My Little Wooden Cross (Pictures and Memories)

Pictures and Memories

It was the eve of Holy Saturday, and people, keeping the vigil of the feast, were preparing for Easter.

The feasts in Latin America are "feasts" in their deep Christian meaning: feasts of worship, of celebrating the memory of the Nazarene's birth, his crucifixion, and his passion. The people there do not know the meaning of "showing off" at the feasts; they do not take the holy days as occasions for swaggering with volleys of gunfire, or for parading airs of heroism, or for cutting a figure in the eyes of the "qabadays" of the other communities.

Easter, there, is reverence, prayer, and worship. The processions cross the city streets with flowers and incense, in silence, and the great men of the state — presidents, ministers, judges, deputies, physicians — walk bareheaded, escorting the memorial bier. And whenever the procession reaches one of the quarters, it halts before the house of a lady known for piety and virtue; and there stands a platform which a girl mounts, representing the Magdalene... a slender figure draped in black, long fair hair, and a sweet, angelic voice chanting passages of the loveliest that the genius of Italy's artists has poured forth in the lament of the greatest lover for the greatest beloved.

★

It was the eve of Holy Saturday.

And I lay stretched on a bed in the Matarazzo Hospital, while a low, dull, unrelenting, stubborn fever — the kind that the germs in the well water of the distant inland villages present to people's bodies — gnawed at my patience, my endurance, my power of resistance, and my wish that the worms of Lebanon, not the worms of the emigrant land, should one day eat my body.

I had no cause to complain of exile in Brazil, where I had families of kinsfolk whom I loved and who held me dear, and women friends who surrounded me with every kind of care. I had no cause to complain of isolation and loneliness in Brazil, where I had five cousins with whom I had been brought up in one house; I had carried the little ones of them on my arms, and their memory was mingled with all the memories of my youth and my first girlhood... And no sooner was I struck by the calamity of my brother's murder than they closed round me, a canopy of hearts that pitied and showed mercy, that grieved and consoled.

I was entering the hospital for the third time, and — over and above the illness — I was wearied by the trouble I had brought upon my people. I remembered that we were on the eve of the feast, and that my cousin would leave the affairs of her house and her children and come to visit me; so I dragged myself to where the telephone was, asked for the number, and said:

"Adla! Adoul! God be with you, cousin. I am well. Don't come today. No! Don't leave your house, God bless you. Come tomorrow, or the day after; but today, do me the kindness of not coming."

I went back to my room with her voice in my ears. It seemed to me that in her voice were gathered all the voices of the quarter where I grew up: the voices of the birds waking at dawn, the voices of the roaring waves in the middle of the night, the voices of my mother, my brothers, my daughter...

I took to my bed, aching with a thousand and one memories, while memories of tragedy upon tragedy pressed upon my throat; and outside, the rains were pouring down like brooks and streams.

★

In the room I had occupied when I entered the hospital the second time there was an icon of Jesus, very like our icons in the East. I used to take comfort in it, gazing at it long and addressing my secret prayers to the spirit of Him whose image it was — above all on a night when my condition worsened and I thought myself going... When I returned to the hospital the third time, the Italian benefactress, Mrs. Matarazzo, who superintended the hospital's affairs, had replaced these icons with modern statuettes of the new porcelain manufacture. My share, in my room, was a small statuette representing a beautiful woman with eyebrows lifted toward the temples, eyes following the eyebrows in their upward slant, and cheeks and an upturned mouth on which the artist had tried to bestow the beauty of the cinema girls. I hated this statuette, and I would ask Sister Susanna

to bring me the old-style icon of Jesus from room 264; and she would answer that the old icons had all been taken away and replaced by these modern statuettes — then she would laugh and say: "We must be 'à la mode'..."

That week the tender-hearted physician, Dr. Wadih Safadi, decided that I must have a companion to pass the night with me; so Sister Susanna brought me a young Japanese woman who had taken her nursing diploma and entered the school of midwifery. I agreed with her that she would pass the night in my room, and might sleep — since no vigil was needed — for 1,500 piasters a night.

At the pension where I had been staying before my illness there was a black woman called Alta — that is, "Aliyeh" — who did the washing and ironing of clothes. She lived with her old mother and her daughter in a wooden hut built in the pension's garden. After I entered the hospital she went on looking after my clothes, and visited me at night when her work was done.

She visited me one evening — before Easter week — and saw the Japanese nurse in a second bed; she was asleep, snoring an unpleasant snore, like a laborer who has spent his whole day carrying loads. She asked me who the girl was, and when she learned that she slept in my room and charged me 1,500 piasters a night, she knitted her brows and turned down her lips.

She came back to me the next morning, when the Japanese girl had gone off to her lessons, and burst out the moment she entered:

"I did not sleep all night. I could not bear to see you 'exploited' like this. I have just spoken with Sister Susanna, and she said you only need a companion to pass the night in your room and call the nun for you if your condition should require prompt treatment. I will take this girl's place. Pay me what you will, or pay nothing; I and my mother and my daughter do not forget you. Send the Japanese girl away from tonight."

*

I return to the eve of Holy Saturday, the hour when the rains were pouring down like the brooks and the streams. I began repeating that verse of that French poet:

It rains in my heart
as it rains on the plain.

And the tragedy of my life came rolling back, followed by the tragedy of an emigration that was to have been a short journey of four months — then war was declared, and here I am in the fifth year.

And the tragedy of my brother's murder came rolling back — that poor man who was called "father of the poor," who for forty years had done good to the wretched classes, laborers and black slaves,

and whom three black men repaid by slaughtering him as one slaughters a hen. And I began cursing that ungrateful black hand which had robbed me of the one man who was to have sheltered my days.

And suddenly the door opened.

Before the door stood a paravent — a draft screen — that protected me from the currents of air when the door was opened. Aliyeh's head appeared, the water streaming from her dress. She went into the bathroom adjoining my room, and in a moment had taken off her dress and put on a coat she used to wear at night over a transparent shift that showed the build of her beautiful, strong black body. Then she took off her soaked shoes, put on slippers, came up beside my bed, and, with much shyness, opened her modest handbag and drew from it something wrapped in one of those thin papers in which holiday gifts are wrapped.

She said in a low voice:

"Forgive me, Dona Salma. Tomorrow is the feast, and I wanted to bring you a small present.

"I have heard you asking, more than once, for a picture of Jesus — like the one that was in room 264. I went down to the market and searched a long while for a gift that would please you and that my hand could reach. I found this wooden cross. In the gift shop there were crosses far more beautiful, but I had only fifty piasters. So I have brought it to you. Will you accept it from me?"

And I took the cross — a piece of walnut wood bearing a crucified figure of lead. I took the cross from the hand of this black woman whose race and kin — and every black hand God ever created — I had been cursing but a minute before; and before raising it to my lips I took that black head between my hands and kissed "Aliyeh" — kissed her hair and her forehead and her cheeks — and poured out my soul before that black woman who had brought me the symbol of forgiveness for the white and the red and the yellow and the black...

And I broke into a fit of sobbing and throbbing, into a burst of pent-up grief, into the leap of a thankful soul toward that unknown inspiration which had moved a servant, a stranger to me, to bring me, under the pelting rains, the symbol of that love which no love equals, the symbol of a purity no purity approaches, the symbol of the friend of the sorrowful and the sick, the forsaken and the strangers.

It entered Aliyeh's mind that I was in the grip of an attack — and how was she to understand how so small a gift could work such an effect? — so she ran calling Sister Susanna, who came with the medicine needle, thinking in her turn that I was having a "fit." I spoke to her in French of the cause of my emotion, and she made the sign of the cross and kissed the crucifix hanging on her breast; then she said to my black friend:

"There is nothing wrong with Dona Salma, Alta. She is weeping because she is happy. She feels now the one happiness that none but Jesus gives."