The mother said, “A gold bracelet with her initials on it.” And Nona said, “A blanket. He brought her a Bourbon-rose-colored blanket. It was my brother Clement who sent the bracelet. Don’t you remember, Lucette?”
She didn’t remember, not exactly: going to bed with memory, delighting in its curves, were liberties available only to those who kept still, stayed in one place, like the Nona. So at least she told herself: she had no time to remember. She counted pain, too, even at the moment it happened, as a memory, a kind of illusion. She didn’t believe in it.
Nona said that the child was sick. She got fatter and fatter with the quantities of semolina the Nona fed her, and Nona said that she didn’t look right. There was something wrong with the child. Every day she pushed her in the carriage sent by Maurice’s brother from Italy (was he the one who sent it?) to the clinic, for some kind of penicillin. If they didn’t give her penicillin, or at least antibiotic pills, the Nona didn’t sleep at night: “I didn’t shut an eye,” she said. They walked to the clinic along the long, roundabout asphalt road, not through the fields, lingering five or six times on the way. Nona liked to linger. Her eyes never tired of gazing at the perfectly matching clothes, for which she was responsible, from the color of the baby’s hat, the trim of her socks, to the collar of her dress: then she still had her eyes. “Is there some celebration today that you dressed her up like that? What are you celebrating, Madame Esther?” people asked her in the street. They didn’t ask, they stopped her: “People stopped me in the street to ask, ‘Where’s the party, Madame Esther?’” said Nona.
“Stop it,” the mother scolded her, “stop dressing her up every day. Who do you think she is?” But Nona didn’t listen and she didn’t stop. She sank up to her neck in her double- and triple-entry bookkeeping of the Evil Eye and her measures to counteract the Evil Eye, until she became so confused by the figures and calculations that she drowned in them.
“The child is sick” was an antidote to the Evil Eye of remarks like “Where’s the party, Madame Esther?” but not effective enough against the frontal attack of “What a little doll!” against which only antibiotics would serve, but even they were useless against the worst of alclass="underline" “What a healthy child.” Here only shots of penicillin would do. So far everything was simple. But the accounting became more complicated and labyrinthine, with no way out, when the doctor herself, under the Nona’s urging to prescribe something, said: “What a healthy child.” Nona was speechless. She “saw everything black”: the impenetrable barrier separating the world of the demons from that of the angels came tumbling down, and from then on every angel was a demon in disguise and every demon sported the halo of an angel.
All this paled into insignificance beside the most perverse and uncontrollable of alclass="underline" the Evil Eye that “elbani-adam,” human beings, inflicted on themselves. This, the Nona thought, was the greatest catastrophe of all, the Evil Eye that people gave themselves, with envious, annihilating looks sent by one to the soul of another.
Nona’s head spun. For hours she lay in her high iron bed, a prey to her thoughts, her eyes open and absent.
At the foot of the bed, on the floor, the child crawled or tottered, playing with the white or red beans fallen from the jar. She was a little over a year old and she knew the songs. Once in a while the Nona checked to see if she was all right. She started singing “au pres de ma blonde” and the child continued “qu’il fait bon fait bon fait bon.”
And once, in a tale told in the present continuous, perhaps more than once, the Nona on the verge of falling asleep sang “au pres de ma blonde” and was greeted by silence. The child had quietly disappeared: put on her lace-trimmed bonnet, dragged her Bourbon-rose blanket behind her, slipped out of the half-open door, and crawled down the three concrete steps of the quarter-shack. It was midday, the dirt track at the entrance to the shack was boiling hot, the asphalt road blazed. The child walked down the middle of the road, barefoot, the pink train of the blanket trailing behind her, sweeping the asphalt. She went past Jina’s house, the nursery, and the hill of sand and thorns opposite the bend in the road leading to Savyon, and reached the bus stop. There they found her, somebody found her. “Where are you going, Toni, in the middle of the road?” the somebody asked her. “I’m going for a walk,” the child replied. He picked her up and carried her back to Madame Esther, who had simply fallen asleep after the opening sentence of “au pres de ma blonde.”
The mother knew about this from the neighbors, not from the Nona: the Nona “turned everything around” so it came out like nothing, as if it were nothing at all. “How can I be quiet when you let her wander round like that, how?” the mother raged. “You’re never quiet, ya sitti, why should you be quiet now?” Nona retorted. But she spoke to the child, the Nona, in three languages: “It’s a good thing he never found you, that one,” she said. The child pricked up her ears: “At night he’s as big as a house, but transparent. By day he’s as small as a cat’s tail, but he’s still as big as big can be,” the Nona continued. “Who?” asked the child. “The white man. He’s been seen lots of times in the neighborhood, lots of people have seen him. Guetta’s daughter who’s deaf and started to stammer? It’s all because she saw him and ran away.” The Nona fell silent and took a puff of her cigarette. “What does he do?” asked the child. Nona thought for a minute: “When you walked down the road, did you feel a wind, like a kind of hot wind next to your face?” The child nodded. “That was him. That’s how he begins to swallow, with a wind, because of not having any teeth, he swallows with a dry tongue.”
That night the child couldn’t sleep. She lay next to the Nona, in the high iron bed, and after a few minutes she sat up, lay down, and sat up again, staring at the rectangle of glass on the door. Nona cooked her semolina, sang songs, counted the little pads on the tips of her fingers, put a damp towel with drops of valerian on her forehead.
When the mother returned from work on the last bus, she found the child on Nona’s lap. The Nona’s dress was open in the front: she had bared a huge white breast with a dark pink nipple, which lay between the child’s lax lips. The mother stood and looked. Nailed to the spot, she stood and stared and suddenly came to her senses. Her eyes darted round the room and found the Bourbon-rose blanket neatly folded on a chair. She snatched up the blanket, pulled the sleepy child off Nona’s wide nipple, wrapped her in the blanket, and charged outside, the child in her arms, flew down the dark path under the dark tent of the sky between the two houses, breathless, her heavy bag hanging from her arm swaying from side to side, hitting the backside of the child who was half asleep with her eyes open.
EYES OPEN
ALL NIGHT SHE would lie with her eyes open, waiting for morning; she would switch on the bedside lamp and switch it off again, read another few pages until her eyelids drooped. She couldn’t fall asleep with the light from the little lamp, and she couldn’t do without it: the nights were an interrupted sequence of flickers of light, between which lay areas of darkness. At some point she reached a compromise in her bargaining between light and dark: she threw a towel over the lampshade, half covering it. The light was very dim but it was still there, veiled and orange. My brother, Sammy, was afraid the towel would catch fire in the night, when everyone was sleeping, when she was sleeping. “But I never go to sleep all the way,” she argued, “my sleep is light as a feather.” He looked at her suspiciously out of the corner of his eye, shaking his head in an affectation of shocked disapprovaclass="underline" “The things you do, God save us from the things you do.”