The Origin of Waves

by Austin Clarke

  “The super is a mother!” John says.

  “… and another idea hits him. He realized in the heat of the moment, in the heat of the situation, like when you are angry or quarrelling with a woman and you want to say something in your defence, but you are so vexed that you can’t remember the words you want to say, or should say, to end the quarrel and defend yourself. Or like when somebody calls you a nigger, and you know before he even calls you so that you have practised a response that is more hurtful, that has to be more hurtful than that, but when the name cuts into your heart, the wound is so deep and so sharp and there is so much blood pouring out of it, that you forget in the moment of the cut to say what you had practised you would say. Only after the quarrel or the assault of that word is over and fades away a little, or the fight is over, bram! that word, or the response to that other word comes back to you. He has an idea. He has this idea. Ring any buzzer. If it answers, it will release the lock on the outside entrance door. But this Barbadian fellow feels so stupid and humiliated that now, after twelve o’clock at night, on a Friday night in the suburbs, he is ringing a buzzer, ringing a buzzer, ringing a buzzer …”

  “If the motherfucker had-ring that buzzer in Brooklyn, on any street in Brooklyn – Nostrand, Schenectady, Fulton – any of them, even in a black neighbourhood, from nine-something in the night till after twelve midnight, his ass woulda-been shot! Out goes you, Jack!”

  “He has this next idea to ring the buzzer beside the name of any woman on the panel. And she answers, ‘Who is it?’, and the fellow says, ‘John,’ and the voice coming back at him through the panel and the intercom says, ‘Come in, Johnnie!’ and the door flies open, and he plants his winter boot between the door, and ease-in the three bags, and immediately he feels the warmness in the main lobby. And his body is so tired and he remembers how long he was ringing the buzzer that he almost collapses in the fresh warmness. So he remains standing for a moment feeling the warmness of the lobby bathe his skin, and for a moment he forgets completely he is calling the woman on the thirty-third floor, the woman he has come to see. All he wants now is the warmness of the lobby, to sit down and rest, and get off his feet. Or just lie down on the couch in the main lobby, or in a bed, and go fast to sleep, and forget the woman. But just as he imagined how warm it would be in a bed, he remembered her again. And then, he has to place his winter boot in the elevator to prevent the door from closing and the elevator going back up without him. He eases his three bags in the elevator, and as he does so he forgets to press number 33 on the elevator panel. Not that he really forgot to press 33, it was more like he was scared, thinking what was going to happen when the elevator reached the thirty-third floor, and he had to get off, and walk along the hallway with its red carpet with red patterns like vases — you remember Roman vases, or urns, Grecian urns? There are Grecian urns in the pattern of the red carpet that runs all the way from one end of the hallway to the next, by the fire-escape door with a big red EXIT above it, a distance of about one hundred yards, a good hundred-yard dash.”

  “ ‘Ode on a Grecian Urn.’ By Keats.”

  “Wordsworth.”

  “Keats.”

  “Wordsworth!”

  “Keats! ‘Thou still unravish’d bride of quietness, / Thou foster-child of silence and slow time, / Sylvan historian, who canst thus express / a flowery tale more sweetly than our rhyme …’ You think Wordsworth could write poetry like this? Is Keats! Don’t you remember we did this poem in our School Certificate from Cambridge University?”

  “I remember the poem, too, man! But I tell you it is Wordsworth. ‘What men or gods are these? What maidens loth? / What mad pursuit? What struggle to escape? / What pipes and timbrels? What wild ecstasy?’ … ‘What wild ecstasy?’ … Wordsworth!”

  “Keats’s hand is written all-over that poem, man! You can smell Keats’s sweat and perspiration pouring-down from this poem!”

  “Who in this bar would know? Let’s axe the barman.” And he beckons the barman over. “Buddy, right? I hear the patrons call you so. It’s Buddy?” John says.

  “Buddy,” Buddy says. So John asks him, and the barman shrugs his shoulder, and says he has never heard of Keats or Wordsworth, but he knows a fellow who comes in here who says he writes poetry, a Canadian fellow. But he likes Grecian urns, he says.

  “I worked for fifteen years for a Greek fellow who owns a Greek restaurant,” he tells us, “and on the menu and on the interior design, like on the doors and the window panes and the matches, was all these things like urns. I asked the owner, my boss, one day what these things is, and he says to me, ‘Grecian urns, Buddy, Grecian urns. Arts from my country.’ I love those urns.”

  “Well, never mind. Give us two more double martinis. The same as before.”

  “Coming right up, gentlemen,” Buddy says, grinning and laughing. We have made a friend.

  “One hundred yards of red carpet with red Grecian urns that he walks along, not making any noise although the three heavy bags seem as if they have dead bodies in them, not knowing what is going to happen when he knocks on the door of the woman’s apartment … and he is thinking of the time when he was a runner at elementary school and at the Combermere School for Boys, when this same distance travelled over by him so many times got longer and more painful with each sprint, longer than one hundred yards. More than this fear of the interminable nature of the hallway was the deeper fear that he would not reach the tape, and that he would not ever again reach the tape first. There is fear as he travels over one hundred yards of red Grecian urns that he knows so well, and that has brought him such victory and such pleasure of satisfaction. The Grecian urns in the pattern of the red carpet are like his own trophies of cheap silver, metal painted to look like silver. The urns multiply with the distance and go out of focus, as he wonders what reception he is going to get when he reaches her apartment, just as he always wondered what reception he would get if he reached the tape, and was not the first to break it. He walks up to the door and stands outside it for a few minutes, listening to the noise inside, imagining what noise is inside, what is going to happen to that noise he imagines he hears when he presses the bell, what dream she is coming out of, what dream her son is in, and will he scream at the shrill ringing of the bell repeating its sound in the dark insides of the bedroom, and interrupt his nightmare? Will her mother be the one to come to the door, armed with a kitchen knife, as she does when she answers the door after dusk back home in Georgetown in Guyana where she says that ‘all those bastards want to do is choke-and-rob we.’ She was robbed on her last visit by a man who held a cutlass to her throat. He imagines the woman in her soft blue nightgown that is not real silk, not the pure silk she is accustomed to at cheaper prices in her native Guyana, but which fits her like a priceless outer skin of silk, and riding her body like kisses over her hips and breasts as she moves about the bedroom, rubbing the rheum out of her eyes and looking more seductive in her drowsiness. Her eyes are larger than in the daytime, and her lips, always large and now more luscious and quivering with desire in the night time. And he rang the bell. And froze. And waited for the door to be flung open and for him to face the glistening blade of the seven-inch kitchen knife he had seen her mother use to snap the head off a red snapper, or make mince with a shoulder of pork for the making of garlic-pork, which he ate with them the three Christmas mornings, before the boy was born. The hallway becomes quiet, quiet. In the quietness he can hear the waves in the sea at Paynes Bay, and he can hear the first sound of the conch-shell announcing the arrival of the fishing boats, and he can hear the pop of the starter’s gun at the beginning of the hundred-yard dash, and he can hear the rattling of knives and forks in the drawer in the kitchen, and the rustling of the nightgowns worn to bed at night. The stillness is making him guilty, his deliberate breaking of the peace within the sweet-smelling apartment where she burns incense from India for the sake of its fragrance and its acridness which kills the smell of raw red snapper and curry. No one comes to the door. H
e rings the bell again. He can hear it from where he is standing. No one moves inside the apartment. But the stillness of the night makes the hallway become dark, although it is bathed in fluorescent light, for the entire one hundred yards of its distance. But he is standing in the dark and is becoming aware of things that come at you at night out of the darkness. A head of a woman peeped out of an apartment, and said nothing, and withdrew without expressing disgust. He cannot remember if he knows this neighbour from his previous visits. Perhaps, and knows that the neighbour’s lips are sealed against disclosure of her personal knowledge of things. And on his other side, a body comes out into the middle of the hallway, and he can see the outline of her legs through the penetrating fluorescent light which rips the thin nightdress, the waist down to her feet. She says nothing and just stands and stares. He thinks he sees a smile on her face. Not a smile of recognition only, but also a smile that contains information she is not willing to divulge at this ungodly hour of the night. And fearing that more heads and bodies will come out in punctuation of his pressing the bell, he takes up his three leather bags, and moves the short distance to the elevator. He presses the buzzer for the carriage to come and carry him from these neighbourly eyes. Just before the elevator comes, he goes back one last trembling time to the apartment door and presses his right ear against the dark-stained plywood, and hears movement inside and a swishing of cloth, and a rattling of knives and forks in the drawer beside the refrigerator. But it is the noise from the elevator coming up to rest beside him, and open its mouth, and take him in. And down, down, down he goes in his retreat, wishing he was a braver man, wishing he was a man who didn’t care about scenes and neighbours in nightgowns looking out; wishing he was a strong man, brave enough to shout out the name of this sleeping woman, and have the sleeping neighbours open their doors to welcome him, or laugh at him; wishing that he was brave enough to kick the door in, and bring scandal and attention to all of them; wishing that he didn’t care how brutal the Toronto cops are to men stalking and beating, assaulting and harassing women; wishing that he could face the cops and face his reputation put upon the front pages of the Toronto Star and the Toronto Sun, in the large, full proof of print. He would disregard the papers heralding the image and the stereotyping of his West Indian race and colour. But he is a coward. A stupid fucking goddamn Barbadian black coward! Down, down, down in the elevator, which is hot, hotter than the lobby after the cold, damp, small vestibule where the panel of buzzers and names are installed; down, down, down he goes, and gets out of the elevator and sits in the lobby, and watches the colour of the thick glass on the front door change, until he can see the outline of trees and cars and people moving, and buses driving by, and more people coming out of the four elevators behind him, on their way to work and on their way after a night of playing dominoes, and a night spent with women. ‘Morning,’ a woman greets him. ‘Cold again, today, eh?’ a woman says, as she pulls her scarf in a tighter fit, as she grabs the front of her winter coat. And her coat grabbed in this fashion makes her body warm, and makes her body look smaller. ‘Boy, what we doing in this damn place, eh? You have a good day, son.’ A man comes out, and looks at him and moves to the door; and before he places his hand on the horizontal metal bar to let himself out into the cold morning, he looks back a second time, and says something with the movement of his body and his eyes; and the man sitting on the bracket of the radiator realizes that he has seen this same man three times in the hours he has spent tracking the woman down and ringing the bell, from the time he first stood in the small outer lobby, ringing the buzzer. The man is Indian. From the West Indies. Younger than he. In the new dawn of morning, a taxi drives up to the front door, and he rushes to the door, and beckons to the driver. A passenger gets out; the driver nods his head, and tells him to come. The man in the lobby helps him with the three leather bags, and before he closes the door behind him, the man says, ‘Rass! What a night, eh, bwoy!’ The tires of the taxi scratch the ice on the driveway, skid a little, and it moves out into the Saturday-morning traffic, going west. He thinks of crabs moving over the beach. ‘Where to this time?’ The airport, he tells the driver. ‘Had a good night?’ The radio receiver in the taxi is loud, barking names and addresses and warnings, not intended for this driver, and which he listens to nevertheless, but does not answer.”

  “Goddamn!” John says. “This is the first time I have heard you talk like this! Goddamn! Normally, not even in my profession, do I hear a man bear his soul like this.”

  “It wasn’t me I was talking about.”

  “Bullshit! You were a sprinter!”

  “This story is not my story.”

  “Getouttahere! You came second in the hundred-yard sprint at school!”

  “It isn’t. If it was, I would-have told it in the first person.”

  “Are you for real? Come on! You’re talking to me, your ace-boon, remember? The fellow who grew up with you, who went with you to the Public Library every Saturday. Look. Lemme tell you something. Women can face the truth easier than men, and are the only people who can face the truth the way you just faced it, though you’re trying to bullshit me that this isn’t you. Your language, man. Your language gave-you-way. The emotion in your story, even the details of the story, the hundred-yard dash reference; and even if the details of the story don’t all apply to you, the language in the narrative is yours, brother. The language. Plus, there is certain details that only the perpetrator, or the participant, or a man who experienced that experience could know. But who the fuck cares? Who cares? There ain’t one man, not one motherfucker who hasn’t been fucked-over by a woman, whether he deserve it or not. And most men, lemme tell ya, fellow, most men deserve to be fucked! So, you were horned. Fuck it! You was had, baby, you was had! I told you so, hours ago, before we had this last martini. I told you the meaning of the dream about falling outta bed and about the bull with the horns and the three men. Surprising, maybe for you, but not really surprising to me. You went over the same things in your dream as in your story. You was had. But you can’t face it, even though you know, ipso-factually speaking, you was had. Horned. Cuckold. Cudgelled. Call it what the fuck you like, you was fucked, baby! Join the club.”

  He is looking at me, like a brother, a big brother who cannot feel the actual pain but whose compassion is meant to ease it. And although I do not have a brother, John is always like one to me, a big brother. So, here he is now, sitting in this crowded bar, in this foreign city, Toronto, so far from Durham, North Carolina, in the South where he now lives, giving me the feeling that he has been coming to this bar for years, every afternoon, with me, and listening to my stories, and understanding them. As if the cord that first joined us from those days on the beach at Paynes Bay, with the sand the same colour as the conch-shell, has never been severed.

  “Enter the brotherhood, baby. Another?”

  “Sure!”

  “Change the gin, this time.”

  “Bombay gin,” I suggest.

  “You-got-it!”

  “I never told this to anyone,” I say.

  “You think you had me fooled, eh?” he says. “Open your heart, man.”

  “You know something? Do you know that I have never in my life made a choice? A choice that was my own choice. Beginning with the place I went to school, Trinity College here. Do you know I have never made a choice, I mean, never did anything I knew was what I wanted to do, by my own decision, and not what either somebody-else, or the system, made me do. Am I making sense? I have never had the opportunity to talk about this. Forty, forty-five, fifty years I held this inside myself. But when I think about it, I know in my mind that this is the meaning of the experience of living in a place you are not born in. And you know something else? Women. I have never made a personal choice, meaning I never found myself in the position to pick out the woman who is a woman I want and love, my choice. What I mean by this is that it is either the situation, the circumstance, like standing at a bus stop, or in an art gallery looking at pictu
res which I don’t understand, and a person, a woman comes behind me and she then stands beside me, and begins to say something, and we talk, and then I would invite her for a coffee or a drink, purely out of boredom, and one thing would lead to another. And before you hear the shout, something is started. But it is not my choice to have something started. Only the coffee or the drink. Am I making sense to you? Am I the only man with this vacantness, this vacuum of making choices? This makes any sense to you? For instance, living here in this city. Toronto. You’re surrounded with a majority of women who come from a different culture and background than you. Women you meet but do not know. Even with the rise in immigration and multiculturalism, still you are surrounded by strangers. In your job. On the street. In classes. In bed. At a concert. At an art gallery. And at a bus stop. Everywhere. But deep down in your heart, you’re fighting it and fighting it. And you know something? It’s a losing battle. Looking for that special woman you really want to know, or that other woman. In your social group, in your work, in your mind. As things, as these things work on your mind, you’re still walking around like a zombie, with your body telling you one thing, and your heart telling you something else. And I find myself painting women black. In colour. And in culture. Not jet-black, but black when they are not, and I am colouring them black. You know what I mean? The loveliest white woman, bright, decent, intelligent, with a good body and character. Just saying these things, I hope nobody is hearing me say them, because I am telling you things that I tell myself, in the privacy of my house, sitting down alone, with the goddamn jumbo can of Black Flag in my hand. And for somebody-else but you to hear these thoughts, they would certainly certify me as mad. Worse! A racist. Am I a racist?”