The True Colour of the Sea

by Robert Drewe

  Dining with her sleek husband and two chubby children, all solemnly munching their way through fried pork chunks and plantain chips, the woman stared silently at her family throughout the meal. Mama let her eyes fall on each of them in turn: first the husband and then the two boys. Under her glare they dropped their eyes and kept eating, munching pork and swigging Coke. Throughout the meal no one spoke. She held her knife like a weapon, first stabbing the food and then eating off the knife, sliding the blade slowly through her scarlet lips.

  ‘Happy families,’ said Alex.

  ‘I bet hubby can’t wait to get home,’ Amanda said.

  And suddenly the family finished eating and was gone, and in the gap opened in the dining room by their absence, Amanda noticed the mankini man and the Cuban youth. Again they were together but still ostensibly separate, sitting at neighbouring tables while keeping up the myth of discreteness.

  Again they weren’t speaking. Each separately and silently helped himself from the buffet. The melancholy thin man scarcely succumbed to the food on offer and then picked dispiritedly at his meagre meal, but the boy piled his plate with the ropa vieja, the rice, the plantains, the beans, the pork chunks, the sliced pork sausage and the pork mince, ate ravenously and returned to the buffet twice more.

  While the thin man tentatively sipped a Cristal beer and gazed unhappily about the room, the boy drank two Cokes, belched into his fist, his eyes never leaving his plate.

  ‘What’s their story, I wonder?’ Amanda murmured.

  Alex said, ‘Pretty obvious, wouldn’t you say?’

  ‘Well, yes. But they don’t seem to get on very well.’

  ‘Just a business transaction. And the boy is ashamed.’

  *

  Alex and Amanda didn’t wish to swim next morning. A strong wind had sprung up overnight and a choppy sea snapped on the shore and carried beach chairs into the sea. The Caribbean was transformed into petulant whitecaps and sand and spray blew against their bedroom window and wind whistled through the bullet hole in the glass.

  It was hard to imagine Frank and Ava nestled down in the Internacional today, with doors and shutters banging, and guests complaining loudly about the weather, and beach conditions so blustery that Alex and Amanda decided to spend the day in town.

  Despite their dislike of tourist habits, Amanda was not beyond buying a souvenir or two. Not souvenirs, she insisted, just gifts, presents for friends and family. Actually, she enjoyed markets more than she let on, and Che Guevara’s ubiquitous presence in every market stall – the interesting unkempt beard, the jaunty angle of the beret, the same thoughtfully virile frown into the middle distance – encouraged her to buy two more Che T-shirts, a Che belt buckle, a Che coffee mug and a set of Che salad servers.

  To Alex’s and her surprise, however, the constant appearance of Che’s image in the Varadero markets was matched by many caricatures of black Cubans. A grinning, fat-lipped Sambo and bandana-wearing, massively hipped Mammy were comically represented in every market stall, in tacky souvenirs of every sort, from ashtrays to bottle openers. Even in the stalls run by black shopkeepers.

  This was unsettling. Back home, as they said to each other, indeed in any Western country, such caricatures would be seen as blatant racism, properly ostracised and even possibly illegal. Here, where nearly half the population was black, Sambo and Mammy held equal sway with Che.

  ‘Hard to understand,’ said Alex, rifling through a display of beer-can coolers and drink coasters featuring drunkenly unconscious black men with crosses for eyes.

  ‘Only two dollars,’ said the dark-skinned stallholder.

  That evening, tiring of the standard of free food at the Internacional, they chose to stay in town and pay for dinner. However, they found the meal choices limited and the waiters distracted by a local baseball game on TV. It seemed that restaurant staff everywhere preferred to watch the game rather than serve meals. One restaurant eventually relented and took them in. But as the couple deliberated over their food selections, their heavily sighing waiter said sarcastically, ‘Why don’t you take the menu home?’

  They ate their ropa vieja quickly and left. They were waiting for a cab back to the hotel when they were accosted by two giant golliwogs.

  ‘Good god!’ Alex muttered. A skipping Sambo and a waddling Mammy, as wacky and single-minded as football club mascots, huge heads rolling on their shoulders, were making their way along the street, stopping traffic, posing for photographs and shaking hands with passers-by.

  As Sambo, arms outstretched for an embrace, bore down on her, a flustered and embarrassed Amanda cried out, ‘Oh no, I just knew it! Alex, do we give them money?’

  ‘I don’t know.’ He was nervously getting out his wallet. But as the big-buttocked Mammy sashayed up to him, agitating her booty, she shook her massive head, and from the depths of the head a deep male voice said calmly, ‘No need,’ and then Mammy hugged Alex to her padded body.

  *

  Back at the Internacional the nightly after-dinner entertainment was about to begin. A local dance troupe was setting up on the terrace, facing the sea. The wind had scarcely relented since morning and a flapping canvas sign declared, in English, Rhythm of the Night. Partly visible behind the sign, three girls and three boys were changing into glittery dance costumes. The girls smoked cigarettes as they dressed.

  Alex and Amanda easily found a table. They ordered free mojitos and sat back in the sea-wind to watch the performance. The wind scraped a plastic chair over the edge of the terrace and tumbled it a few metres along the sand.

  Amanda shivered and pulled her cardigan tighter. ‘What on earth are we doing?’

  ‘Soaking up atmosphere,’ Alex said.

  ‘Very funny.’

  ‘Look over there,’ he said. On the far edge of the terrace sat the mankini man and the Cuban boy.

  ‘At the same table!’ she said.

  The man was dressed in a long-sleeved white shirt and trousers and the wind was blowing out his shirt tails and ruffling his wispy hair. The boy was smoking, his eyes on the dancers’ preparations, and his face was more animated than usual.

  ‘He’s dressed up for a night out,’ Amanda said. ‘And they’re actually sitting together. It’s a proper date. Finally. I’m glad.’

  ‘You old romantic,’ Alex said.

  In chipped heels and laddered tights, the troupe came out from behind the canvas sign to dance. The wind howled in from the ocean, the girls’ hair blew across their faces, but in the difficult conditions, on the sandy and slippery terrazzo slabs, moving to recorded music, they prevailed.

  More than that. They succeeded. No dancer faltered. They looked proud, glamorous, professional and poised. They seemed optimistic that somewhere in this audience of rum-drunk Russians and beery Canadians was an international impresario eager to dress them in un-laddered costumes and immaculate shoes and sign them up for bigger engagements than the mouldy, Batista-era Hotel Internacional in Varadero, Cuba.

  They performed three routines. And anticipated their cue for the next. The young Rhythm of the Night dancers stood frozen in dramatic pose as they waited for the music to resume. And waited. Their music-player sat on a bench, suddenly unmanned. Where was the music for their next routine? Where was their DJ-choreographer? Had he or she fled the weather, the discomfort, the company’s existence?

  Still the dancers stood waiting, immobile, still proud, but stopped in their tracks, willing the situation to be different. Gradually they began sneaking glances at each other and putting their hands on their hips, and slumping. Embarrassed for them, the audience started to sigh and mutter. More time passed. To Amanda and Alex, years, decades, it seemed. Still no music. No more rhythm this night.

  Mortified, the lead dancer, a handsome brown-skinned youth with a shaved head, gave a furious grunt and they all strode off together to the shelter of their windblown canvas sign, shoes clicking on the terrazzo slabs, heads held high.

  The small audience clapped wholeheartedly. T
he sympathies of several nations went out to the dancers as they gathered behind the sign, muttering, cursing, wandering in tight angry circles, consoling each other and lighting cigarettes. As they began changing out of their costumes, the Cuban boy left the mankini man at the table and joined them. Alex and Amanda saw him commiserating with the lead male dancer.

  ‘Uh-oh, here’s trouble,’ Alex said.

  The young men hugged like old friends, and when he saw them talking animatedly, arms still around each other’s waist, and then casually kiss, the mankini man rose abruptly from the table and walked down to the beach.

  Only a few minutes passed before the Cuban boy glanced back to the table and noticed the man’s absence. The boy left his friend and the grumbling dancers, and in the light from the terrace he followed the mankini man along the windblown sand to the shoreline, calling his name.

  So the man whose beach costume and melancholy nature had so amused and intrigued the travellers had a name. To Alex and Amanda, the boy seemed to be calling Walter! Then the thin man and the boy following him both walked beyond the terrace light and out of the couple’s sight and thoughts and their vacation narrative.

  As it happened, melancholy Walter walked purposefully into the ocean, further than thigh-deep this time, and was immediately swept up in a rip. The Cuban boy, whose name Alex and Amanda had not discovered, followed his bobbing blonded head and billowing white shirt into the surf and tried to rescue him.

  Walter was carried three hundred metres north along the Hicacos Peninsula and dumped, exhausted, on the shore amongst some beached and broken paddleboats. The Cuban boy, who could barely swim, was swept away and drowned.

  The next day, Alex and Amanda Emerson would return on the bus to the beguiling atmosphere of Havana, to experience the haunts and habits of José Martí, Ernest Hemingway and Graham Greene. As with the ubiquitous Che, there was no getting away from José and Papa. Back to the Ambos Mundos, the Hotel Sevilla, El Floridita, Finca Vigía.

  However, this windy night at the Internacional in Varadero they left the terrace for the warmer saloon inside, ordered a last free mojito and optimistically tried to check their emails. But there was no wi-fi, as advertised. The hotel computer was ‘not working yet’. This news didn’t surprise them.

  One humid Sunday morning in February when the scent of frangipanis hung heavily in the air, Brian Tasker stood in his yard overlooking Lavender Bay while his mother-in-law shaved his body.

  Sunlight glanced off the surrounding oleanders and frangipanis and flickered through the native fig trees clinging to the cliff behind the house. The cliff marked the boundary of Luna Park, the harbourside funfair, and between the loops and slopes of the dormant roller-coaster that came to rumbling, screaming life every sunset, a mirage quivered on the surface of the bay.

  While Dulcie Kroger was kneeling and spreading shaving cream over her son-in-law’s legs, he tried to concentrate on the way the mirage lapped like a windswept lake on the boatshed roofs across the water. But once she began wielding the razor, working upwards from his size-thirteen feet, up his shins and calves to his thighs, he found it difficult to maintain interest in an illusion.

  During dinner the evening before, he’d mentioned something Alf told him at training. ‘Guess what?’ he said to Judy and her mother as he dug into the five courses Dulcie had served him, ‘The Yanks have had a bright idea – shaving their bodies before a race.’

  ‘Seriously, Brian?’ wondered Judy, her eyes twinkling. After six months marriage he still found her wide-eyed look and little-girl giggle intriguing and adorable. She knew it, too, which made her even more provocative to him. ‘Shaved all over?’

  A delicate creature to look at. Her chirpy laugh, blonde bob, bright nails and arms like twigs belied her nervous intensity. Full of nervous energy, a fast walker, someone who ran up and down stairs, a chatterer, she seemed hardly to eat.

  Compared to his meal – tonight it was chicken soup and buttered bread, six lamb chops and vegetables, potato salad, sliced bananas and ice cream, and cheese and biscuits, washed down with two glasses of milk – hers was miniscule: one chop, a smidgen of mashed potato and a smattering of peas to push around her plate.

  ‘All over?’ her mother repeated.

  ‘The whole body,’ said Brian. ‘All the exposed bits, anyway. They reckon it makes them swim faster.’

  Alf Wilmott, his longtime coach, had picked up this intelligence from an American friend who’d observed a training session of the swimming squad at the University of Southern California.

  ‘Shaving-down eliminates drag,’ Alf told Brian as he dried off after his afternoon hundred laps of the North Sydney municipal pool. He’d been his coach ever since Junior Dolphins, where he’d recognised the talent of the skinny nine-year-old who’d been brought along to swimming classes to help his asthma. More than a coach, really. A mentor, almost a father figure. Then through all the high-school and district victories over his teenage years, and the regionals, and his successes at state level. And now, if all went to plan, to the nationals and the selection trials for the Australian team.

  ‘We’ll give it a shot,’ Alf said. ‘The psychological effect makes you swim quicker. They say you feel smooth and slippery like a fish. Transformed.’

  Brian didn’t need reminding he needed to swim faster. To be transformed. As Alf repeated, unnecessarily, the Melbourne Olympics were only nine months away, in November. The Australian team would be selected in August, after the national titles. And there was another Sydney swimmer, Murray Rose, dogging his heels. Rose’s times for the 400 and 1500 metres freestyle almost matched his. And they were improving, and he was still only sixteen.

  This boy Rose was a handsome wunderkind, a blond prodigy who defied swimming’s traditions. For a start he was thin, rather than conventionally barrel-chested and broad-shouldered. And he trained in Sydney Harbour. The harbour? With its tides and waves and oil spills and flotsam. Moreover – veteran sports writers shook their heads in wonder – the kid was a vegetarian.

  They struggled to recall any top athlete who’d been vegetarian. Who didn’t exist on steak. The papers set up photographs of wet-headed, muddy-footed young Murray standing on the harbour foreshore after training, towel looped around his neck, skinny ribs poking out, happily munching a carrot or a stick of celery. Such a novelty. The newspapers were happy to provide the on-camera veggies.

  Brian knew Melbourne was his last possibility to make an Olympic team. His BSA Gold Star motorbike, slippery tram tracks on the Lane Cove line, and a broken elbow had ruined his chances for Helsinki in ’52. So he sold it. No more physical risks. He’d be twenty-four by the time of the Games in November; and twenty-eight, positively elderly, by the next Olympics, in 1960.

  ‘Get out the razor this weekend,’ Alf said. ‘We’ll do a time trial on Monday.’

  *

  Brian thought he’d surprise Judy with his new smooth body when she came home from St Francis Xavier on Sunday. Surely anyone could put a new Gillette in their razor and shave themselves down? But standing there in the sunny yard in his skimpy racing costume, cursing with the effort, he found it surprisingly tricky. How to shave the backs of your thighs? How to avoid nicking the tender skin behind your knees? The grunts, the near-naked contortions: a neighbour or passer-by might have wondered what was going on behind the frangipanis and oleanders.

  Dulcie was watching this comedy through the kitchen window and she came out into the yard. She was wearing a swimsuit, too: pale blue and strapless, in some sort of elasticised satiny material.

  ‘Come here, furry boy,’ she said, and took the razor from his hand.

  It was like a mild electric shock at first. As she scraped the razor up his shin and thigh to the edge of his swimsuit, his focus on the wavy roof mirages of Lavender Bay was fading fast.

  ‘Relax, kiddo,’ Dulcie said. ‘I used to be a nurse.’

  This was evident in her proficiency: in her frowning attention to her task and the frequent pauses to r
inse the razor to keep the blade keen.

  As if experience, her knowing boldness, changed anything. While Dulcie continued shaving his thighs Brian stared across the bay and tried to fight the reaction of his body and mind. A feeling somewhere between excitement and fear, stimulation and embarrassment. This woman kneeling before him, strands of auburn hair brushing his skin, her tanned cleavage looming below his eyes, was his mother-in-law!

  After she’d finished his thighs, she rose to her feet, rubbed more shaving cream on his stomach, and as a tremor ran down his body she performed a professional depilatory operation on the furry track of his abdominal hair.

  By now Brian was blinking rapidly and finding it difficult to regulate his breathing.

  ‘I’ve seen it all before,’ she went on. ‘The male body’s nothing new. I’ve done this a thousand times.’

  That made him feel even younger. In her competent hands he felt naive and innocent, a self-conscious adolescent. His heart was still hammering when she rinsed the razor again and attacked the curly hairs on his chest. As she worked, she hummed a sentimental song from the hit parade. ‘Oh! My Papa’.

  In a greater effort to distance his mind and body from Dulcie’s matter-of-fact razor work, Brian lifted his gaze to the sky where a pelican hovered over the bay, higher than he imagined possible for such an ungainly-looking bird. Then as his mother-in-law glided the blade carefully over his pectorals, gently circumnavigating the nipples, the pelican became a tiny soaring white blotch.

  The sun beat down. ‘“Oh! My Papa”,’ Dulcie hummed. In the native fig trees on the cliff, a clumsy flock of black cockatoos rustled and fed. The pelican skimmed out of sight.

  Brian closed his eyes on the sky. Orchestrated shapes like dew droplets or oil globules floated in patterns behind his eyelids and he could feel the sun’s rays on his upturned face.

  Now Dulcie stood on tiptoe. ‘Head up, Tiger,’ she said, and in four strokes she swept the razor from collarbone to chin. ‘Right arm up,’ she ordered. Brian’s arm hung tentatively in the air, trembling slightly. She had to steady it to shave his armpit.