I left Blanca and Lethe arguing at the porter’s lodge, found a phone and called her father. Nora answered. Jacob wasn’t there so I explained what Lethe planned to do. Nora put on her distraught voice and handed the phone to Ernest.
“What’s the matter?” he asked hoarsely, clearing his throat.
I told him.
“She’s going on the march.”
“Well what’s wrong with that?”
“But …”
“But …” the way he said it made me wonder how to answer him. If he didn’t see anything wrong with it, what was wrong with me?
“I fear for her safety, for one thing. And I really do think she is going for all the wrong reasons.”
“So what?” he said. “Do you think any of them know the right reasons or can forecast the outcome? She is young. Let her make her own commitments and her own mistakes. If it’s foolish, she’ll find out.”
“But she’ll find out the hard way.”
“Well, that’s usually the best way.”
I suspect he was actually proud.
“That’s how she’ll find herself.”
I hadn’t thought of it like that. In many ways, Lethe was searching for something. It showed as a vagueness even in the way she walked, when she argued, grasping at straw after straw. Ernest understood her. I put myself in Ernest’s shoes. A brown man who’d shrugged off racial prejudice all his life. What was his experience of finding himself? Had adversity helped him to sharpen his focus as a Jamaican? I thought of me, a mulatto, as was my father. In my island, my grandfather had been the first black man in the corridors of law. My own schooling had found me in a white school, me the first black student. I was mocked and bullied mercilessly; I still feel contempt for them. But it reinforced who I was in a very real way. Maybe Ernest was right. Lethe felt a sense of rejection at university, the current passion of black power just out of her reach. It reinforced in her a sense of what she was not. She was a mulatto, but in a roll of genetic dice she appeared so fair most people thought her white.
Of course Ernest was right. With that I took a step back, and, trusting his wisdom, prepared to return to my own life.
Which brings me to Helen.
Helen came to Jamaica to teach. She was bright and creative in a solid and practical English middle-class way, very kind to me, and over a period of months, on the occasions I allowed her into my life at close quarters she made my life calmer and gave it shape. Of all the women I met since that year on campus with Lethe whom I tried to cast out — that elusive, maddening and saddening, frustrating mirage that she was to me — this was the first with whom I developed a bond. She didn’t replace Lethe, nor offer an alternative to her. It was that she understood who Lethe was without meeting her. She understood that all men who live bravely must have a Lethe somewhere in their lives. I think she also knew that Lethe would and should remain an idyllic mirage. She never felt threatened, and I was unsure how I felt about that.
I had by then become quite close to Ernest and Nora, spending a lot of time at Erehwemos helping Ernest where I could with his sporadic efforts at a memoir, usually ending up listening to music, limbing a tree or cutting firewood for him. I took Helen to meet them. After witnessing my ups and downs with Lethe, Nora seemed to be relieved to meet her. She told me in her conspiratorial way as she drew me to one side, “Helen is real.” I knew it was her way of lending support, but it reinforced my sense of just how unreal Nora found her own granddaughter, or maybe she meant that Lethe could never be real for me. I’ll never know exactly where she stood on that score.
But I could see Ernest liked Helen. He discovered her father was a military man whom Helen mimicked with a strident marching voice and a mimed metronome of her hand as if it held a walking stick. She’d been afraid of her rigid father. She and Ernest talked about the army, and Ernest told her amusing stories about his time in the First World War with his late brother, how before they were sent to Europe they’d wandered into an auction house and mistakenly bid on a consignment of clocks; being so heavy they had to stack them in a wheel barrow and roll them into the nearby Thames. How they once found a deserted café in France where they pinched several cases of Veuve Clicquot and proceeded to drink, finally passing out. She loved his stories.
The morning of the march, Nora called me. She was beside her-self, whispering so Ernest wouldn’t hear.
“I want you to look after Lethe today.”
I told her I wasn’t going. She’ll be okay, she’s tough, your granddaughter. She’s a survivor. Nora said she didn’t doubt Lethe was valiant, but feared she had no idea what she was getting into. “Though we are all very proud, even her father is worried. How-ever, Ernest insists we leave her to make her own way.”
So I kept my radio on and listened all morning to the news with reports of the march’s progress and at about two o’clock I went down to Helen’s school to borrow her sports car, which luckily had the roof on that day, and attempted to drive as near to the route as I could. There was enormous tension in town with the peripheral streets oddly quiet, police everywhere, and occasional eruptions of sound in the distance — a speech hurled through a megaphone, shouts and cheering, the wails of police cars. I finally drew quite close on a parallel street, pausing at a gas station. There was a sud-den drift of fast-moving mist with everyone now running. Feeling that heart-stopping ripple of fear I heard as a frantic pattering on asphalt, I watched as they started milling around the gas station. I thought at first the mist was smoke from a fire and by instinct rolled up the car windows, but then I saw people covering their faces, and the gas station attendant holding out a water hose for eyes to be rinsed. It was tear gas. Thinking what a kindness, I suddenly saw Lethe alone, running blindly toward me. I leapt from the car and fought my way through the edges of the scattering crowd to her, grabbing her by the hand and pulling her back to the car. I shouted at the man with the hose and he turned it toward us, drenching us both as I ordered Lethe to wash her eyes with the blessed few seconds of water.
Bundling her into the car, I passed her a towel lying in the back seat to ease her severely reddened eyes. I sped off with no idea where to take her, at first considering Jacob, but with the thought of Nora seeing her in such a mess, I decided to go to my place.
Safely home, I gave her water, offered her drops to flush her eyes, and fixed her a cup of her favourite Milo. She was curled up on my uncomfortable two-seater, so I offered her my bed to sleep for the afternoon.
“Don’t leave me,” she pleaded. “Please don’t leave.”
I lay down beside her. She was shivery and scared.
“I’m a mess.” As though I hadn’t noticed. Her long wavy hair, spread over my pillows, reminded me of some painting I had seen and couldn’t remember where, but it was so precious, so scary to me that Lethe was lying here on my bed, the very place I buried my head to sleep each night. Her legs drawn up tightly, her long feet very dirty below her jeans, I curled up behind her and held her gently, savouring every moment she allowed me.
Suddenly she held her waist and with difficulty heaved herself around and curled into my chest, burying her head and breathing hard.
“I’m a fool,” she mumbled, pulling back with eyes still red, mud on her cheeks. She repeated, “I am such a fool.”
I agreed. She tilted her chin to be kissed and I kissed her, ever so gently for fear she would disappear or dissolve. I felt her insistence and kissed her more deeply and held her for the first time the way a man should hold his woman, feeling her shape, being allowed into her curves and softness, the sometimes sharpness of her small bones and into the intimacy of her smell, her dusty hair, her unimaginably tender sweetness and tangy bitterness just for that one long hug.
“I love you, Lethe,” said more to myself than to her as I gently twisted a lock around my fingers. The words seemed so insufficient.
“I love you too,” mayb
e she mumbled, but I couldn’t be sure.
Our first kiss.
And almost as quickly as she had demanded me, she went slack and fell asleep. Fell asleep until the sun went down and I woke her with a hot bowl of Campbell’s tomato soup. She sat at my small table crouched over the cup and drank it down greedily, the way she did any drink, dying of thirst or getting it over with. Her long feet rested lovingly on mine under the table. Her faced glowed from the heat of the soup. She looked contented. As she stood I drew her to me and buried my head in her small rounded belly. It growled, she laughed and kissed my head. Off she went to shower to get ready to go.
A single afternoon had turned my life back into welcome turmoil.
When she returned to the room the glow had gone. She was tidy, but her face was tired and cold. The magic was over.
It was then I remembered Helen’s picture on the bureau. Helen sitting in her car, the one I’d used to rescue Lethe.
“You okay?” But I knew she wasn’t, and I knew she wouldn’t ask, which was best because the coward in me didn’t know how to explain, and a logical man takes umbrage at any need to do so. Lethe had her own life, I had mine. She had wanted it this way.
“Can you take me to Nora and Ernest?” she asked quietly.
I dropped her back, more in love than I have ever been in my life. But with a sense of doom. The afternoon was already confined to its own isolated hiatus, a story trapped in a book, some unfathomable, lovely poem.
Jacob’s car was not there. As I watched her walk uncertainly up the circular path like a stranger, searching inefficiently under stones for the hidden key, I saw her so lonely and valiant. She finally shouted out to Nora. Ernest let her in and Nora called out to me, thanking me through the window.
I comforted myself with the fact that we were impossibly misfit. And yet, we were pieces of a puzzle to which we both belonged. In time much more would need to be assembled before we could see where we fitted in the whole.
I have relived that afternoon all my life, wondering if I missed a moment I should have seized.
the black peacock
LETHE
I awoke in the middle of the night certain I’d heard a voice calling. It made me think of Jacob, of women always calling him, on the phone, across rooms, through windows at night, or to the sound of some disembodied cry. But this was Daniel’s home. Daniel reminded me of Jacob. His tendency to be secretive. I knew Blanca had liked him. So had Henny, though Daniel disagreed. He’d kept Helen a secret from me. I inadvertently observed him many times leaning intently into seemingly tender and intimate conversations with various girls at the soda fountain or the students’ union. I once saw him on campus holding hands with an Australian girl with orangey hair. He had no idea I’d seen him. Students spoke of him as a ladies’ man. Helen I discovered in a photograph. Later he’d had a brief second marriage that I would never have known of if I hadn’t come home for an operation in Jamaica. I would never have trusted him as a lover. Women often tried to contact Jacob or Daniel through me. They would become enamoured after reading one of their columns and I’d be approached for an introduction. Occasionally I have unwittingly acted as a procurer for one or the other.
Was a woman calling to Daniel now? But as I waited quietly in the dark the windmill remained silent, just softly bathing in endless night rain.
I lay in bed thinking.
Henny. I was on campus one evening studying in my room, when there was a knock on my door. On opening it there she stood all sturdy, an immovable force, her eyes that strenuously avoided me now fixed on me unblinking. She’d never visited me or spoken to me before. Now she looked like a statue planted in front of me, quite unavoidable.
She took a deep breath like a soprano preparing to sing, and spoke on a single ominous breath at my direction:
“A snail impaled upon a thorn.”
Then, as abruptly as she appeared, she left.
What the hell did that mean?
DANIEL
Did I mention that the student who first told me about Peacock Island was my lover? We had a stormy but at times heartwarming relationship, one that made a middle-aged man feel like a boy again — the King of the World. I got so carried away I grabbed her hand one day on campus in St. Augustine and strolled proprietori-ally across the lawn with not a care as to who would see us. It was total madness on my part and I received warnings from older men who could only dream of walking in my shoes.
Nabokov would have understood. She was my Lolita. That’s how I felt at the time. But who she was and her circumstances as my student should have been more significant to me. But I got carried away. What became paramount was how I felt when I was with her. I suppose it was selfish in the way of some older men whose power of the hunt is fading; middle-aged men who make this grand mistake as if to rage at sunset with Dylan Thomas. At least, to my shame now, that was my rationale; the young woman, my writing student, was no older than my eldest daughter. And she went insane. Not a reckless, self-absorbed, attention-seeking craziness, but a slow, deeply disturbing slide into madness. Her mother had gone that way, she confided, perhaps a genetic weakness, a fact I discovered too late.
From the beginning Mamta was a strange girl. In many ways she reminded me of young Lethe, a certain defiance, a gaucheness in the way she handled simple human communication. She was physically more elegant, taller, and without the awkward lilting walk; her face, though coarser, reminded me of Lethe’s. It was something about mulattos, the mix of black and white that sometimes left a harmony, the best of each choice, the finest possible graft. The large, deep-sunk brown eyes, the square jaw, sturdy cheekbones. Mamta was more womanly, less fey than Lethe, more exotic, and she wasn’t an irritable cross-patch. She did have the one quality I remembered in Lethe: she could make a man long to be her protector. A sort of helplessness that in Lethe was a paradox — the very frailty her power as a waif. In Mamta that perceived vulnerability was real — part of her slow decline that I not only witnessed, but drew me into its vortex and made me unable to think, write, or reason. I was a man struggling to save someone I could not reach in a storm who must surely drown.
Like Lethe, she was at university studying English, and, like Lethe, she wrote from time to time. Unlike Lethe, she was a poor student of literature, and, unlike Lethe, she was a mostly tedious writer, a typical undergraduate scribbler. One of her stories about a small island off St. Vincent was a description of her home.She transplanted a bit of Trinidadian folklore into its landscape and was unable to make it fit. I told her so. As a kind of revenge, she would do the oddest thing. After lovemaking, she used to leave three small stones at the foot of my tidied bed in the morning before she’d depart.
One evening I returned home to find three stones, painted black, placed in my toothbrush mug. I was less dismayed with this ominous sign, than the fact that she’d got into my flat without a key. This was disturbing.
From that point she became decidedly stranger. The university suspended me. They opened an investigation into the relationship. I resigned and left. Mine was a cowardly act, not telling her before I left. This is how I came to Peacock Island; it was the setting for her story. Here I met Aesop, who is her father. Although I introduced myself as Mamta’s friend, I did not admit his daughter had been my lover. Aesop could be inscrutable. If he suspected, it never showed. But in my guilt, Charon’s silence always felt like judgment. I have often wondered if I stole Mamta’s only refuge. But this is past history, a story I need never share with Lethe.
In the years that followed, I wondered what became of Mamta. When I wrote to the university they answered, which was surprising. They informed me she was no longer a student and that she’d left Trinidad. They made no mention of her next address, but in these days of greater privacy concerns I was certain that I would not be the beneficiary of such information. Then Aesop informed me she’d been in a treatment program. He did not
mention where. This was about a year ago. Since then, Aesop says he hasn’t heard from her. I am too afraid to keep asking, too ashamed not to.
I know it’s my conscience, I am haunted by Mamta. There are times at night I think I hear someone knocking on the door downstairs, usually when it’s stormy, though it could be the wind battering at the windmill’s arms. I’ve woken up thinking I’ve heard a voice calling me. I listen intently, troubled as one is by night calls, hoping it’s just remnants of a dream, and dreading it’s Mamta. I get out of my bed and descend the stairs. But when I open the door, I never find anyone there.
The other afternoon on my walk with Lethe, it began to rain. We took shelter beneath the Samaans. When the rain stopped, and we decided to head back home, though it was foggy, I’m sure I saw a figure disappearing down the path away from the windmill. Her back was turned to us, a furtive figure swathed in heavy clothes. I didn’t hear any steps crackling on leaves, no typical disturbance of the flora. Then the shape turned slightly around as if to look at me. It was over in a matter of seconds. Lethe seemed to think it was a trick of the light, shadows of the Samaans and the mist.
“It’s the isolation. You’re getting stir-crazy,” she said.
There was something about the figure. Her hair was long and unkempt. She had a stealth, a fleeting quality. The figure was famil-iar — her sloping shoulders. It made me very uneasy.
This is how I came to tell Lethe about Mamta. She asked what had attracted me.
“Strangely, I think it was a story that she wrote.” The title was “Mama Dlo.” About a character in Trinidadian folklore I’d never heard of before. The name came from maman de l’eau, mother of water. She was a hideous mermaid creature, her tail ferocious as she smashed it about. Her extensive powers protected rivers, forests, and animals. Should a man trespass against nature he was doomed to marry her.
The Black Peacock Page 9