Possessing the Secret of Joy (12 page)

Did you suspect anything? prods the attorney.

The child looks pained. I feel sorry for her. How could they imagine any of this is her fault? It was I who shooed Mbati from her post; I who told M’Lissa: Mama Lissa, give the girl a break. Your other daughter has come from America just to look after you! Since this coming back to care for the elderly was such a strong characteristic of the ancient traditions, how could she refuse?

Oh, M’Lissa had said, it is too much happiness. Too much! To see the daughter of Nafa, here, right beside my bed. Oh, surely I shall die of it!

I thought it an odd thing to say.

How did the defendant appear to you? the prosecuting attorney asks.

There is a long pause. Motherly, Mbati replies.

The young man is surprised. What, his look implies, this demon,
motherly!

Yes, Mbati continues in a definite voice. I lost my own mother when I was an infant, and yet never believed she died. When Mrs. Johnson showed up at the door—

Childhood memories are quite irrelevant to this court, says the attorney, cutting her off. Though surely the humane response would have been to let her finish; even if one felt quite unable to ask the question: How did your mother die? It is a taboo question, in Olinka. One never asked for fear of the answer.

Mbati subsides into silence, but looks me in the face and holds my gaze. I see she has not condemned me.

M
Y HEART GOES OUT
to Adam, physically stout, emotionally frail; perspiration beading on his upper lip. It is hard to believe this grayhaired and graybearded old man is my husband, and has been my dearest friend for over fifty years. And was my lover.

He looks condemned, simply to be present in the jammed court. He stares up disconsolately at the recently oiled, slowly whirring ceiling fans, or out the open windows, awaiting the thrust and parry of the attorneys’ questions.

I remember when his body was slender and firm, and how I used to kiss from nipple to nipple across the smooth expanse of his beautiful chest.

He is saying I am a tortured woman. Someone whose whole life was destroyed by the enactment of a ritual upon my body which I had not been equipped to understand.

As soon as he utters the word “ritual” there is a furor in the court. Male voices, and female voices, calling for Adam’s silence. Shut up, shut up, you disgraceful American! the voices cry. This is our business you would put into the streets! We cannot publicly discuss this taboo.

Adam looks weary. About to weep.

Mother Lissa was a monument! the voices hiss. Your wife has murdered a monument. The Grandmother of the race!

I feel the furies, the shrieking voices, wrap their coils around my neck. But rather than allowing myself to choke, I become a part of the shrieking and rise from around my own neck exactly as if I were wind. I blow and blow about the court, building toward explosion.

The judges call for order, over and over. The other furies and I subside. At last order is restored.

I am thinking of how I never met Lisette. How she tried to know me. Tried to visit me. Wrote me letters. Tried to interest me in French cooking—sent me cookbooks and recipes. Sent me clippings about wild mushrooms and where to look for them. (None of this is helpful, I used to mutter to myself, gazing into the mirror and sticking out my tongue.) Sent me her son. And how I refused her. How I thought she knew me too well.

And then suddenly, after a long, painful struggle, she died. Leaving Pierre her eyes—for his eyes are not Adam’s—and it was those knowing eyes, with their appraising look, that, from as far away as an undergraduate dormitory at Harvard, saw into me. Even into my dreams.

Chère
Madame Johnson, he wrote. I hope you will not tear up this letter before you read it. (At that point I of course tore it in half, then held the pieces together to continue reading.) All my life I have heard about the tower that frightens you in your dreams. This tower question obsessed my mother since the day she heard of it, and she read many books trying to figure out what it could mean. It was an effort I shared, from the time I was a small boy. Always in the back of my mind has hovered this compelling nightmare of yours, told only once to my mother by my father, but told so vividly our house was never quite free of it.

For as we both understood it, this nightmare, this
cauchemar
of yours, of being held captive in a dark tower, was what kept my father away from me.

Madame, I now know what the tower is, though not, perhaps, what it means.

As you know, I am now in Berkeley, which is not so far, after all, from your house.

Will you not throw stones?

Shall we meet?

Pierre Johnson

T
HEY DO NOT WANT
to hear what their children suffer. They’ve made the telling of the suffering itself taboo. Like visible signs of menstruation. Signs of woman’s mental power. Signs of the weakness and uncertainty of men. When they say the word “taboo” I try to catch their eye. Are they saying something is “sacred” and therefore not to be publicly examined for fear of disturbing the mystery; or are they saying it is so profane it must not be exposed, for fear of corrupting the young? Or are they saying simply that they can not and will not be bothered to listen to what is said about an accepted tradition of which they are a part, that has gone on, as far as they know, forever?

These are the kinds of questions my father taught me to ask, alas. Adam, he would say, What is the fundamental question one must ask of the world? I would think of and posit many things, but the answer was always the same:
Why is the child crying?
There had been a crying child even in Old Torabe, whose filth and age and illness so disgusted me. Before he died, I saw it. He had not loved the majority of his wives; in fact, he didn’t even hate them; he thought of them as servants in the most disposable sense. He barely remembered their names. But the young woman who ran away, the wife who drowned herself, he had at least thought he loved. Unfortunately for him “love” and frequent, forceful sex were one. And so he lay, finally, wounded and wet with his own tears, lamenting his life but knowing no other. Women are indestructible down there, you know, he’d said to me, lewdly, more than once, his eyes alight with remembered lechery and violence. They are like leather: the more you chew it, the softer it gets.

If every man in this courtroom had had his penis removed, what then? Would they understand better that that condition is similar to that of all the women in this room? That, even as we sit here, the women are suffering from the unnatural constrictions of flesh their bodies have been whittled and refashioned into? Not just Evelyn. But also the young woman from the paper shop; the old woman who sells oranges. The bourgeois women in their elegant robes, fanning themselves and powdering their noses against the humidity. The poor women packed tight against the back doors. The beautiful, daughterly woman, Mbati.

How wearying to think nobody in this courtroom has ever listened to them. I see each one of them as the little child my father was always so concerned about, screaming her terror eternally into her own ear.

We are aware, says the prosecutor, that Mrs. Johnson, though Olinkan, has lived in America for many, many years, and that American life is, for the black person, itself a torture.

I stare at him blankly.

Is it not true, Mr. Johnson, that in the United States, with its stressful whites, your wife is often committed to an insane asylum?

My wife is
hurt,
I say.
Wounded. Broken.
Not mad.

Evelyn laughs. Flinging her head back in deliberate challenge. The laugh is short. Sharp. The bark of a dog. Beyond hurt. Unquestionably mad. Oddly free.

T
HEY WOULD ALL TAKE
America away from me if they could. But I won’t let them. If I have to, I’ll stop them in their tracks. Just as I stopped Amy. How do you stop someone in their tracks? By not believing them.

W
OMAN AFTER WOMAN
comes to me to complain that her husband, man, lover, is or was unfaithful to her, says Tashi’s new doctor, Raye, when we have a consultation. The result, nine times out of ten, is frigidity in the woman. Psychological circumcision? she asks, pensively.

I tell her I do not know. It had never occurred to me to think of Tashi’s suffering as being on a continuum of pain. I had thought of what was done to her as something singular, absolute.

“T
HE
G
OD
A
MMA,
it appeared, took a lump of clay, squeezed it in his hand and flung it from him, as he had done with the stars. The clay spread and fell on the north, which is the top, and from there stretched out to the south, which is the bottom, of the world, although the whole movement was horizontal. The earth lies flat, but the north is at the top. It extends east and west with separate members like a foetus in the womb. It is a body, that is to say, a thing with members branching out from a central mass. This body, lying flat, face upwards, in a line from north to south, is feminine. Its sexual organ is an anthill, and its clitoris a termite hill. Amma, being lonely and desirous of intercourse with this creature, approached it. That was the occasion of the first breach of the order of the universe…

“At God’s approach the termite hill rose up, barring the passage and displaying its masculinity. It was as strong as the organ of the stranger, and intercourse could not take place. But God is all-powerful. He cut down the termite hill, and had intercourse with the excised earth. But the original incident was destined to affect the course of things forever…

As Pierre reads I study his face seeking signs of Adam, signs of Lisette. He seems a completely blended person and as such new. In him “black” has disappeared; so has “white.” His eyes are a dark, lightfilled brown; his forehead is high and tan; his nose broad, a little flat. He has told me he likes men as well as he likes women, which seems only natural, he says, since he is the offspring of two sexes as well as of two races. No one is surprised he is biracial; why should they be surprised he is bisexual? This is an explanation I have never heard and cannot entirely grasp; it seems too logical for my brain. His brother sits across from him as he reads, sunk in admiration. They have stolen many hours to be together, roaming the Berkeley campus and the city’s streets, happy to have found each in the other his own best friend.

Now he stops reading, suddenly, and looks at me. This is from a book by a French anthropologist, Marcel Griaule, he says, turning it so I can see its orange cover and read its title,
Conversations with Ogotemmêli.
I am under the influence of a new, mild and quite pleasant drug. It is as if I’ve smoked marijuana. I have not grasped the meaning of the passage, which Pierre has read to me so earnestly; nor do I completely comprehend how it is he is sitting in my living room reading to me from this strange book. Have I stopped hating him? I gaze at Benny, who looks so happy, and then down into my lap. My eyes sting the way they do when I’m drugged; closing them brings relief. Pierre is reading as if I am listening: “God had further intercourse with his earth-wife, and this time without mishaps of any kind, the excision of the offending member having removed the cause of the former disorder.” I feel him stop, rustle the pages, and look over at me. I raise my eyes and attempt a bright look in his direction. I am awake, I say. Indeed, I am listening. However, as he resumes reading, the words, on touching my ear, bounce back into his mouth, as if they’re made of India rubber. This is a distracting sight, and I look at Benny to see if he has noticed it. He hasn’t. He sits enraptured, his notepad on his lap. Who taught him to write, I ask myself, if he can never remember anything?

“The spirit drew two outlines on the ground, one on top of the other, one male and the other female. The man stretched himself out on these two shadows of himself, and took both of them for his own. The same thing was done for the woman. Thus it came about that each human being from the first was endowed with two souls of different sex, or rather with two principles corresponding to two distinct persons. In the man the female soul was located in the prepuce; in the woman the male soul was in the clitoris.”

Here I looked up. Pierre continued: “Man’s life was not capable of supporting both beings: each person would have to merge himself in the sex for which he appeared to be best fitted.” So, said Pierre, closing the book but keeping his finger between its pages, the man is circumcised to rid him of his femininity; the woman is excised to rid her of her masculinity. In other words, he said, leaning forward in his chair, a very long time ago, men found it necessary to permanently lock people in the category of their obvious sex, even while recognizing sexual duality as a given of nature.

How long ago was this? I ask, my focus somewhat blurred.

Pierre shrugged, and I fancied I saw his mother’s body in the fluid ripple of his shoulders.

Even Cleopatra was circumcised, he says. Nefertiti, also. But some people think the people in this book, the Dogon, are from a civilization even older than theirs, and that this civilization spread northward, from central Africa
up
toward ancient Egypt and the Mediterranean. He paused, musing. My mother used to say genital mutilation, which predates all the major religions, was a kind of footbinding.

After he leaves the house to accompany Benny to a basketball game, I am left with the book, whose pages he has thoughtfully marked, and with the puzzle of his last comment. Suddenly I see Lisette very clearly. She is sitting by a window in front of which there is a desk. She is thinking of me as she looks into a thick brown book in front of her, and her white brow is puckered in a frown. She is gazing at a drawing of a tiny, putrid, Chinese woman’s foot, and reading the notation that says the rotten smell was an aphrodisiac for the man, who liked to hold both small feet helpless in his large hand, raising them to his nose as he prepared to ravish the woman, who could not run away. This immobility most satisfying to his lust. The pain of her hobbling attempts to escape pure incentive to relish the chase.