The Autobiography of My Mother Read online

  My brother died. In death he became my brother. When he was alive, I did not know him at all. His hair was black like his mother’s. His eyes were brown like hers also. He was kind, he was gentle, but it was the kindness and gentleness of the weak, not out of largesse, not out of instinct. He had a great beauty, but he did not make you want to touch him, not because he repelled you, but because he made you afraid that just to touch him would be to cause him harm, as if he were something vegetable and out of a fable. My father loved him: he was good; he would inherit much; the foul work of acquiring would be unknown to him. How he would keep his inheritance is a thought that would occur and be an irritation only to someone like myself, the disenchanted, and, before that, the disinherited. His father loved him; their names were the same: Alfred. This boy died. Before he died, from his body came a river of pus. Just as he died, a large brown worm crawled out of his left leg; it lay there, above the ankle, as if waiting to be found by a wanderer one morning. It soon dried up and then looked as if all life had left its body thousands of years before. They became inseparable then, my brother and the worm that emerged from his body just as he died. My father did not stop living then, nor did he lose the desire to continue living, he only came to believe that there was a secret purpose to all his suffering and he longed for it to be revealed to him.

  My brother died and the seas were still, but not in the usual way; the wind did not blow, the leaves of the trees were still, the earth did not shake, the rivers did not swell, the sky was blue in that eternally deceptive way—innocent, as if it could never change; everything was itself, just the way it would be no matter what happened, but the world had changed for my father, and I believe now that he felt small again, insignificant, helpless against life itself taking a course indifferent to his own wishes. A sheen of calm came over him then, the sheen of calm that is seen in a saint, but I am sure no real saint ever looks like that; it is something seen only in paintings.

  My brother was buried in the churchyard of the Methodist church in Roseau. His mother was silent in her grief; she had longed for something also. It centered around her son, his importance; his strength and accomplishments would be a source of pride to her. He looked like her; his beauty was her beauty also. So closely did she see herself tied up with him that when he died, she felt she had died, too; she could not bring herself to actually die; she could be among the living only in body, her spirit now was with her dead son. I felt sorry for her then but not enough to forgive and forget that she had once tried to make me dead also, and most certainly always wished me dead and would make me dead if she could ever bring herself alive enough to accomplish this. Hymns were sung, prayers were offered; they were prayers asking for forgiveness and they were prayers acknowledging an acceptance of events that were ultimately disappointing. But such is the lot of the defeated: in the end what is was meant to be, in the end the other outcome, the outcome of triumph, would have been a tragedy, a consequence far more devastating than the defeat being experienced now. Such is the consolation of the defeated.

  My father and his wife and his daughter, the girl who was not me, his wife who was her mother, formed a triangle of pain, of blame, of suspicion, of revenge. To my father none of it had a personal, intimate nature. He did not quarrel with his wife. She, too, was now a source of disappointment. I was only a reminder of disappointment, on the one hand; on the other, I was of the flesh of someone he believed he had loved. My father could not love, but he believed he could, and that must be enough, because perhaps half the world feels that way. He believed he loved me, but I could tell him how untrue that was, I could list for him the number of times he had placed me squarely within the jaws of death; I could list for him the number of times he had failed to be a father to me, his motherless child, while on his way to becoming a man of this world. He loved, he loved; he loved himself. It is perhaps the way of all men. Having lost that small vessel through which he had hoped to perpetuate himself, he then became his own legacy. He was his own future. When he died the world would cease to exist.

  To his daughter, the one who was not me, my presence was such an irritant that even when I was not standing in front of her she arranged her face in the disfiguring frown she had created solely for me. She insisted that I was not my father’s child, and that even if I was his child, I was illegitimate. The look of awe and bewilderment that alternately crossed her face when she realized that I welcomed this characterization made me pity her. I wished somehow she would draw inspiration from me. Why am I not valued? is the question she wanted to ask the world, the world as constituted by her mother and her father; but she could not ask such a question, she could not begin to suspect there might be an answer. Her mother could not look at her, for what a waste she was, she was the wrong one to be alive. Her father had never really looked at her; seeing her after his son died was not so different from seeing her before he had died. Her mother now greeted her always with silence. Her father continued never speaking to her at all.

  She became my sister when shortly after she was expelled from school she found herself with child and I helped her rid herself of this condition. It was not hard to do; I had remembered everything from my own experience. She did not want anything surrounding these events to be advertised, so I hid her in my small room behind the kitchen where I had resumed living. I still cooked my own food. I made her strong potions of teas. When the child inside her still refused to come out, I put my hand up into her womb and forcibly removed it. She bled for days. Her body shrank and crumpled up with pain. She did not die. I had become such an expert at being ruler of my own life in this one limited regard that I could extend such power to any other woman who asked me for it. But my sister did not ask me for it. I never became her sister; she never took me into her confidence, she never thanked me; in fact, the powerful clasp in which she could see I held my own life only led to more suspicion and misunderstanding.

  She was expelled from her school for having a clandestine relationship with a man; it had been described just that way by the headmistress in a letter to our father: Elizabeth has been conducting a clandestine relationship with a young policeman from St. Joseph. This letter lay on a table in that room of my father’s house in which everything looked as if it had been plucked from a picture—a painting, not a photograph, so lustrous, so lifelike, yet so dead. Nothing in the world could have made me resist reading it. It said, Cher Monsieur et Chère Madame, and the rest was in English. My sister had a row with herself, for her mother did not speak to her and her father had never spoken to her. She denied everything. She made up a story that gave me my first insight into the life of childhood and what a real child might say and do. A child looks at the horizon and believes that the world is flat and that when you get to the edge you will fall off into nothingness. Such a belief is a child’s belief. It is not a scientific explanation that makes such a belief laughable; it is the lack of faith, the lack of complexity that makes it so. She believed with all her might that her explanations were transparently true: she had climbed over the wall of the convent to take a walk because the enclosed atmosphere caused her to feel homesick and she missed the openness of her dear Mahaut so; each time she escaped the walls of the convent in the middle of the night, by a strange coincidence she met the same man, a Claude Pacquet, a young man who hoped one day to be a bailiff. Such silliness was laughable only if you lived in a large, comfortable world in which your family’s position could not be questioned, in which your own position could not be questioned. Her mother did not laugh. Her father did not laugh. I did not laugh.

  When she was fully recovered from expelling the child she did not want from her body, the very first thing she did was to spit at the ground in front of me after saying words she thought would do a great injury to my feelings. But even when I was born I was older than her seventeen years of age, so her words did not come as a surprise. I had not expected gratitude, though I would have welcomed it. I had not expected friendship; that I would have regarded with susp
icion. The empty space in the small yellow house that had always been her home she could not fill. She looked so much like her father, more so than her brother had: her skin was the same as his, a mixture of people—not races, people—her hair, red and gold and tightly curled, had the texture of hair on the back of a sheep; her eyes were gray, like the moon when seen against a navy-blue sky, and yet she was not beautiful; it was not in her character, beauty. She was fierce; she had been born feeling that her birthright was already spoken for. She thought I was the person who might take it away from her. I could not. I was not a man.

  Her father, my father, had by this time become a very rich man. This was unusual for a man of his standing, a native; that is, a man who through blood is associated with the African people. His wealth was a wonder to other people who could be labeled native. These other people, the natives, had become bogged down in issues of justice and injustice, and they had become attached to claims of ancestral heritage, and the indignities by which they had come to these islands, as if they mattered, really mattered. Not so my father. He had a view of things, of history, of time, as if he had lived through many ages, and what he might have seen was that in the short run everything mattered and in the long run nothing mattered. It would all end in nothing, in death, as if you had never been there, and no matter how glorious your presence had been, if at any given moment no one cared about it enough to die for it, enough to live for it, it did not matter at all. Everything mattered, and then again, nothing mattered. He grew rich and rich again. He did not wear it on himself. He did not wear gold, he did not wear silver. He wore a fine white linen suit, so well tailored to fit him—it was not his skin but it could have been. He looked magnificent: a bird of prey, an insect vulnerable to a bird of prey, a master of the jungle, a ruler of the plain, a small mammal. His skin then began to wrinkle, the folds were tiny, creases so minute that only someone as interested as I would have noticed.

  My sister did not notice. Her father’s wealth did not seem unusual to her. He should be rich, she should be his daughter. She bought a comb—I did not know from where—that when heated and run through her own tightly curled hair made it lie flat against her head. It gleamed in the sunlight, piles and piles of it, like a kind of wealth. Her father was a thin man. He never ate food in a way to suggest he enjoyed it. Her waist grew wide, her hips wider. Her bosoms were large but without seductive appeal; they grew larger, but they did not invite caresses. Ah, how much she did not know herself caused me such sadness that for one whole day I wept from it. She, too, was in love with herself, but hers was not a self worth loving.

  And one day my father got a motorcar. It was not a new car, it had belonged to someone else, but that did not matter; he had a car. In it he and his wife and his daughter would drive to Roseau each Sunday and attend church. They would drive back and eat a large meal, sometimes by themselves, sometimes with a man he had befriended, a man who was from England. I did not go in the car with them to church, I did not go to church at all, and I did not eat dinner with them. My sister had been given a bicycle; it was a luxury, not a thing common to everyone. After this Sunday meal, which was made up of meat cooked in the English style, roasted, and a collection of starches, some sweet, some savory, called puddings, she would go out on her bicycle for a ride. A ride to where? I immediately knew that it was a ride to be in the company of the man from St. Joseph. It is possible that her mother and father knew this also, but they did not mention it, they did not speak to her anymore, certainly not to give her a warning. For many Sunday afternoons she took a ride on her bicycle, and when she left her parents’ house it was with an idea that they all agreed upon: enjoyment of a specific kind. She would ride through the pleasant afternoon air, the heat lessening as the day grew shorter, the light softening as the day grew shorter, all enthusiasm that began with the long yawn of the morning dampening as the day grew shorter. But the heat, the light, the length of the day held no importance for her; she was going to meet a man. Her mother and my father knew this, that she was going to meet a man, and that it was that man, the very one from St. Joseph, the one they did not like. They had by that time exhausted their ability to oppose: they had opposed the dying of their son, and death had come to him anyway.

  It had grown dark one Sunday when she was returning from her clandestine meeting with him. They had met in a place between Massacre and Roseau, they had kissed, he had been on top of her, they were both half clothed, she had gasped, he had groaned, she had said to him that she loved him, he had not said such a thing to her, but she did not notice; he had withdrawn himself from her, she still clung to him. The way he pleased her when he was inside her, his body just that part between his waist and his knees, moving away from her as if forever and then inside her as if forever, was so glorious to my sister that she thought this sensation was unique to her being with him; she did not know she could have this sensation with anyone else, including her own self. She was in love with him, and what did that mean? It was something I hoped never to know, for she made it look like the definition of foolishness itself. She was rounding the bend on her bicycle, the sharp bend, the bend that was so sharp it felt that way even when you were walking slowly, returning from her meeting with him that Sunday afternoon. She was going at too fast a pace and she went off the road, falling over the precipice into the tops of some trees and then onto the tops of some rocks, the small remains of a volcanic eruption. That she was alive after this was considered a miracle, which was true, and a blessing, but her survival seemed a blessing only to all who could not imagine and so therefore had faith in the future.

  I had seen her Sunday afternoon before she set out to meet her destiny and she had had that peculiar way about her that people sometimes get, which I now know but did not at the time: that look which says, Every action I now take is the action that will determine my end. She had quarreled with herself, though she thought she had just had a disagreement with her mother, but her mother was not paying attention to her at all. She wore a white dress made of cotton; her father insisted on her wearing white on Sunday, not because of any custom recognizable to anyone, but only because he had an idea of his own virtue and it was superior to other people’s virtue and recognizable only to himself. As she went to fetch her bicycle, she had met me, and she had looked at me in a way that was to become the set look of her features: the corners of her lips upturned; the irises of her eyes strained to the far corners, rendering the object at which she was gazing out of focus. A bitterness came out of her nostrils; it was not the air she breathed in but the air she exhaled. She was without pity when she looked at me, but it did not matter, I did not need her pity. When I saw her again she was lying in a bed in the hospital in Roseau. She was alone then. Her father had been there before me, her mother had been there before me, they had not been there before at the same time. It had been ten days; she had fallen off the precipice ten days earlier. The strangeness of life had not yet occurred to her, the short-livedness of each moment, each day, each existence itself, had not yet occurred to her; I do not now believe it ever has. I believe that at the end of her life she was unhappy, she was confused—exactly as she had been at the beginning. Life is of course not a mystery, everyone born knows only too well its entire course; the mystery is a trick designed for the cursedly curious.

  She was lying in between the coarse sheets of the hospital bed. Her skin was a pale brown, like new paper, the deep brown pigment lying on top. She was beyond being happy or unhappy to see me. She could not see me clearly at all. I perhaps looked like three or one hundred people to her; whether I was three or one hundred, she still did not like me at all. But she would never like the world again. I had come to see her of my own free will. It had not been expected of me; no one had asked me to do it. When she saw me, she turned her head away; perhaps it was from disgust, or perhaps she was ashamed.

  When I saw her lying in a bed in a small room in which there were six other beds but no other patients, a man was standing over her. He was the sa
me man who sometimes came to have dinner with my father and my father’s wife on a Sunday; he was the same man with whom I would spend the longest part of my life, but how was I to know that then? She did not look up at me, she did not want to see me; he looked at me, but at that moment I held no significance for him, and later he did not remember that he had seen me then. When she looked at me, she saw me as if I were replicated ten times, each partially imposed upon another, and no version of me fully revealed. This sight of me made her feel uncertain; she turned away from me in anger. I should have loved her then, enough to quell the curiosity that was aroused in me when I saw her lying there: what was he like, he who could bring her to this, a semi-invalid whose vision would forever be blurred?

  My father had taken the world as he found it and made it subject to his whims, even as other men had made him subject to their whims in the world as they had found it. He had never questioned these worlds within worlds, not as far as I knew. He was a rich man; there were men richer than he was, and men richer than that. They would all come to the same end, nothing could save them. He had lived long enough to have lost faith in his efforts, to have lost the belief that they had some future value, but his dabbling in the material gain of this world was like a drug: he was addicted to it, he could not just give it up. His heir only his wife’s daughter now—his son was dead, his wife was dead, I had removed myself from such a position—had no connection to his feelings about the makeup of the world, and might not by nature have his same feelings about the world in any case; she only saw her father’s fortune as freeing her from the burden of the everyday life she saw around her: a life of sweeping ground that would shortly only be dirty again; a life of cooking food that would only be consumed, with more food needing to be cooked again; of making clothes clean that would only be worn and be dirtied and need to be cleaned again. And yet perhaps my father was correct to pursue the world, and my sister correct to enjoy it, because its opposite, the pursuit of death, is not a pursuit at all: death is the inevitable of all inevitables, the only certainty in every uncertainty.