Possessing the Secret of Joy - Alice Walker [32]
She adored Pierre. When he left for America I thought her heart would break. She who saw him as the light of her waning existence, and the light of her memory of an earlier phase, in which he had had no part, but rather was like a belated sun in the evening of her life, illuminating some new truth she now knew, pointing backward with its rays. She who, since he could walk, had strolled hand in hand with him in every Paris square. Protectively wary at first of the covert glances of strangers; then boldly in solidarity with petit Pierre; then lost, happily, in the grandmotherly joy of his golden hand in hers.
EVELYN
I TOLD RAYE about my lifelong tendency to escape from reality into the realm of fantasy and storytelling.
Without this habit, I said, it would be impossible for me to guess anything out of the ordinary had happened to me.
What do you mean? she asked.
I mean, if I find myself way off into an improbable tale, imagining it or telling it, then I can guess something horrible has happened to me and that I can’t bear to think about it. Wait a minute, I said, considering it for the first time, do you think this is how storytelling came into being? That the story is only the mask for the truth?
She looked doubtful.
I grew to trust Raye. One day when I went in to see her I found her with her cheeks puffed out like a squirrel. Her skin was ashen and she looked awful.
What’s the matter? I asked.
She grimaced. Gum mutilation, she said, with her lips pursed.
Later, when she could speak more clearly, she told me how it had bothered her that the kind of pain I must have endured during circumcision was a pain she could hardly imagine; and so, having been told by her dentist that she had several pockets of gum disease, in an otherwise healthy mouth, she’d had her gums turned down like socks around her teeth, their edges clipped and insides scraped, and then sewed up again, tight, around the roots of her teeth.
I could not prevent an involuntary shudder of disgust.
But of course I had anesthesia, she said, still speaking as if her gums were stitched. And of course in a few days I’ll be better than before.
But you are obviously in pain now, I said.
Yes, she admitted. And it is nearly impossible for me to bear it, and also talk. Not surprisingly, making love to anyone at all is the furthest thing from my mind. She laughed. And this is only in my mouth!
You shouldn’t have done it, I said coldly. It was stupid of you.
But she only chuckled, grimacing painfully as she did so. Don’t be mad because my choosing this kind of pain seems such a puny effort, she said. In America it’s the best I can do. Besides, it gives me a faint idea. And it was something I needed to do anyway.
I was angry because I was touched. I realized that though Raye had left Africa hundreds of years before in the persons of her ancestors and studied at the best of the white man’s schools, she was intuitively practicing an ageless magic, the foundation of which was the ritualization, or the acting out, of empathy. How theatre was born? My psychologist was a witch, not the warty kind American children imitate on Halloween, but a spiritual descendant of the ancient healers who taught our witch doctors and were famous for their compassionate skill. Suddenly, in that guise, Raye became someone I felt I knew; someone with whom I could bond.
In my heart I thanked Mzee for her, for I believed she would be plucky enough to accompany me where