A Soldier's Daughter Never Cries (18 page)

“She didn’t
mean
to bump the shelf; but just maybe she was unconsciously careless.

“Oh hell,” he said, getting up with a big sigh. He crumpled the newspaper in a swift sweeping gesture, walked over to the closest wastepaper basket, shoved the whole thing in, and stepped on it with his foot.

Billy and I found a wounded sparrow under the old, heavy wooden door that was the back entrance to our apartment building. We were eleven.

“It must have gotten scared and flew right into the door trying to get out,” Billy said in a sorrowful voice. It took all of his patience and coolheadedness to get the sparrow out without wounding it further. I stood behind him, jumping up and down and screaming as he lay stomach down on the sidewalk with his hands under the door. Billy directed me to fetch a shoe box upstairs.

“Put some cotton in it,” he said. “Hurry up!”

I grumbled a good deal, but returned with the box. Billy held the tiny bird in his cupped hands and gently placed it on the cotton. It wouldn’t lie still; it banged into the sides, trying to get out.

“It has a broken wing,” Billy said thoughtfully. “But maybe it’ll get fixed if it’ll sit still for a while. Maybe we can take it to the
v
é
t
é
rinaire
?”

“What are you, crazy? You think they’re going to let us take it to the
v
é
t
é
rinaire
?”

“Well, I’m keeping it,” he said with finality, which was his way with everything, once his mind was set.

“You’re a jerk,” I told him, disgusted.

Candida did not like the bird one bit. If it had been my bird she would have been more compliant. She insisted that the bird wasn’t going to live two days in that box. She said our mom’s cats would get it for sure.

I went against Billy for the hell of it, and because the sick bird gave me ammunition with which to abuse him. I didn’t really care one way or the other about the bird. The issue became a battle of wills—his against mine and Candida’s. As the bird grew weaker, continuing its miserable attempts to fly out of the box, I reveled in the fact that he was wrong and we were right.

But Billy stubbornly and silently ignored me and Candida. He went straight to our father, who was the boss (and considerably less squeamish than our mother or Candida about street animals), and got permission to keep the sparrow, at least for a few more days.

Billy put the box high up on a shelf in his closet, where the cats couldn’t climb.

After two days, the bird still would not eat and still tried to fly out of the box, bashing its wings against the sides. It made a horrible, skittering sound that attracted the cats, who sat patiently in front of Billy’s closet, waiting. Billy finally kicked the cats in the behind, and hissed them out of his room.

“How dare you kick the cats!” I said, full of self-righteousness. Ten minutes later they were back, having come through from my room to his, through the archway that had no door.

Exasperated, I told Candida to go talk to our father. She went to him on the third day and told him that Billy was torturing the bird. She said it was clearly dying and he was just prolonging its misery. Our father did not like things to take a long time to die and told Candida to get rid of it quickly and without any hoopla.

It must have been a Saturday because my bedroom seemed particularly bright and sunny, not long with shadows like a late, after-school afternoon. Billy and I were arguing over G.I. Joe’s jeep—Barbie wanted to take it for a spin but G.I. Joe wasn’t in the mood to comply—when Candida suddenly walked through holding something between her hands, at arm’s length. It was the sparrow, twirling round and round in frantic, quivering pirouettes.

Candida had pierced it through the eyes with a long sewing needle. She was holding the pin horizontally at both ends while the sparrow spun round and round the pin. Her pale, angular face displayed no emotion, neither pleasure nor horror, just a flatness, which horrified me.

Billy and I stood up at once, staring at the poor, blinded sparrow.

“It was dying,
pobrecito
,” Candida said in a toneless voice. “I’m putting it out of its misery.”

Billy backed away from the sight, turned completely white. He headed for the bathroom in slow motion, stiff like a sleepwalker. I found him kneeling around the toilet with his face in the bowl.

For days the sight of food made him blanch and he would not eat.

“The bird was dying, Billy,” our father said in a soft earnest tone. He had no idea, and Billy never said one word about what we’d seen.

The memory left a terrible itch in my lower abdomen, like a hand tickling me from the inside. I felt Candida had betrayed me, although I knew I was to blame—and for a long time I could not look her in the eyes.

Candida met Mamadou about a year later, on the way to the market. He was the manservant and chauffeur of our new neighbor, a high-ranking diplomat who’d spent years in the Belgian Congo.

It took Mamadou three months to work up the nerve to ask Candida if he could help her carry her groceries back to our house. Then they began to go to church together on Sundays. Mamadou was as religious as Candida; he’d been converted by a zealous Catholic missionary who’d taught him to read and write in French.

Six months passed before Mamadou formally asked her out. He’d asked his
patron’s
permission to take Candida for a spin in the black Citroën with government plates. It was spring and they packed a picnic. They went all the way to Fontainebleau before they stopped to eat at a picnic area that had wooden tables and benches under large chestnut trees. “I can drive very fast and no policeman will stop me,” Mamadou said proudly, “because of the diplomatic plates.”

Eventually, Mamadou took to visiting our kitchen. He’d sit and watch while Candida moved swiftly and expertly about the small space. It was immediately apparent to Billy and me that Mamadou was in love. He’d gaze at Candida admiringly, ask her for recipes, as though her cuisine was the most elegant and important thing in the world.

They did not talk much. Their conversations were mostly about the weather and the state of affairs in France. Their information came only from the trashy gossip papers, which made them experts on the private lives of the rich and famous—who’d had an abortion and who’d been arrested for drunk driving.

Mamadou was a handsome man. He had delicate features, large eyes that were shockingly black, and shockingly white. His skin was not murky like coffee, but like a polished onyx stone, so black that it gleamed in the light.

Billy and I were fascinated by the palms of his hands and his nails, which were so pink in comparison to the rest of him that they seemed unreal, dyed. His hands were a different black than his face, blue black. We liked to touch his palms and fingertips, at which he laughed complacently.

His attentions caused Candida to blush furiously, leading us to believe she might be a little in love as well. Altogether, we thought, and our parents thought, that it was a perfect match.

After six more months of this very spiritual courtship, Mamadou proposed.

He went to my father first, in his funereal Sunday church suit. On a weekday morning, while Candida was out shopping, he climbed the musty back stairwell of our apartment building to the third floor, which was my father’s office.

My father wasn’t the least surprised. He was, in fact, extremely relieved and pleased. He called my mother on the intercom and told her the good news. Within a few minutes, she joined them.

They discussed the arrangements. My father told Mamadou that as a wedding present, he’d buy them the old concierge’s apartment on the ground floor which had heen empty for some time. He offered to hire Mamadou but said he probably wouldn’t be able to pay him as much as the French diplomat did. Mamadou said he’d already talked to his
patron
and that it was decided that he’d still be the diplomat’s chauffeur, but no longer his manservant. Instead, he would take on some duties in our house.

My mother put in her two cents. “You know, Mamadou, Candida is like a young girl—”

“I know, Madame.” He looked down at the floor.

“All right, that’s all I wanted to say,” said my mother. A salary was agreed upon for Mamadou and they all shook hands. My father sent him back downstairs with my mother to wait for Candida.

Candida refused him. No one knows what words passed between them; Candida would never say. That afternoon, a heavy, uncomfortable silence descended on our house and remained for several days. It was as though someone had passed away. Candida, pale and silent, did not cry but attacked her work with a vengeance. She scrubbed behind the refrigerator and under the washing machine, and other such places that had never been cleaned before.

Soon afterward, Mamadou’s diplomat was called back into service and they moved away and were never seen again.

I asked her once, some time later, why she’d said no to Mamadou. She shrugged offhandedly and looked away.

I pressed her. “Come on, Didi. You always tell me everything.”

“Maria was teasing me,” she said in a distant voice. “She said my mother will get a heart attack. Can you imagine? I liked him well. But I didn’t want café-au-lait babies.”

I told her she was foolish, I told her that her café-au-lait babies would have been beautiful. She shrugged heavily, as though shifting a terrible weight from one shoulder to the other.

I told my father what she’d said. He shook his head and said, “That might be part of it, but that’s not really it. She was afraid for other reasons.”