Is Just a Movie

by Earl Lovelace

  Sweetie-Mary at the

  Funeral Service

  At the funeral, Sweetie-Mary left a multitude of mourners outside the church where the Picoplat Steel Orchestra was playing hymns in bolero tempo on the walkway beside the flower garden, and carrying the muted steeldrum rhythm in her body, she entered the hot crowded church and made her way up the center aisle to the front row where her nieces and sisters had already taken places beside the family of the deceased, not out of any forwardness, but in their own right as dignitaries, since over the last seven years three of her nieces had represented the district as Carnival queens and had been accorded the status nearly that of cabinet ministers, granted the privilege to sit in the front row at any public function, to be entertained in the VIP lounge and to be photographed by the press.

  For what was to ensue, providentially, that front-row seat placed Sweetie-Mary in direct line with the coffin, and she could see a bit of Dorlene’s upper body and all of her face.

  Mr. Godwin Constantine, proprietor of Cascadu’s recreation club and Chairman of the Village Council, dyed hair, lisped speech, fatigued face, was reaching the end of a eulogy in which he traced Dorlene’s life from the shelter of a stable home where she mastered the piano, played the steelpan, conduct the church choir and give support to the Cascadu steelband that moved it from a pan-round-the-neck band with fifteen players to a conventional steel orchestra with seventy-five players. Sweetie-Mary listened with sadness as he talked about Dorlene’s earnestness, her disappointment in love, her struggles with the band, the abuse of her goodwill, the more she give the more they want from her, when out of nowhere, startlingly, a single tenor pan began to play, the notes drawing to themselves the strings of a new thrilling silence that made the church heave out a breath and elbow for itself a grander space. In that space and silence the choir began to sing and Sister Cynthia Salandy, a nun now, began to weep, deep heartfelt sorrowful tears for the Dorlene she knew when together as young women they entertained the sick in hospitals and the children in orphanages. Sweetie-Mary listened to her weep for that Dorlene. Just so Miss Ella’s high-ringing voice cry out in song:

  Zion, Zion, mi lord

  Zion Hill is a shining glory

  And down, out of the belly of the congregation came Brother Ken’s answering plaintive wail:

  Zion, Zion, mi Lord

  When the power come down from glory

  Zion Hill is a shining glory

  This was for the Dorlene Sweetie-Mary had come to know, the Dorlene who after she came back from visiting Clayton went into the panyard to play music that when Sweetie-Mary hear it, she say, This music is me; because in it she could see the Shango dances, the hefty women’s rhythmic bumping. She could feel the heat of the fire crackling in the coalpot, the oil frying the red fish, the tawa roasting the roti, the raindrops and the chickens with their fluffed feathers sheltering the rain, she could hear the love call of Sonnyboy’s whistling, she could see Franklyn batting, she could hear the roadside preacher ringing the bell outside the market and the young girls ambling down the road with short dresses showing their lean thighs. And she join the people who take the bus and go down to the savannah to push the pans across the stage there until things change and it became a hassle for them to go with the band on the stage. Because now they had police to keep supporters of the band off the stage, and as much as she love the music, she say, You see me I too precious for this business. And for Carnival now she stay home and look at it on TV, but it wasn’t the same thing. Poor Dorlene. Without the people there the music begin to change, to lose its spirit, the dancing going out of it. Dorlene begin to grieve. You could hear it in the music, the lament, the confusion. Dorlene keep getting thinner and thinner and paler and paler as she try to bring back the spirit to the music.

  Zion, Zion, mi lord

  Zion Hill is a shining glory

  Sweetie-Mary felt tears fill her throat, her body breaking and her head set on fire; and feeling that she was about to go into the spirit, she squeezed her eyes shut, tried to control her breathing and commanded her mind to focus on something happy. She found herself thinking of herself and Sonnyboy, before he created the distance between himself and those things that used to make him and her alive and happy, the early years before he distanced himself from Carnival and tried to find his more perfect world in Africa, imposing on her a lifestyle that make her sisters ask her if she join the nunnery. Yes, she was thinking of that time before this time, when he took her with him into that world of the island: the Carnival that had so much confusion and beauty, with the old mas and the pretty mas; the Camboulay and Mardi Gras; a stage for the haves and the haves not, for the Blackpeople and the Whitepeople, for the rich and the poor, for the imitative and the creative, for the Glories of Greece and Sailors Ashore, for the Jab Molassie and the Ice Follies. For brass bands and steelband, and she see this was the place, this was the place, this bacchanal space where it had everything that he fight against and was fighting for. This world and vision that she couldn’t let him surrender; because it was against the background of this world that they really see each other, when his eyes on her was a hymn of praise and the anointing of a blessing, and his fingers softly grasped her hair and they surrendered themselves to long patient kisses that make time disappear and their love was a continent to explore and they loved everything about each other, their skin, their scent, the very feel of their blackness. And they went out together to a fête or to a show dressed in the same colors, black and black or beige and beige, and after the fête they lie down together and he caressed her with his scandalous hands that healed her wounds and sent her crazy. And right there in thinking, she feel those hands on her body and the scrape of the hairs on his chin under her neck, going down her breasts, meandering over her body, and she realize Oh, God, I in a church!

  Frightened by the sin of her thoughts and desperate to fix her mind on something less disturbing, she was about to turn her attention to the coffin when she feel a tug on her hand from her sister Mercury who tell her that her son had just said that he had seen Dorlene’s eyelid flutter. She was about to dismiss it when in looking at the coffin she sighted the cloud on the glass pane over the face in the coffin and quickly realized that the cloud could only indicate that there was hot air that would only have gathered there if someone was breathing in the coffin.

  Excited by the possibility that Miss Dorlene might be alive, she and her sisters looked around the church frantically for someone in authority to tell. The person they decided to reach was Claude, Dorlene’s brother, who was sitting on the other side of the church. Not wanting to cause a commotion she whispered her observation to the person next to her who whispered to the person next to her until by such relay the message reached across the pews to the ear of Claude Cruickshank, “Look at the cloud on the glass of the coffin. Miss Dorlene breathing. I think she is alive.” His response was to shake his head and open his eyes like he think she and her sisters crazy. Until she take it upon herself to squeeze past people and go herself to him in the pew where he was sitting to whisper to him what they had seen, for him to express his disbelief: “Look, darling, I hear you. I hear what you say, but Doctor Bissessar has pronounced her dead. The District Medical Officer has signed the death certificate. There is nothing I can do.”

  She couldn’t believe it. Right there she start to bawl. Her sisters joined in and they became so loud and appeared so afflicted with grief that they had to be led outside the church, where they let it be known that Dorlene was in her coffin breathing.

  In a little while the news swept like a fire through Cascadu, reaching people on the roadside waiting for the funeral to pass, so that one man, Dalton Bobb, Big Dee, who had lived a quiet and apologetic life attending church and working a piece of land with great diligence, hardly saying a word to his wife, repenting for the time fourteen years before when he gambled away the money he got from selling twenty-seven bags of corn one day, and to pay off this debt had undertaken to cook and wash and attend
church with her and be at her beck and call, as his relatives would complain, like a little puppydog: this man, seeing the occasion to be a hero and so break out of his humble prison, hearing the news that Dorlene was alive in her coffin, went into his house and come back out with an axe on his shoulder and a cutlass strapped to his waist and set off for the church with the intention of freeing Dorlene from her imprisoning coffin.

  Seeing which, people, who a moment before had seemed unable to make up their mind what to do, grabbed up sticks and stones and set out behind him, their march picking up people on the way; so that by the time they reached the recreation ground they had grown into such a noisy and purposeful procession that spectators, watching the football match in which the local team Penetrators was surprisingly ahead of Cross Winds 2–1 for the first time in three years of contests, believing that some disaster had hit the town, ran out from the pavilion into the street. Aji, the Penetrators goalkeeper, seeing people leaving the pavilion, looked up the hill to see what was going on and in his moment of inattention, Hing Wang put in one for Cross Winds just as Manding, the referee, blow the whistle to call off the match. All the players run up the hill, to the street and join the band which was on its way to the church. By the time the band reached the police station, it had maybe sixty people in it.

  Constable Stephen Aguillera and Ramona

  In the police station on top the hill overlooking Main Street, Constable Stephen Aguillera, buttoning up the last few buttons of his tunic in preparation to taking up duty at the funeral, heard the hubbub in the street below. He went to the door of the station, looked past the palmiste trees and see this multitude led by a man with a cutlass in one hand and an ax on his shoulder.

  For twenty-five of his twenty-seven years in the police force, Constable Aguillera had pursued his resolve not to make an arrest.

  In the beginning he just turned his back on the misdemeanors that people committed, but afterward, he began to think of people, why did they break the law, how did they get to be who they were, what examples of fair play and justice did the higher-ups set? What choices did they think they had? He saw past

  the little schemes they tried to get over one on the other, the small transgressions that ended in grief, the stupidity, the jackassness, the pride, the shame, and he found himself feeling toward them as much compassion as outrage. The exercise of what the villagers saw as his leniency made him the favorite police officer in the district, a sweetbread, according to my aunt Magenta, and in their parties, the people of the town always had a place for him. He was asked to speak to errant children, to stand as godfather to numerous children of women and men he had spared from arrest. A number of women had their eyes on him, and although he was more than willing to engage in the occasional encounter, he held himself back and didn’t encourage them beyond a certain point because he felt settled as a bachelor, the only person with a chance to make him change his mind Ramona Fortune who he expected one day to turn up. So much so that he had developed the habit whenever he went to cricket in the Queen’s Park Oval or at any event where there were plenty people of always looking around, thinking that by some chance he would see her. He aged, not getting gray, getting bald, taking fewer drinks, speaking his mind in a more philosophical and humorous way, saddened by the losses of the West Indies cricket team but always hopeful, on the lookout for a new captain, a fresh talent, better management; and even when his hopes were not fulfilled he would feel the sting of disappointment that made him glad it had something in his life that could make him feel.

  One day, in the effort to settle a dispute between two of the villagers, he went to the community center where preparations were taking place for a Best Village show. Asked his opinion, he immediately began to critique the show. Impressed by his insights, the villagers asked him to join them. That year he helped them to reorganize themselves and to put aside old village grievances. The following year he wrote and directed a skit, entitled Today For You, Tomorrow For Me, for which he himself composed the songs. The success of this skit motivated him to turn his hand to writing calypsos, which he sang at the annual police calypso competition, using the soubriquet Lord Constable.

  He was never in winner’s row but he made people laugh.

  Then, last year, at the annual Police Carnival Calypso competition, he placed a very close second with

  Pain pain pain

  I want to feel you again.

  You gone gone gone

  Let the memory of this love remain.

  And “Don’t Take My Coverlet”:

  I pay down on some furnitures

  I want my place look nice

  I had the intention to bring in a lady

  To make me a wife

  But I had some problems and run in arrears

  The people come to repossess items I paying on for years

  You could take my bed

  But don’t take my coverlet

  Repossess the stove, the furniture, the fridge

  The pillow where I rest my head

  But please leave my coverlet.

  His performance so impressed Assistant Police Commissioner Dowden, who was present and who had joined the police service at the same time he did, that he was prepared to intercede on his behalf to get him promotion that would enable him to retire with some measure of dignity and with the benefits accruing to at least a corporal. But ASPC Dowden felt he couldn’t do that for a policeman who had not made an arrest in how many years? Twenty-seven years.

  Despite the clear temptation to go out a corporal, Stephen Aguillera had his principles and it didn’t feel right to him, out of convenience, to arrest a man (or a woman) for an offense he had earlier overlooked in another; also, he felt that to start arresting people now would be too obviously self-serving and make him look like someone who had been simply a slacker. But this afternoon, as he buttoned himself up into neatness and strapped on his gun-belt in preparation for leaving the station, it occurred to him as he saw the noisy procession down the hill that a man with a cutlass in one hand and an ax on his shoulder, leading a mob of sixty people through the main street of the town, was a genuine candidate for arrest. Constable Aguillera put on his cap and without hurry, started down the steps. He followed the crowd and caught up with it in front the Catholic church, and was moving toward the armed man to question him. When he got to him, he saw it was Big Dee.

  “What is this?” he asked. “Eh? Just so you going to start a riot, eh?”

  It was then that he got the explanation for Big Dee’s action from the crowd: Dorlene was alive and her brother wouldn’t open her coffin.

  “So you take the law into your own hands? You is the police here, or me?” he asked them. “Well, all-you better disperse before you force me to arrest somebody. And, Big Dee, you better give me that ax, and keep that cutlass in its case and go to the police station and wait there for me.”

  Constable Aguillera turned away to face the formidable sight of Sweetie-Mary and her sisters sweeping toward him. He stood where he was. He saw them speaking but he didn’t hear anything because – and he couldn’t have imagined it more perfectly – there, in her dress of mourning, looking up at him was this woman with the gentlest smile that came out of her throat, the full lips across her face, the huge eyes with their hint of sadness and pity, as if she was fighting hard not to cry.

  “Ramona? Ramona Fortune?”

  And yes, there before him was the Ramona Fortune of nearly twenty-seven years ago. Following on his happiness to see her, he felt an overwhelmingly tender desire to weep. Because it all came back, the days of coming out on the gallery of the police station to watch her walk to the taxi stand to get a taxi to go to school, and to be there when she returned, no words between them except those spoken by their eyes, until he take it upon himself to write her a letter expressing his feelings and give it to a girlfriend of hers to give to her and waited for her reply, only to discover that the friend (her name was Imelda) had out of mischief or naiveté handed the letter to h
er in plain view of her mother. She had showed her mother the letter and at the mother’s request read it aloud before the family, who were listening and laughing. She herself laughing and crying (what else could I do?) but secretly triumphant that his words had such feeling and intelligence. It must have been that feeling and intelligence that indicated to the mother a potential for danger. They sent her to stay at a relative outside the district. He did not see her and heard nothing about her until Imelda the Traitor come and tell him that Ramona pass the examination and as reward her parents had agreed to let her play mas in a Carnival band and she would

  be leaving on Ash Wednesday for England to study. It was the only opportunity he would have to be with her before she left. And that was how he had come to lock up

  the station and go to look for her in the band. He

  had found the band and then had found her surrounded

  in the band by a phalanx of relatives who would never leave her side. He followed her for most of the day without being able even to put his hand around her waist. Band members offered him drink, he bought drink, he drank, but he couldn’t touch her. And he awoke to find himself sitting on the pavement in the middle of the afternoon with the band nowhere in sight. The rest of the day he spent looking all through Port of Spain. They had disappeared. He never did see her. As if that was not penalty enough, he was found guilty of dereliction of duty and as punishment, had been stationed in this remote district of Cascadu.

  Now she was here. Constable Aguillera was so off-balanced that he did not ask anything. Almost as an act of defense, he reached into his pocket for his notebook, because by then it had penetrated that they were complaining that Dorlene was alive in her coffin.

  “Tell me,” he said to Sweetie-Mary, who appeared to be the spokeswoman, “how you get this information?”