by Shani Mootoo
The garden was suddenly illuminated. On the bare earth lay a young pigeon. She knelt by it, sniffing. She poked it. Although the body had stiffened Mala could tell from its smell that the bird had died that day. She hid behind a thick majagua bush and began to cluck and clack. Her clucking heightened as though she were a bird being pursued and then, as though caught, she squawked and spat. Shaking the branches of the majagua she made a convincing imitation of a chicken struggling to free itself, and failing.
In the darkness of the yard she plucked the pigeon, slit the bird’s belly and removed its entrails. She cut off its head with a machete. She snipped the soft breasts apart, separated the flesh and flung the bones over the fence. Then she cut up the rest of the small bird. By the time she was finished the mound of bird parts was not dissimilar to young chicken meat.
Chandin was more than halfway through a bottle of whiskey when he heard the sizzle and smelled the aroma of masala, garlic and onions frying in oil. He was too drunk to notice the foulness of a dish prepared with meat that was almost rotten. He tasted curry spices and that was enough to appease him, and besides, the spoonfuls of hot pepper sauce he doused the food with scorched his taste buds and eliminated the finer details of taste. He suffered nothing more than a slight stomach gripe and went to bed earlier than usual, believing the aches were the result of having eaten too much, too hot and too late: an entire chicken, two plates of rice floating in dhal and a quarter jar of pepper sauce. As she cleaned up the table and the kitchen, Mala heard him moaning in his bed. He called out to her twice but she pretended not to hear. By the time she was finished in the kitchen she heard snoring.
Mala turned out all the lights. While she had been washing all the cookware and cleaning up, the town had been sucked up into darkness. She leaned on the back porch banister and smelled the moistness of the earth. A million fireflies flickered on and off. Amidst the chirping of invisible crickets and frogs was her father’s snoring. As long as the guttural sounds were audible she would be able to relax.
She thought of Ambrose, wondering if he too snored, of what he must look like while sleeping, of his lips. She tiptoed to her bedroom and quietly pulled the box from under her bed. The words Cadence and The Shivering Northern Wetlands and Music Makers, Appointed by H.R.H. Rupert II were stencilled on the side of the box. She whispered them to herself, savouring the sound of their exquisite foreignness. The box felt heavier than before. She toted it out to the verandah and lifted out the awkwardly balanced gramophone. She and Asha had once watched Aunt Lavinia crank up her gramophone. She tried to remember just how she made it work. She found the volume control knob and turned it down. She lifted the arm with the needle and placed it in the grooves of a disk. Even with the volume turned off Mala could hear the faint scratchiness, the suggestion of a Dixieland jazz band. She pressed her ear to the horn and smiled, filling once again with the feeling she had had watching her mother and Aunt Lavinia dance, her feet wanting to break out from under her and tap across the verandah, up and down the back stairs, from one end of the town to the next. She tapped a bare toe. She imagined herself in a flower-print dress, newly washed and pressed, twirling in the arms of her coattailed, top-hatted Ambrose, laughing and stepping from star to star all the way across the Lantanacamaran sky, and then back again before the first hint of dawn.
* * *
—
From then on, Mala schemed to get her father out of the house early. Usually still drunk from the night before, he barely noticed that she had washed and dressed herself before he had finished his cocoa and salt biscuits. One morning Ambrose had complimented her on her hair pinned back, and after that she fastened the long hair into a high bun especially for his pleasure.
Since Ambrose returned from the Shivering Northern Wetlands and started paying her frequent visits, she began washing and pressing her clothes the instant her father fell asleep. Looking forward to his visits gave her the strength to endure her father’s night-time attacks. She wanted to look as elegant and as rich as she could for Ambrose, her gallant suitor, who dressed himself like a Wetlandish lord. She thought privately of him, indeed, as her black Wetlandish lord, and of herself as the lady who would one day be rescued by him and revealed to all the world as a princess stolen by commoners at birth.
And almost every single day—except for one day a fortnight when he was unable, and, to his credit, unwilling, to avoid his filial obligation of one kind or another to his mother—Ambrose rose with the sun to wait interminable minutes around the corner until he saw Chandin Ramchandin leave the house. Then he would visit Mala, his arms laden with some syrupy fruit he had picked especially for her or with bulbs and roots of wild plants, the pocket of his black slacks bulging with jars of the brilliantly coloured and weirdly shaped fungi he had found the day before in the forest or out on the banks of the swamp.
At the end of each visit they would cart the gramophone out from under the bed to the verandah, where they were afforded privacy by the backyard trees. He would put on one of the two records and the black lord and his poor brown princess would delicately hold the tips of each other’s fingers and dance. Mala, at first cautious about moving her body freely, lost her shyness when her lord, with quiet, gentlemanly concern, acknowledged her fears and would neither touch nor gaze at her body in any way that made her uncomfortable. From the slightest touch of her fingertips he could feel her drawing the music into her soul and see it filling her from her feet to the dark hair gathered on her beautiful head. Quieting his desire, Ambrose would drop his eyes and stare at his own dancing feet and imagine the taste and texture and smell of her lips and tongue.
Ambrose quickly settled back into his homeland. He lived principally to visit Mala, the twinkling star of Lantanacamara as he had come to think of her. Dancing with her was the climax of his visits, which he simultaneously looked forward to and didn’t want to arrive because it signalled the end. He plodded through evenings and at the first sign of darkness took to bed, long before the last rooster had settled itself down for the night. To induce sleep he lay with a fresh, young leaf of a black sage bush tucked under his tongue. And he waited.
How long these visits would remain hidden from Chandin worried them both, but did not deter them. Mala prayed for the day when Ambrose’s dreams of his own enterprise would become a reality, yielding just enough money that they could elope to another town in Lantanacamara.
* * *
—
One morning Ambrose waited by the corner as usual, watching for Chandin to leave. Ambrose carried an empty aquarium in which he threw a branch of ripe, red gru-gru berries plucked from the palm tree under which he hid.
Even before Chandin had made it up the hill, Ambrose had entered the yard with his gifts. He placed the glass box under the house in a dark corner, an unlikely place for Chandin to come across. He grabbed the gru-gru branch and bolted up the back stairs. Mala was waiting for him on the porch.
Before entering the kitchen he invited her to take their old school days route and visit his mother, who had been asking to see the woman about whom her son could not stop talking. Mala found it curious that Ambrose would consider walking in public with the sullied daughter of Chandin Ramchandin. She could see he was not the same shy, easily led boy who had usually cringed in the face of disapproval. She would have loved to trek the old route with him but she feared being caught. Many people considered it an entertainment to watch Chandin become wildly angry, and they would vie to be the first to break such news to him.
“I have to be here when Pappy come home and I don’t really know when he coming,” Mala said halfheartedly. “He getting more and more crotchety, always have something he want me doing for him. I don’t really think I could get to go away for too long a time.” She wanted Ambrose to figure it out for himself. She had become so adept at not revealing her emotions that it was almost impossible for anyone else to detect her sadness and pleading. But Ambrose was learning.
“Well, I don’t know when he plan to come back but I shouldn’t leave the house.”
Ambrose felt as though he were being told a story in code. He entered the kitchen and put the berries on the table. They glowed between them as brilliantly as their still unspoken love for each other.
“You eat breakfast?” she asked.
“Mammy cooked me roti and salt fish which I ate, but I saved room in the hope that you would spoil me once more with your heavenly talents.”
“Oh no, I make salt fish too.”
“It is one of my favourites. I could eat it several times a day. And I am sure that yours will be different from Mammy’s, and perhaps even better.”
Mala set down a plate of fat bake and salted cod she had prepared for him the night before.
“Mmmm, this is unparallelled,” he said, and so often that she stopped fretting that he had already had salted cod that morning.
Ambrose was in the presence of his most favourite and indulgent audience. (While his mother doted on his every move, she hardly understood a sentence he spoke.) Not long after he finished eating, words and phrases began to slide languorously from his lips. He was trying to express how he felt about her.
“A word is not the substance itself,” Ambrose stated simply enough but soon slid into a morass. “A world freed of nomenclature, syntax and lexical form is experienced…named senses are enhanced…sensors in your joints open up like eager blossoms, their little receptors waving wildly, anxious to engage. Your entire being, the physical, and most of all the spiritual, is a vibrant network of synesthesia…throughout your body miles of blood, water, serums, toxins, effluvia and nutrients ebb and wane in tune to the moon…the tiniest random fraction of your being is connected to your sensorium, and your sensorium experienced as integral only when you recognize yourself as a conduit, a vibrant little cog in the functioning of the universe…”
Unable to directly tell Mala just then how aroused he became in her presence, Ambrose moved on to an intoxicating sermon on the potential uses of fine fabric spun by spiders. He asked Mala to imagine women’s stockings and hair nets woven from the spiders’ delicate threads. Hidden behind his words was his desire to know the delicacy of her skin, to sip from her lips. Yet he was also alerted to her need not to be smothered. The urgency of this need was so apparent that, without understanding its origins, he complied and hoped that with time she would come to trust him.
As he sat in the kitchen Mala too looked at him, at the shape of his lean chest underneath his shirt, his slender fingers, his velvet lips that were rendered much pronounced because of their stunning redness against skin as dark as the pods of the mudra tree. She fixated on his hair, which he no longer soaked in coconut oil, and wanted to bury her fingers in its tight coarseness. She scrutinized the stubby, sea-green area where he shaved. She imagined how the patch might feel and the scratchy noise the ball of her thumb rubbing up and down it might make. She gave his sweat an imagined odour and longed to feel the heat of his underarm against her face. The only man’s sweat she knew was her father’s, which made her nauseous, and so she was delighted that she could invent a smell for Ambrose that melted her with passion and momentarily overpowered her father’s awful hold over her. Her desire for Ambrose made her body arch, reaching out, engulfing, drawing him deep inside her, yet she resisted converting these thoughts to actions.
Yet thorns of fear and treachery would prick her after Ambrose left the house. The fear that her father would discover that her head, heart and body were betraying him, if only because he could smell this new desire on her skin, rendered her inactive in Ambrose’s presence. She would pace the upstairs of the house, tormented and confused by odd feelings of having betrayed her father. After all, she thought, her father had suffered immeasurably when her mother left them. Mala would chastise herself, pointing out that even she could not imagine the hurt he must have felt, or the embarrassment he endured. There were times when thoughts of Ambrose made her hate herself for being so cruel and thoughtless to her wounded father. But even at those times, her tenderness aroused, she wanted to be lifted up and taken away by Ambrose.
* * *
—
Ambrose took her outside and showed her the aquarium. They combed the underneath of her father’s house for web-spinning spiders. Mala watched nervously when Ambrose gripped a strand of sticky fibre from a web attached to a mudra pole beneath the house. She followed as he walked slowly across the backyard, the unbroken fibre lengthening with each step he took. She admired his straight back and imitated his posture. Confident that the backyard was so overgrown that they were well hidden from view, she revelled in the magnificence of his attire. He walked as far as the back fence and still the filament remained unbroken.
“Imagine!” he whispered, “imagine a finely woven curtain miles high in the sky, hung between the Caribbean Sea and the Atlantic Ocean. A curtain that would not deny light, yet could contain and halt a hurricane!” She was so in awe of his inventiveness that she wanted him to whisper those words inside her mouth. She kept her eyes on the crook of his finger. He delighted in telling Mala the methods and principles of spider silk harvesting, and as he spoke he watched her, drinking in her beauty and suppressing his astonishing desire.
They stocked the aquarium with over forty spiders. Mala had little trouble catching the flies that clung lethargically to the nectar-stained petals of passion fruit flowers in her backyard. She put them in a bag, and then shook them into the aquarium.
Back upstairs, though thrilled with the first steps in their research adventure, Mala kept her distance, standing near the kitchen sink. Ambrose, red and puffed up with excitement, sat at the kitchen table. They sipped a cooling, good-luck tea that she had brewed from the leaves of the pigeonpea plant and ti marie, and snacked on the pale yellow meat of the gru-gru berry.
Ambrose produced a leather-bound notebook in which he entered the details of his fledgling business. Both agreed upon a name for the research business: STC–STS. Softer Than Cotton–Stronger Than Steel. On the inside front cover of the notebook he penned the name in letters with sprawling tails and elaborate feathers, and then in bold clean letters he set down his own name, Ambrose E. Mohanty, next to which he wrote Principal. And under this line he wrote Pohpoh Ramchandin—Second Principal and Ultimate Inspiration. He read it aloud and they laughed. Mala watched how he had scripted the word Pohpoh. His penmanship was crisp and artful. She could not bring herself to contradict him.
Ambrose leaned back in the caned chair and stretched his legs. Under the table she could see his sheer white stockings. With hands clasped behind his head, he related to Mala how he came to be fascinated by the properties and potentials of spider fibre. It happened as a result of the first winter he spent in the Shivering Northern Wetlands. He had never experienced such cold in his life.
“Don’t even try to imagine it. You won’t be able to. I had read about it. Even long before setting foot in the Shivering Northern Wetlands, I had seen photographs of the city dusted with this powder they call snow. But you know, Pohpoh, I was entirely unable to truly comprehend just exactly how cold such cold might be. Not until I experienced it for myself.
“This hellish, endless event takes over your entire existence and you can do nothing but think of artful connivances for remaining dry and warm. In the depth of this ruthless winter, while I nursed a demon of a cold, I sat indoors and mournfully contemplated the bleakness of snow-covered yards and walkways and streets from my window. I thought it would never end.”
“Hmm,” Mala responded simply.
“And then one spring day that same year, I chanced upon a thread of spider silk attached to the higher boughs of a naked tree. The glistening thread was stretched almost to the ground in a perfectly symmetrical V by the weight of an eight-inch-long icicle clinging to it. I stood there, und
er the warming spring sun and for hours watched as the icicle dripped itself thinner and shorter. Slowly unburdened, the thread itself rose elegantly, as if succumbing to spiritual levitation, higher and higher. When the icicle had succumbed to its watery demise, the spider-spun filament, now perfectly levitated, appeared not to have been stretched. It was, Pohpoh, glistening brilliantly and breathlessly, and as taut as any I had ever come across that had been freshly spun.”
Mala grasped Ambrose’s intent among the jumble of his words. “Ah! A bridge. You could make a bridge with the threads from this spider business, a bridge to cross the river and no matter how much people and animal and car they drive on it, it would never come falling down.”
Mala laughed at her joke. Ambrose was still caught up in his reveries but when he noticed her enthusiasm, he leapt out of his chair, ran over to her, and in utter jubilation threw his arms around her, pulling her surprised and reluctant body into his. She instinctively crossed her arms in front of her chest yet when he looked at her she was smiling. In fact she was beginning to giggle. He knew the giggle from the long-ago days in the schoolyard. He also recognized the smile, yet instead of mirth he was overcome by concern.
“Ah, Pohpoh, my sweet, sweet Pohpoh.”
Mala looked into his eyes. “Please don’t call me by that name,” she whispered. “Don’t call me that. You remember my real name?”
Ambrose was taken aback.
“Which one? I am mortified. Tell me which name and it shall never be uttered again.”
“Pohpoh. That is not my name.”
After a quick joggle of his memory Ambrose smiled, pleased with himself. “Mala! You are right. Mala is indeed a name more fitting. The other one shall not be mentioned again.” He continued, intending to make amends. “Come home with me. Come and see my dearest Mammy. She knows everything about you and she expects you soon. You will come, sweet Mala, won’t you?” Her name, which he had not said aloud in many years, sounded foreign to him but he cottoned quickly to its adult sound. Mala relaxed her face into his chest. He pressed his lips against her thick hair. His chest smelled even more sweet than she had imagined.