I wonder if I’m supposed to give up my White and Yellow dreams. What is my father up to? He’d promised to help me pursue my studies as far as my aptitude would let me go, and for that reason I made it to the top of my class. Has he forgotten both me and his promise? Or is the promise beyond his financial means, so that he is no longer able to keep it? Or is he just another show-off, as his cousins claim?
Strangely enough, Grand Pa Helly defends my father, the only time I ever heard him do so. He cites “the events” that are so long in being resolved, the dangerous circumstances. He advises me to take the final year of school over again so as not to forget what I learned while I wait for my father to keep his promise. It was sweet to hear my faith confirmed: Grand Pa Helly wouldn’t lie. Soon my father would come and take me to a White and Yellow people’s school, and I’d become a test pilot just like the idol he had chosen for me in a magazine, Wou-Tchou-Ti, the little seventeen-year-old Chinese (or Korean) girl who led an entire squadron. I was in a hurry, but at the same time I felt ready to wait by taking the same class over again, at least for the three years I’d gained on the others.
Grand Pa Helly didn’t lie; my father came the following year.
A few days earlier, Aunt Roz had acquired official permission to take Grand Madja, who was very ill, to the district clinic. Actually, it was a pretext to attend a very important meeting. Some activist women wanted to study a new strategy for helping the resistance fighters, since “the events” were going on longer than had been expected, and the backlash was increasing.
SONG 5
When the devil, catching up with you, unexpectedly
Wants to see your private parts,
He causes you infernal diarrhea.
Yes, all the forces of nature are at the service
Of the destiny that is to be fulfilled,
When it is forbidden to forbid,
When fate and chance are bonded by a pact signed in blood.
When my time came to receive the blow of fate,
A thousand “accidents” occurred that caused my mother and my aunt,
Even my grandmother, not to be present
To surround me with at least a word that would have changed
The direction of my path.
Yes, when the devil, catching up with you,
Wants to see your private parts at the wrong moment,
He causes you infernal diarrhea.
• • •
While repeating my last year at school, I was more a tutor than a student. At recreation one day I discovered my legs were dripping with blood. Both embarrassed and terrified, I fled into the classroom and refused to leave my seat. Baffled by my sudden and inexplicable insubordination, my teacher questioned me in vain—not a word would break through the lump in my throat. First of all, I wasn’t hurting anywhere and I couldn’t understand where the blood was coming from; and second, I was afraid of my own explanation.
Two days before, a classmate had gone into a wild trance and was needlessly making trouble for me because she was jealous. She claimed I’d cast a spell on her and was squealing like a wounded dog, threatening to take revenge on me if something were to happen to her. Her parents had to take her to a medicine man to quiet her down. I knew I’d done nothing to her, but the mysterious blood flowing between my legs disturbed me profoundly. Surely they would now take me for a sorceress, a soul-eater.
To ward off this disaster, I swore I wouldn’t leave my seat until everyone else was gone; but a few of them kept insisting, which put my nerves on edge. I was like a cornered wild animal. As soon as anyone came near me, I showed my teeth as if I were going to bite; finally, I myself wondered if I were in the process of turning into a jackal or a panther, right there in the bright light of day in front of the entire class. My fear and shame soon reached their peak, all the more because my anger at my classmates was growing, and they were certainly not showing any understanding as far as I could see.
They were whispering idiotic things.
“You should give her a spanking, Sir, or else she’ll never stop trying to be ‘interesting’ and taunting us with how brilliant she is.”
“She already thinks she’s the teacher, Sir, and she’s always in your place in front of the classroom. That’s why she’s getting to be so arrogant.”
The teacher finally had enough of my stubborn refusal to respond, and pulled me roughly from the seat I clung to; I had to let him haul me out of class. Very excited, all the students applauded.
Outside, the teacher at last understood what was happening to me. He made all the children go back to their classroom, picked me up like a baby, and quickly brought me to his house, where he handed me over to his wife. “Madame,” as we called her formally, looked at me the same way my grandmother would, with a trace of both mockery and tenderness.
I asked her a thousand and one questions to be sure this was no sorcerer’s blood. She had a hard time keeping herself from bursting out laughing, but assured me that if this were sorcerer’s blood, I, too, would be in a trance just like my classmate. While she taught me how to wear protective cloths, Madame explained that I had just become a woman and from now on would be seeing blood with each new moon, that every woman in the world went through this, and that it was the great difference between us and men.
“You certainly are quite precocious, but you were that way with your studies, too. It’s in your nature; don’t worry about it,” she reassured me.
Unfortunately, she was too succinct. She said nothing about the connection between this blood and pregnancy, or about possible precautions to be taken. Did she even know herself? And had she known, would she have burdened my little head with it? I don’t think so. In her place, no one would have thought of alarming the frail and childlike little girl I was, without the slightest sign of a bulge on her chest or without any awareness whatsoever of her femininity and seductiveness, always half-naked among the boys as if I were one of them. I truly wasn’t aware of sexuality yet. There’s no doubt that in that area I was very backward.
A few days later, when Grand Madja and Aunt Roz returned, I had already forgotten the incident and therefore did not mention it to them. I went back to class without the other children knowing what had actually happened. They no longer dared say anything against me, fully convinced that I was under the protective wing of Monsieur and Madame. At last they all left me in peace, and I served as their tutor with greater patience and good will, waiting for my father to come soon; that was what Grand Pa Helly himself had said would happen, and he never lied.
SONG 6
My father, double human of a giant tree,
His feet at least as gigantic and threatening,
Roots buried deep down in the riverbed,
Dousing himself in the waterfall.
His arms, lianas and boughs,
Sometimes wrapping around my body and holding it imprisoned,
Sometimes defying heaven with their splinters, broken shards in the face of God,
Held up high to the sky, the knife shimmers reflections of clouds and of water,
Turbulent witnesses that, even, so will keep forever