Breath, Eyes, Memory (2 page)

I tried to listen without looking directly at the women's faces. That would have been disrespectful, as bad as speaking without being spoken to.

"How is Martine doing over there?" asked Stephane, the albino's wife. She was a sequins piece worker, who made herself hats from leftover factory sequins. That night she was wearing a gold bonnet that make her look like a star had landed on her head.

"My sister is fine, thank you," Tante Atie finally answered.

Madame Augustin took a sip of her tea and looked over at me. She gave me a reprimanding look that said: Why aren't you playing with the other children? I quickly lowered my eyes, pretending to be studying some random pebbles on the ground.

"I would wager that it is very nice over there in New York," Madame Augustin said.

"I suppose it could be," said Tante Atie.

"Why have you never gone?" asked Madame Augustin.

"Perhaps it is not yet the time," said Tante Atie.

"Perhaps it is," corrected Madame Augustin.

She leaned over Tante Atie's shoulder and whispered in a not so low voice, "When are you going to tell us, Atie, when the car comes to take you to the airplane?"

"Is Martine sending for you?" asked the albino's wife.

Suddenly, all the women began to buzz with questions.

"When are you leaving?"

"Can it really be as sudden as that?"

"Will you marry there?"

"Will you remember us?"

"I am not going anywhere," Tante Atie interrupted.

"I have it on good information that it was a plane ticket that you received the other day," said Madame Augustin. "If you are not going, then who was the plane ticket for?"

All their eyes fell on me at the same time.

"Is the mother sending for the child?" asked the albino's wife.

"I saw the delivery," said Madame Augustin.

"Then she is sending for the child," they concluded.

Suddenly a large hand was patting my shoulder.

"This is very good news," said the accompanying voice. "It is the best thing that is ever going to happen to you."

I could not eat the bowl of food that Tante Atie laid in front of me. I only kept wishing that everyone would disappear so I could go back home.

The night very slowly slipped into the early hours of the - morning. Soon everyone began to drift towards their homes. On Saturdays there was the house to clean and water to fetch from long distances and the clothes to wash and iron for the Mother's Day Mass.

After everyone was gone, Monsieur Augustin walked Tante Atie and me home. When we got to our door he moved closer to Tante Atie as though he wanted to whisper something in her ear. She looked up at him and smiled, then quickly covered her lips with her fingers, as though she suddenly remembered her missing teeth and did not want him to see them.

He turned around to look across the street. His wife was carrying some of the pots back inside the house. He squeezed Tante Atie's hand and pressed his cheek against hers.

"It is good news, Atie," he said. "Neither you nor Sophie should be sad. A child belongs with her mother, and a mother with her child."

His wife was now sitting on the steps in front of their bougainvillea, waiting for him.

"I did not think you would tell your wife before I had a chance to tell the child," said Tante Atie to Monsieur Augustin.

"You must be brave," he said. "It is some very wonderful news for this child."

The night had grown a bit cool, but we both stood and watched as Monsieur Augustin crossed the street, took the pails from his wife's hand and bent down to kiss her forehead. He put his arms around her and closed the front door behind them.

"When you tell someone something and you call it a secret, they should know not to tell others," Tante Atie mumbled to herself.

She kept her eyes on the Augustin's house. The main light in their bedroom was lit. Their bodies were silhouetted on the ruffled curtains blowing in the night breeze. Monsieur Augustin sat in a rocking chair by the window. His wife sat on his lap as she unlaced her long braid of black hair. Monsieur Augustin brushed the hair draped like a silk blanket down Madame Augustin s back. When he was done, Monsieur Augustin got up to undress. Then slowly, Madame Augustin took off her day clothes and slipped into a long-sleeved night gown. Their laughter rose in the night as they began a tickling fight. The light flickered off and they tumbled into bed.

Tante Atie kept looking at the window even after all signs of the Augustins had faded into the night.

A tear rolled down her cheek as she unbolted the door to go inside. I immediately started walking towards our bedroom. She raced after me and tried to catch up. When she did, she pressed her hand down on my shoulder and tried to turn my body around, to face her.

"Do you know why I always wished I could read?"

Her teary eyes gazed directly into mine.

"I don't know why." I tried to answer as politely as I could.

"It was always my dream to read," she said, "so I could read that old Bible under my pillow and find the answers to everything right there between those pages. What do you think that old Bible would have us do right now, about this moment?"

"I don't know," I said.

"How can you not know?" she asked. "You try to tell me there is all wisdom in reading but at a time like this you disappoint me."

"You lied!" I shouted.

She grabbed both my ears and twisted them until they burned.

I stomped my feet and walked away. As I rushed to bed, I began to take off my clothes so quickly that I almost tore them off my body.

The smell of lemon perfume stung my nose as I pulled the sheet over my head.

"I did not lie," she said, "I kept a secret, which is different. I wanted to tell you. I needed time to reconcile myself, to accept it. It was very sudden, just a cassette from Martine saying, 'I want my daughter,' and then as fast as you can put two fingers together to snap, she sends me a plane ticket with a date on it. I am not even certain that she is doing this properly. All she tells me is that she arranged it with a woman who works on the airplane."

"Was I ever going to know?" I asked.

"I was going to put you to sleep, put you in a suitcase, and send you to her. One day you would wake up there and you would feel like your whole life here with me was a dream." She tried to force a laugh, but it didn't make it past her throat. "I had this plan, you see. I thought it was a good plan. I was going to tell you this, that in one week you would be going to see your mother. As far as you would know, it would just be a visit. I felt it in my heart and took it on Monsieur Augustin's advice that, once you got there, you would love it so much that you would beg your mother to let you stay. You have heard with your own two ears what everyone has said. We have no right to be sad."

I sunk deeper and deeper into the bed and lost my body in the darkness, in the folds of the sheets.

The bed creaked loudly as Tante Atie climbed up on her side.

"Don't you ever tell anyone that I cry when I watch Donald and his wife getting ready for bed," she said, sobbing.

I groped for my clothes in the dark and found the Mother's Day card I had made her. I tucked it under her pillow as I listened to her mumble some final words in her sleep.

Chapter 2

T
he smell of cinnamon rice pudding scented the whole kitchen. Tante Atie was sitting at the table with a bowl in front of her when I came in. I felt closer to tears with each word I even thought of saying, so I said nothing.

I sat at my usual place at the table and watched out of the corner of my eyes as she poured a bowl of rice pudding and slid it towards me.

"Bonjou," she said, waving a spoon in front of my face.

"Your bonjou, your greeting, is your passport."

I kept my head down and took the spoon only when she laid it down in front of me. I did not feel like eating, but if I did not eat, we would have had to sit and stare at one another, and sooner or later, one of us would have had to say something.

I picked up the spoon and began to eat. Tante Atie's lips spread into a little grin as she watched me. Her laughter prefaced the start of what was going to be a funny story.

There were many stories that Tante Atie liked to tell. There were mostly sad stories, but every once in a while, there was a funny one. There was the time when she was a little girl, when my grandmother was a practicing Protestant. Grandmè Ifé tried to show her Christian faith by standing over the edge of a snake pit and ordering the devils back into the ground. Tante Atie was always bent over with laughter as she remembered the look on Grandmè Ifé's face when one of the snakes started to crawl up the side of the pit towards her. My grandmother did not come out for days after that.

Whether something was funny or not depended on the way Tante Atie told it. That morning, she could not bring the laughter out of me like she had in the past. It was even hard for her to force it out of herself.

After I had eaten, I washed the dishes and put them in the basket to dry.

"I want to tell you a few things," Tante Atie said from where she was sitting at the table. "You need to know certain things about your mother."

"Why can't you come to New York too?" I interrupted.

"Because it is not the time yet. After you leave, I am going back home to take care of your grandmother. I am only here in Croix-des-Rosets because of your schooling. Once you leave, I can go back."

"I don't know why you can't go to New York too," I said.

"We are each going to our mothers. That is what was supposed to happen. Your mother wants to see you now, Sophie. She does not want you to forget who your real mother is. When she left you with me, she and I, we agreed that it would only be for a while. You were just a baby then. She left you because she was going to a place she knew nothing about. She did not want to take chances with you."

Tante Atie opened the front door and let the morning sun inside. She ran her fingers along the grilled iron as she looked up at the clear indigo sky.

She picked up a broom and began to sweep the mosaic floor.

"My angel," she said, "I would like to know that by word or by example I have taught you love. I must tell you that I do love your mother. Everything I love about you, I loved in her first. That is why I could never fight her about keeping you here. I do not want you to go and fight with her either. In this country, there are many good reasons for mothers to abandon their children." She stopped to pound the dust out of the living room cushions. "But you were never abandoned. You were with me. Your mother and I, when we were children we had no control over anything. Not even this body." She pounded her fist over her chest and stomach. "When my father died, my mother had to dig a hole and just drop him in it. We are a family with dirt under our fingernails. Do you know what that means?"

She did not wait for me to answer.

"That means we've worked the land. We're not educated. My father would have never dreamt that we would live in the same kind of house that people like Monsieur and Madame Augustin live in. He, a school teacher, and we, daughters of the hills, old peasant stock, pitit soyèt, ragamuffins. If we can live here, if you have this door open to you, it is because of your mother. Promise me that you are not going to fight with your mother when you get there."

"I am not going to fight," I said.

"Good," she said. "It would be a shame if the two of you got into battles because you share a lot more than you know."

She reached over and touched the collar of my lemon-toned house dress.

"Everything you own is yellow," she said, "wildflower yellow, like dandelions, sunflowers."

"And daffodils," I added.

"That is right," she said, "your mother, she loved daffodils." Tante Atie told me that my mother loved daffodils because they grew in a place that they were not supposed to. They were really European flowers, French buds and stems, meant for colder climates. A long time ago, a French woman had brought them to Croix-des-Rosets and planted them there. A strain of daffodils had grown that could withstand the heat, but they were the color of pumpkins and golden summer squash, as though they had acquired a bronze tinge from the skin of the natives who had adopted them.

Tante Atie took the card from under her pillow and put it on the night table, next to the plane ticket. She said that it would be nice for me to give the card to my mother personally, even though the daffodil was gone.

Chapter 3

T
he trip to La Nouvelle Dame Marie took five hours in a rocky van. However, Tante Atie thought that I couldn't leave for New York without my grandmother's blessing. Besides, Grandmè Ifé was getting on in years and this could be my last chance to see her.

The van from Croix-des-Rosets let us off in the marketplace in Dame Marie. The roads to my grandmother's house were too rough for anything but wheelbarrows, mules, or feet.

Tante Atie and I decided to go on foot. We walked by a line of thatched huts where a group of women were pounding millet in a large mortar with a pestle. Others were cooking large cassava cakes in flat pans over charcoal pits.

In the cane fields, the men chopped cane stalks as they sang back and forth to one another. A crammed wheelbarrow rolled towards us. We stepped aside and allowed the boys to pass. They were bare-chested and soaked with sweat, with no protection from the sun except old straw hats.

We passed a farm with a bamboo fence around it. The owner was Man Grace, a tall woman who had hair patches growing out of her chin. Man Grace and her daughter were working in the yard, throwing handfuls of purple corn at a flock of guinea fowls.

My mother had sent money for the reconstruction of her old home. The house stood out from all the others in Dame Marie. It was a flat red brick house with wide windows and a shingled roof. A barbed wire fence bordered my grandmother's pumpkin vines and tuberose stems.

I raced up to the front of the house to stand under the rooster-shaped weather vanes spinning on my grandmother's porch. My grandmother was in the yard, pulling a rope out of her stone well.

"Old woman, I brought your child," Tante Atie said.

The rope slipped out of my grandmother's hands, the bucket crashing with an echoing splash. I leaped into her arms, nearly knocking her down.

"It does my heart a lot of good to see you," she said.

Tante Atie kissed my grandmother on the cheek and then went inside the house.

Grandmè Ifé wrapped her arms around my body. Her head came up to my chin, her mop of shrubby white hair tickling my lips.

"Are you hungry?" she asked. "I am going to cook only the things you like."

. . .

At night, the huts on the hills looked like a crowd of candles. We ate supper on the back porch. My grandmother cooked rice and Congo beans with sun-dried mushrooms. She was wearing a long black dress, as part of her devil, to mourn my grandfather.

"Tell me, what good things have you been doing?" asked my grandmother.

"She has been getting all the highest marks in school," said Tante Atie. "Her mother will be very proud."

"You must never forget this," said my grandmother. "Your mother is your first friend."

I slept alone in the third room in the house. It had a large four-poster bed and a mahogany wardrobe with giant hibiscus carved all over it. The mattress sank as I slipped under the sheets in the bed. It was nice to have a bed of my own every so often.

I lay in bed, waiting for the nightmare where my mother would finally get to take me away.

We left the next day to return to Croix-des-Rosets. Tante Atie had to go back to work. Besides, my grandmother said that it was best that we leave before she got too used to us and suffered a sudden attack of chagrin.

To my grandmother, chagrin was a genuine physical disease. Like a hurt leg or a broken arm. To treat chagrin, you drank tea from leaves that only my grandmother and other old wise women could recognize.

We each gave my grandmother two kisses as she urged us to go before she kept us for good.

"Can one really die of chagrin?" I asked Tante Atie in the van on the way back.

She said it was not a sudden illness, but something that could kill you slowly, taking a small piece of you every day until one day it finally takes all of you away.

"How can we keep it from happening to us?" I asked.

"We don't choose it," she said, "it chooses us. A horse has four legs, but it can fall anyway."

She told me about a group of people in Guinea who carry the sky on their heads. They are the people of Creation. Strong, tall, and mighty people who can bear anything. Their Maker, she said, gives them the sky to carry because they are strong. These people do not know who they are, but if you see a lot of trouble in your life, it is because you were chosen to carry part of the sky on your head.