“How can an artist create something to be disposable? What about legacy and history?”
“Mek another tomorrow, na?” Philip had laughed irreverently.
I thought about that — was there was some basic national difference in our expectations of the artist or ourselves? An indifference to permanence and thus legacy?
“Man, you Jamaicans take life too seriously. Here today, gone tomorrow. That’s life,” he said wiping his hands on a rag, attempting to pick off the glue that had dried. “The point is, it happens.”
“Remember the dancers …” said Daniel.
His crazy girlfriend Libby arrived gyrating like a flour kneader and landed in my lap. Lethe took it all in good humour.
We ordered hamburgers and beer. She drank the beer, which she swilled about in her mouth with a grimace. I ate both burgers. She was oddly relaxed and seemed to fit right in. Despite her distaste for Carnival, she’d cast her spell on my friends as well as my family, gently harassing the revellers about their calypsos which she claimed Jamaica had outgrown. “Have you heard our festival songs!” she proclaimed, describing her island’s progression from early mento music, Pocomania ritual, through ska and rock-steady to the new phenomenon of reggae. She conceded the development of modern dance on both islands whose roots she felt were buried in fragments of African lore and discussed the influence of the dominant ritualistic Roman Catholic Church in Trinidad versus the comparatively austere Protestants in Jamaica, relative to each island’s cultural development. She had become less defiant, more charming, as she expressed her habitual opinions. Nora would have been proud of her.
A half-dozen raucous band members arrived, bursting in through the door and chipping around the room, singing and laughing as they “mamaguy-ed,” jeering at each costume as they tried to find the one they were assigned. Philip sucked his teeth and teased them back with local jibes of “picong” and “fatigue.”
“In Trinidad you have so many ways of putting each other down,” she observed.
“It’s our blood sport,” I explained.
Saying goodbye, I offered to show her Port of Spain, but as we drove through Queen’s Park it was clear she had no interest in sightseeing. She was preoccupied with some fierce thoughts of her own. When it started to rain quite unexpectedly — out of a blue sky — she made me stop the car to find her a piece of paper — a napkin from the Hilton — and wrote some hurried notes maybe about our rain that she called “cussid” and too short to be meaningful.
I wanted to take her sailing on my small boat but, when we got to the dock, the water was too rough. Waves rocked the boats. She took one look at the little skiff bobbing and refused to go aboard. But she was happy to sip vodka daiquiris from the club for the rest of the afternoon, her feet dangling off the pier as we talked about Naipaul, whose paper world of Biswas’ people seemed to be more real and immediate to her than the Savannah, Queen’s Park, the yacht club or even Woodbrook, where I lived.
It’s strange, I said, you don’t like to swim yet you love the sea.
“I like it from the safety of the shore. I like its unknowability,” she said. “You send out questions and only more questions come back.”
“But we’re Cancerian,” He replied, resorting to Nora’s horoscope signs.
“Yes, you’re the crab who likes to swim while I’m scuttling sideways across the sand.”
We argued about whether the voice of the sea was a language of vowels according to her — guttural, or one of consonants according to me — not guttural, glugging? I think I won for we settled on sibilants as the sound.
She remained determined not to read Moby Dick, explaining that she couldn’t get to American literature till she had read all the literature of the Commonwealth. When I asked her to make an exception she said Moby Dick was too much water, as bad as Dr. Zhivago with too much snow that made her cold. She really could be a philistine.
“You love Moby Dick because you’re a sailor,” she said.
I liked that. I liked how she called me a sailor!
But it’s not about water, I tried to explain. The landscape of a book can provide its metaphor. Remember the story: it’s the person or the people in it. The landscape, the water, are really just the foreground to distract and absorb the reader. In the background it is the movement, however tangential, of the character — the human heart — that does the real work on the reader.
“Moby Dick is your Bible,” she replied after a moment, frowning at her now-busy fingers cannibalizing themselves. “It’s a boy’s book. I don’t like adventure stories. I can’t stand Rudyard Kipling.” She could be so emphatic and infuriating.
I reached out and took her hand to stop her picking. I wouldn’t know till much later in life to what extent many aspects of Moby Dick reminded me of us in the sense of the hardest and loneliest quest of the true artist, the choice of the most arduous, dangerous voyage, the refusal to accept safe harbour.
“… for refuge’s sake forlornly rushing into peril.”
She shook her head like a duck drying off. She’d heard enough.
“What are you doing in that bland isle Barbados anyway?”
Instantly I regretted asking, not really wanting to hear about some new boyfriend. I sensed no elation of new love, no residual contentment, no excitement. She seemed bored.
I asked her if this was it.
“If this was what?” she asked, frowning.
Is he the one?
She chastised me for being a romantic. “He’s a musician,” she told me.
I kept my silence for surely Barbados was the last place in the Caribbean one would expect to find a talented musician, though she would never agree with me. But Trinis are biased. Each island is.
“He always laughs when he comes.”
“Comes where?”
She stared at me with teenage exasperation.
“Oh!” I said feeling stupid, and also so sad. What an empty thought.
“It sort of breaks the ice.”
“Will you marry him?”
“He’s married already.”
I cringed, thinking immediately of Ernest. How was she going to create a writer’s life? I heard myself sounding like a father.
“You’re a writer, Daniel. I just write.”
It was true her work then was still adolescent, but she had a natural instinct for metaphor and simile, a radical and exquisitely sensitive imagination. Young though they were, none of her poems felt like exercises or rhetorical gestures, poems written for the sake of writing a poem. She always wrote as she was moved to.
We had recently had a run-in over editing. She had sent me a true poem, embryonic but promising, with near-perfect pitch — an inner voice that gently and sure-footedly carried a sombre theme, the homesick passing of time, but it kept tripping on its undisciplined excess, circling its theme, and resisting the focus to aim for the heart. So I sent it back to her edited with the short note: The poem you sent is good. Here it is, back to you better.
This elicited from her an angry letter that also needed judicious pruning: My poem came back to me anorexic and like a late convert bearing her new guise whether it fitted her or not. Then she hurled a volley of abuse at me calling me the Great Poo-Bah of Port of Spain, the cultural Caligula, and in a puzzling malapropism said I had exorcised — read exercised — her lines as though training mindless gymnasts.
But I have always thought there was something unfinished about her poems. They lacked a father’s instinct for shaping the mother-made offspring before sending it out into the world. Was I a chauvinist? Assigning gender roles to writing? Ernest thought they needed more work. I wondered if this didn’t reflect Lethe’s plight, being an almost-finished creation herself. In the family structure, she appeared to have fallen between the cracks. She had the inspiration and indulgence from Nora and a sterner more detached guidance fro
m Ernest. She lacked discipline and certainty, the confidence that might have grown naturally from her father’s attention.
“You don’t finish your poems, Lethe,” I ventured.
“And you finish yours?”
Yes, I finish mine.
“I must have my grandfather’s genes,” I said. I saw in his portrait hanging over the dining table a mysterious and irreducible stubbornness. He had a head of stone.
“My first memory of my father is arguing with him adamantly insisting that since big was spelt b-i-g, big–er could only be spelt b-i-g-e-r. He lost his temper terribly, but I never doubted he was wrong and I was right. I was four or five. In the end Aunt Gilly became alarmed and took me inside. I went with her obediently, but remained quite sure I was right and he was wrong.”
“Are you saying I’m unfinished? So, who finished you? Gilly and Verrie?”
No. It wasn’t my aunts. It was something I demanded for myself. I knew despite what Nora said, our fates had been very different. Did Lethe lack the discipline? Did she expect enough of herself?
She said her feet were cramping. She jumped up frantically stamping them. I pulled over two iron chairs from a nearby table and pulled her close, my arm around her.
“I want you to find peace. Even if it means I have to see you at peace with someone other than me — building a life the way that Ernest and Nora did.”
I couldn’t imagine her companion-less. Worse still, alone in Bar-bados, an island toward which I felt a great ambivalence. This tiny country where my mother was born, beaches on which my mother lay in every picture extending into an infinity of wordless silences, a mother’s voice I’d never heard.
“I don’t want peace!” She blew a spurt of bubbles through the straw into her vodka orange. “Who am I like? Ernest or Nora?”
I told her she was herself, not like anyone else.
I shared a funny anecdote of how Nora had recently claimed to a patio of visitors that Ernest was a terrific lover — everyone was taken aback at one of those odd moments when Nora could be strangely inappropriate.
Lethe pulled sharply away and remained silent.
“What are you thinking?”
“Sex is a tranquilizer,” she said sagely. “I mean, if you really think about it, it’s so undignified and we take it so seriously when it’s all really quite funny.”
Was this about the laughing Barbadian?
“In the throes of sex people aren’t romantic — they are just escaping the world, escaping the person they are stuck there humping. In each ridiculous pose they are able to imagine things they don’t even know are on their minds. It’s who we really are but probably don’t want to be.”
I was completely taken aback.
“I find this philosophy terribly sad.”
“Well, isn’t that Carnival?” she snapped back. “One roaring orgasm to which you return every year!”
I felt the urge to take a blanket and cover her. She had revealed too much. It felt like she was unaware of being naked.
By then it was late afternoon and a strong breeze was coming in off the sea. She finished a second vodka and walked over to sit on the edge of the dock again. It was wet and she shivered a little, her eyes fixed on a boat returning home. She looked small and vulnerable. I offered her my towel and she bundled up.
I wanted to talk to her about Helen. We planned to marry in the summer and Ernest had agreed to give her away. I should be the first to tell her but now feared hearing something hurtful.
Then here it came. The question.
“Does Helen make you happy?”
“Yes.” In truth I didn’t deserve her and that was not meant to be self-effacing. Any woman who married me was taking on the aloof and rugged life of a writer. Helen made life easier for me and in practical ways she freed me to write. Together, we would create a home and family, I would eat too well, become middle-aged, somewhat contented and respectable, hopefully not in a dull way. Helen was shrewd and bright, shrewd enough to cope with me and bright enough to interest me. She came from a stable British army background and had imbibed the virtues of discipline and patience. Most of all she had a sense of humour. My decision was made, my course was set. So why did I feel so guilty?
Lethe fixed her face into a well-sculpted expression of approval, looking like Nora as she sat on the dock, contemplating with determined optimism a body of water she would not enter.
When we returned home that evening, the aunts were waiting with supper for Lethe’s last meal with us. My father had gone to bed.
“He waited up for you,” they told her with meaningful nods. There was new life in the house. Even the curtains blowing in the uncertain weather seemed to reflect a new energy. After supper, Lethe disappeared with the aunts into their rooms. I heard the occasional squeal of delight over a baby photograph of me. Once, she came rushing out to where I sat on the verandah, an old exercise book in hand, the king or queen pictured on its cover, with my essay whose simplicity delighted her. How had she dug up these things? Dug out these feelings from a retired landscape in which these gentle folk endured the changes of time with little but their staunch routine as a bulwark. Here they were laughing with this woman who was a virtual stranger to them, incautiously telling her their secrets and mine, not a word of rebuke about her cigarette smoke in either room nor the way she sat on Gilly’s bed, legs crossed, tugging occasionally at the skin on her toes in that awful habit she had when she was reading.
“I pick my toes when I write poems,” she explained to Verrie and they surrendered to peals of laughter.
Before we turned in, we watched the evening from the verandah, the night tense with expectation as the busy pan drums peeled out their practice.
Watching her so happily taking over my life, I convinced myself she could not be the woman I worshipped for all time — the love of my heart, the sister to my soul — and visit my country, stay in my home with my doting aunts and father, and not add some extra meaning to my Carnival beyond her petulant pout.
“You know what Carnival is? It’s the dance of life, a dance against death. You can’t deny its symbolism, no matter how fleeting. It has a tragic joy, since death will nonetheless come, which is why on Ash Wednesday they score the foreheads of the schoolchildren with ash, and the dancers will sense — though they hardly understand — that at the moment of dancing they are immune. But you already understand this. I never saw a dancer, dancing die. Who wrote that?”
“I did!” she shouted it out with delight, a schoolchild getting a teacher’s question right.
It seemed culturally blasphemous that she could be here, but chose to walk away as they were marking the foreheads of the children, something so profound to take place on a fellow island. But she dismissed my entreaties without a second thought.
As I held her at Piarco the next day, I remember her hair a sea-tide sweeping back and forth across my face as she tugged at my neck and told me over and over she would miss me, late as it was, and then as she left me and retraced her path over the tarmac her image remained, contrary and unpredictable yet sterling, always bright in my mind.
It would be many years later when I saw her again. But that day, as I watched her uncertain steps to the plane, head down, moving numbly like a refugee, her bag stuffed with Gilly’s sandwiches and cake over one shoulder, I thought of my father’s shining face as she embraced him goodbye, her nose wrinkling as she tried not to cry. She had brought him sunshine. She had listened to his stories and told him her own. She had claimed him as a spiritual brother to Ernest, the details of their actual compatibility temperamentally or of a time frame being a matter of indifference to her. I saw him as I never had before, human and tender, lonely and brave.
As she was leaving she had pressed the folded Hilton napkin into my hand: He survived that loss — his reckless middle-aged desperate last chance at happiness — because he wouldn�
��t let you both down. He stayed for you. That was all he could do.
With a few stark words, she’d thrust my father at the void I’d lived with all my life. Now it fills with his shape for me.
We rob happiness when we give it voice. So I like to think, though our paths would separate again at Piarco that morning, we moved into a sacred, shared stillness.
Despite all the steel pans and revellers the next day, as I took to the streets the world she’d left was empty. And it struck me as I chipped along … the ripple of the pans, the sweetly sweaty acrid air, the singing rum, the red eyed trance, the joyous refrain only spoilt by the pickled Dolly ascending a passing float to liberate herself from her golden costume and gyrate with naked abandon falling over the side of the truck after a few yards into a passing band of bemused Roman gladiators. I knew the underlying desolation of this gay abandon. Lethe, who had never seen a Carnival, never succumbed to its throb, never lived its courageous cry above the pathos, had said it all in her poem — “a dancer, dancing never dies.” Its poignancy brings tears. On Ash Wednesday the streets will be littered with broken bottles, a place in the past; the dancers will have moved on. Lethe will be gone. The children will already live in tomorrow’s Carnival. They will live with hope. They are not yet used to these deaths.
With Lethe back on that bland island, Barbados, with her soulless lover, the great after-calm came. For a while I held could breathe her in from the memories she left me in this grieving city that had hosted her. Such a hard place to love this sardonic isle, yet she made me love it. Most of all, she gave me my father.
LETHE
I was in Jamaica, at the university hospital twenty years later, lying in pain again. I had returned home to have an operation. My doctor was there, my family was there and they would look after my sons. Though at thirty-six my pattern of exile was long established, I still felt the instinct to come home in times of crisis or trouble.
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