Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [29]
Antoinette, for God’s sake,’ I said from the doorway.
She swung round, very pale. Amélie buried her face in her hands and pretended to sob, but I could see her watching me through her fingers.
‘Go away, child,’ I said.
‘You call her child,’ said Antoinette. ‘She is older than the devil himself, and the devil is not more cruel.’
‘Send Christophine up,’ I said to Amélie.
‘Yes master, yes master,’ she answered softly, dropping her eyes. But as soon as she was out of the room she began to sing:
‘The white cockroach she marry
The white cockroach she marry
The white cockroach she buy young man
The white cockroach she marry.’
Antoinette took a few steps forward. She walked unsteadily. I went to help her but she pushed me away, sat on the bed and with clenched teeth pulled at the sheet, than made a clicking sound of annoyance. She took a pair of scissors from the round table, cut through the hem and tore the sheet in half, then each half into strips.
The noise she made prevented me from hearing Christophine come in, but Antoinette heard her.
‘You’re not leaving?’ she said.
‘Yes,’ said Christophine.
‘And what will become of me?’ said Antoinette.
‘Get up, girl, and dress yourself. Woman must have spunks to live in this wicked world.’
She had changed into a drab cotton dress and taken off her heavy gold ear-rings.
‘I see enough trouble,’ she said. ‘I have right to my rest. I have my house that your mother give me so long ago and I have my garden and my son to work for me. A lazy boy but I make him work. Too besides the young master don’t like me, and perhaps I don’t like him so much. If I stay here I bring trouble and bone of contention in your house.’
‘If you are not happy here then go,’ said Antoinette.
Amélie came into the room with two jugs of hot water. She looked at me sideways and smiled.
Christophine said in a soft voice, ‘Amélie. smile like that once more, just once more, and I mash your face like a mash plantain. You hear me? Answer me, girl.’
‘Yes, Christophine,’ Amélie said. She looked frightened.
‘And too besides I give you bellyache like you never see bellyache. Perhaps you lie a long time with the bellyache I give you. Perhaps you don’t get up again with the bellyache I give you. So keep yourself quiet and decent. You hear me?’
‘Yes, Christophine,’ Amélie said and crept out of the room.
‘She worthless and good for nothing,’ said Christophine with contempt. ‘She creep and craw like centipede.’
She kissed Antoinette on the cheek. Then she looked at me, shook her head, and muttered in patois before she went out.
‘Did you hear what that girl was singing?’ Antoinette said.
‘I don’t always understand what they say or sing.’ Or anything else.
‘It was a song about a white cockroach. That’s me. That’s what they call all of us who were here before their own people in Africa sold them to the slave traders. And I’ve heard English women cal us white niggers. So between you I often wonder who I am and where is my country and where do I belong and why was I ever born at all. Will you go now please. I must dress like Christophine said.’
After I had waited half an hour I knocked at her door. There was no answer so I asked Baptiste to bring me something to eat. He was sitting under the Seville orange tree at the end of the veranda. He served the food with such a mournful expression that I thought these people are very vulnerable. How old was I when I learned to hide what I felt? A very small boy. Six, five, even earlier. It was necessary, I was told, and that view I have always accepted. If these mountains challenge me, or Baptiste’s face, or Antoinette’s eyes, they are mistaken, melodramatic, unreal (England must be quiet unreal and like a dream she said).
The rum punch I had drunk was very strong and after the meal was over I had a great wish to sleep. And why not? This is the time when everyone sleeps. I imagined the dos the cats the cocks and hens all sleeping, even the water in the river running more slowly.