The background ebb and draw of the lake.
‘Do you want me to go now?’ she asks.
‘You don’t have to go.’
A BAG OF cat’s eye marbles.
A stuffed rabbit that I once loved for some reason. Jiggling eyes.
A collection of records. Something by Charley Pride. A worn 45 of ‘Kung Fu Fighting.’ Another of ‘Stranger on the Shore.’
A relief globe that Father bought decades ago. I would run my fingers up the curved back of South America until I reached a tiny bump just off the coast of Venezuela, my parents’ old home. I would spin the globe faster and faster, turning geography into a blur. It still gives off the scent of orange, my typical afternoon snack.
Also in the basement, there all the while, my brother’s red metal toolbox.
‘Want some tea?’ Meera calls from upstairs.
‘No thanks. Just give me a second.’
‘Are you sure? You sound unsure.’
‘I’m sure. I’m OK.’
It’s locked and I don’t have bolt cutters. I press at the red metal of its surface and notice that it bends slightly. I take a hammer and flat-head screwdriver and work carefully for a few minutes before gradually abandoning caution. I pry at the torn metal with the claw end of the hammer and then with my hands. My breathing becomes irregular. I look down once and see my thumbnail purple and a jagged cut on my left hand.
I’ve made a hole that is almost large enough for me to reach inside. I scrape my hand pushing it in and then cut it again while trying to pull it out. I work a while longer with the hammer and driver until I’m able to tug out the contents. A pouch of chewing tobacco. A pocket-sized French-Hungarian dictionary.
Also three small wire-bound notebooks. The first two have had all of their pages ripped out so that only the cardboard covers remain, thin backbones of pages still lodged in the spiral binding. The third book has quite a few of its pages intact. There’s no title on the cover. Inside is my brother’s poetry.
It goes on like this for page after page. On one of the last pages in the book, an attempt at a word catches my eye.
I look closer at the page and see it. A detail so fine that it could have been missed so easily. A drop of liquid that has endured after all of these years. It’s magic. It’s nothing less than a miracle. I notice another drop and then another. My eyes blur. I reach to touch my wet face.
I knew this. Why such stupid emotion when I knew this all along?
MEERA STEPS DOWNSTAIRS with a cup of tea in both hands. She finds me on the floor of the basement, sitting beside an open notebook. She sits close to me, lowering herself slowly without letting go of her cup.
‘The floor’s damp,’ I say.
‘It’s OK.’
She takes a soft slurp from her cup and looks at the notebook in my hand.
‘He’s still talented in his own way,’ she says. ‘You see that, right? The script itself is something.’
‘It’s alright, I guess.’
‘And there. That’s an evil spirit, isn’t it? A soucouyant?’
We sit in silence for some unknowable length of time. Meera takes another sip from her cup.
‘You don’t have to tell me the story,’ she says.
‘I know.’
Six
SHE SAW A SOUCOUYANT.
It happened long ago in a faraway place, one morning when the sun was only a stain on the edge of the earth and the moon hadn’t yet gone under. She was a young girl fleeing upon a path so old that none could remember its origins. An out-of-the-way path, her ankles painted cool by the wet grasses. She stumbled into a clearing where there was an old mango which knotted the sky with its branches. Its fallen fruit upon the ground, the slick and blackened peels, the drone of drunken insects.
Something brilliant passed overhead and afterwards a silence like glass. This was when she noticed the creature. It was using, as a mirror, some water that had collected in a rusted oil drum. It was putting on its skin, syrup sounds and soft elastic snaps. It was gloving on its fingers when it rolled its eyes towards her.
She didn’t run, not at first. Even though the creature smiled and beckoned her to horrors. Even though the world wheeled about and everything became unreal, the sky shimmering like a mirage of blue.
THIS HAPPENED NEAR Carenage, a village that extended from a seaside hill down to the blue. Carenage was an old village without a plan. It had winding lanes and abruptly ending roads and houses of many different colours, each fashioned out of spare wood and corrugated metal from the ancient dockyards. Many buildings were perched on pillars of brick and concrete on the lower edges of the hills to avoid flooding during the rainy season. This wasn’t a nice place, but one of waste and hard edges. A place where the city dumped its garbage, piles of it along the shore. But there was one month early in the dry season when the town was a dazzling mosaic of colour in the light of noon. The hills become rich with green and fruit becomes plentiful. The many fishermen of the town bring their boats to the wooden chapel at the water’s edge to be blessed, and those participating in the ceremony wear white and step waist-high into the water and afterward feast on shark and kingfish and dolphin-fish and crab.
There is a world of strange magic around Carenage. There is Chacachacare, a haunted island off the island’s easternmost tip that was once a leper colony. Miles west, there is a magnetic road where carts and bicycles appear to roll uphill. Farther south, there are villages celebrating Hosay and Diwali and Phagwa, proving that Columbus was right, that it is possible to sail west from Europe and reach India. Farther south again, there is a pitch lake where the earth wells up black and prehistoric, where those who are not cautious might sink to their fate and perhaps be recovered centuries later, a body steeped in tar and half preserved, a teabag dripping juices. And farther south once more, the oilfields and the rigs with their fires burning through the night.
In Carenage, a young girl watches as a fighter plane crashes into the sea. A solitary seaplane circles the wreckage once before returning to the military base at Chaguaramas, only a kilometre away. Time is short and accidents can only be expected. The world is at war.
‘THE WORLD?’ Mother once asked me.
‘World War II, Mother. That’s why the Americans set up the base in the old harbour of Chaguaramas. They leased the site from the British. The Americans were thinking strategically, you see. They needed the base to help protect the Panama Canal. The war in the Pacific was heating up, and to get there, American ships would have to pass safely through the canal. Also Germany was trying to colonize South America. There were U-boats throughout the Caribbean. Even in the Port of Spain harbour.…’
‘The Caribbean, the Carib. The Arawakian, the Arawak. The Cibonnean, the Ciboney.…’
‘The base, Mother. The one at Chaguaramas. I learned. It was sheltered from hurricanes, and ideal for military ships and sea-planes. Also, there were tropical staples on the island to protect. Sugar and chocolate. Coffee too. But especially, there was oil. Did you know that, Mother? Did they teach you that in the late thirties, that your birthplace was a major producer of oil for the entire British Empire…?’
‘How old you is, child?’
‘Seventeen, Mother.’
‘And what some boy who have seventeen year think he know about oil and Empire?’
‘I told you, Mother. I learned. I read it in books.’
‘They does always tell the biggest stories in book.’
THE AMERICAN engineers had whole libraries at their disposal. When planning out modern roads and piers and watchtowers, they could borrow from the research of earlier empires. They consulted old books and papers written in Spanish, French, and English for information about the depths of natural harbours, the severities of currents and tropical storms, and the heights of tides. They stumbled upon curious details during this research in university archives. The fact that Columbus landed on the island during his third voyage to the New World. The fact that one of the original aborigina
l groups named the island ‘Iere,’ which might have meant something like ‘Land of the Hummingbird.’ The fact that hummingbirds, at least, are still around, though their population was decimated during the early years of colonization by hunters of hat ornaments.
The engineers are not interested in archaic names for the island or hat ornaments. They need to ready the harbour for modern ocean-going vessels, and so they enlist immense mechanical shovels to dredge the shallow lagoons of Chaguaramas. The shovels cut through layers of prehistory, through the sticky tarmac and sand and down to the sedimentary rock carrying imprints of earlier seas, earlier occupations and orders of life. The diggers routinely unearth fossils of fern-like plants, giant insects, plated fish. Even in the slimmest and topmost muck of human history, relics are found. Once, the shovels exhumed the rotted timbers of a sunken galley, its anchor encrusted with barnacles and sea moss. Another time, they discovered the metal helmet of a conquistador, the dream of El Dorado now a rusted bucket of sludge.
One of the American privates doing gruntwork with a shovel had a habit of occasionally passing his hand through the mud. He used to be a farmboy in Oklahoma before the Great Depression scattered his parents and siblings to the dust roads and soup kitchens. Arriving at the site for his first day of labour, he wandered to the water made milky with the dredging. He cupped some to his mouth and dipped his tongue, but spat it out immediately, wincing and spitting again. One day, he tried reading the earth with his hands as he worked, trying to get a feel for this land. But he was scratched by something hidden in the mud, an ancient arrowhead, its poison miraculously alive after all of this time. This is nonsense, of course. No Carib venom could last so long. It’s absurd to imagine that it could. But the private fell sick, and he spent a full week in the medical tent.
‘Complete bullshit,’ remarked a captain. ‘Is this what we’ve got here? A bunch of superstitious rednecks? Bloody Okies.…’
The truth is that the Americans faced major challenges in building and occupying the base. There were morale problems among the builders and troops, and the unfamiliar climate and food and water to contend with, never mind the disorientation and boredom of soldiers stationed far away from home. By 1943, the island emerged as one of the most important training regions of the war, with not only the Americans, but also the British, the French, the Brazilians, and the Dutch all simultaneously performing training drills in different locations. New challenges mount. Those were the early days of military aviation. Planes were hastily designed and built, and pilots hastily trained. Metal and fire rained from the sky, and not always as planned. Those were also the early days of petro-chemical technology, and the newly concocted fuels and lubricants had unanticipated effects and strengths. Once, a pilot in training crashed his plane into the Chaguaramas harbour and the explosion lit an otherwise thin and innocent-looking oil slick. The fire burned for two full days, the flames and billowing smoke observed carefully by locals miles away.
The locals presented their own problems for the base, of course. Few seemed mentally equipped to understand the logic behind the curfews and the rationing of food and the strict rules on movements. Few seemed properly appreciative of the importance of establishing a wide security perimeter around a major military base, and how even a casually lit cooking fire or candle might indicate a target for the enemy. Many blacks and South Asians had been living on the Chaguaramas peninsula for generations, and some had grown attached to the surrounding lands. The bois cano and the howling monkeys. The cliffs to the north looking off onto endless waters. Some of these locals had even come to imagine that they had some sort of right to live there. But, in a relatively short amount of time, they were all transported away under the supervision of British soldiers.
Years after the war, certain historians and community activists pushing for the island’s political independence would kick up a fuss. They would argue that the American military base, still operational, remained a bitter reminder of their island’s long history of control and occupation by foreign powers. They would point out the continuing arrogance and racism of the soldiers stationed there, as well as the exploitative relationships that inevitably resulted. These historians and activists also would point out that a significant number of the blacks and South Asians who were expelled from Chaguaramas during the construction of the base were never properly compensated. Many estate workers were forced to abandon their livelihoods and homes for desperately needed pittances, and a great many, in fact, received no more compensation than one-way transportation to ‘approved’ sites such as the struggling fishing village of Carenage. Agricultural skills passed on for generations were suddenly useless. Extended kinship links were broken, and surviving families were plunged into new forms of poverty without trusted networks of support.
But other historians would offer what they described as a more ‘balanced’ perspective on these events. After all, the world was at war, and proper measures needed to be taken, even if this meant inconveniencing a few illiterates who, most likely, would not have grasped the severity of the situation, had it been explained to them. And, in any event, the American presence appeared to offer genuine benefits to at least some of the local inhabitants. Those eking out a meagre living on struggling plantations had the chance to earn Yankee dollars as road workers, maids, and latrine diggers. Others who had already benefited from a rigorous colonial schooling had the chance to become skilled construction workers, or secretaries, or even entrepreneurs in their own right. Some crafty locals even managed, on occasion, to fleece the Yankees of money in the rapidly growing nightclub and gambling scenes. The legacy of the base might in fact be rather more complicated and ironic than some have supposed. People trapped in the aftermath of slavery and colonialism had the chance to encounter the modern world, and to find their place in it.
RUM AND Coca-Cola,
Go down Point Cumana,
Both mother and daughter,
Working for the Yankee Dollar.…
‘What was that?’ Mother said, noticing me just then. ‘What I was singing?’
I was seventeen. I had had enough. I was leaving her, and I was trying to explain this decision. I was trying to explain all sorts of things. I wanted to settle the past. Mother was all the while humming to herself and ironing a shirt. Drifting alone while my words fell about the room empty and meaningless. Mother started to sing aloud, and the sound of her own voice seemed to startle her awake. She froze with the iron still on the shirt. She looked at me and asked.
‘It’s an old song, Mother,’ I answered.
‘A song?’
‘A calypso. By someone named Lord Invader.’
She stopped to think. The smell of burning cotton started to lift in the air.
‘How you know such a silly, silly song?’
‘You told me, Mother.’
The smell of burning cotton got worse. Neither of us moved.
‘What else I tell you?’ she asked.
THERE WAS ONCE a girl named Adele. She was the sort of girl who always seemed to be elsewhere. She never had time for ordinary goals and matters, or else too much time for the ordinary. At markets, she would roam aimlessly among the fruits and vegetables, touching this and that and smiling dreamily. She would be found haunting a neighbour’s window with her eyes closed, taking in the yeasty smell of new bread or the coughing stench of blackened peppers. The same dreamy expression on her face when sampling the sweet slipperiness of a chenete or the pucker of a salt prune. Or standing at the village pipe with its cool gush of water upon her bare feet and hands. Pumping and waiting for the sensation, over and over again. The cold weight and flow through her fingers. The dropping away … the liquidity of this freedom.…
‘Damn it, girl,’ said the man waiting behind her with a bucket. ‘You think people have all day to wait for you dreaming? You think that any amount of water ever going to wash away the filth that going on in you mother two by four mash-up house…?’
SHE HAD ARRIVED in Carenage with her m
other, the old woman, and a handful of others only a year ago. They were among the last of the people displaced from the estates to the north for the base’s security perimeter, but they weren’t eligible for any compensation since they appeared unattached to any adult man. Arriving exhausted in the village after a long journey, they were offered a temporary place to sleep only out of respect and fear for the old woman. The knowledge she possessed, the skill she exhibited in healing a boy who had become ill during the journey.…
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