The Autobiography of My Mother Read online

  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.

  On the road between Roseau and Potter’s Ville I was followed by a large agouti whose movements were not threatening. It stopped when I stopped, looked behind itself when I looked behind myself to see what it was up to—I did not know what it saw behind itself—walked when I walked. At Goodwill I stopped to drink water and the agouti stopped but did not drink water then. At Massacre the entire Church of St. Paul and St. Anne was wrapped in purple and black cloth as if it were Good Friday. It was at Massacre that Indian Warner, the illegitimate son of a Carib woman and a European man, was murdered by his half brother, an Englishman named Philip Warner, because Philip Warner did not like having such a close relative whose mother was a Carib woman. I passed through Mahaut crawling on my stomach, for I was afraid I would be recognized. I did not need to swim across the mouth of the Belfast River; the water was low. Just before I reached St. Joseph, at Layou, I spun around three times and called out my name and so made the agouti fall asleep behind me. I never saw it again. It was raining in Merot, it was raining in Coulibistri, it was raining in Colihaut.

  I could not see the top of Morne Diablotin; I had never seen it in any case, even when I was awake. At Portsmouth I found bread at the foot of a tree whose fruit was inedible nuts and whose wood is used to make exquisite furniture. I passed by the black waters of the Guadeloupe Channel; I was not tempted to be swallowed up whole in it. Passing through La Haut, passing through Thibaud, passing through Marigot—somewhere between Marigot and Castle Bruce lived my mother’s people, on a reserve, as if in commemoration of something no one could bring herself to mention. At Petite Soufrière the road ceased to exist. I passed by the black waters of the Martinique Channel; I was not tempted to be swallowed up whole in it. It rained between Soufrière and Roseau. I believe I heard small rumbl
ings coming from deep within Morne Trois Pitons, I believe I smelled sulfur fumes rising up from the Boiling Lake. And that is how I claimed my birthright, East and West, Above and Below, Water and Land: In a dream. I walked through my inheritance, an island of villages and rivers and mountains and people who began and ended with murder and theft and not very much love. I claimed it in a dream. Exhausted from the agony of expelling from my body a child I could not love and so did not want, I dreamed of all the things that were mine.

  It was the smell coming from my father that awoke me. He had been asked to arrest some men suspected of smuggling rum and they threw stones at him, and when he fell to the ground he was stabbed with a knife. Now he stood over me, and the wound was still fresh; it was on his upper arm, his shirt hid it from sight, but he smelled of iodine and gentian violet and carbolic acid. This smell seemed orderly and reasonable; I associated it with a small room and shelves on which were small brown bottles and bandages and white enamel utensils. This smell reminded me of a doctor. I had once been to a doctor’s home; my father had asked me to deliver an envelope inside of which was a piece of paper on which he had written a message. On the envelope he had written the doctor’s name: Bailey. This smell he had about him now reminded me of that doctor’s room. My father stood over me and looked down. His eyes were gray. He could not be trusted, but you would have to know him for a while to realize that. He did not seem repelled by me. I did not know if he knew what had happened to me. He had been told that I was missing, he looked for me, he found me, he wanted to take me to his home in Mahaut, and when I was well again I could go back to Roseau to live. (He did not say with whom). In his mind he believed he loved me, he was sure that he loved me; all his actions were an expression of this. On his face, though, was that mask; it was the same mask he wore when stealing all that was left from an unfortunate someone who had lost so much already. It was the same mask he wore when he guided an event, regardless of its truth, to an end that would benefit him. And even now, as he stood over me, he did not wear the clothes of a father: he wore his jailer’s uniform, he was in his policeman’s clothes. And these clothes, these policeman’s clothes, came to define him; it was as if eventually they grew onto his body, another skin, because long after he ceased to wear them, when it was no longer necessary for him to wear them, he always looked as if he were still in his policeman’s clothes. His other clothes were real clothes; his policeman’s clothes had become his skin.

  I was lying down on a bed made of rags in a house that had only the bare earth for a floor. There was no real evidence of my ordeal to see. I did not smell of the dead, because for something to be dead, life would have had to come first. I had only made the life that was just beginning in me, not dead, just not to be at all. There was a pain between my legs; it started inside my lower abdomen and my lower back and came out through my legs, this pain. I was wet between my legs; I could smell the wetness; it was blood, fresh and old. The fresh blood smelled like a newly dug-up mineral that had not yet been refined and turned into something worldly, something to which a value could be assigned. The old blood gave off a sweet rotten stink, and this I loved and would breathe in deeply when it came to dominate the other smells in the room; perhaps I only loved it because it was mine. My father was not repelled by me, but I could not see anything else that was written in his face. He stood over me, looking down on me. His face grew round and big, filling up the whole room from one end to the other; his face was like a map of the world, as if a globe had been removed from a dark corner in a sitting room (he owned such things: a globe, a sitting room) after which its main seam had been ripped apart and the globe had been laid open, flat. His cheeks were two continents separated by two seas which joined an ocean (his nose); his gray eyes were bottomless and sleeping volcanoes; between his nose and his mouth lay the equator; his ears were the horizons, to go beyond which was to fall into the thick blackness of nothing; his forehead was a range of mountains known to be treacherous; his chin the area of steppes and deserts. Each area took on its appropriate coloring: the land mass a collection of soft yellows and blues and mauves and pinks, with small lines of red running in every direction as if to deliberately confound; the waters blue, the mountains green, the deserts and steppes brown. I did not know this world, I had only met some of its people. Most of them were not everything you could ask for.

  To die then was not something I desired, and I was young enough to believe that this was a choice, and I was young enough for this to be so. I did not die, I did not wish to. I told my father that as soon as I was able to, I would return to the household of Madame and Monsieur LaBatte. My father had a broad back. It was stiff, it was strong; it looked like a large land mass arising unexpectedly out of what had been flat; around it, underneath it, above it I could not go. I had seen this back of his so many times, so many times it had been turned to me, that I was no longer capable of being surprised at the sight of it, but it never ceased to stir up in me a feeling of curiosity: would I see his face again or had I seen him for the last time?

  * * *

  Lise was waiting for me on the steps of the verandah. She had not known when I would show up again, or if I would show up again, but she had waited for me, she was waiting for me. She wore a new black dress with an old piece of crushed-up cloth pinned just above her left bosom. The color of the cloth was red, an old red that had only darkened with time. She said, “My dear,” only that, “My dear,” and she wrapped her arms around me and drew me close to her. I could not feel her; even as she pressed me close to her, I could not feel her. She drew away from me, she could hear her husband’s footsteps coming along the path. He was wearing his galoshes, I could tell. I knew the sound of his footsteps when his feet were in his galoshes. When he saw me, he did not mention that I had been away; I knew that if he had noticed, he would not tell me in any case. I did not care, I was curious. We stood, the three of us, in a little triangle, a trinity, not made in heaven, not made in hell, a wordless trinity. And yet at that moment someone was of the defeated, someone was of the resigned, and someone was changed forever. I was not of the defeated; I was not of the resigned. There was a castor-oil bush growing, untended by human hand, not far from us, and I fixed my eyes on it with a hard stare, for I wanted to remember to harvest the seeds when they became ripe, render the oil from them, and drink it to clean out my insides.

  My heart was not unmoved by the sight of Lise haunting the space of ground that stood between the house in which she lived and the small hut I occupied. She swept the ground at night, in the dark when it rained; she planted small bushes that bore white flowers, then uprooted them and put in their place some lilies that would eventually bear flowers the color of the inside of an orange. How long it would take for the orange-colored flowers to appear she did not know, but she was very sure they would please me. She wore the black dress with the tattered red flower over her breast day after day. She was in mourning. Her eyes were black and shiny with tears; the tears were trapped there, they never spilled out. Her arms would reach out to me—I never stood too near her—then up to the wide-open blue sky as if she were drowning, her mouth open with no sound coming out, yet even so I could hear her say, “Save me, save me”; but even if she did not know, I knew it was not herself she wanted to save; it was me she wanted to consume. I was not unmoved by the sight of her, she was a sad sight to me; but I was not an angel, nothing in me broke.

  I could hear the clap of thunder, the roar of water falling from great heights into great pools and the great pool wending its way slowly toward the sea; I could hear clouds emptying themselves of their moisture as if by accident, as if someone had kicked over a goblet in the dark, and their contents landing on an indifferent earth; and I could hear the silence and I could hear the dark night gobbling it up, and it in turn being gobbled up by the light of yet another day.

  My father wrote to my host and hostess to ask after my health; he did not know what had happened to me and so he asked them to forgive me the bad manners
I had shown when I disappeared without telling them of my whereabouts, and went to live all by myself in a section of Roseau which was dangerous and unsanitary, and so almost caused my own death. He sent me his best through them. He sent me five guineas. Lise gave me the five guineas. She showed me the letter. His handwriting was such a beautiful thing to behold. It covered the page with strong curves and strong dashes and strong slashes. I could not read it; I could not bring myself to make out each word and put them together in sentences. I only saw that his handwriting covered the page from top to bottom. The envelope bore the postmark of Dublanc, a small town in the parish of St. Peter, many, many miles away from Roseau; even so, I felt I knew the small miseries he had created and left in his wake there.

  The days followed the nights with a helpless regularity, day devouring night devouring day devouring night with such obsessiveness that it might have fascinated me if I could be fascinated. I wanted time to pass in one fell swoop, like the blink of an eye; I wanted to look up and suddenly find myself looking at the events of my immediate past on a horizon from which I was receding rapidly. When this did not become so, I did not grow insane, I did not grow tired. I left the household of the LaBattes at the very blackest point of the night. This was not because of the cover of darkness. I did not want the actual sight of Lise seeing me leave her to haunt me for the rest of my life; I could imagine it well enough. I walked just past the village of Loubière and rented a house for which I paid sixpence a week. I had four dresses, two pairs of shoes, a very nice straw hat, and the five guineas given to me by my father; it was not nothing. A road was being built between Loubière and Giraudel. I took a job sifting the sand needed for it. I was paid eightpence for each day of work, and each day of work consisted of ten hours; at the end of a fortnight I received in a small brown envelope my pay of seven shillings and fourpence.