Temple of My Familiar (45 page)

“Terribly damaged human beings, especially if they were once beautiful and whole, are hard for people to remember by talking about. So it has been with you about your father. The war, the loss of much of his soul, the loss of his arm. The wearing down of your mother. What I’m saying, Suwelo, is that Hal and I are sorry we did not encourage you to speak to us about your parents; we regret we did not offer whatever memories we have—they are few, unfortunately—or anything that we’d heard or knew. That you did not speak of your parents, of the ‘accident’ that made you an orphan while you were still such a young person, seemed to us very odd, when we thought about it. I know you are caught up now in this knottedness with Fanny, and both Hal and I agree that the work with her is what has to be done. But part of your work with Fanny is the work you must do with your parents. They must be consciously called up, called
upon
, re-called. How they lived; but why and how they died, as well. Even the make and model of the car in which they died. Even the style of your father’s haircut, the color of your mother’s dress. The last time you stood over them.

“Hal and I felt you have closed a door, a very important door, against memory, against the pain. That just to say their names, ‘Marcia’ and ‘Louis,’ is too heavy a key for your hand. And we urge you to open that door, to say their names. To speak of them, anything you can remember, freely and often, to Fanny. To trace what you can recognize in yourself back to them; to find the connection of spirit and heart you share with them, who are, after all, your United Front. For really, Suwelo, if our parents are not present in us, consciously present, there is much, very much about ourselves we can never know. It is as if our very flesh is blind and dumb and cannot truly feel itself. Intuition is given little validation; instinct is feared. We do not know what to trust, seeing none of ourselves in action beyond our own bodies. This is why adopted children will do anything to find their true parents. And, more important, the doors into the ancient past, the ancient self, the preancient current of life itself, remain closed. When this happens, crucial natural abilities are likely to be inaccessible to one: the ability to smile easily, to joke, to have fun, to be serious, to be thoughtful, to be limber of limb.

“Where Carlotta is concerned, the task is not difficult—or perhaps it will prove more difficult—because she is still alive. You are right to understand, as I know you now do, that it is a sin to behave as if a person whose body you use is a being without substance. ‘Sin’ being denial of another’s reality of who and what she or he actually is. You can still go to her, as you must, for your own growth, and ask her forgiveness. Express to her something of your own trauma, which may have its origin in your mother’s abandoned and suffering face, and the fear this caused you about knowing too much of women’s pain, and tell her something of what you have learned.

“It is against blockage between ourselves and others—those who are alive and those who are dead—that we must work. In blocking off what hurts us, we think we are walling ourselves off from pain. But in the long run the wall, which prevents growth, hurts us more than the pain, which, if we will only bear it, soon passes over us. Washes over us and is gone. Long will we remember pain, but the pain itself, as it was at that point of intensity that made us feel as if we must die of it, eventually vanishes. Our memory of it becomes its only trace. Walls remain. They grow moss. They are difficult barriers to cross, to get to others, to get to closed-down parts of ourselves.”

Miss Lissie cleared her throat.

“I am running on about this, Suwelo, because it is important, and true, but also because I am afraid to tell you how I know all this, to tell you my own news. Which is”—and here she took a long, slow breath—“that I lied when I told you I have always been a black woman, and that I can only remember as far back as a few thousand years.

“Of course I was from time to time a white woman, or as white as about half of them are. I won’t bore you with tales of the centuries I spent sitting around wondering which colored woman would do my floors. Our menfolks were bringing them in all the time. You’d go to sleep one night brotherless, husbandless, fatherless, and in the morning more than likely one of them would be back. He’d be leading a string of some of the wretchedest-looking creatures you ever saw. Black, brown, red. Sometimes they looked like Mongols or Chinese. You never knew where in the world they came from. And he wouldn’t tell you. ‘Got you some help,’ was the most he’d say, dropping his end of the chain next to where he kept the dogs tied.

“He’d stick some savagely gorgeous trinket on my neck or arm, surely made by witchcraft, I’d think, but silver or, more likely, gold, and start looking about for breakfast.

“I knew what a lady was supposed to do. I clutched the front of my wrapper shut and went to inspect the savages. I always turned up my nose and made a pukey motion toward their filthy hair. They were so beaten they could barely look at me.

“Over time, if
he
didn’t pawn it, the thing on my neck or arm would start talking to me. Especially whenever one of
them
looked at it. It took me years to understand that they knew that on my careless skinny, or fat, white arm I was wearing all the history, art, and culture of their own people that they and their children would ever see.”

There was a pause. “Gold,” said Miss Lissie thoughtfully, “the white man worships gold because it is the sun he has lost.”

There was another pause, during which Suwelo leaned forward slightly and stared into the cassette spinning noiselessly round and round. In a moment, Miss Lissie drew in a labored breath and continued.

“Let me tell you a story,” she said. “It is a dream memory, too, like the one I told you about my life with the cousins; but it is more tenuous even than that one, more faded. Weak. And that has been deliberate. I have repressed it for all I am worth. Regardless, it is still with me, because, like the other memories, it
is
me.”

She paused, coughed, and said, “This was very long ago, indeed.”

Suwelo leaned back against the cushions of the couch, put his feet up on the coffee table in front of him, and placed his hands behind his head.

He thought he was ready.

“We lived at the edge of an immense woods,” said Miss Lissie, “in the kind of houses, made of straw, that people built; insubstantial, really flimsy little things, somewhat fanciful, like an anthill or a spider’s web, thrown up in a hour against the sun. My mother was queen of our group; a small group or tribe we were. Never more than a couple of hundred of us, sometimes fewer. But she was not ‘queen’ in the way people think of queens today. No, that way would have been incomprehensible to her, and horrid. I suppose she was what queens were originally, though: a wise woman, a healer, a woman of experience and vision, a woman superbly trained by her mother. A really good person, whose words were always heard by the clan.

“My mother kept me with her at all times, and she was always stroking me, rubbing into my skin various ointments she’d concocted from the flesh of berries and nuts that she found. As a small child I didn’t notice anything wrong about spending so much time with my mother, nor was it ever unpleasant. Quite the contrary, in fact. Her familiar was an enormous and very much present lion; they went everywhere together. This lion also had a family of his own. There was a lot of visiting between us, and in the lion’s little family of cubs I was always welcome.

“This perhaps sounds strange to you, Suwelo. About the lions, I mean. But it is true. This was long, long ago, before the animals had any reason to fear us and none whatever to try to eat us, which—the thought of eating us—I’m sure would have made them sick. The human body has been recognized as toxic, by the animals, for a very long time.

“In the Bible I know there’s a line somewhere about a time in the future when the earth will be at peace and the lion will lie down with the lamb. Well, that has already happened, and eventually it was to the detriment of the lion.

“In these days of which I am speaking, people met other animals in much the same way people today meet each other. You were sharing the same neighborhood, after all. You used the same water, you ate the same foods, you sometimes found yourself peering out of the same cave waiting for a downpour to stop. I think my mother and her familiar had known each other since childhood; for that was the case with almost everyone. All the women, that is. For, strange to say, the women alone had familiars. In the men’s group, or tribe, there was no such thing. Eventually, in imitation of the women and their familiars, companions, friends, or whatever you want to call them, the men learned to tame the barbarous forest dog and to get the occasional one of those to more or less settle down and stay by their side. I do not mean to suggest that the dogs were barbarous in the sense that we sometimes think of animals today as being ‘red in tooth and claw.’ No, they were barbarous because they simply lacked the sensibility of many of the other animals—of the lions, in particular; but also of the elephants and turtles, the vultures, the chimpanzees, the monkeys, orangutans, and giant apes. They were opportunistic little creatures, and basically lazy, sorely lacking in integrity and self-respect. Also, they lacked culture.

“It was an elegant sight, I can tell you, my mother and Husa walking along the river, or swimming in it. He was gigantic, and so beautiful. I am talking now about his spirit, his soul. It is a great tragedy today that no one knows anymore what a lion is. They think a lion is some curiosity in a zoo, or some wild thing that cares about tasting their foul flesh if they get out of the car in Africa.

“But this is all nonsense and grievous ignorance; as is most of what ‘mankind’ fancies it ‘knows.’ Just as my mother was queen because of her wisdom, experience, ability to soothe and to heal, because of her innate delicacy of thought and circumspection of action, and most of all because of her gentleness, so it was with Husa and his tribe. They were king of creation not because they were strong, but because they were strong and also gentle. Except to cull the sick or injured creatures from the earth, and to eat them, which was their role in creation, just as it is the role of the vulture to eat whatever has already died, they never used their awesome strength.

“We had fire by then. I say this because it was a recent invention; my mother’s grandmother had not had it. Husa and his family would come of an evening to visit; they loved the fire; and there we’d all sprawl watching the changing embers and admiring the flames, well into the night, when we fell fast asleep. My mother and I slept close to Husa, and in the morning’s chill his great heat warmed us.

“So I was not lonely, though at times I saw that other children regarded me strangely. But then, being children, they’d frequently play with me. I loved this. Our playing consisted very often of finding some new thing to eat. And we would roam for miles in search of whatever was easy to reach and ripe. It seemed to me there was everything anyone could imagine, and more than enough for twenty human and animal tribes such as ours. I wish the world today could see our world as it was then. It would see the whole tribe of creation climbing an enormous plum tree. The little brown and black people, for I had not yet seen myself as different; the monkeys, the birds, and the things that today have vanished but which were bright green and sort of a cross between a skunk and a squirrel. There we’d be, stuffing ourselves on plums—little and sweet and bright yellow. Husa would let us stand on his back to reach the high inner branches. If we were eating for a long time, Husa would lie on the ground yawning, and when we were full, the monkeys, especially, would begin a game, which was to throw plums into Husa’s yawning mouth. It was curious to see that no matter how rapidly we threw the plums into his mouth, Husa never swallowed one and never choked. He could raise the back of his tongue, you see, like a kind of trapdoor, and the plums all bounced off it.

“What does not end, Suwelo? Only life itself, in my experience. Good times, specific to a time and place, always end. And so it was with me. The time arrived when I was expected to mate. In our group this was the initiation not only into adulthood, but into separation from the women’s tribe—at least from the day-to-day life of it that was all one had ever known. After mating and helping his mate to conceive, a man went to live with men. But this was not a hardship, since the men’s encampment was never more than half a day’s journey from our own, and there was always, between the two tribes, the most incessant visiting. Why didn’t they, men and women, merge? It simply wasn’t thought of. People would have laughed at the person who suggested it. There was no reason why they should merge, since each tribe liked the arrangement they had. Besides, everyone—people and other animals—liked very much to visit. To be honest, we loved it. That was our TV. And so it was well to have other people and other animals
to
visit.

“Though I hated the thought of leaving my mother, I knew I could still see her whenever I wanted to, and I also knew that the men in the men’s tribe were ready to be my father. For no one had a particular father. That was impossible, given the way the women chose their lovers, freely and variously. The men found nothing strange in this, any more than the women did. Why should they? Lovemaking was considered one of the very best things in life, by women and men; of course it would have to be free. See what I mean about songs?” Miss Lissie chuckled. “Besides, when a young man arrived in the tribe of the men, they were at long last given an opportunity—late, it’s true—to mother. Fathering
is
mothering, you know.

“There was a girl I liked, who liked me back. This was a miracle. And at the proper time, the day before the coming up of the full moon, she and I were sent to pick plums together. I remember everything about that day: the warmth of the sun on our naked bodies, the fine dust that covered our feet... . Her own little familiar, a serpent, slid alongside us. Serpents then were different than they are now, Suwelo. Of course almost everything that was once free is different today. Her familiar, whom my friend called Ba, was about the thickness of a slender person’s arm and had small wheellike extendable feet, on which it could raise itself and whir about, like some of those creatures you see in cartoons; or, retracting these, it could move like snakes move today. It could also extend and retract wings, for all serpents that we knew of at that time could fly. It was a lovely companion for her, and she loved it dearly and was always in conversation with it. I remember the especially convoluted and wiggly trail Ba left behind in the dust, in its happy anticipation of eating fresh plums... . Later that day there was the delicious taste of sun-warmed plums in our mouths. We were, all three of us, chattering right along, and eating, and feeling very happy.