25.
Thing Without a Name (After Naipaul)
Each morning, waking, Hat would sit. Sit a minute to Hatself. Hat, stretching, would glance at the ceiling. Ceiling Hat could touch by standing on Hat’s bed. Bed Hat would leave each morning, feuding over dreams Hat ordinarily found absurd. Absurdity was least concerning to Hat until whatever Hat found in the morning, waiting for Hat in the yard, beyond Hat’s front door. Door like a mute mouth, Hat would think, until you close it and know it’s not so much quiet as forgettable. Forgettable, like unknown things could trick plenty people into disremembering that, at one time, the Earth was the same age as everybody present, everybody still alive, everybody still to come. Come alone to your disadvantage if you forget that unknown does not equal fixed. Fixed on this story, every barbershop and salon halfway through every city in this peninsula dug what zeal there was between Hat and one Bogart.
Bogart knew Hat was full of the kind of ambition that meant Hat’s name stuck to every yard seven miles around. Bogart had a long-legged walk, and this was the stride everybody saw him do every morning, going to sit on the banister of the veranda around the back of Hat’s house, waking half the people seven miles out, too. So, you could say Bogart was projecting his own kind of ambition.
How exactly Hat came by the ritual that caused Hat to grow an inch each morning, no one really knew. But the business involved Hat stretching over the veranda’s bevelled edge every morning as Bogart appeared. Hat then bawled, “What happening there, Bogart!”
“What happening there, Hat?” Bogart would say. And just as soon as Hat gained that inch, Hat lost the inch again.
It was something of a mystery why Bogart was called Bogart. Suspect that it was Hat who named Bogart—or had tried to. Remember that year the film Casablanca was released? That same year when Bogart’s fame for living an unknowable life full of both disaster and fortune made a fire through Port of Spain? There were, before long, hundreds of young men adopting a hardboiled Bogart similitude. And no young woman within a three-mile range was spared a what’s your name, a hey, doudou darling.
Hat knew, more than anyone, that Bogart preferred a carefree spirit to caricature and lived with one eye in the present and the other pinned to a time before. Bogart had an instinct for things Bogart always claimed to be too old for. Before anyone had called Bogart “Bogart” they had called Bogart “Patience,” because he played that game elsewhere called solitaire. Whether the day was bright or dark. Whether dark mood or light mood. But Bogart never liked cards, if you ever asked Bogart or Hat. No, sah! Not me. Cards is for little chil’ren. Big people don’t have no business with cards!
On a day like today, Hat hovered over to Bogart’s little room at the rear of his house and found Bogart sitting on his bed with a deck of cards in seven lines on a small table in front of him—like what?
“What happening there, man?” Hat asked. Somebody might say it was natural for Hat to speak and for Bogart to acknowledge little of what Hat said to Bogart. And that this was the only true form of steadiness on this Earth.
Bogart said nothing for ten or fifteen minutes. In that time, you somehow felt what Hat also felt whenever Hat asked Bogart a question. Years passed between one uttered word and the next. Then, next, you were surprised to be face to face with Bogart, having revealed everything you knew about something. Something-Bogart, passing through life so uninterested and superior. Those superior-looking little eyes. Small and sleepy, keeping Bogart’s face Bogart’s. That face, fat; and that hair, gleaming black. A roil. Something like a wave. Bogart finally waved Bogart’s arms. Ample, they had their own aura as Bogart moved them above the cards. The drama of clouds hovering near a mountain’s peak could be a thing that happened around here in the mornings at sunrise, or it could be Bogart studying how Hat picked up a card that would work like a lustre in Bogart. Then Bogart would clutch Hat’s ass with a hypnotic slowness before Bogart made his move to win the game.
It happened this way each time. And this is how Bogart had entered Hat’s life never to leave it again. They’d met over a cards table, and since Hat had watched Bogart enter the room with a slowness, Hat was sure he could wager big against Bogart in a game of patience.
“Bogart, if you win this game here, you have free room and board for the rest of your life.” Hat—who, in a recent cockfight, had wagered and nearly lost everything he owned to a swindler from Maraval—felt, in that moment, that some luck had entered Port of Spain, and that all the luck would be in Hat’s favour.
Bogart had just given up cockfighting, a game in which Bogart’s Aunt Linda had become icon and fable at once. It was a reputation Bogart could not afford to ruin, and that is why Bogart had come to risk heaven and a hell green as Earth on the more honourable and close-to-god patience. That is how it all went.
Patience was necessary for Hat, given that Hat had taken Bogart at Bogart’s word. “Don’t watch me, just so you know. I learn this game like a chemist or alchemist or something. The old man from down Freeport teach me good-good,” Bogart said.
That Bogart was so desperate for a good night’s sleep indoors, Bogart would risk nearly anything, even all of Bogart’s gambled secrets. Whatever made yesterday fat with comeuppance, round with chance. Whatever were the inner workings of patience, Bogart risked for that good-good assurance Hat was offering. Bogart’s own stake was that Bogart would spend the rest of Hat’s life working out the strongest mathematics to make Hat’s life as easy as Bogart could make it if Bogart lost the game of patience to Hat.
“Hat,” Bogart said, “believe me.”
Bogart said this all out loud, with such grace and frankness that Hat thought the reward of giving lodging to Bogart a dispassionate risk to take for a person who lived such self-denial, so open-veined and fair. Plus, there was the flavourfulness of Bogart’s every word. Even when Bogart licked Bogart’s thumb to deal out the cards, there was grace in that.
Bogart’s words turned out to be true. And now Bogart, with this room and board, became also the most bored person ever known to Hat. It was this realization that led Hat to invite Bogart on daily walks at the start of their cohabitation. This was until one day when Bogart stopped and said to Hat: “I doesn’t really like to walk. But walking with you does be like a special kind of punishment. You does walk like you always hustling. And I don’t have nothing against a good hustle—you know that by now. I just don’t like not knowing what I hustling for or against.” And just as abruptly as their walks began, their walks came to an end.
After that, no considerable time had lapsed before Hat tried to encourage Bogart again. This time, Hat pretended Hat believed Bogart could make a living by tailoring. Bogart then paid Hat to write a sign to legitimize Bogart as a tailor:
TAILOR AND CUTTER
Suits Made to Order
Popular and Competitive Prices
Bogart lowered his prices through barter or through his deck of worn cards. And Bogart bought a sewing machine and some blue and white and brown chalks. Chalks aside, Hat never could imagine Bogart genuinely competing with anyone else’s fees. Fees were not what people will remember of Bogart. This fact was easy persuasion for some people who ordered Bogart’s tailoring. And it brought many interesting people to Hat’s yard: one with a missing arm who insisted Bogart make every shirt with one long sleeve and one short sleeve; one who was a funeral hobbyist and wanted only blue-mauve get-ups to attend them; one whose mother had given birth to thirteen children without taking a single day off work. Bogart’s work had its perks for Hat; but still, Hat could not remember Bogart ever making a suit, even as there never seemed a surpassable threshold for the promises of Bogart.
Bogart was a bit like Popot, the carpenter next door, who never made a stick of furniture but would plan and plan and chisel and chisel what Hat thought the carpenter called mortises. Mortises—? Hat never understood. Understood, mortises were the thing that whenever Hat asked, “Mr. Popot, what you making?” Popot would answer, “Ha, boy! That’s the question. I making the thing without a name, Hat.”
But Hat knew Bogart made nothing like this contraption nobody alive will ever know what to do with. Whatever a mortise was busy being.
Hat never wondered, then, how Bogart came by any money. Money, according to Hat, did not belong in the same universe as Bogart. Did anyone pay Bogart for the things Bogart made and called clothes? Clothes! Hat mourned. Far too generous a name, far too inadequate a sorting for what Bogart was up to with the island’s good and cheap cloth. It must have been that languor of Bogart’s—which people took for gentility or grace—really doing the work. Grace, Hat assumed, was what most grown-ups traded for money as a matter of course (even if that was not true for Popot. Popot had a wife who worked at an assortment of jobs. She’d ended up befriending many men. Men were one thing, but Bogart never brought a woman to that little room that Bogart now owned because of a game of patience that Bogart felt occasionally bad about. Bogart did enjoy clutching Hat’s ass. A thing that had been settled between them ever since that big wager had been won).
This little room of Bogart’s had once been called the servant-room. But no servant to the people in the main house had lived there for at least one hundred years. Hat’s parents had left the estate to Hat upon their death. On a day like today, the servant-house was still just an architectural convention of a kind. A leftover plantation protocol. Unlike the unknown, it had been always empty until Bogart.
It still seems like something of a miracle to Hat that Bogart managed to have a friendship. Friends, to Hat, were the most honourable habits of people who were curved toward fitting somewhere for long. Hat had imagined Hatself always moving. Whether in life or death. Hat had thought, before Bogart, the ones who temper a person should always cause them to move, even when they fit somewhere. Person or not, Bogart had been at one time the most popular name on Belmont Street. If you asked Hat. Here, Hat would grow used to seeing Bogart squatting on the pavement with all the big men of the street, and the odd woman clutching a handbag or a cutlass. And while Hat or Edward or Eddoes was talking, Bogart would look down, stretch out a finger or two, and draw rings on the pavement. Pavement, when it was less a heavy object than the dogged behaviour of a thing that knows how to act completely dead, would shake with the laughter of those gathered as Bogart told them one story or another. But Bogart, he never laughed audibly. Audibly, he never told a story. Story meant everything outside of speech for Bogart.
And Bogart, whenever there was a fête or something like that, could never rest easy, because everybody would say, “We must have Bogart. Smart like hell, that Bogart, like a thing without a name.”