The Autobiography of My Mother (12 page)

And so again, what makes the world turn? Most of the people inside that church would want to know. They were singing a hymn. The words were: “O Jesus, I have promised / To serve Thee to the end: / Be Thou for ever near me, / My Master and my friend.” I wanted to knock on the church door then. I wanted to say, Let me in, let me in. I wanted to say, Let me tell you something: This Master and friend business, it is not possible; a master is one thing and a friend is something else altogether, something completely different; a master cannot be a friend. And who would want such a thing, master and friend at once? A man would want that. It is a man who would ask, What makes the world turn, and then would find in his own reply fields of gravity, imaginary lines, tilts and axes, reason and logic, and, quite brazenly, a theory of justice. And when he is done with that, he will say, Yes, but what really makes the world turn? and his mouth, grim with scorn for himself, will say the words: Connive, deceive, murder.

This man is not completely ignorant of the people inside the church, or those same people inside their small houses. His name is John or William, or something like that; he has a wife, her name is Jane or Charlotte, or something like that; he shoots plovers, he eats their eggs. His life is simple, he shuns excess because he wants to; or his life is an elaborate web of events, rituals, ceremonies because he wants it so. He is not ignorant of the many people in his thrall, this man; sometimes he likes the condition they are in and he would even die to keep them in it; sometimes he does not like the condition they are in and he would even die to remove them from it. He is not ignorant of them, he is not ignorant of them completely. They plant a field, they harvest its yield; he calculates with his sharp eye the fruits of their labor, which are tied up uniformly in bundles and lying on docks waiting to be shipped. This man makes a profit, sometimes larger than he expected, sometimes less than he expected. It is with this profit that the reality these many people represent is kept secret. For this man who says “My Master and my Friend” builds a large house, warms the rooms, sits in a chair made from a fabric that is very valuable because its origins are distant, obscure, and involve again the forced labor, the crippling, the early death of the unnamed many; sitting in this chair, he looks out a window; his forehead, his nose, his thin lips press against the glass; it is winter (something I will never see, a climate I will never know, and since I do not know it and since it holds nothing that is beautiful to me, I regard it with suspicion; I look down on people who are familiar with it but I, Xuela, am not in a position to do more than that). The grass is alive but not actively growing (dormant), the trees are alive but not actively growing (dormant); the hedge, its severely clipped shape a small monument to misery, separates two fields; the sun shines, but the light is pale and weak as if a great effort is being made. He is not looking at a graveyard; he is looking at a small part of all that he possesses, and the irregular mounds, gravelike in shape, caused by the earth first hardening, then softening then hardening again, already holding his ancestors and their deeds, have ample room for him and all that he will do and for all who come from him and all that they will do. His forehead, his nose, his thin lips are pressed ever harder against the window; in his mind the still earth becomes a blue sea, a gray ocean, and on the blue sea and on the gray ocean are ships, and the ships are filled with people, and the ships filled with people sink to the bottom of the blue sea and the gray ocean again and again. The blue sea and the gray ocean are also a small part of all he possesses, and they, with their surfaces smooth and tranquil, are a sign of covenants made, inviolable promises, but even so, the irregular mounds, gravelike in shape, appear, small swell swallowing up small swell, hiding a depth whose measure can be taken but the knowledge of it cannot overcome the fear. The impartiality of the dormant field outside his window is well known to him; it will accept a creature he finds a pest, it will accept his most revered ancestor, it will accept him; but the dormant field is carved up and it is spring (I am not familiar with this, I cannot find any joy in this, I think people associated with it are less than I am but I, Xuela, am not in a position to make my feeling have any meaning) and the field can be made to do something he wants it to do. The impartiality of the blue sea, the gray ocean, is well known to him also, but these cold, vast vaults of water cannot be carved up and no season can influence them in his favor; the blue sea, the gray ocean will take him along with all that represents his earthly happiness (the ship full of people) and all that represents his unhappiness (the ship full of people).

It is an afternoon in winter, the sky above him is a blue that is at once overwhelming and ordinary, there is a moon of pure white and not quite full in the middle of it. He is afraid. His name is John, he is the master of the people in the ship that sails on the blue sea, the gray ocean, but he is not master of the sea or the ocean itself. In his position as master, his needs are clear and paramount and so he is without mercy, he is without compassion, he is without tenderness. In his position as a man, unclothed, unfed, as a testament to ordinariness without his house with the warmed rooms, he meets the same fate as all he used to be master of; the ground outside his window will take him in; so will the blue sea, so will the gray ocean. And so it is that at the moment he finds himself in this position, the position of a man, an ordinary man, he asks that master be friend, he asks for himself the very thing that he cannot give; he asks and he asks, even though he knows such a thing is not possible;
such a thing is not possible,
but he cannot help himself, for always the first person you feel sorry for is your own self. And it is this person, this man, who says at a moment he needs to: God does not judge; and when he is saying this, God does not judge, he places himself in a childlike pose; his knees are crossed, his hands are clasped around them, and he will repeat to himself a parable, The Sower and the Wheat, and he gives it an interpretation favorable to himself: God's love shines equally on all the wheat wherever it may grow, between the rocks, in shallow ground, in good soil.

This short, bitter sermonette that I delivered to myself was not new to me. There was hardly a day of my life that I did not observe some incident to add fresh weight to this view, for to me history was not a large stage filled with commemoration, bands, cheers, ribbons, medals, the sound of fine glass clinking and raised high in the air; in other words, the sounds of victory. For me history was not only the past: it was the past and it was also the present. I did not mind my defeat, I only minded that it had to last so long; I did not see the future, and that is perhaps as it should be. Why should anyone see such a thing. And yet … and yet, it made me sad to know that I did not look straight ahead of me, I always looked back, sometimes I looked to the side, but mostly I looked back.

The church outside which I stood on that Sunday was very familiar to me, I had been baptized in it; my father had become such an outstanding member of it that he was now allowed to read the lesson during Sunday-morning service. As if obeying my summons, the congregation erupted from the church, and among them were my father, who no longer bore so much as a trace of the treachery he had committed by joining such a group of people, and Philip, the man I worked for but did not hate and who at the same time was a man I slept with but did not love and whom I would eventually marry but still not love. They were, this congregation, just then in a state of deep satisfaction, though they were not all in identical states of deep satisfaction; my father was less satisfied than Philip, his position in the group less secure. But my father was an incredible mimic and knew well how to make an ordinary person miserable and how to turn the merely miserable person into the person who cries out in the middle of the night, “What makes the world turn against me?” with a wail of anguish so familiar to the night itself, yet so strange to the person from whose being these words have made an involuntary escape. Just a glance not so far away would have provided a substantial example; at the far end of the cemetery, which abutted the churchyard, stood a man named Lazarus and he was making a hole in the ground, he was making a grave; the person to be buried in this grave so far away from the church would be a poor person, perhaps one of the merely miserable. I knew of Lazarus—his name would have been given to him in a moment of innocent hope; his mother would have thought that such a name, rich and powerful as it was with divine second chance, would somehow protect him from the living death that was his actual life; but it had been of no use, he was born the Dead and he would die the Dead. He was one of the many people with whom my father maintained a parasitic existence (even as the people with whom my father attended church maintained a parasitic existence with my father), and I knew of him because my mother was buried in this graveyard (I could not see her grave now from where I stood), and once when I was visiting it I came upon him face-to-face in the graveyard, carrying a bottle (pint size) of white rum in one hand and holding up the waist of his trousers with the other; an insect kept trying to feed from a small pool of saliva that had settled at the corner of his mouth, and he at first used the hand that held the bottle of rum to brush it away, but the insect persisted, and so, instinctively, without calculation, he let go of his pants waist and firmly brushed the insect away. The insect did go away, the insect did not return, but his trousers fell down to his ankles, and again instinctively, without calculation, he reached down to pull them back up and he became as he was before, a poor man driven out of his mind by a set of events that the guilty and the tired and the hopeless call life. He looked like an overworked beast, he looked like a living carcass; the bones in his body were too prominent, they were too close to his skin, he smelled sour, he smelled of stink, he smelled like something rotting, when it's in that sweet stage that can sometimes pass for a delicacy, just before real decay sets in; before his trousers met his waist again, I saw the only alive thing left of him; it was his pubic hair: it covered a large area of his crotch, growing in a wide circle, almost hiding all his private parts; its color was red, the red of a gift or the red of something burning rapidly. This brief meeting of a gravedigger and myself had no beginning and so it could have no end; there was only a “Good day” from me and an “Eh-eh” from him, and these things were said at exactly the same time, so that he did not really hear what I said and I did not really hear what he said, and that was the point. The idea of him and me really hearing each other was out of the question; from the pain of it, we might have murdered ourselves or put in motion a chain of events that would have come to an end only with our hanging from the gallows at midday in a public square. He disappeared inside the Dead House, where he kept the tools of his trade: shovels, ladders, ropes.

The congregation stood on the church steps, basking in the heat, now strong, as if they knew with certainty that it held blessings, though only for them; they spoke to one another, they listened to one another, they smiled at one another; it was a pretty picture they made, like ants from the same nest; it was a pretty picture, for Lazarus was left out of it, I was left out of it. They bade each other goodbye and returned to their homes, where they would drink a cup of English tea, even though they were quite aware that no such thing as a tea tree grew in England, and later that night, before they went to bed, they would drink a cup of English cocoa, even though they were quite aware that no such thing as a cocoa tree grew in England.

*   *   *

At that time in my life, how did such a day come to an end? I was sitting on my bed without any clothes on, my legs over Philip's legs, and he also had no clothes on. He had just removed himself from inside me, and a warm saliva-like fluid leaked out of me, making a damp patch on the sheet. He was like most of the men I had known, obsessed with an activity he was not very good at, but he took directions very well and was not afraid of being told what to do, or ashamed that he did not know all the things there were to do. He had an obsessive interest in rearranging the landscape: not gardening in the way of necessity, the growing of food, but gardening in the way of luxury, the growing of flowering plants for no other reason than the pleasure of it and making these plants do exactly what he wanted them to do; and it made great sense that he would be drawn to this activity, for it is an act of conquest, benign though it may be. He had come into my room in his usual state: he said nothing, he showed nothing, he acted as if he were feeling nothing, and that suited me, for everyone I knew was so filled up with feelings and words, and often much of this was directed at impeding my will; but he had come into my room then holding a book, a book filled with pictures of ruins, not the kind that are the remains of a lost civilization, but purposely built decay. He was obsessed with this idea, too, decay, ruin, and that again made sense, for he came from people who had caused so much of it they might have eventually come to feel that they could not live without it. And pressed between the pages of this book were some specimens of flowers he had known and I suppose had loved, but flowers that could not grow in this Dominican climate; he would hold them up to the light and call out to me their names: peony, delphinium, foxglove, monkshood, and in his voice was at once the triumphant chord of the victor and the discordant melody of the dispossessed; for with this roll call of the herbaceous border (he had shown me a picture of such a thing, a mere grouping of some flowering plants) he would enter an almost etherlike induced trance and would recall everyday scenes from his childhood: what his mother did every Wednesday, the way his father trimmed his mustache, the smell of rainfall in the English countryside, puddings stiffened with eggs and not arrowroot; and how in summer his hair was freshly cut so that his head resembled the back of a baby animal and a swift evening breeze would cool off his hot scalp as he reached the top of some cliff after a day's walk over some moors; and the last sound he heard just before he fell asleep on the first night he spent away from his mother and father at school, and the friendliness of an English sky especially on Easter Sunday, and the
thwop
of a tennis ball—a white blur—punctuating the absolute stillness of an English summer afternoon; his mother standing in the shade of a tall beech, a basket filled with vegetables of distinction and character in one hand, a trowel in the other—on the whole, an outdoors full of natural, perfect symmetry, an indoors free of novelty, or the currently fashionable, and unpleasant smells.