Possessing the Secret of Joy Page 8

  I liked to watch my father with petit Pierre, his namesake. They were physically much alike, short, thin-bodied and serious, rather slow and low-key among the coffee-crazed, perpetually cranky Parisians. I know that when my father looked at Pierre he saw the innocent, that is to say, apolitical, Algerian boys of his congregation whom he’d left behind to an uncertain fate, caught as they were between the French security forces, to whom all Arabs looked alike, and the Maquis, the NLA and the more militant Moslem fanatics, to whom Christian Arabs looked not at all like themselves: which is to say, like true Arabs. The young boys who had appeared deeply moved by the nonviolence preached by the Jesus Christ of my father’s church. The Jesus they inevitably identified as a rebel Algerian, for not only did the Jesus Christ of the Christian religion look like an Algerian, but for a long time there was a tradition of Arab martyrdom in Algeria, of which they were well aware, as young “Arab terrorist” after young “Arab terrorist,” sometimes boys no older than themselves, went up, barehanded or with stones and rusty swords, against the machine guns and hand grenades of the French.

  Petit Pierre, appearing years later, after my parents had resettled completely into French life, and I had settled for the first time, became both our remembrance of our Algerian experience, which in Paris seemed suddenly never to have existed, and our solace. This became true even for my mother, who cared, to a much greater extent than either my father or I, what other people thought. She did not have her own mother’s firm belief in her right to enjoy life as she pleased and in such company as she alone chose, but she had loved Algeria and the warmth of the people had impressed itself upon her. Her bourgeois French racism—“All Arabs steal; the women are no better than they should be; the children are born with a criminal streak; etc., etc., etc.”—had been severely shaken by the suffering of her servants and friends.

  She adored Pierre. When he left for America I thought her heart would break. She who saw him as the light of her waning existence, and the light of her memory of an earlier phase, in which he had had no part, but rather was like a belated sun in the evening of her life, illuminating some new truth she now knew, pointing backward with its rays. She who, since he could walk, had strolled hand in hand with him in every Paris square. Protectively wary at first of the covert glances of strangers; then boldly in solidarity with petit Pierre; then lost, happily, in the grandmotherly joy of his golden hand in hers.

  EVELYN

  I TOLD RAYE about my lifelong tendency to escape from reality into the realm of fantasy and storytelling.

  Without this habit, I said, it would be impossible for me to guess anything out of the ordinary had happened to me.

  What do you mean? she asked.

  I mean, if I find myself way off into an improbable tale, imagining it or telling it, then I can guess something horrible has happened to me and that I can’t bear to think about it. Wait a minute, I said, considering it for the first time, do you think this is how storytelling came into being? That the story is only the mask for the truth?

  She looked doubtful.

  I grew to trust Raye. One day when I went in to see her I found her with her cheeks puffed out like a squirrel. Her skin was ashen and she looked awful.

  What’s the matter? I asked.

  She grimaced. Gum mutilation, she said, with her lips pursed.

  Later, when she could speak more clearly, she told me how it had bothered her that the kind of pain I must have endured during circumcision was a pain she could hardly imagine; and so, having been told by her dentist that she had several pockets of gum disease, in an otherwise healthy mouth, she’d had her gums turned down like socks around her teeth, their edges clipped and insides scraped, and then sewed up again, tight, around the roots of her teeth.

  I could not prevent an involuntary shudder of disgust.

  But of course I had anesthesia, she said, still speaking as if her gums were stitched. And of course in a few days I’ll be better than before.

  But you are obviously in pain now, I said.

  Yes, she admitted. And it is nearly impossible for me to bear it, and also talk. Not surprisingly, making love to anyone at all is the furthest thing from my mind. She laughed. And this is only in my mouth!

  You shouldn’t have done it, I said coldly. It was stupid of you.

  But she only chuckled, grimacing painfully as she did so. Don’t be mad because my choosing this kind of pain seems such a puny effort, she said. In America it’s the best I can do. Besides, it gives me a faint idea. And it was something I needed to do anyway.

  I was angry because I was touched. I realized that though Raye had left Africa hundreds of years before in the persons of her ancestors and studied at the best of the white man’s schools, she was intuitively practicing an ageless magic, the foundation of which was the ritualization, or the acting out, of empathy. How theatre was born? My psychologist was a witch, not the warty kind American children imitate on Halloween, but a spiritual descendant of the ancient healers who taught our witch doctors and were famous for their compassionate skill. Suddenly, in that guise, Raye became someone I felt I knew; someone with whom I could bond.

  In my heart I thanked Mzee for her, for I believed she would be plucky enough to accompany me where he could not. And that she would.

  PIERRE

  IT WAS A RAINY DECEMBER AFTERNOON and we sat by the fire, reading. My mother sat; I lounged on the sofa across from her. Earlier that morning she had permitted me to sleep late, missing school, and had brought her gifts to me and spread them across the foot of my bed. Each year since my birth she’d knitted me a sweater. Each year I watched the piece of knitting grow between her flashing needles; each year I was charmed by the result. This year, as every year, she’d outdone herself. The new sweater wrapped me in gold and chocolate; near the center of my chest, just above my heart, there was a petroglyphic spirit head in a rich, mossy green.

  I was reading a book by Langston Hughes, the laughing spellbinder whose sadness almost hid itself in the insouciance of his prose. I had already devoured several novels by James Baldwin, the guerrilla homosexual genius whom I had met once when he came to speak at our school, and two volumes of essays by Richard Wright, the tortured assimilationist and great lover of France. These men, “uncles” from my father’s side, would be my guides on my American journey. I glanced over at my mother, expecting to find her still reading, or staring thoughtfully into the fire, but finding instead that her warm brown eyes were fixed on me.

  I was just thinking, she said. It has been sixteen years since you were born. I can’t believe it.

  That long? I said, smiling at her.

  Her brown hair was dusted with more gray than I’d noticed before, and her face seemed thinner than usual, and more pale. I sighed with the contentment of the spoiled only child, and pondered my good fortune. I felt the greatest possible security with my mother. As she often said, our hearts had beat as one since before my birth. No matter who else was not in my life, there was always my mother: reading, knitting, preparing for her classes at the lycée. It was true that I was beginning to feel ready to separate from her, but gently, as a fruit drops from the tree. One more year of school, of Paris, and I would be gone.

  If you go to America, she said—as if I might not after all our years of planning—and spend time with your father, there’s something you should know.

  What? I asked.

  Something minor, perhaps. But he won’t remember it. And I do.

  How mysterious, I said.

  Not so mysterious! she said. It’s just that I’ve realized with your father that men refuse to remember things that don’t happen to them.

  Full of the passionate words of Baldwin, Hughes and Wright, which rang in my heart as if already inscribed there, I leaned forward to protest. My mother put out her hand and covered my lips.

  For as long as I could remember, my father came to see me and my mother once in fall and once in spring; for two weeks each visit. He never came on my birthday, b
ecause coming at that time seriously distressed his wife. Each time he came he showed me photographs of his other son, Benny, and at least one photograph of his wife, Evelyn, or, as he sometimes called her, Tashi. Benny was nearly three years older than me, with bronze satiny skin and a sweet, tentative smile. Whenever I saw a new photo of him I wondered if he’d like me. If we could ever be friends. Once, my father told me that Benny wasn’t as “quick” as I. This pleased me enormously, though I hadn’t the words to ask him what a lack of “quickness” like mine might mean.

  My mother began to tell me the story of how she met my father, years ago in Africa. I’d heard it before. I nodded complacently as she talked about the hours she spent with my father in Old Torabe’s hut, as the old man waited for death. But I soon realized my mother was adding a more adult twist than usual to the tale.

  You have to understand, she said, there was a reason why Old Torabe lived alone, way outside the village, and why none of the villagers came to care for him. Your father certainly didn’t enjoy caring for him, either; your grandfather Samuel assigned Torabe to him.

  My mother uncrossed her legs, pressed her palms against the arms of her chair in order to stretch her back and glanced from me to the fire, which would soon need another log.

  In his youth Torabe had had many wives. A few of them died. In childbirth. From infection. One died from snakebite. In any event—and I learned this from Adam, who liked to recount the old man’s, as he called them, “negative blessings”—at last Torabe married a young woman who ran away from him, and could not be brought back. He’d been notorious for tracking and bringing back his runaway wives before. This one drowned herself, in water that didn’t even reach her knees, rather than return.

  She’d gone to her parents and asked them how they expected her to endure the torture: he had cut her open with a hunting knife on their wedding night, and gave her no opportunity to heal. She hated him. Her parents had no answer for her. Her father instructed her mother to convince her of her duty. Because she was Torabe’s wife, her place was with him, her mother told her. The young woman explained that she bled. Her mother told her it would stop: that when she herself was cut open she bled for a year. She had also cried and run away. Never had she gotten beyond the territory of men who returned her to her tribe. She had given up, and endured. Now her mother stood in the shadow of the girl’s father, a man she despised, waiting for death, but, in the meantime, longing for grandchildren, which she hoped this errant daughter would provide. There is nothing in the world to kiss but small children, said the mother, turning away from her daughter’s tears.

  Torabe was thrown out of the village because he lost control of his wife, a very evil thing to do in that society because it threatened the fabric of the web of life. At least the web of life as the villagers knew it. He died deserted, filthy and in tatters. The girl’s family too was ordered out of the village, and the girl herself was dragged from the river and left to rot, her body food for vultures and rodents.

  Now, said my mother, rising to place a log on the fire, your father always mentions the fact that he and I had “lively” conversation there in Torabe’s hut, as he reluctantly washed the old man, but he never remembers what our conversation was about.

  It was, said my mother, about a young woman in Algeria who worked for us, and who nearly suffered the same fate as Torabe’s wife. It was about how, at last, I recognized the connection between mutilation and enslavement that is at the root of the domination of women in the world. Her name was Ayisha, and she ran to us one night screaming from the sight of the variety of small, sharp instruments her anxious mother had arranged underneath a napkin on a low seating cushion that rested beside the bridal bed.

  My mother suddenly shuddered, as though watching a frightful scene. It’s in all the movies that terrorize women, she said, only masked. The man who breaks in. The man with the knife. Well, she said, he has already come. She sighed. But those of us whose chastity belt was made of leather, or of silk and diamonds, or of fear and not of our own flesh… we worry. We are the perfect audience mesmerized by our unconscious knowledge of what men, with the collaboration of our mothers, do to us.

  After a long pause she said: This episode with Ayisha, who was returned to her family, who beat her for running away—and actually we never knew what became of her—is at the root of my refusal to marry; even though in France there are no instruments of torture beside the bed.

  And the Marquis de Sade? I asked.

  Thankfully only one man, she said, and thankfully not in this century. She laughed. And thankfully not beside my bed.

  Perhaps, I said. But surely his cruelty to women is lodged in the collective consciousness of the French? Like the zest of Rabelais, the wit of Molière?

  Perhaps, she murmured, and seemed to lose herself gazing into the fire.

  PART NINE

  EVELYN

  I FELT NO COMPUNCTION about opening letters that came from Lisette to Adam, letters which sometimes contained copies of letters she’d received from her uncle Mzee touching on my case; or even, sometimes, copies of letters from Adam himself; she seemed often to need to jog his memory about something or other. There was an occasional copied page of her diary in which she appeared contented, and self-possessed: autonomous in a way I could not imagine for myself. She also had the nerve occasionally to address a letter to me. These always sounded as if she were feeling her way through fog. I trampled them. I routinely, and leisurely, read those from her which Adam left lying open at the back of his bottom desk drawer, the key to which I had long since duplicated. It was from one of her letters that I learned their son, Pierre, was coming to America.

  Informing me he was going to a gathering of progressive religieux, Adam flew to Boston to meet him and was gone a week, helping Pierre settle into the life of Cambridge and Harvard. The boy was still far away, the breadth of the continent, so I did not worry. He remained in Cambridge for three years.

  It was from her letters that I learned of Lisette’s illness. Diagnosed first as stress brought on by her political activity: she was active in the movement against French nuclear power plants, which, she wrote, dotted like dangerous pustules the once pristine countryside; later diagnosed as an ulcer. Then as a hernia. Then, finally, as stomach cancer. She petitioned Adam to permit Pierre to live with him and to attend Berkeley after her death. This Adam apparently agreed to do; I refused to let him bring up the subject with me.

  It was during a period when I could not eat and was emaciated as a scarecrow; my clothes hung on me, and I wore nothing that wasn’t black. The week before, someone introduced to me by Adam said, with a snigger: “Ah, Adam and Evelyn. How cute!” And I slapped him.

  I felt the violence rising in me with every encounter with the world outside my home. Even inside it I frequently and with little cause, no cause, boxed Benny’s ears. If I made him squeal and cringe and look at me with eyes gone grave with love and incomprehension, I fancied I felt relief.

  I was watching the street when the taxi came. A boxy, bright yellow, child’s cartoon of a taxi. The kind of taxi the world expects all American taxis to be. I glimpsed Pierre’s curly head before he got out, as he leaned forward to pay the driver. He was skinny and short, as if still a child. I watched the two of them, chatting like old friends, go around to the boot to take out his bags.

  Still chatting, they did not notice the dark spectre floating near them: first to the door, then to the porch, then to the steps, alighting to stoop beside a large pile of stones I had begun to collect the very day I learned of Pierre’s birth. Large oblong stones from the roadside; heavy flat stones from the riverbank; sharp jagged shale stones from the fields.

  As Pierre thanked the driver and turned toward the house, he saw me, and smiled. A large jagged stone, gray as grief, struck him just above the teeth. Blood spurted from his nose. I began to throw the stones as if, like Kali, I had a dozen arms, or as if my arms were a multiple catapult or a windmill. Stones rained upon him and up
on the cab, which had started to pull off but screeched to a stop as the driver realized Pierre was under attack and sinking to one knee. I did not let up, but floated nearer, cradling an armful of stones. Pierre began to speak in a gibberish of French, which infuriated me. I dropped the stones in order to close my ears with the palms of my hands. During this interlude, the cabbie ran up to Pierre, grabbed him under the arms and dragged him out of sight.

  I began to laugh, as the taxi disappeared down the street. In their cowardly haste they’d forgotten Pierre’s luggage. The brown suitcases sat, importunate and irrevocable, where he’d dropped them; more heavy baggage for me to lift and somehow carry. I would not. I dove forward, flapping my arms and shrieking hoarsely like a crow, to kick them into the street.

  PART TEN

  EVELYN

  THE BUS RIDE from Ombere station was long. The roads bumpy. The dust everywhere. Each twenty-five kilometers or so we stopped to use roadside facilities. These were not at all like those in America but were entirely makeshift. Smelly holes in the earth on either side of which some forward-thinking person had nailed a board. On these boards, inevitably splashed with urine, one placed one’s feet.

  A week ago I would not have expected M’Lissa to still be alive. But yes, according to a year-old Newsweek I perused in the waiting room of the Waverly, she was not only alive but a national monument. She had been honored by the Olinka government for her role during the wars of liberation, when she’d acted as a nurse as devoted to her charges as Florence Nightingale, and for her unfailing adherence to the ancient customs and traditions of the Olinka state. No mention was made of how she fulfilled this obligation. She had been decorated, “knighted,” the magazine said; swooped up from her obscure hut, where she lay dying on a filthy straw mat, and brought to a spacious cottage on the outskirts of a nearby town, where she would be within easy commute to a hospital, should the need arise.