Читать книгу A Tall History of Sugar - Curdella Forbes - Страница 22

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It did not take long for the obvious question to occur to Princess Arrienne: the question of what other dance, besides the martial dance of tae kwon do, her father had danced with the woman of the East, for she knew him to be a great womanizer, and growing up in a place where dogs did that sort of thing in the streets, she was not unaware of the happenings between women and men. Her father was very forthcoming; it was a matter of pride to him, though also of regret, that he had left behind in the womb proof of his strong manhood, which the woman Chanioon had welcomed though she knew it would cause her further isolation on the abandoned moor.

Arrienne often thought with wonder of this brother or sister whom she did not know, who seemed a figure of dream but was also real. She wondered if this sibling of hers had lived, or was alive. The thought that he might be dead rendered him more real than the thought that he might be alive: it seemed to her, even at a young age, that the one human emotion that could put a face on a stranger was sorrow, and as soon as she thought that her sibling was dead she was able to give him a face, and a gender, because the thought of his death made her cry, and then she knew he must be a brother, not a sister, for she had no brothers and she felt that if this sibling in the East had been a sister, Moshe would have come as a girl. For once she heard her father's story, she was convinced Moshe had come as a replacement for the one she had lost.

It never occurred to her that she might have some siblings in England, given her father's reputation for womanizing. He never spoke about any women he met in the years he spent there. But listening to his story of how he was treated and why he chose to come back home so she could be born, she determined that this was where she would stay—she would never go to a place where her father was treated as though he was not a person, though if she did end up in such a place, she would fight.

Like Moshe, she was brought up alone, for her mother had no other children, and though her father had a reputed bevy of daughters, they were all much older than she was, grown women with their own households, all of them by different mothers, none by his wife Purity, who was past childbearing age when they married. Arrienne was the attaclaps, the unexpected arrival long after malicious rumor decided that diabetes had put paid to George's powers and his ability to roam among Tumela's young maidens.

Her father taught her the martial art because he too mourned the son that he imagined, and because he thought of Arrienne as his surrogate son, but especially because he looked at her great size and thought that she would go through life encountering grief for having the body size of a man. He felt that in giving her the skills that went with her kind of bones, he was giving her the most sensible gift a father could give: the ability to defend herself from advantage-tekkers. This decision might have seemed to an onlooker quite contrary, for he took equal pains to bring her up a lady, paying particular attention to her deportment, which he fostered by making her walk around rooms with books balanced on her head, as the upper classes made their girlchildren do, her hands straight at her sides, her back and wide shoulders upright, and her rather rounded stomach pulled in (for she was a chubby as well as a tall child), and in this way she attained the posture of a queen, and great unself-consciousness about her height. (Other Tumela girls, like Rachel, acquired this same posture by carrying kerosene tins, wash pans, provision baskets, and buckets of water on their heads, but Arrienne, being a princess, never carried any of those.)

Her father saw early that she was unusually gifted, and he thought that this too would put her at a disadvantage with men, not in Tumela (for among the poor, intellect was admired regardless of the sex of the body it was housed in) but in the more privileged world outside with which he was well acquainted and where he intended his daughter to make her mark. He planned for her to have access to the world of learning to the uttermost degree. She was to have a career, and with it, total independence, so if no man married her she would be quite fine, and if any man married her he would know not to mess with a woman who knew how to earn her bread and butter. And like Moshe, he called her Arrii; this sounded more like a man's name than Arrienne. Arrii was a name almost like Harry, especially if you pronounced words the Tumela way, without haitches.

So her father encouraged her in her voracious love of reading, driving her in his haulage truck to the branch library in Jericho, where they borrowed books for her in his name as well as hers so that she could have extra ones to read. In this way she seldom ran short of food for what was becoming, without his realizing it, a morbid appetite. And when on her seventh birthday he took her on a trip to Ora-on-Sea and she spied a great big illustrated book in a drugstore window, The Crackerjack Girls' Own Book, which she made him buy with the last shillings in his pocket, he began the practice, unusual among the book-loving-but-insolvent poor, of buying books for his daughter to keep.

In his own house, up to this point, George had had a total of three books: a paperback copy of the Jamaican constitution (our country had gained independence in the year Moshe and Arrienne were four and five years old); a water-stained volume of Das Capital which someone had given him on board the ship on which he sailed from England; and a strange volume that he allowed no one to touch, though Arrienne was allowed to look at it where it occupied pride of place on a shelf in the glass-fronted cabinet where chinaware was kept.

It was a large clothbound book, handwritten, it seemed, in Chinese calligraphy (but it was in fact Korean), on the finest silk cloth, each page luminous and glutted with embroidered scenes from the stories that were told in the writing nobody in Tumela could read. The colors of the embroidery and the ink drew the child like a spell: she could often be found kneeling in front of the cabinet, her nose pressed up against the glass, her open mouth breathing mist that clouded the glass but could not diminish the glow of colors that bled into each other on the exquisite page. Every morning, at her beseeching, her father unlocked the cabinet and turned the book to a new page so that she could see a different set of embroidered drawings, and in this way, deciphering the pictures, she made up the stories she thought lay like secret treasure in the book. She called it The Book of Things.

The contents of her father's library were unusual for this one thing: he did not possess a copy of the Bible, the one book that every household in Tumela had a copy of. It was used in all matters of the spirit, or necromancy or magic, though only in the case of the spirit was it thought necessary to read its actual words. After three years of experience with war, George did not believe there was any such thing as a god, so he kept no religious book in his house.

On the days when her father was too busy to take her to Jericho, and her cache of books ran low, Arrienne wrestled with these three books that she did not understand (the words of two and the embroideries of the other), without any inkling of the role they would later play in her separation from Moshe and indeed her entire personal fate. What she read in them tied her to the place where she and Moshe were born as surely as his dreams of elsewhere pushed Moshe inside the hold of the cargo ship on which he would sail away to the other side of paradise.

There was one other kind of reading that Arrienne was exposed to before she was six, and this was an experience that Moshe also had: the Sunday newspaper, which the telegram boy brought on his bicycle, at erratic times between dawn and duskfall. Arrienne appointed herself the job of waylaying him at her father's gate, the sixpence (later the five cents) that was to pay him clutched tight in her hand. Her heart pumped first with fear that she might turn her head in the wrong direction for a split-second and he would pass by unnoticed, and then with excruciating joy when the bicycle appeared around the corner, the telegram boy riding at top speed on the rutted road with both hands off the handlebars, singing out, "Glean-er! Glean-er!" the name of the newspaper, to announce his passing.

Rachel too bought the Sunday paper. Whosoever could read or had children old enough to read for them bought the Sunday paper. Only the well-off (by Tumela standards) bought on the other days. Men, and indecent women who could not read or buy, assembled in the shoemaker's shop during the week to have the paper read to them. Women who were too decent to congregate in shops with the leggo beasts but were just as poor or illiterate depended on the bush-telegraph and the radio, theirs or their neighbors', for news of the outside world.

In one trembling motion, the princess would seize the paper and thrust the sixpence into the telegram boy's hand. Then she would flee to her room to devour as many of the fat pages as she could before her father called his turn with the paper, your time is up, princess. Her favorite parts were the horoscopes, the brightly colored comics, the horse racing reports (gaming and betting) made musical with the names of horses, and the transcripts of divorce cases spread over several columns. From the vast tracts of such rubbish that cluttered her mind from early, she developed the ability to think in balloons, distinguish between decrees nisi and decrees absolute, guess the results of horse racing, and foretell the significance of dreams.

At first her father was not bothered by the fact that she was an unusually silent child. For him it was enough satisfaction that she was a more-than-apt pupil, but as her words increasingly dried up and finally ceased altogether unless she was made to read aloud, he came to blame himself for his indulgence and lack of supervision that had nourished the indiscriminacy of her reading, which he now sought, when it was too late, to quell. He did not know how it came about. All he knew was that seven months before she went to the big school, she stopped speaking, as if her ferocious absorption of the words of others had driven her own underground, like a river that hides its head on its way down to the next district or the sea. He grieved that he had added to his daughter's handicaps a worse desolation, the remission of speech.

Tumela wisdom, the wisdom of far districts, counseled a visit to Madda Penny or Bredda John. "Is enchantment, Baba! Smaddy put guzzum pon di child! Carry her out before it too late!"

Even poor Miss Purity came in for suspicion. "Fi all me know, might be di wicked stepmodda. Jealousy. Dem stepmodda type can be wicked, yu know."

"A true. Snake under cool shady!"

But the one thing George and Dulsie had in common, apart from their daughter and an insatiable appetite for sex, was their scorn of superstition. They chose doctors instead. The doctors saw that something was wrong, though it was nothing physiological. They could propose no solution. George was a man devoid of superstition, a genuine atheist, but after the various doctors failed to get Arrienne to talk, in desperation he allowed himself to try the skills of Bredda John, who told him his daughter was reading too much.

Arrienne could have told her father, though she had no idea how she knew this, that the real culprit was not her entire reading repertoire, but the great book of embroidered secrets in the glass cabinet. The Book of Things. It had stolen her words and become an enchantment she could not cast off until she was able to translate its mysteries or find some other way to release herself from the spell that pulled her to kneel, helpless, every evening now, before the cabinet.

"Gimmi back mi talkin," she admonished the book, fiercely, angrily, inside her head.

The book laughed, a cackling, malicious laugh like Mama Mai's, not the graceful gurgling she thought would have emerged from among its lyrical illustrations.

And it spoke, "이 멍청아, 이 세 가지 수수께끼를 먼저 풀어야만 해!" [1]

Of course, the princess had no idea what the book was saying. This made her more angry, but still, every day, she found herself kneeling before the cabinet as if in prayer, helpless, pulled.

She was afraid to tell her father what she knew.

Being only a child, she could not have known that her words dried up because she was aware, by pure instinct, in some still-inaccessible part of herself, that to understand anything that was worth understanding about her own life, she would have to discover a vaster language than was at that time available to her. Neither could she have known that such a language, even the search for it, was possible only at great cost—the cost of suffering. She could not know that her encounter with impotence in front of this book was because of this instinctive knowing and the lack of words-which-are-enough.

(Years later, she received a low mark from a teacher of English for writing a fanciful story instead of a real one: The little mermaid bled on her feet so she could love enough, and become human, and be able to speak. Because she loved the prince. She also lost a mark for a full stop after a sentence fragment. Then further, she lost the remaining marks for a story that was stolen, for as you can see, the story was written by someone else, in another language and country, but she was trying to find through it a way to save her soul. It would not be the first nor last time Arrienne became a word thief, in desperation.