Soucouyant

by David Chariandy

  Roger bites his lip and waits for the landlord to storm off. He shuts the door carefully and locks it, hoping that the landlord didn’t hear the noises all the while, the humming pipe, the patter of water on the kitchen floor. He walks to the bathroom and stands for a moment in the doorway, looking at the woman he loves at the faucet of the sink. The water flowing over her hand, the thin rivulet down her arm and upon the floor still spread with mushy newspapers to soak up the spill. A patter of water to any sensible person’s ears.

  ‘Adele?’

  ‘Hello, dear,’ she says, awakening, smiling at this man, her husband.

  ‘Why, Adele? Why do you do this all the time…?’

  ON THE SECOND anniversary of their wedding, they tell the landlord that they are going away for a vacation to Niagara Falls. A proper honeymoon now that they have a bit of money saved up. They borrow a car from a friend and are admitted into a hotel on the third attempt. They are mesmerized by the gardens and falls. They get soaked with mist and end up lying naked on the hotel bed watching the sky through the window.

  When they return to the city, they find their place completely destroyed. All of the furniture is missing or ripped or broken. Everything small and of value is gone. The vandals have been living inside their home for at least a day or two, since some of the pots have been used for cooking and are now blackened at the bottom with greasy bits of meat still inside. Plates have been scattered over tabletops and on floors, and one of the vandals has shit on their bed just before leaving. On the wall, also in shit, are a series of letters. G … O … B … A … C … K.… GOB ACK? A clue? she wonders. A name? Some riddle toward an identity?

  Roger speaks to the landlord who is coolly surveying the mess. He tries to control his voice, knowing that they are indeed lucky to be here, but also that this just isn’t right. He reminds the landlord that only he knew that they were leaving for a few days. He shows him that the lock wasn’t broken, that no windows were smashed, that the thieves were confident enough to cook a meal and stay here for a while. The landlord pinches his nose and asks if anything was insured. No? Why didn’t you buy insurance? What is he supposed to do if you people don’t know about insurance? And anyway, was anything truly valuable missing?’

  ‘Yes,’ says Adele, ‘A clock and … and … a glass and … a clock.…’

  ‘There were other things too,’ interrupts Roger. ‘Our wedding gifts. The cutlery the Bernsteins gives us. Your mother’s earrings too, remember, Adele? Isn’t that right, dear?’

  ‘I … I don’t know.…’

  The landlord looks at them, nodding. He knew it all along. Cranks. Scammers. He looks around at the house once more and shakes his head.

  ‘You know …’ he begins, searching for the right words. ‘You people come here. You insist on coming here. So what the hell do you expect?’

  ‘WHY DIDN’T YOU tell him, Adele? Our china cups, your aunt’s pearl earrings, the deya my father give me.…’

  ‘The what…?’

  WAS THIS A turning point in her life? The moment when she first realized that something was wrong with her? That something more serious than cutlery or bangles had gone missing? That so many other things were getting lost? This man beside her, for instance. Her husband. She knows his name, of course. It’s Roger. But what else does she know? Where did he come from? Was he always so quiet and reserved? Did he always limp about like that, and had he always hated dancing? What at all had she loved in this body of his? His hand roughed to a glove, his calluses not content to stay there but traveling up arms and down his thighs, a uniform he wore to bed, a toughened helmet on his head. His hacking cough, his body stinking of chemicals and mapped with heat blisters and funguses.

  Finally, brethren, whatsoever things are true, whatsoever things are just, whatsoever things are honest, whatsoever things are pure, whatsoever things are of good report …

  ‘Roger? ’

  … if there be any virtue, and if there be any praise, think on these things.

  ‘Roger? Where did you come from?’

  ‘You know this, Adele,’ he says, lifting his eyes from the epistle. ‘You know I from the same country as you.’

  ‘Yes, I know that. I do. But I talking before that. Where did you great grandmother come from? And she mother too?’

  He knows a few things. That his grandfather could speak Tamil and his ancestors came from a place called Madras. Does this place even exist anymore? The migration happened a long time ago, and it didn’t involve circumstances that anyone had thought important to remember and pass on. Origins of caste and wealth that had no business being remembered. Hushed stories of desperate flights, of cutlasses and sweat. Bodies broken in the canefields. Some surviving rituals of belief, though. Fire coal walking by his grandfather and men of his generation on certain obscure days. Songs that continued to be sung with sincere feeling even though the meanings of the words had long been forgotten. His own lips moving involuntarily to the very beginning of some lullaby right now, the language pure breath and tongue now in its ancientness and obscurity.

  Araaroo ariraroo.…

  ‘You see?’ she says, interrupting him. ‘You do know a different language. You singing that lullaby all the time.’

  ‘Is nothing,’ he says, shaking his head. ‘I don’t know nothing, Adele. Is just a scrap of something gone.’

  THEY FOUND WAYS to believe and endure. They loved each other despite the nets of history and tradition. But it eventually died, their love. Shortly before Father’s accident at work, I woke in the night to go to the bathroom. I found Mother curled up in the bathtub, shivering.

  ‘Mother…?’

  ‘Be careful,’ she whispered. ‘There a stranger in my room. And he making soft sounds like he hurt or something.’

  I NEVER EXACTLY knew what Father did in that factory where he never was offered a full-time job. But once, when I was a teenager, Mother got into a panic and felt that I had to miss school in order to deliver him his lunch. I left at eight o’clock in the morning, a full four-and-a-half hours after he would normally wake to read his bible and begin preparations for his day. I took the bus to the factory carrying a brown paper bag with two eggs, two slices of bread with butter, a carrot and, enigmatically, a whole lemon. Maybe this was right. Maybe he liked lemon a lot. At least the eggs were cooked.

  An hour and a half later, I arrived at the side door of a massive building and stated my purpose to the security guard. I received a helmet and walked through the inferno of the dark building, feeling my clothes instantly plaster against my skin, and knowing suddenly, and only then, why it was imperative for Father to begin work so early, before the heat from the machines became unbearable. I coughed and grew dizzy on the stench of the paints and solvents and the iron-tasting dust. I came to the section where Father was supposed to work and I handed the bag to a foreman and was instructed to leave.

  I’m not sure if I saw my father that day, but I did notice a man in grey-white overalls and gloves, his face hidden behind a battered gas mask, glaring portholes for eyes. I was anxious to get out, for I had started to taste the airborne chemicals as if someone had daubed my tongue directly with paint, but I caught the attention of the man behind the gas mask, and so I waited for a moment. The man was working in a taped-in area, clouds of steam or fine dust around him, but he stopped what he was doing with a gun-like object to flick the switch on some machine. I remember the deepening whirr of the dying motor. A few of his co-workers looked around and began nudging each other, stealing glances at the foreman who hadn’t yet noticed the delay.

  A trick, a show.

  Still wearing the gas mask, the man climbed on top of the assembly line table in front of him. He started to balance himself on the rollers, hands outstretched but miraculously steady, one hugely booted foot placed after the other across the narrow surface, a serrated blade jutting up at least a foot between his ankles at one point. Steady, though. A tightrope act in the bustle around him.

  He walked
the full length of the table and then stooped with difficulty to dismount. His co-workers leaned their heads in together again and nodded, their eyes squinting with something like laughter. The foreman just then noticed the delay and all quickly returned to their work. Except for the daredevil, who turned to me and bowed before flicking on the switch, the machine’s wakening roar like canned applause.

  He was my father. I’m almost certain of it.

  ‘DO YOU KNOW why she does that?’ I ask.

  I’m in the sitting room with Meera. The bathroom tap is running yet again. The hum of the pipes, the deepening bang of water as the tub is filled. Meera lifts her eyes from her book but doesn’t respond.

  ‘Why she runs the tap all the time?’ I continue. ‘Why she likes the flow of water on her hand? It’s because of her childhood. She was raised in a village with a tough hand pump. It required both of your hands to work, and so you only got to feel one second of water at the most when you were alone. You see? The continuous flow is a luxury for her.’

  She turns a page without acknowledging a thing I’ve said. Her book is entitled Radar Ornithology, and she’s an inscrutable bitch with a stupid smear of a birthmark. I hear my voice rising.

  ‘I know these sorts of things,’ I say. ‘I know them because I’ve lived with her for a lifetime. Because when you live with anyone that long, they tell you all sorts of things without ever meaning to do so. Because she’s not just some goddamned patient of yours, she’s my mother…!’

  I KNOW OTHER things too. I can remember things of great practical value. I know that Mother likes lemon and hot water in the morning. And the taste of licorice. And the touch of the silk tassel from a chocolate box against her lips. I know the sorts of things that no nurse, however qualified or sensitive, can ever imagine.

  Occasionally, a memory lances me with anxiety and dread. I suddenly remember that Mother occasionally suffers from ingrown toenails, and that I alone might be aware of this. An image of Mother in endless pain but unable to locate its source, an invisible rat gnawing at her feet. Revulsion builds in my stomach as I approach her in the sitting room.

  ‘I’m just taking off your sock, Mother. It’s OK.’

  I remove her slipper and sock and find that it’s impossible to tell if she’s in pain or if all is well. I take a nail clipper and remove small bits of Mother as she watches with open astonishment, the debris all over the rug now because in my haste I’ve forgotten to lay something down. She slowly lifts a sliver of herself from the floor and holds it to her breasts like a loved one, tears welling in her eyes.

  ‘You … cut me.’

  ‘It’s alright, Mother.…’

  ‘Why? Why you cut me?’

  LATER IN THE evening, I stumble upon her in the kitchen spilling sugar from a large sack over wedges of lemon and then eating away, rind and all. There’s a grainy stickiness all over the linoleum and white streaks on the rug leading out of the kitchen. Mother winces with each of her mouthfuls. ‘Like eating lightning,’ she says. She looks at the leaking bag of sugar and explains it is broken and would someone please call the … electrician. She insists that the whole house deserves a good sweeping, and starts calling for the girl to give her a bath.

  ‘I can bathe you.’

  ‘You can…?’

  ‘I can do it too. I’m your son.’

  She nods warily at this. I accept the bag of sugar from her and guide her upstairs to the bathroom. I make sure the water in the tub is just right, and I add the salts. I help her out of her clothes, her hands balancing on my shoulders while I slip her underwear off. Her private skin so pale and unwrinkled, even childlike. Her elbows pressed tight against her sides.

  ‘Don’t get my head wet,’ she says.

  ‘I know, Mother.’

  ‘I mean it,’ she says, sternly.

  ‘I know.’

  She sits in the tub with the young man, perhaps her son, seated beside her. She looks slowly about without moving her head, looks quickly up at me again.

  ‘Look, Mother. Your calves.’

  ‘You calves?’

  ‘These, Mother. These are your calves. They’re beautiful.’

  ‘They’s not … beautiful.’

  ‘They are.’

  ‘Maybe. Someways.’

  ‘Always.’

  I help Mother dry herself and she laughs when I lay the towel on her head, making us disappear from each other momentarily, before pulling it off. Again, she says. And again. I help her dress in clean underclothes and a nightgown and I leave to fix her some tea. While I wait for the kettle to boil, I look at myself in the kitchen windows now darkened to a mirror with the coming of night. Are these her cheeks, her eyebrows? Are my ears really like teacup handles?

  When I return upstairs with the cocoa it is to an odour that shouldn’t ever emanate from a human body. An evil, metallic assault. She’s soiled herself again and she’s standing in a corner of her room with liquid clots running down her legs, her face breaking.

  ‘It’s alright, Mother. Let’s go to the bathroom and clean up.’

  ‘No. Go away.’

  ‘Come, Mother. We have to go, now.’

  ‘No! Go away. Way, way.’

  ‘Don’t be silly, Mother, you can’t stay in that … state.’

  ‘Leave me!’ she screams. ‘How dare you touch me! How dare.… What right do you have to see me like…? You hearing me? What right? ’

  I move to touch her and too late realize my mistake. She begins to scream. It’s a catastrophic scream that threatens to unmoor the very universe. There’s no meaning in it at all, just the frantic pressure of air in a cracked throat. It takes me a while to realize that her mouth has closed again, and that only my imagination still rings. Later in the day when washing my hands, I notice that I’ve sprouted little pink moons in both palms. Fingernail prints from my clenched hands.

  ‘WHAT ON EARTH were you doing to her!?’ asks Meera, stepping inside the front door. ‘I could hear her voice all the way down the road…!’

  ‘Who the fuck are you to judge me, anyway?’

  My outburst surprises me too. Meera looks intently at me for perhaps the first time, a thin smile on her face.

  ‘It’s not that I was happy leaving her,’ I explain. ‘It’s not like I wanted to hurt her. I didn’t plan anything of this. I had to get away.’

  She hangs her coat and bends to undo her laces. She arranges her shoes neatly and heads toward the kitchen.

  ‘You don’t understand,’ I say. ‘You have no idea.’

  ‘Mrs Christopher is coming today,’ she responds evenly. ‘We should get the house in order.’

  MRS CHRISTOPHER IS yet another challenge. Mrs Christopher has never been married, and she has been Mother’s best friend for as long as I can remember. On the first Sunday of my return, she enters the house with her own key. She quickly notices me and snorts through her nose before turning to some vague task with the foodstuffs she has brought, sucking her teeth noisily and muttering under her breath.

  ‘It’s me, Mrs Christopher,’ I say, foolishly.

  ‘M’know who it is!’ she shoots back. She turns back to the food, smacking a new loaf of hard-dough bread upon the table like a baseball bat. The flower on her hat jiggling like a third eye.

  Mrs Christopher always wears a flowered hat whenever she leaves her house, pausing in the mirror regardless of the rush in order to set it perfectly. She always dresses in the full-length skirts ordained by her Pentecostal church. She smells of peppermint lozenges and coconut oil hair pomade. She is a large woman with rounded arms and full breasts, though a man would be gravely mistaken to believe that there is something comfortingly maternal about her. Everything about her dress and poise has been calculated with higher principles in mind. In every ruffle and embroider, in each bone of her reinforced brassiere, there is a spiritual purpose, a steeling of the body to higher matters.

  Turn aside from man,

  in whose body is breath,

  for of what ac
count is he?

  DURING HER TIME with Mother, she speaks in the most ornate country patois that she can muster, not to communicate with Mother, who speaks the language of a different nation anyway, but to exclude me from the conversation as well as berate me for my lack of culture and airs. With Meera, however, she is much more gentle.

  ‘How she is with she vegetable?’ she asks.

  ‘She’s OK, Mrs Christopher.’

  ‘And she walks? She still taking she walks?’

  ‘Yes, Mrs Christopher.’

  The older woman nods and then arches her neck to glare at me from her position at the front door.

  ‘Is she son irritabling her?’ she says, not at all quietly.

  ‘No more than anyone else, Mrs Christopher.’

  ‘Well, you just call me when he get out of hand. I know how to deal with children like he, you know. He not too old to feel a woman’s stick across he backside.’

  ‘I guess not, Mrs Christopher,’ says Meera. ‘Unless of course he likes that sort of thing, Mrs Christopher.’

  The older woman glares at me even more poisonously before sucking her teeth with incredible noise and leaving the house by slamming the door. Meera smiles exaggeratedly at me on her way up the stairs.

  Mother has been silent for most of Mrs Christopher’s visit, sitting upright and smiling weakly from her chair in the sitting room, but after the older woman leaves she beckons me with a crooked finger and whispers into my ear.

  ‘Now that woman … that older woman there. She frighten me quite a bit.’

  I KNOW EXACTLY one story about the two of them, Mother and Mrs Christopher. Their adventure north long before they received their landed status. It was a difficult time and a reckless adventure, two young black women in a lime green convertible which they borrowed from a young business lawyer who still owed Mother some cash for a last-minute cleaning job. He was away on vacation, Mother had tried to explain to Mrs Christopher. He would understand. Mrs Christopher, already a stern moralist at eighteen, only half believed this, but her imagination had already been seized. A journey north out of the city, just the two of them. Mrs Christopher had arrived as a domestic only a month or two before, and she was wondering when she would see snow. Would they be able to travel far enough north to see snow? This was as hot a day in August as any in the Caribbean, and they both suspected that they’d probably not be able to reach the fabled snow-line in a day. Probably not. But they’d maybe catch sight of a white-capped mountain or something, a snowy peak from afar. They’d maybe catch the scent of snow, a clean scent of mint and pine, doubtlessly, a mist like something rising from a block of ice. They’d find themselves reflected like giants in emerald lakes. They’d name mountains and swallow whole the energies of this land. Mother drove the entire time with a mischievous gleam in her eyes, the convertible occasionally veering right and kicking up gravel from the shoulder. Mrs Christopher leaned into the turns and tightly gripped the door handle with both hands, praying for safety.