скачать книгу бесплатно
He never asked his father who he left his rich garden to or why he gave it up as soon as his mother sent him off to live with him. Why so soon after Santay they were so quick to see him off again. Why they had chosen him instead of Peter. Why they would not tell him for how long.
‘Is you your father ask for,’ his mother said. But she could not hold his eyes. She couldn’t put words to the other things that her tied-up lips and drifting eyes were concealing from him.
He never asked his father about the silence which sat like an accusation between Miss Maddie and himself. Why Miss Maddie looked past him the way she did from the very first morning he called out to her, made her leave her porch and cross her lawn to come over and see her lil brother.
He was not sure she saw him. Her eyes had drifted skywards, over to the Kalivini hills, up to the Mardi Gras and finally down to some point above his head. They passed briefly over their father’s face and settled on the concrete steps on which they were all standing. Small eyes in a face as dark and swollen as blood-pudding.
‘Uh-huh,’ she grunted, and waddled back to her porch. He was sure she hadn’t seen him.
Her son Paso came just when the small pre-dawn birds began to stir the early-morning stillness with their chirping, when the crickets quietened suddenly and altogether, and the silence they left behind got filled in by the humming of the ocean a couple of hills beyond and the whispery shiftings of the canes. He came like the tail end of a dream and seemed to disappear soon after, making Pynter wonder if he had ever been there at all.
‘A scamp,’ his father told him, ‘a child of the night, that Paso. I don’t remember what he look like now, becuz I don’ know when last I see him. You never see him in the day.
‘Not surprising when a pusson know how and where the boy was born. Maddie picked ’im up in Puerto Rico, see? Take a boat back home when she was big as a full moon. Bring the belly back with her but not the man. She didn make it back to land on time. Had him on the sea. Matter o’ fact,’ the old man slapped his knee and laughed, ‘she had him in the middle of it. Now, a chile that come like that can’t tell nobody which country he from, not so? Cuz he wasn’ born in one. Now that’s between me and you, y’unnerstan?’
Pynter thought about his father’s words and began laughing too.
The old man seemed surprised by it. ‘’Mind me of a uncle you had – that laugh.’
‘He here?’
‘He out there. In the hallway. Just the picture. He not with us no more.’
‘He … ’
‘Before you born. Sea take him.’ His father passed his hand across his face as if he were washing it with air. ‘Funny fella he was, your uncle. But nice. Dress like a king. Dress in black, only black. We used to call him Parlourman because of the black. Pretty face. Smooth like a star apple. Talk pretty too. Every woman he meet used to want to kill for him; but he never was interested. I could never figure ’im out. He didn have no children either. Sank with a boat between Curaçao an’ Panama.’
‘What dead feel like, Pa – it hurt?’
‘Don’ know. Why you ask?’
‘Jus’ want to know … ’
‘When it come, I s’pose the part of you that know jus’ not around to know no more, y’unnerstan?’ As he touched the boy’s face with the meat of his hand, a chuckle rose from his chest. ‘Even I don’ unnerstan what I jus’ tell you. Come eat some food. I glad you here.’
Over the steamed yams, sweet potatoes and fried shark that Miss Maddie had covered up and left on the steps for him, his father’s eyes were on him again. This time it was a different look. It seemed impossible that the anger he’d seen there earlier could reside in eyes so soft.
‘You talk kind of funny too – like him.’
‘Like …?’
‘Like your Uncle Michael.’
He wanted to know more about this odd uncle that the sea had taken. To understand the nature of the quietness that came over his father when he called his name. But all he got was a promise that wasn’t really one, ‘P’raps I’ll get the time to tell you about it one day, if I manage to find de mood.’ Or a statement that was so tied up it took him many fruitless days of trying to unravel it. ‘When a man put hi dog to sleep, then is sleep it have to sleep, y’unnerstan?’
‘No.’
‘Well, I can’t explain no better.’
5 (#u28d22412-8e31-55e2-b13f-1fa9a7d51d72)
HE UNCOVERED HIS Uncle Michael in a grip in the room his father had told him not to enter. He also found his mother there.
He didn’t understand why his father should forbid him to enter a room whose door was wide open. He could see, dimly, right through to the furthest wall. Mornings, he stood at the lip of that door-mouth, his head turned sideways, his father’s voice like a staying hand inside his head. But the fingers of light that entered through the cracks in the board wall on the other side kept drawing him back to the gloom inside. However bright the day, the light in there was always yellow. It made burning pathways across the floor, on books and piles of paper, along the red handle of an axe, over the bunched darkness of a broom, and small piles of clothing strewn like debris thrown up on an abandoned shore.
The room had an odour, too, that spread itself throughout his father’s house – the smell of things that had dried too fast to rot.
It took him days. Of tiptoeing and stopping. Of stopping and tiptoeing. Each time a step or two further in, listening to his dozing father’s breathing in the room next door, mapping out the space around him with his eyes, summoning up his courage. It was a while before he noticed the grip in the corner. It was partly concealed beneath a child’s small mattress. A small, deep-brown case, worn and raw at the edges, with bright brass studs at each corner. The three latches at the front were also made of brass, the handle shaped from some white-veined material that had a wondrous glasslike translucency. He laid it gently back against the mattress, wondering how it could have got there. If the sea had swallowed the boat his father’s brother had been travelling on, wouldn’t it have also taken this with it?
There was a small book in there. It was laid on top of the folded clothing, with pages that looked and smelled like paper money. There was a picture of a slim-faced man at the front of it, with large, light-flecked pools of eyes staring out at him, and a mouth that was soft and curved like his Auntie Patty’s.
He’d seen pictures before but never one like this: the paper so smooth and shiny it seemed to preserve something of the darkness and the glow of his uncle’s skin. Those eyes were really watching him, still on him when he reached beyond the little book and began to slowly lift the clothing aside. Things in there were cool to his touch even though his hands were sweating. His thumb was bleeding where he’d pulled on the catch too hard and a splinter had slipped into his flesh.
It was like reaching into a dream. The lining that ran around the box shifted like water beneath his fingers. The shirts were made of fabrics soft as soap suds. The white ones seemed to give off their own glow in the gloom. A razor folded in a soft brown square of leather. Talcum powder in a pouch that smelled like cinnamon, like the ocean, but mostly like the scent that came off the skin of limes.
Further down beneath the razor and the shirts, past the heavy grey trousers, his fingers hit on something hard. He touched its edges and it slid away from him. He could not close his hand around it. Realising what it was, he slipped his hand under and eased it out – another small book, its cover as rough as bark, its pages ragged at the edges as if they had been ripped from something else and put together by absent-minded hands. Nothing in it but small, haphazard markings like a nest of disturbed ants spilling over the edge of every page. Nothing much worth looking at apart from the photo of a boy.
Perhaps it was the smell of the fabric, the sheen of all those things in that dirty time-scratched box, that held him there.
The boy in the photograph was sitting on a step, his head thrown back as if he were in the middle of the most beautiful daydream. The houses and the people around him were bleached almost to a whiteness, but the boy wouldn’t have seen them because his eyes were closed. And as Pynter used to do in his time of blindness, he shut his eyes, rubbing his thumb against the upturned face in the photograph. He found himself slipping into a happy dreaminess, and he knew that this boy, at some time in his uncle’s life, had meant everything to him.
He found his mother in that room too, scribbled over the fat purple-veined leaves that people called the love leaf. Santay had shown it to him – a strange leaf that took root anywhere, even between the covers of a book, and which threw out little plants exactly like itself from the little dents around its edges. They called it love leaf because it fed on air, drank the water from itself and gave life to its children just long enough for their roots to reach the earth. The mother plant could release them only when she dried up and died. Until then, they fed on her and lived. What better love than that?
But, like his uncle’s markings, his mother’s made no sense to him. He’d seen those lines and curlicues of hers before, from the very first week that Santay sent him home. Peter said she’d always made them. These were different, smaller, packed tightly together, but they had the same loops and curves as those she made on the earth between her feet when she sat alone beneath the grapefruit tree, a stick in her hand, a strip of grass between her teeth, her eyes so far away she wouldn’t have seen him if he’d stood in front of her and waved.
The leaves were dried up now, even their children, because, lodged as they were between the covers of the large brown book, they could not fall to earth. It smelled of earth, the book, dropped carelessly in the corner by the door, its covers riddled with the little tunnels the worms had made through it.
He found nothing else among the pages, just the leaves with those marks he’d always thought his mother made only in the dust.
The days merged into each other like the lines he marked on the steps with the bits of chalk and charcoal he found inside the room. His father rarely left the house. He would sit on the long canvas chair beside the door, muttering to himself over the Bible, solid like a slab of rock on his knees, its pages spread like wings on the altar of his palms.
They hardly talked. Pynter didn’t mind. He had the room to go to.
Over the weeks, Pynter came to know the cracks that ran like little ravines in the flooring of that room, from which he’d extricate buttons, marbles, needles, rusty pins, little bits of coloured glass, a child’s gold earring, three silver coins with birds on them, a small chain of beads that slipped from the crease of his palm in a glittering liquid stream, a tiny copper buckle and bits of fingernail.
Still, he felt that even if he’d entered this room, had explored every part of it with his fingers, it had not really opened up itself to him.
‘Pa, I want to learn to read.’
The old man stopped the spoon before his lips and, without looking up, he said, ‘I been thinkin that you’ll have to soon. I’ll start you off with this.’ He nodded at the Bible.
By the time the man with the white shirt and the stick with the head of a lion came, Pynter had begun to make sense of all his mother’s writing on those leaves. Her words, he realised, were not meant for his father. Not in the way that Uncle Michael’s were meant for the boy in the photograph. She wrote them the way she talked, almost as if she were answering Miss Lizzie and the women in the river. A story which over time he slowly pieced together, ignoring the nudge of hunger in his guts, not hearing his father calling him sometimes as he sat in the gloom shuffling the leaves, sorting and re-sorting them until the words followed each other easily. A strange feeling it was too, rebuilding his and Peter’s history with those dead leaves, one he now knew began long before either of them was born.
When John Seegal walk i use to wish i went with him. i use towish i didnt have to wait no more for him to come back home.from the time he leave all I find myself doing was just waiting.i used to like Fridays by the river fridays was quiet like you donthave nobody else in the world excepting you and the river waterrunning over stone like it want to tell you something, and thequiet wrap itself nice and safe round you. i use to like that. Itfeel like if the water was my thoughts running throughmy head.
One morning i take the washing early. i take the long waydown, through the ravine that was a road when rain didntfall and the bottom get dry.
i come to the place i like to wash because it got a flat stonethere. It was big and wide like a bed, like a place you want tosleep on. The top was bleach like a sheet from all the soap thatdry on it.
i like to finish wash and leave the clothes to dry so i couldwatch the water turn white or get dark according to whatcloud pass over it. But dat time for no reason at all i get tiredof just sitting down dere and I decide to walk down the river.i was talking to myself, or maybe thinking to meself i dontremember now so I didnt notice tie-tongue Sharon and sheson a little way ahead of me.
i know her. she cant talk because she tongue was sew downto she mouth. is so she born. People treat her different becauseof that, but i never. First time i look at her close i see howpretty she is. She got the prettiest teeth anybody ever seeand she got eye that look at you as if they watchin from insidea room.
i see how she say things with she face too, if you look in sheeye you understand everything she cant say with words. i didalways like miss sharon.
She was standing by the end of the stretch of water infront of me, and the little boy was standing up in themiddle of the water with her too. They was naked as theyborn and she was bathing him. It dont have no words for it.i feel sometimes that is because she cant talk words that sheshow so much love with them two hand she have. i rememberthe light too because the sun did find a place through all demleaf and it fall on them. the little boy was shyning like if fireitself did bathing him. i could hear he voice and hear himlaughing to heself sometimes and sometimes answering questionsi never hear miss Sharon ask him. she was full withchild, contented and full, that is what i remember. Like wasthem alone in the world and still them wasnt missing nobody.Not like me.
One time she rest her hand on her belly. I see the boy face.I see how perfect and happy he was. Was like if all the questionI been asking ever since my father leave get answer rightthere, all them question I didnt even know I want a answerfor. I didnt miss my fadder John Seegal no more.
I know miss Sharon know dat I was there because after awhile the two of them was lookin over where I was. I wonderto meself how come they know I there on that stone behindthe bush. But then seein as I know she was watching me I getup sort of guilty.
She do the funniest thing when I stand up. She laugh.
I didnt hear her laugh but I know she laugh because shewhole body do it. It shift that way and this way like she koodntkeep the funniness inside of she. I didnt want her to hold it ineider because she look nice an pretty laughing like that. I getup from where I was and walk down to her because she callme with she hand and when I reach she look in my face kindof soft and deep. The little boy was pretty like her. He was slimand and smooth like guava wood.
Dat light, is de light I still remember. All dat light arounddem and I was in dat light now, like if I did belong dere too.
I know she must have hear me thinking because shetake my hand and rest it on she belly like i was touching thewhole world with my hand or the reason for the world, orsomething.
I ask her how I could come like her. what I did mean washow I could be so happy and contented. She look at the boyand she understand and her body laugh. Her face and herhand tell him something dat he tell me afterwards. he say datshe say I have to be a woman first. A woman. Like that wordwas something that she just hand over to me.
i get impatient with de years. I get sort of fed up waitin toturn woman, sometimes. And a couple of times I try to hurrythings up. I start talkin to meself too, bicause all themthoughts was running round inside my head like ants andwhen I couldn hold dem in, I sort of let dem roll out of me andi write dem down on anything my hand fall on. Is how theybegin to think that I gone crazy. Dat my father spirit get tiredof that dirty swamp down dere and seein as I was his favritebefore Patty come he come back to possess me.
I know you long before you know me. I know you from detime you look down straight at me one morning, when I getup early to go to the pipe for water.
I had my bucket on my head when you reach me and I liftmy eye to say Mornin Missa Manuel Forsyth. I tell myselfafterwards that I shouldnt do that. I should a keep my headstraight but I was remembering what Miss Sharon tell me bythe river. Everything I been waitin fo ever since she tell mecome back to me.
You didnt look like no old man to me. Wasnt no old fellaI see when I look and wasnt what I see afterwards.
I dont know why it had to take three months of getting upearly in the morning and saying Good Morning MissaManuel befo I work meself up enough to tell you what I want.And it wasnt no old fella lookin at me when I ask you firsttime even if you look at me as if I mad.
I keep asking till I wear you down. After a little time I seeyou couldnt hide behind your age no more because all thatsleft was a man looking at a woman.
That was how I come to feel alright again since my fatherleave, because after that I was going to have something datbilong to me.
What I never understand …
He could not find the leaf that would have told him what she never understood. Not a whole one, but fragments that, whichever way he placed them, did not fit together …
…dam fool to believe ——
—— crazy l——
——y —— mother and all th——
—— love and ——
—— chilren who is ——.
—— dam fool ——
—— hatin all —— ——nofabitch tha—
How did it end? Was it with love and —— or was it with — — hatin all ——?
Uncle Michael’s words were stranger than his mother’s, colliding in odd and unexpected ways.
moon over your shoulder shadow in my eyes.
Today you looked much older.
Today I made you cry.
Aruba, May 1945
And it was strange that even when he’d forgotten them, it still felt as if they’d left some part of themselves inside his head. Short words, not half as long as his mother’s; sometimes a line running across a page – like a tiny ant-trail against a vast white desert.
Day yawns, cracks the egg of dawn. A coq-soleil’ssopranoing rises and circles a clean sun. Panama, August 1947
Those words did not help him understand why his uncle never wanted children. They were like the doorway that had invited him into this abandoned room. Everything was laid out before his eyes but their messages remained hidden. A darkened room that was as full of stories as the women in the river. Only these were littered in untidy heaps across the dusty floor, and stranger to him than anything he’d ever heard before.
It going to be quiet up there, his father had told him, but it was not quiet in his head. He missed the voices of the women in the yard. The foolish and the awful things they talked about and laughed over. He missed his fights with Peter and above all he missed his auntie’s hands.
Now that the dry season had come, his aunt, Tan Cee, would be down there among those tiny black dots crawling along the green edges of the never-ending fields of sugar cane. Patty the Pretty would be home because Leroy had taken her out of cane. They would no doubt be doing what his grandmother said his youngest aunt always did when Leroy was around: trying for a child.
He never wondered what that meant. It was some kind of magic between adults that involved hiding themselves away and, if he were to judge by what he saw from Patty, looking very sleepy and smiling all the time.
Tan Cee would be down there with the men, swinging her machete at the roots of the cane, his mother just behind her, gathering them in bundles, tying them and lifting them over her head onto the tractors that looked like big yellow beetles from where he stood. Home was just a walk away, but from here it seemed as if it would take an entire lifetime to reach them.
He wondered if Birdie was with them, then he remembered Tan Cee saying that Birdie only ever sweated over bread.
It was quiet up here. The quietness stretched beyond the house. At the back of it, the land ran wild for miles, all the way past the hellish quarry-land of Gaul through to Morne Bijoux on the other side of the ridge of hills that separated them from the rest of the world. Afternoons, when the heat of the day pushed the old man into a deep sleep, he left the room and retreated into the bushes, making his own little pathways among the borbook and black sage.
There was a long, narrow ravine that went down to a tall wall of plants with bright blossoms. His first few visits there, he couldn’t figure out why everything seemed to be either in fruit or flowering when everything else around was dry. He had gone closer, to examine those heavy deep-scented flowers, when he felt himself falling. He landed in a tangle of wist vines, was shaken but not hurt. Sat there while his eyes adjusted to the thick green light.
He was in a gully that he would never have known existed had he not fallen through the bush that covered it like a roof. The earth was dark with dampness, though it hadn’t rained for weeks. It was cool here too, like the riverbank. There were the same darkish odours of growth and fermentation.
He began picking his way through the tangle. This place puzzled him. The earth was covered with guavas. They hung thickly from the branches above his head. A slight brush of his fingers and they fell into his hands. Wherever there were guavas there were serpents. Santay had told him about the reddish ones that grew long and fat and wrapped themselves in tight knots around the branches. And sure enough he saw them, untying themselves, their heads stretched out towards him, their tongues flickering like small flames in their mouths. He made a hammock of his shirt, selected the fruits he wanted and left there quickly. Later, in the dimming light of the late evening, he sat on the steps and broke open the fruit, tasted each one tentatively before stuffing himself full.
He came back to that place often, because he could find food there. He found crayfish canes and water lemons further down the gully, and a little walk beyond that, sapodillas and star apples. Everything was growing there in that long green tunnel of light and leaves, a secret place that only he, the birds, the millipedes and serpents knew about. He called it Eden.
It was during one of his visits there that Gideon came. When Pynter returned to his father’s house, he heard a new voice pitched high and fast. It sounded like an argument. His father’s rumblings were soft and subdued against the other. Miss Maddie was bending over a pepper plant on the side of the house, a can of water in her hand. His father was lying back on the canvas chair. A man in a pressed blue shirt sat on a chair he had taken from the living room. His legs were close together and he was leaning forward slightly. There were papers on the bed.
The stranger turned and saw him, looked at him as if he knew him. His eyes paused on his face, then dropped to his naked feet. They stayed there a while before travelling back up to his face again. Pynter was suddenly aware that he hadn’t washed his hands. Hadn’t poured water on his feet and cleaned them in the grass outside. He felt an urge to go outside and do it.
‘So you the one they call Half Pint?’ The man was showing him his teeth. His face was strange. It was long like his father’s but thinner, with all the bones showing through. His eyes were round and bright like polished marbles and when he spoke, his lips hardly moved.
‘Pynter,’ his father said, ‘dis is Gideon, your brother.’
