WHICH ONE?
by Evelyne Trouillot
Lalue
Translated by David Ball
The great-aunt in Brooklyn had promised to come get one of them, but which one? And take her in under her own roof, in her four-bedroom apartment-a godsend in New York! In a neighborhood that was getting less and less shabby: now the whites were trying to force her out.
“They can’t make me leave. They can move in with their sidewalk cafés, their little ‘boutiques’ with those French names they pronounce in their terrible accent. No way I’m leaving here!” declared the aunt in Brooklyn.
“Her apartment takes the place of a husband,” her niece Beatrice confided. “A submissive husband who doesn’t answer back, stays clean, and doesn’t have wandering hands. Who could ask for more? Four bedrooms is a luxury in New York!”
The bathroom next to her bedroom was graced with an enormous bathtub on ornately decorated feet. She had it put in after visiting the house of a friend audacious enough to tell the aunt that not having a bathroom connected to the master bedroom revealed a standard of living that was borderline primitive. The Brooklyn aunt allowed no one she knew to school her, be they relatives or friends. After all, ever since she came to the States she’d worked for a rich family on Long Island, Italian Jews with a taste for the good things in life and the ability to turn their money into more money. So nouveau riche Haitians thinking they could spin yarns to her-that really takes the cake! At her last yearly visit, Beatrice had gone into long raptures about the Italian tile in the bathroom and the bouquets of artificial flowers decorating the master bedroom. The second bedroom was reserved for the few rare relatives and friends bold enough to face the aunt’s sharp tongue for more than a few hours. After all, she was a hardened spinster set in her opinions and prejudices. The third bedroom was transformed into a sewing workshop where the aunt made cushions and curtains in velvet materials she thought were fancy because her employers were crazy about them. For the moment, the fourth room, the smallest, was full of old furniture and knickknacks. It served as both a storehouse and a treasure trove. This was the shambles she counted on fixing up to take in one of her grandnieces, one of the daughters of her nephew Aramis. But which one?
When Beatrice talked about the whims of her Brooklyn aunt, both of us would listen with a mixture of dread, fascination, and envy for that other world of perpetual wealth and light. But also with the vague fear that TB (Tante de Brooklyn), which we only called her behind her back, of course, might learn of our conversations in which we made fun of her. Still, they were so much fun and so therapeutic that we never got tired of them. We mothers. After all, it was the great-aunt who regularly wired us money and had sent for her nephew Aramis, the one who was carrying on the family name. The one who looked the most like his late father-and the one who had gotten us both pregnant roughly two days (or maybe a few hours) apart. Who knows? In any case, our daughters were born on the same day, at full term and almost at the same time. Right in the middle of an Easter Sunday, like a double, sunny act of defiance. Aramis had told his aunt about it right away. From her Brooklyn apartment, the great-aunt had used her privilege as an elder, settled in the States for more than three decades, to name the babies: Marie Catarina and Marie Carlotta, Italian names embellished with the name of the mother of God in the good old Haitian Catholic tradition. We had not protested because these imposed first names were associated with the father. For Aramis Salnave-with his aunt’s approval and an endearing smile from his sister-had legally recognized both children. I wonder what the clerk at City Hall thought when he saw the same date of birth and the names of two different mothers.
Which one of us had first succumbed to Aramis’s charms? He’s as seductive as the most handsome of the musketeers, Beatrice would repeat, always with the same pensive, nostalgic expression for that brother who’d left too soon, and also for a time when such literary allusions did not necessarily have to be explained. She would look at us almost despairingly when we didn’t react. And yet from the very first day Aramis told me about the character to whom he owed his name, I got all excited despite myself, and without ever telling him, read and reread whole passages in the copy of the novel he’d lent me, carefully covered in plastic. His father, Hébert Salnave, had unlimited admiration for Alexandre Dumas and gave this name to his only son. Beatrice and her younger brother had grown up reading, listening to, and telling the stories of the three musketeers. Aramis knew his namesake’s lines by heart and would quote them in the course of many conversations. He could easily narrate a whole episode if the person he was talking to seemed a bit lost. With a childish smile on his lips, he had charmed me with his cloak-and-dagger stories that were so far removed from our world that I was enchanted despite myself. I should have known this plunge into fantasy would cost me dear, I should have listened to my instinct, which told me to watch out.
He moved his hands when he spoke, like an enchanter whose only material to work with was his body. A beautiful body. Long, long, from his forehead to his slim, muscular legs. He walked like someone in a hurry, but with that relaxed, elegant air that attracted my eyes right away. Did the other mother also instantly feel fire spreading beneath her skin like lit paper before it’s burned up by a flame? I could kick myself even today for not being able to resist that need, for having wanted the burning encounter of our two skins at any cost. Despite my instinctive distrust of sweet-talking men, despite my persistent refusal to believe that life was granting me a reprieve. Even when I learned that he’d wooed another woman in the same month, with the same success, all he had to do was touch me and I was conquered anew, impatient to feel the delicious bite of his body again and again. Even while deep inside me, a child was already growing.
Yet my twenty-five years of existence had not really entitled me to become somebody’s mother. According to the family legend, after the departure of the man who had nonchalantly declared that the earth already had enough people on it, my mother, who was six months pregnant, let herself die. For five years. I still remember her lackluster, teary face and a childhood spent bucking up against that ever-present maternal sorrow. A world of constant privation, of sighs. Never enough food to satisfy you completely, restrained laughter, and shrunken, stifling spaces. No affection. My good grades in high school confirmed my conviction that education wasn’t much use when poverty and bad luck were aligned against you. There I was with my diplomas under my arm, an arid mouth, and a long, gray, dirty avenue in front of me. You had to use people and things-before you were used yourself, and then discarded. That was my motto for survival. Aramis challenged it with a hearty laugh.
When Aramis told me he was leaving, he once again sang the praises and expressed his affection for his aunt in Brooklyn, the one who’d always promised the son of her deceased brother she would bring him to New York for good, on a student visa. Since the papers were ready, he was to leave as soon as possible. As for Beatrice, she had no desire to immigrate to the States. Comfortable in her role as a middle-aged childless widow, she did not want to start life over outside of the country. But Aramis always seemed like he was about to take off and fly. He was always looking for an excuse to change worlds. Put him anywhere at all, he always preferred elsewhere.