Cyrille the storyteller talks and talks and his story reminds me of another one my maman used to tell me during the long September rains when the clouds would fly black and low on the horizon like birds of prey.
“In Matouba, a mother had a daughter who was the apple of her eye. The girl was lovely, very lovely; her mouth was a pink and mauve Jamaican plum; her eyes like two stars out of the firmament. She didn’t want to marry anyone. People came up from Grande-Terre loaded with flowers, fruit and root vegetables to ask for her hand. She acted hard to please, turned up her nose, shook her hair in every direction and went up and locked herself in her room. One day while she was at the attic window, drinking in the cool air that came down from the volcano, she saw a tall, handsome man with a gun slung over his shoulder arrive on a dapple gray horse. She looked and she looked and then went downstairs to find her maman.
“ ‘Mother dear, mother dear, I’ve seen the man I want to marry.’
“Her maman shook her head and said: ‘Pitite an mwen (my child), beware! There’s nothing good about men. You don’t know this man from Adam and he might even be a guiab (a devil). He’ll eat you up.’
“Her daughter refused to listen …”
I, Rosa Ramsaran, I’m not afraid to say that all men are guiabs. There’s no exception to the rule.
When they married me off to Sylvestre Ramsaran, nobody asked for my opinion. I was living happily in my parents’ house. My father’s cattle grazed in tightly-packed herds on his land in the Grands-Fonds, lowing intermittently like the sound of the conch and lifting their black muzzles skyward. On Sundays my sisters and I would tie blue taffeta ribbons in our braids. One day, father called me.
“Sylvestre Ramsaran is coming for a meal. He’s a good fellow, you’ll see. You’ll live in Rivière au Sel. It’s a long way, over on Basse-Terre. But he’ll bring you to see us every month and you’ll also spend each Christmas here.”
Sylvestre Ramsaran arrived at twelve on the dot, a trilby hat on his head, wearing sneakers and looking very pleased with himself.
I said to Gina, my sister:
“Never, I’ll never marry that man!”
“It’s all the books you read that have gone to your head,” Gina retorted. “And besides, what’s so wonderful about living amid the smell of cow dung? If I could leave in your place I would! They say he’s loaded with money, even more than Father, and that he goes to French France all the time.”
Father gave me an expensive wedding because I was the first daughter to leave home. I went to Puerto Rico to buy my pure lace wedding dress and my low, white satin shoes. Bottle upon bottle of Veuve-Clicquot flowed freely, but my tears flowed faster than the champagne. Around 10 p.m. Sylvestre and myself left for Rivière au Sel. Sylvestre didn’t speak to me. At every corner he would sing:
“Amantine, Amantine ro
Rouvè la pot ban mwen
La pli ka mouyé mwen.”37
When we got to Rivière au Sel it was dark. Street lamps that looked as though they were hanging from the thick vegetation lit up patches of the road. You could make out the lighted dots of the cabins.
Sylvestre hurt me. He tore me.
When the sun had risen, I ran out onto the veranda and was suffocated by what I saw. A dark green tangled mass of trees, creepers and parasites, broken here and there by the lighter green of the banana groves. Watching over it all was the formidable mountain. I thought in my heart:
“Oh, God, is this where I’m going to live!”
In the Grands-Fonds, where our family comes from, the land is as flat as the back of your hand. The waves of sugarcane reach to the horizon. Voices are carried on the wings of the wind.
Yet, gradually, to my heart’s surprise, I grew to love Rivière au Sel. A kind of call goes up from the surrounding forest. Climbing the Saint-Charles forest path I would strike off into the depths of the woods, wandering between the columns of trees that held high their crested heads. I would sit between their roots and stay there for hours on end.
Soon, however, I had no time left for that, because I had two sons, Carmélien and Jacques, one after the other, by Sylvestre.
“The iron rod’s38 working well,” he would repeat, so proud of his boys.
I too was proud at first. When the midwife exclaimed: “Sé an ti-gason, oui!” (It’s a boy!) my heart thumped against my breast. But I hadn’t reckoned on Sylvestre’s behavior. As soon as the boys could lift up their little heads he would take them everywhere he went.
“Hey, Sylvestre!” people would call out. “Aren’t you forgetting it wasn’t your belly that carried the boys? A man’s not a woman!”
But he would ignore them or else answer back:
“Tell me about it.”
Sometimes he even took them along when he went hunting thrushes or woodpigeons, and I prayed to the Good Lord my children wouldn’t come back to me with a hole in their heads. But the older they got, the further they grew away from me. Not only did Sylvestre take them away from me but so did school. My heart was drained.
One Sunday while we were having lunch in the Grands-Fonds, I left the men to discuss the slump in the price of bananas and went and joined my mother in the kitchen. She was arranging the fruit salad in dishes with her lovely hands dappled with veins. She listened to me absentmindedly.
“You have the best of husbands and you’re complaining! Does he chase other women? Does he beat you? What you’re telling me is perfectly normal. Boys are made to be with their papa. If you want someone all to yourself, have a little girl.”
A few weeks later I missed my blood and I realized I was pregnant. But once again it was a boy, my third, Alain, and the same thing started up all over again. As soon as Alain could stand on his own two feet, Sylvestre took him for himself. He would take him into the forest and name the trees for him: châtaignier, medicine tree and so on. Out of despair I went to see Mama Sonson. It is said in Rivière au Sel that Mama Sonson can do anything. People even come from far and wide to consult her. It’s thanks to her that Wilfred has remained with his wife, when his heart had already left for Saint-Sauveur with Rose Aimée. It’s thanks to her that Larose is elected mayor of Petit-Bourg year after year, and nobody else ever will be, neither a Communist nor an RPR.39 It was Mama Sonson too who made George’s male member soft and powerless because Eulalie was tired, so tired of all those illegitimate children he was bringing into the house.
When I went to see her, Mama Sonson was amazed.
“Well, it’s the first time someone has asked me something like that!” she cried out. “Boys! All they want is boys to keep their man. You, you want a daughter? Is that what you want? I can’t believe my ears!”
Then she gave me leaves to put in my bath water and potions to drink.
“Pray, pray to the Good Lord,” she urged. “Don’t stop praying, because He alone decides. People don’t realize that my powers are governed by His will.”
A year passed, then once again I missed my blood. But this time, I knew it was a girl from the very first weeks. By the delicate way she swam in my waters. By the very soft whisper of her voice. When evening fell we would chatter until the glimmer of first light, and she would tell me:
“Be patient. Soon I shall be in your arms. Curled up against your breast, gorging myself on your delicious white milk. As I grow up I shall bring you consolation every time you prick yourself on the thorns of life.”
One night I had a dream. I found myself in India, our country of origin about which, alas, we no longer know very much. I was in a village with houses built of dried cow dung. In a courtyard some women were putting a baby into my arms whose face was wrapped in very fine white linen, and they were saying to me: “Here is Shireen.”
The next day I gave birth. I didn’t even feel any pain. The baby simply found its own way and slipped between my thighs, not covered with blood and fecal matter like the others, but clean and dry with silky skin! The midwife put her into my arms, exclaiming:
“What a lovely baby the Good Lord has given you!”
And she really was lovely.
Light-skinned, not black-black like Sylvestre and his boys. Eyes the color of smoke. Lips as pink as hibiscus buds.
“Shireen?” Sylvestre shouted. “What sort of a name is that?”
For once I stood my ground, and it was as Shireen that she came out of the church in her lace dress that swept the floor. Everyone was amazed. They couldn’t understand why I was making such a fuss about a little girl whereas I had already been blessed with three boys.
How can I describe the happiness a child can give? However much the people from the post-natal clinic repeated at each session: “Be careful, Madame Ramsaran. She’s not gaining enough weight,” I preferred her to the three baby bulldogs I’d already given birth to. I watched her sleep in her cradle in a cloud of tulle, her arms joined above her head like a dancer’s. I watched her distort her flower bud of a mouth into a yawn. I watched her breathe.
I watched her live. I had all I needed. I no longer felt Sylvestre climb on top of me and dig his knees into my thighs, then soak me with his liqueur. This happiness lasted three months, three months during which I was overcome with joy and thanked the Good Lord.
Then, one evening, I was in bed, I heard a thick, cavernous cough, a cough that signaled nothing good, coming from the other side of the wall in the room where she slept. I rushed in, and there she was with her eyes wide open, no longer sparkling with life, but dull as an animal’s in its death throes, her mouth swarming with whitish worms. Her heart had already stopped beating.
I wanted to die, but I couldn’t. I kept my eyelids shut tight, so tight, for the darkness to enter all of me as well.
I asked myself, why, oh why was the Good Lord punishing me in this way. I couldn’t understand.
As for Sylvestre, he merely repeated: “Everyone could see she hadn’t come to stay. She was as thin as a guava stick. I’ll give you another little girl.”
And he kept his word. After a few weeks I felt another child moving in the darkness of my womb. But I didn’t want his daughter. I wanted to expel it before it was due. But I felt it clutching to my inside, a voracious parasite, feeding off my flesh and blood. I had to bear my cross to the very end, for nine interminable months, until she emerged, just like her father and her brothers, so different from my Shireen.
The heart does not accept orders.
I bore a grudge against her for living while my beloved Shireen had gone. For growing up and getting bigger while her sister was nothing but a wretched pile of little bones at the bottom of a box. I am guilty, I am the one to blame for all this unhappiness. For you don’t need to look very far; a child’s misfortunes can always be traced to the parents.
Yes, when that incredible thing happened to us, when Vilma, Vilma who never got her head out of a book, went and set up house with that man, I felt that something wasn’t natural; I could feel the Good Lord starting to put his revenge in motion to crush and confound me. I wanted to confide in someone. But whom? Who would have listened to me? I carried my secret in solitude. Around me the men were making decisions, talking of killing her, of killing him. In the end, they didn’t kill anyone. They went to negotiate with Francis Sancher. They didn’t tell me anything about it, for, according to them, this was men’s business that was settled between men.
When they came back with long faces, they didn’t tell me anything either. I understood immediately though that their visit had served no purpose at all. They got together on the veranda, and I could hear Carmélien, as hotheaded as ever since he was back from French France where the white folks had treated him so badly, talking again of sharpening his machete and going to lie in wait for him along the Saint-Charles forest path.
“Go on!” I shouted. “If it’s killing you want, finish me off. Don’t you think we’ve got enough misery!”
They kept their voices down, but I knew. I knew they were talking revenge.
For three months I stayed put, working myself up into a state, with that remorse still gnawing at my heart. Lying beside Sylvestre, who never gives up, and night after night takes his pleasure, despite the years creeping up on all of us, I would repeat to myself: “It’s my fault. I’m to blame for what’s happening.”
Then one morning when Sylvestre, Carmélien and Jacques had gone down to La Pointe in the Toyota, and Alix and Alain were at school, I made up my mind. I remember the bougainvillea were bleeding their blood over the orange plumes of the birds of paradise, I remember the sea between the trees was turquoise green, calm and peaceful. I remember it was a beautiful day.
Regardless of the pain that confines her to a rocking chair in front of the television, Madame Mondésir came out onto the veranda to spy on me. I passed her by, head up, with merely a “How are you feeling in yourself this morning?”
I didn’t listen to her litany of moans and went on my way.
I’d heard a lot about Francis Sancher’s dogs, but I had never seen them with my own two eyes. Black as coal with red patches on their feet, as if Hell had spewed them up on this earth still bearing its fiery traces. On seeing me they started to bark like the damned. Francis Sancher came out.
“Don’t be frightened,” he said. “They’re the gentlest creatures on earth.”
As I didn’t move, he came forward and took them by the collar. Anybody who says that man is wicked, a public menace, can’t have looked him in the eyes. His eyes are the color of the sand on the beach at Viard when the tide goes out leaving behind luminous little shells. They tell a story, a very sad and bitter story. Even though I am forty-five, how I would have liked to sit in a rocking chair and listen to him for hours on end, evening after evening, while the shadows enfolded us!
With an emotion in my voice that I had never felt before, I said:
“She has your good looks,” he replied.
I was amazed. Nobody had ever commented on my good looks before, and I don’t think Vilma is particularly good-looking. Black-black like Sylvestre. What I liked was her hair, her braids that grew longer every day between my hands. Alas, when she was fourteen she went down to Beauté-Coiffure in Petit-Bourg, and without even asking me had them cut off.
“Where is she?” I asked. “I’d like to speak to her.”
He smiled.
“Sit down. She won’t be long.”
He brought me a glass of water, which was probably all there was in the house, but it was cool and fragrant. He sat down not far from me on a whitewood chair, and after a while said:
“My mother must have white hair by now, whereas when I knew her it was black and shiny like yours. She never did love me very much. Never mind, she’s my mother, the only one I’ll ever have!”
“Why do you say that?” I stammered. “A mother can’t help but love her children.”
He shrugged his shoulders.
“It would be too easy. My father, you see, only married my mother because she was the daughter of one of the richest cafeiteros.40 With all due respect, I’m sure he made love to her without even speaking to her. Difficult to love children born under those conditions. In order to be able to love, you have to have received a lot, a lot in return!”
That was me he was describing!
“How do you know that?” I exclaimed.
“From the time I was called ‘curandero’ I realized that the heart and the mind took precedence over everything else and that the body merely obeys.”
I nodded in approval. It was sweet, so sweet to talk about myself that I couldn’t stop.
“How true! Life’s problems are like trees. We see the trunk, we see the branches and the leaves. But we can’t see the roots, hidden deep down under the ground. And yet it’s their shape and nature and how far they dig into the slimy humus to search for water that we need to know. Then perhaps we would understand.”
He sighed.
“Nobody ever understands, Madame Ramsaran. Everyone is afraid of understanding. Take me, for instance. As soon as I tried to understand, to ask for an explanation for all those corpses, all that blood, they called me every name under the sun. As soon as I refused to go along with the slogans, they kept a serious eye on me. Nothing is more dangerous than a man who tries to understand.”
“I would say you are a man of great wisdom!” I murmured.
He smiled.
“Wisdom? I wouldn’t say that. Rather that I tried to untangle the skeins of life.”
“Tell me about it.”
There we were chatting on terms so intimate for the first time in my life, with things I wanted to say swirling around in my head, when Vilma arrived. When she saw me, she screamed:
“Go away! Go away! What are you doing here?”
He tried to intervene, but I was already outside.
I ran into the undergrowth until I was out of breath, and at one point my body refused to go on and felt so weak that I sat down on the root of a tree. Water streamed down my cheeks.
“In order to be able to love, you have to have received a lot, a lot in return,” he had said.
I had never received any. My hands were empty. All I had ever done was serve.
After an hour I felt the weight of a presence, I looked up and saw Xantippe standing dead upright under a pink poui. When he noticed that I was watching him, he turned his back on me and slipped into the heart of the forest. I stayed sitting a good while longer and then got up.
Now Francis Sancher is dead. But he alone has come to an end. The rest of us are alive and continue to live as we’ve always done. Without getting along together. Without liking ourselves. Without sharing anything. The night is waging war and grappling with the shutters. Soon, however, it will have to surrender to the day and every rooster from every henhouse will crow its defeat. The banana trees, the cabins and the slopes of the mountain will gradually float to the surface of the shadows and prepare to confront the dazzling light of day. We shall greet the new face of tomorrow and I shall say to this daughter of mine:
“I gave birth to you, but I misloved you. I neglected to help you flower and you grew stunted. It’s not too late for our eyes to meet and our hands to touch. Give me your forgiveness.”