Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab (25 page)

I knew Catherine did not know what any of these dishes were and could feel the distance between us when she didn’t bother to inquire. It was as if I had embarked on a mission to confirm her ignorance of my life down here. I heard myself say that if I missed anything it was the crabs, and I began to tell her about the crabs that were caught in the swamps and sold roadside in neatly tied-up bundles. Their backs are smaller than my fist, I told her, as if she were begging me for details. The facts of the funeral and of my role in it were like a human presence sitting in a chair watching me as I talked, but I mentioned none of this.

Catherine finally spoke: Were they soft-shell crabs? Were they eaten deep-fried? By way of answering I told her of my first experience with the small crabs, but underneath the regaling was some sort of accusation. I felt it, but from where it came and why I was doing this, I didn’t know. Rosita curries them, I answered. I said that after my first time eating the crabs like this, Rosita suggested that on a moonlit night I go with her and her family to a beach village on the Atlantic side of the island, where her brothers would take me crab catching.

My voice as I said this to Catherine was flatter than I intended it to be.

Catherine interrupted. “At night? With people you didn’t know?”

I was silent and she asked again, “Well, was it safe?”

It was true that I had some time before mentioned how unsafe Trinidad was said to be. I had told her about the
murders during bungled robberies, about the spate of kidnappings. But I wished now I hadn’t, for she used the opportunity to show grave concern for my safety even though I was telling her about an outing that took place about three years ago, before she and I knew each other, and about which I’d clearly lived to tell. Before I could stop myself I said just that: “I’m still around, aren’t I?”

Catherine said nothing, but in my words how could she have not heard the suggestion that one day I might not be around, and my absence would likely not be because I had fallen prey to an unsafe situation? In any case, I carried on against her silence, it had been a large group of us. We had gone down, two cars crammed full. We’d arrived towards evening. We swam, and ate—Rosita’s family had brought a large iron pot of chicken pelau, and there was a cole slaw salad, and plantains. And there was mango chow. At this, Catherine pensively muttered,
Hmm
. I feared that she might follow that utterance with some inane question, so I quickly added, “Mango pickled in a spiced brine,” and left it at that. We arrived at the beach, I said, the twelve of us, with three bottles of rum punch, and there wasn’t a drop left in any of the bottles by the time we left.

At this last mention of our debauchery she said not a word, and I had the sense that I had won something, although I was not sure what. The tide was low by nightfall, I continued, the moon like a searchlight trained on us, and rather suddenly, just as Rosita and her family had said would happen, the sand came alive. It vibrated, and I saw that
crabs were pouring down—like an unruly army—from the land at our backs, and were moving swiftly, in their sideways canter, towards the water’s edge. We ran behind the largest ones—the crabs would freeze their movement, crouch tight to the sand, their knotty beads of eyes flicking outwards like stunted calcified antennae, their pincers that people here—I saw the word “here” as I spoke it, garlanded with a string of white lights, for I was on the telephone in that very
here
, and Catherine was over
there
—their pincers, which people
here
call
gundies
, waving, but in vain, for they can’t actually reach behind to defend themselves from us with these
gundies
.

As I told all of this to Catherine I was reminded of the sea that night and without warning my eyes filled with tears. It had shimmered like liquid mercury, and a salty sea breeze had picked up. I remembered the commotion of the foamy waves crashing and rushing up the shore, and the coconut tree branches rustling wildly, and the sound of the twelve of us laughing and screaming and shouting gentle abuses to one another. But I did not tell any of this to Catherine. I might have described it all, but she would only have thought she understood. How could I have imparted the odour of the wet churned-up shore that was quickly being overtaken by the sea, of the fresh crabs and their strange manner of advancing sideways, of the sweat of eight excited young men with the sweetness of alcohol and pelau on their breaths? I carried on, careful not to let my voice betray the emotions that welled in me alongside the memory. You ran them down, I said to her, and just between your thumb and index finger
you grabbed the backs of the little buggers from behind, and of course if you hadn’t done it just right you ended up with a crab dangling off one of your fingers by the
gundy
, and you dared not scream as it closed its toothy vise because you’d already become the brunt of everyone’s teasing, and they teased mercilessly, which meant that they considered you one of them.

Catherine said not a word. Are you there? I asked.

Yeah, yeah, she answered, her voice noticeably, oddly, distant.

We caught about forty crabs, I concluded. But we both knew that my story had not been about crab hunting.

After a pause, she asked when Gita and Jaan were expected to arrive. I knew exactly who she meant, yet I responded with a question: Do you mean Sydney’s sister and her husband?

Catherine answered with another question: When are you coming home?

“I don’t know,” I said.

It was time for her to end the call, she said; it was late. After another uncomfortably long pause, I told her I missed her. The silence that followed exploded messily when I uttered, I love you.

Catherine did not reply. And I suddenly felt like a child, wanting to run behind her, to tell her that I was sorry.

Rosita was shaking my shoulder. I had been dreaming that I was a pirogue on open water. There was no one captaining me. The sky behind the weightless ball of silver moon was like marbled tissue paper. I was surrounded by three hundred and sixty degrees of ocean stretching clear to a distant encircling horizon. There was nothing else but me on the surface of the water. There were no waves, and not a breeze. I palpitated evenly in the undulating, shimmering sea. Salt water lightly lashed my skin, and I heard a mumble of foreign languages lapping at my sides. I didn’t understand their words, but I knew their meaning and felt an urgency to remember the wisdom imparted in them.

It was not, to my surprise, nighttime, but evening. A violent red light streamed in through the window. Rosita had brought me a glass of lime juice on ice. Three people had arrived, she told me, and the pundit’s daughter had returned.

The pundit’s daughter—“Anta, her name is Anta,” I
informed Rosita as I sat up too fast—was outside waiting to see me! My head was like a weight on a string. I tried to remember the wisdom that I had heard in the water’s foreign language, but it had already retreated into its other realm. There was no time for a shower. I had to dress quickly.

Rosita hesitated at the door, and it dawned on me that there was something different about her manner. She seemed less confident than usual. I asked if there was something she wanted to say.

Yes, she said. She wanted to know if, after the funeral, she would still be employed at the house.

I hadn’t anticipated that the staff would be wondering about this. “Yes, of course,” I answered. “You will all be kept on.”

In the time it had taken me to rinse my face, brush my teeth and pull on a shirt and trousers, several more people had arrived, more than there were chairs on the veranda. They milled about expectantly. A rather tall woman of Indian descent in a long and shiny black dress, a mantilla of black lace clipping the back of her head and falling about her shoulders, stepped ahead and proclaimed, “You are the boy from Toronto.”

That this woman knew of me was for a second flattering, but then no longer, for I was alarmed by her voice. She, in her theatrical black ankle-length dress, had what can only be described as a man’s voice, not a deep or husky voice,
but a
male
voice. I immediately saw that several people on the veranda were, to put it delicately, not entirely what they appeared to be. There were a number who at a first glance appeared to be women. But by the time the glance had been completed I saw that they were men who had dressed themselves so that they would be taken for women. There were, too, some who expected, it seemed, to be taken for men but who were clearly women. Two women with heavily kohl-lined eyes came towards me and greeted me as if we were acquaintances, but I was unable to reciprocate even a feigned familiarity. Lancelot and Rosita were in the periphery of my vision. They were busy serving drinks and food. I did not look at them directly, but I could tell that they were going about this gathering rather easily. I had not yet seen Anta, but knowing that she was there, that she was probably watching all of these people and me, was enough to cause my face to burn. Trying to come to terms with Sydney’s many changes inside the privacy of the house was one thing, but I felt as if these people were being disrespectful by their public unmasking of him. They were exposing me, too, as being closely connected to such a person.

“I’m so sorry for your loss. He was a very special man, a hero to all of us.” The words came from a deep voice. I turned to see someone who expected to be taken for a woman. She blocked the breeze from the Gulf, and the flowery scent she wore permeated the air. Her compassion, the bowed head, the lowered deep voice, the clasped hands at her chest, were as theatrical as the application of lipstick
and eyeliner, as exaggerated as her large hoop earrings, and yet I felt the genuineness in what she said. I was, however, not comforted. I looked for Anta. She was nowhere to be seen, and the only relief I had at that moment was in the thought that she had already left.

I became preoccupied with the thought that these people must once
not
have been what they now appeared to be. How long ago was this
once
? I wondered. As recently as an hour before, when they’d dressed as they had, especially to come here? As long ago as since they cut off, or had reconfigured, or built up, some part of their bodies? Did they think this was a circus for all to come as they pleased? Was this an occasion for mockery? In my view, Sydney was not a man. There was no getting away from the fact that he had altered his body. But to maintain the facade displayed by his clothing, the facial hair, the balding, the thickened muscles of his arms and back and legs, the oddly thickened torso, he had to take injections once a month. These altered his appearance, but they did not make him a man. Yes, I now used the masculine pronouns for Sydney—
him, his, he
. These concessions, I argued in my head, were in a sense forced on me. One could almost say that I had used them against my will, at least at first, and then they’d become habit, for regardless of the new pronoun, I never failed to see Sid in Sydney. I saw Sid first. In Sydney’s voice I heard Sid. In Sydney’s memories and motives I recognized Sid’s. And in his heart I recognized Sid.

All I had learned about women and about men, including what I had learned as a child parented by two women,
seemed now to be a lie. A wave of nausea crashed through me. I felt myself falling, and the tungsten lighting on the veranda dimmed.

I was being carried like a baby, cradled in the arms of the tall woman. I breathed in as deeply as I could, for the scent of her cologne entered my lungs and assured me that I was awake, alive. She set me down on my bed. Rosita bent over me. The tall woman began to undo the buttons on my shirt, her voice deeper now, yet cooing, “Everything is okay, son. Everything is okay. This must be all so strange for you. It’s hot in here.” It was as if I were a cloud, unanchored and floating in an unbearable heat, yet as long as I was able to breathe in her cologne I was safe. The woman somehow knew this, for she stayed close. Her voice was now oddly familiar. She sat on the edge of the bed, one of her arms over me. She asked if there was a fan, then instructed someone to go and get it, and I remembered all at once where I had heard that voice. She was one of the two men who had been Sydney’s only visitors at the hospital; she was the one with the kohl-lined eyes and the painted pinkie.

Rosita left the room. The woman’s hand was close to mine. I moved the tips of my fingers so that they brushed against her. She responded by taking my hand in hers. It was a large hand. It was not the hand of a woman. I tightened mine around it.

What is your name? I asked.

“Kareen,” she answered.

I knew that name, too, from Sydney’s will. Kareen Akal Sharma. I saw Lancelot at the bedroom door, keeping the crowd from entering the room. Then, as if executing some intuitive choreography, the woman rose and stepped away to allow me to sit up. Anta had entered the room and perched lightly on the bed’s edge.

I rose and swung my feet off the bed. I leaned forward, rested my elbows on my knees and put my head in my hands, for I was still light-headed. Soon an electric fan was brought in, placed on the dresser and switched on. People moved out of the room and the door closed, and I was left alone with Anta. She sat next to me, and I turned to face her. Her eyes were a drink of cool water. She lowered me to the bed, my head resting in the cup of one of her hands.

She brought her face to mine and we kissed as if this, our first kiss, might be the last.

———

Later, I sat on the veranda and thought about all that had happened that evening. The sliding door had been pushed in, only one of its two high-security locks engaged. One veranda light had been left on. The drinking glasses had been cleared away and the chairs pulled back into their usual places. Yellow tungsten light pooled softly in the middle of the veranda, but beyond that circle the garden was in blackness. Cicadas whistled and frogs, near enough by, grunted
raucously. Against their din, even the sea could not be heard. Flames from the rigs in the Gulf here and there pulsed upward. A cool breeze whipped about me, salty and smelling of the sea.