by W. E. Gutman
To the more astute observer, and for all its undeniable allure, Stonewall is eerily reminiscent of a theatrical backdrop; an all-too-perfect Hollywoodish “trompe l’oeil” that lures wanderers to its surreal perfection the way hibiscus and frangipani attract butterflies and bees. At first glance its exquisite beauty, the kind rhapsodized in syrupy sonnets and corny travelogues, can be hypnotic. Ringed by coastlines of striking majesty, silvery beaches here, rocky shores hammered by high surf there, it nestles, seductive and unruffled, a few square miles of old colonial charm seemingly unruffled, untouched by time. There’s the ubiquitous clip-clop of horses’ hooves on dusty back roads, whitewashed little churches, tumble down wooden rum shops where vacant-eyed loafers doze off in the noonday sun, and amiable peddlers who hawk worthless trinkets at jaded tourists. There’s the redolence of grilled fish wafting from under the parasols of pushcart eateries; the cooling evening breezes, the graceful dawn-and-twilight flights of snowy egrets over lush, mist-covered uplands; the crisp, starlit nights and the leathery sound of batwings thrashing in the darkness.
Behind this idyllic setting unfold dramas unimagined by visitors, ignored or squelched by the press and warily entombed by the locals. Not far from the posh resorts, the crystal waters of the lagoons, the quaint restaurants and grungy guesthouses, pettifoggery, deceit, collusion and intimidation reign supreme while the locals live in sham unconcern.
Low tide. The surf tugs gently at the flotsam of sea moss, sun-bleached coral and broken shells scattered on the slick sandy shore. Purple clouds glide past a waxen moon, exposing an amber and cobalt sky. Pressing low against the sea, the remnants of a distant storm fade away as one last streak of lightning splashes the eastern horizon with a silvery glow.
Stillness fills my ears as I dream. Tree frogs suspend their call. Red-shelled crabs scuttle back to their burrows as the sun’s smallest arc turns night into day. Shafts of light burst through the splintered shutters. A rooster crows in the distance. Doves respond, cooing their melancholy lilt. I make contact with reality when the voices down by the beach are not those that inhabit my dreams.
But I’m not here to dream. With every blink of the eye reality returns, clipped and spasmodic, like a badly edited film, like a parody of life in which nothing lies so well as the naked truth. What I see and what my words convey somehow never seem to coincide. Syntax gets in the way. I’m now the prisoner of my own craft. Narrating a phantasm may be as risky as living it.
Rising from the ashtray, a thin, unwavering column of bluish smoke climbs from the smoldering mosquito-repelling coil to the ceiling where it shatters on impact. Inches away, a spider cruises by upside down, oblivious to the deadly wisps of insecticide that billow in its path. The fumes keep the mosquitoes at bay. I no longer get bitten. The local variety is fond of whitey only when his skin still bears the ghastly urban complexion of a newcomer. Eventually, they cease to visit and raid other abodes in search of fresh prey.
Cockroaches, bedbugs and spiders, the squatters of the insect world, are much less inventive. They move in for good.
Downstairs, the maids are setting tables. Sleepy-eyed and sullen, they meander in and out of the kitchen. I can hear the shuffle of dragging feet on the age-old tile floor. Dolores Wingate, the proprietor’s wife, supervises the girls, issuing terse, monosyllabic orders from her room. She rarely leaves her room nowadays.
Mavis -- chambermaid, waitress, short-order cook and bartender -- mutters something in my direction. She stops halfway back to the kitchen. Looking elsewhere, wiping a lippy yawn, she asks, chopping her gs, “Yo be havin’ coffee this mornin’?” I always have coffee; every mornin’, but Mavis was instructed to ask. Just in case. The Wingates are such penny-pinchers.
Poached eggs stare back at me, lifeless, like the eyes of a dead fish. I fine-focus my field of view and I see myself in stereoscopic detail. My likeness beckons me to draw near. As I do, bleary-eyed, crumbling snippets of dream still fogging up my brain, my face looms larger in a yolk-yellow sea. I smile synthetically as if posing for a family portrait. It’s a smile of my own creation. My lips are parted. That’s all. It’s a smile without cheer.
I poke the yolk and partake of breakfast. Repentance is where you find it. The eggs dissolve and submerge the shriveled, pinkie-sized sausages and undercooked home fries. Dolores’ husband, Ephraim, turns on the radio. I don’t like to be serenaded when I eat, least of all by Telemann or Handel. But Wingate has no passion for Debussy or Ravel.
Uninvited, a gecko leaps from the wall onto the faded plastic tablecloth. I overturn the sugar bowl. The little gray lizard with the big soulful eyes stops dead in its tracks, his senses aroused, his instincts on the alert. Hunger triumphs. A viscous tongue whips at the mound of sugar and retracts it laden with nourishing brown crystals.
Fuck Wingate.
Brooks is livid. The resident drunk, Whitney T. Brooks rooms here whenever he remembers the address or gets a lift from the local constabulary. Monthly checks keep him out of his family’s hair in East Hampton, and he doesn’t seem to give a shit, not about the hostility, the loneliness, the heat, the spiders, the monotony, the inescapable, unrelenting streams of Calypso music that swell and fade with the wind, the inky blackness of night.
“Filthy animal,” Brooks snivels, recoiling with fear and revulsion. Coming from Brooks, it’s a compliment. He won’t look you in the eye. He cowers, instead, curling his upper lip like a dog begging to be kicked. He reeks of cheap rum. His teeth are yellow, his gaze reptilian, and a white slimy film coats the corners of his mouth. He shares my table. Day after day, breakfast, lunch and dinner. I don’t have the heart to snub him.
Wingate lacks finesse. “Mixed-bloods,” he calls them, sit under the wind chime at a large round table set in the center of the dining room. Those of “common stock,” a special label reserved for people of dubious extraction, sit in clusters at tiny square tables, like satellites orbiting a mother ship. Miss Gwendolyn Peckham -- “Sussex, naturally” -- talkative and stone deaf, and more energetic than ten men half her eighty years, breaks bread with a young German drifter, Helmut Brunner, who speaks comic book English and never gets a chance to improve it in her presence.
Bates eats alone. His table faces a narrow wall from which hang reeking boughs of fan coral and a framed needlepoint inscription. Victory Looms Brighter out of Darkness, it proclaims with cryptic solemnity. Bates shuns the others. He eats with great haste, his nose in his plate, his eyes deep in thought. He always refolds the paper napkin on its original creases, gets up, mutters an apology and returns to his own dreams. He never sits in the sun.
Find me. I’m here, three, maybe four miles from town, past the old fishing village, off the winding road that girds the south coast. Turn left as you face north. Look for the sign.
THE BEARDED FIG TREE
BED & BREAKFAST
Ephraim Wingate, Proprietor
The old wooden placard swings at the end of a corroded yard of metal tubing extending from the eaves. It cries on windy nights. Stray cats often rally to its lugubrious wail.
The elements conspire; neglect finishes the job. The red corrugated iron roof sags. The verandah shows irreparable signs of fatigue. Devoured by wood worms, the balustrade threatens to collapse. Along the porch wall, hundreds of pockmarks erupt in tiny bloody splotches, each the silent witness of a swatted insect. Growing in untamed profusion, lime trees, breadfruit, hibiscus and bougainvillea soften the decadence.
Upstairs where I sleep, there are two single beds, lumpy and creaking, a narrow plywood closet that smells of old sweat and tree rot, a small desk and a wobbly chest of drawers lined with old newspapers perused a dozen times or more. Stand by as I quote from their pages from time to time.
Item:
“Owen Courtney, 47, of Marshall Hall, St. Lucy, pleaded guilty in the Fourth Assize Court to defecating on the steps of the Governor General’s mansion. The infraction is reported to have occurred late on the night of 16 April. Justice Stewart L. Wifing, Q.C., dep
uty director for public prosecutions, appeared for the Crown.
“Mr. Frampton H. Cheltenham represented the defendant. Mr. Courtney could not explain why he had been drawn to that particular venue to respond to what he termed ‘an urgent call of nature,’ when an adjacent public lot, the very one from whence he had emerged, is dark and deserted at night. Sentencing has been postponed for a month and Mr. Courtney was released in his own custody.”
Hanging from the ceiling, a bare forty-Watt bulb lights up my nights. Night comes at six sharp. Every night. Day returns at six sharp. Every morning.
Item:
“Carlton Frott, 32, of Scott’s Gully, St. Barnaby, is appearing today in Third Assize Court -- Justice Florian Sturgis presiding -- to plead on a charge of aggravated sexual misconduct during a funeral procession on Swan Lane Monday last. Several outraged female mourners have accused Mr. Frott of seeking sexual gratification by cunningly and persistently rubbing himself against their posteriors. Mr. Frott insists that, overwhelmed with grief, he had merely tried to inch his way closer to the casket to pay his respects to the deceased. The defendant, who later admitted he didn’t know the deceased, was once granted a suspended sentence in a similar incident involving church statuary.”
The island dozes in mindless serenity, an overgrown chunk of coral sprouting from the scintillating turquoise deep like an oasis in the vastness of the desert.
Today the sea is high, the sky barren. Angry crests collide over cloudy waters. In nature’s indulgence you can sense its inventive cruelty.
Old man Godfrey sits on the verandah, shielding his glaucomatous eyes with the back of one hand, scratching Blondie’s forever pregnant belly with the other. He is nearly blind but he scans the heavens high above the northwestern horizon, pointing a knotty finger yellowed by nicotine, a toothless, gloating grin upon his face.
“Ah, Flight 902,” he chuckles as the jetliner banks leftward on final. Blondie senses elation in Godfrey’s strokes. Shooing away her latest litter with a flick of her tail, she rolls on her back and spreads her rear legs farther apart to receive her master’s caress.
Godfrey has an interesting occupation. If he smiles it’s because every planeload, he reckons, brings a flock of sex-starved white women who pay hard cash for the privilege of being fucked by the uncomplicated youths he has groomed for the occasion, all of them muscular Neanderthals from the highlands who would gladly do it for nothing just to keep score.
Colonel Doulton James, the tall, gaunt, Oxford-bred former chief of Her Majesty’s Royal Police, is a steady guest. No one really knows who he does it with -- Godfrey’s studs or the prim Québécoises who fly south every year with the geese.
Godfrey rents space from Wingate. They split the profits.
Dolores Wingate leaves her room when the first patrons arrive. She can’t bear the moans and the cries of rapture. Walking slowly, feigning sobriety, she sits by the water’s edge, alone. The horizon makes no sound at all so she stares at it until she hears nothing but the sea.
High tide. Low tide. Should the ebbing cease, you tell yourself, so will your pulse. Life oozes by. You do not live it; you let it feast on you.
Then there are nights. No, they’re not all foretold by fiery sunsets and the smell of nutmeg wafting on the wings of an errant breeze. You soon discover a new kind of blackness, beguiling and ominous where exquisite and chilling dreams compete for a share of your being, nights spent in alternating states of suffocating boredom and unease. Shut your eyes. Hold your breath. Listen to your heartbeat. It often is the only sound you recognize.
Drink yourself silly. Like Brooks. Or fill your lungs with burning ganja, as half the island does when no one looks. Indulge in other pleasures if you can find them, endure them. Lust, like a predator, feeds upon the weak, the lonely, the lost. Deliverance lies ahead, at the far end of a mirror in which you see yourself. No, nights do not beget morning. They’re one-way voyages. Everything must end with them when you surrender to your dreams. As you disembark, another flotilla hoists the mainsails, weighs anchor and hazards out of port into Mother Sea’s embrace.
Reena. You can’t see her in the dark but the black satin form writhing in your arms substantiates her existence. She is real, like the night that engulfs her. Clouds disperse, letting moonlight in through the open shutters. Her eyes shimmer like speckled diamonds but she winces and her ivory smile turns to grimace. It’s hard to tell if it’s pleasure or pain.
She swears it’s okay through the eighth month, and you know she’s lying, but you push harder, seeking to go in deeper yet, plowing her life-bearing young body, overlooking the gamy odors, thinking of someone else until the images fade away one by one as you feel yourself coming.
“… I say, that’s nothing, nothing at all. Why, on the savanna -- yes I spent a fortnight in Basutoland last fall. Oh, I know they don’t call it that anymore, but who can keep track? So many new nations, you know. Every jungle outpost wants its own pennant. Every reformed cannibal yearns for an ambassadorship to the United Nations. As I was saying -- now, was it Basutoland? Yes. Dreadful climate, you know. Why, I found a tarantula snuggling in a bag of bonbons I’d carelessly neglected to secure. Big as my palm, I say, frightfully handsome creature, what…?”
Gwen Peckham cups her hands and wiggles her fingers, spider-like, at Helmut Brunner who nods mechanically and keeps eating. Brunner does not partake of food. He attacks it as if it were still endowed with life.
“… Heavens to Horatio Hornblower, in Tashkent one summer night -- or was it in -- oh, never mind. Anyway, I was stalked by a vampire bat who took peculiar interest in my chignon. Luckily, I wasn’t wearing it at the time. You know, bats are so very fond of hair, what?”
Brooks gags as he belches and yawns simultaneously.
Was it Reena? I’m not sure. Maybe it was Rose or Regina or Rebecca or Ruth. It’s hard to remember all the monikers they assume. Pick her up at the House of Limbo where young girls give themselves for a meal, a hot shower, a clean bed and the short-lived illusion that love can somehow be kindled by raw, savage sex. Show her a good time. Treat her with kindness. You’ll find the experience ennobling. Kindness has a way of humanizing exploitation. No need to pay for your pleasure. Buy her some groceries instead. Hers is a risky occupation and there are at least five other mouths to feed back at the shack on Briton Hill. The one-room hovel is filled with precious dreams, I know, but they will never get past the single window that overlooks the sea where dreams are born.
In these parts a window is like a movie screen on which are projected snippets of immovable, remote reality.
Then morning returns and the sun blazes through dawn’s chill dampness. The sea is at your feet and hummingbirds drink from the passionflowers. A new day rises. Think of Tantalus and bite into life as if it were Eden’s last fruit.
Pot-bellied, hook-nosed and bronze-skinned like his cousin Rajiv from Poona, Ephraim Wingate, né Gupta, gets high on premium gin. His British upbringing demands it. When he’s had one too many and he’s in the mood to talk, you can forget his cantankerous side. Every man has deep within him a trace of innocence and Wingate’s surfaces when he imbibes, a pastime that begins before noon in the shade of his beloved fig tree and continues late into the night until someone carries him to bed.
His stories are laced with bittersweet remembrances of a squandered youth, hurricanes and U-boat sightings off North Point, of volcanic eruptions and moonlit picnics by the reef at low tide, in the nude. You embark with him on the decks of rum-runners and shrimp boats, and sail with their loathsome crews and the hideous harlots they bring on board. He revels in the memory of countless trysts with women of opulent proportions for whom he donned grotesque rubber dildos, many of which are still on display in the bar next to the Queen’s official portrait.
In her room since dusk, Dolores Wingate, who has heard it all, drowns her shame in a fifth of Bourbon and sings herself softly to sleep.
On this ocarina-shaped little coral speck, rumors spread like
the clap. The official press remains crassly unconcerned and only the outlawed but widely circulated Onyx dares tell it like it is. I write for it under a pseudonym.
The whites, few as they are, perambulate toward extinction. Outnumbered, cut off from the rest of society, they live on windswept knolls overlooking the sea, well above the rickety tar-roofed cottages that hug the dusty road below, and they peer at the blue expanse longingly as if the Union Jack still plied the deep. An hour before dusk, they gather on their terraces and sip tea with lime. Lime is a very sour fruit, even in paradise.
Item:
“New Zealand film producer and world-famed magician Don Drew is stranded on Stonewall, poorer by ten thousand dollars, or so he claims.
“Drew landed here on April 9 from Bigoudi, via Puerto-Diablo where he changed planes and where he asserts he was prevented from retrieving a briefcase containing ten thousand dollars which he ‘inadvertently’ left on board the aircraft.
“Drew said that airlines are liable for up to five hundred dollars for passengers’ losses. He demanded that he be immediately compensated pending restitution of the remainder of the missing cash.
“Flat broke, Drew has contacted the local Muskrat Lodge and was promptly offered temporary shelter by one of its members. Drew has since been summoned to appear at the Immigration Office, a request he called ‘tantamount to bullying.’