The Origin of Waves (3 page)

“You two sons o’ bitches,
no more further!
You hear me? Do
not
touch the kiss-me-arse white man’s motocar! You hear me?”

John and I did not really live under the yoke of colonialism, as we had read in our library books that Africans did still. We said we were colonials because we were joking; because it was just our young fury and our imitating the words of older men and the book-learning we were getting at Combermere School for Boys that made us see ourselves as colonials, sitting on that sand on that beach, staring at waves that washed assertive and sullen strangers ashore, as if they were born like us, in the island, as if they were born here, to rule over us, here. We knew only what it could mean to be sitting on the sand all day, every day; and dreaming; and pretending we were the brother of that little boy who, in the poem we had to learn by heart, stood in his shoes and wondered, he stood in his shoes and he wondered; and we wondered why. We did not remember the name of the book or the poem in which we had read about this little boy and liked him. We did not wear shoes while we wondered whether the wave that licked our feet and our pink heels, the wave that brought the fateful cobbler into John’s pink heel, that washed my uncle in, dead and swollen, was the same wave born in
another country, and that had travelled alongside the steamer and the Canadian lady-boats and deposited the little blackened piece of wood, or stick, or flotsam and jetsam, at our feet. Or whether it was the same wave as those thousands which washed the ships of groaning Africans sardined in holds on our beaches where the tourist hotels are built. In my elementary school, Mr. Thorpe, our teacher, stood one afternoon before our class, First Standard, with sweat of his honest underpaid labour pouring off his face, as the tears poured from our eyes, as he poured “comma-sense” into our heads and ears and backs and backsides, because we had not remembered that a little piece of blackened stick, or wood, was properly known as “flotsam.” He screamed as he poured the knowledge into our small minds and bodies.

“Flotsam!
The proper word is
flotsam
! What is the proper word? Say it again! Flot
-sam! Flot-sam!”
And each stress of pronunciation was riveted home with the heavy hand of pronouncement from the pronunciating tamarind rod. The rod of tearful justice. And from that soaked afternoon, I associated the two words to have the same meaning:
pronunciation
and
pronouncement
But we were acquainted with another kind of “flotsam,” since one or two of us, not John and I, were sometimes called “the flotsam of our society.” It was the English vicar, one morning at matins, from the pulpit made of lignum vitae by the hands of the village’s cabinet-makers, who polished wood to make it look
like brass, it was the Vicar who used the word which almost slipped by us, as it was spoken in his
accent
which we could hardly understand, but which we killed ourselves afterwards imitating.
“Flott-sum!”
And after that sermon, we too called those other little boys by this name. But we thought of ourselves as
that
other little boy in the poem about boys wearing shoes, standing and wondering.

It is about, it is, I think, a little after eleven o’clock on this cold day in December; and I am walking north along Yonge Street, just up from a place which used to be a commercial bank and which now looks like an abandoned church; and bag men and homeless women have made it their drinking place where they sleep on sheets of thin cardboard, making it look like an institution for justice and a prison in Latin America; and up from this camping ground are the stores open today by Indian immigrants from Sri Lanka and Pakistan and Trinidad, and closed tomorrow by the Housing Authorities sent by the police, for reasons the Sri Lankans cannot interpret; up from the southernmost end of the Eaton Centre, across the street; up from Massey Hall off that short street, walking in a kind of white valley, for the thickness of the snow has hidden all these buildings from easy sight, and I can only know they are there from memory. And the snow has hidden all colour and life from the street, and the Christmas colours of green and red, silver and gold, from store windows; and I am alone, and I can see nobody, and
nobody can see me. There are only shapes; the shapes of people I hear ahead of me. I raise my head against the flakes that enter my eyes, almost blinding me, and those that fall into my ears, tickling me; and I try to laugh at this short tickle, to see the fun in it; but there is no sky, and no sun, and no warm sand, only a channel of white. I am walking through a valley with no landmarks on my left side, or my right, to give me bearing and remind me of the notice of movement, although I know I am travelling forward, north, since I have set out from the bottom of the street, by the Lake.

It is only in the past five years, after my forty-fifty years of complaining about winter, and my threats to myself about going back home, that I find myself walking beside the Lake, wondering what would happen. The Lake is a lake. It is not the sea. There are seagulls but no scratching crabs; and the boats are larger and from larger countries; and no sand on the shore, there is no beach; and no waves; but it is the closest thing I can come to, in the absence of sand of any colour, like the conch-shell on that beach. The Lake is a place I can sit beside and dream of waves and the origin of waves and where waves can take you. I stand leaning on the metal rail guarding the Lake, preventing my jump, in this tormenting time of indecision: home or here; sun or snow; and I have thought, many times, that at this age, and with the leisure that age brings and that hangs languorously on my hands, of attempting precisely that. Jumping into the Lake. “Jump in the goddamn Lake,
you bugger!” a man told me, forty years ago. I was working in the summer in a Flo-Glaze factory as a part-time worker, a working man, when I was a student at Trinity College; and I had put the wrong measurement of percentages and paints and concentrated tints in the order I was given to fill. “Go jump in the fucking Lake!” This was the advice a woman gave when I could not fill the order of her love, when she said she knew that she loved me, after I had asked her to marry me. I was a student out of work, then. Jumping into the Lake. I have tried it often in my mind, but the metal rail prevents me.

On that afternoon back in the island, with sun and light and sky blue as the desire for Chermadene, a young schoolgirl who John and I, as in many things, liked with the same passion, we did not talk about lakes. But we talked about Chermadene. John and I fell in love with this girl with the plaited hair. And she always wore two dangling blue pieces of ribbon in her hair. On that warm afternoon, on the beach, when the needles of the cobbler were in John’s heel, we still talked and argued about her. And our words of little competition had prevented us from seeing the inner tube float out into the deeper water; and we could not retrieve it, this black, patched tube that we had got from a tire off the Humber Hawk. The tire was no longer roaring and screeching along the narrow crowded streets of our neighbourhood. Once, before we got it, it was killing not only two chickens that laid one egg a
day, but one man who was out of work, and who moved too slowly out of the road. On that afternoon, I wished the tire would develop a leak and sink with me on it, and end the pain of Chermadene’s divided love. But when on that afternoon on the beach we looked up to see the tube, a million times larger than the Lifesavers which the tourisses brought into the island and which we sucked in slow delight, I was rendered then as unmovable as the Humber Hawk has become. For it was now placed on four large coral stone blocks, to be scavenged by the apprenticed mechanics in the village. On that afternoon, I could not retrieve the life-saving tube, as I could not make it sink, and would be drowned. Because I could not swim.

And I know now, though at that time on the beach I was too young to possess this heavy knowledge about suicide, that only those who swim can attempt to jump into a lake, to put an end to their lives and to their loves. Money. Love. The lack of money. The loss of love. Those of us who cannot swim are too particular about drowning to test the consolation of the water.

Money and love flow past us, like the waves on that beach with that inner tube that drowned at sea; or was lost. And no man came to put the voiceless conch-shell to his lips.

So, when I ducked my head to shake the snow from out of my ears, I became unbalanced, and I almost got knocked down by the shape coming invisible and silent through the thick mist of snow. He did not see me. She
did not see me. I try to be fair in this city, where I cannot be as sure as an oath taken upon the thin page of the Holy Bible, that I can say with truth and sureness, that it is a man or a woman coming against me, that it is a man; or if I say it is a woman coming against me, that
she
is a woman. Men and women in this democratic, fun-loving, gay city, coated at this time of year in deep, falling snow and wool, all look the same. Sometimes the bodies of men and women shake and behave the same.

The shape did not see me. I was just another obstacle that the shape had to walk around, or walk into, continuing in its journey, with spirited childlike glee at the fresh fall of this thickness that transformed the sidewalk into a skating rink.

This snow, through which I am trying to move, and which I am trying to like, as if I were born to its thickness and trickiness underfoot, and in which I live, is a curtain. It reminds me of the thick white ones,
sheers
, which my mother strung with herringbone twine, at each of the sixteen windows in our walled house, a house with six gables or roofs. These curtains looked and behaved like six waves or big sails against the wind and the blue sea, if you were sitting on the sand and watching them.

And I can see nothing in front of me now. Nothing. But I try to pretend that I am native to this kind of treachery on ice, that I was born here into this white, cold miserableness, and am not really an obstacle.

A new spasm of life comes into my steps. My feet become less heavy. I am back there. And the wet khaki cut-down pants have dried suddenly in the sun; and I am a sprinter running through thick green fields of sugar cane and cush-cush grass after the animals, my mother’s livestock, goats and sheep and pigs and pigeons. And I hear a voice. Her voice? The chauffeur’s voice? Coming out of this thick snow which blindfolds the afternoon. Out of this surrounding curtain comes a voice. “Move-out o’ my goddamn way, man!” The words injure the sweet, white silence of the snow. “What the arse …?”

It is like a voice crying out from amongst thick belching smoke and crackling shingles, of a house on fire, burning for help and assistance. But it is also a voice of anger. I know the anger in the voice of a burning house. I have heard it many times. Voices like this come after a ball bowled too fast and causing injury. This is a voice that comes after a race that is lost, after a wrong key in a solo, in a descant. It is as if the burning house and the white snow engulfing it has to clear before I can learn the distinctness in the voice. The second reprimand is a longer declaration for assistance. This makes the thick smoke clear. It is a voice I know. I heard it once on a beach. “What the arse … You want to lick me down, man?”

Still, I cannot see. No shape, or owner of this voice. And in this blinding snow he cannot see me. But I stop walking, though I am unable to stand motionless, in
this snow which shifts like an uncontrollable roller skate, for too long. My shoes are sliding. I can feel winter on my soles. My left foot is wet from the soaked, cold, woollen sock. And I go back to that time, on a pasture, the Garrison Savannah Parade Ground, so hot and so sticking wet, when I was made to stand at attention, while the Governor moved through our ranks taking his royal time, and I could barely see him in the distance; for in that regal distance, the Governor was nothing more than a bunch of regimental plumes, all white. At that distance, it was as if he were a gigantic common fowl-cock or a Leghorn about to crow the morning in, from the top of the wooden fence, his roost surrounding our yard, and bring his hundred hens to sexual attention. This voice, though, is the same voice I had heard next to me, as I wavered while ordered to stand at “atten-shunn!”; when the water in my bladder was making it impossible for me to be rigid and soldierly, when I moved ever so slightly to ease the pain and the burning of the sun and the sweat pouring down my face and into my neck, making the khaki uniform shirt no longer stiff, and down into the white, blancoed belt me and my mother had laboured over, and changed from green canvas to spotless white.

I am now close enough to stand, to see. And to wonder. And recognize. And call back, in this thickening snow, in this flash of abusive time, all those years.

“John!”

“You?”

“John?”

“Goddamn, man!” he says. I am sitting beside him once more, on the warm afternoon sand. And an inner tube is drifting out, into the sea, into the Atlantic which we knew would join us up again, some time later, in a land too far for our young eyes to see, after it has separated us.

“Jesus Christ!” I say, giving the miracle of this reacquaintance credence and reality, giving the sudden reunion its greeting of incredulity, giving his appearance its dramatic significance.

“
You
?” he asks, believing and not believing.

How can he believe so easily, in this mist of time, in this street, in this city, in this country which we had not only studied in our geography books at Combermere School for Boys and knew by heart, but still had refused to believe to be the place we would choose to live in? In this North America? In all these forty-fifty years we had not once exchanged even a post card at Christmas. Birthdays were forgotten landmarks. And the telephone neither of us thought about. It was out of the question.

In all this time, neither of us knew we would voluntarily live with this cold, this ice, this snow.

“God bless my eyesight!” I say.

“Too goddamn good to be true!” he says.