The Opposite House (10 page)

Brigitte heard about it on the radio, but she had already known it in her head and the knowledge translated into a great silence inside. In her views she was careful to toe the party line, and she took her well-chosen degree in political philosophy with its emphasis on Marxism. And she used that degree to disappear with permission. Brigitte took Spanish classes and bent her thoughts on Cuba, since Cuba was close to America and America was not Communist or Fascist or anything too strongly other than rich.

The temporary teaching post that Brigitte won at the University of Santa Clara was justified by the ‘rising levels
of interest in political philosophy amongst students’, but really it was small-scale antagonism against the fading Batista dictatorship. Brigitte’s post was intended by the Faculty to help foster links between one nation on the path to Utopia and another. After a week’s classes, she finally did what was in her heart and disappeared.

Then, when Brigitte needed money, my Abuelo Damason said to her, ‘I’ll pay you to teach my daughters German. The German language is poetic – that is to say it is both vague and precise. Perhaps once my girls have learnt German they will all become men and go and fight for freedom and frustrated dreams.’

Apparently this grandfather of mine had a way of talking that made him sound as if he was never entirely sincere. Brigitte’s lips thinned.

Even after Abuelo Damason had managed to convince her that he had not been mocking her country’s role in the war, Brigitte still refused to teach his daughters German. My aunt Tia Dayame refused to learn German. Tia Pilar refused to learn German, and so did Tia Caridad. They all said the same thing: ‘What’s the point of learning German?’ but each of them had different reasons. The sisters were not close.

‘German is the language of ideas,’ my
abuelo
repeated, in an attempt to persuade Brigitte and his daughters.

‘But not of reality,’ Brigitte said, and she was sad. Chabella took up Brigitte’s copy of
Der Struwwelpeter
and started reading aloud Heinrich Hoffmann’s dire warning to bad children. Her beginner’s accent was jaw dropping. (Chabella can still muster that accent now. When she puts it on she sounds like an adenoidal man morphing into a frog.) Brigitte looked at her blankly.
Brigitte said, ‘Do you have any idea of the meaning of those words?’

Chabella looked at an illustration; a giant in yellow trousers was dipping two squirming boys headfirst into a cauldron of ink. She said, ‘Not exactly.’

Brigitte said calmly, ‘You’ll sound better if you elongate your vowels when you see those two little dots – they’re called umlauts.’ And so Chabella’s first German lesson began.

That is the collection of things Chabella and I have decided about Brigitte. She is the only non-saintly white face in Chabella’s candle-lit display. Brigitte bought her place in Chabella’s altar with the gold-dust scarcity in Habana of red leather pumps. Brigitte put a pair under Chabella’s pillow the morning she finally left for America. And Chabella didn’t even find the pumps until she hid her face in the pillow to cry because she missed Brigitte. Brigitte had known that she would do that. When she left Chabella at the front door, Brigitte didn’t hug my Mami, but she touched her fingers to her own red lips and said, ‘This is a kiss.’ Chabella felt it the same as the gunshot.
‘Esto es un beso, moquenquen, dies ist ein Kuss,’
and then no word from Brigitte again.

Not long after she left, Batista left too – he fled Cuba. The change that everyone had promised and threatened came, and it came in the form of a military junta, which meant that uniformed men toted guns and smiled celebratory peace and did not fire in places where they could be heard. Chabella didn’t break her routine of stumbling into the one pothole on her street that was her particular bane.

When Mami speaks German she becomes wise. Glad crinkles frame her lips and eyes.
Weltschmerzen, Dasein
,
Sitz im Leben
, and so, and so, from web of thought to web of thought she departs from images and describes things unseen.

I walk back to Aaron’s with my Walkman switched on. My favourite song is sung slowly, blues about a woman who is alone and still and doesn’t understand that she doesn’t like it that way. But because the woman is patient and because she has perfect hair and because she enchants her clothes with French perfume, she sometimes gets a visit from her man, and then, oh. Then the song is poison in your ear, music to seal you in. Because when her visitor comes, the shadow song begins. Nobody has reason to cry the way someone is crying inside this song, not alone. Nobody has it inside them to climb just that note and keep ascending, they couldn’t, not even if they were crazy.

The song woman who curls her hair, she is white, I think. The singing woman, the one who makes me know that the song woman curls her hair, she is black, her voice is whisky dark. The screech in this song is bigger than either of them and it’s both of them doing it, both of them telling on each other until it seems that they fuse into one face and the piano player and his gentle backing notes are playing themselves out from a dangerous position on the screamer’s nose. But the piano player doesn’t fall into the mouth, of course. Screaming doesn’t do anything.

I rewind and replay as I walk down streets and into walls of cloth and skin and people and ‘excuse me’s and late-afternoon confusions of pavement and sky.

Once, when I was listening to this song at the bus stop, out of the corner of my eye I saw a woman staring at me, I saw a woman lift her hand to touch me, and when I looked
at her it was Chabella. I pushed the headphones down and she smiled uncertainly and said, ‘I almost didn’t recognise you. But after all I thought, No, that girl looks like me.’

Another time, when I arrived at band rehearsal listening to this favourite song of mine, I lifted off my earphones gingerly and cupped my hands to my ears, expecting blood.

5
roots people

One day in Habana, the day that would end in
nochebuena

(the good night, Christmas Eve)

Yemaya, in love with Cuba, went walking in La Regla, repeating after the Columbus in her mind’s eye, ‘This is the most beautiful land I have ever seen.’

The day was hot but gentle; beneath its healing steam lay granite, decrepit wood, rocks gloved in blanched sand. The harbour water caught sunlight in layered hoops of petrol-coloured dirt and tried to keep its clarity secret, but the divers told. Small, earth-brown boys kept bobbing up, their backbones hacking out of their skin, hair plastered to their heads, coin pouches around their waists rattling as they added new handfuls of slick bronze to their store.

Aya gathered up her seven skirts – blue lacing silver lacing more blue – and raced herself. She ran past irregularly spaced palm trees, looming with their tops drying out. She ran past a woman clothed in a swarm of toddlers; the woman cooked corncobs on a charcoal-heated griddle with her skirt hitched up around her knees. With her other hand, she kept her children from cooking themselves on her pan.

Yemaya didn’t even stop

(though she felt a pull and a fuzzy, bite-sized happiness like a kiss on the nape of her neck)

at the small household shrine, strung and nailed to a house’s doorway, that was meant for her. Ignored, Our Lady of Regla pouted sweet and pink from a ribboned cage of sea lavender and long-funnelled trout lilies, and cowrie shells with fluted mouths.

Aya stopped at the watchmaker’s parlour – here, a man with hair dreadlocked like a powerful man, like a
babalawo
, made watches and clocks, squinted over tiny, intricate mechanisms with pincers and thin magnets and hammers the size of Aya’s little finger. His clocks were not ordinary, but he sold them at carelessly cheap prices out of his living room. This watchmaker, he spoke exactly like a Cuban – but he said he was not Cuban.

Yemaya saw that, amongst old, knotted mahogany clocks with glazed faces, new clocks peeped out. Their faces were plain, mounted on block-like bases with hands of beaten brass that drove the minutes forward on their glint. Anyone who stood too close to see the time on one of these clocks felt a wafer-thin breeze from elsewhere, a colder place, a higher place. The watchmaker, a scattering of sawdust in his hair, waited for her at the counter with his fingers folded over some secret in his palm.

‘Hold out your hand,’ he said, smiling. He looked at her as if he thought her beautiful, and this was rare, and this made Yemaya trust him. She held out both her hands, cupping them to carry away sweetness, and he chided her: ‘Greedy. One hand is enough.’

His gift was a loose knot of seeds. They looked like oval woodchips, but something green slept inside them. She
wondered what a drop of her vanilla would do to them, and stowed them thoughtfully in the pocket of her top skirt before she remembered to say thank you.

Her watchmaker said, ‘One day, not now, they’ll grow for you, and show you what it is that you most desire. Remember, won’t you?’

She nodded, and he told her then that he was going home. ‘But you must keep those seeds safe. Another time, many years ago, I gave some seeds such as these to a woman as a gift. What this woman most wanted was children, but she was barren. When she spoke of children, I saw how much of her life these dream children had already taken. She knew so much about them, and so little about anything else. She had decided she wanted two boys and a gentle girl, the two boys to take care of the girl and keep each other company. And they would all love each other. I had some of these seeds, and –’

‘Where did you get them from?’ Aya asked, eagerly.

With a wounded stare, the watchmaker said simply, ‘They are mine.’

She raised her hand in apology. He continued: ‘I told her to plant and water them, and to wait and see. She came back to me one month later, shaking. “Those seeds,” the woman said, “are growing.”

‘I said, “Of course.” Her face –

‘She said, “Children. Children are growing from the seeds.”

‘I said, “Of course.” Then I asked her, because she wanted me to ask, what kind of children. But she shook her head. She just shook her head. She couldn’t explain. How many are there? Three. Just as many as she’d wanted. I saw such fear in her . . . she asked me what to do, then answered herself. She would leave them buried, her children; maybe that way they would die before they could
properly draw breath. A cruel thing – I told her so. But she kept saying, “It is better this way. It is better this way.” ’

The watchmaker stopped speaking – Aya saw that he was lost. She pressed his hand.

‘What kind of children are better left buried?’ he asked her.

She tried to guess the end of his tale, the moral of it. ‘Did you dig the children up?’

He did not.

‘Did she take pity?’

‘She dug them up in their ninth month, and they fled her. They must have known that she never wanted them to draw breath. Children know, and when they know. . . it is terrible.’

‘They fled her? How do you know?’

The watchmaker gagged, gaped, put his hand over his mouth, then seemed to recover himself and pretended to wipe dust from his face. ‘I saw them.’

Aya’s vanilla didn’t make the watchmaker’s seeds grow, and neither did plain water. When she dug up the seeds and pocketed them, she wondered whether it was because she didn’t yet know what she wanted.

Dominique and I were good friends until we lost interest in each other. We had only really been friends because she lived two doors away. Then she moved, and nothing. Chabella was disappointed in us both: ‘You’re black girls, as good as sisters!’

Chabella made me phone Dominique a couple of times. I wasn’t allowed to mention that I had phoned against my will. Dominique phoned me a couple of times as well. It was excruciating for us both, and then we were allowed to stop. Even after I stopped, it was awkward for a little bit.

Dominique was in my class from primary school right up until we left sixth form for university. Either I had never looked at her properly, or her face receded beneath the swathes of her hair until I forgot it. Dominique is from Trinidad and she had beautiful hair, soft and thick, which her mother, like mine, banned her from straightening and helped her comb out into a fan. People teased her about it all the time and called her ‘picky head’. Dominique took the name calmly, without offering any insults of her own, which I couldn’t understand. But then some people give off a strange sense of preoccupation, as if there is something in their lives so important to them that they have to keep it silent, and close. And to keep this thing close, they make sacrifices.

Of course, Mami loved Dominique’s hair. And she loved Dominique, who ate everything Mami served at dinner with genuine relish. Dominique tried to teach me some of her sunny, rolling patois. I couldn’t pick it up, but I offered to teach her Spanish. She said, ‘No thanks.’

Dominique’s mum, Cedelka, was a cleaner; she became good friends with Chabella, and her stories about the everyday filthiness of the people she cleaned for racked
Mami with guilt. Their conversations always ended with Cedelka assuring Chabella that Chabella worked just as hard as she did, taking care of her family and doing ‘all that language stuff’, and Chabella rhapsodising on Cedelka’s natural wisdom.

Cedelka wore dreadlocks and she was all soulful eyes and beautiful lips. When I played or ate dinner at Dominique’s, or when Cedelka came to collect Dominique from my house, she would reveal an instinct for freezing gracefully, a way of turning her face to the light when she stepped outside.

I always knew when Chabella had been talking to Dominique’s mum because she would start to mutter, ‘I don’t work hard enough, I’m not useful, all this paper and scribbling is making me soft.’ Chabella would take out her sponges and scrubbers and bleach and get on her hands and knees to clean the kitchen and bathroom from corner to corner. Papi didn’t like that. He especially hated it if I helped her, which I did to stop her from crying. ‘I don’t want to see my wife scrubbing away like that,’ he would say. ‘I write textbooks! Chabella, use a mop, or we’ll get a cleaner. And please, my daughter is not your assistant. Maja, go and have a bath and read a book or something.’