As Sydney related all this India’s phrase returned to me, and played repeatedly:
Oh Sid you’re so sensitive oh Sid you’re so sensitive oh Sid
. Sydney carried on none the wiser.
By this time I had finished my drink and in the melted ice-water was suspended its remnants, a sludge of yellow cloudiness that looked like the uncooked white of an egg. Rosita had not come out to check on us, carrying more of her treats, for quite a while. She and Lancelot were usually aware of these kinds of things and responded without having to be called. Where are they? I wondered. At the same time I saw with mingled amusement and shame—a direct consequence of Sydney’s words—that I had fallen rather too easily into enjoying the comforts of a life with help who anticipated and fulfilled one’s needs before one knew those needs existed. I had not grown up with servants in our house in Toronto, but in her youth in England, before her immigration to Canada, my mother’s family had house staff that included maids, cooks, servers, groundspeople and a driver. I had to laugh at myself now, seeing how easily I had taken to
life in Sydney’s house. I decided that I would simply wait for Rosita or Lance to come and refill our glasses. They would, sooner or later, I was sure. I relaxed and tried to focus on Sydney, who was still carrying on about the hardships of his early life in Toronto.
My mother would cry and ask, he was saying, why couldn’t I just do what was right, like those gay men she had known about: get married and have a family, for her sake at least. To which I would respond with a question of my own: was it fair to the wives that these men who preferred to be with other men, these men who were always looking at other men, and perhaps even secretly meeting with them, had married them? And she would say, “Well, that is true, I suppose.” A moment of pensiveness, Sydney said, would pass before Mrs. Mahale would say, “But …” and evoke loyalty to parents, to family, to society and finally to God. But what about those wives? I would ask again. And we’d go around and around, neither of us able to inform or convince the other. Of course, there was a great deal that I could not share with my parents—the ordinary details of my life, for instance the dilemmas I faced shopping for clothing that suited my idea of myself. How I would have liked to have my mother’s or my sister’s help in sartorial dilemmas rather than feeling their discomfort that I didn’t wear delicate necklaces or pearls or open-toed sandals with heels. And more urgently, I could not share with my parents or my sister the times when I was as high as a kite in love, or those occasions when I had a broken heart and thought that my world had come to an end.
This was not the first time that I had wanted to stop Sydney when he spoke like this, and say,
But, Sydney, I am your family and I never pushed you away
. Awash in the defensiveness that was so big a part of me in those days, I had ceased again to listen to him, indulging instead in an image of red dust whirling over waves in the mid Atlantic Ocean. I had recently read that at certain times of the year people on Caribbean Islands would find that a strange red dust had settled over their lawns, on their cars and porches, and in the louvres of the windows in their houses. The dust had been analyzed and found to be North African soil that had been blown all the way from the drought-ridden Sahel region and from dried-out Lake Chad. The dust must have risen in windstorms, I imagined, high into the air. Red clouds must have formed. They would have fastened themselves to currents of air that rolled off the land, and on meeting the Atlantic they no doubt rose even higher and swirled and swirled their way, over ten thousand kilometres or so of ocean, towards the Caribbean. I imagined the clouds arriving in these balmier climes and delivering their red cargo of sand, carrying unsuspecting bugs and worms. Reefs, I remember learning, were being destroyed as a consequence. I became immediately distressed that I had never in my life snorkelled. And in an instant I was energized by a new resolve: I would find out where the best snorkelling was off this island and see the reefs before they were no more. I would speak with Sankar that very day and ask him about snorkelling holes. Isn’t that what they would be called? Snorkelling holes?
Invigorated, I became alert enough to hear that Sydney had resumed the story of his walk. He was saying now that in the summertime, the noisy, firecracker-wielding people who lived in the dreadful house across the road stayed up for most of the night terrorizing one another and anyone in the vicinity. It was not until about five o’clock in the morning that they quieted down, he added, but they were never completely silent; even in the winter, the terror they had wielded hung about their house like a thick fog. He tugged at his knapsack shoulder strap, he said, just to be sure that it was still snug.
Several cabs passed, Sydney said, although the sludge on the road held back their progress down the street. The sidewalk was icy and unevenly cleared. I had to wonder, he said, if walking was not insane. And I wondered, too, how I could feel so much trepidation, such impending loss, and be, at the same time, brimming with anticipation. I watched as a man dressed in cold-weather gear, hunched over a bicycle equipped with fat tires, laboured through thick brown slush, the water slapping alongside him, a dark skunk-line running up the back of his trousers.
Sydney paused long enough, I remember, for my attention to be distracted by the sounds of dishes and cutlery being handled, and cupboards being opened and closed in the kitchen, and hammering in the distance. This would be a good time, it seemed, to stand, to excuse myself and go in search of an activity outside the house. But Sydney had not finished his story. Staring into a faraway place and time,
oblivious to what was happening around him, he added: I have to say that I was quite impressed; that man, the bicyclist, hadn’t been deterred by the snow and cold or conditions of the road. You see, he hadn’t given in and taken public transit, or flagged down a cab; he was clearly determined to get wherever he was going on his own steam, regardless of the weather. Is a man like that brave, or is he foolish?
Sydney turned and looked at me—for the first time in almost half an hour—and I realized that he was addressing me. But I had no words; I had understood that this was not a conversation and had not prepared myself to speak.
He saw my expression and said, Oh, Jonathan, you should stop me when I carry on like this. You look like you could use a nap. Why don’t you go in? Go take a little rest from this old storyteller. Put on the fan. I’ll stay here. It’s cool out here. Just ask Rosita to bring me a slice of sweetbread and a cup of coffee, please.
And so I hurriedly excused myself, assuring Sydney that I wanted to hear the rest of his story but that I had indeed become quite sleepy, as if I’d been bitten by a sleep-inducing bug. He said, Yes, of course, of course—and I felt oddly accused, but of what I didn’t know.
As I was going to my room, Sankar, who was in the kitchen, stopped me. It is going to be a nice afternoon, he said, as if he knew my mind. He suggested that the two of us—he and I—take a trip to the Caroni Swamp to see the scarlet ibis flying in at sundown to roost on the mangrove islands. We would have to leave immediately to beat the
traffic and get to the site by four o’clock, which was when the boats for hire took off down the canals into the wide, caiman-infested lagoons.
A cup of coffee and a crab-back later, and I was like a boy ready to go off on an adventure to see swamp lizards that were, as Sid had once, a long time ago, promised, “this big.”
At the Swamp, our pirogue anchored in the cover of overhanging trees. Over the course of half an hour, as the sun went down, thousands of brilliant scarlet ibises glided in, alighting on the tops of the blackened mangrove trees. Our return through the narrow channels took place in the dark. Owls swooped and hooted, followed by a flutter too close, a rush of wind above our heads: bats. A pair of brilliant dots of light skimmed the black water as it passed our pirogue—the eyes of a caiman.
I recalled all this as I sat at the desk in my room that first day of the wake and imagined, with some wistfulness, that it was now unlikely I would make another such trip to the Caroni Swamp. I remembered how, upon returning from our excursion, I had revelled in my brief escape, my freedom from talk. I knew that when Sankar and I returned, Sydney’s story would continue. And it did, not just when we came back from the Swamp, but over the course of years and several visits to the island. However, I do think back now on those times when my mind would drift—when as he spoke on, I would plot escapades and too-quickly jump
at chances to leave the house—and I feel remorse and regret in equal measure.
And now, months later, having listened to the essential parts of that same story, particularly the kernels Sydney had guarded until the last hours of his life, and having finally heard and understood what he’d been wanting to tell me, I cannot but wonder why the writer in me—if not the man—had not from the beginning seen and been curious about the threads, had not spotted the unravelling of a larger story.
This grand omission rattles my idea of myself as a writer. And if one of the essential marks of being human is the ability to feel compassion, what kind of a man was I who instead of being able to listen to Sydney’s words and hear and feel beyond their meaning, instead of being able to hold his life’s story in my heart and mind, instead of being the witness he clearly trusted I could be, spent so much of my time hoping and waiting for the smallest mention of my name?
Yes, I eventually stayed and listened to every word he spoke. But that was at the end. And it was then, when it was much too late, that I heard and understood the whole story.
If only I could do it all over again.
At first, I ignored the knocking at my door. But when I realized that the door was being pushed slowly open, I shouted out that I was inside. Lancelot replied, reminding me that people would soon arrive.
I had not showered yet, and hastily roused myself to get ready. When the tepid water hit my face, I cried until I was doubled over with the pain of it. I did not turn off the shower, but leaned into the tiled wall, pressing my face and belly against it, and long after there were no tears left I remained there, my body spent, frightened as if I were a three-year-old who had been left in cold dark silence.
“You’re too sensitive,” I chided myself. “You’re much too sensitive.” It was of course India I’d heard use those words, and they came to me once again in her voice. I must have been eight when I heard and truly understood their effect. My two mothers had gone to a party, and I’d stayed home with Tanya, my babysitter. When Sid and India returned,
India brushed past Tanya and me. She kicked off her black red-tipped high-heel shoes and went briskly upstairs, and from this I knew that she and Sid had been quarrelling. When Sid ruffled the hair on my head and asked if I’d been good, I knew that it was she who was on the defensive.
The bedroom door upstairs closed with some considerable force. Tanya gathered up her belongings and left. I followed Sid into the kitchen. Preoccupied with whatever was transpiring between her and India, she made no attempt to send me up to bed. When the door to the bedroom re-opened some time later and I heard my mother approach the top of the staircase, I left Sid in the kitchen and went quietly to my play corner behind the sofa in the living room. India, thin and tall as she was, could stomp heavily down the stairs, and this she did. I plucked a colouring book and crayons from my toy chest and busied myself. Save for India saying as she passed me, “You should be in bed by now,” and asking Sid in the kitchen, “Why is he still up?” neither paid me further notice; but I was more aware of them than of the book and crayons before me.
India threw the first hook: “It’s always you. You, you, you. Always about you being a foreigner. You’re more aware of it than anyone else is, for God’s sake. What is wrong with you?” I hadn’t needed to look at Sid to know what she was doing. I imagined her, legs parted and firmly planted, arms folded across her chest. She left the kitchen and came into the living room. With exaggerated calm, and displaying tedium at having to explain herself again, she intoned that
the evening had been yet another example of the fact that no matter how long she lived in Canada she would always be a foreigner among my mother’s friends. My mother strode past me and threw herself into a corner of the plush green sofa behind which I was crouched. I guessed that she had stretched her legs across the length of it. Adopting her signature unwavering and ultra-rational manner, India countered that she, like Sid, was a foreigner in this country, but she didn’t harp about it in public the way Sid did. Sid, clearly incensed by this accusation, reminded my mother that while she—India, that is—might be an immigrant, her skin was white, and she had come not from Poland, Greece, Russia, Spain or the Ukraine, but from Great Britain. And the British, regardless of background, were to white Anglo Canadians always more authentic, more grand, than they.
At the time, it had not been of any consequence to me that my two mothers had different skin colours. India was among the first single women in the city to choose to be artificially inseminated, and while it was rather obvious from the way I’d turned out that the sperm donor must have been white, it wasn’t until well after Sid left that I realized that Sid and I were of different races.
Sid continued: India might be an immigrant, but she couldn’t possibly know the prejudice felt by most immigrants. That cut-glass English accent of hers put her above even her white Canadian friends, who, easily seduced, compared themselves to her and concluded that she was the real thing. But, Sid snapped, she was not seduced by any of it.
Gradually I pieced together what had precipitated this fight: at the party everyone had been served wine by the host in tall crystal glasses. Except for Sid. She had been offered her wine in a stocky glass of such poor quality that the thick lip had a bubble on it. India snapped that Sid was petty and went looking for such things, to which Sid responded that one didn’t have to go looking, and India should become more aware. India countered that if things were as Sid had said, then surely it was simply the luck of the draw—the host must have run out of the better glasses, and whoever was served last had just happened to get that one. To which Sid barked, So why was I served last? People only seemed to pay her attention at these parties, Sid said sharply, in a voice that had by this time escalated in pitch and volume, to ask after India’s progress—the great writer’s latest writing project—or after Jonathan. She was always being put in the deplorable role of handmaiden to the creative genius. And, worst of all, her relationship with Jonathan went unacknowledged: she was seen as a nanny to the creative genius’s son.