The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  So he learned the power of the word. And kept close to it. When others filled the streets and danced in a Caribana festival and wore colours hot as summer in a new spring of life, this man remained in his isolation; and he cut himself off from those frivolous, ordinary pleasures of life that had surrounded his streets for years, just as the immigrants surrounded the open-air Kensington Market. He thought and lived and expressed himself in this hermitage of solitary joy, writing letters to President de Gaulle, President Carter, Willy Brandt (whose name he never learned to spell), to Mao Tse-tung, Dr. Martin Luther King, and Prime Minister Indira Gandhi.

  The few acquaintances he called friends and met for drinks at the eighteenth-floor bar of the Park Plaza Hotel, and those he visited and talked with and drank with in their homes, all thought he was mad. And perhaps he was mad. Perhaps his obsession with the word had sent him off.

  The persons to whom he wrote were all unknown to him. He did not care about their politics or their talent. But he made a fortune out of time spent in addressing them. It was an international intrusion on their serious lives: Dear Prime Minister, I saw your name and picture in the Toronto Globe and Mail this morning. I must say I was most impressed by some of the things you have said. You are one of the most indispensable personages in this western world. This western world would come to its end of influence were it not for you. You and you alone can save it and save us. Long may you have this power. Yours very sincerely, William Jefferson.

  “Look what I pulled off!” he told Alonzo. He held the glass of cold beer bought for him on the account of friendship, and a smile came to his face. The smile was the smile of literary success. He had just promised Alonzo that he would defray all his loans with the sale of his private correspondence. A smile came to Alonzo’s face. It was the smile of accepted social indebtedness. “The university would just love to get its hands on this!” This was the reply from the Prime Minister: a plain white postcard on which was written, Thank you very much, Mr. Jefferson, for your thoughtfulness.

  He would charge the university one hundred dollars for the reply from Prime Minister Gandhi. Perhaps he could sell them his entire correspondence! Why not? Even publish them in The Private Correspondence of William Jefferson with the Great Men and Great Women of the Twentieth Century.

  Alonzo did not know whether to continue smiling or laugh right out. He could not decide if his friend was slightly off the head. He needed more proof. The letter from Mrs. Gandhi, which he did not show, could supply the proof. But it was a man’s private business, a man’s private correspondence; and not even the postman who delivered it had the right to see it. If this correspondence went on, Alonzo thought, who knows, perhaps one day he may be drinking beer and associating with a man of great fame, a famous man of letters, hounded by universities to get a glimpse of this correspondence . . .

  While the man is trying to unlock his door, the urge overtakes him. The keyhole had not answered the key. And the urge to pee swells over his body like a high wave. This urge would overcome him almost always when a porcelain oval hole was not immediately available. It would take him into its grip and turn his entire body into a cramping, stuttering, muscle-bound fist. Always on the wrong side of the street too.

  He was on Bloor Street once, in that stretch of shops and stores and restaurants where women wear furs and carry merchandise in shopping bags with CREED’S and HOLT RENFREW and BIRKS proclaimed on them, where the restaurants look like country clubs and the shops like chapels and banks, where he could not get the nerve to enter the stained-glass door with heraldry on it, jerk a tense glance in that direction, and receive the direction to there or get a sign to show him the complicated carpeted route to WASHROOMS printed on a brass plate. Not dressed the way he was. Not without giving some explanation. Not without alarming the waitresses dressed more like nurses and the waiters who looked like fashion models.

  Once he dashed into Holt Renfrew. It was the last desperate haven. The water was heavy on his nerves, on his bladder. His eyes were red and watery. He barely had strength to speak his wish. Experience with this urge had cautioned him, as he stood before the glass case of ladies’ silk underwear, that to open his mouth at that moment, when the association of this urge with ladies’ panties was in full view, meant a relaxation of his grip on the water inside him. Then it would pour out onto the carpeted floor of Persian silence, perhaps even dribble onto the feet of the young clerk whose legs he could see beneath the thinness of her almost transparent dress.

  The young woman saw his stiffness and posture, and with a smile and a wave, showed him the nearest haven. It had EMPLOYEES ONLY inscribed on the shining brass. When he was finished, he could not move immediately. The loss of weight and water was like the loss of energy. “Have a good day, sir!” Her smile was brighter then.

  He was still outside his room. The key was still in the hole. He did not have the strength to go down two flights of stairs to the second-floor bathroom beside the room of the woman who lived on welfare.

  To have to go back down now, with this weight making his head heavier, did something with his hand, and the key turned.

  He was safe inside his room. Relieved and safe. He did it in the pail. He keeps this pail in a corner, under the table, on which is a two-ringed hotplate. In times of urgency he uses it, and in times of laziness and late at night. He adds soapflakes to the steaming liquid to hide its smell and composition, and when he carries the plastic pail down, the woman on welfare cannot smell or detect his business. He relishes his privacy.

  Sometimes he has no flakes of soap, so he drops a pair of soiled underwear into the urine and walks with it, pretending there is no smell; and if the coast is clear, he bolts the lock on the bathroom door and does his business and laundry like a man hiding from his superstition.

  He had heard that a famous Indian politician used to drink his own pee. And it overcame him.

  He is safe inside his room. He breathes more easily now. He is home. His room relaxes him. It is like the library of a man obsessed with books and who is eccentric about the majesty of books.

  Red building bricks which he stole two at a time are placed in fours at each end of the white-painted three-ply shelves. And the shelves end, as a scaffold should, at the end of available space, the ceiling. The same construction occupies all four walls. There are books of all sizes, all topics, all tastes.

  The space between the bottom shelf and the floor is crammed with newspapers which are now yellow. There are magazines with their backs missing through frequent use. Each new magazine goes into the space which can get no larger. Statements of great political and international significance, the photograph of a man or a woman to be written to, are torn out from their sources and pinned to the three-ply shelves with common pins; and there are framed photographs of writers whom this man regards as the great writers of the world. No one else has heard of them.

  He has collected relics of his daily passage through the city, in the same two square miles, not going beyond this perimeter. He has never again ventured into that part of the city where the policeman picked him up. Among his relics are jars and bottles, and one beautiful piece of pottery that looks as if it had been unearthed in an archeological digging somewhere in the distant world. It is brown and has a mark like antiquity around its swelling girth; and where it stands, on an old trunk that could have belonged to a sea captain, or to an immigrant from Europe or the West Indies, large enough to transport memories and possessions from a poorer life to this new country, this little brown jug gives age and seriousness to the other useless but priceless pieces in his room.

  In all the jars and bottles, and in this brown “antique” jug, are dried branches of trees, flowers, sprigs, and brambles. Dead beyond recognition.

  The man collects dead things. Leaves and brambles and flowers and twigs. And he must like this death in things, because there is nothing that lives in his room. Nothing but the man himself. He does not see them as dead things, or as meaning death.

&nb
sp; He has five clocks. They are all miraculously set at the same, precise time, with not a second’s difference. Every morning, using the time on the CBC radio as his standard and barometer, he checks and rechecks each of his five clocks; and when this is done, he sits on his old-fashioned, large and comfortable couch, upholstered in green velvet that now has patches like sores in the coat of a dog, with knobs of dull mahogany at the ends where the fingers touch, or rest, or agitate (if he is writing or thinking about a letter to an important personage in the world). He would sit here, now that he has set his time, and listen to the ticking, secure ordering of the meaning of time; pretending he is back home in the island that consumes time, where all the clocks ticked in various dispositions and carried different times. Canada has taught him one important discipline. And he has learned about time. He has learned always to be in time.

  Paper bags are stuffed between books, folded in their original creases and placed there, anxious for when they can be used a second time. A cupboard in the room is used as a clothes closet, a pantry, and a storeroom. It contains more paper bags, of all sizes, of all origins, from all supermarkets; but most are from Dominion. They are tied and made snug and tidy by elastic bands whose first use he has obviously forgotten. On the bottom shelf of the cupboard are plastic bags imprinted with barely visible names of stores and shops, folded in a new improvised crease and placed into a large brown paper bag.

  All this time, he is walking the four short lengths of floor bordered by his books, stopping in front of one shelf, running his fingers absentmindedly over the titles of books. The linoleum floor is punctuated by the nails in his shoes that walk up and down, late into the night of thoughtfulness, of worrying about a correct address or a correct salutation. Now he stands beside a large wooden table made by immigrants or early settlers on a farm, in the style of large sturdy legs, the size and shape of their own husky peasant form. This table does not move. It cannot move. On it he has storeroomed his food and his drinks, his “eatables and drinkables,” and it functions as his pantry of dishes and pots and pans. At one end of the table is the gas hotplate, the only implement for cooking that is allowed in this illegally small living space.

  On the hotplate is a shining aluminum saucepan battered around its girth by temper, hunger, and burned rice.

  He uncovers the saucepan. The food is old. Its age, two or three days, has thickened its smell, and makes it look like wet cement. The swollen black-eyed peas sit permanently among hunks of pigtails. He is hungry all of a sudden. These two urges, peeing and eating, come upon him without notice and with no regard to the last time he has eaten or peed. So he digs a pot-spoon into the heart of the thick drying cement of food and uproots the swollen hunks of pigtails, whose oily taste brings water and nostalgia to his eyes, and he half shuts his eyes to eat the first mouthful.

  He replaces the lid. He puts the pot-spoon between the saucepan rim and the lid, and pats the battered side of the saucepan the way a trainer would pat a horse that has just won on a long-shot bet.

  He takes off his jacket. It is two sizes too large. Then he takes off his red woollen sweater; and another one of cotton, and long-sleeved; and then a third, grey, long-sleeved, round-necked and marked PROPERTY OF THE ATHLETIC DEPARTMENT, UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO.

  He is a man of words, and the printed claim of ownership on his third pullover never ceases to amaze and impress him.

  Stripped now of his clothes, he is left in a pair of grey long johns. And it is in these that he walks about the wordy room, ruminating as he struggles late into the night to compose the correct arrangement of words that will bring him replies from the pens of the great. Sometimes his own words do not flow as easily as he would wish. And this literary constipation aborts the urge to pee. At such times he runs to his Javex box, where he keeps all the replies he has ever received. He reads them now, praying for an easier movement of words from the bowels of his brain.

  Dear Mr. Jefferson, Thank you for your letter.

  That was all from one great personage. But it was good enough. It was a reply. And an official one at that. A rubber stamp of the signature tells you of the disinterest or the thick appointment book of the sender, that perhaps the sender does not understand the archival significance of the letter he has received from Mr. William Jefferson.

  This is to acknowledge receipt of your letter.

  Another reply from a great personage. Even the stamp, print, and address are reproductions of the original. But the man believes that some value lies even in this impersonal reply.

  Dear Mr. Jefferson, We are very glad to know that, as a Barbadian, you have introduced us to the archives of the University of Toronto, which is considering maintaining a Barbados Collection. We wish you every success in your significant venture.

  This is his most valuable letter. It is signed by someone who lives! A human hand has signed it. But he cannot untangle the name from its spidery script. He does not know who has replied to him. For typed beneath the script is only the person’s official position: Secretary.

  He understands more than any other living person the archival importance of these letters. And he treasures them within a vast imagination of large expectations, in this large brown box which contained Javex for bleaching clothes before it fell into his possession, to be put to its new use as a filing cabinet.

  He has been nervous all week. And this nervousness erupted in strong urges to pee, strong and strange even for his weak bladder. The nervousness was linked to the price of his collection. This afternoon he had spoken to someone at the university. Over the telephone the voice told him, “Of course! Of course, Mr. Jefferson. We’ll be interested in seeing your collection.” It was a polite reply, like the written ones in his Javex box. But as a man obsessed by relics, who attaches great significance to their esoteric value, he inflates that significance. He is also a man who would read an offer to purchase in such a polite reply from the university, dismissing him. He is a man who hears more words than those that are spoken.

  He starts to count his fortune. This letter to him from a living prime minister would be the basis of his fortune. His friend Alonzo would get a free round of beer at the Park Plaza roof bar. He would pay his rent six months in advance. He would have more time to spend on his private correspondence with the great men and women of the world.

  He holds the Prime Minister’s letter in his hand and examines the almost invisible watermarks on which it is typed. He studies the quality of the official stationery, made in Britain and used by the West Indies, and compares it to that of Canada and the United States. He decides that the British and the West Indies know more about prestigious stationery. He continues to feel the paper between big thumb and two adjoining fingers, rubbing and rubbing and feeling a kind of orgasm coming on; and in this trance, he reads another letter.

  Dear Mr. Jefferson, Thank you for your kind and thoughtful letter. Yours, Prime Minister’s Office.

  Above this last line, Margaret Thatcher is stamped in fading ink. Still, it is a mark on history; “a first” from a woman, once poor, whom history had singled out to be great.

  When he is in his creative mood, he moves like a man afraid to cause commotion in a room in which he is a guest, like a man moving amongst bric-a-brac, priceless mementos of glass and china and silver locked in a glass cabinet. He moves about his room soundlessly, preparing his writing materials and deepening his mood for writing.

  His stationery is personalized. William Jefferson, Esquire is printed in bold letters at the top of the blue page. And below that, his address. He writes with a fountain pen. And when he fills it from the bottle of black ink, he always smiles when the pen makes its sucking noise. This sucking noise takes him back years to another room in another country, when he formed his first letters. And he likes the bottle that contains the ink. It has a white label, with a squeezed circle like an alert eye; and through this eye, through the middle of this eye, is an arrow which pierces it. PARKER SUPER QUINK INK. PERMANENT BLACK. It suggests stren
gth and longevity. It is like his life: determined and traditional, poised outside the mainstream but fixed in habit and custom. Whenever he uses this fountain pen, his index finger and the finger next to that, and his thumb, bear the verdict and the evidence of this permanent blackness. This noir. He sometimes wishes that he could use the language of Frenchmen, who slip words and the sounds of those words over their tongues like raw oysters going down the throat!

  “What a remarkable use of the tongue the French have! That back of the throat sensation!” he told Alonzo one afternoon, but in such a way as if he were speaking to the entire room in the Park Plaza Hotel bar.

  Noir.

  Many years ago, in 1955, the minute his feet touched French soil at Dorval in Quebec, the first greeting he heard was “Noir!” The sound held him in its grip, and changed his view of ordinary things, and made him fastidious and proper and suspicious. The only word he retained was noir. It was not a new word to him. For years even before that greeting, and in Barbados on a Sunday afternoon after the heavy midday meal, he used to sit at the back door looking out on to the cackling of hens, one of which he had eaten earlier, inhaling with the freshness of stomach and glorious weather the strong smell of Nugget shoe polish as he lathered it onto his shoes and onto his father’s shoes and his mother’s shoes and his grandfather’s shoes. So he had already dipped his hands into noir long before Canada.