The Bigger Light (5 page)

“One hundred and eighty-one?” He turned the pages of the newspaper to get away from the twenty-six-year-old woman in the underground garage. He was framing in his thoughts the exact words he would use in his letter to the editor. Should he begin by stating his own abhorrence at the act of rape? Or should he expose the despicable nature of the man
who would rape a woman? “This isn’t war,” he said. “This is not war.” He must always use the proper grammar: it was very important in expressing your ideas, he thought. “Only in a war, and even in that, even at that, a man would have to be a damn beast to rape a woman …” (Dots had screamed one night when he forced himself between her tightly closed legs, after he had turned her over bodily from lying on her stomach, as if her stomach was stuck to the sweating summer sheets. “Oh Jesus Christ, man, Boysie! Are you raping me? Are you raping your own wife? Are you so hard-up, that you raping me? Jesus God, Boysie!” But her screaming was part of her enjoyment and her sensual laughter. Then she said, “More, Boysie, man more!”; and then she laughed louder than she had screamed. And then there was only a deep satisfied exhaust of breath. And then it was quiet.) But that was different. Dots had been joking. So that was different.
Floes and floes of angel’s hair, and ice cream castles in the air, everywhere, so that was different
.

“You still want to tell me what a
canyon
means?” she asked him. She had gained the upper hand now. There was no point in being hostile and bitter. She felt it would be too great a brutalization. It was at this moment, and at moments like this, that he realized what a kind person she was, deep down; but he did not often reach her at this depth of her humanity. “That is what
I
would call a canyon!” Her mood suddenly changed from one of compassion to bitterness. She said in her Barbadian dialect, “And list-ten to this next one, now!” Why was she doing this to him, he wondered. But in her heart, she was saying that she had to, because, he was nothing, nothing more than a poor-arse black man who she had to bail-out and actually put food in his mouth, for years and years. “List-ten. Tek this one with you. A woman, a mother o’ three-four thrildrens
got her arse beaten-in last Monday night! In another underground garage where they does park motto-cars. Up near Scarborough. And when that woman see that blasted beast, the purse-snatcher, well, the long and the short of it is that they had was to tek that poor lady, flat on her back, in a stretcher, in a ambulance, up in the Scarborough Centennery Horsepital. And the police sometime later lay a charge o’ non-capital murder on the purse-snatcher. He was a man by the name o’ Rose. Well, I tell you, Boysie, that in both o’ them two cases, the one with the out-right rape, and this next one, I swear that both o’ them two womens is Wessindian women. The newspapers in this place can’t mention a person by creed, race nor religion. But something in this story, and the place that it happen and the name o’ the woman who get beat-up, all this tell me that that woman is a black woman like me. I know she black. She black, Boysie … something in the name, Dianne Daniels, tell me so. List-ten again, to this piece from the paper … 
Missis Daniels, who was separated from her husband, died of multiple fractures of the skull inflicted by a blunt instrument. Her purse containing about fifteen dollars, was stolen
. Them two facts is what I mean. Number one, Missis Daniels is a woman separated from her husband. The bastard. He must o’ left her with four thrildrens in this hard city. And number two, she only had but fifteen dollars inside her purse. Now, do you understand now, Boysie, why sometimes I can’t even as much as look you in the face, furtherless allow you to lie down on top o’ me. That is what I want you to know is my meaning to the word,
canyon
. That is the canyon in my life!”

(Sometime later, it must have been a day or a week or a month, or even a few minutes after Dots had said all this, did Boysie come across the story about which she had been telling him. When he listened to it that night, sitting on the bed, he
did not understand the sudden use of her dialect, nor the meaning of it. He thought it was used because of the way she reacted to
floes and floes and floes of angel’s hair
. And she might have begun talking to him in this way, since she was capable of this kind of change, and had then veered off, talking about things that had nothing to do with floes; and if Boysie was not too arrogant to recognize it, he would see that whatever she was saying was to the point, in the sense that her reaction was
not
only about
floes and floes and floes of angel’s hair
, but about life itself. Boysie then read:
Police found a purse lying on the ground outside the apartment block when they arrived. They searched all apartments directly above where the purse was found, and a suspect was arrested on the seventh floor. Police seized a socket extension wrench. Mrs. Daniels died about 7 p.m. Doctors had given her 31 pints of blood, about three times the normal amount in the body, to try to save her life
.

Sundays used to be a day of drinking rum punch, noise and calypsoes in Boysie’s apartment. Glasses and ice cubes, records and dancing, men and women crowded into the apartment, drinking and dancing and deliberately getting happy and loud and noisy, from their unacquaintance with the system (which they called “racism”) from early in the afternoon right up until past midnight. Not many of the visitors and friends in those hilarious days, three years ago, had to get up early on Monday mornings to go to work. Not many of them were employed. Their collective glee and happiness, which was measured in the amount of food they would eat and Scotch they would drink at Boysie’s expense, knew that they had to remain just above the pitch of soberness so as to face themselves and their lives in the country they had come to in the hope of making an easier living, not a million dollars as some of them might have
dreamed about before they tasted life, but just an easier living, easier than they had hoped for back home: to be able to wear a new dress to a party, to be able to own four pairs of shoes instead of one; to be able to walk down the main street in the city with a few dollars in their pockets, to be able to return home once in every two or three years on a twenty-one-day vacation, paid for later. “We does return home only to show-off!” Dots would tell them; to display to the less fortunate and the less daring, who had not emigrated, the glamour of being abroad, of living in a rich country like Canada: for to be able to return home with five summer suits and two hundred dollars in travellers’ cheques (which many had never known to exist before), to spend it like water on friends and strangers in the newly desegregated night clubs and hotels which once catered only to tourists from North America, on strangers who became friends with free drinks, was part of the dream of success.

Now, here of late, Boysie rejoices that his life is no longer taken up in that swirl of appearances and in that hectic and expensive consumption of food and women. He is glad that he has changed from that way of living. But he is bored. Now, on Sunday mornings, he listens to church music and church services on the radio. The station he listens to is itself a measuring rod of his intellectual transformation. It is the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, the CBC, the government-owned, or public-owned, radio which he first found out about from his old friend and employer, Mr. MacIntosh down in the Bay Street stockbrokerage area. Mr. MacIntosh always listened to the CBC when he worked late in his office. And Boysie changed from the popular radio stations with their twenty-four-hour acid rock and rhythm and blues programmes to the CBC. But the CBC was beyond his comprehension. He felt, however, that he was doing something educational by just
listening to it. There were lots of programmes about world affairs, and he should, by merely listening, understand some of the discussions. But most was above his intelligence. Still, he persisted. Once he changed the station to which his wife was listening, and she abused him, and then wondered why.

“I wish that you could feel that by listening to the CBC you would improve your knowledge of world affairs,” he told her. She did not listen to his words; she saw only that he was speaking to her in a distant, superior manner and voice.

“Man, turn back on the blasted thing!” she shouted. Her hair was in curlers. She was wearing some kind of outfit which she called a duster. Boysie regarded her as shabby when she wore this duster around the house. He wanted her to be well-dressed around the house.

“I just thought that you might want to hear something different.”

“Boy, I don’t know what happening to you! You uses to be such a easy man to live with, much more easier to live with.”

“At least you could try to use proper English when you are speaking to me.”

“Wait!”
The vacuum cleaner handle hit the floor. It rang out on the hardboard. She waited until it settled and until there was absolute quiet in the room. “Wait!” She then tore the head tie off her hair. The curlers made her look very appealing and he wanted to be strong enough right at that moment to grab her by the hand and lead her into their bedroom and fling her on the bed and stand above her, and wait until she melted in his strong presence, and undress herself, and invite him onto her body, to be coaxed, to be loved, to be womanly and feminine and fragile and delicate and like a wife. Or he wanted to be able to look at her tenderly and with gentleness, and say quite simply, “I love you, woman.”

“Who the arse are you talking to, man?”

He wanted to be able to tell her that he knew. He wished he had this strength which he felt Henry had with Agatha. He wish he could just reach out his hand and grab her, and beat her, and make her stop making him feel so inferior and so insecure. He knew he was going to do something to this woman. Soon. But he could not bear the terror of having to think about it, and to plan it.

“All right, Dots. All right.”

“Be-Christ, it better be!” She took up the vacuum cleaner handle and went back to her cleaning. Boysie did not bother to tell her about the noise. “I invite Bernice over this afternoon. She coming round five. Three hours from now.”

“But suppose I had to do something this afternoon, suppose I had to write a letter to the editor, or listen to the world news on CBC or …”

“Kiss my arse!”

“Or listen to my music …”

“Listen to what? Listen to
floes and floes and ice-cream hair
? Look, don’t make me laugh.” And she laughed.

“I really wish that you could see what I mean, Dots,” he said, quite sadly, and no longer with arrogance. “I really wish that you and me, and I, could be able to sit down and listen to something sensible on the radio for a change. And learn something about world affairs and these people. See the way they do things, ’cause as you know, Barbados is no longer in my plans. Or in our lives. I am not going back there to live. I am not even going back there to spend a vacation. I am fixed here in this country now. And I really wish you would understand, Dots, that to live here in the best way, a man has to know what makes this place tick. That is why I tell you that I am not interested anymore in listening to a lot of damn West
Indian noise, called music. And that is why I
done
going back to the Mercury Club and West Indian places like that.” He was getting rid of the tension within him. It was almost impossible for him to say anything these days to Dots. He did not know now whether she was listening to the words he was speaking, or whether she was transfixed on the spot where he had caught her with his first outburst, and that she was now stunned into that position, forced to be bombarded by the noise in his words and by the sound of the words. He did not know whether she ever listened to anything he ever said to her. But he said few things to her.

“I am a different man now, Dots. You have to see that. It doesn’t mean that I am a different man because I find myself with a steady job, that I have a little business cleaning out people’s offices. That didn’t make me a different person, Dots. You want to know what made me a different, brand-new man? You want to know? Well, I’ll tell you.” He was finding it easy to talk, and he was talking with his eyes held down into the glass he held in his hand. He was not looking into the glass. He was merely holding his head down as he had seen some of the speakers on the public affairs programmes on the CBC television do. They would talk and talk and never have to look the other man straight in his eye. They didn’t do it. Their words were sufficient to kill the other man’s arguments. He did not want to kill Dots. He merely wanted to make her listen. Language, he felt, could be more mortal than fists. He wondered again whether she was still transfixed into her place. And he did not even know whether she understood this language.

“It started out this way. I was down on Bay Street. And one night, a young Canadian fellow who was in the office started talking to me. We started up a discussion. I had a chance to listen to him. He was about nineteen or twenty. And it was the
second or third night I had a chance to talk with him. He is a student, studying something to do with philosophy. He introduced me to something called language, Dots. This language is what I am trying to tell you about now. I don’t have to tell you that I don’t know anything about philosophy. And before I met that Canadian young fellow I had never even heard the word philosophy. The only philosophy I ever heard about was something Henry used to call the philosophy of life. But this young fellow told me that he was a school dropout. For five years. In that five years he went from one job to the next. Cleaning cars, delivering parcels in a panel truck like mine, for businesses down Yonge Street. A whole set of odd jobs, as he called them. And one night as he was dressing to go to a party with his date, something happened to him. And when they got to that party, all the young men and young women there were going to school, learning something, and using this new language. And he told me that he couldn’t use one word o’ this new language, because he didn’t know what it mean. He couldn’t join in the discussion of this language. They were discussing the war in Vietnam in a language he never heard of. Do you know, Dots, that there is a big war going on all now so, in Vietnam? Anyhow. He said he really and truly did read something about the war in
The Globe and Mail
, and while waiting for the late movie he had to watch pictures of it on television. But beyond that, the war in Vietnam could have been the price war on gasoline in Ontario, for all he cared. The date he was at the party with said to him afterwards when he tried to kiss her goodnight … and listen to this now, Dots. This is the punch-line. That girl turned her face away from the young fellow and said to him, ‘Nobody without a social conscience version of language can ever kiss me again.’ ” Boysie paused to allow Dots to feed on his words.