mother said, ‘Look, I just talking my mind, you hear. You come here asking me advice.’
‘I didn’t ask for advice.’
‘You come here asking me for help, and I just trying to help you. That’s all.’
‘I don’t want your help or advice,’ Mrs Hereira said.
My mother remained calm. She said, ‘All right, then. Go back to the great man. Is my own fault, you hear. Meddling in white people business. You know what the calypso say:
Is love, love, love, alone
That cause King Edward to leave the throne.
Well, let me tell you. You not King Edward, you hear. Go back to your great love.’
Mrs Hereira would be out of the door, saying, ‘I hope I never come back here again.’
But next evening she would be back.
One day my mother said, ‘Mrs Hereira, everybody fraid that dog you have there. That thing too wild to be in a place like this.’
Mrs Hereira said, ‘It isn’t my dog. It’s Toni’s, and not even I can touch it.’
We despised Toni.
Hat said, ‘Is a good thing for a man to beat his woman every now and then, but this man does do it like exercise, man.’
And he was also despised because he couldn’t carry his liquor.
People used to find him sleeping in all sorts of places, dead drunk.
He made a few attempts to get friendly with us, making us feel uncomfortable more than anything else.
He used to say, ‘Hello there, boys.’
And that appeared to be all the conversation he could make. And when Hat and the other big men tried to talk to him, as a kindness, I felt that Toni wasn’t really listening.
He would get up and walk away from us suddenly, without a word, when somebody was in the middle of a sentence.
Hat said, ‘Is a good thing too. I feel that if I look at him long enough I go vomit. You see what a dirty thing a white skin does be sometimes? ’
And, in truth, he had a nasty skin. It was yellow and pink and white, with brown and black spots. The skin above his left eye had the raw pink look of scalded flesh.
But the strange thing I noticed was that if you just looked at Toni’s hands and saw how thin and wrinkled they were, you felt sorry for him, not disgusted.
But I looked at his hands only when I was with Hat and the rest.
I suppose Mrs Hereira saw only his hands.
Hat said, ‘I wonder how long this thing go last.’
Mrs Hereira obviously intended it to last a long time.
She and my mother became good friends after all, and I used to hear Mrs Hereira talking about her plans. She said one day she wanted some furniture, and I think she did get some in.
But most of the time she talked about Toni; and from the way she talked, anybody would believe that Toni was just an ordinary man.
She said, ‘Toni is thinking about leaving Trinidad. We could start a hotel in Barbados.’
Or, ‘As soon as Toni gets well again, we will go for a long cruise.’
And again, ‘Toni is really a disciplined man, you know. Great will-power, really. We’ll be all right when he gets his strength back.’
Toni still behaved as though he didn’t know about all these plans for himself. He refused to settle down. He got wilder and more unpleasant.
Hat said, ‘He behaving like some of those uncultured people from John John. Like he forget that latrines make for some purpose.’
And that wasn’t all. He appeared to develop an extraordinary dislike for the human race. One look at a perfect stranger was enough to start Toni cursing.
Hat said, ‘We have to do something about Toni.’
I was there the evening they beat him up.
For a long time afterwards the beating-up was on Hat’s mind.
It was a terrible thing, really. Hat and the rest of them were not angry. And Toni himself wasn’t angry. He wasn’t anything. He made no effort to return the blows. And the blows he got made no impression on him. He didn’t look frightened. He didn’t cry. He didn’t plead. He just stood up and took it.
He wasn’t being brave.
Hat said, ‘He just too damn drunk.’
In the end Hat was angry with himself. He said, ‘Is taking advantage. We shouldnta do it. The man ain’t have feelings, that’s all.’
And from the way Mrs Hereira talked, it was clear that she didn’t know what had happened.
Hat said, ‘That’s a relief, anyway.’
And through all these weeks, one question was always uppermost in our minds.