So, he began to beat her with his fists. He was in the ring again, fighting his first amateur bout.... He struck her with a right cross...and the man in front of him was dancing around, making him look clumsy and foolish before the screaming crowd. “Ya bum! Ya bum!” He could hear the boos now, five years later. And he hit her with a left hook.
It is an old story, this one. The husband’s mix of desire and outraged pride, his wife’s passivity, his feeling that “the foe in front of him was absorbing all his toughness and meanness, all his power,” leads finally to “delight” in a newly conceived form of violence. But she sees his smile, sees her own death coming:
And miraculously, the ring stopped its constricting, and began to expand back outwards. It became the room in which he was strangling her. It became as large as the house itself; larger, larger, until the entire neighbourhood was encompassed. And she could see life outside this arena of blows and insult and degradation.
She gets him in the testicles, breaking free at last. And all this is what she is thinking about as she kills the cockroaches in her apartment, “and this is what went through her mind as she stood in the crowded subway car, pressed by the man who was trying to read her thoughts . . . .”
The train stops, and our author-figure watches as she “comes alive from the corridors of her past she had been walking during its ride.” She gets off: “And with her leaves a part of myself, for I had fashioned and created her in the image and lust of my desire this morning when there was nothing else on my mind.” The story closes with his thinking of this woman as his “darling” and of “the fear that resides on women’s faces,” a theme he has returned to in a story that should answer for once and all the question that is always posed to writers: where do your stories come from anyway, where do you get your ideas?
In “Not So Old, But Oh So Professional,” the author-figure is outed again in a Cabbagetown restaurant that he visits regularly to observe the prostitutes. A pimp passes by his table, asking to his astonishment, “’How’s the writing racket?’” Our man takes one of the young prostitutes home with him, and they drink and they talk until morning. Desire is one thing, an admitted truth; but a writer’s material and his human heart is another and more central to this story.
In “Just a Little Problem,” the man’s mother (she who because of her love must be obeyed) informs him by telephone that his much younger brother is coming to Toronto and that he is not to allow him to drink. This brother has been slowly killing himself with drugs and alcohol. The prohibition poses a serious problem, as the author-figure is himself something of a devoted booze-hound, as the reader will have easily detected by now; and his house is replete with good bottles that get emptied wherever he hides them. Besides, “in our way of doing things, to be able to drink is the sign of manhood. A man who can’t hold his liquors is like a dog. Women despise him. Men call him a boy. And children pelt him with stones.” This is a lovely, tender story. Like the next, penultimate story, “They’re Not Coming Back,” it takes us close to the question of death that hovers over the final story about the two old black men in cashmere coats, “The Cradle Will Fall.”
With “They’re Not Coming Back” we are again in the world of mothers. Claudette, the central character, has had a bad marriage and has lost her children. The pain of that loss is overwhelming. Her house is full of little notes left by a daughter, messages that speak cryptically to the pain and the bond that remain and that will haunt that daughter when her mother too is lost. Again, there is drink: Claudette “loved martinis and drank them in generous quantities. They were part of her sophistication.” But now the drink and the pills are about her sorrow. And into this comes Claudette’s own mother, gentle and protective and grieving over how Claudette has thrown her life away on a worthless man. “‘Sleep. Sleep, my darling’” – it is all that is left to say.
Despite all of the pain and sexual violence and racism and recklessness that inhabit Austin Clarke’s There Are No Elders, this is in many ways a joyful (and very funny) book. It is full of the zest of living and of writing well, of truly seeing both the self and others in the time we have:
“Nevermindthat!”
“Why never mind that?”
“Nevermindthat!”
The bad is out there, in here. But there is also, abundantly, everything else. We need sometimes to “nevermind” the one in order to attend properly to the other, however mixed up they necessarily also are. Loving and hating, growing in wisdom and throwing it all away in the stupidity of our lives, are one story and also two – as the comic and the tragic, or Canada and the West Indies, or men and women, or childhood and old age, are one story and also two. There Are No Elders, as a claim, is debatable. “Is only old people,” says Derek Walcott in the poem from which Austin Clarke extracts his title. Well, maybe so, and maybe not. Walcott again: “I am best suited to stalk like a white cattle bird/ on legs of sticks, with sticking to the Path/ between the canes on a district road at dusk.” Throughout this fine book, the seasoned writer stalks, sticking to the Path that is also “between” paths, moving at full power between one consciousness or perspective and another, sticking and switching, hauling in his green crop. Bravo, Austin Clarke. The man has gotten through all the ice and snow and the shifting sand on legs that will last.
Leon Rooke
April 2007
Leon Rooke is the author of, among other books, Oh!, Who Goes There, Fat Woman, Shakespeare’s Dog, The Face of Gravity, A Good Baby, The Magician of Love, The Beautiful Wife, and most recently a book of poems, Hot Poppies.
[1] For a fine portrait of the visible Clarke the reader may look up “Austin Clarke: Riding the Trane” in Barry Callaghan’s Raise You Ten (McArthur & Company, 2006, pp. 263-69).
If The Bough Breaks
Where they were, on the second floor of a building that squatted at the corner of Bay and Davenport, whose ground floor was taken up by a store that sold milk for five cents more than you could buy it in any supermarket, and beside which was a store that sold everything, these five women were chatting while two others sat in the hairdresser’s chair. The hairdresser was a man. Christophe. A big, strong man with a black complexion, from Barbados. He had never learned French at school; had never visited the islands in the West Indies where French is spoken; but he understood what French meant in his business in this city, so he changed his name from Granville Da Costa the moment he graduated near the bottom of the class from the Marvel School of Hairdressing; went by bus to Montreal and stayed there for a long weekend, Labour Day weekend; and when he returned, by train, he had the name Christophe and a new accent. He called every customer, chérie, which came out as “cherry.” He had two women working for him. They themselves had graduated from the Marvel School of Hairdressing, three months ago, near the top of their class.
On the front of the building, on the second floor where these five women were now sitting, emblazoned in lights, was CRISTOPHE’S SALO. The lights that formed the letter N, in “salon” never worked. But Christophe was known throughout the city as the best hairdresser, the only man, or woman, who knew how to “fix” black women’s hair.
One woman had curlers and grease in her hair; another woman’s hair was lathered in shampoo, so thick and rich, you could not tell her age, although she was the youngest in the salon. And the five waiting together were all over forty and well-dressed; and two of them had foreign cars parked below; after one hour, they had given up running down the stairs to put loonies into the meters.
The girl in the chair cried out, as the shampoo ran into her eyes, stinging her, “Are you trying to blind me Christophe? I’m too old to learn Braille, hear.” She was a fourth-year student at the University. She was studying psychology. She was very good-looking. She came from a rich Barbadian family who owned a very small sugar cane plantation that grew sugar cane no longer. “I have theories to read.”
“Cuddear, cherry!”
It was three o’clock, Thursday afternoon. They could hea
r the traffic below and the voices of people passing, for the windows facing the street were open for the breeze.
Christophe had forgotten to call the repairman to come and fix the two noisy air-conditioners, taped round their perimeter with electrical tape which his friend Cox, a plumber had left. So, the room was warm. And the five ladies were using the boxes of Kleenex, passing them from hand to hand, mopping their brows, their embroidered hankies already saturated. And the prospect of the ironing comb, not really a comb made of iron by a blacksmith as many used back in the West Indies, but its modern version, which performed the same function, making their hair “white,” making their temples hot, threatening burns on their scalps, certainly singeing hair in the wrong places, all this made their waiting more uncomfortable than the patience they knew they must have each time they visited this salon, always too crowded, too slow, and too understaffed. They had been Christophe’s customers for years.
In with a whiff of wind which cooled the salon came voices of a quarrel below on the street. The room was quiet for a moment. Then, a siren screamed through the buzz of voices, and the humidity seemed to clutch the women’s bodies, and cause them to breathe more heavily. The noise increased and it seemed as if the ambulance or the police cruiser was going to climb right up the flight of stairs and join them. And in fact, it did stop in front of the entrance. The five women ran to the windows.
There was a hiss. The sirens stopped. And the hissing sound lasted a few more moments. The two assistants dropped their instruments into some kind of liquid. They joined the others at the windows. Christophe continued fixing the young woman’s hair.
There were three large windows. The lower half of each was pulled up. So the women could lean their bodies out, and see. And they could look at one another leaning out the three windows. It was not an ambulance. There were three police cars. Stopped in the middle of the road, blocking all traffic. The owner of the store who sold high-priced milk came out to meet the policemen. They had left their car doors open. The women could hear the three radios crackling. The six policemen had their guns drawn. In the distance, coming towards them, was another cruiser, flashing in red speed and urgency.
“I bet you,” one woman said, “it’s some black man in there.”
“And not eighteen yet,” another said.
The policemen and the store owner were now inside the store.
“These people!” one of the assistants said. “I was walking through the Eaton Centre one night, and just as I take up my parcel with the things I bought in it, and paid for, all of a sudden I feel this hand on my shoulder, and when I turn round....”
“Blasted people, eh?”
Two of the policemen came back out. Between them was a young white girl. No more than sixteen. They took her to a car, and put her to sit in the back seat, while the other four officers exchanged words which the women could not hear; and then they too got into their cruisers, and drove off. The few men and women who had stopped to look, walked on. One man took a red box from his pocket, extracted a cigarette and lit it. He walked at a faster pace. A bus was coming. The wind was blowing again. The store owner came back outside with a broom, sweeping the sidewalk; and they could see because of the stains from chopping meat and pork and roasts on his white apron that covered his body from his neck to his thighs, that he sold other things than milk.
“What do you think they got her for?”
“Shoplifting.”
“They begin young.”
“Well, it was a good thing,” the assistant continued, “that I had kept my receipt that Friday night. It was the Friday before the Caribana parade, and I was thinking of stopping at the kiosk-thing to buy a Lotto, ’cause I had had a dream the night before. But before I could walk more than two feet from the counter where I had bought the pantihose, this blasted man’s hand on my shoulder. I look round. And staring me in my face is this blasted man. Security guard. Accusing me. Of something. Say I shoplifting. Well, I not ashamed to tell you, I let-go some bad words in his arse, that caused all the people in the Eaton Centre to stare at me. These blasted people, eh?”
“How old you think that girl is?”
“I could only see her head.”
“I wonder if she have a mother?”
“From the back, which is all I could see, I would put her at sixteen.”
“So young? And to have a record?”
“She’s sixteen, as you say. She can breed.”
“Christ, waiting here on Chris, my mind all the way up in Pickering, wondering if my child went home straight from school. We moved up in Pickering to get away from crime and violence down here, but child, I tell you, up there isn’t any better than down in Jane-Finch corridor, if you ask me.”
“In the weekend Star, did you read the thing about teenage pregnancies?”
“Wonder what time Chris intends to get to my hair? Four o’clock, and school must be out a long time.”
“What happened?”
“You mean the article?”
“No. The security guard and the pantihose.”
“I looked him straight in his face. The whole store watching me now. I faced him and I said, in my best manner, ‘Let me tell you something nigger-man.’”
“You called him that?”
“Was he black?”
“What was his complexion?”
“If you want to,” I tell him, “you could put your hand in my bag. But let me tell you something. When you put your hand in my bag, I am going to take off my shoe, and drive it right into your two blasted testicles.”
“No!”
“His complexion was what?”
“Not black.”
“And you called him a nigger-man?”
“He was a white man.”
“No!”
“And what happened?”
“He didn’t say another word to me.”
“No! But the teenaged pregnancies is what I want to know about.”
“I didn’t read the newspapers that weekend.”
“Anybody have that article? Joyce, you think you still have it? You clips things from the Star.”
“Was in the Globe.”
“I don’t take the Globe. The Star is my speed.”
“Mr. Chris, how much longer before you getting-round to fixing my hair? I have a child at home waiting on me.”
“And a husband.”
“Had!”
“You divorced, cherry? I didn’t know you and the old-man had break-up, cherry?”
“In name only, Mr. Chris, a husband in name only.”
“That girl, that we just see being arrested by the police, I am sure that they’re going to take her down in that station and make that girl’s life miserable, and they may even do....”
“Do what to her? Do what to her? What you mean by miserable?”
“Child, every other day in the newspapers there’s stories about the police and women they have in their cruisers.”
“But that child, though.”
“She’s sixteen. She can breed.”
“You mean rape.”
“Who said anything about rape?”
“Sexual assault. Sexual assault is the name for it nowadays. Everything nowadays is sexual assault.”
“Growing up in the West Indies....”
“You’re a damn liar!”
“How can you accuse me before you hear what...?”
“What you’re about to say? I already know it, before you even say it. You were about to say that growing up in the West Indies, we didn’t have anything such as what we witnessing nowadays in this place.”
“Well, how the hell could you know what I...?”
“Because I know you. And I know the West Indies. And I....”
“You know too blasted much. You must be working obeah, that you can read my mind.”
The five women were sitting again. The wind came through the windows in a slight gust, and for a moment, it was as if Christophe had fixed the air-conditioners.
“Every year. Child, when you see Christmas come and the 28th is here, I longing for home. But I won’t go home before Christmas. Christmas isn’t Christmas unless you have a tree and snow.”
“Child, all over the West Indies nowadays, is trees, and real Christmas trees too! Not the artificial ones we had in our days!”
“Snow, too!”
“Snow, too? What the hell I hearing?”
“You didn’t know? Didn’t hear? For years now, the tourist board people in Barbados been importing snow from Canada. For years now.”
“You don’t mean the Tourisses from Canada? You not referring to white people?”
“I am no prejudice. I talking about the snow. I understand it comes from Toronto, whiching....”
“And Montreal!”
“Whiching is the best snow in North America.”
“Who’s next, my cherries?”
Christophe removed the plastic bib from the neck of the woman who was now almost two hours in his chair. The smoke from his cigarette rose gently. He put the cigarette to his lips; pursed his lips as if he was about to kiss the woman dismounting clumsily from the high chair; put the cigarette in the glass ashtray, and said, “Who’s next, my cherries?”
The five women looked at one another. They had had lunch together at the Four Seasons Hotel nearby. They had had two martinis each. And when they arrived, giggling, after discussing their children and their families and their husbands, as they did each time they had lunch, once in two weeks, they were fortified through food and drink, to wait the long wait in the old hard plastic-bottomed chairs. The plastic made their dresses stick to their bottoms and they could feel the lumps where the upholstery had collapsed against their soft well-cared-for skin.
“You have a child coming from school soon. You go.”
“Charmaine can look after herself, man.”
“You’re not concern about that little girl walking the street and going home to an empty house with all this worthlessness you read about in Toronto?”
There Are No Elders Page 2