We are two and we are one. But then, there is nothing really strange in
dreams.
--Jorge Louis Borges
The duality of dreams, acknowledged by Borges and Freud, is integral to
my novel-in-progress. I had been thinking about this novel for several
years; what I could not come up with was the form, which is always my
starting point. I knew that there were two voices, two stories. One
belonged to my great aunt, the other to the Barbadian maid who had raised
me since infancy (she had actually worked for my aunt before she came to
live with us). I also knew that these two stories had to be told together,
at least during the dream sequence. I thought of alternating chapters, of
alternating sections, even of alternating pages. Nothing seemed quite
right. Then I had my own dream.
I dreamt that I was reading the book I wanted to write. I held it in my
hands (I dreamt it in hard cover), opened to somewhere near the middle.
What I saw on the page was this: two lines of type and a space, two lines
and a space, two lines and a space . . . and so on down the page. Each line
told a different story, in a different voice. They were the two voices I
knew, but it was up to me to choose which story I wanted to follow,
skipping alternate lines. Sometimes my eye slipped, and I read the line
below; sometimes I'd catch a glimpse of a few words written on the line
above, and my attention would be drawn to the other story. No matter how
hard I tried, I could not keep the two stories separate, and I was always
somehow conscious of the other story being told. I remember saying to
myself: That's exactly what you've been looking for! But by the time
you wake up you'll have forgotten the whole thing! Which was exactly
what happened.
A few days later a composer friend invited me to a recital. He and two
other composers were presenting new pieces. Sometime during the performance
one of the composers wheeled in two sets of speakers, two sets of hi-fi
equipment, and he set them up on either side of the stage. He announced the
title of his piece as something or other recorded on two tracks, and he
turned on both sets of equipment. It was street sounds--car horns and
brakes and bootsteps on the sidewalk--and it was pretty awful. But in the
middle of all the noise my dream came back to me. When I got home I went
straight to my desk. After a couple minutes I'd come up with this:
L(V) L L/V:V/L V V(L)
My novel-in-progress is called Blessed is the Fruit, and it is set
on the West Indian island of Corpus Christi. It is told in the voices of
two island women, both in their mid-fifties: one is a black maid, Velma,
and the other is her white mistress, Lila. Velma comes from dire poverty,
near starvation, and Lila is the descendant of the once wealthy British
plantocracy. Not long after Lila's husband leaves, Velma comes to work for
her. The two women have lived alone for thirty years in a large old
colonial house, which is rotting and falling down around them. They have
become dependent upon one another, though they do not quite realize the
extent of their dependency when the book opens. For several months Velma
has kept secret from her mistress the fact that she is pregnant, even at
her advanced age. Velma knows that should Lila discover her pregnancy, she
will send her home, back to poverty and starvation. Velma "binds her belly"
every morning to hide the pregnancy, and she makes several unsuccessful
attempts to abort the child--from the pharmacist's drugs to bush-medicine
to spells of "obeah" magic. Finally Velma makes a desperate, brutal attempt
to abort the child with a wire coat-hanger. Lila discovers her wounded,
near dead from loss of blood; she carries Velma upstairs into her own
bedroom (Lila's private sanctuary, where Velma has never been allowed
entrance in all the years she has lived in the house). Lila brings a doctor
who treats Velma's wounds.
The story is about these two women's acceptance of the child as their own;
their acceptance of responsibility for the child as its figurative parents.
When the novel opens (and when it closes) the two women are Iying together
in the big bed in Lila's room. Velma is sleeping peacefully after the
doctor's sedative. Lila is awake, and the first third of the novel is told
in her voice, her monologue. She tells of her life with Velma, of her life
with her husband, and of her childless, failed marriage. Finally Lila tells
of her childhood as the daughter of a sugar plantation owner, including the
failure of the sugar industry in the Caribbean. (Lila's portion of the
novel proceeds backward chronologically.)
For the middle third of the book Lila falls asleep, and the narrative is
subsumed by the simultaneous dream of Velma and Lila: the voices merge,
cross over. This dream, however, is really the fetus' dream--the fetus'
dream of its figurative parents who are these two women. (This fictional
device actually has a medical precedent: physicians report that they have
identified REM movements in unborn infants, so fetuses do in fact
dream.)
Velma awakens, and the final third of the novel is told in her voice.
Velma's story begins with the poor village where she was raised by her
grandmother and several aunts (not knowing her father, and scarcely knowing
her mother). She tells of her brutal treatment by various men and, one by
one, of the deaths of her four children (the excerpt that follows comes
from this time in her life). It is only after Velma reaches utmost despair
and attempts suicide that she is given the servant's job with Lila, and she
leaves her village to work for this wealthy white woman. Velma's narrative
proceeds chronologically toward the present--the scene with which the novel
opens--with these two women Iying together for the first time in Lila's
large bed, and the baby still alive in Velma's womb.
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