We met in a mall bookstore. She was waiting to purchase the latest publication by Trinidadian historian and author, Angelo Bissessarsingh to add to her extensive collection. I was in the midst of leisurely browsing through pricey titles I did not need and could not afford, on reluctantly returning to the twin islands to live after 14 years.
Joking that buyers and readers like us, who preferred the crisp cut and crackle of paper, had become an old, endangered species on the way to certain extinction, I giggled with her over my husband’s disclosure of the books I had stubbornly shipped in at great cost.
I pointed out most were his, but she praised my smiling spouse for his long-running, much-loved humorous columns, asked to be added to our mailing and friends list. Two weeks ago, and a few years later, as he thanked her on Facebook for faithfully sharing our writing and his “resurrection of old jokes,” she replied, “Be safe during the Easter, you, Indranie and children. Much respect to you sir.”
Hardly a day seems to go by now that we do not hear the scream of the sirens. Just over a week ago, the sirens sounded but they have become so common along the nearby highway at all hours, that the shrillness sank into incessant background noise. Yet, I jumped up after a fitful night that morning of April 29 last, sad, upset and uneasy over my sudden nightmares including of a man dying as I cradled him at the side of the road. Only my emaciated mother passed away from cancer in my arms, so I am unnerved that he was the second and find myself weeping. One moment the individual looked like my father, but appeared dressed in a policeman’s uniform, the next he was bearded, and faintly familiar.
The dream hurtles me back to a time of terror during my Guyanese childhood, when to the screams of my family, my protesting father was dragged away by a gang of unidentified security officers to be beaten and tortured. It is a haunting trauma that my surviving siblings and I have hidden away for nearly 40 years in a secret area of darkness, making me think of Shakespeare’s line from ‘Much Ado About Nothing’ – “Everyone can master a grief but he that has it.” I shoved the memory back and stifled the threatening nausea. Hamlet appeared, “For in that sleep of death what dreams may come/When we have shuffled off this mortal coil/Must give us pause: there’s the respect/That makes calamity of so long life.” I ignored him.
I am reading the Stabroek News online that Monday morning when I stumble across the Trinidad Guardian story with the names and address of “Entire family wiped out in highway shooting.” The disbelieving brain initially argued, clinging to hope, since given the Venezuelan influx there are many people with Hispanic surnames. I knew her devoted partner as gentle, sweet Pete, the artistic metal fabricator and father who she described as her blessing; she proudly used her three Christian names Carmelita Elizabeth Ingrid. But Marisol who worked with her father? No, Carmelita has two daughters. Consternation. The sense of dread deepened as I ran to inform my own husband Tony. Then the photographs in the Trinidad Express we knew all too well.
Deeply religious, she is happy and elegant in pure white, with finely manicured hands, immaculate hairstyle, poised before her matching vehicle. Even as she lost her job and was forced to retire early, Carmelita courageously continued with school, in her middle age, completing a degree in Public Sector Management at the University of the West Indies. It’s her pinnacle of academic achievement standing outside her home, before the graduation ceremony in 2015.
“I give thanks 1st to GOD and then my husband for accomplishing this. PETE took me from my job and dropped me on campus for my classes. Only when he was overseas did I drive there. He ran his business, the house and took care of the girls’ every need. Yes, they are grown, but he prefers to see about their cars for himself. For the duration, he never allowed me to cook nor any chore in the house. He would simply ask me ‘is that coming on your exam paper’ if he caught me doing a chore. I would have to stop doing it then. To you my honourable husband, I pray that God keeps you and protects you in the palm of his hands ALWAYS!!!!!” she wrote.
He grew stunning orchids with a profusion of blooms but would still remember to bring her roses, in her power colour red, on the 6th of each month to celebrate when they first met. I discovered we shared a love and longing for Antigua and the famous beaches, since the family had gone there to work on a related project. For two decades this ordinary family would labour to gradually improve their modest home bit by bit.
She had a passion for blue and white porcelain as I do, confessing, “I am addicted to them. I have a huge collection that I buy when I travel. But the girls are complaining about too many. I behaved myself this year. Only acquired four.” I admitted to her my children also felt that our smaller house was packed with too many unopened boxes of our collections since I shipped back.
We cracked up, posting multiple laughing emojis. “Kids… I feel when I die, they would gladly dump all my blue and white,” she admitted. I concurred, “Probably the same will happen by me as well! Horrible to think, Carmelita Elizabeth Ingrid Garcia-Quintero.”
In Richard III, there is the chilling reminder, “Tis a vile thing to die, my gracious lord, When men are unprepared and look not for it.” The Quinteros were returning from a movie at a popular nearby mall, when the pick-up pulled over to the right side of the perpetually busy, noisy highway, headlights on. Carmelita’s door was open above the tired crawl of the Cipero River, weakened by the long dry spell, as death thundered in, stealing away, an anonymous criminal in the night and leaving them to be found the next morning by a pedestrian. Just days before she posted the Biblical verse, “No weapon formed against me shall prosper.” At the funeral, I try not to weep and fail, while words failed me as I try to comfort my friend’s last surviving daughter who could barely stand up.
I too, am overwhelmed by shock and fears. Their deaths make me think of my inevitable own as the catalogue of horrors mount each alarming day. With the realisation that his story would then never be told, I finally force myself to write of what happened to my father, one fine evening while he was playing dominoes.
In the immortal words of Martin Carter, from his poem,
This I have learnt:
today a speck
tomorrow a hero
hero or monster
you are consumed!
Like a jig
shakes the loom.
Like a web
is spun the pattern
all are involved!
all are consumed!
ID grieves for all those killed then and now. Until last Friday, she had never been to a funeral with three caskets and still hears the masterpiece, “You raise me up” soaring to the sun-strewn skylight.
