The Autobiography of My Mother (17 page)

When my mother was born (so I was told) her mother wrapped her in some clean pieces of cloth and placed her outside a place where some nuns from France lived; they brought her up, baptized her a Christian, and demanded that she be a quiet, shy, long-suffering, unquestioning, modest, wishing-to-die-soon person. She became such a person. The attachment, spiritual and physical, that a mother is said to have for her child, that confusion of who is who, flesh and flesh, that inseparableness which is said to exist between mother and child—all this was absent between my mother and her own mother. How to explain this abandonment, what child can understand it? That attachment, physical and spiritual, that confusion of who is who, flesh and flesh, which was absent between my mother and her mother was also absent between my mother and myself, for she died at the moment I was born, and though I can sensibly say to myself such a thing cannot be helped—for who can help dying—again how can any child understand such a thing, so profound an abandonment? I have refused to bear any children.

And what could her actual life as a child with such people have been like—for there could not have been any joy in it, no moment of pure leisure in which she would have been an imaginary queen of an imaginary country with an imaginary army to conquer imaginary people, such a thing being the sole property of a mind free of the coarseness of living, as a child's mind should be. She wore a dress made of nankeen, a loose-fitting dress, a shroud; it covered her arms, her knees, it fell all the way down to her ankles. She wore a matching piece of cloth on her head that covered all of her beautiful hair completely.

When did my father first see her? It is possible that he first saw her on a clear yet misty Dominica morning (such a thing does exist) coming toward him on the narrow path that winds its way (the road) around the perimeter of the island (a large mass jutting out of the larger sea), a bundle on the top of her head, and no doubt to him her beauty would have lain not in the structure of her face, the litheness of her figure (I do not know, I can only imagine this), an intelligence that he could sense from the expression on her face; no, it would have lain in her sadness, her weakness, her long-lost-ness, the crumbling of ancestral lines, her dejectedness, the false humility that was really defeat. He at that time was no longer just an ordinary, low, coarse henchman; by then he wore a uniform and it might have even had a ribbon or a marking of some kind to show that he had been properly cruel and unkind to people who did not deserve it. He had by then been from island to island and fathered children with women whose names he did not remember, the children's names he did not know at all. He must have felt when he saw her the need to stay in one place. My poor mother! Yet to say it makes me feel sad not to have known her would not be true at all; I am only sad to know that such a life had to exist. Each day the question whether to live or die, which should it be, must have stood before her. A courtship of this woman would not have taxed his imagination. They were married in a church in Roseau and within a year she was buried in its churchyard. People say he suffered over this loss, the loss of the only woman he had married; people say he was broken by this; people say he did not enjoy life then; people say that a great sadness came over him and this led to a deep devotion to God and he became a deacon in his church. People say this, people say these things, but people cannot say that because of his own suffering he identified with and had sympathy for the sufferings of others; people cannot say that his loss made him generous, kindhearted, unwilling always to take advantage of others, that goodness in him grew and grew, completely overshadowing his faults, his defects; people cannot say these things, because they would not be true.

And this woman whose face I have never seen, not even in a dream—what did she think, what thoughts crossed her mind when she first saw this man? It is possible that he appeared as yet another irresistible force, the last in her life; it is possible that she loved him passionately.

It is sad that unless you are born a god, your life, from its very beginning, is a mystery to you. You are conceived; you are born: these things are true, how could they not be, but you don't know them; you only have to believe them, for there is no other explanation. You are a child and you find the world big and round and you have to find a place in it. How to do that is yet another mystery, and no one can tell you how exactly. You become a woman, a grown-up person. Against ample evidence, against your better judgment, you put trust in the constancy of things, you place faith in their everydayness. One day you open your door, you step out in your yard, but the ground is not there and you fall into a hole that has no bottom and no sides and no color. The mystery of the hole in the ground gives way to the mystery of your fall; just when you get used to falling and falling forever, you stop; and that stopping is yet another mystery, for why did you stop, there is not an answer to that any more than there is an answer to why you fell in the first place. Who you are is a mystery no one can answer, not even you. And why not, why not!

 

 

 

The present is always perfect. No matter how happy I had been in the past I do not long for it. The present is always the moment for which I live. The future I never long for, it will come or it will not; one day it will not. But it does not loom up before me, I am never in a state of anticipation. The future is not even like the black space above the sky, with an intermittent spark of light; it is more like a room with no ceiling or floor or walls, it is the present that gives it such a shape, it is the present that encloses it. The past is a room full of baggage and rubbish and sometimes things that are of use, but if they are of real use, I have kept them.

I married a man I did not love, but I would not have married a man I loved at all. I married my father's friend, a man named Philip Bailey, a man trained to heal the sick, and in this he would succeed from time to time, but even so, only temporarily, for everyone, everywhere, succumbs eventually to the overwhelming stillness that is death. He loved me and then after that he longed for me and then after that he died. He died a lonely man, far away from the place where he was born, far away from all that had sustained him as a child, away from a woman who might have loved him, his first wife. She had died when he married me. His friends abandoned him, for they realized that his feelings for me were genuine, and he loved me. They did not attend our wedding. After we were married we moved far away into the mountains, into the land where my mother and the people she was of were born.

By the time I had married, my own womb had dried up, shriveled like an old piece of vegetable matter left out too long. The other parts of my body were drying up also; my skin did not so much wrinkle as the moisture in it seemed to evaporate. I had never ceased to observe myself, and at the time I could see that what I had lost in physical appeal or beauty I had gained in character. It was written all over me; I did not fail to arouse curiosity in anyone capable of it. I had been talked about, I had been judged and condemned. I had been loved and I had been hated. I now stood above it all, it all lay at my feet. It was said of me that I had poisoned my husband's first wife, but I had not; I only stood by and watched her poison herself every day and did not try to stop her. She had discovered—I had introduced the discovery to her—that the large white flowers of a most beautiful weed, when dried and brewed into a tea, created a feeling of well-being and induced pleasant hallucinations. I had become acquainted with this plant through one of my many wanderings while freeing my womb from burdens I did not want it to bear, burdens I did not want to bear, burdens that were a consequence of pleasure, not a consequence of truth; but this plant was not otherwise useful to me because I was not in need of a feeling of well-being, I was not in need of pleasant hallucinations. Eventually her need for this tea grew stronger and stronger, and it turned her skin black before she died. She had lived among people whose skin was such a color for most of her life, and for that very reason and that reason only she had despised them; she knew nothing of them, except that the protective covering of their shell, their skin, was the color black, and she did not like it, but this was the color she became before she died, black, and perhaps she liked it and perhaps she didn't, but all the same, she died anyway. I was often touched by her suffering, for she did suffer, and then again, often I was not. Before she fell into her final reverie, she demanded and she demanded, and all her demands were based on who she thought she was, and who she thought she was was based on her country of origin, which was England. The complications of who she thought her very self to be were lost on her; she was not unlike my own sister Elizabeth. My husband's wife, this fragile human being, drew her sense of who she was from the power of her country of origin, a country which at her time of birth had the ability to determine the everyday existence of one quarter of the world's human population, and in her small mind, she believed this situation to be not only a destiny but eternal, without any awareness of the limitations of her own self or any sympathy for her own fragility. She thought of herself as someone with values and manners and a strong certainty of the world, as if there could be nothing new, as if things had come to a standstill, as if with the arrival of her and her kind, life had reached such perfection that everything else, everything that was different from her, should just lie down and die. It was she who would lie down and die; everything else went on and it, too, eventually would lie down and die, but something more indescribable than vanity, something beyond fear, perhaps it was ignorance, made her believe that the world as she knew it was perfect. But she died and turned to dust, or dirt, or the wind, or the sea, or whatever it is we all turn into when we die.

My father died also, not so very long after I married his friend. What made them friends? My father admired Philip's garden, in which he grew fruit from the various tropical regions of the world, only he forced them to become a size they were not normally; sometimes he made them grow larger, sometimes he made them mere miniatures. Philip belonged to that restless people unable to leave the world alone, unable to look at anything for too long without becoming troubled by its very existence; silence is alien to them. My father, too, was of a restless mind, but fate, the act of conquest, had made him stay put. He could only look at this man Philip and watch him grow a mango the size of an adult's head, but then the fruit had no taste, it was only beautiful to look at; he then devoted much time to making this food pleasing to the taste buds. I never knew if Philip succeeded; I never ate any of the things he grew.

My father took a long time to die. He suffered much pain and his suffering almost made me believe in justice, but only almost, for there are many wrongs that nothing can ever make right, the past in the world as I know it is irreversible. He did not mind dying, he said. He spoke very movingly about the world of dying and the world of death, and he spoke very movingly of the life he had led. I did not recognize the life he had led when he spoke of it; I also was not moved. His life, of course, looked splendid to him; if it had not, he would have forgiven himself through a show of repentance, a display of good works. All the people he had robbed of their worldly goods were dead or nearly so; all the people who had robbed him of his worldly goods, who had defeated any effort he might have made to be a human being, were dead or would eventually be so. Still, as he lay dying, he could see the enormous amount of land he had acquired, each square of rich volcanic soil covered with some valuable crop: coffee, vanilla, grapefruit trees, lime trees, lemon trees, bananas. He owned many houses in Roseau, and at the end of each month, a half-dead man—for my father near the end of his life had his own henchmen and underlings who worked for him—brought him the rent that had been collected from tenants who sometimes had not much to eat. He died a rich man and did not believe that this would prevent him from entering the gates of the place he called heaven.

I missed him when he died, and before he died I knew this would be so. I wished not to miss him, but all the same it was so. I had never known my mother and yet my love for her followed her into eternity. My mother had died when I was born, unable to protect herself in a world cruel beyond ordinary imagining, unable to protect me. My father was able to protect me; but he did not. I believe instead that at an early age he placed me in the jaws of death. How I escaped I cannot fathom to answer myself. I did not love my father, I grew to love not loving my father, and I missed his presence, the irritant that was this loveless love. He died. I saw the light go out of his eyes, I saw the breath leave his body, I felt his skin turn from warm to cold. For a long time, hours after he was dead, he looked the way he had when he was alive, just there, still, and then he looked like something else, anything else, everything else when it is dead. He was stilled; his body was stilled, his mind was stilled. It was at that moment that I knew death to be a real thing; my mother's death in comparison was not a death at all.