The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  “Griffy dear? Didn’t you enjoy yourself?” Her voice was like a flower, tender and caressing. The calypso band, upstairs, had just started up again. And the quiet waltz-like tune seemed to have been chosen to make him look foolish, behind his back. He could hear the scrambling of men and crabs trying to find dancing partners. He could imagine himself in the rush of fishermen after catches. He was thinking of getting his wife home quickly and coming back, to face Stooly and the Jamaican man; and he wished that if he did come back, they would both be gone, so he wouldn’t have to come on strong; but he was thinking more of getting rid of his wife and coming back to dance with a woman and to discuss the Racing Form; and tomorrow was races, again. He imagined the large rough Jamaican man searching again for fresh women. He saw Stooly grabbing some woman’s hand, some woman whom he had never seen before. But it was his club. He saw Masher, his eyes bulging and his mouth wide open, red and white, in joy. And Griff found himself not knowing what to do with his hands. He took his hands out of his jacket pockets; and his wife, examining her minidress in the reflection from the glass in the street door they were approaching, and where they always waited for the taxicab to stop for them, removed her arm from his waist. Griff placed his hand on her shoulder, near the scar, and she shuddered a little; she placed her hand on his hand; and then he placed both hands on her shoulders; and she straightened up, with her smile on her face, waiting for the kiss (he always did that before he kissed her), which would be fun, which was the only logical thing to do with his hands in that position around her neck, which would be fun and a little naughty for their ages, like the old times in Britain; and his wife—expecting this reminder of happier nights in unhappy London, relaxed, unexcited, remembering both her doctor and her yoga teacher—and in the excitement of her usually unexcitable nature, relaxed a little more, and was about to adjust her body to his, and lean her scarred neck just a little bit backwards to make it easy for him, to get the blessing of his silent lips (she remembered then that the Jamaican had held her as if he were her husband), when she realized that Griff’s hands had walked up from her shoulders, and were now caressing the hidden bracelet of the scar on her neck, hidden tonight by a paisley scarf. She shuddered in anticipation. He thought of Stooly, as she thought of the Jamaican, as he thought of Masher, as he squeezed, and of the races—tomorrow the first race goes off at 1:45 P.M. And the more he squeezed the less he thought of other things, and the less those other things bothered him, and the less he thought of the bracelet of flesh under his fingers, the bracelet which had become visible, as his hands rumpled the neckline. He was not quite sure what he was doing, what he wanted to do; for he was a man who always insisted that he didn’t like to come on strong, and to be standing up here in a grubby hallway, killing his wife, would be coming on strong: he was not sure whether he was wrapping his hands around her neck in a passionate embrace imitating the Jamaican, or whether he was merely kissing her.

  But she was still smiling, the usual smile. He even expected her to say, “Haiii! How?” But she didn’t. She couldn’t. He didn’t know where his kiss began and ended; and he didn’t know when his hands stopped squeezing her neck. He looked back up the stairs, and he wanted so desperately to go back up into the club and show them, or talk to them, although he did not, at the moment, know exactly why, or what he would have done had he gone back into the club. His wife’s smile was still on her body. Her paisley scarf was falling down her bosom like a rich spatter of baby food: pumpkin and tomato sauce; and she was like a child, propped against a corner in anticipation of its first step, toddling into movement. But there was no movement. The smile was there, and that was all. He was on the beach again, and he was looking down at a fish, into the eye of reflected lead, a fish left by a fisherman on the beach. He thought he saw the scales moving up and down, like small billows, but there was no movement. He had killed her.

  But he did not kill her smile. He wanted to kill her smile more than he wanted to kill his wife.

  Griff wet his lips, and walked back up the stairs. His wife was standing against the wall by the door, and she looked as if she was dead, and at the same time she looked as if she was living. It must have been the smile. Griff thought he heard her whisper, “Griffy dear?” as he reached the door. Stooly, with his arm round a strange woman’s body, took away his arm, and rushed to Griff, and as if he was bellowing out a calypso line, screamed, “Oh-Jesus-Christ-Griff!”

  Masher heard the name called, and came laughing and shouting: “Jesus Christ, boy! You get rid o’ the wife real quick, man! As man, as man.” Griff was wetting his lips again; he shrugged his sports jacket into place, and his mind wandered . . . “Show me the kissme-arse Racing Form, man. We going to the races tomorrow . . .”

  THE MAN

  The man passes the five open doors on two floors that shut as he passes, moving slowly in the dark, humid rooming house. Slowly, pausing every few feet, almost on every other step, he climbs like a man at the end of a double shift in a noisy factory, burdened down also by the weight of time spent on his feet, and by the more obvious weight of his clothes on his fat body, clothes that are seldom cleaned and changed. Heavy with the smell of his body and the weight of paper which he carries with him, in all nine pockets of trousers and jacket and one in his shirt, he climbs, leaving behind an acrid smell of his presence in the already odorous house.

  When he first moved into this house, to live in the third-floor room, the landlady was a young wife. She is widowed now, and past sixty. The man smells like the oldness of the house. It is a smell like that which comes off fishermen when they come home from the rum shop after returning from the deep sea. And sometimes, especially in the evening, when the man comes home, the smell stings you and makes you turn your head, as your nostril receives a tingling sensation.

  The man ascends the stairs. Old cooking rises and you think you can touch it on walls that have four coats of paint on them, put there by four different previous owners of the house. Or in four moods of decoration. The man pauses again. He inhales. He puts his hands on his hips. Makes a noise of regained strength and determination. And climbs again.

  The man is dressed in a suit. The jacket is from a time when shoulders were worn wide and tailored broad. His shoulders are padded high, as his pockets are padded wide by the letters and the pieces of paper with notes on them, and clippings from the Globe and Mail, and envelopes with scribblings on them: addresses and telephone numbers. And the printed words he carries in his ten pockets make him look stuffed and overweight and important, and also like a man older than he really is. His hips are like those of a woman who has not always followed her diet to reduce. He meticulously puts on the same suit every day, as he has done for years. He is a man of some order and orderliness. His shirt was once white. He wears only shirts that were white when they were bought. He buys them second-hand from the bins of the Goodwill store on Jarvis Street and wears them until they turn grey. He changes them only when they are too soiled to be worn another day; and then he buys another one from the same large picked-over bins of the Goodwill store.

  He washes his trousers in a yellow plastic pail only if a stain is too conspicuous, and presses them under his mattress; and he puts them on before they are completely dry. He walks most of the day, and at eight each night he sits at his stiff, wooden, sturdy-legged table writing letters to men and women all over the world who have distinguished themselves in politics, in government, and in universities.

  He lives as a bat. Secret and self-assured and self-contained as an island, high above the others in the rooming house; cut off from people, sitting and writing his important personal letters, or reading, or listening to classical music on the radio and the news on shortwave until three or four in the morning. And when morning comes, at eight o’clock he hits the streets, walking in the same two square miles around his home, rummaging through libraries for British and American newspapers, for new words and ideas for letters; then along Bloor Street, Jarvis Street, College Street, and h
e completes the perimeter at Bathurst Street. His room is the centre of gravity from which he is spilled out at eight each morning in all temperatures and weather, and from which he wanders no farther than these two square miles.

  The man used to work as a mover with Maislin Transport in Montreal. Most of the workers came from Quebec and spoke French better than they spoke English. And one day he and a young man dressed in jeans and a red-and-black checked shirt, resembling a man ready for the woods of lumberjacks and tall trees, were moving a refrigerator that had two doors; and the man said, “Lift.” He misunderstood the man’s English and began to turn left through the small apartment door. He turned old suddenly. His back went out, as the saying goes. And he developed “goadies,” a swelling of the testicles so large that they can never be hidden beneath the most restraining jockstrap. That was the end of his moving career.

  This former animal of a man, who could lift the heaviest stove if only he was given the correct word, was now a shadow of his former muscle and sinews, with sore back and calloused hands, moving slowly through a literary life, with the assistance of a private pension from Maislin Transport. He had become a different kind of animal now, prowling during the daytime through shelves of books in stores and in libraries; and visiting slight acquaintances as if they were lifelong friends, whenever he smelled a drink or a meal; and attending public functions.

  His pension cheque came every month at the same time, written in too much French for the rude bank teller, who said each time he presented it, even after two years, “Do you have some identification?”

  He used to be sociable. He would nod his head to strangers, flick his eyes on the legs of women and at the faces of foreign-language men on College Street, all the way west of Spadina Avenue. He would even stop to ask for a light, and once or twice for a cigarette, and become confused in phrase-book phrases of easy, conversational Greek, Portuguese, and Italian.

  Until one evening. He was walking on a shaded street in Forest Hill Village when a policeman looked through the window of his yellow cruiser, stopped him in his wandering tracks, and said, “What the hell ’re you doing up here, boy?” He had been walking and stopping, unsure along this street, looking at every mansion, each of which seemed larger than the one before, when he heard the brutal voice: “Git in! Git your black ass in here!”

  The policeman threw open the rear door of the cruiser. The man looked behind him, expecting to see a delinquent teenager who had earned the policeman’s raw hostility. The man was stunned. There was no other person on the street. But somehow he made the effort to walk to the cruiser. The door was slammed behind him. The policeman talked on a stuttering radio and used figures and numbers instead of words, and the man became alarmed at the policeman’s mathematical illiteracy. And then the cruiser sped off, scorching the peace of Forest Hill, burning rubber on its shaded quiet streets.

  The cruiser stopped somewhere in the suburbs. He thought he saw DON MILLS written on a signpost. It stopped here, with the same temperamental disposition as when it had stopped the first time in Forest Hill Village. The policeman made no further conversation of numerals and figures with the radio. He merely said, “Git!” The man was put out three miles from any street or intersection that he knew.

  It was soon after this that he became violent. He made three pillows into the form of a man. He found a second-hand tunic and a pair of trousers that had a red stripe on them, and a hat that had a yellow band instead of a red one, and he dressed up the pillows and transformed them into a dummy of a policeman. And each morning at seven when he woke up, and late at night before he went to bed, after he washed out his mouth with salt water, he kicked the “policeman” twice—once in the flat feathery section where a man’s testicles would be, and again at the back of the pillow in the dummy’s ass. His hatred did not disappear with the blows. But soon he forgot about the effigy and the policeman.

  Today he had been roaming the streets, as every day, tearing pieces of information from the Globe and Mail he took from a secretary’s basket at the CBC, from Saturday Night and Canadian Forum magazines. And the moment he reached his attic room, he would begin to compose letters to great men and women around the world, inspired by the bits of information he had gathered.

  And now, as he climbs, the doors of the roomers on each floor close as he passes like an evil wind. But they close too late, for his scent and the wind of his presence have already touched them.

  With each separation and denial, he is left alone in the dim light to which he is accustomed, and in the dust on the stairs; and he guides his hand along the shining banister, the same sheen as the wallpaper, stained with the smells and specks of cooking. He walks slowly because the linoleum on the stairs is shiny too, and dangerous and tricky under the feet.

  Now, on his last flight to his room for the night, his strength seems to leave his body, and he pauses and rests his hands, one on the banister and the other on his right hip.

  The cheque from Montreal will arrive tomorrow.

  He feels the bulkiness of the paper in his pockets, and the weight of his poverty in this country he never grew to love. There was more love in Barbados. On many a hot afternoon, he used to watch his grandfather rest his calloused hand on his hip as he stood in a field of endless potatoes, a field so large and quiet and cruel that he thought he was alone in the measureless sea of green waves, and not on a plantation. Alone perhaps now too, in the village, in the country, because of his unending work of bending his back to pull up the roots, and returning home when everyone else is long in bed.

  And now he, the grandson, not really concerned with that stained ancestry, not really comparing himself with his grandfather, stands for a breath-catching moment on this landing in this house in which he is a stranger. He regards his room as the country. It is strange and familiar. It is foreign, yet it is home. It is dirty. And at the first signs of summer and warmth, he would go down on his hands and knees in what would have been, back home, an unmanly act, and scrub the small space outside his door, and the four or five steps he had to climb to reach it. He would drop soap into the water, and still the space around the door would remain dirty. The house had passed that stage when it could be cleaned. It had grown old like a human body. And not even ambition and cleanliness could purify it of this scent. It could be cleaned only by burning. But he had become accustomed to the dirt, as he was accustomed to the thought of burning. In the same way, he had become accustomed to the small room which bulged, like his ten pockets, with the possessions of his strange literary life.

  He is strong again. Enough to climb the last three or four steps and take out his keys on the shining ring of silver, after putting down the plastic bag of four items he bought through the express checkout of Dominion around the corner, and then the collection of newspapers—two morning and two afternoon and two evening editions. He flips each key over, and it makes a dim somersault, until he reaches the last key on the ring, which he knows has to be the key he’s looking for.

  Under the naked light bulb he had opened and shut, locked and unlocked this same blue-painted door, when it was painted green and red and black, so many times that he thought he was becoming colour-blind. But he could have picked out the key even if he was blind; for it was the only key in the bunch which had the shape of the fleur-de-lys at its head. He went through all the keys on the ring in a kind of elimination process. It was his own private joke. A ritual for taking up time.

  He spent time as if he thought it would not end: walking along College Street and Spadina Avenue when he was not thinking of letters to be written; looking at the clusters of men and women from different countries at the corner of Bathurst and Bloor; at the men passing their eyes slowly over the breasts and backsides of the women; at the women shopping at Dominion and the open-air stalls, or among the fibres of cheap materials and dresses, not quite pure silk, not one hundred per cent cotton, which they tore as they searched for and ripped from each other’s hands to get at cheaper prices than those adve
rtised at Honest Ed’s bargain store. And he would watch how these women expressed satisfaction with their purchases in their halting new English.

  And now, in the last few months, along those streets he had walked and known, all of a sudden the names on stores and the signs on posts had appeared in the hieroglyphics of Chinese. Or Japanese? He no longer felt safe, tumbling in the warmth and shouts of a washing machine in a public laundromat in this Technicolor new world of strangers.

  He had loved those warm months and those warm people before their names and homes were written in signs. They were real until someone turned them into Chinese characters which he could not read. And he spent the warm months of summer writing letters to the leaders of the world, in the hope of getting back a reply, no matter how short or impersonal, with their signatures, which he intended to sell to the highest bidder.

  He came from a colony, a country, and a culture where the written word spelled freedom. An island where the firm touch of the pen on paper meant freedom. Where the pen gripped firmly in the hand was sturdier than a soldier holding a gun, and which meant liberation. And the appearance of words on paper, the meaning and transformation they gave to the paper, and the way they rendered the paper priceless, meant that he could now escape permanently from the profuse sweat and the sharp smell of perspiration on the old khaki trousers and the thick-smelling flannel worn next to the skin. This sweat was the uniform, and had been the profession of poor black grandfathers. Now pen and paper meant the sudden and unaccountable and miraculous disappearance from a colonial tradition where young bodies graduated from the play and games and beaches of children into the dark, steamy, and bee-droning caverns and caves of warehouses in which sat white men in white drill suits and white cork hats, their white skin turning red from too much rum and too much sun, and from their too-deep appetites for food and local women. For years before this graduation, he could find himself placed like a lamp post, permanent and blissful in one job, in one spot, in one position, until perhaps a storm came, or a fierce hurricane, and felled him like the chattels of houses and spewed him into the gutter.