Witchbroom by Lawrence Scott

Author:Lawrence Scott [Scott, Lawrence]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780993108693
Publisher: Papillote Press

THE HOUSES OF KAIRI

THE CARNIVAL TALES OF LAVREN MONAGAS DE LOS MACAJUELOS

2

THE TALE OF THE HOUSE IN TOWN

LAVREN WAS stirred once more by the tales of Marie Elena, muse and mother, to leave the turret room and to descend the staircase, where he met his beloved Josephine whose memory he took with him. He dived beneath the corrugated waves of the Gulf of Sadness through a saffron light, and resurfaced at a time when one century tottered towards the horizon of the setting sun, bleeding over the mountains of the continent of Bolivar. Another rose with the morning over the beaches of Manzanilla and shone down on the indentured from the Gangetic plain, the last of whom Marie Elena remembers having seen, brought in boats to the island of Kairi from Nelson, the island of quarantines, with their children whose mouths bled with the dirt they chewed from the haematite cliffs.

As he emerged from the waters of the Gulf of Sadness, the previous generations fell from him, from her, and faded into the sepia of memory and tale. Elena Elena had died of a grand old age back in Aracataca, guarded by her tiger cats and saying, ‘Take the crucifixes away from me, old priest, and paint them black.’ The Englishman had died of syphilis in the Planters’ Club on the Plaza de la Marina, and was buried quietly in Lapeyrouse Cemetery.

Lavren found himself under the old silk-cotton trees at the water’s edge on the mudflats of Mucurapo, where the tide had once strewn the beaches with the charred flotsam and jetsam of the fires of emancipation; the wreckage of indentureship that had destroyed the cities of San Jorge de Monagas, the old and founding town, San Andres in the south and the New Town which now rose above him. He looked towards the Laventville Hills, where the sun came down upon the new streets and squares, the new avenues and boulevards of the Belle d’Antilles. This is what the sailors called her, shimmering in her basin of green hills, circling above Santa Ana, Maraval, Sainte Claire. He looked with the eyes of the master of colour, the art master, Monsieur Cazabon.

Lavren turned the pages of his tale, eager to reach where he was being drawn. The heat delayed him. He made his way slowly, following where he was led by the murmuring of water as of a fountain playing over rocks and falling into itself. The murmur of the water was like the murmur of a voice. It came to him on the breeze that descended from the green hills. Wafting on this breeze was the scent of cuscus grass, which he had first met in the port near the walls of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception with its twin towers. It was mixed with the scent of the market and the orange sellers. The murmuring of the water was mixed with the laughter and shouts of the market criers.

At the comer of Prince and Queen Charlotte Street,

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