The time to go down to the Gully is when the sun has set, when the water is black, in places quiet like a dark hole over the black of nothingness, in others running and leaping over rocks, indistinguishable to the naked eye. As a child I used to go down to the Gully at the end of every afternoon and I would stay there for hours on end. I had discovered how good the water tastes at that hour when the night gradually rolls in. I would huddle up under the leaves of the giant philodendron and hear their angry voices:
“Where has she disappeared to again? Why don’t they leave her there!”
“That child deserves a good hiding. But her papa won’t let anyone lay a finger on her.”
When the noise of voices had died down, I would take off my dress and then all my clothes. I would slip into the water that burned from the heat of the day and penetrated to the very depths of my body. I thrilled to this rough fondling. Then I sat on the bank and dried myself with the wind.
The time to go down to the Gully is when the sun has set and the sky is round and hollow like a painted shell above our heads.
Sometimes when I couldn’t sleep in the middle of the night I would tiptoe along the corridor that went through the center of the house. On the right I could hear my father snoring; he had not yet married Dinah, the girl from Saint-Martin, and had just finished making love with Julia, our maid. On the left, a ray of light shone from under the door of my brothers’ room. One of them, probably Aristide, must have been reading some dirty book. In the garden the dogs ran up to me, whining and wagging their tails. They wanted to follow me, but I chased them away for at night the Gully belonged only to me. I hate the sea, noisy and purple, that tangles your hair. I don’t particularly like the rivers, slow-flowing and murky. I only like the gullies, alive, even violent. I bathe there. I sleep on their banks inhabited by batrachians. I twist my ankles on their slippery rocks. This is my realm and mine alone. Ordinary people are afeared, believing the place to be the lair of spirits. So you never meet anyone there. So that when I stumbled on his body, invisible in the dark like a devil’s darning needle,9 I thought here’s a man like myself who has come looking for me.
Solitude is my companion. She has cradled and nourished me. She has never left me up to this very day. People talk and talk, but they don’t know what it’s like to emerge burning hot from the stone-cold womb of your mother, to say farewell to her from the very first moment you enter this world. My father wiped his red eyes. He had loved his black-skinned Rosalie, his Rosalie Sorane with her breasts the color of aubergine.
“Be brave, Monsieur Lameaulnes!” the midwife kept saying.
My father did not have any daughters. His first wife, Aurore Dugazon, who has since died of a fibroma, gave him only boys. Three boys, one after the other. So he took me in his arms and poured his hot tears over my face. But from that moment on I didn’t want his love. I didn’t want to give him mine. He was guilty.
For if he had left her alone, Rosalie Sorane, if he had let her sleep at her mama’s house, her mama who sat five times a week in the market on the rue Hincelin selling tomatoes, okra and green beans and wanted her daughter to go and study at the university in French France, Rosalie Sorane would not have been dead at eighteen, drained of her young blood and lying with cold feet between two embroidered linen sheets.
My father wrapped me in a blue baby’s cape, since Rosalie Sorane had wanted a boy and had prepared all her layette in this color, and then laid me in the back of his big American car. When we arrived at Rivière au Sel after an hour’s drive, it was dark. A cool wind was blowing down the sides of the mountain, its massive silhouette cut out like a shadow show. Aurore Dugazon, pale and sickly, was sitting on the veranda. My father passed her by without as much as a look, as he always did, and handed me to Minerve, the maid, who had rushed out on hearing the car.
“We’ll christen her next Saturday!” was all he said.
The following Saturday I was baptized at the church in Petit-Bourg: Almira (the name of my grandmother, my father’s mother) Rosalie Sorane. Because however much my father was on first-name terms with all the bank directors, the president of the chamber of commerce and the president of the tourist board, he could not change a child born of adultery into a legitimate one. Despite all that, I was never called anything else but Mira Lameaulnes.
At the age of five I ran away for the first time. I could not accept the fact there was no mama somewhere on this earth for me. I was convinced she was hiding in the mountains, she was guarded by the giants of the dense forest and sleeping between the huge toes of their roots. One day when I had been looking for her since morning, I followed a forest path. I was dragging my feet along. Tired to death. Then I stumbled on a rock and tumbled down to the bottom of a gully, hidden under the mass of vegetation. I have never forgotten that first meeting with the water, the scarcely audible babble and the smell of rotting humus.
When they found me after hunting for three days and three nights, my brother Aristide said mockingly:
“Your mama was a Negro wench who took in men. How did you get the idea she’s up in the mountains? By now she’s probably under our feet roasting in Hell, her skin scorched like pig’s crackling.”
He could be as spiteful as he liked, however, it didn’t bother me. I had found my mother’s bed.
Ever since that day, every time my heart is wounded by the spitefulness of the inhabitants of Rivière au Sel, sharpening their knives of malicious words, I go down to the Gully. I go down on the anniversary of Rosalie Sorane’s death, which is also my birthday, and I try to imagine what life would be like if she were here watching me grow up, waiting for me on the veranda as I come home from school and explaining to me all the mysteries of a woman’s body that I have to discover by myself. It’s no use relying on Dinah!
I was very fond of Aurore Dugazon, Aristide’s mama, who was so pale, so pale you knew she wouldn’t live. When she died they covered all the mirrors with black and purple shawls so that she wouldn’t come and look at herself, lamenting her lost youth.
“Good Lord, she looks just like a bride!” people said.
Aristide locked himself up in his room. It was my father who went to fetch him and threatened to beat him if he didn’t come and give her a last kiss before the coffin was nailed down.
I thought he was going to die too that day! That’s why we were both ready for Dinah, the second wife, when she turned up one morning from Saint-Martin. Aristide had warned me:
“You’ll see how I’m going to teach her her place.”
But he didn’t have to. It wasn’t us who taught her her place.
At first Dinah blossomed like a lily. In the morning she would sing in front of her window which would be opened wide to let in the cool air from the mountains. She had the entire house scrubbed with vetiver and bundles of leaves. The air was heavy with perfume. In the evening she would tell us stories.
Soon, alas, we saw her languish and wilt like grass deprived of morning dew. My father no longer spoke to her. He passed her by without as much as a glance. At table he would push his plate away after the first mouthful. In the evening he went out or else locked himself up in one of the bedrooms in the attic with a woman he’d picked up God knows where, and we could hear them laugh and laugh behind the closed door. Whenever my eyes met his he would sneer:
“If looks could kill.”
It was true I was suffocating with hatred and wondering what I could think up to hurt him. That’s why I let myself be influenced by Aristide. In actual fact I loved him only like a brother. But I thought I had found my happiness in this taste for evil and forbidden fruit.
Very soon, even that was no longer enough. Ever since I had been expelled from my fourth paying school, I did nothing but shoot up joylessly like a plant going to seed. I started to have a dream, always the same dream, night after night. I was shut up in a house without doors or windows and I was trying to get out, but couldn’t. Suddenly someone knocked on a wall that cracked and crumbled and I came face to face with a stranger, as solid as a tree, who rescued me.
I killed time during the day as best I could. At one point, Aristide got it into his head to find me work at the nurseries. I would arrange bouquets for the brides and wreaths for the dead. But all the men could do while I was there was devour me with their lecherous eyes. So that didn’t last very long. Sometimes my father would look at me and say:
“I’ll have to find you a husband! When I’ve got time for you.”
I didn’t even bother to answer.
Life began when I went down to the Gully. One evening, very much like any other, when the air was full of fireflies just like any other, I set off down the familiar path. I was about to go near the water when I stumbled on his body hidden by the philodendron leaves. He sat up and asked:
“Is it you? Is it you?”
I shone my flashlight on his face in the dark. I recognized him at once.
“Were you waiting for me?” I whispered.
“I didn’t expect you so soon,” he stammered.
I bent over him:
“You think it’s too soon? Me, I’ve been waiting for you for twenty-five years and nothing ever happened. I was going to give up.”
“Twenty-five years? How come twenty-five years?” he asked.
I laid my hand on his shoulder. He was shaking all over.
“What are you afraid of?” I asked.
“Of you of course. How will you do it?”
I got right up close and pressed my mouth against his, dry, lifeless and unresponsive.
“Like that!”
After that kiss he stared at me with eyes crazed with incomprehensible terror.
“Is that all?”
I laughed.
“No! Let’s go on if you want.”
I unbuttoned his dark blue shirt, undid his stiff leather belt. He didn’t say a word. He was like a child with a grown-up. We made love on the bed of leaves at the foot of the giant tree ferns. He succumbed, without resistance, but watched my every movement as if he thought I would deal him some fatal blow. Then he lay motionless a long while beside me and finally he said:
“My name is Francis Sancher.”
“I know that, silly,” I answered.
He turned towards me.
“You’re not the one I’ve been waiting for. Who are you?”
I got up and went down towards the water that sparkled black between the rocks.
“I’m surprised you don’t know who I am,” I laughed. “The people from Rivière au Sel tell all sorts of stories about me.”
“They run from me like the plague. Nobody speaks to me.”
“Not even Mosquito?”
“Mosquito?”
“Moïse, if you prefer. That’s how they call your friend the postman. Hasn’t he mentioned me?”
He didn’t reply.
In the dark I could hear the heavy tread of the toads as they hunted insects under the leaves. Suddenly, the wind felt icy on my shoulders and I got out of the water to put on my clothes. He continued to watch me in silence. As I was leaving, he asked:
“Will I see you again?”
“Looks as though you’ve taken a liking to it!” I called out over my shoulder.
The people of Rivière au Sel don’t like me. The women pray to the Holy Mother when they pass me by. The men recall their nocturnal dreams when they soaked their sheets and they’re ashamed. So they defy me with their eyes to hide their desire.
Why? Probably because I’m too beautiful for their ugliness, too light-complexioned for the blackness of their hearts and skins. Despite appearances my father is afraid of me. He can badger his overseers and his Haitian workers. He can rule with an iron hand his children from his second marriage, not to mention Dinah, his very own zombie. He can dismiss the maids at the snap of his fingers, when he is tired of them or when they stand up to him. With me, it’s different. He knows the body of Rosalie Sorane is between us. Aristide too is afraid of me, of my moods, my fits as he calls them. When I arrived in Rivière au Sel, wrapped in my blue baby’s cape, Aristide had just turned three. He let go of his mother’s hand for me. We grew up like two savages. We know each other’s secrets. But I have never taken him down to the Gully. That place is mine. It’s my realm and my refuge.
Aristide says he could never live far from the mountains. Every morning he delves deep into their belly and returns with his backpack full of yellow-footed thrushes, black woodpeckers, partridges and woodpigeons that he has limed among the ferns and that he keeps in bamboo cages at the bottom of the nurseries. His realm is his greenhouse of orchids. Those people who say his heart is as hard as stone don’t know him. His heart is as tender as a little child’s.
The day I met Francis Sancher down in the Gully I came across Aristide smoking on the veranda.
“Where have you been hanging around again?” he growled.
I showed him my back and went up to my room. He followed me and plopped himself down in the rocking chair. I started arranging my hair for the night. Then I began my questions, being careful with my intonation as I knew how jealous he could be.
“What are people saying about Francis Sancher?”
His eyes burnt right through me.
“Why, are you interested in him?”
“Isn’t everyone interested in him round here?”
“People say he’s a Cuban. When Fidel opened the doors of his country, he left.”
“Why did he come here, where there’s no work and nothing to do?”
“That’s the question!”
There was silence. Then he went on:
“Listen, I’m going to tell you a story.
“One Sunday at Mass, Ti-Marie saw a man she hadn’t seen before, all dressed in white, wearing a Panama hat. On leaving the church she asked her godmother: ‘Godmother, oh Godmother, did you see that handsome man in a Panama hat? Do you know his name?’ ”
I shrugged my shoulders.
“Stop your silly stories! What do you think I am, a baby?”
He got up and went out without saying a word.
Night is not made for sticking in bed like a cartwheel stuck in the mud of a cane field. Night is made for dreaming wide-awake. It is made for reliving the sparse moments of happiness that make up the day. I relived the moments I spent with Francis Sancher. Up till then, I had caressed only one familiar body, that held no mystery and was as close to mine as the trunk of the candlewood is to the epiphytical philodendron. Now I had to discover what lay behind this unfamiliar physique. Like Ti-Marie, in love at first sight with the stranger in the Panama hat, all dressed in white, I had to find out who he was.
At breakfast my father was fidgeting impatiently like an unruly horse. He started on Joby, the eldest of his children from his second marriage, a sickly boy who was scared of everything.
“Why do I spend my money sending you to school, eh? You’re no better than those Haitian niggers carting manure in my nurseries.”
For once Dinah protested:
“Remember he was sick with the dengue fever up until yesterday.”
He pounced on her.
“Shut your mouth when I’m talking to my children!”
Then he turned to Aristide.
“What do you mean by clearing the savanna, in Heaven’s name?”
Aristide did not lose his calm and went on quietly to finish his coffee.
“I went to Martinique and visited the Balata gardens. Some guy had the idea of growing all sorts of flowers and plants in his grandmother’s ‘change of air’ property. The tourists come from all over and pay admission. Why not us? We’ve got acres of land and just the right climate.”
“Except that tourists never come round here!” he sneered.
“They’ll come if there’s something to see!”
I knew they were going to start bickering and to go for each other like dogs, so I went out onto the veranda. Morning is my favorite time of day. The leaves are dancing gently on the trees freshly woken by the sun. The air smells of water.
Curled up in the rocking chair where Dinah cultivates her solitude from six in the evening onwards, I saw Mosquito hand over the post to Cornélia.
If ever anybody followed and spied on me with his slit eyes, it was Mosquito. One day I was walking along the ridge at Dillon, where you can see the clouds scampering over the sea, when I met him wandering like a lost soul. He smiled at me.
“Hello, sweetie! Can I walk along the road with you a little way?”
I did not even take the trouble to reply. He stood fidgeting for a moment and then went off with his tail between his legs.
That morning, however, he seemed a godsend and I ran out to him.
“Take me to the shop. I want to see if they have any writing paper.”
I wasn’t too sure how to get the conversation on to Francis Sancher, when I noticed a letter in the basket where he kept the bundles of mail tied up with different-colored elastic bands. It had a rare and unusual name, Francisco Alvarez-Sanchez, so different from those in Rivière au Sel who were called Apollon, Saturne, Mercure, Boisfer, and Boisgris. The masters really had fun baptizing their slaves!
I realized immediately who it was, but I acted innocent.
“Does he live in Rivière au Sel?”
“Put my letter down!” he shouted. “Don’t you know you could go to jail for that if you were in America!”
What does he know about America? Aristide went to America once. For an orchid exhibition in Monterey. He told me about the white birds and the trees carved by the wind.
I laid my hand on his knee, hard and pointed like a pebble from the river, and he began to tremble so much that I took pity on this ugly body that would never know what love is.
“What do you know about him?”
He attempted a laugh, but his eyes were gleaming like an animal’s.
“What will you give me if I tell you what I know? A kiss?”
I didn’t bother to answer.
“His family comes from here and he’s trying to trace them,” he stammered. “They were white Creoles who fled after abolition.”
“Is that all?” I looked him up and down. “Look, Moïse, if you want your kiss, you’d better find out something better than that.”
And thereupon I got out of his van and slammed the door. People were already staring at us.
I waited a week, two weeks, but Mosquito never came to see me. I went down to the Gully every night, but Francis Sancher never came back.
Back home, I sent Aristide away. He didn’t understand what was going on and I moistened my pillow with tears of salt.
Love, like death, takes you by surprise. It does not march in beating the gwo-ka.10 Its foot slowly sinks into the soft earth of the heart. Suddenly I lost my sleep, I lost the inclination to drink and eat. All I could think about was the time spent in the Gully, which apparently was never to be relived since he had forgotten me.
It was a Monday. I remember it was Monday because my father went down to La Pointe once a week and lunched with his cousin Edgar the cardiologist, whom he can’t stand. The night unlocked the door to the wind outside. You should always beware of the wind outside, beware of its demented voice that booms and bounces across hills and savannas, that creeps into every nook and cranny and sows chaos, even in the closed calabashes of our heads. It was the wind that got it into my head. There I was, lying on my bed, when it began to whirl around me, pestering me:
“Go on! Go on! Go to him! Don’t sit there crying your eyes out!”
I had just got back from the deserted Gully whose waters had wrapped themselves round my spurned body like a shroud. Why had he said: “Will I see you again?” if he didn’t know the meaning of these words? If he didn’t know he was setting up another meeting?
All the way back, the oblong moon had bobbed in front of me, laughing at my grief:
“Mira, Mira Lemeaulnes, what’s come over you? You’re nothing but a rag doll crying for a man.”
Now that I know the end of the story, my story, and I ended up like Ti-Marie being eaten alive, I can’t understand why I placed all my hopes in this man whom I didn’t know from Adam. Probably because he came from Elsewhere. From over there. From the other side of the water. He wasn’t born on our island of malice that has been left to the hurricanes and the ravages caused by the spitefulness in the hearts of black folks.
From Elsewhere.
Yes, it was the wind outside that planted this idea in my head under the sweltering heat of my hair. A crazy, senseless idea since I was going to give my life and my love to someone who was waiting for death.
At the crack of dawn I threw everything that came to hand into a wickerwork basket. And then I went out. The wind outside had died down. The water from the rain flattened the tall bright green grass as it washed it afresh. Everything seemed to be waiting for the sun to make up its mind. For a moment I got scared. I saw myself as a mad woman wearing a dress of leaves, setting off along the road to misfortune. I almost turned back. But then I remembered the miserable life I was leaving back there, and my longing to live, at last, in the sun got the better of me. I set off down the road.