It has been raining all day. It is the wet season, and the dark clouds
lumber in from the sea, the rain on the rusty corrugated iron roof
drowning out our words. Usually the rain only comes at dusk, these
eternally long dusks when we forget ourselves briefly, and long for the
city and the world, an aching beyond pain, beyond malaise. We are all
outcasts from the world, except perhaps the woman who calls herself
Christmas. Phantasmagoria died last Tuesday. We lay her in a bath of
rose petals, and burned incense, and a priest came from the mainland
for her funeral wearing a veil against our contagion. We all sat around
her, listening to her death rattle, fear and tears following her every
breath. Pahina sang a Maori lament for the dying, a song of bleak
mountains and snow, so far from this humid lushness. We live on mangoes
and coconut, and once a month they bring us rice and canned meat from
the mainland. I will miss Phantasmagoria. She was huge and stateless.
She’d lived in all the towns on the seaboard. Once
she’d
sold her body for a hundred guineas to sultans and sailors, and youths
who could only afford a shilling, lured by her gargantuan breasts and a
sex that smelled like the sea, and the scent of musk from her rotting
teeth, and the smell of jasmine from her armpits. She only let Minstrel
Joe make love to her, and he was stricken as she lay dying, sobbing,
too bereft to play his guitar. He held her hand as the rain fell and
beseeched his ancestors to accept her into the bright land of the dead,
where her grey hair would turn crimson, and she would find the lover
whom she had always dreamt of, an eighteen year old Indian boy from the
Amazon who would ward off evil spirits and covet her body alone. But
she never found him, and consoled herself with the Christians of the
north. Minstrel Joe dug her grave, the earth accepting her, as it will
all of us. She had no fingers or toes at the end, but she loved the
rain, and we’d put a wicker chair on the sand for her, and
she
growled at the rolling waves, tempting eternity.
I grow more and more attached to Christmas each day. Her hair
prematurely grey from pain. God knows what she went through. I wish I
knew her real name, the name her first lover must have sung in her ear.
She draws us all, somewhat after the manner of Gericault. Perhaps she
will grow to love my shy, wayward ways, my last love before I sink into
the eternal earth. Only Minstrel Joe has found some small nugget of
happiness here. He sang for pennies in his home town; and now he sings
for love, a wealth beyond measure. This is the answer to death
— love — but I have not loved for so long. The
smell of sickness haunts us all, the scent of love haunts us too.