Omeros

by Derek Walcott

  from black, white-jacketed servitors whose sonic

  judgement couldn’t distinguish a secondhand-car

  salesman from Manchester from the phony pukka

  tones of ex-patriates. He was no officer,

  but he’d found himself saying things like “Luverly,”

  “Right-o,” and, Jesus Christ, “Ta!” from a wicker chair,

  with the other farts exchanging their brusque volley

  in the class war. Every one of them a liar

  dyeing his roots, their irrepressible Cockney,

  overdoing impatience. Clods from Lancashire

  surprised by servants, outpricing their own value

  and their red-kneed wives with accents like cutlery

  spilled from a drawer. For them, the fields of his valour,

  the war in the desert under Montgomery,

  and the lilac flowers under the crosses were

  preserved by being pickled at the Victoria.

  He’d played the officer’s pitch. Though he felt ashamed,

  it paid off. The sand grit in his throat, the Rover,

  all that sort of stuff. The khaki shorts that proclaimed

  his forgotten service. Well, all that was over,

  but not the class war that denigrated the dead

  face down in the sand, beyond Alexandria.

  The flags pinned to a map. The prone crosses

  of tourists sprawled out far from the red lifeguard’s flag,

  like those of his comrades with sand seaming their eyes.

  What was it all for? A bagpipe’s screech and a rag.

  Well, why not? In war, the glory was the yeoman’s;

  the kids from drizzling streets; they fell like those Yanks

  in a sun twice as fierce, Tobruk and Alamein’s,

  their corpses black in the shade of the shattered tanks,

  their bodies dragged like towels to a palm-tree’s shade.

  Those lines of white surf raced like the applauding streets

  alongside the Eighth Army when Montgomery broke

  the back of the Afrika Korps. Blokes in white sheets

  flinging caps like spray as we piped into Tobruk

  and I leant on the tank turret while bagpipes screeched

  ahead of those grinning Tommies. I wept with pride.

  Tears prickled his eyes. Maud reached across the saucer

  and gripped his fingers. He knew she could see inside

  the wound in his head. His white nurse. His officer.

  II

  Not club-mates. Chums, companions. Comrades-in-arms.

  They crouched, hands on helmets, while the Messerschmitt’s gun

  stitched, in staccato succession, miniature palms

  along the top of the trench. He shot up. Again

  Tumbly pulled him down. “Just keep yer bleedin’ ’ead low!”

  Scott was running to them, laughing, but the only thing

  funny about him was the fact that one elbow

  didn’t have the rest of the arm. He jerked the thing

  from the stump, mimicking a Kraut salute; then, as

  his astonishment passed, he sagged down from the knees

  with that grin. And I turned to Tumbly and his eyes

  were open but not moving; then an awful noise

  lifted all of us up from the sand and I guess

  I was hit then, but I could remember nothing

  for months, in casualty. Oh yes! that business

  of Tumbly’s eyes. The sky in them. Scottie laughing.

  Tell them that at the Victoria, in the noise

  of ice-cubes tinkling and the draft-beer frothing.

  This wound I have stitched into Plunkett’s character.

  He has to be wounded, affliction is one theme

  of this work, this fiction, since every “I” is a

  fiction finally. Phantom narrator, resume:

  Tumbly. Blue holes for his eyes. And Scottie wiser

  when the shock passed. Plain men. Not striking. Not handsome.

  Through the Moorish arches of the hospital ward,

  with a cloud wrapped around his head like an Arab,

  he saw the blue Mediterranean, then Maud

  lying on her back on the cliff and the scarab

  of the troop ship far on the roadstead. Two days’ leave

  before they set out, and he thought he would never

  see her again, but if he did, a different life

  had to be made whenever the war was over,

  even if it lasted ten years, if she would wait,

  not on this grass cliff but somewhere on the other

  side of the world, somewhere, with its sunlit islands,

  where what they called history could not happen. Where?

  Where could this world renew the Mediterranean’s

  innocence? She deserved Eden after this war.

  Past that islet out there was the Battle of the Saints.

  Old Maud was ruddy as a tea-rose; once her hair

  was gold as a beer-stein in firelight, but now

  she’d stretch a mapped arm from her nightdress. “It’s a rare

  chart of the Seychelles or something.” “Oh, my love, no!”

  “You are my tea-rose, my crown, my cause, my honour,

  my desert’s white lily, the queen for whom I fought.”

  Sometimes the same old longing descended on her

  to see Ireland. He set down his glass in the ring

  of a fine marriage. Only a son was missing.

  III

  How fast it fades! Maud thought; the enamelled sky,

  the gilded palms, the bars like altars of raffia,

  even for that Madonna bathing her baby

  with his little shrimp thing! One day the Mafia

  will spin these islands round like roulette. What use is

  Dennis’s devotion when their own ministers

  cash in on casinos with their old excuses

  of more jobs? Their future felt as sinister as

  that of that ebony girl in her yellow dress.

  “There’s our trouble,” Maud muttered into her glass. In

  a gust that leant the triangular sails of the

  surfers, Plunkett saw the pride of Helen passing

  in the same yellow frock Maud had altered for her.

  “She looks better in it”—Maud smiled—“but the girl lies

  so much, and she stole. What’ll happen to her life?”

  “God knows,” said Plunkett, following the butterfly’s

  yellow-panelled wings that once belonged to his wife,

  the black V of the velvet back, near the shallows.

  Her head was lowered; she seemed to drift like a waif,

  not like the arrogant servant that ruled their house.

  It was at that moment that he felt a duty

  towards her hopelessness, something to redress

  (he punned relentlessly) that desolate beauty

  so like her island’s. He drained the foaming Guinness.

  Seychelles. Seashells. One more. In the olive saucer,

  the dry stones were piling up, their green pith sucked dry.

  Got what we took from them, yes sir! Quick, because the

  Empire was ebbing. He watched the silhouette

  of his wife, her fine profile set in an oval

  ivory cloud, like a Victorian locket,

  as when, under crossed swords, she lifted the lace veil.

  The flag then was sliding down from the hill-stations

  of the Upper Punjab, like a collapsing sail;

  an elephant folded its knees, its striations

  wrinkling like the tea-pavilions after the Raj,

  whose ebbing surf lifted the coastlines of nations

  as lacy as Helen’s shift. In the noon’s mirage

  the golden palms shook their tassels, Eden’s Egypt

  sank in the tinted sand. The Giza pyramids

  darkened wit
h the sharpening Pitons, as Achille shipped

  both oars like rifles. Clouds of delivered Muslims

  foamed into the caves of mosques, and honour and glory

  faded like crested brandies. Then remorseful hymns

  soared in the stone-webbed Abbey. Memento mori

  in the drumbeat of Remembrance Day. Pigeons whirr

  over Trafalgar. Helen needed a history,

  that was the pity that Plunkett felt towards her.

  Not his, but her story. Not theirs, but Helen’s war.

  The name, with its historic hallucination,

  brightened the beach; the butterfly, to Plunkett’s joy,

  twinkling from myrmidon to myrmidon, from one

  sprawled tourist to another. Her village was Troy,

  its smoke obscuring soldiers fallen in battle.

  Then her unclouding face, her breasts were its Pitons,

  the palms’ rusted lances swirled in the death-rattle

  of the gargling shoal; for her Gaul and Briton

  had mounted fort and redoubt, the ruined barracks

  with its bushy tunnel and its penile cannon;

  for her cedars fell in green sunrise to the axe.

  His mind drifted with the smoke of his reverie

  out to the channel. Lawrence arrived. He said:

  “I changing shift, Major. Major?” Maud tapped his knee.

  “Dennis. The bill.” But the bill had never been paid.

  Not to that housemaid swinging a plastic sandal

  by the noon sea, in a dress that she had to steal.

  Wars. Wars thin like sea-smoke, but their dead were real.

  He smiled at the mythical hallucination

  that went with the name’s shadow; the island was once

  named Helen; its Homeric association

  rose like smoke from a siege; the Battle of the Saints

  was launched with that sound, from what was the “Gibraltar

  of the Caribbean,” after thirteen treaties

  while she changed prayers often as knees at an altar,

  till between French and British her final peace

  was signed at Versailles. All of this came to his mind

  as Lawrence came staggering up the terrace

  with the cheque finally, and that treaty was signed;

  the paper was crossed by the shadow of her face

  as it was at Versailles, two centuries before,

  by the shade of Admiral Rodney’s gathering force;

  a lion-headed island remembering war,

  its crouched flanks tawny with drought, and on its ridge, grass

  stirred like its mane. For a while he watched the waiter

  move through the white iron shields of the white terrace.

  In the village Olympiad, on St. Peter’s Day,

  he served as official starter with a flare-gun

  borrowed from the manager of the marina.

  It wasn’t Aegean. They climbed no Parthenon

  to be laurelled. The depot faced their arena,

  the sea’s amphitheatre. When one wore a crown—

  victor ludorum—no one knew what it meant, or

  cared to be told. The Latin syllables would drown

  in the clapping dialect of the crowd. Hector

  would win, or Achille by a hair; but everyone

  knew as the crossing ovals of their thighs would soar

  in jumps down the cheering aisle, or their marathon

  six times round the village, that the true bounty was

  Helen, not a shield nor the ham saved for Christmas;

  as one slid down the greased pole to factional roars.

  Chapter VI

  I

  These were the rites of morning by a low concrete

  parapet under the copper spears of the palms,

  since men sought fame as centaurs, or with their own feet,

  or wrestlers circling with pincer-extended arms,

  or oblong silhouettes racing round a white vase

  of scalloped sand, when a boy on a pounding horse

  divided the wrestlers with their lowering claws

  like crabs. As in your day, so with ours, Omeros,

  as it is with islands and men, so with our games.

  A horse is skittering spray with rope for its rein.

  Only silhouettes last. No one remembers the names

  of foam-sprinters. Time halts the arc of a javelin.

  This was repeated behind Helen’s back, in the shade

  of the wall. She was gossiping with two women

  about finding work as a waitress, but both said

  the tables was full. What the white manager mean

  to say was she was too rude, ’cause she dint take no shit

  from white people and some of them tourist—the men

  only out to touch local girls; every minute—

  was brushing their hand from her backside so one day

  she get fed up with all their nastiness so she tell

  the cashier that wasn’t part of her focking pay,

  take off her costume, and walk straight out the hotel

  naked as God make me, when I pass by the pool,

  people nearly drown, not naked completely, I

  still had panty and bra, a man shout out, “Beautifool!

  More!” So I show him my ass. People nearly die.

  The two women screamed with laughter, then Helen leant

  with her skirt tucked into her thighs, and asked, elbows

  on her knees, if it had work in the beach restaurant

  with the Chinee. They said “None.” Behind her, footballers

  were heading the world. Helen said: “Girl, I pregnant,

  but I don’t know for who.” “For who,” she heard an echoing call, as

  with oo’s for rings a dove moaned in the manchineel.

  Helen stood up, brushing her skirt. “Is no sense at all

  spending change on transport”; easing straps from each heel.

  II

  Change burns at the beach’s end. She has to decide

  to enter the smoke or to skirt it. In that pause

  that divides the smoke with a sword, white Helen died;

  in that space between the lines of two lifted oars,

  her shadow ambles, filly of Menelaus,

  while black piglets root the midden of Gros Îlet,

  but smoke leaves no signature on its page of sand.

  “Yesterday, all my troubles seem so far away,”

  she croons, her clear plastic sandals swung by one hand.

  III

  Far down the beach, where the boy had wheeled it around,

  the stallion was widening. Helen heard its hooves

  drumming through her bare feet, and turned, as the unreined

  horse plunged with its dolphining neck, the wheezing halves

  of its chest distended by the ruffling nostrils

  like a bellows, as spray fanned from the punished waves,

  while the boy with an Indian whoop hammered his heels

  on the barrel of the belly into thick smoke

  where its blur spun, whinnying, and the stallion’s sound

  scalded her scalp with memory. A battle broke

  out. Lances of sunlight hurled themselves into sand,

  the horse hardened to wood, Troy burned, and a soundless

  wrestling of smoke-plumed warriors was spun

  from the blowing veils, while she dangled her sandals

  and passed through that door of black smoke into the sun.

  And yesterday these shallows were the Scamander,

  and armed shadows leapt from the horse, and the bronze nuts

  were helmets, Agamemnon was the commander

  of weed-bearded captains; yesterday, the black fleet

  anchored there in the swift’s road, in the wiry nets

  thrown past the surf when the sea and a river meet;

  yesterday the sightless holes of
a driftwood log

  heard the harp-wires on the sea, the white thunder

  off Barrel of Beef, and Seven Seas and a dog

  sat in a wineshop’s shade; a red sail entered the

  drifting tree of a rainspout, and the faint pirogue

  slow as a snail whose fingers untie the reef-knots

  of a common horizon left a silvery slime

  in its wake; yesterday, in that sea without time,

  the golden moss of the reef fleeced the Argonauts.

  I saw her once after that moment on the beach

  when her face shook my heart, and that incredible

  stare paralyzed me past any figure of speech,

  when, because they thought her moods uncontrollable,

  her tongue too tart for a waitress to take orders,

  she set up shop: beads, hair-pick, and trestle table.

  She braided the tourists’ flaxen hair with bright beads

  cane-row style, then would sit apart from the vendors

  on her sweet-drink crate while they bickered like blackbirds

  over who had stolen whose sale, in the shadows

  of the thatched hut with T-shirts and flowered sarongs.

  Her carved face flickering with light-wave patterns cast

  among the coconut masks, the coral earrings

  reflected the sea’s patience. Once, when I passed

  her shadow mixed with those shadows, I saw the rage

  of her measuring eyes, and felt again the chill

  of a panther hidden in the dark of its cage

  that drew me towards its shape as it did Achille.

  I stopped, but it took me all the strength in the world

  to approach her stall, as it takes for a hunter

  to approach a branch where a pantheress lies curled

  with leaf-light on its black silk. To stand in front of her

  and pretend I was interested in the sale

  of a mask or a T-shirt? Her gaze looked too bored,

  and just as a pantheress stops swinging its tail

  to lightly leap into grass, she yawned and entered

  a thicket of palm-printed cloth, while I stood there

  stunned by that feline swiftness, by the speed

  of her vanishing, and behind her, trembling air

  divided by her echo that shook like a reed.

  Chapter VII

  I

  Where did it start? The iron roar of the market,

  with its crescent moons of Mohammedan melons,

  with hands of bananas from a Pharaoh’s casket,

  lemons gold as the balls of Etruscan lions,

  the dead moon of a glaring mackerel; it increases

  its pain down the stalls, the curled heads of cabbages