The Autobiography of My Mother (7 page)

In the room where I slept, the room with the floor of dirt, I poured water into a small tin basin and washed the thin crust of blood that had dried between my legs and down the inside of my legs. This blood was not a mystery to me, I knew why it was there, I knew what had just happened to me. I wanted to see what I looked like, but I could not. I felt myself; my skin felt smooth, as if it had just been oiled and freshly polished. The place between my legs ached, my breasts ached, my lips ached, my wrists ached; when he had not wanted me to touch him, he had placed his own large hands over my wrists and kept them pinned to the floor; when my cries had distracted him, he had clamped my lips shut with his mouth. It was through all the parts of my body that ached that I relived the deep pleasure I had just experienced. When I awoke the next morning I did not feel I had slept at all; I felt as if I had only lost consciousness and I picked up where I had left off in my ache of pleasure.

It had rained during the night, a rain that was beyond torrential, and in the morning it did not stop, in the evening after the morning it did not stop; the rain did not stop for many, many days. It fell with such force and for such a long time that it appeared to have the ability to change the face and the destiny of the world, the world of the outpost Roseau, so that after it stopped, nothing would be the same: not the ground itself that we walked on, not the outcome of even a quarrel. But it was not so; after the rain stopped, the waters formed into streams, the streams ran into rivers, the rivers ran into the sea; the ground retained its shape. I was in a state of upheaval. I would not remain the same, even I could see that; the respectable, the predictable—such was not to be my own destiny.

For the days and nights that the rain fell I could not keep to my routine: make my own breakfast, perform some household tasks in the main house in which Madame and Monsieur lived, then walk to my school, in which all the students were female, shunning their childish company, returning home, running errands for Madame, returning home, performing more household chores, washing my own clothes and generally taking care of my own self and things. I could not attend to any of that; the rain made it impossible.

I was standing in the middle of a smaller version of the larger deluge; it was coming through the roof of my room, which was made of tin. There were the same sensations; I was not used to them yet, but the rain was familiar. A knock at the door, a command; the door shook open. She came to rescue me, she knew how I must be suffering in the wet, she had been in the kitchen and from there she could hear my suffering, caused by this unexpected deluge, this unconscionable downpour; to be alone in it would be the cause of much suffering for me, she could already hear me suffering so. But I was not making a sound at all, only the soft sighs of satisfaction remembered. She took me into the house; she made me coffee, it was hot and strong, with fresh milk he had brought that morning from some cows he kept not too far away from the house. He was not in the house now; he had come and he had gone away. I spent the day with her; I spent the night with him.

It was not an arrangement made with words; it could not be made with words. On that day she showed me how to make him a cup of coffee; he liked to drink coffee with so strong a flavor that it overwhelmed anything that anyone wanted to put in it. She said this: “The taste is so strong you can put anything in it, he would never know.” When we were alone we spoke to each other in French patois, the language of the captive, the illegitimate; we never spoke of what we were doing, we never spoke for long, we spoke of the things in front of us and then we were silent. A silence had preceded the instructions to make coffee; a silence followed it. I did not say to her, I do not want to make him coffee, I shall never make him coffee, I do not need to know how to make this man coffee, no man will ever drink coffee from my hands made in that way! I did not say this. She washed my hair and rinsed it with a tea she had made from nettles; she combed it lovingly, admiring its thickness; she applied oil she had rendered from castor beans to my scalp; she plaited it into two braids, just the way I always wore it. She then bathed me and gave me another dress to wear that she had worn when she was a young woman. The dress fit me perfectly, I felt most uncomfortable in it, I could not wait to remove it and put on my own clothes again.

We sat on two chairs, not facing each other, speaking without words, exchanging thoughts. She told me of her life, of the time she went swimming; it was a Sunday, she had been to church and she went swimming and almost drowned, and never did that again, to this day, many years after. It had happened when she was a girl; now she never goes into the water of the sea, she only looks at it; and to my silent question, whether when she looks at the sea she regrets that she is not now part of its everlastingness, she did not answer, she could not answer, so much sadness had overwhelmed her life. The moment she met her Monsieur LaBatte—she called him that then, she called him Jack later, she calls him Him now—she wanted him to possess her. She cannot remember the color of the day. He did not notice her, he did not wish to possess her; his arms were powerful, his lips were powerful, he walked with a purpose, even when he was going nowhere; she bound him to her, a spell, she wanted to graft herself onto him, the way it's done with trees. She started in the world of the unnatural; she hoped to end in the world of the natural. She wanted only to have him; he would not be had, he would not be contained. To want what you will never have and to know too late that you will never have it is a life overwhelmed with sadness. She wanted a child, but her womb was like a sieve; it would not contain a child, it would not contain anything now. It lay shriveled inside her; perhaps her face mirrored it: shriveled, dried, like a fruit that has lost all its juice. Did I value my youth, did I treasure the newness that was me, sitting next to her in a chair? I did not; how could I? In my loss column, youth had not been entered; in my loss column was my mother; love was not yet in my loss column. I had not yet been loved, I could not tell if the way she had combed my hair was an expression of love. I could not tell if the way she had gently bathed me, passing the piece of cloth over my breasts, between the front and back of my legs, down my thighs, down my calves—if that was love. I could not tell if wanting me dry when I was wet, if wanting me fed when I was hungry—if that was love. I had not had love yet, it was not in my column of gain, so it could not be in my column of loss. The rain fell and we no longer heard it, we would hear only its absence, my days full of silence yet crowded with words, my nights full of sighs, soft and loud with agony and pleasure. I would call out his name, Jack, sometimes like an epithet, sometimes like a prayer. We were never alone together, the three of us; she saw him in one room, I saw him in another. He never spoke to me, not even in silence. He was behaving in a way he knew well, I was following a feeling I had, I was acting from instinct. The feeling I had, the instinct I was acting from, were all new to me. She heard us. She never let me know that she did, that she could hear us. She had wanted a child, had wanted children; I could hear her say that. I was not a child, I could no longer be a child; she could hear me say that. She wanted something again from me, she wanted a child I might have; I did not let her know that I heard that, and this vision she would have, of a child inside me, eventually in her arms, hung in the air like a ghost, something only the special could see. Not for every eye, it was for my eyes, but I would never see it, and it would go away and come back, this ghost of me with a child inside me. I turned my back to it; my ears grew deaf to it; my heart would not beat. She was stitching me a garment from beautiful old cloths she had saved from the different times in her life, the happy times, the sad times. It was a shroud made of memories; how she wished to weave me into its seams, its many seams. How hard she tried; but with each click of the thimble striking the needle, I made an escape. Her frustration and my satisfaction were in their own way palpable.

To become a schoolgirl again was not possible, only I did not know this right away. The climate remained the same, the weather changed. Monsieur went away. I did not see the counting room for a while. In each corner and along the sides of the floor he had small mountains of farthings; on a table he had piled on top of each other more coins, shillings, florins. He had so many coins all over the room, in stacks, that when the lamp was lit, they made the room brighter. In the night I would awake to find him counting his money, over and over, as if he did not know how much he really had, or as if counting would make a difference. He never offered any of it to me, he knew I did not want it, I knew I did not want any of it. The room was not cold or warm or suffocating, but it was not ideal either; I did not want to spend the rest of my life in it. I did not want to spend the rest of my life with the person who owned such a room. When he was not at home, my nights were spent in my room with the dirt floor off the kitchen. My days were spent in a schoolhouse. This education I was receiving had never offered me the satisfaction I was told it would; it only filled me with questions that were not answered, it only filled me with anger. I could not like what it would lead to: a humiliation so permanent that it would replace your own skin. And your own name, whatever it might be, eventually was not the gateway to who you really were, and you could not ever say to yourself, “My name is Xuela Claudette Desvarieux.” This was my mother's name, but I cannot say it was her real name, for in a life like hers, as in mine, what is a real name? My own name is her name, Xuela Claudette, and in the place of the Desvarieux is Richardson, which is my father's name; but who are these people Claudette, Desvarieux, and Richardson? To look into it, to look at it, could only fill you with despair; the humiliation could only make you intoxicated with self-hatred. For the name of any one person is at once her history recapitulated and abbreviated, and on declaring it, that person holds herself high or low, and the person hearing it holds the declarer high or low.

My mother was placed outside the gates of a convent when she was perhaps a day old by a woman believed to be her own mother; she was wrapped in pieces of clean old cloth, and the name Xuela was written on these pieces of cloth; it was written in an ink whose color was indigo, a dye rendered from a plant. She was not discovered because she had been crying; even as a newborn she did not draw attention to herself. She was found by a woman, a nun who was on her way to wreak more havoc in the lives of the remnants of a vanishing people; her name was Claudette Desvarieux. She named my mother after herself, she called my mother after herself; how the name Xuela survived I do not know, but my father gave it to me when she died, just after I was born. He had loved her; I do not know how much of the person he was then, sentimental and tender, survived in him.

This moment of my life was an idyll: peace and contentment of innocent young womanhood by day, spent in a large room with other young people of my own sex, all of them the products of legitimate unions, for this school begun by missionary followers of John Wesley did not admit children born outside marriage, and this, apart from everything else, kept the school very small, because most children were born outside marriage. I was surrounded daily by the eventually defeated, the eventually bitter, the dull hum of the voices of these girls; their bodies, already a source of anxiety and shame, were draped in blue sacks made from coarse cotton, a uniform. And then again there were my nights of silences and sighs—all an idyll, and its end I could see even so. I did not know how or when this end would come, but I could see it all the same, and the thought did not fill me with dread.

One day I became very sick. I was with child but I did not know it. I had no experience with the symptoms of such a state and so did not immediately know what was happening to me. It was Lise who told me what was the matter with me. I had just vomited up everything I had ever eaten in my entire life and I felt that I would die, and so I called out her name. “Lise,” I said, not Madame LaBatte; she had put me to lie down on her bed; she was lying next to me, holding me in her arms. She said I was “with child”; she said it in English. Her voice had tenderness in it and sympathy, and she said it again and again, that I was having a child, and then she sounded quite happy, smoothing down the hair on my head, rubbing my cheek with the back of her hand, as if I were a baby, too, and in a state of irritation that I could not articulate and her touch would prove soothing to me. Her words, though, struck a terror in me. At first I did not believe her, and then I believed her completely and instantly felt that if there was a child in me I could expel it through the sheer force of my will. I willed it out of me. Day after day I did this, but it did not come out. From deep in Lise's underarms I could smell a perfume. It was made from the juice of a flower, this smell would fill up the room, fill up my nostrils, move down into my stomach and out through my mouth in waves of vomiting; the taste of it slowly strangling me. I believed that I would die, and perhaps because I no longer had a future I began to want one very much. But what such a thing could be for me I did not know, for I was standing in a black hole. The other alternative was another black hole, this other black hole was one I did not know; I chose the one I did not know.

One day I was alone, still lying in Lise's bed; she had left me alone. I got up and walked into Monsieur LaBatte's counting room, and reaching into a small crocus bag that had only shillings in it, I removed from it one handful of this coin. I walked to the house of a woman who is dead now, and when she opened her door to me I placed my handful of shillings in her hands and looked into her face. I did not say a word. I did not know her real name, she was called “Sange-Sange,” but that was not her real name. She gave me a cupful of a thick black syrup to drink and then led me to a small hole in a dirt floor to lie down. For four days I lay there, my body a volcano of pain; nothing happened, and for four days after that blood flowed from between my legs slowly and steadily like an eternal spring. And then it stopped. The pain was like nothing I had ever imagined before, it was as if it defined pain itself; all other pain was only a reference to it, an imitation of it, an aspiration to it. I was a new person then, I knew things I had not known before, I knew things that you can know only if you have been through what I had just been through. I had carried my own life in my own hands.