of the stone porch, and Helen was starting to walk
towards her, then stopped and turned. “Morning,” Helen said.
Morning. No “Madam.” No “Good.” All in a day’s work.
Maud stopped. In midstream the liner now hovered
over Helen’s tautly brushed hair. Maud nodded
as amiably as she could, but with one palm covered
over an excessive squint.
“So, how are you, Helen?”
“I dere, Madam.”
At last. You dere. Of course you dare,
come back looking for work after ruining two men,
after trying on my wardrobe, after driving Hector
crazy with a cutlass, you dare come, that what you mean?
“We’ve no work, Helen.”
“Is not work I looking for.”
Pride edged that voice; she’d honed her arrogance
on Maud’s nerves when she worked here, but there was sorrow
in the old rudeness. Helen tore the stalk in her hands.
“What I come for this morning is see if you can borrow
me five dollars. I pregnant. I will pay you next week.”
Maud went as purple as one of her orchids. “I see.
How’ll you pay me back, Helen, if you’re out of work?
It’s none of my business, but what happened to Achille?
Hector not working?”
“I am vexed with both of them, oui.”
What was it in men that made such beauty evil?
She was as beautiful as a liner, but like it, she
changed her course, she turned her back on her friends.
“I’ll fetch my purse,” Maud said. Helen turned her back
and stared out to sea. This is how all beauty ends.
When Maud came with the money, she was down the track
with the arrogant sway of that hip, stern high in the line
of the turned liner. Maud stood, enraged, in the sun.
Then she picked up the flowers Helen had wrenched from the vine.
The allamandas lasted three days. Their trumpets would bend
and their glory pass. But she’d last forever, Helen.
Chapter XXIV
I
From his heart’s depth he knew she was never coming
back, as he followed the skipping of a sea-swift
over the waves’ changing hills, as if the humming
horizon-bow had made Africa the target
of its tiny arrow. When he saw the swift flail
and vanish in a trough he knew he’d lost Helen.
The mate was cleaning the bilge with the rusted pail
when the swift reappeared like a sunlit omen,
widening the joy that had vanished from his work.
Sunlight entered his hands, they gave that skillful twist
that angled the blade for the next stroke. Half-awake
from last night’s blocko, the mate waveringly pissed
over the side, keeping his staggering balance.
“Fish go get drunk.” Achille grinned. The mate cupped his hands
in the sea and lathered his head. “All right. Work start!”
He fitted the trawling rods. Achille felt the rim
of the brimming morning being brought like a gift
by the handles of the headland. He was at home.
This was his garden. God bless the speed of the swift,
God bless the wet head of the mate sparkling with foam,
and his heart trembled with enormous tenderness
for the purple-blue water and the wilting shore
tight and thin as a fishline, and the hill’s blue smoke,
his muscles bulging like porpoises from each oar,
but the wrists wrenched deftly after the lifted stroke,
mesmerizing him with their incantatory
metre. The swift made a semicircular turn
over the hills, then, like a feathery lure, she
bobbed over the wake, the same distance from the stern.
He felt she was guiding and not following them
ever since she’d leapt from the blossoms of the froth
hooked to his heart, as if her one, arrowing aim
was his happiness and that was blessing enough.
Steadily she kept her distance. He said the name
that he knew her by—l’hirondelle des Antilles,
the tag on Maud’s quilt. The mate jigged the bamboo rods
from which the baits trawled. Then it frightened Achille
that this was no swallow but the bait of the gods,
that she had seen the god’s body torn from its hill.
II
The horned island sank. This meant they were far out,
perhaps twenty miles, over the unmarked fathoms
where the midshipman watched the frigate come about,
where no anchor has enough rope and no plummet plumbs.
His cold heart was heaving in the ancestral swell
of the ocean that had widened around the last
point where the Trades bent the almonds like a candle-
flame. He stood as the swift suddenly shot past
the hull, so closely that he thought he heard a cry
from the small parted beak, and he saw the whole world
globed in the passing sorrow of her sleepless eye.
The mate never saw her. He watched as Achille furled
both oars into one oar and laid them parallel
in the grave of In God We Troust, like man and wife,
like grandmother and grandfather with ritual
solicitude, then stood balancing with a knife
as firm as a gommier rooted in its own ground.
“You okay?” he said, speaking to the swaying mast.
And these were the noble and lugubrious names
under the rocking shadow of In God We Troust:
Habal, swept in a gale overboard; Winston James,
commonly know as “Toujours Sou” or “Always Soused,”
whose body disappeared, some claimed in a vapour
of white rum or l’absinthe; Herald Chastenet, plaiter
of lobster-pots, whose alias was “Fourmi Rouge,”
i.e., “Red Ant,” who was terrified of water
but launched a skiff one sunrise with white-rum courage
to conquer his fear. Some fishermen could not swim.
Dorcas Henry could not, but they learnt this later
searching the pronged rocks for whelks, where they found him,
for some reason clutching a starfish. There were others
whom Achille had heard of, mainly through Philoctete,
and, of course, the nameless bones of all his brothers
drowned in the crossing, plus a Midshipman Plunkett.
He stood like a mast amidships, remembering them,
in the lace wreaths of the Caribbean anthem.
Achille looked up at the sun, it was vertical
as an anchor-rope. Its ring ironed his hot skull
like a flat iron, singeing his cap with its smell.
No action but stasis. He is riding the swell
of the line now. He lets the angling oars idle
in their wooden oarlocks. He sprinkles the scorched sail
stitched from old flour sacks and tied round the middle
with seawater from the calabash to keep it supple,
scooping with one hand over the rocking gunwale
with the beat of habit, a hand soaked in its skill,
or the stitches could split the seams, and the ply
of its knots rot from this heat. Then, as Achille
sprinkles the flour sack, he watches it dry rapidly
in a sun like a hot iron flattening his skull,
and staggers with the calabash. The tied bundle
huddles like a corpse. Oui, Bon Dieu! I go hurl
it overside. Out of the depths of
his ritual
baptism something was rising, some white memory
of a midshipman coming up close to the hull,
a white turning body, and this water go fill
with them, turning tied canvases, not sharks, but all
corpses wrapped like the sail, and ice-sweating Achille
in the stasis of his sunstroke looked as each swell
disgorged them, in tens, in hundreds, and his soul
sickened and was ill. His jaw slackened. A gull
screeched whirling backwards, and it was the tribal
sorrow that Philoctete could not drown in alcohol.
It was not forgetful as the sea-mist or the crash
of breakers on the crisp beaches of Senegal
or the Guinea coast. He reached for the calabash
and poured it streaming over his boiling skull,
then sat back and tried to settle the wash
of bilge in his stomach. Then he began to pull
at the knots in the sail. Meanwhile, that fool
his mate went on quietly setting the fishpot.
Time is the metre, memory the only plot.
His shoulders are knobs of ebony. The back muscles
can bulge like porpoises leaping out of this line
from the gorge of our memory. His hard fists enclose
its mossed rope as bearded as a love-vine
or a blind old man, tight as a shark’s jaws,
wrenching the weight, then loosening it again
as the line saws his palms’ sealed calluses,
the logwood thighs anchor against the fast drain
of the trough, and here is my tamer of horses,
our only inheritance that elemental noise
of the windward, unbroken breakers, Ithaca’s
or Africa’s, all joining the ocean’s voice,
because this is the Atlantic now, this great design
of the triangular trade. Achille saw the ghost
of his father’s face shoot up at the end of the line.
Achille stared in pious horror at the bound canvas
and could not look away, or loosen its burial knots.
Then, for the first time, he asked himself who he was.
He was lured by the swift the way trolling water
mesmerizes a fisherman who stares at the
fake metal fish as the lace troughs widen and close.
III
Outrunner of flying fish, under the geometry
of the hidden stars, her wire flashed and faded
taut as a catch, this mite of the sky-touching sea
towing a pirogue a thousand times her own weight
with a hummingbird’s electric wings, this engine
that shot ahead of each question like an answer,
once Achille had questioned his name and its origin.
She touched both worlds with her rainbow, this frail dancer
leaping the breakers, this dart of the meridian.
She could loop the stars with a fishline, she tired
porpoises, she circled epochs with her outstretched span;
she gave a straight answer when one was required,
she skipped the dolphin’s question, she stirred every spine
of a sea-egg tickling your palm rank with the sea;
she shut the ducts of a starfish, she was the mind-
messenger, and her speed outdarted Memory.
She was the swift that he had seen in the cedars
in the foam of clouds, when she had shot across
the blue ridges of the waves, to a god’s orders,
and he, at the beck of her beak, watched the bird hum
the whipping Atlantic, and felt he was headed home.
Where whales burst into flower and sails turn back
from a tiring horizon, she shot with curled feet
close to her wet belly, round-eyed, her ruddering beak
towing In God We Troust so fast that he felt his feet
drumming on the ridged keel-board, its shearing motion
whirred by the swift’s flywheel into open ocean.
BOOK THREE
Chapter XXV
I
Mangroves, their ankles in water, walked with the canoe.
The swift, racing its browner shadow, screeched, then veered
into a dark inlet. It was the last sound Achille knew
from the other world. He feathered the paddle, steered
away from the groping mangroves, whose muddy shelves
slipped warted crocodiles, slitting the pods of their eyes;
then the horned river-horses rolling over themselves
could capsize the keel. It was like the African movies
he had yelped at in childhood. The endless river unreeled
those images that flickered into real mirages:
naked mangroves walking beside him, knotted logs
wriggling into the water, the wet, yawning boulders
of oven-mouthed hippopotami. A skeletal warrior
stood up straight in the stern and guided his shoulders,
clamped his neck in cold iron, and altered the oar.
Achille wanted to scream, he wanted the brown water
to harden into a road, but the river widened ahead
and closed behind him. He heard screeching laughter
in a swaying tree, as monkeys swung from the rafter
of their tree-house, and the bared sound rotted the sky
like their teeth. For hours the river gave the same show
for nothing, the canoe’s mouth muttered its lie.
The deepest terror was the mud. The mud with no shadow
like the clear sand. Then the river coiled into a bend.
He saw the first signs of men, tall sapling fishing-stakes;
he came into his own beginning and his end,
for the swiftness of a second is all that memory takes.
Now the strange, inimical river surrenders its stealth
to the sunlight. And a light inside him wakes,
skipping centuries, ocean and river, and Time itself.
And God said to Achille, “Look, I giving you permission
to come home. Is I send the sea-swift as a pilot,
the swift whose wings is the sign of my crucifixion.
And thou shalt have no God should in case you forgot
my commandments.” And Achille felt the homesick shame
and pain of his Africa. His heart and his bare head
were bursting as he tried to remember the name
of the river- and the tree-god in which he steered,
whose hollow body carried him to the settlement ahead.
II
He remembered this sunburnt river with its spindly
stakes and the peaked huts platformed above the spindles
where thin, naked figures as he rowed past looked unkindly
or kindly in their silence. The silence an old fence kindles
in a boy’s heart. They walked with his homecoming
canoe past bonfires in a scorched clearing near the edge
of the soft-lipped shallows whose noise hurt his drumming
heart as the pirogue slid its raw, painted wedge
towards the crazed sticks of a vine-fastened pier.
The river was sloughing its old skin like a snake
in wrinkling sunshine; the sun resumed its empire
over this branch of the Congo; the prow found its stake
in the river and nuzzled it the way that a piglet
finds its favourite dug in the sweet-grunting sow,
and now each cheek ran with its own clear rivulet
of tears, as Achille, weeping, fastened the bow
of the dugout, wiped his eyes with one dry palm,
and felt a hard hand help him up the shaking pier.
Half of me was with him. One half with the midshipman
by a Dutch canal. But now, neither was happi
er
or unhappier than the other. An old man put an arm
around Achille, and the crowd, chattering, followed both.
They touched his trousers, his undershirt, their hands
scrabbling the texture, as a kitten does with cloth,
till they stood before an open hut. The sun stands
with expectant silence. The river stops talking,
the way silence sometimes suddenly turns off a market.
The wind squatted low in the grass. A man kept walking
steadily towards him, and he knew by that walk it
was himself in his father, the white teeth, the widening hands.
III
He sought his own features in those of their life-giver,
and saw two worlds mirrored there: the hair was surf
curling round a sea-rock, the forehead a frowning river,
as they swirled in the estuary of a bewildered love,
and Time stood between them. The only interpreter
of their lips’ joined babble, the river with the foam,
and the chuckles of water under the sticks of the pier,
where the tribe stood like sticks themselves, reversed
by reflection. Then they walked up to the settlement,
and it seemed, as they chattered, everything was rehearsed
for ages before this. He could predict the intent
of his father’s gestures; he was moving with the dead.
Women paused at their work, then smiled at the warrior
returning from his battle with smoke, from the kingdom
where he had been captured, they cried and were happy.
Then the fishermen sat near a large tree under whose dome
stones sat in a circle. His father said:
“Afo-la-be,”
touching his own heart.
“In the place you have come from
what do they call you?”
Time translates.
Tapping his chest,
the son answers:
“Achille.” The tribe rustles, “Achille.”
Then, like cedars at sunrise, the mutterings settle.
AFOLABE
Achille. What does the name mean? I have forgotten the one
that I gave you. But it was, it seems, many years ago.
What does it mean?
ACHILLE
Well, I too have forgotten.
Everything was forgotten. You also. I do not know.
The deaf sea has changed around every name that you gave
us; trees, men, we yearn for a sound that is missing.
AFOLABE
A name means something. The qualities desired in a son,
and even a girl-child; so even the shadows who called