“I was ten” she spoke perfect English. It was like her memories came falling down on her shoulders with a dreadful force. And I knew how that felt, it felt exactly like the shipwreck I spoke about when I started telling you this story. The woman I was holding in my arms was now a ship hit by a storm of emotions and hurt, turning into the little girl I listened in that tape. Watching me go away must have taken her back to those fears; the fear of losing someone you care for.

“Stay here, please” she asked me wiping her tears. She calmed down.

“I am not going anywhere”

We spent the whole night talking about how she got on that island, for how long she had been there and how come she seemed to suddenly speak a perfect English. I came to know that her parents were two explorers; his father was famous, a “brave man” she said, and was known in the whole country for his discovers and how he also fought for African-American rights. She had been on that island for twenty-two years, which meant that she was 32-years-old now. Her English didn’t sound like the one a little girl usually speaks, because, as she told me, when their parents died she spent her days reading all their books; this must have taken years, because she knew a lot of grownup words, you know, the ones that are so difficult to understand or even pronounce.

And that’s how she coped. By reading what their parents discovered. The inheritance left to their dear daughter.

“I don’t know, I guess it just came all of a sudden” Bette said.

“What do you mean?”

“I mean, these memories. I think that maybe I just put them aside. Totally forgetting about who I was. Even the language. Look at me, listen to me. I am far from what I showed you this morning and the past months. I feel like a complete different person”

“You are not so different from who I’ve known so far” I smiled. “You just talk a lot now”

This made her laugh. Then she got serious again: “I miss them, you know”

I kept quiet, letting her talk.

“It’s like I had been living my life in total denial…” she surely knew how to talk. Not even Henry knew what denial meant. Her parents clearly did a good job raising her. “I had to erase, eradicate my memories in order not to kill myself when the thought of not seeing them anymore became too unbearable. I kind of make myself forget my past, my language, my identity” and that’s how after some years Bette became the Bette I’ve met some months before.
And I needed to know more, I wanted to know what really happened.