Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [31]
‘There was a road here sometime.’
‘No road,’ he repeated obstinately.
It was nearly dark when we were back on the red clay path. He walked more slowly, turned and smiled at me. It was as if he’d put his service mask on the savage reproachful face I had seen.
‘You don’t like the woods at night?’
He did not answer, but pointed to a light and said, ‘It’s a long time I’ve been looking for you. Miss Antoinette frightened you come to harm.’
When we reached the house I felt very weary.
‘You like you catch fever,’ he said.
‘I’ve had that already.’
‘No limit to times you catch fever.’
There was no one on the veranda and no sound from the house. We both stood in the road looking up, then he said, ‘I send the girl to you, master.’
Hilda brought me a large bowl of soup and some fruit. I tried the door into Antoinette’s room. It was bolted and there was no light. Hilda giggled. A nervous giggle.
I told her that I did not want anything to eat, to bring me the decanter of rum and a glass. I drank, then took up the book I had been reading, The Glittering Coronet of Isles it was called, and I turned to the chapter ‘Obeah’:
‘A zombi is a dead person who seems to be alive or a living person who is dead. A zombi can also be the spirit of a place, usually malignant but sometimes to be propitiated with sacrifices or offerings of flowers and fruit.’ I thought at once of the bunches of flowers at the priest’s ruined house. ‘ “They cry out in the wind that is their voice, they rage in the sea that is their anger.”
‘So I was told, but I have noticed that negroes as a rule refuse to discuss the black magic in which so many believe. Voodoo as it is called in Haiti – Obeah in some of the islands, another name in South America. They confuse matters by telling lies if pressed. The white people, sometimes credulous, pretend to dismiss the whole thing as nonsense. Cases of sudden or mysterious death are attributed to a poison known to the negroes which cannot be traced. It is further complicated by …’
******
I did not look up though I saw him at the window but rode on without thinking till I came to the rocks. People here call them Mounes Mors (the Dead Ones). Preston shied at them, they say horses always do. Then he stumbled badly, so I dismounted and walked along with the bridle over my arm. It was getting hot and I was tired when I reached the path to Christophine’s two-roomed house, the roof shingled, not thatched. She was sitting on a box under her mango tree, smoking a white clay pipe and she called out, ‘It’s you, Antoinette? Why you come up here so early?’
‘I just wanted to see you,’ I said.
She helped me loosen Preston’s girth and led him to a stream near by. He drank as if he were very thirsty, then shook himself and snorted. Water flew out of his nostrils. We left him cropping grass and went back to the mango tree. She sat on her box and pushed another towards me, but I knelt close to her touching a thin silver bangle that she always wore.
‘You smell the same,’ I said.
‘You come all this long way to tell me that?’ she said. Her clothes smelled of clean cotton, starched and ironed. I had seen her so often standing knee deep in the river at Coulibri, her long skirt hitched up, washing her dresses and her white shifts, then beating them against the stones. Sometimes there would be other women all bringing their washing down on the stones again and again, a gay busy noise. At last they would spread the wet clothes in the sun, wipe their foreheads, start laughing and talking. She smelled too, of their smell, so warm and comforting to me (but he does not like it). The sky was dark blue through the dark green mango leaves, and I thought, ‘This is my place and this is where I belong and this is where I wish to stay.’ Then I thought, ‘What a beautiful tree, but it is too high up here for mangoes and it may never bear fruit,’ and I thought of lying alone in my bed with the soft silk cotton mattress and fine sheets, listening. At last I said, ‘Christophine, he does not love me, I think he hates me. He always sleeps in his dressing-room