Lisa Allen-Agostini - Trinidad Noir

Early the next day he went into Port-of-Spain to take care of urgent matters, he said. The house was busy, filled with people about their daily duties — the maid, the gardener, the workers for the vegetables and orchard crops at the back. “Don’t worry,” he said, kissing me absently and moving to the door without a pause, “nobody will come here in the daylight. And I’ll be back in three hours.”

I hung around all day, listening to his jazz collection, working in my song book, chatting with the maid who showed me her secret ingredient for oil-down, a breadfruit dish I had only heard about but never tasted before, growing up in the southland where Indian food ruled. I felt uneasy in the house as evening drew nearer and the precision of his three hours stretched into the whole day. I locked the back door and went for a walk along the ridge, along a path beaten through the bush so thoroughly that it looked like a clear road, one that I felt had been there for hundreds of years, a natural pass through the impenetrable mountains of the Northern Range down to the sea’s edge. At the top of the ridge I could see the ocean in the distance. The symmetry of the land’s contours was perfect, its equilibrium hammered out over eons of time, and once more I felt a pang of misgiving about the life I had chosen so far from here. I was home again, unafraid of the hidden perils of the place, of Micah’s mysterious expeditions, the whispers in the darkness outside, that outside peering menacingly into the wide-open house.

I struck out through the underbrush on my return, finding another more secret path that was entirely camouflaged from house and ridge and feeling sure that last night’s visitors had come this way. Rounding a curve in the path, I sighted the broken-down gazebo before they could see me, and I stopped in my tracks. Their voices were low, murmuring, and as their figures came into view I saw that they were saying goodbye. The man reached out and his hand ran directly down the length of Micah’s thigh, on the inside, right down the inside from crotch to mid-thigh, and then he half-turned to go. I stepped out sharply. Seeing me midway down the path, Micah waved and called gaily, “Geeta, come and meet Legano.”

Legano shook hands with me gravely, politely, and then said he must go.

“Legano came to help me plan the revolution.” Micah was laughing now, hamming it up too much, I thought. And had I actually seen what I thought I had, from the hand of this man, small, well-built, with a dapper look, a shaved head, an absolutely neutral countenance underneath the striking pallor of his gaunt face?

Legano left and Micah gathered me close as we walked toward the back door of the house. He mentioned that Legano had brought him some papers to be signed but I couldn’t buy that and listened in silence, wondering what the real story was. It was more than paperwork and more than the physical intimacy I thought I had witnessed, my instincts leading me into a cul-de-sac once more, questions and more questions that I knew I should never ask.

The carambolas remained intact and beautiful, stalk and fruit in perfect symmetry, while we continued our holiday antics in between his unpredictable forays to town, always urgent and unplanned. Our lovemaking retained its tacit delicacy, but as we approached the end of my stay, the sex itself got more wild and hectic, frantic even. I forgot all my earlier reservations. It was a roughness as smooth as silk, and savage as waves crashing into the rocks on the north coast. I could ask for nothing more. We had found our own spaces in each other and the simple pleasures of love had changed everything between us.

We drove to the northern beaches, up to Yarra, went by boat to Paria, climbed the hills of Platanal, battled at the mouth of Shark River just where it flowed into the sea at Toco, and lay together on a flat rock at the eastern edge of the island, near the lighthouse where two seas lashed and embraced ceaselessly, throwing up a barricade of cliffs and waves and whirlpools, with tiny cairns of polished stones anchored in coves along the shoreline, amidst the treacherous surf.

I had regained my strength fully. I laughed at his silly jokes, drank his rum swizzles, cuddled with him on mornings. The gaiety in the air was hurried, and almost palpable in its intensity; all the earlier doubts had dissolved into a hoarding of this time, a time I wanted to last forever. My earlier picky attitude to his house, the arrangement of space, his rambling work habits, and my own solitary needs made me more than a little embarrassed and I found the heart to wonder, too, about his irritation at some of my own ingrained habits. I thought a lot about the song, which had turned into “Nowarian Blues,” and even began to hum the melody, but I felt strangely shy about confiding to Micah my desire for mango and zaboca and ackee trees, for a backyard filled with wide arches of drooping branches that you could swing on in perfect safety.

The island was rocked by a coup two months after I left and Micah was involved in the storming of the — buildings. He was blasted on the front steps and I heard afterwards that he lay there in the sun for two whole days while plotters and hostages dueled it out. His quick note, written in pencil on brown shop paper, arrived ten days after news of the coup reached me.

A coup inside a coup. Not what I risked everything fighting for.

I won’t make it. Trying to leave but I’m in too deep. No hope, Geeta, my love. Another day for the wicked and one more for advantage that could never done.

I love you, you know. We might have made it.

I found myself writing and rewriting the song the day I got his note. “Nowarian Blues,” its grief deep inside the catchy rhythm of its lilting melody, is still a much-played jazz note twenty years later. Maybe we could have made it, through his ambiguous sexual inclinations, his ordinary human sexuality that threw me into such doubts. Maybe we could have made it if he had not been betrayed. The rustling in the bushes early in my visit — was he already marked? Did Legano, who disappeared from the face of the earth right after, I was told, did that snake do him in? The note had been mailed by Legano, though. His scrawled comment, stuffed in the envelope, was brief. Found this on Mikey. Sorry. Legano . I was grateful that he had sent it and also nervous that he had my address. He must have gone back to the house to find it. A survivor. Like me. Was I, God forbid, a factor in the equation surrounding Mikey’s death? Jealousy, maybe? The cold hand struck at my heart again. Mikey. Everyone I met during my stay in Trinidad had addressed my lover as Micah. Everyone except me and, I now realized, Legano. Maybe we would have made it because of our true connection — Mikey and Geeta, primal, uncomplicated, clean. But who knows, perhaps not even that could have saved us.

The day I left, we had lain in bed together for a long time. He had shifted between hugging me tightly and holding me at arm’s length, staring into my face. I grew uncomfortable. “Like if yuh trying to memorize my face,” I joked.

And he had nodded seriously. “Yes,” he whispered. It seemed to me then that we had reached an agreement beyond words, but I couldn’t tell if it was for all or for nothing at all, the silly words of that love song still ricocheting through my brain on the flight back, a flight I thought would never end. It wasn’t anxiety that I felt, just an inexplicable sense of belonging, though no such words had been spoken between us. No words; something else had taken care of that. Call it carambolas, gold-black nowarians, all-knowing, alien fruit standing in the rain.

Godineau