Voyager

by Russell Banks

  At Praslin, after settling in at La Réserve Hotel, I took the bumpy local bus out to the end of the line at Anse Boudin, walked two miles farther to Anse Lazio, reputedly the best beach on the island, and, after a long swim, had a pleasant lunch at a little beachfront restaurant, the Bonbon Plume. There was more of the wonderful woodwork that I’d seen all over La Digue and in the rural parts of Mahé and that had come to seem the characteristic and most distinctive Seychelles art form.

  That evening I walked out again from my hotel, where a Chinese buffet was being served, for a creole meal instead. A place called Café des Arts was recommended to me by an Italian couple I’d talked to on the boat from La Digue. I passed through a mile and a half, two miles, of tropical dark, with no light from houses, for there was no electricity out there, no streetlights, no passing cars. It was a palpable darkness, like being inside a black tent. I walked down the dirt road through the village and on out, past a seaside house walled against the road, when suddenly I heard the unmistakable sound of a tenor sax. John Coltrane playing “Giant Steps”! For a long while, as long as the tape or record played on the other side, I stood next to the wall and for the first time on this journey felt truly homesick. I’d obtained whatever I’d come out here looking for, and now I wanted to take it home with me, to apply it there.

  The next day would be my last on Praslin, my next to last in Seychelles. I rode the bus over bumpy winding roads to the famed Vallée de Mai, where I got out and began the two- to three-hour walk through the park, following the trail markers and my guidebook.

  The Vallée was truly Edenic—as advertised, as predicted, as reported and chronicled by awed visitors for the last two centuries. I expected to see a brontosaurus munching among the tree-size ferns, to look up and see pterodactyls instead of fox bats soaring overhead. The hundred-foot-tall coco-de-mer was as truly erotic as everyone had said, its nut the largest seed in the world, weighing up to forty pounds and shaped like a Brancusi sculpture of the female torso, anatomically exact, with the male plant owning a huge black penis, the two of them pornographic comic book versions of female and male genitalia. One could only gape.

  I had never seen any place this densely green, with primitive plants blocking out the sun and a wall-of-sound of birdsong. I could understand why General Gordon, hero of Khartoum, having stopped here on the way home from his post in Mauritius, decided that the earlier visitors and theologians were right, this was indeed the original Eden, and rushed on to London with the news.

  Then, once again, great luck! Just as I came to the end of the winding path through the park, I looked up at the umbrella top of a huge cola nut tree and spotted, jerking along a branch in characteristic parrot-walk, as if pulling themselves ahead by their beaks, two small smoke-gray parrots that were nothing special, of course, except for what I knew about them, which intensified them, literally singled them out—for these were two of the last twenty-six black parrots in this garden, on this island, on this planet. In this universe.

  A friendly fellow bird-watcher had come up silently beside me as I stood gaping, and he saw them, too, and smiled. For as long as the black parrots remained in the tree, which was perhaps ten minutes, we stood there watching them. Then, at last, they flew off, and we moved on. My companion asked me to take his camera and snap a picture of him for his sister back home. He was an Anglo-Irishman named Steve Jenkins, a reasonable, friendly, laid-back sort who, as we walked and chatted, turned out to be a petroleum geologist. He added that he was working for a British oil company whose name he would not reveal. He was in Seychelles to attend the government-sponsored Indian Ocean Oil Producers Seminar being held at the Plantation Club on Mahé, and he’d taken a day off to come over to Praslin to visit the legendary Vallée de Mai.

  I politely asked further about the state of oil exploration in the region and learned that Amoco had already drilled three test wells here and that, owing to the peculiar and ancient geology of the region, there was indeed oil in the Seychelles continental shelf, referred to as the Mahé Plateau. These islands, he pointed out, are the mountaintops of a microcontinent, part of what’s called the Mascarene Ridge, a remnant of the continent that existed before Africa and India split apart. The islands lie at least one thousand miles from each continent but have the basic 650-million-year-old Precambrian geology of both, which happens also to be the same as the very best oil-producing regions in the world, he explained.

  Steve Jenkins was a nice, smiling man in his late thirties, with a mustache and a potbelly. A reasonable, modern man. He assured me that the Seychelles government did certainly desire to protect the environment, even as they explored for oil and made plans to develop it. “We won’t make the same mistakes we made in Scotland,” he told me with a broad smile.

  Here, then, was the serpent in the garden. I’d met him. A smiling, well-intentioned European man working for an international oil company that, for security reasons, cannot be named by its employees, especially not to peripatetic Americans with backpacks.

  My last afternoon in Seychelles, I was back on Mahé, in Victoria, and stopped for a sandwich at L’Amiral, which passes reasonably well for a brasserie. I noticed at a nearby table the old bird-watcher I’d seen on the boat going over to La Digue. He had his black umbrella, straw hat, tight gray British army mustache. I stopped at his table and said hello, and he invited me to join him. He had a story to tell, and he needed to tell someone. He was eighty years old, had spent two years during the war in Kenya, and was an artist. “Semiprofessional, retired,” he said precisely. He had reached an age where he could see things now purely for the sake of seeing them, he said. His wife, ten years older than he, had died a few years ago. He’d then become friends, he said, with a Seychelloise in England, a woman in her early fifties who, he added, had been his and his late wife’s housekeeper. He had always wanted to see these islands and the rare and marvelous birds here. He had been hearing about them since his Kenya days. He had offered to pay the woman’s way out and back, if she would act as his traveling companion. It was too daunting a journey for him to make on his own, he pointed out. She had agreed, and they had got here fine and set up in the country, living for a few months in a tiny house with her large family. Then things had started to break down. The woman, her family, all the neighborhood, expected him to pay for everything. With his money running out, he had objected to the arrangement, and his companion and her family had abandoned him, kicked him out. And so here he sat, without enough money for a hotel and unable to change his flight home. He had not seen the paradise flycatcher or the black parrot, he said. He had loved the islands, however, especially Praslin and the Vallée de Mai. “The wonderful skies here!” he said. “You just want to look and look and look, don’t you!”

  Later that afternoon, at the airport, waiting for the slightly delayed flight back to Djibouti, then to Paris and home, I struck up a conversation with a prosperous and intelligent-looking gentleman of late middle age. British, it turned out. He was a prospector for an oil company that, in spite of his gregariousness, his eagerness to announce that serious drilling would be under way in less than two years, he would not name. Oh, yes, there was definitely oil here, he said. Of course, once the oil came in, there was no way the country would survive the way it was now.

  “They never do,” he said.

  We sat in the lounge, waiting to leave paradise. He talked about eating bats in Borneo, the rigors of prospecting for oil in Venezuela, the intricacies of Middle Eastern politics.

  I listened but didn’t hear much. My thoughts were still with the elderly British bird-watcher who had been hoodwinked and abandoned by his Seychelloise lady friend. His stepdaughter was wiring him enough to pay for his flight home, he said. She was rather vexed with him, he added.

  “At least you’ll soon be home,” I said.

  “Yes, but it’s Sunday in England,” he pointed out, “and the banks will be closed until Monday, by which time it will be late Monday evening here, long after banking hour
s.” He would not be able to access the money for at least two more days.

  He didn’t ask me for help, not directly, but I offered him a hundred dollars anyhow, enough to pay for a few nights in a cheap hotel, which he declined. When I assured him that it was a loan, he relented. We exchanged addresses, and he promised to repay me as soon as he returned to England.

  I never heard from the old fellow, of course. Months later, I calculated the time difference between London and Seychelles and realized that it was a mere four hours and Seychelles was ahead of London, not behind. Our meeting in Victoria had taken place at midafternoon on a Monday, when the banks in London had been open for business for at least two hours already, and the Barclays in Victoria wouldn’t close for another two. The stepdaughter must not have existed. The Seychelloise housekeeper turned girlfriend probably didn’t exist, either. Nothing was as it seemed. No one was who he seemed. Not even I.

  INNOCENTS ABROAD

  A dark and cold and old north European city like Edinburgh as a site for high connubial romance? As a place for chasing the erotic sublime? Not likely. As Boswell’s Samuel Johnson said of Edinburgh Castle, the city’s most famous sight, “It would make a good prison in London.” Even Calvin preferred Geneva, and most of the Stuarts opted for France.

  Well, yes, true enough. And, yes, when Chase and I were younger and more innocent (I should say, differently innocent), it never would have occurred to us to elope to this place. But now, entering middle age—with our imagery for romance somewhat less restricted than back when tropical sunsets and moonlit beaches or even Paris in the springtime when it drizzles were still capable of signifying blissful escape from the quotidian—now, we decided, Edinburgh might be just right. In middle age, after all, there are more complex, perhaps less clichéd, shades of meaning and desire connected to romance, and the imagery of love tends to shift in a corresponding way. It happens: one grows older, and different images and atmospheres and cities turn one on. One can only be grateful.

  So why not elope to Edinburgh? we thought. Why not slip away from friends and family, job, phone, don’t tell anyone what we’re up to, just go—two consenting, unmarried, middle-aged adults eager to marry—and let the force of our affection for each other and the rich complexities of our romantically aroused sensibilities color this stony old city with the rosy innocent light of late love. Why not indeed? Besides, Chase’s parents, after long, sometimes acrimonious negotiations, were in the middle of divorcing, and my four daughters from my first two marriages were not eager to be present at the commencement of their father’s fourth. They weren’t so much against the idea as reluctant to witness and implicitly endorse the ceremony personally. Eloping seemed the kindest thing we could do for everyone.

  So that when, on our arrival at the airport, the sun was shining brightly in a soft blue sky straight out of Constable, we took it as our due, as merely natural and appropriate, rather than the near miracle that our taxi driver called it. There was even a rainbow in the northeast sweeping across the pewter-colored Firth of Forth to the steepled town of Kirkcaldy. And when, a few moments later, halfway into the city from the airport, the clouds pulled in from the North Sea and filled the sky with gray crumpled sheets against the treeless heights of Arthur’s Seat, and a fine cold mist started to fall, we were not disappointed. We were entranced.

  As we entered Edinburgh, the rain silvered the city, hardening the edges and soldering its seams and planes, giving to the cobbled streets and stone buildings the cool clarity of a high-resolution black-and-white photograph. This was midsummer northern light, dropping from the sky in planes as straight as the rain. Before leaving home, I had checked the atlas and learned that Edinburgh was located at fifty-six degrees north latitude, which put it on a line with Moscow, northern Saskatchewan, and Labrador. It was north of the Sakhalin Peninsula, north of most of the Aleutian Islands. Summertime daylight here fell like a hard-loving stare that wants everything revealed.

  Historically, the city first appeared shrouded in Celtic mist, a place called Dineiden, “fortress of the hill slope,” in a sixth-century poem. This I knew because Chase is a poet and had read the poem to me. In the seventh century, the Angles marched up from Northumberland and conquered the region and replaced the Celtic prefix din with the Old English suffix burgh. Then as now, the center of Edinburgh was Castle Rock, which we could see even from the outskirts—the high black escarpment where Edinburgh Castle is situated and where Malcolm III (1058–93) built his royal hunting lodge and, at the request of his sainted wife, Margaret, constructed the simple chapel that stands today, open to the public, the oldest building in the city. In 1128, David I, pious son of Malcolm and Margaret, established the Abbey of Holyrood along the sloping ridge a short ways east. The mile-long road connecting the two sites soon became the famous Royal Mile, the central spine of the city for the next six hundred years. You can stroll it today, the guidebooks assured us. We had every intention of doing so. We were here for a full five days.

  Our hotel was the Howard on Great King Street, recommended by the woman who was about to become my mother-in-law, whose taste for simplicity and bourgeois comfort exceeded ours. There were plenty of large, stately, first-class hotels in Edinburgh—the Caledonian, the Carlton Highland, the George—but the intimate, European-style Howard seemed more appropriate, more . . . romantic. It was small—twenty-five bright, high-ceilinged rooms furnished on the frumpy side (heavy on the pink-fringed lampshades), but comfortable and attractive, with marble mantels and elaborately carved woodwork. There was a lounge where you’d expect to find Miss Marple taking tea and a dark, masculine cocktail bar and a twelve-table restaurant where no one spoke above a whisper. Unpretentious, homey, with a warm and helpful staff, the Howard seemed to attract mostly British and Canadian guests along with a few American regulars.

  The hotel was located in a pair of renovated Georgian town houses in the middle of the district called New Town—which of course is not “new” at all, at least not to a North American. In 1767, after a public competition won by the twenty-three-year-old architect James Craig, the district was laid out in true Enlightenment fashion—broad, cobbled, tree-lined boulevards in grids and elegantly symmetrical parks and row after row of tall, cut-stone town houses with bay windows and bow fronts and domed stairwells and enclosed gardens in back.

  This was when the city was the “Athens of the North,” the time of The Edinburgh Review and Blackwood’s and David Hume and Adam Smith and Boswell and his eminent guest Dr. Johnson and Burns, Hogg, and Sir Walter Scott, and when we had unpacked and were headed out in search of an early dinner (early by New York time, late by Edinburgh: we were jet-lagging), we half expected to pass one of these gentlemen on the stairs or outside on the sidewalk. It rarely happens that a city you’ve envisioned wholly through literature matches your image of it. Balzac’s Paris, even Hemingway’s, is long gone, and so is most of Dickens’s London. But there was so much of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century Edinburgh remaining in its architecture and parks and streets that I could almost ignore the purple-haired punks and the Japanese cars and German trucks and the chic boutiques with branches in Beverly Hills and Tokyo. As a novelist and university teacher, I’m supposed to be especially susceptible to literary versions of a city. And I am. I had prepared for my elopement by rereading Boswell’s account of his Scottish tour with Dr. Johnson, James Hogg’s Private Memoirs and Confessions of a Justified Sinner, Daniel Defoe’s Tour thro’ the Whole Island of Britain, Vol. III, and Robert Louis Stevenson’s Edinburgh, Picturesque Notes. That first evening I walked the streets of Edinburgh’s New Town the way Elvis fans walk the streets of Memphis.

  Actually, we walked everywhere in Edinburgh—no rental car necessary, no hired driver, not even taxis or buses, although taxis did not seem particularly expensive and the bus service was excellent and easy to use. No one place seemed more than an hour’s stroll from any other, and if one designed a set of daily tours for oneself, as we did, one could see the entire city in
four or five days. And really see it, not cruise it. We got to talk to people and not just pass them by. One could study the buildings and browse in shops and have a decent lunch and afterward sit on a park bench and watch the children play and old men read.

  Our first morning over breakfast at the Howard and every morning afterward, we spread out our street maps and plotted a walk. We had already checked in at the Register’s Office, conveniently located only four blocks from the hotel, to make sure that our documents had arrived safely from the U.S. (marriage notice forms, our birth certificates, my divorce decrees), assuring ourselves that there would be no last-minute surprises, and now we had a few days to wait for our witnesses—old friends from the States, the poet Mark Jarman and his wife, Amy Kane Jarman, and their two children, Zoë and Claire, aged six and nine, who had volunteered to be our flower girls. They were driving up from Leeds, where Mark was a visiting professor on leave from Vanderbilt.

  The truth is, getting married in Scotland is not much more difficult than arranging an elaborate dinner party in Manhattan, but to us it seemed like setting up the SALT talks. We checked and rechecked every detail, made lists, briefed and debriefed each other constantly. We were nervous and grateful that the natives spoke fluent English and seemed to have an efficiently run bureaucracy.

  For generations, English teenagers have run north to get married in Gretna Green, just over the border, where no parental consent or residency was required. It’s just as easy if you’re American and no longer a teenager. One writes to the General Register Office for Scotland, New Register House, Edinburgh EH1 3YT, and requests two marriage notice forms (one for each party), a fees list, and the leaflet explaining the legal preliminaries to marriage in Scotland. One mails to the district office where the marriage is to take place the completed marriage notice forms and fees and several documents—birth certificates and, if one has been previously married, a certificate of divorce or annulment, or if one is a widow or widower, the death certificate of one’s former spouse. These have to be in the registrar’s hands four weeks before the marriage is scheduled to take place (six weeks, if one or both parties have been married before). For a civil service, one makes arrangements with the registrar; for a religious ceremony, one arranges it with the clergyman before completing the notice of marriage. One needs two witnesses over the age of sixteen, whether it’s a religious or civil ceremony. The registrar prefers to meet with the parties two or three days before the marriage to discuss, among other things, the question of the two witnesses and to return your documents. And that’s how one gets married in Scotland. Simple.