SPIRITS OF THE DEAD KEEP WATCH
Never had I seen her so beautiful, so tremulously beautiful… How could I know what at that moment I might seem to her? Might she not with my frightened face take me for one of the demons and specters, one of the Tupapaüs, with which the legends of her race people sleepless nights? Did I really know who in truth she was herself? – Paul Gauguin, on the genesis of his painting, The Spirits of the Dead Keep Watch, Noa Noa, 1919.
When she arrived, she was so tired she slept for three days on the sofa in the study. She has grown to a woman during the past ten years. The same long, dark hair, the same hands, but the breasts are fuller, the hips and waist more shapely. She appeared on Friday morning, ten o’clock, after I’d come back into the study from breakfast.
Sprawled on the sofa, she wears a plain black dress. It suits her, like the dresses women wore when I was young. Others her age might consider the style old-fashioned, but I like it on her. Only her face disturbs me; it has a blankness to it. Still lovely, if somewhat coarse in its prettiness, the lips too red, still bitten (how, after ten years?), a kind of dark campesina prettiness, too generous to be refined, or elegant.
Any other twenty-three-year-old woman would have some kind of mark, some sign of time or experience on her features, and even a worldly turn at the corner of the mouth. Her face is empty and blithe as a renaissance Madonna’s. Of course it makes sense—she hasn’t done the living that would have given her the signs of age—but it unsettles me. I am afraid for her to wake, to see that blank child’s face on a grown woman move and talk. It disturbs me more than her coming back.
I cannot lie and say that I have not been expecting her for years now.
I wake and he’s there, old—older now, and dozing in the chair at the desk. The room is lit by the glass lampshade, stained with thick, blazing roses. It makes the shadows honeyed, heavy. Outside the night drops soft on the sweeping lawns, the hundreds of little English flowers nodding, little ghosts. There’s ivy crept closer around the windows but otherwise nothing else has changed.
The sight of him sets things tilting. My head is sore and thick, my throat rough. I don’t know where anything is, only that I’ve been gone—a long time I think now, looking at him. I remember nothing about it and feel cheated. Perhaps I really don’t deserve Heaven at all, and this is Hell.
If so, I want him awake even less, and I lie still, breathe slow and small through my nose. My breath hitches when I realise I don’t know if I’m wearing any underwear; it seems stupid, but there’s no way to check without moving enough to wake him. I don’t know why it matters to me so much. I don’t understand why I’m here or why I’m wearing this old black dress. The room surges and I lie back again, and close my eyes to make everything settle. The shapes of the stained glass roses burn through my lashes.
When I was small, I wore a dress with blue roses on it and never any underwear. I’d never seen blue roses in real life. These were dark and tangled. They looked like the impossible flowers in nightmares. I liked that the dress never flew up in the wind.
When I was bigger and went to the primary school in Newclare, they used to say Pinkie-Pinkie was in the girls’ toilets, and that if you wore pink underwear, you would be raped. I saw him once, sliding eyes, pale and sickly, grabbing amphibian hands. I saw him in the mirror right at the end of the row, where the water and piss leaked across the floor and the lists of everyone who’d had sex were written up in chalk. He let me go. He knew I never wore underwear. I was proud my name was never put up on the wall.
It’s strange seeing him doze in his chair like that, to see him grown old. He seems vulnerable, like afterwards, that quiet spent look, his eyes closed. But never for this long. I’m embarrassed looking at him like this, and I’m afraid of him waking to see me staring. This is the first time I’ve ever seen him sleep. Strange, when you think about it. There was a time I thought we were lovers or something. Don’t they see each other sleep? Sometimes I’d go so quiet and close my eyes so he thought I was sleeping, but I wasn’t.
The first time, he hated the way I stared at him. He seemed embarrassed. He pushed the hair from my forehead, held it too tight so my face tilted up to him. He looked at me for a long moment before his mouth twisted, almost a smile. “Your eyes are too big,” he muttered.
I closed them after that.
I knew the degrees of closeness, the highest being skin to skin. Often I told myself I was special, that he picked me. It was me he chose to tutor for the scholarship exams, the English Olympiads, the Eisteddfods. It was me he read to, talked to about music. And then there was this, the highest closeness, even if it hurt, even if it was dirty and I shook for hours afterward, not understanding why. I thought, to see him with his eyes closed, spent and helpless for a second. That was love, and I reached up to him, to touch his face or hold onto his shirt to bring him down to me.
He pushed my hand away. My hands were probably dirty and his shirt was clean and expensive. I didn’t know where to put them, what to hold onto. That became the main thing I thought about. I didn’t like grabbing onto the sheets. I couldn’t let my hands lie beside me like dead things. I hoped he never noticed them. Anyway, it kept me occupied while it happened.
Sometimes he’d look at me almost as if he were scared. That was only when I stared at him, though his mouth clenched when I made a noise, once, because it hurt. But I learned to fix my breathing and bite my lips so I wouldn’t make a sound. Sometimes I looked at him, with his eyes closed and his breathing heavy and him hurting me but needing it, I thought, like a little boy. And my job was not to let him know it was hurting because that might hurt him. Not to have him feel hurt. That was when I loved him. I tried very hard to love him. I thought, this is what women do. I reached up for him and thought, I am a woman now.
I wake and God help me, there are those black eyes gleaming at me. Blank and dark, and like a bird’s. You think, surely it’s not thinking much, behind those eyes, but what if it is?
I am getting away from myself, it’s the uncanniness of it that shakes me, but I know what must be done. She’s come for me, for retribution of some kind, and I must be the one who wins. If I keep my head about me, if I am calm and rational, I will. I know I will.
So I sit upright. I clear my throat. I smile. “Hello, Antoinette.”
There’s that quick birdish flash. She’s been waiting, I think. How like her. “Hello, sir,” she says.
Somehow obscene, coming from a grown woman, especially as she lies there, propped up on an elbow, watching me, eyes intent. What do I say now? It seems grotesque to ask how she is, why she’s here, even. She’d throw it back in my face, insolent and accusing. I use her own tactic against her: simply watch.
She stretches and rises to sit up properly. Her gaze never leaves my face. There is a precision to her movements, the stiff-backed way she sits, folding her hands just so in her lap. She might be mocking me. Or else she hasn’t lost that knack she’s always had for adapting, and has picked up again, like back then, on the precision and elegance I value. Is it terrible of me to feel a stab of gladness, that some things don’t change, that the quick-eyed, willing child is not completely gone? Don’t think for a moment that I didn’t mourn her deeply.
“You’re older. How long has it been?” She rasps as she says it. I won’t let the vulgarity of the question throw me.
“Ten years, but I thought you’d know that.”
She’s shocked, blinks deliberately as if that will help. I hadn’t expected her to look so lost. I’m almost disappointed, thrown myself, but I won’t let her see that. I must stand my ground. The best way with her has always been gentleness, when she least expects it. I will smile kindly. “Were you in Heaven then, Antoinette? What was it like?”
My throat feels raw, I can feel my blood pulsing there, saying run, run, run or play dead. Be dead again. I can’t let him know. Once I shook and shook and he said to me, be calm. Be calm and it will be fine. Of course it hurts when you get hysterical, but if you’re calm you can do anything. So I am calm, or pretend to be. Now he leans in his chair again, and smiles. I never could tell what he thinks when he smiles like that, asking what Heaven was like.
I did not know. I was there for ten years, and I remember nothing. I breathe slowly and tell him lies: “It is very quiet. There are many hibiscus flowers and a thick sweet smell of rain. There are crumbling French façades and bougainvillea. Jacaranda blossoms crushed by rain. The old people—some of the angels are kindly old people, grandmothers and grandfathers—are very beautiful. The light is soft. Like old pictures. It’s very quiet, but full. Like a beehive just been smoked. All the bees dreaming a little aloud at once.”
Quickly I remember something—I am sick with the shame of it—a man saying to me, in that strange city, saying it was all right that I had been whoring myself on its streets. Was that really Heaven, I asked? And he said yes, but that it had its rules too, its customs. And I cried a long time in his arms. He wore a clean white shirt and I felt bad for spoiling it. I said I was sorry. He said it was all right, that I had been gone a long time with the Devil, that I’d been in Hell. Why could I not remember it, I asked. He said I would in time, but that I must not rush those things.
By the time the memories come back you will have learned the customs of Heaven and nothing of Hell will hurt you. You will carry Hell safe back with you but it will not touch you.
I wanted to know what he meant but my throat clenched—to have Hell with me, on me like a smell. How could it not hurt me? He walked me to a hammock on the stoep of a grand, crumbling old house where a tall black woman with long, golden earrings was singing to a guitar. She put flowers on my eyes, jacaranda blossoms soft as shadows, and said sleep now, baby, thula. And I did.
That memory comes so quick I’m sick with it, and the room spins again. I stay upright, though. I have a knack for it. I don’t talk for a minute. I’m afraid if I do I will be sick. Can I be sick?
I will admit: I was shaken when I heard her speak. Don’t think there was no love in me for her. Looking at her now, the old tenderness comes back. She was a promising girl, pretty, very clever. I am not one of those sickly creatures abusing themselves in the dark over sticky pictures, nor am I a sociopathic pervert abducting little girls from playgrounds to do horrible things to them. I am as outraged as you when I read these horrible stories in the paper. I am, all considered, a decent person.
When I got the news, a terse letter from the mother, an invitation to the funeral I never attended (I sent a hundred white orchids instead—I wonder if the family realised how much those were worth), things slowed and drooped around me like a neglected hothouse. I did nothing to stop it. I did not so much as look at another girl again. I’d dream, yes, but she’d always walk in, somehow, or the girl would have her eyes or waist or voice. Eventually, even the dreams stopped, and I left everything to stop around me with all the grace and courtesy of which I am capable. I hope at the end it might mean something.
We can agree, as intelligent adults, that human affairs are not predictable, black and white. We know there are exceptions to everything, and she was—really I mean this sincerely—astute for her age. In its way, strange and difficult as it was for both of us, it was love.
Beyond all this—without getting carried away by sentimentality—shall we say, that the definitions applied are a little extreme. A couple of years ago I read a column by some rabid feminist saying that she realised in adulthood that every man—note: every man she had ever slept with (quite willingly, she admits freely) in her teenage years, was a paedophile. Now, I ask you, considering the fact that, as I mentioned, she states she engaged in sexual acts with these men of her own volition (she was not forced, she was not threatened, she found them attractive) is it fair to condemn them? They may have even had the most tender feelings for her after all; is it fair to label them, paedophiles, perverts and criminals, just because she happened to be below the legally defined age of consent? How do we measure maturity in any case? How do we say she was excused from her sexual behaviour because she was legally defined as a minor in that country? I know of schoolchildren aged eleven—two years younger than my Antoinette when we first slept together—who do filthier things together in their school breaks, for God’s sake.
Still, there was a fair share of hell in it. It was almost too easy, with her, a few months of talking—she came for the tutoring. When I asked her to come look at the artwork in the bedroom, a fine reproduction of one of Gauguin’s Tahiti paintings, she stepped after me, quiet and blithe.
That first afternoon was too bright, the difference in light between the bedroom and the study too marked. Going into the bedroom for a moment, I was blinded. Coming out I was blinded again. The day, and all the days after, seemed to come unhinged. Maybe it was the heat. It was a strange summer, full of exasperating insects that died in droves on the windowsills, full of crushed flowers finding their way under one’s shoe heels to make the rooms drunk with scent.
Her hair, perfumed and dark, was shot through with shafts of copper that startled when they caught light.
She felt so small sometimes, a bundle of delicate bones shaped into a woman. But she was never quite untouched. She had smudges of red dust on her socks, her hair smelled of dust, and that other, low, rich smell, and her waist and breasts were formed and ready. Not a child, not by a long way. Other than her clumsy earnestness and big eyes, she was almost preternaturally grown up. You’d bury your face in her hair, in the copper and the dark, and you were aware of not wanting to crush her, of holding back from too much roughness, but a moment comes when every man forgets. She didn’t make a sound, much of the time. It was like a fever dream, like dying for a small time, and surfacing. Addictive and exhausting.
When you’re done, there is that spent moment when your face is lowered into her hair, eyes closed. Then the scent is cloying, almost drowns you, and because it clings, it seems cheap. You pull out of her, get up, zip up your trousers. Don’t meet her eye. When she looks at you afterwards, she’s clinging to you like that scent. What does she use in her hair? Some kind of oil. No wonder the scent never seems to fade. Too much of it might ruin a shirt.
I smiled again, said, “And here I’ve been, in the same old house. I’ve missed you, Antoinette.”
But she seems to have drawn strength from talking, even if it makes her dizzy. She laughs, leans forward almost drunkenly. “You know, walking to your house I hated you. With every single step I cursed you. I hated everything about your street, about that whole part of town. The green, the oaks, the beautiful houses with their wrought iron gates, the lawns, the little white roses nodding. I hated them all like poison ’til I felt sick with hating it. Can you believe it? I actually felt sick with hate. I hated the beauty and the grace and the loveliness.”
I hadn’t expected this. When she was angry or afraid, she would lapse into that coarse common accent; it was an accent that made the speaker seem more stupid, somehow. Stupid and sometimes worryingly emotional, volatile. Once even, can you believe it, she said huh-uh and shook her head. Stoppit, suh. It set my teeth on edge. Saying it’s soh—instead of “it hurts”.
The music in her was gone, her fine grasp of language, her capacity for beauty. It’s heartbreaking to see that gone in a bright person, to see them replaced by something common, something really below them.
You know just what I mean too. I know you do.
I was thankful she didn’t lapse into it now. She was eloquent, impassioned, and had a good turn of phrase. I’m glad I had given her something, and if she must hate me for all the rest of it, at least she could explain herself adequately. I choose not to show any annoyance.
She leans again, continues, “Wasn’t always like that—first time I saw your house, when I walked over from the bus stop, feeling so proud you’d picked me, and all the other girls had a crush on you and thought you so brilliant, and finally there I was in your study, with all these books, and the paintings, the piano in the lounge. I thought, people live like this. Imagine.” She’s almost bent double, almost spitting as she talks, half-laughing and coughing.
I’m not accustomed to this much emotion expressed so shamelessly. It seems melodramatic, somehow insincere.
I must intervene, before this gets out of hand.
The room seems too bright, the memories are coming back, and more than that. Here his mind is bare, laid out like a chessboard. This man I loved once. I did love him. Here is his mind sprawled in the red light, in front of me: There are orchids, thick flowers like in a hothouse, a sheen on everything like smoked glass. I see the bed, and when the child goes to the bathroom he goes to the stereo, smoking a Sobranie, and plays Schubert until she has collected herself and comes out.
He checks his watch to make sure there is enough time for the cleaner to come in to change the linen. The timing must be precise so that it is before the cleaner comes in. Just before. There’s a pair of red shoes at the foot of the bed, the shoes I bought with the prize money for the poetry contest he told me to enter.
When I wore them at home, my aunt said, you know what those mean, and even though I did, I smiled sweet and said no, Auntie… what do they mean? She tutted and huffed. What do they mean? I asked her again, sweet. I wanted her to say it. I wanted her to say it, the word slut out loud, but she shook her head and blew through her lips and said, no, girl, you too young to know… It’ll make you shy. And I laughed. I’ll wear them in Heaven, Auntie, I said, and she smacked me on the mouth.
I’m laughing now—he gets nervous, and seeing him there, old and white-haired and his fine face and pale eyes paler and worn turns this laugh hitching in my throat to a sob until I double with it. The look on his face is almost kind.
All at once, seeing her hysterical there, I know just what she’s come for. This is a place of ghosts, after all. Every story tells you ghosts must be quieted if they’re to have any peace. It almost hurts, the tenderness I feel at that, knowing I’ve always been able to soothe her, quiet her, until she closes her big eyes and goes sweet and still to that other place. This isn’t retribution; this is a request. Of course.
“Antoinette, my dear,” I say, “calm down.”
The morning is thickening and the sky paling over the hedges of the garden. I venture the ritual question: “Why did you do it, at last?”
Her mouth falls, as if I’ve hit her. She heaves a breath through her nose, shakes her head, and smiles. Her eyes are half-lidded and she sways—from remembering or from tiredness, I can’t tell.
“A little while, maybe two weeks after the seventh time, I went to Evangeline’s fourteenth birthday party. We were going to her uncle’s pool after the school fête. I bought her red lipstick at one of the stalls for R5 and she put it on everyone at the party: five girls. She had her hair up in a ponytail and her mum had done it with henna so it glowed. We went to her uncle’s house in Florida—a double-storey house with a big garden and a pool. It was wonderful, and I just sat there watching everything. I didn’t want to swim, like the others. I don’t know why. I just didn’t like getting undressed, swimming with them. Didn’t feel right.”
She rubs her hand against her forehead. The sound of me clearing my throat, the words, “Go on,” never making it from my mouth, seem deafening to me. She doesn’t notice, rushes, “They were splashing around, showing off. The twins were lying on the warm bricks next to the water, sunning themselves. Evvie was sitting on the edge of the pool with lipstick on, kicking her feet in the water. Pa used to say that was bad luck, to swing your legs like that. He’d say you’re kicking your luck away. She was singing this song. Stupid blêddy—” She winces. “Stupid song. It was playing on the radio all the time. All about like—”
She looks at me, wary as a rabbit, as if waiting for me to laugh, or hit her. She swallows. “About someone going away, and just saying you gonna miss me, you know? You gonna miss everything about me. And you’ll know, you’ll know I’m gone. And—” Her voice catches. “You’ll miss me.”
Her throat trembles, holding it back, the tears and this inane song sung by some brat at a pool party.
“It was just—she sang it like she meant it, you know, like she knew, like she just knew. Like she was this gorgeous thing—just drop-dead gorgeous thing, precious thing…” She clears her throat. “And she was tilting her head so her ponytail shone bright. Cheap lipstick mouth. Voice high and singing, ja, even with that accent you fuckin’ hate, her voice like loose change and I loved her so much for who she was right then. Singing by the bright pool water in the sun. I loved her and loved her like my own sister right that moment, even though she called me a play-white slut, even though she only invited me so they could gossip. I loved her so much it hurt. I can’t explain why—”
When she’s serious her eyes get even bigger and fixed, but her mouth trembles. She leans forward and stares at you but that trembling mouth, the way she repeats herself, that fixed stare—she wants so desperately to be believed that she looks as if she’s lying. Other adults were always a little suspicious of her, especially the women—put most of it down to histrionics. I found it charming at first, that earnestness. It’s such a rare thing in a child nowadays. Maybe that’s why no one trusted it.
She looks at me then, seeing how I can’t understand, can only sit there nodding blandly, as if I always did.
“And I knew all of a sudden what you’d done to me—I’d forgiven and forgiven you and loved you even—but I knew all of a sudden everything you took away from me, everything for always. I didn’t even hate you then, I was just sore—like after—just sore, here.” She presses her fist into her belly. “I was just sad and sore. I couldn’t take it anymore. I smiled at her and when they went inside to change I got up and walked to the oleander tree hanging over the water, and picked up one of the big rocks that ringed the yard, and I jumped into the pool. No one could get it away from me.”
She says it with something like pride. That far-off smile as she sways and says, “Nobody could get me away from it or grab it from me. I held it in the water and it held me down.”
Every so often I’d be overcome with tenderness for her, her memory. I will say that now without hesitation. The sight of a schoolgirl sleeping in a car outside of Pick n Pay while her mother darted for groceries—the girl’s neck tilted, wisp of hair from her ponytail at the little hollow of her throat where her school tie lies loosened and askew. The late afternoon sunlight slanting across her mouth and neck. The picture was too perfect, so poignant somehow that it physically hurt me, and I would have to stop a moment to breathe again, to loosen the knot in my chest.
I don’t want you to think I didn’t suffer too—horribly.
I gather every part of that suffering and tenderness and say, “Oh, my dear. My dear, I am so sorry. Forgive me, Antoinette. Please forgive me.”
She’s silent, staring with those big eyes. I never know if she’s afraid or hating me. She doubts everything. Nothing is ever quite wholly fact to her. It means she doubts herself too, and with her rather obvious, sometimes vulgar need to be loved she drinks in anything said with kindness. I must quiet her one last time, have her close her eyes and sleep, forever this time. I still have life left to me, and we both need the peace from this at last. She sways, stunned.
“Go to bed, my dear. You’re exhausted. Sleep some more. We’ll talk about it all when you wake up. And Antoinette—” I say it before I can stop myself “I did miss you.”
She laughs a little. “Do you remember how once, afterwards, I wanted to fall asleep? I curled up and you took the edge of the sheet and shook it, and said the maid would be coming in at any moment?”
I choke on the words but manage to say, “I remember.”
“Good,” she says. Then furrows her eyebrows, a small child puzzling over something, overtired, “Good,” she mutters. And lies back.
She has been here for weeks, has not disappeared, and only lies perfect and sleeping, warm and breathing on that blue sofa. I must be quiet, all the time. I cannot even risk the creak of the opening door in case of waking her. I cannot risk a sound on of the floorboard in case of waking her. The days go round her and she lies warm and still at the centre, while my breathing catches from being kept so quiet so long, while I wait and watch and cannot move for fear of her eyes opening again. Why has she not left or faded, a ghost as she should be? Ghosts fade when laid to rest, but she lies a woman grown and lovely and alive but sleeping for weeks now. I have not moved. I cannot move. If her eyes open, who knows what she will see.
Mishka Hoosen is the result of an unorthodox education by blacklisted revolutionaries, mad poets, and a cigar-smoking river shaman. Her writing has appeared or is forthcoming in Ons Klyntji, South African Rolling Stone, Chimurenga, New Coin, Bare Fiction, and Hunger Mountain.
Her nonfiction book, Hollow the Bones, deals with narratives of madness and is forthcoming in 2015 from Deep South Books.
Her preferred work spaces have been the tattoo parlour in Grahamstown, boats on the Mekong Delta, army hangouts in Jeddah, Fermoy and Dublin pubs, Eastern Cape farms, university attics, and rooftops. She mainly cares about Cohiba cigars and not getting caught.