Archibald Samuel - Arvida

We drank rum and coke and beer and Jameson shooters. Lé paid me a session in the cubicle with the most beautiful dancer I’d seen so far. I don’t know how much he gave her, but she stayed with me for at least six songs. I would have liked her to rub her pussy against me or shove her big tits in my face, but she didn’t stop showing me her cunt. She had little lips bigger than the big ones, and she kept on playing with them and pulling on them as if they were her pride and joy or I don’t know what.

In the end that kind of put me off, and I was embarrassed to look.

The last day, we got up late. América had gone for a walk. Cindy told me she had an air ticket for that same day.

“I’ll take her tonight. You can leave.”

We waited around a while for her to come back so we could say goodbye. But she didn’t turn up. So we left.

*

It’s Dave Archibald’s brother who asked us to tell him the story the other day, because he wanted to turn it into a film script or a book, I don’t remember which. We started to tell it, we were both talking over each other, and at a certain point he asked:

“The girl, what was her name?”

I looked at Big Lé. He didn’t know any more than I did.

I remembered the road, and the weather, and the guy’s face at the border, and the guy who talked to us in the office. I remembered the bridge, I remembered Bezeau and his bad breath, and if I tried, I could have even remembered the name of the motel.

But I’d forgotten the name of the girl.

Lévis said:

“Just call her América. That’s all she had to say, anyway.”

BLOOD SISTERS I

From time to time, she remembers when her grandmother and Jim were still alive.

Her grandmother was an old village sorceress who believed in St. Elmo’s fire, in the devil, in the Holy Trinity, and all sorts of fantastic creatures. She buried saints’ medals in the gardens of couples expecting a child, and spat on the lawns of men who beat their wives or forgot to shave before Sunday Mass. She invoked the spirits of the dead, and read the future in playing cards. She died of a heart attack in the village restaurant, in the company of her two oldest friends, while enjoying her favourite pastime, gossip.

Jim was her cousin. He was tall and strong, all his movements were slow and sad, and she was, from her birth, in love with him.

For a long time the three of them had been very happy in the fields of the Lord, then less happy, and then not at all.

From time to time she remembers the little girl she was. She recalls a little girl she once was, but is no more. When she thinks of her grandmother and Jim alive, she can think only about how they died.

From time to time, she remembers.

Once, there was a big family reunion on her parents’ land. There must have been a million people under the tents, breathing in the fatty vapours of three spitted lambs revolving over the coals. The little girl wanted to get away from the crowd of children. She saw in the distance the comforting face of her grandmother, and ran towards her with little hopping steps. She embraced her. The old woman was seated sedately on a deck chair, along with other women. She greeted this burst of affection with surprise, but soon began to stroke the little girl’s hair, while talking with the other women. Bit by bit, the little girl began to feel uncomfortable. The lady had a strange voice and strange gestures. The lady had a strange smell, and wore a dress she had never seen. The lady was not her grandmother.

She became frightened and started to cry.

The lady disappeared into the crowd and came back with another lady whose face was a duplicate of her own. The little girl stared at the two identical women, and wasn’t sure if even one of them was her grandmother. She cried, lashed out, bit all the hands trying to grab hold of her, and fled towards the trees, howling like a little savage. They searched for her until nightfall. Her father found her under a cedar tree, and delicately extricated her with his large farmer’s hands. He kissed her on the cheeks, the brow, and at her neck, and explained to her that her grandmother had a twin sister.

When the ambulance had crossed through the village, all its sirens wailing, the little girl had turned to her sister and said:

“It’s grandma.”

They’d been playing with a box, on the side of the road. In the box, a litter of kittens. There were two grey ones, a black, a pale, two caramels, and a tiger. Her sister had said:

“Don’t say that.”

But she knew the ambulance was carrying her grandmother, and that her grandmother was going to die.

Her grandmother had had thirteen children, five girls and eight boys. One of them was her father, three were dead, and two were very sick. The little girl got on her bicycle and pedalled up to the old stone house. She knew that her grandmother would not be there that night, and that someone had to bathe her ailing uncles, and tell them a story.

During the funeral, her grandmother’s sister planned all the visits to the funeral home in deference to the presence there of the little girl, then almost an adolescent. This was difficult, because the little girl refused to leave her grandmother. She lingered there, half woman and half child. She took a few steps away, sat at the foot of the coffin, or stood covering the dead woman’s chill hands, wrapped in a large wooden rosary, with her own warm hands. No one dared to offer her condolences, no one dared to disturb her.

Today she sees in this tale all the wisdom of those people. All the world’s wisdom in this tribe putting its own grief on hold out of respect for a child’s overweening sorrow. All the world’s wisdom in this woman stepping back from her own mourning because the sight of it would be unseemly for a little girl.

The woman had to wait every night for the girl to be coaxed away from her vigil.

From time to time she imagines this woman, alone, watching over her sister in the darkness, while the undertaker cleans up the rooms for the next day. She imagines her also, at home, with her thoughts.

On New Year’s Eve, the old woman had gone to the parish church to see the year’s dead file out in procession. She had seen her own face pass by, and had returned home in a panic. She calmed down in the days that followed, and put her affairs in order. During the first months of the year she made a point of being pleasant with everybody, and did not often refuse chocolates with cherry filling. She was sad to have to die, but glad to have been forewarned. When the telephone rang and her nephew told her that her sister was dead, she understood right away, and was greatly relieved. Now she felt guilty.

She, Rose-Anna, had not been very close to her sister, Laura-Anna, for thirty years. They lived in neighbouring villages, and never visited each other. That night, however, Rose-Anna found herself dreaming of a time when they were one and the same person, with a single face just like that of the little girl. She dreamed of substituting for the face of her dead sister her own identical face, of adopting the little girl in her turn, and of staying with her until she reached an age when the death of an old woman would no longer affect her to such a degree. Of course, she had her own family and her own children, and nowhere near the energy to embark on such a masquerade. It was only an idea, one of those wild ideas of which insomnias are made, and which in the morning linger on only as a desiccated husk, oak bark and the skin of a snake.

From time to time, she imagines and remembers.

The third night, after the mass and the interment, the little girl was taken to her grandparents’. They had thought that it would do her good to sleep among the scents and belongings of her grandmother. They stretched her out in the wide guest bed, where she went to sleep for the first time in days.