The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  He had known noir for years. But no one had addressed him as noir.

  He likes the noir of the ink he uses, as he liked the noir in the Nugget which gave his shoes longer life and made them immortal and left its proud, industrious, and indelible stain on his fingers.

  Tomorrow the University of Toronto is coming to buy his papers. He runs his hands over his letters in the Javex box, hundreds of them, and thinks of money and certified cheques. He empties all his pockets and puts the papers contained there on the table. He picks up each piece like a man picking flesh from a carcass of bones. Who should he write to tonight?

  The silent books around him, their words encased in covers, do not offer advice. But he knows what they would answer. He finds it difficult to concentrate. Tomorrow is too near. The money from his papers, cash or certified cheque, is too close at hand. He spends time spending it in his mind. And the things contained in tomorrow, like the things contained in his Javex box, have at last delivered him, just as his articulate use of the pen confirmed the value of the word and delivered him from the raving crowds of new immigrants. He has gained peace and a respectable distance from those aggressive men and women because of his use of the word.

  “Should I write to the president of Yale University?”

  The books, thick in their shelves around him, and few of which he has read from cover to cover, all these books remain uncommunicative and have no words of advice.

  “Should I write to President Reagan?”

  His five electric clocks continue to keep constant time, and in their regulated determination, refuse to disclose a tick of assistance.

  “The prime minister of Barbados?”

  Barbados is no longer home. Home, he had told Alonzo ten years ago, “is where I pee and eat and write.”

  He gets up and turns on the flame of the hotplate under the saucepan. “While the grass is growing, the horse is starving,” he tells the saucepan. He smiles at his own wisdom. The heat makes the saucepan crackle. “While the grass is growing . . .” The thin saucepan makes a smothered crackling sound. The hotplate seems to be melting the coagulated black-eyed peas and rice and pigtails. The hotplate is crackling as if it is intent upon melting the cheap alloy of the saucepan and turning the meal into soft hot lead, and then spreading its flame over the letters on the table, and then the table itself, and then the room. He lowers the flame.

  “Fire cleans everything,” he tells the hotplate. The saucepan stops laughing with the heat. His meal has settled down to being recooked.

  But he is soon smelling things. The nostalgia of food and the perspiration from his mother’s forehead as she cooked the food, and the strong, rich smell of pork. He smells also the lasting wetness of flannel shirts worn in the fields back on the small island.

  He gets accustomed to these smells. And he thinks again of new correspondence, since all these on the table before him would be gone by tomorrow, sold, archived among other literary riches. A hand-rubbing enthusiasm and contentment brings a smile to his face.

  “I’ll write the prime minister of Barbados!”

  The smell comes up again. With the help of the smell, he is back on the small island, witnessing spires of blue smoke pouring out from each small castle of patched tin and rotting wood where his village stood. He can hear the waves and the turbulent sea, so much like the turbulence of water he boiled in the same thin-skinned saucepan to make tea. As he thinks back, his eyes pass over used teabags spread in disarray, an action caught in the midst of an important letter, when he would sometimes drop a used teabag into the yellow plastic pail.

  Dear Prime Minister . . .

  He reaches over to the hotplate and raises the flame. He sees it change from yellow to blue, and smiles. “The horse is starving . . .”

  Certain important universities have asked me to act as a liaison to encourage you to submit your . . .

  The fragile aluminum saucepan is losing its battle in the heat of warming the food. But it is the smell. The smell takes his mind off the letter, and off the great sums of money, cash and certified cheques. He is a boy again, running home from school, colliding with palings and dogs and the rising smells of boiled pork reddened in tomatoes and bubbling over rice like the thick tar which the road workers poured over a raw road under construction.

  He can taste his country now. Clearly. And see the face of the Prime Minister, greedy to make a name for himself in a foreign institution of higher learning, and obtain foreign currency for his foreign account.

  . . . I have lived a solitary life, apart from the demonstrations and protests of the mainstream of immigrants. I have become a different man. A man of letters. I am more concerned with cultural things, radio, books and libraries, than with reports . . .

  Something is wrong with his pen. The flow is clogged and constricted, just like when he’s caught with his pants up in a sudden urge to pee, and having forced it inwards, cannot get it outwards. And he gets up and heads downstairs. Just as he’s moving away from his door, still on the first three or four steps going down, he turns back. “My pen is my penis,” he tells the door.

  He picks up the yellow plastic pail. He throws a shirt and underwear into the brown stagnant water. It looks like stale beer. Before he goes through the door again, he picks up the unfinished letter to the Prime Minister of Barbados, and in his long johns, armed with pail and paper, he creeps out.

  The stairs are still dim. And he smiles. He moves down slowly, hoping that when he reaches the second floor, the woman on welfare who occupies the toilet longer than any other tenant would not be there.

  The saucepan has now begun to boil, although there are more solids than liquids within its thin frame. Popcorn comes into his mind. He doesn’t even eat popcorn! He doesn’t even go to the movies! The saucepan is turning red at the bottom. If he were in his room, he could not tell where the saucepan’s bottom began and where the ring of the hotplate ended.

  He thinks of roast corn as he reaches the closed door of the only bathroom in the house. He stands. He listens. He smells. He inhales. And he exhales. He puts his hand on the door and pushes gently, and the door opens with a small creak. He stands motionless, alarmed to see that the bathroom is indeed empty. Where is the woman on welfare?

  . . . at night, back home, in the crop season when the sugar canes are cut and harvested, they burn the corn over coals . . .

  Right then, above his head, the saucepan explodes. He doesn’t hear it. The black-eyed peas and rice burst out, pelting the lid before them, and the tabletop is splattered with careless punctuation marks. It falls on his fine blue stationery.

  The explosion comes just as he holds the yellow pail at a tilt, over the growling toilet bowl. In the same hand as the pail is the unfinished letter. The urine is flowing into the bowl and he stands thinking, when he sees the first clouds of smoke crawling down the stairs, past the open bathroom door.

  The smoke becomes heavier and makes tears come into his eyes. He is crying and passing his hands in front of his face, trying to clear a passage from the second floor, through the thickening smoke rising like high waves. Up and up he goes, no faster than when he entered the house earlier that afternoon, struggling through the smoke until he reaches the steps in front of his door. And as he gets there, it seems as if all the books, all the letters, all the bags of plastic and paper shout at once in an even greater explosion.

  Before he can get downstairs a second time, to call for help from the woman on welfare, he thinks he hears all five of his clocks alarming. And then, in the way that a man who has been struck by a deadening blow waits for the second one to land, he stands, expecting the five clocks to do something else. It is then that he hears one clock striking the hour. He counts aloud until he reaches eight, and then he refuses to count any longer.

  A SLOW DEATH

  It began very slowly, almost imperceptibly, his hating the house in which he had lived for fifteen years, and without warning, like the melting of the stub of snow at the end of his walk th
at signalled in the spring. This hatred became a rage, an explosion, and it consumed his mind. It happened soon after his wife died. Her scent and her spirit remained in the house, quiet at first, and like an aggressive tenant afterwards, taking up most of his time and his space, although he was now occupying the three-storeyed house by himself.

  He told the young, vivacious saleswoman that he had to sell the house because it had become too large for him. He did not tell her about his wife.

  He showed her through the house, the three floors of rooms which he had recently cleaned and painted. Linoleum was nailed down the very morning it was bought from Bloor Hardware. The heads of the nails were still shining and visible. When he took her into the bathroom, the fresh, high, pungent smell of the small white balls he had taken from the storeroom at work returned his wife’s smell, the smell of camphor.

  He had mourned for three weeks, with the help of Canadian Club rye whisky. And he would have mourned longer if the rye had sat less heavily upon him, and hadn’t made him drop off in dozes in the middle of the day, and hadn’t built up a pallor of ennui around his entire personality. He felt tired all the time. Cigarettes and more rye did not help.

  He became suddenly tired, almost exhausted, by climbing the three flights of stairs. He began to hate her and her gnawing memory each time he got drunk. And he was drunk these days more often than the evenings of the weekend, which had been his time for relaxation and the occasional drink.

  The saleswoman smiled all the time. He could not guess at her seriousness or interest in his home. But at the end of the showing, she said, “I’ll take it off your hands.” He did not like the way she said it. He did not like the way she was dressed. During the interview she had pulled the tape measure from the neck of her cashmere sweater, like a snake unfolding, dropped it in one corner of the bedroom, after having kicked aside a shoebox, and then she bent down without bending her knees, so that the ridge of her behind faced him as she certified the size of the room. It was in the bedroom in which his wife had died that she bent down this way for the first time. He was still aware of his wife’s presence in the room.

  Whenever he saw her legs and the colour of her panties, he turned his eyes away. But he had taken a full appraisal of her young body and sensual legs; and his age told him he could be her father, and therefore he had probably called the wrong real estate company. She said her name was Jennie Cambull. But she was pretty. He tried to see a comparison between her and his wife, but he could not remember when his wife looked as young as this self-assured woman in the transparent dress. The shoebox she had kicked aside contained his wife’s jewels.

  Nevertheless, he signed the agreement to sell. “I’ll take it off your hands,” she said again, and then left.

  On the subway going back to work in the east end, he was sad. He had agreed to sign his life away, and would probably be lonely and desolate and would have to enter a home for the aged. He wished he had had children. He would happily live in one room and give the children the run of the rest of the house. He wished the city would transfer him to the park across the street from his house. From his house to the city park where he worked as a gardener, down in the Beaches, was a daily journey of almost one hour by streetcar. At five o’clock it took almost twice as long. But the time spent travelling whetted his thirst for rye, and it also kept him away from the house.

  Many nights soon after she died, he would walk up and down the house, talking to her, which he never did when she was alive, rearranging her clothes and playing with her jewels in the shoebox.

  The weekend was upon him. It was Friday afternoon. As he got off the streetcar near the racecourse at Greenwood, a clock on a large brick building said two. He would have the weekend to himself, all of Friday night, all Saturday and Sunday, but he could not face another weekend alone in the house that seemed filled with echoes of a past, unhappy life. He had already done all those small jobs that old men occupy their hands with, leaving their minds to wander and be oppressed by loneliness and advancing helplessness. He had always feared, even when he was fifty, that he would have a hard time going to the toilet and that there would be no one to clean him afterwards. This was one reason he hated her for dying before he did. And now all he had to look forward to were the rough hands of an indifferent, unrelated public nurse in a home for the aged. But that was better than living in this large house alone, to be lathered in his own excrement and be found dead. He wondered if the smell of his excrement would be the same he would give off when he was found dead. This Friday evening he stifled these thoughts with a half-bottle of Canadian Club.

  He had chosen this house because of the park. The park and the price of the house. He had lived for ten years in a flat in a rooming house opposite; and when the FOR SALE sign was nailed into the snow in mid-February, he saw it early. That afternoon he was walking through the park. Sibelius Park was as lovely and boisterous with snow and children’s laughter as was the music of the composer after whom the park was named. He had saved three thousand dollars in ten years. Once a month, on each payday, with a constancy that matched his wife’s attendance at the Shaw Street Baptist Church, he went to his bank to make his deposit. This regularity impressed the bank manager. When the time came for purchase and a loan, the bank manager gave him the extra three thousand dollars to make the down payment. “You’re a steady man,” he told him. The price was twenty-five thousand dollars.

  When he came home that night, he announced his good fortune to his wife. He was the first in both their families to own the roof over their heads. He poured himself a rye and ginger, and poured one for his wife. And together they stood at the window of their flat on the third floor of the rooming house and looked across at their new home. He dreamed of improvements and flower beds and green-painted fences and red roses and new linoleum.

  He faced the new life before him—new, but only as large as the width of the quiet dog-deserted street—with the same bravery as he had faced the steps of the Air Canada plane that brought him here from Barbados twenty-five years ago.

  Fifteen years ago this house was on a street whose houses had an ordinary beauty and working-class charm. The street was inhabited by Jews and Anglo-Saxons who were still trampling through snow to catch a five-o’clock streetcar in the morning; by people of modest means and fair-sized families, with children who played safely in the park. But all of a sudden the street became popular, enviable and expensive; and just as suddenly the neighbourhood became known as the Annex. He never found out what it was annexed to. But the droves of refugees from the suburbs and from Europe’s poorest countries transformed it into a village.

  “Townhousing” sprang up like the bulbs he nurtured in the city parks. He watched the street change from a stable, working-class district to one made up of lawyers, university professors, and architects. They filled the sidewalks in front of his house and his shared laneway with the guts of their renovations. Dust and brick and broken plaster lay for days all over the demolished front lawns. And in the racket of the improvements, he remained silent and disapproving, suffering from long bouts of sinus caused by the dust of regenerated homes.

  The owners, wallowing in new money, delighted in destroying the old gracious charm of these houses bought by the sweat and blood of ambition; and they resold them after one year for small fortunes, and the street became infested with transients who bought and sold and had no time for families and for sitting amongst the flowers and the playing children and the barking dogs in the park.

  The first thing he did when he moved into his home was turn the volume of his Seabreeze record player up as loudly as it would go. He stood with a broad smile on his face, laughing with his wife, who covered her ears with her hands, and he cried out, “I am now a man!” She shrugged and moved away, but there was a smile on her face.

  He experienced new privacy. He used the bathroom with the door wide open, and the sound of his passing gas went from the second floor to the first, where she was washing the dinner plates. “A
hhh! I wanted to do that for ten years! Excuse me.”

  As the years passed, he loved the park more and it became a vacationland of his imagination. In winter the crystals of leaves and icicles shone white and splendid, and he sat by his bay window and watched this magic, helped on by the strength of his rye and ginger ale.

  In the spring, which it is now, he counted the erupting new life of plants and flowers, Dutch bulbs and green grass around him; and at his job in the east end, he wallowed in these new shoots of life and felt himself getting younger. Every year at this time, and for years now, he pestered his supervisor for a transfer. “Everything takes time,” his wife would say, but it only made him more impatient and angry with her. “A man like me, used to watching and waiting on bulbs and plants and things to grow, and that is all you could say?” She did not understand him, did not understand his anger, his ambition for their success, his ambition to be his own man.

  On this Friday night, as on every Friday night since she had died, he did the shopping for the groceries and topped off the plastic bag that had a large red D with two forty-ounce bottles of Canadian Club. He already had a case of ginger ale in the cupboard beneath the sink. He took a shower and put on a green long-sleeved shirt and green trousers, the same as the uniform he had to wear to work. “City” was stitched in large letters on his left-hand breast pocket. He threw the uniform which he had worn during the week, and which fitted him no better than the fresh one, into the dirty-clothes hamper. He did not close the lid.