Temple of My Familiar (28 page)

Yesterday I had an eerie experience of winter, unlike anything I have ever known before, and once again it was a gift—though an unsettling one, to be sure—from my cousin, my darling cousin T. It was snowing and nearly as dark within as without, and gloomy, since no one ever comes to see us, it seems, any longer. But Mother says this is not true. She says it is I who refuse to see people—especially those with expectant young marriageable males in tow—who come to visit us. Well, I have tried every way I know how to explain that I will
not
be married; if they are sick of having me about, they will simply have to think up some alternative for me. If I were to marry I feel sure I should slit my throat, or his, within a fortnight. But
why
, Eleandra? my parents lament.
Why?
It is all they ask. And I do not
know
why, except there must be more to life than opulence and material ease, more than servants and fat horses and fatter men ogling other men’s daughters and fat wives. I cannot—oh, but what is the point of raving? They shall drug me and marry me off to a rich Turk, no doubt, before it is done. No danger there, says T., confidently. He thinks it will probably be a rich Greek, someone in shipping, to be precise. These are the wealthy foreigners my father knows. He has sensibly given up on finding a husband for me among the English. Sometimes, indeed, they do come to dinner, these Greeks, dark-haired and dark-eyed, warmer than any men in England; that, at least, is in their favour. Still, I would rather slip out the door with T... . He will not let me call him “Theodore”; too bloody religious boring! he cries.

But I was about to write of our outing to the Museum of Natural History. T. had come for me. We have to make up all kinds of lies about where we are going, yet wherever we go is entirely innocent, at least while it is still daylight. And it was daylight today. At night, it is true, we have been known to visit certain “houses” of ill fame, but this is because T. and I have insisted on seizing an education, a sexual education, wherever it can be found. He has had clothes—trousers and overcoat similar to his own—made for me, and I push my worrisomely long hair under any one of several capacious hats, and we are off. For, as T. says so well, how am I to be a great painter if I never
see
anything? And, with T. beside me, sometimes I feel I must have seen it all: men and women, men and men (T.’s eyes light up!), women and women (interesting), everyone with animals, vegetables, and fruits. We never “buy,” exactly. We pay to look, to study, to contemplate. I am fascinated by the women’s eyes, their bold, aggressive stares, their businesslike appraisal. They go through the motions professionally, rolling and tumbling like so many slow-motion acrobats, some great beast of a man poling them from the side, the front, or behind—and they are apt to be looking over at the next man coming up and calculating whether they or the next woman will have him. No doubt the calculation involves how much money there will be for Johnny’s shoes and Susie’s milk. Sometimes the women are pregnant, hugely pregnant, and there are grown men, sometimes grey-headed, bearded, grandfatherly men, who pay to suck them. This can all, for a price, be viewed. I must say it is this sucking that the women most seem to enjoy and their enjoyment of it in turn stirs me, and, I hazard to guess, even T.

But I was trying to get to the event of today, at the Museum of Natural History. Well, when we got there it was quite late, and so, nearly dark; the flickering interior lights seemed feeble enough, in any event. T. took me round the fossil cases and past the humanoid drawings (as I always call them) of mankind on his wearisome way up the evolutionary spiral. This was not my first time at the museum, and as usual I had to be pried away from the collection of wondrous new goods—ancient feather cloaks, called, if I remember correctly,
moas
, after the bird for which they are named; enormous carved greenstones that glistened like jade; monstrously beautiful, brilliantly painted canoes—from recently explored, conquered, and apparently quite ravaged New Zealand. There were pictures of lush, grinning Polynesian women and stalwart unsmiling men. “Come on,” said T. “If you like this lot, you’ll love what’s next.” I followed him down halls and up stairs until we came to a part of the museum I had never seen before. “Close your eyes,” he said as he slowly opened the door.

When I opened my eyes, I saw that T. had propelled me into a medium-sized room (most rooms at the museum are huge), with windows that were very high up, and there was a strange smell. At first it looked like a replica of part of an African village. There were three huts, facing each other, as they always do to make one living space (I read this in a book), but somewhat askew, angled away from each other slightly, I suppose one would say,
obliquely
, for privacy. Then there was a granary and part of a wall made of mud, as was everything else. This wall surrounded the compound except where it was deliberately cut away to give the viewer clearer access to the activity of the “village.” Glancing overhead, I noted that the museum, in its intent to assure verisimilitude had even painted a blue sky. “Come,” said T., pulling me closer to the little dwellings, for I had stopped short on entering the room and for some reason was abnormally frightened to hear the heavy wooden door clunk shut behind me. It gave me gooseflesh. Suddenly I felt a little afraid of T. Weren’t buggers dangerous, after all? But he was smiling, with an odd, strained bonhomie that seemed put on for someone else’s benefit; I had certainly never seen such a grimace on his handsome face before. There were colours on these huts and designs such as I had never seen before, except in paintings from the American West. The most abstract, totally stylized shapes and figures in vivid yellows and oranges and tans, with black and white jumping out to meet the eye with the vibrancy of zebra skin. It was so completely what one was not used to that it was hard to take it in. In the same way one takes in a painting, say, by an English or European artist, no matter how odd. It was as if the reference point was missing; I could not grasp either the feeling tones of the work or the meaning. It seemed natural, somehow, to begin thinking of all that was “wrong” with it. T. laughed at my expression, which was, I am sure, a vexed frown. “Just enjoy it!” he said. And I moved closer, still vaguely bothered by the smell. It was not that it was unpleasant. No, there was something almost familiar about it. I felt I had smelled it before though decidedly not in the streets or flats or great houses of London and not, for certain, at Morley Crofts. And then it seemed to me perhaps I had smelled it in a dream, for the whole room now had an aspect of dream—the bright blue sky above, as if lighted by the sun, the cosy little huts. I plopped myself down on one of the mud “porches” that extended from the wall. “Careful,” said T., “the mud’s dusty.” Sure enough, when I got up my skirt was covered with fine dust. T. brushed me off. He was still smiling that savagely benign smile that looked so odd. My eye, though, was attracted to the gorgeous strips of woven cloth hanging on pegs by the door of one of the huts. There was a figure, its back to us, very lifelike, that one could barely make out, sitting on the floor near the doorway inside the hut, apparently spinning.

“Do you know what?” I said to T. “This is so
much
more civilized than what some other countries do. I just read an article in the
Times
—maybe you saw it too?—about the Germans—or was it the Belgians?—anyhow the people who are settling South America, and they brought back two of everything they’ve discovered so far: fish, leopards, birds. They even brought back a pair of Indians. People turned out in droves to see them. But the poor things shivered and shook—they were just children—the whole time, and when winter set in,
poof
, they died.”

At that moment, I happened to glance up at T., but he was looking into the door of the hut where the figure was spinning. But the figure was not spinning any longer. She was standing in the doorway!

M’Sukta was little, about four feet ten, slender as a reed, and blacker than anyone I had ever seen. She seemed ageless—a very young child, an adolescent, or an old woman carefully preserved. She was dressed exquisitely in cloth made from hundreds of the strips that decorated the pegs by the door of the hut, which I now saw copied many of the colours, motifs, and symbols that covered the mud walls. Her hair was in dozens of mid-back-length plaits; on the end of each one was a bit of seashell. Her small feet were encased in colourfully beaded slippers of soft leather. She came towards us holding her spindle and carrying a large basket of cotton from which she was making thread.

She barely acknowledged us. No. She did not acknowledge us. She just seemed to know we were there, and that was her cue to come out, sit before us in her splendid garb, which obviously she had made herself, and begin a demonstration of this aspect of her village’s way of life. I looked about for other members of the tribe to emerge, but none did.

It would not even have required a feather to knock me down.

“The museum lets her live here,” said T., still smiling fixedly at the woman. I had never noticed before how shallow he was, always willing to skim about on the surface of things. The woman gave no indication that she heard or saw or cared about our presence. But there was an increase, barely perceptible, in the smell. It was, I realized, the smell of
fear
. This tiny, childlike creature was afraid of us! Of
me
! I felt myself immediately brought into focus. Animals in zoos were afraid of me as simply another human being come to stare at them, but this was different, somehow. If she was afraid of me, then it was definitely my whole existence that was “wrong,” and not the screaming colours of her clothing or her house.

“What do you mean, they
let
her live here? Where does she
come
from?” At this question T.’s expression said: A woman so black, where
would
she come from? “But where does she
really
live?” I was frantic for an answer now, feeling my whole being, further back than I could remember, involved. My reaction was perhaps unique to me.
Was
it, I wondered. If so, this made me feel more afraid. I mean, where was this woman’s
world?
That she should end up like this, on view to
us.
Black people, though not unheard of in the streets of London are nonetheless rare. There are a very few men that one glimpses from time to time and
no
women. Or maybe, I thought now, they live in a part of London, a kind of underworld, that I have never seen. Even in the brothels there are not ever any really black people, not chocolaty black and exquisite, like this woman. Only Indians and the occasional swarthy Arab, looking ashamed of himself.

T. was smiling. “She’s lived here ten years,” he said, through his teeth. And I noticed how straight and clean and polished they were. They glistened like pearls against his red lips. They made me think of T.’s love of food, and of him eating, eating rather than talking if any subject arose at dinner that made him uncomfortable. There were many such subjects. In another few years, I thought, T. will be quite fat. The fat of silence, the fat of silence, the fat of ... I could not stop thinking this, even as I strained to hear what T. was saying.

“At first she was installed on the main floor, but after a year or so she had a breakdown of sorts. The young boy who was with her died. Maybe it was the cold,” he said, looking up at the bright “warm” ceiling. “These old buildings are draughty and damp, really only made for ghosts. Anyway, after the boy’s death, which some people ascribed to one or the other of them, she went inside herself to such a degree that everyone assumed she would be next. They watched her round the clock, just as though she were a sick elephant. But when they gave her some privacy—she and the boy had been on view in the main hall downstairs every day except Thursdays, when the museum was closed, and of course at night—she recovered.”

“She has never tried to escape?” I asked T., looking at the meek creature bent over her spindle, her little black fingers, on one of which she had placed a tiny, many-coloured cotton-thread ring, fairly flying. It was a simple wooden spindle she was using, like the ones the older shepherds’ wives still use in the country near Morley Crofts. There were looms of different sizes—one of them a tiny handloom on which she made the colourful inch-wide strips—propped against the wall near where she worked.

T. seemed surprised by my question. “But where would she go?” he said. “As I understand it, the tribe she comes from in Africa is no more. Intertribal warfare, slave raiding, that sort of thing. She’s the last of her people.” There was a hint of disgust in his voice for “that sort of thing.” I welcomed it eagerly. After all, I love T. “Besides,” he continued, killing this feeling entirely, “you know women like to stay at home. Here she has everything she needs, her houses, her granary—there’s even grain in it—her household duties, just as she’d have back in the jungle. She’s remarkably talented, as you can see. She makes her own clothes, and things to sell, too, you’ll be happy to know.” He looked at me and reached for a strip of woven cloth hanging on one of the pegs. The woman’s eyes flickered when he took the strip, but that was her only reaction. He tied it about my hair, making a headband like American Indians wear. He placed a shilling in a dish I had not noticed before. I liked the strip, I kept it on. I bowed stiffly in the woman’s direction. But the thing was covered with the smell. I would have to wash it over and over again.

Scribbled in the margin at a much later date—the ink was darker and a different color from the rest of the writing on the page; also, the writing was larger and written with a firmer hand—were these words, in which Mary Jane detected a hint of what, for all she knew, was her great-great aunt’s legendary sense of humor: “And that is how I met M’Sukta, the little woman who carried me to Africa!”