Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [45]
I couldn’t bear any more and again I went out of the room and sat on the veranda.
My arm was bleeding and painful and I wrapped my handkerchief round it, but it seemed to me that everything round me was hostile. The telescope drew away and said don’t touch me. The trees were threatening and the shadows of the trees moving slowly over the floor menaced me. That green menace. I had felt it ever since I saw this place. There was nothing I knew, nothing to comfort me.
I listened. Christophine was talking softly. My wife was crying. Then a door shut. They had gone into the bedroom. Someone was singing ‘Ma belle ka di’, or was it the song about one day and a thousand years. But whatever they were singing or saying was dangerous. I must protect myself. I went softly along the dark veranda. I could see Antoinette stretched on the bed quite still. Like a doll. Even when she threatened me with the bottle she had a marionette quality. ‘Ti moun,’ I heard and ‘Doudou ché,’ and the end of a head handkerchief made a finger on the wall. ‘Do do l’enfant do.’ Listening, I began to feel sleepy and cold.
I stumbled back into the big candlelit room which still smelt strongly of rum. In spite of this I opened the chest and got another bottle. That was what I was thinking when Christophine came in. I was thinking of a last strong drink in my room, fastening both doors, and sleeping.
‘I hope you satisfy, I hope you well satisfy,’ she said, ‘and no good to start your lies with me. I know what you do with that girl as well as you know. Better. Don’t think I frightened of you either.
‘So she ran off to tell you I’d ill-treated her, did she? I ought to have guessed that.’
‘She don’t tell me a thing,’ said Christophine. ‘Not a single thing. Always the same. Nobody is to have any pride but you. She have more pride than you and she say nothing. I see her standing at my door with that look on her face and I know something bad happen to her. I know I must act quick and I act.’
‘You seem to have acted, certainly. And what did you do before you brought her back in her present condition?’
‘What did I do! Look! don’t you provoke me more than I provoke already. Better not I tell you. You want to know what I do? I say doudou, if you have trouble you are right to come to me. And I kiss her. It’s when I kiss her she cry – not before. It’s long time she hold it back, I think. So I let her cry. That is the first thing. Let them cry - it eases the heart. When she can’t cry no more I give her a cup of milk – it’s lucky I have some. She won’t eat, she won’t talk. So I say, “Lie down on the bed doudou and try to sleep, for me I can sleep on the floor, don’t matter for me.” She isn’t going to sleep natural that’s certain, but I can make her sleep. That’s what I do. As for what you do – you pay for it one day.
‘When they get like that,’ she said, ‘first they must cry, then they must sleep. Don’t talk to me about doctor, I know more than any doctor. I undress Antoinette so she can sleep cool and easy; it’s then I see you very rough with her eh?’
At this point she laughed – a hearty merry laugh. ‘All that is a little thing – it’s nothing. If you see what I see in this place with the machete bright and shining in the corner, you don’t have such a long face for such a little thing. You make her love you more if that’s what you want. It’s not for that she have the look of death on her face. Oh no.
‘One night,’ she went on, ‘I hold on a woman’s nose because her husband nearly chop it off with his machete. I hold it on, I send a boy running for the doctor and the doctor come galloping at dead of night to sew up the woman. When he finish he tell me, “Christophine you have a great presence of mind.” That’s what he tell me. By this time the man crying like a baby. He says, “Doctor I don’t mean it. It just happened” “I know, Rupert,” the doctor says, “but it mustn’t happen again. Why don