Trinidad Noir

by Lisa Allen-Agostini

  The stupid letter had filled me with questions—unspoken and unanswered between us. And where to start? My depression was not helped by the setting. The raw glass front let the night in, gaping and gawking, while I sat framed in the low halo of light, which from the outside would surely eviscerate the room and its contents. My sense of exposure was enormous, yet pulling his deep drapes shut seemed completely out of the question. I let the nasty dark overwhelm me and was in tears by the time he found me. He said nothing, only moved to the couch to sit quietly with me and look through glass at the outside, while the outside observed.

  Later, the moonlight made lined patterns on the floor of the bedroom. It was then that I noticed the carambola tree, stretching and arching toward the bedroom, its tessellated black trunk clean of vines and stray leaves, but studded with golden budlike growths. Little golden warts on a tree trunk under the moon, a cold moon.

  More doubt crept into my heart in bed, during an act of love. His lovemaking was slow, deliberate, a desire to sample and ponder mixed with the earlier, carefree excitement. He ranged over my body, I couldn’t help thinking with some displeasure, calculating its assets, quantifying, almost, the degree to which the effort was worth the price. What price? What was he spending? My ungenerous self took over. I resented being pored over as his particular object of desire. But my sensual self remained present too, loving his possessiveness, wanting it, watching him pore over my breasts and buttocks, evaluating their heft before letting himself go.

  Some peculiar anxiety had been invading me for the past week even as he had aided in my recuperation. Now, exhaustion gone, I came alive in sex and knew at once. It was when he turned me over and deliberated on his next move while pulling the hair back from the nape of my neck. He kissed and slurped at my neck but the act was different somehow. My body intuited that it was my hair that was alien: He had been expecting a different head of hair. My hair is straight, dropping clear past my shoulders in an uncomplicated, clean cut. His hands were too inexact somehow, grabbing for something else, maybe more hair, or maybe none, a shorn head perhaps, shaved clean. Not a woman’s head, I thought irrationally, even though many women wear shaven or short, cropped hairstyles. But the thought that had come to me unbidden could not be dismissed: He was fresh from another lover. I realized that I had never claimed him before, nor cared to own him, yet this dynamic was different and strange.

  We had always been flexible in bed, not caring who took the lead, so perfectly did our moves synchronize themselves. From the start he had described it as not caring who was man or who was woman. But tonight something had changed. He was being man but he wanted me to be a man too. The intruding lover had been a man. Of this I felt sure. Sure too that this could not have been the first time. He would continue to protest his fidelity to me. No doubt it was true, insofar as he had not taken another woman. I loved him back with a vengeance, hungrily, greedily even—“Oh my God, Micah, Mikey, Mikey, sweetheart, Mikey honey . . .”—while wondering what to do with this certainty, until a great wave left me alone on the farthest shore.

  It was immediately afterwards that the feeling of panic and terror rose up in my throat. It was unyielding in its grip upon my consciousness. Nothing as ordinary as a fear of abandonment. No, it was the opening of a great bottomless cave of emptiness stretching interminably forward, a vacancy that would not be filled by the everyday, that yearned for dissolution into another’s consciousness, that knew the impossibility of that longing for annihilation into death, the little death.

  I awoke much later to hear sounds outside, whispering, rustling, a feeling of menace in the air. I opened my eyes but did not move, rigid with fear. I turned toward Micah but an iron hand held me down. I lay still and waited. His hand left mine and all in one motion he turned on his belly toward the doorway; it was then I noticed the gun in his hand. The rustling lasted a few seconds longer and then stopped abruptly. The doorway beyond the burglar bars was wide open to the night. Why, in a country where sudden wealth had brought an avalanche of crime, would he leave himself so exposed? I was afraid beyond all reason, but instinctively I knew that no sound was to be made. He crouched, motionless, for several more minutes, the gun still pointing into the darkness, then he rose decisively, pulled the doors shut, and drew the heavy drapes together. They (who? who? I asked, but no answer came) are gone, he said. It’s all right. He pulled me close and stroked my back, my hair. In comforting me he was relaxing, becoming the master of the situation again. I wanted his touch, I closed my eyes and tried to feel safe in his arms, but just as unerringly as before I knew that these were not burglars and all was not as simple as he wished it to appear.

  The next morning it rained and rained. From inside the burglar bars I saw that overnight the carambolas had invaded the tree’s black trunk. Carambolas are strange fruit, alien sojourners from another dimension. Star fruit, five-fingers, carambolas. They lined themselves along trunk and branches like sentries, short, green, and golden, thick and phallic, impervious to rain, thrusting forward dumbly, held securely by their short black stalks. Carambolas resemble cocoa pods in shape, but their surface is succulent crisp, not hard. Cocoa pods, though, hang in some kind of collaborative truce between gravity, the tree trunk, and the leafy earth underneath, eventually ripening and bursting at the seams, the beans leaking out of their sweet cotton wrapping, the collaboration extending to squirrels, manicous, and even the occasional manicou crab. Not carambolas. Carambolas float arrogantly, gold on black, each alone, separate, breaking the even back of the trunk, gloriously wet. I looked at them wonderingly. Life can be this simple; this brutal.

  I decided against questioning and accusing and, inevitably, threw myself on his mercy. My questions were now more complex and I hardly knew where to begin. Still I desired him more, even as the vacant days and nights loomed ahead, even as I knew that the maelstrom I sought would come to an abrupt end and I would be disconsolate for days, maybe months afterwards. Any idea of sharing would torture me beyond sanity. The bisexual connection (if it was true, and I would never ask) would be a greater torture. Its secrecy would fill me with contempt, yet if he told me, it would be the end. And my suspicions would not be allayed. The space that I was groping for at the beginning made sense only as I calculated its loss, but the realization left me nowhere. The futility of my needs hit me in the face—mine, his, Ella’s, even the folks at Carrie’s Place—and despair too at my own contempt for people’s struggles. Yet, no way could I have apprehended Micah’s impact on the rest of my life. Not then.

  Early the next day he went into Port-of-Spain to take care of urgent matters, he said. The house was busy, filled with people about their daily duties—the maid, the gardener, the workers for the vegetables and orchard crops at the back. “Don’t worry,” he said, kissing me absently and moving to the door without a pause, “nobody will come here in the daylight. And I’ll be back in three hours.”

  I hung around all day, listening to his jazz collection, working in my song book, chatting with the maid who showed me her secret ingredient for oil-down, a breadfruit dish I had only heard about but never tasted before, growing up in the southland where Indian food ruled. I felt uneasy in the house as evening drew nearer and the precision of his three hours stretched into the whole day. I locked the back door and went for a walk along the ridge, along a path beaten through the bush so thoroughly that it looked like a clear road, one that I felt had been there for hundreds of years, a natural pass through the impenetrable mountains of the Northern Range down to the sea’s edge. At the top of the ridge I could see the ocean in the distance. The symmetry of the land’s contours was perfect, its equilibrium hammered out over eons of time, and once more I felt a pang of misgiving about the life I had chosen so far from here. I was home again, unafraid of the hidden perils of the place, of Micah’s mysterious expeditions, the whispers in the darkness outside, that outside peering menacingly into the wide-open house.

  I struck out through the underbrush on my return, finding
another more secret path that was entirely camouflaged from house and ridge and feeling sure that last night’s visitors had come this way. Rounding a curve in the path, I sighted the broken-down gazebo before they could see me, and I stopped in my tracks. Their voices were low, murmuring, and as their figures came into view I saw that they were saying goodbye. The man reached out and his hand ran directly down the length of Micah’s thigh, on the inside, right down the inside from crotch to mid-thigh, and then he half-turned to go. I stepped out sharply. Seeing me midway down the path, Micah waved and called gaily, “Geeta, come and meet Legano.”

  Legano shook hands with me gravely, politely, and then said he must go.

  “Legano came to help me plan the revolution.” Micah was laughing now, hamming it up too much, I thought. And had I actually seen what I thought I had, from the hand of this man, small, well-built, with a dapper look, a shaved head, an absolutely neutral countenance underneath the striking pallor of his gaunt face?

  Legano left and Micah gathered me close as we walked toward the back door of the house. He mentioned that Legano had brought him some papers to be signed but I couldn’t buy that and listened in silence, wondering what the real story was. It was more than paperwork and more than the physical intimacy I thought I had witnessed, my instincts leading me into a cul-de-sac once more, questions and more questions that I knew I should never ask.

  The carambolas remained intact and beautiful, stalk and fruit in perfect symmetry, while we continued our holiday antics in between his unpredictable forays to town, always urgent and unplanned. Our lovemaking retained its tacit delicacy, but as we approached the end of my stay, the sex itself got more wild and hectic, frantic even. I forgot all my earlier reservations. It was a roughness as smooth as silk, and savage as waves crashing into the rocks on the north coast. I could ask for nothing more. We had found our own spaces in each other and the simple pleasures of love had changed everything between us.

  We drove to the northern beaches, up to Yarra, went by boat to Paria, climbed the hills of Platanal, battled at the mouth of Shark River just where it flowed into the sea at Toco, and lay together on a flat rock at the eastern edge of the island, near the lighthouse where two seas lashed and embraced ceaselessly, throwing up a barricade of cliffs and waves and whirlpools, with tiny cairns of polished stones anchored in coves along the shoreline, amidst the treacherous surf.

  I had regained my strength fully. I laughed at his silly jokes, drank his rum swizzles, cuddled with him on mornings. The gaiety in the air was hurried, and almost palpable in its intensity; all the earlier doubts had dissolved into a hoarding of this time, a time I wanted to last forever. My earlier picky attitude to his house, the arrangement of space, his rambling work habits, and my own solitary needs made me more than a little embarrassed and I found the heart to wonder, too, about his irritation at some of my own ingrained habits. I thought a lot about the song, which had turned into “Nowarian Blues,” and even began to hum the melody, but I felt strangely shy about confiding to Micah my desire for mango and zaboca and ackee trees, for a backyard filled with wide arches of drooping branches that you could swing on in perfect safety.

  The island was rocked by a coup two months after I left and Micah was involved in the storming of the ——— buildings. He was blasted on the front steps and I heard afterwards that he lay there in the sun for two whole days while plotters and hostages dueled it out. His quick note, written in pencil on brown shop paper, arrived ten days after news of the coup reached me.

  A coup inside a coup. Not what I risked everything fighting for.

  I won’t make it. Trying to leave but I’m in too deep. No hope, Geeta, my love. Another day for the wicked and one more for advantage that could never done.

  I love you, you know. We might have made it.

  (Mikey)

  I found myself writing and rewriting the song the day I got his note. “Nowarian Blues,” its grief deep inside the catchy rhythm of its lilting melody, is still a much-played jazz note twenty years later. Maybe we could have made it, through his ambiguous sexual inclinations, his ordinary human sexuality that threw me into such doubts. Maybe we could have made it if he had not been betrayed. The rustling in the bushes early in my visit—was he already marked? Did Legano, who disappeared from the face of the earth right after, I was told, did that snake do him in? The note had been mailed by Legano, though. His scrawled comment, stuffed in the envelope, was brief. Found this on Mikey. Sorry. Legano. I was grateful that he had sent it and also nervous that he had my address. He must have gone back to the house to find it. A survivor. Like me. Was I, God forbid, a factor in the equation surrounding Mikey’s death? Jealousy, maybe? The cold hand struck at my heart again. Mikey. Everyone I met during my stay in Trinidad had addressed my lover as Micah. Everyone except me and, I now realized, Legano. Maybe we would have made it because of our true connection—Mikey and Geeta, primal, uncomplicated, clean. But who knows, perhaps not even that could have saved us.

  The day I left, we had lain in bed together for a long time. He had shifted between hugging me tightly and holding me at arm’s length, staring into my face. I grew uncomfortable. “Like if yuh trying to memorize my face,” I joked.

  And he had nodded seriously. “Yes,” he whispered. It seemed to me then that we had reached an agreement beyond words, but I couldn’t tell if it was for all or for nothing at all, the silly words of that love song still ricocheting through my brain on the flight back, a flight I thought would never end. It wasn’t anxiety that I felt, just an inexplicable sense of belonging, though no such words had been spoken between us. No words; something else had taken care of that. Call it carambolas, gold-black nowarians, all-knowing, alien fruit standing in the rain.

  BETRAYAL

  BY WILLI CHEN

  Godineau

  At Godineau, the sleek little boat shot out from under the canopy of mangrove branches like an arrow pointing toward open sea. The only glints in the moonlit ocean were the helmets that crowned the two men seated like robots in the narrow cabin of the speedboat. Painted black, equipped with two powerful 100HP Johnson engines specially assembled and mechanically assisted with turbo jets, the vessel was fast and undetectable as it roared to a destination only eighty miles away—a secret bay of the mainland where, unseen and with engines muffled, the men would pilot the craft upriver along banks whose trees cast an aura of gloom over the compound on the Venezuelan coast.

  Balbosa, Manickchand, another Spaniard, Vasquez—who was as cunning as a forest quenk—and a Trini Indian of skill and courage had made countless trips into this dark camouflaged cave within the interior of the compound. Tonight they removed the lids that concealed the boat’s cabin cupboards and lifted plastic bags tied with red ribbons, then hoisted the cargo onto the trays of one-ton four-wheel drive Mazdas equipped with tools, hooded lamps, and extra tanks of gas necessary for perilous journeys through the jungle.

  Expeditions from Trinidad by speedboat to the mainland took place at night. It was the cloth king of indisputable wealth and authority, Sabagal, who commanded this unlawful business that had made him a kingpin operator of devious courage, a figure of charm and power.

  The strength of Sabagal’s dominion was in his dexterous voyages and skills deemed inherited from his father who had peddled blue dock jeans, colorful scarves, and head ties across the country roads in bygone days. His father had never worried that villagers were slow to pay for goods, or cared about the pain he experienced as ferocious pot hounds gnawed at his heels when he entered the yards through the mud traces of the country villages. His frequent visits had paid off over the years until he was able to purchase an Austin 8 that took him further inland, into secluded districts where he clothed the people with his cheap, colorful fabric.

  Like his father, Sabagal also sold haberdashery of pots and pans, window curtains, miscellaneous kitchen implements, brass bowls, small mirrors, lamps—anything that attracted naïve housewives who spent time talking, laughing, touchi
ng, then eventually buying Sabagal’s goods. Sabagal would check his money, using rubber bands to hold his notes together. There would be a song in his heart.

  Eventually Sabagal hired salesmen, bought two more vans, and as his business prospered, his wealth increased. He acquired properties in the city, at Bay Shore, Otaheite, along Trinidad’s central coast, and at Maracaibo, El Tigre, Santano, and Margarita. He sold a larger variety of clothes and other silken fineries which yielded immense profits. His name became well-known across the land, but his lust for power and wealth overcame him. Greed thickened his blood to craftier ventures, which became devilishly uncontrollable and all-consuming.

  Lured by mainland drug dealers into the high woods of that vast countryside that bordered the shores of roaring waves, Sabagal found himself surrounded by hefty men, bearded like ancient prophets. Unsmiling and grave, they emerged from a cave where bats whirred with grievous squeals and over-flapping wings. On skids on the higher terraces of the grotto were bags and boxes of cocaine and other drug-related pouches and vials of liquids. Here in this secret lair was the stored bank of wealth, guarded by thieves and hoodlums.

  Further into the cold dark corners of the cave were boxes of loot from vessels traversing the ocean—cartons loaded with electronic equipment, whiskey, radios, stoves, refrigerators, and heaps of massive bundles stamped with foreign markings in foreign languages. Sabagal was stunned by the vastness of this store of contraband that amounted to a countless sum. He stood between four men armed with Uzi machine guns who also carried radios and cell phones. He had come to see the evidence. He was satisfied. He opened his carry-on case and Vasquez brought the papers to be signed.

  Sabagal realized that more lucrative drug deals involved higher risks. He was soon entangled in liaisons with unknown men of extraordinary wealth. He took his chances.