While mother slept, I sat at my father’s desk with those three disquieting snapshots — the beach, the women, the veranda — and searched for a better ending to my mother’s story. His journal spoke of his ‘dear wife’, his ‘loyal companion in research’, ‘the angel who is mother to my girls’. But, otherwise, the notes were obsessively academic and dry. His dedication to the natural sciences seemed unbroken, humourless, without restraint. ‘I have been asked to prepare a pamphlet on the forest phenomenon,’ he wrote finally in his diary for 1926, ‘but I am not happy to proceed. It seems to me that the evidence is thin and that the absence for a year or more of menstruation and estrus in P. was possibly contingent on late puberty or the disruptions of weight loss, anxiety and digestive complications brought about by her hasty relocation in the town. Moreover, travellers from the Institute have not been able to establish the whereabouts of P.’s village. The plantation has been abandoned and, no doubt, her people have either descended like so many others to work on farms or to offer themselves in service in the towns, or they have withdrawn further into the trees, where, perhaps, it would be a kindness to leave them. At some later time all this would warrant an amusing memoir of conclusions rashly reached by a natural scientist too eager and ambitious. I smile at my younger self, but, for the moment, Uca felix calls and we — my wife, my three girls — are repairing to the coast.’ And nothing more.
I stood before the peeling mirror on the wall of his study and smiled at my older self. Thin and dry and squeamish. I looked again at that family photograph and wondered at the girl encountered there, in her torn and spermy dress, the slight and bony exception of the beach. My mother and my sisters were broad and tall with heavy hips and wide-set, comfortable eyes. Even the Uca felix were wide and swollen for the solstice.
Then the bulbous women and the girl in the cotton dress and the service gloves, that slight, pale teenager with the empty tray and the smile and the fessandra blooms, looked out at me from the other fading prints. Who — in my position, with my dismay — would not hurry now to unearth those charts again, to match her dates and mine, to sit lifeless in that chair (where she had sat, her face flushed, her breasts swollen, her acids flowing), to shut both eyes and hear those doves take wing, vabap-vabap, the shingle and the crabs, the baying of the donkeys left alone and tethered in the ardour of the night, the closing of a study door?
FIVE. Sins and Virtues
I USED ONCE to have a calligrapher’s booth in the marketplace. Bridegrooms came and I blessed their marriage certificates with the name of God in gold-leaf. I provided decorative alphabets for elementary schools and delicate pillow-prayers on silk for the superstitious. The old came to my booth and detailed their sins and virtues. I inscribed them into a list on parchment soaked in ambergris and sealed them into a tube of bamboo. So when the old were dead, their Sins and Virtues were burned with them.
I was the only calligrapher in the city who possessed the franchise to profit from Sins and Virtues. It provided great business but precluded me from marriage and fornication. That was the custom and the regulation. The sin-lister must be free from sin.
Later, when business superseded religion as the preoccupation of our people, I decorated shop fronts and designed letterheads for ambitious greengrocers and ice-vendors. I prepared boastful posters for the first cinema, ornamental scrolls for lofty institutions and fancy gate-plates for embassies. My work on parchment was etched and woven and carved into more durable materials by craftsmen in Europe. I extended my booth and employed an apprentice to mix my inks and to deliver my work. But that was long ago. Now I am nearly dead. The acacia which my uncles planted in their village at my birth (its name in Siddilic signifies ‘Patience’) has almost lost its leaves. Only one branch draws sap. The rest is the home of ants.
I DO NOT now go into the market. I spend my days almost entirely within the walls of this echoing and lizard-infested house. I start work each day at my Morning Desk, which faces eastwards towards the river. At noon I dine on some delicacy — a modest snack of grilled perch or, when they are seasonable, locusts. I no longer eat red meat or drink wine. My head and my stomach are too vulnerable. A little honey water is sufficient. Or some sweet mint tea. I sleep for an hour or so beneath my one fan. My house gecko joins me, lying across my bare chest like a damp medallion.
In the afternoon I move to my Afternoon Desk, facing into the sun of the courtyard and the evergreen of the oleander. I burn a stick of fine cinnamon to keep the devils at bay. An old habit. I work until moonrise and then eat again: some tomatoes or beans with a little sour bread, followed by a mango or guava or a fruit milk-shake from the machine at the shop on the corner. I change my white day clothes — now soiled with pips and juice and crumbs — and put on heavier evening wear for my third work shift at the Evening Desk in the inner room. If I want some ink, perhaps, or some small delicacy, then I send Sabino, who was my boy apprentice and is now my factotum, to the market and to the new air-conditioned stores.
I myself have withdrawn from the marketplace. I am now too grand for marriage certificates and shop fronts and lofty institutions. What I did for the price of an olive in my youth I will not now consider even for an orchard of olive trees. I have made my small fortune and, in what time there is left, I am looking for inner meanings. I am the last and certainly the most distinguished of calligraphers in the old Siddilic script but I am done with weaving and ennobling letters, of chasing their edges into the corner of the page. Now I am a doodler. Every leaf of gold-foil counts for me as an acacia leaf. I am in no hurry to use up my supply. I work three shifts from habit, from boredom and to exercise the arthritis in my hands. My mind is elsewhere, searching out material for my last work, to be burned at my funeral.
THEY CALL my craft Art these days and pay great sums for it. Last month a collector from Chicago offered Duni the ironmonger three thousand dollars for his ancient shop front with my flaking age-old letters. I went down to the marketplace on Sabino’s arm to witness the dismantling.
‘We’ll take great care of it, sir,’ the American told me, cracking my frail hands between his own. ‘We’re going to restore it, right? We’re going to give it a fresh lick of paint and we’re going to put it on show in the Museum of Ethnography. The people of America will be able to see your work. Back home, artists and historians are just beginning to appreciate the subtleties of Siddilic. This is such a beautiful piece.’ He stood back and admired Duni’s shop front. ‘Wonderful,’ he said. ‘Sir, I am proud to be acquainted with you.’