Monday, October 29, 2012

HOW TO LIVE IN PARADISE ... AND FAIL




                         

                                                      PART ONE
                           





      Twice upon a time that seems like yesterday, I lived on a pair of mythic islands.
      The first was Mallorca, mountainous and magnificent, in the Mediterranean south of Barcelona. Conquered over the millennia by countless violators, it remained always angry, beautiful and unbowed.
      The second was Virgin Gorda, narrow and parched, with brilliant white beaches fondling the azure Caribbean. When it was first seen on the horizon by Christopher Columbus, he said it looked like a fat virgin at rest. Thus, the name.    
     He’d been at sea for a very long time.
   
     When I think of Mallorca I think first of people: of Tod and Lee Minisch and one of the strangest sights I‘ve ever seen; and of Colonel Gerald Patterson, epitome of imperial arrogance. And I simultaneously visit in my mind terraced villages clinging like lichen over the sea and ancient olive groves saturated in sun and salt and history. But somehow I also find myself remembering the loneliness and sense of separation I felt while living there, and never understood.
     And when my mind turns to Virgin Gorda, I remember Teacher O‘Neal‘s Good Gifts and Restaurant; the huge ‘message tree’ that shaded the island‘s only freshwater well; the incomparable smell of night-blooming cactus; and the day I met the most beautiful woman in the world. But again, I’m visited by a residual memory of  personal emptiness, of estrangement, that defied definition.
     But that’s for later. Or maybe not at all.
     
     Let’s begin with Mallorca; with laughter, and with the obscure fishing village of Puerto Andraitx where my wife and I rented a tiny house near the village square.
     As we all know, news in a small town travels at the speed of light. So it wasn’t a surprise when -- on only our second morning there -- a guy about my age (late twenties) hailed me by name and introduced himself: Tod Minisch. He was sitting at a sunlit table in front of the local tavern and drinking black coffee mixed with a foul-tasting local hooch called algarroba, made from the seeds of St .John’s Bread trees. With dark and disheveled hair topping a lanky frame, heavy horn-rimmed glasses, careless clothing to match a broad, generous smile, and a faint Southern accent, I liked him immediately A beaten-up copy of  Camus’ The Stranger was at his elbow.  
      We’d begun the usual ritual of where-you-from-and-why when he told me without  embarrassment that he was paid a monthly stipend by his family to stay away from his ancestral home in Kentucky. So he and his wife -- after wandering around Europe for a while -- had chosen Mallorca as a semi-permanent ‘pit stop‘..
     I’d never met a ‘remittance man’ before and was about to ask what he’d done to be sent into exile, when two huge Afghan hounds -- beautifully groomed with coats nearly to the ground -- came out of nowhere; joyously leaping all over him, spilling his drink and knocking him half off his chair. Right in back of them came a stunning girl; tall, tanned, leggy and dressed only, it seemed, in long, semi-diaphanous scarves that yielded glimpses of a beautiful figure. She was walking fast and talking fast, but not to us or to the dogs. She was just talking. Something about learning the sexual nicknames for turnips and scallions in Mallorquin, the local dialect. And soon the local ladies were going to teach her onions, tomatoes and (best of all) carrots and cucumbers!
     Tod, arms flailing to fend off the Afghans, blurted: Lee, this is the new guy who just  moved into the ….
      Never breaking stride, she said: Oh hi. Welcome.
      And walked right past us, still talking, but now -- I thought -- about fishing or about flowers. Maybe a mix of both. In any case, the Afghans ran after her, unfettered and raucous, while Tod  and I watched her recede toward the harbor, scarves flapping like  loose spinnakers and her voice fading to a slow dissolve.
      That’s my wife. he said finally. She talks a lot.

       A week or so later, a dinner invitation (more like a summons, actually) arrived from the self-appointed leader of the town’s English-speaking ex-patriots: Colonel Gerald Patterson whose grand villa sat on a hill overlooking the harbor. Long and white with chocolate shutters and two central domes, it reminded me of a banana split .. and I hadn’t even been at sea for a long time.
       According to Tod, with whom I’d been having coffee every morning, the Colonel had been chief of police of Alexandria, Egypt (at the time a British protectorate), before retiring. But he still had a penchant for investigation and liked to ’vet’ new arrivals in town. Lee, Tod’s wife, hated him. But Tod himself -- a gentler and more accepting soul -- simply described him as a ’another Brit asshole’. I decided to reserve judgment.

      So then came the dinner: four couples at a large round table being served a wonderful paella by two Spanish maids. There were the Pattersons, another British couple, a Canadian couple, and my wife and I. The British couple seemed limited to a two-word vocabulary: ‘uumm’ for approval, and ‘quite‘ for agreement. The Canadians were more interesting. He wrote episodic thrillers for BBC television and hovered over his wife like a hawk. After she and I exchanged glances, I didn’t blame him. She was very attractive and clearly bored.
      And then there was the Colonel, a near-stereotype: blustery and overweight with a florid complexion and a handlebar mustache, wearing a pressed khaki shirt, and pontificating endlessly on the sorry state of the world, of England, of Spanish wine and of local plumbing.
      His wife’s name, apparently, was ‘Yes, Gerald‘.
      Sometime around dessert, he looked over at me like a great white hunter about to interrogate a native bearer.
     So... Tell me, young man. he said. How are you finding our little community?
     Knowing that my debut was at hand, and after saying we loved it, I launched into an anecdote about the retired local schoolteacher I’d found to teach me Spanish. He’d lived in the United States for eight years as a boy and returned to Mallorca after World War Two. As a result, his English was sprinkled with long-forgotten slang like ‘You’re a card.’ and ‘Tell it to the Marines, kiddo!’ and ‘Loose Lips Sink Ships’.
     He’s just great, I said, grinning. … it’s like listening to a time capsule.
     Uumm, rather amusing I‘m sure.. the Colonel replied. But why in heaven’s name do you want to learn the language? I mean .. it’s silly, really. Quite useless.
     The Brit couple doubled up with an ‘uumm .. quite’.
      I suspect my face went blank with incomprehension because he shifted his chair to face me more directly. Then he picked up a knife from the dinner table and held it at arm’s length for all to see.
      Look here. he said. You see this knife?
      Everyone nodded almost involuntarily.
      Well, in Spanish it’s called  … a cuchillo.
      He paused, looking slowly around the table. Everyone was focused and waiting.
      Simply ridiculous. he said disdainfully .. A cuchillo! Can you imagine? Why any damn fool can see it’s a knife!
      I didn’t see much of the Colonel after that lesson in colonial linguistics. He probably thought of me as ‘just another American asshole’ .. or whatever the polite British equivalent is. Nor did I even consider returning his hospitality
 
      During the following months, I settled into a comfortable daily routine: coffee in the morning at the tavern, reading the Paris edition of The Herald Tribune (always three days late), snorkeling and spear fishing, lunch and a siesta, writing until dinner (almost everybody -- including me --was writing a novel), and then back to the tavern after dinner for whatever it might offer.(It had the only TV in town; a smallish box that got snowy reception but which was kept at maximum volume on Sunday afternoons for the bullfights from Barcelona.)
      As I got to know Tod better, and to a lesser extent, Lee, I marveled at their tolerance for each other. He seemed to endure her non-stop chatter with grace and a degree of amusement; and she seemed to accept his off-beat intellect and the light alcoholic fog that usually encircled it. As an ex-model, she loved clothes and dressed flamboyantly. He cared nothing for clothes and could have passed for a bum. She was an excellent cook; he barely noticed. In sum: he drank quietly, she sipped noisily.
      Their loyalty to each other was never better illustrated than on the evening of Bobby Somerset’s party. Bobby was a Brit and a sailor, and unlike the Colonel, could never be blamed for England’s loss of empire. He was gregarious, intelligent and engaging. His yacht -- a sizable schooner -- had a permanent mooring at the end of the town wharf: a long, stone pier that sheltered the town’s little fishing fleet.
      Every year he threw a cocktail party on board, attended by an eclectic mix of ex-pats  as well as a few local characters like the tavern owner -- a fan of the dictator Franco -- and a sour-faced but shapely widow whose husband died in one of Franco’s prisons. Bobby’s yacht, however, was considered to be like Switzerland: neutral with requisite civility.
      In any case, on the night in question, the party ended after dark just as a misty rain began to fall. Lee was dressed to the nines in a flowing, flowery skirt and Gypsy blouse, in full make-up with her long brunette hair carefully coiffed. Not wanting to dampen her artful image, she dispatched Tod to get their Land Rover -- parked in the town square -- so he could back it down the wharf to the yacht’s gangplank.
      A few minutes later, while several of us waited under a tarp suspended over the deck, Tod’s taillights appeared as he backed slowly toward us. His brake lights went on near the gangplank and he stopped.
      Open the door. Lee shouted.
      And that’s when it happened.
      He reached around to open a rear door and suddenly the Land Rover shot backward right off the end of the wharf. After floating for a few seconds, it sank toward the harbor bottom with its headlights beaming upward like subterranean eyes. We blasted up the gangplank, but when we reached the end of the wharf, there was no sign of Tod. Only those eerie eyes staring at us from the depths.    
      Lee screamed and tore away from the arms of Bobby Somerset who was trying to hold her back. She ran without a sound to the edge and leaped off.
     A split second before she hit the water, Tod’s head broke the surface. I imagined her desperately trying to reverse gravity, but to no avail. She landed fully clothed and instantly uncoiffed.
     Tod swam easily to the wharf’s stone steps and climbed to the top with a silly, embarrassed grin. Somehow, he was still wearing his glasses. Seconds later, Lee appeared. She had seaweed hanging from her hair and looked like a Dali portrait: limp and dripping, but hissing with anger.
     She ripped a lit flashlight from my hand and hurled it at Tod…who ducked.
     You stupid son of a bitch! she screeched.
     We watched the flashlight fly past his head and describe a graceful arc into the harbor. Suddenly a third eye was beaming at us from the depths.
      Tod said: Are you okay, honey?
     And then he giggled. And then Bobby Somerset giggled. And then viral laughter attacked everyone, even Lee who looked at first volcanic, but who finally started talking and laughing and hugging her sappy and saturated husband.
     It was, everyone agreed in retrospect, a wonderful party.

     In a village hidden from the pulsing arteries of progress, time is different. Rather than passing in measured cadences --in hours or days or weeks --it drifts in a current you never really feel until you bump into an unavoidable reality.
     We’d been in Puerto Andraitx nearly a year -- using it as a base and as a home -- and abroad for nearly two years. We’d traveled together through most of Europe and parts of the Middle East, and done what we’d set out to do. But our savings, which we’d been living on and which had lasted longer than I‘d hoped, were nearly depleted. The drain was showing at the bottom of our financial tub.
     It was time to go home.

     A few nights before we left for good, a going-away party was thrown for us at the tavern, attended by ex-pats and locals alike. It was a noisy, drunken affair that lasted deep into the night and at which lots of promises were made, knowing they’d never be kept. But such is the nature of things in a impermanent and capricious world.
     And then finally --on our last night -- we were having dinner at home when Tod, as was his habit, walked in without knocking. He looked a bit downcast and I sensed he’d come to say a final and more private goodbye.
      Hi, Tod .. I said. Where’s Lee?
      He seemed puzzled for a few moments until, with the shyest smile and with his spirits lifting, he said:
      I think she’s home discussing something with me.
   
      It was a great line and we laughed hard and with tears, as only good friends can.
But I couldn’t help but sense in that sentence a hint of loneliness.. It wasn’t an acute feeling, exactly. And not necessarily conscious either. It seemed to me as if he were grasping quietly for something he couldn’t identify and wasn’t even sure existed.  But somehow I empathized and understood .. because I myself felt in my most unwilling moments a similar emptiness: a barren place inside.
      But how could I?
      Tod and I were different personalities, totally. Different backgrounds, different values, different futures. And given the moment, it seemed silly of me to be morose or self-analytical. After all, hadn’t I been living in Paradise? Hadn’t the last two years been nearly idyllic?
       And there was still last-minute packing to do, a plane to catch, a job to find and yet another life to explore. So I packed all unspoken questions away with my socks and my half-written novel and forced them into their own exile, thinking foolishly they’d stay there.

     
       
       Until Part Two and Virgin Gorda … I wish all my readers well.
                                                                                   



                                         
                                         AFTER DINNER MINTS

In the next few years, I wrote to Tod a number of times but never heard back and thus have no idea how he fared. But since his was a soul without malice or spite, I hope he fared well; with or without the chatter.

No-one who lived in the village ever published a word, including myself. In fact, not long ago I found a few yellowed pages of my novel; and remembered one particular sentence that I must have written a hundred times. The prose was labored, artificial and pretentious. In other words, terrible.
     So much for the Great American Novel.

Finally, Puerto Andraitx is now dominated by condominiums that block all access to the water. The village square boasts a modern pharmacy, an expensive boutique, two gift shops, and a disco. The tavern has been renovated and offers cappuccino and hi-def TV. On weekends, its outdoor tables are crowded with tourists gawking at the power yachts moored against the wharf and speculating about how much they cost.
     Very few seem to enjoy -- or even to notice -- the splendid anamoly of sea mists in the mornings mingling with the scent of orange blossoms.


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