Cereus Blooms at Night

by Shani Mootoo

  Pohpoh’s breathing turned shallow and rapid. “You so full of big words. You ent worth one word, you little rat face!” Then she lunged and kneed Walter Bissey in his stomach. He doubled over and she smashed her arm down on his back. She swiftly turned and shouted out to Asha, “Run, Asha. Run that way. As fast as you can!” Pohpoh, able to run much faster than Asha, caught up to her and grabbed her arm. They bolted away, Asha leaving the ground as she was yanked along, almost like a kite being launched. They made a direct line toward the road, Pohpoh’s speed increasing with each step, like flamingo feet pushing water back just before take-off.

  Walter remained on the ground, doubled up, hugging his stomach and screaming in agony. The other children backed away for a moment and then one of them shouted, “Get them! don’t let them get away! Cut they ass!” But Pohpoh and Asha were already racing to their safest place, the cemetery a block over and across the road, where the other children never entered for fear of being attacked by people who made their homes under the roofs of crumbling tombs or, worse, of being whisked away by restless corpses to some remote place from which there was no return.

  Under the shelter of a roomy stone mausoleum Pohpoh sat cross-legged and sulked. Asha was yanking out knotgrass, rabbit grass and stunted trees sprouting from cracks in the cold floor. She watched Pohpoh pout and mutter what sounded like curse words. She wanted to touch her sister’s face and hug her tightly for getting into a fight because of her, and she also felt guilty that Pohpoh was ridiculed and had to endure all those stupid insults. She knew Pohpoh wanted Walter and his friends to like her.

  Like the air throughout the cemetery, the spacious tomb smelled of burnt wick and candlewax. On a stone plinth under a plaque with much raised writing, a rusted milk can with cut ixoras and red ginger lilies, their tips turning brown in the heat, rested in a hardened pool of candlewax. Leaf cutter ants zigzagged their way to the flowers, each almost hidden by a little piece of leaf or flower waving like a flag above its body. Asha squatted down to watch them, fascinated by the perfectly cut pieces of plant. She reached down and lifted one. It dropped its umbrella and moved its legs rapidly. She picked up the leaf and tried to put it back in the ant’s pincers. When it wouldn’t close its pincers, Asha dropped the leaf and tried to get the ant to pinch her flesh. The pincers remained wide open. She put the ant back on its path and it scurried off at a distraught pace. Suddenly the entire line of ants ran off in different directions.

  “Oh-oh! Look what I do. I make the bachacs go crazy!” she whispered, afraid to disturb Pohpoh’s slump.

  Without looking at her, Pohpoh answered, “Don’t worry. Is nothing. Just wait one minute. You’ll see. They’ll get back in their line and carry on.”

  “Poh? How they know where to go?” Asha jumped at the opportunity to engage her sister. Pohpoh got up from her corner and squatted with Asha.

  “They have their way. Look at this.” She interrupted the ants’ path by rubbing her finger hard across it. The first couple of ants stopped at the interruption and then carried along, followed by the others. “Now watch this.” Pohpoh took a tiny piece of blackboard chalk from her pocket. She cut across their path and encircled one of the ants in a line drawn thickly, chalk powder flying. The ants outside the circle marched up to the chalk line and one after the other backed off, refusing to cross. The ant trapped in the circle ran around the inside of the chalk edge, frantically changing course, standing on its hind legs and then crouching on the ground in panic. Outside the circle several ants dropped their leaves and scurried back in the direction they came. Within seconds a new path bypassing the circle had been created, and the ants outside it hesitantly resumed their trek, more cautiously than before. The ant in the circle stood completely still. Pohpoh and Asha watched in silence.

  “Why you do that?” Asha finally asked.

  “Because,” Pohpoh snapped. Then after several long seconds she said, “I hate Boyie. Why he didn’t stay with us? I hate Walter. I hate everybody.” Wiping tears from her eyes she jumped over the railing of the tomb and stomped off. “I wish Papa was dead,” she mumbled softly. “I hate him. I hate him. I wish he was dead.”

  The cemetery was quiet except for the creaking sounds of tall, old samaan trees weighed down by hundreds of flowering bromeliads. It was too hot for the birds, and they rested in the branches. In the distance came the dull tock tock sound of two metal spades hitting stone and shovelling out dirt and gravel for a new grave. The two gravediggers, Pohpoh and Asha were the only ones in the cemetery. Pohpoh, her head hung low, listlessly hopped on and off the cemetery’s narrow path. Asha followed at a distance, sometimes running so as not to lose sight of her. On either side of the cobbled path were more tombs, and in the air was the inescapable odour of burnt wax. Pohpoh, with Asha following, left the winding path and exited the cemetery.

  ASHA RAMCHANDIN, ASHA Ramchandin, Asha Ramchandin. In quiet moments after a long day caring for your sister, when I would rather lie in my bed in the nurses’ quarter and have my mind lie fallow, your name repeats itself mantra-like in my head. At night I fall asleep clinging to the hope that you are happy and well, and you would soon know that it is now safe to return to Paradise.

  I often call out Randolph John Hector’s name, too. And Sarah Ramchandin’s. And Lavinia Thoroughly’s. Where are you all?

  Today Asha, watching your sister sit in her one-room bungalow stroking a cat she calls “Pohpoh” sometimes and “Asha” other times, I do feel despair. I wonder at how many of us, feeling unsafe and unprotected, either end up running far away from everything we know and love, or staying and simply going mad. I have decided today that neither option is more or less noble than the other. They are merely different ways of coping, and we each must cope as best we can. You see, Asha, I must rationalize your leaving and her staying—and, as many see it—going mad. Otherwise, I must admit to feelings of anger that you left your sister behind. While I don’t begrudge your leaving, I wonder if you ever tried to encourage her to go with you. Asha, from the way she calls your name, it is clear that she, more importantly than I, also does not begrudge you.

  AT RECESS POHPOH mostly kept to herself, though Boyie still often hovered nearby. She watched the other children as if from the other side of a fence. The boys climbed the hills behind the school looking for snake skins, thriving on the thrill that they might stumble on a snake itself. One day when they turned up neither snake nor skin, they collected handfuls of battimamselles, daddy-long-legs, tree frogs, millipedes and snails that got flushed up in the rains. Pohpoh watched the group huddle in a circle, their heads locked together like a mass of papaya seeds.

  “I bet you I know what they’re going to do,” Boyie whispered, noticing she was curious. “You see, the other day we learned about the reflexes of plants. Teacher said plants respond to gentleness. He told us too that plants could show signs of trauma. Watch this. I bet they are going to do an experiment based on that idea. Want to bet me?”

  Pohpoh sneered at him but quietly worried he might be right.

  Candlelight flickered across their concentrating faces. Walter Bissey held an inch of candle first about one foot away, then gradually drew it closer to a praying mantis gripped in a pair of lab tweezers. The insect tensed and rubbed its front legs up and down. The boys grew more fascinated. Their bodies seemed to tingle with excitement.

  “Ey! Ah tell you, go close na, boy!”

  “Slow down, slow down. Doh go so fast, na!”

  As the flame got nearer the mantis’ body began to arch. The insect twisted its head, its front legs a blur. The instant the flame touched a back leg, the mantis’ movements stopped abruptly. It became as rigid as if it had disappeared.

  Pohpoh bit her lower lip. She stood perfectly still.

  The mantis’ chitinous body smoldered where the flame had touched it, crackling and hissing as ruby sparks spat and sputtered. The abdomen took the longest to disintegrate but the boys were
resolute. One held the truncated torso with the tweezers as another torched more persistently. When, eventually, the head fell off like the tip of a spent match, one boy reached into his jar and pulled out a grasshopper.

  Pohpoh leered at them angrily but she was unable to move. She was invisible to all of them, including the tall boy named Walter.

  At school the next day Pohpoh insisted that Boyie accompany her. They followed the crude-smelling, silver trails that led to a colony of periwinkle snails, alive and ripe and vulnerable to the torture squad’s delights. One clean blow with a heavy boot or the blunt end of a guava rod could shatter the snails into a gooey green, yellow and pink jigsaw. From Aunt Lavinia, Pohpoh believed such an act would bring down a torrent of bad luck on the boys who committed it, and she believed good fortune would be visited on a protector of the snails. She and Boyie began fervently collecting the periwinkles in the heavy cotton bag she had crudely stitched especially for this purpose. Once the bag was bulging and the thread that held it stretched beyond its capacity, they carried the snails down to the backyard fence. There she turned the bag out over the stone wall and delivered the creatures from the reach of the school yard’s bullies.

  Nudging Pohpoh away from the wall, Boyie looked expectantly at her.

  “Pohpoh Ramchandin,” he began to chant as if it were a mantra, “Pohpoh Ramchandin Pohpoh Ramchandin Pohpoh Ramchandin.” He guided her to the back wall of the small school building, which seemed to quiver with the shadows of a tamarind tree. Shrieks and screams of after-school wildness floating through half-open wooden jalousies stoked his pubescent desire. Joking and teasing, he leaned his pudgy body into hers, pinning her like a butterfly to the cool jagged wall up which daddy-longlegs crawled. He rubbed his hand up and down the front of her white school blouse. A small club was growing in his pant leg, she noticed, and was starting to press into her thigh.

  Pohpoh threw her head back and giggled, more high pitched than usual. She ducked down, spun around and swiftly manoeuvered out of Boyie’s clumsy embrace. He waited, unsure yet grinning, for firm refusal or further encouragement. She ran back to him, grabbed his hand, tugging him along with her.

  “Leh we go to your house. Your bedroom,” she said.

  Biting the corner of his lip, he tried to yank her to a halt, protesting that they would be alone, that his mother wouldn’t be home until much later.

  “Of course, you bachac you,” she said half-affectionately. He turned to face the corner of the building, toward a statue of the school’s founder, Reverend Ernest Thoroughly. He grazed a shoulder along the length of stubbly brown wall as he limped away from her, his eyes cast on the damp stone littered with pink, wet-weather earthworms.

  Pohpoh caught up with Boyie before he rounded the corner. She trapped him against the wall, grabbed his wrist and pushed his now reluctant fist inside her opened white school blouse. The fist disintegrated, weakened by its brush against a small upright nipple under the cotton petticoat. Fingers extended, explored and moulded themselves around the little hump. His other hand groped behind her, discovering with pleasure other mounds. Aroused beyond control he shoved his open mouth, tongue first like a can opener, toward her mouth. The words Pohpoh Ramchandin danced in his mind. Pohpoh Ramchandin thumped a firm palm against his chest. “Not here,” she said. “Leh we go to your house, ah tell yuh—I really want to do it with yuh.”

  Pohpoh and Boyie headed out to his mud house on the outer edge of the Paradise Estate cane fields. They ran in the shallow, fertile gullies between crests of recently planted cane. On the other side of the cane field they came out at the village cricket pitch. Crossing the flat open area, Boyie tried to hold Pohpoh’s hand. She squeezed and released it dismissively, plopping her exercise book and dictionary in his arms. She skipped ahead of him past the roughly hewn bleachers and improvised pavilion and down through a row of poui trees.

  He followed her over rickety boards that lay across a ravine of foul-smelling water. They beat through curtains of mosquitoes and black flies to the back of the whitewashed ajoupa where he and his mother lived. Inside the yard of lepayed clay she deferred to his lead. Boyie dilly-dallied by the fruit trees and insisted on showing her his brood of rabbits penned up in a decrepit hutch under the sapodilla tree. He nervously explained how he had constructed the hutch himself. Pohpoh tugged at his shirt sleeve, insisting they go inside straight to his room.

  Standing before the heavy cotton curtain that cordoned off his room, he held a trembling hand up, signalling to her to wait while he checked just to make sure that, even though it was much too early, his mother had not already returned home. In the centre of the sparsely furnished room Boyie stood motionless, listening to the sounds of the evening, expecting any minute to hear his mother calling to him from the yard.

  The already dim interior was made darker by the fading evening light. Pohpoh waited, watching him impatiently. Slowly parting the curtains she slipped into the sliver of space that he called his room. He followed reluctantly, brushing his body deliberately against the curtain to separate it again. Pohpoh turned and yanked the two sides tightly together. On this side of the flimsy partition, amber-coloured evening light streamed through a square window recently cut out of the mud wall. An overturned crate fit snugly against the wall between the curtain and Boyie’s bed. Neatly pressed and folded school shirts rested on the crate in a sternly perfect pile. At the foot of his low and narrow bed was another crate, also overturned and raised with stilts. Dog-eared, tattered books and a jam jar full of pencils were arranged on it. Two more jars sat like trophies. One contained the remains of a single green and black locust with a chalky white underbelly, the other a monarch butterfly. Pohpoh picked up the jar with the butterfly and turned it around, tracing the fat, unbroken black lines of its wings. “Well, is better, I suppose, than leaving it to rotten out there,” she said dismissively.

  Boyie, unsure of himself, sat on the edge of the bed facing the homework crate-table and busied himself twirling a compass. Pohpoh stood behind him, not at all caring for any sense of his body but intent on keeping him attuned to what had now become her goal. She inched forward and quietly stopped just behind him. He could feel her body blocking the breeze through the window. Pohpoh braced herself and slid her fingers through his greasy hair. She walked the tips of her fingers up and down his damp, hot neck, flitting one in and around an oily ear.

  “Did you know, uh, you see Stanley and Deo?” he muttered. “Did you see them copying from each other? In class today? Teacher could have caught them, yuh know. What would happen if they were caught.” To deny the sounds of her undressing, he rearranged the tattered books stolen from the school library. At the edges of his vision, just above the rim of the table, he saw bare skin and the soft, yellowed cotton of her bloomers. He turned, mesmerized by the deep cinnamon swirl of her navel. Slowly he adjusted his eyes to rest first on one pinkish-brown breast, then on the other. Pohpoh Ramchandin Pohpoh Ramchandin Pohpoh Ramchandin. He stood up and faced her. She held his hand and pulled him to the bed while he glanced at the drawn curtain. His eyes flitted to the orange sky through the window as though he expected to see someone peering in. He was stricken with panic, yet aroused.

  Pohpoh lay down. The mattress was lumpy, thorny. Coconut husk fibres protruded through the rough cotton top sheet. The cot had the musky smell of sweet-talking schoolboys and coconut. Still clothed in his school uniform and shoes, Boyie climbed on, guided by her, hovering and trembling and frightened and bumbling over her near-naked body. He stayed elevated on his knees and elbows. When his fear succumbed to the urgent lowering of his pelvis, she grabbed his waist and firmly pushed him back up into the air. She held him there until he understood that this was where he should remain. He brought his mouth awkwardly down to peck, flit, pry at hers, tongue first again. She stopped him, turning her face sharply away and pushed his head down toward her breasts. She locked his head with both her hands so that his mouth was placed
where she intended it, on a breast. She lifted her nose toward the ceiling to escape the schoolboy sweat trapped in his thick, oily hair. Without looking at him she whispered, “Suck them.”

  He instinctively grabbed her waist with his hands and did as he was told. His eyes, wide as dinner plates, remained planted sideways on the closed curtain. He was terrified of being caught, yet half hoped his mother would return.

  Suddenly he felt her entire body writhing and her hand clutching at his head. The curtain now forgotten, he dropped off of one knee and angled his crotch between her widening thighs. He fidgeted and fumbled to undo the belt of his pants, dropping his other leg and letting his full weight fitfully thump against Pohpoh. She pressed up against the hard shaft that seemed to have found its niche even through his smelly khaki shorts and her wet panty that she knew very well would not come off. She used this hardness to arrive at her intended destination before he could even unbuckle his belt.

  Instantly, her body dissolved into an entirely different mode.

  “I have to go, it getting late,” she blurted out, pushing him off to the side of the bed. She pulled her clothing from the floor and began to dress. Boyie lay on his stomach, not breathless but airless, his deflated face propped in his hand. Confused and hurting, he studied Pohpoh as she fumbled, turning her petticoat inside out and yanking it over her head.

  And without notice Pohpoh Ramchandin was gone, as though it were nothing at all.

  * * *

  —

  Clutching her school satchel like armour against her chest, Pohpoh hustled home. She wanted to beat her father’s arrival from the rum shop where he often spent his afternoons. Sometimes Pohpoh imagined that if she could gather up enough speed, she would be able to take off, flying above all the walls and gardens, above the topmost branches of the tallest trees around and even farther—a frigate bird soaring with other frigates until her town below was swallowed up, consumed in an unidentifiable fleck of island adrift like a speck of dust in a vast turquoise seascape.