The Blue Clerk Read online

  VERSO 25.1

  It came back to her this morning. She was running in a relay. She was twelve and there was a pain in her ankle bone, it ripped from the heel right up to the ankle bone and she almost stopped running but she was the last leg of the relay and her friends were waiting at the finish line. Patsy Sones had fallen in the third leg so the clerk was far behind already. And then the ankle started to hurt but she said to herself, “No. I am running.” And then someone said to her, “Hmm.” And she almost stopped running. And this someone, who she was to notice all her life, said, “Hmm,” again as if expecting failure. And she swung her head around risking being totally left behind to see who was talking to her but there was no one. And she thought the voice must be inside of her head, but she thought about it and it wasn’t. It was right at her eardrum, not inside her, very definitely not inside her. And just like that she had a glimpse of her future self and that is who it was saying, “Hmm.” A future self, drinking a beer in a neighbourhood bar with a cross look on her face. A future self who didn’t say any words, just hmm, like that, lifting the beer to her lips and squinting at the sun through the plate-glass windows with a red painted sign. Imagine having a voice like that say hmm at your school track meet when you’re twelve. Imagine how early that voice appears, and imagine that you don’t really understand that tone, that sly interruption. And when all you are doing is trying to recover your House dignity because Patsy Sones fell and was late getting the baton to you and you already had to stand and wait while all the other girls ran ahead of you. But small as she was she tried to ignore it, that voice which sounded older and which was like a voice from the definite future and was taking advantage of her. But even then the clerk had the will to ignore that voice. She ran and she ran. She picked her legs up and she ignored that little pain and she came in second. She was disappointed. Especially with the voice behind her, next to her ear still saying hmm. Like a sentence, like something it knew about her already, and not like a warning or anything, not like something saying slow down or speed up, but like something with a forever prediction. How hard it was to outrun that voice. But the clerk did outrun it and her mates were waiting for her at the finish line, even though she only came second. And they grabbed her up and spun her around and Patsy Sones looked so absolutely grateful as if she owed the clerk for the rest of her life. The girls screamed, “We came second!!” As if they had come first.

  And so the voice saying hmm receded in this screaming but of course it never quite went away the clerk now thought looking at the funereal face of Allan St. Clair of R.R. 2, Spanish River, Ontario. His face told her nothing but the clerk thought, for sure he had never had to grind away at any substance as she had. He had not had to look at his face daily seeing the things people had attached to it. But then again she thought how would she know. Gut feeling, she said aloud. Gut feeling, she said, to the bales and the aphids and the midges and all the insects who had gathered on her papers.

  The girls in her relay team had spun her around with them and they had all ring-a-ring-a-rosied around the track as if the girls who came first did not in fact win, only the girls who came second were important. And it was always the girls who came second as the clerk thought now, who really came first. The girls who had fallen, and recovered and who had aches in their shins and braces on their teeth and raggedy garments. But the clerk could not remember if she thought it then or delighted in it then. She hoped that she had because today she knew for sure. There they were in their second-place world whirling around the track, until their House-mistress asked them for a little decorum. Then they giggled and giggled the whole afternoon walking home and saying how the clerk saved them from looking bad, and how fast the clerk was and how she blew by two Houses like she was on fire. The clerk lived in that fire all the way to the end of primary school and the fire seemed to have burned off that malicious interjection she had heard running down the track. And anyway the clerk wasn’t sophisticated enough then to understand it. She put it down to the wind on that day. Or then again it may have been the blood rushing through her veins and pounding in her ears. She remembered her face felt so hot it was cold. And ever since then the clerk loved to run. She put it down to these things, a push to do better at everything despite everything. You can see her traipsing, skipping among the bales of paper, dashing up one side and diagonally across another.

  And these days she reads the obituaries because in the obituaries there was a lengthy life crushed into a few sentences as the author and the author’s family would crush hers into parentheses.

  VERSO

  Docile bodies

  Why. What made the dictatorship in Argentina steal people’s children? What a strange and ghoulish intimacy they had with the young people they tortured and murdered.

  I saw a wall of photographs too at the Museum of Memory and Human Rights, Avenida Matucana in Santiago. I said, oh my god. I sat for some time.

  VERSO

  Ants send their aged to war.

  VERSO

  My legs, and at the end of my legs were black patent leather shoes. Why is it you only see fragility? Like the wrists of a girl hanging in a mother’s hand, or a boy’s eyelashes falling on his cheek? Everywhere you see fragility.

  VERSO

  What makes the police kill Black children, everywhere? Rifle through their clothing, write down their names, slap their faces, rough up their bodies, eat away their young days, breath in their breaths; wipe their hands on their little chests and along their legs, and clasp their wrists so tightly they atrophy. What a strange and ghoulish intimacy.

  VERSO 26

  Last evening a man jumped out of the dark and asked me if I had any change to spare. I had some coins but I said no. Out of fear. I wanted to give them to him but I said “no, I don’t have any today.” He had startled me and I was afraid of his homelessness, jumping out in the late evening like that. I walked on quickly and he called after me, “god bless you miss, god bless you.” I wanted to turn around and give the coins to him after all but I didn’t, I said thank you. He’d given me a blessing and I’d given him nothing. A block later I finally remembered his face. I had been self-indulgent with fear. A block later I remembered his face. He had seemed exhausted.

  VERSO 27

  The baby next door was in full voice last night. I didn’t want to put him in that last verso. It would have injured him. Before I fell asleep he woke up and gave a full-throated account of the hours of dreaming he had, he didn’t hush for anything, and not until he was finished. I love his voice, it gives every raw emotion. He must be still alarmed at the stark dry air he entered when he was born. To be born, to be shoved out of water, though that water was diminishing and the body wanting some substance it did not yet know. He awakened again at 3 a.m. with the same desire, or was it rage at not being able to stand and go get what he wanted himself. And then at 6 a.m. He never sounds sad. It is not pity that he is searching for. He sounds energetic and full of life while everyone is in that dark nine-month sleep he escaped. He is full of blood and living. He holds nothing back; his voice is all he has. It has not learned to round itself or square itself on a letter of the alphabet, he is before alphabets. In fact, it is plain to the baby that Marshall McLuhan knew what he was talking about when he said the alphabet was the first technology. But why bring up McLuhan, the baby predates McLuhan. At the same time, right this minute, the baby postdates McLuhan. McLuhan never existed and will not exist in this baby’s present. To throw a linguist in, if we think about it, the baby is on one side of Chomsky’s universal grammar theory and the people who take care of him are on the other. They are not yet his parents in these new weeks, they are not yet a noun, they do not yet predicate. For the briefest sliver of a second if we understand time this way, they are a hypothesis. His voice rips out with all its intelligence. He seems aware that some others exist and they are there to make that part of him, which he has no control over yet, to make that part of him sensible to him. These others, they quiet him for thei
r own peace. I love the baby’s voice. I will have to put my ear to the wall to hear him. He has such originality.

  FOUR

  VERSO 28

  You are essence and then you become imperfect, the clerk says. Why is this? the author asks. Dunno, the clerk replies, I’m only the clerk and this is all I know. I have been taught how to be perfect, but not how to live. The author as usual feels implicated in this. I don’t mind, the clerk quickly decides. This tendency for self-implication in the author only elicits more leaves and at this moment the clerk is inundated, thinking of the smell of the earth the author has just brought in with her. The ground smelled like fresh ploughed earth outside the Robarts Library and the clerk thought of the books inside and how, collected there in stacks, they have returned to their original selves as trees and earth, and how difficult it must be for them to be wrenched open again and again to be read and read even as they are returning, reaching through each other and the concrete boat around them. That is why it smells like new ploughed ground around the library. The author brings this smell with her sometimes, it is on her fingers and in her hair as if she’s done some work in dirt and then reached for her head absentmindedly.

  VERSO 29

  Once, I sat at a bedside in a hospital, it was a big hospital in San Fernando. It was a small hospital, at least it became small after forty-six years of perspective but then it was a big hospital. There was the scent of Dettol when one approached it and the scent of unhealed sores, and there were efficient nurses in blue stiff cotton dresses and white nurses’ caps. They also wore black shoes. This hospital was near to a wharf and overlooked a bay in a Gulf. At the time, to me it was simply the sea. The sea lay at the back of the hospital, and the beach there was not good for swimming. It was said they threw bandages from sores and waste from sickness into the ocean. Of course that could not have been true. This hospital was quiet, silence was written near the doorway. There was a room in the hospital on the third or fifth floor. And there lay my grandmother dying. When I entered the room, I could see underneath the beds. It was a general ward, my grandmother had a bed near the window on that side that opened onto the sea. If you looked down the three or five floors you could see a parking lot. That day there was a boy in the parking lot and he was wheeling a bicycle around and around. The sea was tranquil. It must have been a Sunday or a Saturday afternoon. The days, the sea seemed always tranquil then. It was quiet. I recall a breeze blowing the bed sheet of my grandmother’s bed. And the boy wheeling his bicycle below, and the tranquil sea. It was aquamarine, the sea. There is a way that a sea sometimes has of laying still and quiet. I sat by the window by the bed and asked my grandmother when she would come home. The legs of the bed were iron. The floor had been cleaned thoroughly with a disinfectant and the movement of the bed sheet where it reached for the floor raised the scent to my nostrils. My grandmother’s arm I can see now. I can always see. She asked what I saw outside. I said there was a boy below on a bike. She said when she was well she would buy me a bike. I said I could see the sea. She said if I behaved well I would grow up and go away across that sea to America or Canada or somewhere. She made me promise to behave. I promised without conviction. The Gulf was the Gulf of Paria. A long time ago, before that day when I sat beside my grandmother’s bed looking out to the aquamarine sea, this gulf was called Golfo de la Ballena. I found this out long after that day. That day it was simply the sea which was tranquil like a Sunday. Seas and days go on in tranquility whatever you are doing, whatever is going on, they have their own sovereignty. The window was to my right, there was a silence after this conversation and we both looked off. There’s nothing more to add in this verso. Except the present tense. There were no whales in the Gulf that day. They threw bandages from sores and waste from sickness into the sea. I was in my brown school uniform, I think. It wasn’t brown, it was blue and white. A blue skirt, a white blouse. I would have to have been younger to have worn the brown. You are always younger in this type of moment. I have always sat beside this bed in my school uniform looking out to the serene sea.

  VERSO 30

  Lightning is flashing and the hair of the wisteria is flying in the wind, and the smoke bush is also waving and the Rudbeckia and the cherry tree and there is the sound of rain on the roof and there is thunder in a blue sky, some clouds fire pink with the past sun.

  That was last evening. This morning before getting out of bed I ingested several venomous editorial letters. They filled my mouth and sutured my esophagus. One of them went like this…on second thought, I don’t need to record them here, you will have read them.

  VERSO 30.1

  At the door of the philosopher I stood. Peered in and said to no one there, why am I here? The crisis in the heart of the enlightenment, I heard. Then I heard, the crisis at the heart of modernity.

  VERSO 30.2

  And I still can’t forgive T.S. Eliot for those “dead negroes” in the river. To come upon a thing like that. The first in a list of objects followed by the cows, the chicken coops. And the collective noun, cargo, just before. To come upon a thing like that so early. Why should I?

  VERSO 31

  Here again we have to turn to Charles Mingus’s Pithecanthropus Erectus. As I read it there is no way of translating this text yet. Its language rejects a conventional translation, that is, once you attempt to translate it into the sense of a language with vowels and consonants say, that is the sort of language that directs sound in a particular direction as opposed to another—let us say into the direction of known conventional languages that we use to “communicate” with, then you are lost. Or the meaning is lost to you. But why talk of translation. That is not really the point. Unless you feel inadequate to your earlier comparison of Mingus and Plato. Yes, only in conveying the breadth of the work. Translation was the metaphor not the thing. I mean. But is it not music, shouldn’t you say someone in that vein? No, Pithecanthropus is not music, let us say, it is sound; it is a text of philosophical charge. Mingus suggests another territory.

  VERSO 32

  Here again we have to turn to Charles Mingus’s Pithecanthropus Erectus. As I read it there is no way of translating this text yet. Its language rejects a conventional translation, that is, once you attempt to translate it into the sense of a language with vowels and consonants say, that is the sort of language that directs sound in a particular direction as opposed to another—let us say into the direction of known conventional languages that we use to “communicate” with, then you are lost. Or the meaning is lost to you. But why talk of translation. That is not really the point. Unless you feel inadequate to your earlier comparison of Mingus and Plato. Yes, only in conveying the breadth of the work. Translation was the metaphor not the thing. I mean. But is it not music, shouldn’t you say someone in that vein? No, Pithecanthropus is not music, it is a text of philosophical charge. No periphrasis exists. Its ineffability demands another larynx.

  VERSO 32.1

  Plato was a slaveholder. I cannot get past this. I am a barbarian. That is the way it is. People say that is the way it was. Yes, that is exactly the way it was.

  VERSO 32.2

  My ancestral line to John Locke. When he wrote “An Essay Concerning Human Understanding,” in 1689 he had already been the Secretary of the Board of Trade and Plantations. No one disputes this. He had, too, investments in the Royal African Company, whose holdings along the Gambia included forts, factories, and military command of West Africa, etc.,…etc.,…No dispute here either. These statements—an essay on human understanding, and the board of trade and plantations—these identifiers can lie beside each other with no discomfort, apparently. But as I said, I am a soft-hearted person. I cannot get past this. All and any interpretative strategies are of no help to me. I am just a lover with a lover’s weaknesses, with her manifest of heartaches.

  VERSO 33

  There are two embraces, the clerk knows. Poverty has its nostalgias. I am thinking of this when the author appears. She wants to get on with things, get on w
ith what she calls the work.

  VERSO 33.1

  If I see a patch of corn in front of a house as I did this morning, or a zinnia bed, or a wrecked mattress leaning on the side of a house, an emotion overtakes. Not one of sadness as you may imagine, you being you, but a familiarity, a grace of some weight. I might even say longing because it occurs to me that in the zinnia, the desultory mattress, there used to be hope, not a big hope, but a small one for the zinnias’ success, or the mattress’ resurrection—the nights slept on it and the afternoons spent jumping on it. And then the scraggle of corn fighting waterless earth. A tendril, present happiness and an eternal hope, even also, joy.

  My sister used to plant corn in the backyard each year in its season. I remember the first showing of the corn shoots; the green of them was young and beautiful. If it is possible to see energy incarnate it was in these shoots. The earth so black and yielding we felt bountiful; we said my sister had a good hand. My sister was very protective of these corn shoots, even more when they became stalks and then the corn tassel shows and then their own silk, and then corn itself.