Poe's Children (63 page)

Suppers at Surimombo are served each evening at six o’clock. Esther Gabay takes her place at the head of the table. On the side to Esther Gabay’s right are seated Doctor Peter Kolb and Mathew van der Lee. Maria Sibylla is seated opposite them, next to the Widow Ivenes. The food is always plentiful and rich: large bowls of mutton and fricassees, platters of Guinea fowl and vegetables, mullets and snapper, fruits and tarts, alligator pears, guava, and shaddock. Nut meats and oranges are brought to the table last, along with pastries dripping with sugar. The meal is served from left to right. The conversation is animated and jovial.

“How exotic your insects are,” says the Widow Ivenes to Maria Sibylla. “Do they ever crawl upon your hand or your wrist? What does it feel like when that happens, the sensation of your insects crawling on your flesh?”

Sirs, the quickening. Life appearing in the egg and nourished there. And then ferocious biting through. The pede, the stage at which I plucked it, plucking too the leaves on which it fed until its transformation into pupa. Profoundest rest. A rest that angels yearn for—and for that time asleep and dreaming. Then beckoned by the dream it starts to stir, the slightest stirring, and then a parting of the cotton that protects the shell, and a splitting and a chipping of the shell itself, until the transformation is complete from pede to winged creature; emerging, blasting, to fly dazed and free and glorious.

Out of a sky filled with sun, out of air that is still and filled with the scent of flamboyant and sugar cane, storms rise up without warning and blacken the Surinam sky. A breeze begins to blow in the darkened light, a moist breeze that takes hold and the sweet smells are carried stronger, and the moisture in the air bathes the face; but then the breeze gathers strength and becomes a wind, and the wind a raging gale, and the gale gains hurricane force. There are signs if one takes notice. Everything becomes quiet. There is a cessation of the sounds of the birds and the insects.

Maria Sibylla is out behind the Surimombo plantation house when her first storm forms in the stillness. She is studying a species of potter wasp which has built its nest upon the ground. She is intent upon recording her observations, and writing the notes that will accompany her drawings, so that she does not take notice of the darkening light. It is Mathew van der Lee who comes running to fetch her—frantic his running—shouting something she cannot hear, stopping just short of knocking into her, he grabs her sketching papers and her charcoals, and, though now quite on top of her, he continues his shouting. They are not back inside the house five minutes when the walls begin to rattle, and the whistling of the wind becomes deep and throaty like a lion’s roar, and she huddles low with Esther Gabay, and with the Widow Ivenes and Doctor Peter Kolb, and with Mathew van der Lee, she huddles low.

The storm subsides and the sounds start up again, the rasp of insects, the calls of birds, the screeching of monkeys.

Mathew van der Lee inquires if he might accompany Maria Sibylla on a collecting expedition she has planned to the shoreline in the aftermath of the storm. It is his specialty, he tells her, the seashore; he had been a collector himself back in the Netherlands.

She packs her vellums and her charcoal, her nets and her collecting jars.

She walks erect and keeps her back straight, her shoes are caked with mud, the bottom of her skirt is wet and dragging.

It is light. The sun completely broken through. The hills behind the shore heavy with what the winds have brought, invisible but present, the air laden with it.

“Madame Sibylla,” says Mathew van der Lee. He wears a hat in the style of the day, black felt and rimmed. He wears a jacket also in the style of the day, three-quarters in length and black like the hat, and his shirt is white beneath the jacket. They are on the edge of the shoreline along the Paramaribo coast. Maria Sibylla is walking ahead of him. “Madame Sibylla,” he says again. “You shall outdistance me if you walk so quickly, Madame Sibylla.” He is teasing and young, pleasing and handsome in his white shirt, in his hat, in his jacket.

Sirs, we sing the creature’s praises! The pede perceives the visual impressions around it, not by means of rows of eyes located down along the sides of its body, but through distinctly tiny simple eyes, ocelli, placed on each side of the head.

For a minute she is breathless. Her breathlessness exaggerated in the intensity of the heat. It is so hot she almost cannot bear it.

The Widow Ivenes beckons her to visit in her suite of rooms. The Widow is sitting with a metal plate against her forehead, alternately placing it against the back of her neck. The drapes are drawn. There is a bowl of water on the table by her bed. “I would like to tear these clothes from my body,” the Widow says point-blank to Maria Sibylla.

Maria Sibylla has come into the Widow’s room with a fan with which she is fanning herself unrestrainedly. It was hand-painted in Italy, but she purchased it in Amsterdam. She offers it as a present to the Widow Ivenes. The Widow takes the fan and heaves and sighs, and heaves and sighs again.

Only Esther Gabay seems to never mind the heat. She carries on in it with the running of Surimombo. Even during the hottest hours, she carries on in it, just as the slaves carry on in it with their work in the sugar fields.

The African slaves go about naked. Or mostly naked. The women naked from waist to neck. The young ones with their breasts taut, their skin the deepest browns, their nipples black, like black cherries on the trees back in Holland. The older women stand with their breasts below their waists in the late day sun. There is a dance the African slaves perform and Maria Sibylla has witnessed it—the Winti, or Dance of Possession—their hips roll as they pass the calabash, drink from the bowl, smoke the tobacco, and then
here Miss, here Miss,
holding out the worm for her to take,
here Miss, here Miss…

That evening there is smoked salmon arrived by ship from Amsterdam. With the salmon is turtle and king fish, grouper and snapper. A beverage is served made of coconut and lime. Hands are washed between courses. The evening meal is like a prayer. Like a service in the church in Paramaribo.

late at night she hears the doctor snoring, she hears him through the walls of the suites of the house, his breath coming in snorts and gasps.

and in the eaves around the house—spiders.

and in her room the smell of the salve she uses to protect her skin. It is something Marta gave her made from the sap of palm leaves. And blood oranges in a bowl. And grapes in another bowl. Her hair is wrapped in cloth. The cloth is cut in strips and woven through her hair. Blood oranges in a bowl next to the grapes.

and what she feels is the heat. The relentless bruising heat.

Sirs, it has been thought the thickened lines of wing venation are veins like those that comprise the network of our own fragile bodies, and through which the moth’s blood (made up of a dense white liquid) flows outward each to body parts dependent on receiving it. This proves not the case. The wing venation are solidly composed and act as brace cords for support.

She is in the small forest behind the Surimombo sugar fields. They call it Surimombo Forest because its edges border the plantation. The light is green and indistinct. Her eyes must make an adjustment. The light filters down through the branches of the trees and through the flowers that grow along the tree trunks. A flatworm glides on a moist trail of sludge on the leaf of a giant acacia. The worm is red and iridescent. When she tries to lift it, it dissolves.

God stirs. In any case impels. Nettles. On which the creature feeds. The Mora branch. And its leaves. The Yucca with its red fruit.

Mathew van der Lee has followed her into the small forest where she is working along its edges. It was by chance, he says, that he caught sight of her, from the sugar fields where he had been observing the harvesting technique at Surimombo. He could not resist, he says, but to see after her, to inquire of her while at her work. I have seen many such plants in the botanical gardens in Amsterdam, he says, pointing to the crimson blossoms of the bougainvillea, but none in the gardens compare to these.

It is said that there were no lovers, only a husband who wound up by menacing—the rumors of his vices—and the whispers of the word
cruelty
—a husband whom she fled in retaliation and defense. A daring act then, at that time, imagine.

But history shall have it there was a lover.

Maria Sibylla is not a child. No. She is a woman already of some years. Though she was little more than a child on the day of her marriage to Johann Graff. But she fled that husband.

On the 21st day of November in the year 1685, Maria Sibylla gathered what was hers and set out for the Protestant Pietist colony at Friesland, and for the colony’s home at the Castle of Weirweurd, and for the prefect, Petre Yvon, who then presided there. She set out to join those pious men and women who lived each moment in the love of God and in the denial of the worldly influence. She took her vellums, her charcoals, her specimens, some articles of clothing, some personal effects.

On the morning of the 23rd of November, her husband appeared outside the door of the Castle, where he bellowed out the name of his wife, and where within those walls Maria Sibylla remained silent.

She was staring out her window when he arrived, thinking of the creatures she might find there, wondering how she might conduct her work from this new home, she was seeing God in all she saw, and trusting in God to direct her.

Graff sought audience with his wife through the personage of Petre Yvon. He demanded that he be admitted inside the walls of the castle. She is mine, he shouted, mine, I will not let go what is rightfully mine.