The Bridge of Beyond (New York Review Books Classics) by Simone Schwarz-Bart

Author:Simone Schwarz-Bart [Schwarz-Bart, Simone]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: New York Review Books
Published: 2013-08-19T22:00:00+00:00

Nothing was too good, nothing too expensive for our cabin, and on our iron bedstead there now lay the bedspread of my dreams, with flounces and the flowers of France that looked so strange to me, and that people said were heliotropes, the ones you scent your earlobes with. I looked after Elie as a mother looks after her child. His clothes were always mended and ironed and folded away in a drawer, and when I gave him his food I always served it on a dish and never put his slice of suckling pig straight onto his plate. All day, while my man was in his woods, I whipped around seeing to my garden and my hens and my linen and my pots and pans, and on Saturdays, with Queen Without a Name, I made preserved breadfruit flowers and crab patties that we delivered to Old Abel’s shop. Every morning when I’d done the house I used to go a little way along the road and turn around suddenly for the pleasure of seeing it there on its four stones, a little cabin just the right size for us, distant, motionless, mysterious and familiar, like a tortoise sleeping in the sun. After the morning cleaning, my next favorite occupation was the washing. I hated doing it in a pan near the house and wasting the water from my jars, and however little there was to wash I used to take it down to the river. I liked to use plenty of water, and it seemed to me, when I unfolded a garment in the current, that I could see my man’s weariness fall away and be carried off with the dirt, and, with the sweat from my dresses, most of my own fancies. I was especially fond of the wood, because of its palm trees intermingled with a tangle of wild bananas and congo canes. The place had a kind of mystery, as if, in some long distant past, it had been inhabited by men who knew how to rejoice in rivers, trees, and sky. Sometimes I almost felt as if I too might some day look on one of these trees in the way it was waiting for. Once I was pounding my linen in the middle of the stream when Letitia came along, the one we used to tease about Elie when she was a little girl. She walked along the bank with her proud slow step, gliding over earth, stones, and leaves like a marauding snake. This was no longer the little thieving Letitia of old. In an instant the light in the wood began to waver, and my heart sank to see her so lovely over the water, looking at me from the rock where she sat as on a throne. With her thick yet transparent skin darkened by some strange colored sap, she made me think of a waterlily on a pond. She gazed at me for a while without speaking, then, tired of

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