Omeros (13 page)

of furred leopardskin. Because of its fiery name

under an arching rocket painted on its side,

the Space Age had come to the island. Passengers

crammed next to each other on its animal hide

were sliding into two worlds without switching gears.

One, atavistic, with its African emblem

that slid on the plastic seats, wrinkling in a roll

when the cloth bunched, and the other world that shot them

to an Icarian future they could not control.

Many accepted their future. Most were prepared

for the Comet’s horizontal launching

of its purring engine, part rocket, part leopard,

while Hector, arms folded, leant against the bonnet

like a gum-chewing astronaut. He would park it

first in rank. Every old woman who got on it—

there was always one quarrelling from the market—

would pause and look at the painted flames with
“Bon Dieu!

Déjà?”
—meaning “Hell? Already?” Once, one remarked,

“All I see is tiger-skin, yes. So let us prey.”

And pray they did, when Hector rammed the flaming door

shut, then his own side harder as he touched the charm

of a fur monkey over the dashboard altar

with its porcelain Virgin in flowers and one arm

uplifted like a traffic signal to halt. Her

statue lurched, swaying, the passengers clutched the skins

as Hector pedalled the clutch in roaring reverse,

and the wharf flashed past them quicker than all their sins

as the old woman clawed the rosary in her purse

and begged the swaying Virgin not to forget her

at the hour of our death, and sudden silence

descended on the passengers and on Hector,

because it was here he had stepped between Helen’s

fight with Achille. Why he had bought this chariot

and left the sea. He believed she still loved Achille,

and that is why, through palm-shadows, the leopard shot

with its flaming wound that speed alone could not heal.

He was making no money. The trips were too short.

He liked wide horizons. Soon the Comet was known

through the sea of banana fields to the airport,

making four trips a day when most transports made one,

hearing his fame shouted on the way to Vieuxfort,

and sometimes, just for a change, coming back empty,

he leant back on the leopardskin, the stereo on

his favourite station: Country. He liked the falling

scarves of the sunset saying goodbye to the sea

the way he had left it. Curving around Praslin

he thought of his
camerades
hauling their canoes

and the dusk thatching their sheds without any noise.

III

The months revolved slowly like the silk parasols

at college cricket-matches; sometimes cicadas

past the edge of the pavilion burst into applause

for a finished stroke. By five, the fielders’ shadows

on the slanted field were history, and the light

for that moment turned as tea-tinted as the prose

of old London journals,
The Sphere, The Tatler, The

Illustrated London News;
then quietly, the white

languid dominion of the water-lily in the heat

behind the reed-barred gates of Maud Plunkett’s pond

was floating into darkness, the clouds were dying,

the field sparked with green fireflies, like sparks flying

from an evening coalpot, the singeing stars.

Low over the mangoes, close over the hills, like fire

under a tin, the sun went out, and the horizon

enclosed the schooners, the canoes, and an empire

faded with one last, spastic green flash, but so soon

they hardly noticed. The Plunketts quietly continued,

parades continued, cricket resumed, and the white feathers

of the proconsul’s pith-helmet, and the brass and red

of the fire engines. Everything that was once theirs

was given to us now to ruin it as we chose,

but in the bugle of twilight also, something unexpected.

A government that made no difference to Philoctete,

to Achille. That did not buy a bottle of white kerosene

from Ma Kilman, a dusk that had no historical regret

for the fishermen beating mackerel into their seine,

only for Plunkett, in the pale orange glow of the wharf

reddening the vendors’ mangoes, alchemizing the bananas

near the coal market, this town he had come to love.

Chapter XXIII

I

It was a rusted port with serrated ridges

over which clouds carried grey crocus-bags of rain;

past its heyday as a coaling-station. Dredges

deepened its draft and volcanic silt would remain

on its bed, but liners, higher than the iron

lance of the market, whitened the harbour and rose

above the Customs. Every noon, a carillon

sprinkled its yellow petals above a morose

banyan. The Church of Immaculate Conception

was numbering the Angelus. With lace frills on,

balconies stood upright, as did the false pillars

of the Georgian library; each citizen

stood paralyzed as the bell counted the hours.

A dozen halos of sound down through the ages

confirmed the apostles. At store-counters, shoppers

crossed themselves with the shopgirls; tellers in cages

stopped riffling their own notes with one wet fingertip

drying before it moved on to turn the next leaf.

The streets held statues. A traveller off a ship

could have sauntered through that Pompeii of their belief

made by the ash of the Angelus, like St. Pierre,

whose only survivor had been a prisoner

who watched the volcano’s powder mottle the air

across the channel to blacken milk and flour.

Then the statues stirred, iron-shop blinds rippled down,

the banks closed for an hour, the entire town

went home for lunch, to come back on the stroke of one.

II

Maud heard the carillon, faint in the wiry heat

over the hot harbour. She watched a lizard crawl down

the fly screen. She took off her damp gardening hat

and lay on the faded couch, she loosed her bodice

and blew down to her heart. It was cool in the shade

of the stone porch hung with her baskets of orchids.

She stared at the slope of the lawn down to the farm

where grass withered in scabs. Then, a canoe. Headed

for Africa, probably, passing her royal palm.

Shadows were sloping down the desiccated lawn

from the bougainvillea hedge. The morning-glory

was wilting. The sea-grape’s leaves were vermilion,

orange, and rust, their hues a
memento mori

as much as autumn’s, when their crisp pile would be raked

by limping Philoctete. Smoke wrote the same story

since the dawn of time. Smoke was time burning. It snaked

itself into a cloud, the wrinkled almond trees

grew older, but lovely, the dry leaves were baked

like clay in a kiln. Their brightness was a disease

like the golden dwarf-coconuts. It was the same

every drought. The sea hot. The sea-almond aflame.

III

A liner grew from the Vigie promontory,

white as a lily, its pistil an orange stack.

She crept past the orchids. At the morning-glory

she stopped in mid-channel, then slowly turned her back

on the island. By dusk, she’d be a ghost like all

her sisters, a smudge on a cloud. Maud marked their routes:

the cost of a second-class berth from Portugal

to Southampton, then Dublin, but the cheapest rates

staggered Dennis. She soon grew used to the liner

moored to the hedge. A girl was coming up the trace,

pausing for breath, and though the light was behind her

and the garden glaring, by the slow, pelvic pace

that made men rest on their shovels cleaning the pens

and the gardener pause from burning leaves on the lawn,

a heap in his hands, Maud knew that gait was Helen’s,

but the almond eyes were hooded in the smooth face

of arrogant ebony. Maud tugged off a glove

finger by finger, prepared for the coming farce.

Slow as the liner she came up the stone-flagged walk

in her black church dress—a touch of the widow there—

then paused at the morning-glory to wrench a stalk

head-down, stripping its yellow petals tear by tear.

My bloody allamandas! Maud swore. And, naturally,

being you, you want me to leave the verandah,

or maybe I’ll ask you up for a spot of tea.

Oh Mother of God, another allamanda!

She’ll wreck the blooming garden if I don’t come down.

She had timed it well. A little intimacy

between us girls. She’d seen the Land Rover in town

no doubt, but not this time, Miss Helen,
non merci.

We aren’t having any confession together;

then hated herself for her rage. Those lissome calves,

that waist swayed like a palm was her island’s weather,

its clouded impulses of doing things by halves,

lowering her voice to match its muttering waves,

the deep sigh of night that came from its starlit leaves.

The cackle of her infuriating laughter

when she joked with the gardener from the kitchen,

but when Maud came to the kitchen to quiet her,

she would suck her teeth and tilt that arrogant chin

and mutter something behind her back in patois,

and when Maud asked her what, she’d smile: “Ma’am, is noffing.”

Maud walked down the steps to the flagged path from the shade

of the stone porch, and Helen was starting to walk

towards her, then stopped and turned. “Morning,” Helen said.

Morning. No “Madam.” No “Good.” All in a day’s work.

Maud stopped. In midstream the liner now hovered

over Helen’s tautly brushed hair. Maud nodded

as amiably as she could, but with one palm covered

over an excessive squint.

                                            “So, how are you, Helen?”

“I dere, Madam.”

                                At last. You dere. Of course you dare,

come back looking for work after ruining two men,

after trying on my wardrobe, after driving Hector

crazy with a cutlass, you dare come, that what you mean?

“We’ve no work, Helen.”

                                            “Is not work I looking for.”

Pride edged that voice; she’d honed her arrogance

on Maud’s nerves when she worked here, but there was sorrow

in the old rudeness. Helen tore the stalk in her hands.

“What I come for this morning is see if you can borrow

me five dollars. I pregnant. I will pay you next week.”

Maud went as purple as one of her orchids. “I see.

How’ll you pay me back, Helen, if you’re out of work?

It’s none of my business, but what happened to Achille?

Hector not working?”

                                        “I am vexed with both of them,
oui.
”

What was it in men that made such beauty evil?

She was as beautiful as a liner, but like it, she

changed her course, she turned her back on her friends.

“I’ll fetch my purse,” Maud said. Helen turned her back

and stared out to sea. This is how all beauty ends.

When Maud came with the money, she was down the track

with the arrogant sway of that hip, stern high in the line

of the turned liner. Maud stood, enraged, in the sun.

Then she picked up the flowers Helen had wrenched from the vine.

The allamandas lasted three days. Their trumpets would bend

and their glory pass. But she’d last forever, Helen.

Chapter XXIV

I

From his heart’s depth he knew she was never coming

back, as he followed the skipping of a sea-swift

over the waves’ changing hills, as if the humming

horizon-bow had made Africa the target

of its tiny arrow. When he saw the swift flail

and vanish in a trough he knew he’d lost Helen.

The mate was cleaning the bilge with the rusted pail

when the swift reappeared like a sunlit omen,

widening the joy that had vanished from his work.

Sunlight entered his hands, they gave that skillful twist

that angled the blade for the next stroke. Half-awake

from last night’s blocko, the mate waveringly pissed

over the side, keeping his staggering balance.

“Fish go get drunk.” Achille grinned. The mate cupped his hands

in the sea and lathered his head. “All right. Work start!”

He fitted the trawling rods. Achille felt the rim

of the brimming morning being brought like a gift

by the handles of the headland. He was at home.

This was his garden. God bless the speed of the swift,

God bless the wet head of the mate sparkling with foam,

and his heart trembled with enormous tenderness

for the purple-blue water and the wilting shore

tight and thin as a fishline, and the hill’s blue smoke,

his muscles bulging like porpoises from each oar,

but the wrists wrenched deftly after the lifted stroke,

mesmerizing him with their incantatory

metre. The swift made a semicircular turn

over the hills, then, like a feathery lure, she

bobbed over the wake, the same distance from the stern.

He felt she was guiding and not following them

ever since she’d leapt from the blossoms of the froth

hooked to his heart, as if her one, arrowing aim

was his happiness and that was blessing enough.