They walked and he talked and the woman was grave and foolish and impertinent, and sometimes she laughed while he ranted on about the injustice he had suffered at the hands of the Jamaican government, and sometimes she made him stop so she could take notes and write down his words in her book.
It was this harmless gesture that had made him so sentimental that he could not control himself—this sight of the white woman writing down his words in her book that made him start to blubber like a child, that forced him to lean against one of those cut-stone mortarless walls that were strung across the Jamaican countryside by anonymous slave hands many years ago, and catch his breath. And when he could not catch his breath, the tears came and he wept along the side of the road in full sight of this woman while she wrote down in her book that the first madman she had met on her holiday to Jamaica was now weeping; wept because in all his life, no man, no woman, no child, no bush, dog, donkey, mule, no one before had ever written down any of his words in a book.
“Hot in the sun,” the woman had grunted as he wept. “Maybe ve find some shade vhen you’re through.”
But she asked no questions about why he wept.
So it was a bizarre afternoon in the company of the stout white woman who wrote words in her book and carried a big bag on her back.
After they had walked up through the Fern Gully road, drawing prying stares from the people in shops they passed, after she had asked him questions about his madness and after he had wept, she asked if he would show her the real Jamaica, as if the ground under their feet were imaginary and the sky over their heads a dream.
He took her into the bush. They left the asphalt road and followed a footpath that pierced through a thickly wooded grove, ascending into the back country where small cultivators lived and cows and goats grazed. Everywhere they looked the land was green and shining, for the afternoon rains had already fallen, and the smell of the moist earth rose up around them like the odor from a freshly bathed woman.
Then the foreigner went to work on the land with her camera. She pointed it everywhere, and it made a small noise like the sound of biting. It bit at bushes and valleys, at mountains and at the sweeps and folds of the green earth. It bit at flowers and at birds, and sometimes it even nibbled at the clouds and the sky.
Some of the bushes loved to be photographed and some did not love it so well. Some screamed at the woman when the camera snapped at them, and others giggled and complained that they were ticklish. Aloysius held himself aloof from the clamor, would answer no impertinent questions put to him by the bushes, and walked meekly in the tracks of the foreign woman while she stooped and bent and climbed and lay on the ground to take pictures. The camera gnawed restlessly at the land all afternoon.
But eventually they had come to the mountaintop and to the time when the woman, her eyes red from smoking too much ganja, began calculating the weight of invisible fish. They had climbed into the deep bushland, where—except for the small sounds of birds—the land was green, dignified, calm, and silent like the depths of the ocean. Under a tree they sat, the woman smoking ganja, Aloysius worrying about what he would eat for dinner.
It was here that the woman gave him the pum-pum.
It did not matter that she had hair all over her body or that she had legs as thick as fence posts, she should not have beaten him.
It did not matter that she was a white foreigner who had spent the greatest part of the afternoon smoking the strongest ganja grown in Jamaica, and it did not matter that she was uncouth enough to have crawled on her belly to photograph his hood while he slept. He would still insist to his last breath that she should not have beaten him.
He explained the circumstances to the flame heart tree under whose boughs he had slept for the past two years and the tree was entirely of the same mind. No foreign woman should come to Jamaica and beat a Jamaican citizen.
It is a horrible state of affairs that a man suffers when a woman beats him. It causes wounds greater than any fist or stick can give. Such a thing stays in a man’s mind to the end of his days. Like an injustice, it returns to torment him whenever he is depressed or sad. It is the kind of injury that requires public expression of indignation and outrage for a man to get over, and so Aloysius that very night told the tree about how the woman had beaten him, and the tree was sympathetic and vocal in its disapproval.
“Damn out of order,” the tree muttered.
Could he have helped himself? After an abstinence of nearly two years—the last time had been with the dry pum-pum of an old woman who had stolen his supper—after he had been reduced to grinding the ground itself, after he had not seen a pum-pum for all this time, could he be held responsible or at fault over the behavior of his starving hood?
“Rude!” the flame heart tree agreed truculently. “De woman is rude and out of order!”
For when the woman offered herself to him, wriggled out of her drawers and bared to him the reddest pum-pum he had ever seen in his life, a thing nestled fat and deep between her legs, a thing that struck him very like a certain kind of shy red fish who lives in a dark part of the reef under a ruff of waving seaweed—for so the pum-pum seemed to him as it peeped out at him from between the dark crevice of her legs—his hood had jumped up like a corporal on the parade ground, and his mouth was so dry from the pounding of his heart that he could not talk, could not even clear his throat as she wrestled him down on top of her.
What happened next was the kind of lovemaking that parsons hate because it has nothing to do with love, kissing, fondling, hand, feet, ears and mouth and noses, nor any other part of the body except hood and pum-pum—the parts utterly ungovernable by religion and preaching, the parts that obdurately pay no collection in church, endure no hymn singing, no shrieking to the Holy Ghost by old women at a prayer meeting. It was lovemaking in which the hood and pum-pum whispered to one another in a private tongue like two lawyers outside a courthouse.
Then he was inside the pum-pum, which was in spate with its own juices, and he was sinking into a smooth tunnel that had neither walls, top, bottom, sides, beginning, end; a tunnel that one might imagine must be like the belly of a fat, endless eel. It was so slippery and soft that for one dreadful moment he imagined that he would continue to slide in until only the top of his head protruded from between her legs, and he would drown there, vainly shrieking in the clammy darkness for a rope or a ladder.
And if he had stuck there and not shifted or moved everything might have turned out for the better—if he had done what bird shooters do when they find themselves suddenly sinking down to the hips in a soft pocket of a swamp—if he had merely poised there for a moment or two and not savored how wonderful it felt to have two hairy legs crushing his ribs in a love grip and how sweet to swim deep between a woman’s legs where softness itself bubbles and oozes out of her body …
“What’s past is past,” the tree said sensibly.
But instead he shifted slightly because of a tormenting fear of disappearing inside her, and it was suddenly over. He groaned and was done.
The fire flared in her eyes and blazed.
“You brute!” she shrieked.
A fist streaked from her side and clouted him a ringing blow on the ear.
He toppled over on the ground. She clambered on top of him and rained blows down on his body.
“No murder me in me own country!” he bawled, trying to shield his face with his hands. “Have mercy!”
“Woman kill man!” a bush screamed with terror.
But the second time he was a little better. She satisfied her rage and smoked another joint of the weed. He gently touched the bruises on his face and shook off the pain of the beating. Then they tried a second time.
This time she rolled on top of him, which was a position he did not especially favor because once a rude woman had ridden him so and screamed “Giddayup!” in his ear as though he were a donkey she was riding to the market. But the white woman was not so obnoxious as to do such a thing. She merely rode him
with an intensity, a dark fierceness that made his heart beat fast and his toes twitch. And though he was a little better and lasted a little longer, he still could not hold out long enough for her. When it was obvious that he was done again before she was ready, she screamed so hard in his face that drops of her spittle rained down on his chest.
She doubled a fist and drew it back. He winced and closed his eyes, expecting the blow.
But instead she rolled off him and lit up another of the Sinsemilla weeds.
The third time he was useful to her.
The third time he was weary and almost unwilling to do it, but she stroked his hood and it stood up for her like a dutiful Boy Scout before the Queen. His belly was bawling for hunger and the bruises on his face stung from his sweat, yet the third time he managed to last long enough to please her.
When it happened, her face turned as purple as a sea grape; she kneaded his shoulders with her fists and jerked backwards as though a bomb had gone off inside her belly.
“O-Isopropoxyphenyl!” she shrieked, causing a ringing in his ears.
It was, she said afterwards, the word she always shrieked whenever a hood gave her pleasure. It was a word from chemistry, which she had studied at the university. She had first experimented with saying that word some three years ago and liked it better than anything else she had cried out before. Since then, it was the word she always said at that time.
“What dat word mean?” Aloysius asked, so weary that he was lying on his belly in the dirt, unable to move.
“Cockroach poison,” she murmured.
“Cockroach poison?”
“Vhy not! Vhat does it matter vhat I say?”
“It don’t matter,” he whispered.
He was so weary he could hardly stand. His hood was dead. The foreign pum-pum had killed it. That was the way it always went with hood and pum-pum: Hood goes in like a lion but comes out like a lamb.
She spat at a bush.
“I need at least two, three, maybe four lovers,” she said. “That’s how I am. One man cannot satisfy me. I must have at least two.”
“Aloysius Gossamer Longshoreman Technocracy O-Isopropoxyphenyl Predominate Involuted . . .” Aloysius murmured.
Now he had a thousand and one names.
“A thousand and one names,” marvelled the tree jealously. “And me wid only one name.”
“What dat name be?” Aloysius wondered, curling up wearily on the ground.
“‘Tree.’ What else? Dat what everybody in Jamaica call tree. Just ‘tree.’”
Aloysius did not stir.
“You don’t know how much me wish me had a hood like you,” the tree griped. “Me damn tired o’ de blossom and de bee business. Damn foolishness every year—blossom and bee. Pollination and cross-fertilization. Me no care what parson say, me'd give me tap root for one good grind. Even if me could grind one o' dem female dog dat, come wee-wee 'pon me trunk sometime. Instead, is nothing but pure bee and blossom, year in and year out. Bee and blossom."
Aloysius began to snore.
Chapter Nine
A preaching bush woke up Aloysius. It was a bush that claimed to have taken a correspondence course from an American seminary, that sat in a dirty gully and did nothing but rant and rave all day except during the fiercest heat of the sun when it had to content itself with muttering like an old man. Once or twice before, this same bush had awoken Aloysius from a sound sleep with its preaching until he had threatened to chop it up with his machete the next time. Now the bush was waxing full force as though it were in a church being listened to attentively by fifty toothless old women.
“Oh Babylon,” the bush shrieked, “what will become of dis Babylon dat we call Jamaica? Where donkey do nothing but bray and grind all day! Where dog want nothing more dan to mount every passing bitch! Where backra and busha lie in wait to grind de poor maid! Where every woman in dis country must caulk up deir pum-pum from ravaging hood! Where de pickney dem don’t do deir lessons at night! What will happen to Babylon in dese wicked times? Woe unto ye, oh Jamaica! Pum-pum and rum gone to your brain and make you giddy!”
“Hush you bumbo!” Aloysius screamed at the bush.
“Is you dat, Missah Aloysius?” inquired the bush timidly, after a thoughtful silence.
“Yes, rass. And you wake me up!”
“Sorry, sah. But a fit o’ preaching catch me!”
“Hush you rass mouth and make me sleep.”
The bush was silent for a few moments.
“Missah Aloysius,” the bush muttered, “Jamaica man love pum-pum too much!”
“Me say hush you rass!” Aloysius screamed.
But in the silence that followed, even though the morning was only a smudge of chalky light against the darkness, Aloysius could not go to sleep again. His back hurt him from all the grinding of the night before and his throat was dry and parched because of all the vital fluids the pum-pum had squeezed out of him.
“Pum-pum mash me up,” he groaned, squirming under the flame heart tree.
“A wish it would mash me up, too,” sighed the tree.
“Serve you right,” hissed a bush spitefully. “Negar love to grind too much.”
Down the road in a big house on the top of a hill, not far from where Aloysius slept, Busha McIntosh was also waking up.
The Busha was the richest man in the parish. His land splashed over fields, licked at the belly of the mountain, and rolled down to the coastline. It was a luxuriant land, fed by wild streams and springs, rich with fruit trees and guinea grass pastures. It supported goats, cattle, fruit trees, rats, and praedial thieves.
Busha had inherited this land from his father, his father from his father, and so on down through a succession of twelve fathers stretching back to the earliest days of Jamaica. The very title of “Busha”—a slave corruption of “overseer”—spoke of ancestry, wealth, land, striking the local ear with the same galvanic ring that initials such as ITT, IBM, GM have on Americans.
A white man whose complexion had been broiled an ugly red by long hours in the tropical sun, Busha still struck an imposing figure in his fifty-fifth year of life. His wife Sarah was fat and cozy like a well-fed cat and had a clever mind for books, balance sheets, and general business.
This morning Busha and Sarah took breakfast on their veranda. All around them the dawn broke open like an egg oozing a thin white light throughout the world.
Maids worked inside the tiled interior of the house while the Busha and Sarah breakfasted. One maid cooked breakfast. The other spread beds and dusted. A garden boy shined the Busha’s boots. In the backyard, another garden boy wiped the dew off the Busha’s Land Rover.
Settled comfortably in a puddle of middle-aged contentment, Busha and Sarah had been married now these twenty-five years, had raised five children, and were each occupied with satisfying pursuits. Busha farmed and reared cattle; Sarah kept books for foreigners and coached the church choir. He fished and hunted birds; she crocheted and scolded maids. Both were devoted to eleemosynary projects in the village— Busha to curbing drunkenness and idleness among adolescent boys, Sarah to promoting matrimony and eliminating teenage pregnancies.
Busha and Sarah had little to say to each other this morning. When a man and a woman have been married for twenty-five years and times are basically good, they do not prattle like new lovers. The small daily issues in their lives are subjected to long-standing treaties, time-honored procedures, predictable attitudes. There is no use chitchatting about praedial larceny or the latest murders in Kingston or the slackness of today’s youth—for each knows exactly how the other feels and can predict what the other will say. Unanimity on virtually every moral and parochial issue reigned in Busha’s household.
If the times had been bad, Busha and Sarah might have gathered themselves in a corner out of earshot of prying maids and begun the morning with gloomy muttering over their daily worries.
But these were not bad times. A few years before, when the Socialists were raving in Parliam
ent about idle land and threatening to confiscate private property all over the island—those were days for muttering to one’s wife; when the Prime Minister so roused the rabble with firebrand orations that urchins and vagrants used to scream “pork” at white people in the streets— those were also times that called for domestic muttering.
But those days were long gone now. Today a man did not have to mutter to his wife just because he happened to be rich and white. Sanity reigned in Parliament. Sugar, salt, flour were back on the shelves. The tourists had returned to Jamaica. In times like these a rich man and his wife could lapse into the unconscious ways of old lovers, could sit and drink coffee with dawn stirring around them and remain benignly speechless toward one another.
Unless there happened to be a bone between them.
For sometimes when a man and a woman have been married many years, a bone will come between them. It will be buried deep below the layers of daily affection, small talk, bimonthly copulation; it will lie between them on the marriage bed, goad them around the breakfast table, jab them in the church pews.
It was the Busha whom the bone tormented and made sleepless. Even now, as he sat nibbling on fish, his wife of twenty-five years no more than ten feet away, he was gnawing restlessly on his bone like an old dog with a toothache.
The Busha was a man of the soil; his brain was of the earth. He could recite rhymes he had learned in school but he did not understand poetry. He could sing songs but he did not like music. He had pictures hanging on the walls of his spacious house but art and artists were as foreign to him as Tierra del Fuego.
So Busha was no good at expressing his feelings. He was good at tending to the land, growing the guinea grass, farrowing a sow, or whelping a dam. He was good at espying a malingerer, trapping a praedial thief, or butchering a cow. But he was no good at telling what was in his heart. And he was too big, too thick a man to sigh over his troubles. If the Busha could sigh so could an ox.
The Lunatic Page 5
