The Niece
AND THAT’S HOW my conversations with my aunt Antoine started. I walked up rue Poulet for the first time with my mind full of questions, not having told her I was coming to her store, hoping to surprise her. When I rang the bell, two dogs started barking asthmatically. Antoine opened the door, scolding them gently, routinely. I saw her in the doorway: a tall woman wearing the same confident smile that I hadn’t seen in years. Her eyes sparkled beneath her thick white hair, hastily pulled back as though she had started a sensible coif and then abandoned it halfway through. She placed her long fingers on my shoulders and kissed my cheeks familiarly, as though we had seen each other just the night before. Her face smelled like jojoba oil and Miss Antilles hair lotion. Her face was full, radiant, barely wrinkled.
My last memory of Antoine was of her hunched silhouette as she stood on a metro platform after one of her rare visits to our house. I was a teenager. My father and I had driven her to the Créteil-Préfecture metro station. I had liked her strange allure, a mixture of outdated elegance and anarchy. At that point, I had heard so much about her that I would have been disappointed with anything less. She wore a dark green raincoat that weighed down her shoulders and she had not taken it off the entire day. She wore old men’s shoes and held a delicate, faux-leather handbag. When she stood up from the kitchen table where we had gossiped over tea until dusk, she adjusted the classic veiled fascinator on top of her head. I laughed inwardly at my father’s seriousness, his face stony all afternoon, later in the car and then again on the metro platform. He was annoyed and distracted, his gaze floating a bit above her, his demeanor betraying impatience and the haste with which he would have liked to rush her into the metro car.
Few people other than Antoine, his older sister, had this effect on him. It was comical and mysterious to watch. He was usually open and smiling, offering an empathy and warmth toward others that earned their trust easily, even strangers. But with Antoine, I could see that the effort he made in order to hold back his rage—and protect himself—was written all over his face. Each word she spoke, no matter how harmless, was an attack against all that was important to him: moderation, serenity, a rational and analytical approach to the world. I saw in him a child struggling silently against powers at once loving and terrifying. One day he told me very proudly that he had never fought with his sisters, not once. He preferred running from them.
Fifteen years after that day in the metro, I entered the old building that had once been Antoine’s store, nestled below the Sacré-Coeur Basilica. Now that I was an adult, I wanted to speak with Antoine alone. I wanted her to tell me about the past—about Guadeloupe, about her family—in her own words.
When I saw her, she still looked a little bit like a friendly witch that the British are fond of, Mary Poppins–style or Bedknobs and Broomsticks. I didn’t need to pass any kind of test to get her talking, though; she opened up right away. I think she was happy I’d recognized that she was the link from the past to the present, from Guadeloupe to Paris, like an underground root, full of life.
For our next visits, she insisted on coming to my house. I lived in the eighteenth arrondissement on boulevard Ornano. She wanted to see what my apartment was like and how I lived, and to cuddle my three-month-old daughter. She was happy to have a reason to stride across the neighborhood she knew so well. On the way over, she would stop in front of the Chinese grocer’s stall and inhale the scent of citronella stems to gauge how fresh they were. She would bring me infusions of aloe vera that she had steeped in plastic bottles or a lumpy dessert sprinkled with bits of egg swimming in cloudy milk. I would swallow it all down so as not to hurt her feelings. When she left, I would watch her for a long time from the window as she walked away. She was a whole head taller than the other pedestrians, who seemed tiny in comparison, and only after she had passed would they seem to be of normal height.
In our family, everyone calls my father Petit-Frère, Little Brother, as though he had never been anything other than the fragile being my aunts shepherded, more or less, through childhood, back when they weren’t totally lacking in tenderness. There had been tenderness, certainly, but measured out, like salt or bread.
I was born into what looks like a typical French family, but without clearly defined relationships. For example, a child- hood friend at our house can also be considered a cousin and referred to as such. We see our real cousins rarely and then they are forgotten. Others—illegitimate children swept in with the rain and whose paternity is never really known—become cherished brothers, even more than brothers by blood. My family fills an entire street in Morne-Galant, all of them Ezechiels, which quickly drives any new postman crazy. A sister can be the godmother of her own brother, who will call her “marraine” as opposed to her official first name. That’s how it works with Antoine and my father. When he calls her “marraine,” I hear only “ma reine,” my queen. And now I know that she has all the makings of a sovereign, proud and independent.
When I was a teenager, prone to leaving my clothes all over the floor, I’d shrug as my parents lectured me for the hundredth time to reconsider my outfit or stand up straight. When I was being disrespectful, Antoine’s name would always surface: “There you go, acting just like your aunt Antoine!” or, “Well you certainly get that from Antoine!” For a while, my parents were slightly worried about the size of my feet. They would declare with resignation: “The same feet as her aunt!” Upon first glance, the comparison wasn’t very complimentary. But a tiny part of me was flattered because even though people said my aunt had a lot of character flaws, I could sense a certain admiration for her, the woman who was accountable to nothing but her own desires throughout her life, with no regrets whatsoever, all while cultivating an art of catastrophe.
* * *
UNTIL I WAS THIRTEEN, my parents, brother, and I lived in Créteil, on the ninth floor of a rectangular black-and-white tower at the intersection of rue Lepaire and rue Marie-Curie. I liked to sit at the window, my back to the sky and flirting with the danger of falling thirty meters backward to the ground. As a little girl, I was a good student and kept a low profile, not wanting to stand out. I would imagine myself becoming invisible, melting into the view that stretched out around me. I liked becoming as neutral as the big, straight roads, and the succession of buildings laid out according to the social standing of the people living there: the lower the rent, the narrower the building’s windows.
From my lookout spot, I would puzzle over the countless little details about our family that, in my opinion, made us unlike other families. Why did we tend to widen the circle of our extended family until you could no longer discern its boundaries? And why did my father’s friends and neighbors tease him about his noticeable lilting accent, his dropped r’s, as he, a French citizen, tortured the French while trying to speak it? Why did my grandfather exist as only a gruff voice most of the time, ghostlike after traveling the seven thousand kilometers of telephone lines stretched across the ocean?
Our neighborhood on the outskirts of Paris was the giant maelstrom of the middle class, where diverse lifestyles were swept up in the current of uniformity that characterizes the French Republican model of “vivre-ensemble,” the peaceful coexistence of those willing to embrace French ideals. In the midst of this heap of offshore debris on the suburban outskirts of the city, Antilleans were one minority among others and métis, mixed-race children, were a rarity. The term métis was rarely used. I felt like I was somehow breaking the rules on the rare occasions that I declared myself métisse at school, with my friends, or in the street. To be mixed-race is to be caught in between—in that space that resists categorization. Our French neighbors, newly arrived from the department of Sarthe or from Deux-Sèvres, our second- or third-generation Portuguese neighbors, and even the poorer Parisians didn’t know what to call me. They had my father figured out more easily. After five minutes of talking with him, they would say, “Oh! Réunion Island! We’ve been meaning to go there on vacation!”*
My father would politely correct them, but for most people, the Antilles, a bit like Africa, was a single entity too complicated to separate into precise geographic areas, which included the ensemble of French overseas departments and territories, all the way out into the Pacific Ocean, into the Indian Ocean. And for most people, French Guiana is an island and Guadeloupe and Martinique are interchangeable! But we couldn’t be too mad at our neighbors, since we had a hard time locating Croatia on a map, where our building’s janitor was from, or the Algerian port city of Béjaïa, where my brother’s best friend returned every summer, or the coasts of the Algarve, which were on posters in the living room of my first babysitter, a Portuguese woman who cooked me the most delicious buttered rice.
All during the late seventies until the end of the eighties, my parents saved up so that every two years they could buy tickets to Guadeloupe on Air France. My mother was always thrilled to go. I was of two minds and I wondered why she was so enthusiastic. What was so exciting about burying herself deep in the countryside, far from what she knew—my mother, who grew up going to festivals in Borinage near the French border in Belgium, who was accustomed to early mornings with hot espresso and the blooming cherry trees in summer? Why would she be excited to find herself in this mysterious place, where the day falls upside down, where people live without running water or electricity, where rats and toads eye you suspiciously, where you get caught under a sweltering sun that is tempered only by the shade of a sizzling-hot piece of sheet metal?
During my first days in Morne-Galant, I was pretty bored and I missed the orderly streets of the city. And then little by little, I was sucked into the beauty of the vegetation, so strong that it enters you from every angle and seizes all of your senses: a violent red of petals against dark green leaves, the scent of rotting almonds, the salty breath of the sea, the sting of fire ants. I saw my father become the pillar of support for his own father, who would hide his tears when we climbed into the car to return to the airport after a monthlong visit.
Once back at home, I wondered why Papa and those like him—people with the same skin color and the same lilting accent that was as ever-present as the bandage Tintin’s Captain Haddock never managed to shake off—had such a warm demeanor compared to the rest of the world, a demeanor that barely masked a deep fragility. He spoke openly to me about his childhood, and throughout all of mine, I listened happily.
I never said anything about this constant feeling of confusion, of being out of step, since there were certainly more complicated family situations than my own. I should have considered myself lucky to have a stable family environment and two working parents. Some of my friends moved constantly between living with their families and foster homes. Some fathers spent entire days at the bar. Others didn’t speak French and never left the house. For most of the adults, situations were so complicated that it was clear that we, their children, were the future.
One year, I decided to ask my father and his sisters about their past and how they each ended up leaving their island. I asked all three of them, but separately. My grandfather, Hilaire, had just died at the age of 105, and shortly thereafter, I’d given birth to my daughter. As I held my baby’s small, smooth hand in my own, I thought of the touch of Hilaire’s old hand—rough but gentle, with wide nails—as he had held me at four years old, then nine, then eleven, his grip becoming less and less sure as the years went on. I wanted to hear stories about Guadeloupe, stories from back in Hilaire’s time and stories about what came after, to connect the threads of these stories with the ones that I had already heard. One by one, Antoine, Lucinde, and Petit-Frère offered me their memories. I took notes and didn’t show them to anyone.
Years passed; my own family grew older, and I became increasingly caught up in busy adult life. Then, ten years later, during a particularly harsh winter, I practically fled to visit Guadeloupe, which made me think back to those conversations and to my notes. The voices had all tightened into a chaos inside of me, one that I needed to untangle and piece apart. When I returned to Paris, I dug out my notebooks from the bottom of a drawer. The words, expressions, and snippets of conversations hastily scrawled returned to me like a conversation that I’d only just had. More and more, I wanted to put it on the page. I balked and waited some more. One day, Antoine, Lucinde, and even Petit-Frère would be gone. So I set to work at last, trying to recount as accurately as possible the narratives they had entrusted to me. I tried to preserve the scenes and conversations that they had re-created for me in our exchanges. I hoped to understand, by looking backward, the contours of my own existence.
Copyright © 2018 by Éditions Liana Levi
Translation copyright © 2022 by Julia Grawemeyer
