It was late at night when Robert heard a scratching at his door. The old man came in, even more crippled than before, nodding and smiling. He sat down without speaking. Robert offered him cake and rum. He ate the cake though he did not seem to find it very appetising. He drank the rum, but only out of politeness. They then sat quietly for some time, looking at each other, smiling slightly now and then. Robert at last, cleared his throat and spoke, holding up a broken mirror for the old man to inspect.
‘It’s so long since I see you. You got so old, so old and so crippled and you used to be so strong. I will serve you and I will carry your bag, if you will let me pass. . . .’ Robert cried and threw himself on the floor. He wept uncontrollably.
‘Father, I ask you, what do you see there? I want to learn the secrets, Papa. I know this, sir: you watch me, but I do not see you. You see all of us, all those who say the truth. You are here; you hear.’ Robert kissed the floor in front of the old man who rocked slightly as he sat there.
‘Dear Papa, please open the gate. Open the gate, so I may pass through. When I have passed, I will thank you. You, Papa, who sit on the gate, give me the right to pass.’ The old man appeared to consider this proposition with some amusement and at some length. Suddenly he picked up his cane and struck Robert a cracking blow on the head. He jumped on Robert’s prostrate body and stomped and danced awkwardly around on his back. He left the house with Robert lying there in the dark.
Far from being disheartened by this meeting, Robert was overjoyed. He ceased frequenting the corner near the school where the old man worked and no longer went to see him. Now, every morning, he lit candles at the foot of each of five trees at five corners in the neighbourhood where he also left food and flowers there. At each corner, he sang this song:
‘Papa removed that barrier for me.
Papa removed it. I pass through.
Now I bring them.
Oh, Papa, you removed the barrier and I come back.
I come back and now I thank you.
I now bring them.’
In this way, Robert entered a world in which, at last, he felt at home.
THE HIGHER REALM
Robert’s life then assumed a regularity and consistency that had previously been lacking. After his early morning round of candle-lighting, he would search the neighbourhood, scrounging for food. He’d return home. He’d get two red plastic pails and go to the fire hydrant. He’d wash himself, wash his clothes and fill the buckets. Even if there was ice, he kept the bathtub in his yard brimming full.
Every day, Robert sat by the tub and swirled the waters in a clockwise motion with his left hand. The gentle splashing soothed him and cooled his mind. When the water began to spin in a whirlpool, he would sing into it, calling his ancestors, the ancestors of his people, to come back into this world. He called them with every name he could remember. Some names he invented. He called on the dead to return and help the living. He asked them to bring their strength, their subtlety, their knowledge to bear on the plight of their children and their children’s children. When he called on deceased people he had known, he referred to specific events in their lives. He invoked their special abilities. He exhorted them to return and apply themselves.
When, he was satisfied that a sufficient number of spirits had arrived, he harangued them to rouse a strong sense of purpose.
‘Thank you,’ he would say, ‘Thank you for coming here. You waited some long time to be called. In the old days, you would have been called sooner—your children would have come to call you back, to come back to help them in their affairs. Now you will see; your children are scattered all over the world, everywhere. They do not remember to call for you from your long wait at the bottom of the sea. So I must do it. I must call you and so I have.
‘Where are your children? You want to know that? Where did they go that they forgot you? Yes. And why? Why did they go? Yes. This you will want to know.
‘Now it is true. They are not the slaves of any one man. But they left. They left their green home. They look for money all over. They are now the slaves of every man. They need the money. They have gone everywhere. The world you come back to is now a world of money. There are no more places in it, places where a family stays, or a power stays, or a man stays. It is a world of winds, winds of money and clouds, clouds of human beings.
‘ “Oh,” you will say. “You have brought us back to hell.” And to that I say, “Yes, I have. I have brought you to hell so that you will lead your children from it.” ’
He could feel the spirits hover around him in a spellbound crowd. Each one appeared like the flame of a match lit beneath the bright noon sun, not quite visible but perceptibly more intense. He could feel them clinging around him, reluctant to go forth. They had thought they would find themselves, on being summoned, again in the mythic Africa of dimly remembered tribal community, free in the lush jungle that provided them with shelter, food and clothing from its own bountiful nature. Such a place they knew, or at least had heard of in their childhood. Some indeed, on seeing where they had come now, might even yearn to return to the shadowy cool depths beneath the sea where they had lingered in a whispering obscurity until they had risen to the promptings of Robert’s voice. He could feel their confusion and dismay. With such as these, he was still more firm.
‘I have called you to a just purpose, and now I send you forth,’ he exhorted them. ‘Save your children. You must do it. Give them heart. Show then how to leave this hell.’ And so he sent them to find their kin, to aid and save them from the pitfalls of this world.
And he felt them dissipate in the air like thin warm clouds, carried on humid breezes that rose off the sea, now eddying through the streets and alleyways, seeping through the cracks in old bricks and into windows. And in apartments a curtain would flutter, a door would unaccountably slam, there would be a chill as these marshalled forces distributed themselves, becoming a palpable strength in the surrounding city.
Robert’s business with the dead took up his mornings. Then he slept. In late afternoon, he cleaned his house and his land. He made designs on the ground with flour, put clean sheets on the tables in his house, and set out offerings of cakes and rum and whatever else he could find. When night fell, he lit candles. He sat by the door smoking cigarettes. Once it was dark, his visitors came. They wandered in through the dark and seemed little more than shadows themselves. Throughout the night they came and went.
These gatherings made the neighbours nervous. They complained to each other about Robert’s nightly parties for the beggars, drunks, cripples, street hookers, crazy people and dopers who gave the neighbourhood a bad name. They took pains not to walk anywhere near. But Robert finally was home. His guests passed the night babbling and quarrelling and eating and laughing. They were his family and gave him a place on this Earth.
Always first to arrive was an ancient, raddled beggar, a little old dark black man, mute from a lifetime of abuse and reduced to a state of innocence that resembled, in his constant toothless smile, benevolence. Robert would sing softly as he shuffled into the house:
‘Oh Papa. Oh, Serpent of the sky. The serpent does not speak. When I see the serpent in the sky, I see you. Papa, it is you. It makes me glad to welcome you here.’ In the old man’s muteness, Robert heard cosmic silence. In his hissing, Robert heard the echoes of wisdom older than the trivial suffering and minor anxieties of human travail. The old man had no teeth. Robert gave him raw eggs which he sucked down loudly with a happy grin.
A later regular guest, a green-eyed vagrant, middle-aged and seemingly fit, shy and furtive, hung back from the others. He leaned against the doorway as if he might bolt. Robert bowed. To him he would sing: ‘Snake of earth, live in the river. Join waters above and waters below,’ he would chant. ‘Stay. Ease yourself. Stay and dance. Stay and bring us happiness. Stay and bring your children happiness.’ The man paid no attention. His self-appointed task was to escort the guest of honour, a large handsome man whom everyone called ‘Ki
ng’ or ‘Sea King’. He was a tall, grave, light-skinned mulatto. He moved with slow dignity and wore a tattered pin-striped suit and a broken fedora. He was distracted, courtly, and bowed constantly. He spoke strangely, his word sounded like a stream of bubbles. Robert bowed and walked backwards as he entered.
‘King of the Sea, Blow and blow. He does not live here. Make the ground shake when you wants; he leaves for Africa. Oh blow and he roar.’ But the king was always self-possessed and mild. He acted like a stranger from another land, grateful but uncomprehending. ‘Protect your children,’ Robert would whisper to him. ‘Seashell in hand, listen for your little ones.’ The King always nodded gravely.
The King came with an entourage of male and female hangers-on. As the night progressed, the group became quite large, more than enough to fill Robert’s house. The gatherings were sometimes contentious.
It was the Sea King’s consort who caused the most trouble. She lived in an abandoned building nearby where she slept with her patrons. She was younger than the others, maybe sixteen. She was pretty, in a street-urchin way. She wore heavy makeup, large wigs and ball gowns, bought or stolen from the Salvation Army. She put on the airs of a great lady, and the others treated her that way. She entered with four or five other women who lived on the street. She waited for the men to stand. She offered her little finger for a handshake. She seated herself and applied more perfume and lipstick. She accepted only the best of the food offered. She flirted outrageously in a forced little chirping voice. As the night passed, she would begin to find fault, then proceed to outright criticisms of the company and their lack of refinement. Then came tears and tantrums that left her prostrate on the floor. Wailing and crying, she summed up all the grievances that women have ever had against men.
And the men all looked forward to her presence as if she really did embody all desires and dreams of luxury and love, took pains to please and comfort her. ‘Oh, mama,’ sighed the ostensible Sea King, ‘Whatever you want, I will get it for you. You are so hard, my love. Don’t cry, now, don’t cry.’
She or her friends slept with all those men at one time or another. She encouraged their love. She was faithless and caused jealousy amongst them. But everything dissolved in the boozy memory-less camaraderie of the group, and thus she was always loved. They sang to her.
‘You work, you do not eat.
You put money on one side to keep a pretty girl.
Last night you went to bed hungry
But you were not alone.
You work.
You work, but don’t eat
’cause you bought a dress to give that girl.
And so you went to bed without a meal
But you had something else.’
Some evenings she did not come. The gathering then was more subdued. After a few months, there was a new guest, always the last to arrive. He was a powerfully built and rather menacing young black man. His hair was piled in a huge cloud of thunderous dreadlocks over which he wore a knitted bag. He wore an old military jacket, pants and boots. He carried a walking stick that doubled as a club. He was the young whore’s latest conquest. For him she had forsaken the Sea King. The latter, she opined, was in all ways the most considerate, the most thoughtful, the most adroit and skilled of lovers. Yet, how could she resist this leader of men, this powerful man, this businessman.
Indeed this was the chief of the band of drug-dealing pseudo-Rastafarians who were squatting in the building next door. Robert liked the chief’s swagger. He’d struck up a particular friendship with him and let him hide parcels in the confines of Africa.
He entered Robert’s domain with a contemptuous air of indifference that almost concealed his curiosity about his neighbour. His great trick, and the one that endeared him to the rest, was to fill his mouth with rum, light it on fire, and spray the assembly with the burning liquid. This he would do in between holding forth on his prowess in drug deals, and the fear the cops had of him. ‘They know best, man, not to fuck with me personally. They know that, man.’ He liked to recall the many women who were good to him, and the good advice he had always given them. Finally, in the depths of his drunkenness, he would cry out. ‘I am wounded. Oh, I am wounded in my heart.’ Two of his companions would then sling his arms over their shoulders and drag him next door. This ended the party.
In general, throughout that winter and spring, Robert went to great lengths to cater to his guests. He spared no efforts in procuring food and drink he thought would please them. ‘To serve them is a hard thing,’ he would remark, smiling to himself as he rushed about the neighbourhood. But soon he became more like them.
Increasingly, his mind became dark and empty as a pitcher when the water is poured out of it; it became empty and completely still. He rested motionless. He found himself somewhere untouched by ideas like space and time.
He took to wearing a black hat and an ancient tail-coat and a pair of round dark glasses. One of the girls asked him why did he wear those round dark glasses? Why, sometimes, did he remove the right lens? He leered at her and spoke like a professor. ‘Ah my dear, it’s this way. I spend so much time watching over my souls beneath the ground it makes my eyeballs sensitive to the sun. With my left eye, I keep watch over the universe. With my right eye, I keep on my food so no one will get it.’
Robert became rapacious. No matter what guests were there, he would seize all the food. If they were eating a cake, he’d snatch it out of their hands. He’d eat it, stuff it in his pockets, take it outside and bury it in a hole. The same with drink. He’d drink everything he could lay his hands on. He craved oblivion but could not find it. He was never drunk. He’d sing loudly:
‘Oh, I am a handsome fellow,
So beautiful am I.
I dress up in my black clothes,
And I will visit Heaven, Hell and City Hall.’
Robert’s behaviour made the gatherings less and less congenial. The guests felt unwelcome. By summertime, he was once again alone in his precincts. The crowd of black faces flickering in the yellow candlelight who had formerly filled his abode with the sweet rank smell of sweat and alcohol, and garbled talking so like nonsense but to him so pregnant with meaning, all disappeared from his life.
DISPOSITION
If abandonment by his erstwhile friends saddened or disturbed him, Robert gave no sign of it. Life became a day and night enactment of his new and disorderly role.
He was in the street continuously, marching around in his improbable attire, the tails of his coat flapping behind him. ‘Oh, I just dropped in. Don’t bother about me. I’ll just look things over, don’t you know?’ He would sidle into a grocery store, and conversation would stop as the owner watched him suspiciously and the customers slipped out the door. Robert would be caught in some ill-concealed, farcical attempt at theft, and the owner would throw him out. Indeed, unlike his previous self-sufficient habits, he now revelled in taking things from people, sometimes things of no conceivable value, then running off laughing.
The police took to rousting him from time to time, finding, on one occasion, four or five mangoes stuffed in his pockets. They would take away his knife or anything else considered a weapon. They would rough him up a bit, and leave him on the street. His family had long since stopped visiting him. He raced and bobbed around. People crossed the street to avoid him. He was barely a part of this world.
In Robert’s head, no vestige of his former life remained. There was nothing ‘normal’ left in him. He was completely absorbed in his peculiar persona. This degree of absorption gave him a great sense of peace and joy, regardless of how frenetic and alien it may have appeared to others. It was as if his body was a suit of clothes that had a motor in it. He woke up in the morning and it turned on of its own volition and took him on its own errands. He had no doubts or regrets. He had become filled with a power beyond causes and effects. His every move was imbued with sublime meaning. ‘This world is ending’, was one of the few serious remarks he would offer to the random passerby, b
ut the calm, almost kindly, detachment with which he offered it made them as uncomfortable as did his rude behaviour.
And in fact, the world did end.
One Tuesday in late September, as the weather was on the verge of turning cool, two policemen in an unmarked car came to find Robert in his abode. They were part of a drug sweep in the neighbourhood. An informant had said Robert was a pusher. As they stepped over the boundaries of Africa, Robert popped his head out of his home and shouted for them to go away. They refused and called him over. Come he did, in his rapid shambling gait, in full regalia, with a cane in one hand and the other behind his back. As he got close, he made a slashing motion with his cane and the police, two nervous white men who always felt out of their depth, pulled their guns. Robert began to scream and laugh. He pulled a mirror from behind his back. The policemen only saw a flash of metal in the hands of a demented black man. Each shot him twice. The bullets entered his right shoulder, stomach, chest and head. He fell to the ground, still and dead.
Robert Sam’s funeral took place after the coroner released his body. It was a seedy and poorly attended affair. Amalie had passed the word it was private. Her neighbours would have come as a gesture of support for her, but they appreciated her feelings in the matter. His mother, brothers and sisters went through with it not knowing how they should feel, although they were numb with shock. No one could take pride in his life or consolation in the manner of his death.
His siblings let him slip from their minds, and on the rare occasions he appeared there, they felt a twinge of pain and fear. His mother, Amalie, was more ambivalent. She preferred to think of Robert as a baby and a little boy when her tenderness had flowed easily to him. His later life filled her with puzzlement, but he never left her heart, where he remained a slender, dark, elusive shadow.
Strange Tales V Page 14