Left at the Mango Tree

by Stephanie Siciarz

  Secretly, the humble Raoul indulged in but a single vanity: to be as worthy of some author’s time and trouble as the formidable Mr. Stan Kalpi had been. Raoul had confessed as much to me when I was a baby, or so I’m told, every time he read to me from the mathematician-musician’s story at bedtime. But then I grew old enough to talk, and the humble Raoul, who resignedly saw in himself an unlikely Mr. Stan, silenced his vain confidences lest I should repeat them and his secret be revealed.

  But that was a long way off. I had yet to utter my first words on that Tuesday that found Raoul in the library polishing his specs and feeling a bit like Mr. Stan Kalpi on the day he awoke and didn’t know who he was. Things were out of sorts. Raoul’s shirt was tight, his breakfast strange in his stomach, and echoes of threats (from both Pedro and Gustave) vied with the bluebottle inside his head. It was a decidedly different Tuesday from the kind Raoul relished at the end of a long week’s work.

  Miss Lila, too, saw that things were out of sorts. It wasn’t like Raoul to dirty his hands on the Sorcery shelf, or to get to his corner table so late in the day. But she had read the article about Puymute’s pineapples in the Morning Crier and suspected Raoul was shaken by the prospect of demystifying the mystery of the disappearing fruit. It never dawned on the librarian that Raoul might be researching a magical matter of a different sort.

  It wasn’t the missing pineapples that had Raoul so upset. He knew that the only mystery surrounding their disappearance was how Gustave had pulled it off, a feat that Raoul would get to the bottom of, sooner or later. The real reason for Raoul’s dismay, in addition to his ruined Tuesday routine, his tedious trek with Pedro, and his unpleasant exchange at Puymute’s, was still me. Nat had summed it up nicely: of course Raoul knew where babies came from, generally, just not this particular one. Where had I come from? I belonged to Edda and Wilbur as near as Raoul could tell, but I looked just exactly like Gustave. And Raoul’s now week-old ad had yet to produce a witness who could place Gustave at the scene of the crime or implicate him in any way in Edda’s pregnancy.

  Gustave had still not even seen me then, the baby that allegedly resembled him so. Maybe if he had, he would have been as interested as Raoul in bringing the truth to light. Or maybe not. Gustave and Raoul were different men. Raoul needed answers to the questions that crossed his path, while Gustave, well, his past had taught him how unfair and unyielding both questions and questioners could be, and he had learned it best to turn his back on both. The questioners would believe what they wanted. They always did. And Gustave found lonely truth more painful than persistent mystery.

  Poor Gustave. Raoul almost (almost) felt sorry for him. He was a victim of sorts, not of the magic of Oh (the existence of which Raoul still intended to disprove), but of the islanders who chose to see in Gustave the proof that appeased their superstitious curiosity and satisfied their magical appetites. And they discriminated against him accordingly.

  Raoul couldn’t shake the feeling he’d felt that day at Gustave’s house. Could it have been the pineapple wine that dulled his senses? Or had he really smelled fear and befuddlement in Gustave’s not-so-nonchalant denials about my mother? Raoul tried to remember. He had definitely smelled something, yes. He had heard something, too, that unspoken awful word. It couldn’t really exist, could it?

  “Aah!” Raoul pounded his fist on the library’s corner table in response to a tsetse fly that droned inside his head. From her altar in the center of the hall, Miss Lila looked at him crossly, her gaze a cocktail of rebuke and surprise. Raoul was out of sorts, he was. She wondered if he was drunk.

  Miss Lila Partridge was a clever chickadee, but she couldn’t have been more wrong. Raoul was as sober as she. (She did slip into the Belly for a tipple from time to time—vodka tonic—but was sober as a librarian that day, as was Raoul.) His malaise had nothing to do with bourbon or beer. And he wasn’t drunk on Puymute’s finest the night he confronted Gustave at his home. His senses, olfactory and auditory, had functioned as they should. Possibly, they said, Gustave had been duped along with the rest of them.

  And yet.

  How innocent could Gustave Vilder be, Raoul asked himself, if he had swiped two acres of pineapple and pinned it on a phantom in the press? Phony magic existed on Oh, but how to distinguish it from the real thing, if there was a real thing? How to prove which kind was responsible for me, his mysterious granddaughter, and Gustave responsible for the bogus burglary at the plantation?

  Raoul was mixing up his flies. He had started this unfortunate Tuesday investigating one crime and now he found himself contemplating another. The mathematical Mr. Stan Kalpi would never have approved of this. One polynomial at a time was all that Raoul should ponder. His process must be logical and his calculations orderly, if he was to harbor any hope of defining his undefined variables. Would Mr. Stan Kalpi have found his native land had he wandered willy-nilly on the road to his past, and navigated its contours in random dribs and drabs?

  Certainly not. When the detours confounded him and the curves cut too sharp, he stopped to line up his variables. With a stick in the sand, his toe in the mud, or even a finger in the air, he marked them down, and then he stepped back to have a look. He closed his right eye and looked with his left, then he tried it the other way round. He guarded his eyes from the rain or shaded them from the sun, then rubbed his chin and started all over again. Always it would surface, in the sand or the mud or the sky: an error in his arithmetic or the solution’s next logical step. “I see it now,” he would say. “I see it very clearly.” Then Mr. Stan Kalpi would put down his stick or put on his shoe and continue on his way.

  “Well, there you have it,” Raoul concluded. “Easy as pineapple pie. I just have to line up my variables.” He was talking to himself, or to Mr. Stan, or maybe even to his tsetse fly. Miss Lila shook her finger at him, sending another stiff glance his way. He pretended not to see her and busied himself lining up the articles that lay collected on the table. There was the notebook in which he had noted Gustave’s story and the ballpoint with which he had done so, the honey-dewed hanky he had used to wipe off his specs. Nat had given him hard candy en route to the library in the cab, and he aligned the shiny transparent yellow rocks with everything else. From the Sorcery shelf he had extracted a number of works, on witchcraft and voodoo and telekinesis, and a dictionary of spells with a meaty Appendix on potions and herbs, from Agrimony to Zinnia. These too he put in a row.

  Hmm.

  Raoul closed his right eye and looked with his left, then he tried it the other way round. He guarded his eyes from Miss Partridge’s reign and shaded them from the afternoon sun, then rubbed his chin and started all over again. No error surfaced, no suggestions sallied forth. Had he forgotten a variable when he lined them up? He patted his thighs and felt the contents of his pockets: cigarettes, house key, a few rainbow bills and some coins. Chewing gum, paper clip, pencil, and a tiny plastic shoe (a doll’s, presumably, and rescued from the gritty airport floor). Stopwatch, lip balm, bookmark, plum. Can’t hurt, he said to himself, and arranged the items with the others. He looked again, right, left, reign, sun, chin. Still nothing. Raoul drummed his fingers on the wooden tabletop and wondered if he hadn’t gotten Mr. Stan Kalpi all wrong. His mathematics worked in books, but not in real life. On Oh, Mr. Stan probably couldn’t find his way from the Crater to the Post. And if Bang had never come up with a mandolin-guitar, then no one had. Raoul’s favorite book was a bunch of lies.

  Now what?

  He felt the puzzled stare of Miss Partridge on the line-up of trinkets he had constructed, and he sniffed the storm brooding beneath her eyelids. “What a fool I am,” he whispered. There was no advice from Mr. Stan Kalpi on what to do in a case like this, but Raoul figured full retreat was as good a tactic as any. He stood and hiked up his trousers. Before he left he would return the volumes to their holes in the Sorcery shelf, to spare Miss Lila the climb on the stepladder and to curb her speculations as to what he was doing. Now, where had the stepla
dder got to?

  Raoul stepped back from the table, about to turn away from it, and stopped. Something in the linear junkyard on its surface caught his eye. An arithmetic error, announced by the plum or the paperclip. Or the solution’s next logical step, suggested by the stopwatch or the tiny plastic shoe.

  “I see it now,” he said. “I see it very clearly.”

  8

  The only dead bodies Gustave knew anything about were his parents’ and (unlike the ones in Raoul’s library book) those hadn’t dangled or oozed their deadly poison into pots. Theirs, rather, was a slow and subtle process of contamination that death had fettered, not unleashed: the Vilders’ poison wasn’t measured in droplets after the fact, but in a soft and terrible fog that had quietly deposited its mold into their growing son’s every pore, camouflaged cleverly though it was in loving pokes to the heart and turtle steaks for dinner.

  Whether or not the poison determined those likes and dislikes specific to Gustave, no one could say for sure, though most of the islanders tried. Little matter, what they said. His likes and his dislikes were what they were. Among the former, the spicy fried sausages of his youth and an especially good vintage of pineapple wine; among the latter, calypso night at the Buddha’s Belly, and books.

  Gustave hated to read. Ever since the days of “GRAMMAR IS FUN” and the fruitless spells he composed underneath its covers. No book had ever done for him what it had done for Raoul, filled the void in his heart or his head, furnished solace or escape or even a recipe for fritters. There was nothing Miss Lila Partridge could show him in the shade of the Cookery shelf. And he most certainly had no use for the likes of Mr. Stan Kalpi and his variables, or for next-door Betty’s matins. Gustave’s maths were simple and his religion absolute, their sum total no less than his ultimate and exclusive salvation.

  So the last thing he would have done that day, when Puymute was in the patch and Raoul drank tea with milk and accused Gustave of knowing about all those missing pineapples—the very last thing—was to run off to the library looking for answers and clues. Not that a clue wouldn’t have soon come in handy, for, like Raoul, Gustave was about to face a mystery of his own.

  Oh, he knew what had happened to the pineapples. That was magic pure and simple, and he had cooked it up himself. The islanders were hungry for magic, always had been. Hungry for something to hope for or to blame, and the temptation to satisfy their cravings once in a while was one to which Gustave periodically succumbed, his seasonal sins a bitter tribute to his sweet, snake-bitten mum.

  It wasn’t the pineapples that would pester Gustave. It was a white ribbon. A white ribbon that danced entangled in what he knew must be the softest yellow hair that ever was.

  After Raoul left Gustave’s office at Puymute’s that day the two spoke, Gustave walked from the plantation to town, continuing in his head his argument with Officer Orlean. “Get me? Figure out what I’ve been up to? I’d like to see him try, damn fool that he is! Fed my version of the facts to the paper, did I? Whilst he’s putting adverts in the bloody Morning Crier about that brat of his? Puh! That’s a cargo-shipful of nerve right there, it is.” His discourse and his path rambled, climbing and plunging, pulling first in one direction and then another, zigging and zagging their way over the holes and humps of the gritty surface that finally deposited Gustave in sight of the market square. He propped his palm against an almond tree, resting his case, and looked down at two stray dogs who sniffed at him in agreement. “That’s right,” he told them, adding a firm “humph” for emphasis.

  Below, the market beckoned, a susurrus of flapping batiks, clanking balances, and tumbling melons whose hollow voices were lost in the rustle of the wind. Gustave kicked the dogs aside and as he neared the noisy space, the rustle sharpened into hello’s and how-much’s and have-a-breadfruit-won’t-you’s, two-for-ten. Its voice shattered, the wind wafted angry scents through the crowd of shoppers—cocoa, saffron, swordfish, sweat—who were used to such tantrums and paid the scents no mind. Their eyes, though, never did grow accustomed to the market’s assault, and they flitted from sandals, baskets, bananas, and drums, to carrots, squash, potatoes, brooms, and jars, from the shiny sun that pierced their pockets to the faded canopy of blue-green-yellow-red umbrellas under which their rainbow bills changed hands.

  Among those accosted eyes that chased round the market square that day were my very own glassy rosebuds, for while Gustave puh-humph-ed his way to town and Raoul ahh-huh-huh-ed at the library under Miss Lila’s scrutinizing glare, my mother decided it was high time to take me for a walk. The islanders had all been so kind, making special trips to see me at home and bringing all those jams and jellies and blankets, but now the island itself awaited, Oh with its sandy wind and singing leaves, with its mangoes and its manchineel, to welcome its newest citizen.

  At just two weeks old, quite a respectable citizen I had become, despite my Vilder eyeballs and the fuzzy blotch on my cheek. I was long and plump and quiet and smooth, with a soft disposition and a generous portion of velvety blond hair that had already grown well past the rim of the sunbonnet sewn for me by midwife Abigail Davies. The excess was gathered into a tiny ponytail tied with a long white ribbon, which the nimble wind twisted through my hair each time my mother lifted me from the pram. It was this windy maneuver that caught Gustave Vilder’s eye as he approached the market collage of greens and gourds.

  He had almost reached Cordelia’s table of spices and marmalade, where Nat was telling Cordelia about a lady passenger who had lost her typewriter keys, when a flicker on the market’s other side jumped into Gustave’s view. The sun had somehow mixed itself up in the wind’s coiffing of my velvety locks, and the shine from one had entwined with that of the other. Like a spark before a fire, this familiar glint ignited in Gustave a flame that lay hidden inside him, a homecoming somewhere in his soul that crushed his guilt and puffed his chest, sloughed off the droop his shoulders still sometimes assumed. Only Miss Peacock ever made him feel this way, or close to it, but she was nowhere near. And this urge, though as primal as the ones she inspired, was to protect, not to procure.

  Gustave’s eyes moved from the shiny light at the tip of my ponytail to my fresh, white doughy face. My mouth was agape in a laugh, the inside of it as deeply red as both his eyes and mine. Gustave’s mouth gaped, then, too and he stumbled backward. Only a step or two, but enough to topple a pyramid of pale green coconuts that Harold Ticker had assembled at his feet next to a faded and illegible hand-painted sign.

  To the music of Harold’s angry shouts, the coconuts danced from one end of the square to the other. They waltzed under Cordelia’s table of spices and marmalade, which overturned when Harold dashed under it to recover his wares. They tangoed over the toes of brothers Jake and Stu Mutter, who mistook them for scurrying rats and scurried themselves. They merengued with old Sonia Susa, who jumped to avoid them, giggling like a girl at her first marimba-contest dance. Everyone else stood and scratched their heads, wondering what the scurrying and giggling and shouting was about, and how on earth the cautious Cordelia had managed to overturn her table.

  It was bound to happen, small as Oh is—not that Cordelia should overturn her table (though long had it wobbled), but that Gustave should spot Edda with me in her arms. When Gustave’s eyes moved from mine to hers, he instantly appreciated the weight of Raoul’s ad and the heights that the island gossip must have reached.

  He tried to reassure himself. So Edda’s baby looked like him. So what? He knew he had never touched her. The islanders just needed a helping of magic stew and they had served up Almondine. Soon enough their silly talk would cease. Unfortunate, Gustave thought, that they should satisfy their craving just then, though. Too much magic meant a bellyache and left a bitter taste, and what he had yet cooked up for Puymute’s pineapples could not be postponed. Once certain forces were in motion, it was impossible to stop them.

  Gustave could no more undo all he had done than Raoul could un-place his ad or un-see what he saw when
he lined up his variables at the library. And Edda could no more take back her baby than I could undo who I was, or un-tell you what you know of my story.

  Likewise, the “silly talk” turned out to be as unstoppable a force as the one Gustave had cooked up, for it did not cease as he predicted. The islanders’ bellyache grew, as Edda’s belly had some ten months before. It was proving to be too much. On Oh they tolerated, even savored, Gustave’s poison, but only in small doses. Any more than that and their tolerance, even approval, turned into indignant hatred. Which Gustave had learned to accept, when he was at fault. But to suffer their rebuffs for something he hadn’t done, well that was too much, too.

  Up to then, he hadn’t understood the islanders’ readiness to blame him for Edda’s baby, but after seeing me in my mother’s arms, he saw why they couldn’t do otherwise, and was soon part of the island faction that accepted Edda’s puzzled denials of the events leading up to her pregnancy, for puzzling they were indeed. Had Gustave seen Edda somewhere, admired her, and imagined himself in her arms? Had he wished himself inside her like he had wished his mother dead? Had she stumbled into the seedy port bar unrecognized and fallen under his spell, landed in his bed? Perhaps he had dreamed Almondine into being.

  Wherever the truth lay, it was perhaps unfair before to suggest that Gustave would not have been interested in bringing it to light, that he and Raoul should have differed on the matter of looking for answers and clues. The mystery of me is most definitely one that Gustave would have wished to solve. That I belonged to the Vilder family tree, and he was convinced that I did, bothered him little. What worried him was that he had no recollection of planting any such seed. Either the forces he commanded were greater than even he had ever dreamed, or he found himself at odds with forces over which he had no command whatsoever. Both prospects frightened him. So, too, did the idea that his every move now was under the islanders’ scrutiny: not all mysteries were meant to be solved.