Coronach, p.89
Coronach, page 89
She took me away from the smoke and the stench and the candlelight into the coolness of another room I did not recognize, which was St. James’s room. There was nothing of him here, no possessions, only the lingering scent of bay rum like an essence of himself, and his spirit, his ghost, came toward me in the darkness, and embraced me as I fainted.
He had only one name to Coventry and no past, as Coventry had no past to him: at the end of his life the past had become only the years they had shared. The rest was half remembered, the dream that dies upon waking, and in that dream his life became mine, a complex web of relationship and experience and time in its every dimension. My past, my present, my future were and always would be inextricably bound to him.
The only name he possessed was MacIain. That this was neither Christian nor surname was irrelevant to Coventry. It sufficed, for one who was enslaved: apparently he desired nothing else, and time withheld his other identity. To Coventry he was a savage, an irrational and unpredictable object of sexual desire, eventually submitting to Coventry’s peccadilloes but never a willing or an ardent participant, neither welcoming nor resisting acts of humiliation and the occasional infliction of pain. Secrecy and irony heightened Coventry’s pleasure: the submissive lover of the afternoons and humid nights had risen to become his overseer, teaching himself to read and write the English he so despised, exacting labour from the blacks, who feared him, an inarticulate presence whom Coventry occasionally summoned from the shadows for the delectation of Jamaican society. When Coventry resorted to prostitutes of either sex, he confined his activities to Haiti: when he returned from Port au Prince with a quadroon mistress this relationship was acknowledged, was conventional. He did not now compel his lovers to join him in copulation à trois, although he had required it of women in the past: neither the woman’s spirit nor the man’s could be broken or seduced, neither could be compelled to desire in one another that which he found addictive in them both, and in time he recognized that their hatred of one another was not merely sexual revulsion but jealousy.
Pleasure and a peculiar peace came from paternity and domesticity, and he was conscious of his own passage toward conformity and his gradual disengagement from the most durable and turbulent of his liaisons. Intercourse with MacIain was infrequent and unsatisfying. He attributed this to age and familiarity, and the enigma of the woman, her sex and her race, was more stimulating than the impenetrable mystery and hostility of the man; and when, in time, he desired to renew their relationship, the submission was a physical resistance which he did not then challenge.
He knew, now, why that had changed. The act of a second becomes the reaction: a thousand, thousand seconds linked him and his past and his lover to this hour, of the day before his lover died, and the seconds had become not separate but an indefinable whole. Time bears us all, unresisting, upon a tide of irrevocability.
He told me this himself when I returned to Jamaica, after Boston, when I was alone.
His lover was dying, in the final stages of tertiary syphilis, riddled with cancers of the testicle and brain and necrosis of the lower jaw, tibia and femur. With the approach of death he had been moved from the spartan quarters he had occupied as overseer to this wing of the house, and dosed ineffectually with quinine, opium, and a tincture of lignum vitae prepared by Maica, which Coventry suspected was poisoned.
Their intercourse had never been social: flesh was the language of their communication, and conversation, when his lover was conscious or rational, was almost inarticulate. The disfigurement of the face and body haunted Coventry, and he found these vigils a source of unrelenting pain.
His defense was the assumption of casualness, as though it was of no consequence: he sat by the bed and smoked yet another cigar and answered and asked the same questions.
What is this place? Why am I here?
One of the guest rooms... in one of the guest rooms, MacIain.
Is that what I am to you now? Your guest?
There was a silence, a faint sound of rain, the wind from the shore teasing the white nettings of the bed. The smoke drifted: the gaunt face on the pillow turned away very slightly, a little gesture of revulsion: the eyes remained closed. He seldom spoke now: his speech had become garbled, and his frustration and anger when he could not be understood was intense and often violent. On these occasions only, he was restrained.
The face, turned aside in its greying hair, seemed curiously at peace. Coventry took the mutilated right hand and felt the faint pressure of its response. He thought his name was spoken.
Of what was said to him he understood only the word kill, slurred almost beyond intelligibility. The rest was gibberish and, disquieted by what he had heard, a request, a confession, a threat, he said, “Don’t talk. Rest. We’ll talk tomorrow.”
He administered the drugs, still believing they were poison. His lover wept, resisting them, and slipped into unconsciousness.
Silence: all the silences, lived and remembered. The rain ceased, the wind fell light, the pattern of cloud and the colour of the sea altered imperceptibly.
He remembered the night and the act, and the day which had preceded them. They had quarrelled over the vévé charm, the engraved copper disc he had seen on a thong half-hidden beneath his lover’s shirt: there is a curse on my life, he said, the blacks are making obeah against me. Coventry had called him a superstitious animal, a white nigger, torn the charm from his neck and gone to his supper party at Palmyra.
He had seduced a woman there, an army officer’s wife, but the brevity of the encounter had not satisfied him: he returned to Ironshore at three in the morning. He found MacIain, ignored for the years when heterosexuality had appealed, writing in his quarters, tracing childish letters and words in an unknown language. That there was some part of his past Coventry could not reach, a part of his life he would never possess, infuriated him, and he mocked the infantile writing and tore the papers to shreds, and, aware at last of some emotion in the gaunt, closed face, he untied his stock.
“Take off your clothes,” and, when he was not obeyed, “I said, take them off.”
“Take them off yourself, you English bastard. They belong to you.”
He did not expect resistance and was excited by it: it had never been offered with such bitter intensity, he had never been rejected, and this was a physical and spiritual rejection; and by this act of rape he was aware of having unleashed inhumanity in himself and in his lover. In the night he whipped him, inflicting great pain, and woke alone. Syphilis, contracted from a Montego Bay whore, manifested itself in MacIain within three months. There was no further intercourse: the dying flesh achieved its freedom.
He had been Coventry’s slave for twenty-seven years.
They were cutting cane at Ironshore, and further up in the hills at Rosewynd and Palmyra and Cinnamon Hill, cutting in the beauty of the sunrise and the implacable white heat of noon. Occasionally they cut by moonlight or torchlight, and burned the fields to rid the cane of the impeding blossoms and leaves: cutting in the fear of sun and hurricane, driven by the whip and the busha and the market, feeding the rollers and the fires, ten tons of cane for a ton of sugar, for Bristol and the London exchange. It was the slave’s world, the driver’s world, the melancholy song, the flash of the machete against two thousand acres of cane, the cloying stench of boiling sugar and distilling spirit in hair, on clothing and skin. I left it when I left Ironshore, for the coolness of the ferns in the valley and the deep red earth, and the decaying peace of Rosewynd great house.
I sat where I had sat with St. James on the wide verandah, in the flickering shadow of the jacaranda, and in the afternoon, Saturday afternoon, as Coventry was burying his lover at Ironshore, I watched the towering thunderheads rise from the sea until the light was blotted out. The onslaught of rain seemed white: the sea, Rosewynd Bay, the valley vanished into mist; the rain fell for hours or minutes; time passed; the valley emerged like Eden, its beauty and fragrance unbearable; the old man, who had retreated into the open doorway, came on sinewy bare feet and removed the untouched lime juice and its attendant ants; the roaring of the rain rendered conversation unnecessary.
The sunset was coppery, Jamaica’s peculiar redness, as if all the blood of her suffering was transmuted into light. With the advent of evening the old man brought me rum, as though he knew white women drank it in secret, as though he sensed my desire for self-obliteration. I did not want the rum any more than the lime juice, but there was a curious compassion in the gesture and in his wordless solicitude. In the twilight, perhaps grateful for the absence of the elusive Langley, who was in the fields, women emerged, gracefully carrying burdens on their heads, pausing to speak in musical voices and in an unfamiliar language to the old man on the verandah, and then, becoming aware of my presence, startled into obsequious withdrawal; their naked children, clinging to them, were fearful of my pallor, as though I were one of the undead. To them, whiteness was master and overseer: it did not wear a woman’s face.
With the coming of night, a clouded, sighing night, the old man brought a lamp, which I indicated I did not want: he placed it on the wet planking at the top of the steps, where it attracted huge soft moths and other, smaller insects. The night opened its heart: a thousand predators and victims stirred beyond the faint circle of light: the old man pointed to fireflies in the darkness, which I watched, and then ceased to notice. He did not expect Langley: I suspected that Langley did not exist, as I did not exist in this suspension of time and reality. In the night he advanced a little closer, and asked me if the Captain was coming; I spoke for the first time in thirteen hours, saying that the Captain would not come, nobody was coming. He continued his patient attendance on me: at some time in the night, as though weary of standing, he asked my permission to sit. He did not attempt to touch me, or the rum, or the pistol on the table near my hand, which I had discharged into the body of Coventry’s lover. I recall neither sleeping, although I must have slept in the chair, nor his first words, although his voice, Africa’s voice, and the subject of his discourse remained with me always. He spoke of Africa, telling me his African name, which I remember although I cannot spell it: among slaves of other tribes he called himself Cudjoe, signifying that he had been born on a Monday. He had been taken by Arab slavers, and brought to Jamaica in a year he thought was 1720. He had not come then to Rosewynd, although he had known it when it was a younger house; he was a field slave then, he said; he did not use the pejorative ‘nigger’. He had known them all, the hurricanes, the crop failures, the uprisings, the malaria and drunkenness and suicides of the masters, the malaria and suicides of the slaves: Seguin and Lydia Seguin and Coventry, and the splendour of Rosewynd in its prime, when Ironshore was an acre of struggling cane encroached upon by jungle. He said that Rosewynd was a place of ghosts, but when the Captain came to live there with me it would rise again: he did not relate the young, diffident naval officer who had purchased Rosewynd from Seguin’s agent in 1747 to the man who had accompanied me on my last visit, and I did not say that I would never live here with him, that time, binding and unbinding, would not allow it, that we would never be buried here together. I said nothing, felt nothing. All was written, all was ordained. He said that he knew the busha was dead: how he knew was uncertain, but he told me that Coventry had buried him, and would remain by his grave for nine days, and on the ninth night the busha’s spirit would depart. He said that he was not a Christian, and believed in obeah, and practised it. Minette, I make you a little charm....
He said he would pray for me.
His voice was hoarseness, and then a whisper, and then nothingness. The night was dying, the dawn white with mist, the sea and the blue mountains pearled, silent. I was alone.
I prayed for myself, for my sanity, knowing that I who was capable of killing could, by a finger’s touch, shatter this dawn with a final shot: I prayed for St. James, and for his peace in his meeting with the unknown son, far from the sea they both loved: I prayed for release from pain, from memory, from fear. The sun rose, as though upon the first morning of the world.
He did not speak to me immediately: he dismounted and came up the steps, out of the new sunlight into the shadows of the jacaranda, and drew out the other chair, and sat. After a few minutes, without undue haste, he slid the pistol across the dew-misted table away from me. Then he leaned back, as he had sat that afternoon, speaking of India and the past; his face was drawn, as though he had suffered greatly in the night. He had known that he would find me here and yet had feared, perhaps to find me, perhaps the irrevocability of his course: he loved me, and this, too, I saw in his face.
I returned to Ironshore with him. He took me to his room, which I had briefly occupied in the dying hours of Friday night: my suite of rooms had been stripped and sealed, the doors locked, the jalousies nailed shut. In all the time that remained to me at Ironshore they were never opened again; the rooms given to me now faced the sea, and it was the sea of which I was most conscious, the distant sighing of the reef, and the shuttered stillness of the house at noon.
He did not open the jalousies to the light, and the dimness and coolness of his room and the indefinable essence and scent of him, which had comforted me, embraced me: he undressed me with infinite tenderness, and loosened my hair, and caressed it. His face was still and intent; these revelations were beyond pleasure, and were worship. He caressed my feet, held them lightly in his hands, stroking the arches, kneeling, resting his head against me: I stroked the hair of the bent head and the hard bone of his cheek, and he held my hand to his lips. I did not resist him, or respond. He wanted my complete nakedness, the damp silk slid away: he lifted me and I lay naked on his bed, where his spirit had loved me and kept its vigil; he kissed the feet he held, and parted my thighs, and stroked my hair, and caressed the dampness and the silk of the vulva. I spoke to him, not from fear but reminiscence and uncertainty: he said, “No. This is what I want,” and kissed me, the softness of his hair against my thigh; I spoke his name, and he entered me with his tongue and, exquisitely, with his fingers, giving this most delicate gift, and the vulva flowered and gave its sweetness to his tongue. I held his wrists, sailor’s wrists, and he left me, undressing without haste, beauty in his nakedness and in his arousal against the burning light, the savage scars on his belly revealed, like his sex, without shame.
There was great beauty in his lovemaking: no ecstasy yet, only peace, a deep and passionate offering of self, even now anticipating rejection, even now both feared and desired. The invitation was mine: had I withdrawn, he would not have insisted. He entered me with infinite patience, sensing the instinctive resistance, the anticipation of pain, moving within me with exquisite slowness, as though he would wait for me forever, beyond pain, beyond shame, beyond memory, until I should come to him, cradling me, lifting me, until his bones were mine, his flesh mine, his scars mine, in the eternal rhythm; I clasped him strongly, as with silken hands, embracing him, and he was not a ghost, not a memory, not a shadow, not the incarnation of the past, either in its terror or its sweetness, but himself and none other, not to be compared, not in the most infinitesimal second, but one greatly loved, who received and cherished my body and its scarred and injured spirit. I tasted myself on his lips, and my spirit and my womb embraced him, and I called him what he had been to me for many weeks, my love, my love, and felt the convulsive joy of his orgasm, and my womb received the sweet salt of his seed.
We slept in one another’s arms, he within me: he did not leave me, nor now, nor ever. Beyond the little deaths of the senses, the darkness of the deadened spirit, he waits for me still.
VI
I may say that I alone am responsible for my life, that I am invulnerable, that the politics and the fates of nations cannot touch me. I may live in naïveté and in bliss, ignoring the signs, the warnings. I may say, it is not written, and yet, it was written. No man is an island, and no woman. We are not inviolable. Time bears us irresistibly upon its fatal tide.
The years have not diminished him, nor has death deified him— he is as he was. I loved him as I love him still, to the exclusion of all else: a thousand words would not confine that love: though I wrote until my life’s end no ink, nor heart’s blood, will evoke him. My passion for him was absolute: for the man, who was my dear companion, for the spirit that opened to me and responded with its sweetness, for his body and his sexuality, which were my renascence. In him, I was reborn.
That we should remain together was without question. My life was with him: I did not contemplate leaving Jamaica without him. He was older than me, his health in some measure damaged, but life is precarious, and on this fever-ridden island it was not unlikely that I should precede him to the grave, or that we should die together: no woman could ask for sweeter consummation. I prayed for ten years, that we should have ten years together: it was not long, it was not eternity. For some, love cannot survive a season, or a year: he knew it, as I knew. Passion dies. Love is not immortal. He said this himself to me. Love is not stronger than death; it confers no immortality.
And yet, as I live, I prove him wrong. Yet, of itself, love is immortal.
His life was briefly mine; the time granted was not enough. I could have loved him for a century without surfeit of him: my greatest desire could never be fulfilled, to have known and cherished and protected him throughout every epoch in that life. The fair child burned by the fierce sun of Bombay, speaking fluent Hindustani to his ayah, the crowded, stinking kaleidoscope of the streets and the days, the cobra in the garden, the clacking birds, the peacocks, the smells of the harbour, the roar of the monsoon rain, the child passionately interested in them all, sketching in pastel, thinking, dreaming, talking to forbidden strangers... a sensitive, affectionate, sharply intelligent, compassionate child, the youngest and only survivor of seven, victims of cholera and typhoid. And later, to have loved him as a young man: the very young officer, the midshipman baptised in blood, the prisoner of war.
