Portal de Periódicos da CAPES

Coconut

2016; Duke University Press; Volume: 20; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1215/07990537-3626668

0799-0537

Gabrielle Bellot,

Coconut Research and Applications

IThe girl the three boys are watching emerge from the river casts a long shadow, noon or night. She has not seen them—and they know she has not seen them. She casts a shadow and a scent, a musk, a magnetism, and the boys who are watching her from the bushes by the road and have watched her on the cracked steps of their homes and in their panting dreams feel something they cannot put into words, and it is a feeling like chopping a coconut with an old cutlass: hitting it, harder, harder, shaking it and hearing the water inside, smelling the sweet as you chop it and feeling the rough of the coconut hairs that have splintered along the edges but the cuts are not clean and the cutlass is shit, thack, thack, thack, thack, thack, oh, how long will it take.The girl has short curls of brown-streaked black hair and wiry arms and the boys think she dresses almost like them and they do not see in her eyes the bashful sweetness they have seen in other girls but instead they see dark and no more, ocean depths, nights without lantern or lighthouse, shipwrecking eyes, these, eyes that could siren the sirens, though they have not studied the Greeks in secondary school or forgot it if they have and see her Dark simply as not-Light. Too much like a boy, they think, and what they can articulate is what they have heard in vague snatches about what makes this girl different from the others, a girl who needs their help. This girl who casts the shadow is like Sun Tzu's army, rapid as the wind and compact as the forest; they cannot understand her, why she is so silent and shielding, almost a young man this one except for the hypnotic sway of her hips, ass like a pendulum when she walks, the rhythm, thack thack thack.What is wrong with this one, they think.They think there is a beautiful girl locked away inside her like a princess forsaken in a castle in a desert. They think they must free that girl, bring her to the surface. They believe her Rapunzel has been told, Do not let down your locks. This is why they have heard this girl does not look at boys the way they look at her; her true girl, the one who will look at boys the way a girl should, the boys know, is as sad and distant as the figurehead of a sunken ship, her screams and sighs drowned.They dream of pinning the girl's imprisoning body down and bringing the incarcerated inner girl to the surface and making the outer girl smile and cry out from the pleasure she has undoubtedly refused up until they show her the keys of Nature and God. The boys see her lost in a desert, chasing after mirages and demons of sand, a beauty crumbling away under a curse. They will flood that dry earth, as they know God desires they do, and both sides will rejoice. It is not, for them, fun what she does, a show to watch at the other boys' parties when one girl kisses another because they have seen drunk American girls do it on YouTube videos. The boys know they must free the imprisoned one before she withers away.IIThe girl knows that she is being watched but not that she is being watched by these boys in particular. She knows the length of her shadow. She moves by the light of evening, vespertine thief, does what she does in locked rooms and soundproof basements with boilers and once by this same river when their bodies were wet and glistening like dark and mango-yellow nymphs and she took charge and pressed the other girl against the rock and held her hands by the wrists and kissed her but that was once, never again, the forest and the river and even the deserted cane fields hold spies, but god was it sweet, love on the river by the smooth periwinkle-starred rocks and gush of the foam-sudded water. The other girls have told her not to contact them, not to speak their names to others, or they will lie and their brothers or their boyfriends will deal with her. She scoffed at this the first two times but she had cried in her room, and, later, the silence grew terrifying. She has known more bodies than she thought she would in an island that does not acknowledge her existence beyond the shadows and perhaps in the mist in the mountains other women are said to travel to after shedding their skin at sundown like balls of fire. Three times at mass on Sunday morning she heard Father Mark from Canada say she was a demon, breaking the stone laws of the Lord. She laughs at those stories, the superstitious fools. But after she laughs, she looks at the palm of her hand and at her reflection in the soap-caked mirror in the bathroom, and she feels a moment of uncertainty about laughing. And she does not laugh at the dream of what she knows some boys must dream of, does not laugh at the eyes or noses she knows are on her trail like half-competent, savage detectives. Her mother does not say anything; she is sure her father does not know, or he would have taken off his belt.She falls back into the river at a sound. An agouti running through the leaves.“I need to stop,” she says aloud, as has become her habit, “thinking someone is watching.”She looks for the pale blue towel she had rested on the rocks on the shore; for a moment, her heart drums when all she finds is an empty stone flanked by the red-purple shells and pincers of dead crabs, and then she sees she was looking at the wrong stone. The towel is where she left it. Be easy, she thinks, though she does not say this aloud, and then she begins to hum the new dancehall song she has been listening to for the last four days, softly at first and then loud enough to stir the leaves. She hears nothing but her voice, nothing but the endless gurgle of the river, yet even so the towel drops from her hands and as she bends to pick it up she steps with a grimace on a dry piece of crab shell. She cannot maintain her balance to clean the shell off the sole of her foot; she falls, but instead of cursing she lets out a laugh and peers up the dirt trail flecked with elephant grass that leads from the road to the river. Girl, if people were watching you for real, they would think you were crazy. She brushes off her feet, her behind, her hands, and then she wraps the towel around her, too tightly at first, and she begins to climb up the trail. The girl hums to drown out the other sounds around her.She is almost an adult and her heart skips at the scrape of the bougainvillea on her room's window when the wind picks up. She sits up in bed on those nights, listening, hand raised, back of her head pounding, eyes heavy with insomnia. It is worse on the nights when the great storms come; then, the curtains of rain erase all sound, and she imagines footfalls all around her. She thinks sometimes of the antiburglar club that looks like a caveman's weapon, which her mother keeps beneath her bed; at other times, she thinks of the long fish knife with its serrated edges in the kitchen. The pain that would come scares her, yet she knows she cannot live like this, tiptoeing through the too-vast halls of the night. Sometimes, she breaks down and prays and always repeats, You will pass your CXCs, get a scholarship, and leave this island, the deceptive calm of the Caribbean Sea, behind. For good. It will all work out. Just keep quiet until it's all over.IIIThe boys by the river believe they can hear the imprisoned girl screaming from inside her, louder and louder, now, insistent as the sweet water trapped inside a coconut.The boys grin and swallow and bite their dry lips as the girl comes up the trail in her towel, humming her song.