“As far as I’m concerned, I was born when I turned twenty-one,” she said to Porter. That was when she had bolted for Paris to study with Mathilde Marchesi, who had trained so many luminaries of the era: Emma Calvé, Frances Alda, Ellen Gulbranson, Selma Kurz, and the detestable Nellie Melba, whose success would haunt Isabel’s career. Her father, who had been led to believe that Isabel was engaged to a Harvard divinity student, cut off her allowance and disowned her. A month later he died at home of aggressive stomach cancer, and she was forced to fall back on her own devices. For a while she modeled nude. Not for anyone famous like Rodin or Bouguereau but for a gentlemen’s painting club made up of lonely geezers who met on Thursdays and Saturdays to be reminded of what it was like to have a hard on. The salon was on the Boulevard de Clichy and had a funky, dusty, fungus smell. She loved it.
Though Mathilde Marchesi favored the detestable Melba, she recognized her American pupil’s potential. Isabel once described her emerging voice to a newspaper reporter as “very flexible, with a natural trill and chromatic scale and a big working range from A below the line to C-sharp above, the pronunciation unfettered and the diction clear.” By the 1894 season, she had ridden her clear diction and natural trill all the way to New York, lifted on one of the most scintillating career arcs in late-century opera. Faust, Cavalleria Rusticana, Lucia di Lammermoor, Roméo et Juliette.
It was all roses and bon bons until one frosty November day in 1899. She was on stage at the Auditorium in Chicago, before a capacity crowd of 4300, as Elsa of Brabant. Twice in the first bars of Einsam in trüben Tage, she went flat. Gasps. Whispers. Hissing. The music continued. Her high notes sounded like shattering glass. More hissing. She flubbed the description of the knight of her dreams, her voice full of more holes than an old sock, at which point she fled the stage to jeers and curses of the sort usually heard only from the gallery at La Scala. Her tessitura was shot to hell.
First she blamed Mathilde Marchesi. Then she sought therapy in London from Manuel Patricio Rodríguez García, who had treated Jenny Lind. Rodríguez García put a laryngoscope of his own invention down her throat and declared her perfect. He was ninety-four years old and deaf.
She underwent hypnosis with Bernheim in Paris.
She withdrew to the Hamptons for a two-week silent retreat at a natural-living commune in the vain hope that her voice would heal.
She listened carefully to herself and felt that she had recovered, but everyone she performed for made her stop after a few notes.
Finally, she decided that the detestable Melba had cast the evil eye on her, transatlantically, and she spent the next several months tossing gobs of money at a succession of soothsayers, voodoo doctors, quack spiritualists, gypsy fortune-tellers, Irish fortune-tellers, and wrinkled Calabrian crones on the Lower East Side who floated slips of paper on bowls of water. Nothing worked. The public washed its calfskin-gloved hands of her.
Her numerous handsome but cash-strapped Village beaux found women who were more monetarily endowed. Her debts mounted. She was left as bereft as a heroine in an Edith Wharton novel. She saw the unfolding of a bleak future.
Thank God the banana-king had arrived in Manhattan on his annual trip to see his banker, his tailor, and his mother, in that order, moving uptown from Wall Street to 38th Street to 72nd Street, where he crossed paths with Isabel at a charity event his mother sponsored for domesticated animals that had been abandoned by their owners. She—Mrs. D.L. Whitaker, widow—had invited Isabel Eames to perform. Mrs. Whitaker was tone deaf and was not, unlike most women in her social circle, an opera buff. She did not realize that Isabel, whose name she was used to seeing in the newspapers, was on the skids.
Isabel knew it would be a long road back to the Met and might involve such unpleasant stops as Upper East Side dinner parties, so she had said yes when the invitation reached her, somehow, in Southampton.
She reprised the aria from Lonhegrin and it was pretty bad. Walter Whitaker sipped champagne and gazed at Isabel’s operatic bosom. He thought she was enchanting. Like his mother, he had no ear for music.
Isabel was deeply, deeply in debt. Walter Whitaker had a ton of money.
“My goodness,” Porter said and wiped his face with his handkerchief. They had ended up on the steps of the church, in the only patch of shade on the plaza at that hour of the day, and were sharing a papaya. Porter scooped out the gray seeds, like glooey clumps of fish eggs, with his pocketknife and tossed them in the spiny weeds by the steps. A thundercloud of whining insect-life descended on the clumps and almost immediately migrated to their persons. Isabel dug out the red-orange flesh with her fingers. Juice ran down her wrists and stained the cuffs of her shirtwaist. Her armpits were damp with perspiration and her hair drooped in the heat like a mass of malodorous orchids. She squeezed a lime over the mash of papaya on the palm of her shapely hand and slurped.
“You must have seen something in the man worth marrying,” Porter ventured.
“Power, I suppose. But it was mainly money. I like money, though I wish I did not. Unfortunately, a woman has a hard time earning her own. Also, I like a man who does what he says he will. Walter always does exactly what he says he will. But I forgot to ask him whether he intended to establish a home in Manhattan. I never thought we would sail for—” She looked around. “Here. I admit it: I made a mistake the day Walter and I applied for a license. I am so sick of this bung-hole of a town. There’s no one here who cares.”
She looked at him imploringly.
“No glory?”
“Have you seen the men who wash up here? Not a backbone among them. Jeez.”
“By the way, my name isn’t Henry,” Porter said.
“Why should it be?” Isabel said.
Geddie could hear the faint sounds of a staff at work, although he had no idea what they could be doing during the heat of the day. Sybil was curled in a ball on a cowhide chair while the consul bent over his big pigeon-holed desk, working on his annual report. He had finished his official annual report two weeks before and had dutifully posted it on a Mobile-bound cutter which had put in to Coralio for an afternoon. He reckoned that Alvey Adee at State had received it just about yesterday.
Now, cigar smoke swirling around his head, he put his mind to drafting a more accurate version of the facts, figures, and events, back-channel-bound for the branches of government where bureacrats could evade the slings and arrows of political misfortune, keeping the clocks wound, the presses rolling, and the world turning on its axis for the benefit of Wall Street and the betterment of the Republic that paid their salaries, mostly.
From time to time he glanced over to make sure that the balding little monkey was still breathing. His heart expanded painfully. She had experienced stomach upset at lunch after eating a cricket she found under the dining table. He had dosed her with seltzer. She burped softly in her sleep.
The consul’s afternoon project involved organizing columns of figures, with commentary and appendices, showing, among other things, the gross tonnage of steamships owned outright or contracted for the trade by the half-dozen fruit companies that Vesuvius allowed to operate in the region in order to avoid prosecution in the United States under the Sherman Act. But only Vesuvius made a damn bit of difference. The company’s unofficial true numbers showed a marked jump in the fiscal year just ended. Geddie recorded the gross tonnage of the fleet:
Steamship Gross Tonnage
Greennbrier 3,332
Valhalla3,493
Miami3,762
Suriname3,775
Matina3,870
Pacuare3,891
Nicoya3,911
Coppery3,992
Norma Zent3,999
Barranca4,111
Aracataca4,440
Cartago4,937
Sixaola5,018
Tyra5,019
&
nbsp; Cormorant7,782
Tenadores7,788
He checked this list against the slips of cabbage-colored paper he kept in cigar boxes in the desk. These were ad hoc reports from the custom houses, Caribs, Amish pioneers, pursers, captains, and stevedores, Jamaican and Sicilian; intercepted French and German cables; copies of letters; manifests; minutes of semi-official meetings; bits of badly translated crop reports; scraps of military interrogations. Among the coded scribbles could be found records of the goods that Vesuvius belched into the world—bananas, coffee, pineapples, indigo, sarsaparilla, coconuts, oranges, cowhides, opals, pita hemp, mahogany, rubber, and more bananas—the precise measuring of which could be translated into digits on ledger sheets in New York and Washington to determine the proper deployment of military resources, political promises, and diplomatic pressure, as well as to allow the unappointed guardians of capitalism to predict their profit-taking in the commodities futures market. None of this abstracted wealth trickled down to Geddie, but for performing his patriotic service he got to die a slow death on foreign soil, strumming his six-string, and looking after his little monkey, who was just now stretching herself awake. She yawned and shivered. Geddie tossed her a peanut, which she snatched and swallowed without cracking the shell. Now she would be sick all night.
He sighed grimly and reached for the telephone. He plugged the cord into the second jack of the key exchange—the line to the custom house—and cranked the battery. There was a rush of distant wind in the earpiece and for a moment he was afraid, of what he knew not.
Click. “Evans,” said a thin voice.
Geddie could not keep his annoyance in check. “I know it’s you, Elliot. Who the hell else could it be? There are only four telephones in the whole town.”
“Five,” said the reedy voice of Elliot Evans. “What do you want?”
“I need the numbers on pita exports for the first three quarters of ’04.”
There was a shuffling of papers, some light breathing and—was that a drumming of fingers? “3920 acres; thirty-five tons gross.”
“I mean the real numbers, Elliot.”
Pause. A crashing of file drawers. “4475 acres; forty-two tons gross.”
“Those are the true figures?”
Long pause. “Yes.”
“All bound for New Orleans?”
Even longer pause. “Yes.”
“I find that hard to swallow.”
“I don’t care,” the customs agent said and hung up.
Geddie cradled the earpiece and shoved his cigar back between his teeth. He wrote the figures in the report, adding, in a blind stab at accuracy, ten percent to each number. He still had to draft the section dedicated to the political situation on the coast, not to mention the monthly weather reports, and now he was too irked to concentrate.
It irritated him whenever Evans made sure that he, Geddie, knew that he, Evans, was withholding information. It irritated him even more when the man corrected him. For instance, the telephone. Technically there were five telephones in Coralio—one each at the consulate, the custom house, the Hotel de los Estranjeros, the Whitaker estate, and the firehouse; but the telephone at the firehouse—a dilapidated adobe building where the volunteer brigade stored its equipment and a heap of broken furniture—hardly counted since there was no one there to answer it. When something caught on fire, rushing to the church and ringing the bell was the only effective way of summoning the volunteers. Once or twice a month some local kids broke into the firehouse and telephoned the consulate or the custom house to practice their lexicon of curses and insults. They knew better than to ring the hotel, because Cornelia Anderson spoke Spanish and recognized their voices, or the Whitaker house, because, they reasoned, upsetting that particular gringo might lead to a visit from a Vesuvius security detail, which only came down from the hilltop to mete out justice, personal or commercial, in ways beyond imagining. The soldiers at the cuartel performed the more mundane police duties such as running down rogue politicians and torturing smugglers who had neglected to pay into the graft. They were very good at their job.
Elliot Evans was the sort of bloodless number-farmer Geddie would have recruited for a customs agent if he wanted to make sure that every penny reached its proper pocket. Evans had appeared in Coralio some two years earlier, a delegate of the new dollar-diplomacy, whereby the United States of America seized the duties, in U.S. currency, at ports scattered across the Caribbean. The aim was to make whole the J.P. Morgan combine, which held bad paper on a dozen unbuilt electrification projects and deep-water ports; the effect was to open a protected space for octopuses like Vesuvius Fruit Company. Men such as Walter Whitaker and Elliot Evans—one a bully, one a pernicious drudge—were two warring arms of the same creature. Whitaker hated that this pipsqueak agent of the Morgan interests felt free to skim duties from his banana exports. On the other hand, the presence of all the Evanses along the coast ensured that the interests of Vesuvius Fruit would be protected, if necessary by military force.
Whitaker and Evans occupied more of John Buchanan Geddie’s official thinking than he liked. For that matter, unofficial thoughts about the two of them kept him awake in the wee hours, despite guaro and the midnight needle in his arm. Especially Evans. The man had the personality of a sewing machine. He neither smoked nor drank; he did not play cards; he ate mainly yellow vegetables; he slept but four hours a night; he suffered fits of fever with the indecent equanimity of a goddamned bodhisattva. No infectious mosquito would ever wreck his kidneys. When Geddie looked at the blank blond face, he saw writ across it the story of the rising century, impersonal, impartial, and relentless. Once Evans had confided, in a rare flash of humanity, that he maintained an interest in hummingbirds-of-the-world. He had asked to borrow Wallace’s Malay Archipelago from the consulate library, but he never brought it back.
Why, Porter questioned himself, as he typed on the Underwood one hot afternoon, was this so satisfying? It made him itch. He scratched his head. He scratched his chest. His armpits. With a mew of horror, he tore off his shirt and undergarment and sprinted to the window. In the palm-filtered light, he could make out inflamed red bumps on his skin. He looked more closely. Creatures the size and color of sesame seeds were crawling through the thickets of his chest hair. Lice.
In a panic he tore the coverlet, sheets, and pillowcase from the bed and hustled to the window. He threaded the linens through the jalousies, and they fluttered to the street. The soldiers at the cuartel looked up at his window without much interest. One of the soldiers ambled over and prodded the pile with the barrel of his rifle. He looked back at his companions, shrugged, and gathered up the linens and carried them off.
Porter scratched himself like a dog in the weeds. Now that he knew he was lousy, his scalp and torso felt inflamed, invaded, colonized.
He sprinted down the hallway and pounded on Dr. Grieg’s door. “Doc, you in there?”
“I’ll be in the bar after six p.m. Cash only,” came a muffled voice. “If you’re from the Etinel, slide the money under the door.”
“It’s Bill Porter. Open up!”
“Oh, hi, Bill. I’m reading.”
“Open up, Doc. I need you.”
“I’m not getting out of bed, Bill. If you want to see me, you’ll have to break down the door.”
Porter sprinted back to his room and pulled on his shirt. He tumbled downstairs to find Pierre and his clump of keys. He stuck his head in the kitchen, but no one was around. The bar, too, was deserted, and Cornelia Anderson was not at the front desk.
Porter ran outside. Pierre was leaning against the portico, wearing dark glasses, a panama hat, and a buttermilk-colored suit. He was trading insults with one of the Sicilian banana workers.
“Vous êtes un baiseur de rats!”
“Figlio di puttana!”
“Mes couilles sur ton front!”
&
nbsp; “Stronzo!”
There was no apparent object of disagreement; they were just exercising.
Porter reached over and yanked Pierre into the lobby by the collar. “Here’s a buck. I need you to unlock Room Three.”
Pierre shook free and smoothed his jacket like a flustered bird calming its feathers. “Happy to oblige,” he said, pocketing the coin, and sidled off toward the staircase.
A minute later, Porter stepped into Dr. Grieg’s room. It looked almost exactly like his own. Porter stood looking at the quarantine doctor, who was sitting in bed, reading a book. His left cheek bulged with chaw. He turned his head and spat at his Hong Kong spittoon. “I’ll be damned,” he said. “Sit down, Bill. And get that egregious butthole out of here.”
Pierre turned his dark glasses toward the doctor. “Thought you’da want company. You’re always sayin’ how the only folks come visit is dope heads and whores.”
Dr. Grieg shot a thick slurping stream of tobacco juice in his direction, hitting the door as Pierre yanked it closed behind him.
The doctor adjusted his steel-rimmed spectacles and went back to his book. Porter sat down on a broke-bottom cane chair like the one he had in Room Five. Resisting an unbearable urge to scratch, he cleared his throat.
“What?”
“I seem to have contracted a case of Pediculus humanus.”
Banana Republic Page 7