The Island that Disappeared

by Tom Feiling

  Hidden in the pasture were masses of delicate purple flowers that reminded me of the miniature blooms I’d seen on the cliffs of north Devon the previous summer. Basha said that they could be taken as a tea to bring down high blood pressure and treat diabetes. I pointed west and told him about the green land on the other side of the sea, which also rose up through wooded valleys to open pasture. ‘A lotta sea to climb to get there,’ he said.

  As a child, he had come this way to get from his home in Rocky Point to school in Old Town. In those days, there had been a well-worn path that zigzagged between carefully tended plots of gungo peas, melons, and sweet potatoes. Every plot sustained a family, and every family had one. It was their birthright and most precious possession, and had been passed down through the generations since Francis Archbold first came ashore. But in the years since Basha left school, most of his classmates had left the island to look for work elsewhere, and many of those who stayed behind had found jobs in local government. In the 1980s and ’90s, Bogotá had renewed its efforts to integrate the island into national life. Money was poured into the island’s public sector, and before long, a third of the islanders were employed courtesy of the mayor’s office. Contracts were often reserved for allies, jobs for loyal voters, and farming started to look like a job for losers.

  Left untended, the fruit trees died, the vegetable plots became overgrown with weeds, and the path between Rocky Point and Old Town was lost to the bush. By Basha’s reckoning, only twenty of the five thousand people on Providence still walked the paths that led into the heart of the island. He had cleared the one we were on just a week before, but it was already thick with cockspur saplings. The cockspur bush, a.k.a. the bullhorn acacia, had been brought to Providence from Central America to serve as a boundary marker. Its branches are covered in thick black thorns, which grow in pairs and resemble the horns of a bull. But that isn’t the only weapon in the cockspur’s arsenal; at the tip of each thorn is a tiny hole, which is the entrance to the nest of an exceptionally aggressive ant. En masse, associate ants will bite any animal that tries to climb, bore into, or defoliate its host. In return for this service, they get a constant supply of the protein-rich sap inside each thorn.

  For generations, the cockspur served as an emblem of the islanders’ possessive love of the land. But when they turned their backs on farming, it began to run wild. It is a hardy and adaptable plant, and thanks to the mutual aid between bush and ant, it makes any walk into the island’s hilly interior difficult and potentially dangerous. It is an appropriate end for an island that once served as the embodiment of the idea of divine protection. Far from returning to the benign state of nature that Daniel Elfrith found when he reached the island in 1629, the untended garden has become a grotesque parody of providence, the source of nothing more useful than a tropical crown of thorns for the islanders’ heads.

  Once we’d ducked under the barbed wire running along the crest of the hill, we were in the ‘bare bush’ at the head of Cedar Valley. There were the usual ‘bad elements’: cockspur, pica-pica, and the birch with copper-colored bark that peels off in layers as thin as tracing paper, its sap a delicate pistachio green that belies the harm it can do if it gets in your eye. But the other elements we found were all good: lignum vitae, the tree of life; the wild parsley that sends you right off to sleep when drank as a tea; and ‘stinking toe,’ a long chocolate-colored pod whose seeds reinvigorate the blood. When the breeze set the dry pods on another bush rattling, Basha reminisced about how they used to roast its seeds in a pan to make bush coffee. But who drank bush coffee nowadays? he wanted to know. The younger islanders had effectively become urbanites, albeit on an isolated island of seven villages, and they only wanted to drink Nescafé and Milo.

  As we clambered down the slope into Cedar Valley, we came across a farmer who was clearing the undergrowth from the few plantains on his plot. He let his machete hang loose in his hand and watched us approach. Somebody had been stealing his fruit, he grumbled. To take a mango or two was time-honored practice, but these days, boys took them by the sackful. A farmer was within his rights to kill such a thief, said Basha sympathetically. Although thievery seemed to preoccupy every islander over the age of forty, thefts were rare, and from what I could gather, there had only been two murders on the island since 1789. Nostalgia and righteous bluster, on the other hand, were so common they went unnoticed.

  Come the rainy season, the stream running through Cedar Valley would become a torrent, Basha told me. What he didn’t say was that thanks to the grazing of his cows, it would carry much of the island’s topsoil out to sea. The last of the cedars had been felled long ago, but there were still some magnificent cotton trees in the valley. They were wider than they were high, and their roots were huge arms that branched off the trunk as fins two meters before they reached the ground. Their trunks were perfectly round and straight, and were encased in smooth, gray bark and jagged thorns to keep fruit-eating iguanas at bay. A boat built of timber from a cotton tree was the fastest there was, said Basha wonderingly; he knew of one that had been caught by the wind and hadn’t stopped running until it hit the Miskito Coast.

  We scrambled back up to the crest of the hill. In a hollow formed by the curious spires of volcanic rock was a small copse of lemon trees, where we found dozens of bright yellow lemons nestling in the grass. They were round like limes and had a delicious scent made pungent by the brief shower of late morning; it was sharp yet creamy, as if the warmth of the sun had brought out their latent milkiness. We gathered armfuls of them, which Basha carried in his shirt, holding it in front of him like a bib. He was going to make lemonade, he said.

  But not yet: We had worked up a thirst by the time we got back to Rocky Point, so I bought us a couple of cans of Old Milwaukee from the schoolgirl who ran the village shop. We drank them in the shade of the bus shelter opposite the church, and when the beer was gone, I went back for more. Getting drunk in the daytime was a good way to lose track of time. I could see why there were so many empty tins of Old Milwaukee rusting in the grass in front of Basha’s shack.

  * * *

  Yet there were still fighters on the island. Luz Marina Livingston had spent the past year clearing the abandoned plot of land her family owned on a hill overlooking Manchineel Bay. Judging by the undergrowth we passed on the way up, it must have been a heck of a job. She already had an acre or two planted with lemon, sweet and bitter orange, banana, guava, and papaya trees. She had had two big water tanks shipped over from San Andrés, and built a shelter for them and her makeshift bush kitchen. She’d spent last Christmas up there by herself, sleeping in a hammock strung between the wooden posts that supported the corrugated zinc roof.

  I wondered what had driven her to work so hard, all alone on her hillside plot. She told me that she had studied radio and television production at university in Bogotá, and how her family had worried about her living on the mainland when Pablo Escobar was running rampant and the threat of explosions and gunfights was ever present. ‘I had a trust inside that it would be great,’ she said. ‘Bogotá has become for me like a public university of life. When you live in the city, wow, then you learn a lot, and you grow up. And if you want to keep advancing and get knowledge, then you keep going.’

  Luz Marina lived in Bogotá for eleven years, working first for the National Institute of Radio and Television, and then for one of Colombia’s first mobile phone companies. ‘Sometimes on a Sunday, one o’clock in the morning, I would be in my office working. It was cool, you get the experience, but when I was twenty-seven years, I said, “OK, I don’t want to be closed up in an office. I want to be outside. My dad is getting old, and my parents want to see me.”

  ‘When I get back home, I just have enough time to share with my dad. To get to live the last part of him and live that spirit…I got it. My dad was really free-hearted, free-minded, free-handed—free everything. He was a little of everything. He was a musician, he was a fisherman, and he was a farmer. On Saturday morni
ngs, we would go on horse to his farm and take back home bananas and cassava and corn and watermelon. In those times, you could survive off what you have on your land. You could exchange with your people, and you didn’t worry about having effective cash. We get back home and he would start to make a big share for people in the area. Say, “OK, this is for this person, and this is for that lady down there.” The original people was so united. Everything was homemade, and people were self-sufficient. It was amazing.

  ‘But things changing, and very fast, especially with the younger set of people,’ Luz Marina went on. ‘Now everybody wants to have the last iPhone. The new generation get overambitious for money. You can rip me off and you will do it. The consumer moral is changing everything. Old time, people could go with their eyes closed. You can still find people that are very honest in this place, but it’s not like before. They lost this confidence in people. You miss that.’

  Until the 1980s, Providence had been something like a museum piece, preserving customs from an era before modern transport and technology. Cash had always been present on the island, but most of it stayed in the cash register at the island store and was only removed when a merchant ship stopped by with goods for sale. Electricity had come to Town in the late 1930s, but it was only when Bottom House was connected to the grid in the late ’80s that the villagers were able to power televisions, electric ovens, and washing machines. The arrival of electricity also brought light in abundance, which banished the malevolent spirits that had haunted the island since Francis Archbold’s day, and finally brought the age of ‘dark pollution’ to an end.

  ‘A couple months later, my dad died. I say to myself, “The island give so much to me, it’s time I give back something to the island.”’ Luz Marina clubbed together with her friend Annie Chapman to produce a radio show, which went out every weekend. They’d talk about anything: shipwrecks, bush medicine, cruise ships, and the arrival of ‘sweet thing,’ the name the islanders gave to crack cocaine. But their favorite topic of conversation was politics: by the millennium, el departamento de San Andrés y Providencia was on the brink of bankruptcy, and Bogotá had to step in to take over the running of the islands. A series of interim governors resigned, aghast at the amount of money that had gone missing. The bank froze the local government’s accounts and seized what was left in the pot to recover what they were owed. On Providence, the mayor’s employees went unpaid, and retirees couldn’t get their pensions.

  For the first time since the blight of the coconuts in the 1920s, families began to go hungry. Community marches were organized, and public employees went on strike, but this only resulted in a breakdown in the provision of public services. Even after the local government’s finances were restored to some semblance of order, the islands’ governor was unable to find a long-term solution to the crisis because the deputies in the islands’ legislative assembly refused to approve the bills that would have restructured the administration. They had become entirely dependent on Bogotá and the annual grant it gave to the islands, and had nothing else to fall back on.

  Amid so much corruption and misgovernment, the islanders grew disillusioned, not only with their politicians, but with Colombia itself. An opinion poll found that, given the chance, 25 percent of islanders would vote to become independent, and a further 17 percent wanted the islands to become British or American dependencies. But their feelings were mixed—just as many of them simply wanted Colombia to provide them with more jobs.1

  On the Monday after her radio show went out, the mayor would shoot Luz Marina dirty looks in the street. He wasn’t the only one: a third of the islanders worked for local government in one way or other. Many of them considered deference to authority part of the Baptist heritage, and didn’t appreciate two women on the radio reminding them that they were living in a democracy, where politicians were supposed to serve the people.

  * * *

  Every time Ed saw me he let out a gargled laugh of pleasure, for I had become his new best friend (though I couldn’t help feeling that anyone who gave him cigarettes, bought him packets of frankfurters, and gave him rides home on his scooter could have done the job as well as I did). This time, however, he wasn’t smiling. ‘You didn’t come to church yesterday,’ he said. The only reason I gave Ed money was so as not to see the face that he pulled: the one that told me that I was just another of the heartless people to wander in and out of his world. Only the day before I’d agreed to go to the Baptist church in Town with him, but maybe because I had found an internet connection, discovered that Liverpool had beaten Spurs five to zero the previous Saturday, and gone to Roland’s Bar on Manchineel beach to celebrate, I hadn’t been able to face it.

  I pulled a face of deep remorse, and we lapsed into silence. A police van pulled up, one of only two on the island, and a pair of mainlanders got out. I had often passed the island’s other police van on my circuits of the island; it was on blocks over the mechanics’ pit at the island’s only garage and, judging by the thick layer of dust, had been for some time. The van in front of us had two big dents in its windscreen, and I asked Ed if he knew what had caused them. He screwed up his face in distaste at the memory. Three boys from Bottom House had taken delivery of a three-hundred-kilogram consignment of cocaine from San Andrés, he said. They were planning to take it to Costa Rica in a fast boat, but a sapo had grassed them up.*1 The police raced down to Bottom House, raided their homes, and took them back to the station, where they set the electric probes on them. The next time the police van passed through the neighborhood, the young men’s friends let rocks do the talking for them.

  Providence had been a midocean fueling station for the fast boats since the millennium, when Colombian traffickers stopped carrying cocaine across the Caribbean to Miami, and instead began running it into the myriad creeks of the Miskito Coast. From there, the precious cargo was loaded onto trucks, which carried it along the overland route through Mexico to the border with the United States. Until then, the island’s young sailors had been content to spend the first years of their careers saving up the million pesos (£3,000) they needed to get their mariner’s license. There was healthy demand for their services throughout the western Caribbean, for they had grown up on the edge of the second largest coral reef in the Americas and, in learning how to navigate it, had acquired an ability to read the sea that was second to none. They would spend the next twenty years working on cargo ships, and by the time they hit forty, they had enough money to come home, get married, and build a house. But a young mariner could make the same money in two or three years working on a fast boat. As a result, there were thought to be six hundred men from Providence and San Andrés languishing in the state penitentiary in Tampa, Florida, on drug trafficking charges.

  It didn’t take Ed long to brighten up. He wanted to introduce me to his brother, ‘the one I told you about, who lives in California.’ We found Manuel—‘you can call me Manny’—painting his new house, which was the latest addition to the cluster of concrete houses around Ed’s stepfather’s place. Apart from the floors, which were still bare earth, the building work was complete. Manny had been painting the walls since eight that morning; it was now five, and he was tired. ‘Working hard, man. Unlike the people here,’ he said. Over an Old Milwaukee, Manny told me about the man who had cut most but not all of the grass in front of his house. ‘He said he’d be back, but I never saw him again.’ I asked if he’d already paid him—he had. Manny had obviously been away for some time. In fact, he had been away for twenty-three years, working as a limousine driver in Santa Clara, while he saved up the money he needed to build his house.

  Ed peeled one of the June plums that had fallen under a tree and handed it to me, while the three of us watched a little plane come in to land at the island’s only landing strip, which was just behind the family’s plot. Ed told me that he had spent his childhood watching pilots do battle with the headwind and had worked at the airport as a teenager. One day, he had even tried to make off with a biplane
but had only got as far as the end of the runway before he was hauled out of the cockpit by its furious pilot.

  ‘You’re talking to a bad man,’ said Manny, pointing at his brother with a knowing smile. Ed shrugged nonchalantly, but my look of surprise begged an explanation. It had all started when he was caught carrying three hundred kilograms of cocaine from Medellín to Pereira in his wife’s car, he said. The judge gave him eleven years, which he spent shuffling between prisons in Medellín, Montería, and Valledupar. At first, he had been content to serve his time working in the kitchens, preparing rice, beans, and chicken for his fellow inmates. But incarceration began to get to him, and one day, he took a knife from the kitchen and stabbed one of the prison guards in the throat. When reinforcements arrived, he took the dead man’s gun and shot two more of them. He managed to escape, but four months later he was stopped at an army checkpoint and soon found himself back in court. This time the judge gave him forty-nine years. He got out in twenty-two, which was four years ago.

  Following his release, he flew back to San Andrés, where he found work as a moto-taxi driver. Not long after, a hit-and-run driver piled into him, killing his two passengers and leaving him seriously injured. For the first time, I imagined Ed’s life before his accident: slim and healthy, in freshly laundered clothes and new shoes, with a swagger he’d never have again. Ed had been one of those who had never even considered fishing or farming for a living. Instead, he had left for Medellín, where he latched on to the cocaine business, it being the only line of work for teenagers who try to steal biplanes. Once on board, it was only a matter of time before he was thrown.