There was a general uproar of laughter and Aunt Monica removed her hands from my shirt as if stung; but she quickly recovered, gave me a swift slap on the cheek, and said, ‘Don’t fool around with me, boy, I could be your mother. Besides, everybody knows that I’m just taking off this crushed-up excuse for a school shirt to give it a quick press with the steam iron and see if I can’t get you to look a little more decent. If your mother can’t make sure you all children go to school looking presentable (and you, Mr. Nickie, are the worst of the lot), then somebody else will have to do it, for the sake of the good name of the family you represent...’ By the time she’d finished saying this, she was traipsing out of the kitchen waving my shirt behind her like a flag.
We did not realize it at the time, but Uncle Umberto’s story was the beginning of a strange sequence of events that was to befall him and to haunt the rest of us for a very long time.
No one was surprised when he revealed, a few days later, that he had met the woman again, and that she had walked up and down the riverside path with him, but the mystery of the woman was solved for me when she came into my classroom at school one day, along with our teacher, Mr. Fitzpatrick, who introduced her as Miss Pauline Vyfhuis, a graduate student who was doing fieldwork for her thesis in Applied Linguistics. She carried a tape-recorder in a black leather case and told us that Professor Rickford at the university had sent her up here to record the people’s speech for her research. When I went home and announced this to the family, they all accepted that Miss Vyfhuis must be Uncle Umberto’s blue butterfly lady – all except Uncle Umberto himself; he claimed to have spoken at length to his lady and she’d confirmed that she could appear and disappear at will; that she could fly or float in the air and that one day he (Uncle Umberto) would be able to accompany her – floating off the cliff to places unimagined by the rest of us.
‘Umberto, before you go floating off over the river,’ Papi interjected, ‘just make sure you take off them two four-wheel drives ’pon your feet, in case they weight you down and cause you to crash into the river and drown.’
Ignoring Papi, Uncle Umberto went on to tell us that, besides all he’d just said, he had also met Miss Vyfhuis, outside Arjune’s rumshop, and had even condescended to say a few words into her microphone. She was nothing like his butterfly lady; she was small and mousey-looking, and anyone could see that she could never fly. Also, her tape-recorder was twice the size of the magic black box carried by his lady... We shrugged – no one could take away one of Uncle’s prized fantasies.
A few months after this my grandmother died one night in her sleep. The family was not overwhelmed with grief; the old lady was eighty-nine years old, and although her death was unexpected, everyone said that it was a good thing that it was not preceded by a long or painful illness. ‘She herself would have chosen to go in that way,’ Mami said. Uncle Umberto seemed the one most deeply affected by the old lady’s passing; he seemed not so much grief-stricken as bewildered. It was as though the event had caught him at a particularly inconvenient time and for days he walked about the house and the streets mumbling and distracted. Uncle Umberto should have become the head of our household, and I suppose he was, in a way, but he seemed to abdicate all responsibility in favour of Aunt Teresa, his wife, who took on the role of making the big decisions and giving orders. Umberto’s slippers took their increasingly distracted occupant more and more frequently to the path above the river and he could be seen there not only in the evenings, but now also first thing in the morning and sometimes again in the heat of the day. None of us who saw him ever saw the butterfly woman – nor anyone else, for that matter – walking with him, although there were times when he seemed to be gesticulating to an invisible companion. Mostly he just walked. He haunted the riverside path like a Dutchman’s ghost and we all began to worry about him.
One evening not long after this, Uncle Umberto came home dishevelled and distraught, a wild look in his eyes.
‘She going,’ he said. ‘She say is time to go and she want me go with her.’
‘Go where?’ Aunt Teresa snapped. ‘Just look at yourself, Umberto, look at the state you have yourself in over this imaginary creature.’
‘I keep telling you,’ Umberto pleaded, ‘she’s not imaginary – I see her for true, swear-to-god, although it seem nobody else can see her. Now she say she going away, and I must go with her – or else follow her later.’
‘Tell her you will follow her, man Umberto,’ Papi said. ‘You know like how a husband or a wife does go off to America and then send later for the other partner and the children. Tell her to go and send for you when she ready. No need to throw yourself off the cliff behind her.’
I was sure Papi was joking, and there was a little nervous laughter in the room, but surprisingly, Umberto thought it was a great idea. His face cleared of its deep frown and he said simply: ‘Thank you, Ernesto, I will tell her that and see what she say,’ and he went off to his room, followed by his visibly uncomfortable wife.
Two days later Umberto reported that the lady had agreed to the plan; they had said their goodbyes early that morning and she floated off the rock where she had first appeared, and was enveloped in the mist above the river. Umberto seemed in very good spirits and the family breathed a collective sigh of relief. In the weeks immediately following he appeared to be his old self again – having a drink or two with the boys in Arjune’s rumshop, joking with the rest of us and talking of replacing the north roof of the house, which had begun to leak again. He never spoke of the butterfly lady.
In just over six weeks, however, Uncle Umberto was dead. He announced one morning that he was taking a walk into town to order galvanize, stepped into his famous slippers and disappeared down the road. It seemed like only minutes later (we hadn’t left for school yet) that we heard shouting outside and looked down the road to see Imtiaz, Mr. Wardle from the drug store and even old Lall at the forefront of a crowd of people running up the hill, waving and shouting. The only thing that we could make out in the hubbub was the word ‘Umberto’.
It seems Umberto had stopped at the edge of town to chat with a small group of friends when he suddenly looked up, shouted ‘Oh God! Child, Look out!’ and leapt right in front of one of the big quarry trucks that was speeding down the hill. He died where he had landed after the impact, his rib-cage and one arm badly smashed and his face cut above the left eye. The slippers were still on his feet. There was no child – nor anyone else – near to the truck.
Well, you can guess what everyone said: the butterfly woman appeared to him and led him to his death – just when we all thought he was rid of her. The family was devastated. Unlike my grandmother’s, Uncle Umberto’s funeral was an extremely sad and painful occasion – not least because we saw Umberto’s feet, for the first time ever, in a pair of highly polished black shoes. The shoes were large, but not as large as we thought they needed to be to contain Uncle’s feet. The thought that the people at the funeral parlour had mutilated his feet and crammed them into those shoes was too much to bear. We all wept, and scarcely anyone looked at Umberto’s face as he lay in the coffin – all eyes were on the extraordinary and deeply disturbing sight at its other end. At home, after the burial, we all turned on poor Aunt Teresa – how could she permit the undertakers to mutilate Uncle’s feet? My cousin Lennie, his favourite, said tearfully that not even God would recognize Uncle Umberto in those shoes.
‘You should have buried him in his slippers; those were his trademark.’
‘Trademark, yes,’ Aunt Teresa spat, her eyes bright with tears, ‘and they made him a laughing-stock – everybody always laughing and making fun of him and his big feet. I wanted that he could have in death the dignity he was never allowed in life, what with Ernesto and John and you and Nickie and the children always making cruel jokes about the feet and the slippers. God knows he used to encourage you all with his antics, it’s true, but
