Читать книгу In the Belly of Her Ghost - Colin Dayan - Страница 6
ОглавлениеHow to Remember My Mother
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I SAW SOMETHING on my left cheek. I thought it was a scab. I pulled it off. It was a tick. Less than a 10th of an inch and very light in color, it was a taupe little thing, not big and black like the tick I found on my back just a month ago. I was living in Nashville much the way my mother lived in Atlanta, but without her beauty or luxury.
As a child, I was in awe of the woman. She laughed at me, screamed at me. She shunned me, but now, dead, she stays close. Sometimes she comes down the wall like a spider.
For years I’ve been writing her story. Much of it remains incomplete, pages with titles like “The Lady with Camellias,” “A Daughter’s Lament,” or “Blues in the Night.” I tried in vain to forget her, but she has stayed around as close to me as my breath, hovering like dust hanging in the air.
After she died, boxes arrived from Atlanta. They filled the garage. I gave away her clothes, her furs, gowns, sequined sashes, golf shoes, and hats. But I kept my father’s photos of her. There were thousands. One had been corroded by water. This photo of my mother just after her marriage shades from pale lilac to ochre to yellow to cobalt blue to gray, as if cinders were eating away at the remnants of color. Her lineaments curve gently in and out of the mold. What shows is one eye, an immaculately plucked brow, a bit of hair covered with something like a hat but more like a towel, pulled down with her hands caught mid-movement. The rest of the body is a blur of fabric dissolved into the waste of wet and dust.
That eye — cinematic, hard as nails, her stare is astoundingly communicative yet closed off, as if letting us know: she knows what to make of us, and she knows we can’t have a clue what to make of her.
Looking through other photos of my mother, she appears a stranger. I can’t be sure who she was or where she came from. Everything seems make-believe. Anything is possible. She told me she was from Paris. Years later, in a taxi going to a restaurant in New York, she began speaking Creole to the driver. She smiled and told me she was Haitian. I’m trying to tell her story, as if it might account for my discomfiture in the world of humans. And yet as time eats away at the picture, I’m not sure it matters. She was a mimic. She was false. She may not be knowable. The story may be lost.
I always felt that I was not right in my skin. Everything, in my youth, had to do with race. What mattered most was the quality of hair, the color of skin. My hair was too frizzy and my lips too thick. She said I had murky skin and called me “Ubangi.” Only years later did I take in all that the name implied: not simply a black, but rather one of those saucer-lipped women of the Congo or Chad, so distended around the mouth by a disk of clay that they looked freakish.
I did not look like her friends’ daughters. She did not like me to touch her.
But who was she? As I write this, I remember how she hated to be referred to as “she” or “her.” “I have a name,” she would say. But even that was a changeable thing. Her real name was Sophie. She never uttered it, occasionally using “Sophia,” but most often going by the name her friends gave her when she arrived in Atlanta, still speaking French. They called her “Frenchie.” Like her appearance, her name was mutable, adapted to whatever role she wanted to play, no matter how fantastic. Appearance was everything. Sham was the core, the truth, and I tried in vain to tell the difference between fantasy and reality.
In 1936, the year my mother left Haiti, Swing Time with Ginger Rogers and Fred Astaire was released. It promised romance in the pain of the Depression: whiteness, a décor of stale purity, amidst snow and ivory staircases, ladies kicking up their legs and singing “Bojangles of Harlem.” Fred Astaire in blackface imitates Bill “Bojangles” Robinson. Long and black, a pair of legs comes out of his crotch. Dancing ladies surround him. These legs spread out from him and over the stage, black and all-enveloping. Suddenly, women take hold of the black legs, pick them up and carry them away.
Then Astaire’s white legs, his small and elegant real legs, begin to dance. No more Bojangles, no more black legs, no more mystery, and no more threat. Instead, Astaire became himself: the urbane man in love with the lovely lady in white.
After the dances for the vodou spirits, the yanvalou and crabignan legba, the drums in the hills around Port-au-Prince lulled my mother to sleep. And then a few years after digging in the Haitian dirt for lizards she called “zandolites,” there she was, a teenager on Ocean Parkway in Brooklyn. She went to movies and watched the thin white dancer in blackface on a white marble linoleum floor.
My mother left Haiti two years after the American occupation ended, moving with her family to Brooklyn, where she met my father and soon married him. When the US marines finally departed in 1934, Haitians sang words in praise of President Sténio Vincent, words that my mother later sang to me — but only after my father died. “If there’s anyone who loves the people, it’s President Vincent,” the song goes, and she sang it to me in Creole: Papa Vincent, mesi. Si gen youn moun ki renmen pèp la, se President Vincent. In a deep and rapturous voice, she gave thanks for all he, “a mulatto,” did for the blacks of Haiti, while ruthlessly punishing light-skinned elites. With this one song, she let me in on her secret: she harbored a confounding infidelity to her class and color.
Identifying with the black majority, this light-skinned woman, daughter of a Syrian merchant, used to belt out these couple of lines from “Papa Vincent, mesi,” the popular merengue recorded by Alan Lomax after he heard it at the elite Club Toland in Port-au-Prince on Christmas Eve, 1936: “This is a guy who loves the people. This is the guy who gives us the right to sell in the streets. He gives us that because he kicked out the Syrians. So, we’re crying out, thank you Papa Vincent.” The self-proclaimed “Second Liberator” allowed the masses to sell goods wherever they could, and curbed the Syrian takeover of retail, shuttering their stores and driving them out.
Once in Brooklyn, my mother must have wondered about the sea, where it was hidden, and what to do when the snows came down. Nothing can have seemed right after she left Port-au-Prince, after the dirt, the drums in the night, and the mangoes she loved to eat right down to the pit, juice dripping over her hands. Things were so alive in Haiti, the stones that killed lizards, the fires that burned Jews in effigy, the gourds that held the gods. Then, three years after leaving, at just 17 years old, during her last year in high school, she was introduced to the most eligible man around. “On our first date I ran out of the car,” she recalled. He was 20 years older. She did not love him, but she was the oldest of four daughters, her mother wanted to get her out of the house. My father took her to the circus. He tried to teach her to ride horses and eat mussels. I don’t know what she thought about the circus, but she could not ride and, until her dying day, hated anything that looked slippery and lived in shells.
That same year, my mother traveled from Brooklyn to a honeymoon in Mexico. They traveled around for two years, then to Nashville and, finally, to Atlanta. The South must have seemed to her like a cross between Haiti and New York. “I would have been an actress,” she told me. “Then I met your father.” But she never stopped acting. She lived to be looked at.
After leaving Haiti at the age of 13, my mother never knew beauty or hope again. Everything that followed her departure and her marriage four years later to a 37-year-old husband seemed useless or dead. When she moved with my father to the Jim Crow South, she exchanged her complex racial origins for the empty costume of whitewashed glamour. I didn’t realize until recently just how deluded she was about her real attachments, and just how casually — without really ever knowing the loss — she surrendered her origins to a mask of whiteness.
But in moments of privacy, when not seen by the eyes of others, she used to say things that sounded like incantations. “Arab manje koulèv,” which in Creole means “Arabs eat snakes.” I never knew what to make of this, but she was never clear about her family or her childhood, didn’t know her own family history: her father never told her his origins, and told her not to worry. “It’s no good to be too strange in a country you love,” he sighed. She remembered feeling not “normal” in Haiti, that she did not look right to people shouting at her: “gadé kochon pwal,” which she translated as “Look at her hairy pig legs.” I heard her say this, but it didn’t mean anything to me as a child — I made no sense of those words, either, in the dark of my bedroom.
Years later, I learned they were pieces of the life she had left behind, not just rapt conjuring. Besides “Mesi, Papa Vincent,” she repeated, “Desalin pas vle oue blanc,” which means “Dessalines doesn’t like whites.” Late at night when she came into my room, she returned to the pleasure of her life in Haiti. Her longing was consecrated most often in this homage to Jean-Jacques Dessalines, who proclaimed Haitian independence in 1804.
She praised only the fierce Dessalines — called “barbaric” by most historians — not the urbane Toussaint l’Ouverture, and not Henri Christophe. Turned into a god or spirit by the Haitian people, Dessalines is still invoked as a lwa in vodou ceremonies in the countryside. Rejecting things French and unconcerned about social graces, he fought to give land to ex-slaves, only recently considered property themselves; and when he drafted his constitution for the new republic in 1805, he took the most crucial racial configuration of Saint-Domingue and annihilated it. Instead of the three-part division of whites, people of color (or mixed-bloods), and blacks, he created one category for Haitian identity that absorbed all distinctions: Haitians, no matter their color, would henceforth be referred to “only by the generic word ‘black.’”
In the South, my mother concealed her past. She remained estranged from the whites around her, even though she immediately recognized that she’d better become as white as possible. A gilded white lady of the South, that’s what my father wanted. Confined by the role she assumed, she performed it, flawlessly. Hiding herself beneath a false smile and pale skin, she wrapped her discomfort and later her sorrow in silks and jewels. This denial of her history was not anything like a grab for white power and privilege, but rather a casual act performed in exchange for a lifestyle of luxury, which just happened to be white. This false if stylish veneer killed her spirit and destroyed any chance for happiness.
I can reckon with her life and mine only through how far I fell away from whiteness or how close I could come to black. “Who knows what evil lurks in the heart of men? The shadow knows.” We lived, my mother and I, in a world that flickered back and forth between black and white, darkness and light. Nothing could be secure. She liked to imitate the shadow’s voice. She must have heard those words — that voice, Orson Welles, on the radio in the late ’30s. She would walk into my room and whisper, “Heath-cliff, Heath-cliff,” imitating Merle Oberon’s cry on the moors of Wuthering Heights. She became the Cathy who married the wrong man, died, and kept calling for her own true love. There were many women in our house, and all of them wanted something different. My mother became them all, only to realize that nothing remained alive inside her.
One day she pulled a magnolia off the tree in our front yard. She grabbed it in her hand like a castanet, shook it and pulled off the white leaves. “There,” she sighed, “There — look — and see the red and the rot.” I was astonished by the violence of that gesture and the softness of her voice. She was entranced by whatever had died and gone bad.
She knew that it had once lived in beauty.
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A white spider too small for me to truly make out its legs came swinging down so lightly. It hovered over these pages about my mother, then two filaments came through the sunlight, now onto the desk, then around my cup of tea, then onto other pages, and now it comes toward me. Fragile and precarious, it hovers. I’m afraid to move: I feel that it has enveloped me in its threads. As if wrung out from the innards of her being, they loop me into her beaten promise.
My mother’s past comes to me in flashes: fragments of Sinatra’s voice, the sound of her laughter or the feel of her slap across my face. Now her photos, one by one, lead me like patches of light into a world that was but is no more. Not long after I brought them into the house, I smashed my nose against the jamb of a doorway, crushed my fingers in a broken garage door, and shattered my ribs in a fall down the stairs.
We found each other again when I least expected it; and in sight of her, with her breath on my neck, I know now that whatever mattered to me — the poems I cherished, the writers I taught, and the words I wrote — were inspired by her life and raised up again more fiercely after her death.
Haiti, Mexico, and Georgia. Bulls and skulls; drums and gods; recipes, jewels, and Scotch, these words shape and give flesh to her past.
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Not long after awakening that first morning in Mexico City, she looked up at my father in what seems to be sheer wonderment. Or is it just languor in the soft light of a room sometime in midsummer at the beginning of their honeymoon. I had never seen any of these photos, all carefully numbered on their backs in pencil, and kept in two wooden boxes. Only now, with her death behind me, am I struck by expressions that I never saw in life, looks that astonish me in gentle repose.
Doom is never foretold. Not when you’re young, just married to a man who adores you and takes you away to a place of sun, with dust, lizards everywhere in the cracks, birds wandering lost in streets that remind you of Port-au-Prince.
In Mexico, she heard the familiar sounds of suffering and holiness in the bodies of beggars and priests. But how bad could things be? A gold bracelet, given to her by a doting husband, encircled her wrist. She especially liked to see the statues of the Virgin that appeared miraculously on the steps of churches or on altars with candles, gold chalices, violets, and white carnations.
In 1939, right after their marriage, my parents arrived in Mexico. My father drove his Buick Special 8 convertible from Guadalajara to Cuernavaca, stopping in Mexico City, traveling along roads Graham Greene first captured that same year with his “whisky priest” in Lawless Roads and then a year later in The Power and the Glory, but I doubt they ever read him. My father didn’t like Catholics. I do not know any details of their journey. No one ever told me stories. All that remains of the visit are photographs. They got there seven years after Hart Crane leapt off the Orizaba into the sea; just after Sergei Eisenstein began the film that would be cut and mangled in Hollywood; a year after Malcolm Lowry was deported, his life with the alluring Jan Gabrial a shambles.
My parents began their marriage when the New York World’s Fair opened with the debut of nylon stockings, when Billie Holiday first sang and recorded “Strange Fruit,” Judy Garland sang “Somewhere Over the Rainbow” in The Wizard of Oz, and Gone With the Wind premiered at Loew’s Grand Theater in Atlanta. Franco had already conquered Madrid, ending the Spanish Civil War. They arrived in Mexico a year before Trotsky was axed to death there, at a time when over 1,000 American tourists a month visited Mexico, and artists too. But none of this, no history of persecution, no pleasures of culture high and low, no thought of politics can be gleaned from these photographs.
The suffering of bulls, yes, and the remarkable poses of my mother, but alongside a few scenes of peasants, cacti, churches, murals, or horses, there was only a young girl chosen by an older man, and continuously reinvented in split-second exposures, caught in hundreds of ways: lying down in a two-piece bathing suit on rocks, or sitting, long legs crossed doubly graceful in the rise of the stairs underneath her, or sometimes standing in sunlight, her head rocked to the side and eyes like tinder.
The bulls mattered, even if she didn’t know it then. My father went to bullfights. During those afternoons, what did my mother do? As I remember her broken life, I can’t stop thinking about the bulls, isolated from their kind, released into spectacle, performing their agony, the light in their eyes slowly turning into dark. The man rides the horse. He spears the bull and looks down at the stricken animal.
Three quarters of a century later, I look at the pictures. Out of boxes and other wooden and steel containers, and buried deep under other albums, these relics of a honeymoon emerge. They were not part of anything I knew, nor did they make up any kind of beauty my parents might retrieve from a past when they might have known love or passion.
I spent my life not knowing what it meant to love. There was no warmth in our house, no sign of a kiss, except once or twice when my father tried to peck at my mother’s lips as if he was ashamed, a moment in time preserved for me now only in her grimace.
Lust I knew. The long afternoon phone calls when my mother rested on her bed behind a door that was not quite shut. Her legs I could not see. They were under the sheet. She laughed and sounded different than usual. Or was that love, as one hand moved up and down, and the other held the phone very close to the ear?
I wanted these photos to tell me something about their past, something that might otherwise be lost forever. My mother’s face, caught in poses that were never off-guard or random, still does not speak to me. Sometimes she has that immaculate quality of being purified of anything living. When she looks out at my father, the hand drawn up on one side, sultry on the hip, I think of Rita Hayworth, her idol. The earliest films of this love goddess had been on my mother’s mind long before she left for Mexico with my father.
Once there, my father said, the bellowing of bulls could be heard wherever you stood. The heat and the cruelty and the beauty and the grace were simply part of the landscape. The bullfight photos are large 8x10 prints. They touch my heart more strongly than I could have anticipated.
What more can be known about the honeymoon that left my mother cold, my father clueless? I am somehow sure that my mother never looked at any of these photos. She never had any interest in remembering the past. Her indifference to whatever she had felt then made her the woman that I grew up watching. I admired and feared her, but most of all I longed to be close to her, enveloped in the waves of her brown and heavy hair. Just a couple of years after marriage, the soft face of a woman beguiled became impenetrable in its exacting beauty. A veneer set in over her luscious skin. Hardness took over eyes that were once inviting, and her smile remained frozen for the camera.
That unyielding stiffness had not, though, yet set her face in stone. She was not afraid to be vulnerable, and her eyes still looked at what she thought she loved.
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“Blood poured down the streets,” my mother used to repeat after my father died. Cryptic, she never explained who or what she meant. Did she mean the blood of bulls or the blood of men?
She liked to hear church bells ringing. She prayed the words she learned as a child in Port-au-Prince, where the nuns at Sacré Coeur, her school in Turgeau, took away the girls’ mirrors and then gazed secretly at themselves: “Je vous salue Marie, pleine de grâce, le seigneur est avec vous.” Trying to tell me about her childhood in Port-au-Prince, never sure if she was French, Syrian, or Haitian, and light enough not to think of herself as black, she always returned to the nuns at Sacré Coeur. Her stories focused on transformation and shape-shifting identities: “They never told us about the slave trade. I never knew about that. In the beginning, the nuns told me, there were some little light pygmies that were here, and then they grew bigger and darker. I always wondered,” she said, “how they got so black and so big so fast.”
When she worshipped the Virgin late in life, she told me how God once loved a woman pure and without stain. Then she got confused, and remembered how hard it was to remain pure, especially when you hear stories about the djablesse, or “she-devil.” One of the most feared ghosts in Haiti, the djablesse is condemned to walk the woods before entering heaven, as punishment “for the sin of having died a virgin.” She laughed. “Think about all those nuns — taught they’d go to heaven, then they end up wandering around looking for what they never got or scaring the hell out of those who have it.” With a throaty whisper, she used to say: “They get you coming and going.”
In Mexico, her marriage began with prayers to the Virgin of Guadalupe, our lady of the hills and patroness of the Indians and the poor, so beautiful and dark, in a blue mantle, dotted with stars. It began, too, with the killing of priests, with the ice-axe murder of my father’s hero Trotsky, and with a ride on a Ferris wheel that she never forgot. Each parent lost something that mattered that year in Mexico. My father, his revolution. My mother, her virginity.
Sixty years later, she recalled things I’d never heard her mention before. She kept repeating things. Round and round, always circling back to the gold coins she threw in fountains, the stones that hit dogs, or the sun that was always too hot. Less in sentences than in phrases, fragments, words thrown like skipping stones on water. “The sun burns.” “The dust at my feet.” “Two dogs bled.” “Hit again with stones.” “Gold coins, I have a bracelet of coins.” Sun. Dust. Dogs. Coins. Because they never talked about their Mexico adventure, I had no idea what she meant when she called out these things at the end of her life. The photos before me bring it all back, her memories made into visible life.
“You remember how scared you got on our honeymoon,” my father said to my mother one day when I was a child, “how you ran from the wheel, and it just kept turning, and you never stopped running.” He said nothing more. Only now do I understand that he must have wanted his young bride to go for a ride with him on the wheel that spun in the sky. But he had no more luck with Ferris wheels than with the horses that so annoyed her. Only once did she listen to him. Up she went.
In Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, set on the Day of the Dead in 1938, Consul Geoffrey Firmin rides with his beloved Yvonne on “the huge looping-the-loop machine” high on the hill in the tremendous heat “in the hub of which, like a great cold eye, burned Polaris, and round and round it here they went…they were in a dark wood.” That feeling of entrapment in time that circled on itself, ominous in its repetition, the return of a past that will not quit, reminds me of my parents’ lives. Perhaps their unhappiness was already fixed, in the image of a wheel turning, in actuality, and also, and around the same time, in Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished film Qué Viva Mexico!
All that remained of his visionary epic — mutilated in Hollywood — were three short features that pandered to commercial, and, some argued, fascist interests. Culled from over 200,000 feet of film rushes, Thunder Over Mexico, Eisenstein in Mexico, and Death Day were released between the autumn of 1933 and early 1934. The last, which Lowry must have seen, features the “Dance of the Heads.” The Ferris wheel revolves dead center, while in the foreground are dancers, and three hovering death’s heads, human skulls, whether real or masks it does not matter: not for this story of dashed hopes, where everything seemed purposely to turn life into death, but a death more vibrant than anything life offered, in a land where stone lured more than flesh.
The dead do not die, my mother knew. The earth was squirming with spirits, and at any moment she might be caught off guard. While she tangled with things too luscious to be put to rest, mostly the unseen, my father was busy using his photographic techniques to pin down patterns of light and dark, to capture brave matadors at the kill, people on the street, the campesinos in the countryside, women at market, but, most of all, his wife, transforming her into an artifact, as if her body had been raised up from rock and conceived anew in rolls of film.
In one photo he titled “Sun Worshipper,” my mother stretches, head thrown back in abandon, hair a glossy smooth brown, one leg bent. Her body takes up most of the frame. With the mountains dwarfed behind her, she is so fluid that she seems to recline sitting up. Years later, it won an award at the High Museum in Atlanta. I remember my father’s long nights down in the darkroom, after my mother had already turned her back on him.
Though my father never much liked to talk about their time in Mexico, he kept and treasured a heavy wool blanket with many-colored stripes, tightly woven, with the indigo blue, orange, and white lineaments of a face like an Aztec god. The other precious remnants of their time together were an elaborate silver water pitcher, sugar bowl, and creamer, and a large hand-hammered tray. As long as my parents lived, this baroque display remained in the dining room. It seemed to me heavy as lead.
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In Haiti I was told that when you take someone’s photo you steal their soul. Maybe that is what happened to my mother. Where was the injury? When did everything change? Hundreds, no, thousands of photos: my father overdid everything. How many times must a door be checked before you are sure that it is locked tight?
My mother was holed up in a series of rooms, first in Mexico City, and then in Atlanta, at the now-condemned Clermont Hotel on 789 Ponce de Leon Avenue. Built as apartments, by the time my parents lived there it had become a hotel, the kind of place that would have appealed to my father. An online site describes the hotel’s wildly eclectic clientele: “For nearly nine decades, the Clermont Hotel has accommodated everyone from white-collar workers to prostitutes under a single roof.” Increasingly decrepit and seedy with the years, it was shut down by health inspectors in 2009.
It slowly dawned on my mother that she had been given away to a man who had better things to do than be with her. But what could she do? Everyone thought of him as good Edmond, kind Edmond, and he proclaimed his love while he left her very much alone. What I thought was her wildness and icy contempt was nothing but revenge, one long steady erosion of feeling — or was it retaliation for what she believed he had done to her? I grew up blaming and hating her for behavior that became the only response she could find to what she could not control.
Though she could not put all this into words when she was young, she knew what had happened, felt it in her bones, and with every breath she took she sensed the creeping emptiness. He gave her jewels. She honked the horn of the car. He threw himself into his work. She went shopping. It was a standoff.
He kept her idle and adorned her so that she would be the most beautiful object in town. He prohibited her from working, when all she wanted was to try different things, anything to get her out of feeling that she was now more dead than alive. She found other kinds of freedom, or so she thought. By the time she reached Atlanta, she had confronted her own unreality. She was what others made of her. Everyone compared her to a movie star. A certain specimen of glamour, she was nothing more than a body that danced, her head topped with fruit-filled turbans, a Carmen Miranda or Lupe Vélez. Exotic, she appeared a lady of pleasure in the glitter and cigarette smoke of party nights, with men who leered and women who envied her beauty, even as they mocked her accent.
That’s what I grew up watching, none of which she could tell me in words. Instead, I was punished, the offspring of a deadly marriage. She told me her pain by inflicting it.
