Too Solid Flesh
Cross the road and you can walk south into an urban space that looks immemorial. .Aston’s Eyot is the site of a nineteenth-century midden; an old dump. The refuse heated up underground. Apple cores and pear seeds and walnut kernels matured into a wilderness too hybridized for names. Sprays of blackberries and rosehips arch red and black; sloes add notes of steely blue; a willow grows askant a brook. Other walkers are seldom met or heard. There are trodden paths but also many turnings.
She four-thousand-miles-away-across-the-ocean hasn’t been herself lately. She hermits more and more. She would have liked the walk. Now I am home for another Saturday night...
“My thoughts have turned to green leaves.”
“Well, that’s better than sorrow. I’m so tired of living in this nameless sadness, even I am bored by myself.”
“Do you keep a diary? A document of marvellous and total self-obsession?”
She feels like an invalid of centuries past, to be rolled out into the sun.
Who would push the chair? A lithe and grateful illiterate youth?
“A brilliant lavender and lace parasol-carrying creature with an air of reckless innocence...”
She four-thousand-miles-away-across-the-ocean has often felt, as have many others, that she is disconnected from her corporeal self. I am feeling out of touch with my body: it feels like something I have been given to look after. When I bathe I feel that I am washing it, not that I am bathing. She likes that I speak of it as being a thing I take care of, like a costume or a small animal.
How do I take care of it? Why is it not mine? Might a description get me closer to making it mine, or at least an understanding of why I am at odds with it?
She-who-hermits-more-and-more offers a description: leaning over a claw-footed tub, body costume in hand, I may gently soap and groom it... bathe it in milk and rose petals...take delicate brushes to it... do I? For it needs to understand not what it doesn't have but what it needs.
She desires me to immerse myself in the hows and whys.
The howls and wiles!
It wants things.
It is an idiot child.
It understandeth not that there is no store of warmth. It has forgotten thirst.
A reminder to myself: water, at least every three hours. A reminder from myself: nudity, between clothing it at least twice a day. A reminder of myself: carefulness, up and down the steep expressionist stairs.
It wakes expectant. The look of ceiling meets its eye, or the look of curtain. Expectancy is worst.
A reminder, not to expect?
No. Clinging helplessly to its capabilities, ever hopeful of change, it issues reminders that are first cousin to cravings.
For her, in the sun perhaps; certainly elsewhere; like me, insufficiently solid; for her, this description, a near-total avoidance of the one with which I was tasked.
Because I am superstitious, I am stringing a series of lights between this and anything else that happens.
* * * * *
It was inconceivable to me that there had been nothing on the land in the residential area of Port of Spain where my family’s house was built, though I knew the construction date was in 1971, and some of the building materials from the quarry my grandfather owned; thereby his ill elder son and unarranged daughter-in-law were enabled to hide respectably and save face for the family. There is no such thing as nothing.
Our storybooks were English and children in them ran around thousand-year-old castles or two-hundred-year-old vicarages; our myths were Hindu and we were encouraged to imagine many civilizations in a universe cyclically created and destroyed; and our island geography, we were told, had been Arawak and Carib.
The land sloped down, just over a quarter of an acre of it. There were mostly well- behaved trees and one frightening one, but there was also somehow the feeling of where trees had been. I do not mean stumps or even irregularities in the ground. There was more to this than the suggestion of seeding patterns of kush grass and razor grass, windflowers, lily spathes and snake plants. A child not allowed, for all sorts of reasons, to play much with other children started to know the nameless lilac trumpets, no bigger than two millimetres, that never did figure in textbooks; the partly concreted-over gap into unfathomable dark, possibly created by earthquake or earlier watercourses, which the grown-ups placed stones in front of only to find the stones moved away just enough to let something muscular through; and the patches of brooding that you might explain by the humidity of a present microclimate, but which I took to be the past knotting up of fibres into the concentration of a tree.
It was indoors, just inside the threshold of my bedroom, that I dreamt the woman who had tan yellow skin and a shearing rag of silk for hair. She was not the unwrapped mummy from the dead-house museums abroad. She was not quite my aunt’s maid, who was over here from South America and was the first Arawak I had ever seen, since ours were extinct from ancient conflicts. She was more like that, though; yes, indigenous, a category scarcely met with in Trinidad, to which people have been waves. She smiled at me and her smile went up toothily at the corners, because her flesh no longer covered skull.
“I’m as solid as you are,” she said loudly and tonguelessly. Her arms extended themselves and my upper arms were grasped hard between the elbow and shoulder. “I’m as solid as you are.”
I knew she could not be.
“I’m solid as you are.”
But I was alive, and she was not. I broke free and woke up. I arrayed my mind with ferocity and identified a day.
* * * * *
It should be early evening. Can you see the individual flames, and the bronze tiger?
Janaki is tall. When she opened the wardrobe and I saw the array of clothes, it seemed right. There is stateliness in her modesty. The formal garments glistering there matched her presence almost weight for weight. She is pure gold.
A statue, moving: does that call up a nightmare scene? Why? A statue, moving: can that instil a sense of peace? It is, is so. Each gesture it makes should be made with consideration: otherwise it risks breaking itself or crushing that which it would reach or touch. Respecting its own range of possible movements, it would respect your space. If it made an approach, it could never be appropriate. It could only approximate you, so wearily, as only stone can be weary, for its way of breathing is to lose itself: each micropore exhales dust in a tiny brightening of the air, and with each exhalation the stone is less.
I read today of the man in his early forties pierced to death by metal as he dismantled a bridge under government orders.
There are inevitabilities that need not have become inevitable had there been the difference made by thought.
A statue, moving: pure matter so considered as to have identity with pure thought? Pure is a strange word.
Anyway, it took both hands for me to lift one of those garments on its wooden hanger. I imagined her inhabiting it, thin-backed, barefoot and gracious in mud or on tiles in that territory where a dream of the village East washes through into somewhere western, momentarily eroding the reality of both, sometimes leaving permanent alterations in its wake; somewhere like Trinidad, so Indian even if not considered so, so Western even if not called so, thumbnail of the Americas, immigrant blood opal at its base.
The weight of it I couldn’t bear though I loved her for wanting to lend it to me. I gave up. I was the ghost.
The need to acquire weight followed me north and overseas. Imagine a pointilliste vision given an order of dismissal: the dots of colour that vibrate until the eye interlinks them and learns the trick of making sense of the person or the landscape depicted, these dots would obediently dance apart, disperse, making image into worse than nonsense, hurting the eye that tries to focus into questing after a scattering in which each particle is adamantine uncollectable. Being looked at, I was that unmade image, that hurt in return.
People who talked to me were unable to keep their countenance. I was not as dense as the object would need to be for them to focus on it. Their question, “Where is she from?” in my very presence became, “Where is she?”
I had the unfortunate effect of making segments of their heads disappear. These did not always reappear positioned correctly. This effect was deathlike in that nobody was immune. So you will better understand that, I shall tell you about the Armed Forces man. He had the kindness to ignore the others at the dinner table, in order to explain to me how I might acquire density: essentially, I was the same as any woman, if we could put aside the intellect. Abruptly, he took on the aspect of a pegged grapefruit of which one quarter had been eaten. His head not only disappeared; it also came apart.
The Armed Forces man’s voice continued to make itself heard. Others around the table nodded vigorous support of his views. Now all of them were missing something. A solid and crystalline seam of absence scarred them from temple to jawbone. I searched in vain for any faces. Voice kept tilting out of voids. I got up and left the table in some distress.
I had not yet decided to abandon the scene, so I exited to the bathroom, where iridescent lights were strung across the bathtub and there was no shower and no soap. I looked in the mirror and did not see myself, which brought some comfort. A classic moment had enveloped me. The same had happened to Vidia Naipaul’s father; but in his time, non-being brought with it horror and insult. I could and did wait. That I was a trick of the light, I accepted. Failing to pull myself together, I left the party without embarrassment, indeed without a proper farewell, and started walking.
The knife crime boys were not at the end of the road that day. At the corner I passed a woman pushing a pram. She was chatting to another woman, who carried a bag of shopping. They were not as old as I am. More had happened around their eyes. They seemed to see and not see me. Their aura of sociability expanded, spreading with a faint juddering as they drew near. They walked me off the pavement into the gutter.
I was too horrified to say “Excuse me”. The hands in charge of the baby carriage had no wrists. A seam of void extended beyond the sleeves. No cross-section of bone and pulsing bluecrimson evidenced itself. Just solidity again, palpable absence. The same apparent chasm joined the set of fingers grasping the plastic shopping bag to the pinkish banister of arm. The women moved like a staircase next to a lift shaft down which I and my kind dropped.
Reading, a sedentary occupation except on places like the London train, where tickets are sold after the last seat is gone, and the area of corridor between First Class and standard class carriages is much coveted by those who can find floor early enough to settle down with a book until forced upright by the briefcased, backpacked, mobile telephone users...Reading could fix me. It could be a way to acquire weight. Consider the women in academic posts, whose faces are keener than normal and who rise like bells from an ever widening base. I have seen one such white-stockinged and long- skirted in the south-west, and dared not wonder how long it would take for her legs to meld together into one. Then she would ring out and trundle towards the apex of a career, wild for the literature that has been written, for no more need be written, for literature is the province of the dead, and how can I have something to add to it? To the bells that clamour over the greening inscriptions, I can but ghost the living past...
I opened a book and a mango fell out. I opened another, and another mango fell out. These were newly published books: fresh leaves.
Woman doth not live by mango alone. Was there more goodness in volumes of essays or in novels? Were specialist shops and second-hand departments a good bet in the search for sustenance?
After a couple of weeks or perhaps ten or twelve years, with something like desperation I totalled the yield, excluding mangos:
2 quarts desiccated coconut 1 breadfruit
Half a yam
A grain of salt
A grain of match
A piece of camphor
1 measure sweet (maraschino)
10 measures sour (lime)
100 measures strong (rum)
1 tin condensed milk (for sandwiches)
1 tin condensed milk (for tea)
5 enamel cups
Cream crackers
Curried shrimp
A 1950s bookmark with a school crest defaced with the motto Sufficient unto the dhal is the weevil thereof (fountain pen, italic)
(I did not buy the book that had the tablecloth)
(The coal pot presumably had been removed by the police after he was found to have succumbed to carbon monoxide poisoning)
This left over a hundred and seventy mangos, despite the careful selection process. “I do not know what to do with all these mangos.”
“Take them to market,” said the agent with half a face.
“The same ones?”
“You were glad enough to find them, weren’t you?” he said, answerably.
Mine is one of the few corners of the city not assailed by pigeons. On my way to buy the weightiest bread I could, I noticed the absence of pigeons; for the food of many people was strewn or for sale along the pavements. A lot of reading must have been going on, if even a few of these nostalgic, often faintly toxic fruits had fallen from the leaves of books. A volatile, ratty iridescence of pigeons would have flocked towards such riches in Oxford city centre, but there are seldom such spills between the spires; perhaps nobody reads there at all, or perhaps the opening of books is no such unsealing.
A woman friend with a head full of music and hips like a cello...solider than I am...once met me in the market square among those urbocentric pigeons, her face phosphorescent with fear. That was when I began finding out how widespread pigeon phobia is, in the south of England; as inconvenient in its way as the well-diagnosed lizard phobia in the Caribbean.
How different the child with bronze fluff for hair who had laughed in the streets of Florence as he went towards the pigeons and stamped. Again and again he stamped, his face a forum for the mingling of cruelty and glee. The birds, stupid with alarm, went and settled, went and settled, not seeming to identify an attacker, unable to deal with the repeated fact that they could not stay in what they felt to be their place. He was an infant Perseus. He was cause; the rest of the world, effect. He impressed me as much as that other Perseus, bronze all through and smiling slenderly but solidly in the Piazza, the head of the Medusa in his hand.
Medusa’s beautiful, wise serpentine head was cut off because she paralyzed people who looked at her. Was that it, or did people fear being seen through by her? Could they not bear to be known? Not by her, not as she could know. Crying paralysis, they stopped themselves in the presence of an amoral scrutiny in which everything is as it is, not as anyone would have it be, and the intricate is simple. Medusa’s head was co- opted as a weapon, to be brought out of the man’s bag when enemies needed to be stopped. Was this change of use good or bad or neither? One thing for sure: her quality of living contemplation had ceased to be in the possession of a female form moving with the constancy of the living. It had been made deathly, after being marked for death.
Bronze was ringing and serpents twirling somewhere in the past’s past as I turned the corner.
I was solider than the girl behind the counter of the shop. She had a saline pallor like a washed rind cheese. The shelves were clean, but darkness clustered like flies; not darkness that one could see...it made the space between the wrappers of untranslated s/z sweets heavy with something yet more adaptable than shadow. The bread there was cheap and good, and I needed to acquire weight. If I met her eyes during our transaction, she too might solidify some more. This would benefit the neighbourhood. A slice of air circulating among the merchandise was clearly another customer who had disappeared altogether on seeing me in the wrong pigeonhole. (This shop was without salt fish or mangos.) The loaf, chock full of seeds, was the right size for a one-person household.
I took pleasure in the quietening of the street. A laugh, here and there, closed a shutter of air on the temporary private room of a pavement hello or goodbye. Light thickened. The small, dense grains opened strange flavours to the inside of my mouth. Changes were occurring in what my mind could visually process. Twilight was general throughout my apartment. A plain spread wide in my imagination. The scene constructed itself as I saw less and less of my actual surroundings. Terror and relief came at the moment of realization. Greyish green and dark brown, the almost-black of a cold field, and hair tossing in the abandonment of earth; pale limbs, shaped and furred similar to those I had known; and recent roots, shallow, hard at work, drawing out of the soil their nourishment from the uncountable breaking down of human beings into scandalously lamentable flesh. I saw the sprouting and greening of the plain, and the sheaves ripening towards harvest. The bread that was to have made me solid had undone itself and nearly undone me. I finished the meal. I could not finish the loaf. It was a hungry thing. There was too much time in it.
The glass overcoat was manufactured, if not developed, in that country where the grains of the loaf had grown. The glass overcoat gave automatic density. It was cast in one, seamless, except for tiny bubbling within the glass, like you get in marbles. Scratch-resistant and shatterproof, it was admittedly chill; less so to the wearer, who felt insulated by the build-up of body heat; felt, if anything, more flexible, within the range of movement that did remain possible. The people in glass overcoats spent a lot of time in transit. The main drawbacks to contact with others were evident. The smudges from everyday wear translated to rainbows. These were not so much a problem as was the gritty rain of that climate. This style of garment is out of fashion and no longer exported. Dubiously collectable, some turn up second-hand in England. Buying one and wearing it would show a real investment in... something.
The loneliness of the body is utterly different from the loneliness of the mind. Ready to race ahead, the mind is impatient when the body, untouched by anyone day after day, begins to shiver as bedtime draws near. The hands catch and hurt when undoing a button. They refuse to deal with the edge of the book, which tumbles to the floor, leaves flying. This shiver is not a thing of the surface. It is a shuddering from within, as if cold breaks out on the skin from a heart splintered into a rose of frost. Then the weightlessness of the bed must be resisted. It wants to assume the body. A wind of separateness drives at the outline of each fold and bend battered by ice. Sleep will not take under these conditions. A summer that dries out the linens within hours has no effect on the ague of isolation. A layer of black wool has to be worn at night-time in the hottest month of the year. The being practised in isolation not reconciling itself to the exercise in cruelty that is dream...It wakes warm and looks about, the body ready for a round of greetings. The mind knowing otherwise, ordering the smile wiped off the face, the tender weakness in the fingers to tense up, wakes a little annoyed at the insistence with which it is tipped into disappointment, having nothing to do but begin in silence and space, meeting only its own demands, without refreshment from a contradictory presence.
The scission, when I finished losing my body, was in January. Christmas was just past and I was due to travel up to Scotland for Hogmanay, so it was still the Old Year, the turn of winter over the calendar, when the high fever set in. I was invited to come north anyway, and be looked after; but I was not strong enough to deposit my temperature on the train and carry my germs across the Border.
I had been aware of greater tiredness than normal, but what is normal? Winter in Oxford was a scant pause for the trees that minded their own business and continued more or less strenuously to branch and bud. A layer of coconut frosting on the ground looked more like a birthday cake than serious weather, and disappeared faster.
So, this winter was not normal. The tall nineteenth-century windows that let in light from the south and west were filled with blackness in between falling snow. The snow fell, and settled, and went on falling. The snow settled, and did not melt, and more snow fell. A small white dog could have been buried in the amounts that drifted up around the annexe door. Twigs were coated to several times their thickness. The roofs of the next door pub and its add-on buildings could have been any shape under their pitiless cover. At whatever hour that I looked out, there were the lines and monuments of this winter’s victory; and those were many hours.
For my tiredness was not normal. Overnight the skin of my face blistered and began to peel off like paint on a badly neglected wall. I had no thermometer. Was this fever? Morning after morning my lips, stuck together with dryness, needed lotion rubbed in to them before they would open and I could drink water. They cracked deeply and widely at the corners, visible slits as if made by a letter-opener, and bled as I took the first sips. I dabbed with a tissue, and saw scarlet. The cracks blistered but would not fill up with flesh or cover over with scab. The reasons I did not immediately ring the doctor are not to be told here; suffice it to say that I was too accustomed to people who varied between unseeing and unseen.
I creamed my lips and watched the winter. I became frightened only when the lead box installed itself in my rib cage: walking from the bedroom to the kitchen necessitated a stop on the sofa, and lifting a glass brought on hyperventilation.
Let these procedures not be questioned.
I visited the official website. The website diagnosed me with official swine flu. No tests would be done. I took the number I was issued, and knew it was pointless to call my doctor, for I could not get myself to that location. The official website informed me that everyone ill in Britain needed a ‘flu friend’, who would collect their medication. I rang a few acquaintances who might have stayed at home during the festive season. Their mobiles connected to differently pitched signals: international ones: before switching to answerphone. The woman in the flat above me had gone away. As usual, footsteps or creaky boards sounded in her empty flat; they were of no use. No post was being delivered through the snow, so there was no point looking for a pileup on the stairs that might tell me nobody had been in at all. I listened out. The great emptiness assured me that this house, divided into flats, was holding itself in during the snow. I was its breathing.
The official website directed me to the so-called Primary Care Trust. Relieved to see they were located in my neighbourhood, I rang. Soon antibiotics would drop through the brass flap; I would wander germily down the stairs, making rest stops when the lead box was awkward, and wander back up to start waging internal war against the infection. The person who answered the phone had an audible conversation with his colleague. If she doesn’t have a number and she hasn’t spoken to her GP we don’t have to give her the Tamiflu. I gave the number several times, to two people, in the course of a few minutes. Each time, they seemed not to remember that I had consulted the website and given them an official number. I pushed back memories of Passport Control, and the memorable twenty minutes when I reiterate where I live or where I was born and the blandness of my desired voyaging...the classical music of the wrong origin; twenty minutes is long enough to perform some concertos. The Primary Care Trust would call me back.
The woman on the other end of the phone raised her voice and began a patter like a fishmonger desperate to move on her rotting wares and raise enough money to cover her husband’s rum habit. I had to have family; friends; co-workers; neighbours...? You seem to have difficulty in understanding that someone might be alone at Christmas. There must be someone...! Only a friend, one of those truly dear friends who nonetheless are seen fewer than five times a year, in another village, expecting a second child, living with her toddler...exactly the Flu Friend to brave the House of Plague...Well, if she’s pregnant the child can’t be that small!...I realized that she had elicited a biography from me: of immigration, a broken relationship and unemployment: and an analysis, of how doors close on English houses during their holidays. The lead box was pressing closer to the surface of my chest. I raised my voice in turn and dehumanized the woman and rang off, and fell asleep with the effort of it. I woke to the doorbell. The reluctant health worker walked up a couple of stairs and extended her arm like a kindergarten flag waver at a national parade. I smiled infectiously at her and started down the stairs. With undisguised horror she thrust the tiny packet in its oversized envelope towards me, and fled.
Let these procedures not be questioned.
By this time I was not solid at all. I had the colours of Snow White: lips as red as blood (but in the wrong way); sky and hair black as ebony; and the slant of descending white to look at. What was inside, what was outside? I stopped trying to contact anyone, and found it would be two weeks or more before anyone would contact the childless, no-news nowherian. In those days something changed.
This was the first spring of disconnection.
So why not you and I...a music-box dusting itself off as its ballerina figurine twirls...Some melody played itself in previous springs, as pollen blew and temperate colours reasserted themselves waxily, waterishly, pink and white; the external and internal flickered up again, always....
This year I knew that had been youth. Spring would not come again with a sense of oneness. It was not in my future to soften and burgeon. The young kangaroo mothers and grim boyish lovers and ice-cream-on-a-stick screaming mess of children, the leafmeal and paper wrapper litter, swirled together, adhered to railings and bus stop signs, washed up again and toppled and proceeded to paint the city with an impression of life.
The hearts of the roses outside the Botanic Garden were an embarrassment of potential. The depth, the disclosure...Out of rhythm with the natural process, I became gentler with old people and thought about soldiers, whether for them spring had elements of homecoming.
The sun is so bright, the eye is a blackboard. The car approaching the crossroads slows down. Four walls of shimmering air are too much for the mind’s eye. It perceives and makes memories of what it sees as if sitting in a cool classroom. A woman in white is waiting to cross the East Oxford road. She flutters. Her silhouette, instantly recognizable, feels extra familiar; her clothing is old-fashioned North Indian.
So much of cloth. An older woman’s voice whispers disapproval in my ear. Why so much of cloth, when dresses would not be frowned on by the guardians of good behaviour? My grandmother’s generation was already permitted to wear colonial- export challis cotton or georgette print, fastened with covered buttons like those on living room furniture. The knees would not quite be exposed. The uncovered legs might be sturdy, twentieth-century varicose originals of the limbs adored in bronze or sandstone by pre-Christian-era sculptors. The uncovered legs might be spindly, kin to those that bend again and again among the leaves of some labour-intensive crop on its way towards the airtight hold of a fragrant destiny. The partly razored legs might be sleek with cocoa butter or coconut oil, rubbed in by the hands of grandchildren who learn the mysteries of pain and age from the question-command, “Come and rub your Ajee’s legs!”
If you see the pictures like Auntie Sati had — you remember the batik pictures? — we never covered ourselves up. Covering ourselves up, that is a new thing. Maybe it is a Muslim thing, maybe it is a Western thing. Those women in the pictures, some of them are not even wearing a choli. They tie their sari across their bare chest. I do not know whether what the older voice says is true.
Widow: the white drapery identifies the woman poised at the kerbside. White-is-the- colour-of-brides-black-is-the-colour-of-mourning: no. Dissonant and spectral associations have to be pushed away when I sit in a church whose stony atmosphere is fertilized by the overspilling of satin and orchids and tears of joy as the bride navigates the aisle. The strong florals are overlaid by those of a tropical night and the cool striking up under my feet seems to strike up more directly. Sitting in church in the afternoon, facing a crucifix, I am standing barefoot in a marble courtyard in the dark, the Dancing Siva at my back, the Kali shrine still to be built. A row of women assembles itself on foldup metal chairs. They are in white drapery and look so much alike, whited out in widowhood, that I embrace my great-aunt, taking her for my grandmother.
Because I am superstitious, I am stringing a series of lights here once more.
* * * * *
“Black,” my mother says darkly, “is a colour of joy.” Kali is black. Black contains all the colours; it is ultimate colour.
Can you see the flame in front of the bronze tiger?
The wick has blackened and at the base of the flame is a note of steely blue. Reflections shine red-gold.
Yesterday I walked again in the green space.
This has been thought for you.
Vahni Capildeo (b. Trinidad, 1973; currently UK-based) works in both poetry and prose. Her most recent poetry collection, Undraining Sea (Egg Box, 2009), explores both forms. A forthcoming book, Dark and Unaccustomed Words, is partly inspired by her time with the Etymology Group at the Oxford English Dictionary. Capildeo has held a Research Fellowship in the Arts at Girton College, Cambridge and a Writing Fellowship at the University of Leeds. While her roles include work as a Contributing Advisor for Black Box Manifold (University of Sheffield) and Contributing Editor for the Caribbean Review of Books Capildeo is also proud to have volunteered for Oxfam Head Office and Oxford Rape Crisis. She has just been appointed to a part-time Lectureship in Creative Writing at the University of Kingston (Greater London).