Now he could roar out Breen’s encomium by rote
because of his son’s sacrifice in a battle.
The apple of his pride bobbed in his wattled throat,
with a cannonade of a cough, something between a death-rattle
and a wavering sob. He taught Maud to say it by heart:
“When we consider the weighty interest involved in the issss …
ue…” (there was always a spray of spittle with this part,
as the sibilants reared with an adder’s warning hiss),
“Whereby the mighty projects of the coalesced powers
were annihilated and Britain’s dominion on the seas
secured…” Maud recited it to the yellow allamandas
as if they were fleurs-de-lys, as her clicking secateurs
beheaded them into a basket and up the stone stairs.
He found his Homeric coincidence.
“Look, love, for instance,
near sunset, on April 12, hear this, the Ville de Paris
struck her colours to Rodney. Surrendered. Is this chance
or an echo? Paris gives the golden apple, a war is
fought for an island called Helen?”—clapping conclusive hands.
He saw the boy’s freckled face, the forehead turning
under the thatch of red hair, the blue eyes, plum lips,
and, without the full cotton middy, the burning
shoulders raw from the heat, and the other midships
ranged on these iron steps. Some, inaudibly, laughed,
facing the sun’s lens. They were buffing sword-handles
with cleaning fluid, like the droppings of a swift
on a statue’s head, or like Maud’s dinner-candles,
all of them wondering how much time they had left
in the sun near the shade of the tanks, each feature
repeating the same half-naked, shadowy grin,
in a sepia album; he crouched with them there,
holding his Enfield, a tin basin to piss in
under his raw knee and the grinning boy was where
they all were now. In their stone waves, the home shire
of the sun-crossed Armistices, where a bugler
with a golden cord suddenly snaps its tassels
under an arm. And Mortimer, and Glendower,
and Tumbly and Scott, their sadly echoing souls
faded over the desert with its finest hour,
no longer privates, midshipmen, but grinning shells.
O Christ have mercy on them all! Christ forgive him,
for mockery of the midshipmen from whom home
could never be drilled, courage was out of fashion,
just as the faith had gone out from every hymn,
till only rhythm remained; and what was rhythm
if over their swinging arms there was not passion,
not only for England, but some light that led them
beyond their drill-patterns like rooks? For him, they shone
the sword hilts with rags. Not honour, but service;
the bugler’s summons not for brazen renown,
but it threaded their veins, privates and officers,
like Maud’s needles. For it, a young Plunkett would drown.
II
Since the house was on the very ground where buglers
had stood on the steps of the barracks, summoning
half-dressed soldiers from sleep, when frosted dew was
silvering the grass, they all came shouting and running
down the brick arches to the powder magazine,
because French sails were sighted on the horizon,
cries multiplied in Plunkett. Mute exclamations
of memory! Assembled ranks shouting their name
as they wriggled on braces, stamping “Sah!” Rations
for the cannon’s mouth, the black iron lizard’s flame.
Now, one of the longest barracks was the college.
He’d park in the Rover, watching young Neds and Toms
swinging their shadows but giggling at the rage
of their soprano sergeant. Fathering phantoms
like the name in the ledger, their numbers remained
when dusk slanted the barracks’ echoing arches,
with Scott’s cry and Tumbly’s, all the ones he had trained
before these cadets. The mace, flung high in marches
through the wooden streets, then flung higher overhead
and caught like an exclamation! In the night wind
the palms swayed like poplars along the Dutch marshes.
III
As the fever of History began to pass
like the vision of the island’s luminous saint,
he saw, through the Cyclops eye of the gliding glass,
over wooden waves of a naval aquatint,
a penile cannon emerge from its embrochure.
Able semen, he smiled. He had gone far enough.
He leant back, frowning, on the studded swivel chair;
then, with one hand, he spun the crested paper-knife
that stopped dead as a compass, making an old point—
that the harder he worked, the more he betrayed his wife.
So he edged the glass over the historic print,
but it magnified the peaks of the island’s breasts
and it buried stiff factions. He had come that far
to learn that History earns its own tenderness
in time; not for a navel victory, but for
the V of a velvet back in a yellow dress.
A moth hung from the beam, reversed, and the Major
watched the eyed wing: watching him, a silent witness.
He remembered the flash of illumination
in the empty bar—that the island was Helen,
and how it darkened the deep humiliation
he suffered for her and the lemon frock. Back then,
lightning could lance him with historic regret
as he watched the island through the slanted monsoon
that wrecked then refreshed her. Well, he had paid the debt.
The breakers had threshed her name with the very sound
the midshipman heard. He had given her a son.
The great events of the world would happen elsewhere.
There were those who thought his war had been the best war,
that the issues were nobler then, the cause more clear,
their nostalgia shone like the skin on his old scar.
There were dead Germans, machine-gunned near the hotels.
In History, he’d had a crypto-Fascist master
who loved German culture above everything else,
from the Royal House of Hanover to Kaiser
Wilhelm; he had given, as one of his essays,
“A few make History. The rest are witnesses.”
Beethoven’s clouds enrapt him, and Hermann Hesse’s
punctilious face. His essay had won first prize.
Chapter XX
I
By the witness of flambeaux-bottles, by the sweat
of distorted faces screaming for Workers’ Rights
on the steps of the iron market, Philoctete
peered at each candidate through the blinding arc-lights
to cresting gusts of applause for an island torn
by identical factions: one they called Marxist,
led by the barber’s son, the other by Compton
which Maljo, who took him there, called Capitalist.
In the rumshop he asked Maljo which to support.
“Me,” Maljo said, “them two men fighting for one bone.”
He’d pay his deposit, he’d rent Hector’s transport
and buy batteries for a hand-held megaphone.
His party was launched at the depot. The ribbon
was cut by the priest, its pieces saved for later
Christmas presents. In the village where he was born,<
br />
a tall cynic heckled: “Scissors can’t cut water!”
“Ciseau pas ça couper del’eau!” meaning the campaign
was a wasted effort; the candidate addressed
his barefoot followers with a glass of champagne
to toast their trust, and a megaphone which he pressed
for its crackling echo, deafening those two feet
away from him. Since every party cost money,
he marched his constituents clapping up the street
to the No Pain Café to start the ceremony.
There Seven Seas sang for them, there his good compère
Achille promised to canvas for him in the depot
during domino games. A new age would begin.
You could read its poster by the sodium glow
of a lamppost at night. Its insomniac grin
plastered on a moonlit wall with its cheering surf,
while the charter yachts slept and crabs counted the sand,
with his registered name: F. DIDIER, BORN TO SERVE,
its sign: a broken chain dangling from a black hand.
“Bananas shall raise their hands at the oppressor,
through all our valleys!” he screamed, forgetting to press
the megaphone button. They named him “Professor
Static,” or “Statics,” for short, the short-circuit prose
of his electrical syntax in which he mixed
Yankee and patois as the lethargic Comet
sputtered its sparked broadsides when the button was fixed.
As Party Distributor he paid Philoctete,
who limped in the vanguard with handouts while the crowd
shouted “Statics!” and Maljo waved. He, who was once
fisherman-mechanic, felt newly empowered
to speak for those at the backs of streets, all the ones
idling in breadfruit yards, or draping the bridges
at dusk by the clogged drains, or hanging tired nets
on tired bamboo, for shacks on twilight ridges
in the wounding dusk. Their patience was Philoctete’s.
By the Comet’s symbol he knew their time had come,
and what Philo could contribute as a member
was the limp that drove his political point home
as he hopped to Maljo’s funereal timbre,
haranguing the back streets, forgetting the button.
“Ces mamailles-là!” Statics shouted, meaning “Children!”
Then Hector would tap his knee with: “The mike not on.”
“Shit!” said the Professor with usual acumen.
II
His cripple bounced ahead, distributing pamphlets,
starching them to cars and government buildings marked:
POST NO BILLS; then Philoctete sank in the Comet’s
leopard upholstery. In the country, they parked
by a rumshop. He’d lead the clapping while Statics
shook hands, or gave a lollipop at a standpipe
to a toothless sibyl; he was learning the tricks.
To his black Lodge suit he added a corncob pipe
and MacArthur’s vow as he left: “Moi shall return.”
Power went to Statics’s head. He felt like the Pope
in his bulletproof jeep; he learnt how to atone
for their poverty, waving from the parted door
of the gliding Comet, past neglected sections,
nodding, dipping two fingers stuck with a power
that parted the sea of their roaring affections.
“This island of St. Lucia, quittez moin dire z’autres!
let me tell you is heading for unqualified
disaster, ces mamailles-là, pas blague, I am not
joking. Every vote is your ticket, your free ride
on the Titanic: a cruise back to slavery
in liners like hotels you cannot sit inside
except as waiters, maids. This chicanery!
this fried chicanery! Tell me if I lying.
Like that man hopping there, St. Lucia look healthy
with bananas and tourists, but her soul crying,
’tends ça moin dire z’autres, tell me if I lying.
I was a fisherman and it lancing my heart
at neglection-election to see my footman
wounded by factions that tearing him apart.
The United Force will not be a third party
between two parties, one Greek and the other Trojan,
both fighting for Helen: LP and WWPP,
only United Love can give you the answers!”
They drove through Roseau. He said: “Are you hearing me?”
“Yes,” Hector said. “I not sure ’bout the bananas,”
pressing the button. The Comet trawled its echo
through the emerald valleys and the indigo hills,
up rutted shortcuts and their paradisal view
of rain-weathered villages with cathedrals—
the heaven of the priest’s and politician’s vow,
and the blue sea burst his heart again and again
as Philoctete sat, with the pamphlets in his lap,
watching the island filing backwards through the pane
of his wound and the window, from Vieuxfort to Cap.
He was her footman. It was her burden he bore.
Why couldn’t they love the place, same way, together,
the way he always loved her, even with his sore?
Love Helen like a wife in good and bad weather,
in sickness and health, its beauty in being poor?
The way the leaves loved her, not like a pink leaflet
printed with slogans of black people fighting war?
III
The Comet stopped again to let off Philoctete.
They were crawling through Castries, block by crowded block.
He limped through the crowds, as the crackling megaphone
moved past the market steps.
“Ces mamailles-là, nous kai rock
Gros Îlet, the United Force giving a block-
orama till daybreak on Friday until cock
put down his saxophone and violon en sac.
All your contributions are welcome in aid of
Professor Statics’s United Force. Peace and love!”
The night of the Statics Convention Blocko it rained,
it drenched out his faith in the American-style
conviction that voters needed to be entertained.
Statics toured the fête’s debris with a wounded smile.
Beaded bouquets of balloons, soggy paper-hats,
rain-corrugated posters, the banner across
two balconies, the cardboard cartons of pamphlets,
were history this Saturday. It was their loss,
not his. A career prophesied by the Comet’s
having a ball. He laughed. He rehired Philoctete
to clean up the hall first, then distribute the wet
balloons to the kids. Then he watched him disconnect
the bunting’s wrinkling face from a stepladder
with a pronged pole. It sagged like a kite to the street.
That, from the candidate, was his final order,
pointing a warm beer in his shorts and sandalled feet.
He hugged Philoctete, who wept for their defeat.
He left as a migrant-worker for Florida.
Chapter XXI
I
The jukebox glowed in Atlantic City. Speakers
bombarded the neon of the No Pain Café.
The night flared with vendors’ coalpots, the dull week, as
it died, exploded with Cadence, Country, Reggae.
Stars burst from the barbecues of chicken and conch,
singeing the vendors’ eyes. Round their kerosene lamp
the children’s eyes widened like moons until they sank
in the hills of their mothers’ laps. Frenetic DJs
soared evangelically from the thudding vamp
of the blockorama,
“This here is Gros Îlet’s
night, United Force, garçon, we go rock this village
till cock wake up!”
The rumshops, from Midnight Hour,
Keep Cool, No Pain Café, to the high Second Stage,
with its Christmas lights winking, with decibel power
shattered the glass stars. Tourists, in seraphic white,
floated through the crowding shadows, the cooking smells,
the domino games by gas lanterns. Helen’s night.
The night Achille dreaded above everything else.
She sprinkled and ironed a dress.
“Is the music,
the people, I like.” Once the sun set on Fridays,
he grew nauseous with jealousy, watching the thick
breadfruit leaves viciously darken as the cafés
switched their doors open, and the first policemen barred
the street off with signs. After an early supper
he sat in the frame of the back door to the yard
watching her head, in the shower he’d built for her
from brand-new galvanize, streaming from the white foam
with expensive shampoo, and, when it disappeared,
came back, the mouth parted, the eyes squeezed with delight.
She stepped over the wet stones smiling, and she nodded
to him silent on the back step with Plunkett’s towel
holding her beaded nakedness. He said nothing.
He watched the lathered stones, even they seemed to smell
of her clean feet and her long arms’ self-anointing.
In the bedroom, she started again—he should come,
but she soon gave that up. The pipe was still trickling,
so he got up and locked it. If Seven Seas was home
he would sit with him in front of the pharmacy
with its closed door, and describe some parts of the fête
to Seven Seas, whom he envied, who couldn’t see
what was happening to the village. At the bent gate
he paused. No. He would go and sit with the canoes
far up the beach and watch the star-crowned silhouette
of the crouched island. Even there the DJ’s voice
carried over the shallows’ phosphorescent noise.
Or he watched her high head moving through the tourists,
through flying stars from the coalpots, the painted mouth
still eagerly parted. Murder throbbed in his wrists
to the loudspeaker’s pelvic thud, her floating move.
She was selling herself like the island, without
any pain, and the village did not seem to care
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