The Opposite House (2 page)

Chabella is much younger than him, so she wasn’t there in the fields. But she has stories from her aunts who struggled amongst the leaves and cut themselves on sharp stubs left from poorly harvested cane. Sugar makes Chabella cry. She hints at other memories, other sugar horrors, ancestral. Since Chabella only bakes with sweeteners, Papi sometimes complains that the texture of her
cucuruchos
is
different from that of the ones his mother used to make. But he doesn’t complain too loudly or persistently.

From Chabella I’ve learnt how to fight anyone, man or woman, whilst sitting down completely still. It’s all in the quality, not the quantity, of the tears; the soundless shudder as if the water comes from a deep place lined with rocks. When Mami gets sick, she cries like that, and the threat of that was enough for me not to bother with hair relaxers.

Chabella tried to teach me
Gelassenheit
– the longing to let go and collapse under holy madness – long before I read anything by Hans Denck. I drank
Gelassenheit
in by the litre at the kitchen table, where I sat on Mami’s lap and watched her twist rice paper into graceful shapes whose petals were melded together with fine honey. The prayer flowers were ships built to sail nowhere – set aflame they unreeled a bitter scent and carried the tiny pleas scribbled on their petals only as far as the limits of the glass bowl before they died.

Mami recited letters to me; they were from friends she had grown up with, friends who had spread out to Granma, Camaguey and Holguin. There were letters from her cousins in Villa Clara and Pinar del Rio, photographs and notes from her sister in Matanzas reminding her how lucky she was to be abroad, how lucky,
querida
, beloved, not to have to constantly pit yourself against
la lucha
, that struggle for life! The tone of the letters wasn’t envious, only kind. In other news, people were getting married, being born, people eloping with lovers to Santiago de Cuba and getting caught and told off and given family blessings. People were winning street-wide cooking contests for the best
ropa vieja;
people were ripping off hapless tourists. As Mami spoke her alien litany to me, she depressed the centres of
each flower with a deft thumb so that each one could host a fire in its heart. Each petal read

ayude

She was asking for help.

But love gets in the way of her paper flowers, love keeps them secret from Papi. Chabella and Papi have ways of looking at each other, ways of touching that are full of stunned caution. They trip over each other constantly, marvel each time. When Mami sits down at the table, wiping her hands on her cooking skirt after she’s set dishes down before us, Papi takes her hand, strokes her fingers, says her name as if he’s asking it. Mami nods at him; her lips smile, her eyes smile. I grew up doubting that anyone would ever look at me in the same way. My doubt contains no great trauma; it’s casual, the way people doubt they can jump off a bridge and fly.

Papi taught at the university where Chabella was a student. He is twenty years older than Mami. And rare; they were rare, black academics in Cuba, black academics in a lot of places. I only know young-man-Papi from photographs. Young-man-Papi with his unkempt afro and tortoiseshell spectacles. Once he had finally, achingly understood that Castro’s Revolution was not his, Papi eschewed America – rather, after stints at the University of Hamburg and the Sorbonne, he brought Mami and I to London. Papi says he was ‘sent abroad by Castro’, as if Castro, having singled out the academics and bourgeoisie that he didn’t want in his revolution, had first restricted their research possibilities, then leant over and lifted them all airborne with a single puff.

I was seven years old when we came here. I’ve come to think that there’s an age beyond which it is impossible to lift a child from the pervading marinade of an original country, pat them down with a paper napkin and then deep-fry them in another country, another language like hot oil scalding the first language away. I arrived here just before that age.

One time I needed to know an A-level essay’s worth of Kantian ethics, but the very layout of the book I was reading took the words away from me. Papi leaned over my chair. My Papi put warmth between me and the ceiling with his stubbly chin and his kind eyes and a hand on my shoulder. He explained to me some things about Kant and duty. He couldn’t make me understand what he was talking about. Mami sat with me then and told me again, with long pauses as she moved the ideas she remembered from German to English. When she prays to the saints for intercession, her Spanish is damaged and slow because she is moving her thoughts from Africa to Cuba and back again.

St Teresa of Avila was the one who brought me to St Catherine’s for the first time. In her autobiography, St Teresa of Avila tells of a meeting with the devil, and it seemed to her that the devil was a short Negro. Of course it’s funny about the devil being black; I thought it was funny, but at the same time . . .

I needed to do something after I put down the Avila book; I needed to do the worst thing I could do in the world, something to call down hellfire and justice. I took my fifteen-year-old self to Chabella’s room. I took a pair of scissors to the most beautiful dress in the world, Chabella’s hoop-skirted wedding dress, so full-skirted a dress that it
can stand up all by itself. I took the scissors to it, but I stopped before I could cut. I went to my best friend Amy Eleni’s house instead. When I briefly described what was going on, she took me to her parents’ loft, opened up a wooden chest and tossed her mother’s wedding dress at me.

‘Go on then,’ she said. She was laughing. But I couldn’t do anything to the dress. Despina’s dress was the second most beautiful in the world – this dress was satin, with a mist of silver mesh, the kind of dress that makes its wearer look newly wept. In the chest the dress had looked very narrow, narrower even than I thought Despina could be, but Amy Eleni wasn’t scared of getting stuck in it. Amy Eleni didn’t even care about the dress; she just put it on to show me. She flicked up the zip of Despina’s tear-dress as if it were all just jeans.

She turned to the dusty mirror sideways on, struck a pose, hands on her hips, her elbows crooked governess-style. She kicked back at the air to loosen her pose, and the dress’s seams creaked at her thigh. I couldn’t breathe, but Amy Eleni breathed. I looked at Amy Eleni in the mirror, but she didn’t see me looking. She struck another pose on tiptoe, arms held high, neck swaying as if something heavy was on her head. The skylights caught an accusing flash of sun that bypassed stacked sea-grass boxes to illuminate the dress.

The poor dress, it was too much. I stopped Amy Eleni with my hands, kept her waist straight under my palms to let her know that she shouldn’t bend any more, and I turned her in a swish of cold white as I examined the dress for damage. She drooped and jiggled her wrists, pretending to be a puppet. But before my eyes the dress’s shoulder was turning to sad, shredded cloth. Before I could even open my
mouth, Amy Eleni said, ‘It’ll survive, wedding dresses survive anything. People have sex in wedding dresses. I mean, Jesus. Once I put this dress on and I climbed a tree in it! I fell, though . . .’

I screamed small and checked the satin for grass stains, but Amy Eleni sniggered, batted my hand away, named a book and said I really needed to read it.

Books: I am attracted and repelled; books are conversations that are not addressed to me and I want to sneak up and listen but I also want to be invited in. If I was invited in the conversation would not be what it was.

After reading that Avila book, I scared Chabella badly. She decided that I was having ‘a moral, religious and mental breakdown’. I was only saying what was on my mind. The conversation that made Chabella decide that we were going to take a weekend retreat went exactly like this:

ME: Chabella, is it true that the Church refuses to confirm the presence of a single soul in Hell?

CHABELLA (with an enormous, proud smile): Ai,
querida
.

ME: Not even Hitler or Stalin or It the Clown?

CHABELLA: Not even them. Forgiveness –

ME (interrupting): What about Teresa of Avila?

CHABELLA: – is always an option. Mm, St Teresa, what?

ME: Well Teresa of Avila is a bitch, after all, so I expect she’s in Hell.

CHABELLA: (screams for three or four long seconds, while I just sit and look at her. Gasps. Holds her head with tears pouring down her face, shrinks and shakes as if I am punching her.)

Chabella said it wasn’t so much the words, but the way my face went when I said them – she said my face ‘twisted’ and she couldn’t recognise me. Chabella knows the Rites of Exorcism by heart. She is prone to exaggeration.

When Papi heard that Chabella and I were going on a retreat, he gave six-year-old Tomás a high five and said, ‘Just you and me, London baby. Show me some of those London ways.’ Papi had to give Tomás the high five very gently, it was in fact a matter of pressing his palm against Tomás’s fingers, or Tomás would have fallen down. Tomás was happy with the idea of us going away, too. He cackled, ‘Bye.’

When we actually left the following week, he said ‘Wait for me’ and ran upstairs to throw some toys into his rucksack. Mami closed the front door and he cried out: ‘No! No!’

The way Tomás said ‘No’, the way he said it.

He didn’t know what two days would feel like; he didn’t understand that he would only have to go to sleep and get up twice, and then we’d be back.

That first weekend at St Catherine’s, Chabella and I slept in the same room on low, neat white beds with scratchy blankets. We didn’t talk about Catholicism or Teresa; we were already in the Church, high up with a sweet vanilla smell and the softest hush all around. We laughed together in the night for no reason at all. We tried to be quiet because you were supposed to be quiet, and anyway, everyone was sleeping. But Mami would just look at me with her nostrils quivering and that was enough to set me off. At Mass, when I looked at my Mami, she glittered. When she sang, the song came from the wound on her tongue. While Mami slept at night, and I lay with my eyes closed,

a shadow fell, fast and from a great height it fell

it put me inside

it put me inside

the weight of it. Dark came to rest on my eyelids; strange and painful pennies. What if, what if I had opened my eyes and tried to look at what was there in that room . . .

. . . with sleepy awe I felt it:
I am loved
. And outside there were tall trees that had other people’s sleep caught in their branches, dreams like white lights, that first time Mami took me away to save my soul.

Now it’s 4 a.m. and I’m still awake with my fingers splayed over my neck and its old loop

of pain

(and I am at St Catherine’s again,

at the window again

amazed again

at the way a steep hill holds growing green on its swerve when it will support nothing else).

On the wall is St Catherine of Siena, sheets of chestnut hair floating in heaven-driven winds, Catherine who I always fail to love when I remember that she is not the Catherine of spiked-wheel martyrdom. Catherine of Siena looks at me with all of her soul in her soft smile; she looks at me, glad that I will not be staying. I think about the mothers I know or have seen or have heard of. My mother, Amy Eleni’s mother, mothers in books, mothers in Chabella’s
apataki
, her stories about the gods. Twenty-four not being old enough, I want to tell my son,
Not now, please
.

For six days I have been praying, really praying, a state of angry joy that I fell into through a crack in the bottom of my heart. I have not been able to close my eyes for longer
than it takes to blink. I am back to childish bargaining with God for explicit support of my son, as if my son is special, or for advance pardon for the swift ending of my son, as if I am special. Or anything, anything, God give me anything.

Food: everything I eat, my mouth lets it go, my stomach heaves painful, sour streams. My breasts are rotten lumps hooked into my ribcage, and I can’t touch my body at all, I can’t. I keep holding my hands away from myself, or holding my hands together. But the afternoons ripen here in radiant languor as forty women draw a little more breath into their black and white cassocks so as to continue dying slowly from love. When it rains the sisters, capes heavy with water, rotate in fragrant clusters through the slate walkways of the chapel.

At the door, Sister Perpetua takes both my hands and looks at me from beneath the clean borders of her cowl. Her ‘hello’ smile is the same as her ‘goodbye’ smile. She lets me come, lets me go my way, looks at me now the same way that she did when I arrived a week ago. I tottered in on six-inch wedges with the meekest look that I could give her over the top of a pair of oversized sunglasses, the crown of my floppy brown hat settled around my ears and Aaron’s discarded khaki jacket, longer and looser than the black dress I wore beneath it, flapping open despite my best efforts to belt it in several places. She brusquely tells me that this time I came on retreat from a joyous heart, that I was here with her at St Catherine’s because I am being slain by the Holy Spirit.

‘Jesus is in your life,’ Sister Perpetua says again, while I look at her and do not think of Jesus at all because Sister Perpetua’s beauty is bewitched: her lips are a frozen red that thaws out into pink at the corners; her eyebrows climb to
tapered peaks above dark chocolate eyes. Sister Perpetua has the face that Snow White’s mother had wished upon her. But it isn’t that something is keeping her young, just that something is keeping her beautiful. I love Sister Perpetua for stupid reasons: she does not whisper in Chapel but talks for God to hear; she has seen me crying and she just lets me cry; when she wants me to pray with her she covers my hands with her soft ones.

The first time I came she found me in the Chapel and told me about an African priest who the Church had confirmed was in heaven. She did not tell Chabella; she only told me, as if she knew that I needed it. I told her about the shadow at night, and she talked about the Cloud of Unknowing, how when God is near, you are driven into the darkness outside of reason and it is a good, sweet rest. I tried to explain that it wasn’t
un
knowing. But mystics are difficult to argue with.