Maggie Gee - Where are the Snows

‘How long?’

‘A month or two, maybe —’

‘If you want to see Matthew, you’ve got less than a week. Two weeks if we’re lucky. Are you going to come back?’

‘I… I don’t know.’

And I didn’t know. I was afraid of them. Am I a hero, or a coward?

Grey, grey. Grey and cool. Outside the window, the silver-grey world I know so well and had nearly forgotten. I shall stay inside today again. One more day then perhaps I’ll be ready. Pale cool sheets where I could float forever. I have been floating, I have slept for days, helped by the drugs the doctor gave me. Today I’ll try and do without.

The man who brought breakfast said it was Friday. How many weeks — it must be months — can it be less than two weeks since we took her away? How long did I have her? Less than two weeks. Just over a week. Shrinking, shrinking. Less than two weeks for the greatest adventure in my life to begin, and run its course?

I had waited for years. I yearned and waited. With Christopher, with Benjamin, with a galaxy of different pipettes and test-tubes, waiting and hoping for my boat to come in. I grew old as I waited. We all grew old. I travelled the world to find what I craved. I festered in hideously awful places. I hung on to Benjamin, when all was lost, because the child would need a father.

Then all of a sudden she was there, she was ours, with hardly any warning the miracle happened. We had fallen asleep, and the boat came in, all light and colour and music playing… she smelled of mangoes and salt and honey. She played a clay bird whistle the first day we had her, when she was still happy, she sang like a bird… before she realised she was ours forever … Then before we’d really taken it in, the thing we had waited and prayed for was over.

Nothing seems real except this grey. Maybe I came here because it’s grey.

She was a beautiful child, Anna Maria. I have covered the top of the vast dressing-table in this vast pale room with pictures of her. We took so many photographs, trying to capture her, as if we knew she would not stay. Towards the end we only took her sleeping, because then you couldn’t see her eyes, when she was sleeping she still looked child-like, contented.

But at first she was so beautiful, and her eyes most beautiful of all. Her coal-black eyes with the lovely clear whites, white as clouds, white as stars, her plumpling lips so red they looked painted, her short straight nose, so pure in its form, straight, disdainful, Indian. Some of the photographs catch her beauty but they lack the quality which made me adore her, the simple thing I shall never have again. Her presence. She was there.

Anna Maria was there. Suddenly one morning she was brought to us, plump, foursquare, staring at us, then away, smelling of mangoes and salt and honey, her dimpled hands, golden hands, her head of blue-black shiny hair. The child I’d first seen on the step of the hut in a beam of sunlight, playing with a marigold, and the sunlight had linked us, had made me a promise…

There isn’t any sun in Paris.

I’ve lived my life according to whim, superstition, wishful thinking, rubbish. Sunlight doesn’t promise things. Children don’t make good presents. Can’t be given, can’t be bought.

She was decked in her best, a shiny red nylon dress, a little too big for her. Her upper lip gleamed with sweat. She wore orange and blue necklaces which clashed with the dress. She had only brought two toys with her — but perhaps she only had two toys. I am sure she only had two toys. There was a bird whistle and a painted wooden bird on a stick with wings that flapped as you pushed it along, but one wheel was broken, so the bird limped. I thought of all the things I could buy her; it isn’t so wicked to want to give presents, to want to give when you have so much (but now she is gone I have nothing, nothing).

We stood outside their little hut, lined up like two families meeting for a wedding except that Benjy and I were two and they were seven, they had five children, too many to feed; we inspected each other, smiling too much, except the child who didn’t smile at all. They had too many children so they sold us one. Now I see it clearly, they sold us one.

Little Anna Maria. They pushed her forward. She put her head down and clung to them. My heart was wrung. I protested, and yet I knew they were doing this for me, doing it for my money. I took a photograph of them all together to delay the moment when she screamed. We delayed the moment, but then she screamed.

She cheered up a bit when she saw our car and realised she was going to ride in it. ‘It’s your car now,’ I said, taking her hand and placing the palm against the side that was in shade. ‘It’s Anna Maria’s. Well, it’s rented. You can have the next car too…’ My Portuguese is good, it’s always been good, but she looked at me as though she didn’t understand me; when she finally did start speaking that night her intonations and vocabulary were so far from Portuguese Portuguese that I didn’t understand her either. Oddly enough, Benjamin did better at talking to her, with only Spanish he did better than me, so perhaps it was the timbre of a woman’s voice, perhaps Anna Maria was afraid of women, the terrible thing was we knew nothing about her, and even now I don’t know much more. Except her body. At least I know that. How to look after her little body. It’s a lie, though, isn’t it, I couldn’t look after her, now I shall grieve for the rest of my life.

All the same, she smiled as she looked at the car. She consented to climb inside. I told Benjamin to put the car radio on. He turned it up. She was fascinated. It was playing some sentimental song, some dance-band tune from the 1930s, ‘These Foolish Things’, I think it was, something that made my heart light up and the inside of the car, which smelled of hot plastic, suddenly filled with the scent of wallflowers. I knew how happy we were going to be.

It was very hot, near the end of the siesta, but the dust on the road was so appalling that I told Benjamin to put the windows up as we swung round in a half-circle in front of the sprawling row of huts. He turned the radio down, and tried to close the window, but the remote control for the window was broken. He wound the window up by hand.

Two things happened in quick succession. As the volume of the radio sank towards inaudibility, the keening of the family rose to our ears, a cry like the noise of massed distant sea-birds, but as he shut the window it faded away. Anna Maria sat upright staring at us.

She hadn’t understood what was happening. Her first day with us was her best, because she still thought it was an outing of some kind she’d never had before, and that we would take her home later.

We wanted to get to an airport, fast. We were intending to make for Manaus, but we couldn’t get to know her driving through the heat so we’d decided to go back to our hotel for the day. I’d had doubts about that, which Benjamin dismissed.

‘We can’t bring her here. It’s so squalid. The flies …’

‘There are an awful lot of flies where she comes from.’

We’d prepared at the hotel, after a fashion. We had gone to the nearby market to buy toys. It was a very poor town; there weren’t many toys, and none of the sort I had in mind, large comforting toys, enormous teddy-bears or dolls to cuddle. There were drums made from gourds and pipes made from clay that I thought might blow bubbles, but they were for tobacco, there were wildly expressive devil masks that I thought might frighten her… I realised we didn’t know much about toys and we didn’t know a thing about what this child wanted. Sweets were safe. So we went for sweets. Benjy bought lots of baked marzipan sweetmeats in acid pinks and yellows to make up for the toys. We piled them ready on the bedroom table. We had rented an extra room for her, but we thought she would have her presents in ours.