TWO

My skin has the heady fragrance of orange and custard-apple leaves, generously applied after steeping for hours in a basin in the sun. Behind the metal sheet that serves as our backyard screen, I used the infusion to meticulously wash my face, stomach, arms and legs before sleep caught up with me. I am a woman suffused with a lively glow, my body divested of much of its childish awkwardness, to be replaced with a vigour and suppleness which delight me.

How long have I taken to become a woman? I don’t know. My hips have assumed a bold fullness. My thighs have lengthened like palm trees. As the days go by, a deep cosy hollow has formed between my breasts. A fine line between my navel and my pubic hair has darkened and become an object of mystery and desire.When I was still young enough for Mother to wash me, she would often say this line meant my firstborn would be a boy. Now it is a curious detail that arouses men’s imagination and their passion, something I have not yet fully explored; something for which the moment of reckoning is still far off, very far off. And then there is Luckson…I only have to close my eyes to see, again and again, his bare chest seeking my breast, his keen eyes close to mine, and I succumb to insolence and desire. Yet I am an ordinary young woman, totally ordinary. I am so well aware of this that, day after day, I work away at transforming this ordinariness into something precious. I love Luckson’s slim hips. I love his mouth with its warning, his impudent hands. Luckson – honey and danger.

I open my eyes with a feeling of pleasure simply at existing, next to the sound of Mother breathing in her sleep. With a secret music deep in the hottest, most vital part of me, which soothes my ears, puts a spark in my eyes, animates my hands, burns my lips. Between two bursts of distant gunfire, Mother’s sighs kept me awake for part of the night. I don’t know what apparitions wandered through her sleep, what visitors ravaged her. Rising from the bed, I take care to keep my movements slight and ensure that I avoid disturbing the arrangement she has placed meticulously on the altar of her spirit Dambala.

Mother would rather go without buying clothes or food than cease honouring her extended family of African spirits, her loas, the Mysteries, the Invisibles, as she calls them. Above all, Dambala, who sits enthroned at the core of her life, who transports her and brings her back like a stalk of straw in the wind. Three or four times a year, she believes she is obliged to pamper them in turn, Dambala first, then Ogou and Erzulie Fréda. Only yesterday she lit a candle to Erzulie Fréda, placing it in the centre of the little altar she has dedicated to her behind the wardrobe. Three pink flamingo flowers have been placed before it, so beautiful you would think they were natural, freshly gathered from a lady’s flower garden. Fignolé presented them to Mother when he got his first wage. Mother thinks that Erzulie, a flirt like no other, must have been delighted to see her putting a few drops of her cheap eau de Cologne on a pink satin handkerchief and placing it in a small willow basket. She then took the trouble to satisfy the spirit’s huge appetite by serving her three nut slices on a fine porcelain plate, a plate that my employer, Mme Herbruch, left behind in her office one June afternoon and which I stole.Yes, stole. Why June, why that particular afternoon? I couldn’t begin to explain. Still, the next day, my eyes impassive and calmly meeting hers, I helped her myself to turn the shop upside-down searching for it.

‘That plate means a lot to me, Joyeuse.’

She worked herself up into a temper three days in a row, then never mentioned it again. The anger she expressed over the loss of that plate fascinated me. I remained unmoved inside, the better to observe her and to draw whatever conclusions I could from that range of feelings caused by the loss of something so trifling. Mme Herbruch was, after all, someone who could spare one plate!

Mother’s spirits and Angélique’s God have drawn a deep line of demarcation between them and me. I have weighed Angélique’s respectable God against my Mother’s illicit ones and remain unsatisfied. From the far bank where I set out my stakes in the height of noon, blown by fresh winds, I see the two of them fighting with shadows, blind and groping. I have chosen the light, wind and fire – even if they were to strike me blind, even if I had to give up my skin.

I’m in a hurry to go out, to find the fresh breath of the dawn. To leave this house, which seeks to imbue my skin with a musty staleness, the residues of sweat, those signs of deprivation and lack of water, all those clinging smells, the age-old scent of the poor. A house where we are hardly able to breathe in the night. Mother has not lost that annoying habit, from her distant peasant life, of going round before bed and sealing the windows, blocking up the cracks with any bits of fabric that come to hand. All gaps sealed, she keeps the house closed up like a fist, from a fear of all the visible and invisible creatures that await nightfall to come alive. Mother says the night is so favourable to bad air and apparitions!