Hemrajie’s head drooped in release. She took a deep breath. He was still inside her, still hard, as she started to ease off his body. And she saw his face in the moonlight, and the strength ran out of her legs, and she sank, helpless, back onto his erect shaft. In the clear light of the moon, the man’s eyes were open and aware and staring mutely at her.
THE FUNERAL PARTY
BY SHANI MOOTOO
San Fernando
Matilda Jasodhra Mansing would not wear black. Her concession to funereal tradition on the occasion of her husband’s burial was blue. She had commissioned the dress from April Lang, Trinidad’s finest designer, a long time ago. Design me something, she had said, something spectacular for when he dies, should I be blessed with life so long, and do make me something, something less garish but certainly leaning toward the spectacular, for my own day, my own day of reckoning.
Once the word had been given, the paper creation was put into production, a conversation in silk and satin about nature and origins—not so much the flora but the fauna of Trinidad invoked, alongside suggestions of the theater of Carnival—feathers, that is, and wings, sequins, iridescence, all of these commingling with the subtler concupiscence evoked by the Indian sari (teasing translucence, tightly bound and bound and bound, as if to influence deportment, yet an exposé, par excellence, of the wearer’s physical attributes)—a provocative concoction, in short, delivered post haste, for the occasion. The fabrics, the sequins, the feathers, all shimmered in disturbing shades of blue.
For relief there was gold. An abundance of it. Gold laced her neck and dipped into the cleavage of her bodice, dangled from her ears, ringed her fingers and both forearms wrist to elbow, as if she carried on her all the pieces her now-dead goldsmith-and-jeweler-in-general husband had presented to her. (Bribes, she gloats, pleased that she was in such a manner bribable.) This particular excess fortified the lie in the concession to wear what one would previously have simply termed blue.
She arrived late to Selvon’s Funeral Parlour in San Fernando. The yardman, the same one who had been employed by the Mansings for some thirty years now, walked in behind her, tied and suited—and wasn’t that a gold watch chain dangling from his belt?—faintly, perplexingly recognizable-but-not-entirely-so to neighbors who, passing by the Mansing house, would have seen him in his other yardly incarnation, tied and suited like a mimic lord.
The new widow was late arriving because the updo of her hair, the first time it had been styled, was to her tastes unsuitable, too austere. Her stylist had been obliged to wash, set, dry, tease, comb, and spray the do all over again until there was an upsweep reminiscent of at least one of the wings of the Nike of Samothrace, the sculpture in the Louvre in Paris where she and John had honeymooned. In seeing the headless statue, so early in their marriage, there occurred an immediate self-recognition—not the present self, but the one she would become: strong, on the wing, a soar of stone. She would have her hairdresser create the symbolic wing of her funereal costume, precisely on her very present head, a declaration that John Lucknow Mansing had not succeeded in driving her crazy.
At seventy-nine years of age, one her husband’s junior, and for a while not so limber anymore, she finally gave in to the necessity of a walking cane. Hers, a gift from the yardman, was fashioned out of a broomstick, carved to resemble a snake coiled around a hibiscus tree trunk. Two rubies, no doubt taken from the dead jeweler’s stash, marked the snake’s eyes.
From Matilda Jasodhra Mansing’s temples, neck, and wrists rose the scents of oil of geranium and ylang ylang to stem the staining fragrance of chloroform, the netherworld candle-smoke odors of a funeral parlor, and later, under the umbrella of a samaan tree at the San Fernando Lapeyrouse Cemetery, the fetid dampness of freshly dug, worm-ridden earth.
Meera Meera Johna Mansing, John and Matilda’s spinster, middle-aged, son-to-her-father, daughter-to-her-mother, female-born but gender-shifting like sunlight through a leafy tree on a windy day only child, tore herself away from Vishala (or was it Amanda, perhaps it was Brianni, or maybe Carmen that time?)—to whom she had been making passionate like amongst breadcrumbs, mustard seeds, flecks of arugula, shards of prosciutto, parts of meals they fed each other between play in a Brooklyn brownstone—and traveled hundreds of miles to Bel Air, La Romain, Trinidad, not because her mother told her to come and dispense with those damned termite-pocked, moth-eaten butterfly exhibition cases in which she felt Meera Meera Johna was implicated (having caught the butterflies for her father decades ago) and not because Meera Meera Johna was curious to see who would and who would not attend her father’s funeral—all reasons enough—but because it was from him she had learned the crafts she had been practicing when her mother’s phone call interrupted to say that “they”—meaning she and the yardman, for it was apparently “they” who made decisions nowadays—had taken her father off the respirator, and after ten days in a coma he had slipped quietly away, and it was to him she owed debts of gratitude.
As if it were not enough that he was her father.
“Me-me, come child, catch Papa a butterfly, will you?” John Lucknow Mansing would say.
“Did you see a Morpho today, Papa? Or shall I just get you a monarch?”
In childhood Meera Meera Johna was in awe of her father, thinking him then no ordinary indiscriminate collector but a specialist, for the ordinary orange and black monarch, and the considerably less common Morpho, were all he ever wished her to net him. Once, or twice, and in a blue moon, even thrice a season, mischievous rapacious wind currents twirling over the Guyanese rain forests would go after a Morpho, curl themselves about the unfortunate one, spin it about until it was rendered as if in a drugged state, and that wind would propel and haul, propel and haul the thing, at times like an iridescent blue handkerchief, at other times like an oversized candy foil wrapper, all the way from its native Guyana, high above the churning where the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic do violent trade, to Bel Air, La Romain in southern Trinidad, where the wind, bored now and having spotted something else to toy with, the Anartia amathea—smaller, more delicate than the Morpho, and its simple red color a relief—the wind would drop the inextinguishably exquisite blue thing, drop it like a penny to the ground, only to sidle up now to Anartia amathea in the next phase of its serial-courting nature. Morphos, for this reason, on coming to what was left of their senses, remained rather dazed, and although they picked up their somewhat ragged, slightly ego-bruised selves, they were easy to net.
What John Lucknow Mansing did with these Morphos, their blue the inspiration for numerous Carnival and other kinds of costumes, what he did with these, for they disappeared soon after they were caught, remained a mystery until the day of his funeral. On the other hand, the monarchs that had been stretched and pinned were reduced by time to small orderly mounds of shiny dust in the cases that lined the walls of John Lucknow Mansing’s private study, under the shut doors of which, when he was alive, seeped the disturbing stench of chloroform.
Me-me, catch me a butterfly, is what he would say, offering his daughter the net.
Then came a Sunday that began like any other Sunday but turned out to be like none at all.
That very net led Meera Meera Johna by her nose, caused her to skip and trip up, down, and around behind a magnificent Morpho, the biggest she or her father had ever seen, one the size of a small child’s head, as sapphire one minute as the tropical sky at night, as silver and turquoise as the gulf the next, a butterfly-bird rising and falling on ribbons of ocean winds, a siren of iridescence drawing Meera Meera Johna through the front gate up the road past six houses and two corners, causing her to trespass up up up the high wide red-painted concrete stairs of Isabella Tatiana’s shrub and flower-surrounded bungalow. There, on Isabella Tatiana’s generous terrazzo-tiled veranda, Meera Meera Johna was suddenly breathless, and perched on the railing of an overly ornate wrought-iron balcony, she reached out, the net agape, for the flying thing, such a perfect present for her father, when it leaped l
ithely over the railing and was caught in a swirling current of air. It flapped its wings and, gaining control of itself, rose higher and higher, and once above the rooftops of the neighborhood, it stopped flapping its wings and merely glided. She had the good sense not to try and follow it.
The wall-length sliding doors to Isabella Tatiana’s house were drawn wide apart.
“Mrs. Tatiana?” Meera Meera Johna whispered from the balcony. There was no answer, so she called again. “Hello, Mrs. Tatiana? Are you there?”
She could have been a lucky thief that day, if she were so inclined. On tiptoe still, she entered and followed the net around walls and down the high-pile blue-red-taupe Afghancarpeted corridors that ended at a closed door through which low calls and moans wafted. Meera Meera Johna pressed her ear to the door to be sure and heard. A groan. Not an urgent or ugly groan but still, a groan. If someone behind a closed door were making a sound like that, whether ugly or not, wouldn’t you assume they might be in need of some assistance, she asked herself?
Meera Meera Johna called again: “Hello?” The groaning persisted, the sound of pleasure, curiously, and she, if she could be heard, was ignored. She turned the door’s handle, waited, and called again. So, unnoticed, she walked right in.
Meera Meera Johna saw everything. Realizing that the two on the bed were in no hurry and were oblivious to all, and that if she were to return and in earnest concentrate on the goings-on in there, she would need a little something to eat, she left the room in search of the little something. She shut the door as she might have shut any door, caring nothing about making door-closing noises—after all, the two were oblivious to all. She located the kitchen, and the refrigerator, and found in its freezer compartment a tub of milkweed-and-chrysanthemum flavored ice cream.
That Sunday, a Sunday like no other Sunday, Meera Meera Johna returned to the neighbor’s bed on the edge of which she sat, a perfect chrysanthemum-and-leaf-of-milkweed ice-cream sundae wilting, and, still unnoticed, she studied her father, his cacao-colored skin richly, steamily aglow, and she regarded the woman beneath him, hers paler than white, whose groaning Meera Meera Johna came to understand declared, Yes, uhuh uhuh, yes, her eyes shut, torso arched, neatly pinned by her hands and feet atop a velvet coverlet the deep saffron color of pollen, her hair held tightly in John Lucknow’s fist. An interesting situation, Meera Meera Johna pondered, the way Isabella stretched and pushed her pelvis upward, mothlike, and her father like a wasp atop, his pelvis just barely flicking the moth’s.
That very night, when the Mansing family sat at the dinner table, at precisely the time Meera Meera Johna finished posing the question to her father why that afternoon when Isabella Tatiana was groaning, he continued to perch so long on top of her, Matilda Jasodhra, a pale, frail woman—as yet unwinged—who looked as if she had long been chidden by the sun, halted her gleaming brass fork in mid-flight toward her mouth and took studious note of the cube of rare agouti meat—which she herself had barbecued—skewered on its prongs. She brought her fork, agouti untouched, to rest on the brim of her fine bone china plate, an act accorded the precision and delicacy of one experiencing an awakening. She just as carefully, thoughtfully, lifted the sweating stemmed water glass, and sipped from it ice-cold water. Matilda Jasodrha Mansing, once she had set the goblet back on the table, shot up her nose and chin to the ceiling with less delicacy now, and with a flamboyant flick of her head determined that she, she had had, she had had absolutely enough. Matilda Jasodhra thawed back to life, and John was spared having to answer Meera Meera Johna’s burning question when his wife belted out, “We will have a party. A big, big party with music. Lots and lots of music. Live. Cha cha cha. Cha cha cha. I shall oversee the entire thing myself, and everybody shall come to it. Including That Tatiana Woman.” Matilda Jasodhra took it into her hands that day to grow her very own wings.
The day of the party, just outside the front entrance to the house, the yardman had been clearing away the unsavory evidence of day-to-day yard existences—brown fallen leaves, weeds, a wind-borne candy wrapper—when he came upon a corner that was infested with snakes. He was, at the moment the neighborhood children led by Meera Meera Johna appeared, ramming a broomstick straight down into a hole. He had anesthetized the snakes with chloroform, a bottle of it given to him for this very purpose by his butterfly-collecting jeweler boss, and was now shoving, shoving, shoving into the hole one of these garden snakes that had minutes before been a smooth, brilliant green thing the length of a man and a bit, sunning itself on a hibiscus shrub, but was now rumpled into numerous odd angles that oozed and squirted liquids in tones of browns and reds. The gardener was shoving the snake into the hole, killing it again, and again, just to make sure, he explained when they said to him, voices full of awe, “But the thing dead already, why you beating it so? It coulda make a good skipping rope if you hadn’t a mash it up so.” He looked up at them, his eyes—what should normally have been the whites of his eyes, red-red-red, and the pupils, black-black-black—like jumbie beads, the children whispered among themselves later. They watched him move from hole to hole until he had tucked away five garden snakes in all. In the childrens’ peripheral vision shuffled the less arresting single-file procession of fifty women marching up the street, approaching the servant’s gate at the back of the Mansing house. They were all dressed exactly alike, in white servant shirts with rounded frilly collars, and black narrow knee-length skirts, black stockings, and black closed-up shoes. Each pushed a two-tiered trolley laden with dishes on which courses of catered food were artfully splayed.
“Meera Meera Mansing, inside now. Time to dress. It’s late and getting later by the minute. Come now.” Her mother’s voice shot through the house, taut yet euphoric, from the bedroom section down to the front garden, and Meera Meera Johna responded in a flash, leaving her friends to the hands of the yardman.
Just before seven o’clock, from the front of the house an infectious Cha cha cha, Cha cha cha, Cha cha cha wafted up to the bedroom section. Meera Meera Johna lifted her skirt, tugged at the scratchy crinoline beneath, twisted it, and tugged some more. Her mother snapped at her, Stop lifting your skirt. Her scalp hurt too, her hair having been combed back velvet smooth into a ponytail. Meera Meera Johna raised her eyebrows and wiggled her ears in an attempt to weaken the grip. Her mother was leading her down to the party when they both saw the light coming from under the door of John Lucknow’s studio. Forever alert to his abundant furtivenesses—for what else could one call it?—Matilda Jasodhra yanked her daughter along and they both pressed their ears to the door. They heard nothing save for the muted vibration of Cha cha cha, Cha cha cha. Matilda Jasodhra tried the knob of the door. It was locked. She banged, and John Lucknow’s voice, it was indeed his, responded sharply, What? Matilda squealed at him to open the door. He did. That dreadful sweet scent of chloroform assaulted her and Meera Meera Johna, and she wondered, as she always did, why it hadn’t as yet done him in. He held in his hands his jeweler’s glass. Working? she wondered. Working right up to the last minute before the party? She glanced—not so discreetly, so perhaps she gazed rather than glanced—throughout the room, vision gaining the amorphous properties of air that allowed it to float and bend so that she could see around to the back of the desk and behind curtains, and seeing that he was alone, she breathed a sigh of relief. He too sighed. Then she saw a tray of butterflies on his desk. Leave those damned butterflies alone, why don’t you, Matilda Jasodhra whispered between her teeth, and come. Our guests will arrive any time now. John Lucknow sent her on down with an assurance that he would be there in seconds. Why? What for? What on earth for? How odd, she thought, but that was her husband, and on down to the front of the house she and her daughter went.
Faces Meera Meera Johna knew from television bounced about on bodies the TV seldom showed: There was, at her parents’ party, the mayor of the city (whose legs were, it seemed to her, too short for his body), the minister of health (whose feet were very small), the minister of security (wh
ose belly strained against his white shirt), other politicians, entertainment celebrities, various neighbors, some close friends, a handful of relatives, and the president of the country, Sir Oswald Jones (whose legs were long and whose shoes were very shiny) and his wife, Lady Oswald Jones (whose calves were muscular). And yes, that was her—the Tatiana woman whom Meera Meera Johna congratulated herself for recognizing as she had only before seen her once, and she was then in a reclining position, her hair held tightly in one of John Lucknow Mansing’s hands. Meera Meera Johna stared at the Tatiana woman. Matilda Jasodhra put a stiff and warning hand on her daughter’s back and shoved her toward Their Excellencies. Meera Meera Johna moved forward, Isabella Tatiana trapped in her peripheral vision. Where is my father? she wondered. Still in the study? Why isn’t he here to meet the guests? And then Meera Meera Johna pondered: She, Isabella Tatiana, known in one part of our house as That Tatiana Woman, is what must be called beautiful. She must be more beautiful than my mother or me. Isabella Tatiana moved from Meera Meera Johna’s peripheral vision to its forefront. They locked eyes. Tatiana’s were greenish-gray. Her hair was dark brown. Open, it was long. Wavy. She was tall, she was slim and her skin pale. She smiled incessantly. She wore a black dress with no straps. Meera Meera Johna wondered how such a dress stayed up. Isabella Tatiana wore only one speck of jewelry, a silver ring on a finger, and from it flashed beams of iridescent blue, turquoise, black. She smiled still. Her lips were bright but, if Meera Meera were not mistaken, they were naturally so, no lipstick that is, and they seemed soft. She wore shiny black high-heeled shoes that showed her toes. Her toes were—
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