I returned to the capital a short while later. The place was in turmoil. I was in my small apartment near Fort Rupert when I heard Alleyne making an announcement on the radio:
‘It must be clearly understood that the People’s Revolutionary Army and the Armed Forces as a whole will tolerate absolutely no manifestation whatsoever of counter-revolution.’
The next day I left my apartment to buy plantain from the market. There was a hubbub in the street and I turned a corner to find myself confronted by an enormous crowd of excited people who had managed to release their much-loved prime minister. There was a general sense of jubilation. I caught a glimpse of his smiling bearded face as he was swept along by the crowd. Microphones had already been set up for him to speak at Market Square. Then there was a sudden change of plan and he and the clamorous crowd turned and headed for the army headquarters at Fort Rupert. Everyone seemed good-humoured but determined. In the throng I spotted my friend Maeva bouncing along in her lime-green shorts and yellow t-shirt:
‘We gat ‘im free. Freedom!’ she yelled at me in triumph, flinging her arms in the air and waving them about.
I went back home intending to come out later and see what was happening.
It must have been just about then that Alleyne Devon and other army officers, who were in another barracks, heard of the prime minister’s release. It was said that Alleyne shouted angrily to his troops that the newly freed prime minister had betrayed the masses. Two armoured vehicles and a truck were dispatched with instructions to recover possession of the army headquarters at Fort Rupert which had been taken over by the crowd.
From my flat I could hear ‘Pop pop popopopopop’. Gunfire. Then, about ten minutes later, more shots. Popop. Pop pop popopopop. I thought people were firing off rifles to celebrate the prime minister’s release. Fifteen minutes later there was a frantic banging on my front door. It was Maeva, the friend whom I had just left in the crowd:
‘Murder!’ she was shouting. ‘Murder. Quick. Quick. Eva. Help. Open the door.’
I opened the door reluctantly. She was panting. Her lime-green shorts had been torn when she scaled a railing.
‘Dem a dead.’
The news had ricocheted through the crowd. People scattered in panic. The prime minister, who minutes before had been laughing with the crowd of liberators, along with his pregnant girlfriend, two trade union leaders and three other supporters, lay slaughtered in the stone compound which ran with blood. The killings lasted no more than three minutes. Massacres do not always take long.
A few days after the massacre the Americans invaded in Operation Urgent Fury. Alleyne and other members of the Central Committee were detained in metal containers from the docks. The seismic shock of the American invasion concussed the island. A friend hurried to my apartment and warned me to leave.
‘Get out while you can. The Americans are arresting people who supported the government. They’ve killed some of the Cubans who put up a resistance.’
At the airport I sat with other would-be passengers on the dried brown grass outside. Five heavily armed American soldiers trained guns on us. After a while an American jeep drove up. Two U.S. army majors got out with three islanders. They walked among us trying to identify anyone connected to the revolutionary government. Five men were manhandled into the jeep. The rest of us were allowed to board the plane.
*
This was my first return to the island since then. In the morning I called a taxi.
‘Richmond Hill prison, please.’
The taxi driver looked at me with dislike. He had guessed immediately that I was going to visit one of the long-term political prisoners. Even after all this time they were hated. A few minutes after we left the hotel he swerved and took an unnecessary detour so that we passed Fort Rupert.
‘That’s where our Prime Minister was executed.’ His face burned with rage. ‘Dey shoulda hang dem people.’
The taxi began the long zig-zagging ride up the steep mountain slowing down at hairpin bends. Morne Jaloux. The sad road sign looked down at us from a bend in the road. Below I could see the harbour and the huge American luxury liner now heading towards the horizon slowly like a dream.
A guard stopped us at the prison’s main entrance which consisted of nothing more than a tubular metal framed gate criss-crossed with chicken wire.
‘I have an appointment with the Commissioner.’
I was too nervous to use Alleyne’s name in the face of the taxi driver’s fury.
The guard nodded and allowed the gate to swing open. I was dropped off outside a single-storey office. I stated my business and the woman behind the desk asked me to wait outside. I sat on a bench in the brilliant sunshine.
After I had left the island twenty-five years earlier, I tried to follow the chaotic trial from abroad. The tribunal was funded by the United States. One witness testified that Alleyne had been in Fort Frederick barracks when the prime minister was freed; that he had accused the prime minister of spreading vicious rumours against the Central Committee and said that the prime minister was supported by counter-revolutionaries in league with American big business. He had persuaded the soldiers that these elements must be liquidated to preserve the revolution and save the people of the island. The witness said that Alleyne then shouted ‘Long Live the Central Committee. Long live the revolution. The Central Committee orders.’ And the soldiers shouted back ‘We obey. We obey.’
A second witness denied all this saying that the first witness was already under arrest at the time and seated on a tea-chest and had not been in a position to see or hear any such goings on. This second witness stated that everyone was in a state of total paralysis because the Central Committee was demoralised and ineffective.
There followed weeks of contradictory and confused testimonies.
Then came the death sentences. I heard that Alleyne was on death row alongside thirteen of the others waiting to be hanged within a day or so. I tried to telephone Zenia. The phone was disconnected. The gallows were ready and two other executioners had been brought in from outside the island because of the numbers involved. Then I heard that the sentences had been commuted to life imprisonment. Alleyne had been in jail for the last twenty-five years.
A guard was tapping me on the shoulder and pointing towards the doors of the prison visiting room up a narrow lane. That morning there were only two visitors. There was a poorly dressed, haggard woman who walked haltingly up the incline carrying two water coconuts for her son. I followed her.
The visiting room was large, concrete and airy with a wooden ceiling that sloped down on either side from a main beam like the upturned hull of a great boat. Two relaxed prison officers were re-arranging the long tables like school desks and placing benches on either side of them. When they had finished we were called over to have our names written down in a book. The woman offered up her two green water coconuts for inspection and I showed them a book I had brought for Alleyne. Realising at the last moment that I should bring something and not really knowing what he might like, I had bought a copy of Conrad’s Lord Jim at the airport, forgetting that it was about a man who in haste makes a disastrous decision.
Two men entered from the other side of the hall wearing dark blue denim prison garb. For a moment I was confused. Alleyne Devon had been a young man when I last saw him and so for a minute I looked over at the younger man. But I gradually recognised Alleyne in the middle-aged man who was looking in my direction. His closely cropped hair was now white and his features heavier and lined. But it was him.
We acknowledged each other cautiously and sat down on opposite sides of a table whose polished top was etched and scored with age.
‘Hello Alleyne. I wasn’t sure that you would remember me. Do you?’
He ran his hand over his forehead. It was a gesture I remembered.
‘I think so. No. I’m sorry. I’m not sure that I do.’
I reminded him of my brief stay at his house; how we had inspected the bomb damage toget
her; the long wrangling political debates at night; the prime minister’s visit to the guest house. At the mention of the prime minister his face closed.
‘Something is beginning to come back. It was all such a long time ago. But I do now remember you.’
We talked about what he had been doing. He filled in some of the gaps.
‘You know, I have been studying divinity. I have a B.A. external degree from London University. I was a staunch Methodist as a youngster. I have gone back to my religious roots.’
It made sense somehow, the youthful religious fervour turning into revolutionary political zeal. As he talked, I recognised that the man I had known was still a man who desired to transform the world. The revolution that was his ideal had been so perfect, so blazingly pure and inviolable and such a salvation for the poorest people of his island that he was willing to do anything to sustain it. Even, as seemed to be the case, murder.
‘I still have my political beliefs,’ he said in a low voice. ‘I have not lost those. But I am an ordained minister now. I work with the drug-addicted and the disadvantaged in here. I encountered God in this prison. My salvation. I’ve sung my Redemption Song, the song of atonement. I try to help people.’
The guards talked quietly in a corner of the room. He went on:
‘I have learnt so much in this place. I am almost grateful for the opportunity to have learned so much. But when I get out, I won’t be able to stay on the island.’ There was regret in his voice. He knew the islanders hated him. There had been threats of lynching. ‘Perhaps I can go to Africa.’
There was a familiar gleam in his eye, a yearning to use what was left of his life to make a difference somewhere. It was the old fervour, banked down, waiting to re-ignite.
A block on my tongue made me unable to ask the question ‘Did you order the killings?’
As if my thoughts were written on my face, he looked directly at me and said: ‘I owe a debt to humanity.’
Was that a confession? The sunlight caught the whitened hair at his temples.
One of the guards came over and tapped his watch showing that it was time for the visit to finish. Alleyne asked me for a pen.
‘Please get in touch with Zenia. I’m sure she’d like to hear from you.’
He scribbled her telephone number on the piece of paper I handed him.
‘I’ll try. I’m leaving this afternoon.’
He stood up. There was a sort of buoyancy about him now as if he were full of air and might be able to fly to Africa like Macandal. The visit had refreshed him. He looked like a plant after light rain, ready to put out fresh shoots and buds. We shook hands across the table. He said goodbye and walked out of the visiting room studying the copy of Lord Jim I had given him. He did not look back.
On the way back down the hill the thump of reggae music echoed across the valley. The small wooden dwellings perched on the hillsides looked unkempt and dejected, lost and disillusioned. It felt like a murdered island.
Back at the hotel I just had time to telephone Zenia before heading for the airport. She remembered me straight away and asked:
‘How did you manage to get a visit?’
‘I just telephoned yesterday and asked to speak to the Commissioner.’
She sucked her teeth:
‘You were lucky. It’s not always so easy. People are often refused. It’s quite arbitrary. Sometimes the authorities are terrible.’
She came to the airport and we talked a little about her life and her daughter who was now sitting her exams at college. The result of another appeal was due any day.
‘If Alleyne is released we plan to go to Mali and start a new life there. We can’t stay here. You know he is an ordained minister now. They have several Methodist missionary outposts in Mali. Alleyne is learning to speak French.’ She sat with her hands in her lap, both resigned and hopeful.
And then I said out of the blue: ‘I always remember you saying you were full of revolutionary spirit. We all were. What happened?
There was a long pause before Zenia answered, ‘I don’t know. It was an epidemic.’
She waved goodbye as I went through the departures gate. An hour and twenty minutes later my plane was rising through the air leaving the island behind me.
I telephoned her again to congratulate them when I heard that the appeal had been successful.
About four years later an article in the newspaper caught my attention. A Methodist mission in Mali, somewhere north of the River Niger, had been under threat from a small group of Islamic militants. In a pre-emptive attempt to safeguard his Christian mission and thwart any attack, the minister had shot the militants dead. The minister had since disappeared and was thought to be somewhere in the bush outside Timbuktu.
A BRIGHT YELLOW BAG
Gina Fiore thanked the assistant who ushered her into the brightly lit clinical side room on the second floor of Edinburgh’s Royal Infirmary. The window faced on to a brick wall. Next to the examination bed stood a gleaming instrument trolley behind which was a small sink. There was a chair available but it seemed somehow wrong to sit down.
After a few minutes a white-coated junior doctor let himself into the room and shook her hand. His first impression was of a thin anxious girl in her twenties with a slightly crooked smile, her blonde hair twisted into a top-knot. There was an awkward pause before the doctor spoke.
‘We do apologize for everything that’s happened. There are some X-rays here if you would like to see them. They were part of the research. I take it you speak English?’
‘Yes. Thank you.’ She was not sure she wanted to see the X-rays.
The doctor slotted an X-ray plate into the cabinet hanging on the wall and flicked the light switch.
Set against the cosmic blackness of the X-ray plate, the exposed brain resembled the trans-section of a halved white cauliflower, the stalk rising through the centre and branching off into florets. The doctor pointed out a patch of what looked like dark filmy webbing:
‘The patch that intrudes into the brain here is behind the occipital lobe near the reticular formation. That is where an operation was performed. We think that took place several years before your mother was . . .’
‘In prison.’ She finished the sentence for him and twisted her blue silk scarf around the straps of her handbag.
‘Yes.’
‘It was an operation to remove a tumour, wasn’t it? That’s what I was told.’
‘No. It wasn’t a tumour. It was an aneurism. Look. Here is the tiny capillary clamp.’
This was confusing. She had always been told that her mother had suffered a brain tumour. The prison authorities wanted to perform a second operation. Her mother, who had been convicted of various bombings and an attempted kidnap, did not trust the authorities and had refused permission. She was found hanging in her cell shortly afterwards. Her fellow activists remained convinced that she had been murdered by the Italian state. It was a time of political upheaval, of wild rumour and suspicion. The authorities maintained it was suicide.
After the court case and the death, Gina’s father had fled from Milan to Padova with his young daughter. There he lived in an apartment on the Via Orsovo working as a teaching assistant and raising his shy wispy child as best he could. When she was little he told her that her mother was with the angels. When she was older he told her that her mother had been on the side of the angels. Occasionally Gina sneaked a look in the bureau drawer at the black and white press clippings which showed her mother looking grim and intense and not like an angel at all. When she was seventeen her father died and Gina found work with a local estate agent, enjoying the routine and security of office life. Like many children of radicals, Gina showed no interest in politics.
Then one day while she was sitting in the kitchen eating breakfast, a letter from Edinburgh arrived.
In a revelation embarrassing to both the British and Italian authorities it disclosed that, after her death in the San Vittore women’s jail, her mother’s brain ha
d been lifted from the cranium without authorization. The brain had been sent to Edinburgh University for a joint research project. The professor of neuropathology in charge of the original research had been looking for ‘terrorist’ pathology but after several years had found nothing. When he retired, a psychiatrist and another doctor had undertaken some further research, comparing the brain with those of serial killers. Nothing significant was found there either. The research had been put to one side and then forgotten. However, after a scandal and public outcry in England where a hospital had kept body parts without permission, various institutions looked into their laboratory archives and Gina’s mother’s remains came to light. Once the ethical committee of the university had taken the decision to return the brain a letter of apology had been sent to the Fiore family. It included a request for the remains to be collected.
Gina took leave from work without explaining why. She arrived in Edinburgh, where the brain remained in a jar of formaldehyde, with only a vague idea of what to do with it, but she thought she should have it interred with the rest of her mother’s remains in Italy.
‘Do I need to sign anything?’ she enquired.
‘Er . . . I don’t think so. I haven’t got anything for you to sign anyway.’
The doctor stood on a chair and took the brain from the top shelf of a cupboard. The jar was a large standard preserving jar. He handed it over. Gina took hold of it carefully with both hands. The grey mass floated in the moving liquid.
‘Do you want the X-rays?
‘No thank you.’
‘Do you need a carrier bag or anything?’ He asked. ‘I’ll see if I can find one of our lab assistants.’
She sat there looking out of the window at the brick wall outside, while he went to fetch someone. After about eight minutes he re-appeared with a toothy lad in green overalls carrying a large bright yellow industrial plastic bag.
‘This is Dave. You can put the jar in that bag. Dave will show you the way out.’
The Master of Chaos Page 14