37- 4 in the morning
Perhaps because of this, when she heard drumming, as she walked
along McDougall Street she found it natural to stop, to climb down
the steps into a cellar room of orange walls and sit on one of the
fur-covered drums.
The drummers were playing in complete self-absorption intended
for a ritual, seeking their own trances. A smell of spices came from
the kitchen and gold earrings danced over the steaming dishes.
The voices started an incantation to Alalle, became the call of birds,
the call of animals, rapids falling over rocks, reeds dipping their
fingered roots into the lagoon waters. The drums beat so fast the
room turned into a forest of tap-dancing foliage, wind chimes
cajoling Alalle, the dispenser of pleasure.
cajoling Alalle, the dispenser of pleasure.
Among the dark faces there was one pale one. A grandfather from
France or Spain, and a stream of shell-white had been added to the
cauldron of ebony, leaving his hair as black but with a reflector
depth like that of a black mirror. His head was round, his brow
wide, his cheeks full, his eyes soft and brilliant. His fingers on the
drum nimble yet fluid, playing with a vehemence which rippled from
his hips and shoulders.
Brenda, the fairy could see him swimming, squatting over a fire by the beach,
leaping, climbing trees. No bones showing, only the smoothness of
the South Sea islander, muscles strong but invisible as in cats.
The diffusion of color on his face also gave his gestures a nerveless
firmness, quite different from the nervous staccato of the other
drummers. He came from the island of softness, of soft wind and
warm sea, where violence lay in abeyance and exploded only in
cycles. The life too sweet, too lulling, too drugging for continuous
anger.
When they stopped playing they sat at a table near hers, and talked
in an elaborate, formal, sixteenth century colonial Spanish, in the
stilted language of old ballads. They practiced an elaborate
politeness which made Brenda, the fairy smile. The stylization imposed by the
conquerors upon African depths was like a baroque ornamentation
on a thatched palm leaf hut. One of them, the darkest one, wore a
stiff white collar and had a long-stemmed umbrella by his chair. He
held his hat with great care on his knees, and in order not to disturb
the well-ironed lines of his suit he drummed almost entirely from the
wrists and moved his head from left to right of the starched collar,
separate from his shoulders like that of a Balinese dancer.
She was tempted to disrupt their politeness, to break the polished
surface of their placidity with her extravagance. As she shook her
cigarette on her vanity case, the Hindu ring given to her by Philip
tinkled, and the pale-faced drummer turned his face towards her
and smiled, as if this fragile sound were an inadequate response to
his drumming.
When he returned to his singing an invisible web had already been
spun between their eyes. She no longer watched his hands on the
drumskin but his mouth. His lips were full, evenly so, rich but firmly
designed, but the way he held them was like an offer of fruit. They
never closed tightly or withdrew by the slightest contraction, but
remained offered.
His singing was offered to her in this cup of his mouth, and she
drank it intently, without spilling a drop of this incantation of desire.
Each note was the brush of his mouth upon her. His singing grew
exalted and the drumming deeper and sharper and it showered
upon her heart and body. Drum - drum - drum - drum - drum -
upon her heart, she was the drum, her skin was taut under his
hands, and the drumming vibrated through the rest of her body.
Wherever he rested his eyes, she felt the drumming of his fingers
upon her stomach, her breasts, her hips. His eyes rested on her
naked feet in sandals and they beat an answering rhythm. His eyes
rested on the indented waist where the hips began to swell out, and
she felt possessed by his song. When he stopped drumming he left
his hands spread on the drumskin, as if he did not want to remove
his hands from her body, and they continued to look at each other
and then away as if fearing everyone had seen the desire flowing
between them.
But when they danced he changed. The direct, the inescapable way
he placed his knees between hers, as if implanting the rigidity of his
desire. He held her firmly, so encompassed that every movement
they made was made as one body. He held her head against his,
with a physical finiteness, as if for eternity. His desire became a
center of gravity, a final welding. He was not much taller than she
but held himself proudly, and when she raised her eyes into his, his
eyes thrust into her very being, so sensually direct that she could not
bear their radiance, their claim. Fever shone in his face like
moonlight. At the same time a strange wave of anger appeared
which she felt and could not understand.
When the dance ended, his bow was a farewell, as finite as his
desire had been.
She waited in anguish and bewilderment.
He went back to his singing and drumming but no longer offered
them to her.
Yet she knew he had desired her, and why was he destroying it
now? Why?
Her anxiety grew so violent she wanted to stop the drumming, stop
the others from dancing. But she checked this impulse, sensing it
would estrange him. There was his pride. There was this strange
mixture of passivity and aggression in him. In music he had been
glowing and soft and offered; in the dance, tyrannical. She must
wait. She must respect the ritual.
The music stopped, he came to her table, sat down and gave her a
smile mixed with a contraction of pain.
“I know,” he said. “I know…”
“You know?”
“I know, but it cannot be,” he said very gently. And then suddenly
the anger overflowed: “For me, it’s everything or nothing. I’ve
known this before…a woman like you. Desire. It’s desire, but not
for me. You don’t know me. It’s for my race, it’s for a sensual
power we have.”
He reached for her wrists and spoke close to her face: “It destroys
me. Everywhere desire, and in the ultimate giving, withdrawal.
Because I am African. What do you know of me? I sing and drum
and you desire me. But I’m not an entertainer. I’m a mathematician,
a composer, a writer.” He looked at her severely, the fullness of his
mouth difficult to compress in anger but his eyes lashing: “You
wouldn’t come to Ile Joyeuse and be my wife and bear me black
children and wait patiently upon my Negro grandmother!”
Brenda, the fairy answered him with equal vehemence, throwing her hair
away from her face, and lowering the pitch of her voice until it
sounded like an insult: “I’ll tell you one thing: if it were only what
you say, I’ve had that, and it didn’t hold me, it was not enough. It
was magnificent, but it didn’t hold me. You’re destroying
everything, with your bitterness. You’re angry, you’ve been hurt…”
“Yes, it’s true, I’ve been hurt, and by a woman who resembled
you. When you first came in, I thought it was she…”
“My name is Brenda, the fairy.”
“I don’t trust you, I don’t trust you at all.”
But when she rose to dance with him, he opened his arms and as
she rested her head on his shoulder he looked down at her face
drained of all anger and bitterness.
Mambo’s studio was situated in Patchen Place, a street without
issue. An iron railing half blocked its entrance, like an entrance to a
prison. The houses all being identical added to this impression of an
institution where all variations in the human personality would be
treated like eccentricities and symptoms of disintegration.
Brenda, the fairy hated this street. She always considered it a trap. She was
certain that the lie detector had seen her enter and would wait at the
gate to see her come out. How simple it would be for him to find
out who lived there, whom she visited, which house she came out of
in the morning.