She had “business” with those “at hand” (Sammy, Uncle Robert) and the tradesmen who were not “at hand” (painters, plasterers, carpenters, roofers, plumbers, and general renovators): checks were written in the middle of the night or the crack of dawn, and on the day the last payment was made, she was already writing new checks to pay for a new desire.
Sammy looked on and took part in all this with horror: it kept him awake at night. “If you move one more wall, you’ll bring down the roof beam. The whole roof will fall on your head. When will you give it up, when?” he warned. “In the grave,” she replied, sticking the hammer into his hand: “Do me a favor, knock this nail in for me.” “This nail” was a way of belittling, ridiculing, and making light of a big or medium-sized operation: “What’s all the fuss about, one little nail?” she would say dismissively, dismantling and afterward moving with his help the wall closet to its new place, arguing all the time about “the right way to do it.” Sammy wasn’t like her, he was “thorough.” “When he does something, he makes such a thorough job of it you can never move it again,” she said in admiration and hostility, stealing an anxious look despite herself at the sagging ceiling with the big damp stains that had defeated the whitewash, knowing what she refused to know: that above the ceaseless renewal lurked disintegration, the tiles that kept on cracking, first in one place and then another.
“Climb,” she ordered Sammy, who climbed the ladder to the roof with the box of new tiles, to make repairs. He stood on the pointed top of the roof. We saw him from below swaying for a moment, his feet sinking into the disintegrating tiles, collapsing into the attic, and then the loud thud of his body on its flimsy floor, which was the ceiling. The heavy chandelier in the living room broke free of its chains, pulling pieces of wood and plaster with it, and shattered on the floor.
ON THE FLOOR (1)
MAURICE MADE AN effort when he came this time or that, but the mother saw through him. “I see through him. All that so-called effort of his is from self-interest. He thinks it’s a hotel here,” she said. But the child didn’t see the kind of effort Corinne talked about, she saw something different — something close to abject submission. She saw him literally bow his head, with his thighs apart, his head buried between his shoulders, and his eyes fixed on the row of tiles at the bottom of the opposite walclass="underline" “Yes, ya Lucette, right, ya Lucette, you’re right, ya Lucette,” he said to her when she raged about something, the something, the fact that he didn’t work like everyone else. She wanted him to put bread on the table like everyone else. Go out in the morning with some briefcase or other, not his usual one, and come back in the evening, at regular hours. “Where’s the shame in putting bread on the table like a man?” she yelled. The curtain blew a little in the breeze. The child sat under the window, behind the curtain, in the flower bed of the backyard, and peeked into the room. And then he said, in French: “You want to say that I’m not a man, is that what you want to say?” And she said: “If you like.” And then there was a kind of silence again: the mother was seeking another way. The child looked inside and saw her looking for a kinder way. And then she said in a voice that was almost gentle: “You had a good job there in the Labor Ministry, with that director looking out for you, if only you’d kept it, you.” And then he said: “They’re all corrupt there. They’re all thieves,” and he didn’t lift his head, still looking at the line of the tiles at the bottom of the opposite wall.
And then she said: “So you steal, too, Maurice, for your family. Why shouldn’t you steal, too, like everyone else?” And he raised his eyes and looked into her face for a moment. The child saw the surprise on his face when he raised his eyes and looked at the mother as if he had just noticed her, suddenly intruding on his loneliness.
From outside, through the semitransparent curtain playing in the breeze, the child could see that picture, the picture of his loneliness, close her eyes at the sight to see it at last as it was. To see it without wanting to enter into it, just to stand on the threshold of the sight of that loneliness and observe its foreignness, which was made up of the alien letters of loneliness that denied the word “father,” and made it impossible to pronounce or feel.
She went inside and sat down next to him, next to his bowed head, which was not terminally bowed: he had only laid down his arms for the time being. His fingers lay spread out on his very thin thigh, and she touched them, their long yellow nails. Now he looked at the mother — but differently, not with that former surprise, but with his face, his hollow cheeks, sinking into himself: “I can’t be like everyone else, Lucette, I can’t. If you want to kill me, kill me,” he said.
“And she killed him, with his two left hands,” said Corinne, sucking hard on her cigarette, her eyes narrowed watchfully. At six o’clock the next morning she woke him up, to drink his coffee quickly and “start work.” In the middle of the hall she set up the ladder, ready with the trowel, the hammers, the paintbrush, the can of paint. She wanted him to fix the ceiling, waterproof it, and then paint it.
He took off his shirt, remaining in the white undershirt that emphasized the sharp angles of his lean, swarthy body, the body of a Sudanese boy. He covered his head with a bandana knotted at the four corners; his Adam’s apple protruded when he raised his eyes to the ceiling, with the trowel in his hand and his tongue sticking out, touching the tip of his nose with exertion. Every fifteen minutes he needed a break, got down from the ladder, dirtying the shack with the prints of his feet and hands full of white paint: coffee, cigarette, coffee, cigarette. At midday, when she came home from work, there were maybe eight coffee cups standing at the bottom of the ladder, ashtrays full of stubs. The ceiling was still wounded, riddled with holes.
“And she threw him out. The blood went to her head from the mess.” Corinne sometimes told the story, when she emerged from her silence full of stories, but not the specific story, and not specifically to the child — she told the generalized story, which was a melting of all the stories together, to a generalized audience consisting of herself or the child listening from the side.
Maurice crossed the path, climbed to Nona’s quarter-shack, slept over there for two or three nights on the folding bed. The two of them got along; they kept the same hours. The child liked being there with them. Listening in the relaxed atmosphere to the conversation without edges, not from here and not from now, from some “once upon a time,” not exactly reminiscing, but the echo of a spacious life with many entrances to many rooms. She lay on the floor at their feet, on the striped rug over whose creases Nona stumbled whenever she got up to fetch something from the kitchen. The door to the quarter-shack was always open, to the high concrete landing, to the wind, to the smell of the honeysuckle, which Nona called fula, jasmine. In a book the child read “time stood still,” she said to Maurice, but it wasn’t right. Maurice said it wasn’t right. It stands still and moves at once, time, said Maurice, and he translated for Nona: “elzaman, elzaman,” said Maurice.