Trinidad Noir_The Classics

by Earl Lovelace

  “Bastard!” the squirrel eyes cry out. “Got you!”

  And straightaway from another door two police weighed down with all their keys and their handcuffs and their pistols and their nightstick and torchlight enter and clink their handcuffs on my hands. They catch me. God! And now, how to go? I think about getting on like an American, but I never see an American lose. I think about making a performance like the British, steady, stiff upper lip like Alec Guinness in The Bridge on the River Kwai, but with my hat and my boots and my piece of cigar, that didn’t match, so I say I might as well take my losses like a West Indian, like a Trinidadian. I decide to sing. It was the classiest thing that ever pass through Puerto Rico airport, me with these handcuffs on, walking between these two police and singing,

  Gonna take ma baby

  Away on a trip

  Gonna take ma baby

  Yip yip yip

  We gonna travel far

  To New Orleans

  Me and ma baby

  Be digging the scene

  PART III

  Looking In

  Hindsight

  by Robert Antoni

  San Fernando

  (Originally published in 1992)

  Boy, let me give you a little story while we here, showing you just what kind of story this story you hearing has become. It was, I suppose, three or four years after I’d arrive back from medical school in England. The little nurse comes running in to tell me, “Doctor, dey a oldman standing up outside dere, only rubbing up he bamsee groaning groaning like he sit down on a porcupinefish!” “Well,” I tell her, “we better get him in here right away.” So I ask the oldman to drop he drawers, and we put him to lie down quiet on the table with the pillow beneath he belly, and he blueblack bamsee standing up tall in the air in what we call the jackknife position. But before I go in from behind to take a look, I ask the oldman what is the problem. “Doctor,” he says, “big big problem. Ninety years I been shitting like a pelican, me mummy tell me, and dis never happen before.” “Well,” I ask again, “what is the problem?” He says he can’t make a caca. “Every time I try, doctor, I feel one pain in me ass like I been feeding on groundglass, and thumbtacks, and fishhooks!”

  So I take the proctoscope from out the cupboard, I grease it down liberally with the K-Y Jelly, and I ask the little nunnurse to open up he cheeks fa me to push the proctoscope inside. But before I can get near him with this proctoscope, before I can even come close, the oldman seizes up he bamsee tight tight trembling, and he lets loose a bawl like a Warrahoon spying a quenk: “Ay-ay-ay-ay-ay-ay!” Of course, I jump back quick like if it is me sit down on the porcupinefish now, and when the oldman’s bamsee stops quivering, I ask him what is the matter. He says, “Doctor, I beg you, please don’t push dat imperial cannon you holding up inside me. Not to say I too manmen to take little plugging in de softend like a buller. But doctor, contrary to de doctrines of history, contrary to de chronicles of all de schoolchildren’s economics books, dis little black backside ain’t big enough to accomodate de Royal Navy!”

  Well, I have to smile a little bit at that one. I rub up the oldman’s bamsee nice and gentle, and I promise him so long as he relax heself, I wouldn’t give him no more pain. “But Mr. Adderly,” I tell him, “if you don’t let me push this ting inside there, how I ga look to find out what giving you all the groundglass, and thumbtacks, and fishhooks?” I tell him to turn he head and try to distract heself—think about a cricket match, or he girlfriend, or something so—and I promise him he wouldn’t feel the cannon. Now I lubricate he bamseehole too with a squeeze of the K-Y Jelly to try to relax him, and now he tells me, “Doctor, I don’t know what kind of ting you putting up inside me dere, all I can say it must be make from ice cream: cool, and soft, and lovely!”

  Now I slide the proctoscope inside easy enough, I pump up the little bulb a few times to send some air inside there to inflate the mucosal folds, and I light up the little lightbulb at the end. But boy, when I bend down to take a look, when I focus my eye through this proctoscope, is now I feel the porcupinefish: just there at the recto-sigmoid junction, where the third portion meets up with the sigmoid flexure (because the rectum is constructed in three divisions of 5 and 3 and .5 inches in length, the first half curving towards the apex of the prostate gland shining in the middle, then backward and upward curving again on itself to culminate with the orifice of the fecal opening in the end, which is of course where all the caca comes out)—in others words, right there at the onset, in the very beginning, just there at the source of this oldman’s rectum, I find an eyeball staring back at me cool cool like if I am the asshole looking out!

  Of course this thing is impossible! It could never be! But the harder I look, the surer I am that is exactly what it is. And of course, when I nudge my nose at the proctoscope fa the little nurse to take a looksee, she only lets loose a cry, “Mother of Jesus!” and she bolts fa the door.

  Of course, I excuse myself fa quick weewee and I bolt out the door behind her, I fire down a quick one, and when I get back I tell the oldman, “Mr. Adderly, I don’t know how to put this ting any other way: you got a third eye inside there blinking at me, right up at the top of you asshole!”

  Of course, the oldman gives me a face like I gone viekeevie now fa true. But then he begins to chuckle little bit, he bamsee still standing up in the air giggling way. “Mr. Adderly,” I tell him, “if you know a pretty joke you better give it to me quick, because just now I ga shit down this place with enough caca fa you and me together!”

  “Doctor,” he says, “dat eyeball you seeing not belonging to me a-tall. Even dough in truth I must be carrying it round a good long time. Dat eyeball belong to me daddy. You see, daddy used to wear dat eyeball make from glassbottle, and he used to take it out every night and leave it in a cup of water above de kitchen sink. De story goes dat one morning as a little boy, I climbed up on top de sink and I drank down de cup, eyeball and all. So, doctor, I suppose dat glassbottle eyeball must be rolling round me belly all these years, and it only now stick up on de way out. ”

  “Well,” I tell him, “as they say, hindsight don’t drive motorcar. And that is a good thing, because if you ever want to shit happy again, I ga have to remove it.”

  “Pluck it out!” he says. “Let me smell me way to Dover!”

  “England?” I ask.

  “No, doctor, Shakespeare. You play de Regan fa me old Grenada: is de plague of de times when madmen lead de blind!”

  “Oh-ho,” I say. “In that case, you better open up you ear-hole again fa me to pour in the poison.”

  Now I take the anuscope from out the cupboard, I grease it down too, and I replace it fa the proctoscope. I press down the lever to open up the two halves of the anuscope, I reach inside there with a long ring-forceps, and in no time a-tall I pluck it out. Of course, before I have a chance to remove the anuscope, before I even have a chance to brace meself: Boodoomboom-doodoomdoom-boom-boom-boom! And boy, dat ain’t groundglass, it ain’t thumbtacks, and it ain’t fishhooks. It come out flowing easy as poetry!

  Uncle Zoltan

  by Ismith Khan

  Central Market, Port of Spain

  (Originally published in 1994)

  The last time I saw Uncle Zoltan was in the Central Market in Port of Spain. He was still the hard tough man he had always been, barrel-chested, thick arms and legs to go with it, and now he was beginning to show a little paunch. His trousers were caught by a wide belt way down low, below the navel. But his gait was the same, his arms thrown out to the sides like a gorilla ready to pounce, or a wrestler pacing about in stances before he got a hold. I was sure that he could still take on four men at a time and throw them helter-skelter in different directions. I had seen him do just that when I was a boy in the old Britannia Bar, then he went back to his nip or rum, and muttered to himself, “A man can’t even drink he rum in peace no more.”

  I had been away for several years and I wanted to see as many of my huge family as I could, but no one
knew where Uncle Zoltan lived. When I asked my mother she simply said that he might very well be doing a stint in the Royal Gaol. She saw him on occasion, either on his way to jail, or on his way back. He always stopped in to tell Mother that he was going “up” or that he was “out,” and since Mother’s house was the meeting place in the city for all the relations from the hinterland, he would simply leave word with her, “just in case” he would add, never saying just what. Every six months or so he gathered up a few things: a straight razor, a pair of wooden-soled shoes, a pipe and a copy of a book called She which he thought was the greatest book ever written; he had read it hundreds of times but it still fascinated him. “Every time I read it I find something new in it,” he had told me.

  Although he rarely shaved when he was on the outside, he had learnt that one should look one’s best in jail. “You have to make the turnkeys respect you, then they will know that you is a gentleman.” The wooden-soled shoes he took along because he did not like to step on the damp floor of his cement cell, it was too cold, too much of a shock when he awoke in the mornings. And he took along a pipe although he always smoked cigarettes on the “outside.” Why? “Every schoolboy know the answer to that one,” he assured me. If you had cigarettes you had to offer them around, and he was not one to hide odds and ends from his cell-mates like others did. The pipe needed only to be filled and if anyone wanted a puff, that was all right, but he did not have to run through as much tobacco if he smoked a pipe instead of cigarettes. I once suggested to him that he was foregoing his own pleasure by not smoking cigarettes, which he adored, simply to avoid having to share them around, but he only laughed. “You think I is one to cut my nose to spoil my face?” he asked in a tone of injured pride, which left me with the feeling that I should not press him any further.

  What looked like spite to others was his code of honour, and somewhere in his mind he saw something proud, beautiful and honourable in this code of his. The reason he went to jail periodically, for example, was because he and his wife had a “falling out” years ago and she took him to court to get support for herself and their small child. He reasoned that she had a rich father and that he could take care of them; his pride was injured when they actually filed papers and brought him before the magistrate, who did not see eye to eye with him and ordered him to pay up or go to jail. In those days he had a little establishment on Charlotte Street in which he pretended to make filigree jewellery. For the most part he hired a few boys who were part apprentices, part errand runners and part bar attenders for Uncle Zoltan and his cronies who argued all day long in his “shop.” He managed to get people to apprentice their young boys to him, not because he was a fine craftsman, but on my father’s reputation. Everyone knew that it was my father who was the real craftsman, yet somehow the parents of the apprentices no doubt felt that something must have rubbed off on my Uncle Zoltan if his brother was so well known. And Uncle Zoltan never felt that he was being dishonest. As soon as one of the boys became fairly proficient and began to demand more wages or treatment like a full professional, my Uncle Zoltan would give him a sharp clout on his head and send him home. “And tell you poopa I want to talk with him . . . to tell him what a worthless rogue he have for a son . . . ain’t even begin to learn the trade and he want full salary . . . It only have one boss here . . . and that is me!”

  It was at this point in time that the magistrate ordered him to pay support. He did away with his “shop,” and with the few dollars left he idled about with his cronies until they decided to send him off to jail, where he adapted nicely. He got to know the turnkeys and since he was no ordinary thief he did not have to do hard labour breaking stones at the quarry like the other prisoners. His class of prisoners had all the light jobs and my Uncle Zoltan managed to get out of those as well.

  His mind was made up about one thing, that his father-in­law should take care of things, that he would in the end wear them out and they would finally leave him alone to live his life the way he wanted to, and so he went to jail at regular intervals at first, then later on when his father-in-law began to weaken, Uncle Zoltan went to jail at less frequent intervals, and then finally, when he was getting his gear all set for jail, no policeman came to serve him with a summons. He was infuriated. He got shaved and dressed and went up to visit his wife and his in-laws and propositioned the old man this way: “I have a good friend who want to sell a lorry . . . if you put up the money for me to buy it, I will work and save you all of these court costs.” The old man all but fainted. His body became rigid; he could not even move a limb to strike Uncle Zoltan, so great was his rage.

  I felt that I really wanted to see Uncle Zoltan before I left for the States, but my mother would not hear of it. “You know how he done gone and spoil up the family name . . . Sometimes when people ask me, I have to tell them that he ain’t belong to this family . . . that he is only a stranger . . . that Khan is a common name . . . and now you want to go up to the jail and let the whole world know that he is family?” Of course she was right, I thought. What right did I have to go up to the jail and let everyone know that we had a jail-bird in the family? I was there for a short visit, and then I would be off, while everyone else would have to bear the shame of it all, so I let it go at that.

  After a couple of days during which my mother had been turning things over in her mind, she asked very casually if I had heard anything of Uncle Zoltan. She must have realised that I would find him on my own anyway and now she decided to help, but not without a certain amount of sighs, groans and complaints. “Well, we couldn’t be the last to have a jail-bird in the family,” she sighed. I thought of any number of things I had learnt in the States about criminals and crime and people, and society being partly responsible and any number of other things which would excuse Uncle Zoltan, but I also knew that this wasn’t my mother’s way. She had to lay a good groundwork of shame, humiliation and “think about us here after you leave in a couple of weeks,” so I waited without saying anything. “You know that that rascal nearly killed me right here in this house four months ago?” My heart leapt, because even as a boy I had heard a rumour that Uncle had killed a man in one of the backwater villages. He was what was known as a “Bad-John” in all of the rum shops in the city, and if some weakling in the family got into an argument with someone he could not beat, he would threaten, “I have a cousin who is the worst Bad-John in Trinidad . . . better watch you mouth,” and as soon as the stranger learnt that he was toying with a relation of Bad-John Zoltan, they would drop the argument.

  My mother kept rattling the breakfast dishes in her special disgruntled movements. I think that she wanted me to come to Uncle Zoltan’s rescue, but first she would tell me what a really worthless type he was and how could I defend him, etc. etc., only to end up with a “Very well then, go and find him . . . and remember, he is your father’s brother, we don’t have any jail-birds on my side of the family, thank God.” Of course, I knew all of this about my mother, but she apparently knew me even better than I thought I knew her.

  My instinctive reply was, “Did he really try to kill you?”

  She took away another armful of dishes and came back adjusting her hair over her temples with the motions of an actress­-philosopher who had set her own stage, who had fully pre­pared her audience, and now she had them tense with the “And then what happened?” kind of expectation which she had so thoroughly ingrained in all of us children since we were toddlers at her knees, listening to all of those gory tales of ancient Indian mythology. I had no sooner asked my foolish “And then what happened?” than I realised that I had played right into her hands. She remained silent, moving back and forth, not without a kind of triumph in her gait and strut, until I asked again, with the old childish image of Uncle Zoltan burying the corpse of a man somewhere in the hinterland. I was almost tempted to ask her whether he really did kill a man in the old days, but I checked myself. It was a foolish kind of exasperation I felt, and if my mother knew me well, I knew her well too. She woul
d not speak her line until and unless she could sense just the right amount of exasperated curiosity in her listener’s voice.

  “Well, did he really try to kill you?” and for good measure I thought that I would add her own little refrain, “Right here in this house?”

  She had one hand on her hip and a pot spoon in the other before she felt that she was quite ready to answer. “Well,” she said, “you know what kind of man he is; I don’t have to tell you.” I let out a long sigh, cupping my forehead in my palm.

  “Look, Ma . . .” I began, but she did not let me finish; it was her dream come true—both listener and audience were worked up to the point where something had to happen, as it did.

  “Well . . . he didn’t really try to kill me in the way you think.”

  “Oh,” I let out, “thank God for that.”

  “But that ain’t all . . . that ain’t all,” she said hastily, as though sensing that she was losing her ground, her audience, her flow and gentle build-up to crescendo.

  “Well, what happened then?” I asked with even more exasperation than before. I must have stood up without realising it, and she was quick to take advantage of this and give herself another pause.

  “Sit down and listen . . . why don’t you. You’re just like your father’s side of the family . . . always getting excited over nothing.”

  I sat down, and I decided that I was not going to say another word . . . not a single word for the rest of my stay. I’d been too excitable—well, I wasn’t going to be any longer, I would wait and wait and wait, and even if it took until doomsday, I would wait that long for her to tell her tale.

  “Now listen,” she said, sitting down now across from me, her pot spoon still in hand as she began, “your Uncle Zoltan come running in that yard (she pointed to the yard with her pot spoon) must be three four five month gone. You know how I like to sit down in the backyard under the breadfruit tree when it get hot by two o’clock?” I nodded. “Well, that boy (she always referred to Uncle Zoltan as that boy) come running into my yard like a deer out of season. He see me sitting in me rocker half asleep and he run come and bury he face in my lap. ‘Oh God, Didi . . . I kill a man, and police after me.’ Your father wasn’t home at the time, otherwise I don’t know what would happen. My heart jump! I ask him, ‘Who you kill, boy, why . . . why?’ But he only want me to hide him from the police. Well, what to do? I feel how he heart beating and how he shakin’, so I ask him better he eat something before he faint in the hot sun. Mister man well eat and he well drink and just before five o’clock, you know, just before your father come home, he come and say to me, ‘Didi, I don’t want to bring shame on the family. I have to go to the bush and lay low . . . I have to lay low.’