Love Forms

The first handover was made in midafternoon, somewhere between the university campus and the airport. An unfamiliar road, and one I’ve never been able to find again. I remember squat brick houses sparsely placed, the rain just fallen, rising again now as vapor from the hot asphalt. My mother slowed outside one of the gates, and then pulled over in front of a parked car. A man appeared at her window: clean-shaven, neatly dressed; probably black nylon trousers and a light-colored shirt-jac. I can still bring to mind something of his manner: courteous, eager, important; full of reassurance that his mind was only on the task at hand. “Right, Mrs. Bishop,” he might have said. “Right, right. Everything good. Everything done fix up. We ready.”

My mother got out. I waited alone in the car, watching them through the front windshield. She and the man walked together to his car, just ahead, and he opened the door on the driver’s side and she ducked down to look inside. I don’t know what she was looking at. She came out again, and the driver pushed the door shut, and she bent down and pressed her thumb against the tire. Then they walked around the front of the car and she tried the other tire, and the driver opened the other doors, one by one, and she looked inside, and checked the other tires. They came back around to the back of the car and the driver opened the trunk, and my mother looked inside. My mother reached into her bag and took out a small brown envelope and handed it to him. He took it quickly, and put it in his pocket. Then she turned and beckoned to me to come. I got out of my mother’s car. As I walked the short distance to the car in front, I was aware of being observed from the windows of the houses all around; I suppose people must have been watching from behind their curtains. I remember sweating in my hot black clothes and trying to hold my knapsack over my stomach.

“Go in the back, go in the back,” the man said.

I thought he meant the trunk, and I stopped, unsure. He came around and opened the door of the backseat for me, like a chauffeur.

“In here,” he said. “You’ll have to get down. Not right now. I’ll tell you when.”

I got into the man’s car. The windows were covered in dark film. My mother and the man were behind the car, out of sight. I looked out the window to the side, instead, toward the man’s house. A hibiscus hedge; a metal gate, painted white, with a red metal letterbox. Beyond the gate, a front lawn; croton plants growing along the border of the driveway. On the upstairs veranda of the house, a hanging birdcage, a large bird moving slowly inside the cage.

The car sank as the man got in the front and started the engine. I remember him as energetic, eager to set off. He pressed a button to wind the window down on my side, so I could wave to my mother as we left. But I didn’t want to see her: I was afraid of what I would do. Instead, as we drove away, I slid down to the footwell so I was out of her sight, and I arranged myself there, my thighs pressing uncomfortably against the front of my body. Later, I stretched my legs out across to the other footwell so I could breathe more easily.

I must have been in that car for three or four hours. I’m only guessing, based on the distance I know we traveled, all the way down the southern main road. I didn’t look out the windows: the road was familiar enough, and I could tell where we were just by the smell. The stink of the swamp: unpleasant but not unnatural. The fuel smell of the airport: sweetish, volatile, dangerous. A different petrochemical smell as we went farther south: the thicker, dirtier, heavier smell of the oil fields as we passed Pointe-à-Pierre. After San Fernando, the road became less familiar, everything more confusing; I couldn’t picture the exact road we were on. But then, eventually, there was the cleaner air of the sea, and a narrow, bumpy road; and through the car window I saw the tall bushy heads of coconut trees thickly packed together.

It was dusk by the time we stopped, and I unfolded my body from the footwell of the car, and stepped onto uneven, sandy ground—a cool, breezy place, shaded by small trees. I was grateful for the fresh air. I felt dizzy; I had to sit down on the ground. The man walked a short distance away. When he came back, I followed him along a path through the trees. I wasn’t afraid of him. We had become accustomed to each other on the long drive, even though we hadn’t spoken much. Now, he swung his keys in his hand, and walked with a calm self-importance. He might have been thinking with pleasure of whatever money he’d earned.

I went to a lady’s house to wait. Not really a house—more like a shack: one of those on stilts, covered with patches of galvanize. I’d seen houses just like it all over Trinidad, but I’d never been inside one before. In the main room of the house, there was a brown velour couch against one wall; I sat there to wait. I was there a long time, and all I remember is the couch, and that the room was very bare. No television, no pictures, or even other furniture that I can remember. I think there was an overhead light; I think it must have been electric: a bulb, rather than a kerosene lamp. There was a length of fabric across the window—like a curtain, except that it was nailed at all four corners, and didn’t flap in the breeze.

It wasn’t a nice house: I’m ashamed to say that. The woman wasn’t unkind, but she didn’t want me there. She was an old woman, heavy; she walked with difficulty. She brought me food on a Styrofoam plate, and a plastic spoon wrapped in a paper napkin. I asked if there was a phone. At first the woman didn’t reply: maybe she was thinking that conversation wasn’t part of the arrangement. Eventually she said no, no phone. She said my parents knew I’d reached. I asked for water. I offered to get it myself, but she said she would get it. I think she didn’t want me moving around her house. As she went through the beaded curtain to the kitchen, I caught a glimpse of a rusted chair, and fly tape hanging from the ceiling, stuck with black flies. After she brought the water, and took away the Styrofoam plate, she settled back there, on her side of the beaded curtain, on the chair under the fly tape, to wait.

I was there from around six p.m. until midnight—this is my guess anyway: I’m recalling this as best I can, you understand. The truth is that I only remember impressions—images, sounds, feelings. The sequence of events is just my reconstruction, based on what I know must have happened. However many hours it was, the time in the lady’s house passed slowly. The lady was old, black, poor; I was white, young, rich—she must have known who I was. We passed the hours in near-total silence. There was a dog tied up under the house: occasionally I heard the sound of it digging in the dirt, or the clank of a chain. Meanwhile, outside, the night grew deeper.

The next thing I remember is seeing two men standing outside in the dark. I think this must have been outside of the lady’s house that I just described; I can’t remember being at any other house on the Trinidadian side. The men were black, and dressed in black, and with black cloths covering the lower half of their faces. I only saw them by the little bit of light cast from the doorway of the house. I didn’t want to go. For the first time, it crossed my mind that my father and uncle might have lied to me. From the doorway at the top of the stairs, I looked to the woman for help. I asked, “Go with them?” She nodded, lips pursed. I looked at the men, and then I looked to her again, and she looked back at me without speaking.

One of the men was impatient. “Come, come!” he said. “We don’t have time to waste, you know.” He wasn’t really in a hurry, he just wanted me to move. He was that kind of man.

“You know who I am, right?” I said. I was trying to sound bold, but who knows how my voice came out. “You know who my father is?”

“Yes, yes,” he said. “Don’t frighten. We know where you going. You will arrive alive.” I remember those words—he said them in a jokey, rhyming way, like the TV advertisement for seatbelts: Arrive alive! “Come, come. The boss-man done give all the instructions. Mr. Bishop and them. We know what going on.”

The other man hadn’t spoken yet. Now he said something in Spanish, and the first man answered him with a shrug.

“Come on!” the first man said. “Come onnn! You don’t know time waits for no man? Man, woman, cat, dog! We have a window, you know.” He tapped his wrist. “Everything arranged. Is now for now we hadda go. It have all kinda people crossing that water tonight. And we don’t want to bounce up nobody. Now for now. Come.”

Shakily, I went down the steps. The Trinidadian man walked in front; the Venezuelan one followed behind me. My legs were stiff from sitting, and it was hard to walk in the deep, soft sand. The Venezuelan tried to take my arm to help me, but I shook him off. In the darkness, the fallen coconuts all around us glimmered like skulls.

There was a jetty, and a boat knocking against a wooden piling. The first man sat at the edge of the jetty and then disappeared. Then the other man held me under the armpits and pushed me to the edge. I struggled. Below, the other man was reaching up from the boat, grasping at my legs. I landed on something solid. Then: gaps, darkness; I just don’t remember. The other man must have got into the boat, they must have untied it from its moorings. The lurching was terrible. I must have been focusing on clinging on to whatever I could hold. Then we were moving; we were away from the shore.

“You brought the hood?” the man asked. “Put on the hood.”

“You’re not wearing one,” I said to the man. I looked at the other man, at the other side of the boat, but if he understood me, he gave no sign. “He’s not wearing one,” I said. I was suspicious, and afraid. We were still close enough to the shore that I could have jumped out and swum back.

“I hadda see to be able to drive the boat,” the man said. “And him, he’s a lookout.” He pulled the scarf up so that it covered his mouth and nose, and he looked even more like a bandit than before. He called out to the Venezuelan man, and the Venezuelan man did the same.

“Hood, hood,” the man said, gesturing. “You brought it? Put it on.”

I was going to jump out. You grow up in Trinidad, you learn how to smell danger: I wanted to get out. And then someone’s hands were around my head, or throat, or over my eyes; I tried to fight. Then I was being pressed against the bottom of the boat, and everything was dark. I stopped struggling. It would have been so easy for him to twist the pillowcase around my neck and strangle me. I let him put it over my head instead, and then I didn’t move again. We must have crossed the gulf like that, in the dark, the little boat lurching and smacking against the big ocean swells.

I remember arriving, and having to climb up onto something wooden, maybe a jetty. It was muddy; I remember slipping, and someone holding me by the arms. There were other people there, but I couldn’t see them in the dark. I don’t know who they were. Then there was another car, a jeep, with open windows. I got down into the footwell again, automatically, or maybe because of the wind. I was hardly awake. I didn’t know what time it was, or how long I’d been traveling, or where I was being taken. At some point I had to change cars, and I think I might have been sick by the side of the road. The image I have of the place where this happened is like an ordinary open highway, the road wide and smoothly paved, all in darkness except for the occasional headlights of cars traveling in the opposite direction, on the other side of a low railing.

At some point in the journey, in one of the cars, there was a woman in the back with me. I don’t know when she appeared. It was too dark to see her clearly: I remember just seeing her face in silhouette as she looked out the window. She was older than me. My impression was that she was thickset, sturdy. And she was calm—that’s what I remember, mostly, that her presence was calming. I think now that she must have been one of the nuns from the house, but I didn’t know that then. She must have come in order to guide us to where we were going.

It was daylight when we arrived at the place where I would stay. We had driven up a hill, past other scattered houses. All around us was green, the same deep dark forest green as in Trinidad. When the driver switched off the car, I was aware first of the green forest all around, and the clear jeweled voices of birdsong. Then a dog arrived at the gate, sheepishly, as if apologetic for being late. The dog was of no clear breed—brown, slender; knee-height, with a shaggy tail—a nice-looking dog, gentle and welcoming, barking politely, as if to let someone know we had arrived. She was like any other dog who would run up to a gate in Trinidad: even the bark, and the meaning of the bark, was the same. I was disoriented; I thought I might be in a dream. I looked at the woman who had gotten out of the car with me, and I touched her arm to see if she was real. She was sweating—along her forehead and on her cheeks, under her glasses. I said, “Venezuela?” Because I thought that maybe there had been some confusion, and that somehow I was back in Trinidad. She didn’t understand. I said, “Venezuela? Or Trinidad?” And again, the other way: “Trinidad? Or Venezuela?” When she understood, she smiled, and she said, “Venezuela.” She lifted her hands, palms to the sky, and said some other words, and among the words I didn’t understand, she said again, “Venezuela.”

She put an arm around me as we walked to the house. The gate was unlocked, all we had to do was open it, and we walked straight in, up the drive, with the little dog ambling beside us.

I remember quite clearly what the house looked like from the outside. It was an ordinary two-story house, painted white. There were flowerpots lining the driveway. There was a garden all around, dotted with ordinary fruit trees. The fence was diamond-meshed galvanized wire in some places, or brick wall in others, about four or five feet high. There was a big black PVC water tank just behind the house, up a slight slope.

I’ve spent many hours trawling through images online, trying to find this place again. But Venezuela is a big country. If you look at a map, you’ll see: it’s gigantic, nearly a million square kilometers. And outside of the big cities, the place is just forest. Try it. Look at a map, zoom in. Everywhere you look is forest. Even now, over forty years later, I still don’t know exactly where I was.

2

I feel I should clarify about the nuns. When you say “nuns” nowadays, people think of evil, cruel women who starve girls and make them scrub floors—Caribbean nuns aren’t like that. For the most part, they’re cheerful women, busy, active. They run schools, they teach, they find housing for the destitute; they manage kitchens, they pray with the sick, bring food to the poor. And in Trinidad, it used to be the nuns who coordinated the relief efforts—for example, when there were floods, or when an island had been hit by a hurricane.

I have very clear memories of how it used to work. Our school chapel used to be commandeered as a sort of hub: schoolchildren took part in the effort, and it was like a military operation, organizing huge piles of donations into categories; laying out cardboard boxes at the ends of the pews, and distributing items among boxes. There were other adult helpers—some men, some other religious women—but it was the nuns who were in charge. They wore gray knee-length dresses and simple black veils that covered their hair; and sensible shoes—shoes suitable for walking long distances in any terrain. When hurricanes were coming in, there was a sense of working against the clock, but the nuns were fearless, tireless: they strode up and down the aisles, directing operations, their veils fluttering in the wind. Later, I learned that those same nuns used to take the donations to the airport themselves, and as soon as the sky was clear, they would be out on the tarmac getting the boxes loaded onto the plane. Who knows, maybe they even flew the planes; I wouldn’t put it past some of them.

They weren’t all particularly devout: I think now that they were just capable women—women who saw what needed to be done, and rolled up their sleeves and got on with it. Priests were a little different: they were more inclined to sit and complain about the country going to the dogs. But the nuns did the legwork. Nuns got things done. And nuns were trusted: I don’t know if they even needed things like passports to travel from one island to another, or if they just showed their faces and they were waved through.

In that house in Venezuela, the nuns were all called “Hermana,” pronounced without the H, like ear-man-a. I’m sure there was at least one Hermana Maria: I keep returning to the name “Maria-Theresa,” but I could be making that up. I can’t remember the names of the others. I think there were four of them, or sometimes five; other local women came and went too. I have a recollection of a woman who I now think must have been a midwife, or maybe she was a doctor or nurse. In any case, they were all decent. We were fed; we were looked after. One Hermana was a stern sort of person, but there was none of the cruelty I’ve heard about in other places. And some of the girls cried now and then, but it wasn’t because of the nuns.

I was there for four months, from August to November—long enough, you would think, to still have a clear picture of the place where I stayed, but I only remember fragments. One of the rooms had a black-and-white tiled floor, like a chessboard: I remember that clearly. In the nuns’ office downstairs, there were leafy plants on a windowsill that made the light in that room dim: I remember shade and shadows where there should have been bright sun. And the house smelled of bleach and insect spray, just like Trinidad. In fact, many things were just like Trinidad. There was burglar-proofing over the windows, and beyond the windows there was a view of the crisscrossing flanks of the hills, much bigger than the hills at home, but carpeted in the same dark green as at home, the same thick, wild forest. There were the same noisy, squawking parrots as there were at home, and golden orioles, and hummingbirds who came frequently to the hibiscus; the same thick ropelike vines hanging from branches of the tall trees; the same peeping, whistling frog-calls that went on through the same hours of the night.

From the garden, you came up a flight of steps and arrived at a sort of covered walkway, almost like a long balcony or gallery that ran along the high flank of the house. The bedrooms were up there, with doors onto this long balcony or walkway. Two or three beds in each room; mosquito nets over the beds. A crucifix on a nail hammered into the wall.

When I first arrived, I shared a room with a girl called Salomé. I remember her name because it made an impression on me: I thought it was a name that existed only in the Bible. She was from Peru. I remember her sitting cross-legged on her bed, brushing her hair. I remember that part vividly: the long black hair; thick, shining hair.

The floor on that covered walkway just outside the bedrooms was tiled, and very slippery when it rained. I was there in rainy season: it rained often. Girls picked their way along carefully, barefooted or in rubber flip-flops, pressing their clothing flat against their bellies so they could see down to the floor.

I slipped on that floor on my first morning there. I think it was my first morning: everything was still new and unfamiliar. Probably, someone had spoken a warning about the wet floor, but I hadn’t understood it in Spanish, or maybe hadn’t heard above the noise of the rain beating against the corrugated iron roof. I had followed the other girls out of the bedrooms, but then for some reason I had fallen behind, and when I ran to catch them up, I slipped on the wet tiles and fell. I slid some way along, and crashed into the balcony railing. I began to examine my leg, and I saw, now in daylight, the bruises and cuts that had appeared on my body during the long journey the day before. Inside my body, the baby kicked vigorously. I could feel the sickening gliding movements of the small body pushing against my own organs.

One of the Hermanas came up looking for me—not the stern one. I remember her as being rosy-cheeked and energetic, with glasses; brown-skinned, with very sparse gray hair. She might have been in her fifties. She linked her arm through mine and helped me downstairs, plucking occasionally at my wet clothes. Downstairs, I heard the other girls’ voices, and smelled food—good food: coffee, fried eggs, toast. The nun took me to a room, and opened a cupboard and pulled out clothes on hangers. She held them against my body to see the size, talking cheerfully all the while in Spanish, exclaiming at how nice they would look.

A hot feeling of humiliation spread over my body, thinking of having to strip off in full view of the nun to change out of my wet clothes. She must have understood, because she led me to a bathroom nearby. I remember a toilet cubicle, smelling strongly of bleach, and very dark once the door was closed. There was just enough light from the breeze blocks near the ceiling for me to see what I was doing.