the tremulous up-downing of her behind"(p.151), will make him "hurt for her, for the taming of her" (p. 152), for years to come.Graduating from the physical, however, that "up-downing, drop-rising" (p. 152) of her bottom, Aldrick will come to realize that "her very desirability placed her above ordinary desiring" (p. 229), the mere ownership which Guy intends, and it is at carnival that he first glimpses the future that they might share, how he might paradoxically "lose himself and gain himself in her, swirling away with her until together they disappeared into the self that she was calling back, calling forth" (p. 141). Echoing the Indian, Pariag, and Philo the Calypsonian, Aldrick begins to desire to simply live and love and grow, which is exactly why he has always loved Sylvia: her beauty was not a weapon, but a "declaration of a faith in life and a promise of life" (p. 228). He alone realizes the paradox that Sylvia is both "illuminated and doomed by that aura"(p. 229) of inner "sainted" beauty which Guy threatens to suppress by effectively sequestering her in a new home in Diego Martin.Only through the use of paradox could Lovelace convey the full range of emotion between Sylvia and Aldrick, who both realize early on the spirituality of their love that blossomed like a mango rose against the unmitigating backdrop of Aldrick's small room, the crazy formation of boxboard and wood-board shacks on the Hill, against all of the physical and economic realities of Port-of-Spain. When Sylvia notices Aldrick coming up the Hill after his five-year prison sentence, for example, the sight of him sends "a chilling melting thrilling feeling " through her flesh (p. 206). The oxymoron is especially apt given the intensity of her true feelings for Aldrick and her guilty knowledge of the fact that she has affianced herself to Guy solely for economic reasons.Lovelace continues to employ paradoxes to fully dramatize the omnipresent economic tensions in...
