Soucouyant

by David Chariandy

  I’m desperate enough to run up to the storage room and shout up the ladder.

  ‘Mother has disappeared.’

  ‘How could she have disappeared?’ shouts Meera. ‘Weren’t you watching her!?’

  ‘I went out for a walk.’

  ‘You were supposed to be watching her!’

  ‘You never explained that!’ I cry. ‘You never explain anything!’

  She steps quickly down the ladder, a sweater in her mouth and cursing through clenched teeth. I follow her down to the first floor of the house and watch her stamp on her sneakers before stepping outside, the laces trailing behind her.

  ‘Adele?’ she yells from the porch.

  ‘I tried calling already.…’

  ‘I’ll check the tracks and beach,’ she says. ‘You ask the neighbours down the road.’

  ‘Shouldn’t we both check the beach?’

  ‘Just ask the damn neighbours!’

  She yells out ‘Adele’ again before disappearing behind the house. I suddenly feel weakened by the whole situation. I hear Meera call ‘Adele’ once again, though the cry is faint now and probably from the beach itself. I step inside the house just for a moment, just to catch my strength before the search. I close the door behind me and then press my back against it before sinking to the floor right there. I close my eyes and hear the ticking of the safety chain. I then hear something else, a dull scraping sound coming from the basement. The door leading to the unfinished basement is slightly ajar.

  ‘Mother?’ I call softly from the top of the stairs.

  ‘Wait, dear. Just a minute.’

  I push the door open and catch a few dusty angles of light slanting in from the basement window. My eyes take a while to get adjusted to the weak light, but I can just make out the piles of storage chests and bins and boxes. I hear the noise once more and sharpen my eyes upon its source, and there, sitting in a corner beside an aluminum tin, is Mother. She dips her hand into the tin and removes something. She looks at what she has found and discards it and dips her hand in again. It’s impossible to see what she’s looking at. Even her eyes are hollow in this light.

  ‘Mother?’ I call again.

  ‘I’m finding …’ she begins, but then trails off. The tin beside her is full of pictures and she chooses one of her husband and inspects it upside down and then right side up before discarding it to the side. When I help her to rise, I notice that she has been sitting on a damp part of the basement floor and that the seat of her pants is wet.

  ‘I feeling cold,’ she says, shyly touching the wet material.

  ‘Lets go upstairs, Mother.’

  My hope is first to lead Mother to the front door and catch sight of Meera to call off the search in some unobtrusive way. But when I open the front door, I see a car pull up with flashing lights. Someone has called the police.

  The officer inside seems to be alone and he checks a few things on his dashboard console before stepping out of the car and slipping his stick into his belt.

  ‘Hello, sir.’

  ‘Hello.’

  ‘Is this your mother?’

  ‘Yes. She’s … she’s feeling quite a bit anxious right now....’

  ‘Are you OK, ma’am? Hello? So how long was she missing, sir?’

  ‘A couple hours maybe,’ I say.

  ‘Normally, you’re not supposed to report missing persons until twenty-four hours have passed. Do you understand this?

  ‘I didn’t call the police. Someone else.…’

  ‘I know. It’s just for your future reference. Do you live here?’

  ‘Yes,’ I say, noticing Mother’s attention upon me. ‘I’m her son. I was away but I’m back now. I’m staying here for a while.’

  ‘Anyone else living here?’

  ‘Nobody, really.’

  ‘Nobody, really?’ he repeats pointedly, taking out a pad and pen.

  ‘Just Mother’s nurse. A woman … a woman named Cindy.’

  ‘Cindy who?’

  ‘Cindy Crawford.’

  I notice his handwriting is extraordinarily neat.

  ‘So what type of medical condition does your mother have, sir?’

  ‘She’s basically alright,’ I begin. ‘She just gets a bit anxious and confused sometimes.…’

  ‘Could you be a bit more precise, sir? We’ve been getting complaints and we need to keep records.’

  ‘Records? ’

  ‘Yes. So we can know. So we can help.’

  I look at Mother again. She’s smiling now.

  ‘Sir? ’

  ‘She has presenile or early-onset dementia.’

  ‘Dementia,’ he repeats as he writes.

  ‘Dementia?’ asks Mother, softly.

  ‘It means that she’s forgetting,’ I explain, ‘or that she’s confused, or even … even that she’s remembering.…’

  ‘Thank you, sir. I know what dementia is. Well, I guess that’s about it for now.’

  ‘Wait,’ I say. ‘I should explain.…’

  ‘Yes? ’

  ‘She … she saw a soucouyant.’

  ‘A what?’

  ‘Not literally,’ I explain. ‘At least I don’t think so. I mean, it’s not really about a soucouyant. It’s about an accident. It’s about what happened in her birthplace during World War II. It’s a way of telling without really telling, you see, and so you don’t really have to know what a soucouyant is. Well, I guess you do, sort of. What I mean is, I’m not an expert on any of that sort of stuff. I was born here, you see. Not exactly here, of course. In a hospital farther west. But here, as in this land.’

  The officer just stares. I know that I’ve been babbling idiotically. I know this is completely irrelevant. He closes his pad and clicks his pen.

  ‘Just remember to wait twenty-four hours next time.’

  ‘Sure. OK.’

  He steps back into the car and consults his console once again before backing out and driving away. Dwindling red of his taillights in the dark. I’m guiding Mother inside when she leans into me.

  ‘Have I ever told you about you father? About how we met? About how he bicycle in this city place here?’

  ‘Yes, Mother. You have.’

  ‘You just wait until he get home tonight. We’ll sit down all together and tell you the whole story.’

  Three

  THEY MET IN A city that doesn’t exist anymore. A city that perhaps never really existed, though you’ll sometimes hear people talking about it. A city where people cared for each other and children were allowed to play outside unattended. A city before the new dark-skinned troubles and the new dark-skinned excitements. A city where rice and pasta were still considered ‘ethnic foods,’ and one of the few places where a newcomer might have a chance of getting her hands on breadfruit or fresh coconut or the sunny heft of a mango was at the Kensington Market.

  It was early one morning at the height of summer. Adele was walking through the congested lanes of the market, and she had passed vendors calling out to her from behind arrangements of plantain or dried shrimp or okra. She had glimpsed under a rude canvas tent three live chickens and a goat, their freshness unchallengeable. She felt alive in this place, attuned at once to dozens of different voices and smells, but she didn’t notice him at first, the dark young man in short pants, on a bicycle and carrying a massive satchel of flyers and newspapers across his back. He peddled recklessly near, a blur of kakhi and pumping knees, a waft of something discomfortingly familiar. She wheeled to look back at the young man cycling away down the congested street, his satchel swaying with each near avoidance of crates and small children, his calf muscles black-brown and pulsing with liquid energy.

  ‘Coolie fool!’ she shouted. ‘You almost run me down!’

  He stopped and turned around. They didn’t know each other, but there was history between them all the same. There were mildewed explanations for why they shouldn’t ever get along. An African and South Asian, both born in the Caribbean and the descendants of slaves and indentu
red workers, they had each been raised to believe that only the other had ruined the great fortune that they should have enjoyed in the New World. They had been raised to detect, from a nervous distance, the smell that accompanied the other. Something oily that saturated their skins, something sweet-rotten and dreaded that arose from past labours and traumas and couldn’t ever seem to be washed away.

  ‘Sorry, sister,’ answered the man on the bike.

  ‘Who the hell you calling sister!?’

  Adele watches now as the young man begins his dismount by swinging a leg over the seat of his still moving bicycle. He sails on one foot for a couple dozen feet before stepping off, parking, and walking to a stall in one fluid gesture. She watches him tug a paper from his satchel without looking and pass it to a vendor with an enormous brown moustache. The vendor immediately rolls the paper into a tight stick and uses it to conduct his banter. How long has it been, the vendor asks, gesturing about. What kind of trash is this and why isn’t it ever on time? If it’s trash, it should at least be on time. He says the word ‘trash’ in a pleased way, as if he has just learned the word, and the young man smiles as if the whole encounter is perfectly ordinary. He moves to another stall and then another, handing out more papers, and she sees, now, that they are in many different languages. One vendor, an old Asian woman, un-smilingly receives a paper in what looks to be Chinese characters and then carefully counts out four Scotch bonnet peppers into the man’s hand, which he slips into his pocket.

  Scotch bonnet peppers! How on earth, she thinks, burning with jealousy.

  The man notices that she’s still looking at him. He seems to think that she’s admiring him. He seems, quite foolishly, to think that this could ever be the case. He finishes handing papers to vendors on this block, and steps back onto his bike, balancing smartly on two wheels as he swings his leg over. He does a tight circle in the congested street, narrowly missing a box of okras before heading back her way. A world of news in his satchel, the burnt chocolate darkness of his shins. It’s been so long since she’s seen anyone with such skin. Like wet earth. Like molasses.

  About twenty yards in front of her and nearing fast, he lifts his finger to be sure of her attention. He lifts his hand off the handlebars and stands up on the pedals. His hands stretch outward for balance, waver for a couple of moments, then become perfectly still. He glides like this for seconds down the congested street, his eyes long-focused in concentration, past a dozen transactions in almost as many languages and dialects. A tightrope act in the bustle around him.

  This seduction might not have worked at all, but fate intervenes. A self-liberated chicken darts unexpectedly in front of him. There’s a tussle of feathers and a fall as spectacular as any Charlie Chaplin could ever attempt. The man bounces up to reassure everyone on the street.

  ‘Is only a pothole,’ he says. ‘Is nothing. I alright.’

  There is no pothole. Nobody on the street seems to notice or care. There’s a chicken feather plastered upon his wet forehead. She falls in love precisely then.

  SHE LIKES HIS skin drawn tight over his cheekbones and the slim bones of his wrists. She likes his chest so completely hairless even though he’s embarrassed about this. She likes the musky perfume that his hair seems to exude. Is that you, she asks. No, is only hair oil, he explains. Dax.

  ‘Say something to me in your own language?’ she asks.

  ‘You mean English?’

  ‘No. Say something in your mother’s language.’

  ‘What you mean, girl? She only speaking English too.’

  He came to this city from Trinidad, and he is one of the first to take advantage of the new Immigration Act allowing coloured people into the country in greater numbers. He arrived hoping to find some job in carpentry or construction, and he has a lot of experience, but businesses and unions are both suspicious about his skills. He doesn’t care, though. He has his job distributing newspapers, and he is still intoxicated with possibility. He throws himself into the lights and vast energies of the city. He spends foolishly at restaurants, and he acts recklessly and with little foresight. He drinks the finger-bowl of lemon water at the Swiss Chalet. He treats horseradish like mashed potatoes during his first roast-beef dinner, bringing a first and massive forkful of the condiment to his mouth and shrugging off the waiter’s warning about the heat. Like white people could tell him something about heat.…

  ‘I can’t breathe,’ he manages to whisper to Adele after ten seconds of silence.

  ‘Please,’ she whispers. ‘Set you face properly and put you hands away from you nose. You embarrassing me.…’

  ‘I serious,’ he whispers, still standing. ‘I can’t breathe. Girl … I going to die.…’

  He buys himself a white rhinestone-embroidered cowboy suit and drags Adele to country music taverns and bars, places she wouldn’t before have dreamt of entering. He doesn’t seem to notice the people either staring icily or laughing. He waves back smiling, oblivious. He’s so innocent, she thinks, an involuntary smile on her face. He’s such a glorious fool.

  In one wedding picture, he’s sitting at a table in the basement of the church with the Czarna Madonna. He’s beaming at the camera and cradling a bottle of horseradish like a newborn. She looks embarrassed, or like she’s got indigestion, or like she’s trying to stifle a laugh.

  ‘Roger,’ she says aloud to herself. ‘He name is Roger.’

  THEY ARE HERE now, and they have almost no interest in their respective pasts. Without actually discussing the matter, they agree never to wax nostalgically. But they do see old films together. While growing up in the Caribbean, each received their first tastes of escape through these films. Each studied flickering images for phrases, gestures, and postures of possibility. Bogart’s smoky manhood. Dietrich’s cold beauty. People who went overseas to strange lands and lived adventures during world crises, beautiful people who deserved our admiration and sympathy. Now, in a North America they had each inhabited in long before arriving, they watch Casablanca and Morocco in a new light. In an old rep theatre, amidst the rows of empty seats, silent and this time unmoved, they watch something of themselves too. Their own desires, now spectral and grainy on the screen. Distant fictions.

  Marlene Dietrich: ‘I understand that men are never asked why they enter the foreign legion.’

  Gary Cooper: ‘That’s right. They never asked me. And if they had I wouldn’t have told. When I crashed the legion I ditched the past.’

  Marlene Dietrich: ‘There’s a foreign legion of women too.’

  ACCIDENTALLY, and only once, they see Nosferatu together. It’s an old film even then, and during the matinee hardly anyone shows up to watch it. Adele is gripped by something throughout the showing, her hands to her mouth and throat the whole time. She’s pale and wrecked by the end and he knows enough not to ask. He’s already learned about the heavy moods of the woman he loves. Only when they’re out of the theatre does she offer an explanation.

  ‘Is the expression on the creature’s face.’

  ‘You really find it that scary…?’ he asks.

  ‘No. Is not the frightfulness. Is the sorrow. Such horrid sorrow.’

  THEY HAVE BOTH experienced disappointments of late. He is suddenly fired from his job as a paper distributor, and for a while he cannot seem to get a job anyplace else. He finally lands a temporary job in a furniture factory, but the work is difficult. The heated metal parts rip the skin from his hands. He either throws up his dinner or complains that the solvents and paints have made him too dizzy to eat. He’ll get used to it, he says. Besides, the salary is not so bad, especially when you factor in the piecework. It won’t be the last job he’ll have, and the pay is good enough.

  They want to find a decent place for themselves, but here too they find little success. They comb through newspaper ads looking for an apartment. They get evasive answers when their accents are heard, but they persist undaunted. They realize that their voices might be the problem, and so they practice speaking ‘Canadian
’ to each other, laughing when the other’s voice starts to pitch and lower involuntarily.

  ‘You’re singing again. Stop singing, Adele.’

  ‘I singing?’ she answers, gruffly. ‘I? Is you the one always singing. Singing, singing like you have some song to sing.…’

  This doesn’t seem to improve their chances. Muffling their voices over the phone, they learn of vacancies, but always seem to arrive too late. Someone else has always been there just a moment before they show up in person. Sorry, it’s been rented. They continue their search, though, until they find an apartment run by a grumpy middle-aged man. He’s not happy with renting out the place to coloureds, but he needs the money. They live at this house for a while, painting and doing minor repairs, waging war on the cockroaches with numerous Caribbean techniques, until the landlord approaches them furiously. Roger answers the door and the landlord doesn’t mince words.

  ‘The neighbours have been complaining,’ the landlord yells. ‘They don’t like the smells coming from your place. They say they hear country music being played at eleven o’clock at night. They hear dancing.…’

  ‘Really, sir?’ exclaims Roger. ‘Country music? Now that very odd. We from the Caribbean, you know.…’

  ‘… and they say your wife wanders about at night. They say she scares children. She kicks dogs.’

  ‘Well, sir, that very strange too. Adele just love animals.…’

  ‘Don’t play games with me. Someone has been leaving the tap running night and day. This isn’t a place where water grows on trees, you know. The neighbours hear the humming of the pipes all the time. And there’ve been bathtubs overflowing. Leaks in the ceiling and down the walls.’

  ‘I want to assure you, sir. We going to get to the bottom of this.…’

  ‘I don’t want you to get to the bottom of this. I want all of this to stop. You don’t know how lucky you people are to be here. I don’t know anyone so stupid to have niggers in their place!’