Madame Clem

Staying with Madame Clem.

The wisdom of 84 years close to the soil surrounds her, though she is almost never still, the first to rise in the morning, she spends her day cooking, tending the banana-grove, a small bean crop, her herbs, missing nothing that happens in this household of at least 16 people.  Probably not a lot escapes her in the district of several thousand... with nine children, and more grandchildren and great-grandchildren than bear counting, she still has time for the most distant cousin, the stray foreigner, the kitten venturing for the first time from next door. 

Her face is deeply creased but not wrinkled, her knuckle-joints are scarcely more enlarged than someone of 60; she stands up from her ten-inch-high cooking chair with the ease of a young woman, and goes down from the gallery at the front of the house with alternate feet, never hesitating and placing both feet on a step as the old usually do. She loves a new hat or shirt and twirls it like a girl, still tall, still a queen. What burned away in eighty cycles of this troubled earth left her the peaceful strength of ages  - was she born one of the wise ones? Will I achieve the same in any measure?

We sat, not speaking much, for a while in her smoke-filled wattle-and-daub outside-kitchen, I on the old log by the door where half the village stops, from dawn to dusk, for advice or tea or left-overs. She shifts a pot of pois-noirs, the soupy black bean dish that is almost  the daily menu, and stirs coffee beans as they cool in the broken pot she has just used to roast them, tilted on it's side so none are lost through the hole in the bottom. The chicken coop is behind the fire, where the hens roost at night, otherwise this room contains some loose firewood, some bark and shavings in a box the hens also roost in, a few spare stones to prop the basket she carries out from the house daily, with her pots, a knife, some coarse rock salt... There is the small chair and the "pilon" mortar and pestle for the coffee  and cocoa, and of course the three-stone fire with the three logs that are pushed inwards to the centre  as they burn. It's only semi-light despite the open spaces at the tops of the walls and the wavering shafts of sun where there are holes in the tin roof. 

When someone called my name I stood up to go out  - Mme Clem waved to me to wait, and lifted a broken pot from an old shelf, handing me a just-layed white egg from behind it, calling me "sister" as she pushed me gently out the door. Even I, virtually a professional expatriate, am overcome for a minute with the feeling of being at home... This is the centre of the family, the village, the heart.