Moving Forward Sideways Like a Crab (16 page)
I put that notebook down—exhaustion kept at bay by a faint breathlessness more often associated with elation—and I opened another. Considerations of privacy, and the invasion of such, might have given someone else pause. But he had willed the notebooks to me, and explicitly given me permission to read them.
Some sections of sidewalk along the mostly residential blocks on Eldon Street had been taken care of with diligence—cleared and salted, salted and cleared, twice a day when the accumulation came down like this. But for the most part I had to take short footsteps, bracing myself on one leg before planting the other, along a packed, uneven path narrowed by the snow shovelled from residents’ driveways and walkways, snow that in turn had been piled up along the sides from the clearing of the main roadway. This is the kind of winter people will say is the worst they’ve seen in their five, or ten or thirty, years of living in the city. The worst in their entire lives. The most snow. The coldest temperatures. The fiercest storms. The longest winter. They say this year after year. The treachery. I was terrified of slipping and losing my grip on the knapsack. As I write this I am suddenly reminded of the men with the snakes around their necks. Do you remember, Zain, how they appeared as we were walking back up the steps from the beach just after the sun had set that evening at Macqueripe?
How I wish you were with me these days, Zain. How I wish you could accompany me on my trips to the clinic to change the bandages. How I wish you could see what I look like now.
At just this juncture, Mrs. Morgan knocked on the door to the room to see if I was all right. I closed the book reluctantly. I had come unprepared, so Mrs. Morgan gave me a promotional cloth-bag with the name of the bank printed on it into which I emptied the contents of the deposit box.
Back home, I shut myself in my room and pulled out the books again.
You begged me to come down. Come for a month and stay with Angus and me, you said. You told me you felt like a large bear in a small cage. I’d cheer you up, you said. Neither of the children were at home anymore. In any case, they had their own lives now, and it wasn’t right to burden your children. It was just this thing happening inside. Inside of your body and your brain, and you felt like you were going crazy. Trinidad was a small place. Everyone knew everyone. Your friends were Angus’s friends. You felt there was no one you could talk to. But you could talk to me, you said. I’d cheer you up. Speaking on the telephone wasn’t enough. If only we lived in the same country, you said.
You knew that I did not have a dime. I could not afford spontaneity. I could not contemplate a trip. But without telling me, you organized the return ticket and sent it to me. How the tables had turned in our lives. An open ticket, Toronto to Port of Spain, Port of Spain to Toronto. I only had to fill in the dates.
You were such a different person on the telephone from the one you were in the flesh. It was as if, on the telephone, all my senses concentrated in my ear and I could hear your voice in a way that I couldn’t when we were in each other’s presence. On the telephone I heard in your voice how unhappy you were. In one of your letters you shared with me your plans—too many for a single person to carry out in a lifetime. You had met a German woman who had been a famous swimming instructor and choreographer. She was in Trinidad with her husband, who was teaching at the University. You asked the woman to give you synchronized swimming lessons. She knew several women who were also interested in synchronized swimming lessons, and the two of you were planning a show in one of the coves in Chaguaramas. Then, in a phone call just a few days later, you informed me that you were thinking of taking piano lessons. You knew of someone who was selling a piano. In that same call you said you wanted to start up an organization to put musical instruments in the hands of
underprivileged children, and you might even start a school of music for them. A children’s symphony. Symphony camp. Sunday concerts in the Botanical Gardens. A gemology course for yourself. Jewellery making. Artisanal bread making. A chauffeuring business with all-women drivers. You wouldn’t drive yourself, of course, but you would own the business and run it. You told me all of this, but you didn’t tell me that you were seeing a man named Eric.
And now I was engulfed in a confusion of emotion again. I could no longer deny it: I recognized it to be the longing, the readiness, the need—the
insistent
need—to begin to write again.
I put the journal down. I was increasingly anxious, aware there were a million and one things to be done, and I was the one expected to take charge. But I felt myself overcome by anticipation—not anticipation of all that was to come in the next few hours, but a sense, an eagerness, that I was about to begin my life anew.
I thought about the earlier times when Sydney would relate stories about himself or about Zain. I used to become quickly impatient, wanting ones, instead, that showed our connection. Did it take Sydney’s death for me to become more mature? I opened the envelope and removed the will and the newspaper clippings. I flipped through the clippings again, as if doing this were the most urgent task at hand. Sydney had once shown me photographs of Zain. As far as I
remembered, those photos showed a simple-looking—neither attractive nor unattractive—young woman. From her eyes one might imagine, especially after reading her girlish letters, that she possessed an acerbic humour. In the newspaper photos she appears to be plump and well-groomed in the manner of the women of the Indo-Trinidadian elite. Her hair, parted on one side, has some lift to it as it falls in great neat waves to her shoulders and frames her well made-up face. The rise in social circumstances that accompanied her marriage and prevailed throughout her adulthood had, I imagined now, given definition to the features that seemed in the earlier photos nebulous. Sydney had told me that there had been no romance between Sid and Zain. I believe this to be true, but I believe, too, that Sid had loved her, and so had Sydney, long after Zain was gone. I pulled the clippings together neatly and replaced them. In his storytelling, during the days when he and I were together, and, now, via the bequeathing of his and Zain’s writings and these newspapers articles, Sydney had afforded me a consideration I had not predicted. Such foresight, openness and generosity overwhelmed me. If there was anything worth inheriting, I thought, it was these qualities. This revelation had the effect of making me want to sequester myself and begin to think and to write.
With one of the notebooks tucked under my arm, I went out to the wall at the edge of the garden where Sydney and I used to sit, and under a luminescent sky in the heat of the day I again read Sydney’s tilting scrawl.
I would dream often that I was a little piece of thread. I, the thread that is, hardened into a filament of wire so fine I was practically invisible. I had existed for a long time inside of a blurry bump that was on the surface of something so big that I was unable to see its edges. Somehow, I punctured the bump. I, the filament, emerged out of the bump and a crust of dried birth fluids clung along my short length. As I, this filament, lengthened—and this lengthening was happening rather swiftly—those dried bits dredged and trapped new bits along the way, and I, the filament, took on some width now. Suddenly I was longer than a tape measure, and was covered over and weighed down by the accumulating crust.
Soon, in less than twenty-four hours, this encrusted filament will arrive at what I think of as the eye of a needle through which it—the unrealized strand of me—will pass, and forty-two years of accumulated crud will be scraped off—or so I hope—and on the other side of the needle a person will emerge. I am on the brink of personhood. It is strange, and not entirely believable, that a journey that has taken a lifetime could so suddenly reach its culmination, twenty-four hours from now, simply by me arriving at the door of a hospital. It is strange, and not entirely believable, and, I fear, a little foolish to expect.
As I read, my emotions, urges, desires, beliefs surged one way and then the other, and I seemed to have little control over them. My interest in writing seemed at some moments to be a much-needed anchor, and at others to be almost unsavoury.
I looked out beyond the silver sea towards the area of the island that had beautiful names and reflected on the fact that for nine years I had been coming to Trinidad for no other reason than to spend time with Sydney. A full day and several hours had now passed with no Sydney present. And yet, I was tied here.
I remembered how, when I was a child and had visited this island for the first time with India and Sid, Sid’s mother had the cook prepare us a dinner one evening of small greyish-green freshwater fish. I remembered the tough skeletal covering, armour really, of the little fish whose name I would never forget, the
cascadoo
. The
cascadoo
had whiskers and was unlike any fish I had ever seen, not more than twenty centimetres in length, and rather frightful looking. The cook had curried about a dozen and a half of them. They remained whole in the dish, from head to tail, and we were to eat them with rice. I watched Sid push the scales up one of them, sliding her knife from tail up to head, and was appalled by the thick yellow flesh that was revealed. She encouraged me to try it, but as I was about to follow her lead, Mrs. Mahale recited a local saying: “Those who eat the
cascadoo
, the native legend says, will, wheresoever they may wander, end in Trinidad their days.” I was immediately
terrified that if I ate even a morsel of the curry sauce in which the fish lay, I would die before the end of the trip. I refused it. India picked at one, declared it prohibitively bony and left most of it. Now I wondered, if I had indeed, however accidently, ingested the feared morsel of
cascadoo
that had been served to us that night, and was bound to stay here on this island. Sid had so enjoyed the ugly fish, sucking on the scales that were wide and long like toenail clippings, and on the fine threadlike bones to which the flesh clung in lumps. I remember the mound of scales, tails, fine bones and cartilage from the heads piled high on Sid’s plate, not a speck of flesh left behind. Had
she
been destined, then, to return to Trinidad and remain there until the end of
his
days?
And now Sydney’s house seemed claustrophobic like a wood and concrete
cascadoo
. I knew nothing of the island, I told myself. Yes, yes, I had been to various parts of it, and I had seen the supposed drug lord across the road numerous times and met Mrs. Allen and her son a few times. But still I felt I knew nothing. I had no meaningful friendships here, and now that Sydney was gone, no further attachments. My connection to the island would soon loosen. I would do everything I could, as swiftly as possible, to wrap up all Sydney’s business here and leave sooner rather than later. This was not a holiday house, and for me Trinidad was not a holiday destination. I had no need for a place here. I thought of India the day we left Marrakesh to return to Toronto, waving wistfully to the wet-eyed staff as they waved back. As the taxi pulled away, India said to me, “Do you think, Joji,
that they’re saying, ‘
Au revoir
, Madame,
au revoir
, Master Jonathan,’ or ‘Go on now, off you go. Quickly’?”
Of course, the staff here at the house in Scenery Hills were unlikely to have said to me, “Go on now, off you go. Quickly.” To point to a mundane example: on one occasion during those first days after Sid’s death I was making my way to the stove when Rosita intercepted my path and reached ahead of me for the kettle. She prepared the coffee I wanted but had not yet asked for, and certainly had not expected her to make. At a different time, this might not have been worth noting. It would have been the natural order of things. But we were in that state where every action seemed to have greater intensity than usual, and to take on special meaning. I felt that Rosita was, in that instance, taking care of me rather than performing her usual duties. It is certainly possible that I am misguided in thinking that there was now a nuance in our relationship that meant, having become the inheritor of Sydney’s role, I was not simply the employer nor she simply the worker. I can only swear that the act was done with the kind of caring I had only known, before then, from Sydney.
In moments like these, I felt with unwavering certainty that I had to keep the house, had to keep Rosita and Lancelot on. But such moments were still only fleeting.
Quite suddenly, as I was facing the Gulf—my back to the house—I had one of my now-frequent revelations: I must immediately call Catherine. I was struck, as if by lightning,
with the thought that after Sydney’s passing there was nothing to come between her and me any longer. (And I was instantly presented with further evidence that my presence was not being wished away by the staff: I had thumped my forehead with the palm of my hand by way of exclamation, saying aloud, “Of course!”—and not a second later Lancelot was behind me, his hands on my shoulders, guiding me to sit as if I were weak and infirm, and cooing that I needed to take it easy. I protested—perhaps too brusquely—that I was fine, I was fine; I’d simply had a revelation and hadn’t realized he was right behind me. He stayed at my side, thoughtful, and then said, “Is so when people you love dead and leave you. You does stand up just so, and realization coming at you fast-fast, like bullets from a gun.” That was yet another instant when I felt keenly how one has no privacy in this place, and doubted my ability to live among people who were so aware of my every move and need.)
Once I was free of Lancelot’s hovering, I parsed my thoughts. I had always been so preoccupied with Sydney that I had never really attended to any of my relationships—not with my mother, friends or lovers, and, most recently, not with Catherine. Catherine was a good person. She was loyal. She was fair. She had a job she enjoyed, and interests of her own. She was the kind of person with whom one could reliably build a life.
It was quite clear to me that she had to come to Trinidad. She had to stay here at the house with me while I sorted out details and made arrangements for these people who had
worked here. It would allow her a glimpse into this side of my life. It would be a way of reconnecting with her, of showing her the closeness I shared with these people—the kind of closeness that I yearned for, at least most of the time—and, once we were back in Canada, she and I could begin our life together. And I would begin to write again.