The Origin of Waves Read Online Free PDF Page A

you in this place?”
    “This is really you?”
    “Is
me
, man!”
    “But, Jesus Christ! Not calling the name of the Lord in vain, but this is a goddamn … Tell me something, though. I been thinking of this for donkey-years. Must be over forty years now, I been thinking of finding you, to axe you this question. You learn how to swim yet?”
    And our laughter explodes. Out of the white mist come shapes which pause to look, to understand, to wonder why this loud tropical laughter and equatorial joy must take place in this deadening cold, to break the quiet peace of this cold, clean afternoon. What could cause this joy? And cause these two old black men to embrace each other, laughing and slipping on the ice, and pummelling each other on the backs of their thick black and light-brown cashmere winter coats, with hands that are magnified in brown leather gloves, weighing down their hands and their bodies bloated by thick scarves and wool and sweaters? I sometimes laugh at myself, as I see my reflection in a store window, as I pass wearing all this clothing, making me walk after all these years with added weight and meaning and cold experience in this new environment, I see how it makes us, at our age, walk with a limp, like huge tamed monkeys, since neither of us has got accustomed to this way of dressing, nor has learned to walk in winter. And all this laughing in the people’s street?
    We are hugging each other. I am slapping him, he is slapping me on the back, and I am judging how much size he has put on his frail boyhood body. He is slapping me as if he is a Black Muslim. His after-shave lotion is pungent in my nostrils, as he is moving from cheek to cheek slapping me all the time on the back as if he is trying to make me burp, as our mothers used to do after the bottle; and later, after the Cream of Wheat. His after-shave lotion follows me, as he is changing from the left shoulder to the right, when that first shoulder blade has suffered sufficient pummelling from the affection that had first poured on that sand the colour of coral, the colour of the empty conch-shell, when he showed me how to walk on his hands like a crab.
    “I
don’t
believe my two goddamn eyes!”
    “If you want to know the truth,” I say, “if you want to know the truth, I was thinking about home, just before I bounced into you.”
    “Bounce into me? Man, you nearly licked-me-to-fuck down! Goddamn! And a black man like me don’t look too good sprawl-out on the goddamn snow! Never learned how to walk in all this goddamn snow in the goddamn winter, after all these years. And never want to, neither!” We stand and stare at each other; and do not talk for a long while; and then the need for time and place and history comes spewing out. “Been in England for years. The Mother Country, eh? Tried Europe for a piece. France and Italy and Germany. Liketheir food and their women, but not their goddamn language! Catch their winters in my arse! And you know how racist the fuckers are! I hear Canada better.
Liberté
and
égalité
. But France? Those two words are mother-fuckers! Never could figure out how Amurcans like Wright, Richard Wright, and Baldwin could say that France is such a liberal place. France? I had a French wife once. But I never learned to speak their
parlez-vous
. Not one goddamn vowel in
français
pass my lips. Stayed pure-fucking-Barbadian, and spoke the Bajan language. Bajan is
my
foreign language. I spoke it in France as if it was a foreign language. And the French woman that I married would nod her head and say,
oui, oui, oui-oui!
Goddamn! But you was about to say something when I cut-you-off. What was you about to say when I butt-in?”
    “I was about to ask you what you’re doing here. If you have a family. You’re here on a job? A conference? Business …?”
    “Man, look at you, though! Look at little Timmy! And not one goddamn grey hair in your head! Still
fooping?
Screwing chicks? You’re too goddamn old to be still