The Best Travel Writing 2011 - James O'Reilly [18]
As I sat reading, you were running through the streets of Georgetown, sucking half-eaten candies you’d picked off the sidewalk. You were four years older than I, your worn housedress flouncing on your knees as you dodged chickens and stray dogs, trailed mango peels in the dust. When I lived in your city, I imagined that I could turn my head and see you: a phantom little girl playing in the pitted yards. Your singular look of concentration devoted to a grid drawn in the dirt with a stick, your thin brown arm poised to drop a stone, dead into the center.
When we met, I saw the shadows of this past on you, but you had little use for it by then. You were successful, college-educated, wielding the power to grant money to the poor who were no longer you. But I probed: I was still the girl who had sat in the armchair, worrying about girls like you dying. I wanted to know the end of the story. Twenty years later I had come to the country of “a child dies every thirty seconds of malnutrition.” Make me understand what happened, I insisted. Tell me how you didn’t die. How you’re alive today for me to love you.
Guyanese do not talk loosely of the past. You tolerated my American curiosity, though perhaps you suspected it was borne of too much food. Girl, like you love ask questions! you teased me. Why recount a catalogue of deprivations? What could be surprising? It did not seem unique to you. When we spoke of your childhood, I felt as I did hearing Creolese, the English dialect of Guyana. I struggled to wrap my mind around this language that was so different from my own, but was, in fact, my own. I finally resorted to begging for the parts to guess at the whole. How do you spell that? I asked my students, my friends, the person on the phone giving me directions. And all of them would attempt the impossible, struggling to give me letters for an unwritten language. D…O…U…W?…G?…. Their voices trailed off, apologizing. Me sorry, Miss, me ehn’t really know.
So it was with you, humoring me with stories of the past. You gave me the facts you remembered: the crowded home, the violent father, the grandmother who hated your skin darker than her Portuguese white. But when I posed the questions, Why? Why was it this way? you simply shook your head. These things I had to accept: your first tongue could not be written, and your childhood could not be explained.
Still, I forged on. I pushed for the details, the off-moments, the memories you thought unimportant. I was like an investigator recreating a scene, the scene of your invention. Why did I push? Because I adored you, and thought the way to love you better lay in understanding this history. Because I wanted to know this country you sprang from where I now lived. Or maybe your life was just a peephole, a partial view into another world, where I could look on safely. Please excuse my voyeurism, my demands, my curiosity. I was young and so were you. But here is what I gathered. Here are the spellings you invented for me, and the words I made them spell.
To begin, I desired a photo of you from childhood, but none exist. I was jealous of your siblings who had known you then, in your pressed school uniform with the prefect badge. She was always different, your older brother Lelord told me, even when she was small. I envied the woman we met in Matthew’s Ridge. Yes, she had known old Lam, the Chinese man who lived on the hill. That was my grandfather, you told her. She scrutinized your face and I watched as she located you, the little girl I would never know. I remember you, she nodded, unraveling the twenty years since you’d first stepped off the boat into this isolated jungle town. She smiled fondly at a girl’s face I couldn’t see.