Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [48]
(Break her up)
‘She tell me in the middle of all this you start calling her names. Marionette. Some word so.’
‘Yes. I remember, I did.’
(Marionette, Antoinette, Marionetta, Antoinetta)
‘That word mean doll, eh? Because she don’t speak. You want to force her to cry and speak.’
(Force her to cry and speak)
‘Bur she won’t. So you think up something else. You bring out that worthless girl to play with next door and you talk and laugh and love so that she hear everything. You meant her to hear.’
Yes, that didn’t just happen. I meant it.
(I lay awake all night long after they were asleep, and as soon as it was light I got up and dressed and saddled Preston. And I came to you. Oh Christophine. O Pheena, Pheena, help me.)
‘You haven’t yet told me exactly what you did with my – with Antoinette.’
‘Yes I tell you. I make her sleep.’
‘What? All the time?’
‘No, no. I wake her up to sit in the sun, bathe in the cool river. Even if she dropping with sleep. I make good strong soup. I give her milk if I have it, fruit I pick from my own trees. If she don’t want to eat I say, “Eat it up for my sake, doudou.” And she eat it up, then she sleep again.’
‘And why did you do all this?’
There was a long silence. Then she said, ‘It’s better she sleep. She must sleep while I work for her – to make her well again. But I don’t speak of all that to you.’
‘Unfortunately your cure was not successful. You didn’t maker her well. You made her worse.’
‘Yes I succeed,’ she said angrily. ‘I succeed. But I get frightened that she sleep too much, too long. She is not béké like you, but she is béké, and not like us either. There are mornings when she can’t wake, or when she wake it’s as if she still sleeping. I don’t want to give her any more of – of what I give. So,’ she went on after another pause, ‘I let her have rum instead. I know that won’t hurt her. Not much. As soon as she the rum she starts raving that she must go back to you and I can’t quiet her. She says she’ll go alone if I don’t come but she beg me to come. And I hear well when you tell her that you don’t love her – quite calm and cool you tell her so, and undo all the good I do.’
‘The good you did! I’m very weary of your nonsense, Christophine. You seem to have made her dead drunk on bad rum and she’s a wreck. I scarcely recognized her. Why you did it I can’t say – hatred of me I suppose. And as you heard so much perhaps you were listening to all she admitted – boasted about, and to the vile names she called me. Your doudou certainly knows some filthy language.’
‘I tell you no. I tell you it’s nothing. You make her so unhappy she don’t know what she is saying. Her father old Mister Cosway swear like half past midnight – she pick it up from him. And once, when she was little she run away to be with the fisherman and the sailors on the bayside. Those men!’ She raised her eyes to the ceiling. ‘Never would you think they was once innocent babies. She come back copying them. She don’t understand what she says.’
‘I think she understood every word, and meant what she said too. But you are right, Christophine – it was all a very little thing. It was nothing. No machete here, so no machete damage. No damage at all by this time. I’m sure you took care of that however drunk you made her.’
‘You are a dam hard man for a young man.’
‘So you say, so you say.’
‘I tell her so. I warn her. I say this is not a man who will help you when he sees you break up. Only the best can do that. The best – and sometimes the worst.’
‘But you think I’m one of the worst, surely?’
‘No,’ she said indifferently, ‘to me you are not the best, nor the worst. You are –’ she shrugged ‘ – you will not help her. I tell her so.’
Nearly all candles were out. She didn’t light fresh ones – nor did I. We sat in the dim light. I should stop this useless conversation, I thought, but could only listen, hypnotized, to her dark voice coming from the darkness.
‘I know that girl. She will never ask you for love again, she will die first. But I Christophine I beg you. She love you so much. She thirsty for