‘Remember what Pilate ask Jesus. What is truth?’ Jonah quoted the New Testament.
‘Yes, what is truth? What is history?’ Vincent added.
‘History, Doc?’
‘Yes, history.’
He pulled his Panama over his brow and looked into the far distance, the western shore of Sancta Trinidad. The coast was a faint pencil line, a trail of grey smoke. He surveyed its contours, as if tracing his finger along a map. His eye travelled from the mouth of the Caroni River where Walter Raleigh had once entered, and much earlier, the conquistador, Antonio de Berrio, had taken his ships, under the swaying bamboo, to the founding capital at San Jose de Oruñya, the site of the hanging of twelve Caribs in the sixteenth century, a rough justice in retaliation for the crucifixion of twelve Spaniards. Here the caravels of Europe, their charnel galleons, their slaving ships, arrived on their Middle Passage, from the coasts of ivory and gold, or, later, when that enterprise had foundered, brought those others in bunks upon bunks in the holds from Calcutta and Uttar Pradesh, for the business of Empire, sugar.
The gulf, now that Vincent could see more of it, was stacked with tankers and merchant steamers. These were part of the transatlantic convoys which came up from Brazil and Argentina, along the Guianas through the Bocas, stopping here to refuel. The tankers were here to collect the oil for the war from the refinery at Point-à-Pierre.
‘See, history.’ Vincent stretched his arm wide, pointing into the gulf and beyond. When he turned towards the house, he saw the figure of Theo. Theo was at the end of the jetty, sitting on his own. Vincent’s heart rose with anticipation, with apprehension. Jonah pointed, ‘Watch, the boy, Doc, he waiting for you.’ Then he added, ‘You ent think the boy need a mother?’
I could have a son that age, Vincent thought. Then he smiled to himself ironically. The figure of Odetta fleeing through his mind, he answered Jonah. ‘A boy needs a father. A father needs a son. What about your children, Jonah?’
‘I does look out for them. I does carry their mother things for them in Moruga. But is here I get a work.’ It was Jonah’s common defence.
As the pirogue neared the jetty, Vincent could see Theo more clearly. So slight. He sat resting his chin on his knees, peering over the end of the jetty. From further out, Vincent had thought that he was fishing, remembering that he had said that he would fish with him this afternoon at four. There was a rod by his side.
‘Hi, Theo, catch this.’ Jonah coiled the rope at the bow to throw to the boy to tie up. The motor idled as they neared the jetty. At first, Theo did not show any recognition of their arrival, but when Jonah called again, ‘Boy, what wrong with you, catch the rope,’ he stood up and faced the two men. He was stark naked. He stood facing them directly, then turned and ran, as fast as he could, up to the house.
They saw him climb the steps to the front verandah, two steps at a time, then disappear; a naked child in the glare of the afternoon sun, running.
The two men looked at each other in astonishment. They did not speak. Vincent raised his eyebrows in alarm. He took the rope from Jonah, who went back to the stern and steered the boat alongside the jetty for Vincent to clamber off and tie up.
‘I better go and see what’s the matter,’ Vincent said to Jonah.
‘You want me to remain, Doc? In case there’s some trouble?’
‘Yes,’ he reflected. ‘Hold on a moment, Jonah, if you don’t mind. I’ll let you know if I need you. If I do, I’ll call from the window upstairs. He’s probably in his room at the back. Not himself since the burning. That’s why he’s not been at the school.’
Vincent was a while. Then Jonah received the signal that it was fine to go. ‘See you in the morning,’ Vincent called. The echo came back from across the bay.
‘Right, Doc.’ Jonah cupped his palms around his mouth like blowing into a conch. The boatman’s voice came back from the hills. He waved from the jetty, undid the rope, got back into the pirogue, started up the motor and set off.
Vincent stood for a moment watching him from the upstairs window. He looked across to the convent. The figure of a nun was standing on the cliff overlooking Embarcadère Corbeau. The skirts of her white cotton habit ballooned in the breeze, her veil fluttered like a white flag of surrender. Thérèse? Vincent asked himself.
He turned back into the house. The stench was overpowering. As soon as he entered the house, he could smell the putrid odour. The wind had died down, so there was not the usual sea breeze to dispel the awful retching smell.
Vincent heard only his own heart beating hard in his chest, as he walked about downstairs, looking into the kitchen, which was spotlessly clean, as was the drawing room and the verandah which he had walked through earlier. Theo had swept, mopped and dusted. He wondered whether he had gone out the back door to his perch on the wall by the water tank. Vincent could see from the kitchen window that he was not there.
Far in the distance, he caught the dying sounds of Jonah’s put putting pirogue arriving at Embarcadère Corbeau. There was the sound of Jonah’s conch and the echo of it in the hills across the bay, as he announced his arrival.
Vincent knew now where to look, having discovered the boy’s hiding place under the stairs in the past.
But no, Theo was not there, not even in the deepest recess. So, then, his first thought that Theo would go to his room must be correct. He climbed the stairs. It was obvious that this was where the smell was coming from. There were more flies than usual, even downstairs. But, on the stairs and on the landing outside Theo’s room, they buzzed and flew off and settled again, particularly near the crack at the bottom of the bedroom door.
His first thought, on entering the house, had been that one of the lavatories had been blocked again, because of the lack of water. The tanks had been running dry until the water boats had eventually arrived earlier today.
The house was still and hot. The heat worsened the pervasive odour of human excrement. The door knob was smeared with dried faeces. Vincent took out his handkerchief and used it to open the door.
Even before he had fully opened it, he heard the low moaning sound coming from inside the room. But with the door fully open now, the full blast of the stench which seeped through the house was unbearable. He had used his handkerchief to protect his hands, so now he had to bury his nose in his shirt sleeve, as he entered and looked around the room, whose floors and walls were smeared with shit. The bed sheets and the mosquito net had been painted with the excrement. There was a strong smell of urine now as well.
Vincent wondered in what place he was. He could not see Theo, but he continued to hear the low moaning sound. There was an old, wooden, varnished Victorian press in the corner of the room, behind the door. The low moaning sound was coming from inside the press. He went over and opened it. Under two shirts, hanging on wooden hangers, one blue, the other a white school uniform shirt, was the naked Theo, curled up like an overgrown foetus. Vincent could now see what he had not seen outside, that his skin was smeared with his own excrement. The body paintings were on his face and arms, and in long streaks across his chest and stomach.
Vincent was retching. He now had to tolerate the smell as best he could, as he tried to attend to the boy. He had learnt to deal with the stench at Saint Damian’s: the smell of rotting flesh, the putrid bandages, the Chaulmoogra Oil. He had to bear this. He was a doctor, after all.
‘Theo. Theo, come boy, come.’ Vincent put out his arms to lift the boy out of the press. He did not help Vincent. He was a dead weight. His head was bent between his legs. His hands were tucked beneath his buttocks. Both his hands and the cheeks of his buttocks were caked with his faeces. While Theo continued to moan, he swayed back and forth. Vincent wondered at the old press not collapsing. ‘Come, Theo, let me lift you. Help me.’
Then he recognised the moan. It had words. Two words with two syllables, each said deliberately, issued from the buried head, the hidden lips of the foetus. These were then followed by a kind of trill. The moan wanted to b
e a song. ‘Coco, Coco, Cocorito.’ Vincent remembered Father Dominic in the convent parlour in Porta España, calling Theo ‘Coco’. He wondered at the friar using what seemed a pejorative nickname at the time. When had Father Dominic first heard that name, in what circumstances? It did not seem to be a name to trifle with. It had not cropped up in any of Theo’s nocturnal stories. Not as yet, at any rate.
There was a visible relaxation, as the boy let himself be coaxed out of his curled up shape, and made to stand on the floor. Vincent lifted him into his arms and took him downstairs, outside, down the short, pebbled path to the beach, across the stretch of ochre sand. He walked straight into the sea with the naked boy, Vincent himself still fully dressed. He squatted in the shallows and small waves. Holding Theo in his arms, like a baby, he bathed his head and wiped off the faeces from his face. The boy allowed himself to be administered to in this way, without any objection. Vincent looked up, and out to sea. The bay was empty.
‘Theo? What’s the matter, boy? What’s the matter? You can tell me.’ Vincent continued to cup the water in his palms and bathe and clean the boy’s body. Theo was looking up to the sky.
‘What’re you telling me Theo?’ He stared into boy’s face, into his eyes. Theo looked back at him. It was not for long, but his eyes did really meet those of Vincent’s with a recognition which had not existed before, in any of their previous meetings.
It saddened Vincent that the boy had had to bring things to this extremity, for this to happen. But, it must mean something that he had decided, or had been driven to this, to make himself known.
He held the boy within his doctor’s arms. He continued to clean him with a doctor’s hands. The boy’s nakedness was not something that was foreign to him. He had had to examine many children. It was not unusual for him to take the penis and wash it, to wipe between the buttocks. He performed this with understanding, as a professional. What astonished him, and made these gestures different, were the circumstances.
What surprised him at this moment, was seeing himself in the sea, fully dressed with the naked boy in his arms, looking out to the bay, to the gulf beyond.
Holding the boy, he surveyed the world: the high blue mountains beyond the port of Guira on the eastern coast of Venezuela; the empty distance of the gulf from this position in the sea; the bay itself with the white walled convent over the other side. When he turned and looked around him, he saw that the green hills behind the house, with the lilac shadows of the afternoon, and the light which the increasing sunset threw across the water and over the hills, were dissolving into flames. The house was a livid pink, its white lattice work gleamed. The fret work was like white lace. He and the boy were in the house which was in the water. The pillars and gables were sinewy in the water. They buckled and twisted, were narrowed and elongated. Their own reflections, just beneath them, were part of this insubstantiality, this variable, this changing possibility, which was now their lives.
Theo was content to float, held at the small of his back with Vincent’s reassuring hand. As far as he knew, the boy could not swim. This was his daily fear, when he left him alone in the house with Beatrice. The boy floated above Vincent’s steadying hand as he sat in the shallows feeling the pebbles moving under him. With each wave he had to work to regain his balance. The water was filling his pockets like balloons. Sand was getting between the seams of his pants and shirt. But he remained balanced. Quite imperceptibly, Theo moved his legs like fins, keeping himself afloat. He swam away from Vincent a small distance. ‘Oh, he can swim,’ Vincent thought.
He stripped off and flung his own clothes on to the rocks nearby. He and Theo swam naked the length between the beach and the point at Father Meyer’s house.
Returning, they could hear that the gramophone had already been started up with the evening’s Wagner. It would have to stop soon, because of the newly enforced curfew.
It seemed as if Theo and Vincent had been in the water a very long time. ‘Theo, come boy.’ Vincent grabbed up his own wet clothes. ‘Race you up the beach, back to the house.’ As he looked back, Theo was running out of the water, the waves breaking behind him.
They both stood on the kitchen floor, naked, panting. It was like he was taking care of a smaller child. ‘Theo, wait here. I’ll be back very soon. Let me get some dry clothes.’
He ran upstairs to his own room, dressed and came back with a towel to wipe Theo. He also brought one of his own white cotton shirts to dress the boy. Theo stood, transformed in the tails of a man’s big shirt. It made him look smaller, like a very small boy, like a boy in his father’s shirt.
The strangeness of what had happened dawned fully on Vincent now. He got the boy a clean pair of khaki pants. He paced around, tidying up. He stopped, abruptly. ‘We’re going to sit and have a cup of tea. We’re going to have tea Theo, like I used to have tea in my mother’s house.’ Vincent looked at Theo, as he turned from the sink where he was washing his hands. He did not quite know why he was doing this. The moment called for something different. ‘Now, you sit there. I’m going to get the tea.’ He had been so distracted, so swept away by what he had found, by what he and the boy were doing in the sea. He stood looking at him, standing in his man’s shirt. He stood there in the middle of the kitchen, staring at Vincent, looking down at the floor. ‘Why don’t you go and sit on the wall by the tank. I’ll bring our tea out there.’
There was the big silver tea pot, the silver milk jug, and the matching bowl for sugar. He went back and forth between the kitchen and the dining room. He ransacked the packing case under the stairs for these essential elements of his mother’s tea. The water was boiling on the kerosene stove. The green tea was in the pot. There was just enough milk left in the churn on top of the ice box, in the cool of the pantry.
Soon the tray was ready. He got some butter from the safe outside the kitchen door, put some of Beatrice’s guava jelly in a bowl. All that was needed were the Crix biscuits. He rummaged in the barrel under the counter for the rations from the commisserie. He put a handful on a plate. He poured the water over the tea leaves. All was ready.
‘Ah! One thing missing.’ Vincent went back out to the safe by the kitchen door. ‘Cheese! Rat cheese!’ The big yellow cheddar block was discovered. It was what he and Bernard had christened rat cheese. You could not eat Crix biscuits and guava jelly without rat cheese. Setting the mousetraps with big chunks of yellow cheddar was a feature in this house as it had been at Versailles.
Vincent went out into the yard by the water tank, which was overflowing, because it had been filled to the very brim this afternoon, from the water boat. Theo was perched on the concrete wall looking out onto the bay.
The sunset was dying over the island rock, Patos. A haze was settling on the fractured glass of the sea. Through the haze, a fire of the sun was burning up the gulf, as if there had been an enormous explosion; orange and red and the sea in flames, as if oil had been poured over its waves.
‘Theo, come, boy. Here.’ Vincent poured the boy some tea, into one of his mother’s, Madame Metivier’s china cups, the white ones with the gold monogrammed crest of the Metivier family which he had also unpacked from the case, stored under the stairs. The old past glinted on the tray.
‘Now, Theo, let’s feast.’ He buttered a Crix biscuit and cut a piece of cheese, spooned some guava jelly onto the cheese and offered Theo the childhood confection. Theo took a quick look at Vincent, as he accepted the gift, and bit into it, the crumbs falling onto the front of his clean white shirt.
This tea ceremony that Vincent had remembered since childhood enveloped him and the boy, as they both gorged themselves on rat cheese and guava jelly, sipping hot tea from Madame Metivier’s white china cups.
The crisis of the afternoon dissolved. The boy and the doctor did not talk, but there was an unspoken communion that afternoon, as they munched away.
Vincent, eventually, cleared up the tea tray got the fishing rods from behind the kitchen door. With his hand on the boy’s shoulder,
they walked down to the jetty. ‘We’re going to catch our supper.’ Vincent got some old bait he kept in the boathouse. They sat at the end of the jetty on the warm boards with their legs dangling over the edge. Theo followed, as Vincent threaded his rod and baited the hooks. With a deft flick of his wrist, he slung the line into the water. With luck, they might catch two small red fish.
It was Theo who got the first bite, and, in no time, they hauled in the first catch.
‘Hold him, hold him, don’t let him slip away.’ Vincent was a boy again. Theo said it all with his eyes, and his following of everything that Vincent said to do, though he knew quite well how to fish. ‘Theo, you carry on. I’m going up to the house.’
Before the light had gone completely, Vincent boiled a large bucket of water. With cloths, scrubbing brushes and carbolic soap, he cleaned out Theo’s room, using disinfectant and leaving the windows open to dry the room. The sheets and mosquito nets he put into the barrel outside the kitchen, and burnt them. The smoke trailed out over the bay as the last of the sun went down.
The boy was still there at the end of the jetty, on his own, fishing.
Later, Theo and Vincent ate fish and bake. They washed up in the dark, behind the black-out curtains which had been issued that day, brought on the island steamer, and put up on the windows at the front of the house. Vincent lit one kerosene lamp. He erected a camp bed in his room for Theo. The house now smelt of Dettol.
There were no words spoken by Theo. Vincent talked his way through his actions. ‘Now let us get you another mosquito net from the spare room.’ Theo followed and watched. Vincent looked after the boy.
That night there were no stories. Doctor and boy slept soundly. Vincent thought he had woken at some time to the sound of a dull thunder. Then, later, there was the drone of an Albacore. But these sounds were becoming part of his dreams.
History Lesson
Vincent watched Theo absorbed in the four o’clock news. His first act, on returning from Saint Damian’s, was to turn on the radio. He adjusted the knobs to get the clearest reception, munching Crix biscuits, cheese and guava jelly, now his favourite. This was their time together, silently, all ears for the advance of armies across borders and frontiers. Vincent sipped his tea.
Night Calypso Page 13