Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [25]
Adieu foulard, adieu madras, or Ma belle ka di maman li. My beautiful girl said to her mother (No it is not like that. Now listen. It is this way). She’d be silent, or angry for no reason, and chatter to Christophine in patois.
‘Why do you hug and kiss Christophine?’ I’d say.
‘Why not?’
I wouldn’t hug and kiss them,’ I’d say, ‘I couldn’t.’
At this she’d laugh for a long time and never tell me why she laughed.
But at night how different, even her voice was changed. Always this talk of death (Is she trying to tell me that is the secret of this place? That there is no other way? She knows. She knows.)
‘Why did you make me want to live? Why did you do that to me?’
‘Because I wished it. Isn’t that enough?’
‘Yes, it is enough. But if one day you didn’t wish it. What should I do then? Suppose you took this happiness away when I wasn’t looking …’
‘And lose my own? Who’d be so foolish?’
‘I am not used to happiness,’ she said. ‘It makes me afraid.’
‘Never be afraid. Or if you are tell no one.’
‘I understand. But trying does not help me.’
‘What would?’ She did not answer that, then one night whispered, ‘If I could die. Now, when I am happy. Would you do that? You wouldn’t have to kill me. Say die and I will die. You don’t believe me? Then try, try, say die and watch me die.’
‘Die then! Die!’ I watched her die many times. In my way, not in hers. In sunlight, in shadow, by moonlight, by candlelight. In the long afternoons when the house was empty. Only the sun was there to keep us company. We shut him out. And why not? Very soon she was as eager for what’s called loving as I was – more lost and drowned afterwards.
She said, ‘Here I can do as I like’ not I, and then I said it too. It seemed right in that lonely place. ‘Here I can do as I like.’
We seldom met anyone when we left the house. If we did they’d greet us and go on their way.
I grew to like these mountain people, silent, reserved, never servile, never curious (or so I thought), not knowing that their quick sideways looks saw everything they wished to see.
It was at night that I felt danger and would try to forget it and push it away.
‘You are safe,’ I’d say. She’d liked that – to be told ‘you are safe.’ Or I’d touch her face gently and touch tears. Tears – nothing! Words – less than nothing. I did not love her. I was thirsty for her, but that is not love. I felt very little tenderness for her, she was a stranger to me, a stranger who did not think or feel as I did.
One afternoon the sight of a dress which she’d left lying on her bedroom floor made me breathless and savage with desire. When I was exhausted I turned away from her and slept, still without a word or a caress. I woke and she was kissing me – soft light kisses. ‘It is late,’ she said and smiled. ‘You must let me cover me up – the land breeze can be cold.’
‘And you, aren’t you cold?’
‘Oh I will be ready quickly. I’ll wear the dress you like tonight.’
‘Yes, do wear it.’
The floor was strewn with garments, hers and mine. She stepped over them carelessly as she walked to her clothes press. ‘I was thinking, I’ll have another made exactly like it,’ she promised happily. ‘Will you be pleased?’
‘Very pleased.’
If she was a child she was not a stupid child but an obstinate one. She often questioned me about England and listened attentively to my answers, but I was certain that nothing I said made much difference. Her mind was already made up. Some romantic novel, a stray remark never forgotten, a sketch, a picture, a song, a waltz, some note of music, and her ideas were fixed. About England and about Europe. I could not change them and probably nothing would. Reality might disconcert her, bewilder her, hurt her, but it would not be reality. It would be only a mistake, a misfortune, a wrong path taken, her fixed ideas would never change.
Nothing that I told her influenced her at all.
Die then. Sleep. It is all that I can give you …. I wonder if she ever guessed how near she came to dying. In her way, not in mine. It was not a safe game to play – in that place. Desire, Hatred, Life, Death came very close in the darkness. Better not know how close. Better not think, never for a moment. Not close. The same