Trinidad Noir

by Earl Lovelace

  This was Nandita’s third exhibition at the gallery. In total, she had only ever sold two of her photographs through that gallery. She worried that the inevitable fallout of such a review would be no sales yet again, resulting in the gallery owner not wanting to invest in her in the future. Nandita had no doubt that she was an artist and that her photographs were art, but not wanting an I-told-you-so smugness levelled at her from her family, she needed to make her own living. She had never imagined the need to equip herself with any other skills. Even if she were able to do something else, the truth is, she had always felt that life would be pointless if she could not live it through the lens of her camera. The review devastated her. Furthermore, so public a denunciation of her medium sealed her reputation and fate, she feared, as a failed artist. She folded the newspaper in half, turned it over and left it on her kitchen table.

  Later that day, sitting dejectedly with a coffee and a cigarette at the table, her eyes fell on Father O’Leary’s article, titled, “An Urgent Need for Baptism Today.” After some preamble about the origins and meaning of baptism, Father O’Leary managed to link the subject with his favourite topic—the jumbies that live in silk cotton trees. He wrote, “Silk cotton trees serve no purpose today, save as lair of the unbaptized and of their leader in the underworld, the jumbie . . . Before civilization, the Caribs and the Arawaks used to chop down silk cottons. They used the trunk of a single tree to carve out a whole canoe. But today, who needs canoes when we have airlines? In any case, even the fearless Caribs and Arawaks, were they still around, would not go near such a tree. For it is under those trees that the restless souls of people who have died without having been baptized gather. There are many such trees rather near to villages on the outskirts of the city, the one at Bonnaire being the closest and most accessible . . . Go close to those trees at night at your own risk. Seek communion with those dark and restless spirits only if you are prepared to pay the severe penalty . . . All night long, in the vicinity of silk cotton trees one hears a restless crying, a painful wailing, begging and calling. Answer at your peril. They will steal your soul and send you back to work for them among the living . . . If you were not fortunate enough to have been baptized the day you were born, then get yourself baptized today.”

  That night, Nandita Sharma, her recklessness encouraged and fortified by the self-pitying consumption of one rum punch too many, packed up a camera bag and a knapsack and drove to Bonnaire.

  Bonnaire, according to Father O’Leary, was off the Lady Young Road, just east of the Hilton Hotel, and to the left of a headless coconut tree in whose trunk was nailed a man’s black dress shoe. With such explicit directions for where one was not supposed to go, and despite a number of quarrying trucks parked on the rough shoulder, she found the road easily—even with a bit of drink in her head. As she entered and immediately descended a steep hill, the lights of the city disappeared. It was so dark that Nandita could not see her hands on the steering wheel. She could see only what was caught in the spray of light cast by her car’s weak headlamps; the asphalt road appeared to be narrow with deep tracks of dried mud. Abruptly sobered, she reflected that she knew better than to travel alone, day or night, in remote areas; her own father’s newspapers reported daily of murders, rapes, kidnappings and robberies—crimes for which perpetrators were seldom caught, and which, as a result, occurred these days with increasing regularity. She drove slowly, contemplating the lack of wisdom of what she was doing. She pressed on, not because she was fearless, but because the worst of all fates, she decided, was to have one’s sense of self diminished by the ideals of others. This was the crime, perpetrated all day long, every day, that she feared most.

  According to Father O’Leary’s article, one drove not far at all—just about a quarter of a mile in—until one found another headless coconut tree on which the shoe’s other side was nailed, and one left one’s car right there, where a footpath took one, through the high bush, to the silk cotton tree.

  Closer to the road the footpath was easy to follow, but too soon it narrowed and was overgrown. On Nandita’s back was a knapsack, and slung across her chest was the heavy camera bag. In her hand she carried a tripod. Thousands of cicadas chirped and whistled, and crapauds croaked like old dogs barking. Nandita tiptoed under the heavy snoring of howler monkeys. Her heart beat so fast it made her breathless. She stole through trees she knew by their smell—mostly guava, but there were lime trees too, and brush that clawed at her skin, cutting and stinging it. She moved as discreetly as she could, all the while listening for human voices and man-made sounds. Unseen creatures fluttered and rustled in the bushes, and several times something flew close enough that she felt a rush of breeze against her face as it passed. She stood still and tried to listen; the thunderous pulsing of blood against her temples was all she heard. She scanned the darkness for twin pinpoints of light that might alert her to the presence of a large animal or a human. It was a good thing she saw none, she thought, as the surprise and fright of it would have been enough to kill her.

  She reached a clearing at the same time that the moon, which had been obscured all the while by heavy cloud cover, burst out and scattered a silver light. In the middle of the clearing was an imposing silk cotton whose enormous and pale grey trunk stretched up like an extended arm, at the end of which were branches spread as if its mass were a hand opened wide to the sky. Father O’Leary, short of giving advice, had written that people who went to the silk cotton to commune with the jumbies were obliged to wear patchouli essence because only patchouli could mask the stench of decay and evil that emanated from the base of the tree. Accordingly, Nandita had brought with her a phial of the scent and, without taking her eyes off the tree, she daubed herself with it.

  Nandita stood still, only her eyes roaming, accustoming themselves quickly to the area. She held her breath, calmed herself and listened. There was an unusual stillness, as if time had stopped; the sounds she’d heard on the footpath—those of the cicadas, frogs, monkeys, night birds and insects—had ceased. The root system of the tree came slowly into focus, and a cave in one of the tall buttresses was revealed. Nandita had not budged and yet, with a blink of her eye, it seemed that she and the tree had moved closer to each other, and leaning against the entrance to the cave was the jumbie.

  Wound raggedly around the jumbie’s waist were sheets of burlap. He wore sandals, and about his neck was twined a thin shawl of some sort of dried and flaky material that Nandita couldn’t identify. A long stick, a walking stick, lay across his lap. Nandita’s teeth chattered in her head. The jumbie lit a match. As he navigated the flame to the pipe he held between his lips, the shawl around his neck hissed and crackled. The old man slapped his thigh and laughed.

  He tugged at the shawl and said, “Skin! Relax! You done dry up. Can’t dry you up no more, yet I can’t shut you up. Shut up yourself or else I’ll turn you back into a human, and then you’ll see what misery is.” The skin around the jumbie’s neck chuntered like a peeved parrot, but finally gave up and settled down.

  Nandita wanted to turn around and run, but the muscles in her legs had gone slack and there was a terrible tickling sensation running up and down her useless limbs. She cleared her throat, and was surprised and frightened to hear the sound come out of her.

  Addressing the sound she’d made, a raspy high-pitched cackle came from the jumbie before he spat out, “You lose! I win! Couldn’t wait, eh? I win!”

  Had Nandita been blind, she thought, she would have assumed that the owner of such a voice was a crotchety old woman, but the barebacked person in front of her suggested otherwise.

  “So, who send you?” asked the jumbie. “O’Leary? He only singing out how jumbie and duppy bad-bad, but he self is the best advertising we ever had. I can’t keep up with how much people does come here, night after night, because they read his stories extolling our virtues!” Again he laughed out loud. “How you like that? Extolling our virtues!” The jumbie threw back his head of matted ropes of hair and sni
ffed the air. “Look here,” he said. “How much time I tell that good-fuh-nutten priest that I don’t like that patchouli scent he does tell all yuh to wear.” She was about to apologize for the scent, but the jumbie carried on: “Listen! Listen. What you hear?”

  Nandita listened. The skin was quiet, and there was still that deadly silence all around.

  She shrugged and the jumbie said, “All you people with eye and ears in your head don’t know how to listen. You have to listen with your whole body—in this case, with your feet.”

  Once presented with such an idea, she found that the possibility of listening with her feet was indeed imaginable, and she concentrated there, but still she heard nothing.

  “We on this side,” said the jumbie, “we living with the sound of quarrying all night long right across the Northern Range. Every day they come a little closer. Bulldozing all the trees and all the bush, all the flowers, all the nests, the homes of all the animals, and of all of we. For hundreds of years the people used to respect the silk cotton, but this generation think all the talk about the silk cotton, about jumbie and spirits, is chupidness. Well, enough is enough. O’Leary free advertising don’t meant nutten if this forest disappear. Why he don’t use his big words to educate people, to tell them that the forest disappearing right before they eyes. All you people ever ask yourself where we who does call the silk cotton home will go and live if the silk cotton chop down? Let me tell you a little secret: we don’t disappear, we just move around. We will find somewhere else, that is certain, but town people might’n like where we will choose to set up, you hear? Anyway, never mind me. Is things so, I have on my mind. So, you! What business you have for me?”

  Keeping her eye on the jumbie, Nandita stepped forward to put her offerings on the ground. She gasped. Something nearby must surely have died, for such a stink rose up. She covered her nose with one hand, thankful now for the patchouli, and with the other set down a pouch of tobacco, a bottle of Scotch, a bag of pennies, six red candles, two rolls of toilet paper and a bag of coarse salt. At this last, the skin hissed and wriggled violently about the neck of the jumbie, causing him to gasp and cough. He grabbed it, cursing unabashedly as he wrestled with it, until he had removed it completely. He scrunched it into a tight ball and dropped it to the floor not far from the bag of salt. It unravelled, and began to smoulder, as if it were about to catch afire. In a swift action the jumbie rushed forward, took a handful of salt from the paper bag and threw it on the skin, which immediately shrank, like burning cellophane.

  “Dime a dozen, oui,” he said dismissively, and then he turned his attention to Nandita. “I have to ask you again? Don’t waste my time.” As if he read her mind, he continued: “Yes, yes. Is true, I was once over on your end, and I carry with me such expressions. Don’t waste my time. But over here, the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth—look, you see, another one—is that time is meaningless, open-ended, many-sided, a foolish concept from the fantasy world of all you living. That is why all you does die. Die, die, die. Because you bow down to this fantasy you call time. But who is you and what you troubling me for?”

  Nandita noticed that while the jumbie seemed to be rather talkative, he was not into conversation. “I am Nandita,” she said. “A photographer. That is what I came about.” When the jumbie didn’t respond, she added sharply, “I need to be able to make great, important, worthwhile photographs.”

  The jumbie steupsed and said, “God, all you people boring for so. You want to be famous. Well, who don’t want to be famous?”

  A rush of indignation flushed Nandita. She didn’t like the position that she’d found herself in. She straightened, and before she could check herself, she snapped, “What makes you decide that I am like anyone else? You are not prepared to listen to me. I am a woman. I came here alone. I am vulnerable in your presence, expected to cower and supplicate before a spirit whose powers, let alone reputation and presence, are supposed to be awe-inspiring, if not terrifying. But you’re bullying me.” She was angry and, to her chagrin, crying now. She picked up her tripod and backed away.

  “Boring and sensitive. How you will get along in that world of yours, if you so sensitive? Stand up. Stand up to me!” shouted the jumbie, stopping her from fleeing. More quietly he said, “Boring, sensitive and definitely brave.”

  Nandita appreciated the part with the compliment. Encouraged, she explained her situation: “It is either that I must figure out how to take pictures that people, collectors, will want to buy as art, or how to make people see that I am a good artist and that my photography is art. Otherwise I will end up taking illustrative pictures of pumpkins, or ripe tomatoes, or of politicians cutting ribbons, or of some councilman watching a big hole in the road, or of a woman celebrating her one hundredth birthday. Look, I just want those who see my photos to stop and think, and to have their thinking changed because of what they saw. And I want them to want to own my work, to want to exhibit it in their homes and businesses. I would not have come here if I didn’t want something big. Compared to what I want, fame is a small thing. I think I want a change in society, more than in my own art.”

  “But you travelled here with your camera, didn’t you? Did you expect to photograph something here? Me, for instance?” asked the jumbie, and Nandita realized that he and she were actually conversing now.

  “The truth is that I didn’t really expect to see you. I intended to take a picture of the tree. The silk cotton tree, at night, when people most fear it. I wanted to show that there was nothing here, nothing to be afraid of.”

  The jumbie began to run his hand over his head and down the front of his bare chest as if smoothing a shirt. “Well, sorry, miss. I here. I promise I won’t break the camera,” he said, arranging himself on his bench, crossing his legs and posing with his cigarette.

  Nandita quickly unleashed her tripod and set her camera on it. She was about to set up her flash, but the jumbie stopped her, telling her that a flash was useless under the circumstances.

  The jumbie was quite the poser, sitting this way and that, unexpectedly patient as she fiddled with the settings on the camera and changed from one lens to another. After photographing the jumbie and the surroundings for more than forty minutes, she felt quite sure that she had made some outstanding photos, and began to dismantle her setup. She was easier now, pleased, imagining what the photographs would look like printed large and framed.

  “Yes,” said the jumbie, again as if he read her mind. “They will turn out pretty. Pretty and grand. People will pay you big money for these. O’Leary self will pay the biggest sum. In the thousands. Don’t be shy with him. But of course, I as your model must be paid by you.”

  Nandita stopped her packing and looked at the jumbie.

  “What? You thought I was doing this for free? Typical.”

  His use of the word typical maddened Nandita.

  “What do you want from me?” she asked, feeling tricked.

  “Ey! Drop the attitude, girl. You don’t get what you want from a jumbie for free. There is always a price, and I am not talking about that tobacco and salt and candles and thing you bring there. When you take from the jumbie, you does get more than you ask for. You does get a little bit of his soul.” The jumbie was about to say more, but he was interrupted by a shoo-shooing coming from the other side of one of the buttresses. He turned and shouted, “You can’t see I busy? What you want, you old duppy?”

  The voices grew urgent. Words were being exchanged, but they were garbled. The jumbie stood up and fumbled toward the wall. Nandita strained to see and hear but in vain.

  The jumbie returned after some minutes. “But, eh-eh, them duppy have they thinking caps on tonight, you hear!” he said. “Between them and me, we have assignment for you. Now listen to this. The pictures—sorry, photographs—you just take of me will only develop for you after you complete the task we have for you. Bargain?”

  Slightly disheartened but eager to see the fruit of that little unexpected photo shoot,
she agreed.

  “You see all the killing in the country?” asked the jumbie. “People getting killed like flies. All this ‘casual brutality’—to quote a famous writer—and nobody answering to any of it. The defenceless dead, the unfought-for dead, they restless for so. See here?” The jumbie held out his long stick and pointed it to the invisible duppies behind him and then swung his stick to indicate the area ahead of the tree, including where Nandita stood. “They all here right now. They ent going to have no peace until their killers are caught and brought to justice. What you doing same time so next Sunday night?”

  “Dimanche gras,” whispered Nandita. She couldn’t mask the fear in her voice when she responded, “Same time so next Sunday night is just hours before J’ouvert.”

  “Wha? So you ’fraid!” answered the jumbie. “Look,” he said, “is not us who ask you for something. Is you who ask. You want the assignment or not? How bad you want it?”

  “I don’t know if the streets will be open,” she protested. She hadn’t intended a long-term relationship with the jumbie. She hadn’t intended much of anything, really, when she set out, except to take a few pictures of the tree at night. Had she really bound herself now, she wondered, to this other reality? “The police will block the roads,” she said. “I don’t know if I will be able to get out of Port of Spain.”

  “So now she ’fraid. She ’fraid, she ’fraid,” he ridiculed. “Young lady, I thought you wanted this. Well, to get what you want, you have to want it real bad. How bad? This bad. That will determine if the streets will block up, if your car will work, if your camera battery will last, if a 32-megabyte flash card will turn by itself into a 208-megabyte flash card. You make up your mind. Yes? Or no?”

  Nandita thought for some long moments. The jumbie waited. Her fear slowly dissolved as she recognized the potential for an opportunity of a lifetime. She answered in the affirmative.