Possessing the Secret of Joy Page 6

  One side of the prison, from a distance, looks down on this, over the rooftops of several rows of shanties and the row of government offices. One reason it had been built on a hill, according to the legend about it that, in the earliest postcolonial days, had been posted near the entrance but was now barely decipherable from age, was because it was also a garrison and command post designed to intimidate and to actively suppress any uprising among the Africans. There had been bunkers around its base, and artillery stations, right in amongst the dusty shrubbery, bougainvillea, jacaranda and hibiscus blossoms.

  I had never even seen the prison before I went with Adam to visit Tashi. From outside, its formerly white exterior now streaked with brown, with patches of gray cement and bits of black girders poking through at the corners, many of its windows broken or gone entirely, it hardly seemed habitable. And of course it really was not. Still, it was crammed to the rafters with prisoners. All sizes, all shapes, all ages. Both sexes. One left the comparative silence of the street and immediately encountered a wall of noise. And stench. The second floor had been turned over to a mounting number of AIDS victims, sent to the prison rather than to hospital because the hospital, being small, was swamped. For almost a year the government had said no such thing as AIDS existed in the country; now its presence was acknowledged grudgingly, though there was no official speculation about what might have caused it printed in the news. There was no noise whatsoever from this floor, as men, women and children, all stricken, dragged themselves about, attending each other, or else lay quietly, so emaciated as to appear already dead, on straw mats on the floor. When we looked in, no one appeared to notice.

  As we ascended the steps to the third floor, I turned to Adam and said, attempting a joke, I want to go home.

  So do we all, he replied, grimly, with the downcast, helpless look of a man bound to a woman and to circumstances perpetually beyond his control.

  BENTU MORAGA (BENNY)

  IT IS ONLY MONEY that changes anything or makes anything happen, I said to my mother, glancing at my notes.

  You mustn’t think that, she said, gazing out the window. It’s so New African.

  But look at what you have here, I said, gesturing at the freshly painted walls of her cell. Her bright red plastic chair, her desk, writing materials and books.

  I can’t be guilt-tripped, she said, smiling. I’m already in prison.

  I smiled with her. I liked the person my mother was in prison. She was warm and comfortable, as if she were an entirely different person than the driven, frowning mother I’d always known.

  Not many of the other prisoners have a private cell, I said.

  No, she agreed. Only the bigwigs who will soon buy their way out and escape punishment altogether. She frowned, and for a moment looked like her other self.

  We heard the bigwigs down at the other end of the corridor. All day long they played cards, kept their radios blaring and drank beer. Unlike my mother’s, their cells were never locked, and so they visited each other far into the night. They would sometimes visit us, and bring my mother an occasional beer, which she accepted.

  I had not understood “bigwig” until I saw the judges at my mother’s trial. Sure enough, they wore huge white wigs, with curls at the sides and a queue down the back. My mother laughed at them, which I thought they certainly noticed and which I felt sure they’d punish her for. I wrote a note to myself about this as I sat observing the proceedings in the courtroom.

  There are a lot of things I can’t do—drive a car, for instance—or even think about. I used to feel there was something mysterious about the way I could never quite keep up in school. I almost made it, but then there would come a point at which I felt myself literally slipping back down the slope. It was a relief, finally, to have it explained to me—not by my mother or my father but by a teacher—that I was a bit retarded, something to do with memory, which meant that just as some people are tall and some are short, some people can think longer or shorter thoughts than others. Not to worry! said my teacher, Miss MacMillan, laughing. You have the attention span of the average American TV viewer. And so I was spared the feeling of being, as my father phrased it, negatively unique.

  And yet, there were times when I wished I could remember the name of something for which my mother sent me to the store. I wished I could do without the lists. A list for the market. A list for school. A list of what things to take and bring back from an afternoon of playing in a neighbor’s yard. A list of street names by which to steer myself home. Nothing that I was asked to do stayed in my mind. Nor could I even remember I’d been asked. Only the look of exasperation on my mother’s face held my attention, but only for a moment. Then I forgot even that.

  One of my mother’s favorite expressions was: It’s a wonder you don’t forget I’m your mother! But I never did. Perhaps it was because I felt connected to her scent. Which was warm, lovely, soft. I felt I could quite happily have spent my lifetime under one of her arms. This, however, I never mentioned because I sensed it would offend her. My mother bathed constantly, as if to rid herself of any scent whatsoever; to her an agreeable odor was that of Palmolive soap, Pond’s cold cream or Nivea lotion. To smell like herself seemed beyond her ability to accept. Even now, in middle age, I like to snuggle her, though contorting my lanky body into a shape that fits cuddly under her neck is something of a feat. She barely tolerates it, though, and immediately moves away.

  If I want to talk to her or to my father about anything, I have to write notes about the subject to myself. I have to practice what I want to say and how I want to say it. As others might prepare for an exam whose subject matter is unknown to them, so I must study, cram, for every conversation with my folks.

  ADAM

  IT WAS SUMMER, and we sat on chaises longues under the linden trees in the garden behind Lisette’s house. Lisette was knitting gossamer blue wool in the heat, and I made the comment that changed my life forever.

  It is so hot, I said, to be knitting wool. Unless, I added, smiling at her, you are expecting to have very cold feet this winter.

  Very cold petits feet, she said, without looking up.

  And that is how I learned of petit Pierre.

  I had always been careful with Lisette. More often than not, when we were making love, I did not penetrate her. Ours was a friendship of shared sadness as well as passion, but a friendship first of all, and I spent many nights in her fluffy white bed, holding her in my arms, but so distraught about my own life with Evelyn, all I could yearn for was sleep.

  On the other hand, there had been an occasional weak moment, which is, after all, all one needs.

  You won’t have it, of course, I said.

  Lisette’s neck, which I referred to sometimes in jest as her thick French neck, grew visibly enlarged. It was the clearest sign of her rage, which she went to great intellectual pains to disguise. It was a stubborn neck, the kind Joan of Arc must have had, and now, looking at me but at the same time rather to one side of me, I saw it and her whole upper body, beneath the sheerness of her white summer dress, flush crimson.

  It is not your affair, she said, knitting furiously, a bead of sweat running toward the corner of her limpid brown eye. In her anger, she looked a bit as I imagined Madame Defarge would have, had someone sat in front of her and blocked her view of the guillotine.

  Not my… I couldn’t finish. I looked at her, speechless.

  Perhaps it isn’t even yours, she said. Perhaps I have a lover, or several, during the months we are apart and you are with your crazy wife in America.

  This was not her usual way of referring to Evelyn. I was hurt by it.

  The silence that fell between us was rendered somehow ridiculous by the energetic droning of her neighbor’s bees, passing in and out of their wooden hives; they made the honey that sweetened our coffee and tea; our empty cups exuded the odor of their work. It was a sound that said so clearly: Life goes on. The pain of it so sure. The sweetness of it so mysterious. It is irrelevant to us th
at you fight. You might both turn to stone there, and it would only mean our liberation into your garden as well as into our own.

  It is mine, I said at last.

  Yes, she said, putting down her knitting. But it is more mine than yours.

  When? I asked. Unfortunately I remembered no moment between us of special tenderness. On the other hand, generally speaking, tenderness permeated our friendship.

  She shrugged.

  When you were here before, of course. In April. When you came to tell me Tashi had run away from you. Even from your kisses.

  LISETTE

  I HAD PETIT PIERRE at home in my grandmother’s bed. My grandmother, Beatrice, who spent her life fighting for the right of French women to vote. The low wooden bed that was built for the house in the century before the last and has never left it. The bed in which my mother was conceived and into which I myself was born. I ate well throughout my pregnancy, and went on long walks all over Paris nearly every day. My father and mother, after overcoming, to a remarkable degree, their normal outrage, racism and shock, showered me with advice and affection. It was recognized, in almost a formal way—“Alors, nothing can be done!” said my mother, shrugging at last after a bitter bout of tears—that I had inherited the genes of my mother’s mother, who had had affairs, but no children, with Gypsies and Turks and the occasional Palestinian Jew, and, even worse, with penniless artists who could be found living in the literal garret of her tiny house and subsisting, again literally, on jars of jam and crusts of bread.

  I had the most sought-after midwife in France—my competent and funny aunt Marie-Therese, whose radical idea it was that childbirth above all should feel sexy. I listened to nothing but gospel music during my pregnancy, a music quite new to me, and to France, and “It’s a High Way to Heaven” (“…nothing can walk up there, but the pure in heart…”) was playing on the stereo during the birth; the warmth of the singers’ voices a perfect accompaniment to the lively fire in the fireplace. My vulva oiled and massaged to keep my hips open and my vagina fluid, I was orgasmic at the end. Petit Pierre practically slid into the world at the height of my amazement, smiling serenely even before he opened his eyes.

  My aunt placed him on my stomach the moment she lifted him from between my legs, waiting to sever the umbilical cord until he could breathe on his own; and so, our heartbeats continued together as they had while he was in my womb. Seeing his sleek tan body and wet curly hair, I missed Adam. But, sighing with completion, I soon sank into the pleasure of the miracle I felt I and the universe alone had made.

  He felt shut out, he said, when he was finally free to come to us. Because he was not there.

  But why? I asked. You knew when he was to be born.

  So did Evelyn, he said.

  PART SIX

  TASHI-EVELYN

  IT IS HOT INSIDE THE COURTROOM. The ceiling fans, as they turn, sound like hoarse throats trying to clear themselves. The louvered windows are open fully to admit any semblance of breeze. I am dressed in cool white cotton from head to foot; Olivia shops for me in the tourist boutiques. Still, I feel perspiration beading at the center of my back, then slipping down in quicksilver rivulets to rest in an already sodden waistband.

  It has been a morning spent listening to the words of those who saw me on my journey. The man who sold me the razors, a squat, rheumy-eyed fellow who admits he overcharged me because I was a foreigner. Although I spoke Olinka he could tell I was American by my dress, he said. Next, a woman who sold me an orange, as I was getting into the bus at Ombere station. She was old and toothless. Her rags obviously smelled, for both attorneys kept their distance as she sweated and drooled a bit there in the witness stand. It was a young woman, however, whose words appeared to nail me. She was thin and dark, with curious light pink, almost white lipsticked lips and painted nails. She explained, in English, with a word or two of Olinka sprinkled through it, that she was proprietress of the paper shop, hard by the square where one caught the bus. She remembered me because I had come into the shop looking for and then asking her to find for me sheets of thick white paper on which to print signs.

  However, I’d changed my mind about wanting the white paper, she said, as soon as she brought some out to me.

  No, she said I had said. White is not the culprit this time. Bring me out paper of the colors of our flag.

  There was a sort of collective gasp in the courtroom when she said this. I felt even more eyes boring holes in the back of my neck. The judges surreptitiously scratched the natural kinky hair at the edges of their straight brush wigs.

  And is this the paper, miss, that the defendant bought?

  The prosecuting attorney stands before the young woman in the dock, the vivid red, yellow and blue paper held out in front of him.

  There was a time the colors alone made me weep with pride. Now I look at them as dispassionately as if they were Crayolas in a child’s coloring box.

  Surprisingly, there are a few older people near the back of the courtroom who, on seeing the colors—for which they, as young bush revolutionaries, fought—stand, their hands over their hearts. (Of course I can not see them; I only hear, faintly, their movement. The creaking of joints, the shifting of feet. I don’t even wonder about it at the time. Later Adam and Olivia will tell me. I think instead of the flag of my new home, America. I see, with my mind’s eye, that red and blue and white flag. The meaning of whose colors is unknown to me. A flag a woman sewed.)

  Reluctantly, I refocus on the young woman giving testimony. I think of the meaning of the word “testimony.” Originally it named the custom of two men holding each other’s testicles in a gesture of trust, later to metamorphose into the handshake. I imagine the woman’s soft black hand cupping the young attorney’s balls, her shell-pink nails deep in the tangles of his pubic hair. What are we doing in this sweltering courtroom, she is saying, brushing the ebony tips of her breasts against his smooth, hairless chest, it’s actually a beautiful day outside. The attorney’s face has that curious look of concentration sexually aroused men have; he…But I must pay attention, I think, rotating my head slowly on my neck; if I am not careful, I will have a torrid romance going, and miss, as Olivia says, my own trial.

  The woman says I bought the paper and a Magic Marker pen and sat down immediately to draw my signs.

  What signs did you see the defendant draw? asks the prosecutor.

  Only one, says she.

  Would you be good enough to tell the court how you happened to read this sign, and also what was written on it?

  She showed it to me, said the young woman.

  She showed it to you?

  Yes. She said to me: You are a young woman and your life is still before you. I am an old woman and my life is already over. All I am good for now is alerting you to disaster.

  Here the young woman paused, as if the emotion of this experience had momentarily pierced her. She raised a palely painted nail to the corner of her eye.

  Of course I didn’t understand, she said, as if to clear herself of any hint of collaboration.

  Of course you did not, said the attorney. Please continue.

  Well, said the young woman, she put down her bag, her suitcase, that is, and sat on it, over in a corner of the shop out of the way of traffic. Because it was rather early in the day, she was the only customer. She simply sat there and proceeded to make these signs.

  And the one you saw? prompted the attorney.

  The first one she drew, said the young woman. She held it out in front of her, gravely, and scanned it, then turned it toward me.

  There was a silence.

  I was surprised to read what it said. And of course I couldn’t understand what it meant.

  Right, said the attorney, waiting.

  “If you lie to yourself about your own pain, you will be killed by those who will claim you enjoyed it.” That is what the sign said; in big black letters. Said the young woman.

  If you lie about your pain you will be killed, repeated the attorne
y.

  To yourself, said the young woman. If you lie to yourself. This was obviously the part of the message that gripped her.

  Yes, yes, said the attorney. And after she showed the sign to you, what did she do?

  I believe she made several more. She explained to me that where she lived, in America, people make signs and buttons for everything they want to say, and no one ever arrests them for it. I warned her to be careful, said the young woman.

  Why did you do that? asked the attorney, sharply. The young woman gave him a frightened look. Her voice dropped to a whisper as she replied. I don’t know, she said.

  But of course she knew. Everyone in the room knew. Half the people in prison in Olinka were there for expressing their discontent with the present government. An audible groan escaped me. The judges glared.

  I had felt happy sitting on my red Chinese pigskin suitcase in the corner of the shop. Scribbling my big letters as if I were a child. It had occurred to me on the plane that never would I be able to write a book about my life, nor even a pamphlet, but that write something I could and would. And when the plane touched down all I saw were the billboards shouting out to the people that they must buy Fanta and Coca-Cola and Datsuns and Fords and chocolate and whiskey and sugar and more sugar and coffee and more coffee and tea and more tea. And I thought: Of course! This excrement is the reading matter of the masses. I am only one old and crazy woman, but I will fling myself against the billboards. I will compete. And the next day, before leaving the city, I went bustling into the paper shop.