The Bigger Light

by Austin Clarke

  When she came home, he made sure he was out of the apartment. In all the other ways he was successful: at the bank with the bank manager; at the barber’s chatting and joking with Alfredo; at his job, entering into conversations with Mr. MacIntosh and with the Canadian young fellow, and exchanging ideas with them, on life; with the car salesman who didn’t worry to check his credit rating, simply because the salesman knew the bank manager — in all these things, Boysie was successful and had respect and some name; but with his wife, and trying to impress her, he was a very ordinary man, a man with great failure. And he wanted to change this too, for it took away from his success. As a matter of fact, he did not consider himself as successful as he really was.

  These things were the gnawing thoughts in his head this morning, waiting for the woman, and feeling the futility of wasting so much energy on a prospect which he did not really believe could be developed into more than a prospect. The tune had come to an end. He got up to put the needle back at the beginning of “Both Sides Now” when the thought hit him that he should look at the other two records he had decided to keep out of the large collection he had had. At times, in his weakest moments, when he doubted that he was wise to have thrown away all those records into the incinerator — all that “noise” as he called them — he would yearn to hear the happy beat of the West Indian calypso, or the funky rhythms of the black music of America; but he held steadfast in his determination not to listen again to that kind of music. He was beginning to regard the music he listened to as being part of the quality of the life he wanted to live. But he had to remind himself of the titles of the other two record albums. One was a jazz album by Miles Davis, named Milestones. He used to play all the tunes in this album years ago, but he grew tired of jazz and started listening to rhythm-and-blues; and after a while Milestones was the only one that he liked. He liked this album very much, but he had not played it lately. It had been given to him by his friend Brigitte, who had heard the Miles Davis Quartet in Germany, and when she met Boysie, seven years later, she was still raving about this album. She bought it for his Christmas present at the end of their affair’s first year. The other record, also a gift, was Mendelssohn’s Incidental Music to A Midsummer Night’s Dream, and this became his favourite record of the two until he discovered that part of the album which contained the Wedding March. He was surprised to find the Wedding March on a record. For he had felt all the time that it was just a special tune which somehow came about and which was chosen years ago to be played at weddings. He did not know that it was composed for an entirely different reason. Mr. MacIntosh gave him this record. He had heard Boysie whistling the Wedding March one night, to a calypso beat, and he thought he would surprise him. But it had taken about six months before Boysie realized the real significance of the gift. And when he found out, he felt that Mr. MacIntosh had tricked him.

  One Sunday — and it was only on Sundays that he played Mendelssohn, even when he had his full record collection — he played this record. He had not played it before. He was in a good mood. He was listening as he lay on the bed, deciding whether to get up and clean out the truck and the mops and the cleaners and detergents; or whether to remain in bed, and wait for Dots to bring him breakfast in bed. And between these two minds, all of a sudden, out came the Wedding March.

  “What the hell is that, Boysie?”

  “Heh-heh-heh!”, and he thought of Mr. MacIntosh. “That man is as smart as …”

  “You mean to tell me that you still listening to that damn nonsense?”

  But every Sunday after that, it was Dots who not only requested to hear Mendelssohn, but who actually put the record on herself. Adversity and her own depression were swept away by the full, heavy and powerful music which sent her back many years — “About how much, now?” — time passed in this country was beginning to wipe out the milestones of time passed back in Barbados, and she had found herself recently counting time in vague areas of time: “a few years ago,” or she might have been speaking about her marriage, or about her emigration from the West Indies. But this powerful music whose discovery was such a shock — “Never, never, never, Boysie, would I have expect to find this nice music in a ordinary grammaphone record! You know what I mean? This is something I had expect to find, originally when it was made, inside of a vault, or some stone inside that church where we got married, St. Matthias Church on St. Matthias Road, in St. Matthias Parish …”

  “St. Michael’s, Dots.”

  “Is a long time ago, Boysie! This music bringing it back now, fresh fresh as anything, as the Mayflower flowers and the lignum vitae and the red roses and the white roses, and flowers of all kinds and denominations, the day when you married me, that was the day when first I really understand what this piece o’ music mean …”

  “We got married in Canada, Dots!” And then they got into an argument, because they could not remember whether they were married in Barbados before they came up to Canada, or whether the wedding had taken place in Canada. “That is what I mean when I tell you that time does do some funny things to a person’s mind. Imagine that!”

  Boysie would remember whole passages of conversations like this one, spoken many years ago, in different circumstances, and if the circumstances then had not held his interest, when the conversations came back he would be able to focus on the interest and the significance as they should have been comprehended at the first context. Conversations were like people. He encouraged them, and he exchanged words with them, and he twisted them to fit his moods, because he could not talk to a cat. He had never had a cat. The only cat he had ever had any relations with was one strayed cat which he found dead under his mother’s cellar: not that he had found it dead the moment it was dead, but he found it dead through its smell, on a hot day, in a far corner of the limestone cellar through cracks of which he first saw columns and battalions and mounds of dark brown stinging ants moving in some form of their own battle array: and the smell. The cats he knew used to kill mice and keep mongooses from eating the chickens, and sometimes if the cat was frightened before the chicken and the fowl-cock thief, its cat’s eyes might frighten the thief and scare him; but this cat which Dots had brought into the house, “this goddamn cat” was being fed on food from tin, Pampers, and Dots had even bought medicine for it.

  “It is a very important cat, Boysie, boy. This cat have pettigree and breeding and class that neither you nor me could come close to having! This is a first class cat you see here, Boysie!”

  “And who I is?” Boysie shouted, in his most belligerent Barbadian accent. “I’s a second class cat?”

  “Boysie, boy, the truth does hurt sometimes, but when all is said and done, the truth is the truth. And neither you nor this cat here, eating outta this can, nor me, could put a hand ’gainst that truth …”

  “Fuck the truth!”

  But he was no easier in his mind about this cat. He would wait until Bernice came over later in the week. She had promised to bring over her young man to introduce him to Boysie (she did not say she was going to introduce him to Dots, and Boysie noticed this suspiciously, and wondered whether Dots knew him, whether Dots had chosen him from among the hospital orderlies at the Doctor’s Hospital, for it had come out in conversation that he worked there part-time), and Boysie was going to ask her about this goddamn cat. In the meantime, these were not really so important as the woman: he was thinking of confronting the woman this morning; but she had taken such a long time to appear, and he was not sure whether it was better to go down and wait for her in the truck, or whether he should first get his new car and try to impress her into accepting a drive … it was now four hours that he had been waiting for her, and she hadn’t come, and he didn’t know he had lived through all this time while waiting for her. And he had to find an envelope for the letter to the editor of Chatelaine which he had written to answer the misleading account of a black woman’s loneliness in Canada. What made him angry about the article was that the woman who wrote it didn’t know anythi
ng about black women. He could tell that from the way she wrote the article; for she had spent so much time on this woman Olivia, and Boysie knew many Olivias, Olivias who would cry on your shoulders morning, noon and night, and when they had you sympathetic in their grasps, they would rip out your balls; Olivias who always had a sob story, and when you counted their earnings, they could pay down five thousand dollars on a townhouse on Belmont Street or any other exclusive street in the city; Olivias who told you they were single, never had a man, and when you arrived five minutes too early, or too late, there was, standing before you, the biggest Jamaican man you had ever seen, and did not wish to see in those circumstances; Olivias who said one thing and lived the next thing: he wanted to meet this Olivia and beat the living shit out of her for giving all West Indian and black Canadian women a bad name, talking a lot of shite about “I’m not a happy woman when I am here and he is there. He is lonely and I am afraid they don’t care for him properly back home,” to a reporter named Linda Diebel. Boysie wanted to meet Olivia and he wanted to meet this Linda Diebel — if she was a real person.

  He unfolded the letter he had written to the editor Mrs. Doris McGibbon Anderson: Dear Mrs. Doris McGibbon Anderson, the Editor of Chatelaine. Have you ever thought of writing a story on the poor black women who get raped every day in Toronto? Have you ever thought of writing an article on black women who work in the hospitals of this city? Have you ever thought of writing an article on one of them, who if they were not working so hard in the hospitals of this city, there would be an epidemic of grave proportions (he remembered this phrase being spoken on the CBC radio during the earthquake in Latin America, someplace) in this city? Have you ever thought of writing an article on the thousands of black university students, professors and administrators at universities in this province? (Boysie had never met a black university professor or a black university administrator, but he figured that if they had some in American universities, there had to be some, perhaps even more, here in Canadian universities, what with all the West Indians and Barbadians especially going to university for so many years. He knew there were hundreds of black university students all over the place.) Why have you not thought before, of writing an article on the black woman who got elected into the Legislature out in British Columbia? Or the black woman who is a doctor at one of the biggest hospitals here in Toronto? Why do you always think you know more about black women and black men and black youths than anybody else, including black people? And who the fuck is Linda Diebel? And who is Olivia? Yours respectfully, Bertram Cumberbatch. Power to the People! He did not know why he had put “Power to the People” after his name; for he was a man who had long stood outside the paling of that kind of verbal militancy. And he did not know why he had taken such a long time to write his real name, “Bertram,” instead of “Boysie.” He was beginning to be embarrassed when he was addressed as Boysie by persons who did not know him intimately. Bertram sounded good, he felt. And he was sorry that he did not have some kind of office, some kind of rank to put after his name. He thought about it, and hoped that by putting “Power to the People” behind his name, Mrs. Doris McGibbon Anderson would think he was a powerful man in the black community who had written the letter. Perhaps it might even scare her into doing something about the article, if not now, then in the future. But most of all he worried about not having some office or rank or organization to put after his name. He should try to join some organization for the purpose of giving his letters to the editor more weight, not because he really had his heart in organizations. Power was what he was after now — not political power, for he was smart enough to know, even before this new awareness, that he could not have political power in a place like Canada unless some Canadian had given him that power, and even then, it would not be true power. But he needed some organization to put behind his name. He had been asked to join the Toronto Elks, and the Bathurst Lions, and some church organizations had asked him to join them; but he knew they were only interested in him because he was a successful businessman. He wanted an organization he could use when the time became fruitful, not an organization which could use him.

  He liked this letter better than any other he had written. And he would read it over and over searching for mistakes (he had actually written it four times, before it was in this present form); and when he liked it in its present form, he had shown it to Dots. Dots read it and folded it back into its creases, put it into its envelope (she was cooking at the time) and said, “Why all of you black men always being so abusive to white women? Fuck white woman, fuck the white man, fuck this, fuck that, and still always ready to jump into bed with the first one? You didn’t have to tell the woman ‘Fuck’ in this letter!”

  Boysie noticed that the envelope was smudged by tomato ketchup. He put it into another envelope and wondered what he could say to Dots’s comments. He was so angry, he regarded her as so ignorant for making that comment, “What the fuck does that have to do with it?” but he could not get the strength to talk with her about his own reaction to her comment; it was irrelevant, but it bothered him. Dots, he found out at last, was a fool. Her comment made him even more keen to send the letter to Mrs. Doris McGibbon Anderson. “Fuck her!” And he was not even running behind white woman when she made her generalization! Out of the corner of his eye, he saw the brown winter coat emerging from the subway station, just near the eave of a house which was his benchmark of her arrival. He ran to the picture window and saw her. This woman, I am sure, won’t make such a foolish comment on my letter, he said to himself, watching her walk upright, sure and secure of her gait, along the short street of his vision.

  She was about five feet seven inches tall. She was wearing a brown winter coat which was cut like a man’s coat. She wore a white scarf around her neck. She carried a white plastic shopping bag, like the ones you got in expensive stores, in her right hand. She wore a slightly sloppy hat on her head, on the right side of her head mostly, and it gave her a touch of smartness. Her boots this morning were white and shining. And she wore large glasses that made her look a little like an owl. He saw her for exactly three minutes, and then she disappeared. And he knew he would not see her again until the following morning.

  He remained at the window looking out. Toronto was white this morning. The snow was coming down, and when he followed it, he could see the swimming pool and the tennis court and the badminton court, and the play area with the dead trees planted in white cement snow, and they all looked like slightly oversized games for children. There were children skating down below. No one was in the area where the swimming pool was. Boysie remained looking down, and the thought of jumping out of a window occurred to him, and when he saw the games of the apartment grounds, and the people walking through the games, he thought of other things. He had never really thought of suicide. He just wondered what people who thought seriously of it thought of just before they contemplated doing it seriously. He thought some more of the people down below in the transformed playing area of the apartment building and then he left the window. He was ready to go out now.

  “Meeeeoowwwwwwwwww!”

  “You goddamn cat!”

  “Meeow!”

  “What the fuck do you want, cat?”

  He opened a new can of cat food, left it in the jagged-edged can, and dropped it on the newspaper on the kitchen floor, just beside the cupboard in which Dots kept the vacuum cleaner. “When I come back, I hope you are dead, you goddamn cat!”

  Just then the telephone rang. Who could it be? Perhaps the car dealer calling about his new car, or the landlord. Had he paid his rent? He was paid up three months in advance.

  “Hello?”

  “You feed my cat, yet?”

  It was Dots. It was the first time she had ever called him from her work.

  Boysie was sitting in his new 1973 black Buick that had everything in it, power brakes, power window winders, tape player, FM and AM radio, and he did not feel elated. He had been sitting in the car for ten minutes, in the parking
lot of the car dealer’s; the keys were his, possession was his, all the papers were signed and in order, and he could not bring himself to feel the power of ownership. He tried to feel elated, something of the pride he had felt when he and Dots drove the panel truck along the street where Henry lived the day they first got it: that day marked his change in fortune in this country. A secondhand panel truck with nothing inside it but two old ripped and soiled seats and a lot of metal space behind him. And he was so happy then. Now, still owning the truck which took him to work, with all his cleaning materials, with his name printed on its sides, BOYSIE CUMBERBATCH, CLEANERS, INC. (“I must remember to change that to BERTRAM CUMBERBATCH, JANITORIAL SERVICES, INCORPORATED”), and sitting in this new car, it was as if nothing had happened to him. “I must remember to get my new batch of cheques changed to Bertram Cumberbatch, Janitorial Services, Incorporated, too! And I should have put that as my office and title after the letter to the editor of Chatelaine!” But he decided it was wiser not to have done that: just another case of a black person who was a cleaner; and to own a cleaning company was the same thing as being a chief cleaner.