Trinidad Noir

by Lisa Allen-Agostini

  Lucille’s fear was not the garden-variety fear of ghosts walking on their graves in the cemetery. Her fear had a logical basis, logical if one believes in spirits or at least the ability of humans on this side of the world to communicate with the dead. I am sure this is not how Lucille’s mother would put it if asked about the prayers she said for the dead. Lucille’s mother was a devout Catholic. She believed, as Catholics believed at the time, and perhaps still do, that her prayers for her dead relatives had the power to remit some of their time in Purgatory if they had the misfortune, as most of us will, of dying with venial sins on their souls. Indulgences, the Church called these gifts that the living could bestow on the dead, and one could earn them for their dearly departed if one said such and such prayers and put such and such coins or paper money in the collection basket. Chaucer, of course, had lots of fun with this practice. In the third form, brash teenagers, testing the limits of our religious beliefs, Lucille and I spent many a happy hour reciting lines from The Pardoner, our favorite being the Pardoner’s unabashed admission that he would make people believe they were kissing the bones of saints when what he had offered were the bones of sheep: For myn entente is nat but for to wynne, / And nothyng for correccion of synne.

  My mother had no patience with my cynicism. There are no atheists in fox holes, she would say to me, shaking her finger in my face whenever I voiced criticism of the Church. And she proved her point when I dropped to my knees the first time an earthquake shook our house. I was not an atheist by any means, but I resented the hours I had to spend in church every Sunday and on the holy days. Lucille, like me, was not religious but, unlike me, she never challenged her mother’s beliefs. Every night she obediently joined her siblings in her mother’s bedroom as her mother led them in prayer for Mummy Alice. Mummy Alice was how Mrs. Smart referred to her stepchildren’s dead mother. All Souls’ Day was special. On that day, according to Mrs. Smart, the souls of the dead gathered near their graves, anxiously awaiting Indulgences. So every All Souls’ Day, Mrs. Smart took the children to the cemetery, to the grave of Mummy Alice. I would go with Lucille because, of course, Lucille was my best friend. Mrs. Smart would give each of us several candles. She would light them for us and we would stick them, one at a time, into the earth on the mound of Mummy Alice’s grave. Soon Mummy Alice’s grave would twinkle and glitter with pretty flickering tongues of fire and even I was inclined to believe that Mummy Alice stood their smiling with gratitude and appreciation.

  In the year Lucille and I failed to win an Exhibition, we were so ashamed that younger girls had won and so desperate for help that we decided that the next All Souls’ Day, when Mummy Alice supposedly came out of Purgatory to hover over her grave, we would make a bargain with her. For a whole year, we would put half our weekly allowance in the Indulgence box at the entrance of the church if she would ask God to help us. Hoping to seal the bargain, we placed extra lighted candles on her grave.

  To this day, though rationally I know better, I still wonder if it was the force of nature or, as Mrs. Smart proclaimed, the arrival of Mummy Alice that suddenly caused a powerful wind to swoosh across the cemetery, bypass all the other graves, and slam into the lighted candles on Mummy Alice’s grave. Most of the candles went out immediately, but the flames from a row of them, close to where Lucille was standing, reached up to the edge of her dress and set it on fire. Her mother, who kept a bucket of water nearby for such eventualities, quickly put out the flames. Lucille did not get burned, but whether she believed it was Mummy Alice or the wind that had set her on fire, she developed a mortal fear of the cemetery.

  News traveled fast in our neighborhood, and it was not long before the local boys learned what had happened. But this much I could say for the power of the Indulgences we earned for Mummy Alice with our money and our candles: we both won an Exhibition the next time we took the exams. Yet neither Mummy Alice nor the Smart name could save us from failing Latin and Math in the First Form. On the walk back home from the after-school lessons, which our parents hoped would stir dormant gray cells in our brain (surely, with her last name and accomplished brother and sister, Lucille’s cells were simply resting; in my case, my mother’s hope was an act of faith), we had to endure the taunts of the boys. They would hide behind the cemetery wall, waiting to terrorize us, especially on days when no matter how often I repeated the convoluted Latin verb declensions I never could get them right, and so our lessons lasted close to 6 o’clock. “Boo!” the boys would shout over the cemetery wall as we made our way home in the dusky twilight. We would run, but they would race behind us, stopping just short of our homes. “Lucille Smart ent smart!” they would shout. “She friend duncier. Devil come from the grave and bring the fire from Hell to burn she dress!”

  Did Lucille believe their taunts? It is hard not to lose confidence in one’s intelligence when test scores prove malicious boys right. But I did not believe in all that stuff they said about the Devil and the fires of Hell and I wanted to pay them back for scaring my friend.

  The rainy season that July, toward the end of the school year, was worse than any other in the memories of our parents. According to the rhyme we sang to herald the coming of the rains, July should have stood by. June too soon / July stand by / August come it must / September remember. But the thunder and lightning and powerful winds came in July. There was no standing by. For four days it rained, and when it stopped, much of the earth from the tops of the cemetery graves had eroded. Lucille was not with me when I passed the cemetery and noticed something white and hard and round lodged in a corner between the wall and the rails of the gate. It was the head of a skeleton! I am not a particularly brave person, but I could not bear to see my friend breaking into a cold sweat each time we passed the boys. I had to stop them. When I saw the skull in the corner of the cemetery wall, my already overactive imagination went into overdrive. Our English teacher had told us that we would be reading Hamlet in the Second Form, and Lucille, being an avid reader (though, paradoxically, her competence in every subject except English cast doubt on her native intelligence), couldn’t wait that long. I confess I did not share her enthusiasm, but I listened as she told me the plot. The cemetery scene piqued my interest. Alas, poor Yorick!

  I don’t remember the excuse I gave Lucille for leaving our lessons early that day, but I must have been persuasive for she never suspected I had devious plans. I got to the cemetery early, before the boys came, mounted the skull on a stick, and hid behind a headstone near the cemetery wall. Just as the boys began taunting Lucille, I raised the skull and began such a hooting and a bellowing I almost scared myself and certainly scared them. They ran for their lives.

  I wish I could say that from then on life was wonderful for Lucille. By the Second Form, my brain cells became active, not radically so, but enough that I was able to pass all my seven subjects in the O Level exams in the Fifth Form and was promoted to Lower Sixth to sit for A Levels. Lucille barely passed five subjects. I am convinced it was the pressure of high expectations that stunted her potential. I believe she was so terrified of failure, she was afraid to try. It is curious that only by daring to risk failure do we get the chance to succeed. Lucille never dared. Her father, however, banking on the Smart name, was not deterred, and he was able to persuade the principal of our secondary school to admit Lucille to Lower Sixth.

  Boys, of course, came back in our lives. By the Fifth Form we had begun to blossom: breasts, hips, thighs, and legs. Lucille, struggling behind me in class, overtook me by wide margins in each of those areas. Her dark skin with its red undertones glowed like a ripe governor plum. The boys noticed and vied for her attention. In Lower Sixth her grades continued to slip, though more drastically. Caught up with the rigors of the curriculum for my A Level exams, I could no longer find the time to help her. Lucille turned to the boys, basking in the adoration they showered on her. Was it because at last she found the approval she had longed for all her life that she didn’t seem to care when she wasn’t promoted to Uppe
r Sixth? A few months later she left for the States, and it was years before I heard from her again.

  I know now where Lucille went and what she was doing while I was sitting for my A Level exams. Lucille, who longed for attention and approval, not for what she did but for who she was, succumbed to the hot passion of a boy who did not love her. Ashamed when she became pregnant, her parents squirreled her away to a distant great-aunt in Harlem. Hers is too much a Caribbean story, a story noir, not of guns and daggers, not of high crimes and misdemeanors that cause havoc on the corporeal frame, but a story noir nonetheless, of crimes and misdemeanors against the spirit that feeds “the canker [that] galls the infants of the spring / Too oft before their buttons be disclosed.”

  PEACOCK BLUE

  BY VAHNI CAPILDEO

  Fort George

  When your blood fills with bubbles as you come up too fast to the surface from that kind of depth, that’s when you die. Maureen didn’t think of herself as a water sports girl. Twelve months after the honeymoon at the neighboring island’s safe resort (one block down from the unsafe resort where the hurricanes call in on their way north), that was when she and Vikram started their deep-sea diving. That’s their code name for sex like you wouldn’t believe.

  It’s always like that now. Something breaks and then a million bubbles fill the space she used to call her brain with blue champagne and her eyes scream out to smile. The first time they went to that kind of depth was right after the first big fight. Even a drunk Vikram is not unsteady on his feet, but a Vikram holding their three-month-old (count it, a wedding-night conception) to his chest saying, Is a reflex. I go dive off the cliff, the babba go close he little eyes an’ hold he breath, and then we go come back up safe an’ sound. That way he won’t ever fear the water. Do not fear! Vikram is here is not Maureen’s idea of someone steady enough to lean on. But it was the deliberate use of dialect that drove her wild. They had met abroad at university. She struck the first blow. Not in front of de child, her big man had begged. Put my child down, Ms. Maureen had ordered. And the child had been dumped in the bassinet, and (not in front of the child) they had incurred each other’s gratitude and forgiveness. As any policewoman could have told her, though no policewoman did, it was her fault. So they made a home, the married lovers.

  If the red planet Mars could lift extra color from the vertically aligned points glowing on top of that hill, the points would win out, redder. What else is up there, anyway? A view you’d do better to find in a stack of shopping-mall postcards?

  Up there is the national broadcasting station; is an anarchic geographical condition that makes mobile phones yield up and die halfway through their new national anthems; is a road running from named to nameless that you wouldn’t be driving your Toyota Hilux up in a hurry—with or without an invitation—to the isolated mansions where a catalogue’s worth of electronic amenities flashes constant through the earthquake and thunderstorm power-cuts, for such houses have their own generators, satellite dishes, and stashes of firearms that a slender woman can manage two-handed, her feet spurning rugs that must have driven three generations of a weaver’s family blind, azure into amethyst, blood-red into terra-cotta, shipped here to get crapped on by geckos that turn themselves azure, amethyst, blood-red, and terra-cotta in one blink-free flick of the tongue, but still crap black and white.

  Requisite woman stretches her long legs in her long skirt. The skirt fabric is officially known as “slinky.” Pity that nobody is there to see why. A genuine crocodile-skin bag emits its silent visual crackle on the teak bar. A choppy little wind makes racing silks of the pool. Similar purplish patterns were recently invoked on the soft skin behind the knees beneath the slinky.

  Requisite woman is slender no longer. Four hours hill walking per day “for the sake of her health.” Now she is built. You wouldn’t call that a beaten look.

  The garden hose coils up quietly.

  The lady knows how to treat herself. That dash of lavender in the citronella candle. How about that more-than-a-dash of vodka in the grenadine cocktail with the ruby glass cocktail stirrer tipping back in it. Angostura. Jeezanages! Another stirrer smashed! Just seven left in the set. Get another, order another, go abroad just to buy another. Go abroad and why come back?

  “But he will always come back.” Maureen knows to be tender with beautiful things. Vikram has been a Beautiful Thing surprisingly long, even after the second babba, conceived in fury, blessed their home.

  “Look at him now,” she giggles. It’s not the violence. It’s not the betrayal. It’s his vulgarity! Ducking behind next door’s washing line to have bareback sex with the forty-six-year-old, grizzle-chopped maid. Mr. Not-in-Front-of-the-Children. As if children playing in the upstairs veranda won’t cast a glance next door. Is that beautiful? Telling the doctor it couldn’t be from him that his own wife . . . and then the injections. “It was very uncomfortable,” she enunciates. But the children turned out all right.

  True, things go sweetly. Only sometimes they have what Vikram calls “ding-dong quarrels” and the old people call “Tobago love.” Season in and season out, Tobago love stays in fine flower.

  Maureen sips the drink and smiles. Mica-flaked lips glitter at the smashed ruby glass on the poolside tiling. She pulls her skirt up above her knees. One leg uncoils. See the Beautiful Thing’s latest artwork? It aches to be critiqued. Bitterness sets in, the chlorine aftertaste to every kiss. (Sip, and sip again.)

  This stuff is damned expensive. But he wouldn’t want me to have to work. You can disconnect the wife from the household, but the family’ll keep transmitting to her brain. A sober Vikram maxim. Lucky lovers’ move, to their fortress hilltop, away from Vikram’s poisonous clan. “I made a cry for help. And nooo-body heard me.” What was that his mother had said?

  “Look at you! How you get those hard calves? You were a small-small girl when I saw you on the airplane steps five years ago! You become an old hardback woman now! Watch yourself, or you will find you have to think about . . .”

  “About cosmetic surgery, like Kirti?”

  “Hush your mouth! Who told you that? Kirti is blessed with a natural beauty. Ever since young she has used the aloes from my garden. You want me to bring you some aloes? You could plant them in your garden, or keep them in the fridge and use them fresh. I could keep bringing them for you, if you want to do that and spare yourself the trouble of planting them. I don’t mind. True, I don’t mind. Aloes is good for all kind of things. But what happen, child? You not listening to me! So, sweetheart, where you going to celebrate your anniversary? Somewhere nice? Tea at La Boucan? Dinner tête-à-tête at Apsara? You know how I am happy to mind the grandchildren, if you two young things want some time to go out and enjoy yourselves while you are young—not like me! Where Vikram taking you for your anniversary?”

  “I’m glad you mentioned his name—” Petal the Matriarch suddenly solidified, ten times denser. Her voice softened. That was a rawhide whip in it.

  “Listen to me. If you have something to say about my son, remember this. He loves you so much, it even makes me—his mother!—jealous. Imagine that! When I love you like if you were my own daughter! Vikram is a very loving boy, but he is not per-fect. I don’t know what kind of men you had when you were abroad, or how many, and don’t tell me—I don’t care for you to tell me. I know you feel you are modern young people with a modern marriage. All I know is that you are the apple of Vikram’s eye. You hear me, sweetheart? You believe that? The apple of his eye.” Petal the Matriarch was satisfied with the ensuing silence during which her daughter-in-law’s mouth had closed again after opening in a way that it had never quite opened before.

  That was then.

  “And you know,” sings Requisite Woman to herself, “Petal is the ideal mother-in-law. She would do anything for the grandchildren. We are family. She is right.”

  The glass arcs. Maureen drinks to women’s solidarity. Nice girls don’t snarl in the throat. Let that sound be a sob from the womb. Quick, n
ot the glass too! So many things smashed up, he will notice! Sa-a-a-ve it. A couple of tries before Maureen gets a grip, then the Murano is upright on the—

  “But who the hell put the table there?” The glass is saved. It’s the footing that goes. Muscular bottom, aflower with bruises, makes slinky-clad contact with marble. And—just like that—she sees it.

  Candlelight and fairy lights shine into the pool, but the shining snake has the starring role. Neat, how the tail thrashes. The head’s elevated on that segment of body—so long, would you call it a neck? It’s no bad swimmer. Still doesn’t look pleased to be in the water.

  “You, too, in at the deep end! Poor thing. I wonder what you did in your pas’ life to end up in our pool in all that stink-stink chlorine. But you’re a mapipire. A poisonous one. Death in what, twenty minutes? The hospital people would never find the way up this hill in time. And my mobile might cut out and I forgot again to pay the damned blasted bill for the land line. What would Vikram say in this situation? Do not fear, snake, Maureen is here. If you do something bad, it’s not your fault. Nobody meant you to be in the water.”