Possessing the Secret of Joy (11 page)

And the Marquis de Sade? I asked.

Thankfully only one man, she said, and thankfully not in this century. She laughed. And thankfully not beside
my
bed.

Perhaps, I said. But surely his cruelty to women is lodged in the collective consciousness of the French? Like the zest of Rabelais, the wit of Molière?

Perhaps, she murmured, and seemed to lose herself gazing into the fire.

I
FELT NO COMPUNCTION
about opening letters that came from Lisette to Adam, letters which sometimes contained copies of letters she’d received from her uncle Mzee touching on my case; or even, sometimes, copies of letters from Adam himself; she seemed often to need to jog his memory about something or other. There was an occasional copied page of her diary in which she appeared contented, and self-possessed: autonomous in a way I could not imagine for myself. She also had the nerve occasionally to address a letter to me. These always sounded as if she were feeling her way through fog. I trampled them. I routinely, and leisurely, read those from her which Adam left lying open at the back of his bottom desk drawer, the key to which I had long since duplicated. It was from one of her letters that I learned their son, Pierre, was coming to America.

Informing me he was going to a gathering of progressive
religieux,
Adam flew to Boston to meet him and was gone a week, helping Pierre settle into the life of Cambridge and Harvard. The boy was still far away, the breadth of the continent, so I did not worry. He remained in Cambridge for three years.

It was from her letters that I learned of Lisette’s illness. Diagnosed first as stress brought on by her political activity: she was active in the movement against French nuclear power plants, which, she wrote, dotted like dangerous
pustules
the once pristine countryside; later diagnosed as an ulcer. Then as a hernia. Then, finally, as stomach cancer. She petitioned Adam to permit Pierre to live with him and to attend Berkeley after her death. This Adam apparently agreed to do; I refused to let him bring up the subject with me.

It was during a period when I could not eat and was emaciated as a scarecrow; my clothes hung on me, and I wore nothing that wasn’t black. The week before, someone introduced to me by Adam said, with a snigger: “Ah, Adam and
Eve
lyn. How cute!” And I slapped him.

I felt the violence rising in me with every encounter with the world outside my home. Even inside it I frequently and with little cause,
no
cause, boxed Benny’s ears. If I made him squeal and cringe and look at me with eyes gone grave with love and incomprehension, I fancied I felt relief.

I was watching the street when the taxi came. A boxy, bright yellow, child’s cartoon of a taxi. The kind of taxi the world expects all American taxis to be. I glimpsed Pierre’s curly head before he got out, as he leaned forward to pay the driver. He was skinny and short, as if still a child. I watched the two of them, chatting like old friends, go around to the boot to take out his bags.

Still chatting, they did not notice the dark spectre floating near them: first to the door, then to the porch, then to the steps, alighting to stoop beside a large pile of stones I had begun to collect the very day I learned of Pierre’s birth. Large oblong stones from the roadside; heavy flat stones from the riverbank; sharp jagged shale stones from the fields.

As Pierre thanked the driver and turned toward the house, he saw me, and smiled. A large jagged stone, gray as grief, struck him just above the teeth. Blood spurted from his nose. I began to throw the stones as if, like Kali, I had a dozen arms, or as if my arms were a multiple catapult or a windmill. Stones rained upon him and upon the cab, which had started to pull off but screeched to a stop as the driver realized Pierre was under attack and sinking to one knee. I did not let up, but floated nearer, cradling an armful of stones. Pierre began to speak in a gibberish of French, which infuriated me. I dropped the stones in order to close my ears with the palms of my hands. During this interlude, the cabbie ran up to Pierre, grabbed him under the arms and dragged him out of sight.

I began to laugh, as the taxi disappeared down the street. In their cowardly haste they’d forgotten Pierre’s luggage. The brown suitcases sat, importunate and irrevocable, where he’d dropped them; more heavy baggage for me to lift and somehow carry. I would not. I dove forward, flapping my arms and shrieking hoarsely like a crow, to kick them into the street.

T
HE BUS RIDE
from Ombere station was long. The roads bumpy. The dust everywhere. Each twenty-five kilometers or so we stopped to use roadside facilities. These were not at all like those in America but were entirely makeshift. Smelly holes in the earth on either side of which some forward-thinking person had nailed a board. On these boards, inevitably splashed with urine, one placed one’s feet.

A week ago I would not have expected M’Lissa to still be alive. But yes, according to a year-old
Newsweek
I perused in the waiting room of the Waverly, she was not only alive but a national monument. She had been honored by the Olinka government for her role during the wars of liberation, when she’d acted as a nurse as devoted to her charges as Florence Nightingale, and for her unfailing adherence to the ancient customs and traditions of the Olinka state. No mention was made of how she fulfilled this obligation. She had been decorated, “knighted,” the magazine said; swooped up from her obscure hut, where she lay dying on a filthy straw mat, and brought to a spacious cottage on the outskirts of a nearby town, where she would be within easy commute to a hospital, should the need arise.

After being brought out of her dark hut and into the sunlight of her new home—with running water and an indoor toilet, both miracles to the lucky M’Lissa—a remarkable change had occurred. M’Lissa had stopped showing any signs of death, stopped aging, and had begun to actually blossom. “Youthen,” as the article said. A local nurse, a geriatrics specialist, ministered to her; a cook and a gardener rounded out her staff. M’Lissa, who had not walked in over a year, began again to walk, leaning on a cane the president himself had given her, and enjoyed tottering about in her garden. She loved to eat, and kept her cook on his toes preparing the special dishes of lamb curry, raisin rice and chocolate mousse she particularly liked. She had a mango tree; indeed, the photograph showed her sitting beneath it; she sat there happily, day after day, when the crop came on, stuffing herself.

In the photograph M’Lissa smiled broadly, new teeth glistening; even her hair had grown back and was a white halo around her deep brown head.

There was something sinister, though, about her aspect; but perhaps I was the only one likely to see it. Though her mouth was smiling, as were her sunken cheeks and her long nose, her wrinkled forehead and her scrawny neck, her beady eyes were not. Looking into them, suddenly chilled, I realized they never had.

How had I entrusted my body to this madwoman?

A
FLAG FLEW
above her house, the red, yellow and blue vivid against the pale noonday periwinkle sky. I was not her only visitor; there were cars parked in the postage-stamp parking lot, neatly screened from the house by a rose-colored bougainvillea, and a tour bus was halted by the road. The passengers were not permitted to disembark, but were busy taking photographs of the cottage from the windows of the bus. I left my rental car out of view of the house, and when I walked up the red steps to the porch and looked back, I felt surprise that it had disappeared. Not seeing the vehicle of my arrival seemed right, however, after a moment’s reflection, for I experienced all the more a feeling I’d begun to have in the openness of the countryside: that I had flown direct, as if I were a bird, from my house to hers, and that this had been accomplished with the directness of thought: a magical journey.

I was met on the porch by a young woman who had not been mentioned in the
Newsweek
article: slender, with smooth dark skin and shining eyes, as lovely as a freshly cut flower. I explained I’d known M’Lissa all my life; that she had in fact delivered me into the world, having been a great friend of my mother and in fact mother of the entire village. I explained I had come from America, where I now lived, even though Olinka by birth, and that I hoped to spend time with M’Lissa, perhaps after her other guests had gone.

What is your name? she asked softly.

Tell her it is Tashi, Catherine’s, no,
Nafa’s
daughter, who went to America with the son of the missionary.

She turned. Out of habit I glanced down at her feet. As she moved away, I saw she had the sliding gait of the “proper” Olinka maiden.

Within minutes all of M’Lissa’s guests poured out of the house, as if scattered by her cane. They scrutinized me as they passed. Perhaps they thought me an important dignitary. As their car motors were turning over, shattering the quiet, the young woman returned.

You may go in, she said, with a smile.

What is
your
name? I asked her.

Martha, she replied.

And your other name?

Mbati, she said, her eyes twinkling.

Mbati, I said, why do the people come here?

The question surprised her. Mother Lissa is a national monument, she said. Recognized as a heroine by every faction of the government, including the National Liberation Front. She’s famous, she said, shrugging her shoulders and looking at me as if puzzled I didn’t know.

I do know that, I said. I read
Newsweek.

Ah,
Newsweek,
she said.

But what do they talk about with her?

About their daughters. About the old ways. About tradition. She paused. It is mostly women who come. You may have noticed this by the people who just left. Women of a certain age. Women with daughters. Frightened women, often. She reassures them.

Oh? I said.

Yes. She knows so much and says such bizarre things. Why, do you know, Mama Lissa claims there was a time when women did not have periods! Oh, she says, there may have been a single drop of blood, but only one! She says this was before woman’s capture.

I couldn’t help laughing, as Mbati was doing.

She just sits and talks; holds court. It hardly matters what she says. She is probably a hundred; everyone wants to have been in her presence before she dies. So much, as you know, has fallen apart here: independence is killing us as surely as colonialism did. But then, she added, sighing, that is because it isn’t really independence.

Mbati takes my hand and pulls me slowly forward, still speaking quietly. She is a link with the past for us; especially for us women, she says. She is the only woman honored in this way by the government; she is an ikon.

How is it possible, I think, as Mbati leads me into M’Lissa’s sparkling hallway and pushes me into M’Lissa’s room and toward a snow white bed, that my mother has lived and died; Mzee has lived and died; the Frenchwoman Lisette has lived and died; I myself have lived and died—in and out of the Waverly, in and out of my mind—many times. World wars have been fought and lost; for every war is against the world and every war against the world is lost. But look, here lies M’Lissa, propped up like a queen in her snowy bed, the open window beside it looking out into a fragrant garden, and in the distance, above the garden, there is a blue mountain. She is radiant, and her forehead, nose, lips, teeth, cheeks smile at me. I bend to kiss the top of her head, her white hair a resistant brush against my lips. I take her hand, which has the feel of feathers, and stand a moment looking down at her. Her whole body is smiling her welcome; except for her eyes. They are wary and alert. I had thought when people aged, their eyes went bad. But no, she sees me clearly. Hers is an x-ray gaze. But then, so is mine, now. What is that shadow, there in the depths? Is it apprehension? Is it fear?

M
BATI IS TAKING THE STAND.
She wears no makeup or jewelry and her hair is short and natural. There is a simplicity about her that dignifies the whole room. When she speaks the warm quietness of her personality soothes the court, even if the hoarse cry of the ceiling fans becomes more grating than ever. She is the daughter I should have had. Perhaps could have had, had I not aborted her out of fear.

I float up to the stand and hover, a large dragonfly, in front of her. Reaching out, I take her smooth hand in mine. Her eyes widen: with wonder; with delight. Come, I say to her, smiling, I am your mother. If you take my hand before all of these people, all of these judges, all of these policemen and warders and rubbernecks in the audience, you will discover that the two of us can fly. Really? she asks, placing her other hand also in mine. I tug gently and she leaves her seat and floats beside me over the railing of the witness stand, over the attorneys’ tables, over the heads of the packed courtroom… out the door and into the sky. We are lighter than air, lighter than thistle. Mother and daughter heading for the sun.

No, I suspected nothing, she is saying, when I float back into myself, sitting on the hard chair next to my attorney.

They were old friends. Mother Lissa knew her. She was happy to see her. In fact, I’d never seen her so excited. They needed to talk. Time alone. Mother Lissa insisted.

And so you left your post. Left
Mother
Lissa’s bedside. Even left the house, the attorney says accusingly.

My daughter drops her head. But quickly looks up again. There is that healthy, impish twinkle in her eyes she sometimes gets.

She turns her face to the judges. Your Honors, she says, firmly, I left the vicinity.

They all ignore this spark of life. This simple authenticity. This beauty.

Objection, says the other attorney. (I can no longer really tell them apart; the only way I recognize which attorney is mine is by noticing which of them sits next to me, and by the way he smells: his cologne is a scent popular in America.) The defendant’s fiendish behavior is not something which, in advance, the witness could have known.