in the room with the slippers in his hands, saying ‘These are fantastic, just amazing – nobody else in the world – just look at them!’ And he held them up, tears streaming down his face.
‘Give me those!’ Aunt Teresa shouted, flying into a rage, ‘He only been buried two hours and already you parading these ridiculous things and making fun of the dead. At least you could have a little respect for my feelings.’
As she snatched the slippers from Patti I couldn’t help noticing with awe that they still had the deep grooves of the tire tread and seemed to be hardly worn. At another time I might have remarked: ‘They look as though they have less than a hundred miles on them’ (that is, if Papi didn’t beat me to it), but now, with Aunty raging, we all kept silent and watched her disappear into her room, clutching the offending footwear.
* * *
You might think that the story is now ended, but in fact there is a little more to tell. You must remember that this is not the story of Uncle Umberto, but of his slippers. Several months later, when Aunt Teresa returned from a visit to her sister in Trinidad and seemed to be in a good mood, someone – Lennie, perhaps – casually asked her what had become of Uncle Umberto’s slippers. Her face clouded over, but only for an instant. She smiled and said: ‘Oh, those things – don’t worry, I didn’t burn them, only buried them away in the bottom of my trunk. I don’t think I’m ready to see them again yet,’ and the conversation moved on to other topics.
About a year later, when the house was in general upheaval – because Mr. Moses was replacing the rotten north roof at last; because Aunt Lina (one of my father’s sisters) was visiting from New Jersey and because my cousin Lennie had just disgraced us all by getting Rima Valenzuela pregnant (and him barely nineteen!) – Aunt Teresa came into the kitchen one night and announced that Uncle Umberto’s slippers had disappeared. ’What you mean “disappeared”, Aunty?’ Lennie said. ‘Remember you told us that you had put them in the bottom of your trunk?’
‘Yes,’ Aunt Teresa said, ‘in this big blue plastic bag; but when I was looking for them just now to show Lina, I find the bag empty. Look, you can still see the print of the truck tire where it press against the plastic for so long under the weight of the things in the trunk.’ And she held up the bag for us to see.
‘But it’s impossible for them to just disappear,’ Lennie insisted.
Aunt Teresa gave him a look: ‘Just like how it’s impossible for Rima Valenzuela to make baby, eh? You proud to admit that you responsible for that miracle, for all I know you may be to blame for this one as well.’
‘Ow, Auntie,’ I pleaded, ‘don’t start picking on him again.’ I was feeling for Lennie, who had taken a lot of flack from the women in the family (and had become something of an underground hero to the men and boys!).
‘OK. Look,’ Teresa said, ‘I don’t know who removed the slippers. I would have said it has to be one of you, but I always lock the trunk, as you know, and walk everywhere with the key – in this menagerie of a house that is the only way I can have a little privacy and be able to call my few possessions my own. The disappearance of the slippers is a real mystery to me, but you could go and search for yourself if you want.’ And she flung the bunch of keys at us, shaking her head. We did search – the trunk, the wardrobe, the chest of drawers, under the bed, everywhere, but there was no sign of the slippers. It was a mystery in truth.
Eventually the slippers became a dim memory for most of us. Life moved on; we children continued ‘to grow like weeds’, as my Aunt Monica would say. I went to board with cousins in the city during term-time, so that I could attend sixth form at college, and I found that my life changed, to the point where all that remained of Uncle Umberto and his slippers were memories, dim and fading memories. But.
After I wrote my last A-level exam – just days ago – I returned home at once to spend some time with my family and to prepare to leave them again in a few months, for I had already received provisional acceptance from the University of Toronto. The day after I returned home, about mid-morning, Aunt Teresa ran into the house in a state of shock; in her hands were Uncle Umberto’s slippers. She had taken to walking along the path above the river, almost as regularly as Uncle Umberto had in the years before his death – perhaps she did it in memory of Uncle – but that morning, as she passed the large rock on the cliff at Mora point, she saw on the path, just at the base of the rock, Uncle Umberto’s slippers. They were placed neatly, one beside the other, as though someone had just stepped out of them to climb the rock. There was no one in sight. Aunt Teresa had almost fainted. The rest of us were in shock as well, at seeing the slippers again, and you can well imagine the wild surmises about how they got to be on the path that day.
But the strangest thing was that the slippers, while undoubtedly Uncle Umberto’s (portions of the incised initials were still discernible), had soles that were worn until the thickest parts were less than half as thick as they were when Uncle died; on the sections between instep and the tip of the toe the tire tread was worn away entirely and the rubber was smooth and black. In two and a half years someone – or something – had put ten thousand miles on Uncle Umberto’s old Firestones!
The next day I came up here, to the bookroom tower, and began writing this story.
TWO BOYS NAMED BASIL
by Hilary Augusta Sutton
Basil Raatgever and Basil Ross were born three days apart in the month of November, 1939. Basil Ross was the elder. From the beginning their lives seem to have been curiously and profoundly interrelated. They were both born to middle-class Guyanese parents of mixed race and their skins were of almost exactly the same hue of brown. They were not related and although their parents knew of each other – as was inevitable in a small society like Georgetown at the time – there was no opportunity for them to meet as young children, because Mr. Ross was a Government dispenser who was posted from time to time to various coastal and interior districts, while the Raatgevers lived in Georgetown, where Mr. Raatgever was some kind of senior clerical functionary in the Transport and Harbours Department.
The two boys met at the age of ten, when Basil Ross began attending the ‘scholarship class’ in the same primary school in Georgetown which Basil Raatgever had attended from the age of six. Basil Ross had been sent to the city to live with his maternal grandparents so that he could have two years of special preparation in order to sit the Government scholarship examinations. The two Basils found themselves seated next to each other in the classroom and from that moment on their lives and fortunes became intertwined. Before the scholarship class neither child showed any particular scholarly aptitude. They both did well enough to get by, but the fourth standard teacher had already warned Mr. Raatgever not to hope for too much of Basil in the scholarship exams; he was restless and easily distracted, though he seemed to have the ability to do fairly well. Basil Ross, on the other hand, possessed great powers of concentration and could occupy himself enthusiastically and obsessively with a number of demanding hobbies, but for him school work was a chore unworthy of his attention, to be done with haste and little care, so that he could return to his more interesting pursuits.
From the time they were placed together in the same class, however, all this changed. Whether this was due to their awakening to the pleasures and possibilities of scholarship – or simply the instinct to compete, to see which Basil was better – in a strange symbiosis they seemed to draw energy and inspiration from each other. At the end of the first term in scholarship class, Basil Ross was first in class, beating Basil Raatgever into second by a mere four marks. At the end of the second term, the positions were the same but the margin was only two marks, and after the third term – at the end of the first year – Basil Raatgever was first in class, beating Basil Ross by a single mark. And so they continued. The change in both boys was
