Learning the Banda: Intermission
Act One
--
Intermission
The garden reeks of rosebushes. You lie in the grass, stare up at the sky and watch the clouds. You're half-asleep, mind drifting, when your mother drops a book on your chest. You don't flinch; you heard her coming, not her feet or her breath, but the comforting familiarity of her mind. You pull your eyes from the blue, look into a different blue, one eyebrow raised in silent question.
"You should read that," your mother tells you. "I think you'll enjoy it."
The first thing you notice when you pick the book off your chest is how worn the book is: front cover missing, pages dog-eared, tape holding the binding together. You flip through it, catch highlighting, notes, scrawled and illegible words in almost every other margin. Your mother's book, then, and something precious to her.
"I want you to take it with you," she says, "but I thought -- maybe if you read it now, we can talk about it before you go?"
"I can't," you tell her, and when her face starts to drop, you sit up, say, hurrying, "No, I don't mean -- this is yours. It means a lot to you, I can tell. You shouldn't give it away."
Your mother smiles, sits down on the grass right next to you. She pulls her knees to her chest, rests her chin on them. Her expression, as she looks out over the grass, gains a tinge of grief. Quietly, she says, "I'm sick, Jen. I won't be around much longer. Think of this as my gift to you, okay? No doubt your father's going to contest every word in my will but I want to know that you have this, at least."
Sick. She's hidden it so well, the last few days, but now that you look back, start putting the puzzle together, you can see what the finished picture looks like. The shortness of breath going up and down the steps. The going to bed early, sleeping late, napping every afternoon. The way her hair is thinner than you remember, the way she is thinner than you remember, bones with as much strength as diseased branches, a core you remember being strong and steadfast, now with every ounce of sap and life drained away.
"I put some papers on your bed," she adds, soft as she leans her head, bends her neck to rest her cheek on your shoulder. "It's your choice what to do with them, okay? But I want you to make the decision. I just wish you had longer to think it over but you'll need to fill them out and send them in before I die. Your father would never agree."
"How long?" you ask, words caught in your throat. Your thumb strokes the book, back and forth, back and forth, back and forth. No genie pops out of its pages, though. No answer, no way around this, no magic. Nothing.
Your mother lets out a deep breath. "They said six months," she says, quiet enough that you could consider it a whisper, a murmur, one of those confessions that usually happens at night, in the dark, when it's safer to bare parts of yourself because it's so hard to see. "And that was four months ago."
You're not quite sure where to go with that. "If I hadn't asked Mama to visit before I left, I wouldn't," you say, trailing off, feel that lump in your throat threaten to strangle the breath from your lungs. "Were you ever gonna tell me? Were you -- did you petition?"
"Jen, I didn't want to be -- I thought it would be better if you left with a clear conscience," she says. "I wanted it to be your choice to move on without looking back at a family you never really belonged to." That stings. Truth generally does. "And no, I didn't petition." You want to ask why not, what she's thinking, if she's given up on the family you have always been a part of and always will, but she sets a hand on your knee. You reach, take your hand in hers, gently trace out the knobs of her knuckles, the bony spindles of her long, elegant fingers, the edges of her tissue-thin nails. "Jen, you had to've -- I haven't been to a ceremony or a celebration since your first one. After I brought you, they never let me back in."
It's a realisation you must have had before, all those nights and days when the house was crowded, when the hounfor was filled to bursting with people and patrons both, all under the watchful eye of Papa. You can't think why it never stuck, why you never questioned it.
Your grandmother tilts her mouth to your ear, whispers, "People only ever have one mother, Jenny-boy. The moment you gave that other woman the title was the moment you moved on from the one who birthed you. And with Mama Mel around, why would you think about another parent, except in the most abstract of ways?"
"One Papa, one Mama," you murmur. Your grandmother runs a hand over your head, fades back into the air like she's made of dust motes that can only be seen in direct beams of sunlight. "I'm sorry," you tell your mother, wrap an arm around her shoulders, pull her so close she's practically on your lap. "I never realised. Fuck, I'm so sorry."
"Not your fault, baby," your mother tells you, leaves a bitter-ashed kiss on your cheek before she stands up. "I'm just glad you have a place in the world, y'know? Go ahead and read; I'll be back out in an hour or so with lunch."
She turns and leaves. You watch her go and when you feel tears start to fill up your eyes the way regret, loss, sorrow have filled up the insides of you to the point of suffocation, you look down at the book, roll over onto your stomach, and start reading.
--
You stay another week, spend lazy mornings following your mother's instructions as you cook family meals from scratch; she wants you to have this, at least, and you don't dare tell her that everyone in your family who made this stew or that bread for the first time is hovering over your other shoulder, watching. You spend afternoons napping, sometimes with your mother, sometimes each of you in separate rooms or on different couches; you dream of him and wake up feeling guilty. Some evenings are good and you go out for dinner or to see a movie. Some evenings are bad and your mother goes to bed shortly after dinner, breath heaving as she walks slowly up the stairs. Times like these, you get the urge to pick her up, to carry her, but if there's one thing you took from this woman, all those years ago before you left her behind without a second glance, it's her determination. You understand her. You respect her. And when you're sitting outside, reading the book, paying too-close attention to Casaubon's adventures in Brazil, you understand.
"Who gave you the agogo?" you ask your mother. You're on the grass and she's sitting on a lawn chair wearing huge sunglasses that cover the majority of her thin-skinned, drawn-tight face. Who kept you out, is what you want to ask. Who put you on a platform so everyone could keep an eye on you, pretending you belonged long enough to get to me before they cut all ties with you? Who pushed you to the edges so you could do nothing but watch as your son was initiated in a place that should have been yours?
You think of the banda, of your parents getting divorced, of the first time you felt him, of the first time you woke up with an appreciation for the pleasures of the flesh, and you say, "It was Mama Mel, wasn't it."
She doesn't treat your statement like a question because it's not one. "Don't be like Amparo," your mother tells you. "Or Casaubon. Don't let it take you over and then reject it, okay? And don't try and distance yourself. You've been given a great gift, Jen, and you should appreciate it."
Your mother has her eyes closed; you can tell, even through the sunglasses. She's smiling, warmed by the heat of a Texas summer sun, and if this is the only thing you can give a dying woman, you will, but it's already your life, already the choice you've made. It's not difficult to tell her that but the way her smile changes, the way she lets out a breath, that does hurt, a deeper ache than being fucked with no prep, a sharper pain than the absence of him, a sweeter sorrow than Papa leaving you to dance the banda by yourself.
"My Jen," your mother says. "The one thing I've done right in this world, baby -- that's you." She lets out a sigh, says, "Keep reading. It gets better," and she struggles to stand.
You want to help her but you can't move, wouldn't move even if you could because she's stubborn, even like this, probably will be right to the end. Instead, you watch as she finally gets up, strain of it visible in every muscle, and goes inside, and then you ask Papa why the fuck your mother was treated this way, what possible excuse he had, his family had, his followers had.
Papa doesn't say anything back but Marie, the shade who's been with you ever since Mama Mel gave you the option to leave and you made the decision to stay, says, "Our patrons work in mysterious ways, little wolf, and they always have. But our destinies are set from the moment we come into the world, screaming and bloody, and we can fight all we want but we ain't ever gonna be able to change things. Let your maman die in peace, you hear? Let her die with dignity, knowing that you're gonna be all right, knowing that you're starting the next phase of your life. Yeah?"
There's an echoing feel of agreement from other voices, other minds; the one you want to hear is silent but he kisses your eyelids, licks up the tears you just now realise are slipping slow down your cheeks.
"You won't meet your chosen here, little wolf," Marie tells you. "But some things follow a lineage and serve as lodestones for our lives."
You look down at the book in your lap, fallen and forgotten without having marked your page, and stroke your fingers down the middle of the page it landed on. "A lodestone," you say. "You think -- this has something to do with him?"
Marie brushes a hand down the back of your neck; you lean into the touch even as your skin breaks out in goosebumps. "No way to know for sure," she says, "but probably. So keep it safe, my wolf. Keep it close."
When you leave your mother at the end of the week, the book is clutched tight in your hands. When you pack to leave Mama Mel's, the book is clutched in your hands. When you get the keys to the back half of a shotgun cottage in the Bywater, the book is clutched in your hands.
Act Two