Aelred's Sin (10 page)

To find my name years later, his thoughts of me, amazes me, moves me. It was like he had died then. They had both died. I kept a low profile at school, except I learned tennis, and got really good, for his sake. He wanted that.

He tells a story moving over the sea, migrating in his mind. I follow.

The pelican’s young pick at its breast. They drink
blood. Images I’m reminded of.

Drink this… words, words change everything. Blue veins the colour of Quink ink. A poetry of pain.

The Grave

Take no notice of my swarthiness,
It is the sun that has burnt me.
Song of Songs

Aelred came to the cemetery at siesta time. It was a quiet, secluded spot above the abbey. It was a sun catch. That was what he liked about the spot. He brought the work he was doing on the translation of the psalms and sat on the grass in the open among the graves. The graves were in rows; a simple wooden cross over each plot. The only inscription was ‘PAX’ and the name of the dead monk with the date of his birth and death. He would be able to listen for the bell for None from here. His concentration flagged in the warmth and after-lunch drowsiness. He struggled with his translations.

In a corner of the cemetery was the small medieval chapel. Aelred wandered around it, reading the inscriptions on gravestones which had been leant up against the walls. One stone in particular caught his attention. There was a stone carving of a head. It was a young head, a boy, with curly hair. Under the head was the letter J. The other parts of the inscription had faded. He could just read part of a date, 17– As Aelred continued to stare at the face, he realised that it was an African head. He could tell by the lips, the nose, and the woolly hair the stone carver had given to the head. The portrait on the staircase came immediately to his mind. Could he be the same boy? Something in him wanted it to be the same boy. His fancy ran away with him. He invented a name for this head. Jordan, like the river. ‘The
River Jordan is mighty and cold, halleluia, chills the body but not the soul, halleluia.’ As Aelred hummed, he heard the singing and clapping, the chanting and wailing coming from the Baptist chapel down in the village of Felicity below Malgretoute. Toinette bound her head in a white cloth and went to pray there on her evenings off.

Jordan. He said his name. The wind whispered in the cedars of Lebanon. Jordan. He heard waves breaking on a beach without care. He heard the chuckle of salt waves meeting the fresh water current of a river. Then, there was an ocean.

Aelred thought of Father Dominic’s remark about the secret tunnel and about the runaway. His fancy enlarged upon a story building in his mind. He was filling in from his study of West Indian History at school in his last year. He was filling in his recent reading in the library of Master Walter Dewey’s exploits on the island of Antigua.

According to Amy, an old woman who worked in the Dewey house at Ash Wood, Master Walter had arrived late one night from one of his voyages. The ship had berthed in Bristol. They had had to put in at those islands called the Azores because of storms. Amy heard Master Walter grumbling to the groom of his many trials as he left the horse to be watered and stabled for the rest of the night. They might’ve lost a valuable cargo. And that would have been a cheer for the abolitionists, she heard Master Walter sneer. They’d rather them in God’s hands than in chains doing work in my household or in my sugar fields. He had galloped all the way from the port to Ash Wood. But there was a great commotion in the courtyard that night of his arrival and Amy, that Somerset woman, was left to assuage the wounds of a young black fella who had
had to run alongside Master Walter’s horse, often dragged behind along the lanes and fields, stumbling and falling near the hedgerows.

Then all at once, Ted entered this story. Certain moments just came back, kinds of coincidences they must be, Aelred thought. He and Ted had been playing one of their secret games. Then they had gone to the grapefruit trees below the estate house. They were climbing and picking fruit, peeling it with their fingers, pegging it, they called it, and sucking on the fruit so that the juice was sticky on their hands and faces, dribbling on their merino jerseys.

Sometimes little quarrels would break out between them. He couldn’t remember now what the quarrel was about. But suddenly Ted blurted out, ‘So, my grandmother’s black.’

‘She can’t be black, because you’re not black. That’s stupid.’

‘She is black. I should know.’

‘Which grandmother is it - your father’s or your mother’s mother.’

‘She’s my father’s mother.’

‘But your father’s not black.’

‘His father is white.’

They were shouting these statements at each other as if they were swear words. The words ‘black’ and ‘white’ in particular, ‘father’ and ‘mother’, were ringing out, with venom and insult mixed with incredulity in J. M.’s voice, and a stoic assertion in Ted’s.

‘Anyway, you aren’t black, so,’ J. M. hit back.

Then Ted said, ‘But I’m blacker than you. Look.’ He stuck out his arm and lifted his merino and showed his
chest and belly. ‘Look, I’m much blacker than you.’ He was saying this boastfully. Till quite suddenly, they were almost fighting with each other, grappling and almost falling out of the fruit tree from whose branches they were hanging.

‘I know what you’re like. I’ve seen you. You don’t have to show me. Don’t show me,’ J. M. shouted.

‘Don’t you like it?’ Ted teased.

J. M.’s anger brought tears. He walked away and went out from where the fruit trees were into another part of the estate. He hid among the young canes. He remembered the smell of ripe guavas.

Now as he wrestled with his nature, his sin, his love for Benedict, he sort of made a pact with Jordan. Like having an imaginary friend, a friend from home. It was his black skin, reminding him of Ted and the black school pardners whom he had left behind. He repeated their names like a litany. Surnames: de la Borde, Espinet, Mackensie, Redhead, Ramnarine, Salter. Like a roll-call at school. Present, present, present… their voices faded in the yellow sunlight, motes of dust caught in the bands of light coming through the open windows of the school room smelling of coconut oil in San Andres.

They were all in the same school in the racatang building next to the church of Notre-Dame de Grace. He could smell the coconut oil which the Indian children used to use. They were all together: black, brown, white and Indian, all mixed together till three o’clock and then they went their separate ways. They didn’t come to his home to play; only Ted did. ‘He’s a nice boy,’ his mother said. ‘His people are good people.’ Now Aelred could
begin to admit to himself the coded words of his mother’s statements and questions. ‘Have you met all the family, dear?’

He held the memory like a photograph: the day he saw all of him standing with his back to him, his dark curly hair, his strong neck and shoulders, his curved back and slim hips, his buttocks rising, the muscles climbing his back and then his long legs, muscled calves. He just had to recall it and the vision was there. His brown skin. ‘I’m blacker than you.’ He turned and smiled. He could now see his developed chest and the darker, browner marks around his nipples, his flat hard belly, the black curly hair around his thick prick and tight balls, little tight curls on his legs. ‘I’m blacker than you.’ He smiled a smile of white teeth and full red lips. They locked together, hard against each other and then relaxed into that embrace they began to know so well; then held fast till they could hardly breathe.

The images of Ted and himself swarmed and hummed like the bees and wasps already beginning to feed on the new flowers in the warm after-lunch heat of his secluded sun catch. He could hear the noisy playground when they were younger. He could hear Dom Maurus’s voice: ‘de la Borde, Salter.’ They would run to meet him and be caught up in the swirling folds of his white habit, his scapular like a Hindu prayer flag in the breeze. They were Dom Maurus’s favourites. Dom Maurus smelt of incense, communion wafers, the scent of wine, the blood of Christ on the breath. He gathered them into the white clouds of his monastic habit as they swirled in play in the school yard of the parish church of Notre-Dame de Grace.

Jordan. Aelred began his story. He was Jordan of Ashtown in Antigua. His portrait was on the staircase. He was the duke’s slave. What kind of life had he had before he was buried here? Jordan was blacker than boys he had known at school. He had the blackness of Africans. There was something pure about the colour of his skin, the mould of his face, the dome of his brow, the spread of his nose, the white of his eyes which shone against the black of his skin. The full curl of his lips was red like rouge.

Who had painted him? Had he really looked like this?

Aelred began to remember facts and figures from the history he had learnt in the last year of school, when the syllabus changed from British History to West Indian History. Father Julius had chosen to teach the slave trade. There were etchings, artists’ impressions of Africans being captured on the shores of the dark continent. That was what John Buchan had called it in Prester John. It was a green and black book and published by Blackie. He remembered that.

Then he saw Jordan beneath the deck of the ships. He was put into a hold for small boys. In the holds of those charnel galleons, they were packed in, head to head on their sides with other boys, chained at the feet and the hands, with collars round their necks. Many peas in one pod.

‘Lord and Master, in the River Jordan wash me clean, as white as snow.’ He heard Toinette praying in the kitchen after Baptist prayers, peeling onions so it made her cry.

‘What you crying for, Toinette?’

‘Child, don’t be stupid.’

Sin was black. There appeared to be nothing more
beautiful than Jordan’s blackness. There appeared to be nothing more beautiful than what Aelred felt for Benedict, his love for him. That too was a sin, Aelred’s sin. His first love was Ted. It became a prayer. Don’t go from me, dear friend. They had hardly known what life meant. He did not want to betray Ted’s memory. He felt again how unjust that he should have been snatched out of his sight. He jackknifed into the bronze pool; the River Jordan, bled like flamboyante. Then there was his bruised white face; powder over his face. The lid came down on the coffin in Paradise Cemetery.
‘Dies
irae,
dies
illa
’
…
it was a hot afternoon with a procession of schoolboys. Wreaths smelt sweet like frangipani. Still a boy, one of the old ladies of the parish whispered. He prayed. I will not betray you. I’m adult now. Here, unasked for, unimagined, quite unpredictable, I came across the ocean thousands of miles following a dream, then another dream, not knowing, and here, this man, this kind man. Nothing has happened. Nothing I can put my finger on has touched me so. I know nothing like it. Not what we had, Ted. Do I betray you? Not just that touching and those pardner feelings, those little-boy pleasures. And even when it came out all sticky and white and smelling of swimming-pools. Was it love like this where there has been nothing? There is nothing to speak of, but glances and smiles, the restraint of the monastic kiss, the brushing of cheeks at the ‘Agnus Dei’. ‘Lamb of God, who taketh away the sins of the world, have mercy on us.’ There is the acknowledgement of the bowed head, the tilted hood, hands put back into the safety of cowls, or folded beneath scapulars; averted eyes.

This was how he chose to remember him. Jordan
reminded him. Ted, Benedict, he called upon all three.

Jordan would help. It was his name which first came to him. Because of the river? Because of the river and the crossing over, Toinette called it. Because of the black boys he played with, because of the comfort of blackness: it was these things.

Toinette say,
‘Dou-dou
…
Dou-dou.
’
He heard her voice in the wood pigeon. He saw her black breasts. Her polished, purple arms like melangen enfolded him.

He smelt Jordan. He smelt of bayrum and talcum powder. He smelt of Ted.

Because of the river in the valley which flows beneath the school he called him Jordan.

Aelred was jolted out of his reverie with the bell for None. He scrambled up his books. He had not got far today with the translation of the psalms.

The Guest House:
27 September 1984

May evening time be calm and clear…

Since eleven this morning the house has been smelling of boiled cabbage. That was something J. M. always remembered; still the old cabbage. The diet has not changed in twenty-one years. Siesta; I doze and read. I was reading, but also re-reading what J. M. had read twenty-one years ago, trying to make sense of the passion of his youth. I read of how Aelred of Rievaulx lost his heart to one boy and then to another in his schooldays. I reflected now, like the young abbot of Rievaulx, that J. M.’s youth had brought with it many problems concerning the question of love. That really seems an understatement. But I can see why J. M. identified so closely with this twelfth-century Cistercian.

I’m changing inside myself. Joe’s advice is proving to be good advice. As I read and reconstruct I’m beginning to see it J. M.’s way. Well, not completely. I’m not sure about all the physical stuff. I can see you can really be close to a fella, kind of love him. But the other, I don’t know.

I wait for the bell for None. This afternoon I will work again in the orchard with Benedict. I hope. He whispered at breakfast that he had not had a good night, whatever that means. I must confront him about his health. He was so pale. I didn’t see him eating anything: he was only drinking coffee, his head bowed over his brown bowl.

The events surrounding Ted’s death came back to me again last night, so I didn’t fall back to sleep till almost
when the bells for Matins went. I must’ve been wakened by the bells for Matins and then again for Lauds. I was half dreaming, half going back over the events.

What is still so extraordinary is that even now the monks at college don’t know the truth, or won’t divulge it. If I had not gone down to the river that afternoon, no one would’ve have had a chance to hear the truth. Not that they listened, or wished to believe. It was a scandal. Above all else, scandal must be prevented. What is truth? I’ve put all this aside for so long that I find it difficult to recall it precisely the way it happened. Then Joe’s letter came, announcing J. M.’s death.

When he went away I gradually forgot everything. His letters to Mum and Dad used to bring it back but, even then it faded eventually. He was like a frozen image, my brother who went away. J. M.’s journals astound me in how much they remember, as if it had all happened yesterday. This is disturbing for me. I’m beginning to see how he saw it.

Now, I should’ve seen it coming, the afternoon of ‘the Raid’, as J. M. called it. That should have been a sign enough, but I should have seen it even before that. I can’t imagine, though, how anyone dared to start it. It spread like wildfire. To say it of Ted! He didn’t deny it. But he chose silence which meant guilt to everyone. Then his standing in the college, as head boy, and captain of both the football and the cricket team, was at its height. He was everyone’s hero. But who was the sad boy who thought he had to destroy him? I read that question all these years later. Did even I know, who saw him dive? Saw them both dive? Standing away from the bigger boys, I see his fear, hear jeers, taunts, the dares of all the others jostling
around him. Dive, dive! Those others stood around me.

No one owned up to the writing on the wall. A jealous boy? I could always swear I knew who it was. Was it someone who wanted to hurt J. M., jealous of him, someone who wished to destroy the one whom he desired? But he knew that if it was said about J. M. alone it would peter out, last for a day or two. Linked with the name of Ted, that was dynamite! Headmaster, dean of discipline, house captains, parents, everyone was involved. But they let it run. No one said a word. No one dampened the stamping feet in the study hall. No one put a stop to the hissing in the refectory.

Psst!

And then those words hurled!

Ted’s authority was threatened and challenged everywhere. Ted remained in his positions. No one seemed to take on the refusal of the teams to practice. No one seemed to take on the self-fouling that took place on the football field.

Is this why I’m here? I saw and heard all that and I said nothing. You forget how it was. J. M. must’ve gone over these events many times. They are dated early on in the journal.

Ted Salter is a
buller.

The word we boys used for sodomites, the double-backed beast. Everyone went scuttling to their Bibles for the words: Sodom and Gomorrah.

The word got taken up,
‘Buller,
buller,’
the chant leaders looking around to see who was not joining in.

Then there were the writings and drawings. An arrow pierces a heart, like those chalked by teenage sweethearts. It was a lopsided heart scratched with a
penknife into the door of one of the cubicles in the seniors’ lavatories. You sit there and scratch away at the wood with the smell of farts and urine, running water gurgling like a fountain in the urinal. There can be silence and escape there. It can be as silent as the silence of a confessional. You read the other words; words that are written then scrubbed off, written again, ‘Timothy de Gannes has the biggest prick. Eight inches. Fuck. Suck. Cock. Balls. Ted Salter loves Jean Marc de la Borde. XX for kisses in a heart. Love me tender, love me true… ELVIS.’

I had crept in and looked at the graffiti now that everyone was talking about it. My face burned with shame; a smaller boy, a younger brother. My allegiance was challenged, my ideals attacked. Athletes, heroes. His beauty, their beauty, was destroyed.

It took a while for either of them to understand why it had started. They were sure no one knew. No one saw anything. Then a friend told them. They each, separately, found the right cubicle and saw the heart and kisses. They read the words. There was a feeble attempt to find the culprit with a threat of detention for the whole school, the suspension of the Saturday night film. This was allowed to happen to a head boy!

They thought no one knew anything.

No one knew. No one saw. Their love was a secret, confessional. It hid in the silence of the night, in an owl’s hoot, in the head boy’s room after lights-out. He was the trusted one. The window of his room opened over the wide valley, the sky encrusted with constellations. Jagged stars, Look, a comet.

One boy tilts his head back over the window in the
darkness. The other boy has his lips on his mouth, his hands on his neck.

Look, Orion, the Plough, the Rosary. They navigate with the stars.

The world swirled. They risked everything. The plains beneath were smouldering with cane fires. The smell of cane juice was on the night air.

They had permission to swim late at the river pool. They picked ripe cashews, stained their shirts with the juice. The shade of the cocoa trees hid the yellow and red sunset, hid their naked bodies. It was siesta when their cries were drowned by the cigale in the gru-gru tree, when their sighs, their kisses, mixed with the sawing cicadas in the whispering casuarinas.

J. M., Aelred. It is Aelred the young monk, not my brother J. M., who found this poetry in himself even here in the cold of winter. He found these high words, as he calls them, in the high hills, from the tall palms, from the palmistes. He called them that, ‘high words’. He had begun to mix it all up. ‘In the valley below, the River Jordan over blue-veined rocks like the blue of Quink ink.’ High words. He writes them, the kind of words he writes as poetry, the kind of words I saw in the lavatory: lick, suck.

I hear his voice: Push it in.

They walked back in the darkness holding hands.

I eat his words. I am drunk with his blood. Words of blood soak into desk tops, on to lavatory walls. Messages. They were marooned in their desire. I become a poet.

Cocoa planter sing your calypso boy. Leave these matters to the poet. Then a world litany of abuse: queers, faggots.

What’s strange, what lights a fire?

Pouf, fairy. Pretty, funny, light as a feather.

I talked with Joe and Miriam and they explained to me these things. I’m beginning to understand a bit. Like Joe says, you can still see written up in public lavatories, ‘Who will kill a pouf for me?’

Then, when I return to J.M’s journal, he’s recorded it with another gaze.