Witchbroom E-Book

Lawrence Scott

• Herausgeber: Verve Poetry Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 566

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2017

Beschreibung

Witchbroom is a visionary history of a Caribbean Spanish/French Creole family and an island over four centuries – to 20th-century independence. With an innovative tone and content, its carnival tales of crime and passion are told by the narrator Lavren, who is both male and female. First published in 1992, Witchbroom is a Caribbean classic. The following year it became a BBC Radio 4 Book at Bedtime, broadcast over eight nights and read by the author. It was shortlisted for a Commonwealth Writers' Prize Best First Book. A pioneering work, it heralded a new generation of modernist Caribbean writers who, like Scott, broke away from a predominantly realist literary tradition; Witchbroom identifies more with magic realism. A richly entertaining and many layered read, its hermaphrodite narrator brings a contemporary flavour to the novel. The title Witchbroom refers to a fungus that attacks cocoa trees, and is also used as a metaphor for the decline of the island's plantocracy.

Leseprobe

Critical acclaim for WITCHBROOM:

‘Rare and magical. The first of its kind... wonderful evocative language; complete emotional range; a loving, touching insight into human and family relationships.’

Sam Selvon

‘An impressively written work by a very gifted writer... subtle but compelling... strange and intriguing fiction with its layers of incurable pathos.’

Wilson Harris (Wasafiri)

‘What a powerful writer... unfashionably leisured and completely self-confident. A Caribbean One Hundred Years of Solitude.’

Fay Weldon

‘An engrossing and compulsive work of fiction... with a sensuous prose style... a vast gallery of characters – vivid, grotesque, miraculous, surprising, pathetic.’

Ken Ramchand

‘This novel has more of the tone and texture and taste of the Caribbean milieu than any novel I can think of. This is a wonderful novel: rich, sensuous, quirky, energetic, vividly memorable.’

Stewart Brown

'Witchbroom is more ambitious than anything I’ve seen in West Indian fiction. Witchbroom is a superbly crafted first novel.'

Curdella Forbes (Journal of West Indian Literature)

‘The novel’s brilliance lends itself to the kind of superlatives that have come from a cross section of reviewers... he explores a colonial reality that has not been really dealt with in Caribbean literature...

a picture of Trinidadian and Caribbean society that is unique, one that helps us to understand the present even better.’

Kwame Dawes (A Genuine Caribbean Text, Journal of Caribbean Literatures)

‘... an admirable fresco teeming with life, in which the personal mix with the historical in the narrator’s memory and imagination. With the publication of this novel, it seems that the white artist is at last prepared to acknowledge the planter’s responsibility in the creation of a society built on exploitation and oppression and that he considers himself an integral part of the society.’

Hena-Maes Jelinek (Literary Criterion)

‘The novelist’s compelling achievement is in reviving the lives of the conquistadors... to re-examine the official history of the Caribbean and revise it so that it encompasses the lives of all those who have been left out of the mainstream: the Amerindians, the black slaves, the indentured servants as well as all women – the colonisers’ wives, mistresses and daughters.’

Dominique Dubois (In Search of a New Beginning for the New World in Witchbroom), Université Sorbonne Nouvelle

‘Cric? . . . Crac. Voices upon voices; tales upon tales, stories and history ascending and descending a family tree that gapes with an intriguing gap. The greed of planters... with the curse of the fungi on cocoa bushes as a recurring punctuation, and carnival not just a moment of release but an opening to lasting changes.’

Christine Pagnoulle, University of Liège

‘Witchbroom remains one of the masterworks of Caribbean literature. Scott has crafted a moving and complex allegory of the postcolonial Caribbean nation that traces the vagaries of memory, the power of the imagination, and the impossibility of Caribbean historiography.’

Njelle Hamilton, University of Virginia

‘Witchbroom is a dense, elaborate and beautifully wrought Caribbean family saga: sweeping in its scope and laden with sensory, emotional and historical detail. The novel’s lyrical style and time-travelling trickster-narrator, its magic, tenderness and romance, seduce readers into something very like an enchanted world. Yet that aura of enchantment ultimately serves Scott’s trenchant critique of colonialism and its malign effects.’

Rachel L Mordecai, University of Massachusetts Amherst

Published by Papillote Press 2017 in Great Britain

First published in Great Britain in 1992 by Allison & Busby, an imprint of Virgin Publishing Ltd

Reissued in paperback by Heinemann (Caribbean Writers Series) 1993

© Lawrence Scott 2017

The moral right of Lawrence Scott to be identified as the author of this work has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording or any information storage or retrieval system without the prior permission of the copyright owner

Typeset in Minion

Printed in India by Imprint Digital

Book design by Andy Dark

ISBN: 978-0-9931086-8-6

Papillote Press

23 Rozel Road

London SW4 0EY

United Kingdom

and Trafalgar, Dominica

www.papillotepress.co.uk

@papillotepress

In memory of mum and dad

and for Jenny

By the same author

NOVELS

Light Falling on Bamboo

Night Calypso

Aelred's Sin

SHORT STORIES

Ballad for the New World

Leaving by Plane Swimming back Underwater

NON-FICTION

Golconda, Our Voices Our Lives

‘... history is a fiction subject to a fitful muse, memory

... In time every event becomes an exertion of memory and is thus subject to invention.’

Derek Walcott, The Muse of History

CONTENTS

An Overture – Fugues, Fragments of Tale

THE HOUSES OF KAIRI: The Carnival Tales of Lavren Monagas de los Macajuelos: 1

The Tale of the First House

The Tale of the House on the Plains

The Tale of the House in the Cocoa

A Journal

THE HOUSES OF KAIRI: The Carnival Tales of Lavren Monagas de los Macajuelos: 2

The Tale of the House in Town

The Tale of the House in the Sugar

The Tale of the Last House

J’Ouvert

Postscript

FAMILY TREE

AN OVERTURE - FUGUES, FRAGMENTS OF TALE

THAT MORNING he noticed that the lime trees were dead. It was the same day that he found the small mountains of dust on the floor in front of the press in which his mother had neatly packed away the remaining things of his father’s life. The woodlice again. He remembered them as a child. Now that he had returned they were here again. The evidence of their work, the decay, as in the doors, which were now paper-thin. He could put his fingers through them, almost, like the thin pages of a book; folding them back, there were the same rooms, musty and damp. The rains were here again. He had returned in the month of August. ‘Rainy season, you come back rainy season,’ Antoinetta, his old nurse, his mother’s housekeeper, had said. ‘So you come back? Well, I still here. You find me where you leave me, keeping your mother house, Madam house.’

On these mornings there would be no Antoinetta.

He hardly saw anyone nowadays, particularly on days like these, when the rains had been hammering all night on the galvanize roof. The ravine beyond the savannah would be flooded. He was sure of that. Maybe even the river on the plain might have broken its banks and overflowed its bridge. The Indian boys who still came to cut the lawns like when his father was alive would be stranded in the villages along the ‘old road’. In the rainy season they came on brighter days to mow the lawns and keep back the wild growth of the alamanda from the gate to the yard. Long ago they would have spoken Hindi. ‘Salaam, baas, salaam.’ He could hear the ancestral strain. Other voices said, ‘Coolie people.’

The morning on which he noticed that the lime trees were dead and that woodlice had attacked his father’s press and the doors to the bedrooms, he discovered an old cracked artist’s portfolio. It belonged to his aunt. It had been tucked away under some of his mother’s old suitcases. As he flicked through the watercolours and sketches it seemed both an extraordinary discovery and something more than coincidence. That he should find these now! Was this to be part of the story?

What story? The story I had returned to this old family house to tell.

I had once started it in this fashion: neat, clipped and distanced, until after much more of that, which I beg your permission to omit, it seemed impossible for the story to hold; for me, or him or her - how did I see my alter ego? - to hold it at that distance or in sentences so always balanced like the prose of another land, the one we were taught in schools in order to write good compositions in our royal-blue exercise books with the picture of the king on the front in an oval frame and then when he died, the queen... it could not hold. Now neither king nor queen, but ibises, cocricos, and the red wound in the green of the forest which is the chaconia. It could not hold.

I chose Lavren, or did he choose me, did she choose me, or did we choose each other, or was he or she chosen for me out of the bric-a-brac of history? Maybe you can tell. Maybe you can decipher, divine whether it is tragic schizophrenia or miraculous coupling or something else I tell you here, at times confusing and fusing my pronouns. I allowed Lavren his fragments of tale, his fugues, his first tales. I allowed him his way of telling the story. Lavren tells these tales with the help of his beloved Marie Elena, his mother and muse, and with the help of black Josephine: cook, housekeeper, servant, nanny, nurse, doer of all tasks, comforter in the darkness and in the hot stillness of noon. She it is who speaks first.

‘Cric,’ she says, teaching Lavren to tell stories. Not once upon a time, in the olden days, in a fine castle, but like an African story-teller telling anancy stories, she invites him to listen and to respond. ‘Cric,’ she says.

‘Crac,’ he replies, eager for her story.

‘Cric,’ Lavren, storyteller himself now, says, breaking his story.

‘Crac.’ Lavren hears you respond to his story and ask for more.

This was no ordinary place. Is a piece of the New World.

Where it began did not announce itself. There was no grand flourish to say this was where it had all started. The grassy fringes of the verge merely petered out down by the dairy and the black galvanize barrack-rooms in the gully. The pitch road carried on to Princes Town, where the two English princes had planted a yellow poui tree on either side of the heretical Anglican church before they dined in Coblentz House in town, and then went back to England, where one of them died. ‘One yellow poui died at the very same hour as the prince who planted it died,’ Marie Elena said. She travelled to Princes Town every Friday to the market: not in a racatang Princes Town bus or in a maroon taxi fluted with silver chrome driven by a coolie man, but in a convertible Chevrolet which her sister Immaculata’s daughter, Giaconda, drove like a film star, scarf flying in the breeze and lips the colour of carmine, pretending that she was still in Philadelphia. When Lavren went with Marie Elena, sitting next to her in the Chevrolet, close to her silky legs, rubbing the hem of her soft cotton dress with his thumb and index finger of his right hand and sucking the thumb of his left hand, he daydreamed as he looked out of the window, but knew exactly when they were passing the secret garden with the pond, the poisonous lilies and the staircase which led nowhere, but which he liked to climb, and pretend when he got to the top that he could see the whole world.

Yes, there could be at this point another prologue, a prologue to a swelling act and an imperial theme. This would be if you told the tales another way, if you came by another route, if you came by the Boca de la Sierpe as did Columbus and his caravels; or from the north which brought the ghost ship through the Bouche du Dragon where the isthmus is broken for the fourth time: that narrow broken-back spine of sundrenched, windblown peaks encrusted with wild forests and white orchids, the archipelago that connects the island of Kairi to the continent of Bolivar.

Cric

Crac

Bear with him, bear with Lavren, his high-flown words, his love of geography and the magic in the names of places. He will ransack the carnival for the writing of his Carnival Tales. He will dissemble: he will be man, he will be woman. He will be Pierrot, discoursing in similes, arguing in metaphor and pun, flowery extravagances. He will be Robberman: storyteller extraordinaire holding you up in the street carnival morning with stories of his origins, his travels through the nether world and the kingdoms below the sea. Lavren will rise to the heights of the Moco Jumbie, balancing on long stilt-legs, will dance the Dragon, twist and wind like the devils’ Jab Jabs, beating their biscuit tins and clanging their chains. Accept it all. Delight in it. It can make you laugh. It can make you cry.

Cric

Crac

This is the one cordillera, the northern range, the Andean foothills. To come this way you would have to brave the current-eddied channels, the destiny of the middle passage between the islands of Monos; the isle of the red monkeys where Marie Elena dangled her feet in the water and went on a picnic with Auguste; Gasparee, the island of centipedes, where Lavren made love for the last time before taking the vow of chastity, an aberration which hardly lasted between one confession and another; Chacachacare, the island of lepers and nuns; Nelson, place of quarantines, where Indian children, sons and daughters of indentured labour, addicted, ate clay.

This was no ordinary place. Is a piece of the New World, boy.

Cric

Crac

Look out for the remous, the black, green vortex of currents that can take you under.

From here, at the centre of the island, where the grassy fringes of the verge merely peter out and the gravel roads are as ordinary as brown string flung down among these other peaks, humped like the back of a green iguana, running diagonally across the centre of the island; from here at the window of the turret room, Lavren, at the sill of the Demerara window, Marie Elena behind him on her deathbed telling the last tales before the end of the world as bachac ants attack the rose bushes in Immaculata’s sunken garden, and woodlice eat their way through the pitchpine floorboards, and Josephine sits by the kitchen door shelling pigeon-peas: from this vantage point, Lavren can listen and write and tell the history of the New World. From here, he can see them coming with their barrels of wine that were stacked in the cellars under the gabled houses which rose from these enamelled forests, painted white and decorated with fretwork as intricate as Breton lace, embroidered with lattice as curly as crochet. From here he can survey the four points of this place of the New World. He can look myopically or can put his hand to his forehead to shade his eyes from the glare to look into the distance of history. There are the ships of Columbus in the harbour at Moruga: the Nina, the Pinta and the Santa Maria as clear as when Miss Redhead, his black schoolteacher, sung their presence under the mango tree in the school yard near the walls of the Church of Notre Dame de Bon Secours, tapping the blackboard with her tamarind switch. There are the burning ships of Apodaca, the Spanish admiral scuttling his fleet to deprive the English Abercromby of the booty of surrender in 1798. There the ships whose bellies are full of black human cargo. There is the Fatel Rozack from Calcutta, dhotied and capraed in mourning on that fatal dawn. All come through the channels of the Serpent’s Mouth and through the Dragon’s Teeth into the Gulf of Sadness.

Don't leap the years, Lavren hears the voices say. Eager he is to put down the record of the first genocide, then enslavement, then indentureship and then on to self-rule and independence.

No, but we must, back and forth and now, with ancient chroniclers, cartographers, cosmographers and geomorphists (who can trace the vestiges of the spirit of place, the footprints in the sand, the voices in the forests), and the others who misled the Christian, Genoese sailor Columbus, Great Navigator, to be surprised at the topography, that lying so close to the band of heat, the circle of fire, there could be such verdure, such mildness, such paradisiacal beauty, that it reminded him at once of heaven and at the same time of his own sweet Valencia in March.

This was no ordinary place. Parrots scream across cobalt skies. Eh, heh?

Cric

Crac

Down in the gully and the house high on the hill in a copse of royal palmiste, palanquins of shade – The Governor tall tall tall, he peeping over the wall – calypso say, their plumes like the fanfare of colonial rule.

‘Pappy yo,’ people shout.

‘Pappy-show,’ they answer themselves, twisting their tongues in irony and ridicule. The trumpets of poisonous lilies hang from the wild vines on the saman tree in the clubhouse yard which Lavren can see from the window of the Chevrolet on the way to Princes Town as he sits next to the silken knee of Marie Elena. They pass the gap, where the grassy fringes of the verge merely peter out.

Remember the house on the hill, the gabled house on high pillars with gingerbread arches, high balconies and wide verandas.

Remember the galvanize barrack-rooms in the gully, remember the clubhouse yard. This was where it had all started. Here in the canefields climbing up from the plain to the cocoa hills, the whole place an estate, a plantation to be shipped abroad to Liverpool, Cadiz, Le Havre. ‘Boy, when Cocoa was King,’ in the hills climbing up from the fields of serrated sugarcane leaves.

Cric

Crac

Here one sunny afternoon... Let us prepare the scene. Let us enter that time, that time of showers and Palmolive soap behind the ears, that time of tea with guava jelly, big chunks of yellow rat cheese, and Crix biscuits...

Cric

Crac

... rat cheese, juice and Coca-Cola. That time of pressed linen caps and aprons, that time which still smells of siesta and almond leaves falling away into the bougainvillaea hedge... and Josephine, sweet Josephine singing and humming a tune, leaning out of the window of the servants’ room, pressing her hair with iron combs which glow on the coalpot, making her hair straight and smooth, all the kinks out with vaseline, rubbing it into her yellow palms.

‘Tidy up your hair, girl. Plait it and put it away. Tuck it under your cap. Always wear your cap in the house,’ Marie Elena orders.

We will sit and listen here with Lavren, in time. Her story, Josephine’s story will be told. Josephine will speak. Lavren will let her speak, because of his love for her melangene arms, her breasts as heavy and smooth as watermelons, her milk as sweet and comforting as sugar-apple, her hips as comfortable as cushions, her smile as bright as the sun, her teeth as the ivory of Africa: because of these things which Marie Elena did not love: her vaselined hair, her voice as deep as the gully where the tania grows, her ears with black holes in her black lobes where she hangs gold as yellow as Benin. Her pride is the stature of a Zulu, as tall as Ashanti. She sucks her teeth with defiance. Cheups. She winds her backside with contempt and joy. He loves her for the way she sweeps her room clean and lets him sit on her bed with the counterpane a flower garden, a material from the chiney shop, for the smell of talcum powder and bay rum and her weewee in her potty under her bed which she flushes in the latrine, behind which grow the bright white lilies that Auguste smells when he goes to have a shit in the morning.

Josephine will speak because no tale would be a tale without hers, no fiction a fiction, no history a herstory without hers. There is no memory without the memory of Josephine. Lavren tells a story as she would, like the storytellers of Africa, like the storytellers chained down below the hatches on the waves of the middle passage, limbo dancers passing under fire, the rod of correction, to the New World. ‘Cric,’ she says.

‘Crac,’ we answer, eager for the truth.

There is another voice: ‘Josephine, Josephine.’ Orders. She is called by Marie Elena and will come up from the servant’s room eventually, after being called many times over. But she is not to be blamed. Her slowness to respond is not the laziness of inertia, but is a studied delaying which Marie Elena does not understand. Marie Elena wants everything done in a jiffy, is impatient with servants, with maids, ironers, washers, yardmen, market-cart men, scrubbers and women who weed the garden. She is impatient with them all, but mostly she is impatient with Josephine without whom she can’t live a moment of her life.

Marie Elena is for pressing ahead with time, for forgetting, for forgetting what she wants to forget, what she does not want to remember. Amnesia ran in the family. But she is also the storer of other tales, tales no one else knows except Lavren, who sits by the window in the turret room taking it all down so that the New World will know from whence it is sprung.

Cric

Crac

Josephine remembers. Remembering takes time. She is careful that the other side gets said, is all recorded. She does not write things down. Josephine probably can’t write except with difficulty. She can write her name and she can read Madam’s messages on brown paper for the shop because she heard Madam read them out. She knows letters. She tells Lavren stories.

Cric

Crac

Let us enter that time. Let us enter over the scrubbed pitchpine floorboards in the soft tread of Josephine’s alpagats, through the cool rooms with the high ceilings slatted with sunbeams that pierce through jalousie cracks. While we walk across the dining-room the jingle-jangle of silver is laid for tea, the tinkle of china signals four o’clock, and the siren is heard in the sugarcane-factory yard, and at that very moment time is altogether altered when Marie Elena sweeps her hair into a bun and touches behind her ears and along the flutes of her neck with eau de Cologne as she sits before the mirror of the dressing-table preparing herself to descend for tea.

(Remember the dressing-table with the cut-glass powder-bowl, the silver filigree hairpin box, the varnish of the mahogany with a film of powder as pink as sand in which Lavren imprints his fingers and leaves his signature. Remember, dear reader, take time with this poetry, these fragments. Listen well to these fugues, let them work on you till the tales are told and you get the story which Lavren promises you.)

It is a time of Palmolive soap, eau de Cologne, Chanel No. 5. If it was Lent, Marie Elena would be dreaming of the Stations of the Cross and the Five Sorrowful Mysteries of the Rosary, whispering her Hail Marys and Pater Nosters.

Time is drenched and drunk and we can forget in an amnesia of perfume.

So, you don’t water the plants in the sun. The crotons and hibiscus are heavy and green. The cockscombs in the circle bed hang their heads. There is absolute silence when the siren in the factory-yard stops. Lavren is picked up from his crib. He is puckered and wet and he wrings his face away and hangs his head over Josephine’s shoulder. Let us enter that time. His cry can rend the afternoon and he can stretch his white body in an epileptic arch yearning for Marie Elena, taken away in the black arms of Josephine.

Cric

Crac

Here one sunny afternoon, this was where it had all started. The remembering.

Let us enter this idyll, this colonial time in sepia, freckled with age and the chemicals of elementary photography. The sunny afternoon that is now recorded was like many other sunny afternoons in the routine of servants and their charges. This sunny afternoon saw the procession, down the gaps from the bungalows, of black women in pressed aprons and starched caps, who generally called their charges Master or Miss in the presence of their madams but called them chubby-chubby, goochy-goochy, my white child, ‘The child fair, eh?’ when they were alone, and boasted to other servants of the beauty of Madam’s child, mourning the loss of their own. This is the time when you hear the crunch of gravel as the perambulators are pushed down the road past the gaps, filling out the procession, the taking of the children for a walk after tea. On the verandas you can see the mothers, the madams, waving them away, trusting them absolutely into the arms and care of Josephines, Olgas, Gertrudes, Theresas, Sybils, Emestinas, Almas, Antoinettas... a litany of servitude. Pray for us.

Cric

Crac

Oh, for black grandmothers who stay at home to keep their daughters’ daughters and their daughters’ sons... those sons... Cric

Crac

Where are the fathers? Cric

Crac

Remember the clubhouse yard, where the poisonous trumpet lilies hang from the saman trees over the gap. Stand on the green veranda of the clubhouse with its rattan chairs and look out over the red clay tennis courts – pick pock, pick pock – where Marie Elena’s daughter Elena Maria plays tennis in a short cotton skirt with scalloped hem, all in white with broderie anglaise ruffles underneath, shimmering like the curl on a wave when she leaps and serves. Her brown legs are smooth and long. Mr de Lisle, senior chemist in the sugarcane company, stands on the veranda and stares and Lavren, from his sill, stares at him and then at her. This was the distraction that lingered in the mind of Mr de Lisle on his way to the golf course, an innocent protagonist in these events, a mere peccadillo, a venial sin, in the scheme of things to come: past, present and future.

Cric

Crac

They teed off, Mr de Lisle conjuring and kissing the feet of Elena Maria. The afternoon was filled with the noise of heavy golf-bags jangling on the backs of barefoot Indian caddy boys. This was the idyll, this was the scene. This was that sunny afternoon in 1944, Lavren not quite one year old. Hiroshima, Nagasaki lie in the future, no flower so great has yet bloomed... Rum and Coca-Cola... working for the Yankee dollar.

It was into such a scene, such a colonial idyll of black servants in white aprons and starched caps, that the Holy Ghost, third person of the triune God, flew down to perform the will of God by the hands of Mr de Lisle.

Cric

Crac

The Holy Ghost hovered over the barrack-rooms, behind the screen of casuarina trees, down the rutted gravel trace – more mud than gravel – which housed, no, harnessed and shackled whole families in single confined rooms with little light, so that a child as small as the baby Lavren could upset a pot of boiling water all over his stomach and be scarred for life, and if you lived in the gabled house high up on the hill with the wide verandas and high ceilings, high above it all, the black hole of Calcutta, the fields of Uttar Pradesh in the New World, you would never have known. You might have only heard a terrible scream, and not knowing the cause have put it down to a foolish noise. Then Marie Elena or Auguste might ask Josephine, ‘What is that noise? Shut the window.’ What would happen to such a child? How would he see the world?

Cric

Crac

There had been such a scream, such a scar. People were dreaming in the twilight barrack-rooms, in the kerosene-lit villages for the setting of the imperial sun. That afternoon a small Indian boy ventured out from behind the screen of casuarina trees and stood where the grassy fringes of the verge merely petered out, and stared at the nurses with their white children; stared at Lavren sitting up in his pram bonneted and laced, embroidered in the bonnet and lace of his ancestors, tucked up with pillows and a delight to see, so chubby and healthy. The Indian boy from the fields of Bengal behind the screen of casuarinas stared with hands on his belly which was as white as bait, raw as white raw fish, raw like pain, no pain like this body. What delirium in his head when the boiling water splashed upon his stomach in the dark barrack-room?

Cric

Crac

The Holy Ghost hovered.

Mr de Lisle drives his ball. It has found its preordained trajectory. It is guided by the Holy Ghost, accompanying its swift flight with a flock of white doves and a hallelujah of egrets whose shadows skim the fairway to the No. 9 Green. It avoids all obstacles, crashing into the branches of saman trees, bunkers and verges, lost in the rough. Vent Sancte Spiritu... it overreaches the green and bounces on to the grassy verge which had merely petered out at the edge of the gravel road where the pram with Lavren stands with Josephine sitting at its side. The ball hits the pram. PRAM P’DAM, like steel band. Ricochets. Finds the hallowed spot at the back of the baby’s bonneted head, storer of memory, soft still with the trauma of birth, miraculously protected from the stroke of death by the Holy Ghost. The ball, guided by the Holy Ghost and the illicit passionate thoughts of Mr de Lisle, dreaming of stroking and kissing Elena Maria’s small feet, makes its dent which shocks the cranium and shakes up, wakes up the memory of the last of the Monagas de los Macajuelos, whose stare was at that very moment locked into the eyes of the Indian boy, smudged with the yellow of malnutrition. In this coincidence, while the tennis players continue their game, the golfers continue to stroll and Auguste and Marie Elena continue to munch rat cheese, guava jelly and Crix biscuits and sip tea, Lavren begins to remember.

Cric

Crac

Lavren entered through the black holes of those eyes, black from the black hole of Calcutta smudged with the yellow of malnutrition. He entered the white belly burnt with the pain of history. He entered this pain into a revision of history. He entered a sea of green and yellow, coppery, silted with the refuse of the Orinoco whose mouth was crammed with wrecks, festooned with skeletons, the treasure of that far-flung folly of cross and sword whose seed was sown in Genoa. Out of the empty sockets in the algae-encrusted skulls vast processions issued, performing the liturgies of Corpus Christi, the candlelit mass of Easter. Out of one skull Las Casas swam, bearing Amerindians and welcoming black slaves from the belly of ships and baptising them. The seaweed was stained with the blood of Christ and the slaves and Amerindians had their mouths stuffed with loaves and fishes from the gospels, while archbishops and nuns copulated in confessionals to the chanting of the Salve Regina.

Cric

Crac

In the buoyancy of the water, Lavren seemed to be without a body, but had the soul at that moment wished to manifest itself it could not have done it more beautifully or wonderfully. It was the body of a young boy not quite a man, the body of a young girl not quite a woman. This was a body known only to mythology, to the pantheons of gods, a place of goddesses and nymphs in a carnival of coupling. S/he was born in the waters of the New World a hermaphrodite, a young boy who might have been mistaken for a girl. Hermaphrodite, with the breasts of a young girl, who might have been mistaken for a boy with a penis and a crack between his legs in the half-light of the coppery sea silted with the dreams of El Dorado. S/he levitated between worlds. S/he hung between genders. S/he trembled between loves and desires. S/he was pigmented between races. S/he stretched her young body between continents and hung about her neck this archipelago of islands. Swimming among these visions, Lavren was as comfortable as when s/he hung below Marie Elena’s heart in the amniotic sack, or in the black arms of Josephine, cradled on her lap in the pantry, listening to her words, ‘Let me tell you a true story.’

Cric

Crac

There he founds maps, undiscovered maps of Kairi. He deciphered hieroglyphs written in coral and scratched on barnacled barracoons. He opened chests as he listened to the beat of Marie Elena’s heart and heard her tell her tales. There he found the Carnival Tales which told of the past, the present and the future, of which this overture contains fragments and fugues.

Cric

Crac

Monkey break he back

For a piece

a Pomme arac.

THE HOUSES OF KAIRITHE CARNIVAL TALES OF LAVREN MONAGAS DE LOS MACAJUELOS1

THE TALE OF THE FIRST HOUSE

LAVREN SURFACED into the first of his tales far out at sea, where the caravels were adrift. Their keels were entangled in sargasso weed that entrapped dolphins which had gone astray. Large fish were panting to be free, or floating bloated and rotting in the sun. Whales were unable to fathom because of the sludge. Sails were hanging limp for the lack of a breeze to billow and pull taut the rigging. Lavren surfaced for air in the hot and stagnant stillness up on the open deck among the motley crew, the old-world crew: criminals set free from dungeons and prisons. Poverty had clambered aboard in Cadiz, Le Havre or up the river in London-town to make a fortune. Priests who would be saints, to make Christians of savages and extend the mantle of Holy Mother Church, matching cross with sword, abandoned their monasteries of the old world. The cocksure aristocrat, nose in the air, smelling for a breeze and avoiding the stench below, embarked on a season of adventure. These and others he saw and heard: buccaneers, pirates, conquistadors, adventurers seeking a New World, drawn by tales of El Dorado which, for some, meant a glimpse of heaven, for others, gold in their pockets and pouches, the holds of ships and the coffers of old-world kingdoms. For the poet, it was booty with which to woo a queen. Lavren was drawn to a dreamer who rested his head upon the hairy chest of his mate and listened to the itinerant storyteller, the conjuror of the future. ‘Listen to this one, lads!’

They huddled in the darkness under a canopy of stars which hung from a black vault. They sought the pointers, the outline of the gods. They needed a breeze, which would come to lift them to where the constellations pointed and the new maps indicated. Lavren nestled close to Gaston de Lanjou. He will soon change that name, when he follows his imagination, set free by the storyteller’s tale. ‘And listen to this other one, lads.’

‘Wind!’ a sailor in the poop shouts, the rigging and the tackle jangle and jingle; a breeze, and sails flap. The tale of the most beautiful girl in the world, who awaited them at the next port, is interrupted. ‘A wind! Set sail!’ The motley crew, like monkeys, scampered and scarpered up the ropes to unfurl the sails to billow and take the breeze for the New World. They begin to move, leaving the sargasso weed of the wide Sargasso Sea.

Lavren followed Gaston as he fulfilled the future in the tale told by the storyteller.

They landed at Margarita, the island of pearls, where Gaston purchased his collection of pearls as white as blanched almonds, dived for in a sea they called Mar Dulce, later called the Gulf of Sadness. With these moons, Gaston went in search of the storyteller’s most beautiful girl.

Lavren begins with the dream of Eden where it began for Gaston de Lanjou and Clarita Monagas de los Macajuelos in the convent parlour of Aracataca on the savannahs of the Monagas on the continent of Bolivar. As he begins, the nuns chant his favourite music in Saint Gregory’s composition, ‘Salve Regina, Mater Misericordia... for those who live in this vale of tears.

When Gaston arrived from Margarita with his dowry of pearls, Clarita was already in the Convent of the Immaculate Heart of Mary of the Nuns of Cluny. She was put there by her father as a gift to God for favours which Father Rosario, the parish priest, had given old-man Monagas: for indulgences, days off purgatory, or a place in heaven at the footstool of archangels. Who knows? She was not yet a novice, but still a postulant, though the rules of the enclosure nevertheless applied to her, and in particular, the rule that no man was to enter the walls of the convent to visit her without a special dispensation from the Archbishop in Margarita which had to be applied for by the parish priest in Aracataca, on the recommendation of the Mother Superior. On top of that, the dispensation had to have the papal seal. So given the lapse of time that voyages across the ocean took, and the inestimable difficulties to gain audience and hearing in Rome, it would have been impossible for Gaston to enter the convent legitimately. ‘No man’s desire can be expected to beat that long, unsatisfied,’ said old-man Monagas. ‘But why Clarita?’ Old-man Monagas and his wife Angustia could not understand this obsession with the one daughter who was in the convent to be the bride of Christ.

‘Why Clarita?’ Angustia pleaded.

‘I have other daughters,’ the old father said, ‘Jeanne Clara, Celestina, Louisa, Cecilia. But she will be a child for ever. There is Andresita and her twin sister Ursula. There is Elena, but she is still too young, and there are three babies. I keep those for your younger brothers whom I know will come one day with bags of pearls.’ Old-man Monagas laughed, but Gaston did not laugh. He remembered the storyteller’s description of Clarita while he was still at sea, crossing from the old world to the new.

‘A sailor on the boat I worked on told me that an old man in the town of Aracataca on these dusty savannahs had a daughter so beautiful he had to lock her up in a convent, otherwise his own brothers, the poor girl’s uncles, would molest her, and even her father had been tempted to touch her where it thrilled the most.’ Gaston looked knowingly at the old man. Old-man Monagas turned to see that his wife and daughters were out of earshot.

‘My boy , what is it that you want? And you bring such fine pearls, yes?’

But Gaston continued the story he had been told at sea under the moon, on the loneliness of the ocean. ‘Where it thrilled the most,’ he repeated, ‘that is what we sailors have been told, and it was only when the old man told the parish priest, Father Rosario, that they came up with the idea to put her in the convent.’ Gaston winked. ‘They would say it was because of some favour, in answer to a prayer, that she was being offered as a bride for Christ.’ Gaston continued the tale he had been told, while old-man Monagas fingered some of the finest pearls from Margarita, which Gaston had emptied from a leather pouch on to the ledge of the veranda. He marvelled that the story told by this young man of himself and his daughters was already a legend, a story told on dark and lonely nights by sailors and travellers to fill the desire of their dreams and the passion of their sleep.

Old-man Monagas whispered with his fingers to his lips, ‘Shush,’ glancing round to see that none of his little daughters had crept up to listen to the grown-ups. But Gaston continued the story he had heard from the sailor, as he put more pearls on the ledge of the veranda, tempting the old man with these shadows of the moon.

Normally, old-man Monagas would have had to find dowries for all his daughters, but this was the New World and, since he had spread about the tale of their incomparable beauty, it was the suitors who had to find the dowries, and the dowry always had to be pearls. They came one after the other; Gaston, and in his wake another brother. ‘If you want her for a wife you must bear my name and carry it to the ends of the world.’

Gaston ignored the old man with his plans. ‘The world knew it was not because Clarita was holy. Her mama wept and railed against you, old man, but the priest quietened the sorrowing mama and reminded her of her duties to her husband. Do you say no to this tale I heard upon the wide Sargasso Sea, when our ships lay adrift under the scorching sun by day and the cold winds at night? This tale I heard by starlight, falling asleep against the hairy chest of my mate? Do you deny it, old man?’ Gaston leant over to put the pearls back into his pouch. ‘I must see Clarita. The storyteller said her name was Clarita.’

‘Shush, man, what do you want? Do you want the confessional ears of the priest to burn?’ Old-man Monagas stayed the hand of the sailor who had begun to eclipse the moons with his fingers.

‘Where is that sweet-smelling priest?’ Gaston had been thinking of this Father Rosario, whom he had met already, and who smelt of the rosewater he applied to his hands and face before morning mass to bewitch the women of the parish.

‘Shush.’ Old-man Monagas realised that this young man knew the truth, but his obsession was so great he was willing to pay for his daughter with the most perfect pearls, despite the fact that he could have blackmailed him instead. This mystified him.

But Gaston continued. He would only be satisfied with Clarita the most beautiful, in spite of the ugly rumour that Father Rosario had locked her up so that when the Archbishop came on confirmation days, there would be something to make his long journey from Margarita worthwhile. The young Gaston was even a little flattered that Clarita had had her hymen broken by an archbishop’s bejewelled finger. Cric

Crac – it broke Gaston’s heart, this tale, it broke the heart of Lavren –

Monkey break he back

For a piece a

Pomme arac...

Now, that is the kind of comment that Lavren knows that Marie Elena, his muse and mother, would not like. It is lucky she is nodding off into eternity, and probably will never see the truest history in the world of the great and pythonic family of the Monagas de los Macajuelos. It would break her heart. On the other hand, she likes a good story.

Once Lavren gets tripped up with Marie Elena’s tongue, language and words of the Holy Spirit, it is no knowing where the story will go, and the tale of Clarita, most beautiful girl in the New World, precursor of carnival queens, will not be told.

Ah, she’s nodded off and Josephine has brought a bowl of chicken soup into the room with the bed by the Demerara window overlooking the Gulf of Sadness where Lavren sits, sometimes at the windowsill, sometimes at the foot of the bed, depending on the light. It will settle her stomach and be a palliative to the feet and feet of intestine wrapped inside of her. If she wakes she can be given the chicken consommé to stop indigestion and keep her telling stories.

The digressionary tale has become fashionable again; the delaying of the truth, if there is a truth to be told. But it is not for this reason that Lavren uses it. He is not a fashionable writer, merely a child of the New World: educated in a parody of Albion’s culture; a failer of exams; a procrastinator of tasks; a fantasiser who would have liked to have danced on the stages of the world, a creole Diaghilev; been the prince of Elsinor; the Puck of an English forest; Cesario at the feet of her Orsino; Oberon and Titania, the two heads of the same dream with their changeling boy; Ganymede, a Rosalind wooing in disguise, wooed in disguise; a creole child from a creole house; the child of a silent father and a talkative mother who told too many tales. But all must be told at the appropriate time, the time when the hints can be abandoned and the clues made clear and Lavren appears in all his contradiction, levitating between genders and races. These digressions have more to do with the indigestion of Marie Elena than with literary sophistication to charm or confound critics at the end of the century. Some little country-bookie come to town would never presume to do that. Some little creole boy from the backyards and backwaters of great empires, boy, could only hope to imitate the great users of the one thing they left us, language. But with that we go mamaguy them, Lavren thought.

There is more he would have been, more he could have been: a pope with a triple tiara, a saint, a martyr lacerated and crucified upside down, Saint Lawrence on his gridiron... Te Deum laudamus, Te Dominum confitemur...

‘Amen,’ Marie Elena hiccupped, choking on her chicken soup. Lavren is reminded to avoid the tendency to digress. He must get back to the tale of history.

Gaston, in the meantime, had wavered in his intention the night before, and had almost changed his mind when he saw the ten-year-old Isabella, Clarita’s younger sister, playing with her Amerindian servant girl in the yard in front of the veranda where he was sitting with old-man Monagas. Old-man Monagas detected the gleam in his eye, seduced by the beauty and innocence of the child. It was this in the end which made him think it better that Gaston go to the convent the next morning. He clapped his hands and said, ‘She’s too young, my boy,’ and then, ‘Children, go and play at the back.’ The vision, which had momentarily eclipsed the beauty of Clarita, vanished into child’s play, and Gaston returned to his obsession with Clarita, which was just what old-man Monagas wanted. Isabella was too young.

Mama was crying in the bedroom all that night surrounded by her daughters: ‘My children, my children, is this your destiny, so rudely awakened and weaned so quickly for the desires of men?’ Her voice had always been one of lamentation. Angustia, her name lives on, given to a pain that all Monagas have in their legs. They say it is because she stood for so long each evening searching the horizon for her vanished daughters. Lavren must not hasten too quickly.

When Gaston arrived at the convent, the echo of Clarita’s mother’s lamentation was still in his ear, to remind him, young as he was, that there was another’s sorrow amidst his joy. I’ll give your daughter heaven, old woman.’ Then he put the old woman’s voice from his mind and fixed his eye on the prison of the convent, as it seemed to him: this walled garden, this cloister, pretending to be Eden or a piece of heaven. The Sister Porter would not allow him to enter. She merely showed her eyes through the grille in the door and said:

‘Mother Superior has not given permission, nor the Holy Father in Rome. So, off you go, young man.’

Gaston made such a racket at the door, banging and crying out, ‘Clarita, Clarita,’ that they eventually allowed him into the parlour, maintaining that he did not possess the official edict from Rome with the papal seal which would allow him to breach the enclosure of the nuns, and see Clarita in the garden where the fountain played among the bougainvillaea bushes and the frangipani trees. He continued to make a racket like a peevish boy, ‘Clarita, Clarita.’ His mother had told him how he used to lie on the floor and kick his legs in the air in order to get what he wanted, and she would always relent. One day he even did a shit in his pants. Gaston knew he would eventually have his own way and so began to bang on the door. But then he grew strangely silent, and this seemed to have more power than the noise to terrorise the nuns. Intermittently, he would cry out with a great lamentation as before: ‘Clarita!’ – which made the poor postulants who were scrubbing the corridor overthrow their buckets and run away to the scullery.

‘Diabolus!’ they screamed, letting their divine reading concerning the Prince of Darkness take hold of their imaginations.

Gaston spent most of that day pacing the parlour whose walls were adorned with murals depicting the overshadowing of the Virgin Mary by the Holy Ghost. These had been painted by one of the nuns, who was famed for her calligraphy in gold lettering and was an illuminator of extraordinary beauty in the New World. She had inscribed the words, Maria, integra et casta: without stain and unbroken.

Even after a special meal of vegetables cooked in herbs and spices which the nuns had prepared for Gaston from the convent garden, he would not relent, and vowed to spend the night on the floor of the parlour. ‘I will root myself to the ground and grow like a strong vine against your walls, until I see the face of the most beautiful girl in the world. Clarita!’ The name of the most beautiful girl in the world echoed through the vaults of the cloister.

After compline, when the nuns, in the darkness of their choir, implored that they be saved from the diabolus, their adversary like a roaring lion going about seeking whom he may devour, the Mother Superior opened the grille and spoke to the impetuous young man who had travelled from the old world and came with stories heard upon the ocean of the most beautiful girl. ‘This young girl you seek, my man, has been given as a bride for Christ, but since you have come from so far and persist so strongly, I will give you a glimpse of heaven, but then you must leave our town of Aracataca and go on your travels. And you must not be so noisy, young man. Come back in the morning.’ The Mother Superior spoke with a wisdom often gained by women who live for a long time without men. She was not sure, however, that Gaston would agree to come in the morning, have his glimpse of heaven and then leave. After admonishing him again for his behaviour, she said he might see Clarita through the grille in the morning after lauds.

Gaston went off cheerily into the town, feeling that he had won the first round. He caroused at a neighbouring hacienda with the servant girl Cigale, so called by her master and mistress because she had such a piercingly high voice like a cicada crying for rain.

Marie Elena used to raise her eyebrows at this point of the story when she admitted that Cigale was half Amerindian and half Spanish. ‘Mestizo, mulatto,’ she would say, tapping her wrist and indicating that she meant the girl’s colour. It is reputed that this became such a habit of hers that no one paid any attention when on her deathbed she tapped her wrist, and her family kneeling around the bed thought she was either hallucinating or wandering in her mind, giving expression to the one overriding obsession of the Monagas, the colour of their skin and of the skin of black people, yellow people, Indian people. People were the colour of their skin except if they were priests; then they were let off.

There are still some who never let anyone off, priests or lay folk: everyone for them who was not a Monagas, or carried ‘de’ before their name was beyond the pale, as the verandas reverberated with, ‘A damn blasted nigger, a damn coolie. Give us another punch, there.’ This was in the last days, told in the last of the tales when the verandas rocked on their rickety stilts, corrupted by woodlice and history. Lavren must resist the future.

In fact Lavren, who was an expert at the slightest variation in mood and gesture of his muse and mother, realised that she was indicating the time of her death. The gesture was the common one of indicating a wristwatch which she never possessed, always wearing her watch on a little gold chain pinned to her dress like a brooch; but then she always acted with ambiguity. This meant she would die at the time of the Angelus. He knew that Marie Elena, in nearing her death, had been asking forgiveness of her God for the whole world, and for the discovery of the New World, for the conquest, for the destruction of the Amerindians, for the enslavement of Africans and for the indentureship of the Indians. He was proud of her for this. She smiled when she was dying because she knew that he knew. Of course Marie Elena surprised everyone at the time of her death and did the completely unexpected thing, or expected thing, depending on how well you knew her.

Lavren must not leap like a salmon to his death, spawning his pearls. He must resist the future and return to the convent in Aracataca.

Gaston arrived the next day at dawn. He was refreshed by the night he had spent with Cigale, and she had brought him a fresh change of clothes and a bowl of coffee. All the small children who were out on errands for their mothers abandoned their duty and followed Gaston down the street to the convent. They skipped and played around his feet calling out, ‘Gaston, Gaston, pearl thief and nun-snatcher.’ He ignored them at first, but then he called a little boy and girl who looked weaker than the others and were lingering behind the crowd.

‘Go to the nearest shop and buy me a dozen tamarind balls.’ He gave them money and off they went, soon to return with the sugary purchase. He gave them the change. ‘Now go and find what you want the most.’ The other children, still chanting, continued to follow him till he got to the convent gate.

The Sister Porter again showed her face through the grille. When she saw him she opened up the side door and let him into the parlour reluctantly. She shooed the children away. ‘Off, you urchins, little devils.’ She crossed herself, believing Gaston to be the devil incarnate. Marie Elena would often say of someone she disapproved of, ‘He is the devil incarnate.’ Lavren uses her words, but must not digress.

Clarita, being only a postulant, appeared in a simple cotton smock without a scapular. Her head was covered with a short veil which did not enclose her forehead, so some strands of black hair shone from beneath the white linen veil. She knelt with her arms tucked into her sleeves and she rested them on her banded breasts. Her head was lowered, her eyes downcast but not shut. She whispered her rosary while fingering her beads within the folds of her sleeves. ‘Ave Maria, gratia plena...’

It must be remembered that this Clarita, reputed to be the most beautiful girl of the New World and precursor of carnival queens, was not here from choice. She was her father’s gift to Father Rosario, to be kept by the nuns, rumoured, a nuance omitted by Marie Elena, as a solace to the visiting archbishop. Ha! Marie Elena dribbled her chicken consommé.