Omeros (26 page)

III

And I felt the wrong love leaving me where I stood

on the café balcony facing the small square

and the tower with its banyan. I heard my blood

echoing the lifted leaves of the hills, and fear

leaving them like the rain; I felt her voice draining

from mine. A drizzle passed, but the sprinkled asphalt,

since the rain was shining and the sun was raining,

dried quickly with the smell of a singeing iron,

and whipped up the wet in sheets. My eyes were so clear

that I counted the barrack-arches on the Morne,

and traced the gauze of fine rain towards Soufrière

and imagined it cooling the bubbling pits of

the Malebolge, and beading its volcanic ferns

with clear, sliding drops. The roofs glittered with that love

which loses the other; clearer when it returns.

The process, the proof of a self-healing island

whose every cove was a wound, from the sibyl’s art

renewed my rain-washed eyes. I felt an elation

opening and closing the valves of my panelled heart

like a book or a butterfly. The drying roofs

glittered with an interior light like Lucia’s

and my joy was pounding like a stallion’s hooves

on a morning beach scattering the crabbed wrestlers

near Helen’s wall to this thudding metre it loves.

Of course we had loved each other, but differently,

as we loved the island. My braceleted Circe

was gone, like the shining drizzle, far now, at sea,

but the Caribbean ringed me with infinite mercy

as it did the island. In her white pillared house

I looked down from the wrong height, not like Philoctete

limping among his yams and the yam flowers.

My love was common as dirt; brown sheep bayed at it,

as it sang an old hymn and scraped a yard with a broom,

a yard with a bunioned plum-tree and old tires

under the bunioned plum-tree. It was rusted from

heat like a galvanized roof, it writhed from blue fires

of garbage, hens pecked its eyes out, smoke made it cry

for a begging breadfruit, an old head-scarfed woman

in the bible of an open window, a boy

steered it like a bicycle rim; like an onion

it wept openly. In a shop, with its felt hat,

it smelt of old age. It was carrying Hector’s child,

and taking a break from the heat outside, it sat

fanning its parted thighs, and whenever it smiled,

it smiled for the island. It looked out on a street

of small, fretwork uprights. It yelped when a mongrel

skittered from a transport. All night, it sucked the sweet

of an Extra-Strong moon till it melted. The smell

of asphalt drying from rain was the breeze that shone

on Philoctete’s skin, opening her gate with its bell,

then turning to fit the hook, closing that question.

Chapter L

I

Latticework shadows diamonded the verandah,

crossing out plans for the Plunketts’ cruise. Brochures. Dates.

“Time, time,” swayed the brass bells of the allamanda.

“Cheap! Cheap!” the sparrows chirruped round the breakfast plates.

On their last trip home he’d been shaken by it all:

England cashing in on decayed gentility

like the sneering portraits in their three-star hotel,

its frock-coated porter’s coin-eyed humility;

its corner-pub, The Rodney, with its copper bell,

sporting prints, and brown quiet where a pint of ale,

two bangers and mash made his fist a sea-diver

coming up with a fortune. “It’s the Admiral

Rob-Me, all right,” he told Maud. Much of the river

was quietly preserved like the area-railing

near Putney Boat-House, where garden-boxes in June

exploded with chrysanthemums; but the ailing

statues of lions wearied him. One afternoon,

he so badly missed shaking the paw of his tom

drowsing in the window-light like a regular

lion that he cried. The bombsites had become

cubes of blue glass and indifferent steel. Trafalgar

was all tourists and cameras and the red roar

of pillar-box buses. They would begin to argue

over menus in windows. But the worst horror

was in the voices. Caught on a traffic island,

waiting for the sea-green light, he began to hear

the surf of a dialect none would understand;

it coiled in his ear-shell with its tireless moan,

feet could not muffle it nor traffic round the Strand,

nor a Kensington crescent remote as the moon.

II

After the voices faded, he heard his own voice

growing brazen in its key from the hotel stair,

one step above that with which he spoke to the boys

on the estate. He searched the eyes of the waiter

pouring breakfast coffee with a frightening rage

at the spoon-clicking silence. Ringing the porter,

his pitch kept wavering on the proper language

and the correct key—not a plea, but an order.

This tightened his jawline and increased his hatred.

He thought of Tumbly and Scott. They’d fought the same war,

but he limped with pride at being the walking wounded

in the class-struggle, in the hotel’s high ranking,

its brass-buttons and tips, and he might have ended

that way, saluting taxis and crisply thanking

gentlemen. The Major waited till his rage

ebbed and, with his eyes shut, his hands behind his head,

was ready to go back home. Through their ersatz lace

came the surf of cars. The sailing curtains lifted.

Level-voiced London unnerved him. He found his excuse

in its self-rapt adoration. Steering around

lines patiently forming at drizzling bus-queues,

umbrellas politely revolving in its rain,

the cold, beaded faces in raincoats and parkas,

he shook off the old hallucination again,

from a spun umbrella, that they were back at war.

On wet summer afternoons that grew dark as

February, its gutters muttered in patois

in the indigo light that spelt a hurricane

or thunder over Marble Arch. What he missed was

the roar of his island’s market, palm-fronds talking

to each other. It was one of the mysteries

of advancing age to like those tempestuous

gusts that hyphenated leaves on a railed walk, in-

stead of keeping things in place and their proper use.

He felt like a strolling statue, passing the
News

of the World,
and the Thames looked smaller to his eyes.

III

Maud could never sleep the length of those afternoons;

stretched out on the verandah in the chaise-longue, and

fanning with a palmetto, deep in her cushions,

she stopped to examine the maps along one hand.

Dennis was sprawled out upstairs in his khaki shirt.

In the hot breeze everything stirred like an omen.

She knew it was coming, but when? In the inert

pasture with its quiet trees? In the wide-open

bay? Was its message that rooster kicking up dirt

like a grave near her kitchen just behind the pen?

In a donkey’s bray sawing the heat? It was not

visible, it was only cold sweat on her brow.

In the day’s slow yawn before it swallowed the night?

In the mango’s leaves, the square shade under a cow?

Whenever you want, dear God, once it is not now.

She found herself exhausted before it was night.

In the heat, the low biplane of a dragonfly

buzzed the reed-wilted pond, as its rings spread the white

languid dominion of the crowned water-lily;

from their straw nets the orange beaks of the ginger-

lilies gaped for rain. She knew that it was silly

but she heard them screeching with the ceaseless hunger

of fledglings. She watered them. She personified

everything these days, from the archaic elegance

of Queen Anne’s lace to the gold, imperious pride

of the sunflower’s revolving, lion’s countenance.

She preferred gardens to empires. Now she was tired.

Chapter LI

I

He still enjoyed taking Maud to five o’clock Mass,

backing out of the garage with the dewy stars

sharp through black trees, the metal wet, and Maud shawled as

if it were Ireland. Downhill, torches of roosters

caught a hill’s edge, and the Rover’s beam would surprise

clumps of grey workmen going to their factories,

all waiting for the first transport down the highway

with thermoses and construction hats in a breeze

as nippy as early spring, the greying road empty,

until, one morning, screeching round the cold asphalt,

twin lights had challenged him with incredible speed,

blinding him, until they veered and their driver called:

“Move your ass, honky!”

                                           They were lucky to be spared.

Plunkett carefully parked the Rover near a ditch.

Maud was shaking. He kept the lights on and got out.

“Where’re you going?” she screamed.

                                                                  “For that sonofabitch!”

Plunkett said in the old Army voice. The transport

had braked to a screeching stop where the workmen were

waiting, and some of them were already inside

when he walked up the greying road like a major

out to bring them some discipline. One of them said:

“Mi ’n’homme blanc-a ka venir, oui.”
Meaning: “Here comes

the white man.”

                            The dawn was coming up like thunder

through the coconut palms. Bagpipes and kettledrums

were the only thing missing. Plunkett smiled under

his martial, pensioned moustaches.

                                                               “
HOLD ON
!” he roared.

They froze like recruits. One with his boot in the door.

“
TILL I TALK TO THE DRIVER NO ONE GETS ABOARD
!”

The driver rammed his side open. It was Hector.

“Are you the bloody driver?” he asked him quietly,

close to his face. “Are you drunk? We were nearly killed!”

The engine was on.

                                  “Very well, give me the key.

Come, come on, the key,” as if to a sulking child,

snapping his fingers. “And furthermore, I resent

the expletive you used. I am not a honky.

A donkey perhaps, a jackass, but I haven’t spent

damned near twenty years on this godforsaken rock

to be cursed like a tourist. Do you understand?”

All the workmen were now in the van. “What de fock!”

one yelled. “Fock da honky!” Hector held out one hand.

It was hard as a cedar’s roots.

                                                   “Pardon, Major,

I didn’t know it was you.” It was only then

that Plunkett recognized the ivory smile. Hector,

of course, of course; he had been one of the fishermen

and had given up his canoe for this taxi. More

business. He steered the conversation to Helen

cunningly and asked if she was happy. Morning

wickered the palms’ shadows on the warming asphalt.

He shook Hector’s hand again, but with a warning

about his new responsibility.

                                                   “My fault,”

he said to Maud, turning the key in the engine.

II

He dropped her off at the door of the cathedral

among other black-shawled women. The empty square

with rusty railings guarding the Memorial

still shone with the dew and its grass-green benches were

glazed with it. The fountain had uttered its last sigh.

The sidewalks were empty. He could park anywhere.

He parked the Rover in front of the library

with its Georgian trim and walked to the harbour.

Alone, down Bridge Street, he caught the smell of the sea

as the sunlight suddenly heightened the mutter

of Mass from the cathedral, and the balcony

uprights under which he passed rippling like water

or the dead fountain once. One sunrise in Lisbon,

walking along its empty wharves, he had wondered

where in this world he and his new wife could settle

to find some peace. At the Customs gate the old guard

let him in, unlocking it. He saw the metal

dazzle of the sea between rusty containers,

then the blue port itself, and on the opposite

headland the arches of Married Women’s Quarters

and the old Officers’ Mess as its hill was hit

by a salvo of light. He could hear the chuckle

of water under the hulls of island schooners,

and one still had a bulb on its binnacle

in spite of the sunshine. He strolled. His hunger was

pierced by the smell of coffee. He was repeating

with every step of his forked shadow the same pace

as the midshipman, centuries ago, reading

the italics of Dutch ships by moonlight. Now peace

swayed the creaking hulls of the schooners. His favourite

was an old freighter welded to the wharf by rust

and sunsets. He felt a deep tenderness for it,

that it went nowhere at all, grimed with coal-dust

from the back of the market, hung with old tires

as if it had had enough of the world. It once

had great plans for leaving, but after a few tries

it had grown attached to the helmeted capstans

to which it was moored and the light-surprising walls

of its retirement. Now, in their rising leaven,