The Autobiography of My Mother (3 page)

The word “love” was spoken with such frequency that it became a clue to my seven-year-old heart and my seven-year-old mind that this thing did not exist. My father's eyes grew small and then they grew big; he believed what he said, and that was a good thing, because I did not. But I would not have wanted to stop this progression, this new thing, this going away from here; and I did not believe him, but I did not have any reason to, no real reason. I was not yet cynical and thought that behind everything I heard lay another story altogether, the real story.

I thanked Eunice for taking care of me. I did not mean it, I could not mean it, I did not know how to mean it, but I would mean it now. I did not say goodbye; in the world that I lived in then and the world that I live in now, goodbyes do not exist, it is a small world. All my belongings were in a muslin knapsack and he placed them in a bag that was on the donkey he had been riding. He placed me on the donkey and sat behind me. And this was how we looked as my back was turned on the small house in which I spent the first seven years of my life: an already important man and his small daughter on the back of a donkey at the end of the day, an ordinary day, a day that had no meaning if you were less than a smudge on a page covered with print. I could hear my father's breath; it was not the breath of my life. The back of my head touched his chest from time to time, I could hear the sound of his heart beating through his shirt, the uniform that, when people saw him wearing it coming toward them, made them afraid, for his presence when wearing these clothes was almost always not a good thing. In my life then his presence was a good thing, it was too bad that he had not thought of changing his clothes; it was too bad that I had noticed he had not done so, it was too bad that such a thing would matter to me.

This new experience of really leaving the past behind, of going from one place to the other and knowing that whatever had been would remain just so, was something I immediately accepted as a gift, as a right of nature. This most simple of movements, the turning of your back, is among the most difficult to make, but once it has been made you cannot imagine it was at all hard to accomplish. I had not been able to do it by myself, but I could see that I had set in motion events that would make it possible. If I were ever to find myself sitting in that schoolroom again, or sitting in Eunice's yard again, sleeping in her bed, eating with her children, none of it would have the same power it once had over me—the power to make me feel helpless and ashamed at my own helplessness.

I could not see the look on my father's face as he rode, I did not know what he was thinking, I did not know him well enough to guess. He set off down the road in the opposite direction from the schoolhouse. The stretch of road was new to me, and yet it had a familiarity that made me sad. Around each bend was the familiar dark green of the trees that grew with a ferociousness that no hand had yet attempted to restrain, a green so unrelenting that it attained great beauty and great ugliness and yet great humility all at once; it was itself: nothing could be added to it; nothing could be taken away from it. Each precipice along the road was steep and dangerous, and a fall down one of them would have resulted in death or a lasting injury. And each climb up was followed by a slope down, at the bottom of which was the same choke of flowering plants, each with a purpose not yet known to me. And each curve that ran left would soon give way to a curve that ran right.

The day then began to have the colors of an ending, the colors of a funeral, gray, mauve, black; my sadness inside became manifest to me. I was a part of a procession of sadness, which was moving away from my old life, a life I had lived for only seven years. I did not become overwhelmed, though. The dark of night came on with its usual suddenness, without warning. Again I did not become overwhelmed. My father placed an arm around me, as if to ward off something—a danger I could not see in the cool air, an evil spirit, a fall. His clasp was at first gentle; then it grew till it had the strength of an iron band, but even then I did not become overwhelmed.

We entered the village in the dark. There were no lights anywhere, no dog barked, we did not pass anyone. We entered the house in which my father lived, there was a light coming from a beautiful glass lamp, something I had never seen before; the light was fueled by a clear liquid that I could see through the base of the lamp, which was embossed with the heads of animals unfamiliar to me. The lamp was on a shelf, and the shelf was made of mahogany, its brackets ended in the shape of two tightly closed paws. The room was crowded, with a chair on which two people could sit at once, two other chairs on which only one person could sit, and a small, low table draped with a piece of white linen. The walls of the house and the partition that separated this room from the rest of the house were covered with paper, and the paper was decorated with small pink roses. I had never seen anything like this before, except once, while looking through a book at my school—but the picture I had seen then was a drawing illustrating a story about the domestic goings-on of a small mammal who lived in a field with his family. In their burrow, the walls had been covered with similar paper. I had understood that story about the small mammal to be a pretense, something to amuse a child, but this was my very real father's house, a house with a bright lamp in a room, and a room that seemed to exist only for an occasional purpose.

At that moment I realized that there were so many things I did not know, not including the very big thing I did not know—my mother. I did not know my father; I did not know where he was from or whom or what he liked; I did not know the land whose surface I had just come through on an animal's back; I did not know who I was or why I was standing there in that room of the occasional purpose with the lamp. A great sea of what I did not know opened up before me, and its powerful treacherous currents pulsed over my head repeatedly until I was sure I was dead.

I had only fainted. I opened my eyes soon after to see the face of my father's wife not too far above mine. She had the face of evil. I had no other face to compare it with; I knew only that hers was the face of evil as far as I could tell. She did not like me. I could see that. She did not love me. I could see that. I could not see the rest of her right away—only her face. She was of the African people and the people from France. It was nighttime and she was in her own house, so her hair was exposed; it was smooth and yet tightly curled, and she wore it parted in the middle and plaited in two braids that were pinned up in the back. Her lips were shaped like those of people from a cold climate: thin and ungenerous. Her eyes were black, not with beauty but with deceit. Her nose was long and sharp, like an arrow; her cheekbones were also sharp. She did not like me. She did not love me. I could see it in her face. My spirit rose to meet this challenge. No love: I could live in a place like this. I knew this atmosphere all too well. Love would have defeated me. Love would always defeat me. In an atmosphere of no love I could live well; in this atmosphere of no love I could make a life for myself. She held a cup to my mouth, one of her hands brushed against my face, and it felt cold; she was feeding me a tea, something to revive me, but it tasted bitter, like a bad potion. My small tongue allowed no more than a drop of it to come into my mouth, but the bitter taste of it warmed my young heart. I sat up. Our eyes did not meet and lock; I was too young to throw out such a challenge, I could then act only on instinct.

I was led down a short hallway to a room. It was to be my own room; my father lived in a house in which there were enough rooms for me to occupy my own. This small event immediately became central to my life: I adjusted to this evidence of privacy without question. My room was lit by a small lamp, the size of my now large, aged fist, and I could see my bed: small, of wood, a white sheet on its copra-filled mattress, a square, flat pillow. I had a washstand on which stood a basin and an urn that had water in it. I did not see a towel. (I did not then know how to wash myself properly, in any case, and the lesson I eventually got came with many words of abuse.) There was not a picture on the wall. The walls were not covered with paper; the bare wood, pine, was not painted. It was the plainest of plain rooms, but it had in it more luxury than I had ever imagined, it offered me something I did not even know I needed: it offered me solitude. All of my little being, physical and spiritual, could find peace here, in this little place of my own where I could sit and take stock.

I sat down on the bed. My heart was breaking; I wanted to cry, I felt so alone. I felt in danger, I felt threatened; I felt as each minute passed that someone wished me dead. My father's wife came to say good night, and she turned out the lamp. She spoke to me then in French patois; in his presence she had spoken to me in English. She would do this to me through all the time we knew each other, but that first time, in the sanctuary of my room, at seven years old, I recognized this to be an attempt on her part to make an illegitimate of me, to associate me with the made-up language of people regarded as not real—the shadow people, the forever humiliated, the forever low. She then went to the part of the house where she and my father slept; it was far enough away that I could hear the sound of her footsteps fade; still, I could hear their voices as they spoke, the sounds swirling upward to the empty space beneath the ceiling. They had a conversation; I could not make out the words; the emotions seemed neutral, neither hot nor cold. There was some silence; there were short gasps and sighs; there were the sounds of people sleeping, breath escaping through the mouth.

I lay down to sleep and to dream of my mother—for I knew I would do that, I knew I would make myself do that, I needed to do that. She came down the ladder again and again, over and over, just her heels and the hem of her white dress visible; down, down, over and over. I watched her all night in my dream. I did not see her face. I was not disappointed. I would have loved to see her face, but I didn't long for it anymore. She sang a song, but it had no words; it was not a lullaby, it was not sentimental, not meant to calm me when my soul roiled at the harshness of life; it was only a song, but the sound of her voice was like a small treasure found in an abandoned chest, a treasure that inspires not astonishment but contentment and eternal pleasure.

All night I slept, and in my sleep saw her feet come down the ladder, step after step, never seeing her face, hearing her voice sing that song, sometimes humming, sometimes through an open mouth. To this day she will appear in my dreams from time to time but never again to sing or utter a sound of any kind—only as before, coming down a ladder, her heels visible and the white hem of her garment above them.

*   *   *

I came to my father's house in the blanket of voluptuous blackness that was the night; a morning naturally followed. I awoke in the false paradise into which I was born, the false paradise in which I will die, the same landscape that I had always known, each aspect of it beyond reproach, at once beautiful, ugly, humble, and proud; full of life, full of death, able to sustain the one, inevitably to claim the other.

My father's wife showed me how to wash myself. It was not done with kindness. My human form and odor were an opportunity to heap scorn on me. I responded in a fashion by now characteristic of me: whatever I was told to hate I loved and loved the most. I loved the smell of the thin dirt behind my ears, the smell of my unwashed mouth, the smell that came from between my legs, the smell in the pit of my arm, the smell of my unwashed feet. Whatever about me caused offense, whatever was native to me, whatever I could not help and was not a moral failing—those things about me I loved with the fervor of the devoted. Her hands as they touched me were cold and caused me pain. We would never love each other. In her was a despair rooted in a desire long thwarted: she had not yet been able to bear my father a child. She was afraid of me; she was afraid that because of me my father would think of my mother more often than he thought of her. On that first morning she gave me some food and it was old, moldy, as if she had saved it specially for me in order to make me sick. I did not eat what she gave me after that; I learned then how to prepare my own food and made this a trait by which others would know me: I was a girl who prepared her own food.

Parts of my life, incidents in my life then, seem, when I remember them now, as if they were happening in a very small, dark place, a place the size of a dollhouse, and the dollhouse is at the bottom of a hole, and I am way up at the top of the hole, peering down into this little house, trying to make out exactly what it is that happened down there. And sometimes when I look down at this scene, certain things are not in the same place they were in the last time I looked: different things are in the shadows at different times, different things are in the light.

*   *   *

My father's wife wished me dead, at first in a way that would have allowed her to make a lavish display of sorrow over my death: an accident, God's desire. And then when no accident occurred and God did not seem to care one way or the other whether I lived or died, she tried to accomplish this herself. She made me a present of a necklace fashioned from dried berries and polished wood and stone and shells from the sea. It was most beautiful, too beautiful for a child, but a child, a real child, would have been dazzled by it, would have been seduced by it, would have immediately placed it around her neck. I was not a real child. I thanked and thanked her. I thanked her again. I did not take it into my small room. I did not want to hold on to it for very long. I had made a small place in the everlastingly thick grove of trees at the back of the house. She did not know of it yet; when eventually she discovered it, she sent something that I could not see to live there and it drove me away. It was in this secret place that I left the necklace until I could decide what to do with it. She would look at my neck and notice that I was not wearing it, but she never mentioned it again. Not once. She never urged me to wear it at all. She had a dog that she took to ground with her; this dog was a gift from my father, it was to protect her from real human harm, a harm that could be seen, it was meant to make her feel a kind of safety. One day I placed the necklace around the dog's neck, hiding it in the hair there; within twenty-four hours he went mad and died. If she found the necklace around his neck she never mentioned it to me. She became pregnant then and bore the first of her two children, and this took her close attention away from me; but she did not stop wishing me dead.