The Temple of My Familiar Read online

  "The captors and the captives found themselves to be something like a family, and the children born in the village grew up in the gray area of believing themselves half-slave and half-free. They understood neither the contempt in which their fathers held their mothers nor their fathers' deep fear of these women who were so helpless; nor did they understand the bottomless hatred their mothers felt for their fathers, whose missions of rape among the women became ever more camouflaged as affection as the bastard offspring began to grow. The earliest memories of these offspring were of the muffled screams of their mothers, and the scraping of what they thought must be their mothers' backbones against the floor."

  "It does not matter if you love me or not," said Arveyda. "Perhaps I don't deserve even to see you or my children. But I want to give you the gift of knowing your mother--which I don't think you would have without me, because she couldn't tell you herself; she was too ashamed--and I want to give to you exactly what I wish someone could give to me, and what, since my mother is dead, no one ever can."

  Carlotta felt she hated men; their disappearances and their absences and their smugness on return. She thought of the foolish Angel Clare and saw herself as Tess. She thought of Tea Cake and saw herself as Janie. She was convinced Helga Crane was a fool. She decided the only man in all of life and literature worth her admiration was Leonard Woolf. But of course she and her class had not yet started to read his A Village in the Jungle. Perhaps she shouldn't hold her breath.

  Arveyda had wanted to tell her about Zede somewhere outside under trees. Outside in the open air. If you can see all of the sky, no message, not even from someone who despises you, can destroy you. But Carlotta sat in her cheaply furnished living room, arms folded, slim legs crossed. She was not hearing him. She could not make sense of what he said. It was as if they were both drunk. Besides, a funny Roadrunner cartoon was on and the children were clapping their hands and laughing.

  In this atmosphere, Arveyda stopped speaking. He looked at his children lying on the floor ignoring him. He did not blame them. Who was he, this man who had deserted them, after all? Besides, it seemed important to them to see whether the Roadrunner would make it to where it was headed after so many cruel attempts on its life.

  When the cartoon was finished, Arveyda, over their outraged objections, turned off the TV. He carefully closed the wooden doors of its cabinet, and taking his guitar from where he'd set it behind the front door, he seated himself in front of it, in a straight chair from the kitchen. He began to tune the guitar, as his children, glaring at him and faking yawns, huddled on the sofa with their mother. They looked at him as if at an intruder. He plucked the strings of the guitar. Its old name was Selume, in ancient African divination, the bone or rune denoting youth. He felt he must, after all his travels, think of something new.

  He had an idea.

  "Do you have the three little stones your mother gave you?" he asked Carlotta.

  At first she did not answer. She was thinking how she hated him and then trying to remember three little stones Zede had given her and then trying to remember where they were.

  "Will you get them?" Somehow he did not doubt they would be produced.

  Maybe they contain diamonds and rubies at their core, Carlotta thought, annoyed at her own docility, as she left the room.

  Her dresser drawers were neat and orderly, as usual. She really had no trouble finding the three small rocks. They were always kept in a straight line at the back of the lingerie drawer. She took them up and returned to the living room.

  Arveyda put out his hand, and she dropped the rocks into it.

  He leaned over his guitar and put the rocks on the floor, not in a straight line, but in the shape of a pyramid.

  "That is the way they belong, like the symbol for a fallout shelter," he said. "They are a gift to you from your father and his people."

  This sounded pretty meaningless, actually, not to say bizarre. Carlotta's mind drifted. She wondered how it was she hadn't lost them; she'd never kept them in the bag Zede made for them. Somehow she must have thought of the plain little rocks as her jewels and wanted them on display. She'd kept them on view on top of her dresser when she was growing up. "These are muy especial," Zede had said, touching them with emotion at night when she came into Carlotta's room and tucked her into bed. "These stones have meaning for you." But she'd never told her what the meaning was.

  Arveyda was experiencing something amazing as he sat over the stones, beginning to strum his guitar. He knew, he finally knew, why he was capable of falling in love so easily, even with his own wife's mother. It was because he was a musician, and an artist. Artists, he now understood, were simply messengers. On them fell the responsibility for uniting the world. An awesome task, but he felt up to it, in his own life. His faith must be that the pain he brought to others and to himself--so poorly concealed in the information delivered--would lead not to destruction, but to transformation.

  He began to sing ever so gently, to his wife and children. A song about a country that wore green as its favorite dress; a land of rivers and of boats that from a distance made one think of the pods of dried vanilla beans. He sang of the people who came to this country long ago, from a land called Sun, how they'd discovered the river that flows through the ocean--and knew also of the one that flows through the heavens but had no means to travel it--and of how they met the people already there and how some of them ran off together to share each other's understanding of the world, and founded great civilizations almost by accident, though great civilizations never notice or boast about whether they are great; and how, over time, these fell, and the people went off in all directions and lived the simple life of small peoples everywhere. Hunting and fishing and praying and making love and having babies. He sang of the red parrot feathers in their ears--for they had brought the parrot with them; it was their familiar, symbolic of their essence--and the long rough hair that made a pillow for their heads. He sang of the coming of the enslavers and the cruel fate of the enslaved. He sang of two people who loved for a moment and of one of them who died, horribly, with nothing to leave behind but his seed that became a child, and some red parrot-feather earrings and three insignificant stones. He sang of the confusion and the terror of the mother: the scars she could never reveal to the child because they still hurt her so. The love for the child's wild father, a bitter truncheon stuck in her throat.

  The children had long been asleep by the time Arveyda came to the part Carlotta most wanted to hear. Arveyda sang softly of how much the mother, far away still, loved and missed the child. How grieved she was that she had hurt her. How she prayed the child would forgive her and one day consent to see her again. He sang of how the mother missed her grandchildren. He sang of the danger the mother was in now in her old country because, working with the gringo movie-production crew as a front, she was trying to find her own mother, whom she had not seen since the soldiers came to her poor little escuela de los indios many, many years ago and dragged her away. This was the only reason she was not this moment embracing her hija, if her hija would only permit it. He sang of Zede's courage, of her pride in not burdening her child with an unbearable history. He sang of her true humbleness. He sang until Zede, small and tentative, was visible, a wisp, before her daughter.

  Carlotta had not dreamed her numbed heart could be broken still more, or that breaking the heart opens it.

  Arveyda was back. Yes. Singing as never before. Carlotta could see that now he would need neither feathers nor cloak.

  Under her piercing, tear-filled gaze Arveyda closed his eyes, so as to ask nothing for himself. He knew he was singing for their lives. A true artist, the one whom God shows, he knew he dared not doubt the power of his song.

  ECSTASY IS UNCUT FOREST and the Smell of Fresh-Baked Bread. Suwelo strained to hear the warm, lush music over the telephone, between the icy bars of Fanny's words. That is what she is still listening to, he thought, surprised. That old album of Arveyda's. She must have bought a new on
e after she moved out; the one they'd bought together was one long groove scratch. She'd worn it out playing it. And he remembered how she held the record album to her chest, an album on which there was nothing but a large redwood tree, with a loaf of bread beneath it, and how she swayed in rapture to every note, and how she sometimes became so filled with the sweetness of the music that she cried. And he had watched her as she tottered and danced and wept. The music carried her higher, he thought, than anything else in her life. It was all ecstasy to her.

  And once, when Arveyda came to town to play a concert, he'd bought tickets for them. Finally they would see him. And at first Fanny had been very happy, and he'd laughed at her fumble-fingered excitement as she dressed. All her best things. Everything shades of lavender, deep indigo, and gentian. How beautiful she is, he'd thought.

  "You might get a glimpse of him," Suwelo had teased. "He'll be onstage, and the tickets I bought should get us good seats. But he won't be able to see you except as a pinhead in the audience." She'd laughed, dousing herself with a perfume she made that smelled amazingly like fresh water.

  But then, just as they were leaving the flat, just as they were entering the hallway, she stopped, and nothing he said would induce her to go further. When he took her arm, she appeared to be rooted to the spot. When he pretended to drag her, she clung to the door frame with a force that broke one of her nails.

  She was afraid to see the person who created the beauty that was so much what her soul hungered for it made her weep.

  Suwelo vaguely understood this, but he was also annoyed, because now he'd miss the concert--though she begged him to go ahead and take someone else. And he'd spent quite a lot of money on the tickets.

  "Isn't Arveyda old?" she asked hopefully. (He wasn't.) "I'll wait until he dies, or until I do, and then ... I will see him."

  And what could Suwelo respond to such a love, constricted by a so much greater fatalism and fear?

  "Oh, my poor baby," he'd said with exasperation and helplessness, holding her, knowing without seeing her face that tears of longing were flowing down her cheeks.

  THE FIRST TIME HE saw Carlotta, what had he thought? Fanny had accused him of seeing only the amber skin and the long mass of black hair. The shapeliness. A woman of color, yes, but one without the kind of painful past that would threaten his sense of himself as a man or inhibit his enjoyment of her as simply a woman. But actually, he had these thoughts later on, after he had begun his affair with Carlotta. The very first time he saw her, at a faculty meeting at which she appeared restless and trapped, he'd thought she looked like a much younger, Latina Coretta King. There was a picture somewhere he had seen of Mrs. King, looking grief-stricken and betrayed, a beautiful woman, he thought, but slipping inexorably into the quagmire of Famous Widowhood. Run, run, he'd wanted to shout to her. Don't let them close you up in the tomb! But perhaps this was partly how she felt, as if part of her was entombed with her husband. But surely there was more of her own life to live? Suwelo admired only one thing about Jackie Onassis, whose fate might have been similar, except for her canny refusal to let it be: her absolute success in slipping out from under her dead husband, Jack. In the picture of Mrs. King of which he was reminded, she was standing with a large group of Native American women, and she looked more Indian than most of them. Carlotta, as he studied her, had that same grief-stricken, betrayed look. But as he studied her more closely, ignoring the other faculty members, who were white, and whose university he understood it was, the more he saw that it was really not the look of Mrs. King. Or perhaps it was, but it moved him because he had seen it, felt the pain of it, and attempted to remove it from the weeping face of someone much closer to home: He was attracted to Carlotta because the expression on her face was identical to that on Fanny's once she knew he had betrayed her. He had spent the entire time he was with Carlotta trying to remove the reflection, on her face, of Fanny's grief. Without once daring, however, to force her to tell him its cause. Once he knew she was separated from her husband, with two children to raise on her own, once he'd seen her shabbily furnished apartment, and once he'd heard her bitter complaints about the racism of the Women's Studies Department in which she worked, he assumed he understood her grief. Now he realized he'd probably understood nothing, and it also occurred to him what a superficial, ultimately fraudulent act it was to sleep with a person you did not really know.

  He began to appreciate more than ever the story Mr. Hal and Miss Lissie were relentlessly telling him.

  "MY FATHER WAS NOT so gay as my mother," Mr. Hal said. "She was all the time laughing; giggling really. She just couldn't help it. Everything was funny to her. Over my daddy's head, though, there was always a cloud. Now you might not want to believe this, but you do live in California, after all. I read the newspapers from time to time, so I know that a lot of the men who go with other men are dying. Every time I read about it I think of my father, because I think he would have been glad. He was not an evil person--don't get me wrong--but he just hated that kind of person and that was the only kind of person I ever heard him express any hatred of. Even about white people in general he never carried on the way he would about 'funny' men. While he was on his deathbed himself, he told me why.

  "He grew up on the Island on a plantation that was owned by some white folks from the mainland and run by a black overseer. This wasn't slavery time--the slaves had been legally freed a long time ago--but it seemed a lot like it, the way things were still being run. Anyhow, on some holidays like Christmas and Easter and always during the summer, these white people came out to their place on the Island. It was cooler on the Island in summer, much more pleasant than on the mainland. They'd sail over on their yacht--they were rich people--and bring everybody from the house on the mainland: the cook, the maids, the horse handler, even the gardeners. My father used to work for them as odd jobber and gofer, and he used to help unload the yacht, and they paid him in oranges, which we almost never had on the Island and which were the taste equivalent of gold. Anyhow, these people had a son, Heath, and he began to tag along with my father. The two boys liked each other right away, but it chafed my father that he always had to stay in his place. Heath had the run of my father's house, for instance, and during the summers would often eat there, right in the kitchen with the rest of them, but my father, whose name was David, by the way, after little David in the Bible, could never get closer to Heath's house than the back doorsteps. If you were black and you didn't work in the house, you weren't permitted. That's just the way it was.

  "Heath's father and mother seemed cordial with each other rather than warm, and neither of them talked much to Heath. Still, the father seemed glad that Heath and my father were friends; the mother never appeared to notice it. She drank.

  "Heath and my father were boyhood friends, seeing each other for holidays and summers, for many years. Then Heath went off to college and my father married. Eventually Heath also married, and he and his wife came to settle on the Island in the big house that Heath loved and that now belonged to him through his parents. My father was happy enough in his marriage. I don't know that he ever expected any kind of skyrockets from it. On the Island you married young, you raised a mess of kids, you and your family worked hard, you ate and slept and worshiped as well as you could. You died. That was about it. And that was plenty to most people. Excitement? The stories and rumors you heard about other people, way over there on the mainland, was your excitement.

  "Having Heath around again and for good was exciting, and as well as they could manage it, now that they were more than ever unequal in the eyes of society and the law--in other words, they were grown men--they carried on their friendship. Heath, though, had started to drink, and he really didn't like black people. He was one of those whites who, drunk, would say to a black person he had his arm around: 'You know, So-and-so, I don't like nigras, but I like you!' So you can imagine how this so-called friendship between him and my father had to walk that fine line between anger and fear. Naturally my
father hated Heath's racism. Just as he feared him as a white man, even as they laughed and joked together. My father had no idea--and I don't think Heath himself knew--that Heath was drawn to him in love. I mean love of that most peculiar kind. It was an understanding that sort of crept up on them both, I imagine, as they saw how much time Heath put in at our house, and how much he and my father, in spite of everything, enjoyed it.

  "I can even remember him. A heavyset, stocky, rather than fat, red-faced guy, with his high color sometimes seeming to come and go in his face. Hair that bleached almost white in the sun. Substantial teeth and a minty breath. A Teddy Roosevelt sort of guy.

  "It was Heath who encouraged my father to get out of farm laboring and become a furniture maker. He'd seen and admired the things my father carved in his spare time: mostly toys and the children's beds and cradles. I don't think he could bear seeing his friend working in the fields like a slave. He didn't care about the rest of the people, you understand; he thought that working like slaves on his plantation was no more than they deserved. But not David, with his thoughtful expression and always pregnant wife and his houseful of barefoot kids. He helped my father build a shop and bought the very first pieces he made, a table and some chairs. He found a market for my father's work on the mainland, and we lived very well. Much better than we had on stoop labor, digging potatoes and picking beans.

  "He wanted my father.

  "Even on his deathbed this was a hard concept--no joke meant--for my father to get ahold of. It was curious, too, how no matter what words he found to tell me about the situation, they always made me laugh. Even he was finally able to laugh, a hollow cackle though it was. He wasn't laughing at Heath, but at this possibility of a way of life that just seemed totally out of the realm of nature to him. Two men together, like a man and a woman? It was just too much. What would my father have made of San Francisco?