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The Last Harmattan of Alusine Dunbar
Syl Cheney-Coker
(First published 1990)
This book is out of print.
Gustavius Martins died in the fire that night, but his badly burnt body was not discovered for some while, not until his wife, in the confusion realised that he had not come out with the other men, and went in search of him. She prayed that she would find her husband wounded, unable to walk, so that she would bring him back to nurse his wounds, bring him back to life and wipe out the terrible anguish that had come into their lives since the war. The thought that he might be dead did not enter her head, because Isatu Martins was not a woman easily troubled by the supposition that things could happen to her or to Gustavius to deprive her of living in happiness with him for ever. After Garbage was born, she had gone to see the diviner, who had told her to take her husband back to her town. She wanted to thank him for his advice, and to bring him some presents. Asked by the venerable man is she had any other request to make, she replied that she had only one wish in life.
'What is that, my child?' asked the wise man.
'To die in bed with my husband, when I am seventy-five years old,' she replied.
So now she prayed even more loudly, hoping that all the angels and all the dead would come out of their graves to answer her prayers. But the further she picked her way into the burnt-out garrison, the more shocked Isatu Martins was at what she saw. Parts of the garrison were completely gutted and the fire was still burning in the one area where Isatu Martins hoped to find her husband. It was a slow fire but if there was life there, then it was the sound of the beams as the collapsed onto the floor in the blaze. The former shop of the carpenters from Calabar, the barns where the captain and his men had stored food for the possibility of a long rainy season, had been wiped out and the place smelled of the burning flesh of animals.
Yet Isatu Martins went into each of the cells, looking for the familiar face of her husband. What she saw in nearly all of them were the poses in death. She had never seen anyone dead, and had always wondered what people looked like when they died. She saw men gripping their heads as if when the angel had come to take them away they had asked him to go away and come back later because they were not yet ready to leave this world. Others had died with their arms flung wide open as if they had mistaken death for a beloved woman who was coming into their arms after all those months of being without love.
'Good Lawd,' said Isatu Martins. 'If dis is de face of death, then ah wonder what its back looks like?'
When she finally discovered the body of her husband, she did not have to turn it over as she had done with some of the other men. She was familiar with the country of the man's body, with the way he lay in bed, especially after a hard day's work. She knew the rhythm and the storm of that body better than any other person in the world, its tales of magic and rhythm to the accompaniment of the weaverbirds' songs as he had made her his; how often she had trembled in the storm of his passion, with his smell of a man, of pinewood.
Suppressing the deep surge of pain which was threatening to flood her, she sat next to the dead man and touched his face. But in her heart, Isatu Martins refused to accept that her husband was dead. She thought that death was a nasty thief who came at night to steal all that twenty years of hard work had given you but that, like some good thieves, might return some of the stolen items when they had taken the best stuff for themselves.
She raised the head of her man to see if there had been a mistake after all, especially as his face was still warm, like a young bull's, but the buzzing of the flies that had been attracted by the smell of blood all over the garrison was enough to tell her that his life had gone out a long time before she had arrived to claim it. Then from a region in her heart where they had loved each other so much, she began to bring back the moments of happiness. She saw him coming across the cornfields, shy and dark like a bronze mask, to tell her about the throne where she would sit for ever. She remembered how his hands had trembled as he helped her into the lantern where she was serenaded by the acrobatic monkeys dancing over the crouching lions, in that forget-me-not afternoon of the protestation of his love for her. She recalled how he had told her the tales of the sea with its millions of living souls fed to the sharks would be forgotten, if only she would return to his life.
Life, Isatu Martins remembered, had been good to them, despite the terrifying period when she had wanted to kill her love for him with her death, because Garbage had not arrived yet, the gift of the chimerical dwarfs, and smelling of the banana grove where his grandfather had made him immune to the pernicious eyes of envy.
With a great strength belying her now unbearable grief, she lifted the limp form of her husband and came into the hallway. The hills dwarfing the garrison were alive with the voices of the creatures of the night, but Isatu Martins was not afraid. She walked slowly, carrying the man, as she had carried him in other times, though when in the past they had reached the bottom, it was not clear who had carried whom.
Suddenly she found herself on the road leading to the town, and for once she was glad of the oppressive silent hand that had clamped the mouth of Malagueta, so that she could take her husband home without being seen. Grief, for Isatu Martins, was a private affair.
When she felt she was losing strength, she put the man down gently on the ground where all men had an ancestor waiting to claim then. She stroked his face, but his smile did not change. Gustavius Martins looked like a happy man in death, because he had died thinking about his wife. But as he lay there, Isatu Martins saw, in the faint glow of the moon, that although her husband's face had escaped the ravages of the fire his body was badly burnt.
She ran her hand gently down the hard, leathery body, felt where it had gone to sleep, where the ribs had broken out of their cage, but she was not horrified. He was her man. Once again, she saw the same beautiful man who had come to her that evening many years ago as she was bathing in the stream. Suddenly, she felt the tears running down her cheeks and she began to speak to the dead man.
'Sleep, my love, sleep until we get home where ah shall tend your wounds: you look beautiful and no one will ever know how ah found you, because it is none of their business. We was alone together and we shall be alone again in dat house where you will never want for anything, because ah shall see to it dat you are happy in dat house dat you built wid your hands.'
She asked him to 'come any time you feel like it, from de other country, where ah know you will be going for a while, only for a while; come because you know ah shall be there always, with de doors open, wid my heart waiting for you, and holding your son by de hand'.
Isatu Martins regained her strength. Slowly, singing to herself so that she wouldn't cry, she continued the journey home. In the still of the night, she was a monument to all brave women: upright and proud, so that not even the shrieks of the dog-faced baboons giving birth in the surrounding countryside disturbed her calm. Getting closer to her house, she passed the school of the Farmer brothers, and Isatu Martins suddenly remembered that other man who had come to Malagueta, in the dignity of his English suit, with the cadences of love in his voice, to find a name in the babel of tongues that was Malagueta in those days. And because she was a woman who had always admired courageous men, men who dared the impossible to make their world better, she felt a deep gratitude to her husband and to Gabriel Farmer. She thanked God that she had been given the chance to share the life of one of them, to have loved him, and to have been loved by him in return.
Jeanette Cromantine was just blowing out the lamp in her room when she saw Isatu Martins toiling along with the body of her husband. She ran out of her house like a mad woman, without a shawl to protect her in the cold. But when she realised that it was a dead man who was coming home, she cried out in anguish as she had never cried before.
'Isatu!' she wept. 'What a great pain life has given you, my sister. There will never be anoder man like him.'
Gustavius Martins was laid out in a rough wooden coffin that Alphonso the cabinet maker made free of charge. 'He was like a brother to me, and helped me to find my feet when I was starting this business,' the carpenter said, refusing to be paid by Isatu Martins. Before she opened the house to the large crowd of people who wanted to pay their last respects to the dead man, she asked Jeanette Cromantine, who had been with her all the time, to let her have some time alone with her husband.
'Before they take him away from me, let me rest my head on his chest one last time.'
She combed his hair and powdered his face, straightened his tie and adjusted the handkerchief in his breast pocket. Then she remembered that he had bought an expensive gold watch many years before Garbage had been born, but that he had not worn it because of the situation brought about by the war, when time was measured more in terms of the number of battles that were fought than by the awakening of the sun. She found the gold piece and when she opened the case, she was surprised that its hands were moving, as if someone had wound the mechanism. 'Take dis away wid you 'cause ah won't be needing it to know when you coming.'
The sword of Modibo of Timbuctoo rested at the right side of the dead man, and the Moroccan slippers that he wore were the same that Santigue Dambolla had not been able to give to his son-in-law, but which Sawida had brought with the dead cloud of her grief. She loved this son-in-law of hers and, like all women accustomed to pain, she felt it hard to cry. While her daughter sat motionless in a chair in front of the sleeping man, it was the widow of the banana-grove man who served coffee, who saw to it that all the doors were open so that everyone who wanted to come would have a last look at the man who, next to Sebastian Cromantine, had made Malagueta the prosperous town that it was.
Over the protestation of Sawida Dambolla, Isatu Martins let Garbage stand next to her, looking at his father. As in the past, when they had shared the ephemeral hours of grief, the mother and the son did not talk too much; each was locked in a secret territory of knowledge, learning to reshape their lives, in the morning after. But when Isatu Martins put her arms around the body of her son they clung to each other, and for the first time since she had come upon the body of her husband, he cried with her because they had found each other in the great eternal love that they felt in their hearts for the man and for themselves.
Gustavius Martins was carried away to the heights of his mortality by the largest crowd that Malagueta had ever seen. Sebastian Cromantine, who, when he heard that his friend had died, shook the cane chair where he sat with a volcanic rage, insisted on burying his friend.
'Those bastards drove ma son outta dis place, and now dey have killed ma brother,' he raged, while Jeanette Cromantine tried to hold him down on the dusty road leading to the cemetery, leaning on his cane.
Under his breath, he swore that one day the young men of Malagueta would organise themselves and drive out all the foreigners. He was still recovering from the effects of his confinement in the garrison, so he had difficulty going up the hill, but he resisted his wife's attempts to help him along the way. The sounds of feet marching in the solemn procession rose above the voices of the people in the crowd; young men and women turning the last corners of wisdom, asthmatic and coughing clerics from the church who remembered when Gustavius Martins had given them the money to finish its construction, turned up that afternoon.
When she saw the open grave into which they were going to put her husband, Isatu Martins stared at the limitedness of space, the solitary, red and cold void that had claimed a man who had been all warmth and sunshine. But it was not the space that she would remember later when the body was gone, for Gustavius Martins was not a man confined by the diameters of space, as much as the thuds of the earth that she put on the coffin, earth to earth, dust to dust, and the gravity of the look of Sebastian Cromantine as he shovelled the first spadeful of earth in an everlasting rite of brotherhood.
After they had covered the coffin with the last remnants of red soil, the large crowd of mourners went back to their houses; they were too sad to remember how many years earlier, at another funeral, Thomas Bookerman had led the first attack against the garrison.
Isatu and Garbage Martins moved in with the Cromantines. Although the widow had insisted that she was all right and could get on in her own house with only a little help from her friend, Jeanette Cromantine would hear nothing of it.
'Put youself in ma position,' she said to the bereaved woman. 'What would you do if it be Sebastian and Gustavius who died?'
Death had broken a bond that had existed between the two couples since the early days of the founding of the town. Throughout the long years in the bitterness of the first settlement, in the triumphs over the various adversities they had encountered, in the excitement of watching the town grow, nothing so terrible had happened to any of the original families. But when Jeanette Cromantine wanted to shut the windows, hang white curtains and mark the windows with white chalk as a sign of mourning for Gustavius, Isatu Martins told her not to.
'Gustavius was a kind man, always gentle wid me. Take de time when ah wanted to die 'cause ah did not have Garbage then. Most men would have been vexed, vexed, but not my Gustavius. So let me think of him as if he only gone away on a long visit.'
They opened the house, whitewashed the stones and welcomed the neighbours who came around every day to pay their respects to the dead man's widow. Some brought little pieces of lace, spices to drive out witches, a leg of lamb, chickens and eggs, not because Isatu Martins needed them but because they wanted to be one with her in that season.
