“Au contraire!” I say, imitating him.
My mind wanders very often these days. But it wandered often when I was in elementary school, and at Combermere School for Boys, and later at Harrison College; and it wandered every day of the four years I spent at Trinity College here in Toronto. It has been wandering ever since, and with its wandering I fall off into a small sleep, a doze. At regular intervals during this lingering afternoon with John, I have been dozing off and on, but not allowing John to feel that his tales of existence and experience in Brooklyn and Durham, North Carolina, are not gripping my attention. Dozing off is my habit. While reading. While drinking. While eating. And once, when I was a much younger man, a woman accused me to my face of dozing off while making love when she was on the brink of an orgasm. I left her with no satisfaction. I do not remember her name. If decorum and propriety had not buckled me down and kept my tongue in silence, I would have told her that it was merely my peaceful appreciation of her love, and my passive disposition under the writhing, demanding up-and-downs, the pistons of my creaking mechanism, that caused me to express my savouring her passion in that desultory manner – by dozing – and that I had a need to recover from the exhaustion by taking a quick nap, taking that nose-dive of a doze. I make fun in these words of that accusation laid at my doorstep, years ago; but this is merely an attempt at erasure. The accusation has corroded the virility I hinted at earlier in my narrative to John, and I live from day to day with its bruising condemnation.
John is talking while I am wandering in the thoughts of my personal history, while his voice comes at me, like the soft sprinkle of cold water from melting ice, falling into my neck, rousing me to the uncomfortableness of staying awake long enough to catch the thread of his story. “… Paris was cold and I spoke no French and she won’t learn Barbadian or English,” I hear him saying; and I shake my head to drive the sleep from it, and to try to put his words in some focus and context. “We went home to Barbados twice on holiday, though. She spend her time at the Alliance Française, and I spend my time in the rum-shop around the corner from the beach where me and you used to sit and look at the sea. She never tried to learn to speak my language …”
The bar becomes like the night back home in the island, in the thick darkness, sitting in the front-house with the flickering wick of the kerosene lamp which seems to get brighter with the sweet, lulling voice of Ella Fitzgerald; and the light from the fake Tiffany lamps fades and we are swallowed in almost total, crêpe-like darkness, with only our eyes flashing. The entire bar is dark now, and soft, and cradled with the voice coming through the speaker of the Rediffusion box. And, in the darkness, a voice drones and I am carried away on another wave with its memory. “Ten thrildren!” he is saying now. “Ten thrildren from three different wives and a spouse, as they call it nowadays. Imagine, imagine one man having ten thrildren from three different wives and the woman he is living with now. From the parlez-vous woman, two of the loveliest thrildren you can imagine. Forty and thirty-nine is their ages, which makes me a goddamn old man, if yuh look at it that way. Monique and Faye, forty and thirty-nine, two of the prettiest thrildren you can imagine, two thrildren that I raised by myself when they were thrildren, even attended the classes in having babies and in breathing properly during childbirth, and in giving birth to babies, conducted in French, s’il vous plaît! Here I am, in this clinic, this clinique in Paris, surrounded by bare women, all women surrounding me, and the instructor is talking in French, and I am sitting-down rubbing my wife’s belly. And you know something? Every time I lay my two hands on the woman’s belly, I am getting an erection! I didn’t give a damn about those horny French-men attending the classes, but it was the women I was embarrassed over, in case they saw the stiffness in my pants. And I did this for about three months, waiting for the child to born, and two times a week I am sitting-down on the cold floor in this clinique listening to all this French and not understanding one fucking word except the French for belly,’ cause my mind was on sex. We had sex right up to the day the child was borned. They say it is good for the mother, but what is good for the mother is more better for the gander. After that, it was Italy and the Eye-talians. Spent a little time in Rome-Italy, and had three just-as-pretty bambinos, Roberto, Ricardo, and Umberto, thirty-three, thirty-two, and thirty-one; and me behaving as if I am a fucking child-making machine! A sociologist, a psychiatrist, and a’ anthropologist, those three are. I don’t know where they get their brains from. Perhaps from me. Perhaps more from their Eye-talian mother. In that order, a sociologist, a psychiatrist, and a’ anthropologist, all-three professors at the same place, the University of Rome, the university that Mussolini build. So, I been making geniuses. That is my contribution to mankind. Then, I get fed-up with Rome and Italy and Eye-talians, including the women. In the ten years that I live in Rome-Italy, drinking Scotch and eating spaghetti, I picked up very little Eye-talian, and my wife was fluent in English and French. I could never understand why in all those countries, I had to learn their goddamn language, as if their language was something, something special, and my language was shit. All the time, none of my thrildren made a’ effort to learn Barbadian or to know anything Barbadian, Barbadian customs and culture, or Barbadian food. Ain’t that a bitch? It was as if I was living only half my life, operating on one engine or cylinder, trying to talk to everybody in a foreign language, and not one fucker wanting to learn my language! So I split. Not that the language-thing was the only cause for me splitting, but it must have been connected. Then, it was the South, after Brooklyn. The South. The deep South. The South is the best place for an hombre like me to live in; and I get a job in a firm, in a corporation of social workers and therapisses …”
I begin to pay attention; and I think I remember that he had said earlier that he was in another profession, but I am not sure. “On the train up north, to get to Sick Thrildren’s Hospital, up here from New York, where I left my car, after driving up from Durm-North Carolina, all I could see was snow and more snow, like if I was really in a plane flying through clouds. Snow and snow, and the occasional lake or river, frozen-up anyhow, and almost the same colour as the snow … we pulled out from, from Penn Station and then hit Yonkers … and after Hudson we came into Albany-Rensselaer, where a lot o’ people got off, and it made me think of trains and carriages in Germany during the war, and trains taking people to concentration camps … probably because of what was on my mind, regarding the hospital, and for being here …” I do not know why he is here. I plan to ask him, and then I forget. His words wash away my deep curiosity to know, in this flood of words. I have to know why he is here. “… It was Schenectady that put me right back home, that remind me of back home, ’cause I could swear that I remember how every Sunday morning we used to listen to a preacher preaching outta Schenectady on the radio. Don’t you remember Schenectady? Was it Quito or Schenectady? Schenectady that was mention in the radio church services broadcast from the States?” I am listening to him now, and listening to the smooth voice coming through the speaker of the shortwave wireless, when we had moved up in the world from the rented Rediffusion box, and were now huddled around a “private set” as we called the shortwave wireless, made in Holland. The private set was attached to a very long piece of wire almost as long as the clothesline in the backyard, but this line of wire, the aerial, was strung inside the front room of the house, bringing the full blast of power in the word of God, his anger with black people who tuned in Sunday after Sunday, sinners in fear of hell, in longer sermons that shook the heart more deeply than the ones preached by the Vicar of the Anglican church. “Schenectady, New York!”
“Greater power in words,” I say.
“Greater sins to report.”
“Sweeter voices, always sweeter voices! Southern voices preaching the gospel to black people!”
“My God! Imagine! Is only now that I realize and can see that we was listening to Southern voices telling us about hell and brimstone and repentance! Is only now that I unde
rstand our attraction to those voices, that I realize what is the association with those Southern voices of the nineteen-thirties and nineteen-forties.”
“There were white voices, looking back now.”
“There were sweeter voices preaching beyond the seas, than the voice of the Vicar.”
“White cracker voices …”
“… that brought the gospel to Barbados and the Caribbean!”
“Sweet preaching Sunday voices, coming like a long river of molasses capsized over the private set, pouring out Sunday after Sunday.”
“Schenectady, New York!” I say.
“And after Schenectady was Amsterdam, goddamn! That’s a place I never visited while I was in Europe, and I wonder why. Utica, Rome, Syracuse, making me feel I was travelling through Italy again; or going back in ancient times, before I was there. But I beginned telling you about my wives,” he says. “And the South being the best place for a’ hombre like me to live, where a man can make real money, and still remain lonely as hell in the South. That is the South for you. I work for a corporation of social workers, sort o’ activisses-like who call themselves therapisses, therapists; and I been working with this firm for years without a licence. A bunch o’ therapists, sociologists, and psychiatrists. I even tried my hand at some psychiatriss-work, and seeing as how the firm is so well-known and so well-regarded, my licence problem was absolved by the name of the institution I work for, and I did not have to prove that I was licensed, and did not have a licence. Nobody gives a goddamn if you have a licence, or if you don’t have a goddamn licence, or so I feel. Nobody cares. But my work was supervised by one of the real psychiatriss who have a licence. And I wasn’t engaged in telling anybody, in particular a woman, that she needed a special kind o’ medication, and I didn’t put anybody on pills. Just talk. Psychiatriss-talk. Apart from liking the work I do in Durm-North Carolina, there is things about the place that I like, like pecans and Virginia hams and real Southern-fried chicken, none o’ this Kentucky Fried shit! And the smell of the place! The smell of the place, the smell of patchouli all over the place, on the clothes of the women, on their underwears, on their bodies, what a smell, patchouli! And the sight of the magnolia trees, those goddamn magnolia trees! Sometimes, they make me rage with anger, like the type o’ black rage that you read about in Ebony magazine. Magnolia trees! And you know, one night I was relaxing with my woman, and we had-just-take a bath together, with patchouli bubbles in the water, and was drinking some white wine, and she put on this record … that was when I was still in love with magnolia trees. Well, she put on this record, and I hear the words, and something come into my body, my whole body, in my heart, I could feel it like a spasm, hearing Billie Holiday for the first time, singing about the magnolia trees. And after hearing Billie Holiday sing about the magnolia trees, my tom-pigeon refuse to get hard. Brother, I could not get hard. And I was goddamn scared I never would get a hard-on again. We listened to Aretha Franklin after Billie Holiday. And I start to feel a little more better, and more peckish. And my tom-pigeon start to rise again. But those goddamn beautiful magnolia trees that overhang the street and make it look like duss before it is even six o’clock in the evening. The magnolia trees, you never see them, ’cause after listening to a song like the one Billie Holiday sing, you can’t really look up at them and see them as a normal tree, for with the words in the song, you cannot ever see their beauty again. Except you’re white. Black bodies hanging from a branch of a tree …”
“What made you say that?” I ask.
“It’s from the song,” John says.
“Billie Holiday is a black singer?” I ask.
“And my woman didn’t goddamn tell me!”
“Billie, Billie Holiday … Lady Day.”
“And the food. The amount o’ food that Southerners can eat, the men and the women, especially the women. In my books they are the best goddamn women in the whirl! I like my women big, and heavy and solid and sturdy. So gimme a sturdy woman any day – or night, for that matter – in preference to some thin-ass, twiggy-type o’ broad walking-’bout on gangways as fashion-models swinging their ass from side to side and not doing nothing for me, Jack! This woman does nothing for me. A big woman is like a tonic, like a man’s blessing, especially when she puts her weight fair-and-square on you. Goddamn!” And he raises his voice, and slaps his thick palms. And people in the bar look at us. “Goddamn! All that weight! That lovely weight! And I am a small man by comparison, as you can see. Young age in a woman? Young women? You can keep that! But gimme the weight, any day, baby! Avoirdupois. It must be the pork chops and fry-chicken. Don’t you like big women, like those big Amurcan mommas? They remind me of Barbados; though, as I say, I don’t go back to Barbados too often, nor to the Wessindies, barring the two times I take the parlez-vous lady there, when she spend all her time at the Alliance Française polishing-up her French instead o’ talking in my language, or coming with me in the rum-shop and learn how to drink a rum. And it really burned my ass ’cause it was after we had-arrive too late, after my Old Lady died, when I got the message concerning her death too late to get there and lift her head. But I tell you something this evening right here in Toronto. The very next goddamn time I go back there, or you hear that I gone back there, to Barbados or the Wessindies, it is in a goddamn mahogany box with silver strappings and a silver breastplate on that box bearing my name and date-o’-birth. Rest-in-fucking-peace! Adios! Adieu! But getting back to the women of the South; the women of the South, they remind me of a calypso by Lord Kitchener, “Sugar-Bum-Bum.” Too-sweet! All the way up North on that Amtrak train, after I turn-off the overhead light that I was reading the latest copy of Ebony magazine with, and I close my two eyes, and right through my mind pass this woman, this big, lovely Southern momma, when she walks in the house, the floorboards rumble and does-creak; and when she lays-down on me, goddamn! The sweetness of her weight! The sweetness I see in that woman! How-come you don’t say much about women? You’re talking to me, ya know?”
I find it easy to picture him deep in the South, in Durham, North Carolina, or in Atlanta, Georgia, or in Austin, Texas; and I am able to do this because in all this time we have been drinking, and he is talking about France and Italy and Germany, the pictures of his narrative are drawn with a heavier touch of the language from the South than from those countries in Europe. And I think that, perhaps, he never lived in them. For the language he has retained from those countries is not a real language, not a true language, but merely his retention of words, tastes. And when he is talking about back home in the island, he speaks in an honest, native, broad and flat Barbadian accent, much like the old Barbadian lady who gave him the smelling salts in Paris at Gloria’s funeral. But out of all these voices that he hides his emotions in, tracing the French, the Italian, and the German, like a spider’s web, there is no more powerful web of enchantment that captures that afternoon on the beach at Paynes Bay. His own language makes clear those chapters in the past that he is laying before me, on this shiny, round, black table. I am beginning to wonder how much of his talk he expects me to believe, how much he expects me to trust, out of all his stories which have me laughing and sad. But I know he expects me to trust all of them. We both know that time erodes truth and memory; doubting and accepting. But I am also intrigued by his life; and once I laughed so loudly at what he was telling me that I forgot we are still sitting in this bar, now crowded, and that we are not alone on that deserted beach. Some women fresh from work look, on these occasions, in our direction, stare, do something with their eyes and the shape of words on their red lips, and I think I hear the word “Amerricans!” from their lips, the word standing for something else unmentionable, and spoken with a flat venom of distaste about the noise we two old black men are making in the quiet, dimly lit bar with the fake Tiffany lamps. I can feel their distaste because I am more acquainted with it, their disapproval of our loudness. We are the only ones who speak and laugh that others can hear. Around us is the whispering of church
and concert congregation. At times like this, after all these years, it is the quietness of this city that makes me feel different, that makes me shiver with that difference – and still I must walk these lonely streets, as I watch all these people passing me, without one word, without one smile. And all I see as I watch them is a grimace, if I watch too closely or try to smile a greeting. But I might be imagining … this quiet unspokenness bordering upon boredom and psychotic silence, and the cleanliness of the city.
The barman walks smiling from behind the safety of the bar, which he polishes with a cloth that is turning less white from the cleaning with each span of dabbing and wiping up of water on the counter and the wiping up of spilt drinks, and is now standing beside John and me. He is changing the ashtray yet another time, although it has not been used, in a gesture of service and dedication. He has the small round tray in his left hand, flat to his chest, and his right hand is deep into his right trousers pocket, jingling the change of his tips.
“Now, this is what I want you to do for me this time,” John is telling the barman, who listens as he runs the cloth across the silk of the water on our table. John’s speech takes on a friendly slur. He is now drunk. The barman mistakes this for merriment. It is the season. “Now,” John says, and stops, as if this is the end of what he intends to say. Words are coming with greater difficulty, slothful and slow. “Now. If you don’t mind me saying so. If you don’t mind me saying so. And I don’t. Wish. And I don’t wish. To tell you how to do your job. To tell you how to do your job. ’Cause I been a waiter, a barman, myself. In some of the best bars in the Big Apple. You know the Big Apple! And I’ll be goddamned. Be goddamn mad. If some son of a bitch from off the street comes into my bar. And tells me how to do my job. If you see what I’m saying.” The words are coming easier now. “But this time, this time, I want to axe you to do me a little favour. A little favour is all I axe, if you see what I’m saying. This time, when you make the next two double martinis, pass the vermouth bottle, unopen, over the glass, and measure-off two drops, two drops of Chivas in each martini glass, and then pour-off the ice and the Chivas, and fill-er-up, Joe! Fill-er-up! Filler-up! I’m here talking to my ace-boon, this son of a bitch who I haven’t rested my two goddamn eyes on in forty, no, fifty years! Half a-goddamn-century! Not since me and him were small. Me and him born in Barbados, went-school at the same schools, done the same things, got-into the same goddamn trouble, was unseparated like two twins; he was flogged by my mother, him and I; and I got my backside tarred by his mother, me and him, if you see where I’m coming from. So, this son of a bitch comes here, to reside; and I find myself travelling the whirl! We just met. Right here. On the street out there. Me and him. On Yonge Street. A minute ago. I’m ploughing through your goddamn snow, like a snow-removal, and into this goddamn son of a bitch, my ace-boon, I bounced. He. Him. Look at him! Rambling in the white-people thoroughfare, and nearly knocked me flat on my ass in all that snow outside. So, where you from, y’all? Where you from?”
The Origin of Waves Page 13
