Long ago I had heard that Gabriel went to Jamaica looking for work, then shipped out on a freighter headed north. Had the northern ports bedeviled him, turned him into something as rare as murder on Providence—a racist? Had he ever raced home to marry his sweetheart? And what of Mundo? The Canadian novelist Robertson Davies once wrote that a man, in his youth, has several fathers, and his biological one isn’t necessarily the most significant. I had three: the one who fathered my physical self; a professor in Missouri who fathered my passion to be a writer; and Mundo, the third and most adroit, a poor black fisherman, the father of my spiritual point of view, who taught me how to persevere past hardship and never to be afraid of life. Mundo, I was convinced, was dead.
It didn’t really eat at me, the life I never chose, and to say I missed Providence would not be entirely true, though Providence is the only place I’ve ever lived where I envisioned myself not leaving. But years ago my island fever metamorphosed directly into an obsession for writing and swept me off into another life. I had never been homesick for Providence, though I often felt as if I had been born there, but I was aware of it always, embedded there in my existence, like a phantom limb. I was never homesick for Providence but, more to the point, I was utterly bewitched by it. I was haunted, though in a kindly way.
My past on Providence wasn’t ice but fire, burning with indelible images that kept reappearing in my fiction writing; the last thing I wanted to do was mess with the mojo, or spoil a dream year’s delicate aftertaste by indulging in the overrich confections of nostalgia or, likewise, the thin broth of pity and regret and disillusionment.
I finished my lunch but not my despondent mood. I ambled back across the road to the airport and asked a taxi driver whatever happened to Cessnyca.
“It dropped,” he said, an answer that required no further elaboration.
As I sat in the departure lounge watching the weather deteriorate, I kidded myself into believing I’d been through too much over the years to feel trepidation about the flight. Even buckled in, finally, on the sweltering, claustrophobic nineteen-seater I was more or less fine, a little jittery maybe, but the jolt of takeoff reawakened the religious conviction of the woman across from me and, damn it, it makes my skin crawl when people stutter their prayers out loud on small airplanes. With horrific noise, rain blasted against the cockpit windows; a downdraft slapped us into a steep bank. I closed my eyes—here was the old dread, an overwhelming sense of déjà vu—and when I opened them again we had busted through the squall; below us spread the inside reef like a celestial swimming pool, and in front of us humped the musky, verdant mountains of the island that had gotten deep inside me, so deep it seemed to have rearranged my DNA. I had flown back not into time but into some other stage of my imagination, my serendipitous literary collaboration with place, back into the genesis of my own symbols, themes, and fictions.
I jumped into a taxi; the road—the only road—had, like the landing strip, been paved some time ago, and already it begged repair. Larry, the amiable driver, smiled when I told him I wanted to get a room in Town. Alvaro’s residencia had a new life as a general store; the Hotel Aury now housed the bank and some municipality offices. Now the hotels were all in Freshwater Bay (Aguadulce in Spanish) and having to rely on them underscored my unfamiliar status as a tourist.
Driving through Rocky Point, through Mountain, and down into Town, I was cheered to find that, at least on the surface, Old Providence had not been inspired or coerced to re-create itself for a profit. We gossiped, Larry and I.
“There was a fisherman in Old Town, Raimundo Lung . . . ” I said, tentative, providing a lead.
“Yes, yes, Raimundo. He was our most famous diver on Providence. Guys would come from all around—Cartagena, the Caymans, the States—to dive against him. But they never beat him, you know. He was our best man with a speargun. Now nobody dive in Providence these days except with tank.”
Finally I had to ask: Was he still alive?
“Livin’ right there in Old Town still,” Larry told me. Suddenly I was euphoric with relief, and coming back made sense. But then, just as suddenly, our conversation had a trapdoor in it, which sprang open underneath me. I asked about Marta and her sister, Clara. What had become of them?
“Them still here,” Larry said. This was unexpected—wonderful—good news.
“No,” a passenger we had picked up along the road corrected him. “One of them is dead.”
On December 1, 1979, Marta and eight other passengers boarded the flight to San Andrés and took off into what turned out to be catastrophic weather. That was the last anybody saw of them and no trace of the wreckage had ever been found.
I was numb with sorrow when Larry pulled over in front of Mundo’s house. What I had attained, exactly, by my return to Providence was an invitation to an emotional slam dance. Through the greenery, I could see down the path where Mundo stood, leaning over a worktable. Age had sucked at his muscles and carved into his face; his hair was graying, but then so was mine. When he realized it was me we embraced, tears in our eyes and now I was back among the living.
“Mistah Bob,” said Mundo tenderly, “I thought you were dead. I am a grown man, but when I received your last letter, and then no more came, I lay in bed at night and cried, telling myself them rough fellas in St. Vincent killed you, and you was dead.”
We held each other’s hand like lovers, reluctant to let go.
“But Bob,” Mundo continued, “just last week I was fishenin’ with Armando, and I tell him, Somehow I feel Mistah Bob is alive.”
Anyplace else, coming from anybody else, Mundo’s declaration would have struck me as mannerism, the exaggerated rhetoric of a good friend, but Providence had a way of forcing the supernatural down your cognitive throat, and twenty years ago, Mundo had startled me with his clairvoyance, again and again, until years later, a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I was compelled to write about his eerie talents, fictionalizing the truth of events I was unable to comprehend, and although I had crafted an alter ego for myself, it seemed unnecessary and even somehow wrong to give Mundo any other name—or reality—but his own. In life, he had always been larger than life.
The same goes for duppy-haunted Providence, rubbing itself so intimately against the cosmic shanks of nature. The island had always played Twilight Zone tricks on me, suggesting, among other mysteries, that there were moments of inexplicable mysticism in the human act of expression, especially the act of writing, moments that would reach out to tear a souvenir off the coattails of the future. Where does an imagination come from, I found myself asking on Providence, but the island always answered back with a riddle—Where does reality come from?—and a biblical reproach—In the beginning was the word. It’s the language, dummy. There was no other link between real events and the imagination but language and nature and the imagery that hovered between the two.
Our reunion drained me. I was both exhausted and exhilarated, heartbroken remembering Marta and, remembering her, chilled by the fact that an image of her death—a woman sinking to the bottom of the ocean—had been with me—I could date it in my notebooks, since 1979, the year she vanished into the deep.
I needed a room, a shower, stiff drinks, food, and a bed. I promised Mundo I would return tomorrow and we’d go fishing Monday. Not Monday, he said. We’d be hungover Monday. For a few minutes more, we said what needed to be said between us. Then, as I was poised to reenter life under the microscope in the nineteenth-century village that was still Old Providence, Mundo paved the way for me.
“Mistah Bob,” he said, his tone a mild warning. “When you left everybody said you took the gold. But I told them no, I knew you well, you were not that type of man, that was not you.”
The Monday after Sunday’s fete at Mundo’s, I couldn’t determine if I was actually hungover from aguardiente or if my beaten-up feeling could be written off as emotional decompression. My former self ch
astised me for renting a moto in Freshwater Bay to tour the island, opting for convenience and speed over the old-fashioned rewards of putting one foot in front of the other, because even though the number of cars and pickup trucks had doubled to about sixty since I was last there, as had the population—about 4,500—the underlying pace of the island was still dictated by the start-and-stop stroll of pedestrians.
Whom I didn’t overly blame for not stepping out of my way as I puttered past like a mechanical mosquito. Before I could click into third gear, I had left behind Aguadulce, Providence’s only bona fide tourist zone. In my day I would ride my horse, Reeva, here from Old Town, or walk the distance with Marta—an hour-and-a-half Spanish lesson, one way—to sit on an empty beach in a prolifically empty landscape. Marta and I loved our sense of sole ownership, making out in the sand. By the end of my year on Providence, a mainland panya visionary had constructed three rustic cabanas under the shade trees behind the beach, easy to scoff at since the one-room clapboard shacks sat unrented, unwanted. Providencia wasn’t for tourists, it was for travelers, traffickers, drifters, exiles, runaways. Sail in, sail out.
Now the paradisiacal beach had eroded to a narrow crescent, and Freshwater Bay supported a thriving but inoffensive village of restaurants, open-air bars, and lodging. No grand projects, cash only—even your traveler’s checks were no good. Providence simply lacked the infrastructure and accessibility for corporate greed to take root. In this insular nook of the world, greed was still the prerogative of individuals mostly lacking deep pockets, the damage they caused less visible: a few kids knocked into outer space by drugs, several luxurious hideaways for nameless kingpins, ruinous land speculation.
“It [the island] will be totally private ten years from now,” one of Providence’s new entrepreneurs told me. “A few of the large landholders will get rich, but everybody else will be fucked. They’ll have to move up into the mountains, or to San Andrés. Their children’s children will never be able to afford to live here.” What he described I accepted with fatalism for I had witnessed it happen again and again, a centuries-long heritage and way of life suffocated overnight, assigned to the archives. Make way for the twenty-first century, where the gold is electronic and all acts of piracy in the global village are cultural.
Over a hill that plunged precipitously into blue-green waters, I motored onward to Southwest Bay, once the island’s most magnificent beach, yet despite considerable erosion it remained wide enough to accommodate Providence’s most colorful spectacle—the Saturday morning horse races. I’d come to find the Brittons—Van, his father Burgo, his sister Indiana. Mutual friends in Miami had asked that I take them a gift, a modest amount of money, a fresh reminder of caring, old bonds renewed. But Burgo, I soon learned, had fallen out of a sea grape tree and broken his back; Indiana, two years younger than I was, had a heart attack—they were both dead. I followed directions to a trailhead into the bush, parked, and hiked through the scrub to scout Van’s weird, serene—as if it were intentionally vacant—tourist compound and give him the money.
Hey, remember me? Yeah, you took the gold.
Back on the motorbike, I traversed the hilly southern tip of the island, dismayed by the sight of well-armed marine guards posted at all four compass points on the sun-scorched mountainside. The Colombian Navy found itself high and dry here in a garrison ostensibly built to show the flag to those bellicose Nicaraguans, who for some unfathomable reason were nursing a Falkland Islands territorial fantasy about Old Providence. That would be an interesting turn of events for a population who has no communal memory of institutionalized colonialism or slavery, only of being ignored and forgotten, thanks very much. Most islanders wouldn’t readily admit even to being Colombian. What are you then, I’d ask. We is gyad-dyamn Englishmen, Mistah Bob.
Down where the eastward slope flattened on the outskirts of Bottom House, I stopped to ponder an unpaved turnoff I’d never seen before. Had someone bulldozed a road up over the densely jungled hill to Manchineel Bay, once only reachable by boat or by a perilous horseback ride along the cliffs? The Manchineel Bays of paradise were reserved for lovemaking, one of those spots you would never bother to go to without a date, one of those places where you unabashedly worshipped sensuality, enslaved yourself to it, where you ended up contemplating, if you were male and so inclined, the metaphor that if islands were women, tropical islands were women who riveted you with lust, and how many islands would it take to soothe the itch, you licentious dog? How many islands before you came to your senses, settled down, and married Ohio?
I couldn’t imagine that a road, however rocky and washed-out, would enhance Manchineel Bay’s reputation for intimate liaisons. Better go see, I thought, and what I thought was true—cookshacks, snack bars, thatched ramadas shading picnic tables, a covey of sunbathing tourists, some Bottom House locals playing dominoes. I bought a bottle of beer and sat down, feeling irrational, feeling jilted. Things weren’t so bad at all. The beach was still spectacular, peaceful, its atmosphere like an erotic daze. So what if Manchineel had lost her virginity? That didn’t make her a whore, at least not yet and maybe never, even if the municipality went ahead, as promised, and paved the road.
Still in love with her, I began to brood, took a walk and a swim to sort out my thoughts, ease the ever-increasing pressure on my heart. Rather than disoriented, I felt surreally connected, more, perhaps, than I wanted or deserved. Come back to Providence and all of a sudden you’re loaded up with dead people. My own personal ghost fleet of souls, and the manifest was growing daily. The worst of it was, and not without its tragic beauty, I had become a medium between the two worlds, the one here and the one not-here, not just an emissary from the past but from the afterlife, toting around the images that survived beyond death. There they were, the bulge in my day pack. My books, of course, and two carousels of slides, previously thumbed by a curious National Geographic editor twenty years ago and then returned with apologies.
In this poor place condemned to poverty and isolation, no one had pictures of their dead, no one could recall the faces of their lost children, fathers, sisters. Last night at Mundo’s we had tacked a bedsheet to the wall, turned off the lights, and I began the show. Neighbors crowded in the doorway. I was prepared for the bittersweet taste of peeling back time, but I hadn’t counted on opening so many graves.
Now everywhere I went, sad-eyed but hopeful islanders were flagging me down on the road. Like Miss Daci in Old Town, who waved me over because she had lost three of her four young sons with Mundo’s daughters on the Betty B. Someone at Mundo’s had recognized the eldest, an iconic shot of a fourteen-year-old boy standing up to his chest in slate-green water, fishing with a hand line. Her surviving son, Roy, now the cashier at the bank, had only been a few years old when his brothers drowned. He had no memory of them, and Miss Daci herself couldn’t quite reassemble their faces in her mind, it had all happened so long ago. So it was I began making house calls, delivering back the disappeared to their families and loved ones, and two nights later I set up shop in the town square, running an extension cord out of the bank, which had agreed to remain open for this purpose and, as twilight fell, I projected my mixed bag of phantoms and former selves across the wall of the erstwhile Hotel Aury. Duppyshow, I would overhear someone in the enthralled crowd say, matter-of-factly.
There’s Oscar Bryan, my uncle, said the bank manager.
Three schoolgirls sitting splay-legged on the ground: My God, mahn, the one in the middle is my wife!
Ah, look, poor Winston. He get crushed by a truck.
Lookout House—it burn down, you know. Yes, I know, and Linda’s dead now seven years, her ashes scattered off the Turks and Caicos.
Margarita and Virginia, angels, no? Raimundo and Miss Pearlie’s girls.
Marta. Hello, Marta. Good-bye.
I turned around to see who had identified her so quickly. It was the island’s agent for SAM airlines. “Bob,” he said, ext
ending his hand, “you don’t know but I am Roberto, Marta’s youngest brother.” He was four years old when I left, had inherited my surfboard, which still hung on his bedroom wall. His older brother and sister had moved to Miami; Roberto had stayed behind to look after his mother, who had not come out of the house since the day Marta had died. No, Roberto told me in answer to my questions, Marta had never married; according to Clara, after me she never had another boyfriend either and, as for Clara herself, she hadn’t become the aviator she had once dreamed of being, a sixteen-year-old girl sitting in the moonlight on my veranda, staring at the sea, but she had read about my books in the Miami Herald and knew about my life. It meant a lot to Clara, Roberto said, that things had worked out for me.
There was just so much of this I could take. My stoicism collapsed into melancholy and I began giving away the slides, shedding my collection of spirits like a retiring schoolmistress dismissing class, sending everybody home for the last time. I escaped to the boat bar tied up to the wharf—Glasford’s boat, Ibsen’s brother—where I could sink into a pair of island traditions equally eternal as its ghosts: listening to country and western music, the more sentimental the better, and firing back a bottle of Medellin rum. Bullshit optional, but just as time-honored.
Kingdoms in the Air Page 32
