By the Light of My Father's Smile (3 page)

This is the moment Pauline loves. In fact, if she thinks about how much she loves it before it happens she will go off and miss what is for her the crowning moment. That moment when all her terrible beauty is acknowledged, her awesome power bowed to, the sensuality of her daring to wear a bathing suit while riding motorcycles driven by Hindu boys in a country run by Muslims, forgiven.

The Kalimasan boy has her breasts now, as she waits, in what seems a royal, even imperial squat, for the plea she knows will come. She has given Susannah deeper orgasms than she has ever known; she feels she controls them. Pauline has the same breasts that she had at thirty. Strong, upright breasts whose slight sag only makes them more supple in the hand. Breasts that have never known a bra. The boy's mouth on her breasts is cool as a melon seed. Waiting for my daughter's surrender she rocks; my daughter's shudder against her clitoris almost sets her off. She moves slightly back from her. It will not do to come now and give up the moment my daughter bares herself.

Please, my daughter says.

Please what? says the woman, stopping the movement of her hand altogether.

My daughter whispers something.

Pauline says, loudly: Speak up!

Lick me, my daughter says, and looks her in the eye.

My daughter hears the sharp intake of the woman's breath. Still looking deep into her eyes, witnessing the lust and the victory, acknowledging it, she reaches up to touch Pauline's clitoris. It is swollen and tremulous, her cunt dripping. Her hand is a dancer in the woman's wet flames. Intoxicated, she raises her hand to her nose. The scent of a woman's sex is like nothing in the world. It is a scent she would crawl for, though Pauline, ever practical, has reminded her it is a scent she already owns.

Pauline pumps her hand slowly up and out of Susannah's body, which grieves its leaving by shivering and shuddering. Every fiber of her body is alert to what is coming to her clit.

Pauline would like to make her beg some more. She is in an arrogant, nearly hostile place few of her friends, colleagues, children, and grandchildren ever see. It is powerful there. She loves it. But if she doesn't get on with it, the sight of Susannah, laid out like a feast, will bring her to climax—and she is not ready for that yet. In truth, she can barely believe she has restrained herself for so long, and denied herself the taste of my daughter's core.

Now she is all gentleness, easing her sweaty body between my daughter's legs, ever so gently pressing them wider with the broad width of her own thick shoulders. She flings her lead-colored locks out of her eyes, and slithers down, and sinks.

It is her warm breath my daughter feels. Immediately she is calmed. She settles her body into the bed. Cradles her head exactly in the middle of the pillow. Sighs.
At last.
Touches briefly, gratefully, masterfully, almost negligently, the woman's shoulders and her wild hair. Surrendering, she is all but consumed by her own feelings of power.

Pauline flicks her clitoris with a tongue that seems made of suede, and Susannah begins to moan anew. It is a moan so animallike and guttural, so abandoned and shameless, so full of self-witness, a moan so unlike her day-to-day self, when a certain fastidious haughtiness is often commented on in her character, that it is comical. Leaving passion for just a moment, they both laugh. The bed shakes, as they giggle; a slender bamboo leg cracks. Shit, says Susannah. Pauline raises her head: Next time, she mutters, I'll have you on the floor.

Pauline's mouth captures the whole of Susannah's vulva. There is no little corner of it that at first escapes. It is as if she would suck out the womb and, indeed, she appears to dive for it with her long whining tongue. Only now, at this, the whining tongue sings, and Susannah feels herself mounting to the clouds, and tries to slow herself down from arriving there. Unbidden, in that moment, she thinks of me and of her mother, so often fighting, when she was a child. Only to emerge from our bedroom after a fight completely peaceful, tranquil, with each other. Our every movement one of indolence, our every utterance marked by an unfathomable calm.

Of course Pauline's behavior reminds me of Magdalena's. Of Maggie. MacDoc.

When Susannah was four, my church sent me as spiritual advisor to Mexico to work among the Mundo Indians. In reality her mother and I were both anthropologists, but in the early Forties no one would fund us on any serious expedition. We threw ourselves on the mercy of our church, as black people always do when all other sources of sustenance fail. We explained what we had heard about the Mundo: that they were a tiny band of mixed-race Blacks and Indians who'd fled across the border during the Civil War; that by now the people, like others of their mixture near Veracruz, Costa Chica, and elsewhere, thought of themselves not as Africans or as Indians, but as dark-skinned Mexicans. Isolated, however, as they were, they were said to retain distinct tribal ways that they honored and had never repudiated. This was mysterious to earlier anthropologists who had attempted to study them, because they were continually being, it was thought, killed off. They were truly dying out this time,
though, according to the information we had, and it was urgent that we witness their way of life before their demise.

We drove, my wife Langley and I, the entire way, though since the Mundo live in such splendid isolation in the Sierra Madre, where their closest neighbors, the Tarahumara, are still two hundred miles away, we were forced to leave the car at the last hard-scrabble mission, its church crumbling, we encountered. The Mundo sent donkeys down for us, and we arrived to find a gathering of friendly, curious villagers preparing barbecued mutton and broiled corn.

Maggie was six. Not a six, however, of innocent cheerfulness. Not a six of languid indolence. Not a six driven merely by the dictates of a playful curiosity. No. She was a six that already stared boldly at anything that interested her. And what interested her, it seemed to me, even at that early age, was men, and what was concealed by their trousers.

My wife did not see this as a problem. Leave the child alone, she advised as we prepared for bed at night, children are curious! I complained that Maggie embarrassed us by her boldness. Her staring and her sidling up to boys three times her age. She is curious, my sweet daughter, said my wife. She laughed. And the young men here
are
magnetic. She shrugged. Come to bed yourself, and don't forget the nightly rubber.

Langley made me laugh. Almost each and every night she made me laugh, as she had done the very first night we met; at a society ball thrown by upper-class Blacks for their grown-up Jack and Jill offspring in a sleek and prosperous enclave of Harlem. Her parents had inherited what was referred to at the time, with envy, as “musical money,” from a famous uncle who was a jazz composer
and performer. After Jack and Jill, which was considered by most black people as a kindergarten for the rich, and after boarding school, she'd gone to college in Maine. I, on the other hand, had worked my way through Hampton Institute in the South, and in fact was so poor that I owned only one suit, the one I was wearing when she asked me to dance.

I was so astonished by this breach of propriety, especially as I noticed her parents looking on, and yet so thrilled by the playful recklessness in her eyes, that I spilled the pink punch I was drinking, all over myself.

You look good in pink, she'd said brusquely, cracking nary a smile and coolly using a dainty, heavenly-scented hanky to dab at my tie. I laughed because it was certainly not what I'd expected her to say.

In Mexico she was a woman split in two. During the day, as the “pastor's” wife, she wore dark colors, even in the midday heat. Or snowy white on feast days, as some of the Indians did. At night she wore nothing at all. Oh, what does God care about what I wear? she had asked the first night we slept together and I was stunned by her beauty, naked, but also profoundly shocked. God gets to wear everything, including us. I suppose I could have forced the issue. But she did not even own a nightgown. Although she did find something, and hold it up. It looked serviceable and was the color of poached salmon, “flesh colored,” it claimed on the label. There were stays. Shall I sleep in this slip your mother gave me? she asked. Frowning, draping the ugly color against her peachy skin.

Susannah was fascinated by the gigantic pots that the women made in heaps. Some were so big she could put her whole head inside.
The Mundo women used only three colors: the red of earth, which was the pot itself and came from the local clay; the black of charcoal; and the white of lime, used as decoration, which after baking in the fire was not white but gray. There were few designs on Mundo pots: their beauty was in the burnished smoothness, the rich symmetry of their form. Their usefulness. The rough, unpolished pots which they also made were bound with strips of goatskin; these were filled with grain and strapped to the backs of donkeys that took them down to the market for sale.

We were there when the railroad came within a day's journey of their mountainous territory, almost a century after it was begun in Mexico; and there to see the beginning of the end of the long line of donkeys snaking down the mountain in the blinding sun.

Langley studied pottery making with the women. She learned to dig the clay, clean it, wedge it, roll the long coils that formed the sides of each pot, and then to kneel before the growing pot as it magically rose from her shallow grass basket, her tongue often poking out the corner of her mouth in rapt concentration, as the other women's did. There was in building a pot a distinct feeling of prayer, she said. Especially in the first, beginner's lessons, when she did pray that her slippery, wobbly construction would not slump to the ground. Of course, she said, from watching their mothers make pots, primitive man would assume God made men from clay. Though why, seeing their mothers' work, they'd think God male, she could not grasp.