by Chris Gilmer
(with a debt to The Wide Sargasso Sea and Jane Eyre, and for all Antoinettes--especially my own--because the past earns us a future)
My name is Antoinette Mason, but names are not important since they only imprison with temporal bars a race of sufferers which God has given to the devil. The only important thing about my name is that I did not choose it, just as I did not choose the life which it has come to represent. Antoinette was almost my mother's name.
I am Bertha to him, because he knows that I hate to be, but I am not Bertha Rochester. To the rest of the world, I am the daughter of the crazy off-white woman who was raped by her keeper. She was weak, but I am stronger, though still not strong enough to say, "I am not your Bertha or your Antoinette. I am not the crazy woman's daughter, but in some ways a more tortured reincarnation." I have said it with fire and curses, with vampire's fangs and hot sexual embraces, but I have not said it in words, the only language which the ignorant can ever hope to understand.
Names are not important to me, but they are vital instruments of comfort and torture to the flesh without soul world in which I live. The man who owns my body loves names, so that is why I never gave him one. I love and hate my husband, but mostly hate him. I can scarcely remember his face now as I lie awake in this third-story prison room where my guard hoards and sleeps, and my mind tries hard to hold onto the world by remembering the savage colors of an image which long ago blurred. "I opened my eyes, everybody was looking up and pointing at Coco on the glacis railings with his feathers alight. He made an effort to fly down but his clipped wings failed him and he fell screeching. He was all on fire." Yes, I remember the day my mother died. She had been dying for quite a long time, and then she found Mr. Mason who saved her from death once, only to send her crashing to the ground like a flaming parrot. My mother died as damned brothers and sisters who could not quite touch the sibling connection of it all burned the house, the home, the soul, of their damned off-white sister. I learned from the ashes that one of the first gifts which we are given, along with the milk from our mothers' breasts, is a hate for anyone or anything which is different. I learned that the oppressed can become the oppressor, and that the savagery is no less savage. My husband will learn that lesson well. The woman who cried for us showed me the human sadness which we feel as victims of ourselves, if we allow ourselves to feel at all.
I was sick for a long time after Tia broke my heart and my head with the rock, and the only person who ever really gave a damn about me--the one who looked death in the face and cursed it with "never a drop of sangoree to cool your burning tongue"--sang about being set free. I slept before the end of the song, and I am dreaming now in my lonely attic where the keeper is sitting at her table. I have gone back to Aunt Cora's room where the sunlight casts shadows of leaves onto the floor like the shadows of warm light which begin to flood my consciousness. The longer I stay in the world of this room, the harder it becomes for me to know when I am sleeping and when I am awake. All of time springs to life in each and every moment, and journeys of the mind and journeys of the flesh become as impossible to separate as the subtle shades of yellow at the end of a lighted candle. All of time springs to death in each and every moment. I see a wall of fire protecting me, and I know that the only way to make the world pure and honest is to make it hot. Surely my mother did not hate me the last time that she pushed me away; my flesh must have burned her like a truth which she did not wish to know.
A starving boy imprisoned in the body of a man longed for a father; a girlish woman craved a mama her mother could never be. The man who made loud animal love to a whorish maid in my bed was no more able to heal me than I was able to become what I could not become. I wanted him to be more than he was, and he wanted me to be less than I am. Now I allow a creature more hideous than what they made me to hold me captive in a world which I could easily escape. I am afraid to escape. The prison of my husband's body is much larger than mine, though the prison of his mind is smaller, inescapable.
Christophine loves me like a doll, and my mother is being raped somewhere, maybe in heaven. The man who calls himself my English brother has blood which is bland to the taste, and Mr. Mason went to hell for thinking that he loved the crazy woman and her reflection. My name is Bertha Antoinette Mason Rochester, and I live out a life of lies which they have created about me. Maybe sometimes I tell the worst lies of all by believing theirs. Only a heat more powerful than that which freed Coulibri from its zombie pain can make us honest and pure. I wonder if maybe everyone is a little crazy and a little sane. Truth is like hell on a summer afternoon.