The Autobiography of My Mother Page 4

  My father did not believe that I had witnessed the boy’s drowning. He was angry with me for saying I had seen it; he blamed the company I kept. He said I was not to speak to those other children; he said they did not come from good homes or good people; he said that I should remember that he was my father and that he occupied an important official position and that for me to say such things could only cause him embarrassment. I remember mostly the way he told me that I did not see what I knew, and still know: what I had seen. My father had inherited the ghostly paleness of his own father, the skin that looks as if it is waiting for another skin, a real skin, to come and cover it up, and his eyes were gray, like his own father’s eyes, and his hair was a red and brown like his father’s also; only the texture of his hair, thick and tightly curled, was like his mother’s. She was a woman from Africa, where in Africa no one knew, and what good would it do to find out, she was simply from somewhere in Africa, that place on the map which was a configuration of shapes and shades of yellow. And he pointed his brownish-pink, pinkish-brown finger at me and said that I had not seen what I had seen, could not have seen what I had seen, did not, did not, did not; but I did, I did, I did. But it was not to him that I insisted on the reality I knew. And I did not tell him of the day when, returning from school alone, I saw a spotted monkey sitting in a tree and I threw three stones at it. The monkey caught the third one and threw it back at me and struck me over my left eye, in the hair of my brow, and I bled furiously, as if I would never stop. I somehow knew that the red berries of a certain bush would stop the flow of blood. My father, when he saw my wound, thought that it had come from the hands of a schoolmate, a boy, someone I was so protective of I would not reveal his identity. It was then that he began to make plans to send me to school in Roseau, to get me away from the bad influence of children who would wound me, whom I was protecting from his wrath, and who, he was certain, were male. And after this outburst of emotion, meant as an expression of his love for me but which only made me feel anew the hatred and isolation in which we all lived, his face again became a mask, impossible to read.

  On that road which I came to know so well, I spent some of the sweetest moments of my life. On a long stretch of it in the late afternoon I could see the reflection of the sun’s light on the surface of the seawater, and it always had the quality of an expectation just about to be fulfilled, as if at any moment a small city made out of that special light of the sun on the water would arise, and from it might flow a joy I had not yet imagined. And I knew a place just off the side of this road where the sweetest cashews grew; the juice from their fruit would cause blisters to form on my lips and make my tongue feel as if it were caught in a bundle of twine, temporarily making speech difficult, and I found this, the difficulty of speaking, the possibility that it might be a struggle for me ever to speak again, delicious. It was on that road that I first walked directly from one kind of weather system to another: from a cold, heavy rain to a bright, clear heat of midday. And it was on that road that my sister, the girl child of my father and his wife, was traveling on a bicycle after meeting a man my father had forbidden her to see and whom she would marry, when she had an accident, falling over a precipice, which left her lame and barren, her eyes unable to focus properly. This is not a happy memory; her suffering, even now, is very real to me.

  Not long after I came to live with them, my father’s wife began to have her own children. She bore a boy first, then she had a girl. This had two predictable outcomes: she left me alone and she valued her son more than her daughter. That she did not think very much of the person who was most like her, a daughter, a female, was so normal that it would have been noticed only if it had been otherwise: to people like us, despising anything that was most like ourselves was almost a law of nature. This fact of my sister’s life made me feel overwhelmingly sympathetic to her. She did not like me—she was told by her mother that I was an enemy of hers, that I was not to be trusted, that I was like a thief in the house, waiting for the right moment when I would rob them of their inheritance. This was convincing to my sister, and she distrusted me and she disliked me; the first words of insult she could speak were directed toward me. My father’s wife had always said to me, in private, when my father was not there, that I could not be his child because I did not look like him, and it was true that I did not have any of his physical characteristics. My sister, though, did look like him: her hair and eyes were the same color as his, red and gray; her skin, too, was the same color as his, thin and red, not the red of his hair, another red, like the color of the earth in some places. But she did not have his calm or his patience; she walked like a warrior and could not contain the fury that was inside her. Nor did she have his quality of keeping her own counsel; every thought that came into her mind had to be voiced, so that whenever she saw me, she would let me know immediately whatever my presence suggested to her. I never hated her, I had only sympathy for her. Her tragedy was greater than mine; her mother did not love her, but her mother was alive, and every day she saw her mother and every day her mother let her know she was not loved. My mother was dead. It was her own son that my father’s wife favored, not loved more, for she was incapable of it—love; she favored him because he was not like her: he was not female, he was male. This boy thought, and was encouraged to think, that he was like his father in ways that were physical and in ways that were spiritual, so that it was said of him that he walked like his father and that certain of his gestures were like his father’s, but it was not true; it was not so, not really. He did walk like my father, he did have some of his gestures, but this walk of my father’s was not natural to my father and his gestures were not natural to him, either. My father had invented himself, had made himself up as he went along; when he wanted something, he made himself meet the situation, he made his cut fit the jib. The man, my father, whom his wife and his son saw, the man they wanted that boy to be, existed, but the person they saw was an expression of my father’s desires, an expression of his needs; the personality they were observing was like a suit of clothes my father had made for himself, and eventually he wore it so long that it became impossible to remove, it covered completely who he really was; who he really might have been became unknown, even to himself. My father was a thief, he was a jailer, he spoke falsehoods, he took advantage of the weak; that was who was he was at heart; he acted in these ways at all times in his life, but by the end of his life, the jailer, the thief, the liar, the coward—all were unknown to him. He believed himself to be a man of freedom, honest and brave; he believed it as he believed in the realness of anything he could see standing in front of him, like the warmth of the sun or the blueness of the sky, and nothing could convince him that just the opposite was the truth. This was not something his wife and her son would have known, or could have known, and so this boy from his beginning lived a painful life, a copied life, a life whose origins he did not know. To see him, when he was eleven years old or so, wearing a white linen suit, a direct copy of his father’s; so thin, so pale; his black hair, which was the same as his mother’s, forced down straight against his scalp; his gait awkward, unsteady, as if he had only just mastered the ability to use his feet—to see him walking to church, to worship a god my father did not really believe in, because my father could not believe in any god; to see him try so very hard to be like this man he did not know, whose actions he had never examined, inspired in me only pity and sadness; and so when he died, before he was nineteen years of age, I did not feel it was a tragedy, I only felt it was merciful that his life of misery and torture should be so short. His death was long and painful, its cause unknown, perhaps even unknowable; when he died there was no empty space where he had been, and his mother’s grief and my father’s grief for him would often seem mysterious, a big why and what, because who was this boy, this person whom they grieved over.

  And so I had come to know well the world in which I was living. I knew how to interpret the long silences my father’s wife had constructed between us.
Sometimes in these silences there was nothing at all; sometimes they were filled with pure evil; sometimes she meant to see me dead, sometimes my being alive was of no interest to her. Her wishing me dead was an automatic response; she had never loved me, she had never wished to see me alive in the first place, and so when she saw me, really saw me, looked at me and realized who I was, she could only wish me dead. But after her first real attempt—the one in which she made me a gift of a necklace, which I then presented as a gift to her favorite dog and the necklace gave the dog the death that was meant for me—the other attempts she made were only halfhearted; this was partly because she recognized my desire to survive and partly because she had become preoccupied with her life as the mother of a great man to be. When her son died, I was no longer living in her house, I had passed out of her view, she did not have me to look on and perhaps take revenge on because I went on living.

  Observing any human being from infancy, seeing someone come into existence, like a new flower in bud, each petal first tightly furled around another, and then the natural loosening and unfurling, the opening into a bloom, the life of that bloom, must be something wonderful to behold; to see experience collect in the eyes, around the corners of the mouth, the weighing down of the brow, the heaviness in heart and soul, the thick gathering around the waist, the breasts, the slowing down of footsteps not from old age but only with the caution of life—all this is something so wonderful to observe, so wonderful to behold; the pleasure for the observer, the beholder, is an invisible current between the two, observed and observer, beheld and beholder, and I believe that no life is complete, no life is really whole, without this invisible current, which is in many ways a definition of love. No one observed and beheld me, I observed and beheld myself; the invisible current went out and it came back to me. I came to love myself in defiance, out of despair, because there was nothing else. Such a love will do, but it will only do, it is not the best kind; it has the taste of something left out on a shelf too long that has turned rancid, and when eaten makes the stomach turn. It will do, it will do, but only because there is nothing else to take its place; it is not to be recommended.

  And so it was that when I first saw the thick red fluid of my menstrual blood, I was not surprised and not afraid. I had never heard of it, I had not been expecting it, I was twelve years old, but its appearance to my young mind, to my body and soul, had the force of destiny fulfilled; it was as if I had always known of it but had never admitted it to consciousness, had never known how to put it into words. It appeared that first time so thick and red and plentiful that it was impossible to think of it as only an omen, a warning of some kind, a symbol; it was just its real self, my menstrual flow, and I knew immediately that its failure to appear regularly after a certain interval could only mean a great deal of trouble for me. Perhaps I knew then that the child in me would never be stilled enough to allow me to have a child of my own. From a baker I bought four bags, the kind in which flour was shipped, and after removing the dyed brand markings through a long process of washing and bleaching in the hot sun, I made four squares from each and used them as napkins to catch my blood as it flowed from between my legs. After my father’s wife saw me initiate and complete this one act, she said to me that when I became a real woman, she would have to guard herself against me. At the time I felt such a statement to be unwarranted, for after all I was still on my guard when it came to her. It was around then, too, that the texture of my body and the smell of my body began to change; coarse hairs appeared under my arms and in the space between my legs where there had been none, my hips widened, my chest thickened and swelled up slightly at first, and a deep space formed between my two breasts; the hair on my head grew long and soft and the waves in it deepened, my lips spread across my face and thickened into the shape of a heart that had been stepped on. I used to stare at myself in an old piece of a broken looking glass I had found in some rubbish under my father’s house. The sight of my changing self did not frighten me, I only wondered how I would look eventually; I never doubted that I would like completely whatever stared back at me. And so, too, the smell of my underarms and between my legs changed, and this change pleased me. In those places the smell became pungent, sharp, as if something was in the process of fermenting, slowly; in private, then as now, my hands almost never left those places, and when I was in public, these same hands were always not far from my nose, I so enjoyed the way I smelled, then and now.

  * * *

  At the age of fourteen, I had exhausted the resources of the tiny school in Massacre, the tiny village between Roseau and Mahaut. I really knew much more than that school could teach me. I could sense from the beginning of my life that I would know things when I needed to know them, I had known a long time ago that I could trust my own instincts about things, that if I were ever in a difficult situation, if I thought about it long enough a solution would appear to me. That there would be limitations to having such a view of life I could not know, but in any case, my life was already small and limited in its own way.

  I also knew the history of an array of people I would never meet. That in itself should not have kept me from knowing of them; it was only that this history of peoples that I would never meet—Romans, Gauls, Saxons, Britons, the British people—had behind it a malicious intent: to make me feel humiliated, humbled, small. Once I had identified and accepted this malice directed at me, I became fascinated with this expression of vanity: the perfume of your own name and your own deeds is intoxicating, and it never causes you to feel weary or exhausted; it is its own inspiration, it is its own renewal. And I learned, too, that no one can truly judge himself; to describe your own transgressions is to forgive yourself for them; to confess your bad deeds is also at once to forgive yourself, and so silence becomes the only form of self-punishment: to live forever locked up in an iron cage made of your own silence, and then, from time to time, to have this silence broken by a designated crier, someone who repeats over and over, in broken or complete sentences, a list of the violations, the bad deeds committed.

  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 wit
h 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.