The Autobiography of My Mother Read online

  In this house, for which I paid sixpence a week, I spent all my time that I was not working. I acquired bedding, a mattress stuffed with coconut fiber, from a woman who lived in the middle of the village. It was not new; I could not tell if she was the only one who had slept on it before, but I was not afraid to take on the hardships of all who had done so. My life was beyond empty. I had never had a mother, I had just recently refused to become one, and I knew then that this refusal would be complete. I would never become a mother, but that would not be the same as never bearing children. I would bear children, but I would never be a mother to them. I would bear them in abundance; they would emerge from my head, from my armpits, from between my legs; I would bear children, they would hang from me like fruit from a vine, but I would destroy them with the carelessness of a god. I would bear children in the morning, I would bathe them at noon in a water that came from myself, and I would eat them at night, swallowing them whole, all at once. They would live and then they would not live. In their day of life, I would walk them to the edge of a precipice. I would not push them over; I would not have to; the sweet voices of unusual pleasures would call to them from its bottom; they would not rest until they became one with these sounds. I would cover their bodies with diseases, embellish skins with thinly crusted sores, the sores sometimes oozing a thick pus for which they would thirst, a thirst that could never be quenched. I would condemn them to live in an empty space frozen in the same posture in which they had been born. I would throw them from a great height; every bone in their body would be broken and the bones would never be properly set, healing in the way they were broken, healing never at all. I would decorate them when they were only corpses and set each corpse in a polished wooden box, and place the polished wooden box in the earth and forget the part of the earth where I had buried the box. It is in this way that I did not become a mother; it is in this way that I bore my children.

  In that house with its openings of one door and three windows, the many crevices in the sides where the planks of wood did not meet, the holes in its roof made from the branches of a coconut tree, I sat, I stood, I lay down at night, and so sealed the doom of the children I would never have. I slept; the dawn came; I went to work; the dusk fell. Each morning I roasted coffee beans, pounded them into a coarse powder, and brewed a beverage that was thick and black and so pungent the flavor of it caused my taste buds to feel not whole but as if they had been stripped and flung about into various parts of my atmosphere.

  I did not yet know how vulnerable each individual is to the small eruptions that establish themselves inside her heart. I bought from his wife the garments of a man who had just died: his old nankeen drawers, his one old pair of khaki pants, his old shirt of some kind of cotton. I paid her fourpence for all this, plus a hand of bananas and some ground food. It was these clothes, the clothes of a dead man, that I wore to work each day. I cut off the two plaits of hair on my head; they fell to my feet looking like two headless serpents. I wrapped my almost hairless head in a piece of old cloth. I did not look like a man, I did not look like a woman. Each morning I cooked the food I would eat at midday; I wrapped it in fig leaves, then wrapped it again in a knapsack made out of a tired piece of madras cloth and took it with me to work. All day I carried buckets filled with black sand, or filled with mud, or filled with small stones; all day I dug holes and filled the holes with water and bailed water out of other holes. I spoke to no one, not even to myself. Inside me there was nothing; inside me there was a vault made of a substance so heavy I could find nothing to compare it to; and inside the vault was an ache of such intensity that each night as I lay alone in my house all my exhalations were long, low wails, like a lanced boil, with a small line of pus trickling out, not like a dam that had burst.

  I came to know myself, and this frightened me. To rid myself of this fear I began to look at a reflection of my face in any surface I could find: a still pool on the shallow banks of the river became my most common mirror. When I could not see my face, I could feel that I had become hard; I could feel that to love was beyond me, that I had gained such authority over my own ability to be that I could cause my own demise with complete calm. I knew, too, that I could cause the demise of others with the same complete calm. It was seeing my own face that comforted me. I began to worship myself. My black eyes, the shape of half-moons, were alluring to me; my nose, half flat, half not, as if painstakingly made that way, I found so beautiful that I saw in it a standard which the noses of the people I did not like failed to meet. I loved my mouth; my lips were thick and wide, and when I opened my mouth I could take in volumes, pleasure and pain, awake or asleep. It was this picture of myself—my eyes, my nose, my mouth set in the seamless, unwrinkled, unblemished skin which was my face—that I willed before me. My own face was a comfort to me, my own body was a comfort to me, and no matter how swept away I would become by anyone or anything, in the end I allowed nothing to replace my own being in my own mind.

  It was in this way that I lived, alone and yet with everything and everyone that I had been and had known, and would be and would know, apart from my present—and yet to be apart from my present was impossible. One day I saw my father. He saw me also. Our eyes did not meet. We did not speak words to each other. He was riding a donkey. He was wearing his jailer’s uniform, the same one he always wore, khaki shirt and khaki pants, so well ironed; only, on the shoulder of his shirt there was a new green-and-yellow stripe. It meant he had been elevated to new levels of authority. He was bearing a summons for someone; his presence as always was a sign of misfortune. Wherever he was, someone was bound to have less than they’d had before my father made an appearance.

  He looked so much as if he were born that way: erect; back stiff and straight, lips held tightly together, eyes clear as if they had never been clouded with tears, footsteps never faltering; even the beasts he rode never stumbled. He did not look as if he had ever been a baby and caused anyone to worry that he would die in the middle of the night of a fever, a cough, the breath suddenly leaving his body and never returning. To grow powerful became him, and as he grew more powerful, he did not grow fat and slovenly; he grew sleek, finely honed. You had to look into his eyes to see what he was made of, something deeply satisfying to him; and he would not tell you what that was, you had to look into his eyes. His eyes were the first thing everyone wanted to see about him; and people who saw him for the first time, who did not know him at all, looked for his eyes without thinking that they wanted to see them.

  He was making a visit to the site at which I worked. He came to where I was sitting, taking a short break from my labor, and left a bundle at my side. I did not open it immediately, I took it to my house and opened it that night. His gift to me was one Ugli fruit and three grapefruit. I remembered then that once, when I was a child, he had taken me to ground with him, wanting to show me the new land he had just acquired, which conveniently adjoined his old property. Without knowing why, I held my young self away from my inheritance, for that was what was being shown to me. On the new land he had planted many young grapefruit trees, and showing it all to me with a wide sweep of his hand—a gesture more appropriate to a man richer than he was, a gesture of all-encompassing ownership—he told me that the grapefruit was natural to the West Indies, that sometime in the seventeenth century it had mutated from the Ugli fruit on the island of Jamaica. He said this in a way that made me think he wanted the grapefruit and himself to be One. I did not know what was on his mind at the time he told me this.

  After I had been living in this way for a very long time, not a man, not a woman, not anything, not gathering, only living through my past, sifting it, trying to forget some things and never succeeding, trying to keep the memory of others more strongly alive and never succeeding, I received a letter from my father asking me to come home to his house in Mahaut. The letter was given to me by a man I had never seen before, but from his bowed head I could tell that my father knew him very well. The letter was dated two days earlier; I no
ticed this because only the day before I had seen my father, appearing in his usual way as a despised official, bearing documents which would lead to the imprisonment of some, the permanent impoverishment of others; he could have given me the letter himself then. His handwriting, like the rest of him, had been overtaken by officialdom. I remembered seeing the letters from him Lise and Jack received when I was living with them, and his handwriting then was more rounded, climbing up and down the page unevenly, the “Dear Jack and Madame La Batte” very large, taking up all of the first line, his “Your friend” just barely squeezing in at the bottom of the page. Not so the handwriting of this letter asking me to return to his house. The letters had been formed with a very hard and expensive pen nib, the ink was a thick unwatery black, the writing was the kind to be seen on an official document. The paper was a soft cream, the lines on it thin and green. All it lacked was a governmental seal. My brother was very sick, he wrote, and might die soon; my sister had developed into a sour personality and had been sent to school in Roseau, where she also lived with some nuns even though we were not Roman Catholics; my stepmother had grown distant from him. He wrote that: my brother, my sister, my stepmother; but I substituted these words: your son, your daughter, your wife. They were his; they were not mine. He wanted to tell me that we were all his; it was at that moment that I felt I did not want to belong to anyone, that since the one person I would have consented to own me had never lived to do so, I did not want to belong to anyone; I did not want anyone to belong to me.

  A wild bush had been in bloom for many days now. As I read the letter I looked at it. Its many flowers were small and a deep pink, with long deep throats and short flared lips for petals. A single bee kept going in and coming out, going in and coming out, in a leisurely fashion, as if it was at play, not at work at all. I suddenly grew tired of the life I had been leading; it had served its purpose. I suddenly felt I did not want to wear the clothes of a dead man anymore. I took off my clothes and set fire to them. I bathed myself. I wanted to set fire to the house I had lived in all this time before I left it, but I did not want to bring attention to my absence; I did not want anyone to notice that I had been there and that now I was not.

  I left for my father’s house in the middle of the night. This was not by design; I was ready to leave just then. I packed everything I owned into a small bundle and placed it on my head. It was not very heavy, it was not very much. The things I had had when I came I still had, except I had more money, and this I had worked very hard for. When I left, the night was black, a moon was in the sky, but I could not see it: a thick cloud hung a false ceiling between us. I was alone. My feet knew the road as if I had made it myself. By morning I was passing through Roseau. I did not stop. My father’s daughter was there. Lise and Jack were there. They did not interest me in the least. I did not wonder what they were both doing just then.

  It was before I reached Massacre that I passed a woman who was not much older than I was but who looked twice my age. I recognized her as someone who used to come to my father’s house and help his wife to wash their clothes and sweep their yard. She did not perform this duty of washing clothes for me; his wife did not wish it, I would not allow it, I wanted to do everything for myself. At that moment I was seeing her she resembled a martyr, but to what I am quite certain she had no idea. She walked with her hands folded in front of her, resting on her stomach. Her stomach was swollen, but I could not tell whether it was with child or from illness. Her dress was old and faded and needed washing. Her feet were without shoes. Her hair was uncombed. Her skin, which when I first knew her had been a fresh black, as if its blackness had just been newly made, was now dull and tired, and nothing could refresh it. We passed each other exactly under the canopy of an old tree; the earth had been torn away from its roots by so many rains that the roots were exposed in a merciless way to the elements: half of the tree was alive, half of it was dead. Neither this woman nor the tree became a symbol of anything to me. I had come to know that I would rather be all dead or all alive, but never half of one and half of the other at the same time.

  When I saw my father’s house again, I wept. It was situated at the far end of the village of Mahaut if you were coming from Roseau, going toward Belmont. I had never realized that it was a beautiful house outside, its wood frame painted yellow with deep brown windows. These shades of brown and yellow were not beautiful in themselves and yet they were beautiful when seen on this house. It was across the road from the sea, the big sea, so silvery, so without end, so blue, so all-encompassing, so gray, so without mercy, so powerful and without thought. Against this, the house was so delicate, so vulnerable to the force of the sea that it faced, for it was not unreasonable to think that from time to time the waves of the sea could reach it. It was not an old house; it had been built according to my father’s instructions, but already it sagged with the many burdens of its inhabitants: my father’s grief for the loss of my mother; his marriage to his present wife, whom he had not loved for herself but for her family’s connections and wealth; the grief her own barrenness had caused her; his son’s lack of good health; the waywardness of his younger daughter. I could not see anything of myself in this house; I could see only others. I did not belong in it. I did not yet belong anywhere.

  My father’s daughter whom he had had with his wife who was not my mother was born in the middle of the day, when the sun was directly overhead, and that was not a good thing. It was too bright a time of day to be born; to be born at such a time could only mean that you would be robbed of all your secrets, your ability to determine events. No room could be made dark enough to protect you from a brutality so spare, so voluptuous: life itself. The time of day when his son was born did not matter at all. Any time of day a son is born is the right time. At the time his son was born my father was no longer in love with life itself; he was not in love with anything. He only wanted more of everything, and of the everything he wanted, he did not want to wear it on himself. He did not want people to look at the coat he was wearing and know that he had many more where that came from; he wanted the things that could be laid at his feet, he wanted things he could do without, he wanted things that were without real use. Perhaps this was because in his life he had already exhausted the experience of usefulness, the experience of needing, the idea of desire. He was an animal of neutrality. He could absorb love; he could absorb hate. He could go on. His passions were his own: they did not obey a law of reason, they did not obey a law of passionate belief, and yet he could be described as reasonable, as someone of passionate beliefs. I was like him. I was not like my mother who was dead. I was like him. He was alive.

  Inside that yellow house with the brown windows, my father’s son was lying on a bed of clean rags that was on the floor. They were special rags; they had been perfumed with oils rendered from things vegetable and animal. It was to protect him from evil spirits. He was on the floor so that the spirits could not get to him from underneath. His mother believed in obeah. His father held the beliefs of the people who had subjugated him. He was not dead; he was not alive. That he was not one or the other was not his fault: to be brought into the world is not ever anyone’s responsibility, the decision is never your own. He in particular was someone else’s idea. He was an idea of his own mother to make his father forget the woman he had loved before. To make someone forget another person is impossible. Someone can forget an event, someone can forget an item, but no one can ever forget someone else.

  And so my father’s son lay, his body covered with small sores, his entire being not dead, not alive. It was said that he had yaws; it was said that he was possessed by an evil spirit that caused his body to sprout sores. His father believed one remedy would cure him, his mother believed in another; it was their beliefs that were at odds with each other, not the cures themselves. My father prayed to make him well, but his prayers were like an incitement to the disease: small lesions grew larger, the flesh on his left shin slowly began to vanish as if devoured by an invisib
le being, revealing the bone, and then that also began to vanish. His mother called in a man who dealt in obeah and a woman who dealt in obeah who were native to Dominica, and then she sent for a woman, a native of Guadeloupe; it was said that someone crossing seawater with a cure would have more success. The disease was indifferent to every principle; no science, no god of any kind could alter its course, and after he died, his mother and father came to believe that his death was inevitable from the beginning.

  He died. His name was Alfred; he was named after his father. His father, my father, was named after Alfred the Great, the English king, a personage my father should have despised, for he came to know this Alfred not through the language of the poet, which would have been the language of compassion, but through the language of the conqueror. My father was not responsible for his own name, but he was responsible for the name of his son. His son’s name was Alfred. My father perhaps imagined a dynasty. It was laughable only to someone excluded from its substance, someone like me, someone female; anyone else would understand entirely. He had imagined himself as continuing to live on through the existence of someone else. My father had never suffered the indignity of coming upon his own reflection in some shiny surface by accident and finding it so compelling that he came to believe that his own reflection was his soul also. He thought his son looked like him, and perhaps he did, though I would never have thought so; he thought his son was just like him, and perhaps he really was, but this son of his did not live long enough for me to draw such a conclusion.