The Bigger Light

by Austin Clarke

  These thoughts disappeared as he emerged from the garage to meet the sun, and it was a bright day and very cold, and he remembered asking Henry many years ago how it could be cold with the sun still shining, but he couldn’t remember what answer Henry gave him. “That bastard had an answer for every question.” It was probably a philosophical answer, too. But he was by himself this morning and he had things to do. As he waited for the light, he saw the old ladies with their shopping bags coming from the Liquor Store, dressed in the same faces and winter coats as they wore to church every Sunday morning; and he wondered what exactly was in those bags. He was walking between an alley one night not too long ago, to clean one of his contract offices, just a laneway, and he stumbled upon three men, their faces red around the cheeks and their necks white like parts of a dead chicken, or like paste or flour dough, in black coats shabby around the elbows, (“Why do bums always wear black?”), drinking from the mouth of a bottle. As he passed, one of them hailed him, “Hey, buddy! Sir, just a minute, sir,” and he halted in his pace, for he was no longer afraid or scornful of confronting drunks either in elevators or in laneways; and the man came up to him, with the bottle of wine in his hand, it was something named “67” or “76” or it could have been “1776,” it was so dark in the laneway; and he knew what “1776” meant, the independence of America, it should have been, could have been 1776; but this man said to him, “Could you spare a dime or a quarter?” Boysie stopped, put his hand in his overalls, fumbled a little and took out a thick wad of bills. “You buying coffee or you are buying wine with this?” The man’s teeth showed and he was missing some in the front and some at the back, and the whiskers on his face bristled and he said, “Take a swig, sir. You’re a goddamn gentleman.” Boysie put the bottle to his lips, and when he took it away, almost half was gone. He gave the man a five-dollar bill. “You’re okay, you’re okay, you’re from Jamaica, right? You’re goddamn okay, mister!”

  These old ladies were hurrying to cross the street with the light changing now from amber before he moved off. One of them, — there were only three crossing together, but not in the same company, not as friends, — wore a crucifix around her neck. He moved off, turning right onto Wellesley Street East, and he looked about him and saw all the derelict men and women, most of them past fifty and, certainly older than thirty (“The Eskimos live to be thirty years old, ain’t that a bitch, Mr. Cumberbatch? In my country, in their country really, ’cause it is theirs, but they live to be thirty and when I am thirty I will just be beginning to hit my highest earning power! What do you think about that, Mr. Cumberbatch? I am a Canadian, but they’re the real Canadians!”), bulging in their bodies in places where you won’t expect them to bulge, the women beyond the child-bearing age and child-bearing interest, walking heavy as if a barrel of water is suspended just below what used to be their waists; and the men, some of them thin and emaciated, some fat in a way that a woman is usually fat low around the hips, and their complexion like, like like what, Boysie? “Like what, Boysie? Goddamn, you never see one o’ them bastards down by you on Parliament Street with their skin the colour o’ putty?” Yes, their skin is like putty, and they always seem to be in a small hurry if they are not too slowed down with wine. He thought he must soon leave this area: for this was not the place to live when he was striving so hard for appearances, and grappling with a new language. (“If a king was living in a fucking pig-sty, what would you call him? A king, or a pig?” He and Henry were drinking one Saturday afternoon in their favourite bar, the Paramount Tavern, when Henry asked him this question; for Boysie had just described the area in which Dots had signed the lease for the apartment. Boysie did not know the city in those days; and to be living in the Parliament Street area or the Ontario Street area did not mean anything significant to him, except that “the rent is blasted reasonable. You are talking a lotta shite ’bout pigpens and kings, but I’s a fucking unemployed man!”)

  He must prevent himself from getting mired in this pigpen area with the women and the men who all looked as if they had misused their bodies for the first twenty-five years of their lives. He was waiting for the light at the corner of Sherbourne (this woman from the subway must walk along here every morning: perhaps I should park here and watch her like a private eye, Ai-yiii-yiiiii!) and Wellesley, where the nurses are mostly West Indian and Filipinos, “I never had a ’Pino yet! Uh never had a white beef yet! A ’Pino beef is the sweetest beef in the whole ranch o’ Wellesley Horsepittance!” Who said that? Not Henry again! Sheee-it! “Three Filipinos travelling through Afri-ka!” Who said that? The Mighty Sparrow, Calypso King of the World! “Three sweet ’Pinos travelling through Africa …” Why did he burn all his calypsoes? He should have kept “The Congoman,” by the Mighty Sparrow, about the three white women travelling through Africa: he liked that one. He had burned all his music that had rhythm, and only three were left. The Judy Collins album about clouds and floes and floes, floes and floes of angel’s hair and ice cream castles in the air! “I like those words, though. No matter what Dots say. I like floes and floes of ice cream hair …”

  The snow was coming down, he hadn’t noticed it before, and he was humming the song to himself, and his mood picked up and he was happy, and then he heard the blowing of car horns behind him, and he realized that he had been standing a long time after the light had turned green.

  “What the fuck is wrong with you niggers, eh?” The man in the Oldsmobile thundered away before Boysie could get his window rolled down to call him a bastard.

  The other two albums which he had kept were “I better check their names when I get back, you know I can’t even remember the jackets!” He should have swerved into the middle of the road and ram the man, or take down his licence or follow him; but it was such a nice day with the sun shining. “I’m becoming like a real Canadian, saying ‘It’s a nice day today,’ when it is cold as hell!” He knew what he was doing talking in Barbadian dialect; he knew what he was doing. He was driving slowly, looking around enjoying the day, and didn’t know that he had reached his barber’s. Nobody was with him so he could talk as he liked, and that was why he spoke Barbadian.

  “Hey! Mister Boysie! What you doing?”

  Alfredo Cammillio, Specialists in Scissors Clipping, Parking across the Street in the Esso Gas Statione, greeted Boysie this way, with the same exuberance, as if Boysie was a long lost customer, every time he appeared in the barbershop. The barbershop was not special, and it was not an exclusive one. It was an ordinary barbershop. “Mister Boysie! Long time I don’t see you! Why you no come to visit Alfredo, no?” Boysie was in the barbershop less than two weeks ago; but Alfredo had this exuberance about him. Boysie took off his coat very carefully and hung it on the rack, and then, just as carefully, he selected his seat. There were four others waiting before him. They were all Italian. And they were talking in their family dialect about the recent soccer match between Italia of Toronto and Santos of Brazil. Boysie had seen that game too. The game had been played about six weeks ago. But everybody was talking about it, because Santos, with the star Pele, had won the match; one to nil, through a free kick which resulted from a foul. The Italians in the crowd went mad, shouting and with tempers; and Boysie, who was sitting in a row of Italians, narrowly escaped being smashed in the head when two Italians started arguing about the refereeing. There were many West Indians in the crowd (West Indians and Italians were the two minority groups which supported soccer in Toronto), but Boysie had deliberately chosen to sit apart from them. When the blows started, it was in their direction that he crawled along the seats, and sat at the edge of a seat at the end of a long row of shouting West Indians. He felt he was safer among them, although he felt uncomfortable in their midst.

  In the barbershop, the Italians were saying scaremo-paremo, madre-tutti-soccero-Pelito-issimo-que-passa, and things like this; and Boysie listened very carefully, and loved their language and nodded his head when they looked in his direction, and regretted that for all the years in Toront
o, visiting Henry in the Spadina area where the Italians lived, he had neglected to get close to an Italian, close enough to learn how to speak their language, “ ‘cause Godblummuh! not too long from now, is going be these same spaghetti-eating fucking Eyetalians who going be running this fucking town, you mark my word! You ain’ see that one o’ them is the biggest councillor on City Council already, Joe Pickinninni!” and Boysie listened very carefully to Henry’s warning, then and later, as he saw droves of Italians walking the streets, owning the streets, spitting in the streets, digging up the streets, and congesting the streets with new apartment buildings, “And I ain’t ever taste an Eyetalian meats yet, sheee-it! ain’t that a bitch!” Henry knew all these things; and Boysie sat here, this morning, listening to men who might have been his brothers-in-law, had he been successful with conversational Italian phrases, most often used, and then successful with an Italian woman: “Whatssa matter for you, Santos win, I ask you Mister Boysie did Santos win? compadres,” and arms and hands were flying about for emphasis and in the excitement and the love of argument, just like back home around the Bath Corner, when Henry and Boysie, Dots and Bernice, and children the age of Estelle’s son would crowd around and talk and shout and laugh and curse one another’s mothers in jest, just to make a point about cricket. “I wonder if the Eyetalians really own Toronto already?” Boysie surmised, as he was bombarded by the voices. Somebody’s hands were blocking his vision of a black woman who was passing the street; and even though he got up to see better, to see the hips and the legs better, — “You like, eh? Nice-ah stuff, eh, Mister Boysie?” — she was gone. Everybody was disappearing from him; everybody was gone before he could get a good look, and everybody was giving him orders.

  When his turn for the chair came, Alfredo said to him, very confidentially, and very much like a father, “Mister Boysie, why you don’t change your car? A man like you. A man prosperous like you, look, the way you dress, you come in here and you look grando, mucho grando” (Boysie thought this was what he said). “I tell you. I put you on to a man, a fine gentleman who sell you new car. Good deal …” He was back in his thoughts again: did the Italians really own Toronto? And had the Mafia moved in yet? “I give you his card, grand torino, felicimo …” And then Alfredo talked about his trip to Boysie’s country, and mentioned for the tenth time how many women he screwed (Alfredo once told Boysie how best to “screw the women, eh?”), and how much he liked black women, and Boysie listened, for the tenth time, trying to make up his mind whether Alfredo was making all this up to make his time in the chair more easy and bearable; deciding whether he should be insulted by this information; deciding whether he should tell Alfredo that he liked Italian women; deciding “I must get me an Eyetalian skins before too long, boy, ’cause a fellow tell me that there is pure mustard, mozzarella, garlic and olive oil underneath there, and you know how much I love garlic and mustard on my meats, Boysie!”; the Italian woman that Boysie craved to get was a woman with thick thighs who wore black all the time, who had a shade of a moustache on her top lip, whose lips were thickish like his, whose hair was black and who had just a faint smell of the odour of womanhood and strength about her, not a woman who wore deodorants and perfume and you could not smell the real smell from the smell of Helena Rubenstein: that was the thing Boysie wanted. Should he, “should I ask Alfredo here, palo-mio here-o, to get meo an Eyetalian woman-o? Sheeeeeee-yit”; oh Henry, Henry, Henry-o, Henrico, O’Henry … “Henry was a real motherfucker, a gorilliphant!” And that was what he called himself.

  “I give you the man’s card, eh? You go and see him and make a deal.” Alfredo dusted the clipped hairs off his shoulders where the dandruff ought to have been, flicked the cloth and made it sound like a whip, held out his hand for the price of the haircut and the one-dollar tip Boysie always gave him, and then he hugged Boysie and patted him six times on his back. “I love you, Mister Boysie. But, please, change your car.”

  Boysie thanked him, nodded to the other Italian gentlemen waiting, fixed his coat comfortably on his shoulders, a hair was biting into his neck, and just as he got to the door, with his mind on the same black woman who had passed, Alfredo said, “We go to the trots this week together, eh?” and Boysie left. Alfredo had not given him the card. Alfredo had no intention of giving him the card. Alfredo had no card. It was just his way of talking to Boysie. And Boysie liked him. If it was not inappropriate to say it these days in Toronto, he would have said, openly, that he loved Alfredo, as Alfredo had said he loved him. But Alfredo came from a place and a time and a space where men said “love” and the word passed for what it really stood for: in Toronto, with so many homosexuals — “Thirty fucking thousand o’ them!” — Boysie could not expect that his language would span that time and place of precise meaning. Alfredo never went to the races with Boysie, or with anybody else. It was just his way. And Boysie had stopped doing those things for excitement and entertainment soon after Henry was buried. That part of him was buried too.

  Now, what should he do? Where should he go? There was still lots of time before he had to go to work; and he would have time to change from his “business clothes” which he did not wear to his business, because his business was cleaning and he could not clean in clean clothes. “That is something, eh?” he told Dots one night, when he came home tired and soiled. “Imagine! Most men and women too, go out every morning to work, wearing business clothes, nice clothes. And I go to work at night, wearing old clothes, as if I am a blasted cockroach! You ever thought of it that way?” But wearing old clothes was no great difficulty. What was becoming difficult was all this night work, which made most of his day idle and listless and without enthusiasm. There was really no place for him to go: everyone he knew was at work. Dots was at work. He couldn’t call up a friend and talk or drink, or do anything; and since he was now normally against gambling at cards or dice or at the racetrack, his ability to clothe and people his vegetating hours with anything creative was taking its toll on him. That was why he fell in love with the woman in the brown winter coat, because he knew he would never see her, never want to see her, and never should, since he had despised those kinds of complications in his life. Brigitte, the German mistress he had had for about three years, was far away now, in Western Germany, and there was no real person, no person in the flesh, just the imaginations of a liaison with the strange woman that was on his mind, and that was not a threat: infidelity was not a problem in Boysie’s life these days.

  He entered the parking area of the Esso gas station to find the manager and the man who pumped gasoline standing beside his truck. They had been talking. And as he drew closer they changed the tone of their manner. Boysie walked up to the truck and unlocked the door.

  The manager’s face changed from annoyance to wonder.

  “You own this?”

  “I think so. What’s wrong?”

  “Well it shouldn’t be parked here!”

  A year ago, this would have been the signal for Boysie to explode: you son of a bitch, you goddamn racist bastard, who the hell are you talking to, who you think me for, this is a fucking free country; and only after he had said these things would he size up the situation, depending upon the manager’s counterattack, and then explain his reasons for parking the truck in the Esso station. He had spent too much energy, for years, exploding, and he was tired. But most of all he resented always having to lose his temper in order to gain, or to contain, his pride and his dignity. He was changing into a different person. He was dwelling on appearances. And he wanted to be respected as a man: he wanted his treatment to match the clothes he was wearing. He did not wish to disrespect his clothes, nor abuse them.

  The manager waited for his explanation, and Boysie saw that he was waiting. In a neutral voice, without hostility, and really without overweening and informative feeling, he said, quite simply, “Just came from Alfredo’s barbershop.”

  “Oh well, that’s all right,” the manager said. “I’ll be goddamn if I thought a man dressed like y
ou would be driving this goddamn old heap.” And he came to the window, and rested his hand on the door of the truck, and smiled at Boysie. “What’re you trying to prove? Are you a hippie lawyer, or some radical university professor? Dressed like that, the way you do, and driving this heap?” And then he slapped the truck, as a man would slap the rump of a horse going out to face the starter.

  Boysie drove off. He had things on his mind. While waiting for his turn in the barber’s chair, he had leafed through the latest copy of Chatelaine magazine, a journal published monthly, which dealt mostly with women’s lives. In it he had seen an article about black women in Canada. Otherwise he would not have spent too much time on this magazine. The article bothered him. It said that black women were very lonely; and he didn’t want to read the article too carefully, for reading about these things, about police brutality and police harassment, discrimination, people not finding jobs and housing, which he knew existed, and which happened every day but which he had wiped out from his interest and consciousness, these things which magazines like Chatelaine always wrote about, and could think only of writing about, worried him. But as he flipped the pages, he promised to write a letter to the editor of the magazine. He had wiped practically all of the words he had read out of his mind, but this portion refused to leave him: Olivia was crying softly almost inaudibly the tears rolling down her face only an uncomfortable silence until Olivia spoke, “Its my son … I’m not a happy woman when I am here and he is there, he is lonely and I am afraid they don’t care for him properly back home, I miss him terribly but I don’t know what to do …” It was strange that this piece should stick in his mind! He was approaching his bank, and he wanted to have a talk with the bank manager. “Who the hell is this Olivia? I wonder if she is a Trinidadian, a Trickidadian, or a Jamaikian, or a Sin Lucian, ’cause she sure as hell is not talking like a Wessindian”; his thoughts were framing themselves in his own idiom, and he saw for the first time the power in being able to talk as he liked: because there was no one in the truck with him, just his goddamn lonesome; and he could talk for so! lick his mouth, and refuse to speak the King’s English which he felt he had to do, and did in fact do, when he was talking with the young Canadian fellow or with Mr. MacIntosh. He had done this same thing, talking in a formal and forced way when he had to confront Dr. Hunter, his wife’s ex-employer. “You know something? This is damn interesting! This Olivia. Now she obviously is a black woman like Dots or like Bernice, but the way she talking in that magazine ain’ the same blasted way a Wessindian would use words!” He was parking his truck in a public park lot, and Olivia was still in his mind: “Wonder how old she child is? But I going tell yuh something else! I bet it don’t take much for any Wessindian reading this blasted foolishness that that white woman write ’bout we women to know that the name Olivia is ninety-nine per cent a Jamaikian name, and that reading between the lines, he would know that Olivia’s child can’t find his blasted father, neither, hah-hah-hah!”