The Origin of Waves (15 page)

“You didn’t hear what I said? I said it could happen to any man.”

“It happened to you? Where? In Italy?”

“I didn’t say that. And I didn’t say I would
walk away
. I said I wouldn’t kill the woman, or the man. But what I would do is this. I would take off my jacket and my tie and my shoes, and my trousers, and lay-down beside the two o’ them. Beside she and him. In the same bed. And pretend that nothing had-happen. And I would wait till the man put-back-on his clothes, trousers, shirt, socks, underwears, and tie; and I know that he
bound
to leave; and the moment he leave and go through the door, I would
paint her ass!”

“So cruel? You’re a cruel man.”

“A cruel man? Not with blows. With
love
. And after I make love with her, I would put-back-on my clothes, get in my motor-car, and drive straight to my lawyer and begin proceedings. Then, I would turn-round in my motor-car and drive
straight
to that man’s house, because Barbados is a small place, and I must know this man, where he live, perhaps me and him are friends;
and when I reach his house, be it a small chattel house or a big plantation house, or a mansion, I would enter, axe him for a drink, tell him me and him have to speak a few words in private, that we had-better go outside so his wife don’t hear what I have to tell him, and when I got that son of a bitch in the backyard …” I feel he is talking about himself, and when he goes on, I am sure this is a real story; and I wonder why. John is contradicting himself? “I took out my gun and place one shot in his fucking head. ‘Take that!’ I told the son of a bitch, ‘take that!’ And I stood up over him, and finished my drink and I dropped the empty glass on the fucker laying-down there, in front o’ me, dead. It’s the Eye-talian experience in my blood. I like Eye-talians. A man do that to me? And get-off? It’s the Eye-talian in me. They know about
amoray.”

“I didn’t know. I thought you were joking. This happened to you when you were living in Italy?”

“Enough said,” John snaps.

“Did this happen when you were living in France?”

“Every goddamn day! You open the paper
Il Figaro
, and you read that a man fucked with another man, and you see that man with his throat cut, and leff in the gutter. Or you see a man, usually well-dress, ’cause Eye-talians like their clothes and their
disegnatores
, silk tie and shirts with their initials worked-in on their cuffs or pocket, and very nice leather shoes. They’re very well-dress, Eye-talians. You’ve heard about Eye-talian leather shoes, the finest in the world? Bruno Maglis?
Only thing, their shoes are not made for black people, and can’t fit us too good, ’cause our feet is too broad. Broad feet and low instep. I don’t really think that Hannibal did such a good job. I don’t think he do his job properly when he crossed the fucking Alps!
In occulo altero Hannibal Alpam …”

“Transgresserat!”
I say. He smiles from ear to ear. “But doesn’t that word,
transgresserat
, have a connection to
transgression
, in a figurative sense, although the strict sense is
crossing
? I suppose a crossing-over is a crossing-over, even if one is crossing the Alps, or crossing-over a man’s woman!”

“But I begin telling you about the only other time, apart from my Old Lady’s death, when I cried like a baby. At Gloria’s funeral. I was telling you about Gloria. At the funeral, the church was
packed
. Gloria had friends. But I never imagined she had an army o’ friends, nor so many. People like peas. All kinds. White. Black. Blue. Brown. Red. French-people, Wessindians living in Paris, and even some came over from London-England. First time I ever see a funeral at a church packed with people, and still people are stanning-up outside like if they are lining-up to go in a dance or a movie. People? She had two priests taking part. People in black. And people in mauve. All the men in black. Not like in the States where some son of a bitch going-appear at your funeral, a blessèd, sacred affair, dressed in a T-shirt and a pair o’ bluejeans. And Adidas! None o’ that slackness. Proper mourners in proper attire and
apparel. A proper funeral. A very lovely funeral. They sang in French, but everybody knows a burial-hymn when they hear one, regardless of the words sung in
français
! And they had me read a lesson, First Corinthians. And I went up in the part of the
église
by the altar and the sacristy, and climb the seven steps up to the lectern, and I tell you, those steps were more like seventeen or sixteen, and my two knees were wobbly, and I could hardly hold the page. It was the first time I realize how thin and fragile a page from the Bible is. First Corinthians.
‘Now is Christ risen from the dead, and become the first-fruits of them that slept. For since by man came death, by man came also the resurrection of the dead.’
I read it in English. When I reach that part, the tears start to flow, and the page became blurred and I could see Gloria in her pink nightgown with her left bubbie drooping over the top of the nightgown-bodice, and how it was moving as she moved to take up another piece of the bacon that she had fried too hard, and I started to feel my tom-pigeon getting hard, and I started to feel dirty, nasty, and sinful. Here I am in a cathedral, in a French
église
, as she had the funeral service in a big cathedral in Paris. In this cathedral with droves o’ people packing-down the church, like at a dance in Barbados, and my mind is back in that apartment watching Gloria in her pink nightgown. The rest of the words melted into one, like the water-rings we’re leaving on this table, into one blurred line, like things look when you drop them in the sea, and the sea water
makes them bigger than in real life. And the tears, Timmy, the tears, the tears. They had to rescue me from the lectern in the pulpit, or where I was, and lead me outside. Outside, it was cold; and an old lady who was-born in Barbados, but had-come-over to Paris to live, and to study piano lessons, administered smelling salts to me, to try to revive me. ‘Here, son,’ she says to me, talking with a real broad Barbadian accent after all the years she had spend in Paris, and with the vapour from her mouth almost hiding her from me and me from her. ‘Take this. Is smelling salts. You love her
real-bad
, didn’t yuh? Breathe-it-in. But don’t breathe-it-in too deep. Yuh going-live-through this strategy, boy. Tek the smelling-salts.’ ”

“She died in the depths of winter? You were still married to the
parlez-vous
woman, and living in France?”

“It was just before I leff France. Just before I leff my first-wife Hyacinthe the
parlez-vous
woman and my three thrildren behind. One afternoon, me and the wife taking a walk through the Shan-deleezays, and who am I going to butt-up-on but this same old Barbadian woman. She see me and she lowers her head. I stop right in front of her. And she raises her two eyes and shake her head, and look me straight in my two eyes, and say, ‘Them smelling salts
revive
you real fast, eh, smart-boy? The girl not dead quite going on a week, and you tek-up with this one, a’ready? The smelling salts work real fast, eh?’ And she move off. I felt like a piece o’ shit.
Hyacinthe, who is a real
parlez-vous
woman and don’t understand a word of English, is smiling and nodding her head at this old Barbadian woman, as she is cursing my ass, Hyacinthe not knowing what had-pass between me and that old Barbadian lady. And to this day, I don’t have the nerve to tell her. Gloria was a woman-and-a-half. A beautiful woman. Sometimes, now that she dead, I wonder if I shouldn’t have-followed my mind in regards to my real feelings at the beginning, and axe her for a piece … No disrespect to the dead, though.”

“God rest her soul. No disrespect …”

“May she rest in peace! Goddamn!”

“You loved her.”

“I loved her.”

“Cousin, or no cousin?”

“Cousin, or no cousin. I should, under-the-circumstances, have-at-least axed her how she woulda feel about my axe-ing her the question. But she is dead. And it is too late. And it goes with her in the grave, in the ground hard as iron, so hard that when the coffin hit the bottom of the grave, I thought it was going to break-up in pieces. It was a strange thought to think. The morning was so cold, so cold, that I had to keep my two hands inside my pockets, and when I breathe, only vapour coming outta my mouth.”

“I don’t ever want to die in this cold country. At least, not during the winter,” I say, and make a dramatic shiver.

“You have no choice. At your age, what you think
your chances is that you won’t drop-dead on Yonge Street, one o’ these mornings whilst you are walking? One in one-hundreds? Or one-in-ten, to be generous?”

“In all my time here, I never attended more than
one
funeral.”

“Nobody that you know ever died? You don’t know anybody who died? In all these years you been living here? It’s because you’re ‘sociating with only young people. ’Cause people drop dead every day!”

“A few acquaintances much younger than me
have
passed-away. But I don’t like to think about death. A few acquaintances. But nobody close. One or two women. But no relation. In this country, from the time I came here, I had nobody close. You realize that when I first came here, with all the West Indians living here as students, and nurses and domestics making up most of the immigrants,
not one of them
was a grandmother? Or a grandfather?”

“Your life here is not natural. My life down there in Durm-North Carolina is a little natural. To-besides it warm in Durm. But with you, you might be looking for a second-spring. Are you looking for a second-spring? You like younger women. You may not admit it. A man your age, and my age, usually likes younger women to make them feel younger. The ego.” He smiles as he says this, teasing me and not teasing; but he has made a wound, nevertheless, and it causes me to think. He has made a wound, deep and raw and bleeding. He smiles, and I see gold showing discreetly at the right side of
his mouth. And I smile, remembering the ways of Barbadian emigrants to countries in the southern hemisphere, Aruba, Curaçao, Venezuela, and Panama. All his original teeth are still in his mouth. The gold is only a filling. Some European sophistication he has picked up in his travels. Those men from our village, emigrants who went
south
, to Curaçao and to Aruba to help find and refine oil, returned home after their two-year contract ended, and entered Barbados with their pockets loaded with guilders, and their mouths gilded in gold, speaking a version of American twang none of us could understand. But we small boys imitated it, in awe at their ease with a new language, American or Dutch, both equally broken like the teeth they had replaced with gold, just as they had lived their former lives speaking broken English when they wished to be impressive making an argument. John’s mouth flashes me back to that of my uncle’s, on my father’s side, who had come back from Caracas and Panama where he went to attend cattle and later attend the men who dug trenches, and who talked about the size of steaks he ate, big as a house and red as blood, and to help build the Panama Canal; and he came back with new suits made in Holland of the finest fabric, hundreds of guilders in cash in his pockets, pink silk shirts the colour of women’s dresses and nightgowns, a colour which men, which our time said was reserved only for women. And this new liberated man started calling us
hombres
and
compañeros
, and saying
qué pasa, qué
pasa
? when an old lady in the village told him, “Good morning.” And calling the rest of us who did not know those Spanish words, and who had not travelled,
niggers
and
nigeros
, remembering words he had learned in barrios where dogs lived with men and women. And we prayed that the oil-refining scheme and its companies would take him back quick to the rough barracks of Caracas and Panama, which he said housed only tough
hombres
and
compañeros
.

John is still speaking about old men in love with younger women, but my mind wanders back to those times when the men in our village tried their luck with gold and oil and new young words.

“A young woman
don’t
make an older man younger,” he is saying. “Quite
au contraire
!”

“An old man gets younger with a young woman,” I argue.

“The old man has to work too hard! All that working usually brings on a heart-affection. Heart-attack, if it doesn’t kill him, or make him more older!”

“Au contraire
!” I say, imitating him.

My mind wanders very often these days. But it wandered often when I was in elementary school, and at Combermere School for Boys, and later at Harrison College; and it wandered every day of the four years I spent at Trinity College here in Toronto. It has been wandering ever since, and with its wandering I fall off into a small sleep, a doze. At regular intervals during this lingering afternoon with John, I have been dozing
off and on, but not allowing John to feel that his tales of existence and experience in Brooklyn and Durham, North Carolina, are not gripping my attention. Dozing off is my habit. While reading. While drinking. While eating. And once, when I was a much younger man, a woman accused me to my face of dozing off while making love when she was on the brink of an orgasm. I left her with no satisfaction. I do not remember her name. If decorum and propriety had not buckled me down and kept my tongue in silence, I would have told her that it was merely my peaceful appreciation of
her
love, and my passive disposition under the writhing, demanding up-and-downs, the pistons of my creaking mechanism, that caused me to express my savouring her passion in that desultory manner – by dozing – and that I had a need to recover from the exhaustion by taking a quick nap, taking that nose-dive of a doze. I make fun in these words of that accusation laid at my doorstep, years ago; but this is merely an attempt at erasure. The accusation has corroded the virility I hinted at earlier in my narrative to John, and I live from day to day with its bruising condemnation.