WHILE WAITING FOR A PARTNER at a West Coast hotel (who was actually in a submarine off Bridgetown) in a rare period of complete idleness (which can only happen to someone with a job accidentally nowadays), I watched a young hotel employee wheel an empty coat-rack from one end of my sphere of vision to the other, and then, after a few minutes inside a building at that end, back.
After his second round trip, I put aside my book – Paul Krugman’s excellent End This Depression Now! – and waited for his reappearance. Sure enough, after three or four minutes, he reemerged, pushed the empty coat-rack along the path, past me, alongside the pool and into the other building; and, shortly after, repeated the process in reverse.
For the 45 to 55 minutes I was there, he passed again and again. The time spent in the building on either end grew longer on each turnaround, but the emptiness of the coat-rack never changed. He was carrying nothing between two destinations over a period; but he never faltered.
What was he shimmy-shammying doing? What blue-collar job could require endlessly parading an empty coat-rack? Who needed coats in Barbados anyway, far less so many as to require a rack? And where were the shiny-shammy coats themselves?
Was this the emperor’s new wardrobe? Had someone in authority actually conceived of this as work? Was he someone’s son or nephew who had to be kept on the payroll, somehow?
The slightly less tense state that passes for relaxation in modern life vanished before this activity, fully pointless as it was mildly industrious.
I considered asking him but something told me his answer would deepen the mystery, not resolve it. There could be nothing – nothing legitimate, anyway – that required such action (or, more accurately, “inertia”).
He was, I concluded, engaged in some sort of smokescreen. Perhaps a surreptitious dominoes game had sprung up in the laundry and he was making periodic checks to see whether the manager had returned. His route gave him a view of the car park; but why didn’t he just wait until he saw the manager and then carry the coat-rack to give the warning?
Out of the back of my mind floated the memory of the late Martin Carter, the Guyanese poet, at a dinner party in Georgetown at which I was the least of the guests. Then President Desmond Hoyte was heading towards losing the next election spectacularly and the intelligent people at the table were puzzled by the president’s apparent inactivity, and the pointlessness
of the few things he did do – until Carter, after listening to everything, said, summed up and sealed the discussion with a single comment.
“They are,” he declared, “engaged in a holding operation.”
The young man came out of the far building and pushed his empty coat-rack past me. I nodded at him and he nodded back. And I understood at last what he was doing: he was applying for a Cabinet post in any West Indian government. Or private sector organization. Or, for that matter, trade union.
• B.C. Pires is spinning top in mud. Email your burnt out light bulbs to him at bc@caribsurf.com