One night, one dark and lonely night when Aloysius was sleeping under a tree, when the loneliness gnawed at his heart so that he wanted to whimper like a child, when his hood stood up stiff and disciplined like a soldier parading before the Governor General, he had even made love to the land. He had dug a hole in the loose dirt with his finger and heaped the dirt around the hole so that it was conical and soft like a small anthill. And then in the darkness, with the incessant chatter of bushes all around him, he had driven his hood into the land and worked it slowly, pretending that the land was a woman. And to tell the truth, it felt just like an old woman’s pum-pum. It was grainy and hard and had no juice whatsoever, but the hunger for pum-pum was upon him with such a fever that he had only to thrust three times into the ground and the thing was done with a loud groan.
But even then it was not over. Even though all this took place in the dark of night in an open bushland with nothing but darkness and emptiness and stars as witnesses, even so it was bound to draw censure, comment, criticism. For everything that Aloysius did, no matter what time of night or day, was bound to draw comment. That was the cross of his madness. A parson could masturbate in the bedroom of his manse three times in one night and next morning go out and preach damnation and warts to onanistic schoolboys and no one would be any the wiser. A government minister could grind the daylights out of his young maid from the country all night long and next morning still deliver a bombastic speech against moral turpitude to Parliament. But let a homeless madman grind even the ground and God knew that every bush in the vicinity, every tree, every weed, ant, cockroach, mouse, or passing mongoose that had seen him relieve himself so would raise its tongue against him.
This time it was a dirty bush that shouted out loud, “Kiss me granny, him fuck de ground!”
And when Aloysius, who had nearly jumped out of his skin with fright, hissed, “Shhhhhh!” and put his finger frantically over his lips, the bush redoubled its cry like one bellowing for a constable, “Him fuck de ground! Madman just fuck de ground! Now ground goin’ hatch mad pickney!”
And all over the grassland the cry was taken up and repeated:
“What dat? Him fuck de ground?”
“Who fuck de ground?”
“Aloysius fucking de ground! Pass de word!”
“Rass! De ground! Even de virgin ground no safe from hood!”
“De ground! De innocent ground that don’t trouble nobody, and now man come fuck it! But kiss me neck, Lawd God Almighty, what is dis now?”
“Ground fucker!”
And there was such an outcry you would have thought a local magistrate had caught his woman in the bush giving pum-pum to a foreigner. Finally, Aloysius had grabbed his machete and chopped down the bush that had raised the alarm, and when the first chop of the machete rang through the darkness the silence of night and death fell on the bushland.
Yet he had had to move from that section of the bushland and could never sleep there again because of malicious whispers that trailed after him. Once a bush had a nasty name to call you, once it knew something about your private life, it never let you forget. That was the way of bushes—malicious and prosecutorial like an old widow woman whose longing for hood turns her into a backbiter.
But even with all this tribulation, the sea was still a greater trouble. The sea was an eye that sometimes stared at you with a nasty blue, and sometimes looked green, and sometimes shone white and ugly like the glare of an albino. It licked ceaselessly at everything—bone or rock or reef or dead body. It lapped your foot like a cunning dog; it fawned and pretended to be your friend. It whispered and purred and sang like a mother and waited. For always the sea was waiting. Watching. Aloysius did not trust the sea. He did not like fish. He did not like anything that had to do with the sea—fishing or diving or even swimming. And though he sometimes went swimming in the sea, he never ventured out too far, never to such a distance that the blue pupil of the great eye yawned fathomless and dark underneath him.
Yet today he was to do a thing in the sea, and that is why his mind had made him forget it. He was to go with a man who owned a canoe. They intended to row up alongside the tourist ship that would be in the harbor today and sing for the passengers and beg them to throw coins into the water. One of the men in the canoe would then dive into the sea after the coins.
Which man? Not the one who owned the canoe, certainly. This man was the white man—the Backra, the Busha, the Boss—whatever name you gave him, he was not the one who threw his body into the sea and went after the coins. It was the other one who did the diving—for half the money.
And that is what Aloysius had promised an Indian fisherman he would do today.
“Backfoot and crosses,” he moaned.
His belly began to bawl with hunger. Sweetsops and naseberries will fill a schoolchild’s belly for breakfast, but the belly of a grown man wants meat or grain.
So Aloysius sat on the wall and shuddered at what lay ahead of him today. His belly wanted food and his hood wanted pum-pum and his mind wanted not to think about the sea.
“So what you goin’ do, den?” asked the bush, in the faultfinding voice of an arithmetic teacher.
“Mind you own rass business,” the lunatic replied, bowing his head while he studied his miseries.
Chapter Six
What Aloysius did was go to Ocho Rios, as he had promised, and he dove deep into the dark blue eye of the ocean beside the great white ship that seemed cemented to the water, and he retrieved the coins that came tumbling out of the sky.
He dove for three, four hours. At first the passengers crowded the railings of the towering decks of the ship, and the silver coins came spinning out of the sky as he imagined snow must look—he had seen snow only in the moving pictures. He would throw himself headlong into the sea and scan for the flash of silver as the coin wobbled toward the bottom, and sometimes he would be lucky and grab the money before it was swallowed by the darkness of the ocean. But sometimes he would be too slow and the coin would drift into the darkness and he would glimpse, as he lunged for it, the shrouded ugliness of the ocean liner’s great underbelly hulking in the depths, and the sight would fill his heart with terror. Sometimes he would even brush against the dark, swollen belly of the great ship and feel its slimy bottom caressing his skin. Then he would hurry to the surface and clamber quickly aboard the canoe, panting for breath, and the cries of the passengers and shouts of the other divers would ring in his ear like the distant sounds of the world awakening a sleeper from a fearful dream.
The owner of the canoe scowled whenever Aloysius broke the surface empty-handed. He was an East Indian with a crooked scar down the fleshy part of his nose, and it was whispered that in his pocket was a sharp knife that he aimed at the throat whenever he became enraged.
“Damn negar man breathe too damn much,” he scowled at Aloysius. “You losing all de money because o’ you damn breathing.”
Aloysius did the diving for the few hours that the tourists were amused throwing coins over the side of the great ship and seeing the black men dive for them, but finally it came to be early afternoon when the sun scalded the sea and heatwaves shimmered off the zinc roofs of the town, and with the heat the tourists disappeared from the railing and the divers rowed back to shore.
On the beach the East Indian counted out the coins, fondling them between his calloused fingers, putting each one up to his nose and sniffing it suspiciously. And when the dividing was done and each man had his share, Aloysius hurried to a nearby shop to buy lunch.
He bought a tin of bully beef and two bullahs and he paid for the food with the coins, sliding them on the dirty counter to the woman on the other side who eyed him warily as she counted out the change, then he wandered through the crowded square and down to the beach where he could find a place to eat his lunch.
The bully beef was wonderful for his belly. It had fat in it and his belly loved fat more than anything else it could eat. He swallowed the meat so fast that he hardly chewed it
, and when it got to his belly, his belly was so glad for the fat that it gave off a muffled noise like a respectable widow passing wind in a church. The bullah was dry and had a slight taste of saltfish, but still it felt good to have the weight of the doughy gingerbread in his belly, and when he had finished eating lunch he felt as full as a rich man after dinner.
He felt so full that he wanted to sleep. But he could not sleep in the hot sun, nor could he sleep on the beach. Soon now the schoolchildren would be out of school and would wander down to the beach to do mischief. If they saw a madman sleeping under a tree, they would stone him with their slingshots or sneak up on him and drop a green lizard on his slumbering belly. Both these things the older schoolboys had already done to Aloysius. It was a great horror to be awakened by the icy pods of a lizard scrambling over the hairs on one’s chest.
He started up the road that led away from the town, looking for a place to sleep. It was only when sleep caught him during the day that he wished he had a house. At night the darkness was a house enough for every man. But during the daytime hours when the sun was hot and the breeze did not blow, when the John Crows circled high in the still air over the bony land, any man would wish that he had a house to go to and a bed to sleep on.
He trudged down the road until he came to a trail that wound through the thicket on the hillside. He took the footpath and shouldered his way into the bush, following the bed of a small stream that trickled down the hill, cutting a groove in the soft, brown earth. Finally, he arrived at a clearing and curled up against the trunk of a towering mango tree whose blossoms scented the woods with a soft perfume.
Here he fell asleep.
Here, too, he met the white woman.
She took photographs of his erect hood.
For when a man has not had a woman for months, when he has had only the ground to grind, the hood of such a man will rise in his sleep. It doesn’t much matter who controls Parliament, what the Queen Mother says, or how much the parsons might rave against it, when a hood has had no pum-pum for two years it will rise like the Union Jack in the glory days of the Fallen Empire. It will ascend into the air like a bishop into a pulpit, a muffin in an oven.
So as Aloysius slept his hood rose up and flew over the tattered fly of his pants, stiff and stylized like the American flag on the moon.
And the white woman took photographs of it.
She had been sitting behind a bush with her camera, trying to take pictures of doctor birds hovering around the blossoms of the mango tree. Aloysius had not seen her when he first tramped into the clearing, and she had remained perfectly still and watched while he settled on the ground and fell asleep.
Then she saw his hood rise and aimed her camera.
She took a distant shot. She came closer and photographed a dorsal view of the risen hood. She moved to the right and got a lateral shot. Then to the left and got another lateral shot. If only the idiot would sleep for a day or two, she thought, she could get more film, take enough shots to make a dirty book.
Her heart was beating fast as she quietly moved around the clearing, taking care to snap no twig, step on no dry leaf, startle no bird. She shot hood in foreground with tree in background, hood in background with bush in foreground; then, adjusting the focus of her camera, she shot hood and bush together, then hood with tree, hood without tree, then hood in sharp focus against a background of the green blur of foliage. Front view, side view, back view, overview: She stalked around the hood like a predator, the camera clicking.
She was exultant as she worked. Others had come to Jamaica before her; others would come after her. But the others returned to Germany, where she had come from, with pictures of a waterfall, an ocean view, a terraced green mountain. She would take back pictures of an aboriginal hood in a clearing beside a brook. Hood shot from every angle. Candid, unrehearsed shots.
She heard a faint buzz of wings, looked up and saw a doctor bird hovering before the blossom of the mango tree. Her heart leapt with joy. She stooped down and tried to get a shot of hood in foreground and bird in background. But the bird flew too high, the hood too low. So she lay down and slithered on her belly up to the hood, the camera mounted over her eye, trying to get hood and bird together.
As if it suspected that it was being used in pornography, the bird prudishly flitted to another blossom.
The woman was creeping toward Aloysius, her camera aimed at his stiff hood, trying to get a shot of hood foreground, bird background, wondering whether she should climb the tree and try for bird foreground, hood background, and muttering curses under her breath because the stupid bird kept restlessly moving without any regard for art, when Aloysius woke up.
He woke up, blinked groggily, and saw a white woman with a metal eye creeping on the ground toward him.
He screamed with terror and scurried behind a bush.
Another woman would have dropped her camera and fled the clearing. But this one knew kung fu, karate, judo. When Aloysius first screamed, she thought he meant to attack her. Dropping the camera, she assumed the menacing crouch of a Sumo wrestler and stalked boldly toward the bush.
Aloysius threw himself on the ground and hid his face in his hands.
“Blood claat!” he shrieked. “White Witch of Rose Hall! Corpie! Help!”
Even the bush he cowered behind became frightened.
“Shit!” the bush hissed. “No hide behind me, man! You goin’ make her chop me up.”
She saw that he was frightened, stood up, and opened her palms in a gesture of peace. Aloysius got off the ground cautiously and peeped up at her.
“Where you eye?” he whimpered.
“Eye? Vhat eye?”
“You metal eye. Where it go?”
The woman looked puzzled, then she laughed.
She picked up the camera and showed it to him.
“This is vhat you saw,” she said, chuckling.
“You don’t have metal eye?”
“Here is my real eye,” she said, prying her right eyelids wide open and showing the dark blue of the Aryan eye.
“Rass,” he said to himself, standing up and dusting himself off.
“I frighten you. I am very sorry.”
“Cho, man!” Aloysius scowled. “Me look up and all me see is one metal eye creeping up ’pon me. What me to think? Me think you was a big insect. Me say, rass, where dem get bug so big in Jamaica? Me say, blood! De bug goin’ eat me like bird eat worm. Must frighten me, man! Cho!”
“I understand,” she said. “I vas behind that bush, trying to take pictures of doctor birds. You fell asleep before I could say anything.”
“So why you creeping ’pon ground, ma’am?”
“I take photographs of that.”
Aloysius stared at her as she pointed to the open flap of his pants. He turned quickly and tucked in his hood.
“Me hood? You take picture o’ me hood while me sleep?”
“Ja,” she chuckled. “I think maybe I send my photographs to the Tourist Board to use in their posters.”
“But see here, Jesus Lawd Almighty!” Aloysius bellowed.
“What a out of order woman!” the bush behind him hissed.
“Mind your own business,” Aloysius snapped at the bush.
“Imagine,” another bush took up the cry, “de man come lie down to rest him head ’cause de daytime sun hot and him tired, and while him sleep, dis rude white woman come take picture o’ him hood! You ever hear anything go so in all you born days? What is dis, oh Lawd, that Jamaica come to? See how de damn slack foreign woman dem go on nowadays?”
“Dunn’s River Falls not good enough for dem anymore. Now dem want shoot picture o’ hood too,” chorused another.
“What happen to white sand beach, Blue Mountain, boy on donkey, conch shell, and tropical sunset? Now is only hood dem want photograph. Dem soon goin’ stop parson in de street and say, ‘Drop you pants so me can photograph Jamaica parson hood.’ You see what de rass world come to?”
The bushes were babb
ling so indignantly and so thickly that Aloysius screamed at them. “Hush up you rass mouth! Is me hood she photograph, no yours. Make me talk to de woman meself!”
“Who do you talk to?” the woman asked suspiciously.
“De bush dem, ma’am. Dem say you out of order, come photograph me hood when me sleeping. Me no trouble you, ma’am! Me sleeping here minding me own business, you is out of order to come photograph me hood, ma’am! You come to me country. Is me country dis! You come and visit me country, and you is very welcome like de Prime Minister say ’pon de radio. But you is out of order to come take picture o’ me hood, ma’am! Out of order!”
“You talk to bushes?”
“Bush talk to me. Me no talk to bush. Me no business wid no bush!”
“You’re a madman!” she squealed.
His eyes blazing, Aloysius could not help but rage at her foolish reasoning.
“Me sleeping in de bush, me not troubling anybody. You creeping ’pon de ground taking picture o’ me hood. Which one is de madder one?”
“A lunatic!” the woman breathed excitedly. “This is vonderful.”
“Listen to me, ma’am,” Aloysius grated, losing his temper. “Me is a peaceful man. Me no trouble nobody. De Prime Minister say no call white man no name in de street, so me no call you no name. Me no call you mad. Me no go to you country and take snapshot o’ you hood . . . Sorry, I mean, you pum-pum. But you is out o’ order . . .”
The Lunatic Page 3
