The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  “Which answer?”

  “To ‘A Tisket.’” Her body had developed all of a sudden, before his eyes, on one other occasion he had seen her, with her hoe, standing with other women, much older than herself; she was nine then; in the North Field; and he thought the gang of women looked like soldiers, standing erect, with their hands resting on their hoe handles, just as he had seen soldiers and policemen do, when they were ordered by the Drill-Sargeant, to “Stand easy!”; and he had seen her, the other times, in church, at Matins; and now on this Easter Monday, in white dress, with white patent-leather shoes, and white anklets and with a white silk ribbon in her hair, which she always wore the same way: plaited in “cornrows,” and the short end of the plaits bound together with the white silk ribbon tied into a bow; or, instead of the ribbon, an ornament, a heart, made from polished tortoiseshell.

  He could see her body as if it had been developing right in front of his eyes, her breasts getting larger, and their nipples standing erect, and her breathing increasing its beat and rhythm, and making her chest rise, and heave in expectation, like the muscles of weightlifters rise when they address the iron bar, preparing for the clean-and-jerk; and her eyes, clear and bright, with dark brown pupils, white eyeballs round the pupils, as white as the clouds overhead are always white on Easter Monday; and her fingers, moving, perhaps against her wish, expressing her nervousness, the pent-up emotion, which cannot at her young age be put into the correct words; and his manhood, his little tom-pigeon in his khaki pants, his “lil pen,” gets harder and harder and just a little larger; and he does not even know, fully, what he is going through. But he had known, nevertheless, that with the female tennis player whom he was being scolded for watching; screamed at for being unable to turn his head, and turn his eyes away from her body, where they remained on the same blond spot with the blond hairs, for exactly three shotgun seconds, three fast bullets of time—in case the woman’s partner, or anyone else, had owned a stopwatch and had been inclined to measure that staring time—he had known deep down, as part of his experience, as the character of his life, circumscribed by myth and ritual, that he could never get close to this fallen, frightened woman; close enough to touch her. And now, seeing her at his feet, bruised against the green-painted fence, he dared not extend a hand to help her up. The reason behind her partner’s high-pitched thin voice was that very hysterial warning about touching. Do not touch. Yes, he could not touch her. “Look; but don’t kiss-me-arse touch, hear! Looking is one thing, boy: it harmless; but touching is something-else-altogether-different!”

  Time would unroll, and Sargeant would be able to draw a conclusion from the similarity of that afternoon in the Garrison Savannah Lawn Tennis Club, about the warning Do NOT Touch, along with the notices nailed to huge wooden gates, with wickets cut into the gates, in black capital letters on pieces of tinning painted white, warning DO NOT ENTER. DOGS. Alsatians. Bloodhounds. Doberman-Pincers. Vicious dogs about which Sargeant, years later, joking amongst the “selected clienteles,” would chuckle and say, “They have dogs in this Island, ’specially trained to put a bite in a black-man arse!”

  And because it was delivered as a joke, all the men laughed.

  The Headmaster of Sin-Davids Elementary School for Boys laughed. The Senior Assistant Sanitary Inspector laughed. The civil servant who worked in His Majesty’s Customs and Excise Department laughed. Manny laughed. And Sargeant, who had given the joke, laughed as if it was a joke.

  Each one of these men, at some time in their growing up, had suffered from the viciousness of dogs owned by estates and plantations throughout Bimshire. And down in Hastings; in Belleville, and in Strathclyde, which Ma said was as “serrigated” as the South in Amurca, “’cause in Strathclyde, in the middle o’ the road, a iron-rail keeps black from crossing over into white, I swear to God! Except you is a servant.”

  And still these men laughed; and laughed; and laughed. And then poured themselves another shot of strong, dark Mount Gay Rum, and laughed as they said, in chorus, “Down the hatch!”

  “As man, man!”

  “As man!”

  And Sargeant, still reflecting, knew too, on that Easter Monday, that when he saw little Mary Gertrude Mathilda, Tilda, with her developing body, that he could not dance with her, could not ask her for the honour, would not get permission from Ma, to dance to “Evening Shadows Make Me Blue.” No. Not in the presence of the entire outing crowd. In the open air. Sargeant, like all the other boys and growing men in the Village, knew that he dared not ask Mr. Bellfeels for permission to dance with his servant girl, little beautiful Mary Gertrude Mathilda.

  Word had just started to travel from that Sunday in the Church Yard, and had gathered strength, like a hurricane, through repetition, throughout the Village, and through the rows of eddoe plants that rolled and rollicked like waves painted green and that stretched for acres and acres in the North Field, that it was Mr. Bellfeels who “was pushing along Mary’s physical development”; that it was Mr. Bellfeels who was “force-ripening her”; that it was Mr. Bellfeels who was “tekking the sweets”; that “is Bellfeels, that son-of-a-bitch, who licking-cork with that girl”; that it was Mr. Bellfeels who “committing statuary rape, by fooping a child!” Oh, Mary, Mary, Mary!

  Yes, but was it really Bellfeels?

  Yes, it was Bellfeels!”

  “Yes!”

  “Is Bellfeels who guiding Mary-Mathilda into this beautiful pulchritudinous ripening pubescence,” the Headmaster of the boys’ Elementary School said, raising his snap-glass to take a sip. And to propose a toast. And to damn Bellfeels. “Between me, you, the doorpost, and the wall in this illustrious Harlem social institution of levity and grace, our beloved Harlem Bar & Grill, associated in culture with that other Harlem in Amurca, before that, Haarlem in Holland-Europe . . . between me and you, my friends, and the four walls, in strictest confidence, and amongst Manny selected clienteles, Bellfeels can’t be accused of ever having had a brain-cell in his head. He didn’t get-past Standard Four in my school! Down the hatch! As man!”

  Mary Gertrude Mathilda was thirteen that year of the first Easter Monday when Sargeant saw her for the first time; noticed her existence; could smell the ram goat in his manishness, as the Villagers say; and for each year that followed, his lust grew with his limbs and with the size of his tom-pigeon, which now began fluttering each time he saw her, from across the street, or passing like the wind, in the front seat of the Plantation’s car, beside the chauffeur clad in stiff khaki, during the day; dressed in black, during the evening. But he remained even farther removed from any closeness . . .

  But now, he is in her house. This Great House, the second largest on the Plantation’s estate, a symbol of her privilege and status, which the Villagers knew was given by Mr. Bellfeels to her for her son Wilberforce to live in.

  The Headmaster and the other “clienteles” said openly, in the Harlem Bar & Grill, that the Great House she lived in, was the “cost-price payment for the pussy!”

  The men, including Sargeant, roared with laughter, and said, “As man!” and downed the next round of rum.

  Sargeant is close to her, now. And he recognizes that his presence here, is a gesture of fate, a stroke of luck, the circumstances of the present notwithstanding. But he feels shame and contrition for all the bad things he has said, and thought of her.

  He is in the Great House. He is able, if this is his desire, to put his arms round her waist; now that he has already walked his hands over her arms and round her neck and across her shoulder—in his imagination; and had stopped at the thought of touching her breasts; but had done so, anyhow—he feels he can bring her body close to him, real and in the flesh, and give himself the bodily satisfaction similar to dancing with her, similar to what he gives Gertrude.

  His heart has imagined this lust for more than thirty years now.

  He was ten years old that first Easter Monday. Mary-Mathilda was thirteen. Mr. Bellfeels, twenty.

  Now, at age fifty-one year
s, Sargeant has the same desire. Age and maturity, and “knocking ’bout as a police,” as Manny says, has transformed Sargeant’s respectable desire, into “raw, animal-raw luss!”

  This time, this Sunday evening, his desire is that of a man who sees for the first time, in his bed, the woman he had been painting from fantasy, but who—it seems to him—now is the one changing the portrait of that fantasy, to willingness; and his mind in turn, paints her body before him, outstretched and willing, more real than in life, in the tableau of his imagination, more real even than the furious fantasies drawn in Quink Ink on blank pages of school exercise books, and in double-lined ledger-size policeman’s Evidence Books, on sleepless interminable, wet-dreaming nights. No amount of imagining or the drawing of clouds could ever get her sitting willingly beside him, like this. Not even after he had dreamed that she was walking beside him up the long chilly marble aisle in Sin-Davids Anglican Church, while the choir sang “The Wedding March,” and witnesses flung congratulating rice grains into their faces.

  He is listening to the song that Miss Ella Fitzgerald is singing. The words in the song do not make sense to him. No one in the Village speaks this way. No one in the Island of Bimshire. Nor in this part of the world.

  And he is surprised now, as he always was surprised, forty, forty-one years ago, whenever he heard “A Tisket, a Tasket” being played, that the words in the song were jibberish. “A tisket, a tasket.” But he had never put his surprise into words, until this evening. He is surprised that he does not know what the words mean, what they are supposed to convey to him.

  He has sung this song and has whistled this song, and has danced to this song, like many other boys growing up in the Village. And he has stood under the front window of a neighbour’s house, and heard each word in the song, after the neighbour had placed the speaker of the Voice of Bimshire Radio, a little farther onto the window ledge to make it easier for him to listen; and one Friday night, as he was standing under the front window of Manny’s house, at a time when Manny was learning to be the Village butcher, before he had opened the Harlem Bar & Grill, Sargeant heard his own name announced in the stillness of the dark night; and it frightened him. To hear his address called out on the programme heard throughout the Island; and followed by the name of the song he had requested to be played. “A Tisket, A Tasket”. . . . “Ladies-and-gentlemen-out-there-in-Radioland, our next request comes-from-a-youngman whose heart is quivering from-his-love-of-a-young-lady he dreams about every-night-when-the-sun-goes-down, and wishes-to-marry some day . . . we cannot-tell-you-the-name-of-the-lucky-lady, his beloved . . . the young man did-not-give-us-the-lady’s-name . . . but it is our-pleasureand-great-happiness, ladies-and-gentlemen-out-there in Radioland, to say that our next request goes out to . . . none-other-than Percy . . . Mr. Percy . . . to Percy DaCosta Stuart residing in Flagstaff Village, in-theparish-of-Sin-Michaels, the Island of Bimshire, in-the-British-Wessindies, the Carrobean . . . So, on this Friday evening, without-any-further-a-dew! . . . Ladies-and-gentlemen invisible-out-there in Radioland, with-your eyes-glued-to-your radio . . . for Percy of Flagstaff Village, here’s Ellaaaaaah, in ‘A Tiss-kit, A Tassss-kit!’ Take-it-ah-waaay, Ella!”

  The words of the announcer remain with Sargeant all these years, and they come back to him now, with the same surge of deep love as the sea and the first wave in the morning that comes in and covers the beach; comes in, wave after wave, with the same freshening power; after all these years; and now as he hears her voice say a second time, just like the wave, that she shall play “A Tisket, a Tasket,” a second time, he is no longer under a neighbour’s window. He is in Miss Mary-Mathilda’s front-house parlour.

  On this Sunday evening, his excitement and sense of pride and of importance blows up equal to that Friday night, years ago, when the announcer called out his name.

  And time went on, and the announcer left Bimshire for the Canal Zone, in Panama, with hundreds of men from the Island, on a work crew, contracted for five years, to help build the Panama Canal. And never came back.

  Yes, as time went on, Sargeant got to know the announcer of the hit parade programme; and would see him at dances; and once, in the Stationery Department of Cave Shepherd & Sons, Haberdasheries, in Town, reading advertisements for songs he wanted to compose; and looking through Amurcan magazines that told him how to have his songs, so far unwritten, put music to; and published; and other magazines about how to become an Amurcan announcer. And Sargeant wondered then, even at that tender age of ten, or eleven, why the announcer spoke with an Amurcan accent even before he emigrated to Amurca. Perhaps, he figured, because Miss Ella Fitzgerald and “A Tisket, a Tasket” were both Amurcan . . .

  On that Easter Monday the skies were blue; not the deep blue that they are, sometimes, early in the morning; but blue as the sea always is when the skies are reflected on its surface; and that day, the sun was behind one white cloud, and the bathers were saved from the brutal humidity which at three o’clock in the Island, together with the afternoon sun, can clutch you at the throat, burn your skin and make it difficult for you to breathe; and the children of the various households in which Sargeant’s and Manny’s and Golbourne’s parents and cousins worked, and Mary Gertrude Mathilda’s mother, Ma, worked; households belonging to the Plantation, to the Church, to the two leading barristers-at-Law, and to the Solicitor-General, with those households, were the children of the workers in those households, screaming and “skinning cuffings,” thrashing about and dancing in the warm waves. And laughing. The waves were blue, and warm and kind and clear; and they reached most of the children only up to their knees; and for some, up to their waists.

  When the waves came in like a hand about to embrace the children, the children screamed; and some of them tried to jump higher than the welcoming waves, and succeeded; and some jumped and fell into the waves; and some still, jumped higher than the peaceable waves, seeking to, and succeeding, in getting out of the way of the rising wave; and did not succeed. The waves knocked them over, and buried them from view, for just one moment.

  Some of these children were not too young to remember what the waves can do to a man. Or to a woman. They knew of cousins and friends and a few fathers who were fishermen, and who were carried away, far-far-far out to the horizon where the rainbow is born, where the large boats climb over the horizon and the surface of the waves sailing for Englund and Amurca, and were drowned.

  They knew the moods of the waves.

  And the accommodating wave came in, on this joyful afternoon of Easter Monday, like a touch, like a pat, like a kind hand laid for a moment upon their bodies; and then it went farther away from them, into the sand where each advance and retreat of the sleeping blue water marked its line of progress and of retreat, like the boundary of a country.

  Here, on the beach, the sand is clean.

  The sand has remained clean from the sweeping it received at daybreak, by the yard boys of the Crane Beach Hotel, clean as the front and backyards of the homes, wall-houses, estates, plantation houses of the women who now are sprawled out on the swept sand, as if they are lying on a carpet in their parlours; or on grass on their lawns, under umbrellas.

  Some of these women are lying on their stomachs, hiding the bulge of their gigantic breasts, and their stomachs which are now heavy and a little sagging from too much leisure, from too many times of childbirth, from no exercise, from too much rich food.

  Some of these women are lying on their sides, those whose breasts did not attract the eyes of the men and the lust of the young boys, because of their small size.

  One daring woman, the wife of the Solicitor-General, a woman born in Englund, is lying flat on her back, her eyes closed, her arms spread as if the area of the wet sand she is occupying is a cross; and she is smoking a cigarette without ever taking it out of her mouth once, to flick the ash into the waves . . . when the smooth calculating wave reaches these women, the blue in the skies seems to take on a softer hue, and the wind coming from the lighthouse, from the
west, rises just a little, and some sand flies a little distance from the large blue-bordered bath towels on which the women are reclining, crawl over their bodies, but not too much, just like a whisper; but still, the wind is strong enough, farther along the beach to make the air spotted with the dried leaves of the beach-grape trees which it holds in its puny power.

  These beach-grape trees are low and thick. Their branches grow in many different directions, like vines more than like trees. The grapes are still green, and young. And most of them have been picked off the deep-green trees. And eaten. By everyone who can reach them.

  Under these trees, which from a certain angle look like wounded soldiers, deformed, their arms and legs amputated by explosions and cannon shot and mines and hand grenades, under these trees lie the men, the husbands of the women lying on the sand, washed by the waves. The men are telling dirty stories about women. Their stories cover their women and their wives, at the edge of the water, oblivious to everything but their children. These men are not the men of the Village. They are not men like Percy or Manny or Golbourne or Pounce. These men are the leaders of the Island. The big men. The Vicar and the two leading barristers-at-Law, Messrs. E. Wharton-Barr, KC, and G. Herbert-Addis, KC, the Plantation manager Mr. Bellfeels, the Solicitor-General, the manager of Cave Shepherd & Sons, Haberdasheries, in Town, the Commissioner of Police, the Organist and Choirmaster of Sin-Davids Anglican Church; and the ADC to Sir Stanley, the Governor; men who play tennis at the Garrison Savannah Lawn Tennis Club, and who sail yachts that set out from the marina of the Aquatic Club. Big men.

  And there are the other children. The girl-children. Daughters of the women who work in the North Field, of women who are schoolteachers, of the women who are nursemaids; and of those who work at various jobs in the Plantation Main House; and daughters of women who, like Mistress Rosa Mary Antoinette Brannford, take in washing for the big houses, and who “try their hand” on the side, “doing a lil picking,” at needlework; and prepare black pudding-and-souse; white sugar cakes, brown sugar cakes, pink sugar cakes . . . “no brown sugar cakes, please!”; and “coconut-bread,” for sale, on Saturdays; and the children of the few Village women who are housewives. These women and their children are gathered together, in small clumps and both from the lolling women at the edge of the water, and from the men sheltering from the sun, under the beach-grape trees.