Is Just a Movie

by Earl Lovelace

  And, later, at the party, without her of course, for he had left her sitting before her mirror at the dressing table, after the dancing and the drinking, thinking how he really missed her and then thinking that maybe he had been too hasty to leave so abruptly, he began to consider returning to get her. The distance came to his mind, her preparedness, her state of mind, would she be ready, and would she still want to come? He argued with himself, and then he got into one conversation, then another and all at once he found himself listening to his friends from long ago, relatives who had not seen him for years, people reminding him of the same things again, of the strides he had made in his career, the make of his car, the importance of his new job, bad-talking the government, remembering again how odd he was as a child, how lonely and stubborn, remembering him in St. Mary’s with the king sailor walk and the muff in his hair and the badjohn attitude that made fellars want to fight him. Everyone had his own recollection, some of it true, that is to say, that he could recollect as really happening, others, stories, just things they made up, all of it said in jest, to give them a sense of superiority as the way of dealing with him. He overheard himself talking to them of the coconuts dying of red ring disease, of the witches’ broom in the cocoa and the die-back of the pawpaws, of the problems, the stupidity, the loss, and he triumphant through it all as if he were a spectator, as if he wasn’t there, and all of them as if they were not hearing what he was saying, complimenting him on how well the country was developing, with a sense of regret for being elsewhere, as if they had miscalculated, that there had really been a place for them here in the island that they had left for Canada, Britain, the USA, consoling him with the observation that at least he was still here, so he didn’t have the heart to tell them about the depth of his disappointment with the people, with his Jouvay band. He didn’t want to blunt his triumph entirely, so he find a way to tell them as if is a joke in which he remained triumphant, of himself, the man carrying the mud and waiting for the original members of the band. And it came off, the joke, everybody laughing, their teeth showing, their stomachs pulled in, as if they knew their faces would be in the papers next day.

  When Claude returned from the Carnival fête he found Arlene curled up on the sofa watching television. He tried to make conversation with her, talking lamely, as if it was a lie he was telling, of who was there, of how she was missed, of who had asked for her. Merrit was there. Merrit. He had met her with Merrit. And she listened with a judgmental and disinterested silence, as if to express interest was to provide him with a relief that she was not prepared to grant.

  That night when they went to bed, she took her side and drew her body away out of his reach so that she wouldn’t have to touch him, and if he wanted to touch her he would have to make a deliberate move. He lay in bed debating with himself whether to lean over and touch her, or bring his body close to hers, but he remained on his own side and drew further away from her, lying on almost the very edge of the bed, hoping that by establishing such an absurd distance she would see the gulf between them. She did not move. He knew she wasn’t sleeping. She did not exaggerate the distance, she did not draw closer, she slept with a sense of innocence as though she had completed the most absolutely satisfying day. He knew she was waiting for him to move closer to her. But he had established too great a distance between them. And he noticed, with some alarm, that the distance could not now be crossed casually. How to cross that distance now? He had crossed that distance many times before, out of understanding, out of love, out of appreciating that she had come with him, alone, abandoned by her family for marrying him. But it did not mean that because she had stood up to them in respect of her choice of him everything would be perfect. It did not follow that they, he and she, would not have their own challenges. He did not want to believe that she used this being alone, this being abandoned by her family as a lever to manipulate him. And although it was not something he was responsible for, he felt that he had to take responsibility. She did not have the option of other brides to threaten him with, I going back home, I going home by my family. Her family offered her no home. If she had to seek a haven it would be on her own. That was the horrible choice they gave to her. And for that she resented him at the same time she needed him. Because they had abandoned her, all she had was he and that was why she expected him to be perfect. It was too much. He had no room. That was his jail, the jail of perfection and it was because of this that, in order to be himself, that he strayed from that perfection. And what of the world? What of the new world of which they had dreamed? He began to see that to arrive at it they had to struggle with each other.

  He thought to yield, as he had done at times before, to cross the distance and hug her and say “I’m sorry about the dress” and confess to his hurt over her remark. But he felt that her response had punished him enough already. Claude in his mind became the heroic and committed victim who had a right to his hurt. Suddenly, in that mode, outraged, he said, Fuck that! Sorry for what? He said it aloud in his mind. But he acted as if he had said it aloud in reality. In the same flow of vexation, as if he believed he had spoken, he got out of bed, went outside into the living room and turned the TV on.

  He lay on the couch in front the TV.

  What had they done with the love, with the dreams with which they begun? What had they learned from each other? What had they shared? He had exposed her to his family but her family was shut away from him, the sharing they had expected to take place, why did it not happen? He drifted off to sleep with these questions on his mind.

  Sometime later he awoke, realizing that he had dozed off, and he returned to bed. She had not moved a millimeter. He lay for a while on his side of the bed, then he rolled close to her and put an arm around her, hoping that it was not too late to begin to deal with this woman, this love.

  He was still awake when the telephone rang with the news that his sister was in hospital. She had collapsed after playing with her steelband at Panorama. As he dressed to go to see her, it occurred to him that once again something had come up to save him (save?) from having to engage things between him and Arlene.

  His sister’s collapse did not so much surprise him as it angered him. Dorlene had driven herself to the point of a breakdown. And the people? They had allowed her to run her blood to water to take up a burden that was really theirs, her house and money used to provide for the Brothers and Sisters who had no one and nowhere. They had allowed her to take on a burden greater than she could bear.

  Claude couldn’t indulge his anger; a more pressing concern had arisen. When he reached the hospital, it was to be told that Dorlene was dead.

  The steelband people gathered around him, anxious, frantic. He did not bother with them. He had reached his end. Finally he knew what he would do. Dorlene would be honored with the grandest funeral ever seen in Cascadu; and he would surrender. He would beg his wife to go away with him for them to start. Again.

  Funeral

  It was a splendid funeral, with schoolchildren lining the streets, the church overflowing with people. Claude’s family had come in from every part of the globe: Abigail from England, Ebenezer from Liberia, Leon had come from his liquor store in Brooklyn, the twins Dido and Aneas from Washington, DC, his brother-in-law Alpheus Brown, the welterweight boxer, from Miami, Ann Marie from Tacoma, Washington. The clergy was represented by bishops of every denomination, the Shouters church with its three archbishops, the Orisha faith with three Babalawos, the Hindu swami. From politics, the leader of the Opposition and his three deputy leaders, and three of the five deputy leaders of the National Party, each one same height, same puffed-out chest, so that despite their difference in racial stock they looked like triplets.

  The only person of real consequence absent was the Prime Minister, who was locked in his residence writing the letter of resignation he had begun in 1970, after that period of dreams and vitality, when revolution appeared possible and he had worked it all out in his mind, how the people would take over and there would be
full and unqualified democracy and a West Indian nation from Cuba to Guyana with a West Indian university, and he would be the one to blend together the different strands of what was his nation, those who had resisted the colonial structure by confronting it, those who had tried to equip themselves for life (not without their own challenges) by following the path it had set out for them, those who had been beneficiaries of its structure of privilege. He worked on his speeches through the Carnival (while the population was fêting), preparing for the debates in the Public Library, the all-night discussions, arguing with activists and politicos from the Left and the Right, confronting Regionalists and African and Indian nationalists, Chinese ideologues and the French Creoles, as he came to grips with the constituencies of people that he needed to understand – as he faced the challenge of blending the discipline derived from the order imposed by the plantation, the creativity that came out of resistance and the anarchy of individual rebellion, and at the end still come up with one nation.

  He had written it to lay blame that had been heaped on him at the door of colonial history, its injustice, prejudice and waste that left Blackpeople so impatient for an equal place, that less than six years after he take power (power?) he would find the army in mutiny, the youth, unemployed and trade unions demonstrating on the streets, productivity down, business people packing up to leave, and a set of Black Power drums vibrating in his head. His prophetess had not yet entered his life. Papa Neeza, the great obeah-man whose advice had guided his decisions, was sick in bed. But he couldn’t do it. He couldn’t allow the country to start its Independence with the military in charge and rabble rousers at the helm. No, sir. No way, Jose. He call a state of emergency. He get the police and the loyal part of the army to do their duty. He put the dissidents in detention on Nelson Island. He make sure they get a fair trial. And he wasn’t going to be no frightened dictator either. To show his self-confidence and because he understood the matter, he released them into the society, and so as not to lose the radical presence, if not the thinking, he attempted to bring into the fold of the Nationalist Party some of the more sober-minded of them, but they too had replaced thought with ambition, were now giddy with the sound of their slogans. They had grown accustomed to being the headlines. So they would remain parading their martyrdom, soaking up the applause as to who was the brightest, the most revolutionary, as if they didn’t know whose backyard they were in, until the massacre of the government of Grenada torpedoed the ambitions of the more left-leaning of them, and left those who described themselves as cultural activists trying to convince Blackpeople that their salvation lay in making the journey back to who they were before the Middle Passage.

  And if, as he wrote in the aborted letter of resignation: ‘. . . if I had not transformed the country to everybody’s satisfaction it was because I resisted ruling with an iron hand, but allowed my people enough space, enough liberty so that from their own error they would come to understand that they needed to establish boundaries for themselves, that they could not be corralled by law alone . . .” Before the people could learn these lessons from themselves, the world had taken another turn, and he wake up to find the country bamboozled into accepting what they called multi-culturalism, that divided up the country into ethnicities and classes, with all the suspicions about each other planted in colonialism in full bloom, everyone with their own culture, their own music, their own worship, with less and less to share, nobody responsible to nobody else. All the work he had done to produce a narrative that included everybody as equal victims of a system unraveled. Instead of excess being used to correct itself, excess established as a way of life, on the roads, in business, in the very government: the laws applied to the meekest and the poorest. Everybody waiting for him to disappear, for his party to mash up like everything else Blackpeople put their hands on, all reduced to frivolity, corruption, emptied of their resolve and spirit. And in his ears, the voices of the cynics: is Independence you want, take independence. See if you could manage these people with charisma, with talk, let’s see you, as you say, put full and unqualified democracy to work, and all he was left with were the people who had made their personal investment in him, the little people, folk from the underclass, the jamettes, the Shouters, the Shango; people from the steelbands, calypsonians, ole mas Carnival characters, Best Village people, who, sad to say, were the least politically conscious. He had to give them political education. He had to take charge of things, put everything in his own hands safe from corruption, select the senators, decide on the parliamentarians, choose the aldermen, the delegates to the party’s convention, run the general council, head the committees, identify who should be given national awards, who should be given scholarships, sift through the contractors. But was he alone. When he open his eyes, it was to find the nationalist movement tottering under accusations of corruption, its supporters still waiting for salvation, colonialism christened with a new name: Globalization. In that election, he get lick-up bad bad, his party reduced to three seats in a Parliament of thirty-six.

  After twenty years he find himself alone. The militants, the ideologues, the intellectuals and the trade unionists had silenced themselves.

  And he sit down to write a letter of resignation, this time to the party, according to the convention in the British Parliament. And he start it, yes, he begin it, in his own hand, To my faithful party members, it is with great sadness that I speak to you tonight. After reviewing the problems that beset the nation I think it incumbent on me to return to private life and take no further part in political activity. I go knowing I leave the party in the capable hands of . . . of . . . of . . . of who? Who?

  The pen freeze in his hand. The pen didn’t want to write. Then he burst out a big laugh. What madness was this? Who he going to leave it to? How many years it take Britain to come up with their holy conventions? How many kings get killed, how many priests murdered? In America how many Native Indians get slaughtered as cowboys win the West, how many Blackpeople get lynched before they settle down – and not even to convention, to law? Well, he needed time too. And he tear up the blasted letter and he turn his attention to winning the next election.

  He set about making alliances with people who had been on the sideline of politics. Those who was out of power he bring them back in, those who was in, he throw them out, those with new money he let them know it would be worth their while to give him their support. He appeal to those who was fed up with their role as perpetual opposition. He leave academics out. Too much damn trouble. He bring in secretaries from the civil service, managers from the world of free enterprise. But these alliances didn’t come without a price. Yes, if wealth had to trickle down, it had to stand on some foundation, his new advisers tell him. So, in for a penny, in for a pound, he couldn’t go in two directions at the same time. He had to start to forget the past. He had to stop what they called his anticolonial rhetoric that made important people uneasy. He had to cull from his vocabulary divisive words like oppression and resistance and injustice and reparation and poverty. He had to accept the fiction that every ethnic and religious group in the country had started off with equal opportunity. He had to agree that privilege was earned and poverty deserved, that people had chosen the state in which they found themselves . . . how you make your bed, et cetera, et cetera . . . Yes, all that he had to do to come up with his victorious new all-inclusive nationalism.

  But things didn’t turn out how they were supposed to. After four and a half years the miracle of prosperity glimpsed on the horizon by his spiritual adviser had not turned up. He had to play for time, slow down the game, put out white papers on local government, set up commissions on race relations, send ministers on economic missions to Norway and Singapore, invite the Prime Ministers of the region to talks on Regional Integration.

  But time run out on him, and he wake up one morning to find trade unions ready to strike, the IMF in his backside, the Chamber of Commerce pressing him to privatize industries his government had acquired during the firs
t escalation of oil prices (when money ran through the belly of the country like a dose of Epsom salts), the Opposition party complaining of discrimination, alienation, marginalization, his constituents in the East-West corridor questioning his commitment to their welfare, the sister island Tobago threatening secession from its union with Trinidad, his eyesight getting dim, one doctor telling him about the rise of his blood sugar, his dentist asking: So what we going to do with this front tooth that’s shaking? His spies whispering in his ears that the party was angling to throw him out as leader, his adviser on policy reminding him that elections were constitutionally due in six months; and the final straw, the dagger to his heart, the words of the handwritten letter left on his pillow that morning by Marlene Spicer, his mistress of ten years, Let us end this thing. It was never enough for me. I don’t want what you are offering, I deserve better, that after he read it make him want to resign in truth.

  Yes. He went into his study, poured himself a drink of brandy (to hell with his blood pressure), called his secretary and instructed her to advise his cabinet ministers that not one of them was to contact him by telephone or in writing unless the miracle of prosperity that his spiritual adviser last sighted on the horizon had entered the Port of Spain harbor – or those idiots in Tobago hoisted their own flag.

  For days he sit down before the paper, searching for words for this resignation, but the words wouldn’t come. He move to his living room, he try the veranda, he lie down on his bed. Everywhere he sit was uncomfortable. He put a desk on the balcony and sat there at his computer but instead of writing he found himself looking out at the sea, this time with a pair of binoculars, trying to locate the miracle of prosperity that his spiritual adviser had assured him was on its way to land. And is there the news of the miracle would find him. But, that is for later.