Wide Sargasso Sea - Jean Rhys [47]
‘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 you. Wait, and perhaps you can love her again. A little, like she say. A little. Like you can love.’
I shook my head and went on asking it mechanically.
‘It’s lies all that yellow bastard tell you. He is not Cosway either. His mother was a no-good woman and she try to fool the old man but the old man isn’t fooled. “One more or less” he says, and laughs. He was wrong. More he do for those people, more they hate him. The hate in that man Daniel – he can’t rest with it. If I know you coming here I stop you. But you marry quick, you leave Jamaica quick. No time.’
‘She told me that all he said was true. She wasn’t lying then.’
‘Because you hurt her she want to hurt you back, that’s why.’
‘And that her mother was mad. Another lie?’
Christophine did not answer me at once. When she did her voice was not so calm.
‘They drive her to it. When she lose her son she lose herself for a while and they shut her away. They tell her she is mad, they act like she is mad. Question, question. But no kind word, no friends, and her husban’ he go off, he leave her. They won’t let me see her. I try, but no. They won’t let Antoinette see her. In the end – mad I don’t know – she give up, she care for nothing. That man who is in charge of her he take her whenever he want and his woman talk. That man, and others. Then they have her. Ah there is no God.