Patrice Williams stroked his goatee. “What are you reading?”
Wynston lowered the book from his chest, and Patrice Williams read its cover.
“He spends too much time with books, but he’s all right,” James said.
“Someone needs to read. Not everyone does.” Patrice Williams glanced at the man with flawless skin and turned back to Wynston. “Come back another time and we’ll talk about empires through the ages, including this age. James will give you a lift home.”
Outside, James rolled Wynston’s bicycle though a lot filled with rusting cars in various states of disrepair. “Patrice says the Americans are planting seeds of change, but their money isn’t reaching our people. We give them tax breaks and then we pay for the roads and electric lines they use.”
Wynston quietly absorbed his cousin’s words.
“He was impressed with you,” James continued. “I could see it.”
Wynston followed James past stacks of bald tires to a 1972 Hillman Avenger with gleaming chrome fenders and polished windows. “What about my bike?”
“In the boot.”
As Wynston lifted his bike from the ground, those of us dozing beneath a pile of scrap metal scrambled into the Avenger’s undercarriage. A moment later, Wynston was sitting in the passenger seat, running his fingers over stitched leather. His breath caught as the engine roared to life.
“You’ve never been in a car before?”
“The bus to town. Not a car.” Wynston tried to emulate his cousin’s blasé demeanor. “Good for getting around, I suppose.”
“You suppose? That library’s done something to your head. You don’t see the way the world’s going. Taxis will be everywhere soon.”
“I see the way things are going.”
“Then you should get involved. Patrice is the only one talking about independence.”
“Is he really a communist?”
“That’s your father’s talk.”
“Who was the man with him?”
James tightened his grip on the steering wheel. “Lyndon Buttskell. Little Butts, we call him. He’s a little ass.”
“What does he do?”
“Every woman in town. He primps and preens. He’s seventeen and I bet some of our mothers’ friends have been with him. I don’t think he sweats.”
James turned on the radio, and the voice of Calypso Rose flooded the car. Beyond Portsmouth, he pressed the gas pedal to the floor. Wildflowers streaked past, the roadside fell away at the edges of steep cliffs, and those of us clinging to the car’s fenders felt as though we had functional wings. For several delicious moments, Wynston dreamed of inclusion in a kinship based on considered convictions. He felt like Calypso Rose was singing directly to him, that he was more intelligent than strange, and that anyone with integrity could find a home.
When James pulled up to the gate, Topsy was sitting on the stoop with Morris. Rose had just come from the garden. At the sight of Wynston pulling his bike from a car, she dropped a basket of potatoes. We climbed atop piles of compost to watch James Brooks Brother execute a perfect three-point turn.
“What was that hairy thing doing driving?” Topsy asked as the Avenger disappeared. “And why are you keeping company with your foolish cousin?”
“He gave me a lift from town.” Wynston leaned his bike against the house.
“He looks like Che Guevara. Like Castro himself.”
Rose sucked air through her front teeth. “He should visit his ma.”
“She wouldn’t recognize him with that thing on his face,” Topsy said.
“He’s broken her heart with his doings and that low woman.”
“It’s that woman’s parents that should be upset.” Morris lit a cigarette.
“He did a fair job on the turn,” conceded Topsy.
“He works at the taxi stand,” Wynston said.
“Because he doesn’t have a bit of sense. Patrice Williams wants everyone to live in shacks, but he wouldn’t give up that car.”
“They’re communists,” Rose said. “They don’t believe in God.”
“They don’t know enough about communism to be communists,” Morris said, wheezing.
“You don’t need to know anything to be somebody,” Topsy said. “What kind of car was that hairy boy driving?”
“A Hillman Avenger.”
“You’re coming up in a different world. I never dreamed of riding in a car at your age. I never talked about revolutions. I was too busy working. Pretty soon, you’ll be lecturing everyone and offering lifts in a fancy car.”
Topsy had stumbled upon two partial truths. Over the next few months, Wynston frequented the cabstand every afternoon and became acquainted with its hirsute denizens. There, he refined his ideas and authored numerous pamphlets, starting with Whither St. Anne?: A Case for Self-Sufficiency and What Can Possibly Be Done?: Lenin’s Philosophy and Taxis. Through his erudition and impenetrable tracts, he assured his professorial status and secured his place in a society of taxi drivers. He started wearing a union pin, if not a beard or beret, on his seventeenth birthday.
“If you write about taxis, you should know what a gearshift is,” James said.
An hour later, the newly appointed Professor Cleave was sitting in the driver’s seat of a dusty car, lurching through the lot behind the taxi stand and suffering the attentions of Little Butts, leaning against a fence and sucking on a mint.
So, as Topsy had surmised, Wynston established himself as the Professor, if not a professor. He began driving a car, if not a fancy one. He divided his time between driving cabs, attending union meetings, delivering towels, and in time, mixing drinks at the Ambassador.
“Is socialism so bad, I wonder?” Rose said one evening, eyeing a stack of bills he’d placed on the table. “If God is merciful, better times on are on the way.”
“If there’s a god and he’s merciful, you won’t end up looking like that cousin of yours,” Topsy said. “I can barely remember his face, and that can only be a good thing.”
The next year, Professor Cleave sprouted the sort of whiskers that might have made him a full-grown member of the Social Democratic Alliance. However, he studiously shaved every morning, not for reasons of ideological disaffection or the vanity that motivated Little Butts, but in opposition to prescribed political aesthetics. He contented himself to work on the fringes of the SDA, authoring pamphlets calling for St. Anne’s independence. A six-week sanitation workers’ strike in Britain provided the first real portent of political change.
“They don’t have the money to pay for trash collection,” Professor Cleave said, scanning a Guardian article about London streets congested with refuse and feasting rats. “Soon they won’t have money to govern us.”
We would have boarded the first plane for England but for the filth in the taxi stand and hopes of better days. Patrice Williams only encouraged our inertia with confident declarations.
“The winds of change are blowing,” he said, tapping cigar ash into a foam cup. “If they carry the smell of garbage, so be it.”
So, we lolled about in discarded food containers and contented ourselves to dream. History will be our judge, and that of our naiveté.
Within a year, a pale master of ceremonies lowered the Union Jack before the Governor’s Mansion, and the SDA, the most prolific faction of St. Anne’s nationalist movement, won a landslide victory in the first independent election. On election night, the UGG’s dust-covered leaders gathered on the Cleaves’ stoop to rue the decline of civilization.
“This place is overrun with communists,” Topsy said.
“Social democracy isn’t the same as communism,” Professor Cleave insisted.
“The Americans will leave with their money. The whole thing reeks of communism.”
Ultimately, distinctions between communism and socialism didn’t matter as much as the place of Cuban cigars in the American imagination. Five months into his term as prime minister, Patrice Williams met with a U.S. attaché to disc
uss trade, and in a fateful moment offered his guest a Cohiba from the private reserves of Fidel Castro.
“Cuban,” he said. “Only the best.”
Three days later, the U.S. State Department issued a travel advisory for St. Anne. U.S. congressmen spoke of rotten banana republics and the creeping noon shadow of communism. American investors withdrew from St. Anne. Cement trucks disappeared from the roads. Hoarding and hard bargains became the norm. Desperate shopkeepers bartered batteries for eggs, toothpaste for chickens, and cigarettes for just about anything. We foraged amidst shrinking stores of rubbish in restaurant dumpsters. The UGG’s members settled for the cheapest rum and cursed the island’s communists.
“They say your man offered the American a cigar autographed by Castro,” Topsy said. “What kind of monkey ass would offer an American that kind of thing?”
“The cigar wasn’t autographed,” Professor Cleave said. “The humidor had his stamp.”
“What the hell is a humidor?”
“A box for cigars.”
“Someone should put Castro in a box.”
To evade his father’s front-stoop gauntlet, Professor Cleave spent afternoons at the cabstand, enmeshed in discussions of the SDA’s future. When Patrice Williams started packing his bags, Little Butts was the first to raise the white flag.
“We can expect a vote of no confidence. Patrice will step down and live with his sister in Liverpool.” He picked a piece of lint from his shirt. “We’ll face the United Independent Party in the general election.”
Professor Cleave narrowed his eyes. “The United Independent Party didn’t exist a month ago. It’s an American creation.”
Butts unwrapped a mint. “And when it falls, we’ll be ready.”
The afternoon Parliament ousted Patsy Williams, Professor Cleave approached his house in dread.
“Hard to have a workers’ revolution with no one working,” Topsy called, inaugurating months of smug commentary on the fall of St. Anne’s communist regime.
Only “romance”—a singularly staid love affair with Cora Jones, a maid at the Ambassador—distracted Professor Cleave from his father’s taunts. With religiously scrubbed skin and a smile as elusive as her sense of humor, Cora performed her tasks with joyless efficiency and murderous intent. She swept so thoroughly that hardly a crumb could be found. If she wasn’t disrupting our naps by upending wastebaskets, she was spoiling our dinners with torrents of bleach. If idle distractions or illicit diversions ever tempted her, she resisted them with the forbearance of a willing martyr.
Schooled in everything but matters of the heart, Professor Cleave mistook her habitual industry for moral rigor and her seriousness for a studious bent. Smitten, he suffered the awkwardness of an isolated intellectual. He addressed Cora only to answer her pointed questions about towel inventories. Her brusque manners failed to quell his muddled passions. On short breaks, he’d sit in the staff lounge, alternately longing to see her face and dreading her appearance. He’d rehearse witticisms about the weather, and when he heard her footsteps, retreat helplessly behind a book.
He pined in silence for months. He’d almost forsaken hope when Cora chose to linger over a small cup of unsweetened tea, taking tiny sips and biding her time until Professor Cleave met her eyes.
“What is your name?”
“Professor.”
“I am not interested in your nickname.”
“Wynston,” he said, his ears warming.
“My name is Cora.”
“I’m sorry.” He hadn’t asked about her name because he’d already spelled it a thousand times in his mind, cherished its open syllables and languorous vowels.
“I am not sorry. I like my name.”
Thus began a clipped exchange that, in fits and bursts, would fill a lifetime, or in this case, two lives spent in close proximity. Though her careful diction charmed him, Professor Cleave enjoyed only the most constrained conversations with Cora. She remained frugal in speech, even on the afternoons they strolled around the harbor.
“Do you ever think of leaving?” Professor Cleave gazed at the horizon. “For the States?”
“I don’t think I’d care much for life over there.”
“London?”
“I wouldn’t like London. They say it rains every day.”
“You think you’ll stay here?”
“I think so.”
“You wouldn’t be leaving, then?”
“Are you asking?”
“I’m asking.”
“Then I will stay.”
This was as close as Professor Cleave ever came to proposing. He married Cora in Stokes Hill’s chapel four weeks later, while Rose quietly wept at the loss of her son and Topsy nervously massaged a scrap of paper covered in cricket scores. Shortly after, Professor Cleave and Cora moved into a small house and settled into unbending routines and undemonstrative physical intimacies. The latter eventually produced a daughter, named Irma after the former head of Portsmouth’s library. As Irma passed through childhood, she revealed a promising intellect, as well as a physical beauty that defied all genetic probabilities. She brought Professor Cleave a joy he fought to preserve in the face of emotional austerity at home and growing social disparity everywhere else.
With the United Independent Party in power, restored plantations welcomed wealthy patrons seeking the curative powers of mud baths and tropical breezes. Sprawling second homes appeared on St. Anne’s southern peninsula. While water pipes and electric cables snaked into gated communities, small villages continued to rely on rooftop cisterns and temperamental generators. Portsmouth’s shops sold cigars and gold jewelry to wintering Americans with well-worn credit cards, while St. Anne’s schools and tiny hospital fell into disrepair, and then disgrace.
Anxious about his daughter’s future, Professor Cleave spent every afternoon mixing drinks and every night ferrying drunks between parties. At midnight, he’d drive home and place his day’s earnings in a biscuit tin. He’d wipe the oily prints of foreheads from his cab’s windows and spray insecticide into its vents. It’s hard to imagine how we managed in those years, dropping from gaskets like so many drunks, only to crawl back into the cab hours later to escape the sun. For our survival, we can thank the short half-life of the cheap pesticides Professor Cleave used and Professor Cleave’s predictability, which enabled us to stay one step ahead of the stinging mist. What a dull existence he led! Still, he knew something of happiness for the first seventeen years of his daughter’s life.
Change, when it arrived, came suddenly and with unprecedented cruelty. Within the span of four years, Professor Cleave helped his father bury his mother and Morris. He watched the SDA, under Little Butts, trade its values for vanities. He spent three years in prison and developed odd physical tics that, in anxious moments, overpowered his self-restraint. After his release, he drove his taxi only in the morning, in an attempt to avoid the company of nodding drug addicts and drunks. At night, he maintained a studied reserve behind the bar to distance himself from the slurred confessions of strangers. He sought refuge from painful memories in chimerical gardens and constructed intellectual bulwarks against tempestuous feelings. He talked to cockroaches.
We might have welcomed his social overtures more readily, had they not been so transparently inspired by loneliness. We have feelings, too, whatever rubbish Ivy League entomologists claim. Sometimes, though, it’s easier to forgive than to fight. And if a sucker is born every minute, it stands to reason, statistically speaking, that some of them are cockroaches (chumps to the last, those of us who stayed in his cab!).
Hopefully, one can understand our low graduation rate from Professor Cleave’s cab. As more and more Americans descended on St. Anne, maids and janitors and taxi drivers (excepting one) pursued their insecticidal regimens with ever-increasing ferocity and drove us from nearly every air-conditioned “public” space. It’s hardly surprising, then, that we reached a strained accommodation with Professor Cleave.
The day the Celes
te arrived, the sun was beating mercilessly. After the two Americans left his cab, Professor Cleave parked in the shade, thumbed the pages of his anthology, and tried to compose himself before the start of his shift at the Ambassador. Deflated, we listened to him dissect the appearance of his latest passengers—the man with depthless eyes and the woman with an unnerving pallor.
“She was all too familiar, my students. A hungry ghost desperate with need.”
He scraped his thumb with his fingernail and examined a patch of inflamed skin. “We should have avoided her today, just as we should have avoided her sort back then, but these are lean days made leaner by your carrying on.” He narrowed his eyes at those of us on the dashboard. “I see the affairs of others are of no concern to you, and that you are content to lapse into intellectual atrophy.”
As it was, we’d begun to feel overwhelmed by strange emanations from the ship. He considered our limp antennae and splayed wings. “Here you are, lazing about, mired in willful ignorance.”
He opened his book to a rabbit-eared page. He read aloud, at first, pausing once to pose a question about the motivations and morals of tragic figures. By then, we had withdrawn behind the vents. The most demoralized among us slipped into dreamless sleep beneath the hood. Professor Cleave tapped the dashboard, and when none of us reappeared, he read silently until the Ambassador’s face grew ashen in the twilight.
EXILE
FIXATED TO AN UNHEALTHY degree on our affinity for sewers, social commentators and petty moralists have long referred to us as the “Great Unwashed” and the “teeming masses.” Even now, one will hardly see the words “cosmopolitan” or “sophisticated” attached to “roaches” in scientific journals, or in the sensationalist tracts written about us—publications designed to alarm more than edify. Despite the baseless aspersions cast by our human detractors, we’re quite cosmopolitan. Ignorance is a luxury, as we discovered when Europeans destroyed our homes and exposed us to the merciless sun and untold misery.
Once the British began their abominable trade in sugar and slaves, we stowed away on ships bound for Liverpool and London, nestled among hogsheads and shuddered at the cursing of debauched captains and their scurvy-ridden crews. In England, we beheld poachers strung from gallows and clouds of poison massing above Blake’s Dark Satanic Mills. We ate exquisitely aged cheese, mingled with pickpockets, and rode on the undersides of aristocrats’ carriages. We lived in castles built for kings. We made our way around the world, drawn by tantalizing scents and distant horizons. We learned Swahili and Arabic, and in the packs of camel traders, crossed seas of rippled sand. We explored abandoned Mughal palaces and nearly lost ourselves in poppy fields. We ran amok in the Forbidden City, perched on golden pagodas and napped in jade vases. We heard Verdi performed in Vienna and sampled Lutefisk in the taverns of Oslo. We lived on the crumbs of croissants and literary conversation in Montparnasse. We dabbled in jazz with bedbugs and Beat poets in Greenwich Village and slept with hobos on trains rattling into Detroit and Chicago, mythical cities built upon mountains of coal.
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