They Never Told Me

by Austin Clarke

  Her voice is quickening. Is higher. Triplicatingly higher. As high as the lightning touch of the keys of the tenor saxophone, in its deep, sensual sound.

  “Yes…”

  It sounds like exhaustion. And then, there is silence.

  There are no mists now. Death has swallowed them up.

  “So?”…

  THEY NEVER TOLD ME

  I am getting old. And I hate it. I use swear words to stem the silent flow of years that overtake my actions, and even the flow of my speech. My first recognition of this malady of old age is the stumbling, and the climbing of stairs. And after many trials, the stammering to find the word that does not come easily into my mind, and that remains on the tip of my tongue. And they never told me how to be cool and decent about this slowing down of speech; the lengthening struggles to find the correct word, remembering it until I match the thought to the written word itself… the fading of faces, the disappearance of names from the faces that my eyes move over, like an usher’s flashlight in a crowded cinema; and from the pages of names in my pocket diary. I am old. But I hide it. I hide my fear of old age; and my shame of it. I do not want to get old; do not want to be recognized; to be greeted by old friends, precisely because they are old; or, to be pointed out by a smiling young woman, with her eyes, and a nod, and a smile, that illustrates her question, and her concern, “Would you like my seat, sir?”

  But I take the offer and take her seat; and my indignation swells, and smells like stale perspiration. I take the seat. I am very close to this young woman as she stands up. I can see the thin outline of her panties through the summer-thin dress. I become ashamed of myself. Of my desire. And I want to scream my indignation out, to everyone on this crowded bus, “Do I look so old to you?”

  But shame and reality keep my lips shut.

  And when I return to my house, two hours after my encounter with the kind young woman, I confront myself in the small unframed, rectangular glass over the white washbasin. The washbasin is made of smooth white enamel. The small bathroom is painted white. The paint shines. There are large brown bottles and a damp washcloth in the sink; and bottles of pills for headache, and pills for earache; and pills to pacify the cough that rumbles in my chest; and pills for head colds. And pills for losing weight; large pills, colourful pills, pills that I have left untouched, left in a bulbous green bottle. And then a round tin, flat like a puck slapped around in a hockey game. Kiwi Black Shoe Polish! And around the tin are the words, “noir, kiwi, black, kiwi, noir, kiwi, black, kiwi.” I had not known that “kiwi” was another name for “black.” I turn the catch, the little metal wings on the tin. “Water resistant. Leather nourishing.” And round the diameter of the tin is the reassurance: “By appointment to H.R.H. the Duke of Edinburgh. Makers of shoe polish.” The picture of a kiwi bird is drawn in yellow.

  As I twist the catch, the full power of the shoe polish strikes my nostrils; and I dig my middle finger deep into the thick, silky blackness, moving my three fingers covered in the black soil of thick shoe polish over my face – I think of Negro minstrels, and of white men who wanted to turn themselves into black men. The hand that holds the black shoe polish is black. And nervous. And shaking in the horror of the act I am committing; turning myself into a black-face black man; while all I wanted to do was to slick my hair with black shoe polish, to make myself look sleek and younger; to make young women stop getting up to offer me their seat. I want to look young. I rub the black shoe polish into my skin. I look at my reflection. And I see the laughing face of a man. The face of Al Jolson. The face of a white man who sang like a cantor who is Negro, whose hand is black, and I imagine myself singing a song written by a white man, by Stephen Foster pretending to be a down home country boy black man,

  Way down upon de Swanee Ribber,

  Far far away,

  Dere’s whu my heart is turning ebber,

  Dere’s whu de old folks stay…

  I am an old man still, and I am mouthing the words of this song; and my back takes on the shape of an old man moving to the slow beat of the song. My back is bent. The song overcomes me. My lips are large; and red. My eyes droop. My hands shake. I am Al Jolson. I am singing the minstrel blues,

  Way down upon de Swanee Ribber,

  Far far away,

  and my face is by appointment to H.R.H. the Duke, and I feel comfortable with my new darkness, and I move my body slow. And I dance, and I laugh and my teeth become pearly white, and my eyeballs lose their pupils; and are now completely white. And I am rocking from one side to another side. And my voice has become deep, and I roar with laughter at my antics.

  I sometimes come to my home and climb the forty-seven steps to this bathroom, and after I close the door behind me, I find I’m lost in my head, I’ve forgotten completely why I climbed those steps. So I retrace my forty-seven steps, counting out loud their number. The count becomes everything, mindful that one false step will send me hurtling down to smash myself against zero, the bronze panel in the front door; and then, I will have to rouse myself and re-climb and re-count the forty-seven steps, and enter the bathroom a second time… and then try to remember why I had entered it the first time. But now it comes back to me. I had wanted to get a tissue of white Kleenex to polish my reading glasses with so I could see whu my heart is turning ebber…

  In the bathroom, I look at my blackened hair, not so black as I had wanted it to be, and I turn the tin of shoe polish over, and I see it is a tin of Canadian shoe polish made at the Kiwi Polish Company (Canada) Limited, in Hamilton, just a few miles west of Toronto; and this closeness, like family, makes the black paint on my face more acceptable. I like being black-faced. In safety and security beneath the “black, kiwi, noir” of my new complexion, behind the mask that is painted black on my face. I can now wallow in the peace of being lost in a place where I will take a seat beside a young woman, where I will inhale her alluring perfume; and when the bus stops, enjoy the touch of her arm, and wonder if at my age – which nobody knows for certain – if her sweet, soft arm, and the whiff of her auburn hair against the blackened, curled hairs on my unshaven chin, could ever reawaken that dormant, once sweet sensuality which… “dream on, old man!… ” might come alive, stand as erect as the first bursts of spring flowers, with me now travelling in peace; buried deep in the deeper tranquility of forgetfulness.

  Riding up and down on a bus, the Rosedale route down to the waterfront on Sherbourne Street. I even stop and get off at the large LCBO liquor store. And buy a mickey of rum, fifteen-year-old El Dorado Rum, made in Demerara. And back on the bus, I sneak a sip from the shaking bottle, caused by the hard driving over a broken pot-holed road, and caused by the strength of the rum. I hold the bottle under my winter coat. Nobody sees me. Nobody looks at me. Nobody cares. I am an old black man with my face painted black at the back of the bus.

  And the bus turns around, going north from the waterfront along this same Sherbourne Street where it touches Queen Street East; past the multitudes of bums and beggars; and the homeless; and drunks; and no one knows me. I have become one of them. No one has to be kind to me, to offer me a seat. I can hum. I can sing, under my breath, like Al Jolson, the whole entire song…

  Way down upon de Swanee Ribber,

  Far far away,

  Dere’s whu my heart is turning ebber,

  Dere’s whu de old folks stay…

  I have to admit, however, with some embarrassment, and more shame, sitting on the rough-riding bus, that the call of the bathroom has become urgent oftener now and no longer do I have the urge that I used to have to pacify my urge to pee. With a mind that no longer distinguishes amongst faces and nor does it recognize one address from the other, a mind that does not place a face against a telephone number, I watch my own sloughing off of habits of cleanliness, I watch my own deterioration, my own incapacities; the increasing difficulty to unscrew the cap of a plastic bottle; trying to unscrew the cap of the gin bottle; reaching up to take frozen food from the refrigerator; or to accept
the offer of space in a line-up at the cinema; and beneath it all, there is my increasing urge to pee, to empty, to void myself. Would those who offer me such consideration want to help me pee? To help me into the void? Full of good-willed unawareness. I resent all such gestures, especially when they come from young women. Not many women my age express these pleasantries. No woman of my age has ever offered me her seat. I presume it is because we are in the same boat, a boat that more and more refuses to float.

  In the Sixties, I lived in many cities in America: in New Haven, Williamstown, and in Boston; and in the South, in Durham, North Carolina; in Bloomington, Indiana, and in Austin, Texas. In those cities and towns, in America, not many people got up to offer any black person their seat. I lived through the years of the determination of that black woman, Rosa Parks, who refused to surrender her seat in the “white section” of a bus in Selma, Alabama. Not being in blackface or in anybody’s face back then, I chose to sit, voluntarily, in the “black section.”

  Here in Toronto in those self-same Sixties, I was crossing Hoskin Avenue from Trinity College and I was wearing the College’s soccer colours and I took up my position as centre forward. I did not score a goal; but I was called “off-side” three times during the match; and when the final whistle was blown, and the game was over on the Front Campus pasture, I wallowed in the cheers of the cheerleaders chosen from the beautiful first-year women students; and I headed back to Trinity College with victory in my muscles and in my loins, to the dining room at the college; and as a new resident in the college, halfway to my new home, I turned right instead of left, and after I reached Yonge Street, that was the name on the telephone pole, I guessed that I had made the wrong turn. I corrected that and turned right but it was long after the last plate of white fish and mashed potatoes in a white thin sauce had been served and eaten in the dining hall that I realized that I was lost. I began in this town by being lost, standing at the corner of Bloor and Yonge in my football uniform.

  And here I am, fifty-nine years later on this same corner on a cold November evening peeling back the years ever further than Trinity College to a time still in Barbados when I was strong enough to run four races – the 100 yards, the 220 yards, the 440 yards and the 880 yards – and the long jump, in one afternoon and come first in each and then to be crowned “Victor Ludorum,” Champion of the Games, who now finds himself on Bloor Street, meeting himself face to Kiwi face, in the show window of a specialty men’s clothing store, Harry Rosen’s, and I find it natural to think of T.S. Eliot who we studied during those school days and what he said about trousers and old men:

  I grow old… I grow old…

  I shall wear the bottoms of my trousers rolled.

  Shall I part my hair behind? Do I dare to eat a peach?

  I ate two peaches this morning. A ladies’ magazine had told me that peaches would lengthen my life but they are my favourite fruit anyway. I like the sweet sensual tickle of hairs kissing my mouth, but now I have to wonder what Eliot’s caution meant and still means, the way we look so eagerly, with such yearning, for our future before we have even got a decent look at our present, this present where in blackface I eat a peach and wear my trousers rolled and mount a stair hoping to see a face above the stair, hoping for fairness if not friendliness, as I did back in my college days, when I stood at the top of a stairs on a stoop in a complete silence, hearing the creaking of startled shoes; the heavy sound of a dead lock, as I managed to read a well-written notice, not much larger than a tea-time calling card, stuck with Scotch tape to the inside pane of glass in the heavy, grand mahogany double door: NO COLOREDS.

  On the door itself, written in an uneven hand, the assertion, or the wish: JESUS BLESS THIS HOME.

  Having come through such disappointments, having lived through flushes of, if not constant, anger and disdain for more than fifty years, having taken my place on the back of the bus and then gracefully accepted my place at the front, I have witnessed my share of deterioration of the spirit, of the body. I have seen deterioration and disintegration not only in other men, those dark pouches of disappointment beneath the eyes that they blame on their livers, but increasing fragility, as a stake in itself, a fragility in my leg, my leg like life itself, covered by an infestation of scabs. And scabs that hatch. And the bone seen peeping through the flesh. And the flesh has become paper beneath my grey trousers that are loose and baggy, three sizes too large for my body, my shrunken body. It is an act of faith, this determination to stay alive while we watch ourselves shrink, doing my best, as an act of the denial of death and dying by assertively wearing my paisley scarf that catches the sunlight of the mid-afternoon, brown, grey, maroon, gold dots, commas in the design of this scarf, a silk scarf glorious and aristocratic, which is still easy for me, for I used to be a man who was studied in the taking of time, even in my years of schooling, to arrive at an aristocratic bearing; for I always wore for public appearances charcoal grey trousers with an almost indiscernible thin vertical stripe in them; a white shirt with the front stiffened by starch, and a very hot iron, a white shirt worn in dress attire with mother-of-pearl studs; and a black silk jacket, single-breasted, custom-made, in a conservative English cut, being a practising gentleman of letters, of which I knew there were and are none too many in our time, bedecking myself in such an outfit and variations of it to assert the relishing of this aristocratic self, which makes me now feel the full weight of my bladder upon me, feel the apprehension of wetness, the apprehension of the stench of pure pee and the loss of all such earned dignity as I have, earned in the deepest sense, as one earns day to day a living. I shift from foot to foot, trying to take the weight off my bladder, which suddenly has the weight of all my past years, while at the same time I try to tighten my legs, to tense my whole body, to tense my mind, try to think of elsewhere; I go over the alphabet, from A to ZED… from A to ZEE… refusing to surrender to my body, to fragility, refusing incontinence, refusing to give in to any sign that all is lost, trying to remember so simple a thing as balance, the perfect balance that accrues to being young, along, of course, with the unknowingness that also accrues to being young; but now, being old, being one of de old folks, no matter where I rest or reside I have lost nearly all sense of balance, have lost my focus, lost even the quickness of the eye required to read the number on my house from inside a moving taxi, that number that I myself screwed into my green-painted front door, emerald green so I can alert some driver who has picked me up, who cannot speak my language, to the fact that We are Here, I am Here! “Here-here!” Home! As I shout, “Green,” and we keep going, passing by the door, having to stop and back up, being fortunate for me that there is only one door on this street that is painted green, such taxi drivers telling me, “You? Sure? Okay? If you know where it is you going…”

  The last time the driver letting me out to stand on the sidewalk like a lord, a landlord, outside my own door as I revised the muddle of my thoughts by revisiting the number of steps up the staircase inside the house that climbs from the front door, up… up… up… up… up… up… up… up… up… up… up… up… up… thirteen steps… an unlucky number!… and at the first floor top step turn right; and up… and I do this each time that I return home; and I wonder if the young woman who offered me her seat climbs an exact number of steps to reach her bedroom every night? High-stepping. I am tormented by yearned-for memories of my own high-stepping, tormented because everything remembered that gives me pleasure also becomes a torment to this black man who I admit is myself, absurd in blackface, toying with the metal wing opener to his Kiwi can, who only wants, when all is said and done, to sit for an hour in a large single bathtub, to soak, in hot suds, in contentment, in comfort and ease of heart, a heart that is beating hard, having climbed another fourteen steps, having gone round a corner in a hallway in order to get to my third-floor bedroom; and although the bones in my knees do not creak and crack, I am aware that so much time is passing so quickly; each stair reminding me of time, a step, a stair, an inch ga
ined, an inch lost; all things being equal, I like my stairs. These stairs are my country. My country for an old man. I like the dignity that comes from having had the will to set my body straight, in an erect posture, if only for a moment, in order to climb…

  To where I lie on my back on my bed; and I make myself raise each leg; and count to thirty, for each leg, and I huff and puff during these calisthenics that I’ve come to believe in as being good for me, and then my legs plop down on the bed, a remembrance of when I ran four races, meanwhile forgetting where my cellphone is so’s to call in case of emergency alone so high up in my house… But even so, if I had my cellular phone, all the names in my pocket diary are the names of friends dead, or nearly all of them dead. Dark casualties:

  “… and Tom? Whu’ happen to Tom?”

  “He dead.”

  “… and when last you see Dick?”

  “Dick gone, too.”

  “That is life. That is the life bequeath to all o’ we.”

  “To all o’ we!”

  “I hate like arse getting old…”

  “Who-else dead? One foot in the grave…?”

  I dial a number, and a deep-throated hum, a misplayed bass note on an organ, takes over…

  “… the number you have dialled, is no longer in service.”

  But I am still here, yes, still in service; and glad to be, even if I am way down upon the ribber in this land of the living where I one day lately, on a whim, went searching through old letters and older pocket diaries determined to seek out evidence of the living, to seek out all those still whinnying with us, their names in alphabetical order, the names of men and women with whom I grew up and also men and women in this alien country of silent people who do not open their front windows and say, “Mawnin, neighbour!” And so, as if the day I did this seeking out of names was actually the Day of Dead Souls, Ash Wednesday, I called their names, one-by-one. Down upon a river, up a creek they came, to let me mark the foreheads of my friends as each appeared before me in my bathroom mirror. I marked their brows with a penitential thumb smear of Kiwi black polish: Grace Sin-Hill. Dalton Guiler. Superintendent Boyce. Mewreel Sealey. Judy Thomas. Rudolph Hinds… I remember him, one of the best of tenors in Barbados. D. Parris. Everton Weekes (now Sir Everton Weekes). Richie Haynes (now Sir Richard Haynes). Jill Shephard. Bruce LaPorte, former Director of Black Studies at Yale University, Edward Cumberbatch, one of the best half-milers on the island, during my time, running on a hot afternoon track, marked in staggered lanes… and Malcolm X, Roy McMurtry (Judge of the Supreme Court), Norman Mailer, Morley, wagging his cane at me, telling me, “First, you outlive the bastards, then you outwrite them”… all such as these rising up in my mirror full of pride but marked by penitence, standing in their youth like standing in a river to surrender their seats to me, singing along with me, dere’s whu de old folks stay, and among them, many beautiful women. Yes, beautiful. Surrendering. Yes, but on what grounds was this surrender made in my favour? Grounds that made me and still make me suspicious. Why does this unalloyed kindness bring out in me such suspicion?