by
Rosie Jackson
(First published in Writing Women, Vol 11, no 1, 1994)
(Translated into Italian and chosen as the title story of a collection of contemporary women’s fiction Lente case del tempo (Rome, Empiria, 1997) which includes work by Janet Frame and Jamaica Kincaid).
I'm here for the women. The way they sit outside their doors on flimsy wooden chairs and fold their arms, flesh tucked beneath their elbows like men carry newspapers.
There's not much else: a few crumbling houses and a white chapel carrying a cross at the top of the hill. Each year heat peels away another layer of skin from the earth, but no one tries to put it back any more. The young ones have all gone to the mainland, they only return here to holiday in the summer. Boys with flashy cars and radios, twig girls weighed down with portable CD's.
When their mothers or their mothers' mothers die, the children try to sell the houses to foreign investors, but the market's depressed and many are standing empty. Olive cans that sprouted geraniums are given over to nettles and weeds. In fact, when I see the children's children visiting - wearing those fashionable trainers that youths kill for in the States - I wonder if they mind, the women's bodies, whether they resent having been so casually used. But none of them protests. Those lovely ripe folds are full now with other things: sunshine, and wine. They sit for hours on end, rolling and peaceful, memories embedded deep inside, like Russian dolls.
Women back home aren't like that any more. They're flat, like the men. Memory can't sing inside those straight bodies like it echoes here. Dreams need doorways to nestle in. Life needs dark sweetness to ferment.
I love being here, minimal resources, not taking anything for granted. A wash means planning a walk to the tap. A meal means carrying bottled gas, hiding food from insects and bugs. It's good, not forgetting the elements, not skate-boarding over the day. But none of my relatives understand. They never did.
`You're crazy, Ben. You won't even be able to understand the TV. What about your roots, connections, friends?' But when I think of England, connections, friends, I see clusters of broken cables, jagged wires.
Siesta time's the worst, when the women are inside. It's parched and deserted then. I've never been able to sleep in the afternoon, so when it gets too bad, I go to the top of the village. The highest point, where the cross on the tiny white chapel looks over to distant mountains and sea.
I must have spent hours up there, when the women are out of view, watching the lizards. They're a peculiar lime green, like dark lichen, camouflaged against stone walls. They used to be symbols of silence, lizards, before Christianity turned them - and women - into evil things. That thought comforts me. Silence darting across the rocks and hiding in the cracks. It calms me, watching the lizards moving in and out, their silence threading my hollow thoughts like beads on a string.
There was never enough silence before. I thought life was about making a noise. Like those kids with their transistors. I spent dozens of years like that, making as much din as I could: nearly fifteen thousand days rushing up and down escalators to prove I was alive.
It's true, I knew nothing till she went. Nothing of silence, nor the darkness. I never even thought of them. Not till that morning, when Grace didn't answer and I had to put my head down, almost beneath her arm, to check her breath. It was too late then, wishing I'd been there before, sooner, watching life push the blood round her body and listening, as her heart pumped love into the world. Nearly fifteen thousand days I'd been with her, and not one spent simply witnessing the fullness of her flesh, the love she carried around.
That's nine years ago now. I still can't get used to it. There's a pot I use for carrying water, with a hexagonal chunk of wood for a lid. Sometimes, I lift the lid and stare into the pot and want to be there, down in the liquid darkness, no longer separate.
In the late afternoons, the women appear again, and I walk round the streets, relishing the smell of meat and cooking from darkened rooms. They've got used to me now. I've become part of the landscape, like the lizards. The best thing is going past those cool doorways, where strips of coloured plastic hide the mysteries. Anything could be in the darkness behind.
That's why I love these women. They're like their houses, they've got depths, past and present stored in their recesses. They all wear black, but they're not dead, any more than the silence of the lizards is mute.
Yes, I'm here for the women. I watch the flesh round their bellies soften and grow into slow houses of time. And I dream of putting my head into those rich shadows between their breasts, of settling forever in their dark eaves, where the swallows of memory dance and swoop and come to rest at last.
(c) Rosie Jackson 1994