I was walking in the snow. The snow was deep. And my legs were heavy, and I felt I was walking in frozen water. I had not remembered to take my shoes to the shoemaker. And I was slipping. I was moving one heavy foot at a time, at the same pace as an old blackened sail I used to see far out at sea, on that same beach where we sat, fifty years ago, counting the steamers and lady boats which brought strangers to our shore. It was about four o’clock, a time when there is still a sun overhead, but today, in January, at noon it feels as if it is night. Time in this city has made that warning sail old and worn and tattered, so that when the wind is cold and strong, holes you could put your fist though appear, and the wind can go through them, and delay the motion and the speed of arrival. But I was going nowhere in particular. I had no hour or appointment; and with this snow, I was just a man, an ordinary man, with no distinguishing markings or name, walking with no purpose other than a ritual walk to defeat the restricting snow and cold, at a time in my life when I should have been elsewhere dressed in too-long short pants named after an island I have never visited, with white soft shoes polished even whiter than the belt we put round our waists on parades in the hot sun when it is the Queen’s Birthday, or when someone is passing out; or like the corked blancoed helmets of the Governor, when there were governors and pageantry and fun and parades and colonialism.
Each January, the snow becomes thicker and more difficult to negotiate, and seems to stick to my body like old white paint, except it has more weight; and I move just like that fishing boat we used to watch far out in the waves that behaved like it was sliding between hills and valleys. John and I spent hours on the sand the colour of an old, empty conch shell, looking at those waves, thinking where they went to when they left our eyesight, thinking how many ships had passed over them, thinking which wave bore a woman we would truly love and which ship would carry us from our governors and pageantry and fun and parades and colonialism. Of course, we did not live through anything like colonialism. It was just our fury and our imitating the words of men older and wiser that made us see ourselves sitting on that sand on that beach staring at waves that washed assertive and sullen strangers ashore who then lolled about our narrow streets as if they were born there; as if they were born there to rule there. We knew only the meaning of sitting on the sand, and wondering, and pretending we were that little boy in the poem we learned by heart in elementary school, the little boy who stood in his shoes and wondered, and wondered why? We did not wear shoes while we wondered whether the wave that licked our soles, the wave that brought the fateful cobbler into John’s pink heel, that washed my uncle in, was the same wave born in another country, that had travelled alongside the steamer and the lady boat and deposited the little blackened piece of wood, or stick at our feet. In elementary school, the teacher stood one afternoon, with sweat pouring off his face as the tears poured from our eyes, and pounded sense into our heads and ears and backs and backsides because we had not remembered that a little piece of blackened stick, or wood, was properly known as “flotsam.” We were acquainted with another “flotsam,” since one or two of us, not John or I, were sometimes call the “flotsam of society.” We thought of ourselves as that little boy in the poem about boys in shoes, standing and wondering.
It was about, it was, I think, a little before four on this cold day in January. And I was walking north along Yonge Street, in a kind of white valley, for the thickness of the snow had hidden the bright colours of the store windows from me, and I was alone. I could see only a shape or two ahead of me. And when I raised my head against the flakes that were blinding me, there was no sky, but only a channel of white though I knew I was travelling north because I had set out from the bottom of the street, by the lake, and if I was not travelling north, I would have been, by now, by this word or sentence, drowned.
I have thought, sometimes, at this age, with leisure, of attempting precisely that. Jumping into the lake. And on that afternoon of sun and light and sky, blue as the desire for a young school girl (John and I liked the same bright, hair-plaited girl), when we were sitting with cobblers in John’s heel, and had not seen the tube float out into deeper water, and could not retrieve the black, patched tube we had got from the Humber Hawk car which roared no more along the streets, once killing not only chickens but a man who had moved too slowly. When we looked up to see the tube, a million times larger than the lifesavers we were sucking, I was rendered unmovable as the Humber Hawk. I could not retrieve our lifesaver. Because I could not swim. And I know now, though I was too young to possess this heavy knowledge on that beach, that only those who can swim attempt to jump into the lake, to put an end to their lives. Those of us who cannot swim are too afraid of the water. We are like cats.
So, when I ducked my head and closed my eyes against the snow, I almost got knocked down by the person coming at me. He did not see me. I doubt that he noticed me. I was just another obstacle he had to walk around, or walk into, as he continued on in spirited childlike glee at the first snowfall that had transformed the sidewalk into a skating rink.
In all the fifty years I have lived in this city, I’ve never once tried to skate on ice, or rollers, and I never watch hockey games. The game that identifies me, through culture and the thick damp soil, is now forgotten, like other customs of that land from which I am torn. Cricket, to me, is now merely a figure of speech.
The snow through which I was trying to move, and in which I live, was a curtain, like the thick white ones my mother had set in each of the sixteen windows in our walled-house, with its six roofs or gables, six big waves against the wind and the blue sea, if you were sitting on the sand and watching it. And I could hardly see. I tried to imitate the sprightly form in front of me, moving faster to hide my fear of ice and thick snow, to make me less conspicuous in this white-coloured world, and hide from the person before me the fact that I was not born into this miserableness. And a new life came into my steps. My feet became less heavy. I was back there. And the wet khaki cut-down pants had dried suddenly in the sun and I was a sprinter running through thick green fields and this thick snow, when out of the blinding morning came a voice I had once heard many years ago. It was like a voice crying out from amongst thick white smoke belching from a burning house.
“What the arse you trying to do? Lick me down?”
I stopped moving. I could not stand motionless for the snow was underpinned with ice. My shoes were sliding; and I went back to that time, on a pasture so hot and so sticking wet, when I was made to stand at attention while the Governor moved through our files and I could barely see him in the distance, he being nothing more than a bunch of feathers all white, as if he were a gigantic fowl-cock about to crow the morning in, and bring his hundred hens to sexual attention. The voice, though, was a voice I had heard next to me as I wavered while ordered to stand “at attenshun!” – when the water in my bladder was making it impossible to be rigid, when I moved ever so slightly to ease the pain and the burning of the sun and the sweat pouring down my face into the white blancoed belt we had changed from green canvas to spotless white.
I was now close enough to see. And to wonder. And to call back, in this thickening morning, all those years in this flash of time.
“John?”
“Jesus Christ!” he said. I was sitting beside him on the sand, and the waves were washing in slowly, and the black piercing, punishing cobblers were in his pink heel. And the tube was drifting out, into the sea, into the ocean, into the Atlantic which we knew would join us after having separated us, in a land too far for our young eyes to see.
“Jesus Christ!” I said, giving the miracle credence and reality, giving the greeting its incredulity, giving the meeting its importance.
“Tom?” he asked, believing and not believing.
How could he believe easily, in the mist of time, in this street, in this city, in this country which we had only studied in our geography books at Combermere, but had refused to think of seriously as a place where we would voluntarily suf
fer; suffer its cold and its ice and its snow.
“I don’t believe my fucking eyes!”
“Man, this is too good to be true!”
“Jesus Christ!”
“Be-Christ, if anybody had tell me that you and me last see each other that afternoon we was sitting down ’pon the beach! Be-Jesus-Christ, look at this thing, though! God bless my eyesight! How long you here?”
“This is really you?”
“Is me, man!”
“Be-Jesus-Christ! Not calling the name of the Lord in vain, but this is a fucking…. But tell me, though! Tell me something. I been thinking of this for donkey-years. You learn to swim yet?”
And our laughter exploded, and from the white mist came bodies which paused to look, to scorn, to wonder what this joy was and what could cause such joy, that these two old black men would be embracing and laughing and pummelling each other on their thick black cashmere winter coats, with hands magnified in brown leather gloves, weighing down our hands and making us walk, after all these years in this new cold environment, like monkeys because we have never got accustomed to, nor learned how to walk, in winter.
We were hugging each other; I slapping him; he slapping me on the back, as if he was trying to make me burp, as our mothers did after the bottle; and changing from the left shoulder to the right, when that first shoulder blade had suffered enough pummelling from the affection that was born on that sand the colour of coral, and the empty conch shell.
“I don’t believe my fucking eyes!”
“If you want to know,” I said, “if you want to know the truth, I was thinking that very thing before I bounce into you.”
“Bounce into me? Man, you nearly licked me to fuck down. And a black man like me don’t look too good sprawl-out on the snow. I never learned to walk in winter. Been in England for years. Tried Europe for a piece. France and Italy. Got fed up with their brand o’ racism. Liberté, equalité could kiss my arse! And I never learn to speak a goddamn vowel, in any of their fucking foreign tongues, neither! Stayed pure fucking Bajan! But you was about to say something when I interrupt you. What was you saying when I butt-in?”
“I still can’t swim!”
He hollered so much, so loudly and so warmly, that I could see the cheap candles in the window of the store we were standing in front of, and I could see shoes with shiny leather and stiff lasts, and the shirts made famous in movies about men who could chop down trees tall as skyscrapers; I could see the sidewalk, and to my right, I could see the long windows of glass with shirts made in foreign countries by foreign hands, Polo, Yves Saint Laurent; and briefcases and travel bags from the sides of animals killed illegally. I could see where I was standing and where we were going. It was as if his breath, and the violence he had put into his laughter, was an exuberance of warmth. The snow had disappeared, it seemed, and around us the street and the sidewalk had come alive, but also I was sure that we two old black men, as they called us in this city, two old West Indian men from the old school, from the old conch days, were the only two living persons in the world. It was like sitting on that sand, possessing the entire beach, conquerors of the entire beach with no one in sight, no one a pretender to our throne.
“Where is the nearest bar? This calls for a drink!”
“Not drink, man! Drinks!”
“Do you have work to go back to?”
“Man, I am free! Work is for new immigrants, or stupid people. Work? Man, I stop working ten years now? I decide not to lift another fucking straw in this country, since 1980-something. November the 22nd nineteen hundred and eight-one to be exact. I have it written down in my wallet. Right here. When we sit down, I going show you the note I write to myself, November the 22nd nineteen eight-one.”
The bar was almost empty. We moved to the back, in the semi-darkness, away from the entrance, to give rein and space to the explosion of our happiness.
“I can’t ask if you drink the same, since when we last was together, neither you nor me was drinking. To me, you look like o scotch man. Right?”
“Scotch and soda.”
“Jesus Christ! Something I was watching on television lately about twins, and their habits. Generic twins. Where one goes, even secretly, the other is sure to go. Who one foops, the other one is sure to foop. Now, how the arse would I know, your drink is scotch, after all this time? Thirty years? Forty?”
“Fifty! Fifty years! ’Twas nineteen forty-three, and the War was still on. You were ten at the time. I was the same age.”
“And you haven’t learn to swim in all this time! Those cobblers that I stepped on! I didn’t have the chance to tell you, seeing that you left soon after, but the night when I went home, my mother warmed some candle-grease and made it into a poultice, and you shoulda seen how those blasted cobblers came outta my heel. At least one inch long, the average. And when I was living in France, one afternoon as I taking a stroll along the Elysses, or whatever you call it, all of a sudden I see this stall full of those blasted cobblers. I stand up. Mon Dieu! I was walking with my French wife, Jesus Christ! Imagine seeing cobblers in France! I tried to explain to her why I won’t let a cobbler pass my lips. The French eat cobblers. The French eat anything, if you ask me. They call it hot cuisine. In the five years I live at home after you went away, a sea egg never passed my lips. Far less a cobbler. In the six years I was parley-vous to that woman, my wife, she never spoke a word o’ English. And I never parlaid-vous. But we had two children. And that shows you that somehow we manage to communicate.”
I was laughing as he said this. And I wanted to hear more about his life in France. I had never been to France, even though it was a short trip from London where I spent one summer day a few years ago, and froze. But he was reading my mind. And he went on, speaking with the same broad, flat Barbadian accent, although I imagined a touch of a French accent to his speech, thin and delicate as pastry.
He was wearing a tailored suit. Dark and with a pin stripe. His shirt was custom-made and white, with French cuffs. The cufflinks were conservative, thin ovals of gold. His tie was dark grey and shiny, and silk, and tied in a knot that was tight and elongated. There was stiffness in the neck of his collar and his cuffs. I could not see his shoes. The room was too dim, and he held them under the round black shiny table. But I imagined they were black leather. He was always fastidious in dress. And I remembered seeing him standing at the bus stop on mornings at eight, stiff in his khaki uniform pants, the white shirt his mother had starched and ironed with the flat clothes iron; and some Saturday afternoons, I sat on his verandah when no breeze could cool the hotness of the day, and I heard the frightening hiss of the iron as his mother touched it with the damp cloth to test its heat, singing as she moved the iron over the sea-island cotton shirt, The Day Thou Gavest. Her voice was good enough for her to be in a choral group. And it was her love of singing which he had inherited, and which had infected me, and which urged us to join the choir of the St. Michael’s Cathedral, choirboys in bright red soutanes. He loved his soutane. He was a lover of clothes. And was responsible for me dropping my “slovenly shabbiness.” He was always using big words, words bigger than our natural vocabulary. But he read four library books a week. So, watching him now, as he talked with the same school yard colloquialness, it struck me that he was using it to take us back to that day sitting on the sand, ignoring the intervening years, not wanting to bring attention or significance to the time that had slipped past.
We were on our second scotch. He had ordered Chivas Regal, “The best,” he said.
“Over-rated,” I said.
“Is said to be the best. It’s therefore the best. Can’t beat advertising. It’s supposed to be the best of scotches.”
“Teachers, for me.”
“You still feel I’m too conspicuous. Remember my English accent? And I was going to England to polish it up. Well, I went to Oxford, as I said I was going. Where did you go?”
“Trinity.”
“Dublin? Now you say it, I think I remember
the girl we was both in love with, Cynthia. Met her in France one summer, she tell me she heard you was studying English at Trinity College, Dublin.”
“Trinity College, Toronto.”
“Well, Jesus Christ, man! If it ain’t Dublin, you just can’t tell a man Trinity! So, you still didn’t learn to swim?”
“This scotch ain’t doing anything for me. Martinis?”
It was evening outside. The lights in the bar were now visible, although they had been burning the whole time; but the colour of the light through the fake Tiffany lamps became a magic lantern leading us back to those dying afternoons when gold and God, man and the seawater, blue and a streak of silver, held us in its power, in its thrall.
“Children?”
“Ten.”
“From the mademoiselle?” I was teasing. He smiled, and gold showed discreetly at the right side of his mouth. All his original teeth were still in his mouth, the gold was a filling. Men from our village who went to Curaçao and to Aruba to help find and refine oil, returned to Barbados, after two years, and three years, and five years, with their pockets loaded with guilders and their mouths gilded in gold, speaking a version of American twang, although the national language was either broken English or Dutch. Seeing the flash of gold in John’s mouth reminded me of my uncle on my father’s side who had come back with new suits made in Holland, hundreds of guilders in cash in his pockets, pink silk shirts, a colour we reserved for women, calling us, ’ombre, his retention of the Spanish word, and calling those who had remained, “niggers.” We prayed that the oil-refining scheme would take him back to the rough barracks of Aruba, which he said housed only ’ombres. But John was speaking while my mind wandered. My mind wanders very often these days, and so too when I was younger. They say that professors are absentminded. Well, I was a professor from the age of twenty-seven, and my mind was wandering then. Now, my memory wanders. And this early evening, for we have been here for several hours at least, I indulged my other habit. Dozing off. While reading. While drinking. Eating. And once a woman, who shall in the circumstances, remain nameless, accused me to my face, that I had dozed off while making love. I was too embarrassed to ask her if she had heard this from one of her friends, or if I had been in the unhappy thighs of a censuring love, when I dozed off. If decorum and propriety had not buckled me, I would have told her that it was my peaceful appreciation of her love that caused me to savor its passion and recover from its exhaustion by taking that nose-dive of a doze.
There Are No Elders Page 14