by Shani Mootoo
The two cars picked up speed and I exhaled. I asked Zain to turn off the air conditioning so that we could open the windows and listen to the sounds of the birds and smell the lush greenness. Ahead, a flat field of low uncultivated grasses, patches of bhaji and of pigeon peas extended well back to a middle ground of broad-leaved trees like teak, papaya, breadfruit, soursop. And rising quite suddenly now in front of us was the Northern Range. A small sign, posted so low we could have missed it, informed us that we were entering the park of Macqueripe Beach. Zain looked at her watch and said, “It’s still early. Cynthia won’t have dinner ready yet.” The sky was by this time yellowish silver.
“Let’s go,” I concurred.
We drew near to a guard’s hut on the side of the road, with a gate that could be raised and lowered, and a sign that warned of a 6 p.m. closing, at which time all persons must have vacated the park. It was quarter to six. There was no one in the hut. Zain asked, “You think they mean it?” From behind us came a car. As it overtook ours Zain put her hand out to stop the driver. “The sign says the park closes at six. You know if they serious?” she shouted. The woman in the passenger seat laughed. The man driving said, “No, it don’t have nobody that does come and check.” The woman added, “I coming here plenty and I never yet see nobody in that hut.” They drove on, the man shouting back, “Doh ’fraid, follow us, we going for a swim.”
And so we drove on and the field ended. Suddenly the forest was right up against us. Dark trees met the road now. Out of the blue, Zain asked, “What about Jonathan? Are you in touch with him?”
“Jonathan?” I asked, surprised.
“The little boy—well, he’d be a young man now, I suppose—the child you were bringing up with that English woman. Was her name India?”
“She and I haven’t spoken in some years,” I said. “India did not want him and me to have contact.”
“Yes, you told me that in one of your letters long ago. But that is still so? It must be so hard on you. But he’s no longer a child, so what does it matter now?”
She was, of course, right. I shrugged and said with finality, “I guess it’s complicated.”
She let the matter rest and we carried forward in silence, but an unease washed over me; I felt suddenly ungainly, my body ill-formed. As if she sensed this, Zain put her hand out and rubbed my knee.
Thankfully, the road soon ended and we were at a parking area. A few men, women and children milled about. Before us, beyond the paved area, was the perpendicular rise of the mountain. Stepping out of the car, I looked up to see the mountain’s top and almost lost my balance. The face of the mountain, I saw, was embroidered with an infinite variety of textured shapes and shades of dark green vegetal tentacles waving out from the face of the wall, linked together by nets of wild philodendron vines. It was frightening, to be so suddenly and unexpectedly halted by the forest of the Northern Range, and this added to the sense of danger I felt about Zain and me, two women from “nice” families, being out here on our own, so late in the evening. On the other side of the parking lot, through a row of cedar trees, was a narrow view to the sea. The light on the open water was startling. It was still bright light—daylight—out there.
We found a stairway and made our way down—Zain in her low heels, and I in my runners, feeling as usual like some deformed-yet-loved thing in her presence. People were hurrying past us. “Come on,” she said, picking up speed, skipping down the steep stairs. We arrived at a bay where small waves formed tightly and then broke. The man and the woman who had spoken to us from their car were already standing in the water, the woman in a dress, the skirt of which she had tightly gathered around and knotted in front of her, the man in navy blue pants that reached his knees, the hem of the pants wet from the leaping water.
We stood close enough that the man called out, “You make it in time to see the sun.”
Zain answered back in her usual quick fashion, “Yes, you know how to give directions.”
His wife had been grinning, but at Zain’s retort her lips tightened.
The man said, “Well, it was a straight road, no turn-offs, you can’t get lost even if you tried.”
Zain answered, “You know how long I trying to get lost, and I just can’t get lost? Is a good while I trying, man.”
The woman turned away, and the man, his smile forced now, looked quizzically at Zain. He glanced at me, he looked back at Zain, and then turned his back to us.
Out ahead, Peninsula de Paria, a flirtatious finger of neighbouring Venezuela, pointed directly at beautiful Macqueripe Bay, sprawled across much of the horizon save for a slip into which the sun would soon drop on an open horizon line. Several people had cameras at the ready. Neither Zain nor I had carried a camera. No photographs of us together, come to think of it, had ever been taken. She and I stood side by side watching. We didn’t speak. As Zain gazed out at the horizon, I wondered what the moment meant to her. It occurred to me that I could think of it as magical, and make a promise, a wish, a commitment, but I turned instead to watch a woman and two children, their backs to the drama of the sky unfolding, being photographed by a man. The children’s antics escalated as they waited for the man, likely their father, to take the picture. He was admonishing them to behave, to be still. Then he became animated and said, “Now!” The camera clicked.
The sun had hit the water. Zain’s eyes were fiercely set on it. She seemed calm and, for the first time that evening, serious. A minute or so later, we turned our attention to the scene around us. With our backs to the horizon, the trees were now softly lit and in sharp focus. What a surprise, a gift it was, to realize that the hills on either side of the bay were splashed generously with chaconia, which had been obliterated earlier by the harsh light, sweeping arms of redness reaching outward as if to fan the bay. And the sky directly above was the most translucent and yet luminous shade of phthalo blue I’d ever seen. We stood staring up and Zain gripped my arm, pointed to the sky over the parking lot, and said, “How strange. So blue in this direction after sunset. And what a strange shade of blue. Almost green.”
Even as I saw what she saw, and marvelled, I was watching to make sure that her touching my arm had gone unnoticed by the strangers around us. I stepped forward, moving slightly out of her reach, and said, “It’s the colour of the Barbados sea as seen from the air.”
She asked, “Do you know what makes the sky blue?”
I opened my eyes wide in a gesture of invitation, and she obliged, laughing, because she knew I was making fun of her, and as she wove in words the tale of oxygen and nitrogen and argon gas and dust particles and light waves and electromagnetic fields and colour wavelengths and frequencies, I thought, you are the mother of two adult children, the wife of a businessman, you are a Trinidadian woman, you are an Indian woman, a Muslim woman, you live here in this country, but who are you, really?
Zain said, “You’re not listening to a thing I am telling you, are you?”
“I heard every word,” I lied. “Now, tell me what makes thunder.”
Her eyes suddenly brimmed with tears. She tried to smile, but it was as if her face had broken. I wanted to put my hand on her cheek, but I dared not. I wanted to take her hand and pull her to me, but that would have been foolish. Any other two women on this beach could have interacted so, and others would have seen one woman comforting another. But I didn’t look like other women. I indicated with my head that Zain should follow me and I walked as casually as I could, toward the stairs, back to where the car was parked.
It was when we were climbing back up the stairs that we saw the men with the snakes. The stairs were poorly made, angled downwards, and as you ascended you had to not only step up, but also grip the rusting railing tight and pull yourself along so that you didn’t slide off. And those stairs were wet, too, made slippery from bathers returning to their cars. We were concentrating, and we weren’t looking ahead. Zain was ahead of me, and immediately behind me were three young women chatting loudly—I don’t remem
ber about what, but I do remember their high-pitched voices, their raucous, daring laughter. They were a new, different breed, I remember thinking. Zain and I had never been like them. I thought they were a bit too loud, and at the same time admired them for it. Zain was making her way up at a good pace. One of the laughing young women snapped suddenly, in an arresting voice, “All yuh!” and her companions went momentarily silent. Zain and I were instantly alert. I looked up to see what was happening, and in that moment Zain cried out and twisted her body back almost to face me, blocking the view with her hand. The women now uttered various shrill sounds of fear and displeasure. I looked back at them and they, too, had their views blocked with their hands, and so I wasn’t sure where to look. But I could see the face of the one who had called out: it was stone serious, and she was staring up ahead. And now I turned and could see, coming down the stairs towards us, four men. They were young and of Indian origin, all with short squarely cut hair that stood stiffly in the most traditional way, and two of them wore long fat snakes about their necks and chests. The young woman shrieked, “Move aside!” The men looked at her. They were bounding down the stairway lithely, as if the snakes were beach towels. “Move aside, get to the side,” she shouted at them, more authoritatively than before. They finally obliged, stepping now to the far edge of the stairway to make more room for us to continue quickly past them.
“I ’fraid them things. Don’t make joke with me around them things, you hear!” the young woman said as she passed them, the voice that had been so high-pitched and bright some seconds before now dark and thick. As I had passed, I’d turned to get a good look at the snakes—an unusual thing for me, as I am one of those people who can’t even bear to look at the image of a snake, much less the real thing. They were so thick that the outline of their scales was quite visible inside patches of cream demarcated by black, and brown patches also outlined in black, and ochre patches of irregular shape, and yellow and black spots. The snakes had the full roundness of motorcycle tires, and did not seem to be limply resting, but rather to be quite alert; the pointed head of one was angled towards the beach front. Their underbellies could be seen in parts and here they were white, the scales less smooth. The eye that I saw in swift passing had a light brown glassiness. Although I am terrified of snakes, when I saw that Zain had hunched her shoulders and turned her back to the men, utter disgust on her face, I wanted to embrace and comfort her. But of course I did not dare to do so, not even around this new and liberated brand of young women. I feared that I, and not the snakes, would become the centre of attraction.
Darkness fell fast, as it does in the tropics. On the way back to the car, Zain turned off onto the golf course road. Farther ahead, she stopped. She turned off the lights and the engine. We were engulfed in pitch-blackness. “What are you doing?” I asked, my concern about safety in such a remote area juggling in my mind against the remote possibility that she was creating an opportunity for something more between us. “I have something I want to tell you, Sid,” she said. And then she told me the news that would eventually haunt me, and it haunts me still—that she had come to know someone, someone who had come to mean a great deal to her, and whom she wanted me to meet.
Unaware that I had stopped breathing, she continued. She and this someone had met in the grocery, in the lineup at the cashier. They’d been seeing one another for some months now. Angus didn’t know, of course. And she’d told him, this new man, a great deal about me.
I knew I needed to say something, but all I could manage was an insipid “Well, that’s a bit of a shock.”
Zain repeated—as if I might not have understood—that this man meant a great deal to her and that she wanted me to meet him. I couldn’t answer. After a moment’s strained silence, she apologized for asking me, and started up the car. On the way back to Cynthia’s bake and fish, Zain told me, as if trying to explain, all the usual sorts of things—he was handsome, smart, attentive and was living on a big beautiful boat that was permanently moored in the harbour near the yacht club; he was caring, he was lean and muscular, and his skin glowed red from the sun; he was gentle and rough at once, but his roughness was never to hurt her, only to weaken her with delight, and on and on. I had heard more than I cared to know. I responded only that I hadn’t realized she and Angus were having problems, to which she answered, “Well, that’s the thing. Angus and I have no problems. He loves me. And I love him. It’s just that there is no mystery for us anymore. I don’t think Angus could survive without me, and I can’t bear the thought of him being alone, but I can’t bear, either, the thought of not being with Eric. I hope you will agree to meet him.”
I didn’t respond, and Zain didn’t bother to ask me again—she simply arranged a meeting some days later on a trip she and I, just a little cool with each other now, took. It was not until we were a few minutes away from the Coal Pot Café in Salybia–Toco that she informed me Eric would meet us there.
There must have been something more to him than I was able to see, perhaps something only revealed in private. To me that day he appeared less handsome, less grand, than she had reported. He was clearly uncomfortable and I guessed that he was meeting me only to please Zain. Still, I did not find him particularly attentive to Zain and, to my discomfort, she asked him several times if he was all right. Over lunch he asked me, “So, you are related to Dr. Mahale?” I said Dr. Mahale was my father. “Yes, I know that,” he replied. I could see Zain waiting for an expansion of the subject. I, too, waited, and when Eric said nothing more, I ventured, This is such a beautiful area of Trinidad; I haven’t been to the beaches up here in almost two decades, and I am so happy to be here.
It was a poor attempt to make small talk. I asked if he came here often. Eric said only, “No.” I asked where he lived. “Up by the yacht club,” he said.
Zain jumped in, reminding me that Eric lived on his boat.
I tried again. “So, do you call that home?”
“If home is where you rest your head at night, then I suppose so.”
I asked how he made a living.
“So you are her guardian, now?” he asked with barely veiled hostility.
Zain laughed, her embarrassment apparent, and playfully punched his arm. She said, “But why you being so coy, boy?”
He said, half laughing, “This can’t be for real, man: this is an interrogation.”
Eric offered me no more, and I gave up. He talked with Zain about the drive from the yacht club to Salybia–Toco, asked her if she had heard from someone whose name I didn’t catch. Later, at the beach, I sat on the sand and allowed myself to be mesmerized by the terrifying ragtag tumble of waves and currents from the Atlantic Sea while Zain and Eric walked hand in hand down the length of the dune. On returning Zain dropped to the sand beside me, but Eric stood facing the sea, arms crossed on his chest. I decided to try one last time, for Zain’s sake. I stood up and joined him and asked if he ever brought his boat here. He answered with one word: Never.
Zain got up and went to the water’s edge. Eric and I stood in silence for some minutes. Then he left in his car.
He is not always like that, Zain told me. She couldn’t understand what was going on with him. On the way back to her house she brooded, and I, peeved but intent on not revealing my disappointment in her choice of a person with whom she might cheat on dear Angus, intent, too, on not showing my own feeling of betrayal, or my fears about why Eric was so rude to me, laid my head back and dozed.
The second time I met Eric involved, to my dismay, similar deceptions. Zain had taken me to her gym, after which we were to go out for lunch. I hadn’t bothered to ask where we would go as I no longer knew restaurants on the island. But my heart fell when I saw that we were heading to the yacht club. Halfway through our lunch at High Tide Restaurant, Eric strolled in and joined us. He was well known there, and obviously liked the attention the restaurant staff paid him. This time he was closely attentive to me. Perhaps Zain had taken him to task about the way he had acted before
. I was not fooled, especially as the topic he chose to engage in with me was my personal workout at the gym. Just as such a topic between a man and a woman was less about the workout than a way of coming around to speaking about the other’s body, I was used to the subject being broached by a hostile kind of man so that he could entertain the inevitable, simple-minded supposition that I was pumping myself up so that I could appear masculine. Of course, my guard went up, and rightly so, for Eric soon admitted that I presented him with the rare opportunity to ask what it was that turned a person into someone “like me.” His questioning eventually went too far, and I was relieved, grateful—and impressed—when Zain brought it and the lunch to an end. She had, in a flash, seen Eric as he was: small and unlikeable.
A couple of days later, the next time I saw Zain, she told me that she had confronted him on his boat, where they had a row. Eric didn’t, he told Zain, like her being “thick” with me. She was pleased with herself that she’d stood up for me: she’d shouted, she said, that under no circumstances would she tolerate bigotry and insults towards any of her friends or herself, and furthermore no one, not her father, not her husband and certainly not he, had the right to be so parochial, so domineering and boorish as to tell her who she could and could not be friends with. But the matter didn’t, of course, end there. He grabbed her by her upper arms and shook her, and then he pushed her. She was so shocked that she didn’t fight back. I thought that was a good thing, and told her so. This new side of him had frightened her, she said. She left him as quickly as she could, and later that same day, once she’d found the privacy, she telephoned him and ended the relationship.
Just before the end of that trip—about ten days after the incident with Eric—Zain and I spent our last day together. It was a Tuesday, the day on which, every week, Angus ate dinner and played poker after work with friends at a club in Port of Spain. When Angus returned—which would be, he said, about ten thirty, give or take a drink or two—they would drive me down to San Fernando to my parents’ house. Zain and I ate dinner, went to the guest room and propped ourselves on the bed next to each other. We had pushed in the door, but not fully closed it. Zain wanted to explain why she had been open to an affair. She reasoned that Angus was her first and only love, that they had been together now for so long that they were like siblings, that she wanted some mystery in her life, some excitement, to be seen again as a sexual being. I was flattered—and saddened—when she said that it was I who had sparked that desire in her to be loved again.
