by Shani Mootoo
At first Zain wasn’t so much sick of hearing about my regrets and wishes, Sydney said, as she was worried that I’d never be content. But, over time, she came to understand my ambivalences, my perennial disquiet, and why in a city of several million people I was always so alone.
Sydney became quiet again. But this time I was more patient. He seemed to consider something, and having come to a decision he pulled himself higher up the bed into a sitting position. I helped arrange the pillows to support his back. When he was comfortable he said, The time for me to tell you everything has come, Jonathan. It was Zain who “facilitated” all of this (the quotation marks were his, made with the first and second fingers of each hand flicking at the air, and as he said “this” he looked quickly down at his torso and back up again). If she had been alive when I made that walk in the snow, I wouldn’t have had to ask; she would have made it her business to come with me.
I was curious to know what had become of Zain, but I felt a rising dread. If Sydney was about to cast light on how he had come to transform himself, I was not entirely keen to hear that story now. Of course I wondered, but my wondering was not prompted by the kind of curiosity that sought answers; it was prompted by disappointment. I did not really believe that there was an acceptable story, and didn’t need or care to hear one attempted. I could already feel my embarrassment and impatience rising. I was in a caretaking role with Sydney, and as such the tables had turned between us. But our relationship was still predicated on the original one in which he had parented me, and surely there are things that a child, regardless of his age, does not need, does not want to know about his parent. I wanted our original relationship preserved.
Sydney said something, but the cicadas outside the bedroom window must have multiplied tenfold and were making an uncommon and piercing ruckus, drowning out his words. I got up, intending to go to the window, but Sydney grabbed my arm. Don’t go, Jonathan. Stay with me, he said. Please, just sit with me. Let me tell you everything. Please try to listen.
His small cool hand on mine still had the power to calm me. The dreadful whistling subsided. Before I could think to still myself, to steel myself, I had already turned my hand over, and this time he rested his in mine.
We sat like that for an unpleasant minute as he stroked my hand. I don’t know why I let him, but in that time, so long in the moment and so brief in my memory, I resigned myself to his will. I suppose I had started down this path when I came to Trinidad looking for Sid, and I could not now abandon him on this last leg of our journey.
Throughout much of that night Sydney spoke, slowly but urgently, and as he laboured I felt that it would be selfish of me to bother him for answers to the questions that, more than thirty years later, still harassed me. In the end, what I discovered I really wanted from him was not stories, nor even answers, but the turning back of time.
Most often Sydney spoke directly to me and I was his sole audience—but every once in a while it was as if he and Zain were alone, and he was talking to her. I felt then that I was an intruder, but I mustered my resolve and continued my vigil. Despite these shifts in tone, he was remarkably lucid—a fact to which I now return, even two months later, as I chastise myself for not getting him medical attention earlier.
Eventually, he drifted off to sleep and I, curled by then at his side, was transported to a different time in our lives: I am wearing only a white cotton diaper and I am sitting on the wide, cool stone sill of the veranda wall of our house in the Annex in Toronto. My legs stretch straight out so that my flexed heels face the house opposite ours. One of Sid’s hands is splayed across my torso, holding me against her body. I am leaning into her body, looking out towards the car-lined street in front of the house. Her fingers against my bare chest and belly are covered in a plastic film of red, yellow and green acrylic paint. There are red-brick late-Victorians on either side of our house and along the street opposite. The far side of the street is lined with parked cars whose metal trimmings catch and then disperse the light that dapples through the leaves of mighty trees.
3
Whenever I look out at the cruise ships in the Gulf, I imagine tourists from those ships returning home and saying, “Yes, I know Trinidad, I have been there.” I, too, have said, “I know Trinidad,” but by this I mean that I know first-hand the daily quotidian: On one of my visits here the German shepherd that belongs to Sydney’s neighbour across the road (the house surrounded by the curiously high concrete fence that is menacingly and artlessly crowned with rolls of barbed wire) escaped and attacked the small dog of another neighbour. I know that the small dog had to be put down. I know that the owner of the German shepherd wears dark sunglasses regardless of the time of day or the weather. He doesn’t say good day or good night to anyone. Lancelot and Rosita have no proof, but are nevertheless certain he is a drug lord. They say everyone knows that he is protected by the area police. Perhaps I can say I know Trinidad because I am privy to neighbourhood rumours and intrigues, and because I can look out at that house across the road and wonder if its owner cares that death had not so long ago crouched on our back stairs.
On one of my earlier trips here, the youngest son of Mrs. Allen, the guava cheese lady who comes around on Saturday afternoons with her tray of sweets, won a scholarship in the CXC exams. The boy, Wilson, was sent by his mother to ask me to attend a special service at the local Roman Catholic Church for all the boys from his school who had passed the exam. Since then, the boy has been in touch with me by e-mail regularly and before I arrived this last time he informed me that he’d been accepted at the Cave Hill Campus of The University of the West Indies to study law. God’s blessings on a hard-working mother, Rosita said to me gravely.
The people who live in the area are not people I saw once, in passing, on a visit here. I know what they look like from the front, from the back, from the side. I have spoken with them. I know their voices. I have heard things about them. They know things about me.
I know, too, the cool muscular smell of mildewed cracks in the floor tiles of the bathroom of a private, crumbling residence—this one; the fright of cockroaches lurking at the dry mouth of the drain, their antennae waving intelligences to each other. I know the smell of thyme, chadon beni, garlic, ketchup, soya sauce, sesame oil and burnt sugar; I can see the crystalline amber shards of the seasoning mixture stuck to a wooden spoon that stirred a chicken in a frothy pot in the kitchen of a private home—this one. I know how paint on concrete steps plasticizes and bubbles in the sun and splits with a surprisingly sharp, audible crack when poked with a fingernail. I know what it is to need to give a sponge bath to a sick man when there is no water in the taps and the two tanks at the back of the house have gone dry. I know how a garden of plants that tower to the height of a house here, but are stunted in pots inside houses where I come from, can wilt and crisp in the dry season and miraculously spring to life again in the rain, and how odd it is to be served food in good china and to sip rum or Scotch and coconut water from cut-glass tumblers even as there is no electricity for days, and for weeks no water in the taps—except for a possible brief reprieve in the most inconvenient hours of the night, when both, without notice, might become available, causing people, myself included, who throughout the neighbourhood are attuned in their sleep to the most distant rumble of the awakening taps, to scurry and gather pails, pans and drinking cups to catch as much as possible. All this and more I have come to know about life on this island over the course of nine years.
Yet, when I looked at Sydney I felt I was no different from the wishful but misguided tourist who thinks he can know a destination by reading a few paragraphs in a guidebook about its history, its flora and fauna, and then visiting it once for a handful of days. Perhaps I have a little more reason than most visitors to say, “I know Trinidad.” But Sydney, the person I knew from the first day I was able to know anything, had remained, until those last days we were together, elusive.
What I now understand, at long last, is that a person c
an tell you simple stories to fill lacunae in time, but these stories will be nothing more than words ordered one in front of the other, like beads on a jeweller’s beading board. You, the listener, might take away a few images, but their significance is diminished because context is absent. But Sydney was right: stories are many-sided. To truly understand, one needs to know, for instance, the rumours and gossip and even the lies about the story. And one needs to know seemingly unrelated things, such as the identity of the protagonist’s neighbours, and what colour of light is cast by the street lamps, and how the streets appear in winter and in summer, and what are the era’s most popular songs and films, what advertising jingles played on the radio stations, and what health and social services are in effect, and what are the immigration policies, which scandals have made the newspaper headlines, and how are the nation’s sports teams faring, and what is the price of a taxi ride across town, of a kilo of tomatoes at the farmer’s market, a hot dog on the street corner or, here, a doubles, or a shark-and-bake sandwich. Even the knowledge of what’s happening continents away—which governments are falling or forming—adds light, and so gives shading and nuance to a story. Once this full palette is known, the beads on the beading board might be arranged differently by different beaders, but the completed necklace, although a delightful surprise, can also be said to be predictable and inevitable. When in the past Sydney would tell me his stories, stories that were full of these kinds of details, beginning always with that walk he had taken in the cold and ice from Bergamot Avenue to the Irene Samuel Health and Gender Centre, his words fell like glass coins in a bottomless bucket, ringing against the bucket’s sides but never landing.
I awoke when Sydney did, about four hours later, in the early morning. He insisted on having breakfast in the dining room, and so Lancelot and I tried to dress him, but he was too weak and eventually lay back in the bed. He had asked for a boiled egg and a slice of toast, but when the dish arrived he nibbled on less than a quarter of it. I showered and dressed, then returned to his room. Rosita and Lancelot brought us drinks and sweets—tea, eggnog, sweet rice, raisin bread, Crix crackers and cheese. Sydney nibbled and sipped and eventually he began to speak again, his voice lower now; at times I strained to hear. It stays with me, how in such dire circumstances Sydney’s speech had an exacting urgency. He knew that this was his last chance and he wanted to be clear, to say everything that had to be said.
It was only then, when he was, I realized, at last wrapping up his story of the walk to the medical clinic, that he chose to reveal that Zain had not simply died, but had been killed during what appeared to be a burglary at her home. I was taken aback when he said that he suspected Zain’s murderer was known to her, and that, furthermore, if he were right—and he was convinced that he was—he also knew who this person was. He’d never told this to anyone before, he said, but now he dearly needed the peace that could only come from saying what he thought had happened to Zain. I worried that he was too weak, but he would not acknowledge my concern. Instead, he spoke throughout the long day, his story punctuated by periods of silence when I thought he had fallen asleep, only to realize, by the details he then revealed, that with each short rest he took, he was gearing himself up—rather than down—preparing himself to delve deeper into the well of his most personal memories and desires, his mind and his storytelling brighter and sharper than ever.
Here, then, is one of the stories that had so heavily weighed on him. I’ve tried to set down his words as best as I can remember, but forgive me if in doing so I have put in a conjunction or two of my own, or have inserted parts of the story I had heard on previous occasions and other parts gleaned from my reading of the notebooks Sydney left me—rejigging, reordering, culling, all for clarity and with no malice or intention to assert my own interpretations. Forgive me, too, if I put in Sydney’s mouth here and there the most minimal of details, such as the colour of the landscape and scents of the place I have come to know well, for although my intention is first and foremost to give voice to Sydney, the writer in me has begun to take flight again.
———
SYDNEY’S STORY
(as he told it to me)
Zain and I were living our adult lives far from each other, but whenever I came home to Trinidad for a visit we would get together and, invariably, she would ask me to tell her what “made me so.” She would hold my face in her hands and search me with eyes that were like fingers, like lips. She knew that to do this to me was a cruel luxury, but it didn’t stop her.
I, for my part, knew that on a small island, in a place like this, I could not misbehave, especially with my best friend. This knowledge had been reason enough for me to leave the island as a young woman and retreat to a place where, if I fell for such a look and such a touch, I was on my own, in a place where I had no family, friends or community to offend. But in all my years away, no one ever touched me or treated me like Zain did. Was this peculiar to Zain, I often wondered, or was it the way of women from our culture? And was it only they who could ever satisfy me? If that were so, I knew my future in Canada would not be easy.
During one particular month-long vacation twenty years ago, I went between my parents’ house in the south and Zain’s house in the north where she lived with her husband and her two children, both then at university abroad. The month had begun happily. Zain and I were like youngsters again, driving all over the island, going here and there on our own, not returning to the house until well after dinnertime. Angus didn’t mind us roaming about. He was traditional and conservative in some ways, but liberal in others. He trusted us not to get into too much trouble. The month passed quickly, and I returned to Toronto. I had been back only one week before my dear friend Zain was dead.
I could recount any number of blissful days during that month, but one stands out. It was late when we left Zain and Angus’s house, around five or so in the evening. The sun was dropping fast, and she and I were headed into the Tucker Valley. It was frightfully liberating, the two of us driving on that road alone, through pastures and fields, at that time of evening. But we weren’t alone; we were together, and when Zain and I were together we were, or so we imagined, invincible, carefree, daring. Not daring of ourselves, but of others. Just you dare; you won’t know what hit you! We drove into the valley slowly, taking in the incredible beauty of the wide-canopied samaan trees on either side of the roadway. Rosettes of bromeliads and delicate orchids clustered around the trunks and branches of the trees, and Spanish moss clumped and hung like wet lace curtains. As the passenger, I could gaze at all of this, and at Zain too, her hair so beautifully coiffed, her makeup and her nails shorthand for how she was to be treated.
Ours was the only car on the road for a good distance into the valley. Then we rounded a bend to see that a hundred yards ahead a small white car had stopped in our lane, and another car, also white, had halted in the oncoming lane. Together, the two effectively blocked the road. Zain was telling me about Cynthia, her maid. Long ago, Cynthia had answered an advertisement for employment that Zain had placed in the paper, and when Cynthia saw the house, when she met Zain and the two children, she’d simply announced, “I am taking this job. I will start right away. Show me my room.” Zain was saying that by the time we got back, Cynthia would have made coconut bake and salt fish. Cynthia was a really good cook, and she was black, Zain said, so of course she didn’t make bake like an Indian. Cynthia’s bake was black bake, she added impishly. “Hers isn’t limp and bland like a thick sada roti. This is bake in which you can actually taste the coconut. A wedge of it between your thumb and forefinger is firm; when you hold it up to your mouth, Sid, it meets you like a man.”
I heard her laugh, but my focus was on the two cars, their disturbing configuration: we couldn’t get by on either the left or the right of them; the road was edged by tall bush on both sides, and a couple of feet beyond this edging were ravines too deep and narrow for a car to manoeuvre. We would have no choice but to stop. I was thinking of how my father,
and so many others, had repeatedly warned me that if you’re the only one on a Trinidad road and someone tries to stop you, if they hit your car, or even if you hit someone on the road, you mustn’t stop, for God’s sake don’t stop, just drive straight to the police station. And I was thinking that the police station was behind us and that there was no easy way to turn the car around. I was noticing that the sun had already gone down behind the hills. The dense greenery was swiftly losing its lushness and definition. There were fer-de-lance, bushmasters and coral snakes in the forest, I thought, and people weren’t just mugged in this country, but they were raped, they were kidnapped and they were murdered. We were two women, alone, on a quiet road in the country. Above my panic I heard Zain say, “But you wouldn’t know what I am talking about, would you. Don’t tell me you like flaccid bake?” Although I kept peering ahead, curious that the situation didn’t seem to unduly perturb Zain—she had continued driving, a little slower, but without any sense of trepidation—I shook my head in feigned irritation, for the slyness of the smile she wore indicated that she was anticipating my reaction. I strained to see if the drivers of the two cars were communicating with each other.
Aware now of my distraction, Zain paid attention. She said, “But what these people think they are doing? They can’t just stand up like that in the middle of the road. How do they expect me to pass? They are going to have to move.” And just as she said that, as if they had heard, the cars began to move, the one in our lane carrying on now abruptly and swiftly, the one approaching us moving more slowly, the driver peering into the field to his left even as he was rolling forward. Zain remarked that they must have seen some animal or other. She touched my shoulder and said, “Sid, don’t believe everything you hear about how much crime there is in this place. Relax a little. There is crime everywhere, but you have to live, don’t you?”
