Lisa Allen-Agostini - Trinidad Noir

The Customs man looks at my mixed race and says casually, “Yuh come back home?” after Immigration just finished giving me hell. And then the Indian taxi driver is asking if where I’m going is up a hill. “Because my car does cut out on steep hill, like it have something wrong with it, but I don’t like asking my customer too much’a question before they get in my car.” Business as usual. Down the highway. Shopping malls and disaster housing schemes stretching, factories, fast food chains, mosques, and the Hindu Girls School. It’s always a bad time for traffic. Island of oil, pothole roads packed with cars crawling like lice, under an asphalt sun. At the junction by Nestlé’s compound, diesel dark — skinned vendors comb through heat waves of glittering cars, dripping red pommeracs. Air-conditioned windows roll down, hands exchange cool bills for hot fruit. None for the limping polio beggar, or his black cracked palm. A neutral radio voice offers, “Four victims were murdered in the country’s latest fatality... A seven-year-old who survived by hiding under a bed reports that his father and brother were tied up, while his mother and sister were brutally raped by three men and chopped with cutlasses in front of them. All were then shot several times... Police say...”

The big Indian-style homes with concrete balustrades, lots of sliding doors, fancy wrought-iron and designer “features,” keep their eyes on the road, untrusting. And the patches of farmlands, bordered by Gramoxone-dead grass, lie low. While the white-teeth smiling billboards want to chat. But I never like talking with them — too fake and clever with themselves. To fool them sometimes, I might wave back at Miss World, dressed in her airline uniform welcoming me; cheers with the multirace bunch’a happy people drinking Orchard juice. The rest of it though — from the La Basse dump, leaking human scavengers and smoldering black clouds of corbeau vultures, the shantytown stretching up to Laventille, the marketplace in Sea Lots, to the ex — railway terminal — the place doesn’t give a shit. But, you see the hills behind all of this? Ranging along the north, behind Barataria, Tunapuna, Arima — they are the ones you have to watch. Blue-gray soft in the rainy season, hard and fire-scarred in the dry season, they talk to you. Fanning, waving, calling you. They laugh, spread out, and mock the radio, echoing whatever they hear. They are part of it. The plumage. Trinidad.

“What’s the use of it?” my sister asked.

“What’s the use of it?” the hills laughed.

After all the bacchanal done, the mating season. After the Carnival flu run down your body and left you with a hollow cough. Mas camps collapsed, not a soca on the airwaves. Port-of-Spain is back to its normal self, going about doing the same things again. Post-Carnival sales for shoppers now. Headlines return to the killings and scandal after the feast of colorful, fleshy photos and aphrodisiac ads. Bank workers finished talking about who they saw in what costume, in what condition — gone back to comparing their children’s school passes.

Port-of-Spain is trying to tell me now — anything you want you can find here. Selling itself. This is the New York of the Caribbean, or at least a Miami. Look, there’s arts and entertainment, nightlife and a whole range of people — cosmopolitan. Get a job or something. Work to buy a car to go to the mall is what you should do. But the Savannah trees and the hills know more about me than that. “You can’t stay,” they say. “You can’t take it in town. Go. But you will come back. Go and learn how your heart walks and the earth talks. But we will see you again. Closer.”

“Don’t worry,” my sister said.

I am back with my child.

“Sheba! Sheba!” The Alsatian doesn’t stop. Play-wrestling with my baby boy, a paw across his chest and his whole little arm in her mouth. But Oliver is laughing and dribbling, pulling one ear. Fur stuck all over his sweaty skin, dog saliva pasting down a patch of hair. A big tongue licks his cheek, slathering. He squeals, little hands fly up to his squeezed-shut laughing face. He grabs Sheba’s mouth and pries it open, trying to shove his whole head inside.

“Ria, your dog’s eating my child!” But it’s okay. Play. The two of them in love with each other as soon as we arrived — a puppy for her, a bear for him. The two of them, sprawling round on the floor of my sister’s house.

“Cheryl’s coming up the hill!” my sister shouts.

Dog saliva’s sliding into Oliver’s mouth, will get in his eyes too. He’s fumbling, pulling big black leathery nipples, sitting up. “Tot-tots!”

The car sounds, scrambles Sheba up and away. I grab Oliver and wipe his face on my skirt, before he tugs off after the dog, running to the gate.

Cheryl had had her baby too. Anika, a cuddly chunksie little girl, almost the same toddler age as Oliver.

“Bella, girl!” Big and warm as ever, “Long time no see! And this is yours?” Anika’s legs try to clamp round Cheryl’s large waist as the dog comes for a pat. “Look at his state!”

And we’re laughing. Oliver laughing, trying to catch the wagging tail, all his hair plastered down, slick with saliva. “Is a real little Indian you have here, girl!”

Filing in together. In the open veranda — living room of Ria’s home. Laughing but keeping an eye on Sheba and Oliver on the floor. Anika stuck in horror to Cheryl’s chest. Filling in the last three years between us. Ria never preached to me yet about I told you so, or what do you expect from a Caribbean black man. But she held the reproach in her neat, pretty features, in sentences stopped just short of it. Never believed me when I said he didn’t hit me. Suspected the violence that I had to save my baby from. Suspected the shouting, cussing abuse.

“What you expec’?” Broad-smile Cheryl must tease. “They only good for one thing. And even dat, sometimes, huh!”

“Just come,” my sister had said. “You know we’re here.”

Maracas Beach we’re heading to in the middle of the week. Just us and the babies and our lucky, good-to-be-women selves. Including my reeling, recovery, begin-again self too.

Now the hills, the hills. Beach. North coast. The road curving, curving. They have you, in controlling heights. Up through the saddle mouth, climbing. Green leaves close in then drop away, swooping back down to the valley. Closing in and carrying us on. Now Trinidad is flaunting, flirting slips of exotic dress. Lipstick-red slivers of chaconia and balisier between wet green. Orange immortelle lace canopy, flickering. Scanty. In the dark shade, pale heliconias bud peach, white lily tongues are wagging. Twisting and winding, the hills rolling a bellè dance. Fertility. Sliding you down a spine, they fling you, catch you breathless in the dip of a waist, hold you close. Clinging to moist, mossy skin. And suddenly, way below, the shiny silver-sea edge of a petticoat flashes, dazzling. Keep crawling along the bank of a neck, tree ferns dripping rain dew, pulling you secretly into intimate island plumage. Driving, slipping through bamboo, between quills, against the skin of a peacock. Sloping along the coast. Further. Drugged with mountain-soft damp breath, the lingering pungence of a cedar tree, we slow to a stop. And taste fresh cocoa flesh again. The jewel pods have been catching the sun. Sweet white pulp, in thick autumn-colored cups. Warm as blood.

A hip of the land lazes against sea — La Vache. And the beaches start pounding the names Maracas, Las Cuevas, Blanchiseusse, marching sleepy villages on and on. Deaf vultures soar high above river mouths, looking for scraps through hazy surf light.

“We reach, Mommy! Beach!” Oliver said.

“We know you had to come back,” the hills said. And they laughed soft. “You see, we accustom. You might as well had eat the cascadura, because you keep coming back. Is okay. Go ahead.” They waved us down the road past the police station, past the food stalls, flagged us into the old public-beach car park. And them hills stayed behind there looking, the whole time we spent on that beach.