WHEN I SAW MY BROTHER again after a long while, he was lying in a bed in the Holberton Hospital, in the Gweneth O’Reilly ward, and he was said to be dying of AIDS. He was not born in this hospital. Of my mother’s four children, he was the one born at home. I remember him being born. I was thirteen years of age then. We had just finished eating our supper, a supper of boiled fish and bread and butter, and my mother sent me to fetch the midwife, a woman named Nurse Stevens, who lived on the corner of Nevis and Church Streets. She was a large woman; the two halves of her bottom rolled up and down with each step she took, and she walked very slowly. When I went to give her the message that my mother wanted her to come and assist with my brother’s birth, she was just finishing her own supper and said that she would come when she was through. My brother was born in the middle of the night on the fifth of May in 1962. The color of his skin when he was born was a reddish-yellow. I do not know how much he weighed, for he was not weighed at the time he was born. That night, of course, the routine of our life was upset: the routine of my two other brothers and I going to sleep, our father taking a walk to a bridge near the recreation grounds—a walk recommended by his doctor as good for his bad digestive tract and for his bad heart—the heavy black of the streetlamp-less night falling, our father returning from his walk, a dog barking at the sound of his steps, the door opening and being locked behind him, the click of his false teeth as they were placed in a glass of water, his snoring, and then the arrival of early morning. We were sent to neighbors’ houses. I do not remember exactly to whose house my other brothers were sent. I went to the house of a friend of my mother’s, a woman whose six-year-old daughter took sick not so very long after this night of my brother’s birth and died in my mother’s arms on the way to the doctor, exhaling her last breath as they crossed the same bridge that my father walked to on his nightly outing. This was the first person to die in my mother’s arms; not long after that, a woman who lived across the street from us, Miss Charlotte was her name, died in my mother’s arms as my mother tried to give her some comfort from the pain of a heart attack she was having.

I heard my brother cry his first cry and then there was some discussion of what to do with his afterbirth, but I don’t know now what was decided to do with all of it; only that a small piece of it was dried and pinned to the inside of his clothes as a talisman to protect him from evil spirits. He was placed in a chemise my mother had made, but because she had two other small children, my other brothers, one of them almost four years old, the other almost two years old, she could not give his chemise the customary elaborate attention involving embroidery stitching and special washings of the cotton fabric; the chemises he wore were plain. He was wrapped in a blanket and placed close to her, and they both fell asleep. That very next day, while they were both asleep, he snuggled in the warmth of his mother’s body, an army of red ants came in through the window and attacked him. My mother heard her child crying, and when she awoke, she found him covered with red ants. If he had been alone, it is believed they would have killed him. This was an incident no one ever told my brother, an incident that everyone else in my family has forgotten, except me. One day during his illness, when my mother and I were standing over him, looking at him—he was asleep and so didn’t know we were doing so—I reminded my mother of the ants almost devouring him and she looked at me, her eyes narrowing in suspicion, and she said, “What a memory you have!”—perhaps the thing she most dislikes about me. But I was only wondering if it had any meaning that some small red things had almost killed him from the outside shortly after he was born and that now some small things were killing him from the inside; I don’t believe it has any meaning, this is only something a mind like mine would think about.

That Thursday night when I heard about my brother through the telephone, from a friend of my mother’s because at that moment my mother and I were in a period of not speaking to each other (and this not speaking to each other has a life of its own, it is like a strange organism, the rules by which it survives no one can yet decipher; my mother and I never know when we will stop speaking to each other and we never know when we will begin again), I was in my house in Vermont, absorbed with the well-being of my children, absorbed with the well-being of my husband, absorbed with the well-being of myself. When I spoke to this friend of my mother’s, she said that there was something wrong with my brother and that I should call my mother to find out what it was. I said, What is wrong? She said, Call your mother. I asked her, using those exact words, three times, and three times she replied the same way. And then I said, He has AIDS, and she said, Yes.

If she had said he had been in a terrible car accident, or if she had said he was suddenly stricken with a fatal cancer, I would have been surprised, for he did not drive a car—I knew that. What causes a fatal cancer? I do not know that. But he lived a life that is said to be typical in contracting the virus that causes AIDS: he used drugs (I was only sure of marijuana and cocaine) and he had many sexual partners (I only knew of women). He was careless; I cannot imagine him taking the time to buy or use a condom. This is a quick judgment, because I don’t know my brothers very well, but I am pretty sure that a condom would not be something he would have troubled himself to use. Once, a few years ago when I was visiting my family—that is, the family I grew up in—I sat on his bed in the house he lived in alone, a house which was two arm’s lengths away from our mother’s house, where she lived with another son, a grown man, I told him to use condoms when having sex with anyone; I told him to protect himself from the HIV virus and he laughed at me and said that he would never get such a stupid thing (“Me no get dat chupidness, man”). But I might have seemed like a ridiculous person to him. I had lived away from my home for so long that I no longer understood readily the kind of English he spoke and always had to have him repeat himself to me; and I no longer spoke the kind of English he spoke, and when I said anything to him, he would look at me and sometimes just laugh at me outright. You talk funny, he said. And then again, I was not fat, he had expected after not seeing me for twenty years that I would be fat. Most women where we are from become fat after a while; it is fashionable to be a fat woman.

When I saw my brother lying in the hospital bed, dying of this disease, his eyes were closed, he was asleep (or in a state of something like sleep, because sleep, a perfectly healthy and normal state to be in, could not be what he was experiencing as he lay there dying); his hands were resting on his chest, one on top of the other, just under his chin in that pious pose of the dead, but he was not dead then. His skin was a deep black color, I noticed that, and I thought perhaps I noticed that because I live in a place where no one is of his complexion, except for me, and I am not really of his complexion, I am only of his complexion in the way of race. But many days later my mother said to me, He has gotten so black, the disease has made him so black (she said this to me in this kind of English, she makes an effort to speak to me in the kind of English that I now immediately understand). His lips were scarlet and covered with small sores that had a golden crust. When he opened his eyes and saw me, he made the truups sound (this is done by placing the teeth together while pushing out both lips and sucking in air with force all at once). He said he did not think I would come to see him (“Me hear you a come but me no tink you a come fo’ true”).

At the time the phone call came telling me of my brother’s illness, among the many comforts, luxuries, that I enjoyed was reading a book, The Education of a Gardener, written by a man named Russell Page. I was in the process of deciding that as a gardener who designed gardens for other people he had the personality of the servant, not the personality of the artist, that his prose was fussy, tidy, timid; though the book bored me I would continue to read it because it offered such an interesting contrast to some other gardeners whose writing I loved. (I only thought all that before the phone rang. I now love The Education of a Gardener and look forward to reading it again.) And so when the phone rang I put this book down and answered it and I was told about my brother.

The next time I opened this book I was sitting on the lawn in front of the Gweneth O’Reilly ward and my brother was sitting in a chair next to me. It was many days later. He could barely walk, he could barely sit up, he was like an old man. The walk from his bed to the lawn had exhausted him. We looked out on an ordinary Antiguan landscape. There was a deliberate planting of willow trees, planted, I suspect, a long time ago, when Antigua was still a colony and the colonial government would have been responsible for the running of the hospital. It was never a great hospital, but it is a terrible hospital now, and only people who cannot afford anything else make use of it. Near the willow trees was an old half-dead flamboyant tree; it needed pruning and food. There was an old lopsided building in the near distance; and the rest of the landscape was taken up with cassi (cassia) trees. And when I picked up that book again, The Education of a Gardener, I looked at my brother, for he was a gardener also, and I wondered, if his life had taken a certain turn, if he had caused his life to take a different turn, might he have written a book with such a title? Behind the small house in which he lived in our mother’s yard, he had planted a banana plant, a lemon tree, various vegetables, various non-flowering shrubs. When I first saw his little garden in the back of his little house, I was amazed at it and I asked him if he had done it all himself and he said, Of course (“How you mean, man!”). I know now that it is from our mother that we, he and I, get this love of plants. Even at that moment when he and I were sitting on the lawn, our mother had growing on a trellis she had fashioned out of an old iron bedstead and old pieces of corrugated galvanize a passion-fruit vine, and its voluptuous growth was impressive, because it isn’t easy to grow passion fruit in Antigua. It produced fruit in such abundance that she had to give some of it away, there was more than she could use. Her way with plants is something I am very familiar with; when I was a child, in the very place where my brother’s house is now, she grew all sorts of vegetables and herbs. The red ants that attacked him when he was less than a day old had crawled up some okra trees that she had planted too near the house and the red ants went from the okra trees through a window onto the bed in which he and my mother lay. After she killed all the red ants that had attacked her child, she went outside and in a great fit of anger tore up the okra trees, roots and all, and threw them away.

*   *   *

I only now understand why it is that people lie about their past, why they say they are one thing other than the thing they really are, why they invent a self that bears no resemblance to who they really are, why anyone would want to feel as if he or she belongs to nothing, comes from no one, just fell out of the sky, whole.

For one day when my mother and I were outside in the back yard and she was complaining, though she did not know it, of how dependent on her one or the other of her children was, and did not notice that she did this all the time, said bad things to each of us about the others behind their back, I noticed that the lemon tree my sick brother had planted was no longer there and I asked about it, and she said quite casually, Oh, we cut it down to make room for the addition. And this made me look at my feet immediately, involuntarily; it pained me to hear her say this, it pained me the way she said it, I felt ashamed. That lemon tree would have been one of the things left of his life. Nothing came from him; not work, not children, not love for someone else. He once had a job doing something in the public works department, but he talked back too much—he had a nasty tongue when crossed, my mother said—and one day in an argument with his supervisor he said something rude (“He cuss dem out”) and was fired. Someone told me he had made a lot of money then. He gave my mother a lot of it to save for him, but after he was out of work he would often ask her for some of it, until eventually there was nothing left, and when he became sick he was destitute, without any financial support at all. This did not seem to worry him; I could not tell if it had any meaning. When his father, my mother’s husband, died, he left my mother a pauper and she had to borrow money to bury him. My brother did not have a steady girlfriend, a woman, someone other than his own mother, to take care of him; he had no children, as he lay dying, his friends had abandoned him. No one, other than the people in his family and his mother’s friends from her church, came to visit him.

But this too is a true picture of my mother: When he was ill, each morning she would get up very early and make for her sick son a bowl of porridge and a drink of a fortified liquid food supplement and pack them in a little bag and go to the hospital, which is about a mile away and involves climbing up a rather steep hill. When she set out at about half past six, the sun was not yet in the middle of the sky so it was not very hot. Sometimes someone would give her a lift in a car, but most often no one did. When she got to the hospital, she would give my brother a bath, and when she was doing that she wouldn’t let him know that she saw that the sore on his penis was still there and that she was worried about it. She first saw this sore by accident when he was in the hospital the first time, and when she asked him how he got such a thing, he said that from sitting on a toilet seat he had picked up something. She did not believe or disbelieve him when he told her that. After she bathed him, she dressed him in the clean pajamas she brought for him, and if his sheets had not been changed, she changed them and then while he sat in bed, she helped him to eat his food, the food she had prepared and brought to him.

When I first saw him, his entire mouth and tongue, all the way to the back of the inside of his mouth, down his gullet, was paved with a white coat of thrush. He had a small sore near his tonsil, I could see it when he opened his mouth wide, something he did with great effort. This made it difficult for him to swallow anything, but especially solid food. When he ate the porridge and drank the fortified liquid food supplement that my mother had brought for him, he had to make such an effort, it was as if he were lifting tons upon tons of cargo. A look of agony would come into his eyes. He would eat and drink slowly. Our mother, who loves to cook and see people eat the food she has cooked, especially since she knows she is an extremely good cook, would urge him to eat whenever she saw him pause (“Come on, man, yam up you food”) and he would look at her helplessly. Ordinarily he would have made his own sharp reply, but at those moments I do not think one crossed his mind. After she saw him eat his breakfast, she would tidy up his room, put his dirty clothes and bath towel in a bag to be taken home and washed; she would empty the pan that contained his urine, she would rub cream into the parched skin on his arms and legs, she would comb his hair as best she could. My mother loves her children, I want to say, in her way! And that is very true, she loves us in her way. It is her way. It never has occurred to her that her way of loving us might not be the best thing for us. It has never occurred to her that her way of loving us might have served her better than it served us. And why should it? Perhaps all love is self-serving. I do not know, I do not know. She loves and understands us when we are weak and helpless and need her. My own powerful memories of her revolve around her bathing and feeding me. When I was a very small child and my nose would become clogged up with mucus, the result of a cold, she would place her mouth over my nose and draw the mucus into her own mouth and then spit it out; when I was a very small child and did not like to eat food, complaining that chewing was tiring, she would chew my food in her own mouth and, after it was properly softened, place it in mine. Her love for her children when they are children is spectacular, unequaled I am sure in the history of a mother’s love. It is when her children are trying to be grown-up people—adults—that her mechanism for loving them falls apart; it is when they are living in a cold apartment in New York, hungry and penniless because they have decided to be a writer, writing to her, seeking sympathy, a word of encouragement, love, that her mechanism for loving falls apart. Her reply to one of her children who found herself in such a predicament was “It serves you right, you are always trying to do things you know you can’t do.” Those were her words exactly. All the same, her love, if we are dying, or if we are in jail, is so wonderful, a great fortune, and we are lucky to have it. My brother was dying; he needed her just then.

In his overbearingly charming reminiscence of how he became a gardener, Russell Page writes:

When I was a child there was a market each Friday in the old Palladian butter market near the Stonebow in Lincoln. The farmers’ wives would drive in early in the morning, dressed in their best, with baskets of fresh butter, chickens, ducks and bunches of freshly picked mint and sage. I used often to be taken there by my grandfather’s housekeeper while she made her purchases, and I remember that always, in the spring, there would be bunches of double mauve primroses and of the heavenly scented Daphne mezereum. Later when my passion for gardening developed I wanted these plants but could never find them in our friends’ gardens. They seemed to grow only in cottage gardens in hamlets lost among the fields and woods. I gradually came to know the cottagers and their gardens for miles around, for these country folk had a knack with plants. Kitchen windows were full of pots with cascades of Campanula isophylla, geraniums, fuchsias and begonias all grown from slips. I would be given cuttings from old-fashioned pinks and roses which were not to be found in any catalogue, and seedlings from plants brought home perhaps by a sailor cousin—here was a whole world of modest flower addicts.

What would my brother say were he to be asked how he became interested in growing things? He saw our mother doing it. What else? This is what my family, the people I grew up with, hate about me. I always say, Do you remember? There are twelve banana plants in the back of his little house now, but years ago, when I first noticed his interest in growing things, there was only one. I asked my mother how there came to be twelve, because I am not familiar with the habits of this plant. She said, “Well…” and then something else happened, a dog she had adopted was about to do something she did not like a dog to do, she called to the dog sharply, and when the dog did not respond, she threw some stones at him. We turned our attention to something else. But a banana plant bears one bunch of fruit, and after that, it dies; before it dies it will send up small shoots. Some of my brother’s plants had borne fruit and were dying and were sending up new shoots. The plantsman in my brother will never be, and all the other things that he might have been in his life have died; but inside his body a death lives, flowering upon flowering, with a voraciousness that nothing seems able to satisfy and stop.

I am so vulnerable to my family’s needs and influence that from time to time I remove myself from them. I do not write to them. I do not pay visits to them. I do not lie, I do not deny, I only remove myself. When I heard that my brother was sick and dying, the usual deliberation I allow myself whenever my family’s needs come up—should I let this affect me or not?—vanished. I felt I was falling into a deep hole, but I did not try to stop myself from falling. I felt myself being swallowed up in a large vapor of sadness, but I did not try to escape it. I became afraid that he would die before I saw him again; then I became obsessed with the fear that he would die before I saw him again. It surprised me that I loved him; I could see that was what I was feeling, love for him, and it surprised me because I did not know him at all. I was thirteen years old when he was born. When I left our home at sixteen years of age, he was three years of age. I do not remember having particular feelings of affection or special feelings of dislike for him. Our mother tells me that I liked my middle brother best of the three of them, but that seems an invention on her part. I think of my brothers as my mother’s children.

When he was a baby, I used to change his diapers, I would give him a bath. I am sure I fed him his food. At the end of one day, when he was in the hospital and I had been sitting with him for most of the time, watching his body adjust to the AZT, medicine I had brought to him because I had been told that it was not available in Antigua, I said to him that nothing good could ever come of his being so ill, but all the same I wanted to thank him for making me realize that I loved him, and he asked if I meant that (“But fo’ true?”) and I said yes, I did mean that. And then when I was leaving for the day and I said good night to him and closed the door behind me, my figure passed the louvered window of his room and from his bed, lying on his back, he could see me, and he called out, “I love you.” That is something only my husband and my children say to me, and the reply I always make to them is the reply I made to him: “I love you, too.”

He was lying in a small room with a very high ceiling, all by himself. In the hospital they place patients suffering from this disease in rooms by themselves. The room had two windows, but they both opened onto hallways so there was proper ventilation. There was a long fluorescent light hanging from the high ceiling. There was no table lamp, but why should there be, I only noticed because I have become used to such a thing, a table lamp; he did not complain about that. There was a broken television set in a corner, and when there were more than two visitors in the room it was useful as something on which to sit. It was a dirty room. The linoleum floor was stained with rust marks; it needed scrubbing; once he spilled the pan that contained his urine and so the floor had to be mopped up and it was done with undiluted Clorox. He had two metal tables and a chair made of metal and plastic. The metal was rusty and the underside of this furniture was thick with dirt. The walls of the room were dirty, the slats of the louvered windows were dirty, the blades of the ceiling fan were dirty, and when it was turned on, sometimes pieces of dust would become dislodged. This was not a good thing for someone who had trouble breathing. He had trouble breathing.

Sometimes when I was sitting with him, in the first few days of my seeing him for the first time after such a long time, seeing him just lying there, dying faster than most people, I wanted to run away, I would scream inside my head, What am I doing here, I want to go home. I missed my children and my husband. I missed the life that I had come to know. When I was sitting with my brother, the life I had come to know was my past, a past that does not make me feel I am falling into a hole, a vapor of sadness swallowing me up. In that dirty room, other people before him had died of that same disease. It is where they put people who are suffering from the virus that causes AIDS. When he was first told that he had tested positive for the virus, he did not tell our mother the truth, he told her he had lung cancer, he told someone else he had bronchial asthma, but he knew and my mother knew and anyone else who was interested would know that only people who tested positive for the AIDS virus were placed in that room in isolation.

I left him that first night and got into a car. I left him lying on his back, his eyes closed, the fluorescent light on. I rode in a hired car and it took me past the Magdalene maternity ward, where I was born, past the place where the Dead House used to be (a small cottage-like structure where the bodies of the dead were stored until their families came to claim them), but it is not there anymore; it was torn down when it grew rotten and could no longer contain the smells of the dead. And then I came to a major crossing where there was a stoplight, but it was broken and had been broken for a long time; it could not be fixed because the parts for it are no longer made anywhere in the world—and that did not surprise me, because Antigua is a place like that: parts for everything are no longer being made anywhere in the world; in Antigua itself nothing is made. I passed the prison, and right next to it the school my brother attended when he was a small boy and where he took an exam to go to the Princess Margaret School, and in the exam, which was an islandwide exam, he took third place of all the children taking this exam. I passed the Princess Margaret School. It was when he got to this school that he started to get into trouble. My mother says, about the friends he made there, that he fell into bad company, and I am sure the mothers of the other boys, his friends, thought of him in the same way—as bad company. It was while attending this school that he became involved in a crime, something to do with robbing a gas station, in which someone was killed. It was agreed that he did not pull the trigger; it is not clear that he did not witness the actual murder. At some point, years ago, my mother told me that he had spent a short time in jail for this crime and she got him out through political connections she then had but does not have any longer. Now she will not mention the murder or his time in jail. If I should bring it up, she says it is an old story (“e’ a’ ole time ’tory; you lub ole-time ’tory, me a warn you”), and for my mother an old story is a bad story, a story with an ending she does not like.

The car then turned onto Fort Road and passed Straffee’s funeral establishment. I did not know then whether Mr. Straffee was dead or alive; when I was a small child and saw him, I thought he looked like the dead, even though at the time I thought that, I had never seen a dead person. I passed a house where my godmother used to live; she was a seamstress, she had been very nice to me. I do not know what has become of her. And I passed the road where an Englishman, Mr. Moore, who used to sell my mother beefsteak tomatoes, lived. This man also had cows, and one day when I was going to visit my godmother, they were returning from pasture and I saw them coming toward me, and I was so afraid of those cows that I threw myself into a ditch facedown and waited until I knew they had gone by. The road has been widened and the ditch is no more. I passed the place where the Happy Acres Hotel used to be. It, too, is no more. On a road that led from this hotel a friend of our family used to live, a friend whom my brothers would not have known because by the time they were born my mother no longer spoke to this person. The friend reared pigs and guinea hens and chickens and also cultivated an acre or so of cotton. At the height of their friendship my mother had bought shares in a sow this friend of hers owned, and also, since it was at the height of their friendship, I was sent one year to spend August holidays with her. This part of Antigua was considered the country then, and I was terrified of the darkness, it was so unrelieved by light even from other houses; also from the house where I lived I could see the St. John’s city graveyard, and it seemed to me that almost every day I could see people attending a funeral. It was then I decided that only people in Antigua died, that people living in other places did not die and as soon as I could, I would move somewhere else, to those places where the people living there did not die. After another minute or so of driving, the car arrived at the inn where I was staying and I went into my room alone, my own isolation.

My mother and I almost quarreled over this, that I would not stay in her house with her. She told a friend of hers, a woman my age, this, knowing that her friend would repeat it to me. I could have said to my mother, You and I do not get along, I am too well, I am not a sick child, you cannot be a mother to a well child, you are a great person but you are a very bad mother to a child who is not dying or in jail; but I did not say that. A few years ago, when she was visiting me in Vermont, we had an enormous quarrel and I then asked her if she could at all say that she was sorry for some of the pain I believe she caused me, whether she meant to or not. And she said then, I am never wrong, I have nothing to apologize for, everything I did at the time, I did for a good reason. Even now, years later, I am still surprised by this, because I spend a good part of my day on my knees in apology to my own children. That time when my mother was visiting me and we had the enormous quarrel, she told a friend of mine, a woman who she knew was very devoted to me, that the reason I did not like her was that when I was a girl she had been very strict with me and if she had not been I would have ended up with ten children by ten different men. It is a mystery to me still why my mother would think I would not be grateful to someone who saved me from such a fate. As an illustration of how strict she had been with me, she told my friend that I loved books and loved reading and there was a boy who used to come around looking for me, and to hide his true intentions, when he saw her he would say that he had come to me to borrow some books; she grew sick of listening to this excuse for his coming around to see me and one day she told him not to come to her house anymore because it was not a library. My friend only told me all this because she wanted to say to me that my mother feels that she loves me very much. But after my mother left, I was sick for three months. I had something near to a nervous breakdown, I suffered from anxiety and had to take medicine to treat it; I got the chicken pox, which is a disease of childhood and a disease I had already had when I was a child. Not long after she left, I had to see a psychiatrist.

My brother who was lying in the hospital dying, suffering from the virus that causes AIDS, told the brother who is two years older than he is, the brother I am eleven years older than, that he had made worthlessness of his life (“Me mek wutlessness ah me life, man”). He told my mother that he was sorry he had not listened to her when all the time she told him not to behave in the way he had been, not to conduct his life so heedlessly, not to live so much without caution, that he had been too careless. He was sorry now that he lay dying that he had not listened to her and used to think all the things she said she had said only because she was an old lady. He said to me that he couldn’t believe he had AIDS (“Me carn belieb me had dis chupidness”). Only he could not say the words AIDS or HIV, he referred to his illness as stupidness (“de chupidness”).

After I saw my brother that first time and returned to the place I was staying, the place that was not my mother’s house, I went to the manageress and said, “I need a drink.” I have heard people say just that before, “I need a drink,” but I thought it was a figure of speech, I had never needed a drink or any other kind of mood alterer before; I have taken mood-altering substances many times, but I never felt I needed them. I drank five rum-and-Cokes. I do not like the taste of rum, really, and I do not like the taste of Coke, really, but I drank five of these drinks all the same and could have drunk more than five but did not. The manageress, a very nice woman, sat next to me and we struck up a conversation; I told her my brother was sick and in the hospital, and when she asked me the cause of his illness I told her he had AIDS. This disease, in Antigua, produces all the prejudices in people that it produces elsewhere, and so like many other places, the people afflicted with it and their families are ashamed to make their suffering known. It was for my own peace of mind that I said it; I wanted it to be real to me, that my brother was suffering and dying from AIDS; hearing that he was sick and dying was new to me and so every opportunity I got I would say it out loud: “My brother is sick from and dying of AIDS.” But my announcing it to this woman led to something. She told me of a doctor in Antigua who she said was always on the radio or television talking about the danger of AIDS, how it could be contracted and how to avoid contracting it. He was considered the leading authority in Antigua in regard to this disease (though in fact he was the only doctor in Antigua who was publicly involved with this disease). She said his name was Dr. Ramsey. The next day I looked him up in the telephone book and called him.

The reason my brother was dying of AIDS at the time I saw him is that in Antigua if you are diagnosed with the HIV virus you are considered to be dying; the drugs used for slowing the progress of the virus are not available there; public concern, obsession with the treatment and care of members of the AIDS-suffering community by groups in the larger non-AIDS-suffering community, does not exist. There are only the people suffering from AIDS, and then the people who are not suffering from AIDS. It is felt in general, so I am told, that since there is no cure for AIDS it is useless to spend money on a medicine that will only slow the progress of the disease; the afflicted will die no matter what; there are limited resources to be spent on health care and these should be spent where they will do some good, not where it is known that the outcome is death. This was the reason why there was no AZT in the hospital; but even if a doctor had wanted to write a prescription for AZT for a patient, that prescription could not be filled at a chemist’s; there was no AZT on the island, it was too expensive to be stocked, most people suffering from the disease could not afford to buy this medicine; most people suffering from the disease are poor or young, not too far away from being children; in a society like the one I am from, being a child is one of the definitions of vulnerability and powerlessness.

When I called Dr. Ramsey I asked him if he would meet me at the hospital and examine my brother and give us, his family, medical advice, as to what we could do, what we could not do, what we could expect and, perhaps, when to expect it. He agreed to meet me and at the time he said he would arrive, he arrived. I only mention this because in Antigua people never arrive when they say they will; they never do what they say they will do. He was something I had long ago thought impossible to find in an Antiguan with authority: he was kind, he was loving toward people who needed him, people who were less powerful than he; he was respectful. He greeted my brother as if they were old friends; he spoke to him of cricket, of calypso, and of a trip he had taken to Trinidad to celebrate the carnival there. He examined my brother with his bare hands, he felt his neck, he listened to his breathing through a stethoscope, he looked in my brother’s mouth, at his throat, and he made me look at the large ulcer that was near his tonsils. After he was done, he sat and talked to my brother some more; he spoke to him in broken English; I could not understand what they were saying, they spoke very fast, it was the most animated I had seen my brother since I first saw him lying there dying. He even laughed out loud at something Dr. Ramsey said, something I did not understand.

Afterward Dr. Ramsey told me that since my brother did not yet have diarrhea, one of the symptoms common to AIDS sufferers in the Caribbean, there was a chance that AZT could slow the progress of the disease and allow my brother to live longer than we thought; certainly it would alleviate some of his immediate suffering. When I had heard about my brother, I asked my mother with what medicines he was being treated and she said they were giving him something for pneumonia and something else for thrush, medicines a doctor at the hospital had given her a prescription for and she had gone to a pharmacy in town and purchased. These medicines common in the treatment of AIDS-related illnesses are not kept in the hospital; people who are not infected with the virus that causes AIDS do not get an extreme case of thrush, do not get a terrible kind of pneumonia, and so the medicines that would treat these afflictions are not on hand at the hospital. But then this: one night my brother had a terrible headache and needed something to ease the pain; there was no aspirin on the ward where he was staying and no aspirin in the dispensary. A nurse on duty had some in her purse for her own personal use and she gave my brother two of them. There are people who complain that a hospital in the United States will charge six dollars for a dose of Tylenol; they might wish to look at this way of running a hospital: bring your own medicines.

When my mother told me AZT could not be obtained in Antigua, I called someone I know, a friend who is a doctor, and I asked her if she would write a prescription for a month’s worth. She said yes immediately, and said she would give me more if it was necessary. I was used to this sort of kindness. I did not know then if even a month’s worth would be of any use to him. She gave me a prescription for a more powerful drug than the one he was taking to treat the pneumonia he had and a more powerful drug than the one he was taking to treat his thrush; when I first saw him, the thrush had made it so difficult for him to swallow anything that the pills had to be crushed before he could swallow them.

After he saw my brother, Dr. Ramsey told me that, with one exception, he had not seen anyone over the age of thirty-two suffering from AIDS. The exception was a man sixty-six years of age. He said that in August one year, in a two-week period, seven people, young people, all under thirty-two, had died of the disease. As far as he could tell, the people who died did not know each other. He said that people who are not HIV-positive give up too soon on the people who are, but that he tries to keep everybody alive, because you never know when a cure might come along. He said that—you never knew when a cure might come along—and I could not tell if, in that, he was asserting native Antiguan foolishness or faith in science. Antigua is a place in which faith undermines the concrete. He said my brother did not look too bad, he had seen people who looked worse; what he meant of course is he had seen people who were on the verge of dying, and by the time he saw them, it was too late to do anything. But what could he do, I wanted to ask him, if there was no medicine available, if the people suffering did not have a sister who lived in the United States and this sister could call up a doctor who would write a prescription for some medication that might be of help, what would happen then? He is a very loving man and the other reason I have for saying this is I saw that wherever he went, people, ordinary people, would go out of their way to greet him and ask him how he was, but not because they really wanted to know: it was just to hear his voice.

I went to hear Dr. Ramsey give a lecture about AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases to a group of twelve people who were attending a workshop on counseling the HIV-afflicted. I had never seen any of their faces before. Among them were a man and a woman, Antiguans, whose thirty-year-old daughter had died of AIDS. She was their only child. They carried with them pictures of her which they showed to the other people in the workshop. They were attending this workshop because they hoped to be able, if need be, to give solace to other parents who might also find themselves losing a child to this disease. This was something very new to me: ordinary people in Antigua expressing sympathy and love for one another at a time of personal tragedy and pain, not scorn or rejection or some other form of cruelty. Dr. Ramsey explained to us what the HIV virus is, how it behaves in the body, how a virus behaves and how the HIV virus, a retrovirus, differs from a normal virus, but I cannot really remember any of it because he showed extraordinary slides of people in various stages of affliction from sexually transmitted diseases. The pictures were amazing. There were penises that looked like ladyfingers left in the oven too long and with a bite taken out of them that revealed a jam-filled center. There were labias covered with thick blue crusts, or black crusts, or crusts that were iridescent. There were breasts with large parts missing, eaten away, not from a large bite taken at once but nibbled, as if by an animal in a state of high enjoyment, each morsel savored for maximum pleasure. There were pictures of people emaciated by disease, who looked very different from people emaciated from starvation; they did not have that parched look of flesh and blood evaporated, leaving a wreck of skin and bones; they looked like the remains of a black hole, something that had once burned brightly and then collapsed in on itself. These images of suffering and death were the result of sexual activity, and at the end of Dr. Ramsey’s talk, I felt I would never have sex again, not even with myself. This feeling I had of pleasure being overwhelmed by fear and death was not new; I remembered how as a child when I was living in Dominica with my mother’s family I would look up at a black sky with a big moon full of light in it and the large mountains in the distance silhouetted against the mysterious (to me, a small girl) horizon, and I would find this the most beautiful, the most wonderful thing in the world, but then I would see a light moving about in the mountains and knew that it was a jablessé and would run inside to bed and pull the sheets over my head. And lying in bed with the sheets over my head, I would become afraid to fall asleep with the sheets over my head because I might suffocate and die.

Someone told me that many years ago Dr. Ramsey led an effort to make women in Antigua conscious of methods of birth control and that it was a success, because had I noticed that every woman of child-bearing age was not pregnant anymore? It is true that every woman of child-bearing age is not pregnant, but I had not noticed it; I take it for granted that every woman of child-bearing age does not have a child if she does not want to. Dr. Ramsey told me that when he first started to talk to Antiguans about sexually transmitted diseases, and in particular AIDS, men would say that he was lying, that he was being unnecessarily alarming, and, jokingly, that he had an ulterior motive (“Me no go wid Ramsey, you know, ’e just want to keep all de women fo’ ’eself”). He told me that one night he gave a talk to some young people about AIDS and other sexually transmitted diseases. Afterward two young men asked him for a lift, and when they reached a certain part of town, a part of town where prostitutes live, they asked to be let out. Dr. Ramsey asked them if they had condoms and they said no. He asked them if they had not listened to anything he had just told them, and they said to him yes, but they would rather die than leave the butter women alone (“Me rather dead dan leave butta women ’lone”). The prostitutes in Antigua are from Santo Domingo. They are mostly light-brown-skinned black women. Because of their complexion, Antiguan men call them butter women. It is believed that a majority of them are HIV-positive.

I did not know how my brother had contracted the HIV virus. I would have liked to know because it would have told me something about him. I was almost sure it was not through the use of intravenous drugs, because there was no evidence of that on his body as far as I could see; also, such a thing as piercing himself with a needle, causing himself pain, did not seem to be in keeping with his personality; the use of intravenous drugs involves hypodermic needles and hypodermic needles would be associated with illness and death. In a place like Antigua, I suspect, the use of drugs is not about the dulling of pain in a useless life but about providing and extending pleasure. I do not know this with certainty, I only suspect so. I suspected he got the virus through sex and I supposed it to be heterosexual sex. I only supposed this, I did not know it with any certainty. If he had had homosexual sex, he would not have advertised it. Antiguans are not particularly homophobic so much as they are quick to disparage anyone or anything that is different from whom or what they think of as normal. And they think of themselves and the things they do as normal: this includes a man and a woman having sex with each other. I only wanted to know these things about my brother because they would tell me something about him, but also, on the whole I like to know whom people have sex with, and a description of it I find especially interesting. My own life, from a sexual standpoint, can be described as a monument to boring conventionality. And so perhaps because of this I have a great interest in other people’s personal lives. I wanted him to tell me what his personal life had been like. He would not do that. Antiguans are at once prudish and licentious. A young woman will be loudly praised for being a very nice girl, by which it is meant she does not have sex; yet no young woman would ever be ostracized because she had ten children by ten different men.

He used to have many friends, they were at his house visiting him all the time before he got sick, when he was well, with no thought of sickness at all. They were young men like him, Rastafarians like him. They would come to his house and sit on his bed and smoke fat marijuana cigarettes. My mother would complain about these young men visiting her son, but her words of complaint did not stop them and she did not go further than words. These boys had Rastafarian names, names they had given themselves, names very different from the ones their parents had given them. My brother’s Rastafarian name was the name of a Hebrew prophet, one whose prophecies were about pestilence and doom. But when he lay in the hospital, none of his friends came into his room to visit him. They came to see him. They would stand in the doorway of his room and they would say something to him. They never came in. After they had seen him they left and they never returned again. My mother said that they came to see if it was true that he was HIV-positive, that he had AIDS. Had he been in their shoes, he might have done the same thing. We are not an instinctively empathetic people; a circle of friends who love and support each other is not something I can recall from my childhood. A girl he used to know saw him in the hospital while I was there with him. I could not tell if she had been one of his lovers. He and I were sitting outside in the sun at the time. He spoke in a very friendly way to her; she was friendly but not too much so, she never came too near him. She went inside to visit someone else. When she came outside to leave, she did not come over to say goodbye to him. He called after her. She waved her hand at him without looking back. He asked her if she would come back to see him. She raised her shoulders high, in an I-don’t-know gesture. She never looked back at him. But not long after, while we were still sitting in the sun, he saw a woman wearing a pair of tight-fitting pants that outlined the curves around her pubic area, and while staring pointedly at her crotch, he said some words to her, letting her know that he would like to have sex with her (“That would fit me very nicely, you know.” He said it exactly like that). She, too, would not look at him. This made me wonder at the confidence of men. There he was, diseased and dying, looking as unattractive as a long-dead corpse would look, and he could still try to convince a woman to sleep with him.

One day years ago—I was thirty-six and he was twenty-three—I was visiting my family, I was lying on my brother’s bed in his little house with my feet resting on the windowsill and in the sun. I used to do exactly this when I was a child: lie in bed with my feet resting on the windowsill and in the sun, because my feet then were always cold. I would read books then, and this whole scene of me lying in bed and reading books would drive my mother to fits of anger, for she was sure it meant I was doomed to a life of slothfulness, but as it turned out, I was only doomed to write books other people might read. At the time I was lying on my brother’s bed, he was sitting in his doorway. Usually he was lying on his bed. He would lie on his bed in a drug-induced daze. His mother would not have allowed him to do this if he were female; I know this. The walls of his house were plastered with magazine pictures of Americans who have been extremely successful in the world of sports or entertainment. All these people are of my and his complexion. My daughter likes to sing. It is perhaps the pictures on my brother’s wall that make me discourage her from singing in a way that might bring her public attention. I have said to her father, “Does the world really need one more somewhat brown person singing?” My daughter loves math and is very good at it. Maybe she can find satisfaction singing to herself while poring over numbers that will explain some small mystery in the universe. There may be someone of my brother’s hue, or my daughter’s hue, or my own hue who has been awarded the Nobel Prize for physics or chemistry, but if such a person exists, my brother does not know of it, my daughter may know of it, I do not know of it. In his room that time were some books on a table and a radio cassette-deck player. The books were his old school textbooks. One of them was a history of the West Indies, though it was mostly a history of the British West Indies, and it was exactly like the textbook from which I had been taught when I was in school. I was reading it, lying on his bed, and when I got up to go, he gave it to me as a gift. I still have this book, it’s sitting on a shelf with some other books that I like very much.

He must have wanted to be a singer. He had a stage name, it was Sugarman. He had on cassette tape a recording of him and a friend of his singing a song called “Mr. Telephone Man.” It was a song that was popular not too long ago, sung by a group called “The Silvers”; these people, “The Silvers,” were all related to each other, they were not just friends. He and his friend sang this song in the reggae style. He gave me a copy of this tape of him and his friend singing this song. I lost it when moving from one house to another. I am only sorry about this now.

On the morning I was leaving my brother, after spending a week with him, we learned he had gained one pound. It was a Monday morning; I had arrived a week ago on the Sunday night and he had looked then as if he would soon die: he was losing weight, he could not eat, his temperature would go from high to dangerously high, his throat had large ulcers growing on the surface and they went all the way down his esophagus. Everyone thought it was a matter of days, weeks, but all the same he would soon be dead. I had brought him the medicine AZT, he took it and did begin to look better. His temperature had dropped down, not to normal, but to below normal; Dr. Ramsey said that was better than being too high. And then just as I was leaving to return home to my own family on an early-morning flight, he, along with the other patients on his ward (all men suffering from various ailments, none of them related to HIV, as far as I could tell, since they were not treated with the aloofness, at-arm’s-lengthness, that was extended to my brother), were lined up in the hall to be weighed on an ancient but accurate-seeming scale. The scale registered a one-pound gain in my brother’s weight from the week before. I felt happy, I felt pleased with myself, I even felt proud of myself. I had been instrumental in this, his gaining one pound, and I knew what it meant; it meant that he was getting better, or at least that he was better than he had been before I got there, when every time he had stepped on the scale it had registered a loss. The nurse who recorded this on his chart, a Sister, a rank of nursing that continues to exist only in places where the British influence, with its love of status, remains, turned the corners of her mouth down as she did so. This must be a universal expression of disappointment and irritation and sourness, but I have seen it only in the disappointed and the irritated and the sour among women in Antigua. He had been expected to die; no one infected with HIV and as sick as he was at that time had ever come out of the Holberton Hospital alive. I said goodbye to him, he thought I would not come to see him again. I said I would come again, and it crossed my mind and he said it out loud, yes, perhaps to his funeral (“Yu cum back fo’ bury me”).

I got on the airplane. As I was going through Customs in Puerto Rico, I wondered what he was doing. He might be sitting out in the sun, the way he and I had done in the few days when I had been there. He might be able to focus his eyes and concentrate now, he might be able to control the tremor in his hands and so be able to read the biography of Viv Richards, the great Antiguan cricketer, a copy of which I had bought for him. As I was going through Customs I remembered a British woman of African descent whom I had met at a workshop she was leading for people who wanted to volunteer to be AIDS counselors. When she found out that I lived in the United States and that my brother was lying in the hospital more dead than alive and because this was due to a lack of proper treatment, she said, as if it were the most natural, obvious suggestion in the world, that I should take him to the United States for treatment. I was stunned by this, because I was doing the best I could, I have a family, I’m not rich, everybody who comes in contact with this disease knows how costly it is to deal with properly; she in her position as leader of workshops would have known so, how could she just say things without asking about my circumstances, without wondering what taking my brother into my life would mean to me. I said, Oh, I am sure they wouldn’t let him in, and I didn’t know if what I was saying was true, I was not familiar really with immigration policies and HIV, but what I really meant was, no, I can’t do what you are suggesting—take this strange, careless person into the hard-earned order of my life: my life of children and husband, and they love me and love me again, and I love them. And then she said, Oh yes, racism. And I thought then, with more bitterness than I would have otherwise, how unlucky people are who cannot blame the wrong, disastrous turns life can sometimes take on racism; because the hardness of living, the strange turns in it, the luck of it, the good chance missed of it, the there-but-for-the-grace-of-God part of it is so impossible to accept and it must be, in some way, very nice to have the all too real evil of racism to blame. But it was not racism that made my brother lie dying of an incurable disease in a hospital in the country in which he was born; it was the sheer accident of life, it was his own fault, his not caring about himself and his not being able to carefully weigh and adjust to and accept the to-and-fro of life, the feasting and the famine of life or the times in between, it was the fact that he lived in a place in which a government, made up of people with his own complexion, his own race, was corrupt and did not care whether he or other people like him lived or died.

*   *   *

I returned to my home safely, and my family was glad to see me. I called my mother. It was the middle of winter and I missed the warm sun and I missed my brother, being with him, being in the presence of his suffering and the feeling that somewhere in it was the possibility of redemption of some kind, though what form it could take I did not know and did not care, only that redemption of some kind would be possible and that we would all emerge from it better in some way and would love each other more. Love always feels much better than not-love, and that is why everybody always talks about love and that is why everybody always wants to have love: because it feels much better, so much better. I missed him sometimes when I took my children to the school bus, sometimes when the snow fell; I talked about him, his life, to my husband, I talked about him to people I knew well and to people I did not know very well. But I did not think I loved him; then, when I was no longer in his presence, I did not think I loved him. Whatever made me talk about him, whatever made me think of him, was not love, just something else, but not love; love being the thing I felt for my family, the one I have now, but not for him, or the people I am from, not love, but a powerful feeling all the same, only not love. My talk was full of pain, it was full of misery, it was full of anger, there was no peace to it, there was much sorrow, but there was no peace to it. How did I feel? I did not know how I felt. I was a combustion of feelings.

My brother grew better and better; the AZT must have worked, he grew stronger, his clogged lungs cleared up, the sores in his throat began to disappear. One day, still in hospital, he rejected the food served to him and the food my mother brought to him, and asked for a serving of Kentucky Fried Chicken, that was the thing he most wanted to eat then. A franchise of this restaurant is in Antigua and it is a fashionable place to go, to be able to afford to buy and eat a meal purchased there. Dr. Ramsey was visiting him at the time he had this craving, and so he drove my mother to the restaurant, where she bought him a dinner of fried chicken, and she took a taxi back to the hospital and gave it to him. He ate it all and my mother was very happy because she had not seen him eat so heartily in months. She reported this to me with as much enthusiasm and satisfaction as if she had just seen him successfully complete a feat that no human had ever successfully completed before. In the days to come he grew more and more well, he ate more, his temperature was a little below normal, but it remained the same, it did not go up and it did not go way up. And then everyone began to wonder what to do with him, how long should he be in the hospital, should he still be in the hospital? No one had ever seen an HIV-infected person, who in fact had full-blown AIDS, leave the hospital in this condition—alive, even well; well if you did not know what his life was really, really like. He by then was sitting outside in the company of the other patients; they no longer shunned him, because he did not look like someone who had AIDS, he looked just like an ordinary sick person; an ordinary sick person was something they knew about, a person with AIDS was not. He looked like them, sick with no choice but to go to an ill-equipped hospital in Antigua. While he was in the hospital, another man came in, very sick with AIDS, as sick as my brother had been. The man died. His relatives did not come to see him. I do not know if my brother visited him and offered any words of comfort. My brother by then was well enough to go home. But what home? He did not really have a home. He would go home to live with my mother, and this was wonderful, that he would live with his mother and she would take care of him, but this became another example of the extraordinary ability of her love for her children to turn into a weapon for their destruction.

My mother lives with her male children, who by now are in their thirties, or rather, my mother’s male children, by now in their thirties, live with her. It is an important distinction. My mother would not subordinate herself in any way to anyone, especially not her children. She would not live with anyone; they would live with her; if she were to live with anyone, they might ask her to leave, they might throw her out after she had given them one of her famous tongue-lashings. She protects and reserves her right to verbally humiliate her children. What can be so wrong with that? She and the grown-up men children who live with her quarrel all the time. At any given moment there is a small war of words going on between her and one of them. The middle grown-up male child no longer speaks to her; it has been years since he has spoken to her in even so much as the tone of voice he would use for giving directions to someone he just met on the street, someone he has never seen before. If he is forced to speak to her, his voice is full of hatred and despair. He has told me he does not recognize the sound of his own voice when he speaks to her. He calls me up to tell me he is sorry he never sympathized with me when I told him how awful she had been to me. He says to me, Mom is evil, you know, as if he had never said it to me before, but he says it to me every time we speak, as if it is a new discovery to him.

After he was dismissed from the hospital my brother went back to my mother’s house and slept in her bed with her. He had no place to go, not even a bed of his own, and so he went to his mother’s house and slept in her bed with her. There was nothing wrong with that. It was decided that the son coming home from the hospital should move into her bed because his old house, which was behind hers, was too drafty. I could not understand this, because what kind of draft exists in a place that is hot all the time? There was another reason for him going to live with her. The oldest of her three sons had been living in the other shack behind her house, and his living quarters were really just pieces of galvanize all nailed together with one opening, which was the door. The structure that my sick brother had lived in resembled an actual house; it had three windows and the windows had working shutters, it had a door that could be bolted. When my brother went to the hospital because he was so sick, the one living in the galvanized house immediately moved into the sick boy’s place and my mother could not and would not tell him to move back to his old structure. These two brothers did not get along; I was told this, they did not get along, as if it were an exception, as if usually the people in this family got along except for those two. It was my mother who told me that they did not get along, and she gave me an example of their disagreement. The brother living in the room made of old galvanize is an electrician and he has many valuable tools, which he kept in his room; at the height of my sick brother’s drug addiction, he would go into his brother’s room and remove tools, which he would then sell. My brother the electrician, after warning his brother not to steal from them. The middle grown-up male child no longer speaks to her; it has been years since he has spoken to her in even so much as the tone of voice he would use for giving directions to someone he just met on the street, someone he has never seen before. If he is forced to speak to her, his voice is full of hatred and despair. He has told me he does not recognize the sound of his own voice when he speaks to her. He calls me up to tell me he is sorry he never sympathized with me when I told him how awful she had been to me. He says to me, Mom is evil, you know, as if he had never said it to me before, but he says it to me every time we speak, as if it is a new discovery to him.

After he was dismissed from the hospital my brother went back to my mother’s house and slept in her bed with her. He had no place to go, not even a bed of his own, and so he went to his mother’s house and slept in her bed with her. There was nothing wrong with that. It was decided that the son coming home from the hospital should move into her bed because his old house, which was behind hers, was too drafty. I could not understand this, because what kind of draft exists in a place that is hot all the time? There was another reason for him going to live with her. The oldest of her three sons had been living in the other shack behind her house, and his living quarters were really just pieces of galvanize all nailed together with one opening, which was the door. The structure that my sick brother had lived in resembled an actual house; it had three windows and the windows had working shutters, it had a door that could be bolted. When my brother went to the hospital because he was so sick, the one living in the galvanized house immediately moved into the sick boy’s place and my mother could not and would not tell him to move back to his old structure. These two brothers did not get along; I was told this, they did not get along, as if it were an exception, as if usually the people in this family got along except for those two. It was my mother who told me that they did not get along, and she gave me an example of their disagreement. The brother living in the room made of old galvanize is an electrician and he has many valuable tools, which he kept in his room; at the height of my sick brother’s drug addiction, he would go into his brother’s room and remove tools, which he would then sell. My brother the electrician, after warning his brother not to steal from him, ran a live wire around the perimeter of his room and did not tell anyone. A puppy that had been a parting present to my friend who was moving to St. Vincent ran into the live wire and was electrocuted. My mother said she was sure that one brother had not meant to kill the other, that he would not have used wires that carried current strong enough to do so.

This was the home my brother was discharged to. He went home with his mother. He had gained more weight. His temperature was normal. He had an enormous appetite. The infections in the throat, the lungs, the thrush, all of them had cleared up. He only took his daily doses of AZT and a tonic, a high-powered multivitamin, that Dr. Ramsey had prescribed for him. We spoke to each other on the telephone; sometimes he called me, mostly I called him, almost every day. He did not sound like his old self. His voice sounded like that of someone who has just inhaled an amount of helium, out of its normal register. He would speak to me with a pretend English accent, making fun of the way I have come to speak, I suppose, but meaning no malice, I believe, and even if he did, I don’t believe I would care; that, after all, is not serious malice. He would say, How are you, maiy deahre, and how is the home front? In his own voice he would tell me that he felt as if he could take on the world, he felt better than he had ever felt, that life looked wonderful, that he was going to change everything, how sorry he was that he had let things go like that, he had wasted his life, he was going to look for a job as soon as he was able, the doctor had said that just now he should rest and gain some more weight, but as soon as he could get a job, he wanted to settle down and start a family. He would say that again and again, he wanted his own family and as soon as he could, he would get to it. He told me of a plot of land that was bare, available, for sale; he was going to buy it and build a house there and raise a family there. Perhaps it was a flag of some kind, he was trying to tell me something, I don’t know; anyway, why should I tell him just now when he sounded so full of promise, so full of happiness, that a family of the kind he wanted, a woman bearing his own children, was not ever going to be possible? I missed him. I missed seeing him suffer. I missed feeling sorry that I could see him in his suffering, I missed seeing him in the midst of something large and hoping he would emerge from it changed for the better. I did not love him. What I felt might have been love, but I still, even now, would not call it so.

His doctor, Dr. Ramsey, called to ask if I thought he was all right, if I knew anything about the life he was leading now, if he was seeing his old friends again; and this was because on one of his visits for a checkup, he had asked one of Dr. Ramsey’s nurses to go out on a date with him, and when she mentioned his illness he denied he was infected with the virus that causes AIDS, and then when he knew that Dr. Ramsey knew of his behavior he demanded to be tested again for the HIV virus because he said he did not believe he was in a positive condition. Dr. Ramsey thought from the sound of his voice perhaps he was on drugs again. I told the doctor that I believed the sound of his voice was from being so glad to be alive. I believed that then, I believe it now. I said, He is so glad to be alive, his voice has the sound natural to someone glad to be alive. But how did I know that? It was not from personal experience. It was only from conjecture on my part. If I had been almost dead, expected to be dead and then found I was alive, I believe my voice would be suffused with the sound of happy disbelief. I imagined him sitting on my mother’s little front porch, watching the sun’s heat lose its grip on land and people, the paper-thin white clouds drift by, going one way, seldom returning thick and black with rain; the unnatural-to-a-small-island sound of car horns signaling a traffic jam, the impatience of people in a hurry to get to destinations that are never much more than a stone’s throw away. Whenever anyone passed by, he would have to call out to them a greeting regardless of whether they were familiar to him or not. He would not be able to bear the emptiness of silence, someone passing by with no knowledge of his existence, someone passing by who wants no knowledge of his existence. He was not meant to be silent. He was a brilliant boy, he was a brilliant man. Locked up inside him was someone who would have spoken to the world in an important way. I believe this. Locked up inside him was someone who would have found satisfaction speaking to the world in an important way, and that someone would not have needed to greet every passerby, that someone would not have time for every passerby, that someone would have felt there isn’t enough silence in the world. But he was not even remotely aware of such a person inside him. It is I who told him this and he agreed with me at the moment I told him this, and he said yes, and I saw that he wished what I said were really true, would just become true, wished he could, wished he knew how to make the effort and make it true. He could not. In his daydreams he became a famous singer, and women removed their clothes when they heard him sing.

*   *   *

He and my mother both called me to say that he had no more AZT. I panicked because I believed even one day of missing his treatment might cause a setback. If only they had told me that he would be needing more before he needed more. Why hadn’t I thought of it? I called the doctor in this country who had given me the prescription in the first place; the doctor called the pharmacy. It was a Friday afternoon, the pharmacy had no more AZT left and would not be getting any more until the following Monday morning. It suddenly dawned on me that there might be quite a few people in my little community who needed this drug. I did not know who they were. If I wanted to know it was only because I now in some way felt related to them. That Monday I got the AZT, I sent it to my brother through a private mail service, he received it, he resumed taking it; a few days without it in his system did not seem to make any difference to his physical well-being. He continued to gain strength, he continued to get well.

*   *   *

It had been six weeks since I had seen my brother, six weeks since the morning I left him in the hospital, shortly after he had been weighed and registered a gain of one pound from the week before. I had returned home to my family, to winter that, as it must, turns to spring. I wanted to go and see him again and I was preparing to do so when in a conversation I was having with my son I mentioned my mother. I said, My mother … but before I could get any further, my son said, Your mother, I didn’t even know you had a mother. He knew very well I had a mother, he had even met her. The time when she had come to visit me and I had a nervous breakdown after she left, he was two years old. Perhaps he was too young to remember that he did not like her, only for the reason that he did not like anyone for whom I had powerful feelings; he might have felt that any powerful feelings I had for anyone else meant less powerful feelings left for him. The way he said it, though, alerted me to something. He had not known or imagined that I, his own mother, could have in her life a someone about whom I felt the same way he felt about me. When he looks at me he does not see a person, he sees the sky blotted out, the horizon, too; there is no B.C.E. or C.E., there is no present or future, there is no time at all; he sees his needs fulfilled, his needs unfilled, he sees satisfaction and disappointments, I am for him a source of pleasure and pain, he shall wish me dead many times, and when I finally do die, a large emptiness that can never be filled up will be with him for the rest of his own life; he loves me now and hates me now, too, though this last he does not yet fully understand. This state of profound contradiction, loving me and hating me, is what will be for the rest of his life, if I am a good mother to him. This is the best that it can be. If I should fail him—and I very well might, the prime example I have is not a good one—he will experience something everlastingly bitter and awful; I know this, the taste of this awfulness, this bitterness, is in my mouth every day.

Feeling, then, that my son—my children—needed to see me as vulnerable to someone as they are to me, I took them with me on the next visit I made to see my brother, which meant being in the company of my mother. They loved her; my children loved my mother, especially my daughter. My daughter asked her to come and eat with us, to come swimming with us, to come and sleep with us. She wanted to see her grandmother all the time. My son felt the same way, except he complained that he didn’t like the way my mother pinched his cheek when she asked him if he was really her little grandson. They ate whatever she cooked for them. I would say to her, They have no appetite, they never eat anything, and she would say they ate everything she had put on their plate. This was true. It amazed me the amount of food they ate when my mother cooked for them. My mother, looking at my children, told me that they loved her (“Dem lub me. Dem lub me a lot, you know”), and there was something strange in this, as if in time they would come to love her more than they loved me, and there was something boastful in it, as if to say that everyone eventually loves her, as if to say that anyone who loves me will love her, only more so. I told her only that this was true, that they did love her; I did not tell her that loving your grandmother a lot was to be expected, that it was something common, like standing in the open anywhere in the world and looking up and seeing the sky. My brother when he saw my children asked if I had brought them to see him before he died (“Yu bring dem fo’ see me before me dead”). He said it sharply, he said it directly, he actually looked me in the face. I thought he might laugh, I thought he might cry. I did not answer. I did not say that had not crossed my mind.

My brother looked well, very very well. He said he felt well, very very well. I thought, He may be dying, but he’s not dying as rapidly as he was before; I may be dying much more quickly than he; I could cross the street and a car could run over me; he may outlive us all; anything could happen. I wanted then to call some of the people who had been kind to him and helped him when he was sick. I called a man who would come to the house and give my mother a ride to the hospital for her second visit of the day every day. This was extremely kind, the sun would be at its hottest then. I thanked some other people. I called a woman, a social worker, who counseled families in which a member was HIV-positive. When my brother first took sick, someone had told me to get in touch with her. When my brother first met her, he denied to her that he was HIV-positive. It was after many visits with her that he began to say of himself that he was infected with the HIV virus, or that he had AIDS, though he still called it “the chupidness.” For him to face honestly and straightforwardly his affliction was thought to be a good thing, because it meant then that he might somehow begin to understand what was happening to him and try to cope with this stage of his life and so live as long as possible. When my brother asked me if I had brought my children to see him before he died, that to me was evidence that the work she had done with him was a success. And so I called and thanked her. I asked her how she thought he was doing. She said he looked well, but she did not like the tonic he took because the main ingredient in it was alcohol, she had asked him not to take it, he did not need it, Dr. Ramsey had given him vitamins in tablet form that were more than adequate; he took this tonic not in the measured, prescribed amount but from the bottle itself. She was annoyed, I could tell. I said I was sorry. She said there was more. She was gloomy now, I could tell. She had come to visit my brother one day, and a girl from Guiana was there (“a Guianese girl”: she was expressing prejudice here, life in Antigua is better than life in Guiana; people will come from Guiana to do the work that Antiguan people like my brother will no longer do). After the girl left, she got answers to questions she had not really meant to ask; she had not come prepared to ask these questions, it occurred to her to mention them only because she saw the girl. My brother had been having unprotected sex with this woman and he had not told her that he was infected with the HIV virus. He did not tell her, because if he told her he thought she might not want to have sex with him at all. The social worker then went home immediately and brought him back a box of one hundred condoms. But my brother told her that he could not live without sex, that if he went without sex for too long he began to feel funny. He was unmoved when she asked him if he would like to have that done to him, someone infected with the HIV virus and knowing it having sex with him without telling him; perhaps he thought that is exactly what had happened to him. He was unmoved when she asked him if he would like someone to treat his sister (me) the way he had just treated that woman (“What if that had been your sister?”). He agreed to use the condoms in the future when she told him that HIV infection was dose-related, that is, the more of the virus you get, the more virus you have received, the quicker it kills you; if he wasn’t telling people he was HIV-infected, perhaps they were not telling him if they were infected also; using a condom was not only to protect other people from him, it was also to protect himself from other people.

My brother told me that he could not go two weeks without having sex, he said it made him feel, and he lifted his shoulders up and then let them drop down; he looked sad, he looked defeated, but that did not stop me from saying cruelly, Every man I have ever known has said the same thing, two weeks without sex makes them feel funny. He had been trying to tell me that there was something unique about him, that he was an unusual person, a powerfully sexual man. Powerfully sexual men sometimes cause people to die right away with a bullet to the head, not first sicken and slowly die from disease. When we saw Dr. Ramsey for his checkup soon after we had this conversation, I told Dr. Ramsey in front of him about his sexual behavior and the risk he posed to other people and to himself; he truupsed and repeated that he could not go without sex for more than two weeks. He said he did not believe he had the HIV virus anymore and he demanded that Dr. Ramsey test him again. Dr. Ramsey reminded him that he had asked for a new test a few weeks before, after he had been released from the hospital and had gone for one of his checkups and had then said that he did not have AIDS and had been tested again and the results were positive. I now said that I would not pay for a new test, I was convinced that he was HIV-positive, so convinced that I had gotten myself into debt trying to save his life. He promised that he would try to be more careful, but as we were leaving, Dr. Ramsey said something which led my brother to know that as a hobby, he, Dr. Ramsey, served as a producer of many well-known Antiguan calypso singers. My brother got very excited when he heard this and said that he was a very good singer himself, such a good singer that when he sang women who heard him removed their clothes (“Me nar joke, mahn, when me sing, gahl a take ahff she clothes”).

And I began again to wonder what his life must be like for him, and to wonder what my own life would have been like if I had not been so cold and ruthless in regard to my own family, acting only in favor of myself when I was a young woman. It must have been a person like this, men like this, men who are only urges to be satisfied, men who say they cannot help themselves, men who cannot save themselves, men who only know how to die, not at all how to live—it must have been such a man that my mother knew of when she communicated to me the grave danger to myself should I allow such a person to know me too well, communicated this to me so strongly that I grew up alienated from my own sexuality and, as far as I can tell, am still, to this day, not at all comfortable with the idea of myself and sex. And so too, it must be this sort of man that my brother was who accounts for the famous prudery that exists among a certain kind of Antiguan woman (the English-speaking West Indian woman, as far as I can tell; I do not know about the other women who speak the other languages). Such a woman will live for a long time; not so the Guianese girl who waited outside the gate for my brother to return from some outing or other.

Who is he? I kept asking myself. Who is he? How does he feel about himself, what has he ever wanted? Girls to take off their clothes when they hear him sing? What could that mean? He doesn’t make anything, no one depends on him, he is not a father to anyone, no one finds him indispensable. He cannot make a table, his father could make a table and a chair, and a house; his father was the father of many children. This compulsion to express himself through his penis, his imagination passing between his legs, not through his hands, is something I am not qualified to understand. One afternoon I had taken him to swim at a place where when I was a child many church picnics were held. It is now a beach with a hotel for tourists; he was swimming with my mother and they looked so beautiful, the water parted for them in ripplets, forming fat diagonal lines on either side of them, the two of them, one black, one gold, glistening, buoyant, happy just then, within speaking distance of each other but not speaking to each other at all. I could see them, I was standing on the sand, the beach, my children near me building structures out of the sand, structures that they had to protect from the waves since the tide was changing. This was my mother and this was my brother, my mother’s youngest child, her last, and I can remember thinking at his birth (I was thirteen at the time) that his arrival marked a change in her, a change in her relationship to his father, a change in her relationship to the world. She became bitter, sharp; she and I quarreled all the time, she quarreled with everyone all the time. Her features collapsed, she was beautiful in the face before, really beautiful, everyone thought so, really thought so, even she did, but that wasn’t true anymore after my brother was born. That afternoon they were swimming together; without speaking, they were swimming, still without speaking. My brother, seeing some European women who were swimming together and sharing conversation and laughter, swam up to them and said things that I could not hear and they responded with words that I could not hear. I don’t know what they saw in him, this man so beautiful in the face, too thin in the body, but they indulged his flirtatiousness, perhaps enjoying this moment with a man they would have found dangerous in their own native surroundings just because of his complexion, this moment so free of friction, in the hot sun. And I don’t know what he really saw in them, they were not beautiful in face or body, by the standards of European or Other, or what he expected of them; it was only that he could not help himself, he had seen some women, he had made himself seen by them; the outcome would always be the same: sometimes women had sex with him, sometimes they didn’t.

My mother came and sat next to me, and as we were sitting on the sand watching my children, my mother told me that God would bless me richly for bringing my brother the AZT, but I do not believe such a thing, because why would God suddenly enter into it now, when the time to have entered into it was to stop such a thing as this virus from occurring at all; and then my brother, too, came out of the water and he and my mother started to talk about how clever he was at growing things and my mother reminded him of “the fern.” Not so very long ago, my mother paid a visit to Dominica, the place where she was born and where she lived until she was sixteen years of age, to see the last of her living relatives. Her mother, a Carib Indian of Dominica, is dead; her father, part Scot, part African, of Antigua, a policeman who emigrated to Dominica, is dead; her sister is dead, her brother is dead. The people she visited were related to her mother through various people I do not know, I have never met them. She had not been back to Dominica since years before I was born in 1949, and she did not say what made her want to return at that time. She had a wonderful visit, so she said, and while there and walking about, she found a fern that was unusual, something rare; she recognized it and she picked it up and put it in her bag, bringing it back to Antigua with her, where it throve quite happily in an old, leaky, white enameled chamber pot in a shady part of the yard. One day when my brother was in the most extreme grip of his drug addiction, he wanted some cocaine but had no money to buy some. He took my mother’s fern and sold it. As she told me this, she laughed; he was sitting near her and she reached out to rub the top of his head; he truupsed and looked away, he was embarrassed; she meant to embarrass him, he and I knew this. He should not have taken her fern and sold it; I should not have been told about his selling the fern in just this way. I wanted to say to him, She doesn’t know what she is doing, but I have never been able to say this to myself, I have never been able to forgive her for any of the things she did not know she was doing when she did them to me. I was looking at his face. She does not like memory, I wanted to tell him; you have no memory, I wanted to tell him, she taught you that. Some time before I was sixteen years of age, I might have taken a series of exams that, had I passed them, would have set me on a path that would have led me to be educated at a university, but just before all of that my mother removed me from school. There was no real reason for me to be removed from school, she just did it, removed me from school. My father was sick, she said, she needed me at home to help with the small children, she said. But no one would have died had I remained in school, no one would have eaten less had I remained in school; my brother would have been dead by now had this act of my mother’s been all that remained of my life. Had my life stayed on the path where my mother had set it, the path of no university education, my brother would have been dead by now. I would not have been in a position to save his life, I would not have had access to a medicine to prolong his life, I would not have had access to money to buy the medicine that would prolong his life, however temporarily. And as we sat there, not face-to-face at all, she rubbing his head, telling humiliating stories about him, telling me some God or other would bless me, she did not remember this, she did not remember that if it had been up to her, I would not have been in a position to be blessed by any God, I might in fact be in the same position as my brother right now. When I was a child, I would hear her recount events that we both had witnessed and she would leave out small details; when I filled them in, she would look at me with wonder and pleasure and praise me for my extraordinary memory. This praise made an everlasting mark and nothing anyone could do made me lose this ability to remember, however selectively I remember. As I grew up, my mother came to hate this about me, because I would remember things that she wanted everybody to forget. I can see clearly even now the moment she turned on me with that razorlike ability to cut the ground out from beneath her children, and said I remembered too much (“You mine long, you know”). By then it was too late to tell me that.

That sun, that sun. On the last day of our visit its rays seemed as pointed and as unfriendly as an enemy’s well-aimed spear. My mother cooked a delicious lunch for her grandchildren, a stew of corned beef from a tin with tomatoes and carrots and macaroni; they ate it so eagerly, as if they were starved, as if they could be called greedy. My brother said he would like to go for a walk with me alone. I was pleased by this and I also wondered what of mine he wanted; whenever he made a special point of being with me alone, it was to ask me for something I had that he wanted; earlier he had taken me aside to ask me for the pair of shorts that I was wearing; they were a pair of khaki shorts I usually wear when I go hiking in the mountains. I gave them to him, and even though I could easily replace them, I did not like giving them to him at all. I did not want them back, I wanted not to have had to give them in the first place. We walked up a road, past a monument to commemorate a slave who had led a revolt. The monument was surrounded by a steel fence and the gate was locked; the fence made of steel and the locked gate weren’t meant to be a part of this particular commemoration to this slave’s heroism. We walked past an old lighthouse. We walked past the place where my old school, an all-girls’ school, used to stand. We walked past two ponds called Country Pond, and the origin of that name I do not know, but they have played a small, significant part in my own personal history: when I was about nine years old or so and a student at that same girls’ school, the other girls thought of me as a bookish favorite of my teachers and as someone who could not defend herself, and was stuck-up; a particularly aggressive group of them would waylay me after school as I walked home and pin me to the ground while they took turns beating me up. There was no reason for it, I was not malicious, I was not a tattletale, I was not pretty. I was just very weak-looking, thin, and too tall for how thin I was. One day my mother, wondering why I was so late from school, came looking for me, saw from a distance a group of girls huddled over something lying on the ground, got closer, realized it was me, and gave the girl she found beating me an even worse beating. The girl’s mother, on hearing about this, told my mother that she would set evil spirits on me and they would cause me to drown myself in one of these ponds. My mother did not doubt this girl’s mother for one moment and I was immediately sent to visit my grandparents and aunt in Dominica, because it is well known that spirits cannot cross water, and in any case, the obeah practiced in Dominica was far superior to the kind practiced in Antigua. This began a long and painful separation from my family that ended when it became clear that I could not adjust very well to my mother’s absence. When I returned, my second brother had already been born and the bitter, cruel mother I now know had just begun to take hold; the beautiful, intelligent person that I knew and this brother whom I was walking with was born too late to know, and when I described this person to him, this woman who read biographies of Florence Nightingale and Louis Pasteur, who knew all the symptoms of all the known tropical diseases, who knew about vitamin deficiencies and what foods could alleviate them, he thought it was something I was saying to amuse him, he thought I was making it up. I told him then, It is hard for us to leave our mother, but you are thirty years old, you are a grown man, you must leave; this one thing you should do before you die, leave her, find your own house as soon as you are well enough, find a job, support yourself, do this before you die. He said he understood what I was saying, he said that he had been thinking along the same lines. Earlier that day, my mother had told me of a plan she and he had to build another little room, right next to her bedroom, for him to live in. I did not say, You can’t afford to do that, save that money for a time when it might be needed for medicine, taxi fares to the hospital, just save that money. I also did not say that my mother must have felt compelled to build my brother something at this time in his life: three months ago she was sure it would be a coffin. The room to be built would be small, the size of an ordinary tomb.

My brother and I walked up to the botanical gardens and found they were closed for repairs; they had been neglected for many years, many specimens had died, but now someone—most likely a Canadian, because they are so generous to the self-destructive of the world—a Canadian had given money to have the botanical gardens restored. We walked around the perimeter, and using a book on tropical botany that I carried and also relying on our own knowledge, we identified many plants. But then we came to a tree that we could not identify, not on our own, not from the book. It was a tree, only a tree, and it was either just emerging from a complete dormancy or it was half-dead, half-alive. My brother and I became obsessed with this tree, its bark, its leaves, its shape; we wondered where it was really from, what sort of tree it was. If it crossed his mind that this tree, coming out of a dormancy, a natural sleep, a temporary death, or just half-dead, bore any resemblance to him right then and there, he did not say, he did not let me know in any way. We walked on, past the botanical gardens, and we came upon some tamarind trees with ripe tamarinds on them; the tamarinds were hanging very high up on the trees and so my brother picked up stones and threw them at the fruits, hoping to knock some down, the way we would have done if we had been schoolchildren. He succeeded, we ate the tamarinds; they were not good, they were not bad, they were just tamarinds. We did not say anything then. We walked past the jail; he did not tell me if he had been in it, that time when he had been in trouble. He did not seem to notice it at all. We walked over to the grounds of his old school. It did not seem to have any memories for him; he noticed that it was dilapidated, he wondered why children were sent to a school with holes in the building. It was there he found the fruit of a mahogany tree, something we had both seen before, the fruit of a mahogany tree, but it was a marvel to us then, so perfectly shaped like a pear, the Northern Hemisphere fruit, not the avocado pear, but hard like the wood of the tree from which it comes. I brought it back to the Vermont climate with me and placed it on a windowsill, and one day when I looked, it had opened quietly, perfectly, into sections, revealing an inside that was a pink like a shell that had been buried in clean sand, and layers upon layers of seeds in pods that had wings, like the seeds of a maple. I did not know until then that the seeds of the mahogany tree were like that. We then walked past the Recreational Grounds, the public grounds where major public events are held. He pointed to a pavilion and told me that when he was a student at his school, he and a friend used to take girls under there and have sex (“Mahn, me used to bang up some girls under there”). We walked back to my mother’s house.

I returned to my own home in Vermont with my children. I spoke to my brother, the one who was sick with HIV; I spoke to my brother, the middle one; I spoke to my mother. I never spoke to my oldest brother; there is no clear explanation for this, his story is another big chapter and he, too, can neither speak it nor write it down. My youngest brother, the sick one, had moved into the little room that had been built for him; my mother was very pleased that she had built it. He got stronger and stronger. Over the telephone my mother told me that he was very well, so well he might go to work; he found a job, but the person who had employed him ran out of money. He was better beyond anyone’s expectation, he had gained quite a bit of weight, he was staying out all night, he was drinking beer, and when I asked if there was a certainty that there was only beer in the bottle, my mother was actually surprised that a beer bottle might have anything but beer in it; but immediately I heard he was drinking beer, I thought he would not stop at beer. He was seeing a lot of girls and presumably having sex with them; there was the Guianese girl and there were other girls, but no one ever said where those others came from. He and my mother had huge quarrels and unforgivable things were said, but after the quarrels were over, they would both feel that everything said had not really been meant.

One day a woman who, when we were little girls together, was my best friend called me on the telephone to tell me that some books I had given her had been stolen and could I replace them. She was in tears. I was very touched by this, because they were books I had written and when I had given them to her she did not seem particularly pleased to have them. We speculated about who might have taken them and why. Just as she was about to hang up, I asked her about my brother and she said he was quite well, he saw his friends, he was not working, he stayed out all night sometimes; he was drinking, he was never without a bottle of beer in his hand, there was always a girl waiting for him. She said his hair had gotten very thin. She said his lips had gotten red again. When I first saw him in the hospital, lying there almost dead, his lips were scarlet red, as if layers and layers of skin had been removed and only one last layer remained, holding in place the dangerous fluid that was his blood. His face was sharp like a carving, like an image embossed on an emblem, a face full of deep suffering, beyond regrets or pleadings for a second chance. It was the face of someone who had lived in extremes, sometimes a saint, sometimes a sinner.