Charon glares at me when he thinks I’m not looking. Whenever I come to Battle Beach he manages to be there. It’s as if he’s waiting for me. He parks himself at the foot of the steep concrete steps to the empty house as though he is guarding it. He watches me. If I were to be around too long, overstay the non-welcome I’ve taken advantage of, I’m sure he’d burn down the windmill with me and the books in it. I’ve often wondered what he thinks about those silent books whose voices must be like a rebuke to him.
Battle Beach was where I promised to take Lethe for a day, but it wasn’t meant to be. Every time I suggested the outing, the rain would wash the chance away. It’s not that she was disappointed by the missed opportunity. She’s lost in her net of grief and doesn’t seem to notice.
I have felt Mamta’s presence like a ghost. One day I went to try the door of the house, but was stopped short by the sight of three smooth stones laid next to each other on the bottom step. A chill went through me. I turned and went home immediately. I actually felt afraid.
I know Aesop is enjoying watching me be pulled to Battle Beach and his wife’s house, only to come away as if repulsed. He says there’s a magnet pulling me to that beach. I am certain he believes I did something to unhinge his daughter and now she is trying to unhinge me. Although I used her name to get in through his door, I never told him I had been seeing Mamta, his daughter, my student, at the university.
“Why you so concerned with my daughter?” he asked me one day when we sat in front of his late wife’s empty house. “Guilty conscience?”
I didn’t answer him.
“Mamta gone long time.”
“Gone how?” I asked.
“Nothing can bring her back to you,” he’d said with satisfaction.
Lethe leaves tomorrow. I have given Aesop the manuscript to post for her after he drops her to the mainland. I don’t want to give it to her now. It will seem so final. It would be a declaration of something I would rather leave unspoken and unacknowledged. In a way, our work has been symbolic of our time together. My time is over now. I know I won’t see Lethe again.
This was my frame of mind when I drove down here. Lethe was sitting quietly in the library at my desk. She’s probably writing me a letter to say goodbye. We don’t do goodbyes well. They are always untidily emotional or awkward. Because our relationship has been complicated — not only by circumstance and time, but also by our failures to act authentically with each other — its beginnings and ends are more like chapters or a series of themes a writer selects to write about. These milestones are not chronological, events by which we mark the progress of our lives, our story. Our goodbyes seem forced when we have to observe them. I expect we are deliberately avoiding each other today. I wouldn’t be surprised if she leaves tomorrow, ferried away by Charon without saying goodbye. That’s okay. I know that we both hear the peacocks even if from our separate windows, and always she will remember their cries.
That’s enough.
LETHE
The peacocks withdrew to their tree as we’d finished our evening rum and cokes. The patio had been cleared of its usual laundry, and we rose from our customary chairs as though we’d been practising the scene for years and walked down to the edge of the cliff. It was like a dream. We were shrouded in mist that looked like a fairy hammock hanging over a darkness of nothing. I had on a simple shift, which Daniel lifted off over my head, my arms held high like an obliging child. He confidently pulled down my underwear, my flag of surrender. He wore only shorts which he stepped out. He jumped straight over the edge into the unseen water. The splash made it real. By the moon’s implacable cataract I could just see the shape of a vague torso beckoning from the water.
I climbed down clutching the old pipe railing, extending my arms — this time toward him — and he took me by the waist and pulled me into the sea. We rocked with the slosh and splash. My breasts between us, softly, loosely up against him, his chest arousing my cold, surprised nipples.
I felt that safety, the indifference of certainty. We had nowhere else to go. No more longing or explaining or excuses. I thought of the twin rocks on either side of the Bog Walk Gorge in Jamaica. They stood separate for all time, Man Rock and Woman Rock, their petrified genitals on either side of the river. I used to wonder if they had once been together and the inexorable drift of geological time had split them apart. Daniel once told me they were moving toward consummation in a continual drift. That was his fairy tale. Blanca would have said he was wrong. These things don’t come together, they were once joined and were now forever moving farther and farther apart.
But here we were. The sea dried my skin with its salt, but he still found moisture for his long fingers. As I kissed them, savouring them like new words he was offering me, I recognized the smell he now craved that I had hidden from him for so long. We unleashed the words we’d kept barricaded from each other. They tumbled into the night: ripe, silly words, yesses, over and over, drunken, euphoric sentiments, my haunches held tightly in his hands.
And then it was over.
One less mystery. The earth hadn’t moved, as they say. I was reminded of the silliness of how seriously we take these things.
I laughed.
The moon turned milky and softer, more playful, the way she looked when she followed me as the child I was, looking out the window from Ernest’s car.
I thought of Blanca, whose death, decades before, continued to lie unspoken between us. It was a death that in many ways I felt we were, by our neglect of her feelings, in some way responsible for.
“Blanca,” I thought I said.
One more betrayal. Would she have charmed Daniel if he wasn’t waiting for me? Like a dog in the manger I didn’t want him, but she couldn’t have him. I knew my power. I didn’t have to use it. It’s how it happened. It’s how I let it happen.
“That night …” I started to say and stopped.
That night I woke sensing someone was in the house. There was a moment when I could have shouted out, shouted for help, woken and warned Blanca. I heard the small puzzle of unconnected noises, unaccustomed in the dark, unfinished, inconclusive sounds. Illogical and unrelated. The air shifted uncomfortably with danger.
Mine was the room with its own bathroom, the only door in the house that locked. I slid off the side of the bed in a darkness that was friendly to me. I knew the Braille of that short journey by heart. I slipped into the bathroom, locked the door, and crouched in the shower behind the curtain and waited. The shower had a drop-by-drop slow leak. I waited until her door was pushed open and her ugly destiny walked in with its small, sharp knife. I waited in safety while he raped her secondhand, sticking in the blade, her screams disturbing the air in every corner of our house. I waited while in the confusion of sounds I heard my name shouted time and time again. Did she mean to warn me? Was she trying to wake me? Maybe she wanted to save me.
But I was safe. I was safe all along.
Blanca like Mummy, whoever Mummy was, is gone. I am not. Surviving is its own kind of hell. It doesn’t take guts. It just happens. Like being pretty or being smart, it just happens. It just happens if you wait long enough for the screams to stop and you are safe to emerge from the shower.
Maybe we are never happy inside knowing someone’s left out in the rain.
I woke up. Perhaps everything had been just a nightmare; we’d all be able to start over at the beginning again.
It was raining outside. I was hungry. I was cold. I hadn’t heard Daniel return from the beach. I’d turned in early. I got up and I felt my way through the dark to Daniel’s room. It was so quiet. He never snored.
I was shivering.
“What’s wrong?” he’d say when I woke him. “You’re so cold, my darling. I’ll make you scrambled eggs.”
But it was Daniel who was cold and still. As dead as Jacob, the wrist mala like a stuttered last prayer hung from the thumb o
f his half-curled hand.
For some reason I haven’t been able to understand, I wasn’t totally surprised. There is a silence that one comes to recognize when one is alone and no one else can break it. I think I recognized that silence as I made my way to his door, knew it by the utter darkness as I pushed it open and the air didn’t stir with his breath. It’s funny how people see peace in the dead. I saw the let go exhaustion of struggle. I stared at him wondering how his voice got away, where it had gone. I wondered vaguely what I should do. I knew he’d gone. He’d written his own ending of our story. I wished I’d left a day earlier.
But you never said goodbye!
Yes, I did.
Last words have their own charged potency. They can do and undo.
He’d left me his dream to colonize my memory.
And there was something else.
Three smooth stones placed next to each other on the sheets at the foot of his bed.
LETHE
Montreal
I don’t remember leaving at all. I don’t remember the days as being separate from one another. But I remember the endless full moon and the cries of the peacocks as though each morning they were to face extinction. Whoever Mamta was is dead, but I see her as a single incarnation of all women — I have adopted the spectre of that strange figure I now call Mamta Dlo. I picture her along the road, with either a hood or black cotton-candy hair, staring with that blunt, dissatisfied look with which one stares at a mirror and seeing in her what one sees in the mirror — oneself.
Did she walk the busy streets of London? Did she establish herself as a writer in Paris? I left her memory there unresolved.
Only Othello broke my heart. Leaving him there, shuffling on his barren shore, waiting for Aesop, for Mamta, for me? Was he doomed by Esopus to long for a human destiny?
I went back to Jamaica for a fortnight and decided not to take on the endless task of sorting out the dead. Let the girlfriend do it. I went home instead. Home now was Alex.
I had grown used to seeing Alex at the airport when I arrived. He had become family, not a rock so much as a familiar landmark on my horizon. He moved too quickly toward me this time and the furrow on his brow, the awkwardness of his sympathetic look, I knew he’d heard Daniel was gone. I was grateful I didn’t have to explain.
My detachment was caused by an old grief. I knew well how to handle that. It was a fifth gear for cruising down the highway. I’d settle back, prepare myself for another long drive alone. “Death’s as easy as the turn of a wrist,” Daniel said as we talked of Jacob’s suicide. Had Daniel done the same thing?
When I checked the mail, I saw the large envelope from Daniel dated a fortnight before, waiting for me.
It was very heavy. It was his manuscript. He’d done it! I felt both excited and afraid to open the package.
I pulled out the white pages bearing the familiar black type, proof of the words he had spoken.
The title looked so small: Columbus — The Seeker by Daniel Smith.
Hi again, When you receive this manuscript you will be back in Montreal and I will be gone. I knew only you could pull the rest of my story out from me, a story that had got stuck in my throat like a seed. You are my muse, Lethe. You always were. And as my muse you have always done right by me. I send you this manuscript. You will know what to do with it. Any proceeds I know you will see that my daughters receive.“One afternoon when he was very old, while he was sitting dreaming in the whispering shade of the great Samaans waiting for his death, he thought he heard a voice say, Can you see the peacock? — and, lifting his head, he became aware of the sound of wings. A large black bird flew overhead, its shadow fleeing across his house and lawn, across the chair where he sat like a benediction. The bird landed deftly on a high limb of the Samaans its long tail settling to trail horizontally down the trunk till, in the shadows, without movement, it became invisible. He wondered if he’d dreamed it. It then occurred to him that it was she who had flickered across his face, returning home from the funeral of her father.”It is certain we’ll not see each other again, but we have grown used to being more apart than together. Our conversation doesn’t need to end because by now we can finish each other’s sentences, answer each other’s questions before they’re asked, maybe even dream each other’s dreams!Somewhere is everywhere in the world I was loved by you.Daniel
Over the years I have often thought about this magical time that seems almost not to have happened. But just for that moment there was an “us.”
We are flawed and unclean as we stand in the rain. We love. Gently or terribly, but we love. That’s what remains.
“Do you know the sound you hear in the shell is really the sound of blood circulating in your own ear?”
Shut up and sleep, Alex.
But I couldn’t sleep. I was thinking about Edgar, changing my mind again and again. Should I let him go as Alex suggested? Just another ghost? Or should I call him. Daniel’s damn echoes.
I wondered how Daniel had closed off his book. I crept downstairs to the study where the stack of obedient pages firmly embossed with each punch of Daniel’s familiar black print, had taken up residence on my desk.
I had the whole night. I might as well settle down here and start reading.
I cheated and turned to the very last page. And there it was:
EREWHEMOS
f
Unpacking to resettle into my old life again, I retrieved the Wallace Stevens book to place on my shelf. I stared at the feather extending from its pages. And there, bright as a turquoise sea with its navy-blue eye was the peacock’s feather which, when packed, had been as black as Othello.
Sometimes, insulated by this city, I still hear the sea as it bore wit-ness for me. All islands are made of rock. See how they wear down so slowly over millennia. So has all the water of the world given and taken its meanings. Isn’t that the truth of eternity? A thing that simply is. And is and is and is.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
Wholehearted thanks to the Toronto Arts Council and the Ontario Arts Council for grants that made the writing of this book possible; Velvet Haney; Bonnie Munday, Jane Brox, Jodi Doff, Rosalie Day, Christina Shea, Martin Mordecai; my beloved book club; Trevor Chin Fook; my agent, Morty Mint; my editor and publisher, Marc Côté; and Iz Cinman, as always.
The Black Peacock Page 17