, falling over the precipice into the tops of some trees and then onto the tops of some rocks, the small remains of a volcanic eruption. That she was alive after this was considered a miracle, which was true, and a blessing, but her survival seemed a blessing only to all who could not imagine and so therefore had faith in the future.

I had seen her Sunday afternoon before she set out to meet her destiny and she had had that peculiar way about her that people sometimes get, which I now know but did not at the time: that look which says, Every action I now take is the action that will determine my end. She had quarreled with herself, though she thought she had just had a disagreement with her mother, but her mother was not paying attention to her at all. She wore a white dress made of cotton; her father insisted on her wearing white on Sunday, not because of any custom recognizable to anyone, but only because he had an idea of his own virtue and it was superior to other people's virtue and recognizable only to himself. As she went to fetch her bicycle, she had met me, and she had looked at me in a way that was to become the set look of her features: the corners of her lips upturned; the irises of her eyes strained to the far corners, rendering the object at which she was gazing out of focus. A bitterness came out of her nostrils; it was not the air she breathed in but the air she exhaled. She was without pity when she looked at me, but it did not matter, I did not need her pity. When I saw her again she was lying in a bed in the hospital in Roseau. She was alone then. Her father had been there before me, her mother had been there before me, they had not been there before at the same time. It had been ten days; she had fallen off the precipice ten days earlier. The strangeness of life had not yet occurred to her, the short-livedness of each moment, each day, each existence itself, had not yet occurred to her; I do not now believe it ever has. I believe that at the end of her life she was unhappy, she was confused—exactly as she had been at the beginning. Life is of course not a mystery, everyone born knows only too well its entire course; the mystery is a trick designed for the cursedly curious.

She was lying in between the coarse sheets of the hospital bed. Her skin was a pale brown, like new paper, the deep brown pigment lying on top. She was beyond being happy or unhappy to see me. She could not see me clearly at all. I perhaps looked like three or one hundred people to her; whether I was three or one hundred, she still did not like me at all. But she would never like the world again. I had come to see her of my own free will. It had not been expected of me; no one had asked me to do it. When she saw me, she turned her head away; perhaps it was from disgust, or perhaps she was ashamed.

When I saw her lying in a bed in a small room in which there were six other beds but no other patients, a man was standing over her. He was the same man who sometimes came to have dinner with my father and my father's wife on a Sunday; he was the same man with whom I would spend the longest part of my life, but how was I to know that then? She did not look up at me, she did not want to see me; he looked at me, but at that moment I held no significance for him, and later he did not remember that he had seen me then. When she looked at me, she saw me as if I were replicated ten times, each partially imposed upon another, and no version of me fully revealed. This sight of me made her feel uncertain; she turned away from me in anger. I should have loved her then, enough to quell the curiosity that was aroused in me when I saw her lying there: what was he like, he who could bring her to this, a semi-invalid whose vision would forever be blurred?

My father had taken the world as he found it and made it subject to his whims, even as other men had made him subject to their whims in the world as they had found it. He had never questioned these worlds within worlds, not as far as I knew. He was a rich man; there were men richer than he was, and men richer than that. They would all come to the same end, nothing could save them. He had lived long enough to have lost faith in his efforts, to have lost the belief that they had some future value, but his dabbling in the material gain of this world was like a drug: he was addicted to it, he could not just give it up. His heir only his wife's daughter now—his son was dead, his wife was dead, I had removed myself from such a position—had no connection to his feelings about the makeup of the world, and might not by nature have his same feelings about the world in any case; she only saw her father's fortune as freeing her from the burden of the everyday life she saw around her: a life of sweeping ground that would shortly only be dirty again; a life of cooking food that would only be consumed, with more food needing to be cooked again; of making clothes clean that would only be worn and be dirtied and need to be cleaned again. And yet perhaps my father was correct to pursue the world, and my sister correct to enjoy it, because its opposite, the pursuit of death, is not a pursuit at all: death is the inevitable of all inevitables, the only certainty in every uncertainty.

And so I went to meet the man who had brought my sister to the bottom of a precipice, lying in a hospital bed, a semi-invalid for the rest of her life. He had never visited her in the hospital, perhaps he had not heard of her accident. She believed he had not; she certainly believed he had not; the messengers were not people she knew; they were not reliable. I was the one person who could get a message to him, but to beg such a thing of me was too humbling, to have me know that he had refused her wish was more than she could bear. I went to see him all the same. He was a vain man, but his vanity was of the ordinary kind; it did not come from some secret belief, some deep knowledge of himself, it came from something he believed other people saw when they looked at him, something in the way he carried himself, in the intense and compelling way he fixed his gaze on them, a certain gait he had in his walk. If I could have been amused, if I could have had time in my life for laughter, such a person as he was could have provided it.

He had a mustache, a thick, sharp brush of bristles, which he caressed with the fingers of his left hand, no matter what the situation. I had already put the neck of my dress over my head, my arms through my sleeves; I was just putting my belt through its buckle when I told him that my sister was in the hospital, she had suffered an accident, and she longed to see him. He did not know Elizabeth had a sister, and when I asked him how would knowing such a thing have changed his world, he played with his mustache and laughed; it was a sound only he could hear. His hands had been incapable of providing pleasure, or even providing interest; his lips were wide and generous, they satisfied themselves. When I had left my sister's bedside to go to see him, I was driven by curiosity, but it was not a curiosity of any intensity. In the end I wanted to see if it was not too late to dissuade her from making permanent the presence of this unworthy man in her life; in the end I did not care, and in the end again, it did not matter anyway.

They were married, but years passed before the event took place: three, four, five, six, then seven. She was never well again after the accident. Her entire body was so marked by scars that it looked like a map on which the lines had been drawn and redrawn, the result of battles whose outcomes were never final. For a time she wept for days and nights. Then she stopped and never cried again. She waited. One day, not too long into her seven-year wait, a woman came to my father's house and asked for my sister. When my sister came to her she pushed a small bundle into her arms and said that in the bundle was a child; she was its mother and Pacquet was its father. She then vanished. My sister and I took care of the child, though in reality it was I who did so, tending to its needs, for she was incapable of taking care of herself, much less a small child. The child did not thrive, and after two years it died of a disease said to be whooping cough. The child's life passed unnoticed, as if it had never happened. My father forbade its burial in the same graveyard as his son, Alfred. In the end it was buried among a small sect of Christian believers, a sect my father did not think too much of.

I was not invited to their wedding. There was nothing unusual about the day on which they were married. It rained on and off, the sky was the color of milk just let from a cow into an old pail; nothing held a portent of good or ill. Everything was indifferent to this match-up. My sister wore a dress of white silk; it came from far away, it came from China, but it was said that she was married in English silk. She wore pearls around her neck; my father had given them to her mother, I do not know from where he got them. She was beside herself with happiness. She was not beautiful. She had been left completely disfigured by the accident: her eyes were unable to focus properly, one leg was longer than the other, and she walked with a limp. It was not those things that made her not beautiful, for the internal chaos her unfocused sight caused her could have led to an expression of vulnerability on her face; the limp, too, might have caused anyone to feel sympathetic toward her. But it was not so; she became more arrogant, she acquired a coarseness to her voice, her gaze became a hard stare, her figure grew wide and slow; she was not fury itself, only a woman disappointed with love when it comes through a man.

After they were married, they lived with her parents, a situation my father immediately, and correctly, guessed was a danger to me. Her husband did not love her, this she knew. He did not love me either; this she did not know. I called him Monsieur Pacquet, and this formality was meant to show a lack of interest, not to mention a lack of knowledge, in regard to him. He called me Mademoiselle; he could have called me Miss, but he liked the way the word passed through his lips, the flourish with which he said it. It was then that my father arranged for me to live with and work for his friend in Roseau, his friend the same doctor who had taken care of my sister when she was made an invalid and was lying in the hospital.

 

 

 

What makes the world turn?

Who would need an answer to such a question?

A man proud of the pale hue of his skin cherishes it especially because it is not a fulfillment of any aspiration, it is his not through any effort at all on his part; he was just born that way, he was blessed and chosen to be that way and it gives him a special privilege in the hierarchy of everything. This man sits on a plateau, not the level ground, and all he can see—fertile meadows, vast plains, high mountains with treasure buried deep within, turbulent seas, calm oceans—all this he knows with an iron certainty should be his own. What makes the world turn is a question he asks when all that he can see is securely in his grasp, so securely in his grasp that he can cease to look at it from time to time, he can denounce it, he can demand that it be taken away from him, he can curse the moment he was conceived and the day he was born, he can go to sleep at night and in the morning he will wake up and all he can see is still securely in his grasp; and he can ask again, What makes the world turn, and then he will have an answer and it will take up volumes and there are many answers, each of them different, and there are many men, each of them the same.

And what do I ask? What is the question I can ask? I own nothing, I am not a man.

I ask, What makes the world turn against me and all who look like me? I own nothing, I survey nothing, when I ask this question; the luxury of an answer that will fill volumes does not stretch out before me. When I ask this question, my voice is filled with despair.

There are seven days in a week, and why, I do not know. If I were to find myself in need of such things, days and weeks and months and years, it is not clear to me that I would arrange them the way I now find them. But all the same, here they are.

It was a Sunday in Roseau; the streets were disturbing, half-empty, quiet, clean; the water in the harbor was still, as if it were in a bottle, the houses were without the usual quarrelsome voices, the sky was a blue that was at once overwhelming and ordinary. The population of Roseau, that is, the ones who looked like me, had long ago been reduced to shadows; the forever foreign, the margins, had long ago lost any connection to wholeness, to an inner life of our own invention, and since it was a Sunday, some of them now were walking in a trance, no longer in their right minds, toward a church or away from a church. This activity—going to church, coming from church—had about it the atmosphere of a decree. It also signified defeat yet again, for what would the outcome have been of all the lives of the conquered if they had not come to believe in the gods of the people who had conquered them? I walked by a church. The church itself, a small beautiful structure, was meant to imitate in its simplicity and unworldliness a similar structure in a tiny village in some dark corner of England. But this church, typical of its time and place in every way, was built, inch by inch, by enslaved people, and many of the people who were slaves died while building this church, and their masters then had them buried in such a way that when the Day of Judgment came and all the dead were risen, the enslaved faces would not be turned toward the eternal light of heaven but toward the eternal darkness of hell. They, the slaves, were buried with their faces turned away from the east. But did the slaves have an interest in seeing eternal light in the first place, and what if the slaves preferred eternal darkness? The pitiful thing is, an answer to these questions is no longer of use to anybody.