“Take a jump, take a jump, take a jump right now — it’s Ka-nee-val…” The hills swallow the words but Ata and Fraser know the tune. They watch, from the birdeye perch of the garden wall, down to the busy glitter of thousands of cars parking near the Oval cricket ground.
“And they’re only just now starting up,” Pierre laments.
Fraser takes the beating on his chest as the bands of sound come up the hill. His eyes gleam. “It’s remarkable, it comes right up.”
“Every bloody year. Every sound.”
“The price you pay for the view. No obstruction and the hills behind us…” Ata turns to face them again and can feel the boo-doom boo-doom, bouncing off her chest, thumping her back.
The infernal Donkey tune starts and the horns blare up the racket louder. The DJ replays and replays the effect. Hill-teeth start gnashing and Fraser and Ata’s eyes meet and fire up, she shaking her little skinny self on the wall and he riding his head round his neck … “bacchanal in Port’a Spain, whoa whoa…” A breeze wipes the words and raucousness away from the hills for a second, cleans their palate. Ata leaps off the wall and they head back across the lawn. You have to join in or run, and Pierre had tried to join once but was completely out of place. Pierre was not one to revel in the authenticity of a place and do like the locals do. He leaves that for the wankers he thinks are wannabes. He nurtures his aversion to loud noise and eye for everyday beauty instead.
“It’s not so bad on the actual Carnival days when it’s on the Savannah — it’s the stupid fetes that lead up to it. Especially when there’s one right below us in…”
“Boissiere Village or Stollmeyer’s Castle.”
“The windowpanes literally rattle.”
“Whoa whoa … godong godong … buddup buddup…” Ata rollicks up and clowns around on the grass, for them to laugh — dangling limbs like a moko-jumbie stilt walker. Pierre is not amused.
“You better take him out, Ata. Don’t feel youall have to stay — go,” Fraser insists. “I have my lovely nurse now and Terence is coming later, to take me for a cru — a drive, a drive.”
Thomas comes grinning out to meet them. “Is loud, eh? You could barely hear de TV!” Skinning teeth big, as if it’s a God-given miracle, turning and admiring the hills as the echoes dribble around them.
* * *
Ata goes with Pierre, to the little beach house they rent sometimes, in Blanchisseuse. He chose to drive, glad for the company and her decision. He thought she had wavered for a moment, but she chose peace over noise. They pass through the concrete-box suburbs that lie trapped, scorching in the valleys around the town. Squeezing through Maraval, up to the ridge where the housing stops, out, and winding over the hills of the North Coast. Pierre glances at Ata staring out the window.
She looks and tries to listen to her heart and mind, and what they could tell her about where she should be, what she should be doing, creating, making, mas, design, what? All she hears is landscape whispers. The road, curving, curving, heights controlling. Green leaves close in then sweep away, down to Santa Cruz Valley. Closing in again, they carry you higher. Then Trinidad is revealing slips of her exotic dress. Lipstick-red slivers of chaconia and balisier, between wet green. Orangey-red immortelle. Pale heliconias, white spathiphyllum tongues in the dark shade. Twisting and flirting, the Northern Range dances the car along her spine. Fling and catch, in the dip of her waist. Clinging, holding on to moist mossy skin. Suddenly, way below, the shiny, silver-sea edge of a petticoat flashes. And up the back of her neck — banks of tree ferns dripping rain-dew, pull them into the intimacy of island plumage. The bamboo parts as they drive, slipping between quills. Against the skin of a peacock.
Further along the coast, she breathes in deeply and through the mountain-cool air, detects a distant, pungent cedar scent. The town ideas and worries have disappeared and she asks Pierre to stop for fresh cocoa flesh. The jewel pods have been catching the sun, warming sweet white pulp in their thick autumn-color cases. Pierre doesn’t like the stuff. He watches her savoring it, but still she stays silent. A hip of the land lazes the sea: La Vache. Beaches pounding names, Maracas, Las Cuevas, Blanchisseuse. Vultures soar above mute villages. And Ata waits for her answers.
* * *
Fraser’s new lightness of weight gives him spring and hope. Maybe he could live with this, the dialysis part. The expensive cocktail of drugs for HIV is another thing, but with more research, things would get better. They expect more years of life. He still hasn’t contacted any of his past lovers and has only said to Helen, and therefore to the others, he will handle it. They watched closely, to see if there was any change in Terence when he visited, or any old friends suddenly appearing. None so far. Mother kept visiting, in her padded oblivion, and became almost a relief, some sort of embodiment of public normality for them all. His father kept his distance whenever he could but peace can be made when strength comes.
The nurse gives him a boost too. He loves her uniform and stockinged, white-shoe containment. The way her belt cinches her gabardine waist and her buttocks suggests an African shelf, but is smoothed over by the material, sealed in. Even her hair, stitched on, perfectly even short braids. Nothing out of place. The strict routine she created worked better than any medicine. Charm and cheerfulness, appropriate disappearance just when it was needed, and supreme calm. A godsend, he calls her, and they all blessed doctor-friend for finding her. “Nurse Armor,” they say when he shuts himself off with her, “Nurse Amour” when he waxes on.
Ata goes with Fraser and Vernon over to Fraser’s apartment, for him to think about moving back home. This is just an initial visit, first time back since he had fallen ill two months ago. They sit on the veranda in the cool afternoon. The passion fruit vine has grown plentiful on the arbor and is bearing fruit and flowering at the same time. The yellow globes hang idyllic among the shiny leaves. Honeybees crawl lazily into the purple-and-white delicate cups. The white tiles, blue-striped canvas chairs, and clean walls — his little Mediterraneany bit of tropical paradise.
Fraser sighs and Ata goes to find the passion fruit juice Vernon had put in the fridge. Fraser had said that he was scared to move back but had missed home. She is as glad as he is, that this isn’t sad or scary now but a gentle relief.
He sighs again as Ata gives him his glass with one of his artist-friend coasters. He admires the juice, the coaster’s colors, the glorious vine on white rail, and the valley beyond, again. “I love Trinidad, yuh know. I really do.”
“I hate it too. You was planning on going somewhere?”
The turtle is slow to answer, gazing away through squinty eyes. “Many times I left, before I began to build my practice here.”
The times Ata knew about, he had disappeared off, gone gallivanting somewhere in the world doing God knows what, without contacting anyone, leaving his staff, clients cussing, staff smalling-up themselves.
“There’s an ancient Greek argument, a long one, about those who love boys and those who love women — who is better. You know I am not into boys, but get what I mean … Roberto Calasso looks at it in The Marriage of Cadmus and Harmony—you should read that one day, you’d like it. The question, since time immemoriaclass="underline" ‘Which takes the erotic prize — love with boys or with women?’ I, of course, always tell discerning persons that, like a good old clock, my pendulum swings both ways.” He chuckles and Ata scoffs a laugh, knowing that his days of proclaiming love with a woman were long gone.
“And there’s the scales — balanced with passion for both, at exactly the same height — Theomnestus. But the debate goes on, this one blinded for saying that women gain more pleasure from sex than men — Tiresias — that one torn apart, for declaring the superiority of love with boys — Orpheus…”