The Bigger Light Read online

  Acclaim for

  AUSTIN CLARKE

  “Clarke makes West Indian speech into an art form of music and poetry … tremendously versatile in what it expresses and exhilarating to read.”

  The Globe and Mail

  “Mr. Clarke is masterful.”

  The New York Times

  “Austin Clarke [is] one of the most talented novelists at work in the English language today.… His fiction is unique, surprising, comfortable until the moment when it becomes uncomfortable. Then you realize you have learned something new that you didn’t want to know — and it’s essential knowledge. And so on you go, alternately congratulating and cursing Austin Clarke.”

  Norman Mailer

  “Uncommonly talented, Clarke sees deeply, and transmits his visions and perceptions so skilfully that reading him is an adventure.”

  Publishers Weekly

  “Brilliant is the word for Austin Clarke’s depiction of his highly ebullient characters.”

  Canadian Forum

  “Clarke is magnificent in transferring to print the music, the poetry, the complete aptness of West Indian dialogue. It is comic, it is tragic, it is all shades in between. And as prose it is as near poetry as prose can become.”

  Charlotte Observer

  Books by

  AUSTIN CLARKE

  Fiction

  The Origin of Waves

  There are No Elders

  In This City

  Proud Empires

  Nine Men Who Laughed

  When Women Rule

  The Prime Minister

  The Bigger Light

  Storm of Fortune

  When He Was Free and Young

  and He Used to Wear Silks

  The Meeting Point

  Amongst Thistles and Thorns

  The Survivors of the Crossing

  Non-fiction

  Pigtails n’ Breadfruit

  A Passage Back Home

  Public Enemies

  Growing Up Stupid Under the Union Jack

  Selected Writings

  The Austin Clarke Reader

  Copyright © 1975 by Austin C. Clarke

  All rights reserved under International and Pan American Copyright Conventions. Published in Canada by Vintage Canada, a division of Random House of Canada Limited, in 1998. Originally published simultaneously in Canada and the US by Little Brown & Co. Ltd. in 1975. Distributed by Random House of Canada Limited.

  The author is grateful to Segel, Rubenstein & Gordon for permission to reprint lyrics from “Both Sides Now” by Joni Mitchell. © 1967 Siquomb Corp. All rights reserved.

  Every effort has been made to contact copyright holders; in the event of an inadvertent omission or error, please notify the publisher.

  Canadian Cataloging in Publication Data

  Clarke, Austin, 1934–

  The bigger light.

  Third book in the Toronto trilogy.

  eISBN: 978-0-307-36426-5

  I. Title II. Title: Toronto trilogy

  PS8505.L38B53 1998 C813’.54 C98-931268-2

  PR9199.3.C52B53 1998

  v3.1

  For Frank Collymore

  Contents

  Cover

  Other Books by This Author

  Title Page

  Copyright

  Dedication

  1: Ice Cream Castles in the Air

  2: “Donkey First, Second and Third!”

  3: The Bigger Light

  About the Author

  1

  ICE CREAM CASTLES IN THE AIR

  Boysie began writing letters to the newspapers to voice his opinion on matters such as pollution, urban development and high-rise apartments in the downtown area where he lived. He liked the downtown area, and had lived there all his life in this country. These were matters which affected him, he said, more than the problems of immigration which affected some other immigrants he knew. He chose not to waste his time writing letters to the editor about the racial problem in the city, or about police brutality. He was a successful immigrant. And he maintained that he had not experienced discrimination and prejudice, and that the police had never stopped his panel truck to harass him, when he came home late at night from his janitorial services in the business district of the city.

  Dots, his wife, was very proud of his sudden expression of commitment. She clipped each letter that he had written from the Letters to the Editor page, and pasted them into the photograph album, at the front. When friends came to visit, they had to look at Boysie’s very wordy and very formal letters before they saw the photographs of other successful West Indian immigrants, relaxing in various poses of exuberance and fat, shining with contentment and accumulation.

  There was one letter which Dots favoured above all the others. Boysie had written twenty-nine letters to the editor, but only three had been published. This letter, which Dots would show last, was framed onto the page of the album by a border of black satin ribbon. Boysie had written it to the paper on the event of Henry’s death. It was a beautiful letter for the occasion that had so tragically struck him. Henry was his only friend. And it was a formal letter. In it Boysie had tried to compare Henry White, his best friend in this country, who had begun writing poetry just before his death, with another great poet who had died in the prime of his youth. He had recently heard about Keats and he knew that this new knowledge was significant. “I am going to compare Henry to Keats.” Although this man was born in a small island Barbados, far and distant from this country of Canada, yet Mr. Henry White the late demised poet, is like that other poet borned on an island, Mr. Keats, who loved nature and flowers the same as Mr. White. This was the simple reference to John Keats, although Boysie did not know his Christian name was John. Dots thought the letter was magnificent. “You write that just like poetry itself, Boysie,” she told him, when the letter was published. And Boysie had sat beside her, in a rare moment of such closeness, for her to read the letter; and especially he wanted her to see how his name looked in print. This was the first letter he had had published; and the pride of seeing his name printed in the largest newspaper in the country made him feel powerful, and made him think that for generations to come, anybody who wanted to could see his name “in the pages of annals,” as he boasted to Dots who didn’t see it this way; and that this was only the first of many letters he intended to write to the editor.

  Henry’s death, and Boysie’s memory of it, and the meaning he attached to it, was nevertheless soon forgotten; and writing letters to the editor about other civic matters soon became the biggest interest in his life. He did, for the length of sincere and proscribed mourning, think very much about Henry, and what his sudden death meant to him: that a man so young and not married a year yet to Agatha, the rich Jewish girl, should be dead without having left a scratch on the surface of life. And for the first few months, with Henry gone, it was like having been abandoned on an unknown lonely road, like having the pleasant, cheerful side of his nature ripped away from him. Boysie went into mourning in a way which found him depressed, and silent, and very difficult to live with. He began to hate Agatha, with the same force as his wife Dots had hated her, when she screamed and refused to believe, as the newspapers had reported, that Henry had committed suicide. “Suicide? Black people don’t commit suicide in this country! They mean Agatha murdered him! That is the suicide they mean!”

  Boysie hated, as Dots hated. And when the energy of his body was spent through the hatred, and his depression was at its lowest, he forgot all about Agatha. She had tried to keep the relationship between them going, after her husband’s death; but neither Boysie nor Dots, Bernice, their friend, nor Estelle, Bernice’s sister, could, with Henry gone, any longer accept Agatha’s friendship or her presence in their compan
y. And so, Agatha drifted out of their lives, in the same way as she had entered; and they did not even mention her name, not even to group her in a despising remark, amongst white people they had known. She was dead to them. In the same way that Henry was dead.

  Dots adjusted to her life as a nurse’s aide at the Doctor’s Hospital on Brunswick Avenue; and it continued in a routine of long hours with overtime that was not paid for, and which was helped from its iron routine of eight in the morning until five in the afternoon, six days a week with one day off, only through her fortnightly trips to the bank, where she deposited one hundred and sixty-five dollars out of her paycheque, and kept back exactly thirty dollars for pocket money and streetcar fare. Boysie was earning quite a lot from his office-cleaning contracts. And he was thinking of buying a house in the suburbs. “Perhaps, up in Willowdale, ’cause they have too much o’ we black people living in Scarborough and Don Mills already, man!”, Dots used as her motive for moving. The house was in her plans for the near future, as it had always been in her mind from the day she landed in Canada. And so, with Dots occupied with work, planning her material success, and conscious always that living on Ontario Street in the low-rental housing district was making it impossible for her to hold her head as high as she would have liked, Boysie was left to himself all day long in the apartment, until it was time for him to go to work, at four in the afternoon. Dots’s ambitiousness kept her busy all the time, and it was only on weekends, on Sundays usually, when she was off duty, that she got a chance to look Boysie in the eye. And every other weekend, they made love. It was the only time they each had, from their respective races after material success, to lie flat on their backs without having to watch the hour hand of the black-faced electric clock on the dresser beside the bed.

  Boysie would spend the mornings reading the three Toronto newspapers, and thinking of which article he could reply to; and to which letter to the editor he should add his comments, or contradict outright. It gave him much pleasure to sit and sip his tea which he drank with lots of homogenized milk in it, and read his newspapers, and reflect on the state of the world. And what gave him the most pleasure was finding “a grammar mistake” in The Globe and Mail which was supposed to be the country’s leading newspaper.

  He did not believe that he had such mental resources in himself, this fastidiousness with grammar and spelling. For he had come to this country as an ordinary man, an ordinary immigrant from Barbados, an ordinarily educated man, who was capable only of understanding the road signs and other printed instructions which he saw around him, and not much more. “Man, Henry,” he had said, long ago, “just to live in this blasted country, you don’t know that a man should have at least a grade eight version of reading and writing! I had only a grade three version. But I does listen and learn and think for myself.”

  Boysie was now, therefore, very alone. And he would feel it most heavily in the mornings about ten o’clock, when everybody he knew would be at work. The only persons he would see from his picture window, high up in the apartment building, were old men, too feeble to work, and old women walking cautiously over the ice to go to the corner store, or to the Liquor Store to buy, perhaps, a half bottle of liquor to keep the cold from drying their bones, and, perhaps, to bring back memories to crowd their own loneliness.

  He was always interested to see these old ladies, with their slow patient walk on the treacherous sidewalks which were not kept too clean in this poor district of the city, moving in pain and in leisure, assured through practised lack of speed that the Liquor Store would be there, no matter how long it took them to walk the distance of a half block. And from his height above them, he could see the winter wind striking them like uncertain sailboats with black sails; perhaps a black hat would fall off the head and expose the whitened hair, or the wind would flap the shopping bag against their defenceless bodies, like a sail let loose. But they would always walk on, and always would they come back, holding the small brown-wrapped bottle in their hand like a child trying to steady a breathing slippery fish. And if this view of mornings of boredom did not satisfy him, he would come down in the elevator and watch them from their own level of their movements, and see and feel the wind ruffle their enthusiasm and their determination. He could see their reddened cheeks, coloured by clotted circulation, or by rouge, and their thin legs that looked as if they had a layer of grey scales covering them, to make them bigger in a strange way, so that it looked to him as if the bigness was transparent white silk fat, and the leg itself just bone. He saw their condition from their own level, and he thought more deeply about his own boredom, seven floors above their heads.

  And back up into his quiet apartment, seven floors above the “smallened” old ladies, as he called them, Boysie would stand at one of the four large windows and look out into the falling snow, or the rain sprinkling down like steel common-pins, and think of what to do, and where to go. He particularly liked to look out at the window which showed him the people coming up out of the subway at Sherbourne Street, and who seemed determined about some time and certain of some place.

  It was at this window one morning that he first saw the woman. She was dressed in a long brown winter coat that was down to about six inches from her ankles, and she was wearing a white beret which was drooped at the back of her head. From that distance he could not tell whether her boots were black or brown. But one morning he spotted her coming out of the subway, and he ran out of the apartment, up the short street and onto the main road, in time to meet her at the corner. Her boots were brown. He did not see her face, because he did not look into her face, and he did not wish to confront her with any suggestion of his interest. It was enough for him to match his morning tea with the colour and arrival of her boots at the head of the subway steps, and follow her through traffic and people, transparently through trees and trucks and houses, until she emerged again, walking like a brown saint upright, alone as he was alone, and disappear eventually among the untrimmed trees that had come through the summer like long hair, filled now with falling snow. He saw this woman from this distance and from this height, and he grew to know her. And as she came and went, with the mornings of idleness except for the writing of letters to the editor, Boysie grew to like her.

  He measured her arrival at the head of the subway steps with the drinking of his tea; and when he measured time and coincidence more, he got to know that she reached that point between five and fifteen minutes to eleven. His day revolved around the sight of this woman, whose face he had dared not to look into; and he would do nothing significant, could in fact do nothing significant, as it turned out, until he had seen her, for that day. She became what morning tea is to some people: the motivation to begin the day. She came into his day and became many different persons, men and women; and he lived among them, among her; and sometimes, when he was thinking about Henry, and the thoughts became too heavy for him with their burden of saddened reminiscences, he would populate his quiet apartment with her presence. And in his mind see many versions of her. And soon, he began to talk to her. He promised that one morning he would go out and really talk to her, ask her her name, where she was going, where she had to go each morning, Monday right through Sunday, at that same time.

  Once he mentioned her to Dots, and Dots went on cooking breakfast (as Boysie talked and watched the woman walking along the street), and when he was finished talking, Dots said, “She’s probably a whore, reaching back home, Boysie, boy. Don’t worry yourself about her.” And right there, Boysie began to look at Dots with a certain disapproval: for she had not even tried to understand what he was talking about, to be sensitive enough to be concerned. It was left to him, in his creative confusion, to puzzle about the woman and to be frustrated by the mystery of the woman’s punctuality. It hurt Boysie very much and he wondered how his wife could be so cruel to the creation of his observations. How then did she really regard the letters he was writing to the editor? How would she regard any other venture he should suggest? Boysie looked at his
wife and in his heart he crossed her out, erased her from his mind, and in her place, he put the woman with the brown coat and the white sloppy hat. And it was only then, only when his imagination had filled in all the details of this transposition, could he sit down and eat his breakfast that morning with Dots. He promised never again to mention the woman to his wife.

  Boysie began to see things that he hated in his wife. Or so he told himself. He had lived with them for six years, as he had lived with her; and they had never been so important; he had never been very trusting nor confiding in her, nor she in him; and they had lived in their pragmatic cocoon of marriage, while at the same time going their own ways, and thinking their own thoughts. For six years it seemed, for him, she did not really exist. He had not even bothered to find out the colour of her underwear, had not even been concerned that she may be unfaithful to him, “horning him”: he had not given her this amount of feminine individuality. But now, the neglect of not having thought about these things became serious, and like an electric shock of sudden comprehension of an obvious fact, he faced his wife and tried to understand her. He was wise enough to feel, at least, that he might be too late. And this realization rendered him almost numb. He accused her for her infertility: every West Indian woman he knew had at least two children. He had the money now for bringing up his children, but his wife could have none. “This woman can’t even breed,” he said to himself, “and she doesn’t even come! I must be cursed now, for my past, or something. Christ! All she is interested in is her bank account and a down payment for a house in the suburbs. What the hell do I have for my old age when I can’t screw anymore? A house?” He wondered how he would live in a childless house, with a wrinkled sterile woman?

  He would look back over his life with her, from the very beginning when she supported him in every essential and material way, from buying his cigarettes to the prophylactics they used. He saw her in those years and he tried to know her now, in the frame of the picture window that looked northwards to the subway station. The perspective gave him the possibility of travel, of arrival and of departure. It showed him nothing about his wife. Perhaps he should disappear.… He saw a woman who was dull, perhaps had always been dull; a woman getting old through fat, and quarrelsome through wanting to own a large four-bedroom house in a Toronto suburb. And the only thing he could do to quell the upsurge of hatred that his thoughts forced upon him was to replace her with the woman in the brown winter coat. He knew, however, that wanting to replace her was the same as wanting to disappear.