Trinidad Noir

by Lisa Allen-Agostini

Flat of the hand on the marble, she pushes herself up, small of the back against the table. The fall has doubled the old pain. For a split second, woman faced with snake is filled with a rare sense of mastery. Lord of creation! But a semi-Hindu lord, animated by a sense of identity with the creature. “Snake,” says the woman, “you are lucky. I know. I am like you. I am not going to hurt you. Listen to me, snake. I did not grow up in Port-of-Spain.” The snake’s eyes flash. It’s going somewhere fast, though not out of the water. “I am a country girl from Sangre Grande, snake, who did well at school and went abroad to university. I fell in love. Now here we are at home. You cannot know what it is to love, snake. Count yourself fortunate.”

  The snake’s flat head reminds the woman of her long-dead, beloved Sangre Grande old ladies, their oiled hair flat under the orhni, their English hissing and thudding, moved by an older, more complicated language translated from but not spoken. The flash of the eyes.

  “Should I save you, snake? If I were my uncles, I would take a long stick and crush your head fast-fast right there where the neck gets thick. That is where you have your li’l reptile brain and reptile soul, snake. You would not twine up the stick and sting me. See, I have a long stick. But you don’t have to swim so fast. Take a rest, snake. You take a rest though I cannot.”

  Vikram rounds the corner of the house soundlessly, navy on navy, evening on denim. A drunken wife is disgusting. There had been no whiff of drunkenness about Maureen the student. A good girl to present to the family and marry, yet more able than a home-kept virgin to appreciate a steady man. Vikram considers himself no drinker. He began during the engagement. There was so much to reconcile. He hates the idea of himself as the athlete who’s started drinking. Early swimming sessions almost abolish the night, and day, before. If only he could make sure that day would always break on him in the blue water.

  And does his wife feel his eyes on her? Of course not. How long will she harangue this freestyle mapipire? Even a snake can hold her attention more than her husband. He knows he cannot make her pay. His beautiful wife is an emotional bankruptcy. Give her a chance, a minute or two. Hasn’t she promised to notice him first and forever? Beautiful Things, if they are male, do well with a touch of cruelty in their good looks. Vikram is no exception. If Petal the Matriarch could have seen her son, she’d have had cause to insist on just how handsome he is.

  “It is not good for me to have a drink, snake, and it is not good for you to be in that pool. I do not give satisfaction as a wife and mother. I know that. But you, snake, I can save you and I can tidy you. Let me tidy you up now.” Maureen totters toward the long pole, the one with the net on the end that the yard boy uses for fishing out dead leaves, belly-up lizards, and whatever unwelcome floating objects you don’t care to have your cocoa-buttered shoulder brush up against in the predawn chill. Those are crazy steps the high-heeled Spanish sandals are making. The Clinique nails press lustrous on the white-painted wood pole. Holding it, the arms swing the body out of balance.

  “MAUREEN!” One foot in the air, mouth open, she skids and lunges to a stop. “MAUREEN!”

  “Hello, darling.” Graceless, she scatters the fire that alcohol stitches to the edge of a sexy voice. She topples onto her bottom and giggles.

  “What the hell you doing, woman?”

  His wife gets up surprisingly fast. Her grip on the stick appears martial. “You want this?”

  “No. No . . .”

  “Here, you want this? Port-of-Spain man, Fatima Boys’ School athlete, you want to take the snake out of your own pool?” She nears at a prowling crouch. The stick lashes across his shins. “Hold onto it, man! I am giving it to you! You can’t take it? Hold onto it!”

  What should be clear tumbles dark. Somewhere in the same pool is the snake, thrashing. Water is bitter on his corneas, bitter bile runs in his gullet. Maureen is not visible through the splinters of water and night light, and the sense of the unwanted thing nearing.

  It is she crying out. “Let me help you . . .”

  She is on her knees, wetting the slinky and stinking of chlorine, trying to scoop a snake into her net. Her ears are filling with husband-voiced curses. She is on her knees screaming as the pole is snatched from her hands by a dripping hero. The snake is on the tiles among the ruby glass splinters. He is beating the snake on the back of the neck with the pole. He is beating her with the same pole. One kick and she’s in the pool. Then they are in the water together. A million bubbles blueing out her brain, the kissing is beginning.

  The Northern Range is green no longer. Much of the rain forest burned down in the last dry season. The police and the army were busy all day and the water trucks exhausted just taking water to people who complained on television that they did not have any. You could study the deforestation and the erosion and everything else, but who listens? What to do? It’s better not to worry your head and beat yourself up about that. Petal the Matriarch watched the burning mountains. “The colors real pretty, you don’t find so? Like sunset all through the day.”

  At the edge of the Port-of-Spain Swim Club pool, Vikram stands. Rain or shine, every day that there is not thunder and lightning, he likes to stand as he is standing now, on the diving board. He must have bought that swimsuit in the States— skintight peacock-blue. His cousins wouldn’t be seen dead in anything except baggy swimshorts of a nondescript color. But from the neck down, it is so obvious that Vikram is no pretty boy. Suave, yes, but not a sof’ man. He real macho.

  Open-air electric-blue laid out in an oblong, and Vikram dives into it. Speed and perfectibility—the white sky shattering announces his departure from the air with a thousand gongs. Bubbles tumble. Deep in the water, Vikram turns with strength. He reemerges all brightness.

  That girl he married does not know when she’s lucky. Like she doesn’t remember she married a man she could talk to. You should see Vikram at a family get-together. You know the way women stand about in groups by themselves? Well, he will go over and talk to the women. He can talk about anything— scandal, international politics, people living abroad. And he will tell the women that looking pale doesn’t mean looking good, that they should not be afraid of getting a little suntan or putting on a little weight, that the most beautiful women in the world are from this country. He offers to top up their whiskey if they are the kind of educated women who drink because they still feel they have something to prove. Vikram is a bit of a radical since he got back from Away, a little bohemian. He knows how to debate, in dialect and in formal English, and he knows how to respect a woman’s intelligence. Whenever Cheryl or Ambika is at one of these dos, he will talk with them ’specially now and then during the evening. You should hear the kinds of things they discuss. Legalizing abortion! Turning a blind eye to homosexuality! But you know, he can be very nice to the children. Even when they grow up and go away, they will always remember him for the little books and things he used to bring back for them when he was studying. It’s so nice when you see that happen in a family.

  When Vikram has dived, he is alone. Maureen should be there to watch him. Even six months ago, before she started drinking and getting ideas, she would have been there on a deckchair, wearing sunglasses and one of those dresses that make her look like Miss Brazil. She has a sense of style, though she went to live with her aunt in England and then to Art College, which is why she hardly knows Trinidad at all.

  Vikram loves Maureen too-too bad. He dwells on the nice figure she had when they met. Maybe it fooled Vikram up, how Maureen tossed her hair and shoulders and giggled, wriggling string-bean legs. Poor Vikram is a boy, after all. Despite her veneer of intellectualism, he must have seen what she had in common with the girls at home, the most beautiful girls in the world.

  Maureen and Vikram have been living apart for all of three days. What is there for her to do alone in that house on the hill? Hog it all to herself and her third, barely-there, pregnant bump? She and her days’ worth of dirty plates on the floor, waiting for her husband to return and fetch a
nd carry and pick up after her, as if he had nothing better to do? And like any nice boy, isn’t her husband hard to convince that he has nothing better to do? Three days’ worth of convincing has not convinced him back up the hill.

  You should see how patient he is. It must be twenty times in the last three days that he has had this conversation:

  “So how come you are the one to move out?”

  He shrugs. “She threaten me with lawyers, police, all kind of thing, I don’t know. Sometimes I’m afraid she hasn’t . . . adjusted . . . so well. But if this is how she feels for the moment, this is how she feels. She is my prin-cess and she must have her space.”

  Who could believe ingratitude like Maureen’s? It’s true she did not throw his clothes out on the lawn, or pull a gun on him, or change all the locks. If she’d wanted an excuse, she had one after the thing with the maid that they both tried to hush up. But it’s ungrateful of her to allow him to just leave voluntarily. If Vikram was intent on leaving for her sake, and Maureen loved him, why didn’t she lock up the house and abandon it and follow? How could she be so ready to abandon her born children and let their grandmother take them away?

  Why is she not there as she used to be—with that naughty-but-nice English-girl look, not straightforward—waiting to offer him a cool drink, pink and green in a rock crystal tumbler, a nip of something else in it. And his clean-cut refusal.

  “It’s only temporary. She needs her space.” Vikram speaks in his American voice, a voice that conveys hurt, together with the smile where the eyebrows quirk up in the middle while the corners of the eyelids droop—a good face set against a bad fate.

  “You mean she let you leave? What a bloody selfish cow!” shouts Ambika, who spent a year at the English college with Maureen.

  “Maureen looks so quiety-quiety, but you can never tell,” Auntie Kirti mourns, frowning at Ambika’s strong language. “Your wife really string you along, boy. She is ungrateful. Neemakharam. A taker. What space she need so? Maureen should be minding her family. She even have a place to live here if it wasn’t for you? But what you worrying about her for? I can see you worrying. Here, you want something else to eat? Take something nah, take something and eat nah, you need your strength for your studies. For your job.”

  “You stupid or what?” Petal the Matriarch scorns her mealy-mouthed sister. “The bitch good, yes. She eh play she lucky! She lucky for true! My son leaving she with the marital home while he traipse back long-face and tail between he legs to his mother’s house? And I minding she children since I don’t know when and I don’t know for how long! But what kind of blasted arseness is this? You stay here as long as you want, Son. Your welcome will never wear out here. I went to college in England too, for well longer than she, but I know I come back home for Independence, I not going to talk like she. She have house and land and children and husband, and now she have she space.”

  Women of the generation of Petal the Matriarch can use bad words without shocking anybody. They started doing so forty years ago, after their marriages, when they acquired their own homes. But Petal makes “space” sound so deeply obscene that everyone is quiet for three seconds.

  “He get thin, eh? How you looking so thin? How she have you so? Like she bewitch you! Look how thin he get! But what happen, like Maureen never used to feed you? Come and eat, boy, sit down and ree-lax, sit down and eat.”

  “He’s not any thinner than he wants to be, Auntie Kirti,” Ambika drawls. “He’s always down the gym, watching his figure.” She taps her cigarette into a red-and-black plastic ashtray on an ivory inlaid table. The Matriarch looks outraged.

  “I have a little paunch,” interjects Cheryl. She places her glittering hands on either side of the concavity around which she has strung a belt. “You see? I am getting a little paunch.”

  “How much do you weigh?” asks Ambika, with interest.

  “One hundred and twelve pounds. You know, eight stone.”

  “And you are how tall? What, five-foot-four? You shouldn’t weigh more than a hundred and four pounds. That is your ideal weight.”

  Anyone can see how Vikram misses Maureen—misses her enough to get vexed. But he won’t say anything. He won’t do anything. He is a gentle man.

  “You don’t worry, Beta,” says Auntie Kirti. “What that girl did was totally out of order. But you don’t worry about her. I have told my maid to get a taxi and go up there and spend two hours a day every morning until that girl is up and about again.”

  “People don’t expect a young lady to get into those sorts of state, do they?”

  “Mind your own business, Ambika. I am concerned for the girl,” croons Cheryl. “It seem to me she has not adjusted well. Maybe she will need to go away for a little while until she feels better.”

  A single woman soon to be dispossessed of her social status, Maureen tries to think that she is safe. That day when the yard boy walked into her bedroom pretending to ask her an ordinary question—she felt too miserable to move when he came in, too sick to know when he left, and she was too wise to tell anyone how he and his friend materialized on another day when she was lying there unbathed and in a tangle of cotton and grief. Since then she hasn’t trusted the so-called instinct of self-preservation. No, since before.

  Maureen knows that someone like her does not really require help. She will not buy a guard dog. How could she manage that kind of beast? She does not talk to the police more than she has to. The police are her in-laws’ friends, and they already check up on her. She knows, when she hears the lock of the back door going. And even the best private security firms would not bring a helicopter to her hill. But armed service is not always what a girl needs to feel secure.

  One little thing she can do, and she has done almost straight away, is to have the swimming pool emptied. That gives her a reason to send the yard boy on a few weeks’ holiday. So nice of him to stay and work for her without wages, when she is so difficult. Without the pool needing chemicals and things fished out of it, and with Kirti’s fearful polisher doing her daily stint, the property is kept up at a decent standard. Any more snakes can go in the pool next door.

  Vikram keeps smiling. “She needs her space.”

  “You need to get out more, talk to some men, boy. Maureen had you shut up there in that house until, like, you gone stupid over she? Why you don’t drop in on Jay and Eduardo this evening? I know they would like to see you.”

  Ambika’s drawl. “Eduardo is a barbarian.”

  “Shut up, Ambika. Isn’t that what you foreign-educated girls like to say to your elders—shut up?” Vikram’s ears are packed with bubbles when the womenfolk talk. He can think only of the fresh start in the morning’s electric blueness.

  Received wisdom has it that on or near the equator, the day vanishes abruptly, gold to black, without nightfall. At eleven degrees above the equator, for those who care to perceive it, there is a violet hour. Whiskey has been on Vikram’s breath for about three and a half hours by now. His tan is deep, acquired by poolsides that are not his own. His anger surges. The new moon is strung out like a hammock, white by the red of the broadcasting station’s three-point glow.

  Does Vikram need an invitation to his own house? It is not without an invitation that the borrowed Toyota Hilux ransacks a path, on full beam, to the heights where that house and wife of his are located. A tipsy giggle ripped apart by mobile phone crackle. “You don’t swim for me anymore? Swim for me tonight.” Then the flatline tone. No hope of a workable signal on that hill.

  There are some lessons that a good man would hope not to have to teach. Vikram is equipped with tools for the teaching.

  Such ridge-top trees as stayed unburned make ink etchings on the tropical dusk.

  Vikram knows this road’s ups and downs. He switches off the engine and the lights. He inches. He coasts. But he can hear singing and talking. That must be in his head. The radio is not on and nobody is about in the neighboring houses, except the high-ranking army couple whose voices are raise
d as ever on their veranda, a gun making punctuation in the air, all present and correct.

  Vikram stops outside his own land. He knows what he has come to do. “My babba. My baby.” He is sobbing and shaking. He is all alone with the feeling of being a man who means harm. This is hateful. He switches on the pinpoint torchlight of his mobile phone—all it is good for in this place where its waves cut up voices.

  First, can’t he cool his head? He rubs some whiskey on his forehead. He takes out his wallet and looks at the photo of Maureen, small smiler in an alien landscape. His Beautiful Thing face reasserts itself over its breakup. (Handsome, the Matriarch says . . .) He can’t cool his head? The Clarks come off and the Pringle socks. The dark jeans too, he folds them neatly. Those as well? Yes. Now there is only the shirt, only the white vest. The athlete, stripped. It is night, but he needs the touch of blueness. Poised at the edge of the pool, he lets it sink in before he speeds up—the feeling of perfectibility, the anticipation of brightness. It shatters white as the moon, whiter than day.

  There is a cry at the moment of no contact with water.

  There is a female cry following hard upon the sound of his cry. Maureen.

  Will she offer to help? She was expecting something to tidy up now.

  If you look at certain hills in other countries—territories that are northern by latitude though seldom by title—any green that you can see might as well be called purple or blue or brown or Venetian-red. The reflections and weave of things prevent the tongue from settling on any adjective, except as a compromise between the dullness of the naming language and the dazzled eye. Here in Trinidad it is different. The green is green. Except when rain gathers, then it is darkness. And except at dawn, when amethyst and terra-cotta slip a glory that is almost cold on the nation’s three defining lines of steep terrain.

  Not far from these houses is the kind of area where you see the steps that go nowhere. These concrete or stone steps may go straight up any hill or mountain in Trinidad. You may have seen them, for example, on the North Coast Road, cut into the ferrous rock. On your left you will have had the precipice—the vines, the trees, and the drop down to the gorgeous dangers of the bathing beaches. Your car, like all the other cars, will have been taking the winds and speeding, hoping not to meet another vehicle going the opposite way around a turn. On the right there will have been the chuckling of rain forest—at certain times of year, a waterfall that runs where nobody knows, under fern flooring. On such a route you may have seen the steps starting in a clearing, but then just going—up. Could the end of that vertical be where the true Rastafarians live, those enlightened yogis tenderly raising their pumpkin, plantain, cassava, and marijuana, with as little disturbance as possible to the earth they cleanly and illegally hold? I doubt that’s how it is, but I like the idea of it.