Omeros (11 page)

III

The village was bounded by a scabrous pasture

where boys played cricket. On its Caribbean side

was a cemetery of streaked stones and the tower

of a Norman church where the old river died.

Like reeds in the old lagoon the French in their power

had lifted a forest of masts with Trojan pride.

When the pages of sea-grapes in their restlessness

lifted a sudden gust, through asterisks of rain,

he climbed the small hill of garbage, and on its mess

he stood there, measuring out the site with his cane

and a small map he had found that was falling apart

from its weathered spine in the back of the library.

From this he had made his own diagram, a chart

that he measured as two thousand steps from the sea,

which concluded in the mound’s elegiac rampart.

In the rain-blotted dusk, what was he raking for,

poking with his cane there among the ruined shoes,

a question on a seething heap, raking some more

when something shone, metallic? What thing did he lose?

The midden was a boredom of domestic trash

whose artifacts showed nothing but their simple sins,

as clearly as rainwater in a calabash,

cracked as the crescent moons of enamel basins.

Boys watched the white man’s inexhaustible patience

chasing the curious piglets away from his work,

which was to prove that the farthest exclamations

of History are written by a flag of smoke,

from Carthage, from Pompeii, from the burial mound

of antipodal Troy. Midden built on midden;

by nature men always chose the same dumping ground

or an ancestral grove, and what lay hidden

under the heap of waste was the French cemetery

when the place was an outpost, facing Gros Îlet.

But this was also her village, this was where she

walked and swam on its beach, this was her parapet.

The midden proved to have been the capital port.

But then she had been the glory of nations once,

the shoes and basins of Troy. Imperial France

lay in his palm: two brass regimental buttons.

Chapter XIX

I

Now he could roar out Breen’s encomium by rote

because of his son’s sacrifice in a battle.

The apple of his pride bobbed in his wattled throat,

with a cannonade of a cough, something between a death-rattle

and a wavering sob. He taught Maud to say it by heart:

“When we consider the weighty interest involved in the issss
 …

ue
…” (there was always a spray of spittle with this part,

as the sibilants reared with an adder’s warning hiss),

“Whereby the mighty projects of the coalesced powers

were annihilated and Britain’s dominion on the seas

secured…”
Maud recited it to the yellow allamandas

as if they were fleurs-de-lys, as her clicking secateurs

beheaded them into a basket and up the stone stairs.

He found his Homeric coincidence.

                                                                 “Look, love, for instance,

near sunset, on April 12, hear this, the
Ville de Paris

struck her colours to Rodney. Surrendered. Is this chance

or an echo? Paris gives the golden apple, a war is

fought for an island called Helen?”—clapping conclusive hands.

He saw the boy’s freckled face, the forehead turning

under the thatch of red hair, the blue eyes, plum lips,

and, without the full cotton middy, the burning

shoulders raw from the heat, and the other midships

ranged on these iron steps. Some, inaudibly, laughed,

facing the sun’s lens. They were buffing sword-handles

with cleaning fluid, like the droppings of a swift

on a statue’s head, or like Maud’s dinner-candles,

all of them wondering how much time they had left

in the sun near the shade of the tanks, each feature

repeating the same half-naked, shadowy grin,

in a sepia album; he crouched with them there,

holding his Enfield, a tin basin to piss in

under his raw knee and the grinning boy was where

they all were now. In their stone waves, the home shire

of the sun-crossed Armistices, where a bugler

with a golden cord suddenly snaps its tassels

under an arm. And Mortimer, and Glendower,

and Tumbly and Scott, their sadly echoing souls

faded over the desert with its finest hour,

no longer privates, midshipmen, but grinning shells.

O Christ have mercy on them all! Christ forgive him,

for mockery of the midshipmen from whom home

could never be drilled, courage was out of fashion,

just as the faith had gone out from every hymn,

till only rhythm remained; and what was rhythm

if over their swinging arms there was not passion,

not only for England, but some light that led them

beyond their drill-patterns like rooks? For him, they shone

the sword hilts with rags. Not honour, but service;

the bugler’s summons not for brazen renown,

but it threaded their veins, privates and officers,

like Maud’s needles. For it, a young Plunkett would drown.

II

Since the house was on the very ground where buglers

had stood on the steps of the barracks, summoning

half-dressed soldiers from sleep, when frosted dew was

silvering the grass, they all came shouting and running

down the brick arches to the powder magazine,

because French sails were sighted on the horizon,

cries multiplied in Plunkett. Mute exclamations

of memory! Assembled ranks shouting their name

as they wriggled on braces, stamping “Sah!” Rations

for the cannon’s mouth, the black iron lizard’s flame.

Now, one of the longest barracks was the college.

He’d park in the Rover, watching young Neds and Toms

swinging their shadows but giggling at the rage

of their soprano sergeant. Fathering phantoms

like the name in the ledger, their numbers remained

when dusk slanted the barracks’ echoing arches,

with Scott’s cry and Tumbly’s, all the ones he had trained

before these cadets. The mace, flung high in marches

through the wooden streets, then flung higher overhead

and caught like an exclamation! In the night wind

the palms swayed like poplars along the Dutch marshes.

III

As the fever of History began to pass

like the vision of the island’s luminous saint,

he saw, through the Cyclops eye of the gliding glass,

over wooden waves of a naval aquatint,

a penile cannon emerge from its embrochure.

Able semen, he smiled. He had gone far enough.

He leant back, frowning, on the studded swivel chair;

then, with one hand, he spun the crested paper-knife

that stopped dead as a compass, making an old point—

that the harder he worked, the more he betrayed his wife.

So he edged the glass over the historic print,

but it magnified the peaks of the island’s breasts

and it buried stiff factions. He had come that far

to learn that History earns its own tenderness

in time; not for a navel victory, but for

the V of a velvet back in a yellow dress.

A moth hung from the beam, reversed, and the Major

watched the eyed wing: watching him, a silent witness.

He remembered the flash of illumination

in the empty bar—that the island was Helen,

and how it darkened the deep humiliation

he suffered for her and the lemon frock. Back then,

lightning could lance him with historic regret

as he watched the island through the slanted monsoon

that wrecked then refreshed her. Well, he had paid the debt.

The breakers had threshed her name with the very sound

the midshipman heard. He had given her a son.

The great events of the world would happen elsewhere.

There were those who thought his war had been the best war,

that the issues were nobler then, the cause more clear,

their nostalgia shone like the skin on his old scar.

There were dead Germans, machine-gunned near the hotels.

In History, he’d had a crypto-Fascist master

who loved German culture above everything else,

from the Royal House of Hanover to Kaiser

Wilhelm; he had given, as one of his essays,

“A few make History. The rest are witnesses.”

Beethoven’s clouds enrapt him, and Hermann Hesse’s

punctilious face. His essay had won first prize.

Chapter XX

I

By the witness of flambeaux-bottles, by the sweat

of distorted faces screaming for Workers’ Rights

on the steps of the iron market, Philoctete

peered at each candidate through the blinding arc-lights

to cresting gusts of applause for an island torn

by identical factions: one they called Marxist,

led by the barber’s son, the other by Compton

which Maljo, who took him there, called Capitalist.

In the rumshop he asked Maljo which to support.

“Me,” Maljo said, “them two men fighting for one bone.”

He’d pay his deposit, he’d rent Hector’s transport

and buy batteries for a hand-held megaphone.

His party was launched at the depot. The ribbon

was cut by the priest, its pieces saved for later

Christmas presents. In the village where he was born,

a tall cynic heckled: “Scissors can’t cut water!”

“Ciseau pas ça couper del’eau!”
meaning the campaign

was a wasted effort; the candidate addressed

his barefoot followers with a glass of champagne

to toast their trust, and a megaphone which he pressed

for its crackling echo, deafening those two feet

away from him. Since every party cost money,

he marched his constituents clapping up the street

to the No Pain Café to start the ceremony.

There Seven Seas sang for them, there his good compère

Achille promised to canvas for him in the depot

during domino games. A new age would begin.

You could read its poster by the sodium glow

of a lamppost at night. Its insomniac grin

plastered on a moonlit wall with its cheering surf,

while the charter yachts slept and crabs counted the sand,

with his registered name: F. D
IDIER
, B
ORN TO
S
ERVE
,

its sign: a broken chain dangling from a black hand.

“Bananas shall raise their hands at the oppressor,

through all our valleys!” he screamed, forgetting to press

the megaphone button. They named him “Professor

Static,” or “Statics,” for short, the short-circuit prose

of his electrical syntax in which he mixed

Yankee and patois as the lethargic Comet

sputtered its sparked broadsides when the button was fixed.

As Party Distributor he paid Philoctete,

who limped in the vanguard with handouts while the crowd

shouted “Statics!” and Maljo waved. He, who was once

fisherman-mechanic, felt newly empowered

to speak for those at the backs of streets, all the ones

idling in breadfruit yards, or draping the bridges

at dusk by the clogged drains, or hanging tired nets

on tired bamboo, for shacks on twilight ridges

in the wounding dusk. Their patience was Philoctete’s.

By the Comet’s symbol he knew their time had come,

and what Philo could contribute as a member

was the limp that drove his political point home

as he hopped to Maljo’s funereal timbre,

haranguing the back streets, forgetting the button.

“Ces mamailles-là!”
Statics shouted, meaning
“Children!”

Then Hector would tap his knee with: “The mike not on.”

“Shit!” said the Professor with usual acumen.

II

His cripple bounced ahead, distributing pamphlets,

starching them to cars and government buildings marked:

POST NO BILLS
; then Philoctete sank in the Comet’s

leopard upholstery. In the country, they parked

by a rumshop. He’d lead the clapping while Statics

shook hands, or gave a lollipop at a standpipe

to a toothless sibyl; he was learning the tricks.

To his black Lodge suit he added a corncob pipe

and MacArthur’s vow as he left: “
Moi
shall return.”

Power went to Statics’s head. He felt like the Pope

in his bulletproof jeep; he learnt how to atone

for their poverty, waving from the parted door

of the gliding Comet, past neglected sections,

nodding, dipping two fingers stuck with a power

that parted the sea of their roaring affections.

“This island of St. Lucia,
quittez moin dire z’autres!

let me tell you is heading for unqualified

disaster,
ces mamailles-là, pas blague,
I am not

joking. Every vote is your ticket, your free ride

on the
Titanic:
a cruise back to slavery

in liners like hotels you cannot sit inside

except as waiters, maids. This chicanery!

this fried chicanery! Tell me if I lying.

Like that man hopping there, St. Lucia look healthy

with bananas and tourists, but her soul crying,

’tends ça moin dire z’autres,
tell me if I lying.

I was a fisherman and it lancing my heart