The Poetry of Derek Walcott 1948-2013 (12 page)

despite the passionate, pragmatic

Methodism of my infancy,

crawled through the thicket of my hair,

till sometimes the skin prickled

even in sunshine at “negromancy”;

traumatic, tribal,

an atavism stronger than their Mass,

stronger than chapel, whose

tubers gripped the rooted middle-class,

beginning where Africa began:

in the body's memory.

I knew them all,

the “swell-foot,” the epileptic “
mal-cadi
,”

cured by stinking compounds,

tisane, bush-bath, the exhausting emetic,

and when these failed, the incurably sored and sick

brought in a litter to the obeah-man.

One step beyond the city was the bush.

One step behind the churchdoor stood the devil.

    
THE PACT

One daybreak, as the iron light,

which guards dawn like a shopfront, lifted,

a scavenger washing the gutters stood

dumbstruck at the cross

where Chaussee Road and Grass Street intersect

before a rusting bloodstain.

A bubbling font at which

a synod of parsonical flies presided,

washing their hands. The scavenger Zandoli

slowly crossed himself.

The slowly sinking stain mapped no direction

in which the thing, a dog, perhaps, had crawled.

Light flushed its crimson like an obscene rose.

A knot of black communicants,

mainly old women, chorused round the wound.

The asphalt, like an artery, flowed, unstanched.

Monsieur Auguste Manoir, pillar of the Church,

lay on his back and watched dawn ring

his bed's gold quoits, and gild the view

of hills and roofs the hue of crusted blood,

heard the gray, iron harbor

open on a seagull's rusty hinge,

and knew, as soundlessly as sunlight,

that today he would die.

The blood of garbage mongrels had a thin,

watery excretion; this, a rich red

bubbled before their eyes.

Monsieur Manoir

urged his ringed, hairy hand to climb his stomach

to nuzzle at his heart.

Its crabbed jaw clenched the crucifix;

he heaved there, wheezing,

in the pose of one swearing eternal fealty,

hearing his blood race

like wine from a barrel when its bung has burst.

The blood coagulated like dregged wine.

Zandoli hefted a bucket

washing it wide. It

spread like a dying crab, clenching the earth.

Laved in a sudden wash of sweat, Manoir

struggled to scream for help.

His wife, in black, bent at communion.

Released, he watched the light deliriously dancing

on the cold, iron roofs of his warehouses

whose corrugations rippled with his name.

His hands still smelled of fish, of his beginnings,

hands that he'd ringed with gold, to hide their smell,

sometimes he'd hold them out,

puckered with lotions, powdered, to his wife,

a peasant's hands, a butcher's,

their acrid odor of saltfish and lard.

Drawn by the sweat,

a fly prayed at his ear-well:

Bon Dieu, pardon,

Demou, merci,

l'odeur savon,

l'odeur parfum

pas sait guérir

l'odeur péché,

l'odeur d'enfer,

pardonnez-moi

Auguste Manoir!

If there was one thing Manoir's watchman hated

more than the merchant, it was the merchant's dog,

more wolf than dog. It would break loose

some nights, rooting at the warehouse,

paws scuffing dirt like hands for some lost bone.

Before he struck it, something dimmed its eyes.

Its head dilating like an obscene rose,

humming and gemmed with flies, the dog

tottered through the tiled hallway of the house

towards its bed.

Under a scabrous roof whose fences

held the colors of dried blood, Saylie,

the wrinkled washerwoman, howled

in gibberish, in the devil's Latin.

Stepping back from the stench

as powerful as a cloud of smoke

the young priest chanted:

per factotem mundi,

per eum qui habet potestatem

mittendi te in gehennam
 …

six men with difficulty pinning her down,

gasping like divers coming up for breath,

her wild eyes rocketing,

as Beherit and Eazaz wrestled in her smoke.

The stores opened for business.

A stench of rumor filtered through the streets.

He was the first black merchant baron.

They would say things, of course, they would think things,

those children of his fellow villagers

descending the serpentine roads from the Morne,

they'd say his name in whispers now, “Manoir.”

The priest prayed swiftly, averting his head,

she had, he knew, contracted with the devil,

now, dying, his dog's teeth tugged at her soul

like cloth in a wringer when the cogs have caught,

their hands pulled at its stuff through her clenched teeth,

“Name him!” The priest intoned, “Name!
Déparlez!
”

The bloodstain in the street dried quick as sweat.

“Manoir,” she screamed, “that dog, Auguste Manoir.”

 

 

CHAPTER 5

—
STATIO HAUD MALEFIDA CARINIS

    
I

AUGUSTE MANOIR, MERCHANT: LICENSED TO SELL

INTOXICATING LIQUOR, RETAILER, DRY GOODS
, etc.

his signs peppered the wharves.

From the canted barracks of the City of Refuge,

from his grandmother's tea-shop, he would watch

on black hills of imported anthracite

the frieze of coal-black carriers,
charbonniers
,

erect, repetitive as hieroglyphs

descending and ascending the steep ramps,

building the pyramids,

songs of Egyptian bondage,

                                        when they sang,

the burden of the panniered anthracite,

one hundredweight to every woman

tautened, like cable, the hawsers in their necks.

There was disease inhaled in the coal-dust.

Silicosis. Herring-gulls

white as the uniforms of tally clerks,

screeching, numbered and tagged the loads.

“Boy! Name the great harbors of the world!”

“Sydney! Sir.”

“San Fransceesco!”

“Naples, sah!”

“And what about Castries?”

“Sah, Castries ees a coaling station and

der twenty-seventh best harba in der worl'!

In eet the entire Breetesh Navy can be heeden!”

“What is the motto of Saint Lucia, boy?”

“
Statio haud malefida carinis.
”

“Sir!”

“Sir!”

“And what does that mean?”

“Sir, a safe anchorage for sheeps!”

High on the Morne,

flowers medaled the gravestones of the Inniskillings,

too late. Bamboos burst like funereal gunfire.

Noon smoke of cannon fodder,

as black bat cries recited Vergil's tag: “
Statio haud!
”

Safe in their anchorage, sloe-lidded sloops

admired their reflections:
Phyllis Mark
,

Albertha Compton
,
Lady Joy
,
The Jewel
.

    
II

The teetering two-storyed house next door became a haven

for bat-like transients.

Tenants flashed in and out of its dark rooms.

Their cries shot from its eaves. A family of creoles.

The mother a yellow, formidable Martiniquaise,

handsome, obliquely masculine, with a mole, “
très égyptienne
,”

black sapodilla-seed eyes

under the ziggurat of her pompadour,

we called “The Captain's Wife.”

Sometimes, when the wind's hand creaked her upstairs window open,

hiding in the dim angle of our bedroom

I'd try to catch her naked. Their son, Gentile,

had round, scared eyes, a mouth

that gibbered in perpetual terror,

even in sunshine he shivered like a foundling.

“Gentile, Gentile!” we called. His own name frightened him.

We all knew when the Captain had dry-docked.

There would be violent bursts of shrieking French,

and in my own bed, parallel, separated by a gulf

of air, I'd hear the Captain's Wife,

sobbing, denying.

Next day her golden face seemed shrunken,

then, when he ulysseed, she bloomed again,

the bat-swift transients returned,

so many, perhaps they quartered in the eaves.

Dressed in black lace, like an impatient widow,

I imagined that skin, pomegranate, under silks

the sheen of water, and that

sweet-sour stink vixens give off.

Serene, and unimaginably naked,

as her dark countrymen hung round her rooms,

we heard their laughter tinkling above the glasses.

They came when Foquarde travelled down the coast.

Her laugh rang like the jangling of bracelets.

    
III

Jewel
, a single stack, diesel, forty-foot coastal vessel,

its cabin curtained with canvas meant to shield

passengers from the sun,

but through which rain and shining spray still drenched,

coughed like a relic out of Conrad. Twice a week

she loaded her cargo of pigs, charcoal, food, lumber,

squabbling or frightened peasants, the odd priest,

threading the island's jettied villages,

Anse-la-Raye, Canaries, Soufrière, Choiseul,

and back. She also carried mail.

In deep green village coves she rocked offshore,

threatening her breakdown,

while rust bled from her wash,

a litter of dugouts nuzzling at her flank,

off-loading goods and passengers.

Disembarkation was precarious,

the inshore swell had to be nicely timed,

against the lunge of struggling canoes

in which, feet planted squarely as a mast, one man

stood, swaying, heaving with the swell.

    
IV

Her course sheared perilously close to the ochre rocks

and bushy outcrops of the leeward coast,

sometimes so closely that it seemed to us

“that all the shoreline's leaves were magnified

deliberately, with frightening detail,”

yet the yellow coast uncoiling past her prow

like new rope from a bollard never lost interest,

especially when the coiled beach lay

between black coves blinding

half-moon of sand,

before some settlement which the passengers

however often they had made this journey

always gave different names,

“because it went on repeating itself exactly,”

palms, naked children fishing, wretched huts,

a stone church by a brown, clogged river,

the leper colony of Malgrétoute.

A church, hedged by an unconverted forest,

a beach without a footprint, clear or malformed,

no children, no one, on the hollow pier.

The Jewel
hove to, ringing her leper's bell.

The passengers crossed themselves and turned,

inevitably, to the priest.

He'd rise as the canoe appeared.

Condemned. I searched his skin.

The surpliced water heaved.

The bell tinkled like Mass. The priest got off.

He sat still in the long canoe, the afternoon

swallowed the bell-rings slowly,

one hand steadying his hat,

the other gripping its stern.

After a while we lost him to the dark green

ocean of the leaves, a white speck, a sail,

out of our memory and our gratitude.

FROM BOOK II:
HOMAGE TO GREGORIAS

I saw them growing gaunt and pale in their unlighted studios. The Indian turning green, the Negro's smile gone, the white man more perverted—more and more forgetful of the sun they had left behind, trying desperately to imitate what came naturally to those whose rightful place was in the net. Years later, having frittered away their youth, they would return with vacant eyes, all initiative gone, without heart to set themselves the only task appropriate to the milieu that was slowly revealing to me the nature of its values: Adam's task of giving things their names.

ALEJO CARPENTIER,
The Lost Steps

 

 

CHAPTER 8

—WEST INDIAN GOTHIC

    
I

A gaunt, gabled house,

gray, fretted, soars

above a verdigris canal which

sours with moss. A bridge,

lithe as a schoolboy's leap,

vaults the canal. Each

longitudinal window seems

a vertical sarcophagus, a niche

in which its family must sleep

erect, repetitive as saints

in their cathedral crypt,

like urgent angels in their fluted stone

sailing their stone dream.

And like their house,

all the Gregoriases

were pious, arrogant men,

of that first afternoon, when

Gregorias ushered me in there,

I recall an air of bugled orders,

cavalry charges of children

tumbling down the stair,

a bristling, courteous father,

but also something delicate,