The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  “He could be a Corporal, a Lance-Corporal, Sargeant, or Crown-Sargeant, be-Jesus-Christ even-if he was the fecking Commissioner o’ Police . . . ’cause I don’t trust no fecking man with my property, with what is mine! Tha’s why I gotting-on so. I protekking my property as any man who is a man would do. So let him fecking try!”

  In this large front-house parlour, containing so many beautiful objects: the grand piano; the mahogany Victrola grammaphone with His Master’s Voice and the sitting dog printed on the hornshaped speaker; the upright mahogany chairs, sofas, armchairs and settees made by Mr. Waldrond the Joiner; and the walls covered with pictures and paintings and photographs framed in darkstained wood, in the shapes of squares and ovals and circles; and the clean white-knitted cloths, doilies, thrown on to their arms and on their backs, and on the surfaces of the centre tables and the side tables; these objects outside his reach, kept hidden from him, like clues of an unsolved crime; or like ordinary clues that he and his Constable, Manny, Golbourne and Pounce had always felt could give the answer to the differences existing between Mr. Bellfeels, the Vicar and the Solicitor-General—“them”; and people like him, Constable, Golbourne and Pounce—“we.”

  “Them” always had: and “we” never got.

  “Come,” she is saying to him now. “Come.”

  But he is still walking on the beach, with his head down, holding the conch shell, counting pebbles washed smooth as marbles by the waves; and seashells over which he walks, while his footprints crush hers, and bury them beneath his larger feet.

  “Come,” she says again.

  He is still on the journey back, beside the cluster of beach-grape trees under which the men are sitting and talking. He can hear their laughter, the sound of their guffaws; and see some of them roll over in the sand, holding their bellies as they shake with uncontrollable laughter.

  “. . . and, me-too, Jesus Christ! I would take a piece offa she, too!”

  “Statuary rape,” Percy hears another man say, and then this man breaks out into raucous laughter.

  It is the man who the Village calls the Solicitor-General. Percy does not know the word statuary; had never heard it used. But he is wise enough to know that it means something serious. It comes from a serious man. The Solicitor-General of the Island.

  “But learned counsel,” the first man says, now howling with laughter and holding his belly, “learned counsel, you-yourself would have to sennhe-up to His Majesty’s Prison at Glandairy, for a few years, nuh!”

  “He gone!” the Solicitor-General says.

  “All sport aside, now,” another man says. “But the child suh-young! How Bellfeels have the stomach to stomach pussy so young, though?”

  “The soil,” the Solicitor-General says, no longer laughing.

  “What soil?” the first man says.

  Percy is now abreast of the group. He doffs his cloth hat to the men. And the men wave to him, in acknowledgment of his good manners.

  “What soil?” the man asks again.

  “Working with his hands in the soil! Anybody working so close to the soil, with his hands in the soil, day and night, week after week, have to behave so! Ipso facto. A man working with his hand in the soil is a different man from a man selling silk handkerchieves down in Cave Shepherd store!”

  “All that girl have to do,” another man says, “is call the police.”

  “But the kiss-me-arse Commissioner right here!” a man says.

  “Oh shite!

  “Or call she mother.”

  “You mean Ma?”

  “Mary-Mathilda’s mother.”

  “Bellfeels fooping the mother, too.”

  “The man have a big fecking appetite!”

  And Percy walks on, kicking the sand, and making small low clouds with each kick, until he reaches the group of women, who are still sitting at the edge of the waves.

  At this point, he breaks into tears. And he gallops down the beach; and the sand is shifting under his feet; and spurts around him, in his sadness; and he thinks he will stumble, and fall; and he whispers, to the sea and the waves, and the women who are lolling in the waves, “I hate Mary, I hate Mary, I hate Mary . . .”

  “You haven’ heard me, Percy. I am telling you to come and dance, Percy,” she says.

  He looks up, pulled from his daydreaming. He sees Mary-Mathilda before him. Her eyes are fixed upon him. Her arms are extended in welcome, inviting him to her; and her fingers are moving inwards to her palms, beckoning him.

  “Come, Percy.”

  “Come?”

  “Come.”

  “Okay, Miss Mary.”

  “I have put on ‘A Tisket, a Tasket.’ We’re going to dance, Percy. Me and you. So, let us dance.” And then she says, “May I have the honour of this dance, sir?”

  “Of course, Miss Mary-Mathilda,” he says.

  He goes to her.

  “Let us dance, sir!”

  He takes her in his arms. The same feeling of sudden weakness, like a physical incapacity, comes over his body, just as it had done so many years ago on that first Easter Monday.

  He can smell the perfume she is wearing. He knows it.Well. He has smelled it before, many times; but from a farther distance: he smells it on Sundays, at Matins, when he passes beside her standing in her pew, with her name on it, on a brass plate; she standing alone in the pew reserved for four for William Henry, for Rachelle Sarah, for Wilberforce and for herself, at the end to the aisle, able to hear the choristers as they walk singing and slow in procession; passing her, close; but out of reach; and he has smelled her fragrance when she leaves her pew, when she leaves the church, and leaves behind her, the rustle of her starched white dress, the soft creaking of her black laced-up boots, and the fragrance of her perfume. Eau de Cologne No. 4711.

  He is nervous. His hand in her right hand is sweaty. Her hand on his shoulder is light and loving; and he can still feel the grip of her fingers touching his muscles.

  He wonders if his armpits are smelling.

  He cannot remember if he patted his armpits with a dab of Limacol just before he left the sub-station when he got dressed. He keeps the bottle of Limacol in the top drawer of his desk. “The freshness of a breeze in a bottle,” the advertisement on the Limacol bottle says.

  In the same top drawer, with the Limacol, he keeps his bottle of Mount Gay Rum. Twenty-six ounces of it.

  He does not remember if he had dabbed his armpits, with the Limacol, as he does before leaving the station on emergencies.

  He tries to inhale deeply, trying not to let her know what he is doing, making an over-elaborate move to follow the rhythm of the music, at the same time; and in this exaggerated move, he tries to smell his two armpits.

  He cannot smell his armpits.

  There is a gold pin on her chest. It is larger than the saftey pin his mother used to secure his handkerchief with, daubed with Chanel No. 5, Paris, in a miniature vial, which she took from her employer’s cabinet.

  He is still trembling; and he can hardly follow the beat of the music; he can hardly follow her as she leads him in and out of Miss Ella Fitzgerald’s powerful voice. Ella’s voice is as lyrical and strong as his nightly snap of Mount Gay Rum. If he had his bottle now, he could put it to his lips, in place of her face so beautiful and so suddenly close to his. Now, with this closeness, he is less exultant than his fantasies about this moment had painted and had anticipated.

  Her face is touching his. This face, which shows not one wrinkle, as his own face does. The nightly snaps of Mount Gay Rum could help him now to regain his equanimity. His balance. Could help him recover his composure and help him to put his attention on the music.

  He must learn to move with her, as he must learn to listen to her. Move in more harmony with her views, her advice and her strong guiding lead.

  She is the man. He is the woman, being led.

  This is more than a dance.

  She closes her eyes. He becomes alarmed, and more nervous.

  He takes this o
pportunity to remove his head from hers, lean over and put his nostrils closer to his armpits. He cannot reach his armpits, to smell them.

  He wishes to smell nice for her. And he wants her to feel that he does. He wishes her to like him. To feel that he is worthwhile; and acceptable.

  He wishes tonight had come on another night, in different circumstances.

  He knows he has to go back to asking her questions; must go back to taking her Statement, and not let her continue giving statements to take him off his track.

  He knows what he has to do. But he knows that he does not want to do it. Under the present circumstances.

  But it is the perfume, more than the force of duty, that overpowers him. It tingles the nostrils with its tantalizing, sensual fragrance.

  Sargeant does not realize that the music has stopped.

  “A Tisket, a Tasket” has come to its end.

  She is still holding his right arm, a little distance from her breast; and his left hand is resting on her shoulder. Her right hand is on his back, in the middle of his back. She can feel the dampness of perspiration, and imagine the smell of his body. The grammaphone record begins to scratch, and it is at this point that she releases him. It is at this moment, too, that he awakes from the reverie the music and her arms had held him in.

  She now guides him to an upright mahogany chair. It has a cane bottom. From this position, he has a better view of the room.

  “Thank you for the dance, sir,” she says; and curtseys.

  “Thank you, too, Miss Mary-Mathilda,” he says, returning the curtsey, with an exaggerated bow.

  In other circumstances, it would have been he who would have escorted her, at the conclusion of the dance, back to her chair.

  He takes in the pictures and the paintings—making no distinction in his mind between the two—that hang at the level of his eye.

  He knows, as if the words are being whispered into his ear, that he will leave this Great House a different man from how he entered it. The voice in which the words are spoken in a whisper is telling him that in one way, he will never leave this house. Perhaps.

  The first picture he passes he recognizes. He has seen it many times. In books. And he has seen it most often in Bible Stories for Children when he was a child. Now, here is the same picture, larger and more lifelike than in the children’s book.

  Here, on this wall, it is in a dark brown frame of mahogany wood. St. George and the Dragon. He guesses that this frame, like the others, is made by Mr. Waldrond, from the same wood.

  He inspects the painting of St. George and the Dragon. The name is printed at the bottom.

  He looks closely at the white horse, and at St. George in black armour, holding a brownish red spear in his right hand; and then at the Dragon, painted in the shape and fierceness of a dog, like the Alsatian dogs in Hastings District where the Solicitor-General and the two leading barristers-at-Law live, near where the Hastings Salon for Modern & Classical Dance, Madame Glorie, Instructoress, is situated.

  The scenery surrounding this struggle to the death, between St. George and the Dragon, is similar to the vegetation and the surroundings of Hastings Rocks, where the Bimshire Police Band plays popular classics, and Sousa marches, every Wednesday evening, in the bandshell shaped like a gazebo.

  The scenery is of rocks, polished by the perpetual pounding and washing by the waves at the foot of the bandshell. There are trees. They look like the local trees of the Island. Like clammy-cherry trees. And dunks trees. Like beach-grape trees. And tamarind trees. In the painting of St. George and the Dragon, the trees are short and stumpy and fierce-looking, as if their branches are ready for a fight; to join in allegiance with St. George and help him to defeat the Dragon. There is a woman praying at the side of a road. And in the background, there are two buildings like towers, tall and dignified and powerful like the water tower in the Plantation’s yard. Or like the Factory that groans and clanks at the start of the Crop-Season, grinding canes.

  The painting is done by a man named Raphael. No one in this Village was ever christened Raphael. Sargeant knows no one by this name.

  “Ralph, in a foreign language,” she says. “I can’t remember which one, Eyetalian, or Spanish.”

  “Is a strange way to write ‘Ralph,’” he tells her. Perhaps, the man writing his name this way, or the man who sold the first original print of this St. George and the Dragon painting, could not spell properly. Or, perhaps, it is a name common to other parts of the world.

  The woman at the side of the road is praying for something: for the happy outcome of the struggle between St. George and the Dragon.

  In this Island of Bimshire, there is a Church by the name St. George. The St. George’s Anglican Church, which has the best Choir, and the best Organist in the Island. And there is a parish named St. George. People in the Island laugh at people who come from the parish of St. George, because St. George lies in the middle of this small Island, and still is not touched by the sea. The Georgians of St. George, as “serrigated” from the sea; and therefore stupid, the Villagers say.

  There are no Dragons in the parish of St. George. Or in the Island. Just the Alsatian dogs and the Doberman-Pincers that the rich people keep. Dogs that can tear your guts out, and your heart out, if they catch you on the wrong side of the road, at the wrong time, in their district. Dogs that are trained, so Manny swears, to rip out the hearts of the poor Islanders, meaning black people.

  St. George’s Dragon looks no more frightening than a Hastings District Alsatian dog. And now that Sargeant sees St. George’s Dragon close up, and in the flesh, so to speak, he is not frightened for Dragons, or for Alsatians; and he feels that the bravery people bestowed upon St. George, and showered him with, and talked about in storybooks for children, and in bedtime stories, the bravery for killing the Dragon, has the same truth and the same history, as The Man Who Jumped Over the Moon. Or Little Red Riding Hood.

  This Dragon fighting with St. George is nothing but a big Alsatian dog snarling at the mouth, at the wicket gate of the homes of rich white people in Hastings District, in the Island of Bimshire, in the Wessindies, in the Carbean. In the “New Whirl,” as Wilberforce calls it.

  Even its teeth, the teeth of this St. George Dragon, snarling, and covered with thick white foam, is nothing different from the scare Sargeant has spent his whole life living through, every day of the week when he had to cross the white road, to go about his business; Personal, or Police; this Hastings Road, called the white road, because of its white marl and the angle of the fierce sun shining on it, whitening it; white, too, because no one, no other black person, but he—small, scared boy; or big man, police Crown-Sargeant, but still frightened to death, to be in this Hastings District—was passing along on it; its loneliness and the fear the loneliness instilled, always made him regard it as a white road.

  And when the teeth sank into his soft black sweet flesh, in the softest part of his behind which has no muscles, and the blood spurted out from the punctures made by the teeth, teeth longer and whiter than these drawn in the mouth of this Dragon by this man named Raphael—a name no more important than Ralph in this Village, in this Island of Bimshire, in this part of the New Whirl—for the first moment, all Sargeant could feel, was aware of, could experience, was the exhilaration of fear, and the excitement of the contest, of the duel like the one he experienced in his imagination of locked horns with Mr. Bellfeels that Easter bank holiday; now it was he against Alsatian. Sarge against the Alsatian. St. Sarge and the Alsatian. Nigger against Rover. They called all their dogs Rover. They called Sargeant nigger. And they called all their servants and labourers in the fields nih-ger, to rhyme with chigger. And he didn’t have even a clammy-cherry stick in his hand, or a limb from the ackee tree, or even a piece of the coconut frond— with which he swept the grounds and the yard and the tennis courts of the Garrison Savannah Lawn Tennis Club—to protect him from the Alsatian, and ward him off, until the owner came reluctantly, with the white smear of a smile on h
is face; and said, “Here, Rover! Here!” And when the wicket gate was closed, he could read, more clearly now, in spite of smudges of someone’s hand attempting to erase the message, this warning, painted in black stencilled letters: NO DOGS, NIGGORS & JEWS ALLOWED.

  And here now, in the safety of thick paint, is this big man, in armour, dressed in cloth of mail; iron, painted black; mounted on a horse, a white horse, and holding a spear or a lance—or is it a sword? He must go back and take a second, longer look at St. George’s picture—in such a puny, overblown struggle of gigantic, mortal proportion. He must go back and take a second look. They have now passed St. George and his dog-faced Dragon, and are standing in front of the framed head of a woman. All this protection and armaments, lance, sword, armour, steed, just to kill an animal no bigger than a Bimshire dog, an Alsatian; and still have his name sent down to the Island, in history, in school books and in Bible stories for educating children, all the way from Europe to teach him and a million other Bimshire boys in this sleepy corner of the tropical New Whirl, a lesson in strength and in daring and in big-heartedness; and in fortitude.

  And in moral bravery?

  And chivalry?

  The painting she is showing him now is of a head. The head is the head of a woman. At the bottom of the painting, it is written that this head is Head of the Madonna. It is done by someone named Boltraffio.

  “Boltraffio,” she says. She pronounces it as if she were born speaking those names. “My boy who spend time in Rome-Italy brought back this with him. And he teached me, taught me, the right way to say the name Boltraffio.

  “Bolt-raffio,” Sarge says.

  Here is another strange name, Sargeant thinks. Here in this Island, the names that name people are names that show and paint and reflect who the people are: or, at least, part of what they are. Here in Bimshire, names are names you understand; Sarge, Constable, the Revern, Manny, Naiman, Mary-Tilda; names you can pronounce easily; and remember. But the name of this painter. And this Madonna. Madame, he knows. He has heard that name used many times. As a matter of fact, he was thinking of her a few moments ago. Madame Glorie, the Instructoress of the Hastings Salon for Modern & Classical Dance. Madame Glorie, he knows. Donna, he understands. There are lots of whores down in Town, in Suttle Street, with the name Donna. Nelson Street, famous also for whores, is crawling with Donnas and sailors off English ships, and native pimps; and Donnas-to-burn, too. He came across a Donna once, who said she is a writer, not a giver of pleasure . . .