The Word Tree E-Book

Teolinda Gersao

• Herausgeber: Dedalus
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2013

Beschreibung

Teolinda Gersão paints an extraordinarily evocative picture of childhood in Africa and the stark contrast between warm, lush, ebullient Mozambique and the bleak, poor, priggish Portugal of Salazar.

Leseprobe

CONTENTS

Title

The Author

The Translator

Translator’s Acknowledgements

Dedalus Africa

Chapter 1

Chapter 2

Chapter 3

Copyright

THE AUTHOR

Teolinda Gersão is the author of 12 novels and short-story collections, which have been translated into eleven different languages. Her work has brought her many prizes, including the Pen Club Prize for best novel (twice), the Literature Prize from the International Critics’ Literary Association and the Grand Prix for Novel and Short-Story from the Portuguese Writers’ Association. The Word Tree is the first of her novels to be published in English.

THE TRANSLATOR

Margaret Jull Costa has been a literary translator from Portuguese and Spanish for over twenty years, translating such authors as Fernando Pessoa, José Saramago and Javier Marías. In 2008 she won the PEN/Book-of-the-Month Translation Award and the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for her version of Eça de Queiroz’s masterpiece The Maias, and in 2009 she was awarded the Valle-Inclán Spanish Translation Prize for The Accordionist’s Son by Bernardo Atxaga.

TRANSLATOR’S ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to thank Teolinda Gersão for making the translation of her novel such a uniquely pleasurable, collaborative experience.

DEDALUS AFRICA

Dedalus Africa aims to introduce to the English-speaking world outstanding literary fiction either from or about Africa.

We begin with Teolinda Gersão’s evocation of growing up in Africa, a novel about what can happen when Europe and Africa meet.

This is our starting point.

1

To reach the backyard you had to go through the narrow kitchen door. And although it’s true that the kitchen was dark, you could still see all the objects in it, the aluminium pans and fat pots, the jugs and enamel bowls, the old white oven with its brass rings, the big table with the marble top on which some piece of crockery had always been left out by mistake. But you tended to ignore the kitchen, you didn’t really look at it, but ran in the direction of the yard, as if you were being sucked towards it by the light, and you staggered a little as you went through the door, because you were blinded for a few seconds, and only the smell and the heat guided your first steps, the smell of earth, grass and over-ripe fruit that wafted to you on the warm wind like the breath of some living animal.

Everything in the back yard danced: the broad leaves of a banana tree, the flowers and leaves of the hibiscus, the still tender branches of the jacaranda, the blades of grass that grew like weeds and against which, after a certain point, we gave up the struggle.

It was only when you lay down in the grass that you noticed how slender the jacaranda leaves were, sweeping the sky, and how the sun was a blue and gold eye watching, blinding all others, so that only he could see; up there above the garden and the house, the sun was the only seeing eye.

But as I said, you didn’t need eyes to see because you could do that even with them shut, through your closed lids inundated with light – the chicken wire on the hen-coop at the back of the yard, the wall, the tiled roof of the house, the windows, the dark doorway, always open, the balcony on the first floor, where, at the end of the day, Laureano would sit drinking a beer. You didn’t need eyes to see because you knew everything, it was yours, you didn’t even need to hope or wish for anything because things simply happened of their own accord and came to meet you – and so, for example, at the end of the day, you just had to raise your head to see Laureano sitting out on the balcony.

Then night fell, like a glass of dark beer spilled by the sky. Or like an eyelid closing. Because the dusk came quickly – well, there wasn’t really any dusk to speak of, there was no gradual transition: it was either dark or light.

Down below, while Laureano was sitting on the balcony, the garden grew like a wild thing. A sorghum plant would sprout from seed dropped by accident or put out for the birds; a clandestine beanstalk would shoot up among the daisies; brambles and nettles and nameless weeds grew among the golden-shower orchids and the bauhinia; any seed carried by the wind eventually burgeoned into green leaves licked by the summer rains. And Amélia would say, frowning: ‘The garden’s turning into a jungle.’ And she’d slam the window shut.

It wasn’t a garden, it was a wilderness, which you either loved or hated; there were no half measures, because you couldn’t compete with it. It was there and it surrounded us, and you were either part of it or you weren’t. Amélia wasn’t. Or didn’t want to be. That’s why she continued to try and tame it. ‘I want this swept,’ she would say to Lóia. No fruit peel could be left lying on the ground, no seed or stone could be thrown down. ‘That kind of thing might be all right in the shanty-towns,’ she would say about anything that displeased her, ‘but not here.’

And so the house was divided in two, the White House and the Black House. The White House belonged to Amélia, the Black House to Lóia. The yard surrounded the Black House. I belonged to the Black House and to the yard.

‘You have to be careful,’ Amélia said, ‘alert. Things look all right on the surface, but the city is rotten and rife with contagion. It was built on swampland, you know.’

When anyone fell ill, she always assumed it was one of the old fevers that periodically returned and left people weak and hollow-eyed, as if sucked dry by evil spirits. The swamp, or the memory of the swamp, which she had never known because it had ceased to exist almost a century before, seemed to besiege her with nightmare visions, as if the putrid, marshy water was still there, close by. And she herself would always accompany the sanitary inspector and the local black official, who made the occasional rare visit, wearing yellow armbands, to poke around in the yard, spraying the corners and the walls with a foul-smelling chemical that was supposed to eliminate or repel mosquitos.

In the Black House no one was afraid of mosquitos, or, for that matter, of anything else. In the Black House things sang and danced. The hens would escape from the coop and walk all over any washing that happened to fall from the line, blithely shitting wherever they pleased. Lóia would shout at the hens and shoo them away, but then, kneeling down, she would burst out laughing and scrub at the soiled washing with a bar of soap and rinse it with a watering-can full of water. She obviously enjoyed doing these things because she was always laughing and never really bothered to keep the hens locked up, and so they would shit on the clothes again, and she would wash them again – the water fell like rain from the spout of the watering-can that swung in her hand as she carried it, and on the way from tap to clothes, it revived the flowers too.

And so the flowers never died for very long, but bloomed again; all it took was for Lóia to go back and forth a few times with the watering-can in her hand and the water was transformed into rain. And one day, while she sat on a bench at the entrance to the yard, she even brought a cockerel back to life, having first killed it on the kitchen table and plunged it, plucked, into boiling water.

It lay on her bloodstained apron, beak open and wings outspread, looking like a sack of jugo beans. If it had slipped from her grasp, it would have made quite a noise as it fell. But she kept a firm grip; she pulled out the feathers and threw them over her head. As the wind caught them, she sat surrounded by a cloud of soft fluff that hovered about her and took time to fall once again to earth, while the cockerel turned into a fat, roundish, yellow, wingless thing that appeared triumphantly that night on the table, having first vanished into the gaping maw of the oven.

The following morning, though, she produced it from her apron and put it back in the chicken-run. And then you could see how she had put the bones together and covered them with that thick skin, yellow with fat and with little pimples where the feathers had been, and how easy it had been for her to stick each feather into its allotted place and skilfully reshape the little cockerel as if it were made of clay, and replace feet, claws, beak, eyes, one on either side, and finally the crest on top of its head.

Lóia opens his eyes by lifting his fallen lids, smooths his feathers, and blows into his beak. The cockerel lifts his neck, flutters his wings and finally opens his eyes. Now he’s standing up on the table, crowing.

Laureano belongs to the Black House too. He’s not afraid of mosquitos and he himself planted a castor-oil tree at the bottom of the yard. The cat Simba, which he brought home one day in his jacket pocket, sleeps on the carpet beside his chair at siesta time, on the days when he comes back for lunch, which is most days. Laureano doesn’t really sleep in the afternoon, he dozes, sitting in the reclining chair with the broad arms, and which we call his aviator’s chair.

The best moment, though, is the night-time, before I go to sleep, when he picks up a music box that has a dancing cat on the lid. It’s a most surprising animal. Dressed in a satin doublet and a flounced shirt with a lace jabot, he holds an arched garland of flowers above his head while he dances in his high-heeled blue shoes. Everything about him intrigues and fascinates me, because he’s a most unusual cat, of whom you would never think, as you would of Simba, that he was a cousin to the wild cat and still knows a lot about the jungle.

Laureano turns the handle and the cat twirls round to the music, whose light, tinny notes sound vaguely like a marimba. Questions occur to me – why is he dressed like that and why does he wear those shoes? – but I don’t say anything because I want to listen and I’ll have fallen asleep by the time he finishes his dance.

In exchange for that cat and his music, I’ll play a game with you. When you arrive home in the afternoon and you call out as you come through the door: Giiii-taaa … only the silence answers, the house seems empty and sleepy. Because I’m not here, as I was at lunchtime, waiting for you by the window, I’ve transformed myself into a small animal that has crept away behind the cupboard on furtive feet. And you have stopped being you and are now a large animal creeping unstoppably ever closer.

I feel you walking, invisible, past the furniture in the hall-way, pushing open the living-room door, sniffing the air, peering under tables and behind curtains, while I almost disappear into the shadows, heart beating faster and faster, conscious that nothing will give me greater pleasure than the moment of near-terror when you find me, when you are still not yet you, nor even a man, but the unknown, the animal, the monster, bursting into the house and violating the old order.

Being found is a death, a joy, the crossing of a line. That’s why I scream, out of terror, pleasure and fear. And then you pick me up and I know I’m at your mercy and that, like a vanquishing beast, you could carry me off into the depths of the jungle. That moment is a small joyful death. You triumph over me and I disappear into your arms as if I were being devoured. Then suddenly I’m alive, on the other side of a gigantic wave.

And now you’re you again, a man, the beloved man of the house. I see your face, your body, especially your eyes, and I don’t know how an animal – or some evil thing – could ever have taken your place, because now you’re as familiar to me as the wind and the rain.

Then there follows much laughter and great peace, at the dizzying moment when the formless terror shatters and is transformed once more into you. And I laugh with pleasure because I was the one who invented the game. It was me, crouching very still behind the door, who changed you into an animal, when the blood beat so hard in my chest that my heart almost leapt into my mouth. I’m the one who allows myself to be discovered and who turns you back into a man again.

At that point, I feel such tenderness for you and such pity for being so slow to understand, because it’s just a game, but you’ll never realise that and will always fall into it as if into a well, and I’ll stay up above, laughing, and that laughter will be like a stone thrown into the water, sending out ripple upon ripple.

And then I close my eyes and I know that I’m going to fall in too, that this game is carrying me, like water, into the luminous depths of the well. Even though I know it’s a game, which I invent and reinvent every day, each time you come home. A repeated game, like the sun or the moon at the window.

Yes, everything in the yard danced, the leaves, the earth, the spots of sunlight, the branches, the trees, the shadows. They danced and had no limits, nothing did, not even your own body, which grew in all directions and was as big as the world. Your body was the tree and the wind. It could touch the sky simply by raising its head a little, swaying on the dancing wind; life was a dance then, and just placing one foot in front of the other set the body celebrating: everything was in the body and of the body, the shrill cries of the birds flying overhead, the hot breath of the African summer, the great night dotted with stars. But the infinite didn’t frighten or surprise us really; it was a simple idea, the certainty that we could grow up as high as the sky.

And maybe that was how we came to know all the secrets – the world was familiar and we knew it down to its tiniest details, knew the curved shell of the snail and the sound of the rain on leaves. The sunlight on the wall and the high trill of the cicadas. The taste of the earth on the tongue and the sickly savour of ants.

The yard and the house had no limits either, they were large enough to contain everything. You could hear, when you were lost in thought, the stealthy steps of wild beasts, and when you slept, you could feel their breath on your face. And when you slept deeply like that, your feet and arms joined with their wild bodies and you suddenly knew how to leap from branch to branch, even, when necessary, over the torrents and waterfalls of dreams.

Then you would sigh, breathing through your half-open mouth into the sheets, you would turn your head on the pillow, but you were still running through the forest, alighting noiselessly on large paws, sniffing the warm night air, alert to the slightest rustle among the leaves. You would travel long paths in the forest and in the night. Then you would drink, at last, from the long-sought water. You would lower your head until your lips touched the surface and then be off again, light-footed as an antelope.

Or you would plunge into the water in order to slake your thirst more quickly, and then your body felt as muddy and contented as a submerged pachyderm.

All night you wandered free and could change your skin at any moment. You could be the swift body of the polecat and eat the juicy fruit of the mampsincha, or you could sniff the wind with the angry snout of the hyena.

You could be everything, and in the morning you returned. You opened your eyes, but, even with eyes wide open, nothing changed. You leapt out of bed with the cloven hooves of the zebra and, in front of the bathroom mirror, you brushed your sharp rabbit teeth. Lóia would place milk and fruit on the table, and you’d devour it all like a famished animal, then leave, tail wagging.

The day didn’t interrupt your dreams. You could sleep with your eyes open, and life was pleasurable, as easy as playing and dreaming. You could spread wide your arms and shout: I’m alive, but there was no need for such exultant, exaggerated gestures; things were so close and simple that you barely noticed them. For example, you would go out of the kitchen door, unaware that you were crossing a threshold. There was no separation between spaces, no intervals separating the days. Because your body joined earth to sky.

Lóia was outside in the yard and everything else was in movement. That’s how I imagine her, immobile, fixed to one spot, with everything else revolving around her.

The water gushes from the tap into the wash-tub, into which she throws the towels and sheets, then the water drains slowly away, creamy with soap, when she pulls out the plug. She wrings out the washing, soaking her feet in the process, so that they look as if they were covered in milk up to the ankles, all the while holding her baby Ló with one arm and adjusting her capulana, the broad strip of cloth that binds the child to her. Lóia always has a child with her, either at her breast or on her back.

This, apparently, is exactly how she turned up at the house one day, clutching Orquídea. She stopped warily at the door. ‘Is this where they need a wetnurse?’ she asked, without letting go of Orquídea.

‘Come in, come in,’ says Amélia impatiently – so impatient that her milk has dried up completely and her tongue too, as if everything in her had become all thinness and haste – and then immediately closes the door. ‘Come in. The creature won’t stop screaming and I’ve been expecting you since yesterday. Didn’t Fana pass on my message?’

But Lóia is in no hurry because Orquídea is in no hurry either; she’s sucking and sighing, making the sounds of a small sated animal. In the kitchen, Amélia shudders with disgust. ‘You’ll have to disinfect your breasts with alcohol, otherwise Gita might catch something.’ But Lóia refuses to apply any disinfectant to her nipples, and Gita catches the very worst of all contagions: she becomes as black as Lóia and Orquídea.

Lóia puts a baby to each breast and sits in the kitchen or in the yard. And I take on the same smell as Orquídea, acquire the same firm, pliable flesh, plump but not fat, covered by a skin as soft as silk. Lóia never leaves us, sometimes even staying with us when we sleep. She always has one of us (usually the one who can’t sleep) close to her body, secure in the capulana, and that’s how she cooks, scrubs the floor, sweeps the house, does the laundry, lights the fire, scales the fish, irons the clothes, and dusts the knickknacks with the blue and yellow feather duster.

Up on the balcony, Laureano smiles. He knows I’m not going to die now, I who had been as pale as wax with arms as thin as Amélia’s sewing thread.

Lóia smiles too. A slow smile that hovers on her thick lips, revealing her teeth and gums, white teeth with gaps between them.

The closed curtains, the shadowy warmth of the bedroom, the clothes draped over the chair, the hushed voice of Lóia when it’s time for our afternoon nap: ‘Sh, sh.’ The door slowly closing, Simba’s erect tail about to be trapped, only to be withdrawn unhurriedly and at the very last moment.

I used to look at Orquídea in the dim light as if I were looking in a mirror. She was the same size as me and identical in every respect. And above us Lóia would be saying ‘Sh, sh’, tucking in the sheet and closing the door.

All day I was her sister. We’re sitting beneath the jacaranda tree and I cry ‘Orquíiiiidea’ and clutch her to me. She lets me hug her until she’s breathless, then picks up fistfuls of earth and flings them into the air. We bat our arms about, closing our eyes and brushing the earth from our hair.

Then I go over to Lóia and say: ‘I want hair like Orquídea’s, in little braids round my head.’

Lóia removes her hands from the wash-tub and bursts out laughing. ‘Wait, wait.’

She divides my hair into clumps about the thickness of a strand of wool, and onto each one she threads a pierced seed or a glass bead, then plaits them together as if she were embroidering. ‘Wait, wait,’ she keeps saying, when I wriggle impatiently, my head on her aproned lap.

The result is astonishing: I look exactly like Orquídea. I shake my head, tremulous with laughter. The braids bob about, but stay sticking out, swaying like insect antennae, except that there are ten of them not two, distributed around my head. I embrace my image, who follows me everywhere: Orquídea.

Amélia, however, doesn’t like the way I look at all. ‘Get rid of those braids this instant,’ she says, opening the door of her sewing-room.

Happiness, every morning, like a bird beating at the window. And the sun was the head of a giant sunflower.

‘Follow my paths,’ said the snail shell, and I traced with my fingertip the dark line that set off from one point and became a wide circle, which, just as it was about to close, became another and another, none of which ever ended or closed.

‘Come with me,’ said the ant, disappearing into the earth.

‘Sing louder,’ said the cicada.

‘Come inside me,’ said the tree.

‘I’ll carry you with me,’ said the wind.

The water dripped from the tap and formed a small puddle in the flower bed; the water falling from above woke up the water that had accumulated below, and the drops danced like ballerinas.

‘So-so-so-so,’ said the water as it fell.

And the little puddle repeated, singing:

‘So-so-so-so,’ on four different notes, two quick, sharp notes, one after the other, in between two slower, more hesitant ones.

We used to sit for a long time under the tree, leaning against its trunk, and, as I said, we would become trees ourselves. Or even become birds, although flying was a bit more difficult. But being things was easy. Because suddenly you held in your hand the root of everything living. Then your first ear would open and start to hear the wind. Then, after a long time, your second ear would open and you would start to hear the rain. And you had a lot of other ears that could hear your blood and the voices of other creatures, other things.

At that time, we knew everything and could issue orders to the world:

‘Wake up, yeast, up you get.’

‘Stop blowing, wind, just crouch down on the roof or spend the night cross-legged under the porch.’

‘Sit down on the edge of the bed, death, and don’t carry off in your bag that person who’s about to die, not just yet, give him a little more time, a piece the size of a palm leaf.’

And in the winking of an eye night came and morning returned.

‘You can’t trust the blacks,’ Amélia says. ‘Because they hate us and wish us ill. They put the evil eye on us and can bring us illness or even death. Yes, your friend, your own friend can cause you to die.’

‘She doesn’t like me,’ says Lóia about Amélia. ‘She has a hard heart.’

But of Laureano she says: ‘He has a big heart.’ And she smiles, showing her bright white teeth and turning to look at him.

Amélia lives in the sewing-room, bent over the machine on the back of which is written: P f a f f, in large letters widely spaced. In the corridor you can hear its irritating, monotonous hum, interrupted, now and then, by a thread being broken or, every so often, by the keen metallic sound of scissors falling.

Usually Amélia breaks the thread with her fingers or puts it between her teeth and gives it a sharp tug before putting it back in her mouth to thread the needle.

She doesn’t use scissors to cut the thread, which makes sense, given how thin it is, especially in comparison with what always seemed to me the excessively large scissors. I gaze in amazement at the deft way her small, quick hands wield those scissors, which look to me as big as pruning shears.

Amelia, however, is not intimidated when it comes to cutting cloth: she makes a line with ruler and chalk down the whole length of the fabric and then the scissors follow that line, not so much cutting as tearing the cloth, until it has parted the cloth in two.

Above the equally enormous cutting table, hanging from the ceiling, is a lamp with a white enamel shade; the lamp is on a pulley with a weight in the shape of a grenade. When the daylight begins to fade, Amélia lights the lamp by turning on a porcelain switch next to the bulb, and then, reaching up above her head, she quickly raises or lowers the lamp to the desired height. And she does this without taking her eyes off her work, on which she is concentrated, lips pursed and with a frown line that runs vertically down the middle of her forehead and ends between her eyebrows.

She sighs, bent over the table, occasionally putting in pins that she takes from a small round cushion fixed to her shoulder. Sometimes she grips the pins in her mouth, and the sharp points appear between her teeth, as if they were part of them.

‘Please don’t do that,’ Laureano would plead. ‘It would be certain death if you swallowed one. I mean what would happen if you coughed or sneezed, have you ever thought of that?’

But she took no notice and continued to put the pins in her mouth and to talk through clenched teeth to anyone who came for a fitting.

‘Yes, yes,’ said the client, who, more often than not, was Elejana Miranda. ‘It needs taking in a bit there. And there. And there. And there.’

She would twirl round in front of the mirror, half-wary, half-pleased, then take a step or two so that the hem of the dress swayed.

Amélia, kneeling on the carpet, measured the dress at the front and the back.

‘A bit more off the hem?’

Elejana hesitated. ‘No,’ she said at last. She still felt that the dress went up a bit at the front.

Amélia shook her head, still kneeling on the carpet. She had measured it, and it was exactly the same. She showed her the tape-measure and went to fetch a gadget that squirted chalk round the hem, at the exact place, so that she could check the distance between floor and hem.

The client sighed again, unconvinced. ‘Look, just make it a bit lower at the front,’ she said peremptorily.

‘All right,’ said Amélia pulling out all the tacking stitches with a single tug.

Once Elejana had left, she let rip with her feelings:

‘What needs trimming is your belly, you fat old thing,’ she muttered, grabbing the scissors. ‘It’s all that fat that makes the dress go up at the front.’

Laureano is whistling in the bathroom, then singing to himself: ‘O Laurindinha, come to the window’, which I change to ‘Laurentina’:

‘O Laurentina, come to the window,’ we sing together, and he runs the sharp blade of the razor over his foam-covered cheek.

On Sundays, he lets me prepare the soap in a metal bowl and apply it to his face with a short-handled brush, which I can’t dip into the bowl without getting my hands wet. Now, though, he has to go to work and is shaving himself in a hurry, his fingers deftly holding the two parts of the razor open and making regular downward strokes that clear a path through the foam on his cheeks; then he splashes his face with water and dries it on the towel, and he does all this so quickly that I suspect there must still be some foam left.

But there’s no time to check, all I can do is put a few drops of the liquid from the green bottle on my hands and rub it on his face; it smells very strong and leaves on my hands and on the towel where I dry them the intense smell that will last all day. Then he says ‘See you later’ and leaves, almost at a run, pulling on his jacket as he goes down the stairs.

I wake up feeling thirsty halfway through my afternoon nap. ‘I need to get some water from the fridge,’ I think. I get up without making a sound, climbing over Orquídea.

I hear Amélia leaving the kitchen and going back into the sewing-room. There it is, there’s the hum of the machine again. Amélia never takes a nap and she tells Lóia off whenever she catches her sitting in the yard, dozing.

I don’t want Amélia to hear me and so I tiptoe past the door and go down the corridor to the kitchen that she left only moments before, the tap still dripping. Drops of water are falling ceaselessly, one after the other, into the sink. Nervous drops, full of hatred.