Omeros (3 page)

tingles like the tendrils of the anemone,

and the puffed blister of Portuguese man-o’-war.

He believed the swelling came from the chained ankles

of his grandfathers. Or else why was there no cure?

That the cross he carried was not only the anchor’s

but that of his race, for a village black and poor

as the pigs that rooted in its burning garbage,

then were hooked on the anchors of the abattoir.

Ma Kilman was sewing. She looked up and saw his face

squinting from the white of the street. He was waiting

to pass out on the table. This went on for days.

The ice turned to warm water near the self-hating

gesture of clenching his head tight in both hands. She

heard the boys in blue uniforms, going to school,

screaming at his elbow: “Pheeloh! Pheelosophee!”

A mummy embalmed in Vaseline and alcohol.

In the Egyptian silence she muttered softly:

“It have a flower somewhere, a medicine, and ways

my grandmother would boil it. I used to watch ants

climbing her white flower-pot. But, God, in which place?”

Where was this root? What senna, what tepid tisanes,

could clean the branched river of his corrupted blood,

whose sap was a wounded cedar’s? What did it mean,

this name that felt like a fever? Well, one good heft

of his garden-cutlass would slice the damned name clean

from its rotting yam. He said,
“Merci.”
Then he left.

Chapter IV

I

North of the village is a logwood grove whose thorns

litter its dry shade. The broken road has boulders,

and quartz that glistens like rain. The logwoods were once

part of an estate with its windmill as old as

the village below it. The abandoned road runs

past huge rusted cauldrons, vats for boiling the sugar,

and blackened pillars. These are the only ruins

left here by history, if history is what they are.

The twisted logwood trunks are orange from sea-blast;

above them is a stand of surprising cactus.

Philoctete limped to his yam garden there. He passed

through the estate shuddering, cradling his cutlass,

bayed at by brown, knotted sheep repeating his name.

“Beeeeeh, Philoctete!” Here, in the Atlantic wind,

the almonds bent evenly like a candle-flame.

The thought of candles brought his own death to mind.

The wind turned the yam leaves like maps of Africa,

their veins bled white, as Philoctete, hobbling, went

between the yam beds like a patient growing weaker

down a hospital ward. His skin was a nettle,

his head a market of ants; he heard the crabs groan

from arthritic pincers, he felt a mole-cricket drill

his sore to the bone. His knee was radiant iron,

his chest was a sack of ice, and behind the bars

of his rusted teeth, like a mongoose in a cage,

a scream was mad to come out; his tongue tickled its claws

on the roof of his mouth, rattling its bars in rage.

He saw the blue smoke from the yards, the bamboo poles

weighed down by nets, the floating feather of the priest.

When cutlass cut smoke, when cocks surprise their arseholes

by shitting eggs,
he cursed,
black people go get rest

from God;
at which point a fierce cluster of arrows

targeted the sore, and he screamed in the yam rows.

He stretched out the foot. He edged the razor-sharp steel

through pleading finger and thumb. The yam leaves recoiled

in a cold sweat. He hacked every root at the heel.

He hacked them at the heel, noticing how they curled,

head-down without their roots. He cursed the yams:

                                                                                           
“Salope!

You all see what it’s like without roots in this world?”

Then sobbed, his face down in the slaughtered leaves. A sap

trickled from their gaping stems like his own sorrow.

A fly quickly washed its hands of the massacre.

Philoctete felt an ant crawling across his brow.

It was the breeze. He looked up at a blue acre

and a branch where a swift settled without a cry.

II

He felt the village through his back, heard the sea-hum

of transports below. The sea-swift was watching him.

Then it twittered seaward, swallowed in the cloud-foam.

For as long as it takes a single drop to dry

on the wax of a dasheen leaf, Philoctete lay

on his pebbled spine on hot earth watching the sky

altering white continents with its geography.

He would ask God’s pardon. Over the quiet bay

the grass smelt good and the clouds changed beautifully.

Next he heard warriors rushing towards battle,

but it was wind lifting the dead yams, the rattle

of a palm’s shaken spears. Herdsmen haieing cattle

who set out to found no cities; they were the found,

who were bound for no victories; they were the bound,

who levelled nothing before them; they were the ground.

He would be the soul of patience, like an old horse

stamping one hoof in a pasture, rattling its mane

or swishing its tail as flies keep circling its sores;

if a horse could endure afflictions so could men.

He held to a branch and tested his dead hoof once

on the springy earth. It felt weightless as a sponge.

III

I sat on the white terrace waiting for the cheque.

Our waiter, in a black bow-tie, plunged through the sand

between the full deck-chairs, bouncing to discotheque

music from the speakers, a tray sailed in one hand.

The tourists revolved, grilling their backs in their noon

barbecue. The waiter was having a hard time

with his leather soles. They kept sliding down a dune,

but his tray teetered without spilling gin-and-lime

on a scorched back. He was determined to meet the

beach’s demands, like a Lawrence of St. Lucia,

except that he was trudging towards a litre

of self-conscious champagne. Like any born loser

he soon kicked the bucket. He rested his tray down,

wiped the sand from the ice-cubes, then plunked the cubes in

the bucket, then the bottle; after this was done,

he seemed ready to help the wife stuff her boobs in

her halter, while her husband sat boiling with rage

like a towelled sheik. Then Lawrence frowned at a mirage.

That was when I turned with him towards the village,

and saw, through the caging wires of the noon sky,

a beach with its padding panther; now the mirage

dissolved to a woman with a madras head-tie,

but the head proud, although it was looking for work.

I felt like standing in homage to a beauty

that left, like a ship, widening eyes in its wake.

“Who the hell is that?” a tourist near my table

asked a waitress. The waitress said, “She? She too proud!”

As the carved lids of the unimaginable

ebony mask unwrapped from its cotton-wool cloud,

the waitress sneered, “Helen.” And all the rest followed.

Chapter V

I

Major Plunkett gently settled his Guinness, wiped

the rime of gold foam freckling his pensioned moustache

with a surf-curling tongue. Adjacently, Maud sipped

quietly, wifely, an ale. Under the peaked thatch

designed like a kraal facing the weathered village,

the raffia decor was empty. He heard the squeak

of Maud’s weight when she shifted. The usual mirage

of clouds in full canvas steered towards Martinique.

This was their watering-hole, this rigid custom

of lowering the yardarm from the same raffia chairs

once a week at one, between the bank and the farm,

once Maud delivered her orchids, for all these years

of self-examining silence. Maud stirred the ends

of damp curls from her nape. The Major drummed the edge

of the bar and twirled a straw coaster. Their silence

was a mutual communion. They’d been out here

since the war and his wound. Pigs. Orchids. Their marriage

a silver anniversary of bright water

that glittered like Glen-da-Lough in Maud’s home county

of Wicklow, but for Dennis, in his khaki shirt

and capacious shorts in which he’d served with Monty,

the crusted tourists were corpses in the desert

from the Afrika Korps.
Pro Rommel, pro mori.

The regimental brandies stiffened on the shelves

near Napoleonic cognacs. All history

in a dusty Beefeater’s gin. We helped ourselves

to these green islands like olives from a saucer,

munched on the pith, then spat their sucked stones on a plate,

like a melon’s black seeds.
Pro honoris causa,

but in whose honour did his head-wound graduate?

This was their Saturday place, not a corner-pub,

not the wrought-iron Victoria. He had resigned

from that haunt of middle-clarse farts, an old club

with more pompous arses than any flea could find,

a replica of the Raj, with gins-and-tonic

from black, white-jacketed servitors whose sonic

judgement couldn’t distinguish a secondhand-car

salesman from Manchester from the phony pukka

tones of ex-patriates. He was no officer,

but he’d found himself saying things like “Luverly,”

“Right-o,” and, Jesus Christ, “Ta!” from a wicker chair,

with the other farts exchanging their brusque volley

in the class war. Every one of them a liar

dyeing his roots, their irrepressible Cockney,

overdoing impatience. Clods from Lancashire

surprised by servants, outpricing their own value

and their red-kneed wives with accents like cutlery

spilled from a drawer. For them, the fields of his valour,

the war in the desert under Montgomery,

and the lilac flowers under the crosses were

preserved by being pickled at the Victoria.

He’d played the officer’s pitch. Though he felt ashamed,

it paid off. The sand grit in his throat, the Rover,

all that sort of stuff. The khaki shorts that proclaimed

his forgotten service. Well, all that was over,

but not the class war that denigrated the dead

face down in the sand, beyond Alexandria.

The flags pinned to a map. The prone crosses

of tourists sprawled out far from the red lifeguard’s flag,

like those of his comrades with sand seaming their eyes.

What was it all for? A bagpipe’s screech and a rag.

Well, why not? In war, the glory was the yeoman’s;

the kids from drizzling streets; they fell like those Yanks

in a sun twice as fierce, Tobruk and Alamein’s,

their corpses black in the shade of the shattered tanks,

their bodies dragged like towels to a palm-tree’s shade.

Those lines of white surf raced like the applauding streets

alongside the Eighth Army when Montgomery broke

the back of the Afrika Korps. Blokes in white sheets

flinging caps like spray as we piped into Tobruk

and I leant on the tank turret while bagpipes screeched

ahead of those grinning Tommies. I wept with pride.

Tears prickled his eyes. Maud reached across the saucer

and gripped his fingers. He knew she could see inside

the wound in his head. His white nurse. His officer.

II

Not club-mates. Chums, companions. Comrades-in-arms.

They crouched, hands on helmets, while the Messerschmitt’s gun

stitched, in staccato succession, miniature palms

along the top of the trench. He shot up. Again

Tumbly pulled him down. “Just keep yer bleedin’ ’ead low!”

Scott was running to them, laughing, but the only thing

funny about him was the fact that one elbow

didn’t have the rest of the arm. He jerked the thing

from the stump, mimicking a Kraut salute; then, as

his astonishment passed, he sagged down from the knees

with that grin. And I turned to Tumbly and his eyes

were open but not moving; then an awful noise

lifted all of us up from the sand and I guess

I was hit then, but I could remember nothing

for months, in casualty. Oh yes! that business

of Tumbly’s eyes. The sky in them. Scottie laughing.

Tell them that at the Victoria, in the noise

of ice-cubes tinkling and the draft-beer frothing.

This wound I have stitched into Plunkett’s character.

He has to be wounded, affliction is one theme

of this work, this fiction, since every “I” is a

fiction finally. Phantom narrator, resume:

Tumbly. Blue holes for his eyes. And Scottie wiser

when the shock passed. Plain men. Not striking. Not handsome.

Through the Moorish arches of the hospital ward,

with a cloud wrapped around his head like an Arab,

he saw the blue Mediterranean, then Maud

lying on her back on the cliff and the scarab

of the troop ship far on the roadstead. Two days’ leave

before they set out, and he thought he would never

see her again, but if he did, a different life

had to be made whenever the war was over,

even if it lasted ten years, if she would wait,

not on this grass cliff but somewhere on the other

side of the world, somewhere, with its sunlit islands,

where what they called history could not happen. Where?

Where could this world renew the Mediterranean’s

innocence? She deserved Eden after this war.