The Worlds Within Her (3 page)

Returns to Icarus.

DARKNESS COMES QUICKLY
, reminding her of what her mother once said: in the tropics dusk is a state of mind.

The brightness through which the plane descended — the dense, late-afternoon rays affording glimpses of mottled greenery rising from concentric shades of liquefied blue — has vanished by the time she clears immigration and customs, and emerges to night and lights and the competitive shouts of taxi drivers. Her arm is grasped, she feels herself led.

She is in the back seat of a car, bare arms sticky against the vinyl seat, night hurtling by beyond the rolled-up window, the driver's breathing labouring rhythmically against the raucous gearshift.

Impossibly small: her exact impression of the island when first seen on a map.

The summer she was ten she drove east with Charlotte's family in a Volkswagen van, she and Charlotte following their progress in an old school atlas. Montreal, Quebec City, Edmunston, Fredericton, Moncton — a day and a night per city — and up into Cape Breton, their destination.

Yasmin remembers the surreptitiousness with which, as they drove out of New Brunswick into Nova Scotia, she let her gaze wander south on the map, down past New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Richmond, Savannah and Miami; past Havana and Port-au-Prince, Santo Domingo and San Juan; and farther
south still, following the concave sweep of islands. When she came to it, she saw that the island was almost obliterated by its own name.

Charlotte said, “Wha'cha looking at?”

Yasmin's fingertip pressed at the tiny island, hiding it. “That's where I was born,” she said.

Charlotte moved her finger away and stared intently at the pinprick of green on the blue sea. “Gee,” she said, “I don't think of you as a foreigner.”

And Yasmin thought: Is that what I am?

Three years later, perhaps four, Mrs. Livingston lent her an issue of
National Geographic.
She tapped a finger at the contents listed on the cover.
Volcanoes of the Caribbean.

The article devoted two pages to a long-dormant cone in the island of her birth. The text confined itself to a geologic history of the volcano whose last eruption would have been witnessed, if at all, by the Arawak Indians who did not long survive Columbus's arrival approximately a century and a half later.

Of greater interest to Yasmin were the accompanying photographs. An aerial shot of the cone — deeply forested with a small turquoise lake in the centre. A rectangle of townscape — red-roofed buildings, ringed with balconies of filigreed metal, sandwiched between blue water and blue sky. The town's red roofs spread from a narrow coastal plain into the foothills of the mountain range within which the volcano slept. A rectangle of beach, water and horizon — foreground of rock and mossy earth crowned by foaming surf and framed on either side by two palm trees and, above, by the hammock strung between them, tossed heavenward by a might wind.

This was how the island remained with her for decades. Impossibly small, swathed in primary colours, with a molten heart forever stilled.

With a single motion, the taxi driver swings her suitcase out and shuts the trunk.

It is this slamming of the trunk — a resounding thud in the still evening — that causes her to notice the silence. The island's reputation for bacchanalia has prepared her for noise, a continuous pandemonium. The silence unsettles her. She follows the driver up the stairs and into the hotel as if seeking cover.

“Jim. Hi, it's me. I'm here.”

Through the small window above the night table she sees the light of a street lamp, vague suggestions of street and sidewalk down below.

“Jim?”

She brushes at the windowpanes with her fingertips, seeking to wipe the dust away. But they are clean. The view is what it is. She sees that the panes are old and cloudy, the light flooding not through the glass but into it, making it almost opaque.

“Are you less worried now? Good. I told you, there's no need to worry.”

The window, it occurs to her, is like a carnival trick: it promises a view illuminated by the street lamp beyond, and yet it is the glass and the light together that defeat that promise. A little laugh escapes her.

“Nothing. I'm just tired.”

She turns away from the window and its sightless view, to the small air conditioner that sits in a cavity beside it. It is on, but its effect is minimal.

“No, I wanted to call you first. I'm tired, I'll call her tomorrow.”

Idly, she presses the off button, and the unremarked hum coughs to a stop. It is like breath held — a new silence vibrating in its wake.

Her chest tightens, and she sees her finger dart to turn it back on. The air conditioner wheezes, rattles, settles back into its hum.

“Small. Plants, whitewashed walls, wainscotted of all things. Kind of Somerset-Maugham-ish. Know what I mean? And there's an armed guard downstairs in the lobby.”

She sits on the edge of the bed, realizes she feels better, safer, for speaking with Jim.

“Oh, yes, I almost forgot. Well, good luck. Hope they sign on the dotted line.”

Even though he is thousands of miles away, he knows where she is, and this makes her feel somehow anchored. It soothes her fear of disappearing.

“Of course, I will. Yeah, me too. Bye.”

She hangs up, slips her shoes off, pushes them away. Places her bare feet squarely on the parquet floor: feels the cool of the lacquer, the hardness of the wood. Feels, after a moment, the tickle of its smoothness.

She sits like this for a while, looking around at the uneasy intimacy of the small room: at the whitewashed walls finely etched by hairline cracks; at the heavy door, which she had double-bolted and chained at the insistence of the handwritten sign taped above the light switch; at the bathroom of surprisingly generous proportions, white tiles startling in the brightness of the ceiling light.

And then her feet feel a vibration through the floor, the waves of a distant movement, the way the rumble of a subway train underground can be felt on the surface. But there is no subway here.

She quickly turns off the air conditioner, listens. And she hears in the distance the asthmatic gasp of the ancient elevator. When it stops, so too does the vibration.

A latch on the top of the window frame catches her eye.
She turns it, tugs, but the window remains secure. Then she sees that it has been nailed fast, limiting the room's perspective to itself.

After a few minutes, she thinks: Explanation is not always a comfort.

With her toes, she reaches for her shoes.

PASSION? SUCH WORDS
you use, my dear Mrs. Livingston! For tea? I like tea, I enjoy tea. It calms me. But I would not say I have a passion for it. Passion! It seems such a naked word. Tea has just been part of my life for so long. I came late to it, you know. After my marriage …

Love, Mrs. Livingston? I wouldn't have believed it: after all these years, you still have the capacity to surprise me. I have never once thought of you as a sentimentalist. And now you bring up this subject. Passion. Love. How very … Harlequin of you.

Of course not, Mrs. Livingston. Love had very little to do with my marriage. Oh, there was affection, certainly. After some time. He was persistent in his courtship, even though his mother believed he could do better. But my husband took a longer-term view of his needs.

He was of a family that had prospered. Large land holdings. Cocoa. But money could not buy the kind of social standing that counted, you had to be born to it. By marrying me, though, my husband was marrying my family and the entire past that was ours. And, certainly at the time, this connection was essential to electoral success. You see, even then, as a very young
man, he harboured political ambitions. He knew that empire was crumbling. And he knew that this crumbling would create new opportunities, new powers to be claimed. But people do not follow those who are like themselves, they follow their betters. What is the point otherwise? That was the genius of the Peron woman in Argentina — to see that, and to play to it. To make the ordinary people believe that, through her, they too could sparkle in the lights. My husband needed the social respectability my family could offer — and, to be frank, my family needed the financial security he could offer. We had pretensions, intellectual pretensions, we could hardly afford. We believed our caste made us special. But how to pay for it — that was the problem.

His mother, my dear? Ah, yes. That charming lady. A suitable subject for the
Reader's Digest
feature — what was it? ‘My most unforgettable character'? Oh, I suppose I'm being unfair. Like every mother she wanted the best for her son, and I was not her idea of the best. I was a little too educated, I suppose — by nuns, at that. And although I had spent my early years in the countryside, I came from the town, while the Ramessars were still, you know, country people to all intents and purposes. We were non-practising Hindus, while they had converted to Presbyterianism. My mother-in-law could give her children Christian names but she could not rid herself of the guilt of having forsaken her religion. And so I suppose in many ways I was a threat to her. At many levels, if you see what I mean.

But, as I have said, he was a persistent suitor. And an accomplished liar. Traits that were to serve him well later on in his career. In order to see me, he pretended to develop a great interest in sport. Every Sunday he would tell his mother that he and his friend Dilip were off to see the football game at the stadium in town. Dilip's job was to bring along a box of chocolates and
a bouquet of flowers, and to go to the game so that he could provide a full report later. If there was no game, they would invent one. And since his mother knew nothing of the sport, her questions were easily answered.

Disturb me? His lying? No, later perhaps, a little. But at the time I was flattered. A man who wanted me enough to plan his lies. Yes, I was flattered, Mrs. Livingston, I felt coveted. I was seventeen when he courted me, eighteen when we were married. Of course I was flattered. I was
seventeen.

It was all a game to me then. His lies to his mother, our Sunday afternoons together. Oh, we did nothing grand. We sat, we walked, we talked. We strolled in the botanical gardens. He never actually took me out, you know. To the cinema, yes, the four-thirty showings. I can hear him still, asking if I was interested in the four-thirty. But never dancing or dining. Couldn't, you see. He had to be back home in the early evening, at a reasonable hour, or his mother would have grown suspicious.

Seventeen, dear God! What an age!

And so, after about a year, he asked me to marry him. I said yes. And he told his mother it was the way it would be. We both knew — we all knew — it was for the best. We all had a great deal to gain.

Oh, yes, my dear, I know. I make it all sound so cold-blooded, don't I? But it wasn't. The emotion, you see, was — how shall I put it? — displaced. It was not the narrow and utterly selfish emotion of the love of a man and woman for one another. It was an emotion that was a great deal less personal, but no less important for that.

Circumstances, as you are well aware, are everything. They create opportunity and responsibility. Ours was not a time that permitted great indulgence in the personal. We were being pushed by entire worlds. The worlds of family and community. The
world of history, the enveloping memory of the immemorial poverty out of which we had risen. The emotion of the moment was bound up with all of this, and the question of whether he made my heart flutter and my pulse quicken was, well, mostly immaterial.

So we married …

Dear God, no, my dear! It most certainly was not the happiest day of my life. I had many happier days before and have had many happier since. Look here, I do not mean to be contrarian, but I do believe that any woman who makes of her wedding day the happiest day of her life — who measures all the events of her life against the day of her marriage — is, well, a sad creature. We do not assume — or expect — that a man's wedding day will be the happiest day of his life, do we?

Oh dear, I've offended you once more, haven't I? But you must understand, my dear, I have little religious feeling, and as for passion … As I have said, I was fond of him.

And it was all a little complicated, you know. The ceremonies of one religion and the other. The finery. All this theatre to satisfy other people. A cousin kept asking me if I felt like crying. I don't think she ever really forgave me for my dry eyes. What remains most vividly with me is the difficulty I had filling my lungs with sufficient oxygen.