Measures of Expatriation

by Vahni Capildeo

  He stood too tall and too far immersed in the sea, looking like brightness. It would be death to join him. Did the women expect it? With the greatest effort I began to turn and found them looking appalled. They called my name. I dragged myself upright to shore. Whether or not he in the sea had vanished I do not know; his satisfaction was at my back and his house was still in front of me. I felt he was many.

  My mother and my friend welcomed me as if there had been no changes.

  I asked to leave the seaside and start finding our way home.

  VI

  Someone had developed the bay since our last visit. The drive north was the same as for the more famous bathing-place; only a little further. We parked and began the uncertain walk (what should the feet expect? blown sand over paved path, or deep sand? mud or quicksand? broken bottle or quartz?), to arrive at the tight little curve. The lines in the sea threw up walls of light, drawing an imaginary stadium around the bay – an under-resourced stadium whose building contractor had run off with the cash: the walls of light, lined like sea, were like corrugated metal, grey and splashed with rust or the red of rained-on national slogans.

  It wasn’t a question of us arriving late: the grey and rust, scrub and dust, in a place indubitably holiday destination-ish for the people who lived on the island even more than for the thin-on-the-ground tourists. Up till the previous bend in the road, the day had retained its colour.

  The match had not started.

  We walked down the steep slope to what was not defined enough to be a beach – more the area belonging to the sea. The ground was damp-packed, indicating that sometimes but not always it was below water. We turned left, or south-west, and up a smaller slope. The pleasant, ramshackle new hotel, two and a half storeys high, overlooking the bay, had an old-fashioned gallery running the length of each floor. Perhaps not belonging to the hotel, there was a not-imaginary slice of stadium, or rather seats in tiered stands and something like a barbecue area, covering the western part of the angle of the small bay. That was new. It looked worn.

  The match was starting. We sat on metal folding chairs in the first floor gallery, to watch the boys play football in the sea. ‘Eh-eh! But what are you doing here!’ It was the drum majorette from the Form II March Past parade – how many years ago? Grown up now, pretty in red, with a frosty can of something in her hand. Retired headmistresses. Half-remembered prefects. Everybody’s aunt in a flowered hat and coral lipstick, the weight of a picnic cooler testing the strength of her talcum-thick wrist. Somebody’s father (but hadn’t he died?) trying harder to be friendly since he had betrayed his wife. The boys from the College of the Immaculate Conception, out of uniform and in red or white cotton T-shirts that burned and cowled over the forbidden meagreness that, shyly and muskily, was – not their bodies –was also-them. Other boys from their college were in the sea, all at sea, playing football in the sea. We were gathered there together to watch the match.

  How were they managing it? Their knees were lifting above the waves. Despite the absence of goalposts, and the shifting depth of water, the boys seemed to know where to go. They were playing sideon to the waves; side-on to us. The waves came in faster, following one another like one ridged iguana moving from branch to branch. The boys were thin and whippy like coconut trees, heads ferocious clusters of concentration.

  ‘The match going well!’

  But a dark cloud was blowing up, between the open sea and the edge of mountain. And the boys would not stop playing. And the wind was blowing up too, chill and bitter and salt, what the Atlantic brings to the tropics and is not ‘tropical’. The drops of rain then, heavy like one cent coins, hitting us like spiteful alms. And the boys seemed unable to stop playing. And they were kicking the ball up somehow from under greater and greater depth of water, and we remarked their sportsmanship from their elbows, the tops of their torsos, the struggling coconut-heads above the waves, in between the waves. They were in deeper. The sea was nearer. Nearer to us.

  We were not enjoying watching the boys playing football in the sea. They were playing the match of their lives.

  Under the rimlet of every wave gasping further up on to the damppacked ground, the sea brought more darkness.

  Then the approximate stadium of the bay began, most impressively, to acquire a fourth wall.

  The Atlantic was going to join the match, and come in to the hotel afterwards.

  Louise Bourgeois: Insomnia Drawings

  Fruitmarket Gallery, Edinburgh, 2013

  for Rod Mengham

  FELT PEN

  ‘Tell me why she – ’

  She. Shush, shush, shush. She.

  A heap of she, as if asleep but not asleep

  she stirs, her bed of pins untucked;

  transforms and tiptoes out,

  a high-heeled bird

  whose own actions plucked away

  the concentrated bits,

  the beak that makes the bird.

  ‘Tell me why she – ’

  She. Shush, shush, shush. She.

  She speaks in pens and is not heard.

  A sheep. A peasant-bellied caryatid.

  Anatomical cabaret. Each pore of the skin

  has edges that kick out like legs

  and not only the eyes twitch,

  but also the unaccredited folds of flesh:

  the submarine corners of the gums,

  the urgent or abject pleating within hinges,

  ankleflanks and wristchrysanthemums,

  kneedeeps and elbowcunts.

  Something of a relief then,

  that the tongue of insomnia burns,

  a wafer of metal,

  an instrument with which to score

  another sostenuto non senza piacere ma quasi senza fine

  long night’s journey into night.

  ‘Tell me why she – ’

  ‘If it weren’t ‘Louise Bourgeois’

  we wouldn’t – ’

  ‘Tell me why she used a red felt pen.’

  ‘Because a red felt pen is Freudian.’

  ‘Because felt is fuzzy, and she’s female.’

  ‘Because red is menstrual.’ ‘Labial.’ ‘Dangerous.’ ‘Primal.’

  ‘A come-on. A stop-short.

  Lucky. Risky. Demonic. Popish.’

  ‘Wetter than blue. Hotter than yellow.’

  ‘Because a red felt pen is

  a substitute for the phallus,

  and also for an American flag stripe

  signifying the absence of France.’

  Because it was there.

  ‘What?’

  Because –

  ‘Oh. If it wasn’t Louise Bourgeois

  who was using a red felt pen,

  we wouldn’t be – ’

  Because it was bloody well there,

  and in a fix or in a fit, the artist

  fiercely repurposes whatever is to hand.

  DANS LE JARDIN DE MA MÈRE

  this was not work meant for your sight

  this was not the work of one night

  a lipstick strike

  a rose grows

  eyelash

  wet flash

  mathematic

  grows oblique

  from the river

  lift its peaks

  but leave its flow

  from each finger

  knifes the heat

  of what they know

  years of marks

  to make a rose

  how to pull space

  apart, extract

  concentrique

  essence of rose

  this was not the work of one night

  this was not work meant for your sight

  SHE COURTED SLEEP BY DRAWING SHEEP, THEN ONE WAS DRAWN TO HER

  friend sheep, if i stretched wide enough

  i could give birth to a child like you:

  a round-eyed barrier against normality,

  a rare breed indeed, not a marie antoinette pet.

  legendary plus que
prehistoric.

  a sheep like you at my knees

  and pre-ruined trade routes at my feet,

  and we would be in Sumeria.

  dans la nuit it was lost, a closet heterosexual;

  my children’s successful sleep rendering me antimaternal

  as if my body had not gaped, was a gap, was immaterial.

  so I placed my hands between my legs, found fleece,

  began to pull, till wonderstruck i ushered you

  into my studio, away from the world, from the waking world.

  peaceable and only slightly sinister

  since languageless and eager in your bleating

  about the silence brushing up against us from all sides,

  my darling newborn ancient beast,

  unboxed and not for sacrifice.

  i count on you. take us away.

  cross another and another stile.

  nibble your way through the hedge of mist

  springing from the Hudson,

  through the thorns of light thrown up

  by the Atlantic; voyage safely, amicable sheep,

  into France; no questions asked.

  i would flatten with you into tapestry,

  my hair and yours washed by handfuls in the river,

  vu que, in profound night and these circonstances,

  it is déjà as if insomnia hangs us, already

  hooked to a wall.

  INSOMNIA DRAWING BY LOUISE BOURGEOIS, FEATURING A BEAST WITH DOUBLE EYELIDS AND FLYING OBJECTS THAT ARE NEITHER EARLY WARPLANES NOR A LOST, CODED ALPHABET OF WASPS

  In this esquisse, the snake, if Freudian, is phallic, simple and part of a complex in the quasi-scientific sense, rather than being the rustling thing that sheds its skins and lives by seasons and for reasons not for our making out.

  Insert a logical connector here; c’est ce qui

  manque dans ce texte.

  This snake, however, seems to be related to the snake from the it-is-not-a-children’s-book written and illustrated by Saint-Ex, ace pilot and seducer, Antoine de St-Exupéry.

  A logical connector is not necessary here; his territory was the desert, and I speak

  in tongues of insomnia, metal wafers that burn.

  In the book of St-Exupéry, the first serpent was a boa; more exactly, boa fermé, a phrase which means neither a farmed boa nor a boa sauvage, but rather a closed boa that had swallowed an elephant and in its suède distension was misapprehended by adult viewers who did not discern a boa in replete speedhump profile, but a somewhat lop-sided, well-worn hat.

  Here the logical connectors are supplied

  by the audience as if in a collective

  dream: a dream of waking, and of waking

  again, and waking with an effort, trying to force the

  buds of day-name and doorknob, but

  after all these wakings, waking only

  into sleep.

  Accordingly, the snake Louise Bourgeois has placed to slide as snakes do: as if reversing gravity, their remarkable unity of woven muscle being the art that conceals art: this snake perches, as if sheepish, on the slope of a mound not so difficult to ascend – this snake is overlooked not by a little planet with its boy and rosebush, such as orbits through the pictures in St-Ex’s book – this snake finds itself observed by a web-centric spider which has a jubilant air, as do most spiders, as if let in on the secrets of time – this snake, if taken to be at best akin to the boa escaped from the arid pages of St-Ex, appears to be climbing partway over itself, over a boa fermé from which both boa and swallowed elephant have been rubbed out, reduced to outline which, being line, has perhaps direction, but no thickness.

  In conclusion, this snake is hors de soi,

  expelled by its own process.

  Poor, menacing, insomniac snake, self-exiled from the warm rolling hill of its digestion; a snake no longer contentedly, interiorly afloat.

  ANYONE CAN DOODLE

  I can draw like that, exactly like that! I mean, when I doodle.

  I’m still surfacing. I had a thought…

  And I know someone who can draw exactly like that!

  ) birds and bushes

  My boss. She always doodles.

  ) scatter graphs and stick figures

  I was doodling like that on a telephone pad when I was two!

  ) bees and daisies

  Just like that.

  ) treble clefs and labyrinths

  Yes, like that.

  ) spirals, stars and traps

  I made and struck down lines, arrayed and

  manœuvred shapes as if I’d been obsessed with

  fractals all my life (I did read Tom Stoppard’s

  Arcadia when I was sixteen). There was something

  I didn’t share with Louise Bourgeois, however:

  unlike poor young Louise, forced by circumstances into

  working with her parents, who were tapestry restorers,

  I was not a victim of child labour, did not have

  to identify, mend or invent intricate patterns;

  that must have been heavy, washing all those

  big cloths in the river; heavy and unquestionably

  very French.

  Well, although I was lucky enough not to

  lose my childhood or anything like that, there

  was a creative interval: I went to a Montessori

  school. You should have seen my play mat:

  a sculpture park of red and blue plasticine!

  Have you seen enough?

  It punched a hole in me

  when we moved house; a great quavering

  black hole.

  So I can relate to that.

  Anyone can draw like that. It’s like

  saying tongue-twisters, or singing very high

  for very long.

  ) je veux et j’exige

  ) du jasmin et des jonquils

  ) daft for daffodils

  It comes out a bit different

  if it’s a coloratura like Kiri Te Kanawa

  warbling in the shower –

  ) insist on lilies

  Not a bit!

  Would you have to think

  at some level

  about music –

  Not a bit!

  all the time –

  It’s a glug of notes, is all.

  Something on my mind to say to you.

  Lost the thread. Tip of my tongue,

  burning metal wafer insomniac tongue.

  ‘I GIVE EVERYTHING AWAY’: A PARCEL CONTAINING THREE (3) SLEEPS (CUSTOMS & RESALE VALUE NIL): UN CADEAU POUR MADAME

  Dear Louise Bourgeois,

  In helpless admiration, I place at the threshold of your lidless doodles a parcel of unlikely sleeps, sleeps which I have ascended like slopes and others that overcame me like waves; for as the action of sleep on the body is obvious, so should the words be, stunning like a mallet falling off the wall onto the head of a folktale fool, all-assuming like a politician pressing the doorbell to a block of flats where the time-decayed wiring has morphed into tufts within the ears of the bricks; sleep, being the gentlest aggressor, assembles these words and gangs up on you; sleep gangs up, for sleep presents as several, a sundering and dissolution of already-unstuck selves, and one sleep passes into another sleep; and in bringing you the confession of unlikely sleeps, I wish for you, too late, wakefulness as a choice; for insomnia is the violent partner of sleep, it is an abuse of time that resembles chosen vigil as a condemnation resembles a destiny, as a compulsion resembles artistic decision, as despair resembles espoir, as an alternative resembles a joyful need; as tuning up resembles music, as settling resembles true love.

  The First Unlikely Sleep

  Did not want to wake up in the hospital. No. Reorder words. In the hospital. Did not want to wake up. Wanted not to wake up.

  In the other life had been the eight-year-old lying across two chairs; the bursting appendix; vomiting in the hallway under the peaky-roofed building’s nursing-home witch�
��s hat; the political nurses in a free and democratic election year summing up the parents by race, by class; the unfinding of surgeons; the disavailability of anæsthetists. Almost the last known to the child, before the chasm to be made in its flesh. Months later, too well known, the expressive brimming, dollops of colour from the chasm, the side that would not squeeze shut.

  General anæsthetic provoques numbness. General anæsthetic precludes dreams. Nonetheless dreams displaced anæsthesia. Nonetheless busyness displaced numbness. Busyness is proper to sleep and to dreaming. As rivers are the salient characteristic of a watercourse’s redirection, both depth and surface, so the nearness of consciousness is a grand source of sleep and of dreaming. In a building with many levels, many people moved, whose murmured speech kept the child enthralled, awake within the dream within the melting anæsthetic, feeling no inclination towards a second waking.

  I wish for you, too late, I wish sleep as a happy occupation.

  The Second Unlikely Sleep

  Madame, just as your clock, in having twelve hours, truly has twenty-four, and just as the unclosing eye, egged on by objects that would have preferred their secret nocturnal life to remain unobserved, undisturbed, just as that wakeful eye turns opaque like a steel ball bearing and refuses to take a view, drawing instead from that which is most inward – the telephone-wire spine, the peaks that the mind (after the fact of the sketch by the hand) might rationalize as life-and-soul-of-the-city pulses but that are even more inward, registering the nervous agony of enfleshed mathematics informing us of our kinship with patterns of music, copulation, rooftiles and rain – just so I wish to lay, alongside and between this metring-by-gallery of your insomnia, a little simplicity: the sleep I stole from a song in a hall where my ex stood enraptured by a swimsuited guitarist who plunged about in a state of girlish roaring; hear how fast, sound and simple this sleep when I climbed into immunity to external stimuli and, careless of what was being amplified all around me, careless even more of my ex’s emotions, like a centipede curled inside a fur slipper, like your dead husband hogging the duvet, found a flat surface and slept.