“But I didn’t like seeing those fingers doing this kind of work, and I liked it less when, at the end, with those same fingers he offered the women little things he had iced, to eat on the spot, as a treat. He liked offering these little treats. They were offered almost like a wafer in church, and the women, concentrating, ate and tasted with a similar kind of respect.
“The third year came. This time I thought I wouldn’t go to Parry’s Corner to meet Leonard Side. I thought I would go to his house instead. I had found out where he lived. He lived in St. James, quite near where I lived. That was a surprise: that he should have been so close, living that life, and I shouldn’t have known.
“I went after school. I was wearing a slender black skirt and a white shirty top and I was carrying a bag with school books. I blew the horn when I stopped. A woman came out to the front gallery, bright in the afternoon light, and she said, ‘Come right in.’ Just like that, as though she knew me.
“When I went up the steps to the front gallery she said, ‘Come in, Doctor. Poor Lenny. He so sick, Doctor.’
“Doctor — that was because of the car and blowing the horn, and the bag, and the clothes I was wearing. I thought I would explain later, and I followed her through this little old St. James wood house to the back room. There I found Leonard Side, very sick and trembling, but dressed for a meeting with the doctor. He was in a shiny brass fourposter bed with a flowered canopy, and he was in green silk pyjamas. His little hairy fingers were resting on the satin or silk spread he was using as a coverlet. He had laid himself out with great care, and the coverlet was folded back neatly.
“There were crepe-paper flowers in a brass vase on a thin-legged side table or vase-stand, and there were satiny cushions and big bows on two simple cane-bottomed bentwood chairs. I knew at once that a lot of that satin and silk had come from the funeral parlour, and was material for the coffins and the laying out of the bodies.
“He was a Mohammedan, everyone knew. But he was so much a man of his job — laying out Christian bodies, though nobody thought of it quite like that — that in that bedroom of his he even had a framed picture of Christ in Majesty, radiating light and gold, and lifting a finger of blessing.
“The picture was centrally placed above the door and leaned forward so much that the blessing of the finger would have seemed aimed at the man on the bed. I knew that the picture wasn’t there for the religion alone: it was also for the beauty, the colours, the gold, the long wavy hair of Christ. And I believe I was more shocked than when I saw him dressing the body and later when I saw him using the same fingers to knead dough and then to squeeze out the terrible little blobs of icing.
“It was late afternoon, warm still, and through the open window came the smell of the cesspits of St. James, the cesspits of those dirt yards with the separate little wood houses, two or three to a lot, with runnels of filth from the latrines runnels that ran green and shiny and then dried away in I dirt; with the discoloured stones where people put out their washing to bleach; with irregular little areas where the earth was mounded up with dust and sand and gravel, and where fruit trees and little shrubs grew, creating the effect not of gardens but of little patches of waste ground where things grew haphazardly.
“When I looked at those hairy fingers on the coverlet and thought about the house and the woman who had called me in — his mother — I wondered about his life and felt sorry and frightened for him. He was sick now; he wanted help. I didn’t have the heart to talk to him about the girls and the May Day fair, and I left the house and never saw him again.
“It was his idea of beauty that upset me, I suppose. That idea of beauty had taken him to the job in the funeral parlour, and had got him to deck Out his bedroom in the extravagant way he had. That idea of beauty — mixing roses and flowers and nice things to eat with the idea of making the dead human body beautiful too — was contrary to my own idea. The mixing of things upset me. It didn’t upset him. I had thought something like that the very first time I had seen him, when he had left his dead body and run out after me to the street, saying, ‘Miss, Miss,’ as though he couldn’t understand why I was leaving.
“He was like so many of the Indian men you see on the streets in St. James, slender fellows in narrow-waisted trousers and open-necked shirts. Ordinary, even with the good looks. But he had that special idea of beauty.
“That idea of beauty, surprising as it was, was not a secret. Many people would have known about it — like the junior teacher who had brought his name up at the staff meeting, and then didn’t know how to describe him. He would have been used to people treating him in a special way: the women in the classes clapping him, other people mocking him or scorning him, and people like me running away from him because he frightened us. He frightened me because I felt his feeling for beauty was like an illness; as though some unfamiliar, deforming virus had passed through his simple mother to him, and was even then — he was in his mid-thirties — something neither of them had begun to understand.”
THIS WAS what I heard, and the teacher couldn’t tell me what had happened to Leonard Side; she had never thought to ask. Perhaps he had joined the great migration to England or the United States. I wondered whether in that other place Leonard Side had come to some understanding of his nature; or whether the thing that had frightened the teacher had, when the time of revelation came, also frightened Leonard Side.
He knew he was a Mohammedan, in spite of the picture of Christ in his bedroom. But he would have had almost no idea of where he or his ancestors had come from. He wouldn’t have guessed that the name Side might have been a version of Say ed, and that his grandfather or great-grandfather might have come from a Shia Muslim group in India. From Lucknow, perhaps; there was even a street in St. James called Lucknow Street. All Leonard Side would have known of himself and his ancestors would have been what he had awakened to in his mother’s house in St. James. In that he was like the rest of us.
With learning now I can tell you more or less how we all came to be where we were. I can tell you that the Amerindian name for that land of St. James would have been Cumucurapo, which the early travellers from Europe turned to Conquerabo or Conquerabia. I can look at the vegetation and tell you what was there when Columbus came and what was imported later. I can reconstruct the plantations that were laid out on that area of St. James. The recorded history of the place is short, three centuries of depopulation followed by two centuries of resettlement. The documents of the resettlement are available in the city, in the Registrar-General’s Office. While the documents last we can hunt up the story of every strip of occupied land.
I can give you that historical bird’s eye view. But I cannot really explain the mystery of Leonard Side’s inheritance. Most of us know the parents or grandparents we come from. But we go back and back, forever; we go back all of us to the very beginning; in our blood and bone and brain we carry the memories of thousands of beings. I might say that an ancestor of Leonard Side’s came from the dancing groups of Lucknow, the lewd men who painted their faces and tried to live like women. But that would only be a fragment of his inheritance, a fragment of the truth. We cannot understand all the traits we have inherited. Sometimes we can be strangers to ourselves.