Krik_ Krak! - Edwidge Danticat [35]
Princesse carried the conch shell in her hand as she strolled. She dug the sharp tip of the shell into her index finger and drew a few drops of blood. The blood dripped onto the front of her white undershirt, making small blots that sank into the cloth, leaving uneven circles. Princesse sat on the cooling sand on the beach staring at the spots on her otherwise immaculate undershirt, seeing in the blank space all kinds of possibilities.
Catherine came back a week later. Princesse returned to the beach and found her stretched out in a black robe, in her usual lounging chair, reading a magazine.
"Madame," Princesse called from the road, rushing eagerly towards Catherine.
"I am sorry," Catherine said. "I had to go to Paris."
Catherine folded the magazine and started walking back to the house.
As Princesse had expected, all the painted canvases were gone. Catherine offered her some iced rum on the veranda. This time Princesse gladly accepted. She would chew some mint leaves before going home.
Catherine did not notice the blood stains on the undershirt that Princesse' had worn every day since she'd drawn on it with her own blood. Catherine sifted through a portfolio of recent work and pulled out a small painting of Princesse lying naked on the beach rock with a candle in each hand.
"I had a burst of creativity when I was in Paris," she said. "Here, it's yours."
Princesse peered at this re-creation, not immediately recognizing herself, but then seeing in the face, the eyes, the breasts, a very true replication of her body.
Princesse stared at the painting for a long time and then she picked it up, cradling it as though it were a child. It was the first time that Catherine had given her one of her paintings. Princesse felt like she had helped to give birth to something that would have never existed otherwise.
"My friend, the artist whose boots I used to wear," Catherine said, "I wanted to go to Paris if only to see his grave. I missed the funeral, but I wanted to see where his bones were resting."
Catherine gave Princesse two T-shirts, one from the Pompidou Center, and another from a museum in Paris where she hoped one day her work would hang.
"I wish I could have let you know I was going," Catherine said. "But I wasn't sure myself that I would go until I got on the plane.
Princesse sat on the veranda next to Catherine, holding her little painting. She was slowly becoming familiar with what she saw there. It was her all right, recreated.
It struck Princesse that this is why she wanted to make pictures, to have something to leave behind even after she was gone, something that showed what she had observed in a way that no one else had and no one else would after her. The sky in all its glory had been there for eons even before she came into the world, and there it would stay with its crashing stars and moody clouds. The sand and its caresses, the conch and its melody would be there forever as well. All that would change would be the faces of the people who would see and touch those things, faces like hers, which was already not as it had been a few years before and which would mature and change in the years to come.
That afternoon, as Princesse walked up the road near the cockfights, clutching an image of herself frozen in a time that would never repeat, a man walked out of the yard, carrying a fiery red rooster with a black sock draped over its face. The rooster was still and lifeless beneath the sock even as the man took sips of white rum and blew it in a cloud at the rooster's shrouded head. A few drops of blood fell to the earth in a circle and vanished in the dirt.
Along the fence, the old drunk was moaning