In this City

by Austin Clarke

  The church had been booked, she said. The reception, in a rec-room, what a doleful term! A rec, could it be a wrecked room, was booked for the reception, she said. Flowers were ordered, she said. Her girlfriends at the bank, all tellers, and of lies, presumably (not one of them a junior trainee), were invited, she said. They had bought their wedding dresses, she said. She had bought her wedding down, she said. White, she said. She had one child left back in England, he said. Everything was arranged, she said. The “wrecked” room was vacuumed twice by the superintendent of the apartment building, she said. It was situated in a dreary district in that city where there were five factories and one slaughterhouse, for cows and pigs. Do you think that’s why she did not like pig’s feet?

  I found myself in the ticklish predicament and role of a father-figure giving fatherly advice to a young woman I wanted to take to bed. Young, because at that time I was twice her age, plus three. Her father left her mother when she was two, in Bray-ton. You were not born then. I saw myself as the main character in the movie made of the novel Lolita, the vicar told me about; about a novel about a dirty old man, and a dirty little girl of sixteen and of sexy disposition. I saw the inequality and the immorality in our relationship. She was a nymphomaniac. I was steadily on a diet of green bananas, prescribed by a woman once my age!

  I found myself, after working ten hours six days a week, in a packing company as a packer’s assistant, walking beside a person in blue jeans and white ankle socks; eating small plastic tubes that contained frozen ice of many colours, and artificial sugar. Holding on to a paper napkin, on a Sunday afternoon, to wipe every trace of dripping stickiness from the white hairs of my beard. (I grew a beard then, to help hide from the immigration people.) So, walking through Queen’s Park in the dead cold of winter, and leaving conflicting, contradictory, unequal pairs of deep prints in the thick, indifferent snow. Deep, because we used to walk hand in hand, and slow, and talk. What do you talk to a woman half your age, plus three? And who likes Chinese bone tea cups, and does not eat pig’s trotters.

  “I didn’t know you had a granddaughter so big, man,” Rufus, a fellow who walk-away from being a farm labourer the same way I did, said to me. The son of a bitch! He had seen us necking on a bench whose colour I could not tell, the snow was so thick. He probably meant, by his salutation, that I should think of incest. Had he said, “robbing the cradle,” I would have been happier. Rufus is not more than five years younger than me. He had refused to grow a beard to camouflage his illegality at the time.

  But she, Kay, twenty-two at the time, made me, by her sensuality, look and behave older than I was. And I, knowing my own age, seeing her look and behave like Lolita in the movie version, increased the eating of green bananas from only Saturdays, to Friday, Saturday and Sunday. And a Chinee man in a store down in the Kensington Market had pity on me, and gave me something Chinese to drink. My son, it was Sodom and Gomorrah, after that! Beware of twenty-two-year-old women. Lolita, as you would remember, from the book or the movie, was not the kind of person anyone could accuse of having brains. In the four years that we lived together in the town house, I never could accuse her of that. Of other things, maybe. And I accused her of many other things. But never of that. She was, however, infelicitous in other ways which I shall tell you about at another time; for at the moment, I have to boil some rice with lard-oil in it, and a few fish heads, for this growling dog, Hitler. Why did you ever christen this poor, unfortunate dog by the name of Hitler? Were you being intellectual? Symbolical? Or diabolical? Suppose Hitler had won the War? Don’t you see that all this time now, Hitler would be one dog you could not kick?

  The government of brown-skinned and red-skinned men that is governing this place (there is no woman in this cabinet!) has raised the price of propane, and since I am cooking for a dog – what a dog’s life! – I have to prepare his vittles on a wood fire. The previous colonials who owned this house, before it passed into our family, through whoring and prostitution and piracy, in 18-something, were smart enough to build a solid iron grate, with a stone fireplace, so I shall be bending over a fire, blowing my guts out, to give it wind and make it burn, and cook the rice and red snapper heads, for Hitler.

  It is only nine o’clock in the night here, on a Friday night. A good night. But it could be after midnight the blackness is so thick. Days in this part of the almost forgotten world are short. When they get short, and the nights long, the lawyer-fellow and the vicar and me would deal a few hands of five-card stud. Sometimes, we play “no limit”: sometimes, ten dollars a raise: highest raise, fifty dollars and raise as much as your little heart desires. These last short days with the long nights, the vicar has been lucky. The layer-fellow had to tell him that the parishioners lucky too, because that demon’s hands won’t be in the collection plate! We three, old men, retired from life and from the tribulations of the young, with money in the bank and time to spare . . . what more – save health, praise God – do we want? But where you are, in that city, at this time of year, September and autumn, the days fade more gradually, more romantically, though faster, into night than they do in June, July and August.

  So, before it gets blacker than that afternoon in 1910, with the May Dust, I still have to read the Good Book. I am reading from the front and going steadily to the back, with the help of some strong, stiff snaps of Mountgay rum and water.

  Don’t ever feel you are too much of an academic to read the Good Book. And do not let “blackness” or the colonial syndrome make you feel that the only people who get something mentally nourishing from the Good Book, is white people, racists and Jews. The Good Book is beyond culture. I don’t know who wrote it. And I don’t care. It is like the air, the skies, the wind and the blue sea. It is attainable. So, even if you have to wrap its cover in brown paper, and hide the title from some of the radicals and semi-atheists in Trinity College, in order not to be called unsophisticated and be called a fundamentalist . . . beware of fundamentalists, especially fundamentalist women under twenty-three . . . still do it. You can hide and read. You can’t reap and hide. As a matter of truth, you should enter that kind of meditation, in the privacy of your conscience.

  I have finished with Genesis again – not a bad piece of writing – the vicar told me so, and I have to agree with him – and am now moving through Exodus.

  “Then Jacob gave Esau bread and pottage of lentil. And he did not eat and drink and rose up and went his way: thus Esau despised his birthright.”

  When I read these word in the evening, in this tropical part of the world, sitting under my mango tree, with Hitler beside me, and a rum and water on the beach beside me, with the stillness of the air, the smell of flowers and the smells of all these polluting fumes from cars and buses and lorries, with the crickets chirping and the mosquitoes humbugging me, I still can’t help feeling that the meaning of these words is more immediate and precise in this circumstance of climate. I read the same passage once kneeling down in St. Paul’s Anglican Church on Bloor Street just before you get to Jarvis, after you pass Church Street, one week before I was to face the immigration people with regards to deporting me, or letting me leave on my own oars, in case I wanted to creep back into Canada. And all I felt was that I was reading the Bible, praying for help, in order to understand in less than twenty-four hours, the economics of my situation and the versatility of my fabricating a story to impress the immigration officer with. I felt nothing more. It could have been like reading the Telegram newspaper, which was one of the best pieces of journalism ever sold in that city. But here in this island, with the vicar living beside me, with all the poverty, dead dogs and dead crappos in the road, untouched and unmoved for days, with all the poorness and poverty and political pillage by the government of the Brown-Skins and the Red-Skins, I feel that Moses or Mr. Genesis had just written the words for me personally to read, and had intended these words specifically for my ears. I never got this feeling of recognition, this pointing out of respect, when I read this verse, that Sunday morn
ing in St. Paul’s Anglican Church. It was damn cold, too. Minus 20-something. It was January. It is 98 here.

  And don’t ever let me hear that you have become so modern that you have started to read the new edition of the Good Book, which reads like the constipated prose of that American writer, Ernest Hemingway. Read it in the King James Version, not the Oxford edition. Me and the vicar came to words, and nearly came to blows over this same argument. Christianity is contemporary, he say, as if he was talking to a child, or was talking about manners and deportment.

  Listen to how beautiful these words are : “And tarry with him a few days, until thy brother’s fury turn away.” Where but in the King James would you hear language as pretty as that?

  Only a person with Kay’s understanding would want such language modernized, for easier comprehension. The infelicities of the young.

  I don’t know how and why I got started on Kay. But having begun, you should hear the end of that part of my life. I do intend, however, that the end of my life shall be slightly postponed. At seventy-one, I intend, as I have said, to begin at Genesis, and word-for-word, word by word, worm and work my way through, until I reach Revelations and Concordance. Another poetic word! I feel that I have reached concordance with you, my son, in the writing of this letter, at this stage, for after Hitler has been fed his rice and fish-heads, hoping that no bones are caught in hi swallow-pipe! and I have read a few chapters of Exodus, I shall retire for the night, and join you again, soon in a concordance of love and of deep nostalgia. I have to complete both: this letter, and the Good Book; and I wonder which of the three remaining duties of my remaining days shall have been dispatched first. The Good Book? This letter? Or my life?

  The feelings which I have been expressing to you, and which I have been expressing particularly with more emotion and honesty than normal, are taking hold of me, because all of a sudden, you are not here; not here in the big old house, whose emptiness echoes as if it was a rock quarry and I myself dynamiting coral stone. It is an old house. And it is large, larger than for one man who spends almost every hour of the day and night inside it, except when I am next door with those two robbers, the vicar and the lawyer-fellow. But it is a happy house, a warm house, a museum of memories and events and things which have been ourselves and our past and our aspirations. Your absence gives me the joyful opportunity both to view these things and to rearrange them. Your absence, I hope, is merely temporary. Four years of study in that city which at this time of year must be forgetting the life and love of summer.

  I was talking about feelings. Yes, these new feelings which I must be expressing in my letter to you with a vengeance you had not known before, are feelings more normal for a woman, a mother who follows her child into another land, with words of love and reminiscence, to express. And in the case of most women, this kind of love and reminiscence need not be pure love. It could be her transmitting the cord of birth, the maternal cord, the umbilical restriction that reminds the child, the daughter, that she owes an unpayable debt for being born. It is important that you do. I do not wish you to miscalculate my motives, even if they are devious.

  I have, and I probably transmit feelings to you which state that I am not only your old irreverent father, but am behaving as if there is a piece of the woman, the mother, inside my advice and words. And I hope that as a wise man, with the blood of your dead mother’s veins inside you, an Edgehill, that you will disregard all the advice I have been giving you, because I am speaking a different language, and breathing in a different air. Disregard it as a modum vivendi: but regard it as a piece of history, to be used as a comparison. Having now absolved you from all filial encumbrances of the mind, let me now incarcerate you immediately, for your choice of a philosophical position which is not valid, or tenable, precisely because as I have said earlier, you have assumed that there was not a history before your time, and you made the mistake of calling it a political situation.

  You said you wrote a paper on the British Constitution, and that professor gave you a B. You showed your paper to a Canadian friend, and he asked you to let him use it as his own submission. In the same course, you said. To the same professor, you said. The same length, you said. The identical paper, you said. The only change in the paper, you said, was that your Canadian friend put his name, a different name from yours, on the paper. You said all these things. Those are the facts of the case. And your Canadian friend got an A for the paper, you said. And you ask me now, if this is not racial discrimination, or bigotry, or unfairness. It is not so much your shock that it happened, and to you, but that there was no explanation, no regret, no forgiveness from anyone when you pointed it out to them.

  I myself am shocked that you would have confronted the professor with his own bigotry. I am also shocked that you expected an apology and did not get one from him. You seem to feel that all these incidents of bad manners, all these expressions of a lower-class peasant syndrome have only begun with your presence at Trinity College, and that Trinity is above that rawness of disposition. Had you an eye to history, to the realism and the logic that other black men before you had passed through the portals of Trinity College, you would not now be so smitten by your paltry experience.

  You are, in spite of the black American, Ralph Ellison, who would claim you are invisible, you are rather outstanding and conspicuous. An easy, unprotectable target of whims and of deliberation. You are also a conscience. And if you know anything about consciences, then you should know that that part of our makeup, of our psyche, is hidden, is dark, is criminal, is Christian, is pure, is degenerate, and is beautiful as is Caliban.

  There was a group of West Indian students at a place in Montreal, a second-rate place, called Sir George Williams. Montreal, as you know, and in spite of what you may be hearing these days amongst the Anglophones at Trinity, is essentially a French conscience. Why did I say this, when I am really speaking about the West Indies, and a bigoted professor of Biology; and not about the culture of a place? The West Indians protested. And the Administration at Sir George, which had become during these protests a most third-rate institution, ignored their pleas of protest. The West Indians held a demonstration. They held it in a room where there was a computer. I never could understand that computer. Why did they not demonstrate in the Department of Biology? Or at the professor’s home? In my estimation, it would have been better tactics philosophically to have done one, or the other. However, the computer was damaged. Allegedly damaged by the West Indians, they said. The West Indians were arrested. All the newspapers said so. The West Indians were charged. The West Indians were later sentenced. To various prison terms. One of them is now a Senator down here. Another is a Senator up there. Does Trinity have a computer? Do you wish to be a Senator? Up there? Or down here?

  These are not the sentiments I like to send to you, in a red, white and blue air-mail envelope, with a fifty-cent stamp on it, all the way from this island to you, up there in that city buried almost to your knees in snow, and in hostility.

  I thank you for sending me the phonograph record by Lionel Richie, Games People Play. It was also the name of a book by a man named Tofler, lent to me by the lawyer-fellow. I could not understand why so much attention was given to Tofler’s book, which I have not read, and so little to Lionel Richie’s song. The Third Symphony of Beethoven’s arrived without a scratch or a warp. I wonder how many postmen or post office workers have put their paws on this masterpiece before it got to me? Pearls amongst postmen.

  Unfortunately, there are no pearls in the music that the Government Radio in this place plays. The music is like the voices of the politicians: vulgar . Games People Play, which I remember dancing to with Kay, almost every Saturday night at a West Indian calypso club, the Tropics, fifty years ago, is still fresh and contemporary; and very sensual. Is it the same Games People Play? If Hitler was a woman, Hitler and I would take a few steps. It is the kind of music that makes me want to dance with a dog! Which never dies. Timeless. Incidentally, although I do not ad
vocate that you become a Christian, I do insist that you find time to sit in a church, at least once a month. But preferably, in the Church of England. If you should stumble into a Catholic church, or if you are taken there, choose the best: the old cathedral at the corner of King and Church. Sit inside a church. Listen to the music. Pay less attention to the sermon. The sermon is not meant for you, for our people. But the liturgy and the ritual are artistically rewarding. And so is the liturgical music. So far as Trinity is concerned, and in case you are hung over, and desperate on Saturday nights, and cannot rise for breakfast before the dining hall closes, slip into the Chapel; take a seat near the rear; find the hymn; that shouldn’t be a problem, you were a choirboy in the cathedral here; and sing loudly; but not as if you are the soloist. And before the worms in your unrepentant stomach growl you out of favour from amongst the “divines,” the theological students as they are called by the vicar and the lawyer-fellow, and out of favour of the sincere worshippers, the latter of whom are there because of the breakfast that is served after the collection plate, you may find yourself amongst the blessed, meaning the hungry poor; for the rich would not rise so early on a Sunday morning; and when they do rise, instead of oranges, bran flakes, soft honey that is grey in colour, bran bread and bran toast, warm milk, bacon done too hard, and soft-boiled eggs, the rich would rather eat eggs Benedict.

  If you were here at Edgehill House, you would be partaking our Sunday breakfast: crab backs, stuffed with pork and champagne . (I found a bottle dated 1943. Dom-Pee.) A pity it is, that I cannot put a crab back into this red, white, and blue envelope, and send it to you!

  Games People Play! It is a song that keeps coming back to my ears, whose emotion will not let me forget the sadness of love spent in Toronto. But I have to begin to move my finger along thee lines of Exodus, and watch for the bones in Hitler’s supper, and scratch the fleas from his back, after supper.