The Broken Bridge

  But it was no good. Here she was, and in an hour or so she’d meet her mother. She stood up, ran some water, washed, and went back to the gallery.

  Paul Chalmers was talking on the phone, so she walked through to the large room, where her mother’s paintings were hung.

  When Ginny was first becoming interested in art and the history of painting, Dad had given her a big book with hundreds of reproductions in it. She’d pored over it with more than delight—with a kind of greed, in fact. She absorbed everything the book told her about the Renaissance, and the Impressionists, and the Cubists, about Botticelli and Monet and Picasso, and she breathed it all in like oxygen she hadn’t known she was missing. And among the pictures in the book, there were two that made her gasp. One was Whistler’s Arrangement in Gray and Black, his portrait of his mother sitting on an upright chair, and the other was El Greco’s View of Toledo. She remembered her reaction quite clearly: a sudden intake of breath, caused by sheer surprise at the arrangement of shapes and colors. It was a physical shock.

  And when she looked at the big painting that dominated the end wall, the same thing happened. It would have affected her the same way whoever had painted it, because it was a masterpiece. What it showed was a middle-aged black man, in a gaudy uniform with epaulets and medals, in the act of falling onto the red-carpeted floor of a lushly furnished room. He’d been eating a meal, and on the table beside him was a plate of yellow soup. Beyond him, through the open door and at the open window, stood a crowd of people, watching: white people and black, old and young, richly dressed and poverty-stricken. Some of them carried objects that helped you understand who they were: a wad of dollar bills for a banker, a syringe for a drug addict, a clutch of guns for an arms dealer, a chicken for a peasant; and the expressions on their faces told Ginny that they’d all in some ways been victims or accomplices of the man who was dying.

  And all that was important, but just as important was the strange discord the particular red of the carpet set up with the particular yellow of the soup, so that you knew it was something significant, and you guessed the soup had been poisoned. And the way the dying man was isolated by that acid red from every other shape in the picture, so that it looked as if he were sinking out of sight in a pool of blood. And mainly what was important was the thing that was impossible to put into words: the arrangement of the shapes on the canvas. These same elements put together differently would have been an interesting picture, but put together like this, they made Ginny catch her breath and put out a hand to the wall.

  “Tell me why it’s good,” said the voice of Paul Chalmers behind her.

  She tried to say what was in her mind and how it had affected her. She tried to say that here was a way of painting that was true to everything she knew: to the European fine art tradition, and to the storytelling part of her too, and it was about blackness, about a black society and its experience of itself.

  He listened seriously and nodded.

  “D’you think a black person paints differently from a white person, then?” he asked when she’d finished.

  It was her own question, coming back at her. But in front of these paintings, at last, she thought she could see the beginnings of an answer.

  “Not…not in the way they’d put paint on the canvas. No. Or in the way they saw, even. The rules of perspective would be the same. But…but the point is that we never see a picture just as itself. Maybe we should; I don’t know. But what we feel and think when we look at a pictures is…well, it’s part of how we see it, isn’t it? We look at it with everything we already know. And we can’t ignore that, because it’s part of us.”

  “Go on,” he said.

  “Well, when I saw this, I thought of El Greco, straight away. The View of Toledo, you know? And so that’s part of my experience of this painting. The fact that it’s part of a European tradition. She speaks the same language. But at the same time…You see that mark up there? The man’s drawing it in chalk on the wall?”

  “What is it?”

  “It’s the vever of Erzulie.”

  She looked at him, but he didn’t know what she meant. She explained, and then said, “And that’s important too. Because I don’t know what this man Colonel Paul had done, but one of the things that’s going to survive him is…love. I think that’s what it means. But it’s also there like a secret symbol for those people who know what it is. And knowing that it’s to do with voodoo…” She struggled to find her way back to what she’d started to say. “Well, I can’t block out all those things I know and just think of the picture as shapes and colors. So I have to accept them and take in the picture with my mind as well as my eyes, and if my mind knows that the artist is black…then maybe there is a difference between black art and white art. I mean, if a black person points out that a black politician is corrupt, then at least you know they’re not saying it out of racism. But if a white person says it…you couldn’t be sure. Unless you knew them. I’m not being very clear….”

  He was listening carefully, frowning.

  “Where are you studying?”

  “Oh…” She blushed. “I’m still at school. I said I was a student, but…I’m a school student.”

  “What do you want to do?”

  “Go to art school and paint.”

  “Why do you think Baptiste wanted to paint this? To say something about this guy, Colonel Paul?”

  “Yes…But not mainly. What I think she mainly wanted to do was to see what happened when she put that red and that yellow together. That’s what would have started it for me anyway. Some little technical thing like that. And the shape of the man as he falls…See, because there’s no shadow, you can’t sort of see easily where he is in relation to the floor. He seems to be floating in space, almost. But if you work it out by taking a fix on the table and the leg of the chair, you can see that she’s got it right, it’s technically correct—he hasn’t got his foot through the plane of the carpet or anything. She just hasn’t given us any clues. Doing that is fantastically difficult, and yet she’s just done it without any fuss. It’s just…Oh, God, I’m amazed. It’s brilliant!”

  She felt a lump in her throat and had to stop talking. She didn’t feel in the least self-conscious with the man. He was part of her world, the world of art.

  She looked around at the other paintings, swallowing hard so that she could speak again.

  “These are the election pictures? God, what happened?”

  “It all went wrong,” he said. “After years of dictatorship, maybe it’s hard to make a democracy work.”

  The pictures were uncomfortable to look at: a man mutilated in the dust of a Haitian street, his blood half-dry in the hot sun; a dead child huddled in a doorway; a smiling man with dark glasses firing a machine gun into a crowded church. They were swiftly painted in crude colors, but under each of them Ginny could see that total technical assurance: the artist knew exactly how limbs fitted together, how shadows fell, how the perspective of a sloping street worked, so there was no hesitation between seeing and painting. Not a second of doubt. There was something pitiless there too. A ferocious unblinking stare, like that of a bird of prey.

  There was one small landscape that wasn’t in the election series, but it had the same fierce quality: sparse green fields bordering a sluggish yellow-brown river. From one side a narrow wooden bridge led out across the water, but it didn’t reach the other side because it had collapsed halfway. Clumsy spars of wood trailed in the water.

  “A broken bridge,” said Ginny to herself in wonder, and then there were other voices from the front of the gallery. The first guests were arriving.

  She hurried back through to help. Soon she was pouring wine, hanging coats, offering catalogues as if she belonged there. What would it be like one day to have a show like this, to see her work hanging in a gallery, being admired and discussed and bought? Not as good as doing it, she thought. That was the best part. There was so much to learn.

  And all the time she was thinking:
When’s she going to come? What’s she going to be like? Will she know me?

  At about eight o’clock there was a stir among the people by the door, and without any warning, there she was.

  She was shorter than Ginny had expected, and her hair was speckled with gray, though her face was unlined. It was the face in Ginny’s photograph, no question about it, but stronger, colder, more austere. She was smiling now, talking to Paul Chalmers and some guests, accepting a glass of wine, and although she was animated and friendly, no one would diminish her by a word like “charming”; she was too powerful for that. She was dressed in what looked like a very expensive cream silk suit, and around her neck she wore a string of heavy bright beads. Her hair was cut short, like Ginny’s. Did they look alike? Would anyone notice?

  Trying not to stare, Ginny carried on attending to the guests, opening wine, disposing of dirty plates, making conversation. There were about forty people there, white and black, respectable-looking and artistic-looking, and they weren’t hard to talk to; they seemed to accept that since she was there, she belonged there.

  And at every moment she was aware of where her mother was, of whom she was talking to, of where she was looking. When eventually her mother moved through to the larger room, Ginny followed, and presently she gathered her courage and spoke to her.

  “Er…Miss Baptiste, can I ask you something? Why is the man up there, why is he drawing Erzulie’s vever on the wall?”

  “Oh, you know what that is? You know about voodoo?”

  She spoke with an American accent, but the word “voodoo” sounded like vaudou, as if it were French.

  “Well, just a little. Only what someone told me. Am I right? Is that what it is?”

  “Yes, that’s what it is. But I don’t know why he’s doing it. It shouldn’t be on a wall anyway; it’s a sacred thing; it should be drawn in meal on the ground. I guess he doesn’t know what he’s doing any more than I do.”

  “Who was Colonel Paul?”

  “An army officer. The Americans wanted to extradite him to face drug charges, but he was popular with the army in Haiti. Someone poisoned him with a plate of pumpkin soup.”

  “I think it’s brilliant.”

  “Thank you…”

  She was turning away to the two people waiting to talk on her other side. Ginny, desperate, said, “Please…Could I show you something?”

  She turned back. “Okay. What is it?”

  “It’s…Could you just come in the office a minute? It’s in there….”

  A slight shrug, an indifferent expression, but she followed Ginny through the door, into the neat cool oatmeal-clean corridor, into the office. Ginny fumbled open the rucksack with shaking hands. She was intensely conscious of the woman in the small room with her, of her expensive clothes, her American accent, her severe manner; they all made Ginny feel small and provincial and unimportant.

  She found the photograph in its leather frame, her mother’s picture, and held it out.

  “What’s—” said her mother, and then fell still. Her eyes glittered as she looked down at the photograph of her younger self. “Where did you get this?” she went on harshly.

  Ginny could hardly speak. “It’s…my mother. It’s you. I’ve always had it.”

  Her mother looked at her, briefly, and then back at the photograph before turning away.

  “You’re making a mistake,” she said.

  “No! I’m not! Dad—my father—he always told me about you. I thought you were dead.”

  But Anielle Baptiste was shaking her head.

  “It has nothing to do with me. This is a mistake. I’m a painter, I’m not a mother. Excuse me, I have to go and see the guests—”

  “Oh, please—it isn’t a mistake—you must listen. I’m your daughter—”

  Her mother was at the door. Ginny was still helplessly holding out the photograph.

  “I don’t know what you mean. All I can say is you’ve made a mistake.”

  She was turning the handle, about to open the door. Ginny rushed forward the three or four steps between them, but stopped before touching her, held away by the formality, that severe, elegant force of character, those cold eyes.

  “Just tell me—listen, I promise I won’t bother you, I swear I’ll go away right now and never see you again, you won’t ever hear of me—but just tell me, for God’s sake: Is it true or not? Are you my mother?”

  The woman looked away. Her hand on the doorknob, strong, square, with paint ineradicably staining the rims of her nails, was the only thing about her that didn’t look glossy and fashionable. Ginny lowered her eyes and looked at that hand; it was the only place she thought she’d be able to make contact.

  She reached out to touch it. Her mother let Ginny’s hand rest there but gave nothing back, neither moving to hold it nor taking her own away, and after a second or so Ginny dropped hers to her side.

  “What’s your name?” said her mother.

  “Ginny. Howard.” It was a hoarse whisper through the lump in her throat.

  “You’re interested in painting?”

  “It’s the only thing—”

  “It’s not the only thing. It’s not even the most important thing.”

  “What—” Ginny still couldn’t speak properly. “What is the most important thing?”

  There was a long, long silence.

  Then Anielle Baptiste slowly turned away and opened the door.

  She said, “Painting isn’t the most important thing, but it’ll have to do till we find out what is.”

  Ginny held out her hand again.

  “Please! You haven’t answered my question! You can’t— you mustn’t—”

  But the woman was halfway out of the room, and then she’d left it entirely. Her back was turned. The soft neon strip light above her in the narrow corridor gave her figure the look of the dying Colonel Paul—weightless, without a fixed position, either floating or sinking but in any case out of human reach. Without looking back, she opened the door to the gallery and went through.

  Ginny was left in the office doorway. Holding herself with great care, like someone trying to avoid spilling a glass that was filled to the brim, she turned back inside, put the photograph into the rucksack, slung the jacket over her shoulders, and went out through a back entrance into a little yard, into the street beyond, into the city.

  TWENTY-FOUR HOURS later, Ginny got off the bus in Porthafon, and stiffly, reluctantly made her way through the town to the row of council houses by Mr. Alston’s garden furniture factory, and stood by the gate of one of them.

  Most of its neighbors had been sold to their tenants; they had stone cladding over the front, or new ranch-style porches, or fancy diamond-paned windows. This one didn’t. The window frames were in need of painting, and the garden was a tangle of long grass and weeds. It was Joe Chicago’s house, and Ginny was going to return the jacket.

  She’d come to that decision in the early hours of the morning, on a bench near the station in Liverpool, at the moment when the street light nearby began to weaken as the sky soaked up the first hints of day from the hidden sun. She’d been wandering around all night, working things out, and she thought she was beginning to see them clearly at last.

  And as she’d known, there would be a price to pay. And the price was simply this, that she had to take back the jacket and apologize.

  So she’d phoned Helen’s number from Liverpool first thing that morning and got Joe’s address, without explaining why. Nor had she phoned Dad, nor had she found Robert. There was no shortage of things to feel guilty about, she thought, but one thing at a time, and this one first.

  She pushed open the gate and went up the cracked path to the front door. The bell didn’t work, so she knocked, and almost at once a high quavering cry arose from inside, like that of a mad child. She took a step back in fright.

  Then there was the rumble of Joe’s voice saying something in Welsh, and a key turned, and the door opened.

  As far as his sull
en features could manage it, they took on an expression of surprise. Before it could turn to anger, she said, “I’ve brought your jacket back. It’s all right. It’s not damaged or anything. I’ve got it here in my rucksack. I just needed it for a few days. I’m sorry I took it like that. Can I—”

  She faltered and stopped, because behind Joe she could see another figure, something out of a nightmare: a corpse, a ghoul, swathed in graveclothes, with a vacant mouth and hollow staring eyes. It plucked at Joe’s sleeve, whimpering, and he turned and said in Welsh, “It’s all right, Mam, don’t worry.”

  A mother? Joe had a mother? Ginny could only stare. He turned back to her, and she said clumsily, “Look, I’m sorry to bother you, but I really need to ask you something. Can I come in? It won’t take long, honest….”

  He considered heavily for a moment or two and said, “Wait there.”

  He shut the door again, and she heard their voices going back into the house. After a minute the door opened again, and she stepped inside, to the smells of fried food and cigarette smoke and unwashed clothes, and worse.

  Joe’s mother was sitting on a torn and greasy sofa, clutching a cushion as if it were a baby. She was wearing nothing but a pink nylon nightdress, the front of it stained with food, and a pair of yellow Garfield slippers. Her hair hung like gray rags from her bony head; she was toothless and senile and, Ginny saw, terrified of her.

  “It’s all right, Mam,” Joe said in Welsh. “She won’t hurt you. The little girl’s come to see Joe. She won’t hurt Mam. Don’t worry.”

  Ginny’s head was swimming. She dragged the jacket from the rucksack and held it out wordlessly, and he took it and slipped it on at once.