The Autobiography of My Mother (16 page)

Outside, outside my father, outside the island on which he was born, outside the island on which he now lived his life, the world went on in its way, each event large, a rehearsal for the future, each event large, a recapitulation of the past; but inside, inside my father (and also inside the island on which he was born, inside the island on which he now lived), an event that occurred hundreds of years before, the meeting of man and people, continued on a course so subtle that it became a true expression of his personality, it became who he really was; and he came to despise all who behaved like the African people: not all who looked like them, only all who behaved like them, all who were defeated, doomed, conquered, poor, diseased, head bowed down, mind numbed from cruelty. And he believed he was being himself one day when a man named Lazarus, a gravedigger, came to ask him for some nails to help rebuild the roof of his house; his house had been a dainty little structure of pine painted red and yellow and it had been destroyed in a hurricane two years before; my father was the highest government official in Mahaut then, he was given by the colonial government various things to give for free to people in the most need whenever there was a disaster; in the case of the hurricane he was given building materials of a not very good quality. My father did dispose of some of the things in the proper way, giving them to people in need, but just enough not to cause a scandal; the rest he sold, and the more a person was unable to pay, the more they were in need, the more he charged them. Lazarus was such a person, more unable to pay and more in need; in him, too, the event of the African people meeting the hyphenated man had taken on such subtlety that any way he chose to express himself was only a reminder of this: a happy song for him would be all about the idea of freedom, not a day spent lying on the sand near the sea in aimless pleasure. And so when Lazarus asked my father for the nails to complete the roof on his house, within my father the struggle between the hyphenated man and the horde had long since been resolved, the hyphenated man as before had triumphed, and my father told Lazarus that he did not have any nails left. I was ten years old at that time; I did not know my mother, she had died at the moment I came out of her, I knew only my father. I did not understand him; I loved to look at him from a short distance where he could not see me looking at him, his red hair glinting in the sun; I loved to look at him when he wore his dress uniform of navy-blue serge pants and white cotton twill jacket with gold buttons, the uniform he wore to a parade celebrating the English king's birthday. But at that moment when he denied Lazarus the nails, he started to become real, not just my father, but who he might really be. I knew that he had a large barrel of nails and other things in a shed at the back of the house, so in innocence, believing that he might have completely forgotten about it, I reminded him of it, I told him of the barrel full of nails, I told him just where the barrel was, what the barrel looked like, what the nails looked like, what the nails lying in the barrel one on top of the other—frozen, shiny—looked like. He denied again that he had any nails at all. The sound of his voice was not new; it was just that I heard him for the first time. It did not cause anything inside me to shatter, it did not cause anything outside me to shatter, it was not sudden, it was not unexpected, though I was not expecting it either—it was natural, an accepted fact, like the unevenness of height to be found in mountains, or the blue of a sky, or the moon. This was my father, the man I had always known, only there was more of him.

After Lazarus left, without the nails he had come for, without the nails he needed, my father grabbed me by the back of the neck of the dress I was wearing and dragged me through the house to the shed where he had the barrel of nails, and he pushed me facedown into the barrel of nails, at the same time saying in French patois, “Now you know where the nails are, now you really know where the nails are.” He spoke patois, French or English, only with his family or with anyone who knew him from the time he was a boy, and I associated him speaking patois with expressions of his real self and so I knew that this pain he was causing me, this suffocating me in a barrel of nails, was a true feeling of his. He gave my head one last push and then he quickly left me. He went to sit in the room that looked out on the sea, the room that had no real purpose, it was used so infrequently; the sea's surface was still, and as he looked at it he removed wax from his ear and ate it.

*   *   *

And what could my father have been thinking as he sat in that room, as he sat on a chair which was a copy of a chair seen in a painting of some dreadful Englishman's drawing room, a chair copied by the hands of someone of whom he had no doubt taken advantage? What could he have been thinking as he looked at that sea, its surface sometimes heaving, its surface sometimes still? A human being, a person, many people, a people, will say that their surroundings, their physical surroundings, form their consciousness, their very being; they will get up every morning and look at green hills, white cliffs, silver mountains, fields of golden grain, rivers of blue-glinting water, and in the beauty of this—and it is beautiful, they cannot help but find it beautiful—they invisibly, magically, conquer the distance that is between them and the beauty they are beholding, and they feel themselves become one with it, they draw strength from it, they are inspired by it to sing songs, to compose verse; they invent themselves and reinvent themselves and they are inspired (again), but this time to commit small actions, small deeds, and eventually large actions, large deeds, and each success brings a validation of the original idea, the original feeling, the meeting of people and place, you and the place you are from are not a chance encounter; it is something beyond destiny, it is something so meant to be that it is beyond words. For my father, the sea, the big and beautiful sea, sometimes a shimmering sheet of blue, sometimes a shimmering sheet of black, sometimes a shimmering sheet of gray, could hold no such largesse of inspiration, could hold no such abundance of comfort, could hold no such anything of any good; its beauty was lost to him, blank; to look at it, to see it, was to be reminded of the despair of the victor and the despair of the vanquished at once; for the emptiness of conquest is not lost on the conqueror, faced as such a person is with the unending desire for more and more and more, until only death silences this desire; and the bottomless well of pain and misery that the conquered experiences—no amount of revenge can satiate or erase the perpetration of a great injustice. And so as in my father there existed at once victor and vanquished, perpetrator and victim, he chose, not at all surprisingly, the mantle of the former, always the former; this is not to say that he was at war with himself; this is only to say that he proved himself commonly human, for except for the saints who among us would not choose to be among the people with head held up, not head bowed down, and even the saints know that in the end of ends they will be among the ones with heads held up.

The callous, the cynical, the unbeliever will say, perhaps in a moment free of gravity, perhaps in a moment when they see in a blinding flash the world end and refuse to begin again, that life is a game: a game that the better of them wins, a game that the worse of them loses: a game in which to win is to gain everything and to lose is to get nothing, or a game of musical chairs in which, when the music stops, to win is to sit down and never make room for the loser, who is doomed to stand up forever. It goes without saying that to be among the callous, the cynical, the unbelievers, is to be among the winners, for those who have lost are never hardened to their loss; they feel it deeply, always, into eternity. No one who has lost dares to doubt, really doubt, human goodness; for the one who has lost, the last breath is a sigh, “Oh God.” Always.

It was not without understanding, it was not without some pity, that I observed my father. When he was a boy—an idea, a reality I sometimes found hard to grasp: him soft, in need of warmth or soothings from rampaging fevers, bruised knees and elbows, in need of reassurance as his boy-strong will would weaken and falter, in need of other reassurance: the sun will come up again, the tide will go out, the rain will stop, the earth's turning cannot be stilled (I could only believe in this reality blindly, since such a state would not be unusual, but he had built so completely another skin over his real skin, a skin invisible to the eye but as real all the same as the protective shell of a turtle or the shield of a warrior)—when my father was a boy, he was given an egg by a neighbor of his mother and father. It was a thank-you gift from this woman because my father had been very kind to her—she was old and lived alone and he ran errands for her sometimes without being asked and never expected to be thanked—and when she gave him the egg—she had three hens, a cock, and a pig, they lived in her yard near the latrine, the fowls slept in a tree that rose up above it—he was surprised, he had never expected to be thanked at all, and he took this egg—it was brown with darker brown speckles all over it—and did not make an omelette or any other kind of meal with it but placed it under a hen, another hen which belonged to his mother, to set along with some other eggs, and when they were all hatched, he claimed one of the chickens as his own. That chicken became a hen and laid eggs and those eggs were set and became chickens and those chickens laid eggs and so on, an endless cycle interrupted only by the sale of some eggs and some chickens, and with the farthings, halfpennies, and pennies that they brought in exchange and profit. He never ate eggs after that (not all the time I knew him); he never ate chickens after that (not all the time I knew him), only collecting the bright red copper of money and polishing it so that it shone and giving it to his mother, who placed it in an old sock and kept it in her bosom awake and asleep. When his father was returning to Scotland for a visit on his journey, which was said to have ended with drownings at sea, my father gave his father the profit that had started with that original egg: a gift; it had grown into an enormous amount, enough to purchase material, English material, to make a suit for wearing only on Sundays. But my father never saw his father again, my father never saw his profit again, and he may have spent the rest of his life trying to find and fit into that first suit he had imagined himself in again and again—though he would not have known he was doing that, I believe—and his whole life may have been a succession of rewards he could never enjoy, though he would not have seen that.

“It was a beautiful day, a day of such beauty that it remains stamped forever on my memory,” my father would say to me, telling me of the day his father boarded a boat that sailed to Scotland; it never reached its destination, and so this picture that began in sunshine ended in the black of cold water, and my father's face, my father's very being, was the canvas on which it was painted. I was a small girl, eight years old, when he first began to tell me about this important detail in his life, the same age he was when he learned he would never see his father again. I was not physically robust, my voice was weak, I was female, I spoke to him only in English, proper English. He sat in a chair made of a wood found in India, and the arms of this chair, too, ended in the form of the closed paw of an animal whose name I did not know, and so did its two front legs, and I sat across from him on a floor that had been polished the day before and held in a tight grip the skirt of the white poplin dress I was wearing, and the poplin itself was from somewhere far away from here, the room in which we sat was the room that served no particular purpose. His face, as he spoke of the last time he saw his father, became a series of geometric references, regular and irregular lines, sharp and soft angles, the shallow surfaces beneath his cheeks growing full and round; he looked like the boy he had been then, or certainly the boy he thought he had been then, and his voice became liquid and soft, golden, as if he were speaking of someone else, not himself, someone he used to know very well, not himself, and had loved deeply, still not himself. His father sailed on a ship called the
John Hawkins,
but the name of that infamous criminal was not what caused my father's face to darken, soiled, criminal, that was not what made the light go out in his small boy's eyes.

*   *   *

Did my father ever say to himself, “Who am I, who am I?” not as a cry coming from the dark hole of despair but as a sign that from time to time he was inflicted with the innocent curiosity of the foolish? I do not know; I cannot know. Did he know himself? If the answer is yes, or if the answer is yes but not completely, or if the answer is yes but in an extremely narrow way, he would have had secret pleasures equal to the measure in which he knew himself; but I do not know, I do not know the answer. I did not know him, he was my father but I did not know him; everything I say about him is only my observation, only my opinion, and this must be a point of shame for all children—it was for me—that this person who was one of the two sources of my own existence was unknown to me, not a mystery, just not known to me.

*   *   *

When my father first ran his hand over my mother's skin—the skin on her face, the skin on her legs, the skin between her legs, the skin on her arms, the skin underneath her arms, the skin on her back, the skin below her back, the skin on her breasts, the skin below her breasts—he would not have likened its texture to satin or silk, for no extraordinary preciousness and beauty had been assigned to her; the color of her skin—brown, the deep orange of an old sunset—was not the result of a fateful meeting between conqueror and vanquished, sorrow and despair, vanity and humiliation; it was only itself, an untroubled fact: she was of the Carib people. He would not have asked, Who are the Carib people? or, more accurately, Who
were
the Carib people? for they were no more, they were extinct, a few hundred of them still living, my mother had been one of them, they were the last survivors. They were like living fossils, they belonged in a museum, on a shelf, enclosed in a glass case. That these people, my mother's people, were balanced precariously on the ledge of eternity, waiting to be swallowed up in the great yawn of nothingness, was without doubt, but the most bitter part was that it was through no fault of their own that they had lost, and lost in the most extreme way; they had lost not just the right to be themselves, they had lost themselves. This was my mother. She was tall (I am told—I did not know her, she died at the moment I was born); her hair was black, her fingers were long, her legs were long, her feet were long and narrow with a high instep, her face was thin and bony, her chin was narrow, her cheekbones high and wide, her lips were thin and wide, her body was thin and long; she had a natural graceful gait; she did not speak much. She perhaps never said anything that was very important, no one has ever told me; I do not know what language she spoke; if she ever told my father that she loved him, I do not know in what language she would have said such a thing. I did not know her; she died at the moment I was born. I never saw her face, and even when she appeared to me in a dream I never saw it, I saw only the back of her feet, her heels, as she came down a ladder, her bare feet, coming down, and always I woke up before I could see her going up again.