Miguel Street Read Free

was at heart a loquacious man, and always wanted to be friendly with the men of the street and he was always surprised that he was not liked. So it looked as though he had got what he wanted. But Popo was not really happy. The friendship had come a little too late, and he found he didn’t like it as much as he’d expected. Hat tried to get Popo interested in other women, but Popo wasn’t interested.
    Popo didn’t think I was too young to be told anything.
    ‘Boy, when you grow old as me,’ he said once, ‘you find that you don’t care for the things you thought you woulda like if you coulda afford them.’
    That was his way of talking, in riddles.
    Then one day Popo left us.
    Hat said, ‘He don’t have to tell me where he gone. He gone looking for he wife.’
    Edward said, ‘Think she going come back with he?’
    Hat said, ‘Let we wait and see.’
    We didn’t have to wait long. It came out in the papers. Hat said it was just what he expected. Popo had beaten up a man in Arima, the man had taken his wife away. It was the gardener who used to give me bags of grass.
    Nothing much happened to Popo. He had to pay a fine, but they let him off otherwise. The magistrate said that Popo had better not molest his wife again.
    They made a calypso about Popo that was the rage that year. It was the road-march for the Carnival, and the Andrews Sisters sang it for an American recording company:
A certain carpenter feller went to Arima
Looking for a mopsy called Emelda.
    It was a great thing for the street.
    At school, I used to say, ‘The carpenter feller was a good, good friend of mine.’
    And, at cricket matches, and at the races, Hat used to say, ‘Know him? God, I used to drink with that man night and day. Boy, he could carry his liquor.’
    Popo wasn’t the same man when he came back to us. He growled at me when I tried to talk to him, and he drove out Hat and the others when they brought a bottle of rum to the workshop.
    Hat said, ‘Woman send that man mad, you hear.’
    But the old noises began to be heard once more from Popo’s workshop. He was working hard, and I wondered whether he was still making the thing without a name. But I was too afraid to ask.
    He ran an electric light to the workshop and began working in the night-time. Vans stopped outside his house and were always depositing and taking away things. Then Popo began painting his house. He used a bright green, and he painted the roof a bright red. Hat said, ‘The man really mad.’
    And added, ‘Like he getting married again.’
    Hat wasn’t too far wrong. One day, about two weeks later, Popo returned, and he brought a woman with him. It was his wife. My auntie.
    ‘You see the sort of thing woman is,’ Hat commented. ‘You see the sort of thing they like. Not the man. But the new house paint up, and all the new furniture inside it. I bet you if the man in Arima had a new house and new furnitures, she wouldnta come back with Popo.’
    But I didn’t mind. I was glad. It was good to see Popo standing outside with his glass of rum in the mornings and dipping his finger into the rum and waving at his friends; and it was good to ask him again, ‘What you making, Mr Popo?’ and to get the old answer, ‘Ha, boy! That’s the question. I making the thing without a name.’
    Popo returned very quickly to his old way of living, and he was still devoting his time to making the thing without a name. He had stopped working, and his wife got her job with the same people near my school.
    People in the street were almost angry with Popo when his wife came back. They felt that all their sympathy had been mocked and wasted. And again Hat was saying, ‘That blasted Popo too conceited, you hear.’
    But this time Popo didn’t mind.
    He used to tell me, ‘Boy, go home and pray tonight that you get happy like me.’
    What happened afterwards happened so suddenly that we didn’t even know it had happened. Even Hat didn’t know about it until he read it in the