Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [14]
I liked The Old Man immediately. Liked his great, stooping height; the looseness of the ever-present tweed jacket that hung from his gaunt shoulders. Liked his rosy pink face and small blue eyes that looked at one so piercingly it was difficult not to turn one’s head to see what he was viewing through it. Liked, even, that he himself had at times a look of madness to match my own—though it was a benign look that seemed to observe a connection between whatever held his gaze and some grand, unimaginably spacious design, quite beyond one’s comprehension. In other words, he looked as if he would soon die. I found this comforting.
ADAM
AT FIRST SHE MERELY SPOKE about the strange compulsion she sometimes experienced of wanting to mutilate herself. Then one morning I woke to find the foot of our bed red with blood. Completely unaware of what she was doing, she said, and feeling nothing, she had sliced rings, bloody bracelets, or chains, around her ankles.
EVELYN
I DID NOT FEAR HIM partly because I did not fear his house. Though medieval European in its outer aspects, particularly its turrets and small slate courtyard, it had at its center a stone hut, round, with a large fireplace and flagstone hearth. He knelt there, his old knees creaking, to light the morning and evening fire, over which he cooked; and seemed to me, at times, an old African grandmother, metamorphosed somehow into a giant pinkfaced witchdoctor on this other, colder continent. He almost always wore an apron of some kind. Of leather, when he chopped wood or carved the stone pillars that stood near the lake across from the loggia, or a thick cotton one when he cooked the wonderful Swiss pancakes and sausages with which he delighted to feed us.
His hair was as wispy and pale as thistle; I would sometimes, late in our visit, creep up behind him—as he sat smoking with Adam and looking out over the lake—and blow it. This caused him to reach up behind him, grasp both my arms, pull me forward against his large back and shoulders, hug me to him with my head like a moon above his own, and laugh.
We used to tell him, Adam and I, Mzee (Old Man), you are our last hope!
But he would only look from one to the other of us—a grave look—and in his heavily accented English he would say, No, that is not correct. You yourselves are your last hope.
EVELYN
HE SET ME TO DRAWING. The first thing I drew was the meeting of my mother and the leopard on her path. For this, after all, represented my birth. My entrance into reality. But I drew, then painted, a leopard with two legs. My terrified mother with four.
Why is this? asked The Old Man.
I did not know.
EVELYN
BENNY TELLS ME there is a lot of discussion now in the newspapers and on the street about whether, since I’ve been an American citizen for years, the Olinka government even has the right to put me on trial. He thinks there is a possibility I’ll be extradited back to the United States. He sits tensely, reading me notes he has made on the subject.
Sometimes I dream of the United States. I love it deeply and miss it terribly, much to the annoyance of some people I know. In all my dreams there is clear rushing river water and flouncy green trees, and where there are streets they are wide and paved and in the night of my dreams there are lighted windows way above the street; and behind these windows I know people are warm and squeaky clean and eating meat. Safe. I awake here to the odor of unwashed fear, and the traditional porridge and fruit breakfast that hasn’t changed since I left. Except my dishes are fresh and appetizingly prepared, thanks to Olivia, who has made herself welcome, through bribery, in the prison kitchen.
And if I am extradited to America, I say, will I have a second trial?
Benny says he does not know for sure, checking his notes, but