by Rita Pomade
“Are you okay, mom?” he asked.
“Yeah, I’m fine,” I said. He nodded and went back to his reading. It’s what he expected me to say. There was a tacit agreement between us that we stay away from any discussion of Bernard’s growing mood swings. Our lives were in his hands, and neither of us wanted to escalate tensions by forming some kind of “him against us” pact.
I picked up a yachting magazine but had a hard time concentrating. I went into the aft-cabin and tried to journal, but I couldn’t write anything. And meditation was out of the question.
Bernard busied himself replenishing his saki supply. He had almost finished his first brew, and was in the process of starting a second batch before he ran out. In the beginning, I liked the idea of our homemade saki, but his constant imbibing had turned me off to the pleasure of that evening drink. I resented his obsession with the little still he had created, but I hadn’t yet connected his drinking to his mood swings.
Towards mid-day, I came on deck and spoke to Bernard for the first time since the incident. “We have to provision,” I said. It wasn’t essential, but I needed something to distract me.
Bernard was in a good mood. It was as though the day before had never happened. “Sure,” he said. “Just tell me when you’re ready to go.”
I didn’t understand the sudden change in behaviour, but I let it go. If I poked, I knew I’d rekindle the tension.
That evening, Stefan took charge of the Santa Rita while Bernard and I set off for the night market at the edge of Phuket Town. The liveliness of the market was totally unexpected after the solitude of the beach. A wall of people milled about make-shift stands that sold everything from plastic shoes to puppies. Fruit and vegetable stands, looking like still-life paintings under their incandescent light bulbs, shared space with food stalls that dished-up local treats.
The movement of the people among the array of goods and food stuff gave a festive air to the market. I got caught up on the energy of the place — as did Bernard. We stuffed ourselves on fish cakes and pork satays, and poked around the new and used crappy stuff for sale. Before returning to the Santa Rita, I filled our basket with mangoes, bananas, red peppers, and some greens. I also picked up a fair quantity of rice now that our rice supply had been sacrificed to the saki god.
Once Bernard had secured his new batch of home brew on deck, we lifted anchor and set sail for Sri Lanka. The island had been one of my fantasies, having read the writer Arthur C. Clarke’s glowing description. I imagined us luxuriating in the flowering paradise, and wondered if we’d make it our home. Clarke did. Why not us? We had no commitments — one of the perks of our lifestyle. Maybe Bernard would be happy there.
Chapter 17
EN ROUTE TO SRI LANKA
Spring 1983
For whatever we lose (like a you or me).
It’s always the self we find in the sea.
— E.E. CUMMINGS
As soon as we sailed out of Thailand, Bernard turned playful, taking pleasure in studying the sea charts, checking the depth sounder and working the sails. The wind was in our favour, and we cruised effortlessly at seven or eight knots under a cloudless sky. We let the autopilot do the work while we munched on fruit we’d picked up in Phuket, sipped coffee, and watched a pod of dolphins that had been following us since the Philippines.
“Great, isn’t it?” Bernard shouted over the whoosh of the boat cutting through the waves.
“Fabulous,” I shouted back.
He gave me a friendly pat on the backside, and I felt that all was right with the world. I did not let on that my exhilaration at the speed and angle of the yacht was tinged with fear. The Santa Rita had never sailed this fast. She heeled at such a sharp angle that to walk along the deck felt like walking cross-wise on a hill. The ocean came almost even with the leeward side of the deck, and sea spray washed over us.
I hadn’t known how far a yacht could lean in a strong wind. And even though it unnerved me, I could see Bernard and Stefan were enjoying it. I calmed myself by focusing on the dolphins. There were about ten of them, and they were enjoying the waves as much as the guys. They swam in and out of the wake, dove under the hull, came up the other side, and took giant leaps in front of the bow while giving us amused looks. They love us, I thought. I knew for sure that I loved them.
Next morning, I sat on deck with a mug of coffee and idly watched Bernard as he focused the sextant to calculate our position. Most yachts we’d come across had satellite systems for navigation, but Bernard preferred to set our course with a sextant.
“Electronics can fail,” he’d said. “It’s better not to rely on them and to know what you’re doing.”
I agreed with that. I didn’t like the idea of drifting in circles in the middle of an ocean with a dead satellite.
“Here, let me show you how to use it.”
I looked at the device he was holding and panicked. It involved geometry, a subject that had always confused me.
“Why don’t you show Stefan first?” I said.
Stefan had a feel for sailing, and I couldn’t understand why Bernard didn’t want to share more knowledge with him. Aside from barking at him to clean the deck, or lift the anchor, or scrub the hull, Bernard hardly spoke to him.
Bernard ignored my suggestion. “It’s easy,” he said.
He handed me the sextant, and I went blank. “I can’t,” I said. I felt it was beyond me.
“What if something happens to me?”
“Teach Stef.”
He snatched the instrument from my hands. “Can’t you make an effort?” he mumbled.
Not waiting for a response, he turned towards the sun and went back to his calculations.
It irritated me that he wouldn’t acknowledge my contribution to our adventure, and was always ready to point out my shortcomings. But I also felt he had a point. A boat is a technical piece of equipment, and because I shied away from that aspect, I was only partially there. Had anything happened to him and Stefan, I would be floundering at sea without a clue as to how to save myself. Today, I look back and know I should have made the effort. If I sailed today, I would. But everything back then was new. I fluctuated between apprehension and anxiety, and that kept me stuck in familiar patterns of behaviour.
Years later, long after we had sold the boat, long after our marriage had dissolved, Bernard told me that he couldn’t forgive me for not learning how to use the sextant. He felt I deliberately refused to learn anything he could teach me as part of a power struggle between us. With distance and time, he recognized I had a fear about learning technical things that had nothing to do with him.
This wasn’t the only time we misread each other’s intent. Each time our desires were thwarted, we took it personally. It required more maturity than we had at the time to understand that we were two independent people who were together by choice, joined at the heart, but not at the hip.
The sail into Galle, the port of entry into Sri Lanka, had none of the relaxed, bucolic charm of Phuket. The harbour, encircled by fortress-like stonewalls, was filled with a hodgepodge of boats — some for fishing, some trampers, and a handful of sailboats. Dozens of barechested brown-skinned men in sarongs and flip flops ran about the wharf bringing in fish or taking goods off trampers. Galle had been an important port for spices travelling from the East to Europe, and the Dutch had built this fort-like older section of the city in the seventeenth century to protect their shipping interests. The exotic paradise I had anticipated looked more like a small European port city.
In Sabang and Phuket, we casually dropped anchor and went ashore without notifying authorities. But Galle was a thriving city with an established bureaucracy, and we knew we’d have to enter through official channels. As luck would have it, we spotted a number of yachts that belonged to the small group of fellow yacht builders we had met in Taiwan.
Among them was Heiko, a young German adventurer who befriended us when we first arrived in Taipei. At the rooming house on Chung Shan Road,
the three of us became drinking buddies, sharing tales of woe and frustration at the great cultural divide in communication between us and the Taiwanese builders. He sailed out before us, and I never expected to see him again.
“Hey, Heiko,” we shouted.
He waved to us with a beer can in one hand and the other around the waist of a slim young woman.
“Where do we go to get clearance?” Bernard asked.
“Windsor, Don Windsor,” he shouted back. “He’s the man to see. He handles all the paperwork. He’ll take care of everything. Look for the giant Buddha. His house is across the street. Then come aboard for drinks. I want you to meet my girlfriend.”
The huge golden Buddha, erected by Don Windsor in honour of his parents, was a beacon that led to the Windsor house. In less than five minutes we walked onto the spacious veranda of a Dutch-style tropical manse that served as agent’s office, gem shop, restaurant, art gallery, boarding house, and home to the Windsor family.
Windsor was an affable, shrewd, entertaining Singhalese gentleman who showed us around his sprawling premises. He then led us back to the shady veranda with its caned chairs and whitewashed wall, crammed with photographs of skippers and crews who had passed through before us.
He offered us cold drinks. “Everything in my home is at your disposal — for a small fee, of course.”
My focus was on the shower and washer and dryer. I hadn’t seen such luxury since we’d left Taiwan, and I knew I’d be a permanent fixture at the Windsor house. While he nodded his head left to right and left again, and talked on and on about his charitable contributions to the local community, I visualized dirty underwear spinning round and round in hot soapy water.
We spent the evening at a restaurant with Heiko and his girlfriend who had flown in from Germany to join him. We drank endless bottles of Lion stout, a Singhalese brew first introduced to the island by Scottish tea planters in the 1800s. And over a meal of curried rice and chicken served with sambal — a coconut, tamarind, chilli condiment — and shrimp chips, we recounted our adventures and misadventures since we had last seen each other. Bernard imparted the saki recipe to Heiko in return for his generous hospitality.
“Can’t wait for your brew to ferment,” Heiko called after us as we climbed into our dinghy for the ride back to the Santa Rita.
That night Bernard was in good spirits.
“Do you mind if I sleep in the aft cabin?” he asked.
It had been his decision to sleep in the salon. His asking permission to return to the aft cabin seemed odd as I had never pushed him out. I scooted to my side of the berth, and lifted the cover for him to get under. He hopped in and stroked my face. I was elated he had returned.
The next day he and I went ashore to explore the old section of Galle. We walked about the granite ramparts, examined the stone walls, took in the hybrid Dutch influenced houses with their large verandas, red tile roofs, and flowering courtyards, and did a quick tour of the defunct Dutch Reformed Church.
The Dutch, at the behest of the king of Ceylon as Sri Lanka was then known, liberated the island from the Portuguese in the seventeenth century. A number of Dutch remained behind or immigrated to Ceylon to work mainly as civil servants, and married Sinhalese women. Their descendants, known as Burghers, had once lived in this section. The quarter, with its houses of gracefully decaying gentility, felt to me as though I were walking through a parallel universe. The only intrusion into this time warp was the endless stream of ragged children and touts tugging at us to visit some shop or site for the price of a coin.
New Galle was a jumbled mess of dilapidated, concrete houses and one-room storefronts strewn together every which way. But life was here, and where we preferred to be. Women in saris and workers in sarongs shopped, ate, and haggled along the narrow streets.
Saffron-robed Buddhist monks with begging bowls edged their way through the mass of humanity walking like a line of ants to the better homes near the old port to ask for their ration of rice. I wondered if the street beggars hadn’t been influenced by their more pious brothers. We’d passed through many places as poor as Galle, but I had never seen so many people squatting on the street with their hands out. Nor had I ever seen so many deformed people and wondered about that. One day I took a local bus and sat beside a well-dressed woman in a silk sari with gold bangles circling her wrists, holding a pudgy little girl about a year old on her lap. The child stared at me with an infectious smile that lit up her large, dark eyes.
“Your daughter is beautiful,” I said.
The woman turned to face me, took hold of the child’s hand and held it out towards me palm up. “Bon bon,” she said. She repeated this request for candy over and over in an effort to have the child repeat her words while holding the little girl’s hand out to me. She finally stopped when I turned away to look out the window in an effort to distance myself.
It was impossible to relate to anyone on the street. To ask directions meant paying for the response in advance. To look lost meant that someone would approach to try to drag you to his father’s or his uncle’s or his brother’s shop. To look at a building meant someone would accost you, mumble something, and then ask for payment as a guide. The one time we had a local aboard in a friendly gesture of camaraderie, we discovered we were missing our radio when he left.
One afternoon, after a meagre lunch of curried fish and rice at Windsor’s, Bernard and I went in search of a gem merchant. We had passed a number of storefronts on our earlier walks and decided to check out some of the places. We had heard that Sri Lanka was famous for its blue sapphires and moonstones. The sapphires were a bit pricy but incredibly cheap compared to the west, and the moonstones were almost given away.
Bernard, in an expansive mood, bought me a moonstone necklace, then a bracelet, then a number of rings, and after that more rings and necklaces for gifts. When we had exhausted the possibilities in handcrafted ware, he bought a box of loose moonstones, many of which I still have in an old plastic film container. I love moonstones, but too much of anything starts to lessen its value. Still, I loved the unexpected extravagance that was in keeping with the light mood and affection Bernard showered on me that day. We held hands, walked with our bodies in synchronized step, and laughed at each other’s comments and observations of the local scene. It was as though we were a young couple who had just discovered love.
In the local post office we asked if any mail had come for the Santa Rita via Poste Restante, which is how mail arrives at sea. The clerk handed Bernard a letter from his mother with some unexpected news. Dedé was on her way to Sri Lanka, bringing with her the young mistress of a wealthy gangster neighbour she had admired for years and who had recently died. She would arrive from France in a week.
Not good, I thought. This stocky, bull-necked woman, built like a tank and with as much sensitivity, had never forgiven me for marrying her prized possession and favourite son. She had once asked if I was happy with Bernard and when I said yes, she broke down and cried. “Life isn’t fair,” she sniffed. “I was never happy with le docteur.” It was the way she always referred to Bernard’s father. “And you have taken away my son.”
That was the only conversation she and I had had when we visited her in France. She spent hours in animated conversation with Bernard, but as soon as I approached, she became silent. When the two were looking at family photos and I entered the room, she quickly put them away. Now, in the cramped quarters of the Santa Rita, I was going to spend several weeks with her and a woman I’d never met.
“This isn’t going to work,” I said. “The yacht’s going to be claustrophobic with the two of them aboard. Your mother takes up a lot of space, and she’ll want Stefan’s cabin. That means this woman whom we don’t even know and Stefan will be sharing the salon.”
“I know,” he said. “I thought about it. There’s a nice hotel near the harbour. I’ll reserve a room for the two of them there.”
Next morning, I awoke to find Bernard sitting up beside me wit
h his back against the bulkhead staring into space. This surprised me as his habit was to grab a cup of coffee upon waking and sit in the cockpit to watch the sunrise.
“What’s up?” I asked.
“I had the weirdest dream,” he said. “I dreamt I was having sex with my mother.”
I gave a nervous laugh, as I knew Bernard had a lot of reservations about his mother — one of the reasons he had moved so far from his country of birth.
His dream rattled him, and I had a twinge of foreshadowing.
The day before Bernard’s mother arrived, Heiko offered to throw a welcoming party for her and her friend at an apartment he’d rented near the harbour. “I’ll pick up some wine and a couple of things to eat,” he said. “What do you think?”
“Good idea,” Bernard said.
That was the last day the two men ever spoke to each other again.
Kenwood and family
Workers at the Shin Hsing boatyard
The Santa Rita under construction
Salon of the Santa Rita
Aft cabin of the Santa Rita
The Santa Rita being launched in the Danshui River
Santa Rita under sail
Me at the helm in Hong Kong
The Santa Rita anchored among Chinese junks
Chinese opera on outdoor stage in Hong Kong
Floating child during Bun Festival in Cheung Chau
Stefan and Jonah tying the Santa Rita to a mooring
Journey into the Palawan interior, Philippines