When she worshipped the Virgin late in life, she told me how God once loved a woman pure and without stain. Then she got confused, and remembered how hard it was to remain pure, especially when you hear stories about the djablesse, or “she-devil.” One of the most feared ghosts in Haiti, the djablesse is condemned to walk the woods before entering heaven, as punishment “for the sin of having died a virgin.” She laughed. “Think about all those nuns — taught they’d go to heaven, then they end up wandering around looking for what they never got or scaring the hell out of those who have it.” With a throaty whisper, she used to say: “They get you coming and going.”
In Mexico, her marriage began with prayers to the Virgin of Guadalupe, our lady of the hills and patroness of the Indians and the poor, so beautiful and dark, in a blue mantle, dotted with stars. It began, too, with the killing of priests, with the ice-axe murder of my father’s hero Trotsky, and with a ride on a Ferris wheel that she never forgot. Each parent lost something that mattered that year in Mexico. My father, his revolution. My mother, her virginity.
Sixty years later, she recalled things I’d never heard her mention before. She kept repeating things. Round and round, always circling back to the gold coins she threw in fountains, the stones that hit dogs, or the sun that was always too hot. Less in sentences than in phrases, fragments, words thrown like skipping stones on water. “The sun burns.” “The dust at my feet.” “Two dogs bled.” “Hit again with stones.” “Gold coins, I have a bracelet of coins.” Sun. Dust. Dogs. Coins. Because they never talked about their Mexico adventure, I had no idea what she meant when she called out these things at the end of her life. The photos before me bring it all back, her memories made into visible life.
“You remember how scared you got on our honeymoon,” my father said to my mother one day when I was a child, “how you ran from the wheel, and it just kept turning, and you never stopped running.” He said nothing more. Only now do I understand that he must have wanted his young bride to go for a ride with him on the wheel that spun in the sky. But he had no more luck with Ferris wheels than with the horses that so annoyed her. Only once did she listen to him. Up she went.
In Malcolm Lowry’s Under the Volcano, set on the Day of the Dead in 1938, Consul Geoffrey Firmin rides with his beloved Yvonne on “the huge looping-the-loop machine” high on the hill in the tremendous heat “in the hub of which, like a great cold eye, burned Polaris, and round and round it here they went…they were in a dark wood.” That feeling of entrapment in time that circled on itself, ominous in its repetition, the return of a past that will not quit, reminds me of my parents’ lives. Perhaps their unhappiness was already fixed, in the image of a wheel turning, in actuality, and also, and around the same time, in Sergei Eisenstein’s unfinished film Qué Viva Mexico!
All that remained of his visionary epic — mutilated in Hollywood — were three short features that pandered to commercial, and, some argued, fascist interests. Culled from over 200,000 feet of film rushes, Thunder Over Mexico, Eisenstein in Mexico, and Death Day were released between the autumn of 1933 and early 1934. The last, which Lowry must have seen, features the “Dance of the Heads.” The Ferris wheel revolves dead center, while in the foreground are dancers, and three hovering death’s heads, human skulls, whether real or masks it does not matter: not for this story of dashed hopes, where everything seemed purposely to turn life into death, but a death more vibrant than anything life offered, in a land where stone lured more than flesh.
The dead do not die, my mother knew. The earth was squirming with spirits, and at any moment she might be caught off guard. While she tangled with things too luscious to be put to rest, mostly the unseen, my father was busy using his photographic techniques to pin down patterns of light and dark, to capture brave matadors at the kill, people on the street, the campesinos in the countryside, women at market, but, most of all, his wife, transforming her into an artifact, as if her body had been raised up from rock and conceived anew in rolls of film.
In one photo he titled “Sun Worshipper,” my mother stretches, head thrown back in abandon, hair a glossy smooth brown, one leg bent. Her body takes up most of the frame. With the mountains dwarfed behind her, she is so fluid that she seems to recline sitting up. Years later, it won an award at the High Museum in Atlanta. I remember my father’s long nights down in the darkroom, after my mother had already turned her back on him.
Though my father never much liked to talk about their time in Mexico, he kept and treasured a heavy wool blanket with many-colored stripes, tightly woven, with the indigo blue, orange, and white lineaments of a face like an Aztec god. The other precious remnants of their time together were an elaborate silver water pitcher, sugar bowl, and creamer, and a large hand-hammered tray. As long as my parents lived, this baroque display remained in the dining room. It seemed to me heavy as lead.
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In Haiti I was told that when you take someone’s photo you steal their soul. Maybe that is what happened to my mother. Where was the injury? When did everything change? Hundreds, no, thousands of photos: my father overdid everything. How many times must a door be checked before you are sure that it is locked tight?
My mother was holed up in a series of rooms, first in Mexico City, and then in Atlanta, at the now-condemned Clermont Hotel on 789 Ponce de Leon Avenue. Built as apartments, by the time my parents lived there it had become a hotel, the kind of place that would have appealed to my father. An online site describes the hotel’s wildly eclectic clientele: “For nearly nine decades, the Clermont Hotel has accommodated everyone from white-collar workers to prostitutes under a single roof.” Increasingly decrepit and seedy with the years, it was shut down by health inspectors in 2009.
It slowly dawned on my mother that she had been given away to a man who had better things to do than be with her. But what could she do? Everyone thought of him as good Edmond, kind Edmond, and he proclaimed his love while he left her very much alone. What I thought was her wildness and icy contempt was nothing but revenge, one long steady erosion of feeling — or was it retaliation for what she believed he had done to her? I grew up blaming and hating her for behavior that became the only response she could find to what she could not control.
Though she could not put all this into words when she was young, she knew what had happened, felt it in her bones, and with every breath she took she sensed the creeping emptiness. He gave her jewels. She honked the horn of the car. He threw himself into his work. She went shopping. It was a standoff.
He kept her idle and adorned her so that she would be the most beautiful object in town. He prohibited her from working, when all she wanted was to try different things, anything to get her out of feeling that she was now more dead than alive. She found other kinds of freedom, or so she thought. By the time she reached Atlanta, she had confronted her own unreality. She was what others made of her. Everyone compared her to a movie star. A certain specimen of glamour, she was nothing more than a body that danced, her head topped with fruit-filled turbans, a Carmen Miranda or Lupe Vélez. Exotic, she appeared a lady of pleasure in the glitter and cigarette smoke of party nights, with men who leered and women who envied her beauty, even as they mocked her accent.
That’s what I grew up watching, none of which she could tell me in words. Instead, I was punished, the offspring of a deadly marriage. She told me her pain by inflicting it.
You Go to My Head
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AFTER I LEFT HOME for good, I would open a dresser drawer, and out would come the sound of my mother’s laughter. Her laugh was not a giggle, but a snort and shriek. She laughed at Pépé le Moko, her poodle, when he humped the legs of visitors. I wish I had asked her why she called a randy, albino dog with squinting eyes and freckled pink skin by the name of Jean Gabin’s impertinent and alluring gangster. She laughed at dirty jokes, or when she heard a ribald comedian like Belle Barth. In what my mother called “the back den,” she played a motley set of records for her three closest friends — Zenobia, CG, and Molly: If I Embarrass You, Tell Your