My brother told me that he could not go two weeks without having sex, he said it made him feel, and he lifted his shoulders up and then let them drop down; he looked sad, he looked defeated, but that did not stop me from saying cruelly, Every man I have ever known has said the same thing, two weeks without sex makes them feel funny. He had been trying to tell me that there was something unique about him, that he was an unusual person, a powerfully sexual man. Powerfully sexual men sometimes cause people to die right away with a bullet to the head, not first sicken and slowly die from disease. When we saw Dr. Ramsey for his checkup soon after we had this conversation, I told Dr. Ramsey in front of him about his sexual behavior and the risk he posed to other people and to himself; he truupsed and repeated that he could not go without sex for more than two weeks. He said he did not believe he had the HIV virus anymore and he demanded that Dr. Ramsey test him again. Dr. Ramsey reminded him that he had asked for a new test a few weeks before, after he had been released from the hospital and had gone for one of his checkups and had then said that he did not have AIDS and had been tested again and the results were positive. I now said that I would not pay for a new test, I was convinced that he was HIV-positive, so convinced that I had gotten myself into debt trying to save his life. He promised that he would try to be more careful, but as we were leaving, Dr. Ramsey said something which led my brother to know that as a hobby, he, Dr. Ramsey, served as a producer of many well-known Antiguan calypso singers. My brother got very excited when he heard this and said that he was a very good singer himself, such a good singer that when he sang women who heard him removed their clothes (“Me nar joke, mahn, when me sing, gahl a take ahff she clothes”).
And I began again to wonder what his life must be like for him, and to wonder what my own life would have been like if I had not been so cold and ruthless in regard to my own family, acting only in favor of myself when I was a young woman. It must have been a person like this, men like this, men who are only urges to be satisfied, men who say they cannot help themselves, men who cannot save themselves, men who only know how to die, not at all how to live—it must have been such a man that my mother knew of when she communicated to me the grave danger to myself should I allow such a person to know me too well, communicated this to me so strongly that I grew up alienated from my own sexuality and, as far as I can tell, am still, to this day, not at all comfortable with the idea of myself and sex. And so too, it must be this sort of man that my brother was who accounts for the famous prudery that exists among a certain kind of Antiguan woman (the English-speaking West Indian woman, as far as I can tell; I do not know about the other women who speak the other languages). Such a woman will live for a long time; not so the Guianese girl who waited outside the gate for my brother to return from some outing or other.
Who is he? I kept asking myself. Who is he? How does he feel about himself, what has he ever wanted? Girls to take off their clothes when they hear him sing? What could that mean? He doesn’t make anything, no one depends on him, he is not a father to anyone, no one finds him indispensable. He cannot make a table, his father could make a table and a chair, and a house; his father was the father of many children. This compulsion to express himself through his penis, his imagination passing between his legs, not through his hands, is something I am not qualified to understand. One afternoon I had taken him to swim at a place where when I was a child many church picnics were held. It is now a beach with a hotel for tourists; he was swimming with my mother and they looked so beautiful, the water parted for them in ripplets, forming fat diagonal lines on either side of them, the two of them, one black, one gold, glistening, buoyant, happy just then, within speaking distance of each other but not speaking to each other at all. I could see them, I was standing on the sand, the beach, my children near me building structures out of the sand, structures that they had to protect from the waves since the tide was changing. This was my mother and this was my brother, my mother’s youngest child, her last, and I can remember thinking at his birth (I was thirteen at the time) that his arrival marked a change in her, a change in her relationship to his father, a change in her relationship to the world. She became bitter, sharp; she and I quarreled all the time, she quarreled with everyone all the time. Her features collapsed, she was beautiful in the face before, really beautiful, everyone thought so, really thought so, even she did, but that wasn’t true anymore after my brother was born. That afternoon they were swimming together; without speaking, they were swimming, still without speaking. My brother, seeing some European women who were swimming together and sharing conversation and laughter, swam up to them and said things that I could not hear and they responded with words that I could not hear. I don’t know what they saw in him, this man so beautiful in the face, too thin in the body, but they indulged his flirtatiousness, perhaps enjoying this moment with a man they would have found dangerous in their own native surroundings just because of his complexion, this moment so free of friction, in the hot sun. And I don’t know what he really saw in them, they were not beautiful in face or body, by the standards of European or Other, or what he expected of them; it was only that he could not help himself, he had seen some women, he had made himself seen by them; the outcome would always be the same: sometimes women had sex with him, sometimes they didn’t.
My mother came and sat next to me, and as we were sitting on the sand watching my children, my mother told me that God would bless me richly for bringing my brother the AZT, but I do not believe such a thing, because why would God suddenly enter into it now, when the time to have entered into it was to stop such a thing as this virus from occurring at all; and then my brother, too, came out of the water and he and my mother started to talk about how clever he was at growing things and my mother reminded him of “the fern.” Not so very long ago, my mother paid a visit to Dominica, the place where she was born and where she lived until she was sixteen years of age, to see the last of her living relatives. Her mother, a Carib Indian of Dominica, is dead; her father, part Scot, part African, of Antigua, a policeman who emigrated to Dominica, is dead; her sister is dead, her brother is dead. The people she visited were related to her mother through various people I do not know, I have never met them. She had not been back to Dominica since years before I was born in 1949, and she did not say what made her want to return at that time. She had a wonderful visit, so she said, and while there and walking about, she found a fern that was unusual, something rare; she recognized it and she picked it up and put it in her bag, bringing it back to Antigua with her, where it throve quite happily in an old, leaky, white enameled chamber pot in a shady part of the yard. One day when my brother was in the most extreme grip of his drug addiction, he wanted some cocaine but had no money to buy some. He took my mother’s fern and sold it. As she told me this, she laughed; he was sitting near her and she reached out to rub the top of his head; he truupsed and looked away, he was embarrassed; she meant to embarrass him, he and I knew this. He should not have taken her fern and sold it; I should not have been told about his selling the fern in just this way. I wanted to say to him, She doesn’t know what she is doing, but I have never been able to say this to myself, I have never been able to forgive her for any of the things she did not know she was doing when she did them to me. I was looking at his face. She does not like memory, I wanted to tell him; you have no memory, I wanted to tell him, she taught you that. Some time before I was sixteen years of age, I might have taken a series of exams that, had I passed them, would have set me on a path that would have led me to be educated at a university, but just before all of that my mother removed me from school. There was no real reason for me to be removed from school, she just did it, removed me from school. My father was sick, she said, she needed me at home to help with the small children, she said. But no one would have died had I remained in school, no one would have eaten less had I remained in school; my brother would have been dead by now had this act of my mother’s been all that remained of my life. Had my life stayed on
the path where my mother had set it, the path of no university education, my brother would have been dead by now. I would not have been in a position to save his life, I would not have had access to a medicine to prolong his life, I would not have had access to money to buy the medicine that would prolong his life, however temporarily. And as we sat there, not face-to-face at all, she rubbing his head, telling humiliating stories about him, telling me some God or other would bless me, she did not remember this, she did not remember that if it had been up to her, I would not have been in a position to be blessed by any God, I might in fact be in the same position as my brother right now. When I was a child, I would hear her recount events that we both had witnessed and she would leave out small details; when I filled them in, she would look at me with wonder and pleasure and praise me for my extraordinary memory. This praise made an everlasting mark and nothing anyone could do made me lose this ability to remember, however selectively I remember. As I grew up, my mother came to hate this about me, because I would remember things that she wanted everybody to forget. I can see clearly even now the moment she turned on me with that razorlike ability to cut the ground out from beneath her children, and said I remembered too much (“You mine long, you know”). By then it was too late to tell me that.
That sun, that sun. On the last day of our visit its rays seemed as pointed and as unfriendly as an enemy’s well-aimed spear. My mother cooked a delicious lunch for her grandchildren, a stew of corned beef from a tin with tomatoes and carrots and macaroni; they ate it so eagerly, as if they were starved, as if they could be called greedy. My brother said he would like to go for a walk with me alone. I was pleased by this and I also wondered what of mine he wanted; whenever he made a special point of being with me alone, it was to ask me for something I had that he wanted; earlier he had taken me aside to ask me for the pair of shorts that I was wearing; they were a pair of khaki shorts I usually wear when I go hiking in the mountains. I gave them to him, and even though I could easily replace them, I did not like giving them to him at all. I did not want them back, I wanted not to have had to give them in the first place. We walked up a road, past a monument to commemorate a slave who had led a revolt. The monument was surrounded by a steel fence and the gate was locked; the fence made of steel and the locked gate weren’t meant to be a part of this particular commemoration to this slave’s heroism. We walked past an old lighthouse. We walked past the place where my old school, an all-girls’ school, used to stand. We walked past two ponds called Country Pond, and the origin of that name I do not know, but they have played a small, significant part in my own personal history: when I was about nine years old or so and a student at that same girls’ school, the other girls thought of me as a bookish favorite of my teachers and as someone who could not defend herself, and was stuck-up; a particularly aggressive group of them would waylay me after school as I walked home and pin me to the ground while they took turns beating me up. There was no reason for it, I was not malicious, I was not a tattletale, I was not pretty. I was just very weak-looking, thin, and too tall for how thin I was. One day my mother, wondering why I was so late from school, came looking for me, saw from a distance a group of girls huddled over something lying on the ground, got closer, realized it was me, and gave the girl she found beating me an even worse beating. The girl’s mother, on hearing about this, told my mother that she would set evil spirits on me and they would cause me to drown myself in one of these ponds. My mother did not doubt this girl’s mother for one moment and I was immediately sent to visit my grandparents and aunt in Dominica, because it is well known that spirits cannot cross water, and in any case, the obeah practiced in Dominica was far superior to the kind practiced in Antigua. This began a long and painful separation from my family that ended when it became clear that I could not adjust very well to my mother’s absence. When I returned, my second brother had already been born and the bitter, cruel mother I now know had just begun to take hold; the beautiful, intelligent person that I knew and this brother whom I was walking with was born too late to know, and when I described this person to him, this woman who read biographies of Florence Nightingale and Louis Pasteur, who knew all the symptoms of all the known tropical diseases, who knew about vitamin deficiencies and what foods could alleviate them, he thought it was something I was saying to amuse him, he thought I was making it up. I told him then, It is hard for us to leave our mother, but you are thirty years old, you are a grown man, you must leave; this one thing you should do before you die, leave her, find your own house as soon as you are well enough, find a job, support yourself, do this before you die. He said he understood what I was saying, he said that he had been thinking along the same lines. Earlier that day, my mother had told me of a plan she and he had to build another little room, right next to her bedroom, for him to live in. I did not say, You can’t afford to do that, save that money for a time when it might be needed for medicine, taxi fares to the hospital, just save that money. I also did not say that my mother must have felt compelled to build my brother something at this time in his life: three months ago she was sure it would be a coffin. The room to be built would be small, the size of an ordinary tomb.
My brother and I walked up to the botanical gardens and found they were closed for repairs; they had been neglected for many years, many specimens had died, but now someone—most likely a Canadian, because they are so generous to the self-destructive of the world—a Canadian had given money to have the botanical gardens restored. We walked around the perimeter, and using a book on tropical botany that I carried and also relying on our own knowledge, we identified many plants. But then we came to a tree that we could not identify, not on our own, not from the book. It was a tree, only a tree, and it was either just emerging from a complete dormancy or it was half-dead, half-alive. My brother and I became obsessed with this tree, its bark, its leaves, its shape; we wondered where it was really from, what sort of tree it was. If it crossed his mind that this tree, coming out of a dormancy, a natural sleep, a temporary death, or just half-dead, bore any resemblance to him right then and there, he did not say, he did not let me know in any way. We walked on, past the botanical gardens, and we came upon some tamarind trees with ripe tamarinds on them; the tamarinds were hanging very high up on the trees and so my brother picked up stones and threw them at the fruits, hoping to knock some down, the way we would have done if we had been schoolchildren. He succeeded, we ate the tamarinds; they were not good, they were not bad, they were just tamarinds. We did not say anything then. We walked past the jail; he did not tell me if he had been in it, that time when he had been in trouble. He did not seem to notice it at all. We walked over to the grounds of his old school. It did not seem to have any memories for him; he noticed that it was dilapidated, he wondered why children were sent to a school with holes in the building. It was there he found the fruit of a mahogany tree, something we had both seen before, the fruit of a mahogany tree, but it was a marvel to us then, so perfectly shaped like a pear, the Northern Hemisphere fruit, not the avocado pear, but hard like the wood of the tree from which it comes. I brought it back to the Vermont climate with me and placed it on a windowsill, and one day when I looked, it had opened quietly, perfectly, into sections, revealing an inside that was a pink like a shell that had been buried in clean sand, and layers upon layers of seeds in pods that had wings, like the seeds of a maple. I did not know until then that the seeds of the mahogany tree were like that. We then walked past the Recreational Grounds, the public grounds where major public events are held. He pointed to a pavilion and told me that when he was a student at his school, he and a friend used to take girls under there and have sex (“Mahn, me used to bang up some girls under there”). We walked back to my mother’s house.
My Brother Page 5
