I will never know why that was the only date she kept.
I was deeply affected by the film. It reminded me of my own predicament. This film gave me hope. Maybe because she let me hold her hand. Toward the film’s end I put my arm around her shoulders and she leaned against me so naturally. There in the dark across the great vastness of the Russian landscape was such a love between Zhivago and his Lara. The Russians understand longing, waiting, and tragedy. With a winter such as the one the Russians experience, one would have to learn patience. “Lara’s Theme” played in my head for years after I saw it. In fact, it still does. The balalaika playing endlessly.
I remember us returning to campus later that evening in an astonishing moonlight. Its enigmatic globe watched over the dark back of those resilient mountains. I stood as witness. I was more committed to Lethe than ever. I was responsible for us despite my unrequited situation.
Lethe had watched the film with such rapt attention. I had felt her softly crying. And now she started humming as she leaned on my arm while walking to the lodge. It was the song, “Lara’s Theme,” going round and round in my head.
“Somewhere,” I assured her as I hugged her good night, her hair smelling like flowers.
She pulled away, turning to go, then stopped, looking back at me, and smiled.
Then a strange thing happened.
“Erehwemos,” she said softly, knowingly, still smiling enigmatically, and disappeared up the stairs.
That was the name of their mountain cottage. I assumed she referred to a plan to visit. Might she invite me too?
I wondered if this was her first night spent in hall.
Walking and smoking around Ring Road that night, trying to think through the dilemma in which I happily found myself, evoking every nuance of the evening to post-mortem, sifting through every word she muttered, I sensed a small clue to the puzzle in the back of my mind just out of reach.
Erehwemos.
That’s when it struck me: Erehwon. Samuel Butler’s Nowhere.
Erehwemos. Somewhere.
Somewhere indeed! Ernest and Nora’s Camelot, their promised land. That’s what Lethe breathed into the night as she turned from me all moonlight and flowers.
A cause for hope.
Somewhere!
Our song. Our sign.
the black peacock
LETHE
Then for the first time, waking to the bird’s bedlam, the sun was already shining, not breaking through a breach in the clouds, but quite alone, a blinding orb in an endless blue sky. The landscape came alive, and what had been bleak and grey suddenly became bright, as though the blood of the world had come right back into the planet’s skin.
Charon set up two chairs for me on the side of the cliff by the sea and went to get a straw mat to line the rough ground. I laid out the cushions from the chairs and spread a towel, shooing Othello, who was shuffling back and forth as ever curious at the new activity.
Daniel took a break. He brought me breakfast and drank his coffee. His sad music drifted out behind him. I had the feeling they took shifts, Aesop, Charon, and Daniel, keeping an eye on me. Maybe they also coerced Othello.
“You look just the same as the girl I met in 1968!”
“Flatterer!” I was pleased. But instantly wrapped my towel around me to sit with my morning tray of fried eggs with toast.
“How you spoil me.”
“Remember that time you baked me a pie, Lethe?”
In all these years I’d never told him I merely brought him the pie. Nora had sent it for him. One of Ernest’s former students had baked it for her favourite teacher.
Daniel perused the horizon from under his hand where a faraway ship glinted on the sea, the endless home of Columbus. I munched on his breakfast and he pulled on his cigarette, its glow invisible in the bright light, just a little ghost of smoke. It was the first ship I’d seen since I’d been there. He coughed, clearing his throat: “But by her still halting course and winding, woeful way, you plainly saw that this ship that so wept with spray, still remained without comfort. She was the Rachel, weeping for her children, because they were not …”
Daniel loved to quote Moby Dick and had chastised me frequently for not reading Melville’s masterpiece. The argument had gone on so long I feared that if I read it, something precious in our relationship might be lost.
“You okay out here tanning?”
“I’m fine.”
On this note he left, as if leaving his island, his people, the pea-cocks, Moby Dick, and all the ocean’s secrets to me.
I hadn’t been conscious of how beautiful the surrounding world at Mona was before I met Daniel. It lay dormant in me like a psalm you know by heart or the Lord’s Prayer you mumble thoughtlessly. Ernest and Nora had placed it in me by the things they loved and talked about, by what they honoured. They stealthily planted in me a capacity for worship.
The campus is spread across the lap of the ancestral Blue Moun-tains. In islands of the new world where we were all transplanted with distant, fierce histories, these high peaks towering above us are what we learn to love and honour, what the eye beseeches and to what the heart prays; they are what moves the spirit. These are our chieftains, earth matriarchs; in these beginnings are our ends, our ideologies, our footprints and imprints; our very Gods.
I knew all this intuitively. But in self-absorbed adolescence, I doubt I would have thought to celebrate any of this without Daniel.
I don’t remember exactly when I met him. He says he remembers the day as clearly as the days of his children’s births. Repeatedly. Until his story became implanted in my head. Until I joined his myth. Maybe it was true. It was, he claims, at the swimming pool. Now I have imagined him into my being, swimming in the pool, a dark figure slicing hugely through the water, rolling heavily from side to side, drawn by one flat arm then the other, causing an even wake which, as he turned at the wall, he disturbed to cut through again, pushing off, propelling himself halfway across the pool between laps and then sloughed through the water again. If for a moment I stood in the sunshine with the rhythm of his quiet metronome, I was quite unaware of the fact it would accompany me for the rest of my life.
I only remember that I met him at university through Blanca.
Blanca was a Czech student who lived across from me in the residence hall. She was slender and bony in a not unattractive way. Her face was all slants and planes like she was carved from a slab of stone. She wore knee-length skirts cut slyly on the bias, which made a little shivery shadow of movement that mimicked her almost invisible hips with each step thrown by her resolute, narrowly muscular calves. I knocked on her door to ask where she got her clothes. She opened it a crack, reluctant to speak to me, and even more reluctant to tell me the source of her skirts that I’d later discover her mother had sewn from bags of pig feed on their farm.
In her swimsuit Blanca stood out, having neither hips nor bottom, not even the smallest rise of a stomach. Truth is all the black power in the world couldn’t make a girl appreciate a big bottom and wide hips in those days. Beneath all our newfound pride lay a history designed to favour white beauty, and with the recent culmination of all things rock and roll, and though the Queen of Soul was statuesquely substantial, Mick Jagger and Twiggy were as thin as rakes. Beauty might be only skin deep, but it better not be too thick, too plump or too wobbly, too hefty or too anything familiar, or black wouldn’t be all that beautiful. We hadn’t got that far. We couldn’t move that fast. My skin might be a bit washed out, but there was no question about my shape, which, though I weighed less than a hundred pounds, had a definite bottom, wide hips, and an arch in my lower back that shoved my stomach out front and my behind tilting up, so that sideways I resembled a teakettle or skinny duck. Good thing Blanca had withheld the information — a bias-cut skirt on me would have fanned out like a tutu.
Those were th
e days of emerging American Black conscious-ness — Black Power — which Jamaica embraced, making little distinction between our post-colonial circumstances and those of our giant neighbour, the U.S. of A. I would walk across the campus with my new white friend, more self-conscious about her colour than mine. Would students look at us as kindred pigs? I’d deliber-ately loiter a few steps behind Blanca’s long stride. This wasn’t my only reticence on campus. I was shy wearing a bikini, shy meeting new people, shy about anything sporty. I played no games at all. My only exercise was to ride my grandparents’ horses. This was now a thing of the past, for Ernest and Nora were getting older and the horses had been sold. In this new world of social upheaval, riders of horses other than jockeys at the racetrack were oppressors, equated with the twenty-one families said to own over ninety percent of the island’s resources.
My family was middle-class. Teachers and liberals, spiritual men-tors about nationalism to several Jamaican generations, irresponsibly generous, always fighting a cause, and in old age, flat broke. So I didn’t deserve to be mistaken for rapacious capitalist pork.
A Guyanese student called me “ecky becky,” a speckled egg, near enough white that Jamaicans would shout the familiar taunt “pork” as I passed on the road. Pork was white meat. Gone were the days when being fair-skinned gave one some kind of automatic, undeserved advantage. White was the oppressor. And “good hair” was the oppressor’s crowning advantage. If you wanted to fit in on campus, you’d tousle your hair, shampoo with baking soda, and suntan. Each drop of a quadroon’s black blood was precious.
“I am a mulatto,” I’d told Daniel. “A quadroon. Like Lena Horne. I never want to be white. I like what I am. I’m brown. A work of translation.”
“Brave words,” he’d said. “But you don’t need them. Any more than you need skill or courage to keep your heart beating.”
I wished I’d had his certitude in those undergraduate days.
My black footballer boyfriend planned to cash in big time on my need for belonging and approval, keeping me, his mulatto girlfriend, busy on the campus selling dashikis and head scarves that he sewed from African prints in his father’s tailoring establishment to an eager new Afrocentric market. But the plan backfired. Intent on becoming popular, I kept giving them away as presents.
Daniel and I had little in common. I knew that. He loved the sea, he loved sailing, he loved Carnival. I’m an indoors person who loves to play cards and bridge. I had no sport. I disliked hiking. I hated crowds and crowded places. I’m still shy of strangers.
“You’re so lucky to have a hobby,” I once said to him as he left to go sailing.
“You do have a hobby?” he said.
“What’s that?”
“People. Your hobby is people.”
Though a bond was forged through campus, through a love of English and books, through our love of Ernest and Nora, I knew there was something deeper. He was my muse, and I was his.
When I first saw a picture of Helen leaning on her car, her hair blowing in the breeze, a beach behind her, it seemed so apt. Helen. Helen could be a sailor’s wife.
When I opened the manuscript, there was Daniel’s careful hand-writing on the opening page:
“True sadness is actually quite lovely. Not at all like unhappiness or depression or pain or grief. That’s the quality that lies behind Erehwemos and makes it such a lovely book: true sadness. You were inappropriately named, Lethe. You have such a dedicated, dutiful, tenacious memory.”
Rubbish, I thought. “My name is completely appropriate. I am named after the river of Lethe, not the people who crossed it. The river swallows their memories and the dead are free; the river must carry their pain along.”
I don’t think his approval should have mattered one iota, but it always came like a benediction, a validation. As it did now. As it always would.
By the time he returned I’d fallen asleep in the sun, the sky had deepened its blue. Othello had become bored and left. Charon was sitting on an upturned pail on the rocks, fishing. I was burnt, except for my stomach, covered by the sleeping manuscript.
The sun closed its blinds again.
DANIEL
The end of my youth coincided with the close of my first chapter with Lethe. There would be many more chapters; but, like all books, one is either held by the first chapter or not. And this being the first chapter, neither of us could know how many more there would be, or how tangentially and serendipitously life would write the plot for us.
This is how we left it.
There was a huge buzz on campus. A political science professor was made persona non grata when he tried to enter Jamaica. But he was Caribbean — from another island. Now the uproar wasn’t so much about the fact a fellow islander had been banned, but why. His teaching was said to be left wing. I believed the first count to be a far more egregious sin committed against us as a community, and to zero in on a question of political philosophy was to partially miss the larger point, one that was impatient of debate. If the university remained — apart from the cricket team — the only truly federal institution and the short-lived federation’s inspiration and vice versa, then to ban island members was no different than ban-ning a Jamaican from coming home.
Whatever the argument raging, this was a political act by a very conservative government.
The students called a day of demonstrations. Lethe, who had never shown the least interest in politics, had never had an original thought on politics, agreeing always with whatever Ernest, Nora, or Jacob thought about an issue, suddenly decided to identify with this cause. Her reasons she explained to me excitedly, puffing intensely on her Matterhorn, spilling little chuffs out unremembered on her frenetic words, were to do with “waiting on her moment,” though how any of this would translate to her moment was not clear to me. Blanca had tried with every negative suggestion to dissuade her — it would be hours of walking in the heat, her back painful, it’s downtown and she was scared of going below Cross Roads, and most compelling of all was that there won’t be a bathroom! But Lethe was going on that march, come hell or high water. It seemed to be something she needed to prove to her family. Or the students. Or herself. I wasn’t sure which.
“What do you hope to achieve?” I asked her.
“I will have been counted,” she said with adolescent ardour.
As though having been counted was anything Lethe had ever aspired to. I was perplexed by her burst of social conscience, and might have expected it on some cause more familiar to Lethe, maybe something related to art or culture.
Lethe could be rash. She had an admirer, a student who’d asked her to dance one night at the student’s union. So as not to offend him she did, and that was that. But Alston persisted. He invited her out, she declined. According to her, he was weird and “kept hovering.” Frustrated by her brusque rebuffs, he sent her an angry, heartsick letter. It was a warning painful to read. One day your head will roll down the streets of Kingston … it began. A flailing, very adolescent letter signed by Alston Robbins, rejected suitor.
She posted it on the Seacole notice board for all to see. When I heard, I took it down.
It should have elicited compassion. I couldn’t understand her reaction, which showed very poor judgment.
“He’s creepy,” she said, “He threatened me.”
“And what would Ernest think of that? It was a cry from a man in love. You can’t destroy a man because he loves you too much. Where is your pity, woman?”
Now again she was overreacting, trying to prove points I was sure she’d intuited incorrectly, that were counterproductive or irrelevant.
“You and I, we’re not bathed in the certainties of politics or faith. We are the curious ones — that’s our greatest gift — artistic freedom. Why don’t you write an article in the student newspaper? That’s our duty as writers.”
She told me not to patronize her.<
br />
“How can I write about freedom of speech if there isn’t any freedom of speech?”
She had a point.
“One has to take one’s cause to the streets. One has to be pre-pared to lie down and die if necessary.”
She’d taken to speaking in third-person jargon.
“Well I’m not going with you,” Blanca told her.
“You can’t go,” said Lethe.
“Why not?”
“Because you’re white. You are European. You can’t possibly understand a cause like this. This comes to me by blood.”
I must have smiled. So much for naturalization! The proud octoroon — and she was not a quadroon as she claimed, but a mere octoroon — had spoken! Blanca took my smile as support and proceeded to tell her she was being ridiculous, didn’t she not know she too was considered white?
Lethe puffed up her small chest.
“You can’t be serious. I am from a long line of African Strongs. You probably come from Attila the Hun.”
In truth the whole argument was outright silly. I knew Lethe well enough to know that freedom of speech had little to do with her motives. I finally decided it was all part of an effort to gain the favour of what was now grandly being called “the student body.” Lethe and her high-minded tone of “one has to” and “student body” with references to “oppressors” “regimes” and “movements” — and things that go bump in the night! She was reciting it all like a bloody parrot and it quite upset me to see my Lethe, who had so adamantly walked her own path no matter how wobbly, had written her own uneven lines with one or two perfect beauties, whose every thought was contradictory and though not always salient, always original, and yes, from the long line of independent-minded Jamaican Strongs — get-ting ready to run with the pack into a potentially dangerous situation.
But say it for Lethe, she would not be swayed.
The Black Peacock Page 8