A Separate Country (8 page)

No, this is not precisely the woman who met your father. I must try again. Why do I write this? It is this pen. It is smooth and black, edged in gold with a gold nib. It fits my hand perfectly, as if it isn’t there. I’ve never noticed it before, but how many inanities have I forced through it onto paper? Thousands. Letters and notes crossing the city year after year. Have I written anything to remember me by? This pen questions me. Will I write something of use? It is a beautiful pen.

You could not understand the girl who met the General without meeting the girl who flung her clothes off for the thrill of being watched, who remained chaste even so, and who slippered about the streets like a Helen without a war and no idea how to start one. Silly girl, I still love her. But do not let me catch you posing nude for old men, Lydia. I have friends at a convent that would take you,
chère
.

I was a young woman but still a child, stepping along the banquettes with my dress caught up in my hand to avoid the mud and the sharp corners of the boxes piled everywhere. Young and beautiful. What has happened to that skin, that shiny hair? Who was that girl? I hardly recognize her now. She was buoyed by desire, it carried her down toward the opera house: her desire and the desire of the men who lingered in the dissipating fog of her lavender scent. I remember that she wanted to be touched, and yet on every block down Royal and over toward the Opera she was not even brushed in passing. Crowds parted, children ceased their jump roping, delivery boys gave wide. I was the blushing, buxom figurehead of a cutter parting the sea of mortals. I trembled. So much power.

This is what I remember. The truth is lost, and unimportant anyway. This is what I remember: I was walking to meet a man who had promised that no one would ever know my name, that he would be discreet. I looked classical and Greek, he said, and I felt it. I had power bestowed on me in curves and color and angles. I had little idea of what to do with it, what I was expected to do with it, what others did with it. The only idea I had, a dream really, was of soft, dark tapestries encircling me and a man, some man powerful and deep-eyed. We fell and fell without end in sweet air. I knew nothing of such things, of course, and so I found myself skipping along the banquette to a rendezvous with a failed painter. Posing for him seemed obvious.

The little man was pocked and the corners of his mouth were wet. He wore black, his legs were bowed and thin. Bent and charred twigs. I lay on his chaise while he fiddled with the stove, cursing it until it warmed. He made tea. I heard the cups nervously twittering on their plates when he came back into the room. I took pleasure in saying I was not thirsty. I was cruel. I had draped my clothes over his washbasin, as there were no chairs. The yellow satin drape fit me perfectly, and I arranged it as I’d seen in sculpture. Modestly at first. He stood behind his easel and unknotted his cravat. There were no other paintings in his room, a third-floor garret around the corner from the Opera with a view of the muddy river. I smelled fish and burning sugar, wonderful scents to me now. He scratched at the canvas with a brush he held like a pen. He asked me to pull the drape down and I pulled it down to my waist. I gathered my hair behind my head and leaned on one hand. The other traced my hip. He came over to adjust the drape, and when I felt his hand sliding across me, I bit him. He yelled and I screamed theatrically. He begged me to silence. I put on my clothes while he stood in the corner, staring. There was no paint on the canvas. He asked me to have mercy on a forgotten man.

I am not cruel, but I was very cruel that day. How could I know what I possessed without seeing it reflected in someone else’s face, in the way they walked toward me, in the way they cowered? I was rapt during my walk home. It had been a joy, a secret had been revealed. I was mindless of anything but the fast-expanding boundary of my world, so much so that I neglected the mud and the nails in the boxes piled along my way. When I arrived home, disheveled and dirty, trailing threads of my dress like a ruined train, my mother thought I’d been attacked.
I fell,
I told her, and giggled.

Silly little girl. Had I been an ape with a bosom the old man might have still invited me up to his studio. The intoxicated mind sees what it desires everywhere. And how long did I think I could play the coquette? Not forever. I write this now while listening to one of my ten, soon to be eleven, children pulling another’s hair. Perhaps that child is you, Lydia.

My city: Fat men in vests trading cotton and rice straight from the quay. The horses in their stalls at the fairgrounds. Smoke on the streetcar, watermelon cast into the water of the St. John by playful boatmen. Drunk men, men with monkeys, men without shoes, men without sense, men in tall hats and thick beards. Mandolins on the galleries. Beautiful boys, deformed boys, strong boys. Christ in every possible pose and dress, in every church, on every street, above every rambling of headstones.
Corpus. Iesus nazarenus rex iudaeorum.
King of the Creoles. King of the Spanish. King of the Irish, the Germans, the English, the
américain
. King of the Negroes. Christ everywhere. Christ above me, Christ below me, Christ at my right hand, Christ at my left hand. The Creoles had their cathedral, and then the Irish. Even the Germans built their own big church down by the tracks near the wharf. We prayed. Flowers sprouted in walls, through walls, around walls. All things grew. We picked sprigs of jasmine and set them behind our ears. We gaped at the dirty girls with bright white teeth hawking Creole tomatoes down along the market. In the faubourgs, we knew a place where the old quadroon slept beneath her awning and served good coffee and cold milk. Palms rattled and scraped, dry and green, in the air above her. We craved her chicken, baked in rosemary and served with cress.

I smoked cigars and rode horses. I rode them fast so that the gaudy new houses lately raised by Americans in our neighborhood—Creoles called it
the country
—would streak together until they were indistinguishable and mere sloppings of color. Mud in my hair and on my nose, hooves clattering over canal bridges. Riding away from town, the wilderness stretched to my right. There were trails, and at night, campfires ringed by men in foreign clothes cackling nonsense. Italians and Germans. Sometimes there were families of negroes, but they had no campfires and tried to hide from me. They were like Indians. I smiled at them. I was not the law, I thought.

I now know that I was naïve, and that the law always follows certain of us whatever our intentions. It was good that I was also a private girl and hated telling anyone anything about my adventures. The negresses often had children at their breast and others sitting by or climbing the old knotty cypresses. During the day they were alone. I brought them what I could sneak out of the house, usually bonbons. Sometimes it was pralines made by the colored women down at the market. They were little things, luxuries, ridiculous things of no value in the deep woods of their exile.

Do not think too much of your mother, do not think she was a particularly charitable or kind girl. Those people in the woods were my playthings, my amusements. My father never caught me carrying off supplies into the woods, though I’m sure he suspected.

This was the way we maintained civility amid cruelty: we’d rather not know, and we wished there was nothing to know in the first place.

I cast myself out from my family, although they never ceased their efforts to bring me back. I roamed, I ate ices straight from the Italians making them on the street, I studied dirt. I loved my family, but I would not be their possession. I hope they understand that now.

I fell in with other outcasts and they became my family. Michel Martin, who you know as Father Mike, Rintrah King the clown, and the lovely fine-fingered and light-footed boy who had named himself Paschal Girard because no one had bothered to gift him a name. He was a boy of other worlds, a hunter of fairies and fleeting beauty.

The most important thing that ever happened to me, the thing that changed my life and eventually your father’s, long before we were married, happened the night the four of us—Michel, Rintrah, Paschal, and I—first came together as mere children. Nothing about my life was the same afterward. I sometimes wish it had never happened, but now I cannot imagine who I would have become without them.

*   *   *

I went to the backswamp as I’ve told you I liked to do. I was older then, older than you, old enough to have become a woman and still young enough to trust in the protection of my horse and in my mastery of the close dark of the backwoods paths I knew by heart.

Michel, one of the altar boys in our parish, followed me that night on foot. We had been at Mass, and as I was dipping my fingers in the holy water on my way out, Michel drew me into an alcove guarded by a blue Virgin.

“Why do you run?”

“I don’t live here at the church, Michel. My bed is at home, and that’s where I will be soon.”

“I long to be in that bed.”

“You would not be in it long. Father would toss you out quick enough.”

“So you would have me to bed except for your father?”

“Except for my father and the fact that I have no earthly idea why I would want you in my bed.”

“Do you not? Really?”

“No.”

“I love you.”

“You are a silly boy. I’ll go now.”

“Come outside with me.”

“No.”

“To the woods.”

Always so brazen, he was.

“Hmmm. What do you think, blessed Mother of God who looks over Michel’s shoulder? You look so sweet this evening. Guide me, Holy Mary. Is this the boy, and do you approve of love in the dark wood with a drunk boy, rolling around on the sticks and vines?”

“Who’s drunk?” He smiled and sniffed at his robes. He was still an altar boy. Years before he had discovered where Father Achille kept his liquor, and now Mass was always great fun for Michel. But I knew that he would not like the idea of the Virgin overhearing his rather clumsy seduction. He was a boy who thought it was possible to hide from God so long as he wasn’t in sight of His monuments, His churches, steeples, tombs, and priests. He was a boy who thought enough of the Lord to hide.

How old was I, perhaps fifteen? I knew Michel had enjoyed the favors of girls and women. He was bigger than most men. I had seen him swimming in the Bayou St. John, and I knew his body. He was broad and thick, his arms were brown and violent and tense. Webs of veins lay upon his forearms when he turned them up to the sky and called upon God to bless his swimming hole. He joked that he was John the Baptist, but I believe now that it was not much of a joke. He had a beard before he was sixteen.

He was an outcast in his own home, among his family. He had grown up outside, very rarely and briefly allowed inside, never walked on their worn rugs or sipped from their glass. He took his meals on their back stoop and studied his letters and Scripture by lamp while battling the mosquitoes and moths and beetles drawn to him. His father, the sweet and jolly clerk, believed in sin and the personification of sin, and he saw sin in his son. He saw sin in a son who had been four years old when he was first exiled to the yard. The father had been afraid of the son, afraid of contamination. His wife believed it, too, though she always took great care with the food she set out on the back step, and found the best tent available once Michel outgrew the lean-to. Now the son was bigger than the father and could force himself upon the household if he liked, but he chose to stay outside. When it rained, there was always the church.

I should have known not to trifle with him in that alcove, or to call on the Holy Mother in his presence. I knew better, but I was also a young woman who wanted to feel her own force, to see it move about in the world. Michel wanted to join me in my bed, and I wanted to make him suffer for it. My mistake was thinking that my bed, or more likely the little clearing in back of the church property, was the only destination he had in mind.

“You’ll have to catch me.” I said this knowing that he had no horse and wouldn’t know how to ride one if he had managed to steal one. He had very little, Michel did.

“I will.”

I rode off expecting that the next time I saw Michel would be at Sunday Mass.

It was October, I remember that because the oaks were beginning to turn and the air was clean and light and sharp. The mosquitoes and june bugs were gone, and I could ride as hard as I wanted and not feel them against my face, only the cool, moist air. I clattered past Creole families lounging on broad porches, and American families sitting down to suppers of cold chicken and biscuits steaming and covered in lace. In the twilight so much was clear, I thought I could see through walls.

I was agitated. I was not used to thinking of a boy’s body on mine, I was not accustomed to my curves or the hot, nervous sweetness of imagining a man fitted to those curves—the hard and violent desires. I suppose I rode longer because I was thrilled by the knowledge of desire, if not by the particular boy doing the desiring. I had no interest in Michel Martin. He was my childhood friend, the image of him thrashing about upon me only made me laugh. But the idea of such thrashing, in general, would not leave me be.

I rode into the backswamp, taking my paths, spying the stars through the branches. Venus hung just over the treetops, Jupiter seemed to be running away, off to the south. I could smell the sweet rot, the heaviness of the forest air, as if the trees were breathing out the fine dust of bark and dirt and leaves and dark swamp tea. I went deeper along the paths, deeper than usual. I let the branches reach out to me and stroke my cheeks and batter my arms. One caught my blouse and pulled it open at the neck. The wind cooled me and my blouse billowed behind me. I untucked it. Squirrels raced me through the understory, shouting at me to go back, go back. I came across the campfire.

A dwarf and a thin, tall boy sat on rotted logs. I skittered into their camp, which had been pitched without much thought across a well-traveled path and not off the trail far into the underbrush. They looked up at me over their spitting, smoking, wet fire. At their feet lay old canvas laundry bags filled with what little they had chosen to take with them, each bearing a rough cross in blue paint. It was a dream, I thought. The tall boy smiled sweetly when he rose to his feet. His head was perfectly round and poorly clipped. He had bald spots, as if he’d tried to cut his own hair. The dwarf’s hair was blond and similarly haphazard. I dismounted and saw that he was tall as my waist and possessed of great and powerful hands. He scowled at me and balled those hands as if to strike.