Bivouac Read online

  Standing there in the cool air outside the university hospital, Ferron imagined it, imagined the woman at the clinic, imagined the men, imagined the stupidity, imagined his father’s unnecessary death. He trembled uncontrollably.

  The doctor friend stared at him. “You not looking good, man. You sure you don’ wan’ me check you out?” he asked.

  “No, I am alright. I am alright.” Ferron started to walk away in a daze.

  “You need a lift?” the doctor asked.

  “No, I alright. Have it arranged. Look, I will see you.” He walked with some purpose along the corridor until he was out of sight of the friend. Then he sat on a bench and started to cry. Whether it was the pain in his stomach or the story of his father’s dying, he cried. This was something he could not dare tell anybody. The story had a quality of truth to it: a tragic, meaningless, lonely death. Ferron could tell no one about it. He was too tired to find out more, and what would he learn? That the woman killed him? That the nurse and those men could have saved his life, but because they were stupid, because of assumptions, they killed him? And who would care? It wouldn’t bring the old man back. He sat there and stared into the night.

  A derelict dragged himself along the corridor slowly, staring at Ferron with a smile. Ferron got up and moved away. He had sweated until his shirt was wet. He walked quickly before the man could say anything.

  * * *

  He thought of Delores, wondering what she was thinking with the men dead. That evening she called. She had to see him.

  “You saw the paper?” she asked.

  “Yes,” he said.

  “Well . . . ?” Her voice had softened.

  “Well, what? They are dead. They should be dead,” he said.

  “Can you come over, then?” It was the old Delores, the old playfully desperate tone. But there was something empty, strained about it. As if she were trying to remember a feeling. “They won’t be here. Daddy left for Miami this morning. Mummy decided to . . . go out.”

  Gilda was screwing around again. It had been almost six months since her last fling. Ferron chuckled. Delores sighed.

  “Well, you know how it is with Gilda. And Nestor seems happier than ever when she starts to stray. I must be a complete neurotic, you know.” She waited for a few seconds. She was more relaxed. “Coming?”

  “You sure it’s alright?”

  “I wouldn’ ask if I wasn’t sure,” she said sharply. Then half pleading, “I am not sure about why, nor can I tell you what is going on in my head. It is probably something sick, but I know I want to see you. I want to talk.”

  “I’ll see if I can get the car.” He hoped he did not sound hesitant.

  “I can pick you up,” she said quickly.

  “No, no. I think I can get it . . .” He wanted to maintain some control. “Give me an hour.”

  “An hour?” she said.

  “Soon come, alright?”

  He drove the long way to her home. The house was in darkness, but the lawn around the house was lit up. The guard let him in.

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  The level of noise continues. Surely this is the most critical thing here. How can anyone concentrate, think, create in this din? Surely it would be better to divide up the office—there is no heat problem as the place is air-conditioned. Some old-time editor who could not live without the perpetual clicking of typewriters must have insisted on it. My guess is that it accounts for 50% of the faults of this paper. Anyway, I am clicking away in that noise, a futile task. Talk and noise and then the beautiful sound of an old car engine. It is the worst kind of punishment but I must endure it for my family. I must insist on not taking home work from the office. I was able to do this at the Institute even though it meant working long hours. I had better get those figures right. From 7:30 to 5:30 with fifteen minutes for a snack. That is ten hours. My work at home was not Institute work. In later days I worked about six hours, on average, at my desk. I must bring down some books to appear to prepare for the seminars.

  There are some others. A lawyer, young and thin; she has no breasts to speak of, but carries something off with her height; she is either cowed by the editor or is extremely conceited. I suspect that she is not a good lawyer but is probably paid an enormous fee to decide whether or not the paper should print. The editor says that there are about twenty libel cases against the paper presently going to court. She must be a UWI lawyer because she speaks English only under stress. Another Trinidadian, married to a Jamaican, who is really the assistant to the editor. She is bright, a UWI graduate, but is losing her charm as the pressure keeps up. She is young and can quite easily get into the money in PR. (Action Station should be boarded off.) She is part of the wider divida et impera played against the editors.

  The cartoonist is evidently employed on a salaried basis; at any rate, he lives and has his being in the editorial office. He must have run out of ideas (did he really have any?) because what he does now is read the papers and pick up simplistic things that the poor Merchant Party man might say or think. These, for some reason that is not immediately clear, are printed among the Wants ads. Occasionally he is on the opinion page, but it is certainly not his opinion that is being illustrated. He is a Trinidad white. After I had been in the office for more than a month (precisely after Lowe’s piece came out), he came over to me and suggested that Lowe should have been “pictured” with a pipe. He implied that the people (all black) at the Star desk had no imagination. I take it that he knew Lowe from the old days, when Lowe was an artist mostly, painting all those patriotic images and hanging around the Phillips. Yes, he smoked a pipe then. Perhaps it was a little pretentious, but I don’t recall it that way. I smoked a pipe too. Everyone did.

  A number of columnists come in from time to time. An Englishman, very unattractive-looking—must be Francis Aston. He comes in every day, I think. The editor wanted to offer him a regular job but the question is—where did he come from, is he part of an agency? His writing is most emphatically pro-Merchant Party and anti-PDP, anti-socialist, and anti-communist. The Czech Jew who writes the art column seems to sneak in, whisper to the people concerned with his business, and tries to spy at what I am writing. He has concealed his European name under a pseudonym that is ridiculously English. There is, of course, no improvement in the column: one feels that fine art is disappearing (because of its attachment to Hanson) and crafts are appearing because of the yoking to Sabel. He is a little confused by this maneuver. Cedric Lindo comes in almost every day as he writes so many columns. He does not, of course, recognize me although he might be made to remember, when he was the stringer for the BBC in the midfifties, that I wrote some pieces for him (with my Oxford accent) and that he took over book reviewing for this paper from me in 1955. Roderick Ashman decided to have the duo of Charley Miller and Paul Green, who then corrupted the taste of this country for twenty years at least. Miller also writes “Wormwood” in the Sunday Gleaner, writes editorials in the Star and a column “John Bull” in the Gleaner. He is a most inelegant writer, but no one has had the nerve or the taste to tell him so. The editor wants (should I say wanted) to take over the property, at least read the material selected for the Sunday Gleaner and run a competition, etc., but it would need to be done over Miller’s dead body and he looks very healthy: he represents the Pen Club. Anyway, the editor has not mentioned the matter to me again. I agree with Marcus, who has shown a remarkable capacity to survive while everyone else is falling away. It is one occasion where his “tastes” may have helped him to cultivate a sophisticated privacy and guardedness that has allowed him to survive in a hostile world. It must be instructive and sharpening to know that a ten-year sentence awaits you every time you embrace a lover. Still, he abandoned me. But then, we never embraced. I am being a bit cruel. His hunger for self-preservation and his callous ability to allow the bus to roll over me has nothing to do with his tastes. It has to do with being brilliant, being black, and living in this country. He says he thinks
that the Sunday Magazine should be an “arts magazine” edited by me. He remains quite generous. It is an art to be kind to the hopeless. Nice idea, but this would mean putting the present features editor (who is really quite sweet and fairly competent) out of a job. Since I am not going to be paid specially for these additional jobs (should I have to stay here), I would rather not see that happen.

  The famous columnist Randy Jenkins comes in, usually in the early evening, and makes himself heard. He actually fits into the office like a newspaperman. Bill James comes in from time to time (on one occasion he did not greet me but I suspect he thought I did not want to be disturbed and not that I might just spite him and do The Natives Are Black). He has been writing for the paper for more than twenty years but is clearly aloof from everybody except the editor.

  The man from the evening paper, who again must have thought that I might work my way into replacing him, phoned the editor to say that my first articles were confused, the kind of joke I don’t take seriously. His support for the Merchant Party is paying off in directorships. He is an awful writer. The theater reviewer, Barry Landon, used to limp in until he was hospitalized. The editor said to me, “You write so much more elegantly than Barry.” I hope Barry will soon be back so that he can go on reviewing those ghastly plays.

  thirteen

  “We should just keep trying,” she said, her back to him. She was naked. Her skin looked paler than he remembered it.

  “What’s the point?” Ferron had zipped up his pants. He was sitting on the bed. His fingers played with his shirt.

  “Don’t you want it to work? It takes time,” she said, still looking out. Her hair was bundled up in a bun. Her neck looked thin. Ferron kept staring at her hips. They were low. She had a small bottom. Two round cheeks.

  “I suppose,” he muttered.

  “Look, I’m the one who’s supposed to have the problem. I was raped, damn it.” She had turned around. “Is me dem rape, alright?”

  “Been a hard time for me too, dear.” Ferron wished he hadn’t been so sarcastic, but he had tried. There was just nothing. No erection, nothing.

  “Well, we will just have to keep trying,” she said. It was final. Delores had this ability to make every activity seem like business. “Heck, that is what we did best . . . That is all we did.” She was back at the bed. She cupped her right breast and began to feel around the nipple for lumps. “I am really horny,” she said nonchalantly.

  “Does it have anything to do with me?” he asked.

  “I guess not. Does it have to have to do with anybody? We all have feelings. Right now, I feel . . .” She stopped talking as she sat down. “I’ll get over it. Take a shower. Want to come?”

  “No,” he said. He concentrated on his body. Nothing. It was the funeral, he thought. Too soon.

  “Fine. I will wait till you’ve gone. Might be noisy,” she laughed. “Smoke?”

  “No,” he said, moving from the bed. It irritated his sinuses sometimes.

  “Sorry.” She was. She half-smiled with sarcasm, holding the cigarette from her lips. Then she lit it up and breathed out. “You think I am dirty now, right? I was afraid of that.”

  “No, it’s not that. Nothing like that,” he said.

  “Just a bad night, right?”

  “Exactly.”

  “So we will try tomorrow. How about that? Or maybe you stay the night and maybe in the morning . . .”

  “I have to take Clarice’s car back,” he said.

  There was a long silence.

  “Come and sit with me. At least put your head on my lap. Touch me. Something.” She opened her arms. “Come, man.”

  He lay in her lap, looking past her nipples to her chin. They remained that way till she leaned forward to kill the cigarette. He shifted a bit. Then they were still again. The radio played in another room. Oldies. Her hand caressed his forehead.

  “Sorry about your father. Really,” she said softly. He opened his eyes to see if she was crying. She was.

  “It’s alright,” he said.

  “It would kill me.” She wiped her breast where tears had fallen.

  “Yeah.” He closed his eyes.

  The long silence again. At about this point they would have been on their backs breathing heavily, trying to fall asleep, planning their days. Now, Ferron’s mind was on Mitzie. It was all cliché, but he found himself comparing the two.

  “Hello? Pleasant thoughts?”

  He followed her eyes, then he felt the pressure in his pants.

  “Patience is a virtue,” she laughed.

  She was kneeling on the bed facing the window. He kneeled behind her and tried. It was too soft. He tried to squeeze it in. Too soft. He fell on the bed in frustration, the loose condom flopped over in his lap. She stayed kneeling but turned to him, as if waiting for an explanation. He stared into the ceiling. She got up.

  “It’s the stupid condom,” he said with very little conviction.

  “Nuh your idea?” She went back to the window. He heard “Shit.” Then she walked to the bathroom. He heard the shower going. He lay back and dozed off.

  When he woke, she was lying beside him smoking. He said nothing. She stared into the darkness. They waited.

  “I feel dirty, anyway, I don’t need you to tell me that. Spoiled goods, isn’t that what they call it?” she said casually. “I must be.”

  He sat up and started to get dressed. She touched his back with her fingers, running them down his spine.

  “He’s abandoned me, love don’t live here anymore . . .” she sang, softly.

  Fully dressed, he watched her sitting there, her knees drawn up, watching him.

  “Sorry for being such a bitch about the condoms, but what does it mean, really? It’s nice of you to blame the condoms. But we know better. So let’s just continue with that excuse. Let me ask you how long you think the condom will be a problem. How long we going to wait?” She scratched her hair with a long red index fingernail. She used her thumbnail to flick out a sprinkling of dandruff. “I have to ask questions like that, you see?”

  He said nothing. He had no answers. It had nothing to do with the condoms. But it had nothing to do with Delores and the rape. Not really. He did feel guilty and he felt as if he was betraying her twice over by being with her now. How could he start to have feelings for Mitzie just when Delores needed him the most? What a cruel person he was not to even be able to try, to make the effort, to hold her, to touch her—even if he could not have intercourse. He could have done what she liked. She never asked, but they both knew that he had not tried and did not want to. And he knew that she did feel dirty, broken by what had happened. He knew that what she needed was his affection, his ability to cut through the nastiness of what she felt and be affectionate. But he was thinking of Mitzie. He was thinking that maybe this was a good time to make the move. He did not need the complication of sex with Delores right now; he hated himself for the thought.

  He combed his hair in the bathroom and came back into the bedroom. She was getting a bathrobe from the cupboard. He looked at her hips again.

  “You know, your hips are really low. They say it’s bad for childbirth,” he said. This was the edge of cruelty that he needed to be able to leave.

  “Really,” she said. “Got nothing to worry about then, do we?”

  Unpublished notes of George Ferron Morgan

  An unscheduled power outage prevented me from seeing most of the Let Poland Be Poland show. Orson Welles spoke Donne’s “No man is an island” and Henry Fonda read Engels’s preface to the Polish edition of the Communist Manifesto. These were odd contributions. I got the impression that the Poles in Chicago must be an election force behind Reagan and the party because he cannot be allowed to stand again. Some of the music was lovely. Charlton Heston (is he Polish?) was a creep. The question is, what about South Africa? Are we not to be concerned about that? Reagan says we must find a compromise. I doubt myself whether there is any real determination concerning Africa. Rawlings has a
ctually made the most significant remark I have heard in years: that if Ghana ever came back to leadership in Africa, South Africa would be finished. It is not chauvinism. Nkrumah would have led to a rapid resolution in Rhodesia or a fantastic compromise.

  fourteen

  Below Half Way Tree, behind the cream walls of the stodgy Anglican church, stood a large warehouse. Entry to this edifice, which rose nearly three stories, was by way of a flight of metal stairs which led to a green metal door. The windows were all some fifteen feet above the ground. There were worn wooden louvers with black gaps where some of the slats had fallen out. The roof was all zinc, bright in the evening sunlight. Shade trees behind the building rose above it.

  On two precariously unsteady wooden posts, about three feet off the ground, was a piece of peeling plyboard on which the words Stringer Sewing Factory had been carefully penned in red. Mitzie worked here. Ferron pictured the sewing factories of Victorian England, the sordid sweathouses where women worked themselves to orgasmic frenzies pedaling the manual machines. It was an image from a tattered copy of Victorian erotica which he found in the old man’s study. He couldn’t shake off the image. Mitzie laughed at his question.