Omeros (5 page)

his own voice ringing over the street. People turned

their heads at the shout. Achille saw the yellow dress

fold into the closing crowd. Helen never turned,

carrying the basket with both hands. Her stubbornness

made him crazy. He caught up with her. Then he tried

retrieving the basket, but she yanked it from him.

“You not my slave!” she said.

                                                    He said, “My hands tired.”

He followed her to that part of the harbour’s rim,

past the charcoal vendors, where the transports were ranged

like chariots, blunt-nosed and glaring, with the hum

of idling motors. She stopped, and in her deranged

fury screamed: “Leave me, little boy!”

                                                                   Achille rammed her

against a van. He had startled a panther. Claws

raked his face in a flash; when he gripped an arm, her

fine teeth sawed his knuckles, she clawed at his good clothes,

so he, in turn, ripped the yellow dress in his rage.

Hector, whose transport this was, led her inside it,

a trainer urging a panther back to its cage.

Achille felt his body drained of all the pride it

contained, as the crowd came between him and Hector.

Achille had tears in his eyes. He could not hide it.

Her elbow moved when Hector climbed in next to her.

The van raced the harbour. Achille picked up the fruit.

II

She was not home. He remembered the morning when

he lost faith in her, and almost lost his reason

on the clearest of days. He had not told Helen

they needed quick money. Lobsters was off-season,

or diving for coral; shells was not to be sold

to tourists, but he had done this before without

getting catch himself, he knew that his luck would hold.

He was diving conchs under the lower redoubt

of the fort that ridged the lion-headed islet,

on a breezy morning, chopping the anchored skiff,

piling the conchs aboard with their frilled violet

palates, and sometimes a starfish like a stone leaf.

One elbow hooked on the tilted hull of the boat,

he saw, along the high wall, a yellow dress whipped

like a sail in the wind when the wind comes about,

then a fellow at the parapet’s end. He slipped

slowly from the thudding hull. Helen and Hector.

He stayed underwater, the keel bumping his head,

then to the lee side, using one arm for an oar,

knowing from their height the clicking shells could be heard

because sounds travel for miles over calm water.

He tugged up the rope and eased its anchor aboard.

He paddled alongside the hull, hearing the shells

rattling on the floorboards, as his own teeth chattered.

He unwound the bow-rope and clenched it in his teeth,

with frog-shadow strokes,
In God We Troust
overhead,

the fast foam-flowers circling his head with a wreath,

and is God only to trust now, his shadow said,

because now he was horned like the island; the shells

with their hard snail-like horns were devils, their red grin

as they rolled in the salt heat over him, were hell’s

lovely creatures, and his wound was Philoctete’s shin.

For a long time he had sensed this thing with Hector,

now he must concentrate on carrying the conchs

safely. On certain days it had an inspector

from the Tourist Board watching the boats, and if once

they catch you, they could fine you and seize your license.

Now, when he felt he was a sufficient distance

from the redoubt, he hauled himself up with both hands.

Then, one by one, he lifted the beautiful conchs,

weighed each in his palm, considering the deep pain

of their silence, their palates arched like the sunrise,

delicate as vulvas when their petals open,

and as the fisherman drowned them he closed his eyes,

because they sank to the sand without any cries

from their parted, bubbling mouths. They were not his

property any more than Helen, but the sea’s.

The thought was noble. It did not bring him any peace.

III

In this boat we were shipmates. Something had begun

to gnaw the foundations, like surf nibbling a pier,

of a love whose breezy vows assured me again

that never in my life had I been happier.

Look past that wire fence: we had said the word there,

in the shade of rattling almonds by the airport,

as if the noise of the leaves came from her blown hair,

and the salt light gusted, furrowing the waves apart,

and, three bays beyond this, in a calm cove at noon,

we swayed together in that metamorphosis

that cannot tell one body from the other one,

where a barrier reef is vaulted by white horses,

by a stone breakwater which the old slaves had built.

They joined with the slithery coupling of porpoises,

then the zebra-streaked afternoon on a white quilt,

hearing breadfruit palms scraping the roof, the noises

of the town below them, and the little crab-cries

of her parting shell, her forehead glazed with the sweat

of the bride-sleep that soothed Adam in paradise,

before it gaped into a wound, like Philoctete,

and pale slugs crawl from the sand with their newborn eyes.

And now I would wake up, troubled and inexact,

from that shallow sleep in which dreams precede sunrise,

as the vague mind cautiously acknowledges the fact

of another’s outline, watching the fall and rise

of suspiring linen, like a skiff at anchor,

nodding in the dawn swell, while a sea-swift takes off

from the bow-rope, twittering, for some other shore.

And a quiet canoe is drawn, gently, with love

as one leans over and draws the wrapped shape nearer

by an invisible rope, and she parts one eye

and smiles, tapping your knuckles, and you leave her there

and stand on the morning boards of the verandah

and see between the broad leaves the small white town

below it, and a liner, and on the Morne, the

rust-roofed barracks, and insect cars crawling down.

Chapter VIII

I

In the islet’s museum there is a twisted

wine-bottle, crusted with fool’s gold from the iron-

cold depth below the redoubt. It has been listed

variously by experts: one, that a galleon

blown by a hurricane out of Cartagena,

this far east, had bled a trail of gold bullion

and wine from its hold (a view held by many a

diver lowering himself); the other was nonsense

and far too simple: that the gold-crusted bottle

came from a flagship in the Battle of the Saints,

but the glass was so crusted it was hard to tell.

Still, the myth widened its rings every century:

that the
Ville de Paris
sank there, not a galleon

crammed with imperial coin, and for her sentry,

an octopus-cyclops, its one eye like the moon.

Deep as a diver’s faith but never discovered,

their trust in the relic converted the village,

who came to believe that circling frigates hovered

over the relic, that gulls attacked them in rage.

They kept their faith when the experts’ ended in doubt.

The galleon’s shadow rode over the ruled page

where Achille, rough weather coming, counted his debt

by the wick of his kerosene lamp; the dark ship

divided his dreams, while the moon’s octopus eye

climbed from the palms that lifted their tentacles’ shape.

It glared like a shilling. Everything was money.

Money will change her, he thought. Is this bad living

that make her come wicked. He had mocked the belief

in a wrecked ship out there. Now he began diving

in a small shallop beyond the line of the reef,

with spear-gun and lobster-pot. He had to make sure

no sail would surprise him, feathering the oars back

without clicking the oarlocks. He fed the anchor

carefully overside. He tied the cinder-block

to one heel with a slip-knot for faster descent,

then slipped the waterproof bag around his shoulders

for a money-pouch. She go get every red cent,

he swore, crossing himself as he dived. Wedged in boulders

down there was salvation and change. The concrete, tied

to his heel, pulled him down faster than a lead-

weighted, canvas-bound carcass, the stone heart inside

his chest added its poundage. What if love was dead

inside her already? What good lay in pouring

silver coins on a belly that had warmed him once?

This weighed him down even more, so he kept falling

for fathoms towards his fortune: moidores, doubloons,

while the slow-curling fingers of weeds kept calling;

he felt the cold of the drowned entering his loins.

II

Why was he down here, from their coral palaces,

pope-headed turtles asked him, waving their paddles

crusted with rings, nudged by curious porpoises

with black friendly skins. Why? asked the glass sea-horses,

curling like questions. What on earth had he come for,

when he had a good life up there? The sea-mosses

shook their beards angrily, like submarine cedars,

while he trod the dark water. Wasn’t love worth more

than the coins of light pouring from the galleon’s doors?

In the corals’ bone kingdom his skin calcifies.

In that wavering garden huge fans on hinges

swayed, while fingers of seaweed pocketed the eyes

of coins with the profiles of Iberian kings;

here the sea-floor was mud, not corrugating sand

that showed you its ribs; here, the mutating fishes

had goggling eye-bulbs; in that world without sound,

they sucked the white coral, draining it like leeches,

and what looked like boulders sprung the pincers of crabs.

This was not a world meant for the living, he thought.

The dead didn’t need money, like him, but perhaps

they hated surrendering things their hands had brought.

The shreds of the ocean’s floor passed him from corpses

that had perished in the crossing, their hair like weeds,

their bones were long coral fingers, bubbles of eyes

watched him, a brain-coral gurgled their words,

and every bubble englobed a biography,

no less than the wine-bottle’s mouth, but for Achille,

treading the mulch floor of the Caribbean Sea,

no coins were enough to repay its deep evil.

The ransom of centuries shone through the mossy doors

that the moon-blind Cyclops counted, every tendril

raked in the guineas it tested with its soft jaws.

Light paved the ceiling with silver with every swell.

Then he saw the galleon. Her swaying cabin-doors

fanned vaults of silvery mackerel. He caught the glint

of their coin-packed scales, then the tentacle-shadows

whose motion was a miser’s harvesting his mint.

He loosened the block and shot up. Next day, her stealth

increased, her tentacles calling, until the wreck

vanished with all hope of Helen. Once more the whelk

was his coin, his bank the sea-conch’s. Now, every day

he was clear-headed as the sea, wrenching lace fans

from the forbidden reef, or tailing a sting-ray

floating like a crucifix when it sensed his lance,

and saving the conch-shells he himself had drowned.

And though he lost faith in any fictional ship,

an anchor still forked his brow whenever he frowned,

for she was a spectre now, in her ribbed shape,

he did not know where she was. She’d never be found.

He thought of the white skulls rolling out there like dice

rolled by the hand of the swell, their luck was like his;

he saw drowned Portuguese captains, their coral eyes

entered by minnows, as he hauled the lobster-pot,

bearded with moss, in the cold shade of the redoubt.

III

Philoctete tried to make peace between them. He told

Hector that they were men, that he bore his own wound

as patiently as God allowed him, that the bad blood

between them was worse, that they had a common bond

between them: the sea. The sea that changed the cedars

into canoes, from the day they had hacked the trees

in the heights. He said, whatever a woman does,

that is her business, but men are bound by their work.

But neither listened. Like Hector. Like Achilles.

Chapter IX

I

In hurricane season, when everything is rough,

Achille ran out of money. His mate, Philoctete,

found him land-work. His canoe was a concrete trough

in Plunkett’s pig-farm. A broom his oar. Through the wet,

whistling grass near the road, a sack shielding his head,

he saved money and walked six miles to the estate.

Rain hissed under black leaves, a white ground mist drifted

from the torn pastures, the hillside bamboos were broke

as he was. In the dirty gusts he missed the sea’s

smell. He was glad that Plunkett still gave him a break

after Helen and the house. Cows groaned under trees,

the ochre track to the farm zigzagged in runnels

of soft, squelchy clay that fretted between his toes.

There was no sun, he was sure. No scorching gunwales

where the hot oars idled, no sea with its bleached sails.

In sucking Wellingtons he shovelled out the mash