Words/worth

I see him every couple months maybe, although the interval can be years at times. He is tall and thin, the fluidity and rhythm of his motion retained from the era when bellbottom jeans and afros were in vogue, without irony, and the particular cadence of his speech is a sort of poetry in itself, a music, like jazz, that inspired or inflected, without words ever being really necessary.

He follows my progress keenly, sincerely, the various women he has seen me with, my letters in the papers which he reads at the National Library, my books of which I may have given him one.

It’s an uneven acquaintance. His story over the perhaps eight years I’ve known him has never really changed, and he himself seems ageless. I listen with rote but unaffected interest about his life in the seventies, when he was the “first boutique owner in Guyana”, the woman he had who broke his heart when she left him for his brother, his slow mastery over the production of ‘bush medicine’ – most importantly, however, is that he has written a book that will save Guyana.

He started and finished it sometime in the eighties, the product of years of untrained studying of the economic and political system, and its manifestations and permutations, but when he took it to the government, they sent him away, when he took it to them big businessmen they sent him away, and now the country still in problems and people still suffering but unless somebody willing to pay him for his works, his words, the book is staying right there at home.

The first time I heard his story, I listened with no small amount of bemusement, and with the image in my head of the itinerant poet/calypsonian, B. Wordsworth, of Naipaul’s Miguel Street. Sometimes, if we meet at Campsite, I buy him coffee.

This last time when I run into him at the bus park, after a couple of solitary drinks at a bar, I get to know more about him than I’ve ever been told in the previous countless encounters, although the boutique and the book still make an appearance. I learn about another woman from decades ago, a young and fierce and passionate Venezuelan with whom he lived for four months in Caracas, who would leap out of bed ready to rage against any perceived slight against the integrity of her people. I learn that at nineteen, he overcame his epilepsy by sheer willpower only to have it triggered again when his heart was broken at twenty six by the woman who betrayed him with his own blood. I learn that he is sixty years old.

In his hand, he has a small plastic bottle, the kind that they sell a quarter of rum or vodka in – it contains a concoction that is guaranteed to keep my ‘boy’ hard, and that since he missed a sale and since it’s me, he would give it to me for half the price. At this point, a bus comes up and I – declining his offer – get on and it pulls out of the park, him standing there, drawn and lost with the bottle still in his hand.

On the bus home, I am exhausted and melancholy and empty, and within that vacuum drifts an image, myself thirty years from now, in some public space at minutes to midnight, desperately poor and hungry and earnest, hawking God knows what, harbouring some great novel meant to save the world, the water-stained pages in an aging briefcase in the corner of a room infested with mice and roaches and a dozen other creeping, gnawing things that only a handful of people ever really know the names of. The sad fear that this inspires passes, but not completely, and with every step in which I falter, I know it will return.

I write alone, within the cavernous belly of the night, and I say truthfully to you – in full consciousness of my capacity for arrogance, even to point of hubris – that what drives it is never anything that aims for nobility or self-sacrifice or acclaim, but instead this thing within the core of me that says, fuck the personal consequences, these words are necessary, that without them this necrotic entropy will spread and consume us all.

We writers in this place are descendants of an ancient and tragic stock, the sons and daughters of the Sybil, and all our grandest work fated perhaps to be as nothing more than a handful of sand let slip through the fingers, than something written upon fallen leaves in the wind.