Is Just a Movie

by Earl Lovelace

  When she fell in love, it was an event. At such times she would become feminine, wear her best dresses, makeup, all the things she did not do ordinarily, and there would emerge this woman, her eyes sparkling, her very skin breathing out her magical femaleness. None of it was for me, for us. I had to listen to her talk about these fellars, blowing them up to a bigness they did not deserve. All the insights she displayed in our discussions on other matters deserted her when she talked of them. And in spite of my misgivings, my own sense of these fellars, their inadequacy, their lies, their bullshit, I was forced to try to see them through her eyes, their style, their fashion, their intelligence, their sexiness.

  I watched Dorlene grow slow, silly, dreamy, helpless, as she fell in and out of love, wounded and miserable as she suffered the pangs of heartbreak and disappointment. At these times, she became unreasonable, demanding, childlike, impossible. For days she went about sick, as if about to give up the ghost, her heart bleeding. She wrote poetry, she recited poems, she posted letters. She made entries in her journal. She grieved, she cried, she didn’t eat, she stopped talking to friends, became critical of us, she pined, she beat herself and I had to pamper her and coax her back to normalcy. Gradually my role became that of consoler. As demonstration of my goodwill, my caring, I had to listen to the stories of the men, their shortcomings, their intelligence, their selfishness, their arrogance, not allowed to say to her a word critical of them unless prompted by her to do so. Ordinary, stupid fellows taking up my time because they had become gods by virtue of the blessing of her love. Even when she was done with them, they remained in my eyes men marked with a status that outranked mine. I felt myself dwindling. I felt myself disappearing as I nursed her back into the world until, at last, when the love waned, she became human again, she became reflective, began to accuse herself of foolishness and to laugh at herself and to destroy the fantasy that was the love and the myth that was the man. And what about me?

  “Look,” I said. “I feel uneasy. I feel that I have to protect myself.”

  She laughed. “Donny, you have so much woman. What you going to do with me?”

  And so she put me off. But, “No. No. I mean it. I have to protect my feelings. I feel uneasy, like a fraud. People believe I in something with you. And I am not.”

  “Why are you getting angry?”

  “I am not angry.”

  “You are not?”

  “You making this a joke.”

  She took my hand, looked into my eyes. “But, Donny, you are my friend.”

  And so she charmed me. I was her friend. And that is what I would remain through the years. If I sound like a nice forbearing guy, forget it. I was doing this for me. I was sticking around waiting for her to see me, to see that I was more, could be more than a friend.

  When Rochard appeared on the scene from England, she introduced me to him.

  “Oh, I know you,” I said, a bit too quickly.

  “You do?”

  “Maybe I don’t,” I said.

  “He lives up the hill from us,” Dorlene said.

  “Near the woman with the piano?”

  “Yes,” she said. “You remember.”

  I remembered.

  I had seen him driving a truck through the town, stopping it, his brakes squealing, and jumping out importantly like he was going to arrest somebody or out a fire or something.

  “You like that fella?”

  “What kind of question is that? Of course I like him.”

  It didn’t make sense to me. Other fellars flattered, they lied. They affected a kind of polish: bullshit, but polished. They performed for her. She was a lady to be wooed. Rochard didn’t believe in this lady shit, he was a Trinidadian, a Trini, he said. The best of human beings in the best place in the world. And he was not to be fooled. Trini women liked their bacchanal. He was short-tempered, as if he was always ready to brawl, to fight. Loud as if his right to be heard was more urgent than anyone else’s. And, for peace, I found myself forced into a role of the agreeable. I was the one to keep my voice down, nod my head, let him talk. I shocked myself. I found myself reining myself in, the consciousness of what I was doing getting me angrier and angrier the more I said nothing. To my shame, I talked not in front his face, but behind his back I complained to Dorlene.

  And Dorlene acknowledged that he was a nice fella but that was his way. She told me of his support for cricket, his old-mas playing, his impatience with the way we were developing. “You know he has read the entire Guinness Book of Records.”

  “The whole thing?”

  “The whole thing.”

  He knew everything. In his company, you felt you couldn’t talk for being so often corrected. Whenever Dorlene tried to talk he interrupted her. He mimicked her if he disagreed and she laughed. She looked at me with complicity as if to say, “You see. His way.”

  But maybe he loved her. He was planning to propose marriage to her, she said. I had the feeling it was the threat he suspected from me that pushed him to propose to Dorlene. But the proposal didn’t take place. Three days before the event, with his same Captain Marvel, Superman bullshit, he went hunting in the forest with his some friends of his. He got separated from them. Not able to find him, the pardners made their way out the forest. Five days later, some fellars planting marijuana in North Manzanilla would bring him out to the seaside town, bleeding, bruised and babbling out his head.

  That was the end of that. Rochard’s family surrounded him and a month later Rochard left for Miami. He never returned. And so began the story that soon everybody in Cascadu would be repeating: Something was not right with Dorlene. She was never going to get married.

  “Poor thing,” Aunt Magenta said. “Something is not right with her.”

  Even though Dorlene had disappointed me, I couldn’t leave her at that time. Dorlene was hurt. That was when she threw herself into the steelband. And began arranging tunes for them. Music became her life.

  On occasions, I went with her to the movies, to a party, but I was more her escort than her lover.

  “Donny, you think something wrong with me?”

  “Wrong? Nothing ain’t wrong with you.”

  But I could see that the confidence she had begun with was dented. I thought that now with this experience she would favor me, that she would at last see me, appreciate me, to think that maybe I could be the one to comfort her on a more permanent basis. I felt myself edging closer to her. We talked of life; I showed her the calypsos I was working on. But I did not push. I, too, had to get accustomed to the idea of she and me. I had of course become quite uncertain. I didn’t want this to fail. And in some way I must have communicated this to her, for she too began to measure how much of herself she would give to me. She began to relax in my arms, dancing, but the relaxedness had brought her close to me and I was gentle with her and she would nestle close to me and I would put my arms around her, and as if alerted to some deep sense of danger, she would pull back to some sense of carefulness, and then she would hold my hand and tell me what a good friend I was. I waited.

  Clayton and Dorlene

  We were at a fête in the community hall when Dorlene first saw Clayton. He was standing a little to one side of the band, ostensibly listening to the music, bristling with an importance that he must have believed everyone was aware of. She was standing in his line of vision. She expected him at least to smile at her, but he ignored her. And for that insult Dorlene decided that she would pursue him.

  “You know him?” she asked me.

  “In a way,” I said.

  “You don’t like him.” It was a statement more than a question.

  “I didn’t say that.”

  “You didn’t have to say anything.”

  She was attracted to him, but, also, I felt there was an arrogance in him she wanted to punish. She wanted him to want her so she could reject him. And that was their beginning. She found her way next to him, they got to talking. After that they saw each other, and soon she became one of th
e group that gathered around him for the sermons he delivered.

  I have tried to think what was the motivation. Passion? Love? Guilt?

  At the dances in the school he came and folded his arms and listened to the band play. Dorlene who used to so love to dance stood up at his side talking. I asked her to dance, she looked at him, she looked at me. She hesitated. She moved toward me just as I turned away.

  She would be angry with him one day, the next she would be singing his praises. I waited for it to end.

  One day she gave me a letter and asked me to give it to him.

  “I don’t know if I should be doing this,” I said.

  She could see on my face that I wasn’t happy.

  “I don’t think you understand him, Donny.”

  She told me how he had come here, his life story, of all the things he had done, the things he wanted to do,

  the struggle he had to escape the chain of being just another fella to get a job and stay out of trouble, as if staying out

  of trouble was a vocation. Stay out of trouble? Let trouble stay out of me. Those were his words. He had come from a poor family, ordinary people, no better than anybody.

  All politics had given them was the right to vote; that

  was all. You have to understand why he is so angry

  with the world. The disrespect he had to endure; and

  even worse, people expecting him to accept it, to accept being second-class. You can’t understand what he had

  to put up with. No, you don’t understand. You can’t understand.

  “I? I cannot understand?”

  “Donny, you are a successful calypsonian.”

  I listened to her talk.

  “How could you have asked him to accept being second-class?”

  “And wasn’t it so for all of us? And we don’t demand to be kings.”

  “And why not? Why shouldn’t you? Why shouldn’t you demand to be kings? You were kings.”

  “All that we left behind . . . The glories of the Nile, the pharaohs. We represent people stripped of name and rank, people who have no badge that makes them superior to anyone.”

  “Independence has failed him,” she said.

  “Failed him? We haven’t even begun. Failed him? What you expect? To find a ready-made country. This is something to build.”

  “But you have accepted it. He has not.”

  “I hear you.”

  “That was why he formed the Black Power movement.”

  “Formed? He formed it? He didn’t form the Black Power movement, Dorlene. He wasn’t even in it.”

  “Formed it, joined it. Why are you against him?”

  “Did he tell you he formed it?”

  “He is fighting for his life. He is fighting to be himself, to restore himself to his fullness.”

  “He said he formed it?”

  “To be a person free to enjoy the best the society has to offer.”

  “He said he formed it? He told you he formed the Black Power movement?”

  “Donny, he made me see myself, how I grew up, where I lived, what we wanted, what we believed, what we were taught.”

  “What were you taught? What were we all taught? To be better than Blackpeople?”

  “To not look back.”

  “To not look back?”

  “He made me see that the more we advance, the further we grow away from Blackpeople. We become lost to Blackpeople. He made me see how lost I am.”

  “Great.” However, I didn’t want to go on. I didn’t want to appear self-serving or to be bad-mouthing him. I listened to her talk.

  “Could you give him this letter for me?”

  I take the letter. I hold it in my hand. I tried to control my temper.

  “Could you give him this letter for me?”

  “So that is what you think of me.”

  “What are you talking about?”

  “So you think I accept this second-class position? Look.” And I gave the letter back to her.

  “You not taking it to him for me?”

  I shook my head.

  On her face I could see, as she took the letter from my hand, a new interested look at me, settling on what I thought she thought was my jealousy. But then she grew so quiet, appeared injured, I was almost moved enough to take the letter and be her messenger.

  I felt myself a traitor to myself. Next day, I wrote to her:

  You have ignored me for strangers, for people you don’t even know. You take me for granted because I am here. Did it ever occur to you that I am better than those fellows, that it is I who love you? Have you ever really looked at me, listened to me?

  “Donny,” she said when she saw me, “Donny, don’t be angry with me.”

  But I was not angry with her, I was angry with me. I had to let her go and I had to hope that maybe if she saw Clayton, rather, if she saw through him, she would see me.

  I didn’t talk of my feelings to Dorlene. But she knew me and, seeing me in that mood, as if to placate me, she invited me to her home.

  “Fine.”

  On previous occasions when I went to her home, her mother had received me with suspicion, if not hostility. She would leave me standing in the yard while she got Dorlene; she would never know my name, I had to give her my name again and again. She would sit there while I spoke to her daughter, looking through the old newspapers she had accumulated over the years, cutting in now and then as if I still was not present, to point out some article on murder or robbery or deception that had to do particularly with young men, or suicides, or chopping that had to do with Indians, or some other, commenting favorably only on the industry of the Chinese, addressing me only indirectly to say to Dorlene, “You don’t find he resemble the Birchwoods or the Douglases,” until later she would come out with: “Well, who is your family, which part you from?” Already as if the very threat of the question was enough to dissuade me from pursuing any relationship with her daughter. And I got the impression that Dorlene herself was waiting to hear what I would say, as if this was an examination that she hoped I would pass.

  I had developed an uneasiness with her. I figured that she felt that not only was I taking Dorlene away from her, I was taking her to an inferior place.

  But this time she was welcoming. It didn’t take me long to work out why. The threat of Dorlene with Clayton Blondell had made her fall back on me. I suppose I was the lesser of the evils. “Come in,” she said, and she called out Dorlene. She offered me a drink and she sat down to talk, spoke to me about calypsos and wanted to know if I sung with Lord Kitchener. Here again, I was second best, the less formidable threat. Instead of this pleasing me, it made me realize how weak I must appear to them.

  “I want you to sing at the wedding,” Dorlene said.

  “Which wedding?”

  Then she told me, “Clayton and I are getting married.”

  “Going to help him build the Sphinx?”

  “I’m not joking.”

  She took my hands in hers. “Donny, I’m not getting any younger, you know.”

  “You going to do it?”

  She nodded. “I want you to sing at the wedding. It’s the least you could do for me.”

  “Girl, you really know how to punish a man. But I’ll think about it. I’ll see if the date suits me.”

  I had a gig in St. Thomas with Lord Superior, the calypsonian. I wasn’t sure of the dates. I hoped I would be away. I didn’t want to be present when she gave herself to him.

  Wedding

  On the Monday morning of the week of the announcement that Dorlene Cruickshank would marry Clayton Blondell, the postmistress, Beryl Dove, discovered on the steps of the post office the head of Sonny Lalloo, a greengrocer of San Juan, in a cardboard box marked Pure Soya Bean Oil. On the Tuesday, Flavius BonAventure, a security guard with the Electricity company, climbed up a telephone post and decided he would remain atop it until his wife, Celia, returned to him. Wednesday, Oliver Kanhai was speeding to his eighteenth-birthday party when he
ran into an oncoming vehicle in a smash-up in which three people were killed. Thursday, Yvonne Peters, a dancer, was stabbed thirteen times by her common-law husband who drank Gramoxone after he had done the deed, dying while she was in the hospital fighting for life.

  So, the Friday announcement of the wedding found priests, pundits and other holy people from the town offering prayers to remove the band of misfortune that had surrounded the community. Women and men who had not gone to church in a long time heeded their call to attend the crusade the Church of the Open Bible was conducting. Everywhere you turned that week, you could hear singing, chanting and praying. Aunt Magenta, a mother in the Shouters church, not to be left out, tied her head, band she belly, take up her bell and other accoutrements of her worship and set out with a small flock of her congregation for the four corners of the town to toss out the evil spirits. In that week the streets were empty after six, as if we were expecting a storm. Men went directly home from work. Even the young men playing football and cricket in the savannah cleared the railings where they usually sat after play. The town was so depleted that in the rum shop Constable Stephen Aguillera found himself drinking in company with Aaron and Isabella, habitual drunks, the only other citizens not seeking redemption. Contemplating the rash of righteousness that had overrun the town, Aaron offered what Birbalsing the shop owner took to be a most insightful remark (which he would write out in his own hand and put up as a sign in the rum shop):