Left at the Mango Tree (2 page)

But Bang’s grandfather did more than write songs about Oh. He was mostly a marimbist. On a marimba he fashioned out of sanded mahogany and polished gourds that he attached beneath the wooden keys, he hammered his way to first place in the island’s annual marimba competition ten years running. He could hold six mallets at once, three in each hand, and he maneuvered their woolen heads across two octaves with even more dexterity than that required by Bang’s mid-air pineapple chopping. From his grandfather Bang inherited his legerdemain, along with the old man’s marimba and mallets when he died.

And Bang too became a gifted marimbist, though eventually his granddad’s gourds cracked, forcing him to modernize. He bought a marimba with both mahogany keys and mahogany pipes that hung below them, and upgraded from woolen mallets to silken ones.

Now almost every night at the Buddha’s Belly from eight to two, when Bang’s voice gets tired, he plays the marimba so it can rest. He has a small back-up band, and sometimes even Raoul is coaxed to join in, on maracas, tambourine, triangle, or all three at once. They play on a low stage near the back of the lounge, a dark, cool gathering-place with ceiling fans that distribute the
smoke from the patrons’ cigars and cigarettes. In front of the stage sit twenty round tables of wood, thatched chairs tucked beneath them, and behind the tables, at the opposite end of the room, a bar accommodates a dozen imbibers easily. Over the bar hangs a wooden canopy with cubbies for rum and for whiskey, and from its edge, cloudy beer mugs dangle on hooks.

There are two entrances to the Belly, where much of my story—or rather Raoul’s part in it—plays out. One leads to the lobby of the Hotel Sincero. The other, to the strip of shore reserved for the hotel’s guests. On a crowded night the hotel’s owner, Cougar Zanne, drags the tables and chairs onto the beach and props open the door, freeing the inside for dancing, and extending his property and profits by fifty yards. Last year he put loudspeakers on the side of the building, so now Bang’s percussion and song can be heard equally within and without.

Our Mr. Zanne has been known as Cougar for so long, that few of the islanders remember his real name anymore. He came up with the feline moniker himself and insisted on its adoption, claiming rights to it because his grandfather rid the island of the scourge of cougars that used to run wild there. Cougar’s friends and neighbors (myself included, I might add) don’t believe there ever were such beasts on Oh, for surely some evidence of them (hunting spears or pelts, perhaps) would have survived in the Parliamentary Museum for the Preservation of Artistic and Historical Sciences. To such protests, Cougar replies, “Well of course there’s no evidence. Grandpa got rid of the cougars’ every last trace!”

The grandson dedicates himself to more genteel arts, namely the running of the Hotel Sincero, a locale popular in no small part because of its popular owner. Tall and handsome by island standards, and with a
je ne sais quoi
that straddles smart and smarm,
Cougar reeks of tender allure. He likes to dress himself up—his bold dinner jackets, silk foulards, and calfskin shoes are flown in—and might look pimpish were it not for his innate and genuine sense of style. He’s the sort of chap who’d do anything for you, really, so long as he has nothing else to do. He’s a problem-solver, icebreaker, cheerleader, pinch-hitter, heartthrob, legal advisor and last resort. It was he who taught my mother Edda to dance.

In the hotel lobby he’s quick to fill your hands with maps and brochures, and your head with the local lore, while at the Belly he refills every glass (never taking no for an answer) and adds on to every tab. Upstairs, in the rooms, it’s the ambitious island girls he fills, first their bodies, then their minds with poetry to salve their broken hearts: “Silly thing! What’s all this talk of love?” He charges money to swim with dolphins lest the creatures be exploited, and lets you carry your own bags lest they get lost. In short, Cougar never means ill.

His Hotel Sincero isn’t Oh’s poshest, but for two-star accommodations and rates, you get four-star atmosphere. The beach, like all the beaches of Oh, is so smooth and white and wide that any description of it waxes banal. Same for the sea, whose blue distinguishes itself from that of the sky by just the subtlest suggestion of green. Half the rooms overlook this view, and half survey a courtyard of concentric circles in bricks of various shades, the outer edge of which is enclosed by sandstone benches that imitate Italian marble.

Inside the flaxen-colored walls of the two-story hotel, the guest rooms are high-ceilinged and clean. On their tiled floors of cobalt and gray rest low, smallish beds hugged by white headboards and footboards, the wood repainted annually to hide wear. Same for each room’s wardrobe, coffee table, and pair of rocking chairs, whose patinas are likewise pristine. And from every room a grand
window stretching floor to ceiling opens onto a three-inch ledge with wrought-iron faux-balcony railing, each pane equipped with a wooden shutter to let in light when the window is closed, a positioning the climate forbids.

The biggest attraction at the hotel is the Buddha’s Belly Bar and Lounge. Its local celebrity presence, in the guise of Bang and Cougar, and its islander clientele draw not only the Sincero’s lodgers, but guests from the more exclusive resorts, too, who return to their air-conditioned suites just after midnight, their appetites for local flavor satisfied. The lodgers regard the visiting resorters with dismissal (though you might expect it the other way round), silently condemning their shallow testing of the deep local waters. All of them, lodgers and resorters alike, clink their murky mugs and rub elbows with Cougar’s fine suits, charmed by the sometimes-bare feet of the liming islanders, whose nakedness they mistakenly deem of choice, not of circumstance.

I’ve introduced you to the crooner and the charmer. The third significant
joueur
in Raoul’s workaday world is Nat, the cabbie. Nat taught my mother Edda to drive—and to smoke a cigarette. Trim and quiet, innately dignified, Nat can’t sing or play the marimba, and he cares little for habiliments. He wears colored t-shirts he buys from a stand at the market. He has no wife and no girl. They tell him it’s because he doesn’t try, but when he asks, “Try what?” they don’t know what to say. Sometimes he drives an American van, or a Japanese one, sometimes an Italian four-door, or a Japanese one. The cars that come to Oh are mostly used, and then presently used up on the pot-holed inland roads. There’s no point telling you what Nat drives now. He’ll surely be driving something else the next time you visit.

Nat grew up on a pineapple plantation, running and hiding
in acres of leaves taller than he, knocking his tiny body against the ready fruits. The plantation belonged to his grandfather, and was at the height of production when the trouble started with the pineapple tax. Among the growers immortalized in the ballads of Bang’s grandfather was none other than Nat’s own. When the winds blew out the old administration, Nat’s grandfather tried to make another go of it, but the winds had deposited sand in his own gears, too, and he gave up. The land, undisturbed by the gusts and tariffs, was fertile. It garnered a healthy profit when Nat’s grandfather sold it, a profit that fed both his own generation and the next. But by the time Nat was a young man, there was not so much as a song left for him, let alone enough to buy a marimba.

Nat’s birthright boiled down to unemployment. He had no livelihood, or rather, any livelihood he might want to entertain the thought of, and at the end of the day considered himself a terribly rich and lucky man. He could be a doctor, or a lawyer, or a cook, or a painter—not an artist, but a man who hung his weight on ropes and pulleys and painted church steeples and schoolhouses. In the end he decided simply to earn a modest living.

With the failure of the pineapple industry, the rest of the island decided the same. A negligible amount of pineapple exportation went on, but the cost of picking, packing, and shipping the small cargoes became too expensive to make it worthwhile. The tourism industry boomed in the meantime, and most of the islanders sought their tiny fortunes there. They taught island dances, sold island dishes, embroidered island cloth, and drove taxis. Nat didn’t know many dances or recipes, and had never threaded a needle in his life. So taxi driving it was.

His first car was a van, a Volkswagen that appeared to him
both round and square at the same time. It was noticeably succumbing to the early ravages of rust, but the interior was nicely intact, and Nat kept it washed both inside and out. No small feat, this, transporting wet and sandy beach-goers, or sweaty tourists carrying dusty suitcases and pineapples. Yes, the pineapple custom at Customs existed even then, though it would become a much messier affair some three years later, when Bang would set up his pen-knife table, and passengers began peeling and slicing right in the back seat.

In no time at all Nat had just what he wanted, or what he fooled himself into thinking he wanted: a simple and modest living. Driving his taxi paid for fish and vegetables and gasoline, and a sensible place to live. He could afford almost any t-shirt from the stand at the market and the almost daily nip at the Buddha’s Belly. He collected and deposited passengers every day at the airport and the Sincero, and by virtue of daily sightings became friends with Raoul and Cougar, and eventually Bang.

Now on the road that borders the stretch of sidewalk outside the airport, Nat leans against his Volkswagen, or his Toyota, or his Fiat and watches as the travelers file out, juggling their loads, swabbing their brows, glancing from the sun to Bang’s gesticulations and back in disbelief. Staggered by the heat and by the spectacle, you don’t even notice when Nat approaches and asks, “Where to?” He rounds up a couple more passengers headed to the same destination, shouts a word at Bang (who acknowledges it with a shrug of one shoulder), and completes the transaction with a shove on your posterior that plunges you into the car. You find yourself stuck to vinyl upholstery, an Albanian on your left, a sprouting duffel on your right, and a pineapple on the floor between your knees.

Except, of course, on Tuesday. On Tuesdays at Oh the airport is
closed. There is no flight in and no flight out, no triplicate forms to stamp and crease and slip inside your passport, no gratuitous fruit to negotiate. Raoul doesn’t size up passengers with his aaah-huh-huhs, and passengers don’t hop over rolling pineapples to claim their baggage. Bang doesn’t set up his table, or sell knives or perform. Nat won’t be waiting in his clean Chevrolet to take you over the gritty roads to Cougar’s hotel. Sometimes on Tuesdays even the wind hardly stirs, and the sand keeps clear of your mailbox, your ears, your pockets and toes. Always on Tuesdays, Raoul lies in until 10:25, wakes to his breakfast of coffee and milk and oatmeal, dons his favorite blue shirt with the stripes, and goes to the library, where he spends almost the entire day. (I’ll get to his business there later.)

This is how it’s been as long as anyone can remember.

That is, on every Tuesday but one. One very distinct Tuesday some 20 years ago, Raoul woke up early, and troubled, at 8:25. He had tea with honey and whipped eggs for breakfast, and wore a white shirt with no stripes at all. He thought about his daughter—his daughter Edda Orlean, who never told a lie and only ever slept with her husband—and he did not go to the library. He went to the grimy-windowed office of the
Morning Crier
, and he placed a classified ad.

Someone
on Oh must know how Edda got pregnant!

And so while other baby girls are heralded with cigars or balloons or pale pink ribbons on the front door, my unusual, even magical, birth was from the first denoted in black and white. Not
announced
, exactly, not in glossy black ink on sturdy white stock with a photo of my newborn self tucked lovingly into the envelope, heavens no! My birth was to be
inferred
, from a want ad in the morning edition, the black of the ink flat and impermanent, the paper flimsy and white-
ish
at best.

2

B
ad things are supposed to happen in threes. When they’re
really
bad, even the bad things themselves know enough to stop at two. Why, on Oh, they don’t know any better than to splash themselves across the pages of the newspaper, I couldn’t say. Poor Raoul found himself sandwiched between two such cases in point. As if I (his white granddaughter) weren’t bad enough, he was faced with a real humdinger of a Customs affair. So he did what he always did, when he wasn’t quite sure what to do. He went to the Belly, ordered a beer, and waited for his three best mates to show, which (sooner or later) they always did.

“Bastard!” Raoul whispered loudly to himself. He crumpled the
Crier
’s front page in his fist and slid it from the table to his knee. His little Almondine the talk of Oh and now this? He needed a pineapple-smuggler to worry about like he needed, well, pineapples. He had crumpled and smoothed the paper so many times that day, it was covered in thumb-prints and the newsprint was smudged.