The Night of the Rambler

by Montague Kobbé

  D.C. van Ruijtenbeek departed the marshlands that day with a lot less grace than he expected. But he did so with Elaine Nesbit’s postal address (not that he needed it) and her permission to write to her every now and then, exclusively in relation to the quality of his products, of course. If you like milk so much, you should come and visit my farm one day. Her refusal was firm, but the smile she let out together with it lit up D.C.’s world and made him think it had all been worth his while.

  He wrote to her every week for the following three years, without fail. As was to be expected, the content of his letters quickly transgressed the limits of what they had agreed initially, but she was flattered by his gallantry, and comforted by the harmless format of his courtship, and he was encouraged by the fact that she did not mention his transgressions, and indeed, sometimes she even fed them with a loose comment here, a careless one there that merited an answer. Until the time came when their correspondence made no mention whatsoever of milk or dairy products, becoming instead an affable conversation between two mutual admirers.

  Then, one Sunday, D.C. van Ruijtenbeek showed up at church unexpectedly. He had been away in Tintamarre for a few months and nobody anticipated him back for some time. Only Elaine Nesbit knew what had brought him back to Sint Maarten so soon, and the truth was that by this point he had been so successful in his task of romancing her that she, too, felt anxiety overtake her bosom when she saw him. For the first time he acknowledged her presence in public. For the first time she was not certain of how to handle him. They walked along the promenade, between Front Street and the beach, beneath the scrutinizing eyes of the curious and the vile. Sitting by the beach, looking out over the sea, D.C. van Ruijtenbeek asked her to join him in Tintamarre. Suddenly, the fiery yearning Elaine Nesbit felt to allow him into her life turned into a shivering emptiness. She couldn’t explain why, but she just felt revulsion inside her. It was the second time she had rejected him, And I don’t often ask anything three times. Instincts overtook her and, without thinking, I will not be no pawn in you kingdom, Mr. van Ruijtenbeek, or you queen.

  The following day D.C. van Ruijtenbeek had Lover’s Leap cleaned up and prepared for a great occasion. Throughout the morning and well into the afternoon women cleaned windows, dusted tables, brushed floors, hung carpets, patted cushions, made beds, cleaned china, polished silver, unstained crystal glasses, and conditioned rooms for no apparent reason. Then, toward the end of the afternoon, D.C. had Elaine picked up in a horse-drawn carriage. He believed his efforts had seduced her into accepting his offer. The truth was, she had never thought of denying him the pleasure of her intimacy. Even the day before, after she had showed herself so adamant in her resolution not to leave Sint Maarten, she would gladly have accepted the invitation to Lover’s Leap that D.C. van Ruijtenbeek had felt was not appropriate—nor had he had the courage—to make. Naked, in bed, exhausted by their shared exploits, in the shadows of an early sunrise, he promised her he would finish every letter he’d ever write to her in the future with an exhortation to come join him in Tintamarre. She pretended to be asleep.

  Three years later, Elaine Nesbit still lived in her small, modest house by the marshlands, toward the Great Salt Pond in Philipsburg, while D.C. van Ruijtenbeek remained the only member of the aristocracy of the Kingdom of Tintamarre. On one night of peculiar discomfort, D.C. jumped on his sailboat and cut across the two-mile channel onto the bay at French Cul-de-Sac. He had been drinking copiously at his farm, perhaps to forget the extent of his solitude, and he had taken a demijohn of rum along with him for the evening. Once at Lover’s Leap, he procured himself a horse, and made his way from Dutch Cul-de-Sac to Philipsburg. That he did not hurt himself on the way was a sign that fate still had a role for him to play. He reached Elaine Nisbet’s house right at the stroke of midnight, amidst the darkest dark of night. Elaine could hear him coming long before he reached the steps that led him to her untidy veranda. When he saw her on the threshold of her doorway, barely covered in the thin nightgown she used more to protect herself from the mosquitoes than from anyone’s sight, he felt an intense anger grow inside his chest. He garnered the last bit of sobriety he could find in his consciousness and breathed in with intent, meaning to strike Elaine with a thunderous roar that could, perhaps, express the extent of his frustration. She stopped him in the middle of his gesture, grabbing the collar of his shirt with both hands and shoving him inside her house with more violence than he could have mustered.

  She ravaged him repeatedly that night while he, caught between nightmares, thought he merely dreamt of her. The following morning, hungover and disoriented, D.C. van Ruijtenbeek understood there was nothing he could do to break this woman’s will. What do you want me to do? he asked himself, more than her.

  I wasn’ born to be no queen. The silence that ensued might have lasted a few centuries.

  Fine—you win. But tonight you’ll leave this house for the last time: from now on we’ll live together in Lover’s Leap.

  Elaine Nesbit and Degendarus Clement van Ruijtenbeek lived in his estate for over twenty years. They ran a farm that prided itself on producing the best milk, butter, and cheese this side of France. The sea island cotton business was liquidated and Tintamarre sold to a merchant from the French side of St. Martin. Consequently, the need for labor was dramatically reduced and a substantial amount of jobs had to be cut. Nevertheless, Lover’s Leap remained a steady source of income for a considerable amount of Anguillians and S’matiners during the years when, in the northeastern Caribbean, there was simply no work to be found. At any one point the farm was likely to have as many as twenty workers, and even in the direst of times there were at least twelve to fourteen people—mainly women—employed there.

  One of them was a young Anguillian who had arrived to the farm as a twelve-year-old boy in 1938, having secretly escaped his home in order to look for means to help his mother maintain a family of thirteen children and no fathers. D.C. van Ruijtenbeek hardly needed another burden to his payroll at a time when the Great Depression was striking the Caribbean at its hardest: 1938 saw the wave of social unrest that swept through the British West Indies from the beginning of 1935 reach its peak with the Jamaican labor strikes, spearheaded by the cane-cutters who refused to continue to work for less than one dollar per day. Not that this had any relevance in Anguilla—just like the prior rebellion of the oil workers in Trinidad had had no relevance, or that of the workers in Barbados, of the coal loaders in St. Lucia, or the working class in St. Vincent; in fact, even the 1935 riots led by the cane-cutters of St. Kitts, nominally part of the same administrative entity as Nevis and Anguilla, had had little repercussion in the latter, because the realities of the two islands were so disparate that they could have been in opposite corners of the world. So, while Robert Bradshaw and the rest of the Workers’ League in St. Kitts strived to secure more humane conditions for the working class in their homeland, people in Anguilla emigrated to St. Thomas, to Santo Domingo, to St. Martin, desperately seeking the minor privilege of belonging to any working class at all.

  As luck would have it, D.C. van Ruijtenbeek’s workforce happened to be short a man—by illness or drunkenness—on the very May Day when the young Anguillian knocked on his door. Can you milk a cow? The young Anguillian would have claimed to have direct communication with God if that would have earned him a job. You can stay for the day—that’ll give you enough money to pay your way back home tomorrow morning. Eighteen years later, the young Anguillian had gone through every possible position on the farm, learning every aspect of the trade and excelling, above all, at milking cows and delivering fresh milk to customers all around the island.

  Then, one mysterious day in November 1956, D.C. van Ruijtenbeek came back from the farm feeling particularly tired. He told Elaine Nesbit he would skip dinner and go straight to sleep. The following day his tiredness was accentuated and his mood gloomy. He never got out of bed again, as his condition deteriorated rapidly. The doctors could find nothing wrong
with his body but he insisted he felt tired and weak. He was diagnosed with acute depression and advised to leave the island for a change of atmosphere. Upon the slightest suggestion that she might be the cause of his illness, Elaine Nesbit discharged the family doctor, never to speak to him again. She sat by the side of D.C. van Ruijtenbeek’s bed, holding his right hand day and night. He died later that same week, on November 29, 1956, roughly at the time when a group of eighty-two young enthusiasts aboard the sixty-foot cruiser Granma realized that rough seas and navigational blunders had made them lose their course on their journey from Mexico to the southern coast of Niquero in Cuba, where they intended to topple the puppet government of Rubén “Fulgencio” Batista.

  Elaine Nesbit was determined to continue the legacy of her husband in all but legal terms for over twenty-five years. She chose the two longest-standing workers of the farm as her right and left hands in the day-to-day running of commercial affairs. But fate was reluctant to have Lover’s Leap outlive its extravagant master for too long, and Elaine missed her Degendarus more deeply, more profusely, than she ever thought she could miss anything, and although she was considerably younger than him, every year she spent without him felt like a decade to her spirit and her body. So, finally, on New Year’s Day 1959, Elaine Nesbit said her prayers before going to sleep for the final time, and even as Rubén “Fulgencio” Batista was fleeing from La Habana to Ciudad Trujillo in the Dominican Republic, granting full control of his country to the revolutionary forces that included the surviving core of the naive fighters who twenty-six months earlier had landed on the southwestern shores of Cuba, she met the love of her life after a wait that felt longer than the twenty-five years they had spent together.

  As a reward for their devotion, for their professionalism, for their loyalty, she left her entire estate to her left and right hands. One of them was, of course, the Anguillian milk boy who had first arrived in 1938. His name was Alwyn Cooke, and in 1959 fortune once again turned his way, this time in the shape of a piece of land worth over one million dollars.

  CHAPTER II

  RUDE THOMPSON AND THE ARUBAN CONNECTION

  Whatever way you look at it, de whole t’ing twisted. Dey go say everyt’in’ change when we go vote, now we vote second time and still all de same. The men sat around a precarious table late one night toward the end of December 1957. The general elections for the islands of St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla had taken place six weeks earlier, resulting in an overwhelming victory for the representatives of the Labour Party of St. Kitts, including Robert Bradshaw and Paul Southwell, despite an increase in the popularity of independent candidates on the islands of Nevis and Anguilla. But the constitution of the islands stipulated a ten-member parliament, or legislature, and seven of its ten seats were appointed to the electorate of St. Kitts, and Robert Bradshaw had spent the past twenty years of his political career galvanizing his position as organizer of the masses, benefactor of the poor, activist for the cane-cutter, and altogether indisputable leader of his people. So, when the Anguillian men sitting around a wonky table made of dry old wood said de same, this might well have been another way of saying screwed up, because a lot had changed throughout the British Caribbean between the day in 1952 when adult suffrage had been introduced in St. Kitts-Nevis-Anguilla and the afternoon of November 6, 1957, when new elections took place to shape the political landscape of the three-island presidency, in the wake of the formation of one integrated Federation of the West Indies.

  Indeed, for some, these had been years defined by the sweeping changes that shook the legal ground of the colonies, whereby the ancient administrative conglomerates—the Federal Colony of the Leeward Islands and the Colony of the Windward Islands—had been dismantled and integrated into one comprehensive state that was ostensibly being lined up by the British government to achieve full independence in the near future. For some, I say, because for others, parliamentary acts of dissolution and association meant nothing, or close to nothing, as their pragmatic minds focused only on the palpable consequences of this shuffling and reshuffling of power which politicians in a faraway country seemed so fond of enacting.

  It was to them, to the pragmatic ones, that, despite the reams and reams of official paperwork involved in the political reorganizations, things seemed frustratingly unchanged. Unchanged not only in that Anguilla remained quite a desolate place, completely isolated from the rest of the world—there were no telephones, no telegraph, no radio station, not even a pier, and just a barely functional dust airstrip. Unchanged not so much in that Anguilla remained hopelessly poor, incapable of feeding its own people—jobs an unthinkable commodity in a land where no commodities existed: no electricity, no running water, no paved roads, nothing. Unchanged, and quite tellingly so, in that there was no hope ahead—damn, not even a trace of accountability—despite the fact that the popular vote had shifted dramatically in the opposite direction, lifting its support from the Labour Party’s administration and backing overwhelmingly an independent candidate. And yet, all Anguilla could expect in the years to come were new tirades of insults from the likes of Robert Bradshaw, who would vent his anger at the people of Nevis following their sovereign decision to vote against him with a threat that he would spike their soup with pepper and their rice with bones, and who would react much in the same fashion after discovering the fate his party had suffered at the hand of the Anguillian voters, vowing to turn the place into a desert. Which suggests his knowledge of the island and its situation was probably sparse.

  But that wasn’t even the worst part—the worst part was that nobody hear wha’ Anguilla say, becausin’ Anguilla part of St. Kitts, an’ to de world dem one an’ de same t’ing. When Anguilla spoke, Anguilla spoke to St. Kitts, which is to say it spoke to deaf ears. Dat why we mus’ aks England for direct administration, man, insisted Rude Thompson, who sat around the rickety table, made of a combination of driftwood, excess building material, and an old collapsed table.

  Rude Thompson was a man of action. He was a man to whom words meant nothing unless they were backed by real facts. That is why, as soon as he returned to Anguilla, Rude Thompson went from home to home, from bar to bar, from shop to shop, raising a question that, he now knew, was also troubling the rest of the population. Is a double-colony we livin’ in—but why mus’ dis be so? And Rude’s fist slammed against the domino table, disrupting the game; against the shop counter, making the cans jump; against the dining table, startling the children outside. Rude Thompson was no politician—his manner was brusque, his words ill-chosen—but this was not so much a debate as a sing-along, because if there was one thing on which Anguillians agreed, and there weren’t many, it was that the island’s relation to St. Kitts had brought more harm than good. But agreeing in conversation was not enough—what Rude Thompson demanded was action.

  He had not taken part in the elections of November 6, 1957 because he had been away, like so many Anguillian men, earning his living abroad and sending money home on a monthly basis through the only means of communication with the outside world there was on the island: the postal service. Faced with the millenary challenge of survival which all of his ancestors had encountered before him, Rude Thompson had chosen to sidestep the option of subsistence farming and fishing, setting his sight instead on achieving a higher level of respectability—of comfort, even—by venturing offshore, by relocating somewhere else on a temporary basis, somewhere more conducive to that which Anguilla wanted most: employment.

  Cursed as the Caribbean might be by a fate whose highs and lows entwine with perverse celerity in a historical roller coaster, it remains an unlikely fact that for every bit that circumstance takes away from a specific island in the Caribbean, some sort of cosmic retribution is put in place elsewhere. There is no other way to explain the emergence of the southern islands—the very first, or very last ones: Aruba, Curaçao, and Trinidad—as regional centers of employment, as the providers of the Caribbean, precisely at the time when the conditions of the international marke
t and increased competition had dethroned King Sugar from its privileged position as the driver of the regional economy.

  In 1922, a subsidiary company of Royal Dutch Shell essentially stumbled upon by far the largest known oil well in Venezuela, at the farm of Mene Grande by Lake Maracaibo. The well was so big, legend has it, that locals thought the gringos had found a Black Lake, as large as Maracaibo, underground. For nine consecutive days the geyser shot up one hundred thousand barrels of the dark stuff, preempting by over forty years the advice Mick Jagger and Keith Richards would give to the world, and painting everything, absolutely everything in sight, black. Just like that, with one fortuitous find, Venezuela had made a giant leap on the charts of oil producers of the world.

  Alongside Royal Dutch Shell, Standard Oil owned the concessions to drill for crude in Venezuelan territory. The eagerness of the corporations competing to exploit the resources of the land, together with the desperate financial situation in which Venezuela had found itself since the days of the populist dictator Cipriano Castro, complemented each other perfectly in a multilateral effort to quickly develop a sophisticated oil industry in the country. By 1930, Venezuela was producing around three hundred thousand barrels of crude daily, allowing the president of the republic, General (and, of course, dictator) Juan Vicente Gómez, to make a final payment of US $3.1 million to put an end to the country’s foreign debt. Right at the peak of a Great Depression that was deemed to be global, a delegation of Venezuelan diplomats traveled from one side of the Atlantic to the other to settle a large debt in solid gold, and to commemorate the hundredth anniversary of the death of Simón Bolivar, “the Liberator.” Now, there’s extravagance for you.