As per usual, I gathered my thoughts and memories of my friend and colleague Victor Marquis, the news of whose passing I breathed-in alongside that of my son Jeavaughn, on the second anniversary of my brother Alex’s one-way trip along the oceanic river-of-no-return.
I got to know Victor late in the last century when he took up the editor’s pen at THE VOICE.
We’d chit-and-chat and ‘talk shit’, accordingly, by phone or in person, both modes engaged for periods lengthier than normal, on issues ranging from this-and-that to everything under the sun.
As columnists, we hardly talked about the subjects of our weekly fun with words in his ‘Of Cabbages and Kings’ or my ‘Chronicles of a Chronic Chronicler’, instead taking joint flights down Memory Lane to things and persons, events and remarkable but undocumented incidents of near and distant past.
Our friendship was born and grown mainly in the kitchen, dining room and upstairs and downstairs porches of his heavenly-placed home known even to the unknown simpleton as ‘The Parker House’.
Victor lived alone in his palatial home, but was never, ever, without visiting company of a common denominator that I will allow to remain imaginable to those who didn’t know the victor in him.
It took several visits (to his home) for him to show me around, as he always insisted on giving me the full history of every photo on his wall, whether of his carnival ‘Turks’ band outfit or his mum, or his many other spaced portraits of frozen moments of time.
The view of Castries ‘town’ is an immaculate reflection of today’s living shadow of the Cathedral of the Immaculate Conception, which finds itself in every photo taken from whatever angle on any front balcony and the view from the back overlooks the Mindoo Philip park and Marchand Grounds, the two reflecting the purposeful choice of a mountainside spot for the house the Parkers built.
Actually, the house became famous for reasons that remain clouded in history, deep in the recesses of the memory of those who can remember anything about ‘The Parker Lady’, obviously of colonial heritage, but of no decipherable race or ethnicity, described by an aging son of an ancient neighborhood lady who described her (to him, decades-ago) as having a ‘couleur wai-ya-yai’ (meaning: neither Black nor White, Indian or in-between).
Ma Parker hardly left the house on the Pavee Hill overlooking the town, but the mystique of the mystical lady who some even claimed was a ‘lajablesse’ (‘La Diablesse’) or (‘The Devil’) who practiced ‘the Black arts’, would have left no doubt that she was happy in her apparent solitary confinement.
Actually, Victor hailed from an original small-business family in Canaries and his uncle had a little shop at the bottom of the start of the Morne Fortune hill, just yards away from then Pavee Hill where he lived.
I actually remember buying bread at ‘Mr Marquis’ and thus now know that Victor was just an uphill away from his downhill relatives from whence he cometh.
In my few calls preceding yesterday’s penning of this article, I was able to get reminded that the victor in Victor is of a literary pedigree that was all more real than literal.
He was the son of Victor ‘Pick’ Lewis, brother of Sir Allen and Sir Arthur Lewis, which also made him a ‘first cousin’ (as he also always reminded me) of former Prime Minister Vaughn Lewis.
‘Pick’ was a very-serious political activist who supported George Odlum to the hilt and represented Philip Doxilly in his case against what he saw as legal acquisition of his family’s property by a former Prime Minister, through illegal means.
But, as one of his teachers at St. Mary’s college would tell me yesterday, “Victor was of pedigree lineage and was therefore unsurprisingly extremely brilliant at school… I taught him zoology and he was so brainy that I knew he knew nothing about the subject but was such a good writer that he couldn’t but get the marks he wrote for…”
Victor grew up in one of the ‘Model Cottages’ that lined the lower-Darling Road area in the first half of the last century, following the 1948 Castries Fire, but his proximity to Conway sparked his interest in playing steal-band with the ‘Conway Boys’ under the stewardship of early Bajan-born social activist James Belgrave.
Indeed, Victor never missed any opportunity to share the view over a bottle of selected wine from our respective cellars – mine under my bed, his under his water bed – and taking turns in the kitchen to see who best prepared pasta was another lengthy round of sniffing wine glasses with every first shot gulped slowly while adding a bit to the roasting beef.
And then there was his fascination with my insistence that he lay out his knives and forks and serve our lunch around 4pm, by then well pepped-up with his latest water bed endeavors in that select space where not everyone has had a chance to see, including me…
But others with better luck will tell you, with certainty, that his water bed was the Victor’s most-prized piece of furniture at the Parker House.
I never got to ask (or I can’t remember if I did) whether he inherited the invisible floating mattress from ‘Ma Paka’, or if he offered ‘flying carpet’ rides to select visitors, whether it sat on the floor or fit like a plastic swimming pool in a four-poster bed.
But when I looked at the smile on Victor’s face when he posed for the photo (in last weekend’s VOICE) wearing the T-shirt advertising ‘Rooster’, I knew that was the Victor of Pavee that I knew and many others did not.
The victor in Victor was in his hands and his pen.
A favorite quote we shared, as journalists, was ‘The pen is mightier than the sword’—with his insistence on joining the second and third words…
He was THAT GOOD a wordsmith, as with his literary prowess in reminding me that ‘No one ever knew who William Shakespeare was, no one ever saw him, except the Queen in her royal boudoir…’
And he has that fascination with the fact that ‘Napoleon the Conqueror’s wife, Josephine, was able to conquer him because she was a Lucian from Babonneau…’ and ‘The French only hate her because she was the one who conquered his mind, just like the wives of Toussaint L’Ouverture and Henri Christophe has pre-nuptial agreements that allowed them to be friends of their husbands’ enemies…’
That was Prime Victor: the Marquis of Pavee and Castries, at a time when proclivity was prime and promiscuity was not a sin.
And I know he’ll rest in perfect peace in that lasting legacy that The Victor in Victor built at The Parker House!