Omeros (14 page)

Steadily she kept her distance. He said the name

that he knew her by—
l’hirondelle des Antilles,

the tag on Maud’s quilt. The mate jigged the bamboo rods

from which the baits trawled. Then it frightened Achille

that this was no swallow but the bait of the gods,

that she had seen the god’s body torn from its hill.

II

The horned island sank. This meant they were far out,

perhaps twenty miles, over the unmarked fathoms

where the midshipman watched the frigate come about,

where no anchor has enough rope and no plummet plumbs.

His cold heart was heaving in the ancestral swell

of the ocean that had widened around the last

point where the Trades bent the almonds like a candle-

flame. He stood as the swift suddenly shot past

the hull, so closely that he thought he heard a cry

from the small parted beak, and he saw the whole world

globed in the passing sorrow of her sleepless eye.

The mate never saw her. He watched as Achille furled

both oars into one oar and laid them parallel

in the grave of
In God We Troust,
like man and wife,

like grandmother and grandfather with ritual

solicitude, then stood balancing with a knife

as firm as a gommier rooted in its own ground.

“You okay?” he said, speaking to the swaying mast.

And these were the noble and lugubrious names

under the rocking shadow of
In God We Troust:

Habal, swept in a gale overboard; Winston James,

commonly know as
“Toujours Sou”
or “Always Soused,”

whose body disappeared, some claimed in a vapour

of white rum or l’absinthe; Herald Chastenet, plaiter

of lobster-pots, whose alias was
“Fourmi Rouge,”

i.e., “Red Ant,” who was terrified of water

but launched a skiff one sunrise with white-rum courage

to conquer his fear. Some fishermen could not swim.

Dorcas Henry could not, but they learnt this later

searching the pronged rocks for whelks, where they found him,

for some reason clutching a starfish. There were others

whom Achille had heard of, mainly through Philoctete,

and, of course, the nameless bones of all his brothers

drowned in the crossing, plus a Midshipman Plunkett.

He stood like a mast amidships, remembering them,

in the lace wreaths of the Caribbean anthem.

Achille looked up at the sun, it was vertical

as an anchor-rope. Its ring ironed his hot skull

like a flat iron, singeing his cap with its smell.

No action but stasis. He is riding the swell

of the line now. He lets the angling oars idle

in their wooden oarlocks. He sprinkles the scorched sail

stitched from old flour sacks and tied round the middle

with seawater from the calabash to keep it supple,

scooping with one hand over the rocking gunwale

with the beat of habit, a hand soaked in its skill,

or the stitches could split the seams, and the ply

of its knots rot from this heat. Then, as Achille

sprinkles the flour sack, he watches it dry rapidly

in a sun like a hot iron flattening his skull,

and staggers with the calabash. The tied bundle

huddles like a corpse.
Oui, Bon Dieu!
I go hurl

it overside. Out of the depths of his ritual

baptism something was rising, some white memory

of a midshipman coming up close to the hull,

a white turning body, and this water go fill

with them, turning tied canvases, not sharks, but all

corpses wrapped like the sail, and ice-sweating Achille

in the stasis of his sunstroke looked as each swell

disgorged them, in tens, in hundreds, and his soul

sickened and was ill. His jaw slackened. A gull

screeched whirling backwards, and it was the tribal

sorrow that Philoctete could not drown in alcohol.

It was not forgetful as the sea-mist or the crash

of breakers on the crisp beaches of Senegal

or the Guinea coast. He reached for the calabash

and poured it streaming over his boiling skull,

then sat back and tried to settle the wash

of bilge in his stomach. Then he began to pull

at the knots in the sail. Meanwhile, that fool

his mate went on quietly setting the fishpot.

Time is the metre, memory the only plot.

His shoulders are knobs of ebony. The back muscles

can bulge like porpoises leaping out of this line

from the gorge of our memory. His hard fists enclose

its mossed rope as bearded as a love-vine

or a blind old man, tight as a shark’s jaws,

wrenching the weight, then loosening it again

as the line saws his palms’ sealed calluses,

the logwood thighs anchor against the fast drain

of the trough, and here is my tamer of horses,

our only inheritance that elemental noise

of the windward, unbroken breakers, Ithaca’s

or Africa’s, all joining the ocean’s voice,

because this is the Atlantic now, this great design

of the triangular trade. Achille saw the ghost

of his father’s face shoot up at the end of the line.

Achille stared in pious horror at the bound canvas

and could not look away, or loosen its burial knots.

Then, for the first time, he asked himself who he was.

He was lured by the swift the way trolling water

mesmerizes a fisherman who stares at the

fake metal fish as the lace troughs widen and close.

III

Outrunner of flying fish, under the geometry

of the hidden stars, her wire flashed and faded

taut as a catch, this mite of the sky-touching sea

towing a pirogue a thousand times her own weight

with a hummingbird’s electric wings, this engine

that shot ahead of each question like an answer,

once Achille had questioned his name and its origin.

She touched both worlds with her rainbow, this frail dancer

leaping the breakers, this dart of the meridian.

She could loop the stars with a fishline, she tired

porpoises, she circled epochs with her outstretched span;

she gave a straight answer when one was required,

she skipped the dolphin’s question, she stirred every spine

of a sea-egg tickling your palm rank with the sea;

she shut the ducts of a starfish, she was the mind-

messenger, and her speed outdarted Memory.

She was the swift that he had seen in the cedars

in the foam of clouds, when she had shot across

the blue ridges of the waves, to a god’s orders,

and he, at the beck of her beak, watched the bird hum

the whipping Atlantic, and felt he was headed home.

Where whales burst into flower and sails turn back

from a tiring horizon, she shot with curled feet

close to her wet belly, round-eyed, her ruddering beak

towing
In God We Troust
so fast that he felt his feet

drumming on the ridged keel-board, its shearing motion

whirred by the swift’s flywheel into open ocean.

BOOK THREE

Chapter XXV

I

Mangroves, their ankles in water, walked with the canoe.

The swift, racing its browner shadow, screeched, then veered

into a dark inlet. It was the last sound Achille knew

from the other world. He feathered the paddle, steered

away from the groping mangroves, whose muddy shelves

slipped warted crocodiles, slitting the pods of their eyes;

then the horned river-horses rolling over themselves

could capsize the keel. It was like the African movies

he had yelped at in childhood. The endless river unreeled

those images that flickered into real mirages:

naked mangroves walking beside him, knotted logs

wriggling into the water, the wet, yawning boulders

of oven-mouthed hippopotami. A skeletal warrior

stood up straight in the stern and guided his shoulders,

clamped his neck in cold iron, and altered the oar.

Achille wanted to scream, he wanted the brown water

to harden into a road, but the river widened ahead

and closed behind him. He heard screeching laughter

in a swaying tree, as monkeys swung from the rafter

of their tree-house, and the bared sound rotted the sky

like their teeth. For hours the river gave the same show

for nothing, the canoe’s mouth muttered its lie.

The deepest terror was the mud. The mud with no shadow

like the clear sand. Then the river coiled into a bend.

He saw the first signs of men, tall sapling fishing-stakes;

he came into his own beginning and his end,

for the swiftness of a second is all that memory takes.

Now the strange, inimical river surrenders its stealth

to the sunlight. And a light inside him wakes,

skipping centuries, ocean and river, and Time itself.

And God said to Achille, “Look, I giving you permission

to come home. Is I send the sea-swift as a pilot,

the swift whose wings is the sign of my crucifixion.

And thou shalt have no God should in case you forgot

my commandments.” And Achille felt the homesick shame

and pain of his Africa. His heart and his bare head

were bursting as he tried to remember the name

of the river- and the tree-god in which he steered,

whose hollow body carried him to the settlement ahead.

II

He remembered this sunburnt river with its spindly

stakes and the peaked huts platformed above the spindles

where thin, naked figures as he rowed past looked unkindly

or kindly in their silence. The silence an old fence kindles

in a boy’s heart. They walked with his homecoming

canoe past bonfires in a scorched clearing near the edge

of the soft-lipped shallows whose noise hurt his drumming

heart as the pirogue slid its raw, painted wedge

towards the crazed sticks of a vine-fastened pier.

The river was sloughing its old skin like a snake

in wrinkling sunshine; the sun resumed its empire

over this branch of the Congo; the prow found its stake

in the river and nuzzled it the way that a piglet

finds its favourite dug in the sweet-grunting sow,

and now each cheek ran with its own clear rivulet

of tears, as Achille, weeping, fastened the bow

of the dugout, wiped his eyes with one dry palm,

and felt a hard hand help him up the shaking pier.

Half of me was with him. One half with the midshipman

by a Dutch canal. But now, neither was happier

or unhappier than the other. An old man put an arm

around Achille, and the crowd, chattering, followed both.

They touched his trousers, his undershirt, their hands

scrabbling the texture, as a kitten does with cloth,

till they stood before an open hut. The sun stands

with expectant silence. The river stops talking,

the way silence sometimes suddenly turns off a market.

The wind squatted low in the grass. A man kept walking

steadily towards him, and he knew by that walk it

was himself in his father, the white teeth, the widening hands.

III

He sought his own features in those of their life-giver,

and saw two worlds mirrored there: the hair was surf

curling round a sea-rock, the forehead a frowning river,

as they swirled in the estuary of a bewildered love,

and Time stood between them. The only interpreter

of their lips’ joined babble, the river with the foam,

and the chuckles of water under the sticks of the pier,

where the tribe stood like sticks themselves, reversed

by reflection. Then they walked up to the settlement,

and it seemed, as they chattered, everything was rehearsed

for ages before this. He could predict the intent

of his father’s gestures; he was moving with the dead.

Women paused at their work, then smiled at the warrior

returning from his battle with smoke, from the kingdom

where he had been captured, they cried and were happy.

Then the fishermen sat near a large tree under whose dome

stones sat in a circle. His father said:

                                                                 “Afo-la-be,”

touching his own heart.

                                           “In the place you have come from

what do they call you?”

                                          Time translates.

                                                                       Tapping his chest,

the son answers:

                              “Achille.” The tribe rustles, “Achille.”

Then, like cedars at sunrise, the mutterings settle.

AFOLABE

Achille. What does the name mean? I have forgotten the one

that I gave you. But it was, it seems, many years ago.

What does it mean?

ACHILLE

                                     Well, I too have forgotten.

Everything was forgotten. You also. I do not know.

The deaf sea has changed around every name that you gave

us; trees, men, we yearn for a sound that is missing.

AFOLABE

A name means something. The qualities desired in a son,

and even a girl-child; so even the shadows who called

you expected one virtue, since every name is a blessing,

since I am remembering the hope I had for you as a child.

Unless the sound means nothing. Then you would be nothing.