Back to Wando Passo, David Payne [little red riding hood ebook .TXT] 📗

down for having the temerity to interrupt her progress. In Charleston, she and her coachman would have been taken out and whipped. There, it was a wholly unremarkable event for them to treat a white man as an object of contempt. I did not know where I was. I felt my moorings slip.

“I wrote Clarisse and asked to meet. She suggested the opera. She said I’d know her by the flower in her hair, so there I was, Addie, in the street before Tacón’s at eight o’clock at night. The volantes rolled up as before, filled with elegant, well-dressed men and women. There was hardly a face without some shade of brown, whether of Spain or Africa—how was one to know? No one seemed to care but me. And the girls…There were scores of them, perhaps some hundreds, all dressed in the identical style, in white dresses, with lace mantillas on their shoulders, and each and every one of them, Addie, without exception, wore a flower in her hair. Madam, I was in a swivet! I turned this way and that. I was perspiring. Not to put too fine a point on it, I was sweating like a hog! Women picked up their skirts and hurried past, casting poisoned looks at me. Officers seemed prepared to draw their swords and run the madman through! And then I saw her, Addie…. No, no, at first I didn’t know it was Clarisse. You saw her—would you guess she had a drop of Negro blood? She was standing in the shadow of a pier, by torchlight, laughing, Addie, this beautiful, elegant young woman dressed in evening dress, laughing at my frantic exercise. I went up to her, and I was fuming. Do you understand? I meant to give it to her straight, no water and no ice! Yet she couldn’t stop. She tried to stop. She’d hold her breath for ten or fifteen seconds, but then she’d look at me and that would set her off again. And I don’t know what it was, Addie, even now, I truly don’t, but after two or three such volleys, I started laughing, too. We stood there shaking, literally shaking in the street before Tacón’s, as the glittering crowd flowed past, giving us wide berth. We were racked with laughter for five minutes, five minutes and a half, before we introduced ourselves or spoke a single word. And what am I to tell you—I’d never had such an encounter with a woman in my life, nor have I since. And when we finally recovered and began to speak, it was not in the diffident and tentative way of new acquaintances; it was as though we’d known each other all our lives. I spoke to her about my mother, Addie, whom I never speak about….”

“Certainly not to me…”

“No, Addie, you’re right, not to you or anyone, and hardly to myself. Yet, with Clarisse, in the first quarter of an hour, I told the story of her illness and death. I felt some permission, and as I spoke, her eyes brimmed with tears. I saw she understood what that had been to me, a boy of five. We were still there in the gallery, walking up and down, at intermission, and when the final curtain fell. It was as if no time had passed at all. It seemed innocent, Addie. I didn’t call it love. It was weeks before I called it that. I only knew a sense of buoyancy had stolen over me. It was as if, finally, I’d discovered what living was, and I was grateful and didn’t ask its name….”

“And can you possibly imagine I wish to hear this?” she asks him wretchedly. “Is it your intention to torture me?”

“No, my dear. No, Addie, not at all.” He sits beside her on the bed and tries to take her hands, but she refuses. “My sole intention is to make you understand what happened, how it’s led to the predicament we’re in. May I go on?”

“Yes, yes,” she says. “Yes, if I must hear it, and I suppose I must.”

There is tenderness in his expression now, tenderness, compassion, and regret. “You see, Addie, when I look into your eyes,” he says, “I see suspicion and distaste. I see a person I don’t like or want to be, yet fear I am, have always feared I was. I’ve helped to put that image there, I know. But, in Clarisse’s eyes, I saw someone strong and capable, someone generous and full of life, who made her laugh. With her, I saw a person I’ve never been but always wanted to believe I might become. Perhaps you’ve never had such feelings, Addie. If you have, I don’t deceive myself they were for me.”

This is the help you’re to receive…. The voice she heard with Jarry on the horse ride through the swamp comes back, and now the nerve is struck. And so, as Harlan speaks, she listens with a double mind.

“It was the most shattering thing that’s ever happened in my life,” he continues. “And this went on. Day by day, it grew. And there came a point when it appeared to me that there was no way back. I decided to forgo my inheritance and stay with her in Cuba, and I was happy in the contemplation of that life. I asked Clarisse to be my wife. It never dawned on me that she might hesitate, and yet she did. She said, ‘I love you, Harlan, but there are things I haven’t shared with you, important things, things I’ve been afraid to say. I see that you must know them now.’

“‘Tell me, then,’ I said. ‘For God’s sake, tell me now.’

“But she shook her head and put her finger to my lips. She whispered, ‘Shhh. There are some things you can speak, and others you can only show.’

“That weekend, we traveled to Matanzas, out to the plantation. Her half brother had inherited La Mella and ran it as