The Worlds Within Her

by Neil Bissoondath

  “You’ve been over the calculations?”

  “It would have held up.” His glass clattered on his desk. “It would have held up.”

  In the silence she could hear his brain racing: skittering over calculations, speculating on stresses.

  “I’ve been undone,” he said, “by clients without courage. Colleagues without vision. You should have been there, Yas. When it came to the crunch, no one’d back me up. When the client said no, he couldn’t take the chance, there was utter silence. Then someone turned off the light.”

  13

  YASMIN THINKS: YET another world.

  As they approach the beach, the quality of the earth changes from a packed brown clay to a sandy white. The brush grows sparse, the vegetation thins out.

  They park in the shade of the trees, not palms — there are none in sight — but leafy giants with gnarled trunks. They are widely dispersed, their branches high above creating a canopy that mottles the sand with shadow.

  They walk barefoot and in silence to the beach — wide and flat, painfully bright in the sunlight.

  A caution, Yasmin notices, has come to Cyril. There is something watchful about him. She asks what is wrong.

  After a moment, he says, “I wish the place had changed, even a little.”

  He turns around and begins walking along the beach away from the river channel.

  Yasmin follows, the sand hot on her soles, a fine dust powdering her toes white. She sees the beach curving beyond his shoulders; sees it ending not far ahead in boulders and rock and plants reaching rope-like tendrils out towards the sea.

  Cyril calls: “There used to be a — Look, it still there.”

  She follows his raised arm to a spot beneath the trees — more numerous here, clustered. And at first she sees only shadows and trunks. Then, behind them, a hill of rock and boulders. And finally, nestled in the greatest darkness amidst the trunks, the regular but crooked line of a house.

  Cyril cuts across the sand towards it, his pace quickened. The house, he says, has always been here. A fisherman’s shack. There used to be a family: a man, his wife, and innumerable children. “I use to envy them, you know. I thought they had an idyllic life. No school, growing whatever vegetables they needed. The father and the eldest son heading out in their pirogue every morning before dawn to set their seines.”

  “Seines?”

  “Fishin’ nets, nuh.”

  The house, when they get to it, is small: hardly enough for a couple, unimaginable for a family. Of simple construction — wooden planks nailed to posts — it has not withstood the years. Many of the planks are black with rot, some had fallen askew, the door is gone and the roof has caved in, forming an almost elegant frieze of poles and dried palm branches.

  Yasmin says, “It couldn’t have been a comfortable life, though.”

  Cyril nods. “I know. I see that now. But back then … It was a fantasy I had, and fantasy does only grow in ignorance. You know, we use to come here often, but we never spoke to them. Never even really went close. This was their part o’ the beach, and over by the river was our part. They never went over there, either, at least not while we were here.”

  “What d’you think’s happened to them?”

  “Who knows?” He steps closer to the ruin, thinking, but jealous of his thoughts. Then he shakes his head, turns and strides away back towards the beach.

  Yasmin catches up to him just as she enters the sunlight. “Actually,” he says without breaking stride. “There was one time when Ram spoke to the father. He had to, you see. He needed to borrow one of his seines.”

  14

  THERE. BACK.

  You do appear to be more comfortable now. Does that feel better? Even your breathing seems easier, there’s a touch of colour to your cheeks. I would like to think that’s a good sign, but I have grown fearful of looking for signs, as you know.

  Now, where was I? Ah, yes. That morning.

  A Saturday. Glorious weather. A detail I remember for several reasons, but particularly because the day before, Friday, had been full of cloud and rain. The drive to the beach that evening was unnerving. The road was narrow, you see, and unlit, and even if there had been a moon — which there was not — the coconut tree plantations to either side would have obscured it thoroughly. The car’s headlights seemed to be without reach, not so much illuminating the road as creating shadows around it, and many of the stories from my childhood came back to me. Stories of douens who kidnapped people and of soucouyants which drank human blood — and particularly the tale of a mysterious white woman dressed in a flowing white gown standing beside the road with a lantern. She had been known to lead the unsuspecting into the depths of the forest and abandon them there. My fear must have been obvious, for Celia, sitting in the back seat beside me, took my hand and squeezed it in reassurance.

  So when I awoke late the following morning to a clear and sunny day, I was delighted. I took my tea out to the porch. How the sun sparkled off the water, my dear! How it dazzled! And the horizon — the horizon was as sharp as a stencil. As real as a destination.

  My husband and Cyril were already down on the beach, sitting side by side. My husband was scooping up sand and letting it run slowly from his fist, a sign of restlessness. This sitting about did not come easily to him. He had had to cancel several weekend engagements but he had felt it imperative that Cyril and Celia get away, and he knew they would not come by themselves.

  You might think this was a simple thoughtfulness on my husband’s part — and you would not be wrong. But there was more. Although he never told him so, my husband depended a great deal on Cyril, not only as a hop-to-it man but also as a sounding board. Cyril, he had said to me, never offered a single original thought — but he had an ability to reflect your own ideas back at you in such a way that their merits and faults came clear. But the problems with Celia — whatever they were, Cyril had given no hint — were distracting him. They had made him careless and absent-minded, and had to be solved before he caused serious damage. He planned to send them off for a walk together later that evening, to give them a chance to talk things out.

  Then something caught my eye on the floor of the porch. A shard of china. Then several. Patterns: a horseshoe, a heart, the crescent moon.

  And with no effort my mind reconstituted the tasseomancy cup. I thought: Oh, dear …

  Alarm, you see, came slowly to me — but it came steadily. I scanned the beach for signs of her.

  And then far out in the water, distant, distant beyond the breakers, a head and two arms flashing like wings, urging her on, pulling her farther and farther away, towards the line that could never be reached.

  I don’t remember realizing what was happening. I don’t remember my teacup crashing to the floor. But later, after the hysteria had calmed to grief, my husband told me that I had wailed a banshee scream.

  That day, my dear, Cyril lost the only anchor he had left. He became, in my husband’s words, irretrievable.

  Yes. Precisely.

  Irretrievable: it is the only word.

  15

  ’WE WERE YOUNG. I must’ve been eight or nine. Ram would have been sixteen or seventeen. We were out here for the weekend. Fishing, nuh. A little swimming. Me, Ram and a bunch o’ his friends. They brought me along because Ma said they had to. The plan was to spend the night right here, sleeping on the beach — not that Ram and his friends planned to sleep, mind you, they brought along enough beer to last the night — and go home the next day. Not something you want to do these days, by the way. In those days there weren’t people running around wanting to cut off your head for no reason.

  “Anyway, towards evening I was sitting with my fishing rod just up there, on the other bank, this side o’ the bridge. Ram and his friends were a little bit upriver. The water was deeper, and they were diving off some rocks. They weren’t far, I could hear them shouting and laughing.

  “Then suddenly the laughing and shouting stop. Dead silence. Then: Splash-splash
-splash! As if all of them diving in at the same time. I knew something was wrong. I drop the rod and run through the bush, and when I got there they were all going crazy diving and diving under the water. Real frantic, nuh. One o’ them, a fella named Kamal, a long-time friend, had dived in and din’t come back up. At first they thought it was a joke he was playing, he was that kind o’ fella — but this was no joke.

  “I don’t know how long it went on, their diving and diving, looking. And then it got dark. Ram wanted to keep on diving and the others had to hold him back. I mean, they even had to throw him on the ground and hold down.

  “Then he saw me standing there, scared out o’ my mind — and that calmed him down. I remember he started to howl. Fear. Grief. They let him up and he hug me tight-tight, so tight I could hardly breathe — and, I’ll tell you, Yasmin, is as if I can still feel that hug. His arms wrapped around me, his whole body shaking. Is the only time he ever hug me like that — but is enough for a lifetime, you know?

  “After a while, he let me go. He’d regained his composure, nuh — and it was something to see, I’ll tell you. He was calm, in control. As if he’d taken all the shock and grief and packed it away somewhere, and his brain was in charge again.

  “That was when he went to talk to the fisherman. The tide was rising, you see. He figured that Kamal had dived head first into a stand o’ broken bamboo underwater. The bamboo must’ve pierced him somewhere — his skull or his neck or his chest — and he was stuck down at the bottom. But the rising tide was going to stir things up, and Ram figured the currents might dislodge the body. And since the incoming water widened the channel — this channel right here — he needed a seine to spread across, so the body wouldn’ float out to sea.

  “He came back with his seine. The others had already lit a fire, so they could see what they were doing. They buried two poles deep in the sand on either side of the channel and tied the net between them. Then we sat waiting, everybody around the fire — just over there, nuh — excep’ Ram, who waited at the water’s edge with a torchlight, looking for his friend’s body.

  “I fell asleep — fear still does that to me, you know — only to wake up sometime later, probably close to midnight to see all the others standing beside the river. I remember I’d gone from one bad dream to another — I couldn’ tell you what they were, not even then — and when I woke up and remembered what had happened I thought I was still dreaming. But there they were, standing right there, kind o’ huddling together. I knew right away that I wasn’t dreaming — and I knew too what they were doing there.

  “The fire was blazing — they’d kept feeding it, nuh, nobody wanted it to be dark — and I remember watching from where I was as Ram emerged from the water with Kamal’s body in his arms. Both o’ them glistening wet in the firelight. Kamal’s arms and legs limp, his head hanging back and rocking, like … Like I don’t know what. A wet rag? But a rag was never alive. I just remember a kind o’ horror. He had no tension in his body. His mouth was open and I could see plain-plain a big piece of wood sticking from his head. Turned out Ram was right about the bamboo.

  “Believe it or not there was a discussion about what to do. A discussion Ram put an end to with some choice words, I tell you. You see, some of the fellas wanted to put him into the trunk. That way we could all leave together. They were afraid, they didn’t want to wait while … In the end, they put him into the car and Ram and one of the others drove him to the police station. There was no hospital here then, you see.

  “A week or so later, Ram drove back here to see the fisherman. He brought him a new seine. He felt that the old one was spoiled. So he gave the fella the new seine and asked if he could have the old one. No problem. He took the seine, brought it right here to the riverside, doused it in kerosene and set it on fire.”

  16

  TELL ME, MY dear Mrs. Livingston, are you certain, and I mean absolutely certain, with no tincture of a doubt, that your husband loved you?

  You are, aren’t you. Then you, my dear, are either unnaturally lucky or perilously trusting, and it is not for me to venture a guess as to which. My, the very thought! To live loved and without doubt: It has a touch of the miraculous, wouldn’t you say?

  And — now that I think of it — were you as certain of this when he was alive, still a man of flesh and blood, strength and weakness? A man with whom you had to mesh your life day after day?

  Yes, of course, I should have known. You are a veritable fountain of certainty, aren’t you, my dear? I will admit, though, that I wish I had had a few drops from that fountain when I was younger. There are a few things worse, it seems to me, than living with doubts you can express to no one — hardly even to yourself.

  What it comes down to is this: I always knew that my husband held me in a certain esteem, but it was an esteem that had little to do with me. He would have offered it to any woman he had married: the traditional esteem of a man for his wife — for her role, as it were, for the part she played in the fabric of his life. I doubt that his sentiment for me ever went beyond that — he touched me with warmth, but I saw him offer this same warmth to others — yet I have no doubt that this was what protected me from the single-minded cruelty he would occasionally inflict on others …

  No, no. Not just for incompetence or failure. Sometimes for no reason at all. It was his way of keeping people in line. Some, the less important ones, he would slip money to, twenty dollars here, twenty dollars there, go off and have a drink, boys. But the others …

  I remember one evening a group of them came back to the house after a day running around the island doing whatever it was they did. My husband, Cyril, several of the usual hangers-on. They were tired and sweaty, they had clearly gone deep into the rural areas, probably visiting the cane farmers. They settled in the porch — in chairs, on the floor — and my husband called to the maid to bring whisky and ice. He carefully removed his shoes — they were filthy with mud and God knows what else — and so I went over to get them …

  Of course, I could have left them for Amina. But — I’ll be frank with you, my dear — this was a little strategic move of my own. I always made sure my mother-in-law saw me cleaning and polishing my husband’s shoes. It brought me a little measure of domestic peace, you see. And even after her death, I carried it on. Simple habit, nothing more.

  So I went to collect his shoes from him — but he stopped me. He said Cyril would do it.

  Cyril laughed — uneasily.

  My husband held the shoes out to him: Cyril?

  Cyril laughed again — a forced laugh. He was aware of the sudden silence, knew he had become the centre of an unexpected drama. He said, rather lamely, that he didn’t wish to take the pleasure from me.

  My husband said he had stepped in cow dung that afternoon, and he had no intention of having his wife deal with that: Cyril?

  He sat there for several seconds, my husband persisting until I thought Cyril would cry. Finally, Cyril took the shoes and went off into the house to do as bid …

  Celia wasn’t around. She would not have tolerated it, to be sure, but this happened afterwards, you see. After she had …

  Well, in any case, later I asked my husband why he’d done it. He said he thought Cyril was becoming a little lazy, he needed sharpening up, he was taking this manager post of his both too seriously and not seriously enough — by which he meant that Cyril was more in love with the title than with the duties. But I sensed this was just an excuse. I sensed that there was no reason. The truth was, my husband had humiliated his brother because he felt like it.

  Imagine, if you can, Mrs. Livingston, living with a man like that — a man respectful of you, or at least of your status, but who would spare no one else, not even his brother. And if he would not spare his brother, what guarantee was there that he would always spare me?

  So I envy you, my dear, the certainty you claim to have had in your husband’s love. I envy you — and, at the same time, I cannot bring myself to believe you …

&n
bsp; But that, undoubtedly, is my problem.

  17

  THEY DRIVE ON.

  Light succeeds shadow succeeds light. A mirage of coolness and dry sand.

  Yasmin thinks: There, I could burrow deep.

  At a bend in the road, he slows down. She does not see the track through the palm trees until he has turned onto it — a road of sorts, leading away from the sea. Unpaved, uneven, but he drives with confidence. He knows the way well.

  Presently, the trees fall back and they are at a large clearing of moist, beaten earth. At the far end stands a house, raised several feet off the ground on thick wooden poles. The house is old, of wood weathered a rich brown. Many of the planks have warped; the window shutters all hang off plumb. But its state does not suggest disrepair. Quite the opposite: merely age, and the normal ravages of climate.

  Cyril parks at the edge of the clearing and asks her to wait in the car for him. He promises not to be long. She watches him walk towards the house, and she finds confirmation in his manner that he is at ease here: his feet know the ground.

  When he is halfway there, the front door opens — she glimpses an interior of contained shadow — and a man emerges. He hurries down the stairs with an awkward, stiffened gait. He is tall and rangy — not young, but vigorous in the economical way of those accustomed to a life of hard labour. His attire — hat, soiled khaki shirt and trousers, black rubber boots — conceals him, makes his age difficult to assess.

  Cyril is the first to offer his hand, and the man responds shyly with his own. He is not accustomed to such gestures. They speak briefly, then the man turns and lopes back into the house.

  Cyril slides his hands into his trouser pockets, his lips pursed in a whistle she suspects is tuneless. He glances back at the car, but does not wave.