by Bill Barich
By December, time has become my enemy. The days whip by, and I must face the distressing prospect of returning to my snowbound university. It makes me sweat at night, even in winter. I’m irritable around the flat, tired of Aldo and his clerkish routines. “Va via!” I’d like to shout. Get out of here, Aldo! The marchesa guesses the source of my moodiness and puts a chocolate bar on my breakfast tray.
Giorgio and I are still the best of pals, at least. He treats me as if I’m a weird older brother from a faraway planet. A crowd gathers whenever we play catch outside, and I make peppy chatter and embarrass Giorgio by saying he’ll be the next Joe DiMaggio.
I bring the marchesa a dozen roses, and she weeps.
* * *
The longing just gets worse! I skip classes to visit galleries and museums. I am devouring the paintings and sculptures, storing up impressions to nourish me in the dark times ahead. The guards at the Uffizi recognize me now and nod to me on their rounds. Are they laughing inside? Poor young American in love with art, he must go home to the land of Norman Rockwell.
Gregor and I plan a farewell weekend. We lie to our host families and say we’re going to Rome by train to see the Pope. We go nowhere. We wallow in Florence instead, soaking up the city. We wander from café to café, get drunk and sappy, and find ourselves near Santa Croce at a medieval open-air bar jammed with grotesques. They’re pounding grappa and eating roasted pig ears. We sleep both nights on park benches and wake covered with dew. Sunday we climb up to Piazzale Michelangelo and watch the sun rise over red tile roofs.
Our city, we cry! Gregor sings to Florence, and Florence applauds.
Next there’s the gross nuisance of term papers and final exams. The hiss of radiators, those profs with hair sprouting from their noses. How can they dare to issue us grades when we’ve been studying the ineffable?
We throw a big party at the semester’s end, but it’s a hollow affair. Gregor, in his wine-soaked beret, will head to Paris and try but fail to be a painter. Guido proposes to Cynthia, then unproposes. She accuses him of being fickle, a Romeo. In his own defense, Guido shrugs. Cynthia will wind up in San Francisco, hiding her hash pipe on the fine leather purse Guido bought her on the Ponte Vecchio.
Jessica and I will travel to Switzerland, Germany, France, and England. We’ll stop at many clubs and pubs and hammer many pinball machines, pretending our trip will go on and on. Rita Pavone is still on every jukebox, no matter what country.
But first I am in the piazza across from our college by myself—one more time, taking stock. Church bells toll, pigeons flap, doves are cooing. The sky turns pink. At that moment, I should be writing in my notebook, “Youth fades, the loving memories endure,” but I don’t have the words yet. They come to me years later, approaching with the speed of light.
Salon, 1998
Barbados: All Right
It’s an ordinary weekday morning in Speightstown, a little fishing village on the west coast of Barbados. The Caribbean is flat and clear, the color of turquoise, and the prevailing January trade winds push a procession of ever-changing clouds across a big blue sky. Already the local fleet has gone out to sea in pursuit of flying fish, except for a couple of ancient skiffs—Elsie, Fondue II—that are beached and bleaching in the sun by the Fisherman’s Pub, where the lunch special today is macaroni and creamed potatoes. The pub is a cheerful, busy, rowdy spot, especially at night, so there are cautionary signs posted inside forbidding the use of obscene language and the theft of draft beer. The signs, it must be admitted, are frequently ignored.
Down the dusty Speightstown lanes come the married women of the village, off to do their shopping, immaculately groomed and dressed in bright dresses and fancy hats. They carry purses and comport themselves with great dignity even as they stroll past hardscrabble yards in which roosters crow and tethered goats munch on blades of grass.
The houses here are compact and made of wood, almost always freshly painted and resting on a foundation of concrete or coral stone from which they can be easily detached and transported. They’re known as chattel houses—chattel being a person’s movable property—and in the old days people routinely moved them from place to place, sometimes following the sugarcane harvest.
Radios are turned up loud in many of the houses, blasting reggae music and its Bajan derivatives. In one yard, a grizzled old man sits on his steps, nips at a bottle of Mount Gay rum, and talks nonstop to the clouds. It would be beneath the women to comment or take notice of him. Barbados was a colony of Great Britain from 1625 to 1966, and its most sophisticated citizens still have a reserve that’s peculiar to the British, an ability to ignore any trace of unpleasantness and keep one’s feet, as it were, on the imperial high road.
This makes for an orderly, polite society, largely untroubled by problems you might find elsewhere in the Caribbean. It shows in the demeanor of schoolchildren arriving on buses, each boy and girl in a spotlessly clean uniform, quiet, well-mannered, and respectful of their elders.
Other women, the wives of farmers in from the countryside, have set up along the town’s main street to sell fruits and vegetables from baskets, carts, and tables. They are often elderly and weary-looking, their faces deeply creased. As they preside over beautiful displays of tomatoes, yams, breadfruit, green beans, and a half-dozen other treats, they banter with their customers in a melodious Bajan English, a form of pidgin that’s so allusive and encoded most English-speaking tourists cannot decipher it. Their standard greeting, though, is intelligible.
“All right with you?” they ask, or, simply, “Is all right?”
I have been on the island for two days now and have learned a proper response. Whenever a trader lady calls out to me, I smile and say, “I cool.”
I am in Barbados on holiday, obligated to live like a pasha on the west coast—also known as the Gold or Platinum Coast—which is the most striking, lush, and expensive acreage around. The high season is beginning here, a time when wealthy Brits flee from the drippy grayness of another English winter to bask in brilliant, bone-warming sunshine such as they have never experienced at home. They are a curious sight, formal in their studied informality, half-naked in their bathing suits and yet still striding about the beach with the determined gait of financiers bound for the City, a ghost copy of Finacial Times under their arms. They love the heat of the tropics, but they resist its sensuality. I imagine them all to be related to the Royal Family and entertain myself by inventing whimsical names for them—Lord Demerol, Lady Smyth-Sonian, and the devilish Sir Tommy Shortpants.
My outpost in St. Michael Parish is a luxury resort a half-mile or so from Speightstown. I have a lovely suite of rooms ten yards from the sea. I go to sleep to the crashing of waves and wake to the sound of rustling palm trees and the fragrant smell of tropical flowers. Everywhere I look I see blazing primary colors, a welcoming world from which the concept of hard work has been banished.
At breakfast every morning I devise a recreational plan for the next 12 or so hours that involves swimming, snorkeling, tanning, reading, and at least one nap. It’s a brutal, grueling schedule that would kill a lesser man. Always, too, over my tea and toast, I listen to the Caribbean Broadcasting Corporation’s drive-time deejay, who delivers important news about cricket matches and impending calypso concerts.
This deejay is something of a comedian. Yesterday he put through a surprise phone call to a farmer outside Bridgetown, the island’s capital. The phone rang about 20 times before the farmer finally picked it up.
“You sleepin’ in your yard of your house?” the deejay asked him, in a comprehensible semipidgin. “Or you in that yard feedin’ some pigs?”
“No pigs,” the farmer replied, utterly unfazed to be talking to a stranger. “Just some sheep in a pasture. What I can do for you, mon?”
“Harry, we learn it’s your birthday! You’re plainly over 40! We hear you gonna marry that woman over in Christ Church Parish!”
“You never know, mon,” Harry said flatly.
“Harry!” c
ried the deejay. “I go play a special song for you by Lesley Gore.”
“Say by who?”
“Lesley Gore, mon!” Then came the tinny, nasal bleat of “It’s My Party,” a song that, like Dracula, will never die. I switched off the radio and hiked into town to buy some oranges and Banks beer, a local brew essential for survival.
At the Alexandra School, an Anglican institution, bountiful teenage girls were entering the grounds under the watchful, probing eyes of several young men across the street. The young men can always be found hanging around a wildly painted house, where their ostensible business is the repairing of “tyres.” I think of them as the Tyre Repair Gang and believe that their actual purpose in life is to try and seduce the Alexandra girls. When the girls are in classrooms, the Tyre Repair Gang grow restless. They argue, joke, wrestle, and indulge in vicious games of dominoes. Sometimes they fall asleep under the palm trees in their yard, dreaming their fantastic dreams.
* * *
Summer is the true rainy season in Barbados, when fierce hurricanes pose a threat to islands throughout the Caribbean. It isn’t supposed to rain heavily in late January, but one morning we suffered through a cloudburst, one of those thundering tropical storms that saturates the earth with endless amounts of water in a matter of minutes.
In my living room I sat listening to the downpour and watching a little bananaquit bird, bright yellow, suck the residue of honey from the bottom of my teacup. I read the Advocate, too, a leading Bajan paper, and was distressed to learn that some readers felt the local calypso tradition was at an all-time low. One correspondent, Hal Hewitt, tackled the issue head-on.
“All that’s necessary these days to make a hit calypso is to get a fairly good backing band,” wrote Hewitt, “and repeat the following lines over and over: Shake yuh bum bum; Jam in de party and Jump and wave.”
Winter cloudbursts on the island are brief. By ten o’clock the sky was blue again, and Lord Demerol, whom I’d last seen nursing an after-dinner rum punch at the hotel bar, marched toward the beach as if to secure it, his snorkel tube in hand.
Two Bajan men, bare-chested and muscular, sped by the resort in a skiff powered by an outboard motor, Speightstown fishermen getting a late start. They reminded me of the men that Winslow Homer painted in the Bahamas, those stunning watercolors in which you can feel the artist’s spirit taking flight in response to the very lightness of the atmosphere, so different from the oppressive chill of his adopted Maine.
My plan for the day was to go exploring. I had a rental car and had marked a route on a map that would allow me to cross the island to the Atlantic Ocean, where the scenery was supposed to be spectacular and the surf dangerous. Barbados is quite small, only 166 square miles from one side to the other, so the trip would take less than an hour if I remembered to stay on the left-hand side of the road. If I failed to remember, the trip might never be completed.
The really important thing was to have a loud, dependable horn. Bajan motorists blow their horns constantly to alert cyclists, pedestrians, cattle, cattle egrets, and small mammals in their path that they are approaching around blind curves, up steep hills, or along tiny, two-lane roads that provide no margin for error. Some roads, I discovered, are just one-and-a-half laners, and it requires some skillful calculation, or a silent prayer, to avoid an accident.
I set off around noon, drove through Speightstown, and climbed up a narrow road that flattened out after a few minutes and then ran through huge fields of sugarcane, a mainstay of the local economy for more than 300 years, although tourism has now surpassed it in economic value.
British colonials established the sugar trade here in the mid-1600s and imported slaves from Africa to do the backbreaking labor. By the end of the 17th century just a few plantation owners controlled the entire wealth of the island. They employed some white servants, but the black slaves outnumbered the indentured whites by about thirty to one. The slave trade was abolished in 1807, after which, very slowly, a period of emancipation began at last.
I went through the village of Belleplaine, then swung onto East Coast Road, a highway skirting the edge of the Atlantic. The landscape changed dramatically. It became less wooded and more open, offering broad vistas in every direction. I could see cliffs of exposed coral and a few trails worn into the grassy hills. The ocean was the same pellucid blue as the Caribbean, but the surf was foamy and pounding, far too rough for most swimmers.
A few surfers, both Bajans and tourists, were paddling about on their boards, the elite of a budding surfing scene. While the waves that day were not world-class, there was still plenty of space for everyone.
At Barclay’s Park, a little café on the ocean, I ate a flying fish sandwich for lunch. The fish was delicate and delicious, dipped in batter, deep-fried, and popped into a soft roll. Another customer watched me with pleasure. He identified himself as Dexter from Bridgetown. Dexter was drinking a Banks, and it did not seem to be his first of the afternoon.
He chuckled to himself, pointed at my sandwich, and said, “You know that fish you eatin’, mon? You ever see ’em fly?”
“Not yet,” I said.
“Any fish like that fly in your country?” he asked.
“Not that I know of.”
Dexter gave me a friendly clap on the shoulder and shared a cultural equation he formulated on the spot: “Barbados, we got flying fishes and the best in cricket. You people over there, you got NBA basketball and movies from Hollywood. Is so?”
“It’s so,” I agreed.
“All right, then,” said Dexter, laughing and shaking my hand.
* * *
Sir Tommy Shortpants, the old rogue, was responsible for touting me on the horse races in Bridgetown. He was stretched out next to me on a chaise longue by the swimming pool, reading about them in the Advocate. They would be running on Saturday, at the Garrison Savannah under the auspices of the Barbados Turf Club.
I decided I would attend out of curiosity, to see what sort of spin the Bajans had put on the Sport of Kings. Their attitude toward gambling was somewhat contradictory. They were often religious and staunchly opposed to a current move to open Vegas-style casinos on the island, but at the same time they plunged mightily on the national lottery and indulged, as did the Tyre Repair Gang, in many petty games of chance, including checkers, darts, pool, and cards, along with dominoes.
“I like Passionata in the feature race,” Sir Tommy whispered, serving up a tip. His skin, after a week in the sun, had turned the tawny color of a mahogany tree. “You won’t go wrong with that filly.”
“Passionata it is,” I agreed.
“Jolly good!” He really said such things. “Well done!”
Bridgetown is a densely settled city of about 250,000, but I would guess that on a Saturday the number almost doubles. Bajans from the provinces travel long distances to shop in the big department stores and also to see and be seen, so the downtown streets are awash with people cruising, promenading, and gossiping. Neighbors bump into neighbors and cousins into cousins.
A “tuk band,” a combo—bass, snare drum, triangle, and pennywhistle—that is unique to Barbados, was giving a concert in Trafalgar Square, passing the hat while six or so teenage girls were dancing. The girls shook their bum bums in a brazenly sexual way, as if to liberate the energies that they had to conceal while they were in school and in uniform.
Garrison Savannah is in a parklike area just outside town. Troops from Britain had once been stationed there, and a few buildings from the early 1800s still stand, excellent examples of Georgian architecture as practiced in the Caribbean. The racetrack itself was a standard oval with an old-fashioned, pre-electronic tote board. As I passed through an admissions gate, I heard Bob Marley wailing “Buffalo Soldier” through a pair of gigantic speakers.
The first race was about to go off, and I couldn’t resist putting a few dollars on Brown Sugar, even though I hadn’t yet opened the local version of a racing program. Brown Sugar, who proved to be eight years old,
went down in defeat.
Most racing in Great Britain is carried out on the turf, and the same is true in Barbados. The grandstand was stuffed with a multitude of different types, black and white, all social classes. Women in hats fit for Ascot, aging doubles for the Queen Mother, were seated next to cheap-speed blondes who clutched the arms of Bajan men adorned in enough flashy gold jewelry to sink the Bismarck. The atmosphere was a happy combination of Jamaica Sunsplash and Santa Anita.
The second race brought me a bit of unexpected luck. My horse, First Home, acted up before the start, unseating her jockey, falling down, and rolling over. I felt doomed, but First Home managed to right herself and still had enough feistiness in her to nip Jumpjet at the wire, paying three-to-one. A groom paraded the filly before the grandstand like a debutante, and she received a muted round of applause and a few sighs of approval.
In the next race I made the mistake of letting my winnings ride on Yeltsin, a strapping gelding, but he fared as badly as his namesake has been faring in Russia. The only cure for it was a glass of Banks at a concession stand, where Bob Marley was now singing “Redemption Song.”
By the time the featured race rolled around, late in the afternoon, there were as many Bajans outside the Garrison as inside it. Taxi drivers, coconut and pineapple vendors, children kicking soccer balls, a few dogs and cats and goats—they were all hugging a fence beside the track, both soaking up and adding to the growing excitement surrounding the big race, which carried a $30,000 purse.
I approached the pari-mutuel windows fully prepared to bet on Holy Smoke, a handsome gray gelding, but Sir Tommy’s tip kept ringing in my ears, and I changed my mind at the last possible instant and put my money on Passionata, a horse that none of the island’s handicappers had listed among their favorites. Passionata, alas, was not nearly passionate enough and faded from view long before the eventual winner, Loan Ranger, was unmasked.
* * *
Edward “Budge” O’Hara, a Londoner by birth, and his wife, Cynthia, have operated a resort on Barbados since 1956, first as managers and currently, in company with their three children, as owners. In many ways their tenure mirrors the story of tourism on the island.
