The Austin Clarke Library

by Austin Clarke

  “It’s Marco, man.”

  He closed the book, after putting a bookmark between the pages; the bookmark was a six-inch piece of kente cloth, and replaced it into the shelves which took up two complete walls of his small room. The shelves were crammed with books. All the books were paperbacks. All the books dealt with black people, and were written on black subjects, in fiction, philosophy, religion, art, culture, and his favourite, biography. He kept his school texts under the bed, on the floor.

  “BJ! Man, it’s Marco!”

  He was not impressed by the impatience in the voice, and before he went to the door, he rested the Gauloise cigarette in an ashtray, he lit some incense, and he turned down the volume of the CD of John Coltrane playing “A Love Supreme.” He put his housecoat on, and went to the door. The ashtray was a square crystal one which his father had bought eight Christmases ago, and had never used. His father did not smoke.

  “Fuck, man!” Marco said, stomping one foot after the other on the worn coconut-husk mat. “It’s fucking cold out here, man!”

  BJ looked at Marco sternly.

  “Sorry, man.”

  A trace of a smile came over his thin lips as Marco remembered BJ’s aversion to foul language. His father had drilled that into him, with a few beatings.

  So, he opened the door a little wider, and Marco squeezed between the doorpost and him, and went in, and stomped one foot after the other, although his sneakers were already wiped clean on the mat. He hunched his shoulders, and pushed his hands into his jeans side pockets and said, “It’s fucking cold, man!” Under his arm were newspapers.

  “You should control your emotions better than that.”

  Marco looked cowed, and said, “Sorry, man. But it’s all right for you, man.”

  They embraced, bodies touching, heads touching the right shoulder, and slapping each other on the back three times, as if they belonged to an old fraternity of rituals and mystery. They let go of each other, and did it a second time, with their heads touching the other’s shoulder. It was Italian, and it was African, and it was this that had joined them in their close friendship for the past nine years. They saw each other every day, either at school or here in BJ’s room. Their parents had never met. And did not know of their sons’ deep friendship. And it never occurred to either of them that they should bring their parents into their strong bond of friendship. BJ’s mother went to every school event that required a parent’s presence. And Marco’s mother and father attended them too. But they never met.

  BJ went to the small square table in a corner that had an African print covering it, and on which he kept a large leather-bound copy of the Holy Qur’an. Two glasses and a bottle of vodka were also on the table. Ice was already in the glasses. He had been expecting Marco. The ice was now melting.

  “Punctuality,” he told Marco, “is also not an Italian characteristic, although we are blamed for inventing CPT.”

  “Fuck, man! Gimme the drink!”

  And BJ poured two strong vodkas. He had not forgotten the orange juice, but he could not risk taking it earlier out of his mother’s fridge, just in case. He did this now, and when he returned, Marco was sitting in a straight-backed chair, with his drink already at his lips. He poured each of them some orange juice.

  Coltrane was at the stage in his song where he was chanting “a love supreme,” over and over. Marco joined in the chanting. His voice, similar to a bass, was deep for his age, eighteen.

  “A love su-preme, a love su-preme,” he chanted. “Nineteen times, fuck, you say he does that. Sometimes, you don’t know, BJ, but I feel he’s gonna sing it maybe twenty times, or eighteen times! Fuck.”

  “Unless your concentration diminishes, Coltrane won’t.”

  “Fuck!”

  BJ went back to the table, brushed a piece of ice from it, and ran his hands over the cover of the Qur’an. It was covered in brown paper, cut from a bag from the Liquor Control Board of Ontario, the LCBO, weeks ago, when he went to pick up his weekly supply of vodka. He was seventeen then. But he looked older. He had always looked older. This did not fool the manager at the LCBO store around the corner from his home, and he knew it; so to save the embarrassment, he used forged identification, including a schoolmate’s birth certificate. He felt guilty about doing this, on the first three occasions; but it was the style of the times. Only last week he read in the Star that the police had caught five immigrants working illegally under false names and with forged social insurance numbers. It was the way of the times. And he was a born Canadian, so “Fuck!” Marco consoled him, and himself. On the brown paper cover, he had printed HOLY BIBLE. On the bedside table, beside his single bed that had an iron bedstead, he had placed the Bible, just in case. He read the Bible too. His mother had given him the Bible. But he devoted his devotions to the Holy Qur’an. Coltrane was now into the second part of his song. The music came out at them with equal balance, and power, even though BJ had turned down the volume, out of the four speakers. The speakers were four feet tall and more than one foot in width. He had built them himself. The other components in the stereo, he and Marco had reconditioned from spare parts and odds and ends thrown out by neighbours in his district in the Bathurst–Dupont Street area, and in Marco’s neighbourhood up in North York. Every piece of equipment, but the CD player, they had reconditioned themselves.

  “Did you check out the things for me?”

  “Yeah, man,” Marco said. He was almost perfect in his imitation of the speech of black people. It came out easily and almost natural. “I got me the Form, man.”

  “Well, let’s spend a few moments scrutinizing the entries, and adding to our fortune.”

  “All these books. Fuck. Man, you’s something else! I can’t help saying, all these motherfucking books!”

  Marco would busy himself by taking out a book, flipping its pages, replacing it, and repeating this until he had touched almost every book in the shelves. And he did this to allow BJ to concentrate on the Racing Form. “You’re like, like a walking ’cyclopedia, man. And also a genius at the track. Fuck!”

  “All it takes is concentration, Marco. I’ve been telling you this for years. Concentration. And dedication.”

  “I gonna give you something Italian to read. You know anything about Italian classics? Man, I gonna lay some Italian literature on you, one o’ these days. Like Dante, man.”

  “Third shelf, sixth book from the right, second bookcase.”

  The book Marco picked out was Seven Systems of Dante’s Hell.

  “Fuck! I didn’t know he wrote this, too!”

  “Imamu Baraka wrote that, Marco. That’s a different inferno,” BJ said. And for no reason apparent to Marco, he added, “My mother is fine. She didn’t ask for you this morning.”

  “Fuck!”

  “This morning, she pushed my door and greeted me in her usual way: ‘You!’ I pretended I was sleeping, but all the time I could see her face, and the worry in it, and the worry in her body about her work, and I was pretending I was sleeping. I was up all night, reading.”

  “This Black Power shit?”

  “As a matter of fact, Marco, I was reading Shakespeare.”

  Marco got up from his chair and went to the bookcase. He knew this one. This one was, in a way, his favourite bookcase, for it contained books he too liked. The bookcase was made from unpainted dealboard, sawed and cut by him and BJ; and it occupied the space in the wall between a window and a cupboard. It ran from the floor to the ceiling. BJ liked everything in his room to run from the floor to the ceiling. It had something to do with perspective, he said. Marco did not understand, and said “Fuck!” to show his sentiments. If his room were larger, Marco knew that they would have built the speakers from the floor to the ceiling.

  In this shelf in the bookcase were books by Shakespeare which Marco liked, and did well in, in school, preferring Romeo and Juliet—“Fuck! Not because I’m Italian, man!”—and As You Like It, and The Merchant of Venice, which they stopped studying in his school
the term before he reached that grade. BJ preferred Henry IV and Othello—“Because you’re black, right? Fuck!” But BJ told him, “Because it contains the best and, perhaps, the most noble of Shakespeare’s noble poetry. I don’t even like the character Othello. Iago is a more realistic character. I see Iagos every day in class.” And to all this, all Marco said, years ago when they had this conversation the first time, was, “Fuck!” They have had this same conversation many times since. And Marco uses the same single word to express his sentiments.

  “Today is the last day. I suggest we go out with a bang. But how many classes would you miss if we got there for the first?”

  “Lemme see. Biology. Physics. English. And basketball practice.”

  “I will do your biology and physics assignments for you. Or we can do them together at the track.”

  “Fuck!” Marco said. He rubbed his hands as if he was cold. He poured himself another vodka and orange juice.

  For young men, for eighteen-year-old boys, really, they had an enormous “prodigity” for alcohol, which is the term BJ used laughingly, when they would sit in his small room, and consume half of a twenty-six-ounce bottle of imported Absolut vodka, hidden under generous quantities of orange juice; and if his mother had returned home and had seen them, she would shake her head in pleasure at their hearty liking for orange juice: “You two boys don’t know how good I feel to see you drinking orange juice, instead of all this damn Coke and Pepsi!” And after these long bouts, their speech was not even slurred.

  “Did you remember the Globe?”

  BJ read the Globe every day. He read the racing tips first. He read the sports section second, the editorial third, and the foreign news section fourth. He read nothing else in this newspaper.

  “Woodbine, here we come!” Marco said. “They’re at post! Fuck!”

  “Should we invest a hundred each? What is your opinion, Marco?”

  “A hundred bucks? Fuck! Why not, man? I deposited yesterday’s winnings in my account. Those tellers’re weird, man. She look at me with all that bread as if I was a drug dealer! Fuck, man.”

  “Today’s the last day,” BJ said. Marco noticed the tone of his voice.

  “You all right, man?”

  “You have to do something with the money in your bank account. Something. Some thing. And we have to think about the car too.”

  “Today is the last day, man. So, if we lose . . .”

  “Don’t say it!”

  “Sorry, man.”

  BJ went to his dresser, a narrow, tall piece of furniture which his mother had bought at the Goodwill store on Jarvis Street, and he had stained it himself to make it look like mahogany. It looked like a mahogany antique piece of Georgian furniture, although he did not know that. It had five drawers. In the top drawer, under his handkerchiefs which his mother starched and ironed and folded into four, he kept his cash, arranged in denominations in ascending order, inside a box that contained cheques from the bank. He opened this drawer now, and took from it a metal box that had a key. He brought the box to the bed, and unlocked it. There were four boxes that used to contain cheques in the metal box. They were full of banknotes. No note was smaller than a ten. He did not count his money every night, but his memory was good, and he knew that, with the withdrawals and the deposits into his private “safe,” he had five thousand, three hundred and five dollars in it. He could not tell his mother about this. He could not offer to lend her money, not even when he saw her moaning and crying and cursing his father for having abandoned them; not even when her rent of four hundred dollars a month was due. And sadly, not even when she had to postpone her registration for one month, in the Practical Nursing course at George Brown College, and never did catch up. She would kill him if she knew that he had so much money, in her house. But he had prepared for her future. At such a young age, it seemed ominous, too adult, too final a thing, this preparation for his mother’s life. He had opened a savings account in her name, at a different bank, different from the one she used. Marco put his winnings in a chequing account. But he kept his in cash.

  “Here’s twenty tens, Marco. I’ll take twenty, too. This is the last day, so I’m staking you. What we win we keep. What we lose, well . . .”

  “Fifty per cent of our winnings should still go in the kitty, man. Fuck!” It was their business arrangement. And they stuck to this code, like members of a gang. “And look for a long shot, man!”

  “There’s no such thing, Marco! No such thing. My father went to the races every day. Faking illness from work. And family crises and emergencies. He had to be there. In summer and winter. He even walked there, once. Not to mention the times he had to walk home. And he bet on long shots, because he was a gambler. He was a gambler. And was greedy. He was a fool. A damn fool. He thought he could get rich from the track. We are different. We are investors. Don’t ever let me see you betting on a long shot! Long shots are for racetrack touts.”

  “Why can’t we use the car?”

  “It’s not safe for us to drive that kind of car in Toronto. It’s safer in Montreal.”

  “Oh man! What’s the point of having the wheels, and not using it? Fuck!”

  “Have you told your parents you own a white BMW? Or more correctly, a fifty per cent share in a 1992 white BMW?”

  “Well, fuck no, man! For them to put me in cement?”

  “Exactly! My mother doesn’t even know I can drive. As long as our friend is cool, the car will remain parked in her underground garage up in Scarborough. Now, I have to make my salats.”

  “Make your salads, man. Make your salads. Fuck.”

  “Respect my religious principles man, or leave.”

  “I’ll respect your salads, man. I’ll respect your praying, man.”

  The Timex watch on BJ’s wrist began to buzz. It was the hour for prayer. Marco poured himself a vodka quickly, eager to stop the racket of the ice cubes in his glass, and the sound of the vodka pouring out of the bottle, now almost empty, before BJ began his prayers.

  BJ pulled a cheap Persian rug from under his bed, unrolled it, and placed it in front of the table on which were the Absolut vodka, imported, and the Holy Qur’an. He placed the Qur’an on the floor, in front of him, and he placed his hands before his heart in the demeanour of prayer and meditation.

  All this time, Marco was looking into the pages of Plutarch’s Lives, which he had taken from the bottom shelf of the narrow, unpainted bookcase that contained only classical literature. And he sucked on the vodka, straining it through his teeth and the melting pieces of ice cubes, as his friend ommmmmmmed and ommmmmmmed, and intoned “alla hack-bar,” which is how Marco understood the pronunciation of the Muslim prayers. Fuck, he said to himself, this motherfucker is real serious. If I didn’t know he was serious, fuck!

  It was nine o’clock. The morning was crisp and cold and clean.

  The boy flung the newspaper at the house, aiming for a different spot, and it banged against the window where she was with her hands in the thick, white dishwater, foaming like the waves that crashed against the rocks near the Esplanade, and then retreated back into the calm, blue sea. She was thinking of home. She had seen the newspaper boy. “You little bastard!” And the boy jumped back on his bicycle, and sped out of the circular driveway over the crunching snow.

  It was ten o’clock. The morning was cold. When she had got off the subway and was walking to this mansion, the wind ripped into her body, and made her think of going back home the moment she had made herself into a woman, meaning when she had money. The ripping wind against her body made her feel as if she was naked. The wind had the same brutal touch as his fingers on her backside that day when she was bending over the vacuum cleaner. He had not touched her. She imagined it was his intention. And imagining it, it made it real. The wind swept up her legs, right between her thighs, clawing at her pantyhose with such force that she thought she had left home without putting on her underwear. She felt the shame in the touch of the wind. “I should have been born a ma
n,” she said, to the newspaper boy disappearing over the smashed snow, but really not for his ears. Men didn’t know how lucky they were, she said, continuing her thoughts; they didn’t know how damn lucky they were to be wearing pants to get more greater protection from this damn cold. “And in other things too!” Her thoughts went back to her son. For she had seen the photograph of the Jamaican family on the front pages of the Star newspaper many weeks ago, and now this morning, when that damn boy pelted the paper that almost broke the window where she was, here was another short story about Jamaicans and the police. She wiped her hands on her apron, and began to study the newspaper. It said that the young man was seventeen, and it said that he was living with his mother in a big house in the suburbs, in Brampton, and it said he was in the car with another young man about his age, and it said that he was not going very fast and that the traffic policeman didn’t have to follow him with the sirens on, and it said he was shot in the back of his head. She felt sad. And wanted to cry. She had just left her own son at home, this morning as always, by himself, before dawn broke, in bed; and she wondered if he was safe. “But praise God, he doesn’t have no car. A car is the surest thing to make a police shoot a black man dead. Praise God for that!” And she wanted to take up a cause, and hold a piece of stick with cardboard stapled onto it, and a message written on the cardboard, in thick black letters: THIS COUNTRY RACIST. THE POLICE TOO! “Yes! And put an exclamation mark after it too!” She wanted to cry. She wanted to scream. But who would listen to her? A simple woman like her? That’s why, she said to herself, a man has it better; for “I am the least amongst the apostles.”