The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  “Another taste, Percy?” she says, without turning to him.

  She is not using her words to make him feel they are intended for him. She is just talking. As if she is trying out her voice to make certain that it still sounds like the voice of Mary Gertrude Mathilda; using her voice to say words that are like traps to catch a fly. She wants him to be able to dig beneath her words for meaning, to detect her sexual interest in him, which she hides inside her words, tricky as a spider’s web. Her seducing voice. A strong voice. A distinctive voice. Sometimes a mellow voice. Capable once upon a time of prising Wilberforce and his friends from their game of cricket beside the House, too close to the vegetable garden and the Rachelle Rose, and the glass in the French doors; or scattering the neighbourhood kids who rambled on to the Plantation grounds; and boys from down in Hastings, from stealing her mangoes; a voice that was once capable of making Mr. Bellfeels’ tool get harder and rise to horizontal prowess and expectation; of softening his heart; years ago; a voice even now, still strong enough to raise the dead from the grave. A strong voice. A sure voice. But used mostly now, not with that strength of vocal chastisement, but as a soothing reminder of youth, and playfulness; and with guile. And love.

  “A taste, yes, please,” he says, “just a taste, Miss Mary. Please.”

  “‘A tisket, a tasket,’” she says now, looking directly at Sargeant, her voice speaking, and not exactly singing. “What in the name of hell is a tisket, Percy?”

  “A tisket?”

  “Amurcans are funny people with the English language.”

  “But it is a lovely song,” he tells her.

  She does not pour the brandy for Percy. She replaces the decanter back on to its doily, after she has poured her own drink. And she goes to the end of the room, far away from him, and for a moment stands beside the large window whose thick glass is divided into four equal parts, and with outside wooden flaps like two heavy eyelids, even though they are latched back away from the frame. The wooden flaps are perpendicular. And in this light, not the light of a moonlight night, or the light thrown by an acetylene lamp; in this new light, Sargeant looks at her in the same slow, sensual, scrutinizing and undressing focus with which his eyes had travelled over Gertrude’s body earlier; just as he had stripped Gertrude’s clothes off her with his eyes: the white, starch-stiffened maid’s cap; her detachable collar; her pleated, white starched apron that covers her breasts, and that winds around her entire body, tied at the back in a bow; and her black muslin maid’s dress; and my God, Sargeant had now to pause, to catch his breath, although he has been doing this for years, every week, every two days in every week in cane field and in bedroom; and admire the round, soft, dark brown skin on her belly; and then the black stockings, after unlatching the clips that secure them to her corset; and her corset is a soft corset; for it does not have the stiffness and the bones of her Sunday-go-tomeeting corsets which she wears to the Pilgrim Holiness Church; and at the sight, and touch, of her dark brown belly, and brown pubic hairs, short and stubby and stubborn, looking at her compelling nakedness, this holiness brings about a lurch of emotion, each time he undresses her. He would handle her too roughly, in that moment, and too hastily, always; as if someone was about to enter the safe, thick canes, and see them like this: he with only two buttons of his fly unbuttoned, on the thick, brown trash; but going over Gertrude’s body in his mind, in this large front-house parlour of this Great House, he can feel her skin, soft and cool against the back of his hand, made rough as sandpaper by the growth of hair, as if it is between her legs; for this is no fantasy; he has undressed her so many times that it is like himself dressing into his special uniform, for parades on the Garrison Savannah Pasture, on the piece of land, grass, gravel, tarred surface, set aside for regimental parades. He is celebrating, with spit and polish, and erect posture, and stiffness; with precision, and unsmiling visage and countenance, this year’s King-George-the-Fiff’s Birthday Parade . . .

  “Eyeeesssssssss, right!”

  “Eeee-eyesssss, front!”

  “Roy-yall, Sah-lute, Preeeee-zent . . . arms!”

  You can hear, from one hundred yards, the sound of sweaty palms hitting the barrel and butt of guns fired in the Boer War; and hear with clearer echo the snap of palms hitting the “board rifles” made by the school carpenters of the Island, for the three companies of the Island’s Cadet Corps. “Mock-soldiers,” Wilberforce, who was a Harrison College cadet, calls them. “Carrying mock-guns, and mekking mock-sport!”

  And the Royal Bimshire Police Constabulary Band plays “I Vow to Thee, My Country”; and the rich announcement of tuba and trombone curdles his blood and makes him feel important; and then “God Save the King,” and the Band Master, a native of the Island, sneaks a jazz riff in amongst the stiff military Sousa-like music, a musical dipsy-doodle; and for that moment, as the reverberation comes over the tall mahogany trees and the royal palms, you think you are listening to a foxtrot, played by the Percy Greene Orchestra, fifteen black men born in Bimshire.

  His eyes leave Gertrude’s body, moving out of focus, departing from his exertion, from the falling of the light in the middle of the cane field, in the North Field, and the colour of the cane blades, and the brown colour of the cane trash, and the blueness of the skies getting deeper; he can no longer see her body in such fierce, desirable sharpness. She never took off her shoes in the cane field. She always wore her black canvas shoes, pumps, on her feet; and she would wrap her legs tight around his black, thick, tickly, serge policeman’s uniform. She wore her black canvas shoes on every rendezvous with him, in the cane trash of the North Field; and stomped them against the noisy trash, to announce her coming. Her black canvas shoes were cleaned with Nugget Shoe Polish. Jet Black. Noir.

  And his eyes comes now into this new focus, into this shocking realization that in this stiffer atmosphere, grandfather clock ticking in a suppressed voice of consideration for their words; the white, ironed doilies on the backs of all the chairs, Berbice, straightbacked, rocking and tub-chairs; settees; the animals from all the countries in the world, in diminutive stature, like Lilliputians . . . not a single animal amongst this collection, he has seen running round this Village, or this Island . . . the pictures on the walls, pictures in watercolour and pen and ink; all of English countrysides; landscapes, fields and puffs of smoke from chimneys and burning brush, and animals lying on their bellies; and their sides; and halfasleep . . . unlike the ones in this Island, who sleep standing up, and with their eyes open . . . workers in the fields, carrying brambles and hay, but no sugar canes or Khus-Khus grass; scenes she identifies with, and claims to be part of, and that are just an extension of her beloved Bimshire; yes, watercolours, pen and ink, oils; these paintings and pictures he lumps into one. To him, they are “pictures.” But it is the formality of this front-house parlour that shows him the distance he has come, from his rendezvous in the trash of the sugar-cane field, of the North Field, with Gertrude. And he hopes that he would not have to go back there, and lie on his back, on the damp cane trash, some night, and pretend that he is in his heaven.

  He must do everything not to let Miss Mary-Mathilda know about his knowledge of the North Field, with Gertrude.

  He has already, gladly, transferred his old preference for that tumbling trash, and of that loud, raucous room in the back of a rum shop, even when it is filled with Selected Clienteles, sacrificed and transferred them to this sedate, quiet, quiet, cool front-house room, with this woman, slightly older than himself—as if there is air-conditioning that comes silently throughout the house, quiet as how Gertrude walks barefoot into a room . . . he has lost the hesitancy that delayed his arrival; and now that he is here, under these circumstances, he likes being here, although he hates the circumstances.

  For the first time, and with the passing of all this time taking her Statement, he really sees her, no longer as a matriarch, as “Bellfeels child-mother,” but as a woman. As a woman, in her own sexual right. With a burning desire of lust and
sexual pleasure in his mind for her that began in childhood; in limber wonder. Now, in adulthood, stiff; tom-pigeon has turned to dickey, to wood, at this first meeting. And in this moment, painful as a sudden stomach ache, frightening as a shudder that tragedy will fall over his path, he sees her as a woman he can still love, and want to foop right now; and this madness of desire transforms her, and makes her desirable, even younger and more satisfying than Gertrude; younger also than when he first entered her House a short while ago.

  In this moment of speculation and equal confusion, Sargeant, a man who has more confidence in his behaviour if it deals with emotion and feeling and violence, than if it demands the analysing of thought and rational action—which can, after all, contribute to the expenditure of unnecessary energy from the brain and the mind—Sargeant sees this confrontation with Mary-Mathilda as facing the truth; her new truth, and his, in terms of light, the light reflected in the pictures surrounding him.

  The very light in the colours he sees in these pictures, is the light he places her in. Pictures that are strange and foreign and inexplicable to him. But he likes the colours, nevertheless.

  The colours he sees, and the colours he paints her in, in his mind, are those same colours which were used by painters whom her son, Wilberforce, had told her about. European painters, Wilberforce called them. And he called them Renaissance Men. And Impressionist Men. And Surrealist Men. And Men from various Schools, and Periods. He told her they all lived in Europe. And Europe became to her, at that powerful moment of knowledge about colours and drawing pictures, a place she wanted to see, to visit, to live in, at least for one week, before she died.

  But in spite of her son’s guidance and his suggestions to help her appreciate this art, she was more interested in the audacity, and marvelled at it, how these European men of the Renaissance, of the Impressionist Group, of the various Schools and Periods of red and white and blue—she giggled the first time Wilberforce showed her a figure of a man drawn entirely in blue; even although he reassured, that “It’s his Blue Period”; to which she had said, “It’s a blasted ghost. The colour of death. And ashes.” It still did not make sense to her that human flesh and human features, hair and fingernails and eyes, should be drawn with blue paint; or with blue chalk.

  All blue?

  “It’s his Blue Period, Mother!”

  All blue?

  “Nobody with a brain in his head would draw human flesh in blue is my answer. Human flesh is either black or white. Pink, if you so desire. Blue is death!”

  No. She could not figure out what gave these Europeans whom Wilberforce was teaching her so much about, the liberty to draw figures of European women to look like Bimshire men, whose bodies rippled with muscles and sweat; these Europeans who drew females to look like the bodies of Bimshire men who lift weights; and “pelt iron” in small backyards paled-round with galvanize, grunting and breathing hard, noises gasped to heighten their concentration, add strength in order to lift the huge iron bar of heavy metal, lead and iron and “metal”; screaming, straining and cleaningand-jerking, as they raised the avoirdupois above their heads, their bodies shaking from side to side, in uncertainty, until they can stand motionless, for three seconds, before they hear the sound of victory, and see the flag of legitimacy.

  Why? How could they draw pictures of women painted entirely in blue? What gave them this right, this bravery of art and creation, to draw nudes of the female body, and to manipulate the colours of blue, white and red, and to legitimate memberships in Schools? The women they drew do not resemble those women she sees walking about the lanes and narrow roads, passageways and back alleys off Suttle Street, down in Town, in the prostituting district, where the light that points you on your way to short-lived satisfaction and victory is always red. Those Suttle Street whores are not the women she is accustomed to seeing in her Village. But the European women drawn by European men from the Blue Period and various Schools bear a more striking resemblance to those women in Town, than to those in pictures of English women she has been seeing for years, in the London Illustrated News and in other English magazines which Mr. Bellfeels read in the Lounge for Gentlemen, at the Aquatic Club down in Town; and afterwards pushed into the deep pockets of his khaki tunic; and took with him, from the premises. Some of the magazines, like Boys’ Own, and some children’s books, like Tom Brown’s School Days, were read by men from the various Plantations, who lay on their backs, stretched out in canvas chairs, guffawing in the restricted men-only lounge; and these periodicals and books were sometimes handed down to Mr. Bellfeels, by the manager of the Club himself, for Little Wilberforce.

  Sargeant, who knows nothing about art except the drawings of donkey carts and of women with huge pads on their heads to relieve the weight and discomfort of heavy trays of yams, potatoes that they carry: “yuh breadfruit, yuh sweet-cassava!”; and galvanize cans of cool mauby; and sketches of fishermen throwing nets into the sea which does not look like the same sea he bathes in every morning at five o’clock but more like a field of blue, molten lead, without waves, because they are drawn in watery colours; no, Sargeant has never seen drawings of the sea that he would call art. The sea that is drawn by the local artists is a sea whose colour he does not recognize; a sea sometimes with the colour of blood; and not the deep blue-green waves he bathes in, just after dawn. The colour of the sea the Bimshire painters draw is a sea he has never seen.

  Yes, this heaviness of limbs and eyes and lips and features, in the paintings, do not remind her of the women in the Village, and the women working on the Plantation; and these portraits bring back her own memories of back-stiffening labour in the North Field.

  “What was I about to . . .”

  And before she finishes her words, she closes the two louvres, and the light changes, and her beauty is outlined both in the shadows that have crept into the room, and from the light from the two electric bulbs. The bulbs each hang on a single strand of plaited electrical cord, like the tits of a cow. In the changing light, it looks also like two strands of her hair, plaited in three streams with two ornaments at each end. Her hair which was once black and thick and long, is now black, streaked with silver and white.

  The number of years these electrical cords have been hanging here, holding the single naked bulb, has caused the original black colour to change, also through age; and the habitation of flies and mosquitoes and moths; and from paint leaked onto them, when the ceiling was painted white, now a colour similar to tints in her hair.

  She passes her hand, the left hand, through her hair; and then she uses her right hand to remove a strand of hair from the ruffles in the design of her white dress. And when she is sure that she has picked up the strand of hair, almost invisible against the whiteness of her dress that reaches to the floor, she flicks the hair off, and it falls unseen on the carpet. Wilberforce calls her hair salt-and-pepper.

  She moves her neck and her shoulders the way people do, to take stiffness from their joints; and as if this jerking of her neck has succeeded in removing the kinks, she moves with a sprightlier gait to the large Victrola grammaphone, and fits the crank-handle into the hole, to wind it. The brown rich leather of her laced-up boots is seen from the ankle to the sole, and then is afterwards covered by the fall of her dress.

  Sargeant watches her shoulder stiffening against the tension of the cranking; as she turns the handle, as her entire body moves; and he can see how the flow of her long dress catches the laces in her leather boots that expose the richnesss of the leather, up to her ankles. He can count the “eyelits,” as he calls them, in each boot.

  She turns the handle, now more easily and with greater smoothness. She does this in the same way he imagines how, on a Saturday afternoon, she would turn coarsely ground yellow Indian meal-corn in a pot with water, made greenish and slimy from ripe, fresh okras in which it is being boiled; how she turns and turns and changes the yellow blobs into an appetizing paste, into cou-cou, rich and mellow and slippery in the throat: now a yellow substa
nce speckled with green pieces of okras; and he imagines sweat from her face, the sign of her labour and her carefulness in the turning of the cou-cou, falling into the pot with the slowly bubbling Indian meal-corn, like a gentle geyser, to add to its taste. He imagines that his hand is touching hers, relieving her of her fatigue in the turning and the turning and the turning; resting on her wrists. For cou-cou, like the making of a glide, a stroke in cricket to fine leg, or the landing of a stinging jab, all these activities in sport that demand the expenditure of sweat, require even before that expenditure the knowledge that it is the wrist which adds subtle power to the natural expression of beauty in the cricket stroke, in the deadliness of the jab, and also to the turning meal-corn in order to make the mellowest cou-cou.

  His hand moves from her hands, and travels all that nervous, trembling distance up from her wrists to her shoulders, over the white sleeves of her dress. This approach takes place in his imagination. He evades through his nervousness, even in his fantasy, touching her breasts. He feels, however, that to touch her breasts, without forethought and foreplay, might awaken a hurricane of passion and sex he might not know how to deal with; so, he moves his hand away from her breasts, as her breasts move with her breathing, beneath the demure cut of her bodice.

  Yes, his hand moves from her hand holding the cou-cou stick, all its trembling slow progress up her arms, over the carefully laundered sleeves until at last, they reach her shoulders.