The Bigger Light

by Austin Clarke

  Last night at the Coq d’Or he had seen another black American singer on the stage. “One thing about these black Americans, they really have style! Man, you should have seen that man up there, singing and carrying on, and looking so good that I wished I was a singer. I actually sat down there, with my drink in front of me, the same Scotch that I bought when I got there at ten, and I am a man who drinks four or five Scotches whenever I drop by there. They know what I drink, but sitting down there looking at that man sing that song, ‘A Rainy Day in Georgia,’ it’s raining all the time, it’s raining all the time. And then I saw what I was looking for all the time, it’s raining all the time. He was free up there, he was so free that he looked like if the song was killing him, as if the song had him in chains, he was so pretty in the singing of it. But he was free, because it was a rainy day in Georgia, and a rainy day in Georgia is just like a rainy day in Barbados: you run out in the rain, bare-naked as you was born, and you open your mouth wide-wide and drink in the warm rainwater from outta the skies, and the barrel beside your house, under the drain, catches that same rainwater, and there is nothing better tasting than rainwater.” Freedom the man had sung about, not the rains in Georgia. It was that freedom that Boysie found himself lacking all these years. This morning was the first time he had sat down in his own apartment, at this hour, dressed in pyjamas. Why hadn’t he thought of doing that before? It was a good feeling. “A Rainy Day in Georgia,” a black American singer, rainwater, and pyjamas were just like a hot bath in his bathtub.

  My Dear Dots, I want to talk to you. Sometime. Your husband. He had written this letter to his wife some few weeks ago, he couldn’t remember how many weeks; and he had put it on the kitchen counter where she was sure to see it as she came in to make her cup of coffee, and bring up “some o’ this gas outta my stomach.” But the letter had been removed. Could the cat have mistaken the name on it? He did not receive a reply from Dots whether in words or in attitude. And Dots never wrote letters to anyone. He remembered the words he had written at work on his notepad which was attached to his wallet. He had wanted to tell her what he wanted to tell her about, but that would have brought about a conclusion, and he did not like conclusions, particularly when he was not certain that he controlled the conclusions. To have told her in that letter what he wanted her to know, that he was going away (not leaving her, for no one can leave Dots, Dots is a mere object that is living everywhere, and she would follow you to the ends of the earth, and molest your memory when you had nothing to think about, but the past of your boredom and its history and its growth), that he had bought a new car, that he had bought four houses, and had put them in her name; that he had made a will and had put all his money in her name (he did not hesitate to do this, he did not wonder whether she would outlive him, for he was certain that something in her, something in the way she saved energy by not making conversation, by not exerting herself in sex, by not doing things which one normally expected a woman to do, he was certain that he would die before her; not that she would kill him, no, Dots was not so cruel as that, even in spite of what he had been thinking about her. It was simply that he had resigned himself to her eventual widowhood, and himself to be replaced by someone else, and to be some place else, just before she inherited all his money), to make certain that her memory of him would not be discussed harshly between herself and Bernice. “My Dear Dots, I want to talk to you. Sometime.” He thought of the letter. Should he have written, “I want to talk to you sometime”? And did the “sometime” standing alone frighten her? Or had she just disregarded it? But it was signed “Your husband.” And Boysie knew Dots was a very faithful woman to him; the word “husband” would bring out her morality. She had never told him that she was not faithful to him; she had not told him that she had allowed another man to lift the dress-hem of her clothes in an act of love or even hate; she had not even told him, “I love you, Boysie.” Dots never was so emotional towards him. But he knew that she loved him. A woman who behaved like Dots had to love him. And he felt she was faithful, and a faithful woman deserves something. What he had to give her he did not think she could appreciate; indeed, he did not know if he had anything to give her, except money. And he thought of the money because of the amount of problems it had caused them, early in their marriage, and the deep hurt it had caused him when she was the breadwinner. He wanted to tell her that he was tired, that he was dying, that he was fed up, that his life with her was like sleeping in a coffin, which their bedroom had become. He wanted to tell her all these things. And more especially, he wanted to take her back to that afternoon when she came unexpectedly early and found him in the bathtub naked, in the condition which would have demanded not much effort on his part, or on her part, had she been willing, when he wanted to rip the housecoat off her body and drag her into the hot water with him, not to drown her, but to drown her, for that last time, into an everlasting experience of love. But he could not tell her then, and it was no easier for him to report about that telling which was aborted by the noise and her sound and her presence. She was killing him, and he was tired waiting.

  The strange woman comes out of the subway. She is wearing different clothes this morning. It must be the weather. Or it must be the time. In all this thinking session he has been in this chair only ten minutes. How time travels, from here to there, taking up space and places and dreams and life and death … but the woman wears this morning a yellow beret that flops down to the nape of her neck. Her winter coat, still brown, is open, and he sees for the first time, he sees for the first time the strength in her body, and in the colour of her dress. It is mauve. Her legs he can see now too, for the dress is short, although the coat is reaching the calves, or is it the knees? And there is the white shopping bag in her hand. It is flat, not bulging, so she must be carrying magazines or children’s books … could she be a mother, or a teacher, or a nurse, or a babysitter … in this white bag. Her winter boots are the same colour as the coat. She is not wearing her sunglasses against the snow this morning. And he has a fair picture of her age. She is about thirty-five, but something about the arrangement of skin near the swallow-pipe tells him that she is probably older, or perhaps … she might be a woman who used once to be much fatter. She shows some emotion this morning. She wears the coat opened, and as if she knows that there is someone looking for her, someone watching her, someone who waits for her, she leaves it open until she is about to pass out of his sight, out of the reach of the desire in his sight (this morning is the first time he feels this way about her), and then she buttons up the coat, and disappears. He keeps this picture of her in his mind. It is a picture of a woman. He does not know what will become of her, but he knows that he has seen a change in her, and if she can change, then certainly he can change.

  There was something about this morning which disturbed him. There was something in the way the woman walked, the emotion she showed, although he could not be sure it was emotion, since he was not sure she was aware of him, so it could not then be her emotion for him; but certainly he had shown emotion for her, and he had never done that before. It was not this emotion which bothered him. But it was something else. He sat back down in the chair, and he tried to think. He tried to remember everything that went through his mind during his thinking session; he travelled all over that space of mind and land, remembered the letter he had written to his wife and which she had not yet answered, he remembered the feelings he had when he listened to the black American singing “A Rainy Day in Georgia” … that was something! He had called the song by the wrong name. It was not a rainy “day,” it was a rainy “night,” “A Rainy Night in Georgia.” So he had been wrong in his comparison, because nobody walked about on a rainy night in Barbados. The song was not fit, not suitable, the song could not be tied to his past and to his experience. He wondered whether he was wrong in seeing freedom in the singing and in the song as the black American sang it.

  There is a great difference between a rainy day and a rainy night: between night and
day. He had been wrong in his conclusions. That was why he could not afford to have said more in the letter to Dots without being there to see her reaction when she read it, because she was capable of making conclusions, and he hated conclusions.

  Was that why he had sat morning after morning waiting for the woman, and when she came he felt as if she had never come, because for her to have come, that would have meant passage from one time to another, and there was bound to be a conclusion somewhere: is that what a conclusion was; or was he just thinking stupidness? He had thought the wrong conclusion about his emotions for the black American singer; what else in his long life in this country had he seen and reacted to in the wrong way, bringing to a conclusion an incorrect beginning? The Canadian young fellow had a term for that. Boysie tried to remember it. There were so many things he had to try to remember these days. “Yes, I remember. The Canadian young fellow calls that a ‘thesis.’ Or did he say a ’diagnosis’? ’Diagnosis’ is Dots’s word, although she never used it with me.”

  There were things about his wife that he did not know at first, but which he hit upon by mistake; and the mistake would be made when he came home and found the radio in the bedroom still playing. He found out that his wife was a lonely woman. And she had never told him she was a lonely woman. He should have known. But he was not the kind of man to ask a woman, not to mention his wife, “Are you a lonely woman?” And she was not the kind of woman who talked, except it was to give a mild order (he had never given anybody an order in his life), or to report something, like, “Close the living room door, Boysie, I am sleeping. Dog tired, boy. This hospital work is killing me. And I am not getting no younger every day!” Or she would say, “I heard from Agaffa yesterday. She called.” And she never told him what Agatha said when she called. Dots said nothing more than that. She was merely noise and sound and a presence.

  But he came home one night and found the radio playing on a popular station, CHIN, which played sentimental music, music for lovers whose lovers are not present, music for persons whose hearts, broken by some circumstance or misunderstanding, should not be listening to that kind of music. He had known this feeling of loneliness. He had listened to Both Sides Now, and he had listened to Mendelssohn. Both had taught him loneliness. When he listened to calypsoes, he was merry during the playing of the tunes, he was alert to the words in the songs, but his mind never functioned, for the music was a drug, to be listened to more easily by another drug, liquor, and accompanied by vigorous dancing and swinging of the backside and by sex.

  He had turned off the radio that night, late that night and early morning all wrapped into one feeling of loneliness, and he had remained awake, listening to her snoring, and to the cat moving from between her legs, in sleep, and onto the floor. The cat never slept between his legs. (“I wonder why? You goddamn cat!”) He wanted to be able, through the quality of the relationship they should have had all these years, to have awakened her, and say to her, “Dots? Dots?” gently, with a soft voice, not requiring an answer; and to have her look up at him with those big bloodshot sleepy eyes, and say to him, “Boy, why you don’t come to bed, nuh?” But he could not do it. He wondered if, had he the inclination to kill her, if he would stand above her bed, and wait so long? But that was a serious and stupid thought. He would never kill Dots.

  He was worried about something this morning: something which had appeared to him either when the woman appeared, and which he did not see, or something in the journey of his daydreaming. He had miscalculated something in his long life, it could have been a mistake way back in Barbados (although he doubted that, for back there life did not take on the dramatic seriousness it was forced to have, in this country, as a factor of existence); or it could have been here in this country. He would have to take the long journey back, step by step, experience by experience, friend by friend (and some friends were already changed into enemies), he would have to look very closely at his relationship with Dots his wife, and see whether there was one iota which he had looked at and had not seen.

  He knew he had to do this much; and he knew it because he had seen something new this morning, when the strange woman appeared with the small ruffle in her otherwise prim and unchanging appearance.

  Janey, 4, is a cheerful invalid. Janey was lying flat on her back with both legs in traction when this picture was taken. They both examined the picture carefully and nodded their heads. Janey was indeed a beautiful little girl. The position didn’t affect her cheerful disposition and certainly didn’t dim her sweet, warm smile. “There aren’t many people and very few women living today who would understand why you want to have a child like this, for adoption, in your home. They aren’t many, child. Even me, as close as I is to you, had a hell of a time trying to understand what was in your blasted head when you showed me this clipping with Janey months ago. A lot of time pass since then. And in all that time, I still don’t know what to say.” But then Janey is used to splints and casts and bandages because she’s had a lot of them.

  “Bernice, gal, people get used to everything. Anything at all. I know it would be something different if I had born a child like Janey outta my womb. That would have make it easier. But I still can’t tell. What really worrying me is why I should be in love so much with this little darling girl. Probably, in a funny-funny way, she resembles me. She had a lot to bear and I had a lot to bear. The woman who borned this child should be ashamed of herself for giving it away. Such a beautiful darling!” This darling was born with a long-name condition called osteogenesis imperfecta, known to laymen as brittle bones. “Osteogennississ.”

  “Yeah, osteogennississ. Is that a thing that does come down from father and mother to son and daughter, though? Do you think that it is something in what people call the genes? Osteogennississ, Dots. That’s a heavy burden for a four-year child to bear all by herself.”

  Dots felt the tears coming down her cheeks. “All by herself, Bernice. All by herself. A woman all by herself. Osteogennississ.” She has had a lot of breaks and will have more. The disease appears to have affected her most in the pelvic and leg area.

  “That means you will have to be careful when you are bathing her, and changing her, because she have osteogennississ, remember that.” She has had a lot of breaks and will have more. “But that is a terrible break to have in life, though, you don’t think so? Sitting down here with you, this evening, and looking at this child’s face, I could see Lew, Llewellyn, that bitch. You know he came to me again last night asking me to lend him three hundred dollars to buy more books. More books? Asking me. A woman who haven’t finished elementary school back in Barbados. And I had to think about that all night. He is a lawyer-student. I am a domestic. He is asking me. For three hundred dollars! Well, do I look to you like one o’ them Canadian women who goes down to Barbados at the Holiday Inn place and Paradise Beach Club and let all them young mens screw them, and then turn around and give the men twenty-five dollars, Canadian currency? If I add-up twenty-five, if I add-up the twenty-fives that are in three hundred dollars, don’t you see that Llewellyn would have to give me a damn lotta screws before he could pay off that debt? Don’t laugh, child!” She has had a lot of breaks and will have more. The disease appears to have affected her most in the pelvic and leg area. “That means that she can’t have thrildrens then, isn’t it, Dots? The pelvic area? I am just like her, and I ain’ got no osteogennississ. But osteogennississ on top o’ that, in the pelvic area?”

  Dots nodded her head, and some of her tears dropped on her dress. Bernice wiped them away. “It must be this pelvic-thing that make me like this child so! You see, it could happen to you before you born, then. And it could happen to you even when you born and think you are a big-big woman. Boysie never forgive me for my pelvic thing. I don’t think I am suffering from this osteogennississ, but one is as bad as the other.” Her legs are bowed and she will probably require surgery later on to have rods inserted in her legs.

  “But that would be painful, though. Won’t that be p
ainful for such a little child?”

  The cat jumped from Bernice to Dots.

  “I have seen up there at that hospital, the doctors in this country perform miracles. Doctors in this place are not like them hacks back home, some o’ them, the minute they graddiate they done studying-up on the new practices and thing. We got some good doctors back there. But up here, they are miracle-workers with a knife! All kinds o’ surgeries. But I am worried about this osteogennississ, and if it will break even more when they start operating on the rods. What you think?”

  “You mean about the operation?”

  “No. ’bout Lew and the money he axed you for. Give him the money, Bernice. Give him. Give it to him. It is only money. You are in a position to demand much more in life. Give him. It would make him grateful. That is one thing I forget to make Boysie feel about me. Boysie isn’t grateful for one blast that I do for him, because Boysie is independent. A woman can’t live good with a man that is too independent. And to-besides, you don’t have one blasted thing to lose, except … you know what.” Janey is luckier than some children, (“You see, you ain’t the worst-off woman in Toronto. They is some more worse-off than you can imagine.”) is luckier than some children with this condition because her arms, back and neck are healthy, and though at this time she is unable to use her legs, they are not seriously malformed. “Answer me something, Bernice.”