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The Iridescent Blue-Black Boy with Wings (After Márquez)

2012; Duke University Press; Volume: 16; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/07990537-1665614

0799-0537

Helmut Hölder,

Latin American Literature Studies

It was just turning light on J'ouvert when Ulysses, covered in dried mud, stumbled up the dirt path toward his grandmother's house. He wore a torn shirt and khaki-colored shorts. The dried mud made the shirt collar stand up around his neck, and the pants, tight and torn in places, bunched up at the tops of his thighs. Tired from dancing through the streets of Scarborough since four o'clock that morning, Ulysses staggered with his eyes half closed, so he could not make out what was moving and whimpering at the side of the track. He had to go up close to see that it was a small, thin boy couched low to the ground, with one of his wings caught among the barbed shrubs that lined the path.Confused by what he saw, Ulysses left the path and ran to wake Stops. Stops's given name was Lawrence, but he stuttered, and the nickname “Starts and Stops” had been shortened to Stops. The morning had fully arrived, brilliant and warm, by the time Stops and Ulysses stood together staring at the winged thing. Two wings sprouted from the boy's back. The child's body and his wings were covered with short, iridescent, blue-black hair, so that he shimmered in the new day. Each of the boy's arms ended in a three-fingered hand with black nails. Besides wings, there were buds of horns, black and spiraling outwards, on either side of his head. The eyes, black too, stared from a face with an upturned mouse-like nose and a human mouth that exposed sharp white teeth whenever the boy grimaced.“It li-like a bat. Bu-but in hu-human form,” said the stouter of the two.“You think we should free it?” Ulysses was thin and as tall as a door.Stops poked it with a stick. The boy whimpered and tried to cover himself with his free wing.“Ye-Yeah.” “Ok. You go round the other side and release the wing.” The trapped wing was free and folded next to its counterpart, and still the boy did not move. Stops squatted in front the child and offered one end of Ulysses's mud-caked shirt, then reversed a little. He did this a few times until the child got the hint, grasped the shirt, and followed Stops to Ulysses's grandmother's house. The house was built on an incline, so it rested on short concrete piles at the back and on long ones at the front. The two friends locked the boy and the muddy shirt in an old agouti cage at the narrowest space under the house.Ulysses's grandmother, Miss Pauline, lived in one of many houses scattered on a long brush- and tree-covered hill, called First Hill, which leveled to a plateau at the top. The plateau was called “the flat.” Most people in Hillsborough Village lived on a slope or on a flat. At the base of First Hill was Windward Road, the main road that connected the village to the rest of Tobago. Next to the road were clusters of shrubs and small trees, then a craggy drop to Hillsborough Bay below. The rhythm of waves hitting rocks ordered all life in the village, the very breath of its people, though those who lived there ceased to hear it soon after they were born. Among the houses on the slope lived Miss Vic, Stops's great-aunt who had reared him since his mother left to go to the shop at the base of First Hill and never returned. There were the Millers, who argued with each other from early morning till late at night. Mr. Miller took to his bed some years ago and refused to work. He and Eta Miller had four sons and three daughters. Stops and Ulysses were friends with the eldest boy, Michael. Carla was Michael's best friend. She lived on the flat but spent most of her time at the Millers' or with Miss Vic.On Mardi Gras, Ulysses, Stops, Michael, Carla, and most of the residents of First Hill went to see the carnival parade in Scarborough. Ulysses had forgotten about the captive until later that day some of the neighbors' dogs lined the side of the house, barking and snarling but never venturing under the house. That night, the two friends told their secret to Michael and Carla and the four moved the creature to an abandoned latrine, behind a stand of trees, further up the hill, almost to the flat. Once the creature was in the latrine, the four friends made a pact to not speak their full names where the child might hear and to not tell anyone about it. At first they took care to heed the terms of the pact, but as time passed they forgot.“I swear I didn't tell anybody,” Carla protested.“Me neither,” Michael shrugged, staring at the young man who had bound up First Hill intent on seeing the iridescent blue-black boy with wings. Like some, the visitor covered his mouth and ran down the hill, not really believing what he saw. Others sucked their teeth and cursed, annoyed that Ulysses and Stops would dress a small child as a bat and lock it in a latrine to fool people. Once the secret was out, Ulysses convinced two girls from Hope Village to give him a feel in exchange for a look. Stops tried the same, but allowed the girl to see the child before he could secure the illicit stroke. After school, the four friends gathered at the place outside the latrine, which was now clear of underbrush and furnished with discarded crates and large biscuit tins arranged in a circle. Here they ate and played cards, entertaining visitors to the latrine until quite late each night.In the many weeks since J'ouvert, no one bothered to feed the child. When Ulysses looked in to see why no squeaking or fluttering came from the latrine, the flashlight showed an emaciated blue-black boy with sores on his knees and torn paper-like wings. Carla opened the door and threw in mangoes and Dominican figs. The creature, his back pressed against the grey-black wooden walls nibbled at the fruit. From that day he was fed occasionally with fruit and leftovers. The child never grew fat, but the wings began to heal and the blue-black hair shone almost as brilliantly as it did that J'ouvert.People came from as far as Charlotteville and Speyside to see the winged boy. Some came during the night, and one evening after school in April, the four friends arrived to find the latrine flanked by two bamboo poles that flew bright colored cotton flags marked with convoluted signs. At the base of the flags were enamel basins heaving with fried and stewed meats, raisin rice, macaroni pie, fruit cake, sponge cake, sugar cake, and bottles of white rum.“What mas' you playing next year, Carls, mud or oil?” Ulysses asked as he picked a card.“Whatever everybody else playing,” she answered, fanning away the flies and summer heat with her free hand.“I playing pan with Hope Pan Groovers during J'ouvert …” Selwyn began.“Well you can't do both. Is one or the other. Mas' or pan,” Michael bristled from his crate.The friends, now five, since Carla's boyfriend went everywhere with them, grew silent and pretended to concentrate on their rummy hands. A cool breeze from the bay whistled up the hill, shivering the leaves of a thin Hog Plum tree that grew next to the latrine. For a moment, four of them almost heard the waves crashing against the rocks again. The winged child felt the breeze too, and a clumsy flap came from the latrine as he tried to catch the air in his taut, smooth wings.“We pla-playing de-devil mas' next year.”“I would love to see you as a devil.” Selwyn grinned and hugged Carla.Carla, a plump, dark, bottle-skinned beauty lazed in Selwyn's embrace, wondering if it would be a mistake to end the relationship with the funny, good natured butcher's son from Hope Village and claim the kind but brooding Michael she had always loved. She was wondering if Miss Vic might have some advice, when Ulysses poked her in the side.“Yes, Carls, we need soot from your mother fireside pot. We want to play real devil. Like long time.”“Ye-Yeah. Wi-with horns. An-and ch-chains.”“My father could get real bull horns from the abattoir,” Selwyn ventured.“Real horns? We could get four pairs?”“Not a problem,” Selwyn answered, fingering his chin and winking at Carla.“We have real horns. So Carls don't forget to scrape the soot from the pot,” Ulysses added.“I will collect. But if Ma find out, she will say that I preparing for Carnival and not for O-levels. Every day she saying that August almost over an—”“Yeah. Miss Pauline on my case about exams too.”“Mi-Miss Vic sa-say sh-she wa-want to see fi—”“Five subjects!” Carla, Selwyn, and Ulysses finished the sentence.“Let the man finish,” Michael chided and sucked his teeth.“Fi-five su-su-subjects.” Stops lowered his cards and Ulysses peered at the disjointed hand of spades and aces.“Yes. I was thinking we should hang less. But we could prepare for mas' on the side.” Ulysses was looking for a six of hearts. The six came down when it was Selwyn's turn. Selwyn picked it up. Ulysses turned his hopes toward a ten of hearts.“Yes. I might have to make less visits to the Hill myself,” Selwyn began then winked at Carla. “And, gin,” he added absently and stood up to stretch his tall, muscular form. “I have to go. Carls, love, walk me to the road?”The game finished, Michael stared into his loosing hand, taking only a fleeting glance at Carla as she left with Selwyn. To Carla, it seemed that Michael had grown gruff and distant, barely ever looking at her. He regarded her this way because he loved her with such magnitude that he could no longer take in the sight of her whole person and had resolved to love her piecemeal. The night of Carla and Selwyn's wedding, Michael climbed onto the Miller's roof and sobbed with both hands over his mouth. He left Tobago never having told her how he felt, but made up for it by marrying a girl from San Fernando, who was plump, dark, and bottle-skinned.It was early evening, and the blinking holiday lights from the houses cast an eerie, staccato glow among the trees and shrubs, and a thin fog hung in the air, blurring all forms on First Hill. From where they stood on the concrete porch, Miss Pauline and Miss Vic could not see the St. George's Christian Soldiers stationed at the base of the hill. The church group had stopped singing Christmas hymns and sent up the junior pastor, Brother Bernard Campbell, a young, handsome, charismatic man for whom the church was raising money to send to the seminary at Oxford. At Oxford, Bernard fell in love with an English woman and became a doctor. He never returned to Tobago and he never returned the church's money.Bernard seemed to materialize at the base of the steps.“Oh, it's Little Pastor,” Miss Pauline called out. She was dressed in a pale-blue organdy dress, opaque stockings, and white plastic house slippers.“Where the rest of the delegation?” Miss Vic asked. She was also in her Sunday clothes, and pink marabou-trimmed house slippers. She stood with her hands on her hips and waited for an answer while Bernard took the steps two by two. At the top of the stairs he felt giddy, as he could see the white frothy tips of waves hitting the rocks in the bay below. If he kept his eye to the bay or to the sky, it seemed as if he stood alone at the top of the world. He wiped his feet on the fiber mat, then folded himself into the ornate wrought-iron chair he was offered. The chair pressed its curly shapes into his back and cut off the circulation in one of his legs.“Um … some of them don't want to come up—” Bernard began.“The track too muddy?” Miss Pauline interrupted. “We throw sand on it just this morning. I could get my grandson to help Sister Graham and Brother Cecil up the hill.”Bernard's eyes were grim and his jaw fixed. “No. It's not the mud …”“What then?” Miss Vic asked.Bernard explained that there were rumors that Ulysses housed and fed a devil. The children, nieces, and nephews of many church members corroborated the story. Even the pastor's daughter, who had died for a few minutes and had had a vision of angels, said that Ulysses was in league with Lucifer. The delegation could not come up the hill until they were sure that the rumor was not true. Before Miss Pauline could answer, Miss Vic stood in front of Bernard with her hands on her hips. In her pink dress and marabou-trimmed slippers she became an Ibis about to pluck something off of his head.“If a devil was on this hill, Pastor would definitely be able to sense it. Pastor feeling the presence of evil?” Her voice tried to escape the concrete porch but dissolved in the damp night air.“Well … I don't know, Miss Vic.”“Well, go and ask him.”Pastor could not say that he felt the presence of evil. The elders of the church, impaired by desire for Miss Pauline's fruit cake, closed their eyes and placed their hands on their chests and reported that the Deceiver was nowhere to be found. On his third trip up the hill, Little Pastor was at the rear of the delegation, supporting Sister Graham, who at that moment decided to give all her life savings to fund his theological education at Oxford.The last of the prayer group left close to midnight. When Miss Pauline and Miss Vic had passed the stand of trees, further up the hill, almost to the flat, they found that the rains, in full gear since September, had thickened the grass, muddied the ground, and raised the level of underground filth such that every other breath of the wind carried a fecal odor. The air at the circle of crates and tins was thick with mosquitoes that bred in the covered pit of the latrine and irritated everyone on the hill. The two women crossed the grassy threshold and held their hurricane lanterns up to the dilapidated privy. Miss Pauline fumbled with the wooden latch, not really believing the tale of her church members. Miss Vic placed her hand over Pauline's and mouthed the word no. They both drew back and Miss Vic threw a stone against the door. The powdery thud was answered by a faint flutter at which Vic leaned her head and looked at her friend as if to ask, you see? The sound had startled the iridescent blue-black boy, who perched on the wooden seat, ate mosquitoes, avoided the water dripping through the roof, and grew.Miss Pauline was not as angry as Ulysses thought she would be. She did not wake to see him off to school for a few days, and as she did her housework, she muttered something about a daughter who had started another family in Trinidad and never looked back. The day she reached the limits of her vexation, Miss Pauline interrupted Ulysses one evening while he was studying with Stops and asked that he and his friends clean up around the latrine for the holiday season. Together, the four friends trimmed the grass and stripped the latrine of its pennants, leaving only the offerings of food out of fear that they were part of some fiendish contrivance between a supplicant and their winged captive. The food had turned to a black glue-like mass that stuck to the enamel basins, and the rains had washed the labels from the bottles of rum. On Boxing Day, before anyone else awoke, Miss Pauline, with a broom made of stripped coconut fronds, swept the alcohol and stained utensils into a large plastic bag. She reasoned that not even the devil would want such food.On the Saturday before J'ouvert, moonlight whitewashed the dried grass and the tree leaves so that Stops could easily discern his way along the parched, potholed earth to the latrine. He walked slowly, trying not to perspire in the hot, dry air. But the armpits of his dress shirt were soon wet, so he put down the bag of leftovers, took off the shirt, and marched on in cotton vest and slacks. When he got to the circle of crates and tins, the latrine was shaking. The captive inside squealed as it banged against the walls. Stops could not decide whether to hold the latrine still to stop it from breaking apart or to run to his friends, who were at the base of the hill waiting to catch a taxi into Scarborough. He did the latter.“What we should do?” Carla asked, worried that Selwyn was waiting by himself outside Club Bluefly in Scarborough. They backed one step away each time the walls of the latrine shook.“We should open it, right?” Ulysses whispered. “It look big. When was the last time anybody see it?”Michael strode forward, opened the door, and scampered away.The latrine got still.With his head down, the winged blue-black boy stumbled from the latrine, crunching the dried grass as he went. The wings were folded like tents on his back and each blue-black hair seemed tipped in silver as it caught the moonlight. When the boy raised his head, his horns, obsidian black, were as long and as thick as a child's arm and spiraled to two glassy points. He stopped, jet-colored eyes staring, and seemed to regard his captors. A rush of stale air hit the four in their faces as the boy's wings extended to their full span, at least five feet each, then folded again. Stops broke the ranks and held out the bag of leftovers. The boy, now almost as tall as Ulysses, took the bag, leaned his head expectantly to one side, took out a handful of food, and started eating. When he was done, he flapped his wings a few times, lifting off the ground only a few inches. Finally he settled atop a wooden crate, folded his wings, and scratched his belly.Ulysses was still mixing the soot with lard when the dark form flew from the latrine roof, disappearing into the darkness above. It was just before three o' clock on J'ouvert. Carla, dressed in shorts and a tattered T-shirt, was helping Stops attach his bull's horns. The horns, smooth and gray, still had the bitter, acrid odor of singed bull's hair and flesh. Michael, in horns and a length of chain around his waist, danced and admired his rotund shadow in the light of the kerosene lamp. When the lard mixture was ready, the four smeared themselves all over till they were a gleaming blackest black. With cords tied around their chests and waists, they attached burlap wings blackened with paint. Ulysses carried a heavy glass bottle filled with water and a metal spoon. Carla gave everyone a whistle before they extinguished the lanterns and made their way carefully down the hill to the main road, every now and then glancing up at the indigo sky.The four friends met the J'ouvert procession on Windward Road, at John Dial Village, going toward Scarborough. The procession was made up of revelers from most of the low-land villages—Hope, Mount St. George, Goodwood, Pembroke. Hope Pan Groovers Steel Orchestra, racked like cutlery on a Bedford truck, led the way, playing the year's calypso hits. Sometimes Carla caught a glimpse of Selwyn playing the nine bass, and shadow danced with him. Each time her hips churned, he laughed and hit the pans harder. To support the steel band, revelers' voices were layered on whistles blown in unison. The shrill call of the whistles rubbed up against the crystalline clatter of glass bottles struck with spoons and tire rims played with lengths of iron. Housewives, husbands, teachers, doctors, lawyers, and children were baptized in mud, paint, crude oil, and soot to become the revelers that make up the J'ouvert. Red, black, and blue vampire bats shook their fabric wings in time with the steel band music. Jab molassie writhed on the paved streets, drinking from enameled chamber pots. A family of gorillas costumed in shredded burlap, scratched and sniffed each other. Ulysses's band from last year, mischievous teens covered in Hope River mud, filled the middle of the procession. And devils of all colors dragged chains and carried pitchforks and empty tins to force onlookers in Scarborough to pay de devil or be smeared with paint, mud, worse.Just before dawn, the village bands merged in Scarborough, peopling the capital with strange folk. Sometimes two steel band trucks ended up next to each other and their music had an altercation in the space between them. Onlookers pointed, danced, and avoided mud-covered masqueraders who searched the crowd, hoping to rub their corrupt skins onto their well-dressed friends.Here and there the street lamps revealed families of winged devils. But when the four friends went to have a closer look, they discovered the cords that held the beings together. It was Stops who saw a shadow plummet out of the sky into the City Square, just behind a crowd of spectators. He darted in its direction. Ulysses followed him. They both halted at a swath of shadow just beyond the streetlights. Beneath the music, Stops and Ulysses could make out the familiar sound of wings rubbing against each other. When the young men squinted, the lamplight settled in places, revealing an assembly of shimmering blue-black persons with thick spiraling horns and wings folded on their backs. Stops stepped one foot within the lamplight and the iridescent contours turned its attention on him. When he stepped further in, the gleaming outline retreated, and a determined wind pelted the dried earth, its famished grass, and paper wrappers into the young men's faces. Shielding their eyes from the debris, Ulysses and Stops ran toward the winged shapes, only to end up under a bright morning, behind a group of people taking a break from the parade.“Did you see that?” Ulysses asked a stout man who, from the neck down, was dressed in a gorilla costume of blackened, shredded burlap. The gorilla's head lay on the ground, looking vacantly at the sky.“See what? This is carnival. Plenty to see.”“A big group. Look like … blue devils. Passing right here.”“I see plenty devil today. Devils all over town. ”“You didn't feel a heavy breeze?”“That was just a rude sea breeze coming off the bay to dance with we.” He took up the gorilla's head and went back to the parade.Carla and Michael found Stops and Ulysses staring up at the sky, so clear it was like a blue bed sheet had been thrown over the world.“It gone right?” Michael asked, looking up at the sky.“Right?” Carla turned her gaze upward.They surveyed the sky till their eyes stung. Then one by one each of them adjusted their horns, tightened the cords that secured their wings, and danced toward the street.