Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [51]
All the time I was writing this letter a cock crowed persistently outside. I took the first book I could lay hands on and threw it at him, but he staled a few yards away and started again.
Baptiste appeared, looking toward Antoinette’s silent room.
‘Have you got much more of this famous rum?’
‘Plenty rum,’ he said.
‘Is it really a hundred years old?’
He nodded indifferently. A hundred years, a thousand all the same to le bon Dieu and Baptiste too.
‘What’s that damn cock crowing about?’
‘Crowing for change of weather.’
Because his eyes were fixed on the bedroom I shouted at him, ‘Asleep, dormi, dormi.’
He shook his head and went away.
He scowled at me then, I thought. I scowled too as I re-read the letter I had written to the lawyers. However much I paid Jamaican servants I would never buy discretion. I’d be gossiped about, sung about (but they make up songs about everything, everybody. You should hear the one about the Governor’s wife). Wherever I went I would be talked about. I drank some more rum and, drinking, I drew a house surrounded by trees. A large house. I divided the third floor into rooms and in one room I drew a standing woman – a child’s scribble, a dot for a head, a larger one for the body, a triangle for a skirt, slanting lines for arms and feet. But it was an English house.
English trees. I wondered if I ever should see England again.
******
Under the oleanders … I watched the hidden mountains and the mists drawn over their faces. It’s cool today; cool, calm and cloudy as an English summer. But a lovely place in any weather, however far I travel I’ll never see a lovelier.
The hurricane months are not so far away, I thought, and saw that tree strike its roots deeper, making ready to fight the wind. Useless. If and when it comes they’ll all go. Some of the royal palms stand (she told me). Stripped of their branches, like tall brown pillars, still they stand – defiant. Not for nothing are they called royal. The bamboos take an easier way, they bend to the earth and lie there, creaking, groaning, crying for mercy. The contemptuous wind passes, not caring for these abject things. (Let them live.) Howling, shrieking, laughing the wild blast passes.
But all that’s some months away. It’s an English summer now, so cool, so grey. Yet I think of my revenge and hurricanes. Words rush through my head (deeds too). Words. Pity is one of them. It gives me no rest.
Pity like a naked new-born babe striding the blast.
I read that long ago when I was young – I hate poets now and poetry. As I hate music which I loved once. Sing your songs, Rupert the Rine, but I’ll not listen, though they tell me you’ve a sweet voice….
Pity. Is there none for me? Tied to a lunatic for life – a drunken lying lunatic – gone her mother’s way.
‘She love you so much, so much. She thirsty for you. Love her a little like she say. It’s all that you can love – a little.’
Sneer to the last, Devil. Do you think that I don’t know? She thirsts for anyone – not for me …
She’ll loosen her black hair, and laugh and coax and flatter (a mad girl. She’ll not care who she’s loving). She’ll moan and cry and give herself as no sane woman would – or could. Or could. Then lie so still, still as this cloudy day. A lunatic who always knows the time. But never does.
Till she’s drunk so deep, played her games so often that the lowest shrug and jeer at her. And I’m to know it – I? No, I’ve a trick worth two of that.
‘She love you so much, so much. Try her once more.’
I tell you she loves no one, anymore. I could not touch her. Excepting as the hurricane will touch that tree – and break it. You say I did? No. That was love’s fierce play. Now I’ll do it.
She’ll not laugh in the sun again.