Too Close to the Wind

by Richard Attree

  Winter became spring (although you’d be hard pressed to notice much of a difference) and the Kangaroo Windsurf School was thriving. ‘We Hop Higher!’ was our slogan and ‘No Worries’ our message. Children started travelling from further afield to join the local kids and Nicole managed to persuade the mayor of Cabarete to extract some funding from the minister of sport. Along with Miguel’s aspirations to be a pro windsurfer, several of the other kids had the potential to become instructors and a few were already helping out in rental centres up and down the beach. For sure there was less fame and fortune in windsurfing than baseball, but it could still be a way to make a living for these kids.

  For me, windsurfing was more than a sport—it was a lifestyle and a religion I practised every day. I taught them its values: freedom, self-reliance, respect for nature, stoicism and patience when the conditions didn’t cooperate, and the comradeship of a tribe of fellow enthusiasts.

  April 2016. After the intense winter sessions in waves of consequence, it was time for the manic partying of Semana Santa (Easter week)—so crazy that all water-sports were banned because there were simply too many drunk people in the water! After that, the tourists left us alone for a couple of months and the wind and waves took a break as well.

  Spring was a quiet season in Cabarete. Nicole and I were happy to have some time to ourselves. She was focussed on her own work now, with a stack of extraordinary paintings in the studio. There was talk of a ‘meet the artist’ day to introduce her to the public, perhaps sell a few, or score a commission. She was even thinking of trying to get an exhibition in the capital city, Santo Domingo.

  I finally started working on the book I always said I’d write—a memoir of my adventures with Robo, a windsurfing equivalent of Kerouac’s ‘On the Road’. Once I’d written the first sentence: The day I should have drowned started well enough… it seemed to open the floodgates and a torrent of experiences, ideas and emotions poured out. I started with my survival story and jumped in and out of my life in a series of flashbacks.

  I was surprised to find I got as much of a buzz from writing as I did from windsurfing. Both activities were completely immersive. Each word, sentence, paragraph and chapter posed a challenge as unique as a gybe, jump, or wave-ride. Nothing else mattered when I was writing or windsurfing, but the big plus was that I could write whenever I had a free moment—no need to wait for wind and waves. So it was the perfect foil for my other passion.

  Writing the memoir was a cathartic, confessional experience—my way of confronting the past, admitting my mistakes and moving on. It was the story of my obsession with the ocean and adventure; the story of an outsider searching for an identity; my struggle for survival; and, in the end, a story about loyalty and betrayal.

  I’d never told my family what I was going through and I couldn’t ask Robo or Alison for forgiveness … but I could write it all down and tell the truth. Perhaps one day it would be published, maybe even become a best seller, and they’d understand why I did the things I did … I thought, somewhat naively.

  At one point I quoted something the Master had said to me: “I think perhaps you have been sailing too close to the wind, Nick, just like Icarus was tempted to fly too close to the sun.” As soon as I quoted him I knew I had the title: ‘Too Close to the Wind’. He was right: it was a perfect description of my stalled life—a series of miscalculations and misjudged angles. Nobody can sail straight into the eye of the wind—there’s a critical angle beyond which you stall and come to a dead stop.

  I showed what I’d written to Nicole, hoping for her approval or at least that she might understand me better. I thought reading it might bring us closer and apart from anything else, it would be good for her English. She read it slowly, digesting it like fine French cuisine—a morsel at a time, savouring some passages, laughing at others, stopping often to ask the meaning of a word, occasionally choking on an indigestible episode. When she finished it she gave me the strangest look. The mix of sadness and joy was unlike anything I’d seen from her before—but perhaps all emotions are just different aspects of the same truth, different sides of the same coin.

  She kissed me and told me she recognised herself in my story. We were the same—outsiders. She because she was an artist, me because I was forever hopping around like a kangaroo. We were mixed-up mulattos from the wrong side of town. We shared a tough background and we were survivors, searching for a better life—not just materially but spiritually. Perhaps we’d never find it. Perhaps we’d always be alone. We were mirror images of each other. Soulmates.

  Her next painting was a portrait of us, surrounded by ‘power objects’ in her Magic Realism manner. She explained that by placing us together, framed by these objects, the painting would protect us. It was a portrait of two spirits who shared the same consciousness. She called it: ‘The Kangaroo Kid and his Voodoo Child’.

  I had no idea whether the painting would really protect us. From what? What does anyone know of their future? All I knew was that when she showed it to me, in that precious moment, the Kangaroo Kid and his Voodoo Child were soulmates.

  9

  Día De Muertos

  June 2016. Spring became summer and the tourists returned to Cabarete, bringing the wind with them. The ocean was flatter but it blew every day, and that’s how they liked it. The lack of surf made my own sessions rather two dimensional (waves were the missing third dimension) but it was great for teaching the kids at the Kangaroo windsurf school.

  We were well established now, funded by the government and promoted by the tourism authority. Miguel was a local hero, winning contests, signing sponsorship deals and well on the way to becoming a professional athlete—at the age of fourteen! His parents were great. They kept him well grounded in reality and insisted he finish his education.

  I was part of the community—welcomed by the pueblo in the jungle, respected by the Cabarete windsurfing tribe, even the mayor occasionally popped in to the school to say hola. It felt like the Kangaroo Kid had grown up and become a contender. Perhaps this was what the Master meant when he talked about “fulfilling my potential”?

  Whatever. I’d done it for myself. It was my life, not his. Whenever I thought about him, the black dog, paranoia, crept into my thoughts. I wasn’t his puppet, but I couldn’t escape the nagging feeling that he was still pulling the strings, somehow.

  Nicole’s paintings were selling well, and not just to tourists. A gallery in Santo Domingo was interested in showing her work, but when I asked how they’d discovered her she was unusually guarded. I thought we had no secrets from each other, so I was a bit upset.

  Eventually, she confessed that the Master had provided her with a letter of introduction which had been included in the package I’d delivered. She hadn’t wanted to mention it because she knew I was worried that she was still somehow contracted to him. I understood why—because he’d helped her to escape from Haiti, but she wouldn’t tell me how. It was the one taboo subject between us: what did she have to do to release herself from this contract?

  August 2016. We went hiking with the dogs into the hills between the DR and Haiti, Nicole’s homeland. She said she wanted to show me how things were there and to teach me about Vodou without distractions, so we left Jacqueline with a neighbour in the pueblo.

  Looking into Haiti from a hilltop above the border fence was like looking into hell. All the vegetation, anything edible or useful, had been stripped to leave a barren wilderness. The rainforest was being turned into an empty plain of mud, scarred by huge craters where gravel had been extracted. The banks of a river were crowded with shanty huts piled on top of each other and the river was an open sewer running with shit. There was frantic activity, angry shouts, bad smells … The place had an edginess, an edge of darkness and violence. The dogs seemed to sense it too, growling to themselves all the time.

  I wasn’t enthusiastic when Nicole announced we’d be spending the night there. It wouldn’t have been my choice of campsite, especially when she told
me that a group of nuns had been ambushed, raped and brutally killed nearby. But she insisted, explaining that the hilltop had a special significance for her. It was a sacred place for her ancestors—a place where spirits were set free. She’d been there several times before, to take part in Vodou ceremonies in which animals were sacrificed. For a moment I feared for Legba and Simbi, but she assured me there’d be no live sacrifice that evening.

  We lit a fire and talked deep into the night. Nicole began by telling me her life story. She was born into a large family, the middle daughter of three older brothers and two younger sisters. Crammed into a tiny, chaotic house there were plenty of mouths to feed, but they all did their bit. The extended family managed to scrape a living and they usually had enough to eat.

  Her father was a black Haitian—a violent cabrón who ruled them like a dictator. He was especially cruel to the female members of the family and his macho cruelty established Nicole’s distrust of men:

  “That hijo de puta, he just like my husband, like all men ... except my Kangaroo Kid” she added, smiling shyly at me.

  Her mother was French, white, but just as poor. She was from a broken home—the illegitimate child of an illicit affair. Nicole’s father had rescued her and he never let her forget it. She was beautiful, kind and gentle, but she suffered from depression.

  Nicole was her favourite daughter. Her mother taught her about French style, art, and her secret knowledge: Vodou. She was desperate for Nicole to get an education and escape from poverty. But one day, when Nicole was ten years old, she came home from school to find her mother had taken an overdose of sleeping pills.

  “I never forget that day” she said, bitterly. “Now I have no one to protect me from my father. Life is more terrible for me and my sisters. But it make me stronger, better survivor.”

  Nicole grew up in a barrio of Port-au-Prince where gangs controlled everything, drugs were everywhere, murders were common. To survive you had to be smart, streetwise. One of her brothers was gunned down right outside her house and she told me about it in a shockingly matter-of-fact way:

  “He was ... how-you-say? In the wrong place, at wrong time, with wrong tipos.”

  She would have been just another chica from the barrio but she had a talent for making pictures and this protected her. The gangs ‘commissioned’ her to paint the walls of their barrio with their tags—their logos, marking their territory like dogs. She integrated them into her own sophisticated images and people sensed her street art was special …

  “Without my painting I am nobody. Art is my secret weapon, the way I survive.”

  Her story struck a familiar chord. My background was nowhere near as harsh as her’s but we shared the same aspirations. I’d managed to escape from a dead-end fishing town by educating myself in mister BigFish’s library, while Nicole had hoped art would be her way out of the ghetto. Sadly it wasn’t to be:

  “When I was a teenager a teacher at my school say my paintings are special. She speak to my father, tell him I must study art ...”

  She paused, staring into the fire, perhaps imagining a life that might have been.

  “But my father get mad and he say: No! Nicole no is especial. She must clean, cook, earn her place like the rest of his women.”

  When she was just seventeen her father was offered money to arrange a marriage to one of his friends—a man twenty-five years older than her. He turned out to be another malvado cabrón, forcing her to be his domestic slave, a baby machine, beating her when she begged to be allowed to have a life of her own.

  She kept painting though, in secret, and whenever she could she smuggled pictures down to the market, occasionally managing to sell one. This was how she met the Master. She taught him what she knew of Vodou and he helped her to escape.

  Just before she ran away she took her daughter into these hills to ask the spirits to protect them …

  “This place is special. Here there is a way into the spirit world. I camp here with Jacqueline and I tell her everything I know—the ‘Knowledge’. Now I do the same for my Kangaroo Kid.”

  It was around midnight when she reached into her bag and produced a leather pouch and a small wooden pipe decorated with oddly familiar symbols. She opened the pouch and emptied the contents into my hand: some irregular shaped brown pellets. They looked like beans or large seeds.

  “The Master give me these” she explained, “to help teach the one he sends to me—you!”

  I looked at her, wary as ever when his name was mentioned.

  “The seeds are from a cactus plant which grow in your own country.”

  Now I remembered: he told me that he’d done some travelling “down under”. I examined the pipe more closely and realised why the markings were familiar—they were traditional Aboriginal symbols.

  “We also have plants like this here, mushrooms, but this cactus work better. Alejandro tell me your native people are using it for hundreds of years.”

  I grinned, proud of my heritage and our psychedelic plants.

  “We smoke together and then I show you the spirits here. They are all around us!”

  “Really?”

  All I could see were fireflies, a full moon, and stars. The forest enclosed us in its soft, green grip.

  She packed a few seeds in the pipe and crushed them into a powder. Then she took a stick from the fire, lit the pipe, and drew the smoke into her lungs. She closed her eyes and passed the pipe to me. We shared it in silence for a while.

  Time jumps. Nicole speaks to me, but her voice comes from another world. She tells me to focus. Not just to look, but to see. She tells me to look at things as she does—as an artist. To see form instead of objects. To see curves, colours, angles, the shape of the space between objects ...

  I look around, trying to see things as she does.

  She explains how our conscious mind overlays a grid on the world to make sense of it. I must strip away the grid to see the reality beneath it. To see things as they are. To see the spirit world.

  I’m trying, but now everything is blurred, out of focus. I catch glimpses, out of the corner of my eye—brief glimpses into her portal, her world—glimpses of things my mind tells me are not there … but then they dissolve again.

  She points to things: water, trees, mountains. Tells me the names of the spirits who are found there—spirits who guard and protect us.

  I gaze into the fire, watching the sparks fly into the night sky, listening to these stories from another world, marvelling as she explains her Knowledge.

  Time jumps and suddenly I’m seeing things differently … I look into Legba and Simbi’s eyes and I see they are spirits, not dogs. I see shapes made of air, surrounding us like magnetic forces. I see the wind—my friend for so long. Now I can see him! I see things I can’t even begin to describe.

  Time jumps, again. Has it been a dream? I don’t think so, but now I’m exhausted. I’m lying in my sleeping bag, gazing at the dying embers of a fire. Drifting. Asleep.

  The next morning. The molecules of psychoactive cactus have dissolved in my bloodstream. I’ve left the alternative reality and returned to ‘normality’. Time was flowing in a straight line again instead of jumping around like a kangaroo.

  Nicole woke me gently. I opened my eyes and took in the view from our hilltop campsite. The forest was bathed in the red glow of dawn. Haiti was waking up beneath us—just another day in Hell for them.

  My friend, the wind, swirled around pulling at the trees. Legba nuzzled my face and Simbi licked my feet. The fire was still glowing and Nicole was making tea.

  “Bonjour, Malcolm” she said, with an impish grin. “Comment ça va toi? ¿Qué tal? How are you feeling?”

  “I’m not sure ...”

  I told her I didn’t know what to make of the previous night. It was confusing and a bit scary, but I was lucky to have shared it with her. I was privileged to be her student, to learn about Vodou, the spirit world, the Knowledge. It reminded me of my own tribe—not the windsurfers but
my roots in the people of the Dreamtime. I wondered whether I would ever return to my own homeland and make my peace with the spirits there.

  September 2016. The summer was nearly over when Nicole had her exhibition in Santo Domingo. Most of the tourists had left Cabarete and we were looking forward to the autumn—another quiet season on the north shore. Her show was a big success and for a while she was the talk of the town, heralded as the next big thing to come out of the Dominican art scene. She sold several paintings and we went on a shopping spree buying stuff for the hut, the pueblo, and the school.

  I was pleased to see her receive the recognition she deserved, but I couldn’t forget that it was the Master who made it happen. We’d been together nearly a year and he was never mentioned, but now his presence loomed over us again. He pulled her strings, just as he did mine.

  Nicole’s exhibition was the high point of that year. We were happy together, growing ever closer, soulmates making the most of our simple lifestyle, on an upward learning curve ... but we’d reached the apex of our loop.

  October 2016. The hurricane hit the island just before our first anniversary. I’d never experienced anything like it but the locals were used to los jodidos huracanes. They battened down the hatches, rode it out in a shelter, and got on with their lives again. The shelters were built to withstand these massive tropical storms and their huts were soon rebuilt from the same palm trees, corrugated iron, and recycled windsurfing components. When you don’t own much you haven’t got much to lose.