“How on earth did you find this place?”
He ignored my question.
It was still quite light, and after more stretches of broken paving, we came to an abrupt stop in a clearing.
“Full circle,” he said with satisfaction.
That’s when I saw the windmill that would come to represent that strange, unresolved place and time.
And it was strange. It was something totally new, something in the middle of our years that held none of the disappointment, none of the squalidness or drudgery, the falling short and falling off, the sheer shortcoming of our living held up against the dreams of youth. Looking back, this was just a moment in time, less than a month. Sometimes I think maybe it’s still there, the way I left it, the old damp windmill silently standing with motionless arms, narrow oblong holes in its massively thick stone walls, neither welcoming nor forbidding, with huge, rough double doors, two single planks of a giant tree trunk, shrugged wide open.
This may read like a bad film script, but with the memory I hear music. Ravel’s Pour une enfante defunte. I tried to find out what the words meant, because they didn’t make sense to me, and Daniel told me “nothing, really.” He was, I thought, deliberately vague. Ravel probably just liked the sound of those words, he said. Enfante defunte. But defunte means deceased or dead. I think the infante is not enfant, child, but from the Spanish infanta, a princess. Music for some dead princess. And that music reminds me now of the trees, the deep leaves and the damp, a world locked away in time by the sea. Of Daniel as the great composer, and me his heart’s dead princess.
It wasn’t playing when we got there. Distance has made me sentimental, but it was nothing like that at the time. It’s just got stuck in my mind because during the subsequent days Daniel kept playing the tape over and over on his small machine.
Aesop first converted the windmill into rustic accommodation for a sailor who had found the island while travelling around the world and who wanted to return one day. He never returned. Perhaps he died at sea. Then, for the past ten years an old man called Esopus who came originally from the Dutch Antilles, but had spent his life in Europe, came home to the Caribbean to study what he found there, from fossils to genetics and, eventually, to die. And now Daniel lived there.
There was only one farm on the island, and this had been its windmill.
“Aesop runs the show,” said Daniel.
He also had the only phone, chickens, peas, potatoes, and carrots. He owned a few mules and several donkeys, one of three old cars on the island — and an open-backed van, the only bulldozer and the only tractor; the ferry that brought the necessary imports that, as the coast guard vessel, often rescued the odd fisherman clinging to an overturned hull. At the side of Aesop’s house he ran a small shop where the handful of islanders came for first aid or to purchase produce from the farm, sardines or condensed milk — canned or packaged items the silent Charon brought over on the ferry, and whatever space was left for bread and newspapers, both of which Daniel considered mandatory items, equally perishable.
“No man comes to Peacock Island, except by him,” Daniel stated biblically. I wasn’t sure whether he meant Aesop or Charon.
A Samaans tree emerged out of the shadows. The half-light beneath its ceiling gathered obdurate as if we faced a mountain.
As my eyes absorbed the deep under-shade that was darker than the afternoon beyond, I saw its heavy arms sinking down over everything, and although only some of its limbs were evident at the front of the windmill, I could tell the tree and its trunk were massive, extending out of view. We stood beneath it in a mostly sandy clearing with remnants of concrete, with recently swept leaves stacked up against a zinc fence that marked the boundary to Aesop’s property.
And there were the peacocks. Glorious peacocks. Their folded tails draped and trailing like complicated fans of menopausal widows.
Then I saw Aesop.
There are places in the world where modernity has no sway; where nature and man seem to have at some point in time worked out a compromise. This was truly Aesop’s land. His presence seemed to swirl in an elemental cloud against a haze of early moonlight, funnels streaming down, dust motes stirring in their way up. The Samaans tree was its own forest and Aesop was its faun. A wide-faced man, one eye with a milky film spread over its story, many missing teeth revealed when he laughed. He never smiled.
“Meet Lethe.” Daniel presented me to Aesop like a queen, and I met him almost eye to eye as he was no taller than his son. I shook this new hand, dry and brown, essential, unaccustomed to mere pleasantry, with a firm hold that yet was on his part oddly neutral, expressing neither welcome nor weakness nor strength, more indifference or tolerance, a patience with anyone whose hand he had to shake. To belong here was a timeless business, one that would need no introduction or farewell. I felt I was shaking the island’s hand.
And that’s when I saw him. The magnificent bird, a peacock at least twice the size of the rest, strutted out, and, finding himself on show, performed a pompous ritual, puffing up his tail as though on the runway of some celestial theatre, the feathers on his forehead a tiny, elaborate hat bobbing up and down, just a little swagger, and then he stopped, suddenly closed down his brief show and reached for the ground to perform the simple function of pecking, his long train of now closed feathers sweeping the ground. Unlike the other peacocks he was jet black. The tallest of the birds, a splendid specimen who kept his distance from the brood, hovered near Aesop.
“See, he’s welcoming you!” said Daniel, obviously pleased with what he saw as my red-carpet treatment.
Daniel was prone to hyperbole. The flattery was good for my ego.
“This is Othello,” Aesop said as though formally presenting the bird who’d now turned his back and looked anywhere but at me.
“But he’s black!” I exclaimed. A Nubian peacock. I’d never seen such a sight.
Neither man offered an explanation.
“So, what. You prejudiced?” He cackled. “Dan, man, you can’t celebrate the lady without the fatted calf.”
Aesop’s earthy informality surprised me. No one I ever knew called Daniel “Dan.”
He returned briefly to his neighbouring cottage, surrounded by shrubs, to re-emerge proudly gripping a plucked chicken by its twiggy feet. Othello waited at the door and as Aesop reappeared he followed his master, apparently unfazed by the corpse of a fellow fowl being held aloft.
Daniel frowned at the carcass with distaste. “Cut it up for me, nuh? I don’t have a good knife. Anyway, the oven doesn’t work.”
Aesop sucked his teeth. “The oven work. You just need wood. Chu, is you pack it up with all you damn stuff.” He walked over to the windmill, leaving his footprints in the freshly brushed sand. He went inside to sort out the oven, an old black Dover stove, which did indeed house a few provisions that Aesop promptly removed. He then fetched dry wood and soon had the old stove lit.
“Even the taciturn Aesop has fallen under your spell,” mused Daniel. He sometimes used florid words in the most everyday con-versation. But not for effect. It’s just how he thought and spoke. “Can you roast a chicken, Lethe?”
“I will roast you a chicken.” I was suddenly feeling lighter, as though this ordinary, mindless task that I had performed so often for my children would bring me peace.
“What, you’ve learned to cook?”
“When you have two sons to feed, believe me, you learn. But you must remove the neck and gizzard, liver — all those innards, and the parson’s nose.” This was no supermarket chicken.
“The pope’s nose,” he corrected me. Trinidadians are usually Catholic.
“Pope’s, parson’s, whatever.”
Aesop’s laugh was like a squall, sudden and wicked. “She ain’t like de fowl batty!”
He felt familiar, crude and revelling; like every mountain carpenter I’d ever known. He lit the
lamps that smelled of the kerosene from my youth. A windmill’s arms may be long, but inside was compact, like fitting into a caravan. The walls seemed to sway pre-cariously to the metronome of our lamp-lit walk.
The sound of the sea shook us with every wash, making even our stillness seem like a journey.
Daniel pushed open a glass-paned double doorway to a long room. Dark as we first entered, Aesop brought another lamp. I could hear the sound of the sea following us, the room being nearest the cliff, its presence felt louder pounding through the walls.
And then like magic, before even I saw them, the familiar smell of books. A world whose body exuded a pungency that I remembered as moisture and paper, the acridity and rot of mould, a linger-ing fragility of age and thought and memory held together in its own private ecology.
Anywhere Daniel lived, the first thing I became aware of was his books. But this was something way beyond his usual collection, which must have been stored away in some previous life. This library was huge.
Daniel watched me straining to read titles in the gloom.
“I wonder, if our writing survives down the years, will anyone connect you with Jamaica and me with Trinidad?” I thought that an odd thing to ask. I assumed only these islands would ever hear of us. No matter where I roamed, home was in me. Surely one’s writing would reflect that?
“Isn’t our island there in all we write, no matter where we live?” I said. “Margaret Laurence once said the place we grew up in is the person we are. You will make Columbus Trinidadian!”
I sensed his smile. I believe he liked that.
I followed him into the dim afternoon light of the room, where at the far end were two large windows, one of stained glass I’d noticed from outside. It glinted and refracted the dying light like a prism of what appeared to be the brilliant circular panes depicting a peacock’s tail.
“A bright peacock!” Even in the late light I could see the aqua and green, the navy eye of each feather. I thought its presence strange and wondered what came first, the window or the flock of birds outside.
“This room is where Esopus worked. Those are just a few of the books he collected.” Daniel pointed to the long walls behind and on either side lined with ceiling-high shelves stuffed with tomes, upright and sideways. There were more in stacks all over the floor.
“It’s said he was the Dutch ambassador to Spain during the civil war.”
Daniel had met the old man when he first came to see the place; he had heard he was leaving for the mainland. He spoke eight languages and wrote several internationally acclaimed books on music, anthropology, and cooking. While in Spain his “real” library was burned to the ground. When Daniel met him at the windmill in his last years, this was the biggest home library Daniel had ever seen — maybe ten thousand books. At age nineteen he wrote a book about peacocks that would become a seminal work on these birds.
“Black peacocks?”
“Dunno. Peacocks!”
He told Daniel he’d decided to leave Europe when he stopped going to concerts, stopped listening to classical music, and would now only read the scores. “They can never play it as perfectly as I hear it in my head,” he’d said.
Daniel didn’t know what had brought him to this island, this windmill overlooking the sea. Aesop was a man of few words, he said. Did he bring the peacocks? Did he install the stained-glass window?
“Ask Aesop.”
Guiding me, Daniel walked over to the dark shape of a large, polished desk under the plain window, with an elaborately carved chair that in the half-light looked like a gargoyle facing the window. He placed the lamp on the desk then ran his long, tapered brown fingers, forever wrinkled as though water-logged at their tips, over the shoulder of the chair. Then he gripped it, leaning back as though at a podium and turned to address me.
“You know what he told me? Look, I’ve turned my desk around. Don’t want to see all those books anymore. Now I only study the sea.”
In his last years, the old man had been full of despair, and more than a little intolerant. But in that time he founded a little museum on the mainland, doing groundbreaking work on the Caribs or Tainos — Daniel didn’t seem quite sure — who’d originally inhabited the islands.
When Daniel met him, the old man explained that his health was failing and he had to return to the mainland. Daniel agreed to rent the windmill. By the time Daniel packed up and returned, the old man had died right there at his desk. He was in his late eighties. He had not left the island.
Daniel had placed his typewriter on the desk under the plain window facing the sea. This was now his study.
I stared at the stacks. It was a labyrinth whose odour we breathed, beloved books and more books, old, leathered, papered, weathered and withering, mildewed. Yellowing books perspiring through heat and damp and time and their ddt, a smell I knew well from Ernest’s library, intimate as a million tiny musky underarms, a netherworld of books. Books in some gallant last stance against time; books I discovered as I walked slowly through their ranks that someone had lovingly read and sorted and placed and framed with a sense of subject and era and theme and genre and author and occasion into shelves in formation, nestled shoulder to shoulder, tall as the thin boundaries of their spines, guarded by the closed arms of their covers, their contents a single dignified, respected life with secrets and efforts and precious births and happiness and bending sorrows tucked into their pages to sleep forever if nobody roused them by taking them down from their shelves.
We stood, as if inspecting the guard, as the phalanx of books stood at attention in formation through the cool, shadowy room that seemed to widen out and reveal itself to me. It looked as large as a small country church, and its contents climbed to the high ceiling. Books that someone had held dear, each hallowed by this its last, lost outpost of defended dignity.
He looked solemnly at me.
“When a man turns his back on his books, he’s ready to die,” Daniel said.
“But Daniel, you’ve turned your back to the books!”
“I want to face the sea, Lethe. I’m writing about Columbus.”
He lifted the light to show me the deep ledge of sill behind the desk. I saw a little crowd of arranged photographs, some of which I remembered, recognizing them by their frames before making out the pictures — his dead mother, eternally young, lying on her side on a beach in Barbados, propped up on one elbow to smile at the camera, to smile at Daniel over the motherless years that were to follow. A stern one of his elderly father in his judge’s robes. Daniel’s two joyous daughters as children in coats, boots, hats, and mittens, standing in Green Park in London. His aunts Verrie and Gilly standing formally behind a single ornate white chair. And a very young me — a photograph he took at university, with my hair short and my neck so very long. On the floor, next to his desk, a horrible carved wooden painted bird. A toucan I’d once given him. He’d scoffed at it, regretting I hadn’t brought him Mount Gay rum instead. He’d lugged it about with him all those years.
“Aunt Gilly died,” he said. He took a small brown envelope from a thin drawer under the table and passed it to me. It bore my name in an old lady’s painstakingly neat handwriting.
Aunt Gilly was dead. I opened the worn envelope that held its treasure — a lavender-smelling piece of crocheted lace.
“It was a while back,” Daniel said so gently, with a softness he always maintained for his aunts. Aunt Verrie had died first. I knew Gilly would soon follow. In a fast-changing world, those two had faithfully provided both company and context for each other. He cupped my head in his hands and gave it an odd, loving scratch, as though I were a cat.
In the awkward but happy space designated a kitchen, I seasoned the pale, lifeless flesh of the chicken with what Aesop brought and what was already there — limes, salt, black pepper, scotch bonnet, scallions, onions, and some damply solid garlic powder I dug out of a bottle
and shoved inside the cavity with stale bread soaked in some beer I found open in the small icebox that had no ice. As I prepared the bird, I was balanced by each tiny, mindless act, each familiar cut of a knife or shake of an arm, the stir of a spoon, the turn of a tap, and the waltz of my hands round the soap and each other, the squeeze and return of a towel. There was an old rusty pan that Daniel scrubbed, in which I placed the bird surrounded by a pool of water. Since there was no tinfoil, after half an hour, when the pyramid of bird was brown, I covered it with two badly chipped enamel plates and left it to its fate in the unregulated blaze.
Daniel fixed us rum and cokes and we sat together on the con-crete patio at the back where he’d hung laundry as we waited for dinner; two deep wooden slatted Adirondack chairs sitting side by side as though we’d always been there, our elbows resting on the wide arms, studying the history of the sea. Daniel, as always, smoked.
The Samaans gathered the rest of the shadows and the drift of Daniel’s smoke. It seemed to make him cough with his deeper inhalations.
I watched the peacocks retreat with advancing evening, dark on dark, jerking, wounded shadows dragging home the rest of their day with their closed tails. Othello was nowhere in sight.
“There is an island in Italy on the Lake Maggiore, off Stresa. It’s called Isola Bella. Napoleon once slept there with Josephine. I went there with Alex,” I said. “It was populated with white peacocks. Albinos. Just like these, but white — an intricate radiance of white lacy brides. That would be grooms, really. It’s the male that is beautiful. I didn’t know there were black peacocks …”
Daniel didn’t know there were white ones.
“Othello’s the only black male. The only black peacock. The peahens look like big partridges with crowns on their head. See? We don’t bother to notice them.”
The Black Peacock Page 2