V. Naipaul - Miguel Street

She threatened to get the police.

Nathaniel said, ‘But who go mind your children?’

Laura said, ‘That is my worry. I don’t want you here. You is only another mouth to feed. And if you don’t leave me right right now I go go and call Sergeant Charles for you.’

It was this threat of the police that made Nathaniel leave.

He was in tears.

But Laura was swelling out again.

Hat said, ‘Oh, God! Two babies by the same man!’

One of the miracles of life in Miguel Street was that no one starved. If you sit down at a table with pencil and paper and try to work it out, you will find it impossible. But I lived in Miguel Street, and can assure you that no one starved. Perhaps they did go hungry, but you never heard about it.

Laura’s children grew.

The eldest daughter, Lorna, began working as a servant in a house in St Clair and took typing lessons from a man in Sackville Street.

Laura used to say, ‘It have nothing like education in the world. I don’t want my children to grow like me.’

In time, Laura delivered her eighth baby, as effortlessly as usual.

That baby was her last.

It wasn’t that she was tired or that she had lost her love of the human race or lost her passion for adding to it. As a matter of fact, Laura never seemed to grow any older or less cheerful. I always felt that, given the opportunity, she could just go on and on having babies.

The eldest daughter, Lorna, came home from her typing lessons late one night and said, ‘Ma, I going to make a baby.’

I heard the shriek that Laura gave.

And for the first time I heard Laura crying. It wasn’t ordinary crying. She seemed to be crying all the cry she had saved up since she was born, all the cry she had tried to cover up with her laughter. I have heard people cry at funerals, but there is a lot of showing-off in their crying. Laura’s crying that night was the most terrible thing I had heard. It made me feel that the world was a stupid, sad place, and I almost began crying with Laura.

All the street heard Laura crying.

Next day Boyee said, ‘I don’t see why she so mad about that. She does do the same.’

Hat got so annoyed that he took off his leather belt and beat Boyee.

I didn’t know who I felt sorrier for — Laura or her daughter.

I felt that Laura was ashamed now to show herself in the street. When I did see her I found it hard to believe that she was the same woman who used to laugh with me and give me sugar-cakes.

She was an old woman now.

She no longer shouted at her children, no longer beat them. I don’t know whether she was taking especial care of them or whether she had lost interest in them.

But we never heard Laura say a word of reproach to Lorna.

That was terrible.

Lorna brought her baby home. There were no jokes about it in the street.

Laura’s house was a dead, silent house.

Hat said, ‘Life is helluva thing. You can see trouble coming and you can’t do a damn thing to prevent it coming. You just got to sit and watch and wait.’

According to the papers, it was just another week-end tragedy, one of many.

Lorna was drowned at Carenage.

Hat said, ‘Is what they always do, swim out and out until they tired and can’t swim no more.’

And when the police came to tell Laura about it, she had said very little.

Laura said, It good. ‘It good. It better that way.’

There were many reasons why I wanted to be like Eddoes when I grew up.

He was one of the aristocrats of the street. He drove a scavenging cart and so worked only in the mornings.

Then, as everybody said, Eddoes was a real ‘saga-boy.’ This didn’t mean that he wrote epic poetry. It meant that he was a ‘sweet-man,’ a man of leisure, well-dressed, and keen on women.

Hat used to say, ‘For a man who does drive a scavenging cart, this Eddoes too clean, you hear.’

Eddoes was crazy about cleanliness.

He used to brush his teeth for hours.

If fact, if you were telling a stranger about Eddoes you would say, ‘You know-the little fellow with a tooth-brush always in his mouth.’

This was one thing in Eddoes I really admired. Once I stuck a tooth-brush in my mouth and walked about our yard in the middle of the day.

My mother said, ‘You playing man? But why you don’t wait until your pee make froth?’

That made me miserable for days.

But it didn’t prevent me taking the tooth-brush to school and wearing it there. It caused quite a stir. But I quickly realised that only a man like Eddoes could have worn a tooth-brush and carried it off.

Eddoes was always well-dressed. His khaki trousers were always creased and his shoes always shone. He wore his shirts with three buttons undone so you could see his hairy chest. His shirt cuffs were turned up just above the wrist and you could see his gold wrist-watch.

Even when Eddoes wore a coat you saw the watch. From the way he wore the coat you thought that Eddoes hadn’t realised that the end of the coat sleeve had been caught in the watch strap.

It was only when I grew up I realised how small and how thin Eddoes really was.

I asked Hat, ‘You think is true all this talk Eddoes giving us about how woman running after him?’

Hat said, ‘Well, boy, woman these days funny like hell. They go run after a dwarf if he got money.’

I said, ‘I don’t believe you.’

I was very young at the time.

But I always thought, ‘If it have one man in this world woman bound to like, that man is Eddoes.’

He sat on his blue cart with so much grace. And how smart that tooth-brush was in his mouth!

But you couldn’t talk to him when he was on his cart. Then he was quite different from the Eddoes we knew on the ground; then he never laughed, but was always serious. And if we tried to ride on the back of his cart, as we used to on the back of the ice-cart, Eddoes would crack his whip at us in a nasty way and shout, ‘What sort of cart you think this is? Your father can’t buy cart like this, you hear?’

Every year Eddoes won the City Council’s award for the cleanest scavenging cart.

And to hear Eddoes talk about his job was to make yourself feel sad and inferior.

He said he knew everybody important in Port of Spain, from the Governor down.

He would say, ‘Collected two three tins of rubbish from the Director of Medical Services yesterday. I know him good, you know. Been collecting his rubbish for years, ever since he was a little doctor in Woodbrook, catching hell. So I see him yesterday and he say, “Eddoes (that is how he does always call me, you know) Eddoes,” he say, “Come and have a drink.” Well, when I working I don’t like drinking because it does keep you back. But he nearly drag me off the cart, man. In the end I had to drink with him. He tell me all his troubles.’

There were also stories of rich women waiting for him behind rubbish tins, women begging Eddoes to take away their rubbish.

But you should have seen Eddoes on those days when the scavengers struck. As I have told you already, these scavengers were proud people and stood for no nonsense from anybody.

They knew they had power. They could make Port of Spain stink in twenty-four hours if they struck.

On these important days Eddoes would walk slowly and thoughtfully up and down Miguel Street. He looked grim then, and fierce, and he wouldn’t speak to a soul.

He wore a red scarf and a tooth-brush with a red handle on these days.

Sometimes we went to Woodford Square to the strike meeting, to gaze at these exciting people.

It amazed me to see Eddoes singing. The songs were violent, but Eddoes looked so sad.

Hat told me, ‘It have detectives here, you know. They taking down every word Eddoes and them saying.’