Omeros (28 page)

hoarsely requesting his rolls of coins in silver,

and the voice carried the old bugle-note that as boys

had racked us in line as cadets. I felt that shiver

of fear we all knew. His shout could carry over

the heights of Saltibus to the cliffs of D’Elles Soeurs,

the khaki slopes of D’Elles Soeurs to LaFargue River.

Then he passed my queue, as if it were Inspection.

“Our wanderer’s home, is he?”

                                                     I said: “For a while, sir,”

too crisply, mentally snapping to attention,

thumbs along trousers’ seam, picking up his accent

from a khaki order.

                                   “Been travellin’ a bit, what?”

I forgot the melody of my own accent,

but I knew I’d caught him, and he knew he’d been caught,

caught out in the class-war. It stirred my contempt.

He knew the “what?” was a farce, I knew it was not

officer-quality, a strutting R.S.M.,

Regimental Sarn’t Major Plunkett, Retired.

Not real colonial gentry, but spoke like

them from the height of his pig-farm, but I felt as tired

as he looked. Still, he’d led us in Kipling’s requiem.

“Been doin’ a spot of writing meself. Research.”

The “meself” his accommodation. “P’raps you’ve ’eard …

the old queen,” shrugging. I said I’d been at the church.

“Ah! Were you? These things. Eyes tend to get very blurred.

So sorry I missed you. Bit of an artist, too,

was old Maud. You must come up. I’ll show you a quilt

she embroidered for years. Birds and things. Mustn’t keep you.”

O Christ! I swore, I’m tired of their fucking guilt,

and our fucking envy! War invented the queue,

and he taught that Discipline formed its own beauty

in the rhyming steps of the college Cadet Force,

that though crowds mimicked his strut, it was his duty

to make us all gentlemen if not officers.

“Nice to see you, sir,” said my old Sergeant Major,

and my eyes blurred. Then he paused at the white glare of

the street outside, and left, as the guard closed the door,

the wound of a language I’d no wish to remove.

II

I remembered that morning when Plunkett and I,

compelled by her diffident saunter up the beach,

sought grounds for her arrogance. He in the khaki

grass round the redoubt, I in the native speech

of its shallows; like enemy ships of the line,

we crossed on a parallel; he had been convinced

that his course was right; I despised any design

that kept to a chart, that calculated the winds.

My inspiration was impulse, but the Major’s zeal

to make her the pride of the Battle of the Saints,

her yellow dress on its flagship, was an ideal

no different from mine. Plunkett, in his innocence,

had tried to change History to a metaphor,

in the name of a housemaid; I, in self-defence,

altered her opposite. Yet it was all for her.

Except we had used two opposing stratagems

in praise of her and the island; cannonballs rolled

in the fort grass were not from Olympian games,

nor the wine-bottle, crusted with its fool’s gold,

from the sunken
Ville de Paris,
legendary

emblems; nor all their names the forced coincidence

we had made them. There, in her head of ebony,

there was no real need for the historian’s

remorse, nor for literature’s. Why not see Helen

as the sun saw her, with no Homeric shadow,

swinging her plastic sandals on that beach alone,

as fresh as the sea-wind? Why make the smoke a door?

III

All that Greek manure under the green bananas,

under the indigo hills, the rain-rutted road,

the galvanized village, the myth of rustic manners,

glazed by the transparent page of what I had read.

What I had read and rewritten till literature

was guilty as History. When would the sails drop

from my eyes, when would I not hear the Trojan War

in two fishermen cursing in Ma Kilman’s shop?

When would my head shake off its echoes like a horse

shaking off a wreath of flies? When would it stop,

the echo in the throat, insisting, “Omeros”;

when would I enter that light beyond metaphor?

But it was mine to make what I wanted of it, or

what I thought was wanted. A cool wood off the road,

a hut closed like a wound, and the sound of a river

coming through the trees on a country Saturday,

with no one in the dry front yard, the still leaves,

the yard, the shade of a breadfruit tree on the door,

then the track from which a man’s figure emerges,

then a girl carrying laundry, the road-smell like loaves,

the yellow-dressed butterflies in the grass marges.

Chapter LV

I

Through the year, pain came and went. Then came Christmas,

everything right and exact, everything correct,

the golden pillars of Scotch, red sorrel, sea-moss,

the hunger of happiness spread through Philoctete

like a smooth white tablecloth, everything in place,

the plastic domes of hot dishes frosting with dew,

gravy-boats anchored on patterns of doilied lace

withdrawn from camphored cupboards, the napkin holder

of yellow bone, the cutlery flashing in light

after a year in the drawer, shoulder to shoulder

the small army of uncorked wines and the corked-too-tight

explosives of ginger-beer, the ham pierced with cloves,

a crusted roast huge as a thigh, black pudding, souse,

the glazed cornmeal pies sweating in banana leaves,

and a smell of forgiveness drifting from each house

with the smell of varnish, and a peace that drifted

out to the empty beach; that brimmed in the eyes of

wineglasses, his heart bubbling when she lifted

the steaming shield from the rice. “Ah, Philosophe!”

he said to himself from the depth of gratitude,

“you cannot say life not good, or people not kind,”

as Ma Kilman sipped her sauce from the ladling wood

and pronounced, “It good,” to both the one who was blind

and the healed one, in her generous widowhood.

The day after Christmas Achille rose excited

by the half-dark. A stale cock crew. Grass grew lighter

in the pastures. Moon-basins flashed in the riverbed.

Today he was not the usual kingfish-fighter

but a muscular woman, a scarf round his head.

Today was the day of fifes, the prattling skin

of the goat-drums, the day of dry gourds, of brass bells

round his ankles, not chains from the Bight of Benin

but those fastened by himself. He was someone else

today, a warrior-woman, fierce and benign.

Today he was African, his own epitaph,

his own resurrection. Today people would laugh

at what they had lost in the
paille-banane
dancers;

today was the day when they wore the calabash

with its marks; today the rustling banana-trash

would whirl with spinning Philoctete, the cancer’s

anemone gone from his shin; the balancer’s

day on the bamboo poles and the stilt-strider’s height

floating past balconies, past the fretwork mansards;

today was the children’s terror and their delight,

running up the street and hiding in people’s yards.

Achille walked out into the blinding emptiness

of the shut village. He strode like a prizefighter

on Boxing Day, carrying Helen’s yellow dress,

and the towel that matched it draped over his head,

the Lifebuoy soap in a dish swallowed by his hand

to wash off the love-sweat with Helen. By the shed

of the fishermen’s depot a trough in the sand

held the public standpipe with its brass-knuckled fist.

The shower was a trickle. First Achille lathered

his skull white as Seven Seas’s hair, then pulled the waist

of the trunks to forage his crotch. Then he rolled dirt

from back of the ankles with a hard-pressing wrist,

then rubbed one heel where the thorn-vine had left its hurt.

Then he opened the shower full out and let it drum

the streaming soap past his eyes, groping to close it.

“You smell like a flower,” he teased himself. “How come?”

Next he unfrayed the soap-dried knots in his armpit,

and spray flew from his hair to the quick-picking comb.

The village was hung over. The sun slept in the street

like a dog, with no traffic. He shook Philo’s gate.

The sufferer was cured now. He walked very straight.

II

Those elbows like anchors, those huge cannonball fists

wriggled through the armholes of the tight lemon dress.

Helen helped him stuff the rags and align his breasts.

At first she had laughed, but then, with firm tenderness,

Achille explained that he and Philo had done this

every Boxing Day, and not because of Christmas,

but for something older; something that he had seen

in Africa, when his name had followed a swift,

where he had been his own father and his own son.

The sail of her bellying stomach seemed to him

to bear not only the curved child sailing in her

but Hector’s mound, and her hoarse, labouring rhythm

was a delivering wave. There, in miniature,

the world was globed like a fruit, since its texture is

both acid and sweet like a golden
pomme-Cythère,

the apple of Venus, and the
Ville de Paris

that he had dived for once, in search of a treasure

that was kneeling right there, that had always been his.

She did not laugh anymore, but she helped him lift

the bamboo frame with its ribbons and spread them out

from the frame, and everything she did was serious.

She knelt at his feet and hooked the bells to the skirt.

Small circular mirrors necklaced the split bodice

that was too small for his chest, and their flashing lights

multiplied her face with the tears in their own eyes.

She lifted the mitre, its panes like Easter kites,

and with this she fitted him. He straightened its spire

with his huge hands and their rope-furrowed calluses,

then he took up the wand and stood there in the mirror

of her pride and her butterfly-quiet kisses.

He was resinous and frightening. He smelt like trees

on a ridge at sunrise, like unswaying cedars;

then he set out for the hot road towards Castries,

the square already filling with tables. Buses

passed him with screaming children and in their cries

was the ocean’s distance over three centuries.

III

Their small troupe stood in the hot street. Three musicians,

fife, chac-chac, and drummer and the androgynous

warriors, Philo and Achille.
Un! Deux! Trois!
The dance

began with Philo as its pivot, to the noise

of dry leaves scraping asphalt, the banana-trash

levitating him slowly as the roofs spun round

the dip and swivel of the head, a calabash

masking the agonized face, as Achille drummed the ground

with quick-stuttering heels, stopped. And then he stood straight.

Now he strode with the wand and the fluttering mitre

until he had walked to the far end of the street.

There he spun. Then, knee passing knee, he stepped lighter

than a woman with her skirt lifted high crossing

the stones of a stream when the light is small mirrors,

with the absurd strength of his calves and his tossing

neck, which shook out the mitre like a lion’s mane,

with a long running leap, then a spin, while he held

the shaft low, like a rod divining. All the pain

re-entered Philoctete, of the hacked yams, the hold

closing over their heads, the bolt-closing iron,

over eyes that never saw the light of this world,

their memory still there although all the pain was gone.

He swallowed his nausea, and spun his arms faster,

like a goblet on a potter’s wheel, its brown blur

soothed by his palms, as the bamboo fifes grew shriller

to the slitted eyes of the fifers. The drummer’s wrists

whirred like a hummingbird’s wings, and, to Achille, the

faster they flew, the more he remembered, blent

to his rite; then suddenly the music ceased.

The crowd clapped, and Achille, with great arrogance, sent

Philoctete to bow and pick up the coins on the street

glittering like fish-scales. He let the runnels of sweat

dry on his face. Philoctete sat down. Then he wept.

BOOK SEVEN

Chapter LVI

I

One sunrise I walked out onto the balcony

of my white hotel. The beach was already swept,

and in the clear grooves of the January sea

there was only one coconut shell, but it kept

nodding in my direction as a swimmer might

with sun in his irises, or a driftwood log,

or a plaster head, foaming. It changed shapes in light

according to each clouding thought. A khaki dog

came racing its faster shadow on the clean sand,

then stopped, yapping at the shell, not wetting its paws,

backing off from the claws of surf that made the sound

of a cat hissing; then it faked an interest

in a crab-hole and worried it. If that thing was

a coconut, why didn’t it drift with the crest

of the slow-breathing swell? Then, as if from a vase,