Zuela and Rosa had given money, too, but not because they were terrified by two hearts for racehorses found throbbing in the La Basse, or because two pigs had vomited the remains of a black woman chopped into fodder, or because fish had eaten the eyeballs of a white woman and gouged out her lips and tongue, but because they needed Our Lady to work her miracle on them, too, to visit them, too, to push back to the darkness a thought that now tormented them, that now gave them no peace.
It was Rosa who would bring them together, Rosa who would remember and would rekindle between them a friendship that would change what was left of her life forever, though time had seemingly calcified to stone that terrible moment she had shared with Zuela behind the hibiscus bush. Yet it was mere chance that caused her to meet Zuela again. She never would have seen her were her soul not so tormented by remorse, yet uplifted by a sort of perverse satisfaction for the thing she had not yet done. Rosa would have missed her completely were she not so terrified, and yet morbidly elated, by the possibility of doing it; if, not so frightened by this wrestling of good and evil within her, she had not sought to shut out all distraction from Our Lady, who could help her; if she had not thus forced herself into deep meditation of another mystery of the rosary; if she had not drawn her black mantilla down the sides of her face, hoodlike, so she did not see Our Lady’s devotees part to the edges of the dirt road; she did not hear the thunder of footsteps racing behind her; she did not jump out of the way before the gaggle of uniformed schoolchildren tumbled her to the ground. Even then she might not have noticed the woman who stooped to help her out of the bramble of bushes. Jarred forcibly out of the Sorrowful mystery of the rosary, she might not have noticed if, in that instant, she had not looked up and her eyes had not caught in the eyes of the other woman, a sadness deep, penetrating, familiar, that sent her head whirling:
One little girl.
A string of pearls.
A man with a pole.
Another little girl, her eyes as sad as a woman’s. A girl. A woman-child, swishing her hips and laughing. “That is nothing. I see that already. Chinaman do that to me already.”
She bolted to her feet but the woman was gone. She squeezed her eyes shut and other pictures came—distorted, blurred, hazy. Terrifying. She fought to focus them but they slipped rapidly in and out of her mind, eluding her. Frantically, she searched for the woman, desperate to stop the collision of images now falling one on top of the other—two, three, five, seven at a time. Disturbing. Unnerving. A memory? A past? She shoved her way through the masses of sweaty bodies thronging up the hill, pursued by that one split second of recognition, clear, precise, and sharp. Unmistakable. She had seen those eyes before; she had known that face well once before. Daughter. Daughter. The sound clear as a bell resounded in her ears. Daughter. Daughter. Her child’s voice calling.
The sharp points of the stones along the muddied dirt road penetrated the soles of her shoes and bruised the bottoms of her feet, but she took no notice of the pain, nor of the women—their heavy bosoms drooping low over their swollen bellies, their arms lost in white suds trailing down the sides of their washtubs—who looked up when she passed, a hardness around their mouths that should have stopped her, but did not, nor of the half-naked children in tattered undershirts who streamed out of one-room houses to taunt the nuns: “Hail Mary, holy white ladies. Full of grace, holy white ladies.” She barely heard them. Nor did she notice the stone-still men standing before the doorway of their houses, legs apart, arms folded militantly across naked chests turned tar black in the sun. She did not see these people from that town of tears who knew already that the rush upstream left nothing but rubble in its wake when it rolled back down again; who were certain that two brothers, fighting over a ring on the decaying finger of the body of the woman that two pigs had disgorged, were not the ones who had chopped her into fodder. For the people in that town had no doubt that such diabolical barbarity could originate only from the valley below.
Everything was obscured in that tangle of photographs in Rosa’s mind. Screened out, too, was the blaze that had sent her racing to Our Lady for her cooling waters: her fear of vengeance on Cedric, which was lost now in that sudden clearing to a past she had made herself forget. Daughter. Daughter. A tiny girl with skin as brown as sand. Through the wild hibiscus they had seen . . . Daughter. A little girl who lived with the woman who came on Fridays to iron clothes for her mother on the Orange Grove estate. A little girl who told her, “That is nothing. I see that already. Chinaman do that to me already.”
At the top of the hill she saw her, her faded yellow cotton dress tight against a belly that rose, round as a watermelon, beneath her tiny breasts, her long black hair pulled back from her copper-brown face, her eyes staring steadily in her direction, questioning, doubting. She stood on the hill, apart from the crowd, framed by a sky indigo and magnificent, which plunged headily downward to where speedboats splayed frothy long white lines like sunrays across a glistening sea.
“Daughter?”
The woman squinted against the blinding sunlight.
“Daughter!” Rosa called out to her again, certain now. But the woman frowned, stepped back, and disappeared into a new wave of bodies crashing on the crest of the hill.
Daughter. Daughter. Again she gave voice to the name and the sound came back on her ears and unlocked the memories.
They had pressed their faces into the hibiscus bush, she and the little girl. Yet long after the girl had turned away, she still remained, her cheeks bleeding where the sharp ends of the dried twigs had made welts down the sides of her face, her eyes snapping photographs. Click! Click!
The little girl tugged her dress to force her away from the bushes, but she resisted. Click, click. Each detail was meticulously captured, each image indelibly imprinted. Click, click!
The little girl tugged again. She fought her. The petals from red hibiscus fell from thin branches and turned blue in the dirt. Click, click! The little girl laughed. “That is nothing. I see that already.”
Then the world went still: “Chinaman do that to me already. Chinaman done do that to me.”
Memory fused to stone and was sealed off in the horror of that possibility, sealed off until the pictures returned years later with Cedric, she sprawled on the dining room floor, panties clinging to one ankle, the ends of her skirt to her throat, Cedric thrusting, the smile on his lips indistinguishable from the smirk on the mouth of the man behind the hibiscus bush, his words the same as that man’s: Beg. Beg. You like it so. You like it so. Beg. Then a truth more horrible confronted her, one that connected the child Rosa, her face sunk into broken ends of the hibiscus bush, to the woman Rosa, dazed by an incomprehensible sense of betrayal when Cedric demanded again: “Beg. Beg for it, white lady.”
In the confessional, the priest said the pictures she saw that night did not come from memory but, rather, from a sinful imagination, planted there by Satan. None of what she saw had happened—not the man with the pole, not the girl with the pearls, not her friend, swinging her hips like a woman, laughing: “Chinaman done do that to me already.” And she loosened the connection in nine days of rosaries to the Blessed Mother, buried Daughter, the child now a woman called Zuela, in a righteous resentment of Cedric three years deep.
Now, near the tops of the gru-gru boeuf trees that rose from the squalor of raw cement bricks pushing up the hill to the shrine of Our Lady, Rosa saw her again. She turned when Rosa touched her shoulders and called her Daughter, her eyes calm with recognition.
“You. It’s really you.” But she would say no more. “Not now,” she said. “Not here in Laventille.”
“When?” Rosa pressed her. “I must speak to you. Must.” She stretched our her hand, feverish with desperation, but Zuela pulled hers away.
“Not now.”
“When?”
Zuela heard the hysteria in her voice, but it did not startle her. She, too, had removed the boulder damming her memory. “After the Benediction,” she said, and t
urned toward the steps of the chapel where the priest had just emerged from behind the acolytes holding the gilded monstrance high above his head, his hands draped by the white shawl that covered his shoulders.
“Later,” she whispered.
It was not enough for Rosa. “I won’t find you.”
The woman she had called Daughter studied her face. No part of her moved, only her eyes boring deeper and deeper into Rosa’s as she peeled away layers to the past. “Rosa.” She whispered her name.
“You’ll get lost.” Rosa’s eyes brimmed water. “I won’t be able to find you again.” She reached for her hand.
Zuela frowned and pursed her lips, but she did not pull away her hand. To Rosa it seemed she stayed that way for an eternity, but suddenly she sighed, a long outpouring of her breath that seemed to empty her body of air. The sound, streaming through her lips, reverberated hollow in the cavity of her chest. “Since last I see you, I live with Chinaman.” She breathed in again. “In Nelson Street.” Her eyes were hard but there was a softness in her voice when she spoke, the hardness directed to something or someone Rosa could not see, the softness to Rosa. “Come see me there.”
The acolytes had reached close to them and were moving in the direction of the shrine nestled just a few feet to the left of where they stood. Clouds of incense wafted from their censers and thickened the air. In the torpid heat of the afternoon, made more intense by the sweet smell of ripe mango and gru-gru boeuf and the stink of human sweat and animal excrement, the pungent odor of the incense plunged into nostrils and worked its hypnotic spell. The crowd surged forward and burst into a hymn to Our Lady, pulling Zuela and Rosa in its tow. Rosa reached for the skinny branch of a bush sprouting stubbornly through a space in the gravel-stoned pathway, and anchored herself to the ground, but when she looked up, she saw Zuela drowning helplessly in the folds of that speckled sea.
She felt cheated, robbed of her chance for the answers she was frantic to find and yet not find, that she believed were there behind the screen that had begun to part on Zuela’s face. Yet before the afternoon would end she would lose this frenzied urgency to talk to Zuela, and she would wait the week it took for Cedric to send her flying like a madwoman to the Chinaman’s shop in Nelson Street. For out of the dark despair that enveloped her then, came an epiphany. It left her dazed, burning, smoldering in the brilliance of its searing clarity as it must have left those who bad witnessed the Vision, Our Lady descending in a blaze of light: she had had her miracle. Our Lady had made one for her in Laventille. Her revelation. And at that moment she understood, in a way denied to her before, why the little girl could not pry her off the hibiscus, why she still pressed her face into its branches though its sharp ends tore her cheeks.
For then, above the silence that descended on the crowd below the drone of the priest now chanting his prayers in Latin; beyond the shouts that followed “Alleluia!” when he raised the monstrance, the Body of Christ gleaming white from the center, radiating metal rays of gold, Rosa unraveled the threads of the knot that had tied her to Cedric, Cedric to the man behind the hibiscus bush, Cedric to the man the little girl thought no different from the Chinaman: He do that to me, too, already. He done do that.
How could her mother have known how desperately she needed Cedric? She herself had not known. Not in the way Our Lady’s miracle would make it known to her. When she said yes to Cedric after he asked her to marry him, she thought she was giving him what she was certain he craved, what the man behind the hibiscus craved, though she did not remember him then, only the feelings: awe for the power the girl held over him, and pity for the man made savage by his hunger for her. They were feelings that filled her with such shame for having them that they detached themselves from the reality she had witnessed and sank deep past her memory. Then all that remained was the awe, and, later, the pity that surfaced with Cedric.
When she was desperate for respite from the rubbing of flesh against the hardness of her mattress and Cedric walked past her house, dark and curly haired, the fabric of his pants so cheap and old it clung to his legs, she thought: Here was a safe place for her passions. Here was the son of a woman who scaled fish on a beach with a pan full of bloody fish guts anchored between her gnarled knees. Here was a man who did not know his father, who would not acknowledge him even if he knew him, so certain she was that he was fathered by one of the toothless men, still not old, threading twine through the loops of torn seine strung between bamboo poles, swigging mouthfuls of raw cane rum to deaden the pain of twisted limbs and wounds still fresh from their fight with the sea.
No, Cedric could not have dreamed a woman like her would say Yes, in spite of the Latin and Greek he read. Yes, in spite of the baccalaureate degree he would get from a university in London. He was ripe for awe of her. She could relieve her passion, surrender it to him and still keep her power. So she thought.
Then he said: “Beg. Beg for it, white lady.”
Though she began to despise him, she pitied him, too, because it was she, not he, who held the power. It was she who bent his knees, like the white woman in Otahiti who drove an Indian farmer’s son mad with his obsession to own her, though he was a doctor and had long since left his tomato patch.
Now Zuela had broken the lock on the vault where she had sealed off her memory of the photographs. Now she saw them clearly. Not even the tremulous shouts of a crowd hopeful for the appearance of Our Lady here and now in Laventille, nor the chants of the blue-frocked acolytes too young yet to need Our Lady’s miracles, could dim those pictures now vivid before her eyes. Frame by frame she retrieved them, each one impeccably preserved, each one fresh, shining, precisely detailed as if she had taken it yesterday, printed it today.
A girl.
A girl younger than either she or the girl she called Daughter, now Zuela.
A girl no more than nine years old, in a pink sleeveless dress.
A girl in a pink sleeveless dress, straight black hair hanging long past her shoulders, bangs across her forehead.
A girl.
A little girl in a pink sleeveless dress with bangs across her forehead. Big, bright eyes.
A little girl with red lipstick on her mouth and rouge on her cheeks, a string of pearls tumbling down her flat chest.
A little girl, no more than ten, younger than either she or Daughter, now called Zuela.
A child.
A child in high-heeled shoes, red lipstick on her mouth.
A man.
A man old as her father, old enough to be the girl-child’s father.
A man with dark brown skin, browner than a sapodilla’s, browner than the girl-child’s brown skin.
A man.
A man in long black pants and a sleeveless white undershirt.
A man, his fingers on his waist.
A man with long black pants, with his fingers on the buckle of his belt on his waist.
A man old enough to be the girl-child’s father.
A man with hairy hands, his fingers on the zipper of his pants.
A pole.
A man with a pole.
Say you want it. Say you want it now or I beat you. Say you want it or I beat you. Beg! Beg!
A man old enough to be the girl-child’s father.
On his knees now.
Please. Please beg. Beg, please.
A man with a pole begging. A little girl in a pale pink dress, a string of white pearls.
The Vagrant at the Gate
by Wayne Brown
Woodbrook
(Originally published in 2000)
Bad news: the 626 abruptly decelerating, all power gone, in a stressed and disappointed silence. But then, good news: an acquaintance in a white Galante had been behind me all along and now obligingly stopped too. (“Pull the hood.”) His brief and hesitant self-insertion therein proved—as we’d both expected, though I still hoped—infertile. He left to go in search of his mechanic, “an electrics guy” from upper St. James.
I’d pulled over to the c
urb facing south on X, two or three car lengths above Y. (X: a north-south residential Woodbrook street. Y: one of the main roads crossing it.) It was not yet nine, but already there was only one viable pool of shade left on the pavement. It came from the dormer-window protrusion of an old forties Woodbrook house which had been expensively and hideously “modernized.” I retired into it to wait.
Almost at once, the vagrant materialized. I glanced at him irritably.
He was your standard vagrant: matted hair, too-bright eyes, red skin upon which the passionate sun had laid a light gloss of washed black, like an old j’ouvert greasing. Baggy trousers, still recognizably khaki, curling outward at the waist like the lip of a vase, from which rose the stem of his tucked-in torso, with its furious navel.
“Eh, uncle, uh beggin’ you,” etc.
The way he said it, it sounded rehearsed: not quite your true-blue vagrant’s heartfelt expression of illimitable desperation. And the light in his eyes was not quite ownerless, I saw: not quite the unsigned light of lunacy. But what to do. My pocketful of coins changed hands (“T’ank you, boss!”) and he was turning away when the oblong bulge in my shirt pocket caught his attention. He ducked and peered at it, making a vagrant’s urgent mime—two forked fingers tensely pumping from his lips—and I gave him the Benson and lit it for him, doing this with a look which told him we both knew he was pushing the envelope.
For a moment, inhaling, he was all concentration. Then: “Heh-heh-heh,” he said sheepishly into his chest, turning away.
He didn’t go very far. There was an electricity pole not far from the corner, a car length or so south of the 626, and he went and leaned on it in the immemorial posture of a whore: hand cupping elbow, cigarette at the ready, one bare sole cocked against the pole.
And, five years ago, I might have rounded on him (“Haul y’ass! What the fock more you want? G’won, move!”). But I discovered I didn’t have that part anymore—or at least, didn’t have it that morning—and so I lit one myself, and paced irritably back and forth in the little pen of shade by the 626’s boot, and presently fell to considering the house across the street, to which my attention had been drawn by the sound of a car engine being laboriously tumbled . . . and then wailingly revved . . . until, with a few last, precautionary, throat-clearing revs, the car itself was modestly induced to demit its driveway—or so I deduced, since both were out of sight on the far side of the house.
Trinidad Noir Page 11