And that must have done something to his mind, because although in elementary school in Cascadu he couldn’t beat Orville or Sammy running, at St. Mary’s, forced into the athletic program, Claude discovered that he could run faster than nearly everyone in his class. It became at first almost an embarrassment to him. He did not expect to run so fast; that was for Orville from Cascadu to do, that was for Sammy. He would run against fellars in scratch races, feeling himself a representative of that world; but he refused to run for the school. Let them represent themselves. They believed the world was their own. The real people were outside this world. Let them run for themselves. He was not going to consolidate their idea that here was the world. He knew there was another world.
And he was waiting for that world. His attitude aggravated fellars. He got under their skin. They wanted to fight him; but there was about him something dangerous, some secret strength that they saw in him that made them hesitate to tackle him.
So in school he became a kind of a rebel, seen as someone who didn’t play the game, and he grew up largely untested, never knowing how good a runner he was, not caring to prove himself to them. He was waiting on that world. He became somewhat of a loner, a kind of odd man out, having friends, but when he tried to show them his world, they were on another beat, and he had to hold on to himself, because everybody, the whole tide was moving on and away and he was left in his elsewhere world. So, with the feeling that everybody was gunning for him, to bring him down, to civilize him, the masters and the boys, he put his mind to his schoolwork, in secret more than in class, studying not just to beat them but to make himself worthy of the fellars in Cascadu, his ambition to be accepted into their world, to have the right to stand with them by the street corner, or feel possessed of the authority to enter the steelband, barebacked with his jersey tie across his forehead, in the line of men beating iron, yes, he wanted to hold on to them, to let them know that they had a champion.
But he had to deal with the expectations the very people had of him. On weekends when he returned to Cascadu, the people of the town wanted to see what St. Mary’s had done for him, for them, and he didn’t have the heart to disappoint them; so he invoked St. Mary’s in his walk, in his speech. When he was in Cascadu he represented St. Mary’s and at St. Mary’s he was the people of Cascadu. He would know how closely the people of Cascadu were watching him when one day, as he was going along the street, Marvel, a fella who had never spoken to him before, watching him walk by, said, “Like you putting on some size. You lifting weights or what?” making him feel buoyed up, recognized. When he got home, looking at himself in the mirror, at his chest and arms, he was putting on some size. After that he went past the corner a little slower, with greater certainty, with a greater sense of belonging to this place and these people.
Claude went through UWI with the confidence of his own opinions, able to outtalk anyone, with a tone of voice that insisted on being listened to and a fastness of mind to keep on the track of whatever point he was making, arguing incessantly with his friend Merrit who in order to keep up their debates, to make another point, to clarify another idea, allowed him to tag along with him and his girl until Merrit girlfriend Joy, so that she could get some time with Merrit for herself, set Claude up with a girl who was teaching in the same school as she, “someone who likes to talk like you.” She was an elementary school teacher, a girl from the country, from Grande, teaching in Tunupuna. She smelled of Oil of Olay, young, clean, and when they embraced she encircled his neck with both hands like lovers in the movies, a gesture that did not seem natural to her, that she was making just for him. However, she didn’t talk; she listened.
Sometimes for hours they would sit, he talking and she listening, her questions opening up new vistas for him. Next day they would take up again where they left off. Not wanting the conversation to end, when he got the job to go to Rio Claro as a Senior Agricultural Assistant, he decided that he couldn’t leave without her. That was when he knew that in her he had found the girl with whom he wanted to face the world.
He went to her school in Tunupuna to give her the news and to ask her to marry him.
“You crazy?”
“Will you?”
“Will I what?”
“Marry me?”
She hesitated. What would her family say?
He had not thought of family. He had been talking about the future, about the world. He had not been talking of family, neither his nor hers.
“Yes,” he asked. “What would your family say?”
Yes, what would your family say, not even saying what was in his mind: You have not asked what would my family say, but you are asking what would your family say. “What would your family say?”
“What you getting vex for? Is they, not me.”
“Then why have you, my love, asked me such a question?”
She encircled his neck with that movie-star hug.
“Well, maybe we should ask them.”
“Ask them? Ask them?”
“Yes. If we want to know what they have to say maybe we should ask them.”
“Claude, you know what I mean.”
“No,” he said, “I don’t know what you mean. Tell me what you mean.”
“I don’t think is a good idea to ask them anything.”
And then it came out in little driblets, Hindu, Presbyterian, caste and family. Old-fashioned.
“But don’t worry with them.”
“How not to worry?”
“It doesn’t matter to me. To me it doesn’t matter.”
He felt he had pushed too far. He held her. She settled in his arms.
“We are the new world,” he said.
And that was the beginning. They never spoke to her father. They dodged it. He never raised it.
They married, his family alone. Her family absent. Her sisters absent. None of her brothers. And it became clear to him that here was another reason why he had to have a new world. She wasn’t going to blame her father. “He is who he is, what he is, his experience, and I must be true
to what I am, my experience,” she said. “We have the future.”
So he got married. They got married.
So he had a partner now, a pardner with whom to face the new world.
They would go together to Rio Claro, where in the first week of his posting he would witness the silent march of armies of hunting ants, his interest in them turning to alarm, to horror, as he saw lines and lines of them climb up into the apiaries and return with bees held in their jaws. Instead of being diverted from their business, the bees kept on flying into the hives to deposit their nectar and flying out again to gather it, while the ants, with the same implacable efficiency, kept marching in and seizing them and making off with them.
He had looked on with interest, expecting the bees to struggle, that they would somehow mass and call upon their own soldiers to repel the attack of the ants, but instead of being diverted from their business, the bees kept on flying into the hives to deposit their nectar and flying out again to gather it, while the marabuntas with the same relentless efficiency kept marching in and seizing them and making off with them. And he soon realized that if something wasn’t done, the waves of ants would overwhelm and destroy the hives of bees. It was his first posting as Agricultural Officer. He did not know enough about bees, and nothing had prepared him for this sight.
“Is there nothing we can do?” he asked the Beekeeper.
The Beekeeper seemed almost pleased to answer: “Nothing, Chief.”
“Nothing. No spray, nothing? Aldrex, Sevin, nothing? There must be something.”
“If you say so, Chief.” Already in the worker the sense of indifference, a surrender, a fear of even thinking of using initiative.
“How you mean if I say so?”
“If you spray the ants you will kill the bees.” He was enjoying this. Yes, I was the fool, I was the arse, I would get in trouble; already in his voice, his smile, Trouble, saying it in his mind, this c
hief heading for trouble.
“But you see they are dying, Carlton. They will all die.” Claude had read of the marabuntas, he had seen the movie where these ants cleaned everything in their path, big animals ran from them, snakes had to get out of their way, cockroaches, grasshoppers, sometimes even butterflies perished in the sweep of these armies.
“They going to clean out the hives, Carlton. Is there nothing you can do?”
“I don’t know, Chief.”
No, you don’t know. What you know is to eat and shit and come to work here and scheme as much as you can to get off as much work as you can, though when I think of it . . . when I think of it, that is what they teach you, that is the way they control you.
“Maybe a little insecticide spray will kill them. A little spray below where the ants are climbing. Give the ants a threshold of insecticide that they can’t cross. Go for the insecticide.”
“You think that will work, Chief?”
As if I don’t know that I stepping out of my crease, as if I
don’t know that this was where the whole fucking conversation was going to lead . . . You going to get in trouble and I have
to be sure I am safe I not in that. I not offering no advice you
do what you want to do that is what they paying you for me
am just a charge hand just a worker just here to see about the pigs and the cows and the goats and these bees you are the one who went to university I am just a laborer here, so I just
helping you out anyway.
“Well, you’re the beekeeper, tell me what to do.”
“Anything you say, Chief.”
Yes, so we arrive where you want us to: anything I say. Anything you say, Chief.
“Anything I say? What do I know? Anything I say?”
So this was how it was going to be. I surprise you. Anything I say.
“You sure, Chief?”
“Just a little.”
“A little, Chief?”
Well, of course you don’t know what a little is. Of course, of course, you don’t want to have no part in it, that is your wisdom, so when they come to ask anything you would be able to say “was not me, I was just following orders.”
“Give me the can, yes, give me the fucking can. Give me the can of Aldrex.” So that was to be how it was going to be, he was the one who had the call and he made it too. “Give me the can,” and he sprayed the area.
But it pained him. He felt let down. He felt let down by the people he so admired. My God. Afterward he began to blame them. How could they? How dare you do this to yourself? How dare you? I know you. He knew them. He knew they were better than that.
“Here, let me do it.”
Next morning not an ant, not a bee. They had all disappeared. It was an omen of his own helplessness, he would realize later, as he watched agriculture go to pieces, the coconuts in his area dying of red ring disease, the bananas falling to moko disease, the pawpaw to dieback. There was no longer any market for pigeon peas. And he found himself supervising nothing.
The Land Settlement Division to which he was posted had its activities frozen. The land, the land. People were building houses on the land. The drops of sweet peppers and anthurium lilies that had been expected never materialized. The great things they were attempting were all fizzling out to nothing: the pineapple project, the sorrel project, the anthurium lilies project, the tomato project. The demonstration stations were closing down because they were too expensive to run and farmers were left without example, to depend on themselves since the demonstration stations had long ceased to demonstrate any practice worthy of emulation.
“It’s a plot,” his wife Arlene said. “They want to frustrate you.”
He read the reports. He heard the stories. In the Nariva swamp thousands of acres were squatted, the rivers were drained of fish, the conch in the rivers harvested almost to extinction, gravel mined and the land abandoned, its deep wounds eventually turning to pools of mud.
He went from division to division, transferred each time with promotion. He wrote papers, he spoke at meetings
of the Agricultural Society. He went hiking. He took photographs. He talked about agriculture in the twenty-first century. And he realized that he was in a limbo place. To keep up the appearance of well-being, he took Arlene to Grenada, he took her to the St. Vincent Carnival, he took her to the baths in Tortola, to Virgin Gorda, among the rocks, its beauty something he could feel only not even speak. He brought her necklaces, rings. They played mas with Minshall one year. Another year they played fancy sailor with Jason Griffith. He went to the cricket Test matches in the Oval. But he soon realized that all this was just a way of seeking to hide the profound disappointment with himself, his job, his life.
He had to face it. He was trapped in the death throes
of a system he had been trained to contribute toward,
but that was no longer viable. Now he thought of his childhood, of the people there, of Orville and the Baachacs. All that life, that energy, that color, that creativity, what had they done with it. St. Mary’s had won. He changed his car regularly. He bought a hat that he never put on his head, but that gave a certain style where he placed it on the rest above the backseat so that it could be seen from outside. In Cascadu, he witnessed the aging of his parents and the confusion of his sister. He looked for Orville. But he hardly saw him now Orville had a small business as a builder. He made regular trips to the United States, where his workmanship was valued, where he could find every tool he needed for his work. And make some money.
Claude felt overwhelmed, the future behind him. The world had not turned out as he had expected it to. The people had not come into their own. Power was being taken away from them, centralized into the hands of the wise. Yes, St. Mary’s had won.
The Hard Wuck Party had interested him. It promised a new world. Arlene had joined with him. They found people who were interested in ideas, who wanted to save the people. They had been educated to believe that they were naturally suited to rule and so had expected that the people would come flocking to them. It did not happen. They had already affixed their hopes to an earlier version of the Hard Wuckers who were already in power. They were already in power. What the people wanted was not better rulers; what they wanted was not to be rescued from themselves, what they wanted to be given was themselves. And where was their future to be found? Where it always was in what they had been doing, in the struggle they had been making, in the struggle to retain themselves. But what worried him was not only the Hard Wuck Party’s confident assumption of its destiny, it was the people’s willingness to be saved. So he had withdrawn from them, along with two couples who were to become his close friends, Orlando and Shirley, Hamid and Carla, the six of them ending up by being liming pardners, going together to fêtes and shows and playing mas together.
It was Carnival that would save him.
One Jouvay they were playing in Three Canal Jouvay band when they stopped at the roadside to get some beers and something to eat. When they finish eat, they start looking for the band. They can’t find the band. Everybody they ask giving them different directions. They start to walk. It was seven of them. They meet up with three fellars and a woman, one fella beating a du-dup, the next fella beating a brake-drum iron and the woman blowing a whistle. The fella on the du-dup know Orlando, so he pulled Orlando into that band. Orlando pulled them in. Out of nowhere a fella appear beating a piece of iron and join them. So now they have a band. They swing down St. Vincent Street. People sitting on the pavement, some resting, some sleeping, some waiting for their band. Among them is a short stump of a woman, her curvaceous body painted yellow and white, a bucket of yellow mud at her feet, who as Claude was about to go past her, responding to what he thought was the desire to join them in her eyes, stretched out an inviting hand. She grasped it with both of her own and pulled herself up to a standing position. With both hands, the woman first dust off her backside, then pat her bosom, heaved the mass of her breasts into a mor
e seemly alignment, dipped into the bucket of mud and began to anoint him, then Arlene and Orlando, other members of the band dipped into the bucket of mud and anointed themselves and each other and with the iron beating and the du-dup sounding, the little woman assumed a half-stooping calisthenics position, cocked the promontory of her bottom in the direction in which the band was heading, turned her head sideways as if to look back at her bottom, put her hands up like somebody ask her to surrender and start to wine and, still wining, she slipped herself between Claude and Arlene, hold them round their waist, and take them with her to the front of the band. Claude take off his shirt and tie it round his head, and is so, moving to the waves of the rhythm from the du-dup and iron, Arlene, Claude and the rest of them moved through Port of Spain, sharing rum, dancing, singly and sometimes one with the other or in an embrace, the line of them, hands round the shoulder and hands round the waist. And for Claude that was his best Carnival. He drink rum. He dance, he jump up. He wine, he beat iron, he hug-up woman, woman hug him. It was the greatest time. And when the sun come up he see in the eyes of the people on the roadside looking on at him the magnificence of this ordinary raggedy bunch daubed with mud, knitted by this love and community and peace, the feeling inside him so holy it raised in him again the sense of people, their beauty. By the time the morning was over, Claude felt touched by everybody in the band. He was ready to go again.
Is Just a Movie Page 20
