“You don’t frighten me,” she said calmly. “I show you.”
She took a deep breath, and the sound of the breath being drawn was a horrible one, like the hissing a child might hear under its bed on a dark night. And when she had sucked in the breath, she crouched low and approached the mango tree, moving in sinister, jerky steps.
She stood panting beside the tree for a moment, breathing heavily like a bitch in heat on a hot day. But then a fearful and guttural shriek erupted out of her belly. Her body exploding in a violent spasm, her hand flashed through the air and struck a limb of the tree, splintering it off at the trunk.
The tree uttered a piercing scream.
“Blood!” the tree howled. “She chop off me limb! Blood!”
“Shit-house mouse!” a bush whispered.
“Blood Town!” muttered Aloysius.
“So easy I kill a man,” she whispered, uncoiling slowly.
“Me no trouble dis woman, sah!” the tree bawled. “Is dis damn madman loose outta de asylum come trouble her. So what she do? She chop off me hand! Jesus God Almighty, she chop off me hand!”
“Hush up!” Aloysius grated, his heart beating with fear. “Is only one little limb. You have plenty more!”
“Now who you talk to?” the woman scowled.
“De tree, ma’am,” Aloysius mumbled. “Him bawling dat you chop off him hand.”
The woman threw back her head and bellowed a maniacal, frenzied laugh—laughter such as Aloysius had never heard outside of the madhouse.
“This is vonderful!” she exulted. “Look vhat I do today. I photograph a doctor bird. I take pictures of—vat you Jamaicans call it—a hood. And I meet my first madman. I feel like my holiday just begins now in Jamaica.”
“Bumbo,” the bush whispered. “New kind of woman, dis.”
Chapter Seven
In the clearing beside the stream that guttered a slow wound in the brown earth, Aloysius stood with the white woman. The tree was shrieking bad words because the woman had cut off its limb. The bushes were hissing about the wickedness of foreigners. Stooping, the woman was writing in her notebook as Aloysius watched from a respectful distance.
She was writing down in her book that at this very moment she had met a madman on her holiday to Jamaica. Before she started to write, she had asked Aloysius the time of day so she could record the exact moment in her book. Aloysius said he had no watch and did not know what time it was, so she burrowed into a big bag, fished out a watch, and recorded the time in her book.
The tree was a profane tree. Even as the white woman wrote down words in her book and Aloysius looked around and debated whether to run, the tree cursed its fate in a loud voice. It cried “Rass” and “Bumbo” and “Blood”—all filthy words—and bawled out monstrous oaths in such a raucous trumpeting voice that Aloysius finally said, “Listen me, tree, you can’t cuss so, you know. God might hear you.”
The tree bellowed in reply, “No talk no shit in me ear, you rass! Is you make dis woman chop off me limb! Is you cause dis whole thing to happen!”
The woman looked up from her writing, squinted at Aloysius, and asked if he was still talking to the tree. Aloysius nodded and said that the tree was bawling because she had chopped off its limb.
“Rass hole!” the tree yelped. “No tell dis rass woman nothing ’bout me, you hear me, sah? No tell de rass woman what me say!”
And so the woman wrote, the tree cursed loudly, and Aloysius stood beside the stream trying to decide whether to run.
“No rest for de wicked,” a nearby bush moaned like an old woman at a funeral.
It was a tense moment for Aloysius. He did not know what to do. He wanted to say something harmless and polite such as, “Good day, then,” and quickly leave. But this was no ordinary woman. She was strong and violent: She might grab a stone and bludgeon him to death. She might bite off his toes. She might wrestle him to the ground and pass wind repeatedly in his face until he was gassed unconscious. God only knew if she was even a real woman or something worse.
Yet he calmed himself by remembering that more than once he had had to cope with strong women, violent women. Jamaican country women were strong from a hard life of laboring beside their men in the fields, violent from a love of hood and rum. The parsons held evangelical revivals on the island constantly but Jamaican country women still loved hood and rum. So they were made by the Almighty. When they were drunk they either wanted to beat a man or give him pum-pum until his back was broken. It made no difference that these women carried a soft wet spot between their legs. Their bodies were still hung with stringy sinews and sharp bones. They broke heads and smashed bones and bit off noses and ears in fights just like the men. Some of them were strong enough to squeeze a hood so tight during lovemaking as to make any man bawl for mercy.
What was different about this woman, other than her violent strength and fearlessness, was her white skin. Aloysius was not at all used to such a white woman. All the white women he had seen in the streets had puffy bellies that jiggled when they walked, mounds of flesh that bounced off their arms and chests. The bodies of the old ones looked spongy, watery; the young ones were ungainly, bony—like newborn calves.
But this white woman was short and thick as a tree stump. Her arms were big and coiled with muscles, her eyes the dark and menacing blue of the deep sea. Powerful, stubby legs and fleshy knees swelled through the fraying cuffs of her shorts. She looked hard and solid as though God meant her to be a bronze statue in a public park.
Done with her writing, the woman stood up, yawned, and put away her book in a bag. Then she stretched so hard that Aloysius heard a bone crack.
“My name is Inga Schmidt,” she said, holding out her hand.
Aloysius shook it. He had not shaken a hand in at least twenty years. He had not held a hand affectionately since he was a young boy. Even the old woman who had given him the pum-pum years ago had not held his hand. What had happened between them had involved only his hood stabbing blindly at her dry pum-pum in the shadow of a bush. The hand had had nothing at all to do with it.
“Vhat is your name?” she asked.
Aloysius began. He did not want to tell her his entire name, but he could not help himself.
“Aloysius Gossamer Longshoreman Technocracy Predominate Involuted Enraptured Parliamentarian Patriarch Verdure Emulative Perihelion Dichotomy Chase Iron-Curtain Linkage Colonialistic Dilapidate—”
“Vait!” she said, holding up a finger. “Just a moment.”
Aloysius scowled at the interruption, but then he remembered what her hand had done to the tree.
“How many names have you?” she asked.
“A thousand names!” he said boastfully. “Me have a thousand names.”
She took out the book.
“Start from the beginning again,” she said, “I vill write them all down.”
“Bumbo claat,” whispered the bush. “Watch dis now.”
They sat down under the tree, which was still whimpering over its injury.
Aloysius began.
“Aloysius Gossamer Longshoreman Technocracy Predominate Involuted Enraptured—”
“Don’t go so fast,” she snapped. “My English is not so good.”
It went this way. He would say one of his names, and she would be unable to spell it.
“How do you spell Verdure?” she asked.
“Me can’t spell, ma’am!” he scowled.
“So how can you have a name you can’t spell?”
“Is me name, ma’am! Me can’t spell it, but is me name!”
“Damnit! I can’t spell it neither. I vant to write this down in my book. But my English is not good! Vhat are ve to do?”
“Bumbo! Make me tell me name, ma’am! Me brain can’t take all de pressure o’ interruption!”
“I cannot spell Verdure!” Her blue eyes blazed a dangerous fire. “I cannot write down vhat I cannot spell! I know six languages, but I cannot spell any of them! This is your language, vhy can’
t you spell your own name?”
Aloysius screamed his anguish, his humiliation, his sorrow.
“Because me can’t read!”
She glared at him stonily, unsympathetically, the book poised in one hand, the pencil in another. Then she began to curse rapidly, her eyes still piercingly fixed to his face, each obscenity popping in the quiet clearing like the distant sound of a child being slapped.
“Shit shit shit shit piss piss piss piss fuck fuck fuck fuck cock cock cock cock pussy pussy pussy pussy modderfucker modderfucker modderfucker. There! Now I feel a little better.”
Aloysius stared at her with bewilderment.
“Vell,” she sighed, putting away her book, shouldering her knapsack. “It is no use. I can’t write down your names if ve both cannot spell. So, come. Ve go now. My name is Inga. You can tell me your names when ve valk. Come on. I vant to hear them all.”
They started down the path that led to the roadway.
Aloysius spoke his names, slowly, carefully, for the benefit of the foreigner.
“Impracticable Loquacious Predilection Abomination Vichyssoise Pyrrhic Mountebank . . .”
“You know vhat I need is a guide,” she said. “Vould you like to be my guide? I have money. I pay you to show me Jamaica.”
“Unconscionable Altercation Lookalike Partition Bosky Pigeon-toed Dentition . . .” Aloysius rattled on obdurately, determined not to answer until he had recited all his names.
“De blind leading de blind,” a bush moaned.
“Bitch and brute! Don’t come back to dis place!” the tree screamed after them, as the surrounding undergrowth brushing the narrow footpath swallowed them up.
* * *
In the old days the first tourists who came to Jamaica were English. They had pale faces, chilly manners, and distracted eyes. They were a belchless, fartless, scented people and in their presence the Jamaicans who met them and served them and who of necessity under the strictures of the Almighty’s plan were bound to occasionally belch and fart and stink, felt small and worthless like unloved children. These first English tourists perpetually said “Pardon” even when they had done nothing to be pardoned for and caused generations of Jamaicans to wince as though that innocuous word was an order for a flogging.
In the later days after the Empire had fallen the tourists were Americans: men with enormous bellies bulging through distended cotton shirts painted with shrill pictures of yellow sunsets, green parrots, and pink fish; women with blood-red lips and enamelled fingernails whose bodies dripped with jewelery like fruit from a bountiful tree. The English had sniffed silently at the land like strange dogs in a strange place and gathered on verandas in the evenings to the clinking of ice and the fluorescent glow of their own whiteness; but the Americans played on the land—romping in the streets during the daytime hours like noisy schoolchildren, fornicating during the nights on dark beaches, their white rumps pumping feverishly under the tropical skies.
In these newest of days most of the tourists were Americans, and a few were English, but many were Germans—people of a growling tongue and the dogmatic mien of a parson sermonizing about hellfire to a Sunday school. Blond, blue-eyed, these new tourists resembled the Americans in many ways, except that their big bellies were not wrapped in gaudy cotton shirts and they did not smile or laugh as easily as the Americans.
When these Germans first stepped off the airplanes the sun licked greedily at their pale skins like a hungry dog licking meat off an old bone.
Aloysius and the white woman came down the hillside and walked toward Ocho Rios.
The sun was hot and no breeze blew. To their left the sea lapped against the shore and the dark blue stretched out to the clothesline on the horizon where a few cumulus clouds limply hung. On their right the land reared up thick and luxuriant against the foothills. Ahead of them the rocky bay of Ocho Rios yawned open and chewed on the gristle of the wreathing sea.
“Vhat a lovely island this is,” she exclaimed. “I think I never see a place so lovely.”
“Life hard here, ma’am,” Aloysius said. “De ground hard. Bush talk too much. Everywhere you go you see cow and goat.”
“Vhat do bushes say to you?”
“Dey like to chat odder people business. Dey love gossip, ma’am.”
In his mind, he was hearing the bush shrieking, “Kiss me granny, him fuck de ground!”
“Dey don’t mind deir own business,” he glowered, his mind still on the humiliation he had suffered from bushes.
“Sounds like my father,” she said darkly.
A dog ambled past, its teats so swollen and pendulous that they scraped the asphalt of the roadway.
"What madman doing wid white woman?" the dog muttered.
Aloysius turned and glared at it.
Chapter Eight
Arithmetic. That was the worry between them. Bad arithmetic. You do not learn arithmetic in the lunatic asylum. You do not learn it from sleeping in the bush or talking to trees. You learn arithmetic the way children have always learned it—out of the mouth of a terrifying teacher while you sit on a hard bench and dream of climbing trees and floating down rivers. Arithmetic was a discipline. It required brain power and concentration. You had to concentrate on the numbers and learn the laws that governed them. And when you knew arithmetic well, it could be your pastime. You could spend a day counting the clouds floating overhead or calculating the weight of fish. You could sit in a forest and count trees or number the leaves on a fern.
The woman sat on a mountaintop smoking ganja and doing these very things as Aloysius watched. First she counted all the trees she could see from where she sat, and then she numbered their leaves and wrote the figure down in her book. She said afterwards that she desired a problem to do with gravity and she worried her brain about it then said she could not recall the formula. And after she had smoked the second weed, she wished out loud that they had kidnapped a physicist so she could torment him with an enigma of arithmetic.
She smoked ganja more than Aloysius had ever seen any other woman smoke it. It was the Sinsemilla weed that she smoked—the strong one that made the mind of a grown man fly like a bee—and after she had smoked the second weed on the hillside, then she started to calculate the weight of fish.
If one fish had a girth of so many inches, she wondered out loud, and its flesh weighed so many ounces to a cubic inch, how much would a fish of a certain length weigh? Aloysius had not smoked the weed except for one long drag, which was just as well because the problem to do with fish puzzled his mind and made him feel dizzy. He did not think it was the right thing to do on an afternoon—to sit under a tree on a hillside, smoke weed, and calculate the weight of invisible fish.
But then the whole afternoon in the company of this white woman had been a bizarre time.
They had walked to Ocho Rios, and the eyes of the townspeople had trailed after them like mosquitoes. Bushes whispered as they strolled past. Everyone turned and looked and wondered what a white tourist woman was doing in the company of a ragged lunatic.
Because of the attention he was getting, Aloysius became puffed up and boastful. He told jokes and pretended that he was a lawyer with a house in the country. But no matter that the woman was a foreigner and unused to the ways of Jamaica, it was obvious that she saw through his lies. His clothes were still ragged and tattered and he still had the dishevelled look of one who lived outdoors like a bird at the mercy of God—one on whose bare head everything in the sky must eventually fall: dew, rain, darkness, and the noiseless breath of the sun.
During one of his lies, the woman turned her blue eyes on him and said, “I think you full of shit,” which shamed him and made him shut up.
So from then on—and by that time they were through the square of Ocho Rios, past the curious eyes that flicked at them from shop awnings, roadside stands, donkey carts, and burglarbarred windows; past the mutterings that ominously rose in their wake; and walking toward the scenic road that is known as Fern Gully and is a favori
te of tourists exploring in rented automobiles—from then on he told her only the truth about himself, or tried to tell the truth even if he did not really know it.
But some things he could not tell her even when she asked. He could not tell her when he had first gone mad because he had never gone mad. He could say when the world had first proclaimed him mad and why: It was because he had gotten into a heated roadside argument with a Trinidadian donkey in the Clarendon village of Parnassus. He could tell her what it felt like to be draped up by a constable, carted off in the belly of the Black Maria Land Rover used by the police to transport unruly prisoners, and driven to a madhouse in Kingston, while the donkey, who had started the argument, incurred no punishment. This was the unjust state of affairs in Jamaica as any poor man could testify to. Let a donkey hold a conversation with a man and the man was not supposed to reply, no matter how serious the provocation, no matter that the donkey propounded preposterous ideas that any sensible man would wish to refute—so long as the man sat still and pretended not to hear the donkey insulting him, he was allowed to roam the streets in freedom. But let the man lose his temper at the rubbish the beast was hurling at him, let him raise his voice to correct falsehood, and see what happened to him. He was sent to the madhouse, where he was forced to eat chicken backs and wings and hold conversations with brown men in white coats. But let him ask one of these brown men, let him say—So you say I am mad because I hold a chat with a donkey, but why isn’t the donkey also judged mad for holding a chat with a man?—and the paradox of that point escaped the brains of the brown-skin men. Say that too insistently, too often, and they locked you in a room whose walls were padded with rubber and they forced you to eat chicken behinds for dinner—the part of the chicken that is pointed like a spear and in the countryside is called the “bishop’s nose”—the worst part of the chicken to give a man who is accused of chatting too much, since it is said to profoundly affect the tongue of the one who eats it, making him talk incessantly. Even today, even after he had been out of the asylum now for some ten months by his latest calculation, he still could not help himself with chatting because of all the chicken behind the brown-skin doctors had made him eat.
The Lunatic Page 4