Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [23]
‘Again you are mistaken. She seems slow, but every move she makes is right so it’s quick in the end.’
I drank another cup of bull’s blood. (Bull’s blood, I thought. The Young Bull.)
‘How did you get that dressing table up here?’
‘I don’t know. It’s always been here ever since I can remember. A lot of the furniture was stolen, but not that.’
There were two pink roses on the tray, each in a small brown jug. One was full blown and as I touched it the petals dropped.
‘Rose elle a vécu,’ I said and laughed. ‘Is that poem true? Have all beautiful things sad destinies?’
‘No, of course not.’
Her little fan was on the table, she took it up laughing, lay back and shut her eyes. ‘I think I won’t get up this morning.’
‘Not get up. Not get up at all?’
‘I’ll get up when I wish to. I’m very lazy you know. Like Christophine. I often stay in bed all day.’ She flourished her fan. ‘The bathing pool is quite near. Go before it gets hot, Baptiste will show you. There are two pools, one we call the champagne pool because it has a waterfall, not a big one you understand, but it’s good to feel it on your shoulders. Underneath is the nutmeg pool, that’s brown and shaded by a big nutmeg tree, It’s just big enough to swim in. But be careful. Remember to put your clothes on a rock and before you dress again shake them very well. Look for the red ant, that is the worst. It is very small but bright red so you will be able to see it easily if you look. Be careful,’ she said and waved her little fan.
One morning soon after we arrived, the row of tall trees outside my window were covered with small pale flowers too fragile to resist the wind. They fell in a day, and looked like snow on the rough grass – snow with a faint sweet scent. Then they were blown away.
The fine weather lasted longer. It lasted all that week and the next and the next and the next. No sign of a break. My fever weakness left me, so did all misgiving.
I went very early to the bathing pool and stayed there for hours, unwilling to leave the river, the trees shading it, the flowers that opened at night. They were tightly shut, drooping, sheltering from the sun under their thick leaves.
It was a beautiful place – wild untouched, above all untouched, with an alien, disturbing, secret loveliness. And it kept its secret. I’d find myself thinking, ‘What I see is nothing – I want what it hides –that is not nothing.’
In the late afternoon when the water was warmer she bathed with me. She’d spend some time throwing pebbles at a flat stone in the middle of the pool. ‘I’ve seen him. He hasn’t died or gone to any other river. He’s still there. The land crabs are harmless. People say they are harmless. I wouldn’t like to – ’
‘Nor would I. Horrible looking creatures.’
She was undecided, uncertain about facts – any fact. When I asked her if the snakes we sometimes saw were poisonous, she said, ‘Not those. The fer de lance of course, but there are none here,’ and added, ‘but how can they be sure? Do you think they know?’ Then, ‘Our snakes are not poisonous. Of course not.’
However, she was certain about the monster crab and one afternoon when I was watching her, hardly able to believe she was the pale silent creature I had married, watching her in her blue chemise, blue with white spots hitched up far above her knees, she stopped laughing, called a warning and threw a large pebble. She threw like a boy, with a sure graceful movement, and I looked down at very long pincer claws, jagged-edged and sharp, vanishing.
‘He won’t come after you if you keep away from that stone. He lives there. Oh it’s another sort of crab. I don’t know the name in English. Very big, very old.’
As we were walking home I asked her who had taught her to aim so well. ‘Oh, Sandi taught me, a boy you never met.’
Every evening we saw the sun go down from the thatched shelter she called the ajoupa, I the summer house. We watched the sky and the distant sea on fire – all colours where in that fire and the huge clouds fringed and shot with flame. But I soon tired of the display. I was waiting for the scent of the flowers by the river