Omeros (23 page)

became its muffled echo, every street a grave

with snow on both sides. I caught the implications

of a traffic-light winking on an iron sky

that I could, since the only civilizations

were those with snow, whiten to anonymity.

Turn the page. Blank winter. The obliteration

of nouns fading into echoes, the alphabet

of scribbling branches. Boots stamp the trolley station.

Dead cars foam at the mouth with icicles. The boat

of the streetcar’s light divides the frozen breakers,

then steaming passengers scratch at the webbed windows’

quickly stitched lace. Swaying in black coats and parkas,

every face is a lantern wincing when the doors

part their rubber accordion, their tears like glass.

The name I had mispronounced was as muffled now

as any white noun outside the spectral stations

along the line, where the faces were flecked with snow

when the full car passed them, resigned in their patience

like statues in their museum. Her old address

enlarged with the next stop. The passengers staggered

on the straps, the doors in a blast of malice

grinned open, the bell rang, and suddenly I stood

in bewildering whiteness, flakes clouding my eyes.

The streets were white as her studio, huge boulders

of sculptured coral, the blinding limestone of Greece

like frozen breakers on the path between closed doors.

The panes of ice in the gutters were as grey as

those of the houses. I climbed steps, I read buzzers,

searched from the pavement again for that attic where

a curved statue had rolled black stockings down its knees,

unclipped and then shaken the black rain of its hair,

and “Omeros” echoed from a white-throated vase.

But no door opened to show me her startled eyes

behind its brass chain, no light linked the Asian bones

of the axe-blade cheek. The glaucous windows were blind.

I had lost the address. I walked through coral stones

that whined like a cemetery in the sunlit wind,

then waited for the trolley’s eye as we did once

on the other side of that year. One came. Its doors

yawned and rattled shut. Its hull slid past the combers.

Houses passed like a wharf. Hers. Or some other house.

BOOK SIX

Chapter XLIV

I

In hill-towns, from San Fernando to Mayagüez,

the same sunrise stirred the feathered lances of cane

down the archipelago’s highways. The first breeze

rattled the spears and their noise was like distant rain

marching down from the hills, like a shell at your ears.

In the cool asphalt Sundays of the Antilles

the light brought the bitter history of sugar

across the squared fields, heightening towards harvest,

to the bleached flags of the Indian diaspora.

The drizzling light blew across the savannah

darkening the racehorses’ hides; mist slowly erased

the royal palms on the crests of the hills and the

hills themselves. The brown patches the horses had grazed

shone as wet as their hides. A skittish stallion

jerked at his bridle, marble-eyed at the thunder

muffling the hills, but the groom was drawing him in

like a fisherman, wrapping the slack line under

one fist, then with the other tightening the rein

and narrowing the circle. The sky cracked asunder

and a forked tree flashed, and suddenly that black rain

which can lose an entire archipelago

in broad daylight was pouring tin nails on the roof,

hammering the balcony. I closed the French window,

and thought of the horses in their stalls with one hoof

tilted, watching the ropes of rain. I lay in bed

with current gone from the bed-lamp and heard the roar

of wind shaking the windows, and I remembered

Achille on his own mattress and desperate Hector

trying to save his canoe, I thought of Helen

as my island lost in the haze, and I was sure

I’d never see her again. All of a sudden

the rain stopped and I heard the sluicing of water

down the guttering. I opened the window when

the sun came out. It replaced the tiny brooms

of palms on the ridges. On the red galvanized

roof of the paddock, the wet sparkled, then the grooms

led the horses over the new grass and exercised

them again, and there was a different brightness

in everything, in the leaves, in the horses’ eyes.

II

I smelt the leaves threshing at the top of the year

in green January over the orange villas

and military barracks where the Plunketts were,

the harbour flecked by the wind that comes with Christmas,

edged with the Arctic, that was christened
Vent Noël;

it stayed until March and, with luck, until Easter.

It freshened the cedars, waxed the
laurier-cannelle,

and hid the African swift. I smelt the drizzle

on the asphalt leaving the Morne, it was the smell

of an iron on damp cloth; I heard the sizzle

of fried jackfish in oil with their coppery skin;

I smelt ham studded with cloves, the crusted accra,

the wax in the varnished parlour: Come in. Come in,

the arm of the Morris chair sticky with lacquer;

I saw a sail going out and a sail coming in,

and a breeze so fresh it lifted the lace curtains

like a petticoat, like a sail towards Ithaca;

I smelt a dead rivulet in the clogged drains.

III

Ah, twin-headed January, seeing either tense:

a past, they assured us, born in degradation,

and a present that lifted us up with the wind’s

noise in the breadfruit leaves with such an elation

that it contradicts what is past! The cannonballs

of rotting breadfruit from the Battle of the Saints,

the asterisks of bulletholes in the brick walls

of the redoubt. I lived there with every sense.

I smelt with my eyes, I could see with my nostrils.

Chapter XLV

I

One side of the coast plunges its precipices

into the Atlantic. Turns require wide locks,

since the shoulder is sharp and the curve just misses

a long drop over the wind-bent trees and the rocks

between the trees. There is a wide view of Dennery,

with its stone church and raw ochre cliffs at whose base

the African breakers end. Across the flecked sea

whose combers veil and unveil the rocks with their lace

the next port is Dakar. The uninterrupted wind

thuds under the wings of frigates, you see them bent

from a force that has crossed the world, tilting to find

purchase in the sudden downdrafts of its current.

The breeze threshed the palms on the cool December road

where the Comet hurtled with empty leopard seats,

so fast a man on a donkey trying to read

its oncoming fiery sign heard only two thudding beats

from the up-tempo
zouk
that its stereo played

when it screeched round a bridge and began to ascend

away from the palm-fronds and their wickerwork shade

that left the windscreen clear as it locked round the bend,

where Hector suddenly saw the trotting piglet

and thought of Plunkett’s warning as he heard it screel

with the same sound that the tires of the Comet

made rounding the curve from the sweat-greased steering wheel.

The rear wheels spin to a dead stop, like a helm.

The piglet trots down the safer side of the road.

Lodged in their broken branches the curled letters flame.

Hector had both hands on the wheel. His head was bowed

under the swaying statue of the Madonna

of the Rocks, her smile swayed under the blue hood,

and when her fluted robe stilled, the smile stayed on her

dimpled porcelain. She saw, in the bowed man, the calm

common oval of prayer, the head’s usual angle

over the pew of the dashboard. Her lifted palm,

small as a doll’s from its cerulean mantle,

indicated that he had prayed enough to the lace

of foam round the cliff’s altar, that now, if he wished,

he could lift his head, but he stayed in the same place,

the way a man will remain when Mass is finished,

not unclenching his hands or freeing one to cross

forehead, heart, and shoulders swiftly and then kneel

facing the altar. He bowed in endless remorse,

for her mercy at what he had done to Achille,

his brother. But his arc was over, for the course

of every comet is such. The fated crescent

was printed on the road by the scorching tires.

A salt tear ran down the porcelain cheek and it went

in one slow drop to the clenched knuckle that still gripped

the wheel. On the flecked sea, the uninterrupted

wind herded the long African combers, and whipped

the small flag of the island on its silver spearhead.

II

Drivers leant over the rail. One seized my luggage

off the porter’s cart. The rest burst into patois,

with gestures of despair at the lost privilege

of driving me, then turned to other customers.

In the evening pastures horses grazed, their hides wet

with light that shot its lances over the combers.

I had the transport all to myself.

                                                          “You all set?

Good. A good pal of mine died in that chariot

of his called the Comet.”

                                             He turned in the front seat,

spinning the air with his free hand. I sat, sprawled out

in the back, discouraging talk, with my crossed feet.

“You never know when, eh? I was at the airport

that day. I see him take off like a rocket.

I always said that thing have too much horsepower.

And so said, so done. The same hotel, chief, correct?”

I saw the coastal villages receding as

the highway’s tongue translated bush into forest,

the wild savannah into moderate pastures,

that other life going in its “change for the best,”

its peace paralyzed in a postcard, a concrete

future ahead of it all, in the cinder-blocks

of hotel development with the obsolete

craft of the carpenter, as I sensed, in the neat

marinas, the fisherman’s phantom. Old oarlocks

and rusting fretsaw. My craft required the same

crouching care, the same crabbed, natural devotion

of the hand that stencilled a flowered window-frame

or planed an elegant canoe; its time was gone

with the spirit in the wood, as wood grew obsolete

and plasterers smoothed the blank page of white concrete.

I watched the afternoon sea. Didn’t I want the poor

to stay in the same light so that I could transfix

them in amber, the afterglow of an empire,

preferring a shed of palm-thatch with tilted sticks

to that blue bus-stop? Didn’t I prefer a road

from which tracks climbed into the thickening syntax

of colonial travellers, the measured prose I read

as a schoolboy? That cove, with its brown shallows

there, Praslin? That heron? Had they waited for me

to develop my craft? Why hallow that pretence

of preserving what they left, the hypocrisy

of loving them from hotels, a biscuit-tin fence

smothered in love-vines, scenes to which I was attached

as blindly as Plunkett with his remorseful research?

Art is History’s nostalgia, it prefers a thatched

roof to a concrete factory, and the huge church

above a bleached village. The gap between the driver

and me increased when he said:

                                                         “The place changing, eh?”

where an old rumshop had gone, but not that river

with its clogged shadows.
That
would make me a stranger.

“All to the good,” he said. I said, “All to the good,”

then, “whoever they are,” to myself. I caught his eyes

in the mirror. We were climbing out of Micoud.

Hadn’t I made their poverty my paradise?

His back could have been Hector’s, ferrying tourists

in the other direction home, the leopard seat

scratching their damp backs like the fur-covered armrests.

He had driven his burnt-out cargo, tired of sweat,

who longed for snow on the moon and didn’t have to face

the heat of that sinking sun, who knew a climate

as monotonous as this one could only produce

from its unvarying vegetation flashes

of a primal insight like those red-pronged lilies

that shot from the verge, that their dried calabashes

of fake African masks for a fake Achilles

rattled with the seeds that came from other men’s minds.

So let them think that. Who needed art in this place

where even the old women strode with stiff-backed spines,

and the fishermen had such adept thumbs, such grace

these people had, but what they envied most in them

was the calypso part, the Caribbean lilt

still in the shells of their ears, like the surf’s rhythm,

until too much happiness was shadowed with guilt

like any Eden, and they sighed at the sign:

HEWANNORRA
(Iounalao), the gold sea

flat as a credit-card, extending its line

to a beach that now looked just like everywhere else,

Greece or Hawaii. Now the goddamn souvenir

felt absurd, excessive. The painted gourds, the shells.