The Restless. Gerty Dambury

blue bathroom.

      I know I don’t deserve a prize. Books, dolls, those plastic tumblers that collapse and can be stored in a little round box—they’re not for me.

      I really wanted one of those tumblers, but not a doll. I hate them and they scare me. Annie will end up with the tumbler that everybody wants because she’s first. (Normally, “Émilienne is first, Annie second.”) I’ll just get the red blotting paper to remind me of my composition’s “awful ink spots.”

      After she hands out the report cards, our teacher opens a cupboard she calls “our own library,” where all the books she’s brought from home are kept.

      Normally, she only opens the cupboard on Saturdays. Every Saturday, we turn in the books we’ve borrowed and read the first few pages of other novels and stories.

      We’re supposed to make our choices in silence, but we whisper all the same, “Which one did you like?”

      It’s forbidden to argue. Everyone is supposed to get a chance to look at each book (but I’ve already chosen mine).

      Our teacher doesn’t want to see us forming any groups by neighborhood, courtyard, or skin color. Every time we invent little excuses (“Pauline is too poor”), she dismisses them calmly, without punishment.

      Wednesday, after her evaluation, after the report cards, she leads us to the cupboard, takes out all the books, and puts them on a table. As she does this, we all stare openmouthed.

      She stacks the books into little piles, thirty-two little piles, gathered with no rhyme or reason, two books or three books to a pile. She puts a blue ribbon around each, thirty-two blue bows. She lines them up on another table and asks us to come up, in alphabetical order. First name, first pile, second name, second pile, until nothing’s left on the table.

      Nobody asks the right question: “Why are you doing this, teacher?”

      Only: “What did you get?” or “Can we trade?”

      For once, there isn’t a first or last place. I’m not going to say anything. I won’t say anything. I’m not thirty-first of thirty-two students.

      I can show my books, my prize, first. And afterwards, but only afterwards, I’ll admit the truth about the report card—n’avoue jamais, jamais, jamais, jamais—and about my ranking and having failed dictation. I tell myself somebody’s going to have to sign the report card, even if it means I’ll get yelled at.

      5.

      You’re thinking that old Nono talks too much, aren’t you?

      But if I were to tell you the story of my life, my modest life amounting to not much at all, it would be obvious that every life, as mediocre as it may seem, can teach us something about history, about difference, about exclusion and illusion. I could tell you a whole lot of truths, and you’d see that the story of the disappeared schoolteacher is only a fine mist, a fifine, compared to what rained down on our heads when I was young. And cross my heart, if I’m lying, I’ll die a second time.

      You have to realize that, to know what happened before, you have to look behind.

      1967. They’re in 1967 and they don’t have a clue about what happened in the past! They don’t see how the suffering and the tribulations they’re experiencing now are connected to what happened before.

      Because her teacher, her pretty little mulatto teacher . . . How do I know she’s mulatto? From the child herself, when she was speaking to her sister Emmy: “We like to touch her hair . . . !” I’ve never seen that child come touch the old white hair under my head wrap. Too hard, maybe, too wired, as they say. In this world, you only touch “good” hair!

      Anyhow, that teacher is lucky to have only disappeared. Maybe they sent her to another school or to another country. Who knows? Maybe she’s already crossed the ocean or is about to.

      But before that, I mean way before, what do you think they would’ve done with her?

      Yeah, nobody asks that question! I could tell you things, but I’d be accused of always bringing up the past. “É wè finn épi sa!” That’s what they say, “Oh yes, my dear, you have to stop that!”

      Standing here on just one leg, I don’t feel like shutting up, because when I was a child, not only was I tossed into the hands of an old established family but they tried to marry me off! They wanted to pick the man I would wed.

      I worked at their house all day long and all night too. You should’ve heard them talk about how I was part of the family, and what would they do without me, all that usual crap. While they were still in bed, I was already up, and when I went to sleep, they’d already been in bed a long time. In any event, school was never an option for me.

      Just let me continue: one fine day my employers decide to marry me off—as if nothing had changed at all! Because that had already happened to my mother and to my mother’s mother before her.

      I was twenty-five years old, and they’d started to worry I was getting too old to get married. Old—that sure makes me laugh when you know I didn’t die till I was ninety-eight! They had no idea I’d last for almost one hundred years. Hah!

      Well, they brought this guy around, a much older man, at least forty. I can’t tell you his exact age, but let’s just say he was no spring chicken! They invited the two of us to eat with them.

      Even I couldn’t believe it; they gave me the day off! I hadn’t cooked, I hadn’t done the housework, not a thing. They hired somebody else’s services. I wonder if it wasn’t even my cousin who came in to substitute.

      They told me to put my white dress on. A white dress that had belonged to God knows who and that they’d given me to wear until it fell apart.

      That man and I were fed like royalty, and after lunch they allowed us to stroll alone on the plantation. Cacao beans. A beautiful cacao plantation that the 1929 hurricane razed to the ground—just like what happens to the hair on a boiled pig!

      A stroll through the plantation, like a real lady with that man at my side . . . But we had nothing to say to each other. I’d never seen him before, and he’d never seen me. Not too ugly, that fellow, not ugly, but hungry, ready to take advantage of any situation. He was looking at the plantation like it’d belong to him one day. He stared at the mango trees. That year there’d been so many mangoes we didn’t know what to do with them all. So many that, even before the trees had finished bearing all their fruit, new little white flowers were already sprouting from the ends of the branches. And he, that fiancé they’d found for me, wanted to gather mangos. I said no. I thought we were already too much in their debt. We had to have some dignity.

      And then, at some point, that so-called fiancé moved a little way off from me. I was tired of the whole thing: the white dress, the shoes, my stomach full to bursting, the stroll in the sun. I’d stopped and sat down, but he’d kept on going. Not too far, but I couldn’t see him anymore. And all of a sudden, I wondered where he’d gone! I couldn’t tell how long he’d been missing; I’d even forgotten what he looked like. I got up to look for him and found him crouching behind a tree eating an apricot. A big fat apricot with a double pit. You know how big our apricots can be, but still stay sweet and juicy.

      That guy had just eaten lunch: a starter, a fish course with green peas, a meat course, rice and pasta, dessert—sorbet and all the rest—but he was still afraid of not having enough. Always afraid of not having enough! So when he saw the apricot on the tree, really fat and ripe, he didn’t think. He just hid, so he could eat it.

      At the