“My Little Wooden Cross” (A Story)

It was the eve of the Saturday of Light, and the people, in the vigil of the feast, were making ready for Easter.

The feasts in Latin America are “feasts” in their deep Christian meaning — feasts of worship and of keeping the memory of the Nazarene's birth, His crucifixion, and His passion. The people there do not know the meaning of swagger at feast time; they do not take the holy days as occasions for showing off with volleys of gunfire, or for strutting in displays of heroics, or for rubbing sour grapes into the eyes of the toughs of the other sects.

Easter, there, is reverence, prayer, and worship. The processions move through the streets of the city 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 a quarter of the city, 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 most beautiful things the genius of Italy's artists has poured forth in lament of the greatest love for the greatest Beloved.

★

It was the eve of the Saturday of Light.

And I lay on a bed in the Matarazzo hospital, while there gnawed at my patience, my endurance, my powers of resistance — and at my wish that my body be eaten one day by the worms of Lebanon, not the worms of the emigrant lands — a low, witless fever, unending, obstinate, of the kind that the germs of the well water in the far villages of the Borór bestow upon people's bodies.

I had no cause to complain of exile in Brazil, where I had whole families of kinsfolk who loved me and doted on me, and women friends who surrounded me with every kind of care. I had no cause to complain of isolation and desolation in Brazil, where I had five cousins with whom I had been reared in one house; I had carried the youngest of them in my arms, and their memory was mingled with all the memories of my girlhood and my first youth... And when I was stricken by my brother's murder, they closed around me — a mass of hearts that pitied and showed mercy, that grieved with me and consoled me.

I was entering the hospital for the third time, and I was weighed down — beyond the illness — by the trouble I had brought upon my own 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! Adloul! God be with you, cousin. I am well. Don't come to me today. No! Don't leave your house, God bless you. Come tomorrow, or the day after; but today you will be doing me a kindness if you do not come.

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 roar of the waves in the middle of the night, the voices of my mother and my brothers and my daughter...

I took to my bed, one memory and another paining me, memories of tragedy upon tragedy tightening about my throat, while outside the rains poured down like the waters of 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 confidences to the spirit of Him it portrayed — especially on one night when my condition worsened and I thought myself going... When I returned to the hospital for the third time, the Italian benefactress, Signora Matarazzo, who oversaw 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 of a beautiful woman with eyebrows lifted toward the temples, eyes that followed the brows in their upward slant, and cheeks and an upturned nose on which the artist had tried to confer the beauty of the cinema girls. I hated that statuette, and I kept telling Sister Susanna to bring me the old-style icon of Jesus from room 264; she would answer that the old icons had all been taken down and replaced by these statuettes — then she would laugh

and say: We must become “à la mode.”

That week the tender-hearted physician, Dr. Wadih Safadi, decided that I must have a companion to spend the night with me; so Sister Susanna brought me a young Japanese woman who had taken her nursing certificate and entered the school of midwives. I agreed with her that she would spend the night in my room — and she might sleep, since there was no need to keep vigil — 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, Aliya — 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 garden. After I entered the hospital she went on caring for my clothes, and would visit 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, asleep, snoring a disturbing snore, like a laborer who had 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 knit her brows and curled her lips.

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

— I haven't slept all night. I could not bear to see you “exploited” like this. I have just spoken with Sister Susanna, and she says you only need a companion to spend the night in your room and call the nun for you if your condition should require quick treatment. I will take that girl's place. Pay me what you like, 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 the Saturday of Light, the hour when the rains were pouring down like the brooks and like the streams. I began repeating that line of that French poet:

il pleut dans mon cœur
comme il pleut sur la plaine.

And the tragedy of my life came surging 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 there surged back the tragedy of my brother's murder — that poor man who was called “the father of the poor,” who for forty years had done good to the wretched classes, laborers and black slaves; and three black men repaid him by slaughtering him as one slaughters a hen. And I began to curse that ungrateful black hand which had robbed me of the one man who was supposed to shelter my days.

Suddenly the door opened.

Before the door stood a paravent, a screen against drafts, shielding me from the currents of air whenever the door opened; and Aliya'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 thin shift that showed the build of her beautiful, strong black body.

Then she took off her soaked shoes and put on slippers, and came to my bedside, and with much shyness opened her modest bag and drew out something wrapped in one of those sheets of fine paper in which holiday gifts are wrapped.

She said in a low voice:

— Forgive me, Dona Salma. The feast is tomorrow, and I wanted to bring you a small present. I have heard you ask many times for a picture of Jesus — like the one that was in room 264. I went down to the market and searched a long while to find a gift that would please you and that my hand could reach. I found this wooden cross. There were crosses in the gift shop far more beautiful than this one, but I had only fifty piasters; so I have brought you this. 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 a minute before; and before raising it to my lips I took that black head between my hands and kissed Aliya — kissed her hair, her brow, 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 fell into a fit of gasping sobs and throbbing — into a release of pent-up grief, into the leap of a grateful spirit toward that unknown inspiration which had moved a black servant woman, a stranger to me, to bring, under the pelting rains, the symbol of that love which no love equals, the symbol of the purity no purity approaches, the symbol of the Friend of the sorrowful and the sick, the forsaken and the strangers.

It entered Aliya's mind that I was under the influence of a fit — and how was she to understand that a small gift could have such an effect? — so she ran off calling Sister Susanna, who came with the medicine needle, thinking in her turn that I was having an “attack.” 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 said to my black friend:

— There is nothing wrong with Dona Salma, “Alta.” She is weeping because she is happy. She is feeling now the only happiness that none but Jesus gives.