It was just two weeks after that Sunday morning that they brought him back, as if he were a shark he himself had caught, out in the darkness, putting an end to his fishing on the Sabbath, as he called Sundays, although he did not know what the difference meant.
“Swim-out! Swim-out!”
John’s voice, meanwhile, is ringing in my ears, but I am seeing the “moses” drifting in the trough of waves; then Galilee; then the darkness; then the blowing of the conch-shell horn that killed the smaller signals from the doves-of-the-woods; and then the bruised sand over which they are dragging my uncle’s body, bloated by water, bloated with more water than my teacher in elementary school had told me was the correct proportion for a human carcass; and then the darkness.
“Swim-out! Swim-out!”
I stood my ground. I saw the black tube do the same dance as the “moses” used to do. I saw it disappear. I saw it reappear. I saw it get small and smaller, smaller still, until it was the same size, the same black mark, as one of the ten needles of the cobbler in the pink skin of John’s heel. That was the last time I saw the tube. That was the last time I ever sat on the sand with John. That was the last time, before I left the island, with John following soon behind, when we did almost everything together or had it done to us: birth, baptism, christening, and confirmation; leaving elementary school for the Combermere School for Boys where they trained us boys and turned us into senior civil servants and junior civil servants too; times when we joined the choir of St. Michael’s Cathedral Church, after St. Matthias, where we learned to memorize Roman numerals before we could follow the announcement of Psalms at matins and at evensong, and then find them in the red leather-bound Psalter; times in Scouts, cadets, Harrison College, a first-rate school for boys also, and only, and for turning us into barristers-at-law, and doctors, and priests to replenish the Anglican church, and secondary school teachers at our old school and college; for early, forced marriedhood, if girl friends were made pregnant by an error of youth and passion; and for university. Canada for me, because my money was too short to stretch across the Atlantic Ocean on a boat and go to Oxford; and Amurca for John, because his ship-working uncle was now docked and hiding in Brooklyn, for ten years, among the waves of other daring, risk-taking men, and was safe between the waves of the Stars and Stripes …
I am walking in the snow now. The snow is deep. And my legs are heavy from pushing aside the tiring snow, which the plough that passes beside me is barely able to do; and I feel I am walking in frozen water. I have not remembered to take my shoes to the shoemaker to cover the hole in the middle of the left sole. So many things that I plan to do, late at night, and the night before, and put them down in diaries, and I forget them all, in this clenching and undying snow and cold, when morning comes. And I am slipping. I am moving one heavy foot no match for the cold leaking through my left sole; moving one foot at a time, at the same pace as the old blackened sail I used to see far out at sea, on that same beach where we sat, John and I, forty-fifty years ago, counting the steamers and the Canadian lady-boats and inter-island schooners which brought strangers and thieves, whose language was French and broken English, and “pahweemangoes” and bananas and nutmegs, weaving through the string of pearls and water surrounding us, to our shore. It is about eleven o’clock now, a time when there would be sun above my head; but here there is no sun overhead, and today, in December, almost noon, it feels as if it is night. Time in this city has made this walking sail old and worn and tattered, so that when the wind is cold and strong as it is today, holes in the sail you can put your fist through appear; and the wind can go through them, and delay the motion and the speed of arrival. But I am going nowhere in particular. I have no destination. I have no hour of an appointment; for the sail that gives me movement is patched with the words of an old song, in the voice of a woman. I can hear her voice now, whenever I walk these streets in winter … walking and seeing a light shining. When I walk there is no light. I can’t even remember the words … something about being released, being released any day. Any day now, I hope to be released from this snow. I walk and people are passing me by, and I say hello, as I have been taught to do, back in the island, but still I can see nobody waving back hello, for my eyes can only look at you … Lang … It is not an ordinary face that I look out for, as I walk these streets.
This snow I am walking in now is anticipated and wished for with fierce resolution every December, just before Christmas, when I wish and pray and plan and curse and vow that this Christmas will be the very last, when I dream it is going to be my last. And I have conversations of reproof with myself, for having remained amongst its whiteness for so long, so many winters, all these forty or fifty years; and still I find myself today, this afternoon in December 1996, walking in the same snow, on the same lonely street which remains clean for the short lifetime of its whiteness, a second after the snow hits the pavement.
I say to myself on the twenty-sixth of December every year, as I have been saying for forty-fifty years, “I am going back home, I am going back home, I am going back home,” recalling the three times written in a legal warning.
And then myself says to me, “You’re damn right! You should haul your arse outta this damn country. What has this goddamn country given you? With all the richness and racism building up, year by year?”
And I argue back with myself, “I have a house. Don’t have to rent from no blasted landlord. I have no children. Never had a wife: but a good woman, one short time, filled with flowers and summer; and she died too soon, and she ain’t here, no more! Made a living. Making a living …”
And myself would argue back, “On that Rock where you born, boy! On that Rock, you can walk down the road, any road, without anybody looking at you the wrong way, and smile and say hello, and hear the greeting coming back, ’cause home is home.”
And I would have the final word in this interminable two-timing monologue, forty-fifty years long. “Who do I know still, back home? They’re all dead. Or gone-away. Living in Britain; one in Germany as I read in a foreign newspaper; a few in Italy; thousands in Amurca; and tens of thousands unknown to the Immigration authorities, also living in Brooklyn. I do not see them; I see their cousins every year here, in the last week in July and the first week in August; here in Toronto, with their strange, loud, over-sized clothes and thin shins; and gold round their necks, their wrists, their ankles, forgetting the first enchainment in ships; and now they come with gold on all ten fingers sometimes, beating the authorities and the rate of exchange, and in enough quantity and shininess to fill many tombs in Egypt that used to be inhabited by Pharaohs, but not all of the same quality.
Each December, the snow becomes thicker and my resolution thinner, and more difficult to walk on; and it seems to stick to my body like old white paint, except that it has more weight than paint; and I move just like Galilee, that overladen fishing boat we used to watch far out in the waves which made it behave as if it was sliding between hills and valleys. John and I spent hours and hours on the warm sand of that beach the colour of the old conch-shell, looking out at those waves, wondering where they went to after they were born at our feet, after they left us, and left our eyesight; wondering how many ships, steamers, Canadian lady-boats, inter-island schooners, and brave fishing boats had passed over those same waves; wondering which wave would bear a woman in its hold that we would truly love, and which ship would carry us from our governors and pageantry and fun and parades and colonialism.
“We’s colonials,” John said. “And as colonials, we have to leave this place.”
“And go where? Where to?” I asked.
“Anywhere.”
“We are not really colonials, are we? This is our home. We born here. And after Cawmere School, and Harsun College, we’d be fixed. For life.”
“The meaning of a’ island,” John said, “is that you have to swim-out from it, seeing as how it is surrounded by water. And anything surrounded by water is a place you really don’t know the size of, like you hav
e to swim-way far from it, and then you would know the measurements of the place. That is the meaning of borning in a’ island. There is a book in the Public Library that I was reading; and what I just tell you I was reading is in that book.”
“What it name?” I asked John, who was always reading in “reading-races” with me, with books we borrowed every Saturday morning from the Library in Town. “What is the name of that book?”
“Man, I read it in a book, man,” he said, “and if I read it in a book, it is true. So I don’t have to tell you nothing more! The only important thing for you to know is that it is printed in a book. Books don’t lie.”
“But you really thinking of not living in this place?”
“The minute I finish school, out-goes-me! I gone!”
“To where?”
“Brooklyn, New York, with my uncle. Europe. Any place. But I know I will not be living in this place.”
“Me, too,” I said. And it scared me because I did not know where I could go; and it scared John that I was thinking along the same lines.
Of course, we did not live through those times knowing it was anything like colonialism. We watched the Governor drive through our neighbourhoods, in his black, polished Humber Hawk, on his way to parades; and going to friends to drink rum and soda, and gamble with cards; and when his car stopped within touching distance, we stared at its glamour, and saw our faces in the sparkling bonnet. And once we caught him at a hotel, the Colony Club, where men who governed the island, although they were not governors, but only played polo, and drank whisky and soda, and lived in large houses, met to drink after a game; and we saw our faces again, and our grinning teeth in the bonnet of the glimmering Humber Hawk, while the chauffeur, a man elevated from our village, and dressed like an officer in evening uniform of black, deep black, stood beside the car, rubbing it down with a yellow chamois cloth, as if he was rubbing down a woman’s thighs, as if he had not rubbed it down for hours, one hour before he left the Governor’s House, making it shine, from any distance, like a dog’s stones on a dark night.
“You two sons o’ bitches, no more further! You hear me? Do not touch the kiss-me-arse white man’s motocar! You hear me?”
John and I did not really live under the yoke of colonialism, as we had read in our library books that Africans did still. We said we were colonials because we were joking; because it was just our young fury and our imitating the words of older men and the book-learning we were getting at Combermere School for Boys that made us see ourselves as colonials, sitting on that sand on that beach, staring at waves that washed assertive and sullen strangers ashore, as if they were born like us, in the island, as if they were born here, to rule over us, here. We knew only what it could mean to be sitting on the sand all day, every day; and dreaming; and pretending we were the brother of that little boy who, in the poem we had to learn by heart, stood in his shoes and wondered, he stood in his shoes and he wondered; and we wondered why. We did not remember the name of the book or the poem in which we had read about this little boy and liked him. We did not wear shoes while we wondered whether the wave that licked our feet and our pink heels, the wave that brought the fateful cobbler into John’s pink heel, that washed my uncle in, dead and swollen, was the same wave born in another country, and that had travelled alongside the steamer and the Canadian lady-boats and deposited the little blackened piece of wood, or stick, or flotsam and jetsam, at our feet. Or whether it was the same wave as those thousands which washed the ships of groaning Africans sardined in holds on our beaches where the tourist hotels are built. In my elementary school, Mr. Thorpe, our teacher, stood one afternoon before our class, First Standard, with sweat of his honest underpaid labour pouring off his face, as the tears poured from our eyes, as he poured “comma-sense” into our heads and ears and backs and backsides, because we had not remembered that a little piece of blackened stick, or wood, was properly known as “flotsam.” He screamed as he poured the knowledge into our small minds and bodies.
“Flotsam! The proper word is flotsam! What is the proper word? Say it again! Flot-sam! Flot-sam!” And each stress of pronunciation was riveted home with the heavy hand of pronouncement from the pronunciating tamarind rod. The rod of tearful justice. And from that soaked afternoon, I associated the two words to have the same meaning: pronunciation and pronouncement But we were acquainted with another kind of “flotsam,” since one or two of us, not John and I, were sometimes called “the flotsam of our society.” It was the English vicar, one morning at matins, from the pulpit made of lignum vitae by the hands of the village’s cabinet-makers, who polished wood to make it look like brass, it was the Vicar who used the word which almost slipped by us, as it was spoken in his accent which we could hardly understand, but which we killed ourselves afterwards imitating. “Flott-sum!” And after that sermon, we too called those other little boys by this name. But we thought of ourselves as that other little boy in the poem about boys wearing shoes, standing and wondering.
It is about, it is, I think, a little after eleven o’clock on this cold day in December; and I am walking north along Yonge Street, just up from a place which used to be a commercial bank and which now looks like an abandoned church; and bag men and homeless women have made it their drinking place where they sleep on sheets of thin cardboard, making it look like an institution for justice and a prison in Latin America; and up from this camping ground are the stores open today by Indian immigrants from Sri Lanka and Pakistan and Trinidad, and closed tomorrow by the Housing Authorities sent by the police, for reasons the Sri Lankans cannot interpret; up from the southernmost end of the Eaton Centre, across the street; up from Massey Hall off that short street, walking in a kind of white valley, for the thickness of the snow has hidden all these buildings from easy sight, and I can only know they are there from memory. And the snow has hidden all colour and life from the street, and the Christmas colours of green and red, silver and gold, from store windows; and I am alone, and I can see nobody, and nobody can see me. There are only shapes; the shapes of people I hear ahead of me. I raise my head against the flakes that enter my eyes, almost blinding me, and those that fall into my ears, tickling me; and I try to laugh at this short tickle, to see the fun in it; but there is no sky, and no sun, and no warm sand, only a channel of white. I am walking through a valley with no landmarks on my left side, or my right, to give me bearing and remind me of the notice of movement, although I know I am travelling forward, north, since I have set out from the bottom of the street, by the Lake.
It is only in the past five years, after my forty-fifty years of complaining about winter, and my threats to myself about going back home, that I find myself walking beside the Lake, wondering what would happen. The Lake is a lake. It is not the sea. There are seagulls but no scratching crabs; and the boats are larger and from larger countries; and no sand on the shore, there is no beach; and no waves; but it is the closest thing I can come to, in the absence of sand of any colour, like the conch-shell on that beach. The Lake is a place I can sit beside and dream of waves and the origin of waves and where waves can take you. I stand leaning on the metal rail guarding the Lake, preventing my jump, in this tormenting time of indecision: home or here; sun or snow; and I have thought, many times, that at this age, and with the leisure that age brings and that hangs languorously on my hands, of attempting precisely that. Jumping into the Lake. “Jump in the goddamn Lake, you bugger!” a man told me, forty years ago. I was working in the summer in a Flo-Glaze factory as a part-time worker, a working man, when I was a student at Trinity College; and I had put the wrong measurement of percentages and paints and concentrated tints in the order I was given to fill. “Go jump in the fucking Lake!” This was the advice a woman gave when I could not fill the order of her love, when she said she knew that she loved me, after I had asked her to marry me. I was a student out of work, then. Jumping into the Lake. I have tried it often in my mind, but the metal rail prevents me.
On that afternoon back in the island,
with sun and light and sky blue as the desire for Chermadene, a young schoolgirl who John and I, as in many things, liked with the same passion, we did not talk about lakes. But we talked about Chermadene. John and I fell in love with this girl with the plaited hair. And she always wore two dangling blue pieces of ribbon in her hair. On that warm afternoon, on the beach, when the needles of the cobbler were in John’s heel, we still talked and argued about her. And our words of little competition had prevented us from seeing the inner tube float out into the deeper water; and we could not retrieve it, this black, patched tube that we had got from a tire off the Humber Hawk. The tire was no longer roaring and screeching along the narrow crowded streets of our neighbourhood. Once, before we got it, it was killing not only two chickens that laid one egg a day, but one man who was out of work, and who moved too slowly out of the road. On that afternoon, I wished the tire would develop a leak and sink with me on it, and end the pain of Chermadene’s divided love. But when on that afternoon on the beach we looked up to see the tube, a million times larger than the Lifesavers which the tourisses brought into the island and which we sucked in slow delight, I was rendered then as unmovable as the Humber Hawk has become. For it was now placed on four large coral stone blocks, to be scavenged by the apprenticed mechanics in the village. On that afternoon, I could not retrieve the life-saving tube, as I could not make it sink, and would be drowned. Because I could not swim.
And I know now, though at that time on the beach I was too young to possess this heavy knowledge about suicide, that only those who swim can attempt to jump into a lake, to put an end to their lives and to their loves. Money. Love. The lack of money. The loss of love. Those of us who cannot swim are too particular about drowning to test the consolation of the water.
Money and love flow past us, like the waves on that beach with that inner tube that drowned at sea; or was lost. And no man came to put the voiceless conch-shell to his lips.
The Origin of Waves Page 2
