Is Just a Movie

by Earl Lovelace

  She had her radio tuned on to the talk shows and she carried on a debate with whoever was talking.

  Mr. Bissoon had become her favorite target because he blamed the PM for everything. He was highly critical of the idea that people should sell their dreams. “This is the madness that you produce when you encourage people to sell all their dreams. At least we should retain some.”

  “Dreams? You talking about dreams,” she said, addressing Mr. Bissoon’s voice coming over the radio. “If to be PM of this country is your dream, you better sell that dream.”

  Clephus was worried about her too. He came to me to ask my advice on a matter he had been thinking about for the longest while. He wanted to ask her to get married and wanted to know if I would have any objection.

  What did I think?

  I indicated to him by way of signs that I still could not speak. And he left me without comment. I didn’t know what he had decided until the morning my aunt Magenta woke up deeply sad, and called us all to tell us her dream.

  In her dream, it was Carnival. She had a bonnet on with the peak turned down so you couldn’t see her face; she had a short short skirt on, her legs all showing. And she had a baby in her arms, and she was pointing at a man who looked like Music, accusing him of not minding the child.

  But the man was ignoring her.

  “You,” she shouted, and then when the man turned in her direction, the face she saw wasn’t that of Music, it was the PM’s. And closing around menacingly to protect him were the police.

  Aunt Magenta was sure that dream foretold her death. “I sure they come to bury me,” she said.

  She set about to instruct us what to do when she died, what preparations to make for the wake. She wanted bongo dancing and children playing games, and plenty rum and coffee. She told us who she wanted to preach the sermon, who was to ring the bell. Clephus and I were to share the house. I was to get a lawyer and see that it was done legal; she did not want any family coming and making any claim on her property when she was gone. She did not want anybody coming to put Clephus out of the house.

  While she was talking, Clephus was trying to get a word in. But she did not give way, and it was only when she was done talking and let him speak that he proposed to her that they get married.

  “Well,” she said, “this is a good time, now when you know I going to dead.”

  “You not going to dead,” he said. “Whatever coming for you coming for me.” And he begin to tell her the dream he had dreamed.

  In his dream, Clephus saw his uncle Abyssinia coming down the hill in Castara, his whole body daubed with black grease, a trident in hand and long pointed fingernails made of tin, and he had a tail and his uncle was dancing and wining like a jab molassie and he, Clephus, was behind him barebacked in a short pants daubed with the same black grease, and on a strap around his neck was a biscuit pan that he was beating with two sticks to provide the rhythm for his uncle’s dance.

  Then I remembered what I too had dreamed.

  In my dream, I was seeing my grandfather Freddie, and he was dressed in a dragon costume. Fire was coming out his mouth and I was one of the men dressed as an imp holding the chain, while he tried to break away. But, of course, I couldn’t speak.

  The rest of the day I puzzled over the dreams. That afternoon, I went over to Sonnyboy’s place. I found his shop packed with people telling each other their dreams. Nobody could give a satisfactory interpretation of what this meant. Next day, the figures of our dreams appeared to the children in Cascadu Primary School. Seven children from Standard Three of the school had to be taken to hospital. One boy had collapsed three times after he had seen a short green man. “He had a sword and a pistol and a dagger and a cape. He was laughing, and I started to pee my pants,” the boy said.

  One of the girls, Avinisha Pariag, said, “I saw a green man with hooves like a goat and big red eyes. And it had a black sword.” Another girl, Marlene Superville, had seen a man with wings folded like a black bat. Six other students, Charlene, Angela, Debbie, Kerry, Leanne and Kamla, are reported to have fainted over the last week. The school principal, Mrs. Sharlene Jagroop, reported the incident to the authorities, who ordered that the school be closed until the Ministry of Education could provide the children with a safe environment. In the meantime they began investigating the cause of these spirits.

  Acting on the assumption that the spirits removed by Dorlene from the sick had taken up residence in the town, some in our dreams and others in the heads of the children, the Ministry of Health ordered that small children and pregnant mothers be moved to other districts so that when the spirits were released they would not find the souls of the innocent to enter.

  With this news made public, it set off concerns in districts throughout Trinidad. The Tobago House of Assembly was concerned that the spirits would find their way over the sea and settle in the island. Also expressing worry, especially for their tourist industry, were the governments of the nearby islands Barbados and Grenada. Venezuela just seven miles away sent its health officials over to find out what was going on. In the meantime on their own initiative, people were consulting obeah-men and obeah-women and religious people who knew how to handle spirits, and in many homes we began to get the smell of incense burning, and on the trees blue bottles and red tied to the branches of trees to repel the spirits.

  The Ministry of Health sent out men with spray-cans on their backs, which they used to spray for dengue fever and they sprayed a thin white mist into the air, which killed mosquitoes, had the place smelling stink, but left the cloud intact and the land dark.

  Business persons threatened to move their businesses because of concern that bandits would be emboldened to use the increased hours of darkness to murder, kidnap and smuggle. The cricket Test Match, which was being played in Trinidad between England and the West Indies, had to be halted at four in the afternoon because of bad light, the English commentators starting to giggle and ask what kind of tropical weather is this, is better we had stayed in jolly old England. Pastor Prue on his own initiative brought in from the USA the Reverend Benny Henny, the famous evangelist. Benny Henny held one prayer meeting in the savannah in Port of Spain. But he stopped what was intended to be a crusade and rushed back to the United States since he found the spirits he encountered were too numerous and strong to be tackled with the resources he had at hand; he promised to return with the reinforcements to take them on.

  The cloud was spreading over the island. The Concerned Citizens lobbied for Carnival to be postponed until the cloud was removed. Some wanted the elections put off as well. In order to put the population at ease and to ensure that neither the date for Carnival nor the elections was changed, the Office of the Prime Minister advertised worldwide for an obeah-man, occultist, spiritualist or holy person to get rid of the cloud before Carnival. This search committee shortlisted three persons – all foreigners – who were to be brought to Cascadu for interview, prompting Claude to take another swipe at the government, saying: “You see how they insulting and ignoring us. You mean to say you can’t even get a competent obeah-man from Tobago or Trinidad?”

  The spiritualist finally chosen was the Canadian who turned out to be a Trinidadian. Because of the shortage of hotel accommodation in Cascadu, he was brought to occupy the spare room that my aunt Magenta had for rent. The man was Victor S. Rooplal. He had put on weight around his middle and his hair had thinned considerably, but Aunt Magenta recognized him right away by his deep engaging eyes. She remembered the danger he posed to women who gazed into them.

  “No. I don’t think you could stay here,” she told him. “Your eyes. I know who you are.”

  “Lady,” he said to her, “it is very flattering, your concern, but I done with that years ago. I am not the man I used to be.”

  “OK. I not doubting you. But, just in case your powers come back, you better put back on those dark shades.”

  That same evening I took Rooplal over to Sonnyboy’s place.

  “Wait,�
�� he said as Sonnyboy was about to greet him, “first things first.” He pushed his hand in a pocket and brought out the twenty-one dollars he had kept for Sonnyboy for twenty years.

  After that he told his story, beginning with that night when he escaped from Khalid’s place with Khalid’s daughter, of going with the truck and getting off at the Central Market, of getting into a card game and winning (the girl was lucky for him) and then going with the girl by relatives of his, moving all over the island to avoid the men Khalid had sent to kill him, until with money from his winnings, from family and the girl pawning her jewelry, he and she got on a plane to Canada, where they were granted entry as political refugees fleeing the discrimination of an African government that had done nothing to protect him and his family from rape, robbery, kidnapping and death.

  “You tell them that?” an astonished Sonnyboy asked.

  “Was the best I could do. I didn’t have a better story.”

  In that land of opportunity, V. S. Rooplal worked as a janitor, a calypsonian and pan beater and a Midnight Robber speech-maker, graduating to become a toaster and later a motivational speaker dealing with young people who had fallen foul of the law. He had married (to the same girl), opened a roti shop and joined the Pentecostal church. His wife had gone to university and had graduated as a business administrator and he had taken courses in magic and anthropology. Later he had moved to Calgary where he ended up being a calypsonian, motivational speaker and toaster using, as poet, the idiom of Midnight Robber speeches; and as occultist, giving people baths and charms to ward off evil spirits.

  Trinidad was always in the back of his mind. Life had been good to him. He had done well and wanted to give something back. He had thought of returning and joining a political party and going up for election, winning his seat and serving the people. And he had actually begun to make inquiries of which political party would offer him a safe seat when Sookraj, who still kept in touch with him from Calgary where he was then living, call him up and as a joke said, “You don’t hear what happening in your town of Cascadu? A woman come back from the dead and they have a whole lot of spirits roaming about the place and nobody to get rid of them, ha ha ha.”

  Next day Rooplal using his new Canadian accent called up the Consulate of Trinidad and Tobago to find out if the services of an occultist would be needed. In Trinidad they would have laughed at him, but here the officer herself, the Deputy Consul-General, hearing his Canadian/Indian accent was interested and told him they were in search of just such a person and if he would send in his curriculum vitae they would contact him. The Consul-General wanted to speed up the process by having him come in, but, knowing that a personal visit wouldn’t do him any good, because once they found out he was a Trinidadian, his chances of getting the job would be quite remote, Rooplal pleaded his busy schedule but kept up their correspondence, and the Deputy Consul-General only saw him when, as an act of courtesy, he came to Toronto airport to see him off. V. S. Rooplal was dressed in a unique outfit – a black cape, a wooden sword, a dagger at his side, a hat out of the French Revolution, blue tights, gloves and pointed shoes – and many people came up to him to ask him what country he was from; however, the Deputy Consul-General, being a Trinidadian, recognized it as a Midnight Robber costume. The man nearly fainted. But it was too late for him to change anything.

  It became clear to Rooplal, after he had spoken to the schoolchildren and listened to what Sonnyboy and the rest of people had to say, that whatever its origin, the way to move the cloud from over the town was by dancing.

  “Dancing?” Sonnyboy asked him.

  “Yes.”

  He wanted all the people in the island to join together and dance. The heat of their exertions would rise, push the clouds higher up, leading to condensation and rain.

  “This,” said Mr. Bissoon, when he heard the proposal, “is just another effort by the government to drag my people into the bacchanal called Carnival that we have resisted for all these years. This dancing might save the town. My question is, will it destroy the moral fabric of my people?”

  In the lecture he was invited to give at the University of Trinidad and Tobago in its Distinguished Lecture Series, Rooplal talked of his work in Canada as a Midnight Robber and a performance poet. He had returned because he had so much to offer to both art and politics in the country. He had no ax to grind for any particular ethnic community since he was six of one and half a dozen of the other. What was required was for the people to put aside ethnic loyalties and come together for Carnival and dance.

  Next day his speech and a photograph of him appeared in two of the daily newspapers. He was hailed in their editorials as a patriot who had left his busy schedule in Canada to return to his beloved country to give us the benefit of his expertise in the resolution of this serious matter. And they suggested that we should not let a man of such important credentials and insight be lost to us. Next day the telephone in Aunt Magenta’s house rang incessantly as one political party after the other sought to court Rooplal.

  But later that week the whole thing turned around. It was discovered in delving into his background that when he left Trinidad years ago he had entered Canada as a refugee seeking to escape what he had described as “the terror of a Black regime and its supporters who had an agenda to rob, rape, kidnap and murder Indians.” When he was further investigated, it was found that his PhD was fake and that he was Victor Sonny Rooplal, a petty magician and gambler who had spent his early years in Cushe and Cascadu.

  After the story broke, V. S. Rooplal indignantly declared that he was returning to Canada to have his name cleared. He packed up his things, said goodbye to us and Sonnyboy and slipped quietly out of Trinidad, his only regret that after all these years he didn’t even get to see Carnival.

  Carnival

  Jouvay morning Claude jumped awake in a cold sweat.

  He had been shot by Orville’s son and was preparing

  to die. He was surprised not to be feeling any pain

  where the bullet had struck him and he found himself waiting with a kind of puzzlement for something else

  to happen before he died, and it was only when he hear the alarm ringing that he realized that the reason his mind was so clear was because he really was not going to die. He had been dreaming the same dream for the last seven nights.

  In his dream, he had gone with Dorlene to the family house she had left to take up residence in the rest

  house, and found it filled with people they did not know and who did not know them, but as they were about

  to leave they saw the piano in the living room and

  knew for sure that they were in the correct house. And he began to wonder how had these people come into possession of the house. Then he remembered that

  he must have sold the house when he thought that Dorlene had died. He must have sold it, because when he went outside, there at the side of the house, heaped there to be thrown away, were the newspapers their mother had piled up for forty-five years to read when she had time. When he rummaged through them he found papers on Self-Government, on Independence, pamphlets by J. D. Elder, newspaper photographs of

  the Carnival portrayals of Beauty in Perpetuity, the fancy sailor mas of Fruits and Flowers by Cito Velasquez, prints of Alf Cadallo’s paintings that his mother had planned to frame and put up on the walls, pictures of Paramin blue devils, a photograph of Errol Jones as Makak and Stanley Marshall as Moustique in the Derek Walcott play Dream on Monkey Mountain, newspaper reports on the mutiny trial of Lieutenants LaSalle and Shah, a big Minshall poster of Man Crab from his Carnival presentation

  The River, a CD of Phase Two Steel Orchestra, featuring Boogsie Sharpe, a C. L. R. James pamphlet on Party Politics, Keith Smith Express articles, Merle Hodge interview on Grenada after the murders, André Tanker’s music, old cassette tapes of the calypsos of Indian

  Prince and Drupatee and Popo and Fluke, cassettes of Neville Jules with Trinidad All Stars and ones with Rudolph Charles, the general fr
om Desperadoes, and Clive Bradley the arranger of the same band, music cassettes from the extempore singer Big B and the calypsonians Lord Blakey and the Mighty Duke, the newspapers she had kept from 1947 with the story of

  the Boysie Singh trial, the Mano Benjamin trial, the Black Power papers from 1970, the papers on the trial

  of the Muslims who sought to overthrow the government in 1990, the Evening News articles of the poet Eric Roach. The picture of a black Jesus that she had bought from

  a Rastafarian peddler whose looks she liked. As they stood up there watching, one of the women who no doubt was trying to be helpful came up and asked if they wanted any of the things.

  “You can take anything before the garbage collector comes.”

  “Claude,” Dorlene asked. “Whose house is this?”

  Before he could speak, he heard the sound of a steelpan; when he looked in its direction, he saw Orville as a small boy, barebacked, standing near the pile of things. He had a steelpan on straps around his neck. He was holding the pan sticks but he wasn’t playing anything. It looked as if he too was left to be taken away.

  Then he heard a gunshot. Orville held his neck and began to fall, and Claude raced toward him, at the same time looking to see where the shot had come from. Another shot rang out, Claude found himself holding his chest, watching the blood spread and waiting to die.

  Awake now, Claude lay in the quiet of his bedroom and heard Arlene changing; then he remembered it was Jouvay morning, the first day of the Carnival. He put on his Jouvay clothes, old pants, old T-shirt, his sneakers still caked with mud from last Carnival, put a rag in his pocket to wipe his glasses, and he was ready. He had prepared everything since the night before, had placed the buckets of mud on the pushcart as well as the du-dup and the two pieces of iron as instruments for any casual musician to play for the band. The mud had settled to the bottom of the buckets, with the water on top. All he had to do was stir the mud to the required consistency so it would be easy to be daubed on. He headed out with Arlene to Adam Smith Square where the band assembled each year, in his heart the same awkward feeling of anxiety, wondering who of the people would be there. There were not many of us when he arrived. He plastered the band members with mud, but we didn’t set out right away. We milled around. Then we set out, the few of us that were there, not really dancing to the music of the du-dup and the iron, but ambling with a heroic resolve, Claude, still looking around for the people he expected, making little forays of enthusiasm that he expected to pass for dancing.