In the Beggarly Style of Imitation

by Jean Marc Ah-Sen

  I found myself at the Ballroom again for a work function a few months later. It was Lotte’s bachelorette party, one of the other girls in my boss’ typing pool. The recognition of knowing that we were in the exact same place where Roddy had received his comeuppance wasn’t worth it, as I had come to enjoy myself. I barely got inside and ordered a drink when a man strode purposefully toward me and grabbed my arm so abruptly that he cracked a bone. He dragged me along with him like he was being pursued by dogs of war. I was about to cry foul when I caught the profile of his face and recognized him for the bartender Roddy had manhandled. I expected he was going to have choice words. I was prepared to take it in stride, but then was seized by a panicked notion that Roddy had caused a more sensational scene than I originally gave him credit for. We stopped in a dining alcove by a framed Konůpek print that helped steady my wandering eye as the barkeep began to twaddle away. I wasn’t listening when he put money into a payphone, pulled out a card from his wallet and dialled a number. He handed me the receiver and blocked my way with his arm. I stared at his heaving chest as the dial tone gave way to a voice that spoke too closely to the mouthpiece.

  An hour later I was picked up by 13 Division. They wanted to know anything I could tell them about Roddy. I was there to fill in the blanks, so I had them return the favour. Someone in the bar had seen Roddy plonking down cash hand over fist, first for my drinks, then for Mr. Nervig (the barkeep)—double shots of Seagram’s—and five other patrons. Roddy seemed unperturbed by the expenditure. On his way out, he had been followed and felled a few blocks west of the bar near Oakwood Ave. He was knocked unconscious with a brick. The officers wanted to know what I could tell them and if I thought there was a pre-existing relationship with his attacker or with Nervig.

  “Double neg-a-tive,” I said.

  I am not an unfeeling person, you have to understand; I would have been moved by far less cruelty. Through some first-rate sleuthing (the investigating officer told me), I was able to find the hospital Roddy was checked into, and was met with disapproval by the hospital staff. One nurse upbraided me with having taken so long to visit Roddy. It turned out I was Roddy’s first visitor since the accident. Pathetic could not begin to describe the affair, even if most of Roddy’s family, excepting his mother, weren’t even on the continent. Roddy remained in a coma for several weeks after my visit, and awoke to permanent damage to his left eye, some clotting in the brain and neurological difficulties (the effects of which would not reveal themselves until more time passed). I was told I should be incredibly patient with Roddy and expect a long, unpredictable way ahead. They assumed I was his legal guardian and I didn’t argue the point.

  Fate intervening like this often chastens one’s attitude, but this wasn’t the case with me. I felt no compulsion to feel guilt over lightening the money in Roddy’s pocket. I wasn’t going to accept ownership of that. Religion hadn’t been in my life long enough to knock that much sense out of me. All the same, I took Roddy into my home because as far as I could tell, he had nowhere else to go. He said he couldn’t let his mother see him in this state. Nor did he have any of the same friends as when I knew him (shocking). They either tired of his grandstanding or were excommunicated as quislings from his inner circle. The housing arrangement was supposed to be for only a few days, or until he got back on his feet, whichever came sooner.

  What happened when we went to his home address was that his landlady said she’d deposited all his things on the curb weeks ago and had leased the apartment to another tenant on account of Roddy being out of contact and not paying his rent. She assumed he had abandoned the unit. I told her the unvarnished truth and she said she regretted what had happened, but there was nothing she could do; in the eyes of the law, she was in the right. She advised that if we didn’t want all our dirty immigration secrets coming out, we’d do well enough to stay away. I was unsurprised by the nature of the insinuation: I’d looked for apartments before. It was an easy thing to steal her welcoming mat and throw it into some bushes a block away. So while I wasn’t overwrought with emotion about my hand in Roddy’s injury, I was not prepared to have his imminent homelessness on my conscience just yet, even if I suspected a few nights living with me gave Roddy no end of satisfaction. This surely tipped the score back in his favour. Everything happened so quickly, I couldn’t find the time to think of an excuse.

  During this residency at my Pelham Park apartment, Roddy and I became close for the first time. We talked without reservation about our families (he could not stop asking questions about my father, the Derwish), our long-term plans (whether we would be staying or going back to Antananarivo/Pereybere), the sort of childhoods we’d had, and in turn, what sort of child we would have theoretically raised had things shook out differently. I found that we shared several things in common and this made having him in my house easier to bear (the nine months we spent together previously weren’t spent talking). I helped Roddy with his disability applications, but they were all rejected saying he was able-bodied. I made sure we kept all his medical appointments in a logbook, and I prepared all his meals for him. The downside to this living arrangement was that it helped me understand the maximalist type of politics Roddy espoused.

  Like a lot of immigrants, he had not been treated well. Lump of labour, slurs, beatings, he’d seen it all. He believed all the whites had an axe to grind against us, that there was something in their blood that made them want to bring the whole world to heel. It wasn’t that I hadn’t experienced the same thing, but I also knew that you couldn’t throw people together like that, that you had to be very careful how you phrased certain things if you wanted to be taken seriously or not fall into the trap of the crimes of the accused. Anything that explained too much in the way of analysis probably wasn’t worth the paper it was written on anyway. Roddy’s handle on how racialization occurred was inconsistent and gestational, constantly resetting and coming-into-being. This made for poor listening. I preferred to let people put their feet in their mouths before I judged them too harshly. Then again, it wasn’t as if I was prepared to let anyone wear the mark of Cain for an eternity. Just because one person was a prat didn’t damn his whole tribe to foolishness.

  I would say something I thought was fairly innocuous by way of counterpoint—say that where we came from didn’t make what we had to say more valuable, what others had to say less so, at least not as a hard-and-fast rule, unless we wanted to get nowhere fast. This kind of provocation would make him erupt like a man possessed with the spirit of the devil himself. He would storm and rage and heap his accusations together in the crucible of his trauma-nudged brain and then send them half-formed into the world. “You know what you are, Cheree, you—you think you’re a tall poppy and that if you have enough grit with your oats, you’ll make something of yourself. And you might, but you’ll always be the song, not the singer.”

  I only had to contradict him to be shut out completely. I came to believe his nominal values had nothing to do with the kind of person he was. His temperament was one that thrived on conflict and forced him to see what he was made of. I had never met someone so insecure about who they were, someone who needed such constant validation for his understanding of personhood while simultaneously inflicting violence to that conception.

  On the subject of sleeping with white women: “They’re just looking for some slum gully to pick out their teeth later. Lord help me if we don’t all go hungry once they develop a liking for the taste.”

  On the subject of white plenitude: “The whites have never had their status positioned as relational, fungible with lesser others. Potato famine, Holodomor, these are what I call minor oblations to God. Look how these so-called afflicted peoples come back to wreak vengeance on the coloured world. They can’t even die like regular people.”

  On the subject of white liberalism: “I’m not here so you can take a hazard-free picture with me to shave a few points off your white-guilt card. Enlightenment isn’t a fucking beauty pageant among yourselve
s. It’s a cudgel I wield to bludgeon your face with!”

  On the subject of white essentialism: “White consciousness is what I call a ravenous monism. If you are not careful, it will devour you and before you know it, you will be picking wild mushrooms and citing the Bavarian Purity Law at supper time.”

  The hostilities grew between us until I could no longer tolerate being called on the carpet in my own home. He wasn’t just a bad guest, he was impeding my ability to have company (he would pick a fight with everyone that came over). I knew things could not stand as they were for much longer. Enduring the feeling that I was beneath his contempt because we did not observe the same political pieties was out of the question. I felt like I was reliving our relationship again.

  Then one day a woman claiming to be Roddy’s mother showed up at my door. Roddy left without so much as a belated “thank you” for putting him up and feeding him for three months. Strangely, I began to miss his presence. I had never had anyone waiting for me in the apartment after I returned from work and Roddy was the first man I ever laid with. I quickly overcame this outpouring of sentimentalism, though. I got on with my life and privately swore I would not see another Malagasy man again socially, cursing Roddy for colouring my mind with his attitudes, a thing I vowed would never happen.

  The next time Roddy came crashing through my life—yes, he did come back—was a little under a year later. He was waiting on my stoop as I returned from buying groceries, and asked if I could put him up again for a few nights since his latest housing situation had fallen through. I was circumspect about letting him into my home again, so asked instead how his health was doing.

  “I don’t trust doctors to go nosing around where they shouldn’t be, and then charge me medicine money for the pleasure. What a hup-ho world we live in.”

  He appealed to my growing insecurities and sense of worthlessness living in a city that seemed to compound my difficulties as a single woman advancing beyond her “prime” (that, and it seemed like he was in desperate need of a bath). I was starting to exhibit some of the world-weariness he had displayed a year before. Perhaps on account of this symmetry and my growing loneliness, I agreed to his staying on the condition he leave after a week.

  I found Borgloon to be very withdrawn this time around, even totally expressionless. I began to ask myself if something drastic had occurred to him. This could have been made more prominent because of the contrast in his personality and behaviour. We did not discuss where he was living before, as I was mostly occupied with work (I left the typing pool and was now employed at a busy government office). This time he provided for himself in the way of food and drink. I threw out the newspapers in the house so that nothing could incite a diatribe, and made sure never to be inside when the nightly news came on. These precautions proved unnecessary, however—Roddy was a model guest. We did not discuss politics at all. I assumed he finally learned some manners and decided not to provoke his host needlessly. He helped with the washing up and was quiet when I retired to bed while he stayed awake drinking tisane, watching Al Waxman on King of Kensington, or Front Page Challenge.

  On what was to be the agreed-upon final night of his stay, he warily came into my bedroom. He waited at the door and asked if he could come in.

  “What’s the matter?” I demanded.

  He made no reply and sat at the foot of the bed. He began massaging my feet. I found the gesture disarming and pleasurable at the same time. I was moved by how companionable he was being. We ended up almost going to bed together, but at the last minute something came over me, maybe a remembrance of our earlier indiscretion. I pushed his hands away gently and declined his advances. He stopped, then continued to caress my belly while he lay beside me. We fell asleep together in the bed for what seemed the briefest of moments, and then sexual contact resumed, though in an abbreviated, less stimulating fashion that made it impossible for a second offence. As he finished on my stomach, he mumbled into my ear, “You are my bitch of infinite resignation?”

  The following morning, Roddy left the apartment to do God knows what. All that was missing from the apartment were a few loaves of bread and some cold cuts from the fridge. Between this and the final time Roddy came to visit me, I thought of him often and more fondly than I had been accustomed. I was scared that I was going to die alone and unloved in a country that passed me over for being unversed in its ways, undesirable in its conceptions of beauty. I had laboured contract after contract in different offices doing secretarial work, and it seemed as if I would never be on the same playing field as the whites. It’s not that I began to wonder if there was a ring of truth to some of Roddy’s ideas, it’s that I was worried that if I didn’t advance in society, I would turn into him and be eaten from the inside by the violent emotions that stirred.

  But then I met Ousmane, who couldn’t be more different from Roddy if he tried, and I realized what a mistake it would have been if Roddy and I had somehow stayed together. I was living with Ousmane for a little over a year, and we were expecting the birth of our first daughter, Nora, when we heard a knock on the door. No one was more surprised than I that Roddy had returned. I took the first time for a one-off situation primarily about getting even, and the second for an apathetic attempt at reconciliation. He looked ghastly. Undernourished and unkempt. I could smell him through the door. The most noticeable feature, though, were the gummas that deformed his face. I had never seen anything like it before. I didn’t understand what they were, I just knew they were horrid and made looking at Roddy directly in the face a murderous task.

  Ousmane had seen enough of these symptoms in Djibouti to take a pre-emptive position about the whole thing. He stepped in front of me and ordered Roddy to leave at once. Roddy became agitated and emotional. Ousmane, not really knowing what to do, took the coat rack by the door and flung it in Roddy’s direction. Roddy lurched forward with his torso, not really threateningly, but Ousmane put his whole back into getting Roddy to clear the entrance of our apartment. Then my husband slammed the door and fastened the lock. We looked through the peephole to see Roddy emerge from the cocoon of our coats he’d become entangled in. He screamed into the door for several minutes before leaving, taking the welcome mats from all the other units with him.

  I asked if Ousmane was sure about what was wrong with Borgloon; he said of course that he wasn’t, but that I should get checked if Borgloon was whom he suspected. “You can only use your cock as a divining rod for so long before it catches up with you.”

  I had never heard my husband speak so coarsely before. I tried to tell Ousmane that I was fine: the first prenatal visit would have alerted us to anything, and unless it could be transmitted by the shaking of hands, the last time I was with Roddy wouldn’t amount to anything. Ousmane, who was known for a clinical disposition in all matters facing his private life, was ready to go around the bend, so I did what I was told and came back with the paper to prove it.

  This incident with Ousmane was the very first time I ever felt shame in my dealings with Borgloon. I believed I had turned my back on someone who needed my help, which would have cost me almost nothing. The last thing he needed from someone he trusted was childish repugnance. I kept telling myself that Nora was my priority, and that I would have to do whatever it took to mentally and physically prepare to bring her into the world. This meant Borgloon falling by the wayside, constituting a distraction. And like with most things that did not immediately pertain to my advancement or happiness, I did not give much thought to Roderick “Borgloon” Rabinur in my later stages of life: nineteen years’ worth of not caring in fact, an onerous legacy to stare in the face.

  Other events outstripped the traces of Borgloon’s impression, and I looked upon all the calamity and cause for celebration that I had wrought—a marriage, a divorce, widowhood, the death of my father, two fully grown children, one of diminished standing in our family because of choices I could not approve of, a blossoming and bloomed career in the civil service, a life-defining friendship
with my friend Rhonda—with the admiration that comes with knowing there was not one thing that gathered about my life which wasn’t of my own making. Despite these regrets, a part of me still feels as though I don’t have to justify the tack I took with Borgloon. Nineteen years on and I still think his politics are shit. I don’t disagree with them, but I feel the conclusions they led him to bear the distinct marks of laziness.

  The Borgloon I remembered believed that to be whole, someone else had to be incomplete, and he had been living with a lack so large that you could hide fifty broken consciousnesses inside it. It was someone else’s turn to chomp at the bit. Conformity was the mark of a weak intellect, assimilation was a subterfuge. Never back down. Never double back. Disappear beyond the even tenor of life, forward into an irrefragable tomorrow. These tenets align well enough with my own, but Borgloon used it as a pretext to treat people shoddily. I know that I had done the same thing to him through other motivations, but at least I knew I could be an asshole—Borgloon pretended he wasn’t familiar with the term. I suspect that being on the right side of history doesn’t count for much if you act like a tosser half the time. Borgloon’s ideas, or better yet, those which influenced him and which he borrowed, gained traction over the years, and all these bloody contrarians fancying themselves Davids to society’s Goliaths started coming out of the woodwork. This only further aggravated my feelings on the subject.

  As I have said before, it’s possible that on some level I resented Borgloon for his worldview more than for any one act he committed against me, that for the purpose of denying there being some inherent quality that governed us and conferred honorific this-ness and that-ness, I put up an impenetrable wall around myself. I never let anyone else define who I was or could be, even if it would serve my interests in the long run. That kind of political conniving will blot out the sun before it lays hands on me. So maybe I didn’t reject a sick and afflicted Borgloon. I sent him to damnation because I didn’t like the colours on his mast. This gives me a queasy feeling inside. It makes me feel petty and unresourceful. It tells me that I stood for nothing except apart from Borgloon—a negative philosophy whose adoption is not a particularly hard thing to do. I made nothing of myself in its stead, and in the dark of creation, I let a man who no one cared about sink into the rot and despair of destitution. Yet what I still mostly remember is what a heel he was. We’re all only human, I suppose.