Is Just a Movie. Earl Lovelace
Читать онлайн книгу.
and, when he found it, trying, without luck, to get past the guard of relatives and friends surrounding her. When he returned to Matura just after midnight, with a heart dripping with grief, it was to find the station blazing in light, and waiting for him the corporal in charge of Matura Police Station, the sergeant and inspector up from Sangre Grande, and the prisoner he had released, back in his cell, on a new charge of wounding.
Pleading guilty to Dereliction of Duty, Constable Aguillera at first accepted the penance of his exile to Cascadu as punishment that was deserved and had worked hard to make up for that single blunder by efforts to present himself as a conscientious officer. His boots, belt and buttons were always shining, his stance erect, his voice firm, his notebook in order, the language of the charges for misdemeanors clear; and in less than two years he had Cascadu straight, his presence enough to bring calm to the bedlam of Main Street on a busy payday Friday, a flash of his eyes sufficient to direct men to give over money due the mothers of their children who had come to the rum shop to intercept them before the rum shop or gambling club take it from them, and a voice with the quality of force and sternness to order the most enthusiastic troublemaker to go to the police station charge-room and sit there and wait while he made up his mind what charge to place him on.
But when Constable Aguillera observed that his good works had gone unrewarded, and officers his junior with nothing approaching his record of arrests were promoted ahead of him, a certain resentment began to eat at him. For two years and a half he went on a spree, drinking rum, gambling and enjoying the favors of women who, drawn to the neatness of his uniform, the uprightness of his stance and his overall power and good looks, were falling all over the place for him. At one time he found himself friending with a woman in nearly every village of his district and had two of them at the same time big-belly for him. He mended his ways somewhat when six months after the two babies were born, the mother of one brought the baby to the police station, put him in his hands and walked away. He gave the baby to his mother to mind, cut down on his drinking and made an effort to keep his head straight when he see a nice woman passing. However, the unfairness of the administration still rankled and he continued to refuse to arrest anyone. Fellars used obscene language within earshot of him. Taxi drivers double-parked, and numerous skirmishes took place within clear sight of him. On Main Street, two badjohns, Big Head and Marvel, had a fistfight that started in front the gambling club and ended up in front the rum shop where he was drinking, bottle and stone pelting, people dodging, the whole street in disorder for an hour and fifteen minutes. Constable Aguillera maintained his resolve not to make an arrest until justice was meted out to him.
So, on that Sunday, when he looked up from the station diary, it was with a sense of personal relief that Sonnyboy’s name was not in the book. But, hearing the disappointed grumble of Sonnyboy’s supporters, and the hum of jubilation from those behind them, he advised that if Sonnyboy wanted to be sure of his status, he should go to the savannah, where he would find the corporal in charge of the police station looking at the cricket match; or he could sit down and wait, on the chance that the inspector who was handling the Black Power business might drop in and clarify whether or not he was to be arrested. “Or, you could go home.”
Sonnyboy recalled smiling. Even the police were doing their best not to see him. He decided to wait.
I would meet him sitting on the bench in the charge-room when I was brought in with two revolutionary brethren, Ibo and Marvin, who, bad luck for us, were apprehended in a roadblock on the Toco Road as we were making our way to the hills of the remote village of Kumaca. As soon as I sit down, Sonnyboy strike up a conversation with me, affecting a familiarity that we really didn’t have, and he continued talking to me for the half-hour it took for the three army officers to come to fetch Ibo, Marvin and me to detention on Nelson Island. As they signaled for me and my two brethren to get up and follow them, Sonnyboy, still talking to me, got to his feet as if he was one of our party and calmly strode out with us to the waiting army jeep.
As we were about to enter the jeep, the newspaper photographers who had been waiting outside the police station to catch a glimpse of the Black Power detainees, as we were called, aimed their cameras at us. I was tired with worry. I turned away, to give the impression of nonchalance but really because I didn’t want my photograph appearing in the newspaper with me, a revolutionary, looking so harassed.
But Sonnyboy, not quite smiling, brought himself erect, lifted his right hand, fist clenched, above his head, and with a sense of honor, and a deserved delight, shouted, “Power to the People!” in a salute so rousing that I thrust my own right hand, fist folded, in the air and shouted: “Power!” When I looked, I saw that my comrades had done the same.
I didn’t know Sonnyboy all that well. I knew him as a badjohn, a man who had his problems with the law. I had seen him at one or two of the Black Power rallies in Port of Spain and, meeting him there in the police station, I assumed he was one of us, one of the detainees. But later, when I heard his story, I was glad that my presence there that day had enabled him to save face before his grandmother and his brethren and allow him, for the first time, to enter into the custody of the police not as a common criminal but as the freedom fighter he knew himself to be.
Poet of the Revolution
When I am released from detention, Port of Spain is a changed place. The People’s Parliament where in the time of Black Power we had assembled before we set out on our daily marches is back to being just Woodford Square. The day I went there, the roar and babble of brethren at the gate, passing out pamphlets for rallies, is replaced by neatly dressed women and men silently holding up copies of the religious magazine Awake. At the side of the fountain, where the Grecian nymph is turning a dirty green under the unsteady drip of water, the leader of a band of Shouters, barefooted, in a yellow robe and red head tie, is delivering a sermon to a single diligent listener, a vagrant whose torso, arms and legs are wrapped in cellophane, bulking him up to look like an astronaut without a helmet. On the railing near to the urinals, a gray-haired man, his hair plastered down on his skull and his beard neatly trimmed, is arguing for the divinity of Marcus Garvey and the immortality of Haile Selassie. I look in the listening crowd for regulars from ’70, men who had talked revolution, who had raised their fists and shouted Power. One is selling snow-cone, another one have in his hands a book of lottery tickets for sale, and one is sitting on a bench by himself alone, curled up and quailed like callaloo bush in the hot sun, the heave and bounce gone out of his step, the light in his eyes dimmed, about him the exhausted look of a routed combatant glad to embrace the chastening rebuke of his defeat. None of them seem to recognize me and I choose not to trouble them. I their poet and prophet was now a stranger.
For Carnival that same year, in the Victory Calypso Tent where I had spent the last five years as the lead calypso singer, the crowd no longer want to hear my songs. They sit quiet enough while I am singing, and continue their forbidding silence when I am done, and it is only out of his sense of gratitude that Jazzy, the manager of the tent, is keeping me on the program, since, thank God, he ain’t forget that in the two years leading up to ’70, I was the big name pulling in the crowd. But even Jazzy’s loyalty was wearing thin.
This night he called me into the little booth he called his office and he say to me, “King . . .” That is how he call me: King. That is how he call those of us who win the Calypso crown already.
He say, “King, how you feeling?” in this tuneless falsetto that put me on my guard right away.
“How I feeling? Since when you is a doctor, Jazzy? Tell me, Jazzy, how you expect me to be feeling? No encores, no appreciation. Most times I feel like I singing to myself.”
“King, don’t think I don’t appreciate the songs you singing.” His words slow, heavy, like they weighing down his head, have him looking not at me but down at his hands, the fingers of one pulling carefully at the others, like a pay-master singling out and counting hundred-dollar bills.
“Jazzy, why you don’t stop beating around the bush and tell me what you have to tell me?”
And now he drop the bomb: “King, we going to have to put you on the bench.”
“You taking me off the program, Jazzy?”
“Because, King, the revolution, the rebellion, it finish,