Читать книгу The Restless - Gerty Dambury - Страница 16

5.

You’re thinking that old Nono talks too much, aren’t you?

But if I were to tell you the story of my life, my modest life amounting to not much at all, it would be obvious that every life, as mediocre as it may seem, can teach us something about history, about difference, about exclusion and illusion. I could tell you a whole lot of truths, and you’d see that the story of the disappeared schoolteacher is only a fine mist, a fifine, compared to what rained down on our heads when I was young. And cross my heart, if I’m lying, I’ll die a second time.

You have to realize that, to know what happened before, you have to look behind.

1967. They’re in 1967 and they don’t have a clue about what happened in the past! They don’t see how the suffering and the tribulations they’re experiencing now are connected to what happened before.

Because her teacher, her pretty little mulatto teacher . . . How do I know she’s mulatto? From the child herself, when she was speaking to her sister Emmy: “We like to touch her hair . . . !” I’ve never seen that child come touch the old white hair under my head wrap. Too hard, maybe, too wired, as they say. In this world, you only touch “good” hair!

Anyhow, that teacher is lucky to have only disappeared. Maybe they sent her to another school or to another country. Who knows? Maybe she’s already crossed the ocean or is about to.

But before that, I mean way before, what do you think they would’ve done with her?

Yeah, nobody asks that question! I could tell you things, but I’d be accused of always bringing up the past. “É wè finn épi sa!” That’s what they say, “Oh yes, my dear, you have to stop that!”

Standing here on just one leg, I don’t feel like shutting up, because when I was a child, not only was I tossed into the hands of an old established family but they tried to marry me off! They wanted to pick the man I would wed.

I worked at their house all day long and all night too. You should’ve heard them talk about how I was part of the family, and what would they do without me, all that usual crap. While they were still in bed, I was already up, and when I went to sleep, they’d already been in bed a long time. In any event, school was never an option for me.

Just let me continue: one fine day my employers decide to marry me off—as if nothing had changed at all! Because that had already happened to my mother and to my mother’s mother before her.

I was twenty-five years old, and they’d started to worry I was getting too old to get married. Old—that sure makes me laugh when you know I didn’t die till I was ninety-eight! They had no idea I’d last for almost one hundred years. Hah!

Well, they brought this guy around, a much older man, at least forty. I can’t tell you his exact age, but let’s just say he was no spring chicken! They invited the two of us to eat with them.

Even I couldn’t believe it; they gave me the day off! I hadn’t cooked, I hadn’t done the housework, not a thing. They hired somebody else’s services. I wonder if it wasn’t even my cousin who came in to substitute.

They told me to put my white dress on. A white dress that had belonged to God knows who and that they’d given me to wear until it fell apart.

That man and I were fed like royalty, and after lunch they allowed us to stroll alone on the plantation. Cacao beans. A beautiful cacao plantation that the 1929 hurricane razed to the ground—just like what happens to the hair on a boiled pig!

A stroll through the plantation, like a real lady with that man at my side . . . But we had nothing to say to each other. I’d never seen him before, and he’d never seen me. Not too ugly, that fellow, not ugly, but hungry, ready to take advantage of any situation. He was looking at the plantation like it’d belong to him one day. He stared at the mango trees. That year there’d been so many mangoes we didn’t know what to do with them all. So many that, even before the trees had finished bearing all their fruit, new little white flowers were already sprouting from the ends of the branches. And he, that fiancé they’d found for me, wanted to gather mangos. I said no. I thought we were already too much in their debt. We had to have some dignity.

And then, at some point, that so-called fiancé moved a little way off from me. I was tired of the whole thing: the white dress, the shoes, my stomach full to bursting, the stroll in the sun. I’d stopped and sat down, but he’d kept on going. Not too far, but I couldn’t see him anymore. And all of a sudden, I wondered where he’d gone! I couldn’t tell how long he’d been missing; I’d even forgotten what he looked like. I got up to look for him and found him crouching behind a tree eating an apricot. A big fat apricot with a double pit. You know how big our apricots can be, but still stay sweet and juicy.

That guy had just eaten lunch: a starter, a fish course with green peas, a meat course, rice and pasta, dessert—sorbet and all the rest—but he was still afraid of not having enough. Always afraid of not having enough! So when he saw the apricot on the tree, really fat and ripe, he didn’t think. He just hid, so he could eat it.

At the time, I thought it was just about that, about not having enough. But since then I’ve dwelled on it, and I’ve come to the conclusion that those white folks set us up to have only one idea in our heads: the idea of having more than our brothers and sisters, of being above them, ready to sell them yet again for a fat apricot with a double pit. I couldn’t see myself with someone like that for a whole lifetime. He would’ve eaten the stars out of my eyes! So I said no—no wedding, and enough of working for them! Enough of being a maid for those folks! I left for La Pointe; I left Basse-Terre. Yeah, I’d been living with that family in Basse-Terre.

That was what it was like in those days, and sometimes even worse. I was lucky. They were good but too good, a kind of goodness that weighs on you. You have to understand what it was. A kind of fake goodness, nicey-nice, where you always end up feeling guilty. You can’t live your own life with people like that. You’re always running, chasing after a sense of equality.