The Origin of Waves (14 page)

“The companionship you were telling me to have with a woman?”

“That kind o’ companionship.”

“To me, that kind of companionship is reserved for a man and a woman who are old, and who have retired from fooping, so they hold hands in front of the television and chew their gums, or play patience. It is an honourable estate.”

“But guess what happened?”

“Companionship, for me, is just before you die, and having a woman to check …”

“And later on, after years and years, guess what happened?”

“She offered you a piece!”

“It was one summer afternoon, and me and some other Wessindians was in her backyard, and we were playing dominoes and really having a good time now that summer was here at last, reminding us of back home, and drinking some rum that her mother had-send from Barbados. And the conversation turned to family and relatives and family trees; and how, back home, a man could be your family and drop dead and you would never know it until after he is six-feet-deep, dead as shite, because the place, the whole o’ Barbados, is so incestuous and close-mouth about it. And Gloria start tracking-back her family, second-cousins to third-cousins and fourth-cousins, back back back, ripping-off the bark from the family tree, and Jesus Christ! Me and Gloria was related! Me and Gloria was first-cousins!
Can you imagine that? Can you imagine that if I had-axed Gloria for a piece that evening when I was in her apartment, what I woulda done? Just me and her. After eating and after I had doze-off and slept most of the night, I wake up the next morning and see Gloria there on the floor sleeping in a nightgown. I could see-through the nightgown that had a tear in it. Transparent as if she had just come-outta the sea. I was sleeping on her couch. ‘Man, you does-snore like a blasted horse!
Two
horses!’ is what Gloria tell me when she wake up. And she made breakfast. Three fried eggs each, six pieces o’ bacon, toast, two thick slices o’ coconut bread, and some of the roast-pork from the night before. The bacon was fried too hard, though. It was burnt. And as we’re eating and talking and joking, and Gloria is sitting in front of me in her see-through nightgown … it was pink. Gloria liked pink. Anything pink. There’s Gloria, sitting in front o’ me in her nightgown, and one bubbie, her left breast, drooping-over the top. And I sitting down and watching that bubbie making little jumps whenever she move her arm to reach over for another strip o’ over-fried bacon; or use a knife to cut-off a slice o’ coconut bread. And I see that nipple get a little more black and start to look funny like how pores does-get bigger, and as if the pores where the milk comes out, or used to come out, for Gloria at this time was a woman who-stopped having thrildren … her two thrildren were already grown men … that bubbie start to get a little stiff. And
the black circle round it get blacker. And I could almost see the blood pumping into the veins in her bubbie. And all I did was to continue sitting and eating the three fried eggs and the eight pieces o’ dried bacon. I had two of hers. And then, the moment she got up and went in the bathroom, the man who was her boyfriend arrive. And the three o’ we played dominoes again, till past midnight. But suppose I had-axe Gloria for a piece? And you know something? I was much younger then, in my early-twenties, or late-twenties. I could not tell you, in sexual terms, what the thing with the pores in her bubbie was telling me! I did not know the meaning of it.”

“What meaning? The nipples or the black circles round the bubbies?”

“The flesh was willing, man! The flesh was willing! But I did not have that knowledge.”

“The spirit was willing.”

“But the flesh was weak. Now, on another Saturday, she had-just called me, to invite me up to her new condominium, ’cause she had-made a hit offa a lottery ticket.
Millions o’ francs she win
, and had-bought this condominium in the suburbs just outside o’ Paris. Me and Hyacinthe was still living in a room in Paris. Gloria always said, ‘Tummuch blasted Wessindians living now in Paris, and they malicious as shite and I don’t want none o’ those bastards to know my business!’ So she moved to the suburbs just outside Paris, a lovely place with all the modern conveniencies, balcony, and a
spare room for guesses, in a three-bedroom condominium. So she called me to invite me up to christen the place, ’cause she was cooking cou-cou and canned salmon the day. She called me at three o’clock the afternoon. The cou-cou was to be ready for five o’clock. I was still in my one-room apartment trying to do some work, with Hyacinthe in my ass, ‘
Beaucoup
years you graduate? I wait
longtemps
for you to graduate,
oui
?’ when the telephone rang. ‘Gloria dead,’ the voice say.
Gloria dead
? ‘She dead. She just dead.’ ”

He takes his handkerchief from his jacket pocket a second time. This time, there are no tears. He sticks the handkerchief, after folding it back into quarters, into his pocket again, leaving its four corners like church spires in full view in the pocket. “Gloria dead. The day after. I found out. She was turning the meal-corn to make the cou-cou when she dropped-fucking-dead! Don’t you think that is a goddamn shame, a goddamn loss, a goddamn shock? So, now, I am at the funeral. At the service. In one of the biggest churches in Paris; and all the years that I know Gloria, I never heard Gloria talk nothing ’bout going to church, or talk nothing about church, although she knew
every
hymn in
Hymns Ancient & Modern
, by heart. And another thing I find out about Gloria, after she dead. Gloria had-paid for her grave and a tombstone five years before she really died. The things you learn afterwards about a person, no matter how close you is to that person in the flesh. But when the person dead, all these things you learn about the person,
for the first time. Gloria had-buy a plot to bury herself in. Five years before! And whilst we would be slamming the doms on a Friday night, right into Saturday evening, we would be singing hymns, especially if a fellow or a girl was about to get beaten six-love; and it would be Gloria who knew the words, and the number of the hymn in the hymnbook. Gloria would sing the first four words in ‘The Day Thou Gavest,’ and
that
meant that somebody was in danger of getting a six-love in their ass …” And we laugh. We can see the barman pouring a little extra gin in our martinis, and heading in our direction. And John, in a soft voice, still retaining a touch of the timbre and a trace of his training as a chorister in the Cathedral Church, begins to sing the hymn which to us back in the island is the hymn sung always at funerals … 
“The day Thou gavest, Lord, is ended; The darkness falls at Thy behest; To Thee our morning hymns ascended, Their praise shall sanctify our rest.”

“Hymn four-seventy-seven,” I tell him.

“How many times you and me sang this hymn? In school, when there was nobody dead? In the choir at funerals, when we got two shillings for singing? At Services-of-Songs, when fishermen gather inside a rum-shop, or in somebody’s front-house? On a Sunday? We sang almost
every
hymn in the hymnbook. And at the first sign o’ trouble, my Old Lady and yours always sing this hymn … 
The day Thou gavest, Lord …
”

“How many hymns are in the hymnbook? You ever counted them? How many you know?”

“Seven, eight hundred? And I’m
not
gonna axe the goddamn barman this time, neither!”

And we laugh. And the barman is coming in our direction, to our table, as if he is reading our minds or hearing our conversation from behind the bar, bearing on his tray a jug of martini. And we laugh, and he laughs and says, “You two on vacation?” and we say nothing, but continue laughing, and he pours the clear, powerful liquid into two new, large, chilled martini glasses, through a strainer, places very delicately two green, juicy olives on a stick with the emblem of the bar on them into each glass, wipes the rings from the oval, black, shiny table, and is leaving when John says, “You a Baptiss?”

“Nope.” he says. I detect an accent.

“Catholic?” John asks.

“Do I look like one?”

“Church of England!” I say.

“I am a Protestant. Guess that makes me something like Church-of-Fengland, too! I’ll buy that!”

“Would you by chance happen to know how many hymns there are in the hymnbook that the Anglicans use, or the Protestants? The book called
Hymns Ancient & Modern
?”

“Sure! Seven-hundred seventy-nine!”

“Goddamn!” John says, spluttering drink and spit on my clothes.

“Wanna hear all seven-hundred seventy-nine?”

“Goddamn!” John says.

“Oh no!” I say, fearing more singing.

“Hold on to this,” John says.

“Thanks,” the barman says, “but are you gentlemen leaving already?”

“Just thought I’d give you a little something for serving us, just thought …”

“Any time you gentlemen needs me again, just raise a finger, just raise a finger, just raise a finger …” And he folds the American twenty-dollar note and slips it into the top left pocket of his black waistcoat.

“God-damn!”
John says.

“I’m going to look it up, the minute I get back to my house! The minute I get home,” I say.

“Home! What a sweet word! We’ve made this goddamn bar our home, I’d say! And what a sweet home! Home-sweet-home, home-sweet-home.”

“My mother had a square piece of cloth worked in crochet with the words
home sweet home
embroidered in it. Two birds that were red were at each side of the frame, and in the frame she had put a cross made out of a leaf from a coconut palm tree that the Vicar distributed to each member of the congregation one Palm Sunday. She kept this cross made outta palm-leaf in her Bible for fourteen years before she got married to my father; and she kept this crocheted motto,
home sweet home
, in the front-house over a mahogany cabinet. That mahogany cabinet she kept her silvers, cut-glass, and crystals in. And she never used them except on Easters and when somebody she liked got married. She
served the food for the wake, to close members of her family, remaining uncles and aunts on both sides of her family tree, in these silvers and crystals the day my uncle came back up, swelled up and bloated from drowning. It was at the wake that I heard some fishermen-friends say my uncle should have learned how to float on the water, at least, if he couldn’t swim. Float on the sea. Float on the water. Home sweet home! I think your Old Lady had a picture that said
home sweet home
too. But hers was a real picture in colour. A watercolour showing an English cottage with a thatched roof, like the leaves of the coconut palm tree. You remember that picture? Smoke was always coming out of the top of the roof, through a chimbley. And I always wondered if that wasn’t the house of your Old Lady’s dreams. And once when I went back home on vacation after twenty-five years, I visited her in the house you bought for her, and the house looked almost identical to the one in the home-sweet-home watercolour picture that was painted by an Englishman, in blue and grey and brown. The picture is still hanging in the front-house of your Old Lady’s new home. All those English pictures that we used to look at when we were growing up, showing us a world that we already knew from books, and which we saw, through those illustrations every day around us, those English pictures fitted-in to the landscape of our lives as if we had painted them ourselves. The painters born in Barbados, most of them, paint only blue skies and
deep-blue sea water with a coconut tree leaning to one side sprouting up in the middle of the canvas. Barbadian art is nothing more than post cards for tourisses. I remember the girl, O-Mary. The girl who walked up to her knees in water going after her sheep and goats across the River Dee. And I understand why the man that wrote the poem and the man who painted the watercolour to illustrate the poem coloured the little girl’s hair red. We have never seen women in Barbados with red hair, have we? To my mind, nobody ever dyed her hair red. Oh! Now I remember something! Do they play calypsos on the radio in Durham-North Carolina where you live? I just remember a calypso, one about what you were telling me, about the three men and the cow with horns. It’s a calypso about a woman dancing too close to a man, and the man is not her boyfriend, nor the man she went to the dance with, and the calypsonian, who is a woman, is warning her not to allow this other man to horn her real man; and then the calypso uses other terms for horning. She says the Jamakians call it
burn
, or
bu’n
. It’s a sweet calypso, but when I heard it the first time, I felt so sad, so sorry for men who find themselves in that predicament.”

“You were, once.”

“I forget. When I heard the calypso it was years after the apartment episode, so I didn’t apply the meaning to myself. I feel sad, though, that a man could face that kind o’ thing in real life, ’cause there are lots of stories from biblical times, and from even when we were
growing up, of a man coming home and finding his woman, or his kip-miss, or even his wife, in bed with another man. And I always wondered what I would do, if that happened to me. What would you do? Have you ever found yourself in that situation? Would you kill the woman? Or the man?”

“Nothing.”

“You won’t kill the man? Or at least throw some lashes in his arse?”

“Nothing. It could happen to any man. As long as you’re living, it could happen to you. Not a goddamn thing!”

“A woman who is your wife,” I say. I say this with some cruel cynicism, because since I do not have a woman, and have not had a woman for years, I am feeling superior about the impossibility to be horned. “Or a woman you’re living with and supporting, and you open your front door to your home and come home, as you are accustomed, and on this occasion you happen not to be making the amount o’ noise you usually make when you come home, and you open the door to your bedroom, and
there
, right there, is a man in the saddle. In your bed. Lying-down on your woman or wife, grinding-away. And you would do nothing? That is not like you. That is not like a man. I could see that if the man in question was himself taking a little piece on-the-side with another woman, that his conscience and guilt might get the better of him; or if the man caught red-handed in your bed was a bigger man
than you; or if the man was richer, and powerful, like a politician; or like is the case in Barbados with the wife working for a bank, and the bank manager starts getting a little piece; or usually as is the case, the wife is working in a haberdashery store, and the owner starts treating her good and getting a taste in return. Even the owner of a grocery store. You really would walk away and do nothing?”