Serendipity 1

Serendipity One

***********

Ile ste marie is a picture postcard tropical paradise. The life is
simple. There is space and time to work and the humpback whales are
having their young in the waters of the small bays protected by the
coral.

'Les baleines', the locals shout every time the whales jump.

I'm staying in a place owned by a French doctor who arrived some years
ago. He used his savings to build this hotel of sorts on the wrong side
of the island. 8 huts on a hill and a big wooden dining room which
opens on to the bay.

The doctor says he was tired of Europe and that it was over for him
there

'What young girl in Europe wants to look at a man with whom nature has
finished?' he says.

He says his young wife here tends him faithfully, bearing him children
and nursing him when he feels a little weak.

On Ile ste marie, apparently the girls are different, they prefer old
men he says, because old men don't change girls.

I asked him if he made love to the other girls.

'Of course, certainly, why not', he says.

'Your wife doesn't mind?'

He laughed enthusiastically, warming to his theme as a master would
with an innocent boy.

'This is Africa, he says, 'here the people wait for death, they say
love is a gift from the gods to make the waiting sweeter'.

'That's nice', I say.

**************

I have been here for almost a week now and have settled into a
rhythm.

I wake before the sun at four or five, sit on my bed or on the porch,
anticipating the long hours until breakfast, living each minute. In a
tree, outside my room, in the early hours, a drongo bird with a deeply
forked tail and a cavalier tufted plume sits motionless.

It sings a constant tuneless refrain.

After eggs and bread in the big deserted dining room at 8, I return to
my hut and prepare for the day ahead.

I am writing in fits.

I have been thinking of the mechanics of my tan or working out how much
I have spent, multiplying it up and so on.

On the slope outside my cabin, a boy with a small knife cuts at the
grass. All day he scythes the grass with this small knife. 'Cigarette?'
he says.

Dinner in the evening is at seven and the doctor turns the generator
off before nine. The mosquitos are killers and so I fasten the big net
around the bed each night and fall hopefully to sleep. As you would
expect, my dreams have grown weird and vivid.

My thoughts have begun to focus on two things, the sating of my daily
appetite and sex.

But the girls here are not pretty. When I arrived their smell reminded
me of the rotting vegetables that lay in the sun at the local
market.

Their unpleasant features are drawn from the negroes and the malays,
their clothes are tatty, black torn slips hang below their skirts,
their hips are heavy and out of proportion.

Here on this island, two good teeth will set a girl apart from her
sisters. 'Elle est belle', the villagers would say to me. 'Ah oui,
certainnement' I would say.

And yet I guess I should have known that if I stayed here long enough,
I would see things differently.

Dostoevsky, I think, he said, 'Love and action is a harsh and dreadful
thing compared with love and dreams'. But that was from another
world.

*********************************

In the end, it was the doctor who intervened on my behalf.

He sent his woman, her skinny frame boosted by her heavily pregnant
state. She crawled through the net in the soft candlelight.

Her skin was dusty and sticky and I was trembling as she put her hands
on me and then opened her mouth to kiss me. She pursed her lips
wickedly and I let my tongue run around the soft gums where the teeth
should have been.

I was like a rock.

Her hair was plaited close to the scalp and it made her head look
conical and misshapen. As she slithered across me like a snake in the
dirt, I tried to hold her head but with the tightly lined unwashed
frizz, I just couldn't.

After we made love, like two gentle savages, I held her tight for as
long as I could - the smell - and then she slipped off, out and into
the night.

When I woke up the next morning, I experienced shock and after
breakfast, I spoke to the doctor. I told him of my plans to leave
immediately.

He sat me down and spoke kindly.

'My wife says she loves you', he says, 'I know you are a romantic, I
see that and how you are, but you must see that love is different here.
I know all the girls like you, I hear them say they would like to make
love with you, you should stay, give it another few days and then make
up your mind, what do you think?'

'OK' I said.

As I walked back up to the hut to unpack I thought about what he had
said.