And he saw that this was what would save him, this little Carnival Jouvay band. All the grandiose dreams he had about the future were collapsed into this little band. Later when they got to Adam Smith Square, and about to split up, all of them confessed it was the best Jouvay they had. And Claude said yes and Hamid say yes, man. Yes. And the little half-pint woman wining on Orlando say yes, and the fella on the iron and the man on the du-dup and everybody had such a great time, they decided to meet again the next year.
Yes, Adam Smith Square at four o’clock on Jouvay morning of the following year. “This time, I will bring the mud,” Claude said, and they took their leave of each other with hugs and pats, Claude and Orlando and Hamid and their party walking back to their place in Woodbrook with such a feeling of fullness, walking on the whole town, sailing on the air, Claude hugging up Arlene and she with her two hands around him.
Claude had a cart made that he could push or pull, and he placed buckets with mud on it. When he and Arlene and his little group reach Adam Smith Square next Jouvay, some of the people were there. But the majority hadn’t turned up, though they had the man beating iron and they had the du-dup man and they had the cart with mud and people came off the streets and joined them; but they didn’t have the inspiration of the little half-pint of a woman.
Next year Claude gone back again, he and Orlando and Shirley, Arlene didn’t get up on time. Hamid decide to go back and play with Three Canal. But now Claude have this pushcart with buckets of mud, so he gone with this little cart with the mud. This time when they meet Adam Smith Square is only the man with the iron. The du-dup man gone. But people join in and they daub themselves with mud and they had a band.
In the next few years, is only he and Arlene alone from the lime. By this time, Claude, anticipating the possible absence of the iron or du-dup, placed pieces of iron and a du-dup on the pushcart with the mud so whoever was around would be able to beat iron and du-dup and make music for the Jouvay band. Fewer people again. The cart was a hindrance. Arlene rebelled. She was prepared to go to Jouvay with him. It was all right, the two of them going out and finding a band, but what was he doing, carrying a cartload of mud when the people not going to be there. But Claude had made a commitment and he would keep it. After that year, he set out for spite with the cart with the buckets of mud.
“For what?” Arlene had asked. “To show what?
“If you know they not going to be there, what you carrying mud for?”
“Just in case they come,” he lied. Because by that time Claude was carrying the mud, expecting the people not to be there, carrying it as an act of reproach, as a testament to his faith, as an accusation, almost as something to martyr himself and hold it against them. As evidence of his faith and their failure. To show how they will disappoint me again. And that year and the years after that he had walked martyred all over the city, pushing a cart in which he placed buckets of mud and on which he had as well iron and du-dup, so that he had all that was needed for the band, except a set of people he was sure of. And although he tried not to do it or he did it less and less, he spent his time looking around for the people from the original band, waiting for the people, on the lookout for them. And although every Carnival a band coalesced around him, he still kept looking for the original members he had found years before. Each year one or two or three of them would turn up, but never enough to challenge his theory that the people had no responsibility, no commitment, nothing to dent the shield of his heroic martyrdom. I listened to Claude. I suppose it was a confession of sorts, that he had good reason for losing faith in the people. But I didn’t have the impression that he had given up. I felt, though, that he was trying to convey the idea that he wanted to believe in the people. I felt that he was looking to me, looking to us for some direction that would help him.
The Martyrdom of Dorlene
From that day Claude became friends with Sonnyboy and me. I think it was his attempt at establishing roots that he had never been able to properly develop in the town. I suspect also that he had a feeling of guilt at abandoning the people and he wanted to prove to himself that he had not surrendered his interest in them. He wanted us as witnesses. When he came to Cascadu to visit his then ailing mother he dropped by and we went over to Sonnyboy’s place to eat or at Mendoza’s to have a drink. He invited me to play with his Jouvay band and I accepted. That brought us even closer.
He was concerned about Dorlene. After that day on the hill, she had returned to Cascadu and had thrown herself into the business of the steelband, arranging tunes, organizing trips, visits, exchanges with other bands – all of it done with a new compensatory zeal that drained her resources and left her exhausted, since increasingly the band depended on her for everything.
But it was a mission that consumed her. She had missed so much, she said to me. She had been so blind. She had wasted so much time. Now she wanted the music to speak not only to the people, she wanted it to speak for them. And she managed it. The music started to make a way into the hearts of Cascadu, so that when my aunt Magenta hear the band playing, she say, “Wait, this is me,” because in the music she could hear the Shouters’ hymns and she could hear the call of she spirit, and hear her own voice preaching and feel a calm sense of belonging to a big big world. And for a time she pack her basket, put on a straw hat and get into the bus with the people and she and Clephus went down to the savannah to push the pans across the stage.
Feeling herself on the right track, Dorlene left her job at the library. She had this idea about wanting Cascadu to be an example where panmen and women and people from their communities could employ themselves in the Carnival and pan industry, making the instruments, but also producing the beads, feathers, sequins and other accoutrements of Carnival. Claude didn’t like it. You can’t do this by yourself, he tell her. “Dorlene, these people will kill you, they will suck you dry. They have to take responsibility.”
She took no warning. Her mother nagged her about her health, she wasn’t eating properly, she wasn’t really taking proper physical exercise. She had no man. She had fainted once or twice after musical sessions. She had fainted at Panorama, but she hushed it up, got to her feet and went again. She was getting thinner and thinner, her eyes puffy, tired. She was having problems organizing the business. She was running out of money. She was asking Claude to help her to convince her mother that they should mortgage the house.
Claude tried to bail her out, but as he said to me, “I don’t want to encourage irresponsibility. I have my own problems.”
Arlene’s Zipper
Early in that Carnival season, Claude was about to leave with Arlene for the fête Orlando was having for friends of theirs who had returned to Trinidad for Carnival from the various continents of their exile, when in attempting to zip her up he ruined the zipper on the back of the dress she had put on to wear to the party.
To Claude, it was a catastrophe so perfect in its untimeliness, so subversive of the gesture of tenderness and regard he intended that he didn’t put it down to accident, as it appeared to be, but recognized it as the familiar rebuke visited upon him every time he tried to extend himself beyond the confines of a habitual restraint that established his competence without challenging his imagination, or risking error.
Years ago, in the few football games that he played for the Agriculture Department, whenever he played a restrained game, it was OK. But he wanted to make the plays only a skilled player could bring off with consistency. Nine out of ten times he failed, often comically, so that whenever he got the ball, a buzz went through the crowd in anticipation of the disaster to follow. Sometimes even when his efforts made perfect sense, once they failed to produce the result he intended, hoped for, he was the one given the blame. He was not really discouraged. He put it down to a culture that had every respect for gift, and pity, if not contempt, for effort that did not yield excellence. And on the occasions that he played, while he never mastered the skills, he never tired of trying to make those extravagant play
s that he could visualize but that could only be achieved by a superior player.
Claude had taken this attitude of adventure along with his ineptitude into his relationship with Arlene. To her, in the beginning, his awkwardness seemed charming, and his attempts at extravagance – in dancing, in cooking, in romance – brought into her life the unexpected, even the alarming. But after many disasters, she began to watch him and to feel she must guard herself once he involved her in his adventures, for she discovered that the things he was trying were not only new to her, they were new to him. After she had twisted herself into so many contortions to accommodate his search for another superior position in lovemaking, or sought to overcome her reluctance for display so as to keep up with his extravagance on the dance floor, whenever she realized he was attempting anything out of the ordinary, she would caution, “Wait, Claude. Wait.” Claude would feel stumped, his good intentions would appear to be mocking him and he would shrink and turn away, wounded that he was rebuffed, and sad that he couldn’t involve her in his adventure.
And the reason she was not alerted as he got at her zipper was that she had, just that moment, looked away from the mirror and did not see him come up behind her.
Claude was ready. He was wearing a new Carnival shirt, a blue silk affair with huge red roses on the front and back, the fashion that year, white pants, white shoes, a white sailor hat with a fringe of blue swan’s-down and the golden insignia of captain, shaved, his little goatee, scented, ready. He had marched into the bedroom with the great sense of hurry she accused him of employing whenever you have anywhere to go that you want me to believe is so important that you have everybody around you on edge, and had met her sitting on the stool in front the dressing-table combing out her hair with a sense of leisure as if she did not know they were due at the party maybe an hour ago and (he had not told her this) that they were to pick up his cousin Sybil and her husband on the way. Why you only now telling me that? said her posture; and as if his presence did not move her, she went on combing her hair with the same deliberate and fluent ceremony, glancing up now and then to look at him reflected in the mirror, not taking him on, as a kind of taunting, almost as if I wasn’t there, as if she was deliberately establishing that she was her own person and the time she was using was her own. Ordinarily Claude’s impatience would have served to convince her that the great world teetering on the edge of a cliff would fall and disappear if they did not hurry, but this time he felt alerted to something in her that he hadn’t quite sensed before, a self-possession, a resolve, a determination that conveyed to him that she did not care even if he got angry, this awareness making him pause, sensing danger, not worrying now that they would be late, concerned now with her. And he stood behind her, scenting her perfume, watching the skin of her back where the dress was open, the zip still undone. And it occurred to him all at once that they had been drifting apart, that he had allowed his concerns with his sister, with his job, the people, the country, to make him lessen the attention he should pay to her, and it came to him that he might be losing her, just an inkling, a thought, something triggered by the quality of calm with which she readied herself. They had left so many questions unresolved, so many issues they had not discussed, hard things. Now, instead of looking to her with exasperation, as the one to be blamed for their being late, instead of that, he felt a fear. He looked at her and he saw a person on her own, disconnected from him; and he looked again, looking for the woman he knew, and it came to him as a surprising truth that she was leaving him. And now that she was leaving him, as he now thought, believed, knew, something occurred to him that he had paid lip service to but now understood for the first time: that she was with him all the time.
She was with me all the time. All the time. And he had not listened to her. He did not know her. Did not know what she had to offer beyond what she gave. All this time this woman had loved him. She had left her family and friends for him, her world to love him. And what had he done with that love? What had he asked of her? Not anything, not enough. Not enough.
Their eyes met in the mirror, hers injured and resolved, almost as if she was looking to see if he had comprehended the change in her, and he knew that his analysis was correct, in that moment wondering who might the other man be, then realizing quickly, no, that was too easy a way out, if it was not a man then it was her thinking. What was this thinking that had entered her head? He saw what it was; and for the first time he had to admit to himself that he had given up the world they were to build together. What had he given her to follow?
Where was the new world now? Instead of feeling angry, he felt a sweep of compassion for her, for him, for them both, thoughts of the party receding. He watched her finish her hair, her makeup, select and put on her jewelry; and the only remaining thing he saw that she had to do was to fasten the zip at the back of her dress. He watched as she put both hands behind her back to zip herself up, he saw the ripple of muscles under her skin and felt in his own heart a melting at his remembrance of her body that took him back to the memory of their first embrace when her arms went over his shoulders and around his neck like you see in the movies, not as something natural to her but as something she had practiced, feeling flattered that she had sought to master this gesture for him, feeling it as a performance, but thinking of it as the potential of what she wanted to give to him, of her will, her surrender. He believed that she thought her self-assertion would challenge him, but he was calm.
He saw the back of her dress open and he moved with a studied tenderness, not wanting to give the insinuation that he was doing this because of time, time was not on his mind then, not even caressing her back as he wanted to, sensing that that wouldn’t do, that it would be a kind of trespass that was inappropriate at that time.
“You ready?” he asked softly, not really to hurry her but for want of something else to say, feeling himself on the edge of a knife, on the edge of a cliff, on the edge of a loss.
She watched him in the mirror. She didn’t give an answer. That slowed him down; it challenged him to respond in a hurt way, as to a rebuff; but instead he rose to the occasion and softly, softly, and he felt it, this affection for her, this idea of affection, this idea of his contrition, he went behind her back and softly put one hand on a shoulder, she allowing him patiently, Let me see what you go do now must have been the thought in her mind, and with the other he grasped the zip with the intention of doing it up, casually, all of it, affectionately even, forgotten all his urgency.
The zip slipped out of the groove. He did not move. He remained behind her looking at the zip, his hands, her back, the dress, then trying without success to get the zip back on track.
“You spoil the zip, Claude.”
He heard it not as a question but as an explosion, a statement of fact, exhausted, gentle and damning, as her body sagged with a sigh.
“You spoil it,” as a statement waiting to be affirmed. As if it was something she could have forecast, not because she could have blamed it on his carelessness or hurry,
but because it was something he had no control over, something that had to happen, that happened to express, quite apart from his intentions of the moment, his true relationship to her, as a sign, an event in its own right, for them to witness together the blight that had ensnared their relationship.
“You spoil it?”
Not even considering that the fault might have been in the zip, not even blaming him, saying, “The zip was good all the time. It was good all the time,” as she breathed out the breath, dismissing him, leaving him in his world that she had escaped from, as if she was not simply uninterested in his world but had, on her own and unknown to him, found another world, her own world in which he not only did not figure but into which she had no wish to invite him. But he was not going there, not now.
He had said to her, “Do you have another dress you could wear?”
She looked at him, knowing he was expressing the exaggerated sense of guilt he was wont to display by accepting
blame for being in the wrong even when he was uncertain that the error really was his. He was sorry, he said. He didn’t know how this thing had come to happen. Did she have another dress that she could wear?
“Do you have another dress that you could wear?”
She looked at him.
She looked at me.
And he watched her first remove her necklace, carefully, take the clips out of her hair, then victoriously peel the dress off her body. Not a word. Then he himself went to the wardrobe and selected a dress that he liked.
He asked, “What about this one?”
Seeing what he thought was her disapproval, he selected another:
“Or this?”
Then he found one he thought that she liked:
“This one. What about this one? You always liked this one.”
She looked at him.
I looked at him.
She looked at me.
“No.” (She had bought a dress for the occasion and it had been ruined. And yes, she wasn’t going anywhere.) “You could go.”
“You don’t like this?” He heard himself like a child.
Now she let out her hair.
“You go.”
And before he could gain the kind of control that he had utilized just a while before, he found himself on his way out the door too late, because he did not mean to go without her. He did not mean it. I did not mean to leave without her. I did not mean it. But he was gone. Sybil and her husband were waiting on him.
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