SONG 8
And when I emerge, I come back with my head and heart filled with a voice,
A voice such as you can only hear coming from inside yourself,
A voice that sings and speaks to the soul in silence,
A voice that scans rhythms ruled by the spirit alone,
A voice from the depths of a body or a space,
Formless, faceless, and yet leaving indelible traces.
Later I’ll be able to forget your scent, your image, even your eyes,
But never will I forget your voice, Yèrè.
• • •
A voice that recreates the nameable: “At last, you’re back. In my heart I’ve called you so often. Didn’t you hear me? Why did you stop coming to this creek to swim? Before, you’d be here at least three times a week. I’d watch you beat the water like a drum with all the other girls; you looked like a new sun, and I thought that God had created this delight for me alone, because until then he had surrounded me with nothing but sorrow and misery. Perhaps I’d managed to find a way to redeem myself in his eyes, to deserve your coming. Do you know you’re a genie? And I thank heaven for having put you on my path, if only to make it known to me that the world is not just a hell. Welcome, my genie.”
He is a stocky boy, gleaming black, with eyes so deeply black that in their incessant sparkling they are constantly turning to a raven blue. I’ve never seen him in the village and do not realize he’s talking to me. I think he’s saying a prayer or some sort of litany, an invocation to a goddess behind me. I turn around to look at her, but see no one. The boy smiles at me sweetly, and there’s something like compassion in his eyes.
“Are you all right? Are you back with us again, awake?”
I jump and straighten up immediately. The tree trunk has made deep indentations on my chest, and it hurts. I can’t hold back a grimace, and I twist to stretch my muscles. On my back my baby sighs and stretches, too, but continues to sleep peacefully. Time and space abruptly become real again. I stammer: “What? I wasn’t sleeping. I just got here and have to get back home before my parents realize I’m not there and start to worry. What are you doing standing there, looking at me like a halfwit? Why don’t you help me get up? The child is getting to be very heavy.”
He holds out his hand to me, smiling even more, and helps me up from the old tree trunk. His hand is firm and warm. I loosen the pagne and he takes the child in his arms, as if he were receiving a newborn, his stunned gaze seems to suggest. We walk in silence. At the village entrance he hands the child back to me with a touch of solemnity in his movements. He certainly is a strange boy. Maybe he’s a bissima, a genie from the river, as in the folktales. Suddenly fear engulfs my heart again. My throat tightens, and I can’t speak anymore. I take the child and leave, speechless. He jumps in front of me and walks backward. His gestures are truly those of a child, and he looks happy. What is it, then, that frightens me so?
“If you don’t sleep so long the next time, I’ll teach you how to fish,” he says with a laugh. “Call me Yèrè, but you don’t need to tell me your name because I already know you’re Halla. I’ll always be waiting for you down there by the creek with the drummer girls. Take your time, but don’t forget that I’m waiting for you.”
He runs ahead of me scampering like a playful goat, and goes into a shrub behind the large kapok tree. He’s either a water genie or a forest genie, I say to myself, now convinced. I won’t go back to that beach anymore; he might abduct me, and my parents would never find me again.
When I arrive at the house, Mam Naja looks at me suspiciously: “Where did you and your father go off to? You leave me in the lurch all afternoon, with all those patients on my hands, and then you calmly come home, each from a different direction to make me think you weren’t together. If you’ve decided not to help me anymore, just say so, and I’ll insist that the sub-prefect hire at least one competent nurse and a nurse’s aide for me.”
My father leaps from the bedroom like a spring. “So you do admit we’re competent as a nurse and aide. I thought you hadn’t even noticed all our efforts. If only you would show you’re satisfied with our help or, at least that we relieve you from a good bit of work. But no, never a thank you, never a single sign of appreciation or encouragement. Everyone owes you, but you, you don’t owe a thing to anyone, right? Well, in my opinion I don’t owe you anything anymore, either; so go ahead and ask for more personnel from whomever is in charge. I’m finally going to have some time to think about my own life again.”
My father’s scathing response apparently catches Mam Naja off guard, because she opens her mouth several times to say something, but no sound comes out. And, to tell the truth, I’m bewildered as well. I didn’t know my father was wallowing in so much anger. So he, too, knew one needed a word of encouragement, a sign of gratitude, every now and then? I thought I was the only one! When she was annoyed at me for stopping in the middle of an activity under the pretext of not getting any response, Grand Madja used to tell me: “It’s your weakness that’s at fault, and your all-too-many impulses, always so foolishly hungry for a response. How many women do you think would manage to love their children and help them grow up if they expected something in return? Do your piece of what’s needed and let that be enough satisfaction in itself, or else you won’t be a real woman.”
Just as I’m growing accustomed to the idea that these superficial emotions exist only to make me bemoan my own life, complain about my lot, and therefore justify my state of mind, here is my father taking me back to a feeling of doubt and disrupting my progress toward Grand Madja’s wisdom and serenity. So many new beginnings!
From that moment on, it seemed to me, everything fell apart very quickly.
My father left every Saturday in one of the cars that had arrived for market day. He would be dropped off in the administrative center of the district, and wouldn’t come back until Wednesday, only to leave again—in search of paid work, so he said.
The sub-prefect arrived on Saturdays as soon as my father had left, and did not go home until late at night. He took Mam Naja I don’t know where, but I could well imagine why. The truce and the dream of a normal family life didn’t last more than six months because of my parents’ fickleness. The nightmare we had experienced in the big city was returning right here before our very eyes—and nothing was being done to prevent it. I didn’t want to stay there any longer, holding together, by myself, a household in which its founders had no faith. A kind of nausea and a feeling of injustice drove me away, for I, too, was in revolt. I didn’t exactly know against whom I held the greater grudge: my father, whose unbearable instability I couldn’t keep myself from judging, or Mam Naja, who in my opinion was incapable of holding on to her husband and at the same time maintaining her role as a modern working woman.
So I suddenly began to find my way to the river as soon as my parents turned their backs. I left my little brothers with old Rebecca and, with my baby on my back, I sat on the old tree trunk near the creek of the drummer girls. Yèrè, whom I now called My Bissima and who called me his water genie, always joined me right away. It seemed as if he sensed my presence there; even when he was in the village, I never had to wait more than fifteen minutes before he came running. He told me about his life as an orphan without any close relatives, his working in courtyards of various people to find a transient sleeping place and some food, here today and there tomorrow. He was preparing for his primary school diploma and his entrance to the Protestant secondary school in the village, hoping to study far away and become a doctor. He wanted to know if I’d wait for him, and then we could get married as soon as he had his high school diploma; we’d go to the capital where he would study medicine. He taught me to recognize plants that some of the old people in the village had shown him. He was extremely obliging and respectful toward all his elders, and had the gift of getting them to divulge all their secrets of wisdom.
He was the first one to direct my attention to the differences between what he called the knowledge of the Whites and the knowledge of our ancestors. He made comparisons that left me open-mouthed. I couldn’t follow the rhythm of his thought processes. He was truly the most intelligent young person I’d ever met. He told me ancient tales and myths, and sang epics to me like the one that the great poets in Grand Pa Helly’s courtyard used to sing during the Feast of the Dog, in the last week of December.
His voice was extraordinary, almost not human, with modulations that created successive echoes, like those inside a cave. Sometimes my fear of him returned, but I think he understood, and then he would become as gentle as a lamb and start humming. He would capture my gaze and hold it, and we’d look at each other for unbelievably long periods of time. He would take my hand and clasp it loosely for a very long time, gradually tightening his hold until I told him he was hurting me. Then, with a laugh, he’d let go.
“So, I’m not dreaming—you really are human and right here next to me. I’m so happy, I’m afraid there’s nothing else left for me to discover on this earth.”
One day we caught a speaking fish, a fish that printed words into our heads without ever uttering a sound. We looked at each other to make sure each of us had heard the silent words. The fish told a story about a united land called Atna, or Atlana.
“It can only be one or the other, but not both names at the same time,” My Bissima answered, “since one is the opposite of the other. Atna means ‘union,’ and Atlana is ‘to take apart, to divide.’ A single country cannot have both names at the same time.”
“If you wish,” the fish replied, “not at the same time, but alternating.
“Atna at night when all must be merged;
Atlana in the morning when things must be apart.
Specify each thing, name each being differently.
But don’t evening and morning belong to the same time?
The time in which you misused your part of knowledge and power,
Or the time in which you shared with others.
Atna or Atlana, call it what you choose,
Within the same time.
That is what I came to tell you.”
The fish pulls from our hand the line we have been holding together, and crosses the river like a shooting star. Our fishing-line traces his path like a luminous trail. Enraptured, we watch, and then suddenly My Bissima kisses me on the mouth. A flow of memories of my Aunt Roz and her husband Ratez surges up from deep down in my belly, and I vomit a long spurt of yellow saliva. For a moment of utter bewilderment he looks at me, then with a laugh he tenderly takes my hand, still capering in his inimitable way.
“I’m happy, so happy! Come, let’s go, I’m done.”
The next morning he didn’t come to the river. Nor the day after, either. Then I saw some people pass by carrying a body wrapped in a white sheet. An old woman said a litany for the end of an orphan’s life. For weeks I roamed along the river without so much as a sign. I didn’t dare ask any questions about him. I only knew that he had left for good. To me it was the fish that had come for him. Did I weep? Did I suffer? Did anger or bitterness build up inside me? Did it have any role to play in the rest of my life as a woman? Consciousness immured, oblivion, great escape toward survival. But the intense presence of his voice remains:
“Yèrè Mbèi Ngock grew beneath the phantom tree
Like a mushroom, Yèrè son of the albino stone;
Yèrè will live like the squirrel of the ancestor Sénd Biok,
Scrambling and jumping along the branches
Without building a nest, without digging a hole;
Yèrè is just a passerby astray on the earth.
If you are looking for Yèrè, son of the albino stone,
Look beneath the phantom tree
Where the mushrooms of rediscovered genies grow.”
This was his favorite song, the meaning of his presence on earth, which I could not understand. But the period of ignorance and unconsciousness doesn’t matter: One day a mushroom grows beneath the phantom tree on the albino stone. May the intensity of your voice guide me along the branches, Yèrè, until the day that genies reunite.