Soucouyant
Page 17
There is a deeper wave of laughter from the soldiers now, and the voice like her mother’s dwindles to hoarse sputterings. The grip upon Adele’s arm becomes beyond tight, utterly unconscious in the hurt that it creates, and Adele then realizes the great danger she is in, and the need to get away, somehow, from this creature and the entertained eyes around them. She is thinking something like this, or perhaps not thinking at all, when in a miraculous achievement of agility and determination, she flicks the lighter and with a flame that wavers on the verge of dying, holds it to the loose corner of the white sleeve.
There is no poof as when a Hollywood actress gets her picture taken. No explosion or bloom of fire as when something eventful happens in a wartime movie. There is only a thin creeping of a flame in the light of noon, and inside this, visible now for the first time to Adele’s eyes, a human form. The woman looks at her belly and arms, watching a miraculous aura grow upon her, smelling the work of something like a hot-comb. She senses more now, and begins to beat at her body, fanning the flames and transferring them about herself. Adele herself feels a pain assaulting her, a sheet of pain on her back and shoulders. A hat of orange light. A halo. She sees her mother in a dress of fire, and she turns toward her, turns to help and undo it all, her mother’s arms outstretched too, but she trips and falls heavily against a loose pile of cinder blocks. A numbness and slipperiness at her chin. An inability to open her eyes.
‘Jeez,’ she hears a voice repeat.
‘It’s not that bad,’ says another. ‘It’s OK. It doesn’t look that bad.…’
‘Jeez. Oh, jeez.…’
‘It happened so … there was nothing we … the girl … what was she…? What’s wrong with these people…?’
‘BUT IT DIDN’T end there, Mother. I also know it didn’t end there. You were taken in. You were gathered by people from Carenage who had heard and wanted to help. You were brought back, the two of you, to your home in the village. You were healed with cobwebs. …’
‘Cobwebs?’ she asked.
‘The old woman,’ I continued. ‘She drew them down from the corners of your house. She laid them upon you like a spell. She gave something to your mother too. Something wet and pithy for the worst of burns. A plant whose name we’ve both forgotten. Can you remember it now, Mother? Can you tell me this last thing? Today, before I go?’
She was smiling at me, and I caught it. I caught her reading me all the way through. The person I’d become, despite all of her efforts. A boy so melancholy, melancholy despite the luxuries that she’d worked so hard for him to enjoy. A boy moping for lost things, for hurts never his own.…
‘Mother?’
‘Yes, child?’
‘Did you really see a soucouyant?’
‘Oh dear,’ she said, still smiling. ‘Whatever you think you want with some old nigger-story?’
I WANTED TO IMAGINE her growing, not diminishing. I wanted to portray her awakening to something that we wouldn’t have guessed at otherwise. The freedom of meaning, the wild magic of existence. Geographies slipping into each other. Constellations wheeling above and seasons bleeding into each other so that some wintry neighbourhood can become tropical in an instant. And here she is again taking off her gloves to feel the heat of ice. A dark hand of a man appearing in hers and now she’s looking down but cannot see her feet because of her eight-month swollen belly. And again her breasts are leaking milk through her blouse, and a boy with eyes like a mother long ago is sitting in a high chair, another boy tugging at her pants. They would have names, of course. She would have given them names, but what if she didn’t? What if they could live in ways beyond such petty details, alive to the teeming…?
‘Please listen to me, Mother. Please believe me. I didn’t want to sadden you or betray the spell. I didn’t want to tell a story like this. I just wanted you to realize that I knew. That I was always close enough to know. That I was your son, and I could hear and understand and take away.…’
A cavernous rhythm like the sea. A window looking out upon endless waters. Could she even dream of living anywhere else? This churning spill, this salt-washed power? Why wasn’t she smelling the salt anymore…?
She was brought back on that day of my departure by crying. She saw me there, her youngest son. Seventeen at the time and crying.
‘You crying?’ she asked. ‘Why you crying, child of mine, child of this beautiful land?’
‘I don’t know, Mother. I don’t really understand it all.’
‘You crying and you don’t really understand it all? Come now, child. Who people children do such silly, silly things?’
‘I WAS YOUNG, Meera. I was maybe only four or five. I was standing in shallow water, and I was blessed. I was too scared to go under, and so my grandmother cradled the water over my head. I licked the salt from my lips and everyone laughed. This was a beach near Mother’s birthplace. A seaside village named Carenage.’
This is a house on the weathered edge of the Scarborough Bluffs. We’re in the sitting room, Meera and I, though there’s little, really, to sit on. Just the sturdiest of the boxes, as well as my own packed suitcase. The walls of the room show off-white squares where paintings and photographs once hung. The windows have no curtains and the noon light is white and brittle. It’s a rainy day in December, the year’s parting joke.
‘I know,’ says Meera. ‘It was an old gesture. Older than anything like religion or history. Your mother told me this many times. She never forgot.’
‘But I don’t remember it. Not even a little bit. I remember something else from that trip, though. A walk along a shore of hot rocks and trash. My grandmother stumbling and reaching, without thinking, for Mother’s hand. Each reaching for the other and then holding hands the rest of the way. I remember being awed by this. It was all so incredibly ordinary. They were just a mother and daughter.’
A passing train and afterward the sounds of the lake. The splash of a rogue wave upon a rock. The single cry of a bird.
We’re leaving when Meera touches my face.
‘Eyestache,’ she says.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
… amnesia is the true history of the New World.
—Derek Walcott
Sophie McCall, first and foremost, for your love, guidance, and faith during the years it took me to write this book. Anne Stone and Lise Winer for your enormously generous feedback on the last two drafts. Wayde Compton, George Ilsley, Larissa Lai, and Ashok Mathur for your advocacy and companionship. Susan Brook, Kate Cassaday, Jef Clarke, Harvey DeRoo, Lara Hinchberger, Anne-Marie Lee-Loy, Maya Mavjee, and Leslie Sanders for reading earlier drafts of this book, and for your invaluable advice and support. Sepideh Anvar, Laura Arseneau, Oana Avasilichioaei, Brett Grubisic, Daphne Marlatt, and Michael V. Smith for your helpful thoughts on individual chapters and sections. Michael Barnholden, Richard Cavell, Daniel Coleman, Steve Collis, Julie Crawford, Andrea Curtis, Jeff Derksen, Peter Dickinson, kit dobson, Kristin Zetta Elliot, Anjula Gogia, Thomas Glave, Hiromi Goto, Scott Griffin, Smaro Kamboureli, Bronwen Low, Glen Lowry, Roy Miki, Shani Mootoo, Cecily Nicholson, Roxanne Panchasi, Charles Henry Rowell, Joanne Saul, Priscila Uppal, Karina Vernon, Elizabeth Yukins, and especially Rinaldo Walcott for your interest, and for your courage when mine fell away. Krystyne Griffin, Ann McCall, Kenneth Ramchand, and K.D. Srivastava for your hospitality. Sita Chariandy for your advice on Indo-Caribbean songs, Leith Davis and Carole Gerson for your advice on “The Scarborough Settler’s Lament,” Elizabeth Kelsen for your advice on dementia, Anand Pandian for your advice on Tamil lullabies, and Lise Winer (once again) for your copious and expert guidance on Trinidadian language and culture. Cindy Mochizuki for your smart drawings and sympathetic script. Robert Ballantyne, Janice Beley, Bethanne Grabham, Shyla Seller, and especially Brian Lam for treating a new author with such patience and honour, and for your heroic work, in general, through Arsenal Pulp Press. Alistair MacLeod for your time and wisdom. Dionne Brand for your support and for your advice about the vocation. Austin Clarke
for believing in me and for inspiring a whole new generation. My brother for asking and caring. My parents for so much love, and for anything at all that’s good in me and in this book.
SOUCOUYANT
Copyright © 2007 by David Chariandy
3rd printing: 2008
All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced or used in any form by any means - graphic, electronic or mechanical - without the prior written permission of the publisher, except by a reviewer, who may use brief excerpts in a review, or in the case of photocopying in Canada, a license from Access Copyright.
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The publisher gratefully acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the British Columbia Arts Council for its publishing program, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and the Government of British Columbia through the Book Publishing Tax Credit Program for its publishing activities.
This is a work of fiction. Any resemblance of characters to persons either living or deceased is purely coincidental.
www.thesanchezbrothers.com. Title of work: Overflowing Sink
Illustrated script by Cindy Mochizuki
Author photograph by Glen Lowry
Printed and bound in Canada
Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication:
Chariandy, David John, 1969-
Soucouyant / David Chariandy.
eISBN : 978-1-551-52376-7
I. Title.
PS8605.H3685S68 2007 C813’.6 C2007-903694-5