The Frequency of Magic E-Book

Anthony Joseph

• Herausgeber: Peepal Tree Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2019

Seitenzahl: 511

Beschreibung

Raphael earns his living as a butcher in a hillside village in rural Trinidad. He is also a would-be author, but there have been so many distractions to the novel he has been writing for forty-one years that many of the characters have lost patience and gone off to do their own thing. But somehow, miraculously, the novel, as Raphael has planned it in one hundred chapters of a thousand words, seems to write itself... Time in this richly ambitious and multi-levelled novel is both circular and simultaneous, but moving, as Raphael ages, towards a sense of dissolution both of persons and of the culture of the village. But if there is a tragic realism about the passage of time, there is also a constant aliveness in the novel's love affair with the language of Creole Trinidad with its poetic inventiveness and wit, with the improvisatory sounds of jazz and the undimmed urge of the villagers to create meaning in their lives. Above all, there is Raphael's belief that in the making of his fiction, however messy and disobedient its materials, art can both challenge the destructive passage of time and make us see reality afresh.

Leseprobe

ANTHONY JOSEPH

THE FREQUENCY OF MAGIC

1

Raphael had been writing a novel for forty-one years. On a cedar table in his house of water and his house of chairs, amongst ornaments, trinkets and books, lay his papers. But distractions were plentiful. The bull cow would ramble, the sour cherry tree would bear fruit, the madman would jump, the ravine would need to be cleaned. So he wrote in the latrine, away from the dissonance of the Million Hills, secluded in the stink of shit, amidst the deep hurling scent of ammonia and the banks of dank moss where women stooped to leggo water. Moan Papa, moan, and write your book. But bugs, bees and red ants want to bite the man ankle, the drake duck grunts, the Deacon rings the bell in the church hid in the bush, a phone keeps ringing in the falling down house, the mongoose chases the hairy snake, the Baptist mother delays her thanksgiving service to cuss somebody upside down. So even in the shit-house things came to inveigle and addle the old man’s brain, to distract him from the seriousness of his craft. After forty-one years, the novel’s characters were understandably restless. Some were elderly, others were dead. Some, like Vince and Giveway, who as boys would pitch marbles in the riverbeds of the imagined city, had simply faded into spaces between words. Ramdass went to shoplift, got caught and heart attacked right there in the shop when police hold him. Tom Denny, a turnkey, got fired for pushing weed, and Luke, who Raphael put in a surreal, Caribbean western, get damn vex one day and ride out like a thief, with his nemesis, the Great Bandit riding close behind.

Raphael was a butcher. He lived alone, high in the Million Hills, past the wooden nursing home and the Credit Union. From there the island spread out below. There was a boy, a relative from a village on the flat lands beneath the hill, who was learning to blow a flute he had carved himself from grief and bamboo. He wore short khaki pants, had a copper-scented head, was awkward and reticent, but he would sit with Raphael on the veranda, silently overlooking the jungles of the rainforest and the deep well of hours. Beyond lay the still, dark sea, and beyond this, the edge of the known world. The maps of their world had been drawn by eminent cartographers who had underestimated the island’s size. At the fireside by night, Raphael and the boy roasted cashew beans, then they sat in silence. Soon this boy too would grow and spin from the old man’s hand, to leave the hill, to blow and to write his own life. Ella even, Deacon’s daughter, whom Raphael had known as a girl among the lilies and rills which ran from the higher parts of the hill, sought her ambition elsewhere – the book, like the island, was too small for her dreams. So between the page and the turning, she too left the book at the foot of the Million Hills. Raphael remained in his room, rubbing bay rum on his knees, writing and rewriting the same movements, then, months later, the concluding sentences of some great chapter.

Raphael told the boy tales of hunting in the hills, of working on cargo ships as a young sailor, and how, every morning, he would rise and fire a rum to start the day, how then he was handsome like a bitch. His working papers were tattered palimpsests, they had been written on over and over again, the original text hidden within the ink and flutter. Sometimes, Raphael would read to the boy from his novel, though the boy could not understand how its multiple stories could occur simultaneously. But the characters, in their impatience, broke needles under Raphael’s fingernails, they penetrated his brain with complaints. Then his wife died. Cancer tore into the sponges of her lungs; tumorous polyps filled them, bursting like grapes in a supermarket, where, as a young man, Raphael once had a summer job and deliberately broke grapes as he packed customer’s bags. In his white shirt and soft pants, this was his protest against the engines of commerce. One day, when hunger held him, he stole a tin of Viennese sausages. His crime was witnessed by a cashier who told, and the manager, Mr Gary, called Raphael up to his office and fired him by saying: ‘Raf boy, you know what have to happen now, right?’

Raphael built himself a tough chapel to write in. He built the soakaway first and then the latrine, where the galvanise stuck like roots into the bug-ridden mud. His notebook was held open on his knees while flies buzzed around his heels and head like constellations. But the rain beat him to print: a vehicle skidded and overturned on a rugged Tobago road; the minister was caught masturbating on a rock behind the school; the Pie Man was strangled with a shoelace till candle wax drip out his nose; a parrot cussed and was arrested and charged; the lizard hid in the malomay bush; in his neighbour’s house black instruments for breaking hymens were found; the mad woman turned into a blackbird and fell burning from the power line; the one-eyed fish went totally deaf. The book would overwhelm him at times. It wouldn’t listen. The characters had became unruly, ungrateful, deceitful; bottle break, table turn over. Then fragmentation of the text and his leaking eye; at night by paraffin lamplight, people fighting, cussing, some grinning like crapaud when the man trying to write; is like the damn book was writing him. But when he spoke about the book, even Mr Crapaud would come and sit down on big stone to hear him talk. It was to be an important book. Raphael had put all his belly and his stones into it. It would be – sui generis – his legacy. It was called The Frequency of Magic, each chapter was precisely one thousand words long.

2

Luke had been sent to buy a tin of sardines and six hops bread in the Chinese snackette on Henry Street, and there to meet the printer, Carlos Wong, whose role was to point Luke further north into the plot’s trajectory. But instead, and contrary to Raphael’s design, Luke took a Red Band Maxi Taxi in town with the man money and headed east and once there he walked among the backroads of the mythic and found himself in The House of Smoke. The House of Smoke stood on the low bank of the Tacarigua River, among fields of rabbit grass and bamboo. The river bank slippery. Tadpoles swam in the water’s oily blackness, and toiled like warriors to scale the steep incline. The river itself was still brisk and earnest as an old woman hurrying from hill to town to sell starch mangoes in Tunapuna market, water in her knee, basket on her head. The water was the same water that had run down from memory string, long seated in the land since it divide from mainland, and it running still.

The House of Smoke was home to seven spirits. Each spoke a different language, though in fact such soundings could hardly be called languages. They were vernaculars, basilects, aspects of meaning, fragments of speech. And yet each spirit understood the other. Luke was seated at the kitchen table in The House of Smoke. He had left Raphael half asleep in that corrugated shithouse high up in Million Hills, writing them both into ambition. But Raphael refused to read the one thousand words he wrote each day – not till the big book had come to an end, and so he could never know what was going on behind his back, in previous pages, or that Luke had gone quite Tacarigua. In the next scene, Luke was supposed to ride his bicycle through the city with a bale of cloth on his shoulder, and having again met the mentor/printer Wong, would pedal north into danger, for a confrontation between fish and bread, or big stone and head. But Luke refused to be led, or to be written into yet another scene in which he was to cross a river on a horse or make love to the sheriff’s hirsute daughter. Instead, he waited until the old man bent his head in supplication to sleep, and then, skidding off his bicycle, he flung an arm upon the sky-hook and leapt. And where he land? He land on Henry Street, with four dollars in coins wrapped in a copybook page in his pocket, on which was written: ‘One tin of sardine, buy six hops bread.’

The House of Smoke had once been an orphanage, and in this shadowless kingdom of grief milk and brackish water, in which he was seeking a story to act his life in, Luke felt exposed and vulnerable, alone in these charred rooms, where dirty light bled through the cobwebbed window above the kitchen sink. But here, beyond Raphael’s pen, Luke could finally begin to see past the fictive eye. He found a chamber hid under the cold rooms of the House of Smoke, a chamber which the children had built to hide or suffocate tears in. They imagined that one day this tunnel would pass from orphanage to paradise, that they would leap through to the other side, away from the cold pigtail and split-pea soup, and the lash, and the house of bondage the orphanage truly was. It was in this pursuit that many became stuck and suffered asphyxia, gasp and beating up for breath under the earth. Once the mark bust, and the tunnel was revealed, several orphans were bitten and killed by the coral snakes the staff sent in there to discourage escape. And whoever they catch in there get beat bad, not nice like last time, but cruel, unusual. Who died? Harry died, Nap died, then Pharoah, the big red-skinned boy with the lisp and the size twelve feet, who used to sing bass in the orphanage choir. Pharoah had resisted being bent, he would not grind spectacular in the corner after being punished for jocking his prick. He was wild and impetuous, but dumb like a bobolee. Fellas used to take turns to fight him like bear.

Eventually the day arrived when Pharoah outgrew his small room and, desperate for freedom, he broke the windows of the dorm while the children jumped on the their beds and cheered as he threw himself out of the suffering house to the hard ground beside the dasheen stream. But he did not run. Pharoah could not bear to be torn away from that prison, even as the doors were flung open. His chest got hot with fear. But let them try to carry him back, let them only put their nasty hands on him and he will box in their breastbones. They stabbed him with needles and he roared, then wept like a mother with cancer, waiting fearful in an airport interrogation room to be deported, in her wig and soft clothes; she know medical care better in metropolis, as opposed to jungle. Pharoah beat upon their jaws with his fists. He kneed them in their sediments. The children watched from the windows to see how Pharoah would die. He turned like a bull to the fighter’s cape, bent his head and blew out blood. They killed Pharaoh, touched with madness and etheric sight, and they killed him for nothing. When the children saw this they set fire to the dormitory and many died, burnt to ash and black bone in that stuttering death of smoke. So this was The House of Smoke, this smoke of children burning into air. Luke had been seeking solace here, but felt the engines of the house, its agonies, its desultory conspiracy of despair. Pharoah was dead and buried in the well behind The House of Smoke, which now stood deserted, as a map of the city of glass.

3

Ella, an actor, is trying on shoes in a store in an arcade on Fulton Street. She is careful not to disturb her past, or to twist her heel. She moves beyond the perimeters of the page on which she is written to a side-street cafe with sandalwood burning, dark wooden plates, red aprons, mussel husks, red wine and kemetic ornaments on the wall. Her memory is a canopy of gospel above marvellous trees. She remembers her beloved father in that house of ploughs in the country; barebacked in the green guava field; in Mt Garnett with a can of kerosene, setting traps of fire; in Enterprise Village, depending on his misfortunes for self-respect; in cold New York building a black Baptist ministry, flinging wood and beast like sorrow self. She remembers her mother the dancer, whose eyes she stole. Her sister who married a merman.

That night she moves above the escarpments, apartments and elevations of the city, beyond verandas, vestibules and routes on the outskirts of narrative demands, away from the page and its cages of text. The streets are heavy with human vibration. She moves, pinioned by the throbbing rim of a drum, following its wavering gait upstairs to a crowded room in a downtown club where a quartet from London are playing. Not secret but black. Blacker. Shuffle, new time shuffle. She is drawn towards the sound as a moth to light, to the rim shot, to the bell of the horn. She might have told it differently. She might have said, ‘Night is a secret, a promise to keep.’ She might have said that the musician was waiting for her at the bar, in his narrow black trousers, dashiki and beads, that he recognised her when she touched him. She might have said he reminded her of a sailor, or that his sound reminded her of the bell ringing at a funeral, flung from a chapel high on a hill, where the cortege has gathered to throw spices and sacrifices into the sea below. His horn was a breathing thing; air hissed out of it. She watches him blow, and following the tapering trail of the melody he probes, falls into the pool of its destination and deepest note. The floor creaks like a ship’s deck when the rhythm kicks, and Ella throws her head back and sways to the propulsive ostinato of the bass. She imagines sea salt in the musician’s kiss, imagines his eyes as ancient and vast, his gaze as a healing spell, his tongue as a serpent creeping beneath a bench where hogs are slaughtered. He has fought the demon in a room full of spiders. His band swings hard, releasing sound in chambers of excess. They live for applause, crescendos; they get high and fall. The saxophonist stands at the front, swinging his horn like a pendulum, he blows as if tied to a mast in a hurricane. After the band has descended, it is written that Ella and the musician engage in their initial encounter.

She has spent the night in his room on Broadway but will not stay; she leaves in the small hours. The street seems tilted. Burnt oil scent. Sulphur, black water runs in the culverts. A few streets away, a body swings in a basement, dead from exile from the neck down. Somebody Caribbean, somebody so weak they want pillars of nostalgia to brace on, or a bridge to return to regions where water rolls under islands. In the lilt of light, she notices her shoes; they are stained with ashes and fruit. A man is standing in the shadowed doorway of a Chinese takeaway. He wears a long black gown, sultan slippers tapered to a point; the anvil of his beard curls back. He is restless in his skin, speaks to himself then answers. Each gesture of his wrist, beneath the cuffs of his sleeves, occurs in a dark cave of bone. His hot teeth boil in his head. His whisper is a prayer of seduction. His mouth unfolds with the sound of a market, deep east in an island, where fishermen hoist their catch with pulleys, hand over hand. The market is noisy. It is Saturday, a child rides between the stalls; his bicycle bell rings like the knell of certain death. An Indian woman is killing a rooster. Another has laid white sweets on a table. The jewellers’ arcade displays ferocious silver, rings and pendants carved from fetish to poison wounds. A boy with a barrel on his back is selling rose water.

At times, one landscape veers into another; familiar locations inhabit alternate spaces, as her world is written into colour and form. Along alleys, the great boulevards – electric air and the sky above – walking west along roads where the rain has been, Ella sees lovers in alcoves, leaning against walls. She needs to rest. Her body relinquishes the will to carry her. A streetlight flickers, perforates the dim morning. A middle-aged black woman is leaning through smoke, fingering the cool air. Another cleans her teeth with the nail of her finger, abandoned from another scene or chapter. She spits and closes her window. The swings are motionless in the park, the playground quiet; the benches are wet with rain. Each bead of water reflects the light of the moon. The sea rolls and roars against the sides of the foundry on the corner of some half-remembered nation. A tree covers the bench; the iron fence is scented with brass and the resonance of children; the playing field is drenched in moonlight and mystery, darkness hovering above the earth like an ethereal shawl. There, in the full span of night, on the bench that is as cold as an abandoned altar where a goblet has spilled, Ella sits and counts the stars, relives the encounter with the saxophonist, sings wordlessly, like an apparition, like a plea. His mouth is still upon her. She listens, but will not wait to be written.

4

Raphael had been writing each night into morning, and still the book wouldn’t done. It keep circling, swerving; the plot won’t drive straight; it insist on tacking back and sideways and, meanwhile, people inside the book getting damn vex and restless. One by one they start going about their own business. These people have lives. Fellas want to ride; women want to make money. They wait out their volition and getting old; they want action before they die in some glad man plot, or let them fling grip upon the skyhook and jump free to roam into desert, or immigrantly into metropolises with tourist camera around their necks to deceive, because they not coming back, once they done say goodbye to everybody in the village. Raphael, writing forward and never reading back, remain unaware of what happening behind him in pages past. He want them to wait until he finish the whole text, like if everything he write is elegant, fine and permanent. But not so. Things he write into existence disappear when he bend back in the book to ameliorate or elaborate. Fellas leave bobolee in bed with cigarette in their mouth to fool him; some just disappear and others change name or how they appear – mirror front posing in dashiki or leather underwear. The book want to right itself vertical, simultaneous and liminal, perpetually becoming something else. But is too late to stop now.

One morning, peeping from his bedroom window, Raphael sees his cousin Belinda bathing with bucket and cup in the galvanised bathroom in the yard further down the hill, and he has to turn away, to blink and change the scene, to be blind to that madness or the world would end. Belinda wraps herself in a white towel and goes up to her bedroom to masturbate, thinking how she should have done that before, not after bathing, and get sweat up again, but a vibration was passing and she catch it. She remember some old man back she break when she mount him upon that spring bed and her blood get hot. Afterwards, she drinks black coffee, leaning on the swinging kitchen door, gazing upon the hill, pondering such things as why the little gully between the yards have just soap froth and white rice and yet smelling so bad, but how some brown water going down between plum and pommecythere trees, and yet the mammy apple so full and sweet. She raises her cup to Raphael. ‘Morning,’ she smiles. Raphael raises his hand. She shuffles to her housework, hurrying to wash her white clothes in a bucket, to throw the water downhill to meet the narrow drain that runs alongside the road, the road where later she waits for a taxi to take her to work. She has been a cleaner in the Credit Union for sixteen years. That morning, sweeping between the queue, she hears two women talking:

: I wake up and one headache, just so, I don’t know…

: Umm hmm, you must been thinking too much.

: But is sleep I was sleeping, I wasn’t thinking.

: What good for sleep?

: A lil’ rosemary, a slice of aloes; ginger good for sleep.

: I sell the house. Is $14,000 I have in this bag.

There are rooms in his house that Raphael has not opened, doors which must remain shut. When he returns from working in the butchering pen late that afternoon, he sees cars parked on the leaning lawn, against the hibiscus fence between his and his cousin Moses’ yard. Creole food steams in huge iron pots, liquor on plastic tables. The yard is heavy with distant cousins and uncles. DJ Champ has one turntable and one speaker-box to boom dub-wax and roots rockers to the hills. Raphael goes to his room to write, to remember his own mother who lived in the house across the valley, the house his brother Bain lives in now. He recalls how one day, as a young man, he climbed over rooftops and could not find a way down. Down was a drop and sudden death into yards guarded by Creole Dobermen. It was Sunday, overcast and melancholic; the light lay old and yellow upon the grass. He knew each route would lead away from the village and further into corridors, into white-walled spaces, chrome balustrades around cane fields, until he became lost on the edge of oil refineries. He spent that evening in the thorn bush of an elegant spinster who had been torn out from the machines of academia. Below them, a narrow path led to the sea. Acrophobic since the age of nine, he climbed down along the side of a wall, blinking hard into fear, until he was among others transversing similar routes, a congregation crisscrossing the road and the field, away from the hurting house he would no longer suffer in.

He is still writing. The book of hours and of days, the book of memory and of forgetting, the book of salt and of water, the book of the Baptist moan, the book of Luke and the Great Bandit, of the actor and the saxophonist. To tell it further: after his madam died, Raphael was arrested up the islands for smoking hard weed in church. He escaped from jail in St Vincent, and bribed a fisherman to skank and carry him among the Grenadines, past seamount and sea volcano, to arrive again in the land where his navel string bury. There he built his home up the Million Hills, where his kin all settled, where after their roam and reach, beyond their shorthand ambition and dictation lessons, they all found their way back to the squatters shacks, to primitive living, the bush cut back for the new road, a promise still coming. Even Belinda had ambition once, though it was just to wear pencil skirt and work in some air-conditioned office in town, but that could never happen – once man start climbing into her life.

5

Luke had now left Tacarigua, the orphanage and the village on the edge of the city of glass. He had withstood the razor-bladed kiss of death, the math of allometry, the deceit of the scarecrow’s tongue. He had dodged spear tips carved from lizard heads, and the efforts of Raphael to portray him as possessing the basic causality of a glad man, or worse, as some tragic imp or protagonist who had lost his way home. He had braced himself against a pillar for invisibility, then, while Raphael slept, he had leapt from the house of stilts into a barrel of water to escape, when he had been given clear paths and requirements. But this page was not turned back to face the past, but turned forward into trackless narrative bush. Poor Luke rambled and ambled across the elbows of the land. He travelled long by the riverside into dark woods and sepulchres of bone, he heard bodiless blues chanted down like rain from hilltop spiritualist temples, but saw no evidence of physical presence there, and he moved on, until the forest gave way to the grassland and the grasses to salt and the salt to dried quagmires of mud and caliche rock, until he arrived at the gates of the Great Bandit’s lair, many miles into the heart of the desert.1 Luke had cried out like Elijah in the desert, but no ravens brought him bread; only the vultures heard his cry; they had seen the splayed flesh on his arms where the sun’s blade had gashed deep wounds, where his perspiration dried to piss funk ammonia in the viscose lining of his coat. Carrion crow, too, had heard the bellow of his breath, had heard his sinner’s prayer, but they at least were compassionate and would not jook out his eyes; they let him live, to suffer. Luke stood at the gates, at least twenty-feet high, with wire stretched taut from corrugated steel to fence around the Bandit’s estate, with stone pillars, ancient like those upon entering Wallerfield, remnants of war, deep in wild island countryside. Luke have to tiptoe and stretch high, high-high to reach up to shake the bell, and when it strung, it bong, and rung far into the distance. Eventually, after five days, the sound reach the bell on the veranda of the Great Bandit’s lair, where sun lash the big man smoking his uncut sinsemilla in a crocus hammock swung across his porch. The big man naked; his drawers are drying on a line. Those who had seen him said he sometimes wore a waistcoat emblazoned with the iconography of Western movies, that the brim of his ten gallon hat was made from stingray skin. Though wide, the hat could not hope to overlap the bulk of him. The Bandit hears the bell and rides his horse out for four casual days before he reaches the estate gates. He finds Luke lying there, sandblast and dreaming that the bead-black of his etheric sight could see through big books and feminine girdles. He had faded behind a pillar for shade when the villain rode up. He tried to rise but collapsed at the foot of the great man who must linger now awhile, till the sun rests, till the path back is shaded somewhat by clouds, and he can ride back across the sand with the young man folded across the back of his horse.

There are beasts that live in holes of the desert, like gaps in language, like holes in the plot, beasts with smoke for eyes. But who black enough to surround this fortress, the Great Bandit’s bungalow, and steal his ornaments, his gold-plated Italian pens, his leather and his silk, his solid-state dream recording equipment, his Blue Note 45s? The Bandit has drawn down thunder, he has broken paving stones, he has lifted up lifetimes of suffering and strain – and he has carried wounded men before. But this Luke must be seduced with manicou and cocorico soup, until he reveals all that he knows, all the secrets he holds of the old butcher who carved them both upon that hill, between the salt lick and the whipping blade, writing them each day into existence. The Bandit finds only one copybook page in Luke’s pocket. But he knows that Luke would remember Raphael washing his stones in the river, laughing, slaughtering cattle and sheep by day, and writing by paraffin night into morning, drinking cedar wine and easing the plot out like a drifting, abandoned boat. The Bandit know that sometimes even before writer write it, star boy know it already.

They arrive at the Bandit’s house in mid-December, twilight leaning on the bungalow roof. The bandit lays Luke down on burlap, in a corner of his kitchen, while he makes him a bed between the buckets and pans, between his stove and his ice box filled with slivers of flesh – fish and dried liver. He will wait for the protagonist to wake from his painted sleep. In the meantime, he will walk into the desert, perch in a guava tree like a parrot and smoke his weed. Sudden images tear at the Bandit’s brain, the image of the butcher’s writing hand, the desk facing east, the daggers of verbs and conjunctions, the impasto processes of Raphael’s prose. He study the page he found in Luke’s pocket, but he could not decipher the old man’s hand besides hops bread and sardine. He could not know how he himself would come to be written, or whether and how he would die. He was as hopelessly helpless as the engineer they sent the band from Paris who could not mix sound. Grapple and bleep, and the band grumble; the bass man come down from the stage and rap hard in the sound boy ear: ‘Turn that damn noise down or I’ll unplug every socket it have in here.’ The sound boy start turning one set of knob but the music still feeding back.

1. The reader may ask, ‘Why should Luke be arriving at the bungalow of his nemesis?’ The answer is that Raphael had drafted plans for him before he escaped the pages of the text, but now Luke want to plot his own arc and archeology. Luke feel he put himself there, but you can’t follow people if it only have one place to go. It have nowhere else for Luke to reach; is only desert there.

6

When he allowed himself to be photographed by his grand nephews and nieces, who had only known those metropolises of the North, Raphael would wear bright blue sunglasses and pose against a derelict Cortina and the vegetation on the slow slope beside the ravine that ran down from ruins of cocoa empires, among blushing rivers and riversides. The sun would sink into the channels of his face; his grin would slack, his skin would pinch and clinch and crevice would form like pitch-pine grain. He would pose his smile until his jaw went rigid and locked, then he would have to fix his face again. He was old; he could not endure airplane rides or gamble with his pension. He would not peel back his wood skin too far, and was content now, at his age, to blaze and butcher swine in his backyard slaughtery, to carry go market with a van back full of meat, and at night to write in the spidery gait of a madman.

The boy with the bone flute, though, was seeking a passage away from the island. He sat and plotted escape at Raphael’s knee. But escape from the island was fraught and improbable; the queue for visas wept around Marli Street corner. Them fellas in shirt and lie held people ransom in those early mornings of nationhood, and grown men suffered humiliating defeats at those portals to materialism. Reason for visit? Holiday? Doh lie. Family in Miami? Damn lie. Your father dying in Queens? You lie. How much money in your bank account? Lie. Them fellas was smart; they know black people catching arse and want to kiss America on both cheeks. Fellas want to see skyscraper and snow, some want to run go Jersey or Atlanta or anywhere they could hide. Plenty of our best skull get bus’ up on them desks. Full women who plan their attack for weeks. Who buy big suitcase on Henry Street, fire their work and telling everybody in the village they leaving. Men who know how visa does get, didn’t get, not even single entry, much less for multiple. You laugh? Some didn’t even make it past the gate. It was not easy, unless you came with house or child, or you old, like Clary, and have business and property. Clary so could go. And you want to ride on him now, append yourself to his passport, because he could go America. And they give Clary visa but he never went. Come with a glint of ambition, your eye long, and they will jam you. You catching your arse, you working as a domestic, they stamp the date of rejection red in your passport and tell you how your ties too frail. They feel thief head would hold you when you reach in New York, seduce you from coming back, like how hard it is to leave for home from some sweet fuck at four in the morning.

The musician was not born of the bourgeois, he was not born in a house of books, or revolutionist doctrine. He did not come from long money, neither jazz, nor pipe-smoke nor professorial folk, but from dirt-poor country people who had made it on to flat land, and who carried the resonance of the earth within them, who knew herbs by name and spoke to spirits that hovered over their houses and gardens. His people were elegant. They were poor but they were clean; they were bucolic – they were invested in the land, tied to it like trees. They could not abandon their ways and they continued to cultivate manioc and barbadine in middle-class suburbs. They held wild hog feasts and danced unashamedly in urbane neighbourhoods. Their mountain ways remained and kept them whole and holy. They were wise but they did not know Merleau-Ponty or Césaire, they had not read Wynter, Carew, Lamming, Lovelace, Mackey, Glissant, Brathwaite, Linton Kwesi or C.L.R. James. They knew politician as crook, trouble man, eat up all the meat, so they vote for the same man for twenty years, a small jumbie-eye man who had cunning and guile, who grasped them in his hand like pan-stick or hard prick. They read big bibles propped upon their knees, and the Brother Mandus prayer pamphlets that came each month from England. They read Our Daily Bread, but never read Achebe or Nicolás Guillén. They read words fused to transcendent purposes, and they tied the jaws of their dead to prevent speech or the evaporation of secrets.

The old man knew the boy desired another life, away from the island, so he arranged for him to meet a long-stones and upright bass man who lived upstairs a rum shop, west of the city of citrus and copra. The boy brought his little clarinet and together they improvised wild island jazz in the old bass man’s apartment. It was a Sunday afternoon. The boy watched the city from the old bass man’s window, saw leaves, calm and drifting upon the cool breeze, then scattering in the gully below. The bassist had played in dance bands, he knew Glenn Miller and Oscar Pettiford music; he could recall a few Count Basie tunes, a few standards, but bring calypso and he playing that bass like a beast. Mighty Spoiler or Duke? He will rattle the wood and spin the bass on its heel. He had some dog-eared sheets of music, good music stored on the shelves above his bachelor bed, like letters from a long-dead friend. The bass man watched the boy with one eye fey and veined and trembling, the other marble-wide and burning. The boy could not play the horn particularly well, but he possessed that naivety and narrow mindedness that were essential in the musical life. The boy, in time of course, would improve upon his ability, he would learn the levers of his engine and, eventually, it was possible that he would climb bandstands in those far and unreal cities of sky and glass.

7

An airport in the early afternoon. Each musician carries luggage and a flight case, and they are driven to the venue to search for their sound. Backstage, they break bread and eat Gruyère, saucisson, and drink cans of iced tea. Testing his line, the saxophonist blows against all sorrow embedded in his lungs – the memory ghost of his grandfather who stripped him naked and forced him to bathe in cold water. If he resisted, was belt all round his back. Once he almost drowned. As a young man, just before he left the island, he was fired from a Chinese restaurant for stealing meat; he run home and tell his grandmother he don’t like the work. All these things get blown when he chunk out sound; notes without precedent, substance deeper than surface, notes that vibrate through the plywood chest where his stepfather, Herbert, kept his black and white swingers’ porn, in the bottom drawer, along with the Berec batteries for his silver flashlight and the passport he never used.

He pauses to break a piece of bread, to find the frequency of magic. May blackness increase. He wrings his hand. He straightens his reed. Who will find the passway, the trace and track lines up the hill to Raphael’s slaughtery? Who will he find at the end of the stave, alone in a corner of the blues dance, feet slipping and sliding? Tanty, trembling from stroke and paralysis, who still can’t lift her left hand? No charts were written, no score was recorded, no document was fixed or pinned upon his back like a bill of sale regarding such things. He wakes one morning and his hands are cut up like an unfinished wood carving, hands of cedar and splinters, hung down coy-like, despondent, tree hands, cut up like prose into poetry. Rose Hill. Million Hills. The shady groves, the vines, the parakeets among the river trees, the bamboo creaking along the perimeters of the pasture. His shadow lies flat against the wall. One Saturday, bitter with salt and sweat, he is captured on 110 film gazing out at oil ships, as if waiting for a storm to pass, for the grass to fold back upright.

One turntable was all DJ Champ had, and two big speaker engine drone for the sub, and tweeters like bees strung to sting the ear on vines above the door. Sacred-hearted Jesus, look! Mister Clarence dancing to Lord Nelson’s ‘Disco Daddy’ was the only glimpse we had of him in that elegant rotation as he flit his good foot out, with his head up, dancing, holding out his glass of Whiteways of Whimple, steady, so it don’t spill. The older women are smoking jazz cigarettes, drinking gin, gossip in the corners of their mouths.

Aunty Ingrid was young then, had plenty verve. She would stand and sing, unsolicited, with her tremulous voice, wavering between keys but driving upwards into the sweet arc of her highest note in the middle of the living room. Is Aunty Ingrid still alive, still barren, with the soft candle heart? She never had children, she lived alone in the bush. She put leg flesh stench all up in that room with the brittle rags under her bed. Who is still alive in these backroads of the mythic? Ingrid left and turned around, went back a few. Who will bury her when she finally dies, when the coast loses its battle against the suspense of the hurricane and the stinging rain? Who could remain in the hut where fishermen keep their nets and oars, their hooks and fears of drowning? One man say, ‘Sea have no branch, I eh going in.’ Another one, a Grenadian, bawl, ‘You go perish away in the riling surf. It too deep to drown in, too shallow for swimming.’

Aunty Ingrid’s house sways in the hurricane, and that night torrential rain bores a hole in the roof, and the gathering pool keeps pressing upon the ceiling, leaking. Ingrid blink to change the scene or the roof will fall in and the world will end. Ingrid say, ‘Soon every room will smell of lavender.’ But didn’t it rain? It rained across the race tracks and back, it rained upon rivers. Didn’t it rain? It rained that night but the quartet was deceptive. They played low octaves that groaned in the cavernous space beneath a railway station in the Ardèche. They blow the mournful joy of this blessed bulk, blow showers of sound and the light so heavy.

A woman at the front of the stage is holding a child, burning skin in the air, crying hot tears against the horror of a burning house. The child, not more than three, glances over the woman’s right shoulder. Ash. If not the sky, is embers glowing, sparks that blind the tractor driver’s eyes. Driven against a mud bank, the tractor overturns and dies upon the man riding it. On the wharf, the tusks of a forklift gut a stevedore, piercing him beneath his waist. His deep croon ricochets against the tax offices and warehouses, the lighthouse in shanty town and the old KH Recording studios in Sea Lots, and the Chinese rice shop, and the abattoir in Central Market. They take the stevedore to the hospital but he bleed out and was buried in Mafeking Junction. Rain, not fire quench. Rain, bucket a drop.

The musician passes through Lyon that night like a ghost with the horn on his back. He knows liberation is the essence of soul. The woman’s house is high upon a rainswept hill. She teaches ballet in the community centre. She makes tea, they exchange alibis, saliva, serums of desire. On his way back from her house that morning, he takes several photos of the landscape, of an arborists’ van, a bridge, bleak in this light, vintage cars with paint as dull as old cymbals. She watches him from her window; the motion in her body is like muscle of the endless sea.

8

Wind in the bush like the names of saints. Houses on stilts where the river runs, irascibly brown, where dirt is the fine grain of insect bone and mollusc shucks. A woman is washing her hair beneath a hibiscus tree, a candle burning for sixteen years in the ground, a navel string hidden in the roots of the orange tree. Upwards, is the house on the hill where Raphael lives and writes. His second cousin, Belinda, lives lower down. Belinda, with the broken teeth, the black-ringed eyes and breasts like long loaves of bread. She moves through the yard ebulliently.

Along the soft verge where a river once ran are the stout wooden houses of Mano the labourer and Bobot the thief. The wind flings its net of dust and porous stone, and the scent of cumin remains on the air in the morning after a wedding. The water truck comes down into the valley of silt, poised teetering on that brink and bound to tumble down the bank one day. The driver, leaning with one hand onto a calabash tree, pisses vinegar with legs bent like callipers. The villagers wait with the buckets and barrels they have brought down the slippery steps.

Raphael, whiskered like a tomcat, smiles for photographs. Bone dry, age becomes him. He moves from room to room, with skin as taut as liquorice root, and his shinbone hardened smooth. He has long dedicated himself to the big book which writes him. But Raphael was once a saga boy, too. He would bend over the engines of government buses in hi-soled mechanic boots with black oil on his hands. In those days, women wanted to mount him. But he never satisfy. He cry blood till the blood hole full up. Cuss, but the oil in his breath dry up.

In his room there is an upright bass, heaving like a fat woman who has run up several stairs. She sang, soulfully, but we never heard a thing. Not even from the next yard where a policeman stalks with tall boots, or from the house that Raphael brother Bain renovate further up the river. They say Bain mad, that Raphael writing book, but he biased, that Melchior the fisherman is who living among the people, so let him tell us what happen.

Melchior say, ‘Bain pounce the area like a flying frog and blaze up the chalwa, he rush fire, he like a scimitar blade rub with garlic, he have a one-inch punch and a length of iron, and he beating down grown men when he leggo Satan on them in Fifth Avenue junction. The iron warm and sweet where he hold it, and when he jump, the block get hot, uptight and distressed. Full men like Mikey and Caruth was liming cool, but when Bain light spark on the block, they get frighten and leap from the gully bank like ten Tarzan. Then they cuss like fire how Bain come just so and mash up the lime, how he put he nasty hand in the wappie game, how he flam his gambage, how the money men put down to gamble with get scatter in the drain. That mothercunt, Bain. Sweat on him, chew corn, people fraid him. Bain say: “I just had to bat a man in the brewery. I bat him in he face with this iron, till blood and teeth spin out. I fire the work.” Telling this gore, Bain laughing. How the foreman glasses break in his face and how the man buck and shiver. How he scramble and scrape the rancid brewery floor, where workers wearing Wellington boots whole day, for his teeth. How Pattison pick up teeth to put them back in his mouth. Bain laugh, “He spring he own water, like chicken in a Dutch pot. Go back for what? To bottle beer? To spit them lump in sugar? To hear some jackass bray and tell me I can’t smoke weed in the boiler room? How I can’t work bareback? How I late again and he docking my pay? Brother, hear my cry, I could smoke my tampi in any motherarse place I want.”

‘People say the overseer tack back; he know trouble reach. He afraid but he in front big men and he have to fight. But he not ready, he wasn’t expecting to fight that Monday morning. He need more time to think, to analyse the angle, to fix himself. All them karate move he plan to launch in situations like this – turn, break elbow, kick, twist neck, unmask and rip from the nose hole with two fingers – all these get delay. Instead he and Bain start to wrestle like dog on the dirty floor. Bain catch him with a blow and Pattison fall. He get cut beneath his navel deep, and sea cockroach and halibut fall out. Bain know how to survive on plankton and ash, how to tilt his head to swallow crack corn, how to fish with waterproof glue and how to light pitch pine in hideous rain. He know to burst carbide, to chop so it don’t heal, how to ectoplast and awe. But after he bat Pattison, somebody put aedes aegypti in his water tank and things turn ol’mas. Bain, who so tall he was a whipping blade, succumb to blues now, ground down by the realtime trajectory of life. Now only women and children fear him. He have to fish in muddy drain. Even Sugars in the weed field have no work for him, even the rabbit won’t die when he kill it – it buckle and kick till Bain hand get simple and fail. He moan, living alone in the suffering house he patch from wood and bone, jocking his prick three-four times a day, counting crapaud bleat when night come, his vibration twist, evil in his teeth like wire to burst. His brother uphill say he writing big book, and Bain wondering now if he could get a star boy role.’

9

When Luke came upon the Great Bandit that morning, he found the big man crouched over a sky-blue enamel basin in his bedroom, washing his black arse. The blue of the basin was the blue of orphanage walls, the blue of abandoned machinery on country mornings in Wallerfield, the blue of slat-roofed huts for the bull-workers in the far east of the island, the blue of the glimpses of sea between the fishermen’s huts on the way to Carenage. The Great Bandit was whistling ‘Stardust’ as he scooped the tepid water with his wash rag to splash his scounx, shaft and gun sack. Wash it out and rinse that. Wash to have bliss of it. Water sprinkling his ankles and toes. The Great Bandit was tired. He had been hunting black-tongued caribou and land snails all night in the merciless heat of the desert. He had been bitten by hairy snakes and cut by cow-itch bush. He had burst his big toe and skidded on the rims of long-buried steel drums that glinted in the moon, like light cracking into messages from the rebellious history of the land that was buried beneath the sand. It had been nine days since he had answered his bell, and saved Luke from the carrion crows, and rode him back to this ranch on horseback to let the star boy rest and reconstitute. The Bandit feel he is a cowboy now, he pinned the ‘sheriff’ badge to his breast and rode the red dust billowing like a woman’s skirt on a windswept bridge. He did not know for sure if Luke held any secrets regarding the great book. Had the old country butcher imparted its secrets to his protagonist, or were they both locked within the mysteries and metaphysics of the text?

Luke had sat many nights peering up into the space between the text and the physical plane, seeing the words as they were being carved onto the white pages around him. He had picked locks in the old man’s brain and, written down to move, he would obey unless driven by some insolent power and compunction. Then he resisted Raphael’s instruction. At times like these, the butcher would pause, drink a whisky, and give Luke the freedom to rock and groove. He would wait a few pages for him to arrive at the same door, in the same house, in the same desert where the Great Bandit had kept him tied to a chair in the dark abyss of his basement for further questioning. Down there, soft dirt and waterlogged wood jutted out from ancestral homes. But Luke feel he slip through a ruse, and now he stood watching from the bedroom doorway as the big man soaped his crotch and underslung areas, and hummed his little tune, with his back turned.

Luke entered the room quietly, with the intention to grandcharge and pierce the Bandit’s craw, and then to thief his horse. But the Bandit rose from his muddy squat, spun and flung the basin of arse water towards Luke – dash funk and spray it out like grief milk. The Bandit was deceptive. He approached Luke while the wash water was still floating through air, and he collar the star boy by his throat and press him up against the wardrobe. It rock back and it creak. He have the power to kill Luke, and Luke buck because he had never felt such power before; he never get to feel his own fallibility; he never knew until then that he, too, could die, within or without any system of plot or narrative theory; that he, too, was subject to limit and limb and that he was not some undying creation or superman. But how could he not have known that even the hero can die in the last reel? He had never run around the area like a fugitive from the cut arse belt of justice, with his gum-grinding father following patiently behind, calling him gently, imploring, not shouting, but with cool forbearance, with a cigarette clipped between the fingers of his right hand, and a belt folded in two in the other. He had never been caught between Gordon and Grant and the Bermudez biscuit factory in Mt Lambert, like an imps, against a wire fence with the hot grip and wrist of a father from whom he could never escape, who would drag him back like a dog on a leash, to blaze him strict and spinning in the hot shed with the galvanise roof, where even snakes would hide when the sun was too hot in the afternoon. So when the Great Bandit held him by the throat, Luke was weakened by the audacity and power of the big man, and his sphincter clenched and unclenched. He was afraid. He could not truckle bitter or bile or battle; he was drawn dumb for mercy, thrown out, lonesome, into a dark map of stars. The Bandit hit him two slap and let him drop. Luke cough up phlegm and sandy-nose cheese, and is then the arse water finally lash him, and what a water it was, wow, Mammy, by now it brown, yet still tepid and funky, the wash of arse and grainy stones, scum dumplings scraped off moist with fingernail and rag. Rinse the rag and wring it, and lumps of gutty balm fall in the water, to be taken back up to mend the skin where the hard soap rip it and sting it. The water wet up Luke and he back-back. He thought he could flex but he could not face the big man wet. The bandit hold him down and put him to skin up on a rock out in the yard, tie him down naked and let that water dry on him like sea salt. Then he hit him two slap again and burst his toe corns with pliers. All these things was to make Luke know who the arse was really in charge.

10

Men had tried to mount her since she was twelve. Young men doing office work in the city, with white shirt and tie, tried plying her with promises. Men who sat grinning on corners scratching the inside of their thighs, tried her with slackness. Peremptory men, who could not wait, waited like crocodiles. They set her in their minds and watched her like fruit to ripen and pick. They lay before sleep and etched her body into the files of their minds, and would draw on these images, which were mostly mere stolen glimpses: Ella, as a young woman, washing her hair over the basin in the yard; Ella walking to school, focused over rockstone on the ridge and into the valley. Their eyes held heavy lids, but they were reckless in their eyeballing, and their mouths held horse teeth, and their hands were always reaching over the wire fence she tried to build between them, their rods prodding against the barrier of her broughtupsy, hoping the doors might be flung open in the brittle heat of some sudden afternoon. But Ella was smart. That never happen. They waylaid her, followed her when she walked past the rum shop, where they threw arrows of seduction, fuck talk, sweet talk: ‘Family, family, how you moving so? Come nah, you not seeing me here or what? How you passing straight so? Come let me tell you something.’ But she would smile and pass. Old, long-stones men, who should have known better, did not notice that when Ella became a young woman their words could no longer penetrate her ear. They could not seduce her with umbrellas in rain, with coconut ice cream, colour TV, English toffee or jaw-grind pornography. In village discotheques, they would lean like shadows against walls, and when she passed they would reach for her hand to slow dance, and when she refused, their hands remained there, exposed. But these men were not embarrassed. Some rooms had higher ceilings. They would wait for her at noon, at the bottom of the school playing field, leaning on their cars, with palm cupping cock, but they could have been deseeding weed and whistling, or promising her whatever she dreamed of, but still she would not come. She would, once she got older, shit talk with them on the block or in front of the Chinese restaurant, but she would not lift her skirt or sit revealingly, or cuss and carry on in the street. She would make sure the latrine doors were shut to peeping. She would not meet them in that forgotten bush that had grown so bad-minded and brusque behind the Credit Union. She might accept an invitation to drive down to the foreshore. Luther Vandross might be singing on the cassette and incense could be burning for sunset romance, but she would not let a boy put his hands between her legs. Some even take her for Chinese food on Cipriani Boulevard, spend big money on Char siu kai fan and shark fin soup, and tell her, ‘Order the lobster if your want, the big shrimp.’ But not even a squeeze prick they getting when they reach back to Mt Garnett. She would not go, she would not come. She could not be hoodwinked and skulled into picking up pencils without bending her knees. She would duck. She was choosy.

Then she left the island for acting school in New York, living in Crown Heights, downstairs from a one-armed tailor who stitched rubber masks and tunics. She would pass him on the stairway, she would smile. One day, he invited her to see the complex machinery he kept in his kitchen, his box of smoke, his needles. He was from the north of Montreal; the arm was a stump, he was bearded, the tattoo of a serpent up the side of his neck. He pumped his presser foot, muscle in the gap; she rode him on her knees. This was long before the old folks passed on to the higher temple, before the animals perished in the flood, before corbeau retire from flight, when snake used to walk upright like man. Kisses of the mouth, the ear drum full of blood. This was before she met the Jamaican landlord who lived downstairs, whose basement was a chiaroscuric cave which hid black hash and bubbling broth, the shebeen, the immigrant yard. Go down there any night and hear Vincentians slapping harsh cards down. Ella went for hash and they welcomed her; they knew she too had slept under the stars of the Southern Caribbean. These men told her of stevedores who had fallen over the brutal edge of America still clutching boxes of yam and mountain dew, green plantain and tins of fried chicken. She was told legends of strong men who had died feverish deaths from work-related injuries on this jetty. Men like Norman Holly and humble Hubert Bramble, who a docker’s hook punctured on the wharf, whose twin daughters were beautiful. Hubert had lain there waiting to die on a hot bed in Canarsie, Brooklyn for two days, his eyesight fading, relinquishing his hold, the memory of islands. Ella had heard these tales before, but she was not afraid to walk along the water’s edge. She memorised Chekhov’s monologue from The Seagull