Is Just a Movie

by Earl Lovelace

  When he was going back home alone, he began to feel that his caution was not enough. Just to follow where she led was not enough. He had to find a way for himself, to expose to her what he had in him and what she meant to him, how to let her see the space in his stomach, the melting in his heart, how to let her know that he knew and liked her smell and the curve and color of her lips, her eyes and her smile and the feel of her soul. And that was how he started to listen and to melt, and to think and watch her lips and teeth and smile, to see, to see and feel it, whatever it was he didn’t quite know yet, but he was beginning to feel it coming inside him, not even patience, not only respect, something that later he would understand as cherish, slow and clear, a light coming inside him how to cherish and love. And just like that he held her hand and she folded her fingers about his own and he begin to discover what fingers is and hands and arms were. He touch her face and he begin to learn what face was, what flesh was and what hair was, all that he learned, marveling with each discovery, oh lord, and he didn’t say a word those times. And next day the world opened up for him, the colors of flowers, the shape of leaves, birds whistling their own tune, dancing their own dance, and insects, so intricate the patterns on their body, fragile like lace, exquisite like gems. He watched the way branches bent, and lonely bare trees standing alone. And he knew now what a flower was and what was a leaf. These things, it had taken him all his life to know. He began to feel himself coming alive in a new way, to a new world.

  “Lover boy,” fellars teased. “Lover boy.”

  Lover boy?

  But he didn’t let their mamaguy bother him and he didn’t tell them of the sweet hard delight he was experiencing. Over these nights now and again she would let him hold her in his arms and for a moment she would sink against his chest and he would feel the heft of her body, or sometimes she would just accidentally stumble against him and he would feel the firmness of her hips and the world wobble and melt and the weight of a wonderful tormenting urgency in the pit of his stomach that made him feel as if he had no time left to live, and only her embrace would save him. Now even as he dealt with the weight of his urgency he found that in his arms she too was trembling and gasping for breath. As if she too was growing weaker, she would push him away less and less firmly until she was more in his arms against his chest, her breasts, her breath, the scent on her skin. These moments were happening more and more often. And they began to walk now further and further away from her house as if they had to keep in motion to escape drowning in the pool of urgency, walking one night in one direction and another night in the opposite one. One night they walked and walked until he found himself in front of the house in which he lived. He pointed out the house. That is where I live. Not daring to suggest that they go in, not wanting to make any move that would make her think of him as crude or uncouth, wondering how to be other than himself. He didn’t know how long he could keep this up. Another night they pass it again. It started to rain lightly. Neither of them wanted to acknowledge it.

  Finally he asked, “You want to go inside?”

  “No. I want to stay in the rain and catch pneumonia.”

  They went inside. She sat on the bed. He changed his shirt that had been soaked by the rain. He offered her a T-shirt of his own. She shook her head no. She watched him, his muscles. He didn’t touch her. He kept his distance. With his shirt changed, he sat on the other side of the bed, away from her. They said nothing. And just when he felt that the urgency in his belly would overpower him, he said, “Let’s go.”

  He really didn’t know how long he could keep up this.

  The PM’s Promise

  This was never going to happen again, the PM said, at his next meeting, as he stood on the platform constructed on the site of the disastrous fire, shouting to be heard above the steaming hum of nine gasoline lamps.

  “Because as wonderfully as these gaslights shine, if we are to enter the modern epoch as a contending force that the world shall respect, if not honor, we shall have to equip our communities with more reliable light. So tonight I make this solemn pledge to you, the first thing I am going to do in my next term as your Prime Minister is to ensure that every rural community be given electricity, a fire brigade be set up in every town with hydrants and standpipes and a twenty-four-hour water service. The colonial order developed the cities and left the countryside to languish in backwardness, leaving you only the monuments of their dominion, their churches and their police stations, the busts of their heroes. So this is where the concentration of our energies shall be. What they left untouched we will develop, what they scorned we will exalt, what they sullied we will wash clean. Here in these villages we will pitch camp and all the angels of hell shall not prevail against us. Come hell or high water, we are not going to leave you without water nor in the dark again. Not in Egypt village, not in Guayaguayare, not in Blanchisseuse, not in Matelot and, God willing, ladies and gentlemen, certainly not here in Cascadu.”

  The PM had said nothing about Franklyn’s death.

  By the time the applause to the PM speech died down, the site of the fire had been cleared of rubble, surveyors and architects and builders had appeared with hard hats and tall boots to construct a complex that would house a new grocery store, drug store, hardware and department store. A week later Mervyn Aladdin, a fire officer from San Fernando, appeared in uniform to interview young men of Cascadu who would form the volunteer fire brigade that the PM had mandated.

  We watched from the roadside as he put them through their paces on a Friday evening, climbing and descending a ladder and then go marching through the town. I never see them touch a hose and they had no fire hydrant to open. They had no building of their own and no equipment except for a ladder, which they borrowed from the Department of Works. They got no pay but were promised a fireman’s uniform at the end of their training and the opportunity of graduating to the ranks of the professional firemen when the Fire Station was opened in Cascadu.

  Since the fire, Aunt Magenta had thought of acknowledging, if not rewarding, Sonnyboy for the good work he had done for the party during its victorious election campaign and (she didn’t put it quite in this way) for his role in starting the fire that had shown itself to be so beneficial to the development of Cascadu. She took her concern to the party group, and after agonizing over what reward to offer Sonnyboy, Mr. Tannis came up with the idea that Sonnyboy should be invited to train as a fireman, after which he would be employed permanently as an officer in the fire brigade that the PM had said would be built in every town.

  At forty-two, Sonnyboy Apparicio was just over the age and one inch under the acceptable height required to join the Fire Service, and with the impediment of his foot, slight as he made it out to be, he did not qualify. More importantly, he did not have any desire to join the Fire Service; so when Mr. Tannis made him the offer, Sonnyboy looked at him in astonishment.

  “Fireman? Me? A fireman?”

  “What he wants to be, Chairman of the County Council? He lucky he not charged for arson,” Mr. Tannis complained to my aunt Magenta.

  Sonnyboy came to me.

  “King, give me your opinion. You could see me as a fireman, eh? Tell me! You could see me climbing down a ladder from a burning building with a man on my shoulder?”

  His new beginning had fallen through and he would have to look for a new job too, because Tannis’s uncle, who owned the van he was driving, had decided to get out of the transportation business and had no further use for his services.

  Sonnyboy spoke to Sweetie. She knew about the fire.

  “A fireman?” Sonnyboy mused.

  Sweetie-Mary heard the pain in his voice.

  “Don’t make them make you stop loving,” she said.

  “This is a sign,” he told Sweetie, “for me to begin my life by myself, independent of anybody.”

  She took his hands in hers. She stroked his fingers. “You know,” she said, almost gaily, “if you want you could run away with me.”

  He loo
ked at her again: “You serious?”

  “Try me.”

  And that was how a few nights later he came on her street, driving a car and pulled up and parked it nearby, with the engine running, not only to signal his presence but because he was not sure that if he turned off the ignition it would start again, hoping she would hear him whistling “With a Song in My Heart” above the sound of the beating engine.

  It was an old car that had passed through many hands, that had spent just over a year in the yard of the mechanic Freddie with a For Sale sign on it. Freddie had allowed him to drive it, so you could see how good it working. Since Sonnyboy stopped driving the van, he had been thinking of driving taxi for a living and had been looking for a car he could afford. This car was a bargain, and what made it so good a bargain was that “you have your mechanic right here,” Freddie tell him. “Whatever little repairs, I right here to fix them,” Freddie said.

  The car, also, of course, was a demonstration of Sonnyboy’s ambition.

  So when Sweetie-Mary came out, he showed her the car.

  “It is an investment,” he said. “I could run it as a taxi and if anything wrong I have my mechanic Freddie to fix it. I bring it to show you and also just in case.”

  “Just in case what?”

  “Just in case you ready to run away with me.”

  “You asking me to?”

  “You ready to run away with me?” he asked

  “When?”

  “Right away.”

  “Wait here,” she said and she walked away from him back to the house.

  “I couldn’t believe it,” he tell me. “I couldn’t believe it. The woman go inside with the same heartbreaking walk that I could make out even in the dark. Next thing I see is the lamp go on and I there in the bush, keeping out of sight, thinking is some big secret thing me and the girl was doing. Then a little while after, this time surrounded

  by her family, all of them there in the front room, she,

  the mother, the sisters, all together, holding on to one another, like they saying goodbye. Then Sweetie come through the front door walking bold-bold with her suitcase in hand, all of them still around her, as if they were seeing her off.

  “And I there in the darkness hiding. I feel stupid. I feel like a arse.”

  But he didn’t say anything, even when she get into the car. And she, sensing something wrong, had the bravery to ask me what happen. “What it is happen? Tell me, Sonnyboy, what happen?”

  Until finally he had to answer: “I thought you was running away with me.”

  “And I am,” she said.

  “And your mother? You tell your mother? You tell her?”

  “Yes, I tell her.”

  “So, so they know everything?” Sonnyboy felt even more of a fool.

  Then is when she tell him that running away was not even her own idea, but her mother’s. For years she had made it clear to her girl-children that as long as they lived in her house, if any one of them was to become intimate with a man, “Is either he marry you or run away with you.”

  All the way to his house Sonnyboy again wondered whether he had made the right decision or if he had allowed himself to be entrapped by Sweetie and her mother. He did not say a word.

  “You vexed with me?” she asked. “You want to take me back home? I put you through a lot of trouble?”

  He still didn’t speak. He didn’t touch her either. For three days.

  And his uneasiness didn’t leave him until the night he awoke to find her sleeping in total abandoned and contented slumber, her head on his shoulder and her legs sprawled all over his body. He removed his arm from under her head and he fixed her head on the pillow and held her loosely, wanting to draw closer but not wanting to surrender his vexation until he better understood the situation that had caused it. She threw an arm around his neck and drew him closer and held his head to her bosom, and bit by bit, without a word spoken, they negotiated a settlement that left them in the arms of each other, climbing into an imminent tomorrow and swimming together to a shore that was on a far horizon and an arm’s length away, going together into a forever place whose name was on the tip of his tongue but that his brain would not allow him to say. And Sonnyboy did not know that the sounds of their celebration had reached the world until next morning when he encountered his neighbors, he find each of them looking at him with a knowing grin. He continued to smile back at them in perplexity until one of them couldn’t keep it any longer: “Last night,” he said, “we nearly call the police.”

  Sonnyboy’s embarrassment turned to alarm at the thought that his grandmother had heard them. And he was thinking to avoid her, but Sweetie-Mary, feeling it would be better to apologize, went to her.

  “Sorry for the noise last night.”

  “What noise? Around here, with dogs and birds and traffic, to get my sleep, every night I plug my ears with cotton wool.”

  Mary’s mouth dropped open and the smile of joy coursed upward from her belly and without thinking or anything she reached out and hugged Sonnyboy’s grandmother; she felt the muscles on the face against hers. The grandmother was smiling. That was the beginning of their friendship that was to delight Sonnyboy and give him a focus that he had never had before. Sweetie-Mary had brought him something. He wasn’t sure exactly what to call it. He called it luck. Mary had brought him luck. Now he would show Cascadu the man he really was.

  One day he came home to find Sweetie-Mary and his grandmother clearing out the front gallery. They intended to make it a vegetable shop and much more. Together the three of them agreed on a plan. Sweetie-Mary and his grandmother would manage the vegetable store and he would pay down on the car and run it as a taxi.

  Of course they had other plans for the car. On weekends they would be able to go to the beach. For Carnival they could go to a fête, to calypso without having to worry how they were going to get back. They could go to see cricket in the Oval. With the money he brought in they would renovate the place, stock the store, extend the gallery, put a couple chairs and tables and set up an eating place where Sweetie-Mary who was a good cook would prepare food for sale. Bit by bit they would pave the yard and extend the eating section, so by the time the electricity promised by the PM came to Cascadu, they would be ready to open a first-class eating place.

  TWO

  The Man He Wanted Them to See

  In the three years it take for electricity to come to Cascadu, Sonnyboy, his grandmother and Sweetie-Mary transformed the gallery in the front their house from what was a stall with its few bananas and tomatoes into a vegetable shop that also sold homemade fruit juices, cakes, fried fish and bake, and whatever dish Sweetie-Mary was cooking on that day: fish-broth, oildown, saltfish and provision, pelau. During the week sales were slow, but on weekends, when people stopped on the way back from the beach, the three of them were busy, and the business would have been profitable, except that it also had to pay for repairs to the car that Sonnyboy bought to run as a taxi.

  The car was running good. Sonnyboy drive it to Mayaro to the beach for them to dig for chip-chip. He went Rampanalgas with Sweetie-Mary for the Fishermen fête. He drive it to Port of Spain market to buy fresh vegetables for the shop. He drive it by Sweetie-Mary sister in Diego Martin. All that time, he owing Freddie for it. The minute he pay off Freddie for the car, it start. Bushings for the starter want changing, gear box want overhauling, the accelerator cable break, points, coil. The battery need recharging. I don’t think it ever again make a complete trip to any destination without breaking down, and the people of Cascadu get accustomed to seeing it on the side of the road with its hood open and Sonnyboy stand up beside it, waiting for some good Samaritan to give him a push or for his mechanic Freddie to arrive with his bluster and bag of tools to get it to run again.

  And is now Freddie tell him: “The car is a old car. What you expect? We have to fix it.”

  “You get trapped already,” Sweetie-Mary tell him. “Is better you just sell it.”

  “Sel
l it,” his grandmother agreed. And even though nobody asked his opinion, his friend Gilda looked at the car and said what he had said the first time he saw it, “Old car is trouble.”

  Sonnyboy held on to the car.

  “People laughing at you,” Sweetie-Mary tell him.

  “Let them laugh,” he said. “They just jealous.”

  Sonnyboy kept the car. Through his mechanic Freddie he found secondhand parts for its repair, Sonnyboy upholstered it and painted it over in a brilliant yellow that hid the scars of the numerous welding jobs done on it, and applied his famed neatness to its upkeep. It looked good, cared for; apart from guzzling gas and drinking oil, the only problem was it took time to start on mornings. In the night he parked it at the top of the incline on the street where he lived so that he could kick-start it by rolling down the hill. Even that operation did not always work and many times the car would tumble, start briefly, flutter for a few moments then cut off as it rumbled downhill. On the flat, it needed a push to start it. After a while he enlisted Sweetie-Mary and his grandmother to help him. It was an adventure that his grandmother relished. She didn’t know how to drive and had never sat in front a steering wheel before, but because she didn’t have as much strength to push as the others, she got the delightful task to steer while they pushed and when Sonnyboy shouted “Hit it,” to come off the clutch, put her foot down gently on the brakes and if it didn’t quite start, to come off the brakes, give it gas and go back to the brakes again. “Clutch, brakes, gas,” she recited. It became part of the ritual of starting the car on a morning. But despite his grandmother’s exhilaration on those mornings, she saw that the expenses for the car was bleeding their takings and she had to agree that he should get rid of it. Sonnyboy argued to keep it. Yes, it was an old car. But, what it needed was care, a good overhaul, a tune-up and it would be ready to rumble. And there would be little trouble because – and this was his ace – he had a good mechanic. Neither Sweetie-Mary nor his grandmother said anything. True to his word, Sonnyboy dropped by his mechanic Freddie almost daily to have him repair whatever problem had developed, replacing broken parts with those he (Freddie) managed to get from derelict vehicles parked in his yard. When Freddie did not have the parts, Sonnyboy himself searched for them by tracking down vehicles from which he could find the various screws and bolts that were missing from his, and soon he knew the location of every Avenger in nearly the whole East of the island. This experience of scouring the region to find car parts brought him into contact with fellow sufferers like himself who held on to nearly useless machines as symbols of their place in the world. Sonnyboy felt admitted into their society, so to them at least because of his suffering he was seen less as a badjohn and more as one of them. He came to feel himself so much part of that brotherhood that even if he was traveling in a taxi, at the sight of a car shut down, he would persuade the driver to stop and he alone or both of them would go over to render if not assistance, consolation.