The Black Peacock

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The Black Peacock Page 14

by Rachel Manley


  “Cow don’t climb tree,” all agreed.

  I only met Mary once. I was in Jamaica when Daniel had gone to Trinidad to see Aunt Gilly. We missed seeing each other. Mary came in to Kingston to visit Nora. Strangely, I can’t remember her speaking. She declined to sit on the small patio where Nora’s guests usually sat, opting instead for the old Queen Anne sofa inside. I am quite certain she did not move once while there; she sat as though posing for a portrait.

  Nora, who loved piano and played quite well, believed that a rigid spine was merely an affectation unhelpful to music. One has to bend one’s shoulder and serve Beethoven, she stated.

  We made Mary tea and talked around her silence, which was punc-tuated by an occasional smile awkwardly altering her face, her eyes blinking sharply like tiny shutters going off in a camera. At one point, I praised Daniel’s poems and I swore she glared at me with hatred. Her eyes darkened and her jaw clenched. Nora took no notice.

  The day Daniel had come to see me at the hospital, he had left Mary behind. He later explained that she hadn’t wanted to come. After seeing me, he drove straight back up the mountains to Erehwemos and found her hysterical. She had read my letters. She’d ripped up his papers, as well as every material she could find and tear to pieces with her pianist’s hands.

  “The aunts were absolute sticklers for one’s privacy and as an only child so was I,” he told me. He never forgave Mary for reading my letters. I had a similar sense of sanctity about letters; mine was derived from Nora. She considered privacy a basic tenet of civility and ethics. That was the end of their brief two-year marriage. Daniel left Erehwemos, and none of us ever saw the improbable Mary again.

  DANIEL

  I know I’m going to die soon. I returned to Peacock Island this last time with the stark news. It was confirmed by specialists in Trinidad. It’s this sailor’s last trip. I know because they double-checked my prognosis. It won’t be long, and it will be quite sudden. The cancer in my lung sits near an artery. Eventually it will burst and, ironically, I will literally drown. Poetic justice?

  This is the season. I expect no miracles and I ask for none. My life hasn’t been about miracles.

  After considerable thought, I have found this thing called death is doable. At least for me. I am not afraid to die. But I am sad to go. I could have loved more, sailed more, written more. But it’s not as though I have any huge regrets; not as though I haven’t had sufficient time to attempt the many things that interested me. To be fair, it’s been enough. To ask more, considering all things, would be greedy. I have that profoundly right feeling that I stuck to my guns, lived on my terms. This is important to me. Having said all that, it’s not quite over yet.

  I won’t leave this bleak island alive, but I must finish my book. It’s almost there.

  My children will be wounded. They will have to be told. They will hurt and then they will heal and go on with their lives. They are whole and can live without me. I take that as a point of great satisfaction. Despite everything between Helen and me, we managed that job well.

  If Lethe knew, she would be filled with dread. She would turn her mind to solutions right away. She would move into her fix-it mode, just as she did for Jacob. Of the two of us, Lethe is to be the survivor. The funny thing is that never at any time did I consider the possibility that I’d go first. I honestly assumed Lethe would die young; there’d be great fanfare, and it would be left to me to eulogize her. This of course is easier for me. Once Lethe has satisfied herself that that’s that, so to speak, I know she’ll set her mind firmly to what remains of her life beyond. What concerns me is who she will become with the last of her landmarks gone, those who have known the whole of her and loved her despite this knowledge. One’s children cannot be one’s landmarks. We are theirs. She will have her sons, her grandchildren, and oh how lucky she’ll be to have those. I won’t know mine. Neither of my daughters have married and I doubt either will have children. They are professional, modern women. Lethe says I am wrong, that I am a pessimist, this is the modern way, they have kids later. She says it’s probably the better way to do it. Children later in life. I’m afraid to dream of grand-children. But Lethe says I must dream for my children.

  Lethe lives in Montreal now, another of her hideouts this time neutralized by a foreign language. She hasn’t really left Alex. She describes her life as contented. She’s becoming the writer she was meant to be. She was thrown off course with Jacob’s illness. That was inevitable. But now he’s dead and she will miss him. As she will miss me. But she will return to her writing.

  But this is the thing. In order to die well, I need Lethe. And not to say goodbye.

  Lethe is my muse. I am stuck with less than a hundred pages to go before I can die. I know only she can wring this thing out of me without even knowing that is her purpose for being here. I also know I can’t let her know I am dying or she’d start trying to save me, leaving me no room to write. Ironically, Jacob’s death is my gift.

  I never doubted she would come to me and I had to see her once more. Although in the past I was accustomed to and disappointed by her sudden changes of mind and heart and plans, I knew she would keep this promise. And though I tried to keep to my schedule, I found myself daydreaming about her being with me at last, my fellow writer in my house.

  Her sheer energy excites and inspires me, even her grief. She always finds some distraction. This time there is an island of them. And yet in all her sorrow and exhaustion she manages to make Pea-cock Island hers, seeming to engage her spirit with all her natural curiosity and untameable enthusiasm. Despite herself, she still carries a delight for the world, one that nothing has managed to quell. So it’s become my task to circumvent her grief with distractions.

  I know I am being selfish, but writing demands we be so. I will try to feed her creativity like a bird bringing straw for her to build a nest. To my amazement her fascination is the peacocks, especially Othello, who dotes on her. And I find it consoling that because of them she hasn’t the chance to wake up sad.

  I don’t know why I told her that tale about the peacocks. Aesop told me — I have no idea if it’s a myth or not, but she loves magic.

  And here she is at last after a journey of years, come to me in my castle, my windmill with the waiting arms. In her grief, my welcome cannot be unboundedly joyous, yet I feel as I had in my first flat in Jamaica, at my family home in Trinidad, and now here on this normally withdrawn island — with Lethe’s arrival everything comes alive with brighter meaning for me, my new ritual breathing to mala beads, even at my end, even in her sorrow.

  LETHE

  When Nora died, I felt my heart literally clench and stop. It gave up. Not its beating but its potency, its willing me along. It just hurt and hurt. That is how a heart breaks. I was drenched with inconsolable grief for two years, two years in which the only thing that motivated me almost insanely was trying to keep her memory alive. She was my mother, her loss somewhat different to the loss of Ernest. Ernest’s introduced me to grief and gave me a knowledge of sadness I feel to this day. Losing him was like losing my way. With Nora’s death, my spirit dissipated into a universe of unchartered loneliness, a motherless place that I’d owned but never known before.

  I had remarried. Alex, a Canadian, a journalist and frustrated chef. I had met him in Barbados soon after my operation. We were married two years later. The wedding was held in Jamaica only nine months before Nora’s death. I had hardly settled into Alex’s Montreal apartment when the call came early one morning.

  Nora was dead. I was forty.

  Alex is a man who sighs. A quiet, thoughtful man. A reader, a skeptic, a sad man. He never had his own children and accepted my sons slowly and with difficulty, but over time he accommodated us as best he could. He always fed us well. Most of all he valued my mind; he was astonished I could quote from Swinburne. Having a dry, stylistically pristine writing workaday ten-second-clip style,
he was secretly working on a cookbook whilst envying my less conventional creativity.

  An only child of Russian immigrants, Alex was locked into the doom of his parents’ circumstances. I couldn’t cheer him and he couldn’t cheer me, but when I was lonely in a new city, lost without the English language and having no friends, my elder son in university and my younger in boarding school, both in the Caribbean, he thoughtfully bought me my first computer with modest winnings from a lottery ticket with five of the six numbers.

  He urged me to write prose, but I knew I couldn’t sustain any-thing longer than the brief spontaneous creative spurts of my poems.

  Alex accompanied me to Nora’s funeral. I was sobbing uncontrollably most of the time, feeling my grandmother still there with me in Jacob’s house. How could she have left? Who would be there to love me when I made a mess, forgive me when I was less than myself, defend me when I was wrong?

  A farmer who tended Erehwemos had seen the Calabash in the house spinning for days before she left. She was now manifest in each mysterious circumstance — a lizard falling or an earthbound black crow that kept walking through a low garden bed of phlox and impatiens and the plumbagos she loved. I don’t remember much, but there is one short scene I could never forget.

  It was Daniel. Daniel walking in to see me. I don’t think he came for the funeral, I think he just happened to be in the island on a visit. I had told Alex about Daniel who sat forever young in a frame on my desk leaning against a small canoe on a beach, describing our relationship as special, Daniel as my literary mentor.

  “I thought I was your mentor,” he’d said.

  Beyond that comment, Alex displayed no jealousy at the time. Holding intelligence and the world of the mind in high esteem, he had always considered the men in my past unworthy of either me or his concern.

  On one occasion Daniel had asked me to send him back copies of his letters he’d sent me over the years. He was writing a weekly literary column that was syndicated in the Caribbean and he planned to write a short story using our exchange of letters. A scribbler adrift in Montreal, not even living in my own language, I was flattered to think our correspondence interesting enough to publish anywhere in any form, and the pleasure I expressed could rightly be interpreted as acquiescence; he would have responded with equal generosity of spirit — that’s how it was with us, and now it’s me quoting him and his letters. I had no photocopier at home so I asked Alex to copy the letters at work. This was a mistake. It started an argument that rages to this day about the sanctity of letters, the ownership of thought. Basically he considered it plagiarism.

  “But these are his letters,” I insisted.

  “But those he has are yours!”

  It was stupid. I had a suspicion he was jealous.

  But nothing prepared me for Alex’s reaction that day. Daniel walked into Jacob’s house and we embraced. He was one of the few who’d understood what the loss of Nora meant to me. I don’t remember introducing Daniel to Alex, who’d been busy making snacks for well-meaning visitors. I do remember Daniel sitting in an armchair, courteous, trying to be friendly, and Alex, who is normally a calm and rational man who hates scenes or public shows of emotion, taking a seat in Ernest’s red leather chair like the head of the household and glaring at Daniel like a man possessed. No matter how Daniel attempted small talk, unnatural for him, or tried to engage Alex in conversation, even gently flattering him by complimenting his salt-fish fritters, he was met with this malevolent stare. I was mesmerized. It actually distracted me until Daniel got up and left.

  “What a dreadful little man,” Daniel said to me on his way out. I could offer no defence.

  After the funeral, Alex left me in Jamaica to dispose of Nora’s belongings and to help with the plans for a drama scholarship in her name. I don’t remember seeing Daniel again on that trip. I wouldn’t see him for many years — but he called a few times. I learned he was living back in Trinidad with a woman who cooked great curries without whom he said he doubted he’d still be alive. I wasn’t sure what that meant; his weekly column, syndicated through the Caribbean, was certainly thriving and the picture over his byline showed he had put on weight.

  I had met this woman on another trip to Trinidad I’d rather forget, except for her curries. She was a misery. She kept scowling at me and slapping her sandals sullenly around his small house. I was used to Daniel’s women being suspicious of me at first, but this one I could not charm. Daniel said she was just insecure and meant me no harm. I’m sure he was wrong. I ended up at Helen’s, who prepared us a splendid brunch, and I couldn’t help thinking what a terrible mistake it was that they had parted, and not just because I preferred her eggs to the lady’s curry. I met their daughters, Marion and Zelda. Neither looked very much like either parent, but they looked very like each other; wonderful brown mixtures with soft skin and luminous eyes. I discovered Marion is my goddaughter; they’d probably forgotten to tell me because of all the quarrelling at the time over Ernest’s book.

  Daniel’s reasoning for the breakup had been based on his notion of an artist needing to live sparsely. I saw nothing in her house but heart and happiness and Daniel’s books and paintings. It was a place where he belonged. Seeing him visit the things and people he had collected over the years made me realize how alike we were: some essential ingredient that was missing made us both scattered, unable to see or trust in personal happiness. The thought made me sad.

  “Why did you think success would change her?” I asked, for she was to me the same Helen.

  “I didn’t. I thought it would change me,” he said.

  That was Daniel. Things tended to be all or nothing. And only his point of view was the one that mattered.

  Alex welcomed me back to Montreal two months later when I arrived with Nora’s bequest, four huge diaries she had written for over sixty years. Alex encouraged me to transcribe, and, where necessary, edit her journals. Her entries were sporadic — sometimes going for months without writing — and they were uneven, sometimes only about domestic or personal matters, other times great insight into the politics of Jamaica. They were compelling to read; so like Nora: lyrical, wise, witchy. Many managed to be spontaneous. Yet they were thoughtful, achingly beautiful at times; silly and funny at others, but never petty. Transcribing them took me two years. I learned to be patient, sitting for hours at a time, no more sudden bursts of energy fuelled by emotions triggered by a sad piece of music which had been how I had managed to produce a mere, or occasionally, mildly profound twenty-four lines of poetry. Nora’s diaries required the long slog of typing for hours on end to pro-duce a dozen pages. These diaries, whose greatest challenge was deciphering her uniquely curly and enigmatic handwriting, allowed me to trace her extraordinary life, stopping in amazement from time to time on seeing a previously unknown detail of my family history, a story I’d never heard before — or the truth behind a piece of family lore.

  Most of all, I was able to retrace our journey together from the day I came to her, soon after my birth. It felt like this was a second chance for me and for her; she was living with me again, here in my house. So many times when questions came to me, I’d flip farther into one of the books and a piece of paper would float down with an answer. Or a family friend would phone to say hello and this would be my opportunity to ask the only person who knew some crucial detail I needed.

  It was a mystical time for me, one lived inwardly. I lost my appetite for anything beyond the work that brought me close to Nora’s memory. I lost all other interest — I think I lost my husband. He says he lost me. He was there and he helped me with my work, but it was as if I couldn’t see him and as if I didn’t really care. With time, I had transcribed Nora’s journals and the long period of mourning that I needed was complete. Jacob found a publisher from the UK who had worked with Caribbean writers. My long night of weeping gave way to that Biblical joy that cometh in the morning as I learned the arduous proc
ess of editing diaries for publication. This was punctuated by the pleasure I found in choosing photo-graphs of family and Nora’s early dramatic roles.

  I felt a power I had not known before. I learned to be patient and to remain with a project by sitting for fourteen hours a day at a computer. I had learned to read and reread, to shut the world out, to live entirely in my head. I felt like I no longer needed anyone. I might have wanted them, but I was strengthened by my independence.

  When we were in London for the launch of the book, Jacob met us there. Alex walked solidly by my side, bemused by the Carib-bean party mood but proud of my accomplishment. Before we were to return to Montreal, Jacob invited us up to Oxford where the university was unveiling a portrait of Ernest. It was a formal and moving affair held in Jesus College — one of the old stone halls — with long tables whose age made me think that ancient knights must have feasted there. Walking outside across the sunny quadrangle afterwards, I felt good about Nora’s book and Ernest’s portrait. As though having lived well, they were now coming into their own in history.

  “Lethe, what is a portrait of a black man from Jamaica doing on the walls of Oxford between Queen Elizabeth the First and Lawrence of Arabia?”

  Alex’s question surprised me.

  “But you know!”

  “No, I don’t really know,” he said.

  I looked around me. I realized that it was now the late 1980s. None of these students had a clue who Ernest Strong was. Why should they? All they would know of Jamaica was ska, reggae, our cricket team, and the brochure promise of our beaches.

 

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