The Autobiography of My Mother (6 page)

I had never been to Roseau until that day in my fifteenth year when my father took me to the house of a man he knew, Monsieur LaBatte, Monsieur Jacques LaBatte, Jack, as I came to call him in the bitter and sweet dark of night. He, too, was a man of no principles, and this did not surprise or disappoint me, this did not make me like him more or less. He and my father knew each other through financial arrangements they made with each other. They called each other friend, but the fragility of the foundation on which this friendship was built would cause only sadness in someone who does not love the world and all the material things in it. And Roseau, even then, when the reality of every situation was so horrible that it had to be disguised and called something else, something the opposite of its true self, was not referred to as a city, it was called the capital, the capital of Dominica. It, too, had a fragile foundation, and from time to time was destroyed by forces of nature, a hurricane or water coming from the sky as if suddenly the sea were above and the heavens below. Roseau could not be called a city, because it could not embody such noble aspirations—center of commerce and culture and exchange of ideas among people, place of intrigue, place in which plots are hatched and the destinies of many are determined; it was no such thing as a city, it was an outpost, a way station for people for whom things had gone wrong, either because of their own actions or through no fault of their own; and there were then many places like Roseau, outposts of despair; for conqueror and conquered alike these places were the capitals of nothing but despair. This did not surprise the ones forcibly brought to live in such a place, but even so, in this place there was some beauty, unexpected and therefore thrilling; it could be seen in the way the houses were all closely pressed together, jammed up, small and crooked, as if ill built on purpose, painted in the harsh hues of red, blue, green, or yellow, or sometimes not painted at all, the bare wood exposed to the elements, turning a bright gray. In this sort of house lived people whose skins glistened with exhaustion and whose faces were sad even when they had a reason to be happy, people for whom history had been a big, dark room, which made them hate silence. And sometimes there was a gentle wind and sometimes the stillness of the trees, and sometimes the sun setting and sometimes the dawn opening up, and the sweet, sickening smell of the white lily that bloomed only at night, and the sweet, sickening smell of something dead, something animal, rotting. This beauty, when I first saw it—I saw it in parts, not all at once—made me glad to be alive; I could not explain this feeling of gladness at the sight of the new and strange, the unfamiliar. And then long, long after, when all these things had become a part of me, a part of my every day, this feeling of gladness was no longer possible, but I would yearn for it, to feel new again, to feel within myself a fountain of joy springing up, to feel full of hope, to feel young again. I long now to feel fresh again, to feel I will never die, but that is not possible; I can only long for it, I can never be that way again.

Long after my father removed me from his house and the presence of his wife, I came to understand that he knew it was necessary to do so. I never knew what he noticed about me, I never knew what he wanted of me or from me; at the time it seemed to have a purpose, this removing me to Roseau; he wanted me to continue to go to school, he wanted me to someday become a schoolteacher, he wanted to say that his daughter was a teacher in a school. That I might have had aspirations of my own would not have occurred to him, and if I had aspirations of my own, I did not know of them. How the atmosphere in his own house felt to him I did not know. What he saw in my face he never told me. But he took me to this house of a man he knew in business and left me in the care of this man and his wife. I was a boarder, but I paid my own way. In exchange for my room and board in this house I performed some household tasks. I did not object, I could not object, I did not want to object, I did not know then how to object openly.

I met Monsieur and Madame in the afternoon, a hot afternoon. They were that to me then—Monsieur and Madame. I met her first, alone; he was in a room by himself, in another part of their house, a room where he kept money which he liked to count over and over again; it was not all the money in the world that he had. When I first met Madame LaBatte, she was standing in the doorway of her nice house, the front doorway, with its nice clean yard full of flowers and piles of stones neatly arranged; to her left and to her right were two large clumps of plumbago with blue flowers still in the hot air. She wore a white dress made of a coarse cloth decorated with embroidery stitching of flowers and leaves; I noticed this because it was a dress people in Mahaut would have worn only to church on Sundays. Her dress was not worn out and it was clean; it was not in a stylish cut but loose, fitting her badly, as if her body was no longer of any interest to her. My father spoke to her, she spoke to my father, she spoke to me; she looked at me, I looked at her. It was not to size each other up; I did not know what she thought she saw in my eyes, but I can say now that I had an instinctive feeling of sympathy for her. I did not know why sympathy, why not the opposite of that, but sympathy was what I felt all the same. It might have been because she looked so much like someone who had gotten something she so very much wanted.

She had very much wanted to marry Monsieur LaBatte. I was told that by the woman who came each day to wash their clothes. To want desperately to marry men, I have come to see, is not a mistake women make, it is only, well, what else is left for them to do? I was never told why she wanted to marry him. I made a guess: he had a strong body, she was drawn to his strong body, his strong hands, his strong mouth; it was a big wide mouth and it must have covered hers up whenever he kissed her. It swallowed mine up whenever he kissed me. She was not a frail woman when they first met, she became frail only afterward; he wore her out. When they first met, he would not marry her. He would not marry any woman. They would bear him children, and if the children were boys, these boys were given his full name, but he never married the mothers. Madame LaBatte found a way: she fed him food she had cooked in a sauce made up of her own menstrual blood, which bound him to her, and they were married. In time this spell wore off and could not be made to work again. He turned on her—not in anger, for he never became aware of the trap that had been set for him—he turned on her with the strength of that weapon he carried between his legs, and he wore her out. Her hair was gray, and not from age. Like so much about her it had just lost its vitality, it lay on her head without any real life to it; her hands hung at her side, slack. She had been beautiful when she was young, the way all people are, so beautiful when they are young, but on her face then was the person she had really become: defeated. Defeat is not beautiful; it is not ugly, but it is not beautiful. I was young then; I was young, I did not know. When I looked at her and felt sympathy, I also felt revulsion. I thought, This must never happen to me, and I meant that I would not allow the passage of time or the full weight of desire to make a pawn of me. I was young, so young, and felt my convictions powerfully; I felt strong and I felt I would always be so, I felt new and felt I would always be so, too. And at that moment the clothes I was wearing became too small, my bosoms grew out and pressed against my blouse, my hair touched my shoulders in a caress that caused me to shiver inside, my legs were hot and between them was a moisture, a sweet smelly stickiness. I was alive; I could tell that standing before me was a woman who was not. It was almost as if I sensed a danger and quickly made myself a defense; in seeing the thing I might be, I too early became its opposite.

She liked me. This woman liked me; her husband liked me; it pleased her that he liked me. By the time he emerged from the room where he kept his money, to greet my father and me, Madame LaBatte had already told me to make myself at home, to regard her as if she were my own mother, to feel safe whenever she was near. She could not know what such words meant to me, to hear a woman say them to me. Of course I did not believe her, I did not fool myself, but I knew she meant them when she was saying those things to me, she really meant to say them. I liked her so very much, her shadow of her former self, so grateful for my presence, no longer alone with her prize and her defeat. He did not speak to me right away; he did not care that it was me and not someone else my father had asked him to accommodate. He liked the quiet greed of my father, and my father liked the simple greed in him. They were a match; one could betray the other at any time, perhaps at that moment they already had. Monsieur LaBatte was already a rich man, richer than my father. He had better connections; he had not wasted his time marrying a poor Carib woman for love.

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I lived in this household, occupying a room that was attached to the kitchen; the kitchen was not a part of the house itself. I was enjoying the absence of the constant threat posed to me by my father's wife, even as I could feel the burden of my life: the short past, the unknown future. I could write letters to my father, letters that contained simple truths: the days seemed shorter in Roseau than the days in Mahaut, the nights seemed hotter in Roseau than the nights in Mahaut. Madame LaBatte is so very kind to me, she saves as a special treat for me a part of the fish that I love. The part of the fish that I love is the head, something my father would not have known, something I had no reason to believe he wished to know. I sent him these letters without fear. I never received a direct reply; he sent word to me in the letters he wrote to Monsieur LaBatte; he always hoped I was getting along in a good way and he wished me well.

My deep friendship, for it was that, a friendship—perhaps the only one I have ever had—with Madame LaBatte continued to grow. She was always alone. This was true even when she was with others, she was so alone. She thought that she made me sit with her as she sat on the verandah and sewed or just looked out with a blankness at the scene in front of her, but I wanted to sit with her. I was enjoying this new experience, the experience of a silence full of expectation and desire; she wanted something from me, I could tell that, and I longed for the moment to come, the moment that I would know just what it was she wanted. It never crossed my mind that I would refuse her. One day, without any preparation, she gave me a beautiful dress that she no longer wore; it still fit her, but she no longer wore it. As I was trying on the dress I could hear her thoughts: she was thinking of her youth, the person she used to be when she first wore the dress she had just given me, the things she had wanted, the things she had not received, the shallowness of her whole life. All this filled the air in the room we were in, the room in which was the bed she slept in with her husband. My own thoughts answered hers: You were foolish; you should not have let this happen to you. It is your own fault. I was without mercy, my condemnations filled my head with a slow roar until I thought I would faint, and then this thought came upon me slowly, saving me from doing so: She wants to make a gift of me to her husband; she wants to give me to him, she hopes I do not mind. I was standing in this room before her, my clothes coming off, my clothes going on, naked, clothed, but the vulnerability I felt was not of the body, it was of the spirit, the soul. To communicate so intimately with someone, to be spoken to silently by someone and yet understand more clearly than if she had shouted at the top of her voice, was something I did not experience with anyone ever again in my life. I took the dress from her. I did not wear it, I would never wear it; I only took it and kept it for a while.

The inevitable is no less a shock just because it is inevitable. I was sitting, late one day, in a small shaded area behind the house, where some flowers were planted, though this place could not be called a garden, for not much care was applied to it. The sun had not yet set completely; it was just at that moment when the creatures of the day are quiet but the creatures of the night have not quite found their voice. It was that time of day when all you have lost is heaviest in your mind: your mother, if you have lost her; your home, if you have lost it; the voices of people who might have loved you or who you only wish had loved you; the places in which something good, something you cannot forget, happened to you. Such feelings of longing and loss are heaviest just in that light. Day is almost over, night has almost begun. I did not wear undergarments anymore, I found them uncomfortable, and as I sat there I touched various parts of my body, sometimes absentmindedly, sometimes with a purpose in mind. I was running the fingers of my left hand through the small thick patch of hair between my legs and thinking of my life as I had lived it so far, fifteen years of it now, and I saw that Monsieur LaBatte was standing not far off from me, looking at me. He did not move away in embarrassment and I, too, did not run away in embarrassment. We held each other's gaze. I removed my fingers from between my legs and brought them up to my face, I wanted to smell myself. It was the end of the day, my odor was quite powerful. This scene of me placing my hand between my legs and then enjoying the smell of myself and Monsieur LaBatte watching me lasted until the usual sudden falling of the dark, and so when he came closer to me and asked me to remove my clothes, I said, quite sure of myself, knowing what it was I wanted, that it was too dark, I could not see. He took me to the room in which he counted his money, the money that was only some of the money he had. It was a dark room and so he kept a small lamp always lighted in it. I took off my clothes and he took off his clothes. He was the first man I had ever seen unclothed and he surprised me: the body of a man is not what makes him desirable, it is what his body might make you feel when it touches you that is the thrill, anticipating what his body will make you feel, and then the reality becomes better than the anticipation and the world has a wholeness to it, a wholeness with a current running through it, a current of pure pleasure. But when I first saw him, his hands hanging at his side, not yet caressing my hair, not yet inside me, not yet bringing the small risings that were my breasts toward his mouth, not yet opening my mouth wider to place his tongue even deeper in my mouth, the limp folds of the flesh on his stomach, the hardening flesh between his legs, I was surprised at how unbeautiful he was all by himself, just standing there; it was anticipation that was the thrill, it was anticipation that kept me entralled. And the force of him inside me, inevitable as it was, again came as a shock, a long sharp line of pain that then washed over me with the broadness of a wave, a long sharp line of pleasure: and to each piercing that he made inside me, I made a cry that was the same cry, a cry of sadness, for without making of it something it really was not I was not the same person I had been before. He was not a man of love, I did not need him to be. When he was through with me and I with him, he lay on top of me, breathing indifferently; his mind was on other things. On a small shelf at his back I could see he had lined up many coins, their sides turned heads up; they bore the face of a king.