The Origin of Waves Read Online Free Page A

with this girl with the plaited hair. And she always wore two dangling blue pieces of ribbon in her hair. On that warm afternoon, on the beach, when the needles of the cobbler were in John’s heel, we still talked and argued about her. And our words of little competition had prevented us from seeing the inner tube float out into the deeper water; and we could not retrieve it, this black, patched tube that we had got from a tire off the Humber Hawk. The tire was no longer roaring and screeching along the narrow crowded streets of our neighbourhood. Once, before we got it, it was killing not only two chickens that laid one egg aday, but one man who was out of work, and who moved too slowly out of the road. On that afternoon, I wished the tire would develop a leak and sink with me on it, and end the pain of Chermadene’s divided love. But when on that afternoon on the beach we looked up to see the tube, a million times larger than the Lifesavers which the tourisses brought into the island and which we sucked in slow delight, I was rendered then as unmovable as the Humber Hawk has become. For it was now placed on four large coral stone blocks, to be scavenged by the apprenticed mechanics in the village. On that afternoon, I could not retrieve the life-saving tube, as I could not make it sink, and would be drowned. Because I could not swim.
    And I know now, though at that time on the beach I was too young to possess this heavy knowledge about suicide, that only those who swim can attempt to jump into a lake, to put an end to their lives and to their loves. Money. Love. The lack of money. The loss of love. Those of us who cannot swim are too particular about drowning to test the consolation of the water.
    Money and love flow past us, like the waves on that beach with that inner tube that drowned at sea; or was lost. And no man came to put the voiceless conch-shell to his lips.
    So, when I ducked my head to shake the snow from out of my ears, I became unbalanced, and I almost got knocked down by the shape coming invisible and silent through the thick mist of snow. He did not see me. Shedid not see me. I try to be fair in this city, where I cannot be as sure as an oath taken upon the thin page of the Holy Bible, that I can say with truth and sureness, that it is a man or a woman coming against me, that it is a man; or if I say it is a woman coming against me, that
she
is a woman. Men and women in this democratic, fun-loving, gay city, coated at this time of year in deep, falling snow and wool, all look the same. Sometimes the bodies of men and women shake and behave the same.
    The shape did not see me. I was just another obstacle that the shape had to walk around, or walk into, continuing in its journey, with spirited childlike glee at the fresh fall of this thickness that transformed the sidewalk into a skating rink.
    This snow, through which I am trying to move, and which I am trying to like, as if I were born to its thickness and trickiness underfoot, and in which I live, is a curtain. It reminds me of the thick white ones,
sheers
, which my mother strung with herringbone twine, at each of the sixteen windows in our walled house, a house with six gables or roofs. These curtains looked and behaved like six waves or big sails against the wind and the blue sea, if you were sitting on the sand and watching them.
    And I can see nothing in front of me now. Nothing. But I try to pretend that I am native to this kind of treachery on ice, that I was born here into this white, cold miserableness, and am not really an obstacle.
    A new spasm of life comes into my steps. My feet become less heavy. I am back there. And the wet khaki cut-down pants have dried suddenly in the sun; and I am a sprinter running through thick green fields of sugar cane and cush-cush grass after the animals, my mother’s livestock, goats and sheep and pigs and pigeons. And I hear a voice. Her voice? The chauffeur’s voice? Coming out of this thick snow which