“FAILURE IS FINAL, BUT WE MUST PROCEED.” Pardi recited this on the veranda at Nomdmi, with his hands folded patiently on his lap; Pardi could not remember where he had heard it. Facing Mardi and himself was a young Trinidadian graduate student who had wandered over from Bellevue.
“Who said that?” Pardi asked the young man.
Pardi had announced his retirement on July 4, 1968, his seventy-fifth birthday. He had surprised the party with the news during his speech at a formal banquet they laid on to celebrate his three-quarter century, thank him for his years of service, and with luck raise funds for the organization.
Pardi fumed, for he considered the occasion an unnecessary fuss. Mardi reminded him that, after thirty years leading the party, he deserved it.
For more than a year after the election in 1967, and all through the final months of Barbara’s illness, Pardi had been preparing to retire. He was frail, his blood pressure was high, and for Mardi, watching him, aging was taking on a familiar face. Its proximity, its traceable fallibility, made her recognize her own frailty for the first time in her life.
At the end of the birthday banquet, the PNP gave Pardi a powder-blue Mercedes-Benz. All through the evening he felt the strain of having to appear to enjoy what he ought to enjoy, and what everyone else was enjoying. In a very profound sense he felt it was time to go home. But he had to make his speech.
Speaker after speaker rose and made eloquent noises about him. They spoke about him sitting there as though he were already dead. The speeches were full of wit and humour, of remembrances and elegiac tributes. They fixed him firmly where he belonged: in the past. And that was just how Pardi felt it should be.
Beside him at the high table his wife seemed to be translating the evening and the speeches for him. She would laugh and press his arm, or pressure his thigh under the table; she whispered when she thought he hadn’t heard something; then she passed what she felt should be his feelings and reactions on to the crowd with nods, smiles, little confiding moments with some large lady who had been a key delegate in the party, or had helped start a clinic in a constituency, or was an indoor agent on polling day. Some she knew, some not. What she did know was that everyone in that room was caught up in the refrain of tribute to her husband.
“And looking back, Mr. Chairman, over the years, may I declare that they have been great years. I have known all things in politics the hard way. I am glad. I would not have chosen my road in life in any other way. I affirm of Jamaica that we are a great people. Out of the past of fire, and suffering, and neglect, the human spirit has survived—patient and strong, quick to anger, quick to forgive, lusty and vigorous, but with deep reserves of loyalty and love, and a deep capacity for steadiness under stress, and for joy in all the things that make life good and blessed.
“Bless this dear land and bless our people, now and for ever more.”
Later that year he mustered his strength for his last farewell to public life at the Party’s annual conference which he addressed in the arena at the National Stadium. It was a deeply moving occasion in which he recounted the grand history of the party in a voice now slightly rumpled from its attic of storage. He spoke of the years creating the infant nation, the challenge provided by Independence to rebuild the national spirit, and the failure of the present government in meeting this, as they moved unimaginatively into what he saw as merely a new guise of colonialism.
Thirty years. 1938 to 1968. Full circle. A political revolution.
“I will … close a very long chapter in the book of my life, but I cannot imagine a life that was lived without that chapter … when the wheel turns it rests on different soil … the difference between birth and subsequent growth … life does not start from scratch … the present derives from the past….”
There he stood before them … a moral old statesman who loved his country. It was as fundamental as that. Beneath the brave words which affirmed the achievements of his own political career, lurked the crumpled memory of each defeat. And although history was on his side as he recounted the irrevocable strides which had brought them to nationhood, his shrunken frame was testament to his disappointments; it was difficult not to think of them as he spoke, since for every milestone there had been an attendant shadow cast as though for him.
He outlined the responsibilities of the next generation of the party whom he charged with social and economic reform. And then he summed up what had been his own.
“I say that the mission of my generation was to win self-government for Jamaica. To win political power which is the final power for the black masses of my country from which I spring. I am proud to stand here today and say to you who fought that fight with me, say it with gladness and pride, mission accomplished for my generation.”
There in the arena at his stadium, the vast crowd exploded. Michael who would soon be persuaded to run in the race for party leadership, was there to receive what he was destined to make his mandate. He crossed the platform to embrace his father who seemed in that moment lost behind the large frame of his younger son. To Mardi it was symbolic of the passing on of a legacy of love, politics, and, inevitably, pain within our family. To me it was a sloughing of skins, an inner shuffling of selves or fates, a natural metamorphosis in the life of the family.
To Michael it was simply his father’s moment of triumph for which he hugged him in an intimate applause, and he predicted that the phrase “mission accomplished” would “resonate in the corridors of national memory.” In this speech Michael had found a crescendo he thought a befitting climax to his father’s work.
And with his public farewell over, one might have safely expected that Pardi could now settle peacefully back on his laurels with satisfaction, visited by devoted family members, appreciative friends, colleagues, and countrymen, his legacy assured, warmed gently by the sunset of his life.
Pardi had built his own study at Nomdmi during the year they lived there. Mardi suggested this was where he must one day write a book.
“A book?” Pardi was perplexed.
Although she agreed with his decision to leave politics, she felt it necessary to find a different name for retirement. She hated the word as much as he did. She recoiled from the concept of voluntary withdrawal—into what? An exile? Worse yet, a void? A dissipation? She wondered how the human mind could embark on any journey without a destination, even if it was simply moving from one room to another. How could it just give up? So she had conjured up an alternative.
“Norman has decided to write a book,” she started telling friends. “Norman is writing a book.”
“Your story, you know,” she nudged. “A sort of chronicle.”
But he had no plan to write any book. He was not a writer. He had lived his life. If a biographer wished to make something of that, so be it. That was another thing.
The study was a long cement-block room with untiled concrete floors. Its entrance faced the first of Mardi’s named peaks, Dilmoon, with large glass doors through which Pardi, when he was seated, could see only the tops of the mahoes and pines staggered down the side of the valley below. My father could never understand why they wouldn’t just cut down the trees to provide a view.
Pardi thought it was a very private room, for it was disconnected from the house and sat on the verge overlooking Morgan’s valley, brooding among the trees. Inside, it felt lonely to Pardi, its emptiness echoing till the sound escaped valleyward, as though the single entrance were a large drain through which everything washed. Mardi got a round watsonia lily mat from Bellevue which she felt would soften the room and absorb its echoes. It proved to be more successful as a dragnet for dust.
Pardi covered the walls with bookshelves, on top of which he centred the second maquette of Bogle; its purpose bestrode the room. He chose a small wooden desk that had been in his bedroom at Drumblair, and matched it with his swivelling wooden desk chair. The desk was the least pretentious one he had, and seemed not to require too much ambition of anyone who sat there. He brought an old reclining chair over from the house, and a cupboard he had made himself.
One day Mardi was surprised to discover one of her old carvings on the wall. It was a bas-relief three and a half feet tall, on a thick plank of mahogany, which she had started to carve soon after the 1938 national unrest from which her husband’s political life had proceeded. Pardi designed a way to hang it with a brace, and Ivan, with help and a great deal of difficulty, managed to hoist the heavy carving onto the wall.
Three heads stared from the wood, surrounded by gouged-out flames; each head faced a different direction. They were Shadrach, Meshach, and Abednego, who in the Book of Daniel are cast into flames by King Nebuchadnezzar for refusing to worship a golden calf, and emerge singed. Mardi had called the carving The Fiery Furnace, but when it was complete she sensed in people an indifference to the piece. When a photographer asked her if she didn’t intend to finish the work, she quietly but firmly stored it out of sight and forgot it.
She had no idea how he had unearthed it. She saw that time had not diminished its sense of defiance. Its place on her husband’s wall now seemed its triumph. She wondered why he had chosen to put it there, but felt she shouldn’t ask him, for fear it would break an important spell. Sometimes when she entered the room its presence inspired her to recite her favourite quote from Lawrence—“See, we have come through.”
In the odd way one remembers the place where one receives bad news, the room reminded me of Aunt Vera. News of her death came by a telegram which Pardi opened one afternoon when he was sitting quietly working on his upcoming retirement speech. She had died of whiplash, reported her daughter Pamela to Aunt Muriel, who thought it was at least mercifully quick.
I had handed him the telegram. “Your Aunt Vera has died,” he said and he kept looking at the telegram for a long time. I remember I was looking at geraniums; I may have picked them and brought them to the room, or maybe they were already there in a vase. Red geraniums with a sticky smell. My great-aunt’s sometimes stern face now came to me gentle, as she had looked when I had last seen her in London where she roomed at the YWCA. She had given me a sensible pair of walking shoes, finding the ones I wore unsuitable for “these devilish pavements.” And for me this study became the place from which the family proceeded without a vital digit. Pardi suddenly rose to take the news to his wife, as though it were properly intended for her instead. I went with him to the main house and ran up the stairs, with an alacrity I always accorded the communication of bad news.
“Aunt Vera is dead!”
“Oh, not now, I’m washing up!” Mardi shouted incongruously from behind the closed upstairs door.
Aunt Vera’s homecoming was unceremonious, for her remains arrived in an envelope carried, inexplicably, by my mother’s first husband, Bob, who happened to be travelling to Jamaica. My family had gone to meet a coffin, and were visibly deflated when Aunt Vera emerged from Bob’s jacket pocket.
“She wished to be sprinkled over the mountains at Nomdmi,” Bob explained sombrely, in his lay preacher’s rumble.
“Absolutely not!” Mardi was emphatic. “I’ve had Vera in my hair most of my life, I won’t have her there in death as well!”
Aunt Vera was placed in an urn and, contrary to her express wish, buried in the cemetery in a spot near Barbara. Cremation was a new phenomenon to Jamaica, so some curious acquaintances who went to pay their respects asked if she was really that small, or wondered why she had been buried upright.
Just after the study was built, Parboo, a maverick Jamaican artist of Indian descent who was a close friend of Douglas, paid an unannounced visit to Pardi at Nomdmi. Not to Mardi—he was explicit about that.
Parboo drank too much and lived too much. He was physically small, with a restless, eager, often quarrelsome resonance that exuded from the light in his eyes and the gleaming of his teeth in a round face. Mardi always said that his person was a mere abbreviation of his being.
He arrived on the hilltop with his comparatively serene American wife, who was also an artist. It was strange that what would have been an intrusion to Pardi and Mardi at Regardless was seen as an event at Nomdmi.
Mardi dreaded unpopularity. She was so eager to win Parboo’s truant heart, and to expose herself to a new generation of artists, that she provided ponchos and pot luck on a cold, windy mountain Sunday, while Pardi gave a tour of the study. The boisterous artist surveyed its incongruous modernity, called for a rum and some paint and proceeded to transform the bleak outside wall facing the cottage with a bright mural in orange and green and black, colours left over from a recent repaint of Nomdmi.
Pardi loved his wall. He often wished he could see it from inside the study. Mardi found the vivid colours and bold outlines exciting—if not confrontational, certainly challenging. Just what Norman needed intellectually, she decided.
So there it remained, a cheerful and surprisingly uncontrover-sial design, in harmony with the mountain top.
Between Nomdmi and the gate, the rebuilt Mini was the halfway mark: the place where Pardi would wait for Mardi to invite him to see her work, or simply to emerge, shaking her short grey hair free of whatever she was doing, for her midday drink.
In a small clearing near Mini there was a large old mahoe which had come down during the hurricane. It was the tree under which, as a child, I used to bathe in the Norman Washingtub mobile bath. In later years we often sat on the natural bench provided by the fallen trunk. Hardening and drying over the years, its bark always made me think of the hide of a pachyderm who had somehow got stranded on his back, feet in the air, on this mountain, and bore the frustration of his handicap in silent immobility. Above the trunk a greenness sprang from a fissure, as though staking its claim, and flourished in joyous contradiction. In the mornings, on her way into the hut, Mardi had taken to beating her breast with a closed fist as she passed the fallen-down tree, and asserting: “A refusal to die!”
Mardi noticed that Nomdmi had returned to that seamless feeling of total inactivity. For a while, when they were actually living there, Mardi feared it had lost this quality. Now even their breathing coming down the path seemed an intrusion, or the sound of solitaire’s musical note, or rats unparcelling the crisp underbrush.
Although Mardi visited Mini, she was not in a working mood. Nowadays she wondered if her carving had taken up too much of her life. She had a strong if desultory maternal instinct that she summoned at times of need, but she kept it as an emergency self, for she knew that in everyday life it might overwhelm her family.
At times she felt in love. Not with anyone, but just the “in love” she had felt in her younger life, when all around her poets were writing poetry and there were artists in love with wood or paint or clay and Jamaicans had fallen in love with Jamaica. And now she saw it all come full circle: a genuine Jamaican art movement.
She had started writing letters to the scattered members of the Focus group. Some of them answered her, occasionally including poems. Mike sent her a few verses he must have written clandestinely during his self-declared years of poetic abstention, and George, who had written virtually nothing, sent a sudden deluge of pained love letters.
She needed to mother some creativity other than her own.
Pardi was getting so frail. His breathing was more laboured, his walk slower, his deafness appalling. Even when he coughed it sounded weaker; only his temper remained indisputably charged. She found more and more that she had to tend him. As she listened to the silence around her, she would try to will the flow of her husband’s spirit onto the page.
But every time Pardi started to write, he felt awkwardly pompous. There was something in his soul that disliked talking about himself. Maybe because of this, he found an erudite voice leaning over his shoulder and telling the story for him, as though it were a third person referring to itself as “I.”
“My father was the illegitimate son of a woman of the people.”
He had always dreaded the fate of both Lot’s wife and Eurydice. Now he looked back in a contemplative search, he found there no new worlds to conquer, only the irritating discovery of endless buried fragments he had not wished to disturb. “Only a dog goes back to his vomit,” he’d sometimes say.
He tried to muster enthusiasm for the project for his wife’s sake. Two young history graduates from the university were hired to do research. They retrieved their findings from the dispassionate graveyard of history, bringing his memories back piece by piece, bone by bone, sorted, bottled, and labelled.
Now and then he sat with the students in the afternoons over a drink. He longed for their opinions of the history that had fathered them. They were solid and righteous, and brimmed with the arrogant omniscience of youth. They waited for him with disapproval as he reached out over the years, shaking their neatly trimmed Afros and clucking pronouncements from the safe rim of hindsight.
“It was a great mistake,” they said of this or that, and their hairdos agreed.
“You should have” or “you should not have,” but they only offered this if they were asked, otherwise staying politely within the mandate for which they were paid. They did their work competently.
Many young Jamaicans were sympathizers of the new Black Power movement. Whatever their complexions, they wore high Afros, colourful dashikis, and Jesus sandals. Black Power, with its mission of restoring black self-esteem, was a powerful antidote for our past. Some of its sympathizers thought deeply about our history, our need for change, and what was positive and constructive for the future. Others simply looked defiant and talked about heads rolling, or appeared to be insolently biding their time. They expressed discontent with everything. They saw compromise in what had been called change, sell-out in what had been considered negotiation, and traitors in some of those who had been our heroes.
At first I was in awe of the movement, excited by its audacity. I wished to be part of it. It was a way to establish one’s credentials on campus. I did all I could to endear myself, even washing my hair in baking soda to make it fizz, always aware that my rather fair skin and the name of Manley singled me out for suspicion.
At the start of the first term of my final year the student body called a protest march. A Guyanese history lecturer had been unjustly declared persona non grata, barred from re-entering Jamaica because of his “subversive” teachings. I hoped that the outrage students felt against the JLP government would impact favourably on their opinion of the PNP. But I was trapped in what the movement called “the old mindset.” Their disillusionment was with both political parties, who were felt to have evolved from white cultural roots through white education, no matter what they fought for.
Caring not a jot about either the issue or the slighted lecturer, I saw my opportunity to pledge my allegiance to those aloof beings who treated me to their indifference; I set off on the protest march. I saw a police baton split open the head of a friend beside me, and experienced the unforgettable inner scorching of tear gas. Hours into what turned out to be an historic and bloody affair in which three people died, I ran towards a water hose held by a kindly gas station attendant who was spraying the jet at the burning faces passing by.
I thought I had won my spurs.
In a newspaper the following morning was a picture of students running towards the hose, with a report stating that even the opposition leader’s granddaughter had fled the march on discovering the real issues.
Pardi was outraged. “Do the students not give us hope that they will serve a real purpose in our community when they show a live interest in matters that are of profound concern to democracy and the principles of human rights? What did Ghandi spend his life doing but practising civil disobedience? And what did Martin Luther King live and die for?”
My written explanation to the students was generally ignored, and I remained an outsider to all but two of my peers: a haughty Trinidadian who felt that the soul was lit more by poetry than by politics, and a Jewish friend whose father had escaped the Communists in Czechoslovakia.
Criticism against both political parties raged on campus. This led to the inevitable protest newspaper. Abeng was a slim tabloid produced by some of those whom Pardi called the “angry young men” of the university. Abeng was an old African word for the horn used by the Maroons to summon members of the tribe.
My dilemma grew with the first issue of Abeng.
I wanted to be part of a generation that repudiated our history, but to attack our two-party democracy I would have to tear down Pardi. Moreover, I was not convinced that I should emulate these people. As far as I was concerned, most of them had not earned the right to destroy Pardi’s name. Yet I still wanted to be accepted by them. I resented them for writing what they wrote, but I hadn’t the guts to say so.
I hated myself for being such a coward. I hated my family for being the kind of people that I couldn’t rebel against without complications. So I resorted to nebulous belly-aching: “Why shouldn’t they disagree if they want to, and who do you think you all are that everyone has to worship you?”
I knew they were wearing Pardi down. And I believed I was disappointing him.
“It’s bewildering,” said Mardi, clearly affronted.
“Well, they are disillusioned. It’s not personal. They don’t really have an argument with me. They have an argument with history; so have I,” he tried to explain. “We just see different ways of proceeding. It’s an old argument, and not a very clever one. It’s based on the premise that even the best things we inherited through the colonial system are to be repudiated. They come from a source of our history that was contaminated, so every aspect must be damned.”
“These young hot-heads were in their cradles when we were struggling for universal suffrage and workers’ rights and self-government! Who the hell do they think got the British out?” Hearing her, I suddenly thought with embarrassment how incongruous Mardi would seem to my fellow students—standing there looking Caucasian, delivering her theatrics against British imperialism in her flawless English.
“Their argument is that we are replacing the old system with a variation of the same system. I do not agree, but it is a healthy sign for Jamaica that there are young Turks fighting about these things.”
Despite what he said, Mardi felt that the sunset was proving to be less golden than expected. “They will break his heart!” she decided.
In February the PNP voted for a new president. The contest was between Vivian Blake and my father. Blake, a Queen’s Counsel like Pardi and a lover of racehorses, had always been close to Mardi and Pardi. It was rumoured that on more than one occasion he and my father had loved the same woman. He was considered a moderate in comparison to my father, who was seen as radical because of his union background. Blake had fought the battles of federation and the recent election side by side with my father, in support of Pardi.
I arrived home on the eve of the party conference with a copy of the second edition of Abeng. There on the front page was a picture of Pardi with the two vice-presidents contending for party leadership, Michael and Vivian Blake. The caption was crude: “P.N.P. Choice: Black Dog or Monkey.”
Mardi gave a little gasp. “Not that wretched rag again!” As Pardi’s fingers, contaminated by the cheap ink, followed the text, his hands faltered.
“Oh God, that’s all we need this afternoon. Why bring this awful rag home, Rachel?” Mardi used my full Christian name when she was angry with me. “I wish you’d just not bring it into this house!” Her face disarranged by rage, she walked over to Pardi and took the paper away, as though to rescue him.
“Chut” was all he said, as firmly as his old voice could, but it was strained. I went to stroke his head, but he brushed away my hand with a lifted arm that felt like steel.
I kept alternating between affection and pain, acutely irritated with them for not seeing things in a way that would make the students forgive them, for not being heroes the students could revere like Marcus Garvey or Malcolm X, for not being something other than the middle class people I had now realized we were. All the shelves with their classical music, the books of Jung and Freud, Bertrand Russell and Browning, Hopkins and Lawrence, seemed an irritating anachronism to me.
“It’s time we start speaking Jamaican, and teaching dialect in schools,” I pontificated, espousing what I heard at university.
Pardi was watching me. He said nothing.
“You don’t understand,” I shouted, facing Mardi. “You were brought up English.” Then came the cruellest thing I could have said to her. I knew this, but I couldn’t stop myself. “You are only a quarter black!”
“So are you, for that matter, my dear,” she replied. I had brought that on myself.
“The point is, you can’t use the oppressor’s system to free yourself. You have to go back to your own roots …”
“You won’t find many of those, I’m afraid … and certainly not in someone else’s field,” Pardi said flatly. “But no doubt we will go on digging, in futile search of a time we lost. It was a betrayal, but that’s that. It’s the past.”
“You can’t go home again,” Mardi quoted grandly.
I felt tears of frustration in the back of my throat. I wanted just to be part of the life I belonged to, with a point of view that rhymed with everyone else’s, in a world where I looked like everyone else. I wanted not to be torn to pieces by conflicting views and ideals, not to have to decide between low ground and high ground, just to flow with something greater than myself that would not even notice it had swallowed me.
My father was elected party president—whether as black dog or monkey, we never knew. Like two old matriarchs, Mardi and I heard the news over the radio at Regardless. “Here we go again,” she said on a sigh, but she was very proud. Though I was joyful for him, I knew that my life would continue in five-year cycles, with good years and lean years, and that the family’s recurring pain was unlikely to end.
Pardi liked the students who visited from Bellevue, the university retreat next door to Nomdmi. Their trespass was part of a code of mountain informality and exploration. They came to pick ortaniques, not to argue history, and when he was there they always left with a bag or a box of fruit. They were usually post graduates, though now and then he met final-year undergraduates swotting for exams. Pardi invited them onto the veranda for a drink and took the opportunity to quiz them.
The older ones were often glib, the younger ones brash.
“I don’t know who said that,” admitted the uppity English major in his lyrical Trinidadian accent, and then, with callous insensitivity, he went on to surmise, “People with big egos can live by the sea, but people with small egos should live on mountains.”
However he interpreted this, Pardi took no offence. “Who said that?” he frowned sceptically.
“I did,” the student said with satisfaction, a smirk pulling down the corners of his mouth.
Pardi appeared not to believe him. He had recently been given a wristwatch by his constituency, but its place on his wrist was only a sign of affection; whenever he needed to know the time, he fished into his shirt pocket for his old fob watch. He did so now. It was after six o’clock, and getting dark.
Mardi had turned on a light in the dining-room. It sent a ghostly beam through the window and down the path, sinking the veranda where they sat into deeper darkness. She saw the wooden chairs hunched like lonely shoulders in the dark, and for a moment she imagined Pardi not being there. Not there at all. As if her life was continuing but she was there without him. She imagined her footsteps coming back from the gate without him, attempting to pick up courage, like a child moving faster and faster from its fear. She became so frightened she swallowed, as though she had stalled and needed to start herself up again.
The student, whose father was a retired high court judge, took the time check as an Edwardian signal of dismissal, and bade them farewell before Pardi could check it again. He descended the crumbling stone steps and disappeared around the side of the house through the guava trees, retracing his steps over the trampled bracken and sticky burs. He carried a box of deceptively ripe looking ortaniques, and no doubt the hope that he had dug a mark deep enough to leave his signature in the bark of the old man.
Mardi, still shaken by her imaginings, was thinking what a lot of her life had simply been her husband. He was almost her faith, and her conscience. In a way he had taken the place of God for her.
“What does he know,” she observed haughtily once the student was gone. “Trinidad doesn’t have real mountains!”