Maurice, don’t leave! The threats become moans. Maurice, come back! My father doesn’t turn around.
Men, they say—and they may be right—don’t like unhappy women. Especially if the men are the ones who cause their grief.
My father, like so many others, takes refuge between the thighs of some Didine, Rosita, Alina, who demand so little and laugh so much. Ah, amor de mis amores, vamos a gozar, she probably says in a singsong voice, while dragging him toward the bed. My mother’s jealousy was such that she could burn down churches, skin children alive, or tear stones with bare hands from the walls of her house. But she remained defeated by those very young girls whose only ambition was to make my father happy. I met one of the Alinas one day, and despite her smile, I hated her right away. Because she was beautiful and because it was her fault that my mother’s eyes were perpetually red.
I don’t know what had provoked this last scene. The smallest thing could ignite the anxious spark in my mother’s eyes, firing up a swarm of Spanish wasps in her heart. A note studded with spelling mistakes, carelessly left on the dresser. And she doesn’t even know how to write “Maurice.” She’s a fool, an utter fool, Maurice. The moaning of another woman’s name in a moment of sexual abandon. Who’s that Didine? Rosita? Alina? Another whore. A damned slut! And this time? What was the proverbial straw that broke the camel’s back? The smell of another woman, her sweat or her perfume on my father’s body, on his cock? But I’m wandering off, I’m dreaming, I’m hypothesizing. What is certain and the real truth is that in her anger she shouted that the child she was carrying, that child in her womb—me—was not his.
My father laughs and finally turns back around to face her. I don’t believe you, Marie Thérèse, you’re crazy!
My mother doesn’t blink.
Think carefully about what you’re saying, Thérèse.
Then, in a low voice, details drop from her mouth, one after the other.
In my father’s eyes, a storm rises. And in a silence that fades into another silence, he gets dressed, puts on his shoes, and walks out the door.
* * *
After my father left, and as far back as I can remember, there were only women’s voices in that ancient house. The cries and whispers that remained inside the walls of our home had the high, deep, or severe tones that I can match with the photographs of dead women pasted to my mirror. There they are, these women who gave color to the days of my life, that line of women from which I come. My great-grandmother Sélitane, baptized Julia, had eaten African earth before drinking the ocean she crossed with the court of King Béhanzin. When she was very old she went blind, and for a long time her monotonous chant, a litany repeated from continent to continent, floated through the house. She was as greedy as a magpie, grabbing everything that wasn’t nailed down. Shoving her pitiful treasures into a cardboard box she jealously kept under her bed, to inspect her riches at her own leisure before sleep claimed her.
After the death of that simple, illiterate woman, virtuoso of the bullwhip, they found among her worthless papers a heart in chiseled silver tarnished by the years, with the word Happiness inscribed on one side and the intertwined initials G.S. on the other. During a stay in the French Antilles, she had met a certain Gaston Sarogance, an innkeeper whose pleasure she had submitted to in the storeroom every God-given evening until she got pregnant. He disposed of her with a promise to support her and her child, and sent her by boat to the other end of our island.
From this little guinea hen of a woman, all black and gray, my grandmother Félicité was born. Tall, beautiful; so beautiful. Majestically displacing her weight in air when she walked, flowing like a breeze that picked up dust and withered leaves everywhere she went. At sixteen, she had men drooling over her. Their pants would swell with surges of sudden desire that would tear the fabric and bring migraines so strong that they would rush to the nearest pharmacy to buy painkillers.
Even Alcantère Debramme, a seemingly rich old gentleman the color of a corpse, lost his head over her. One day he came to ask for her hand. Félicité, however, born and named for happiness, had preferred the love of Anselme. Anselme, with shoes held together by string, with a notebook always under his arm and a pen behind his ear, had stolen her heart with poems he passed to her over the fence. Little pieces of paper rolled into a ball where lover rhymed with forever, and mine with thine. Verba volant, scripta manent: words fly away, writings remain. Madame Julia had said, No, no, and no, as she had higher ambitions for her daughter. Faced with this refusal, Félicité’s heart had become a garden of brambles. Dry thorns. For two years she carried a lover’s mourning for that thwarted love, up to the day when she saw Anselme squatting next to a wall, relieving himself after a sudden bout of diarrhea brought on by an abundance of stolen figs. The fruit seller had pointed an accusatory finger at Anselme, and Félicité could not forgive her poet’s gluttony. Had she looked again toward Alcantère Debramme, she would not have found him—the old gentleman, dropped like an old hat, had consoled himself with a neighborhood Primrose and had never walked past their fence again.
Félicité’s free heart blossomed again with the arrival of Estime Placide, who owned the house in which my mother was born. She fell madly in love with my father, Maître Derville—maître, the title one gives to lawyers—Maurice to his friends. They were happy at first, but after a few years, things changed. Isn’t love always a wonder at the beginning? My mother, my poor sweet mother, was too fragile to resist the charm of this man, whose smile alone always lured young turtledoves.
My father liked to laugh and sing, drink and dance. He had a table reserved for him in all the best cafés of the city and every barman had a bottle marked with the name Monsieur Maurice within arm’s reach. One evening, while out with a group of friends, he let himself be tempted by a little outing near the city. To each man his woman, and they woke up in a brothel at noon. At that time, he still had scruples and would have offered my mother sweet talk as consolation. Then one of his friends, a colonel, suggested that he lock him up in the town jail. The best way to get him out of this tricky situation. That very evening, a rumor circulated that Maître Derville had been arrested. There was talk of a denunciation, of subversive acts. My tearful mother was informed that she would have to approach the colonel to free her husband. She was so terrified that she fainted and fell on a stove. The flaming coals burned holes in the thin cotton fabric of her dress. Screams. Lamentations. Ice to cool the wounds. He would laugh as he told the story later. My mother never learned the truth.
So in that terrible year of 1955, assisted by her mother and a midwife and without fanfare, Marie-Thérèse gave birth to me. For a long time afterward, she stayed in bed praying for my father’s return. So here I am. She called me Lola, a whore’s name.
My mother had lied. I really am my father’s daughter. I inherited his selfishness. The lust and passion that carries me toward many different men is my father’s. We share the same taste for adventure. The brutality of our stubbornness is such that a pack of wild horses couldn’t turn us away from any pleasure we have promised ourselves. And when I talk to you about my father’s love affairs and lies, I’m also talking about my own.
Among my love affairs, some were scandalous, others secret, and one was particularly cruel. Some were only trifles. There were also some that were uninspired and without grace; one ending as another was beginning. And all of them existed to forget just one love, Jean.
In my life, there had been suicides, divorces, and an infestation of bedbugs—they’d had to air out all the mattresses in the sun to get rid of them. There had been the birth of a three-eyed older sister Rose, whose fetus was kept in a jar in our house. There were illnesses that dragged despair in their wake: Grandmother Félicité drowning her suffering in liquor, refusing to show the doctor the crab gnawing at her anus, but howling her pain like a dog wailing at the moon. Yet if you happened to ask me, I would tell you that none of those things affected me nearly as much as my love affair with Jea
n.
It was a magnificent and extravagant love. Old as the world. Fluid as time. He himself would claim with a smirk that we had been in love for centuries. For me, there only existed the time before him and the time after. The first part all childhood memories. The second part filled with days and nights of intertwined cruelty and tenderness.
As is almost always the case with love affairs, this one was born by chance. December, which others found fun, had always been a dark month for me, marking another year of loneliness. It was on a Friday, the thirteenth day of the month, during the longest year on earth. At a dance at a private house, I was distractedly counting flies while my girlfriends were dancing to an old bolero, a sentimental tune.
You have not changed
You’re still that young man, so strange . . .
The air smelled of sweat and perfume. The colored paper lanterns punched holes in the darkness. Romantic conversations were blooming in every corner while the Bengal lights whirled around in the garden. Suddenly—I didn’t see him coming—there he was in front of me.
Mademoiselle?
I was changed forever.
His breath on my neck, the warmth of his hand, that pointed star burning the middle of my back—these sensations communicated a secret to me, something that I felt in my blood, that this man’s hands all over my body would bring me peace.
His long past of conquests had accustomed him to the passions he aroused in the eyes and hearts of young girls. Accepting their feelings with indifference, watching them after making love like so many useless things, and chasing them away with a frown, like silly birds. What he liked most about me—what he hadn’t found with the others—was my deep and uncompromising devotion. I loved him furiously and shamelessly, and he in turn was skilled at hurting me. He rejected my love and then cajoled me like a child. Who can explain how far love can go? Sometimes, passion only ends at the brink of madness; at the point of no return. It seems that you have to let time pass. You only die the first time. The other times, you cry. And the only way to get rid of the taste and smell of the man who left you is to replace him with another man. How many bodies must one love to forget just one? Is it possible for a man’s smell to haunt you through time?
I remember that body. I loved that skin, the smell of tobacco on it. And the scent of absence is so strong that I never had to smoke tobacco or dab my wrists with his cologne to make him relive in me. But everything fades, everything in the end is exorcised. It’s a matter of covering painful memories with others, with less important, more ordinary ones. The way you cover filth with dried leaves.
* * *
Happy lovers have no stories to tell. The moment before you fall in love is the most mundane, innocent moment of your life. There are no omens, no portents, no premonitions. Yet in that timeless, motionless universe, I could have foretold the day, the hour, the minute, and the second when I met him. And in my memory, it all begins on that day when Jean, with his sculpted, chiseled face, got married, and was thus made inaccessible. I was absolutely smitten. And I created an entire story that only I remember. I’m fifteen and I’m at a dance. Jean is merely an unknown man smiling sweetly. His eyes meet those of a slightly frail teenager in siren-blue sandals and dress, sitting on the sidelines. Ceremoniously, he asks me to dance. Out of pity? On a bet? I, who only know the arms of boys my own age, I am stirred, intoxicated, bewildered in the arms of this thirty-year-old man. And when the music stops, I don’t want to be free. I want him to keep me in his arms. He smiles and says, Thank you, mademoiselle. But I am still hanging on to him. Impossible to tear myself away. In the short silence between two songs, a new land is discovered. And I read a desire in his eyes: he must have said words whose color differed from those I was used to hearing. Mademoiselle, my name is Jean. You have a beautiful mouth. I’m going to kiss it. Words said practically without breathing. Words that you never hear when you’re fifteen, words that shake up my sleepy fatherless life. And then he draws near and in a moment everything else disappears, because I had become blind and deaf, a moment so brief I’m not sure I dreamt it. All he had done was lick my mouth. In the time it took for me to smother a cry, he was already gone. The sad voice on the record is singing:
If I hurt you when I left you that evening
Without a word, without a look
To soothe your feelings . . .
A sleepless night, filled with dreams. Filled with Jean. The next day, I looked for him across the city. All day long and on every face I search for Jean, and I write these lines in my notebook:
I will no longer go to dances in a blue dress
For I lost my heart by chance, to the rhythm of a dance
The great madness of love is blowing through me. I am fifteen and finally life mirrors literature. I am not one of those girls men lose their heads over. I’ve become one who loves men to death. And I have loved them all. Without demanding or expecting that they love me back, and sometimes despite their obvious indifference. I have made myself completely available to them. Transforming their lukewarm feelings into love has been my challenge, my persistent desire. Today I see how obviously selfish and flighty those men have been. But at that time, I wanted the pride of having lived exceptional adventures. Jean had become the longed-for tormentor this consenting victim was awaiting. He taught me the skill of smiling while suffering.
I believe everything he tells me. A paragon of sensitivity and truth, he only lies to his wife. I reserve my lies for my mother. I’ve developed a love of music and have resolved to learn the piano. Jean gives me private lessons. Every Saturday when Madame is away, the yellow cover of the Hanon exercise book leaning on the black varnish of the instrument, Jean runs his hands over me while I play the wrong notes. The maids might be listening and silence would be suspicious. Sometimes he’s the one who sits at the piano and I between his legs. When it’s my turn to sit on the stool again, the staccato of the “Indian Waltz” is the only rhythm that resists his assaults and the only one I’m able to control. Even today, it’s the only piece I can play from memory. I played that waltz to the point of exhaustion, while his hands and mouth were playing other games.
I don’t know what kind of relationship he had with the woman I always called Madame. She seemed to me very old, as old as Jean, and I had no interest in her. Did she suspect what was happening in her house? It was certainly not Jean’s first affair. I wasn’t his only pupil, and I did not have a monopoly on his affections. But it was probably the most reckless of his adventures. Like all lovers, we were exhibitionists and gave ourselves away without realizing it, by the trembling of our hands, our looks of complicity, our furtive smiles, light caresses that we thought imperceptible but must have been obvious to everybody else. Revelations as precise and terrible as a vibrant Te amo aria sung on stage by a soprano. È finita la commedia.
* * *
The next year, without having learned the sonatas other students played in recitals at school, I got into the habit of visiting him in his friend’s apartment. I would cut my classes and meet him in the afternoon. The heat of our naked bodies would mingle on the bare mattress in that bachelor pad. He would turn on the radio. The first time, the song might have been “Náufrago” or “María Bonita,” but later I learned he liked to do it with Mozart in the background.
He kisses me. No one has ever kissed me like that. He devours me. He eats my mouth. He eats me up whole, my flesh, my body. Not a part of me escapes his mouth, his lips, his teeth, his tongue. A cannibal feast. He nibbles, sucks, licks, rips, brands me with his teeth. He touches everything, plunders and devours. Voracious, greedy.
But no matter how much I wanted to melt into Jean’s body, my own body—still so frail—refused to let him enter. What happened next, and what was repeated many times throughout that year of torment, I would rather not recall—but he ordered me, at age fifteen, to make love with someone else before coming back to him. Which abandoned sweetheart could I go to for this favor? Who might turn me down? Who would take Jean??
?s place?
I kept returning again and again with my head hanging low. I would keep going back to that bed where Jean had deflowered other girls while we were apart. But this was of no importance. I would have accepted anything from him.
I JUST LOST MY WAY
ÈZILI DANTÒ
Anba Dlo, Lan Ginen
(Originally published in 1997)
i just lost my way.
i had it once, when i didn’t know any better.
My earliest memories, if i go way back to infant times, are blank.
A wall of black.
Like when i’m in a dreamless sleep.
There’s no light, no noise, no color, no smell, no movement,
only a still, airless black.
i’m there in that silent airless black.
But without thoughts, without flesh.
Joined one energy to another, no air between,
i cannot be sundered down through all the millenniums.
i’ve no links here. No involvement, no kinky hair, no caramel skin,
no sexual urge, no community, no foreparents, no hunger to take or
give shape or to resist the shapes the Universe, its powers and
polarities impose on me.
Here, in this airless, senseless emptiness,
there’s no torment about harvest and things,
no dialectic, no contrasts, no time, no reference points, no