The Autobiography of My Mother (18 page)

I chose the clothes my father was buried in; they were the clothes he wore to my sister's wedding, a white suit made of Irish linen. I was allowed to do this, to choose his clothes, since his wife had long ago lost interest in him. My sister ceded this honor to me because of the superior position in which my marriage had placed me: Philip was of the conquering class. She was in awe of this, my own conquest—this was how she viewed it—and she despised me even more for it. That Philip was empty of real life and energy, used up, too tired even to give himself pleasure, that I did not love him, never occurred to her; it never occurred to her that my marriage represented a kind of tragedy, a kind of defeat, nothing, though, that would make the world hesitate to spin—none of this occurred to her.

For many hours after he was dead, my father looked the same; his features were the same as they had been when I knew him: he had a faint smile on his face, his lips were stretched open slightly, his closed eyes were almost lost in the folds of skin above his cheeks, his large ears stood up away from his head, awkwardly if you did not like the way they looked, beautifully if they pleased you. I loved my father's ears. His skin then, just after he had died, looked like the color of something useful: cooking utensils, copra, the earth, the color of the day early in the morning when it is no longer dark but not yet light. Within hours of the last breath leaving his body, he looked like the dead: anonymous, without character, without individuality. If you had not known him, you could not tell if his life had been distinguished by deeds good or bad, deeds of any kind at all. He looked like the dead, he could not say his name, he could not give an account of himself, he could not defend himself; he was of that world, the world of the dead, a world beyond silence; nothing. When I looked down at him, I felt a great sadness. I felt such pity, for he was dead; he would never walk again, he would never speak again. All the things that had pleased him, the fruits of his bad deeds, no longer mattered to him; his deeds were like a wave with its rippling effect, mattering only to the people on the shore who could not avoid getting their feet wet. And again, when I looked down at him, seeing him dead, I felt superior, I felt superior in the fact that I was alive and he was dead, and even though I knew and believed that death was my fate also, I felt superior to him, as if such a humiliation, death, would never happen to me. I was a child then, but you are a child until the people who brought you into this world are dead; you remain a child until you understand and believe that the people who brought you into this world are dead.

My father was buried. I do not know if he would have been amused by the absolute indifference with which his absence was met by the world he left behind.

I had been living at the end of the world for my whole life; it had been so when I was born, for my mother had died when I was born. But now, with my father dead, I was living at the brink of eternity, it was as if this quality of my life was suddenly raised from its usual self, embossed with its old meaning. The two people from whom I had come were no more. I had allowed no one to come from me. A new feeling of loneliness overcame me then; I grew agitated with a heat, then I grew still from a deep chill. I grew used to this loneliness, recognizing one day that in it were the things I had lost and the things I could have had but had refused. I came to love my father, but only when he was dead, at that moment when he still looked like himself but a self that could no longer cause harm, only a still self, dead; he was like a memory, not a picture, just a memory. And yet a memory cannot be trusted, for so much of the experience of the past is determined by the experience of the present.

To my wedding I wore a dress of pink faille silk. I wore around my neck a necklace of unpolished pearls that my father had given to me, a necklace that my sister and her mother did not want me to have; they said it had been lost, but on the day of my marriage they sent it to me. My husband and I did not make a joyful pair; we were very serious repeating the vows of loyalty until death should separate us. And the moment of our earthly union was so palpable, so certain, we could almost feel it with our hands.

My sister died. Her husband died. Her mother died. All the people I knew intimately from the beginning of my life died. I should have missed their presence but I did not.

I had never been sentimental. My life began with a wide panorama of possibilities: my birth itself was much like other births; I was new, the pages of my life had no writing on them, they were unsmudged, so clean, so smooth, so new. If I could have seen myself then, I could have imagined that my future would have filled volumes. Why should the world of adventure forever remain closed to me, the discovery of mountains, vast seas, miles upon miles of empty plains, the skies, the heavens, even the cruel subordination of others? Why should great acts of transgression be followed by profound redemption, a redemption of such magnitude that it had the power at once to make my own transgressions stomach-turning yet not unlike the naïve and simple actions of a child? Such was the case of a man who traded in human bodies and then wrote a hymn, a hymn of such fame that the descendants of the human bodies in which he had traded sang this hymn on Sundays in church with a fervor and sincerity that he, the author and transgressor, was not capable of. The depths of evil, its results, were all too clear to me: its satisfactions, its rewards, the glorious sensations, the praise, the feeling of exaltation and superiority evil elicits when it is successful, the feeling of invincibility—I had observed all of this firsthand. All roads come to an end, and all ends are the same, trailing off into nothing; even an echo eventually will be silenced.

I am of the vanquished, I am of the defeated. The past is a fixed point, the future is open-ended; for me the future must remain capable of casting a light on the past such that in my defeat lies the seed of my great victory, in my defeat lies the beginning of my great revenge. My impulse is to the good, my good is to serve myself. I am not a people, I am not a nation. I only wish from time to time to make my actions be the actions of a people, to make my actions be the actions of a nation.

I married a man I did not love. I did not do so on a whim, I did not do so after making a calculation, but this marriage had its usefulness. It allowed me to make a romance of my life, it allowed me to think of all my deeds and of myself with kindness in the deep dark of night, when sometimes it was necessary for me to do so. Romance is the refuge of the defeated; the defeated need songs to soothe themselves, they need a sweet tune to soothe themselves, for their whole being is a wound; they need a soft bed to sleep on, for when they are awake it is a nightmare, the dream of sleep is their reality. I married a man I did not love, but that word, “love,” that idea, love—what could it mean to me, what should it mean to me? I did not know, and yet I would have saved him, I would have saved him from death, I would have saved him from a death I had not sanctioned myself, I would have saved him if ever he needed saving, as long as it was not from myself. Was this, then, a form of love, an incomplete love, or no love at all? I did not know. I believe my entire life was without such a thing, love, the kind of love you die from or the kind of love that causes you to live eternally, and if this was not actually so, I cannot be convinced of an otherwise.

And this man I married was of the victors, and so much a part of him was this situation, the situation of the conqueror, that only through a book of history could he be reminded of a time when he might have been something other, something like me, the vanquished, the defeated. When he looked at the night sky, it was closed off; so, too, was the midday sky, closed off; the seas were closed off, the ground on which he walked was closed off. He did not have a future, he had only the past, he lived in that way; it was not a past he was responsible for all by himself, it was a past he had inherited. He did not object to his inheritance; it was a good one, only it did not bring happiness; and his reply to such an assertion would be the correct one: What can bring happiness? At the moment the conqueror asks such a question, his defeat is secure. It was at such a moment in my husband's life that I met him, the moment when defeat, his own, that of the people he came from, was secure. I could say he loved me if I needed to hear I was loved, but I will never say it. He grew to live for the sound of my footsteps, so often I would walk without making a sound; he loved the sound of my voice, so for days I would not utter a word; I allowed him to touch me long after I could be moved by the touch of anyone.

He and I lived in this spell, the spell of history. I wore the color black, the color of mourners. I dressed him in the colors of the newly born, the innocent, the weak, youth: white, pale blue, pale yellow, and anything that had faded; these were not the colors of any flag. Each morning the great mountains covered in everlasting green faced us on one side, the great swath of gray seawater faced us on the other. The sky, the moon and stars and sun in that same sky—none of these things were under the spell of history, not his, not mine, not anybody's. Oh, to be a part of such a thing, to be a part of anything that is outside history, to be a part of something that can deny the wave of the human hand, the beat of the human heart, the gaze of the human eye, human desire itself. And each day he would walk along the perimeter of the land on which he lived; it would always remain strange to him, this land on which he had spent most of his life. He would stumble, he did not know its contours, the feel of it never became familiar to him; he was not born on it, he would only die on it and asked to be buried facing east, in the direction of the land in which he was born; he would stumble as he walked the perimeter, coming to a place where the land had split in two, a precipice, an abyss, but even that was closed to him, the abyss was closed to him. At the sight of him staring into a chasm in the earth, I was not moved with pity; no gesture that he made then, running his hands through his sparse hair, stroking his chin, wrapping his arms around his shoulders or around his torso, none of this moved me to consider his entire being in such a way that would make his suffering real to me. I was capable of doing so, of making his suffering real to myself, but I would not allow myself to do it.

He spoke to me, I spoke to him; he spoke to me in English, I spoke to him in patois. We understood each other much better that way, speaking to each other in the language of our thoughts. When he spoke to me his voice was soft, as if he, too, wanted to hear what it was he was saying. His voice was tender, sometimes it had the sound of a stream met unexpectedly in a place you could never forget. When I was young, when he first met me, when he did not know that my presence in his life was permanent, he liked the way my teeth glistened in strong light of any kind, he did everything possible to make me keep my mouth open; he made me sigh, he made me speak, but he could not make me laugh, not for him would I open my mouth in laughter. To see him eating a meal was always a revolting spectacle to me, but I long ago had learned to stop being surprised by this when I realized that many things which reminded me that he, too, was human and frail caused a great feeling of anger to swell up in me; for if he, too, was human, then would not all whom he came from be human, too, and where would that leave me and all that I came from?

He was not a man of any sophistication, a man of any accomplishment. He knew many things, but they were not from his own experience; he knew things that were a distillation of, condensed from, the experiences of many people, none of whom he knew, but I could not condemn him for this; how unusual is it to believe the beliefs—and even die for these beliefs—originating with people you can never and will never know? He was an heir, and like all such people the origin of his inheritance was a burden to him. He was not an ignorant man, he had a sense of justice, a sense of what might be right and what might be wrong. He was even a man of some courage; he could condemn himself. But to condemn yourself is to forgive yourself, and to forgive yourself for your transgressions against others is not a right that anybody can claim.

Before we were married and shortly after we were married, we lived in the capital of Dominica, Roseau. In places like Roseau, wars are fought, but there are no victories, only a standoff, only an until-next-time. We moved away from Roseau, in a state of mind, a calm, that was almost godlike, for it was beyond deliberation and beyond impulse. We moved to a place that was high above some mountains, but not at the top of the highest mountain. It was a place to rest. We were weary; we were weary of being ourselves, weary of our own legacies. He worshipped me, he loved me; that I did not require these things only increased the feelings he had for me. He thought I made him forget the past; he had no future, he wanted only to be in the present, each day was today, each moment this moment. But who can really forget the past? Not the victor, and not the vanquished, for even when words become forbidden, there are other ways to betray memory: the unmet eye; the wave of a hand that signifies the exact opposite of the friendly hello or the friendly goodbye. Or to sit in a chair in a room alone, believing yourself alone, allowing your spirit to hunt for a resting place and finding none (for there is no such thing, only in death, only a dreamless sleep)—this truth registers on the face, in the arrangement of the body itself.

Who can forget? This man I lived with for many years, and whom I would live without for a long time after that, would gather around him various things. In his life, by his tradition, he had become convinced of a certain truth, and this truth was based on reducing, so that only what survived was deemed worthy. He and all like him had survived, so far. He looked at the land on which he lived, he made decisions, his decisions were limited to what pleased him, his idea of what might be beautiful, and then what was beautiful. He cleared the land; nothing growing on it inspired any interest in him. The inflorescence of this, he said, was not significant; and the word “inflorescence” was said with an authority, as if he had created inflorescence itself, which made me laugh with such pleasure I lost consciousness for that moment of my own existence. He took sheets of glass and, gluing them together, made boxes in which he would place a lizard, a crab whose habitat was the land—not the sea, not both, only the land; in a box made of glass he placed a turtle whose habitat was the land, not the sea, not both, only the land; in a box made of glass he placed small frog after small frog; they died, frozen in that pose of stillness natural to a frog which is meant to confound a foe. He made long lists under the heading Genus, he made long lists under the heading Species. From time to time I would release whatever individual he held in captivity, replacing it with its like, its kind: one lizard replaced with another lizard, one crab replaced with another crab, one frog with another frog; I could not ever tell if he knew I had done so. He was so sure inside himself that all the things he knew were correct, not that they were true, but that they were correct. Truth would have undone him, the truth is always so full of uncertainty.