Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [45]
‘Mix me a good strong one, Baptiste. Just what I feel like.’
He took a step away from me and said, ‘Miss Antoinette –’
‘Baptiste, where are you?’ Antoinette called. ‘Why don’ you come?’
‘I come as quick as I can,’ Baptiste said. But as he reached for the bottle I took it away from him.
Hilda ran out of the room. Baptiste and I stared at each other. I thought that his large protuberant eyes and his expression of utter bewilderment were comical.
Antoinette shrieked from the bedroom, ‘Baptiste! Christophine! Pheena, Pheena!’
‘Que komesse!’ Baptiste said. ‘I get Christophine.’
He ran out almost as fast as the little girl had done.
The door of Antoinette’s room opened. When I saw her I was too shocked to speak. Her hair hung uncombed and dull into her eyes which were inflamed and staring, her face was very flushed and looked swollen. Her feet were bare. However when she spoke her voice was low, almost inaudible.
‘I rang the bell because I was thirsty. Didn’t anybody hear?’
Before I could stop her she darted to the table and seized the bottle of rum.
‘Don’t drink any more,’ I said.
‘And what right have you to tell me what I’m to do? Christophine!’ she called again, but her voice broke.
‘Christophine is an evil old woman and you know it as well as I do,’ I said. ‘She won’t stay here very much longer.’
‘She won’t stay here very much longer,’ she mimicked me, ‘and nor will you, nor will you. I thought you liked the black people so much,’ she said, still in that mincing voice, ‘but that’s just a lie like everything else. You like the light brown girls better, don’t you? You abused the planters and made up stories about them, but you do the same thing. You send the girl away quicker, and with no money or less money, and that’s all the difference.’
‘Slavery was not a matter of liking or disliking,’ I said, trying to speak calmly. ‘It was a question of justice.’
‘Justice,’ she said. ‘I’ve heard that word. It’s a cold word. I tried it out,’ se said, still speaking in a low voice. ‘I wrote it down. I wrote it down several times and always it looked like a damn cold lie to me. There is no justice.’ She drank some more rum and went on, ‘My mother whom you all talk about, what justice did she have? My mother sitting in the rocking-chair speaking about dead horses and dead grooms and a black devil kissing her sad mouth. Like you kissed mine,’ she said.
The room was now unbearable hot. ‘I’ll open the window and let a little air in,’ I said.
‘It will let the night in too,’ she said, ‘and the moon and the scent of those flowers you dislike so much.’
When I turned from the window she was drinking again.
‘Bertha,’ I said.
‘Bertha is not my name. You are trying to make me into someone else, calling me by another name. I know, that’s obeah too.’
Tears streamed from her eyes.
‘If my father, my real father, was alive you wouldn’t come back here in a hurry after he’d finished with you. If he was alive. Do you know what you’ve done to me? It’s not the girl, not the girl. But I love this place and you have made into a place I hate. I used to think that if everything else went out of my life I would still have this, and now you have spoilt it. It’s just somewhere else where I have been unhappy, and all the other things are nothing to what has happened here. I hate it now like I hate you and before I died I will show you how much I hate you.’
Then to my astonishment she stopped crying and said, ‘Is she so much prettier than I am? Don’t you love me at all?’
‘No, I do not,’ I said (at the same time remembering Amélie saying, ‘Do you like my hair? Isn’t it prettier than hers?’). ‘Not at this moment,’ I said.
She laughed at that. A crazy laugh.
‘You see. That’s how you are. A stone. But it serves me right because didn’t Aunt Cora say to me don’t marry him. Not if he were stuffed with diamonds. And a lot of other things she told me. Are you talking about England I said, and what about Grandpappy passing his glass over the water decanter and the tears running down his face for all the friends dead and gone, whom he would never see