WITH HER HAIR PAINTED GREY
As a child I did not dare to ask direct questions about things that were whispered about by the grownups. Things like who used to be married to whom, who is the father of that girl, this boy, who got divorced, then married another woman? I tried to figure out by myself about the world, attentive to all the little clues, a word dropped here or there, a photograph in the sala, the inscription on a tombstone. I was a good detective.
Especially intriguing were the stories about the ‘outside’ children, those children born out of wedlock, that sometimes were recognized by the father, and given part of his last name even though he was married to someone else. And who were the children who came to visit my great-aunt and were received only in the hadrei, the front room?
I wondered who else had those hidden children, that lived in another hemisphere, as it were, who were not part of the social group I grew up in, and yet were in my school with me. And how could Yaya, who had been my mother’s beloved nanny when they lived in Cuba, have had a daughter of her own, who had died long ago, but whose children would come to visit their grandmother Yaya in the yard at Skarlo, where she lived when my grandparents returned to Curacao?
One way for me to figure out the secrets of the adults was through my father’s films. There was that that young, engaged couple he filmed kissing each other passionately at the North Coast with its wild waves splashing against the rocks, a couple I understood was no longer together. I asked to see the movie again and again, as if the shots in the film would explain to me how such painful things could happen.
And I would often ask Papi to show the movie The Flight of Love, that stars with a scene in which a woman sits alone, rocking herself in an old bentwood rocking chair, with her hair painted gray. It was filmed on the veranda of the plantation house of Brievengat that was in ruins at that time.
I still remember the filming of that movie; it was before my brother was born. The writer Sientje van Iterson, a friend of the family, was there too. She had written the script of the film, and her daughter, my best friend Foyita and I sat in what was left of the arches of the old plantation house where Mami took our photo as we sang the Dutch song: twee kleine kleutertjes die zaten op een hek – two (it was really three in the song) little toddlers were sitting on a fence. We were a bit bored with the filming.
In the film a woman’s voice plaintively reads a poem by a famous English poet, that I found out years later, was Shelley. Pappie filmed a shrub with its leaves falling, that Mammie was shaking to make believe there was a storm, then Mammie threw an old kerosene lamp to the ground, just in front of the woman in the rocking chair, as Pappie filmed the shattering lamp of the poem, followed by sheets of music flying off in the wind, to suggest the forgotten melodies from a broken lute that is also mentioned in the poem.
At another scene, you see the woman, now her hair is brown, not gray, embracing a man on the old “slave-bridge” in the dense groves of fruit trees at the Sorsaka plantation. Just a little while later, he walks away, leaving her all alone on the bridge. How that old bridge, that now appears to have been built after the abolition of slavery, got another layer of meaning. As a child, I loved to go there with my parents, to try to figure out what had happened in that saddening scene.
Who were these people in the movie? Somehow, I understood, even then, that it was not just a story that Sientje had invented, but there were real people involved. As I got a little older, I found out that the woman in the film had been the mother of my friend J, who was divorced from her father, and always seemed so sad to me. And that it was she who asked my father to make the film for her, based on her beloved poem, The Flight of Love.
I begged my father to show the film, to learn more about what had happened to my friend’s mother, why she was left behind all alone on that old bridge and would sit for hours in that rocking chair with her hair painted gray.
But my father seemed embarrassed about the film, it made him feel uncomfortable. He always found excuses not to show it, and eventually told me it was falling apart, and its sprockets were broken. All that remains of it are my flashes of memory.
Not long before she died, my mother told me, that the woman who had read the poem in that mournful voice, was none other than the sister of the woman J’s father’s married after he had left her mother.
There are things that even today, I do not understand.
***
The Flight of Love
Percy Bysshe Shelley
When the lamp is shatter'd
The light in the dust lies dead--
When the cloud is scatter'd,
The rainbow's glory is shed.
When the lute is broken,
Sweet tones are remember'd not;
When the lips have spoken,
Loved accents are soon forgot.
As music and splendour
Survive not the lamp and the lute,
The heart's echoes render
No song when the spirit is mute--
No song but sad dirges,
Like the wind through a ruin'd cell,
Or the mournful surges
That ring the dead seaman's knell.
When hearts have once mingled,
Love first leaves the well-built nest;
The weak one is singled
To endure what it once possess'd.
O Love! who bewailest
The frailty of all things here,
Why choose you the frailest
For your cradle, your home, and your bier?
Its passions will rock thee
As the storms rock the ravens on high;
Bright reason will mock thee
Like the sun from a wintry sky.
From thy nest every rafter
Will rot, and thine eagle home
Leave thee naked to laughter,
When leaves fall and cold winds come.