‘That is no advice to give him,’ his mistress said. She was bent low over the coalpot. ‘You should be the last one to give anybody advice on how to live.’
‘Is the best advice any man could get,’ Chinese replied unruffled. He lit another cigarette. ‘Look at me and you. We not married and we not rich. But we damn happy, eh?’
‘That is me and you,’ she said, casting a benign glance at him. Her face was sweaty and moist from the fire. She dried it with the sleeve of her dress. ‘The same won’t suit everybody. Not everybody could stand living in a place like this, you know. They would want more comforts.’
‘True. Very true.’ Chinese stroked his chin placidly. ‘But I feel Wilbert is more like me than like his father. Wilbert like to take things easy. He wouldn’t let things get him down. You could tell that a mile off.’ Chinese yawned complacently, rubbing his stomach.
She gazed dubiously at Wilbert and resumed fanning the coalpot.
The smell of fish permeated the stale, overheated air radiating upwards from the narrow streets and the crowded pavements around the market; blanketing the shifting, haggling swarms of people. Open cardboard boxes, filled with the rotting remains of the day’s business, were strewn about the pavements or floated in the black, stagnant gutters. The odour of corruption was everywhere. Men and women, decayed as the fruit and vegetables they were selling – for many it was a front to disarm the police – sat crouched on the sacking where their wares were scattered in disordered heaps, offering their sunbaked stock to the pedestrians with a spasmodic and expiring enthusiasm. It required agility and care to avoid crushing their bony extremities.
The mutilated, the diseased, the starving abounded in this part of the city. They congregated here as if for mutual support, security and solace. It was a gallery of moral and physical degeneracy and Wilbert studied the exhibits with a morbid fascination. There were those missing an arm; there were those missing a leg and hobbling on crutches; there were those with flaking, leprous skin; there were those whose bodies were hollowed out cages of skin and bone; there were those abandoned to alcoholic stupor. In every nook and cranny there was a specimen of derelict humanity, vermin-ridden and covered with festering sores; gargoyles waiting for no one and nothing.
Some appeared to have taken up permanent residence, constructing makeshift habitations in the shelter of which they cooked their food on coalpot fires, while fitfully tending their ragged babies, mewling and crawling in the dust and litter of debris. At night they wedged themselves in a huddle against the unyielding stone walls of the market, their heads covered with newspaper. There were those who slept as well during the day, heedless of the noise and the heat and the flies settling on their inert bodies.
One woman frequently drew his attention. She could have been thirty; she could have been sixty. It was impossible to tell. She had stumps for legs and propelled herself along the pavements with her hands. Her speed and dexterity were astonishing as she scampered among the throng shouting at the top of her voice. ‘Make way! I don’t want nobody to mash me! Make way!’ It was all he ever heard her say. She was constantly on the move – though where to it was not easy to say. Her voice was raucous and penetrating, adapted to its task, and she could be heard from a long way off howling her unvarying refrain. ‘Make way! I don’t want nobody to mash me! Make way!’
Once, when he was wandering among these phantasmal creatures, the woman’s weird cries resounding in his head, the odour of corruption heavy in the stifling air, Wilbert had the odd sensation of suddenly being cut loose from all that was normal, predictable and certain. The street was choked with traffic: motor cars, bicycles, lorries, hand-drawn and horse-drawn carts. It had rained and the asphalt was steaming, wafting upwards into his nostrils the smells of decay: of fish and rotting fruit and vegetables. He stopped near one of the market entrances. From the skylights in the high cantilevered roof a dense grey light filtered down to the rows of concrete stalls. Open drains ran the length of the building and the floor was wet. A fishmonger, his hands coated with pearly scales, was slicing up a fish with his cutlass. Behind him, gutted, bloodstained carcasses were impaled on hooks. The stench intensified. He began to feel giddy and somewhat faint. The external and the internal became confused. It seemed to him that it was he who was steaming and not the asphalt; that the warm, cloying taint of blood came from him and not the gutted carcasses; that it was from within him that all these contaminated scents were rising and percolating to the outside. He was embalmed in the process of putrefaction; drifting off into the vastnesses of an uncharted ocean whose deeps were composed of successive layers of degeneracy, exceeding everything he had yet experienced. World upon world of darkness without beginning or end. His identity was being shattered and pulverized by these ascending vapours. He was a carcass, raw, open and vulnerable; an undulation of that incessantly swelling ocean. Wilbert panicked and started to run, his heart thumping; unable to breathe the lifeless air. ‘Make way! I don’t want nobody to mash me! Make way!’ He only stopped when he could no longer hear that cry. Then he breathed easier.
To clear his head and restore some semblance of balance, he walked westwards out of the city past the docks and the lines of ships in the harbour; past the shuttered houses on the Wrightson Road; out towards Mucurapo and Cocorite and the sea. He walked without thinking. He was angry with Chinese and apprehensive of his siren songs in praise of fruitless ease and indolence. Wilbert felt they were deliberately designed to lead him astray; to entice him from the straight and narrow path of his proper duties and obligations.
At the Carenage he paused to watch the fishermen prepare their nets – he could not escape that sickly. fishy smell! – and looked out at the grey, windless sea and the rocky off-shore islands with their sprinkling of tenacious green vegetation. What was it like beyond them? Was it the same endless sea, flat and grey? Those rocky islands standing sentinel in the water were like the very limits of the world. Perhaps the tales he had heard of foreign lands, of people who fished through holes in the ice, were all lies concocted by wicked people. Trinidad was the world. Trinidad was the universe. And the red and black trucks of the Ramsaran Transport Company, the sun round which it revolved. The rest was the fabrication of deceivers. Nothing else existed. Those were the stern realities he had been reared upon and he could not go beyond them. His head aching from the sun and more dazed than when he had started out, Wilbert took a taxi to the bus station and made his way back to the house in Victoria.
2
The regime of sternness which had for so long dominated the Ramsaran household and all who lived in it was being altered beyond recognition. Egbert Ramsaran, with Sushila as teacher, was discovering there was more to life than hard work, sternness and brutality. Sushila had informed him that life was granted for enjoyment. ‘What’s the point of you breaking your back any more?’ she said to him. ‘Wilbert is getting a big man now. He should be taking over from where you leave off. Is only right and fitting. Is high time for you to rest and enjoy yourself before it’s too late. You should make proper use of the strength left in your muscles.’
Familiar routines which had borne the stamp of eternal verities began to disappear. His daily routine of exercise was phased out and the elaborate equipment transported to the field next door where it was allowed to rust and fall to pieces side by side with the decaying skeletons already there. He claimed the exercises were a strain on his heart. The audiences with the clients came to an end. Sushila had expressed her disapproval of them. ‘Leave that for the office,’ she advised him. ‘Your home is your home. You shouldn’t let all kind of people clutter it up and worry you with they problems. Better still, let Wilbert look after that side of the business for you. You just letting him idle in school and waste money.’ Egbert Ramsaran relinquished the responsibility; but he charged Mr Balkissoon, his foreman at the Depot – not Wilbert – with the task of collecting the debts in whatever manner he saw fit.
Petitioners from the Settlement – and partic
ularly Rani’s relatives – were discouraged from crowding the verandah on Sunday mornings. Sushila too was responsible for this. ‘What you want Basdai coming here for to disturb you? She only out to squeeze whatever she can out of you. Sunday is your day of rest and you need all the rest you could get.’ Egbert Ramsaran was quick to acquiesce. He was agreeably surprised and flattered by Sushila’s concern for his rest and privacy. ‘If they must harass somebody,’ Sushila added for good measure, ‘let them come and harass me. I do know how to deal with beggars like them.’ She was given carte blanche to deal with them as she pleased. Thus they were diverted from the verandah to the kitchen to await Sushila’s pleasure. Sushila exacted the full penalty. They were given short shrift by her and sent away empty-handed. ‘Just wait,’ Basdai threatened. ‘I going to expose you.’ But she never had the chance: Sushila barred all access to Egbert Ramsaran.
Basdai did not know what to say or do and it reduced her to tears whenever she recalled her hand in the matter. As she never stopped reminding everyone, it was she who had schemed to put the worthless Sushila there; and it was she who had berated Rani’s multitudinous shortcomings in repentance for having foisted such a wife on Egbert Ramsaran. Now Rani was very bliss. She was like Heaven itself compared to the ruthless and audacious Sushila who was ordering her, Basdai, about the place as if she were a little ‘piss’n’tail’ girl. The insult! The injury! How much she had gladly endured in the hope that one day she would be adequately rewarded for her patience and fortitude and willingness to serve. Basdai did not know what to say. Her cunning had not bargained with such depths of treachery. Even the unsteady dribble of money which had flowed from Egbert Ramsaran’s pockets into her palm had dried up. She pictured it flowing away from her and gathering in torrents of glowing gold around the undeserving Sushila. Basdai watched Sushila’s growing authority and tried, in vain, to woo her. Sushila’s mocking laughter was all she received in return for her efforts – and untimely reminders of her former treatment.
The chorus of despair turned to Wilbert for relief and comfort. He was reminded that he owed his life to Basdai’s generosity. Her daughters’ milk had given him nourishment. Surely she deserved something more than this. ‘Sushila up to no good,’ Basdai told him. ‘She out to rob you and your father of house and home. Tell him to send she away. I know all she trickery.’ Wilbert was withdrawn. It was not his job to interfere with his father’s arrangements. He had no influence on him; as much a bystander as she was. ‘I have nothing to do with it,’ he said.
The bull died, and not many weeks afterwards Egbert Ramsaran got rid of his herd of cows – again on Sushila’s advice. ‘What you want with cows? Think of all the worry you giving yourself in keeping them. Is much cheaper in the end to buy milk from outside.’ It was a new and delicious sensation to him to be so assiduously mothered. Sushila was a firm but accommodating guide. Day after day she contrived to impress her usefulness and indispensability on him and Egbert Ramsaran marvelled that he could have done for so long without her.
‘It does amaze me,’ he said, ‘to think how blind I was for all them years.’ He patted her shoulders. ‘Where you was hiding yourself all that time?’
Sushila laughed her full-throated laugh. His gratitude amused her and she toyed lightly with it. ‘I wasn’t hiding anywhere,’ she replied. ‘I was there all the time. But you was a married man. You had a wife to think about then.’ She liked to refer to Rani and to observe the effect the mere mention of her name had on him. It was the litmus test of her hold on him.
Egbert Ramsaran frowned. ‘Don’t use that name in this house. She! She wasn’t no wife to me.’ He massaged his stomach. ‘Haunting me from the grave.’ He shied away from calling her by name.
‘You being unfair to Rani.’ Sushila smiled deprecatingly. ‘I’m sure she try she best to please you. Rani couldn’t help the way she was.’
‘I suppose you right,’ he admitted grudgingly. ‘But what is that to me? She try to eat me up all the same. To drag me down with she. I had to fight to keep my head above water and not drown. It was you who make me into a new man. I don’t know what I would have done without you.’
‘Is not me alone you should be praising. You should praise yourself too. Whatever it was make you into a new man was inside of you all along. It didn’t come out of the blue. It just needed the right person to bring it out.’
‘Not anybody could have do that.’ He waved a finger close to her face. ‘It had to be you and no one else.’
Sushila did not contradict him. She was aware of the dangers inherent in an excess of self-denigration. It could be carried too far and end in him devaluing her own importance in the process. She had to tread gingerly. It was a tougher battle than she had bargained for. That first time he had come to her room in the middle of the night was not a joyous affair. The surrender had been petulant and ungracious. She understood that in coming to her he had desecrated a vital part of himself and she had to coax and cajole him into acceptance. Her embraces were not sufficient. She had to become guide and teacher and philosopher, revealing inch by inch the vistas of pleasure, passion and luxurious ease which it was her privilege and duty to open up to him.
Sushila had won ultimately. Yet, her ascendancy over him, considerable as it was, was not absolute. Even in moments of his greatest gratitude, she could not afford to throw caution to the winds. Her suzerainty was hedged with reservations. Egbert Ramsaran retained vestiges of his old independence and, perhaps, because he had given up so much, what remained was sacrosanct to him and he was tenacious in its defence. Sushila had to seem submissive and pliable; to appear to be led while leading. He was acutely sensitive of any infringement of his prerogatives. Though he eventually did as she suggested, to salve his pride Egbert Ramsaran either invoked different reasons for his actions or tampered with the details of Sushila’s remedies. Thus, he stopped his exercises not because there were better ways to use his strength (as Sushila had said) but because they were a ‘strain’ on his heart; he got rid of the cows not because they were a nuisance and because milk was cheaper from outside but because the smell of the cow-sheds upset his stomach; he did not hand over collection of the debts to Wilbert as Sushila had instructed but to Mr Balkissoon. Sushila had to pick her way along the narrow and tortuous path between self-effacement and magnification of her role. She had to decipher his moods and decide which was more appropriate. There were occasions when it exhausted her; when her tact and cunning frittered itself away to no obvious purpose or advantage.
There was a region of his mind whose defences she struggled valiantly to weaken but which, most of the time, was impervious to her assaults. Egbert Ramsaran preserved an unwavering hold on his money. Despite all his gratitude and the tremendous store he set on her, it was still he who manipulated the purse strings and sought to curb and keep in check Sushila’s irrepressible yearnings for the extravagant.
‘All that money you have is no good to you,’ she pleaded, ‘if you don’t use it. Think of all the things you could do with it.’
‘Like what?’
‘Like this house you living in for instance. You should pull it down and build yourself a new one – like those you does see in Port-of-Spain. A man in your position …’
‘That’s not for me,’ Egbert Ramsaran said. ‘I didn’t make my money to waste it. Anyway,’ he added slyly, ‘you yourself tell me money is not everything …’
‘But …’
‘You yourself say,’ Egbert Ramsaran pursued smoothly with a mixture of irony and seriousness, ‘that whatever it is that does make a person happy that is the thing he should do – regardless of what other people think. So if other people think a man in my position should be living in a fancy house – why I should let them worry me?’
‘But if you have money …’
‘Living in a big house wouldn’t make me any happier. Living with you is sufficient for me. That is my happiness.’
Contrary to Basdai’s accusations, Sushila did not want to gra
b his money for herself. She did not have any plans to rob him of ‘house and home’. She would not have been capable of it. Sushila believed money existed in order to be spent and it was madness to her that it should be left lying around doing nothing. Who actually did the spending was unimportant. His alacrity in paying for Sita’s education had aroused false hopes in her: it had been on the spur of the moment in an initial rush of headiness. Beyond that, Egbert Ramsaran was reluctant to go: his wealth was the last thing he had that he could call indisputably his own and he clung desperately to it. He even refused her requests for new curtains. ‘What wrong with the old ones?’ he asked. ‘They have holes in them,’ she said, ‘big, big holes.’ ‘That don’t bother me,’ he replied. He tried to reduce the monthly salary he had agreed to pay her. ‘Remember I supporting both you and Sita now. You should take that into account.’ Sushila would have none of it. ‘Nobody ask you to support Sita. So it have nothing to do with my salary.’ He continued to grumble about it intermittently.
Nevertheless, his tightfistedness did not deter Sushila and she accepted the setbacks it entailed: they were conceived as part of a grander strategy; strategic retreats in a war she was convinced she would win. Her salary apart, by generously admitting defeat on a succession of trifles, she gradually quietened his fears. Her big ambition was to wheedle him into buying a house on the beach: Sushila loved the sea.
‘Is not good for you to be cooped up in Victoria all the time,’ she said to him. ‘I don’t find you looking too well these days. You need fresh air and a change of scene. It will improve your health no end.’
‘Nothing the matter with my health,’ he replied firmly. ‘I never felt better in my life.’
The Chip-Chip Gatherers Page 23
