Prophet
by Lawrence Scott
This is the dark time, my love...
Maraval
I had come back to write about a nineteenth-century painter, an ancestor of the old family, and ended up reporting on something quite different. Sasha called from London a week after I had arrived back. “Patrice, can you do the story?” I could barely hear him through the drifts of snow I had just seen on the news.
“Which story?”
“Come on, man, where are you? I know you. You’re living in your head.”
“No, I’m living on the Saddle Road, Maraval.”
“What!” he screamed down the phone. I didn’t even have to lower the air conditioner or the cable — strictly tennis — both of which I keep at high decibels to block out the roar of traffic: a tropical blizzard.
“Take it easy, Sasha.”
“You know what you just said?” he screamed.
“What?”
“It’s where it’s happening.”
“What? What’s happening?” Then I lost him to the airwaves and the snow.
I e-mailed him. Speaking to Sasha on the phone is like being bludgeoned. This is what I told him, trying out my landscape pieces:
In the morning, I begin my walk in darkness and finish it just as the first light of dawn bleeds into the gray foreday morning. The ridges above me are the first to be lit where I walk among the villas of the rich in the valley of Maraval, an old suburb of Port-of-Spain. I’ve kept this up since my arrival. It’s the one certain thing which I do at the moment. So much else is guessing. What are you telling me?
Beautiful, beautiful! And this guy, your artist, he did watercolors? I can see it in your language. But Patrice, read the papers. Look at the news. This is something for you. I know you can write about this. I know you’ll want to write about this.
Funny, I thought. Why doesn’t Sasha just tell me what he’s talking about?
I read the papers the following day. First day I bought the papers since my arrival; usually, by the time I leave the apartment and the nineteenth century, they are all sold out. I would never buy a paper just before or after my walk, spoil my fraction of the dawn when I can hear myself think.
I read the articles on last year’s missing children and an editorial. There were no leads on the children. I felt I was going to be sick. Then I went down to the main police station. “Who are you? You have a press card?” I overheard the talk: They were busy dealing this morning with the case of two stray police bullets injuring two infants in Carenage last night during a shootout. Nothing to do with the children I was seeking a lead on.
This is a small island, Sas, that last year had a murder each day. The chief justice is on bail and under some kind of house arrest for alleged corruption. The leader of the opposition in the parliament is on bail also for alleged corruption. Everyone says, “He tief man!” There is a connection somewhere, they say. All of this I have just learned.
Fascinating. But keep to the story.
I pass the police each morning on my walk coming up to the chief justice’s villa behind high walls and slavering dogs. They put their lights on bright and catch me in the full beam. They slow down and take a good look. I can’t believe it’s my jogging shorts. I get cold sweats with police, a hangover from the ’60s and ’70s in a homophobic metropole.
I’m beginning to feel at home, but still missing the old, deserted estate house at Versailles in the Montserrat hills. Don’t miss that narrow life though. I try out a next piece on Sasha:
The clouds in the nineteenth century must have been the same over Saut d’Eau and the lit ridges of Paramin, the same gentle hills which welcome the seraphic flight of white egrets, the first birds to bless the valley as I begin my walk along Collens Road. And the nineteenth century, think what happened then!
p. s. I went to the police station — no luck.
Keep digging. Keep writing.
As Sasha had first said, I was lucky with the apartment on Saddle Road — with the position, that is. The block was built in the late ’50s, early ’60s, and the old fella from whom I bought it had changed nothing over the years. So the best which can be said about the interior decor is that it has a distinctly retro look. I won’t ever change the lampshades. “Right at the center of things,” the agent had said. I don’t think she understood her own irony.
I’m definitely doing the story. How can I not?
Sasha would know what I meant without asking me to go there.
Opposite the school from which the children have allegedly been abducted. What a coincidence! Now I saw my luck. Somehow I can’t imagine it. Not here, not from Miss Beaubrun’s School. “That won’t do!” I can hear her at prayers in assembly every morning as she shrieks out the national anthem and the children scream it out after her, echoing: “Islands of the blue Caribbean sea... where every creed and race find an equal place!” Hmm! “God bless our nation!” Hmm!
Some of those mites, gone? Their voices fade when I shut the door to the veranda. I find myself standing in the middle of the lounge looking through the glass doors with tears in my eyes. I know what I’m crying about, but I’ll write the story. Is why I’m writing the story.
I try to get back from my walk in the mornings before the traffic blocks up Saddle Road, or rather, before the short-cutters start slicing their way off the Saddle Road higher up the valley and come through Fairways and fucking hinder my solitude and disturb the late sleeping chief justice on Golf Course View. Each morning now, I’ve noticed that a black car with tinted windows is parked at the exit to his road. Took no notice the first two times, but now I’ve come to look out for it. Suspicious? They’re an East Indian couple, middle-aged. One day, from the corner of my eye I see that he has his head in her lap. Parking at this hour? Tender: He was like a baby wanting to suckle at her breast the way she held his head and looked down at him. The way he looked up at her. I wondered if they had just lost a child. Just a stray thought. What were they hiding?
T&T to the bone. Hug up me island. Rudder soca so sweet! Hug up me island!
Bear with me, Sas. You know it’s fascinating how the security business has become real big business in such an unsafe place. Or so the talk is — because as I told these friends last night, you know, I’m a slow cruiser through the darkness of the darkest streets and all I can say is they are too fucking empty. Bravado, after two Merlots. Fear and dread eats the soul and everyone is behind their burglar proofing. Not the couple at dawn, easy to display their amorous rendezvous to me and the police, who take no notice of them when they pass as dawn breaks and the white clouds turn to dun.
Sasha is online. He replies right away:
What’s dun, Pat?
Sas, it’s pinkish brown. What’s dun is done. Oh gawd! Bad eh?