The Worlds Within Her (33 page)

“No, no. Cruelty wasn' part of his makeup. Not what you might call intestinal cruelty, nuh. He had to work at it. And sometimes this did make it hard to distinguish between his kindness and his — well, cruelty, harshness, call it what you want. On top o' that, as Penny rightly say, he had a wild sense o' humour. Like all of us, nuh.”

And he tells of a young man, an admirer of her father's, who used to hang around the campaign, helping out, doing whatever needed to be done.

“One evenin' out o' the blue Ram start teasin' the fella. Jus' blowing off steam, but mercilessly. You see, the fella was all skin an' bones — in fact, more bones than skin. Ram start saying things like, every time the fella jump, you does hear him rattle. Or, when he needed pants, all he had to do was boil a couple piece o' macaroni and slip them on. And soon everybody join in. Lots o' jokes about boners — not having one but being one. And before you know it, the fella burst into tears an' run out. Never came back. Couple of us felt bad, went looking for him, couldn' find him. But Ram — Ram said, ‘No big deal, he have to learn how to take a joke or he'll never do anything in life.' An' in a way he was right. That's the way we were. You had to learn to take the fatigue.”

“Fatigue?”

“Teasing, nuh. Is how we say it.”

Yasmin says, “It's the same everywhere. I had to put up with teasing at school.”

Cyril leans forward, palms rubbing dry against each other. “I know what you sayin'. And you right. To a point. But there was, to my mind, something shameless in the way we … ”

She notices the sudden narrowing of his eyes.

“You see we din't believe that people like that fella, or like Amie — people who work for us, people who below us — we din't believe they had feelings. Or at leas', they did, but their feelings din't count.”

His right eyeball wanders as his gaze drifts sightless past her.

“For some of us, they still don't.”

THE THING ABOUT
my husband is this: he believed in the torch Celia saw in his tea leaves. He believed that in holding up that torch for his people — our people — he was also holding up a torch for us, his family. He believed that in loving them, he was also loving us. It was part of his self-delusion.

And I thought that his dreams, which went well beyond the possibilities we had been brought up to expect, could accommodate the big We and the little we. What I didn't realize was that the big We would prove to be a demanding mistress. She fed his appetite and in so doing made it larger, to the point where he could never be satisfied. He would spend long days at his desk, keeping himself sharp with coffee, whisky, almonds and sugar cubes.

Yes, my dear. Almonds and sugar cubes. He kept a jar of each on his desk. He'd crack the almonds open with a judge's gavel and pop the nut into his mouth along with a sugar cube.

His quiet moments at home — and they were not many — were spent dreaming of his next encounter with her. He began hungering after her.

Jealous, Mrs. Livingston? Is that how I sound? But I suppose … Yes, of course I was. Your word is appropriate. Wouldn't you have been? It was the hardest thing, you see — understanding that my husband's attentions had been seduced away from me so totally, and in a manner that left me no room to manoeuvre. I am still surprised, you know, when successful politicians willingly surrender their power. To lose in the polls is one thing, but to retire, to give it up for no compelling reason, is quite another. It still strikes me as extraordinary.

I remember the first political rally I attended. I remember it because it was also my last. There was a stage with chairs on it and flaming torches — flambeaux, as we called them — at each corner. There was a microphone and crackling speakers. Somewhere off to the side a tassa band was drumming out its rhythms …

Ah yes, it's an
East
Indian drum band. Its rhythms can be quite infectious. I've seen many fellows — fuelled too, it must be said, by the island rum — surrender to its joyous demons. Why, I too have felt —

No, no, Mrs. Livingston, not in the least like voodoo. Oh my, the very thought!

Anyway, I was asked to sit in the front row beside my husband, but I chose to take a seat in the second row behind him. From there I could see everything, you see, without selfimplication. Tongues of flame from oil drums defining the perimeter of the square, hundreds of faces shimmering up towards us in the flickering darkness. Not ironical or cynical, but rapt with anticipation.

Sometimes there were hecklers, too, and they were the voices that stayed with my husband afterwards, the ones he brought home with him. He would vent anger at them for hours, while Cyril — dear, foolish Cyril who liked to call himself my husband's campaign manager — poured him torrents of whisky and tried to calm him. It often took hours. Cyril once confided to me that he thought my husband expected to be loved by everyone, even his political enemies. He thought he had gained an insight into his brother. Poor deluded Cyril. He took himself so seriously. No one else did, you know.

Then the speeches began, but I remember not a word, not a promise, not an idea. What I do remember is this: those faces
animated by the words, solemn one moment and ecstatic the next. And when it was my husband's turn several warmup speakers later, the sweat that broke out on the back of his neck, and the way his spine — it was a deep spine, like a crevasse down the middle of his back — the way his spine defined itself through the soaked fabric of his shirt. I remember the stiffness of his left arm — it was with that hand that he gripped the stem of the microphone — and the gesticulations of his right. Gesticulations of caution and exhortation, the pumping fists of the passion that is, let me be blunt, a kind of masturbation …

Mrs. Livingston: Are you all right?

My language? Scarlet? My dear, what in the world do you mean?

Masturbation? It's a perfectly good word. It describes a physical action, like spitting or vomiting — only masturbation is surely more pleasurable. Besides, I thought I was being rather poetic — the pumping fists of passion and all that.

No, I'll grant you, it's not Wordsworth — but that's a recommendation, isn't it …

The point is that all of that effort, some of it natural, some of it contrived to simulate naturalness, had its effect. My husband conducted the crowd and I saw what Cyril meant when he said he had the touch of a master. It was quite unsettling, actually. This quality, which others admired in him, had quite the opposite effect on me. How could the little we compete with the adulation of crowds? I left that rally deflated, and promised myself I would never attend another. It was a promise that I kept.

CYRIL SAYS, “HE
wasn' what you'd call a delicate man.”

Penny frowns but says nothing.

His words cause Yasmin to reflect that delicate is an adjective that would do justice to Cyril himself, to his gentle fragility — his fault lines concealed, but barely.

“Give him a san'wich or a roti and he'd take it in the palm of his hand, really
hold
it. No dainty-dainty tea-an'-crumpets little-finger-in-the-air for him.”

She imagines large hands, thick-fingered, with broad nails trimmed close. She senses a physical strength rarely employed — but when called upon, displayed with ferocity.

“Once I saw him take an orange in his hand an' squeeze an' squeeze until the thing just kind o' exploded.”

Cyril spreads his palm, then snaps the fingers into a clench. She sees a small hand, plump-fingered, with nails of painful transparence. Senses the possibility of a vexed impotence. Imagines, yet, the orange collapsing into a pulpy mass.

“And when he
et,
he
et.
Big bites. In fact, when he et, he always brought to mind a teacher I had in primary school. I remember a class when he was teachin' us how to et. ‘Masticate properly. Masticate every mouthful thirty-two times.' Not chew.
Masticate.
That's what Ram did.”

She imagines the working of his jaws, his wet lips, his relish.

Penny says, “Masticate thirty-two times?”

“Thirty-two.”

“You supposed to count or what?”

Cyril nods. “He asked who masticated thirty-two times and guess which fool put up his hand. He said I was lying. And he was right.”

“Why'd you do it?” Yasmin asks.

Before he can answer, Penny says, “Habit.”

IT WAS HARD
on me, you know, Mrs. Livingston, harder on me than on my husband. A brutal experience, watching him get bloodied in battle. I felt his pain more acutely than he himself did — or perhaps more than he could afford to let himself. I remember thinking that my fears for him appeared greater than his fears for himself. He was certain he would prevail, after all.

One of the hacks — and there was a quick gathering of hacks around my husband — one of them said, admiringly, that he had the skin of an elephant. And then he added that these attacks — which to me appeared so vicious, for they went after the man and not after his ideas — that these attacks were like blunt arrows, glancing off my husband's hide. I remember his words: It would take an elephant gun to bring down a man like that. The admiration was palpable in the words, and I knew I should take pride and comfort in them but I could not, for it seemed to me that even blunt arrows must hurt — even though my husband never winced, not once, not even to me in private.

I remember overhearing a conversation he had with Cyril not long after our return. They were having breakfast together — fried bread with scrambled eggs swimming in melted butter, strong coffee — not the instant powder but beans freshly roasted, ground and boiled and sweetened with streams of condensed milk.

You know, this was the one thing my husband pined over
during our time in England: this breakfast. I tried making it for him two or three times. Now, cooking was never my forte, nor one of my ambitions — it fulfilled nothing in me — but I tried hard, for him. Not once did I succeed. He complained each and every time. His tongue, he said, recognized nothing. The bread was too light, the butter wasn't salty enough, even the eggs made him grimace — he dubbed them too English, by which he meant wan and flavourless. So after we got back, he indulged himself — and continued doing so until renewed familiarity dulled the appetite …

As for me, there was one thing. You won't know it, though. It was a fruit. We called it pomerac. It had the shape and consistency of a firm pear, was red as an apple on the outside and as white as cotton on the inside. Of course, I would occasionally hunger for the taste of a mango or sour plums or — another fruit you wouldn't know — chennet. But those were tastes fairly easily satisfied, what with all the coming and going delegation members did between the island and London. Pomerac, though, was the one thing no one ever managed, possibly because it was not widely available …