He is flinching a little, as if we are having a fight. We’re not having a fight.
‘I keep thinking you’d rather go back to St Catherine’s or something,’ he says reluctantly, when I don’t reply. ‘You’ve put something down between us. It’s invisible, but it’s very strong.’
He comes to hold me then, and I realise that I can’t reply because I’ve been weeping those easy tears that Chabella passed down to me. He doesn’t hold me any differently — I thought he would have care for my stomach, but he is as sure as ever that his touch is good for me and my son.
‘Tell me why you keep wearing this,’ he says. He runs his thumb lightly, lightly down the ridge of my polo neck, and I hold still and I let him.
But I can’t say. What do I say, ‘My mother. .’? Do I say, ‘The hysteric. .’?
Gelassenheit.
I lift my head from his shoulder and touch my lips to the skin that crinkles over his Adam’s apple. My teeth latch onto him and I clamp down hard, so hard that my teeth find each other again through his skin
(he shouts)
and I am not thinking anything in particular, just that I have to hurt him.
It’s to do with Magalys, who said there was no singing in the garden in Vedado. Such words are surgical; a pole separates a man’s brain and he survives, but no one knows him any more. With my Cuba cut away from under me, without that piece of warm, songful night, I am empty of reasons. Aaron’s hand smacks my forehead, instinctively batting me away from him, and I fall away like he wants me to, painfully sucking at my teeth. Which are laddered with blood. He stares at me with his hand to his neck; my own hand is at my neck. He is breathing hard; I am breathing hard.
‘What is wrong with you?’ he asks me.
I wipe my mouth.
Aaron rubs his neck, puts me into strong focus, and I am so nervous, too nervous, as if I am fourteen and this is the first time I have ever talked to a boy about anything serious. He draws me back to him, and when I bite him this time, he clenches his fists around me, but he doesn’t let go, and he doesn’t cry out.
Mami and her habit of unhappiness. Mami dazzled and shaded in a strip of kitchen tile and flowered tablecloth, candlelight prising her gaze open for the dark. In the kitchen she makes some more of her prayer flowers.
‘What, you think I don’t make them any more? You think I’d forgotten?’ she asks me. ‘I make them on the third day of each month, on the day that should be given to Elegua.’
The blinds are drawn down against a night storm that screams black noise and thorny rain. Chabella shivers and says quietly, ‘This house will blow away.’
I ask her if there are hurricanes in Cuba; her reply is simple silence.
I talk to her softly, talk secrets to her, but she won’t answer me. So I keep talking anyway, to keep myself awake for her, because I see how the muscles in her long neck are strained, how she bites down and swallows even though there is nothing in her mouth. The window frames bounce against the gales. Chabella says, ‘Lord Jesus Christ of Nazareth,’ without looking up. She is just as fleet at her prayer-making as she’s always been, just as expert, squinting at the paper heaped between her spread elbows, selecting a piece and swiftly folding, twisting, pinching the crisp layers between her honey-soaked fingertips to form broad petals topped with fractured spires.
When her flowers burn, she stretches and sighs.
‘It still works,’ she says.
I watch the petals curl under the blaze that takes them to the centre of the bowl, and I don’t know what she had expected. Did she think that rice paper was no longer flammable? Take a prayer and put it in a photocopier, collect the copies and smile because you have more to go around, cry because when you lifted the lid of that machine, something blank and coarse fell out.
Chabella outstares her flames.
‘My father was kind to people because he didn’t expect them to be good, only interesting. And people are always that, no? If somebody stole from him, he didn’t mind as long as the thief was impeccably audacious. If someone lied to him, he didn’t mind as long as the lie was too wild to be believed, or too subtle to be suspected. Your abuelo, God rest his soul, was so tall that he couldn’t sit down on buses because there was really no room for his legs. But he was good about it; he stood up instead and lowered his head so that it didn’t slam against the bus roof, and he just smiled and watched people like a big bent hook in a paint-spattered T-shirt.
‘My father allowed me to throw tantrums and flounce and switch moods, and I never had to explain. When I announced that on Mondays I was going to eat only green things and on Tuesdays only brown things and on Wednesdays only yellow things, he said, “Fine, you must do what you feel,” even though my Mami frowned and said, “You are making her strange, you will let this girl run mad.” His girlfriends said to each other that he was spoiling me and that he would get no one to marry me. But he was just letting me contradict myself while I still could.
‘My father was almost perfect. The only thing wrong with him was that when he didn’t understand, he got angry. And he didn’t understand me because he stopped listening to me. I was the “feelings” child. Everything I did was a feeling, and it did not count. It is so difficult to talk about demons and gods and spirits without it seeming that you are mad, or sarcastic, or simple, or talking in pictures, or trying to confuse. Or trying to be interesting. It is difficult to talk about demons and make it understood that even if “spirit” is the best word available, it isn’t the right word.
‘Maja, let’s talk like mystics: let’s say I never had a mother. “I always ran home to Awe when a child, when anything befell me. He was an awful mother, but I liked him better than none.” Who wrote that?’
I stare at her. ‘Is this a quiz?’
She laughs at me. ‘No, querida, I only mean that I can’t remember who wrote it.’
I lay my head on my outstretched arms and Mami strokes my hair. Honey from her fingers webs behind my ears, but I don’t move. So what if my hair gets messed up; Mami has stayed still for worse. She told me that once, at a Santeria Mass, she sat with open eyes while rooster blood mapped her face.
Chabella was brave because she didn’t have a plan. She isn’t a storm or a leader or a king or a war or anything or anyone whose life and death makes noise. All she knew was that the words she loved were not all. There is skin, yes. And then, inside that, there is your language, the casual, inherited magic spells that make your skin real. It’s too late now — even if we could say ‘Shut up’ or ‘Where’s my dinner?’ in the first language, the real language, the words weren’t born in us. And unless your skin and your language touch each other without interruption, there is no word strong enough to make you understand that it matters that you live. The things that really say ‘stay’ are an Orisha, a kind night, a pretended boy, a garden song that made no sense. Those come closer to being enough.
12 The soul selects her own society
There is a leak in the hallway too; from a dim green patch the ceiling is crying a thin stream of tears. Miss Lassiter has said that she doesn’t know where the leak is coming from. Aaron, not being a plumber, has tapped her pipes, has said ‘Hm,’ has made a phone call. All we understand from what the plumber tells us is that this is an old house
(AARON: ‘Yes?’)
and that the repair is going to cost over five hundred pounds.
(AARON (jovial): ‘No! Come on, no no no.’)
He laughs pleasantly and tells the plumber that he’s going to get another quote. I say ‘Aaron, please, I need the leak stopped now, now,’ but Aaron is intractable. He doesn’t know that the leak is killing me. Haggling is fine in Accra, but he can’t do it to me — not here.