Although the island has taken on great significance for me, it’s no more inherently beautiful or meaningful than any other place on earth. What makes a place special is the way it buries itself inside the heart.
—Richard Nelson, from The Island Within
Someone—a literary critic—has written that twenty years of distance gives us not just an event or place to return to but also our former self. Or, I might add, somebody’s former self, not especially recognizable as your own.
Van Britton’s younger brother was certain he remembered me, offering as proof the details of my residence on Old Providence Island when I lived there in the early seventies.
“Mistah Bob, you used to live in Freshwater Bay.”
“I lived in Old Town,” I gently corrected him, “near Raimundo Lung.”
“You used to ride a white horse,” he continued, undaunted.
“No, my horse was red.”
“Your wife’s name was Sherrie, no?”
“I wasn’t married,” I felt obliged to tell him. “My girlfriend was Marta, the panya girl who lived with her mother and sister and brothers in Old Town.”
Van’s younger brother paused, momentarily subdued, trying to untwist this piece of information. After a minute his head slowly bobbed, his face brightening into a shy expression of the pleasure that comes from remembrance. “Mistah Bob,” he insisted. “Back then, you didn’t have a beard.”
Back then, he was only thirteen or so, what the isleños call a sprat, a sardine. I had never fished with him, as I had with his older brother, up on the Serrana Bank, and I didn’t know whether I knew him or not since his affliction—a right eye that rolled back into his skull when he shifted his line of vision—was peculiar, I seemed to recall, to more than one of the Brittons.
“No,” I had to tell him. “I had the beard.”
“But it was black, eh? Now it is white.”
“That’s true.”
“Yes,” he concluded triumphantly, his right eye rolling blank. “I remember you, Mistah Bob. It is very nice to see you again, mahn.”
“It’s very nice to be back,” I said, acquiescing.
Throughout the exchange, Van had been giving me knowing looks, studying me with a wry half-smile. I had come upon the two brothers at their compound—sort of like a rasta camp for nonexistent tourists—in the middle of a jungle clearing, the two of them enjoying a quiet late summer day, sitting across from each other on log benches muscled into position on both sides of a long, handmade wooden table. I sat down next to Van, who automatically reached behind him for a calabash gourd filled with pungent weed.
“Do you remember me?” I had asked Van. We had not seen or spoken to each other in almost twenty years. He peered into my eyes for a second before he answered, resolutely, Yes, and then remained silent while his kid brother, exercising his right as an islander, constructed a past for me that wasn’t even remotely true, yet nevertheless plausible. Now I suspected that Van himself was bluffing, that he didn’t know who I was either—until he suddenly spoke up.
“Mistah Bob,” Van began, squinting through the smoke of the stick of ganja he brought to his lips, finalizing his appraisal. Behind us, his girlfriend stirred a Dutch oven set over a wood fire, boiling rice. “Mistah Bob,” Van began again. Apparently he had scoured his memory to his satisfaction and I was there, loud and clear, yet once again transformed, another island variation on the theme of my identity. “Mistah Bob,” he said a third time, exhaling a river of blue smoke. “What did you do with the gold?”
I suppose there was bound to be some misunderstanding about that, but whatever I said would only complicate matters. Providence is a small place—small—and the smaller the place, I’ve learned, the more it thrives on mystery, intrigue, conspiracy, shadow play, and the intimate connectivity of myth. Nobody is quite anonymous, but no one’s story is ever quite reconcilable with the facts. There’s no contest—the fecundity of an island grapevine would put many a novelist’s imaginations to shame.
Gold, the breakfast of empires.
There was once a golden highway in this part of the western Caribbean Sea—these days resurrected but snow-blown with narco traffickers—running from Cartagena to Campeche, whereupon it doglegged eastward with the Gulf Stream toward Havana, turned north up the coast of Florida and east again below Cape Hatteras to direct its trade across the Atlantic. This route was the legendary Spanish Main and throughout the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries, on its prevailing winds and favorable currents sailed the fabulous wealth of Mexico and the Americas, transported to the royal court of Madrid aboard the plate fleet, the treasure-laden galleons of the Spanish Crown, and forever at the mercy of God and hurricanes, uncharted shoals, and, of the utmost relevance to my tale, those rogue seamen and cutthroat adventurers known as the buccaneers. Multicultural long before such ethnic stews were fashionable, the pirates of England, France, and Holland bivouacked primarily on three strategic islands scattered along the Main: Jamaica and its blasphemous Port Royal; Tortuga, off the coast of Haiti (where barbecuing sank its New World roots); and, approximately 500 miles north of Cartagena and 150 miles off the eastern coast of Nicaragua, the island then named Santa Catalina—St. Catherine’s—known today as Isla Providencia or, as its Afro-Anglo inhabitants have always called it, Old Providence (its colonial designation, Catalina, passed on to its tiny sister island, now connected to Providence by a footbridge). Regardless of its far-flung obscurity, Providence was considered prime real estate by the privateers, for virtually all homebound ships sailing north to the Atlantic from South America passed within sight of her timbered peaks, like fattened geese adrift on a pond, and more than one was raided and sunk, or plowed into the island’s thirty-six square miles of barrier reefs to end up permanently established on the bottom, its ghosts counting the centuries until the invention of the aqualung.
By 1600, Dutch pirates were holding cookouts and cocktail parties on Providence, a style of social life you might expect to have altered radically when, in 1629, the Company of Adventurers of the City of Westminster sent aboard the Seaflower, of all people, a stiff-spined batch of Puritans to scrape out a few plantations. The gin, however, proved mightier than the Lord, once the Puritans realized they had been situated in a most divine position for plundering Spanish treasure ships. It was a Welshman named Henry Morgan, though, who would soon place Providence on the bloody map of history.
The future Sir Henry greatly desired, wrote his Dutch surgeon John Esquemeling in The Buccaneers of America, “to consecrate it as a refuge . . . unto the Pirates of those parts, putting it in a sufficient condition of being a . . . storehouse of their preys and robberies.” Which is precisely what Morgan did—or so say the islanders today—when he arrived in Providence in 1670 with two thousand fighting men aboard thirty-seven picaroons to stage his most infamous, daring, and brutal exploit, the sacking of Panama City. The fleet proceeded from Providence to the Caribbean coast and off-loaded twelve hundred banditti, who marched across the isthmus to the city and marched back three weeks later, leaving Panama’s seven thousand houses, two hundred warehouses, eight monasteries, two cathedrals, and hospital burned to the ground. Of rape, torture, and cold-blooded murder, there was plenty. “Of the spoils thereof,” said Esquemeling, “he [Morgan] carried with him one hundred and seventy-five beasts of carriage, laden with silver, gold and other precious things.”
The contemporaneous value of the loot, it has been estimated, was between three and six million dollars. Back on the Caribbean coast, Morgan went secretly aboard his flagship and put out to sea, followed by three or perhaps four vessels containing the greatest part of the treasure. Contrary to the historical record, Providence islanders argue passionately that Morgan stopped there on his return from Panama, sailing into local waters with three ships, though only two proceeded on to Jamaica, because, the folklore has it, either one of the treasure ships hit the reef on its approach or, most insist, because Morgan scuttled a ship after unloading its golden cargo and burying it with several slaves to guard and enchant the trove. Then the pirate hoisted sails for Port Royal and, caught up in the volatile politics of the day, never returned.
After Morgan, Old Providence experienced, like Gabriel García Márquez’s fabled Macondo, one hundred years of solitude. A sanctuary for outcasts, fugitives, and escaped slaves, it was resettled in 1788 by Francis Archbold, the Scottish captain of a slaving ship, who established a cotton and tobacco plantation on Catalina (where the Archbolds—or Archibols—reside to this day). This explains why the people of Old Providence speak a vaguely Elizabethan patois—You vex me, mahn. Tis as I say, Alphonse.—with a Scottish accent—Gid mairnin, sah—but it doesn’t explain why the islanders claim, rather emphatically, that they are descendants of Henry Morgan, his beautiful red-haired mistress, his captains Robinson and Hawkins, and his crew.
Of course, I didn’t know any of this stuff when, in December 1973, fresh from a university miseducation, I decided to step back from the forthcoming betrayals of the nascent Me Generation. I didn’t know, for instance, that Providence islanders, in the words of one anthropologist, were keen on generating hypotheses concerning the whereabouts of the treasure, or that over the years they had dynamited and dug up the length and breadth of Catalina, and a good many sites on Providence, or that the Colombian government itself had sent soldiers to excavate the old ruin believed to be Morgan’s fort—everybody down here running, in effect, a high fever searching in vain for pirate’s gold.
Actually, I had never even heard of an island named Old Providence when I boarded the cheapest flight in Miami that would deposit me, at least technically, on Latin American soil. The flight’s destination was San Andrés, the main island in an off-the-map archipelago and a budding Colombian resort. From there I planned to boat-hop to the continent in pursuit of a romantic’s itinerary, the adventurous dreams of youth: I wanted to sweat in the oceanic jungles of the Amazon, scale the Andes, surf in Peru and Brazil, smell the fires of revolution igniting. Free and restless, I had just turned twenty-two and wanted out—out being not only a destination but a hazily imagined lifestyle.
I never made it, though, to the South American mainland. On the flight down, fate’s ever-playful travel agent booked me a seat next to a fellow I had observed in Miami checking in an egregious amount of excess baggage: footlockers, duffel bags, scuba tanks, an air compressor no one could lift. He had gleaming eyes, a brush mustache, and hair like a clown’s wig, and from the start he impressed me as a genius of self-importance. As we entered Cuban airspace, he began to fiddle with a long cardboard tube, removing nautical charts that he rudely unscrolled in my face.
“Here,” he said without even looking at me, “hold the end of this.”
With the index finger of his free hand, he tapped three or four meaningless spots clustered in the archipelago we jetted toward, mumbling to himself and behaving like an ass. Impatience, not curiosity, got the best of me.
“All right already,” I said. “What’s your story?”
Howard was a dive instructor from Chicago who had once worked in Isla Mujeres, where he had befriended an American couple—Tay and Linda Maltsberger—who now lived in Providence, and somehow were in possession of an exclusive license from the Colombian government permitting them to salvage old shipwrecks in the clump of islands. Since we were both cheapskates, that night Howard and I shared the expense of a hotel room in San Andrés. In the morning before he left on the weekly flight to Providence, Howard made a most casual, semi-serious invitation: Should I happen to be in the neighborhood, he’d teach me how to scuba dive. The impulse to take that forty-eight-mile detour, I have since thought, was tantamount to trading a massive illusion for a small unknown. In my imagination the continent struck an obscene pose, pursed her lips, and beckoned me with a gesture of unlimited possibilities, yet here I was contemplating a blind date with an unheralded island I felt no special interest in. I’ll go for a week, I told myself, but the week ballooned into a year as Providence began, however clumsily, to shape me into a writer.
An old raconteur once suggested that one-third of all criminals are nothing but failed adventurers and that the vocation of adventurer is ultimately as tragic as that of youth. Even in the best of circumstances, treasure hunting is a slippery business, 98 percent bluster, bravado, and self-delusion, and when the bullshit stops, treachery has been known to rewrite the script. Typically, a salty impresario will con a group of investors into financing what amounts to a wild-goose chase. On Providence’s reefs, however, centuries-old wrecks weren’t difficult to find—the locations of at least a dozen were common knowledge among the local fishermen—but without the equipment or resources to salvage them, such information fell into the category of useless.
When I landed in Providence, two weeks after Howard, and tracked him down, I was grateful for his effusive welcome, only partially tempered by his announcement that, if I went halves, he could now afford to rent a launch.
“Let me get this straight,” I said, amazed. “You’re going to salvage a galleon, but you don’t have a boat?!”
It could have been worse, I suppose. He did, after all, have the air compressor and scuba gear—the first on the island. My career as a treasure salvor began and ended with our third dive, which also was my last with crazy Howard. My journal entry, dated January 24, 1974, begins: Our object was a Spanish galleon sunk 300 years ago ¾ of a mile off Morgan’s Head on the island of Santa Catalina. Reading this today, twenty years after it was penned by my adolescent hand, I wonder, however briefly, if I made it up. Is it early evidence that I was already being influenced by the islanders’ habit of thought that aggressively blurred the lines between fact and fiction? For instance, what about those details? How did I know the wreck was three hundred years old, a galleon, or even Spanish? Did Linda or Captain Tay tell me, or are these morsels of verisimilitude my own invention?
Whatever the case, we did indeed dive that day on the visible remains of a ship lost during the colonial epoch—a scenario that would have produced yawns in Hollywood. After snorkeling all morning across a grid of reef off Catalina, we spotted what we were hunting—a prosaic mound of ballast rock, round as the cobblestones that paved the alleys and esplanades of the New World. We skin-dived down four fathoms—as generations of former wreckers might well have done—to inspect a brass cannon nestled in the sand, and an enormous fluked anchor nearly twice my length, cantered against the rock pile. I recovered a page-size sheet of whitened lead, an oxidized iron or silver rod with four symmetrical nodes on its crown, coral-encrusted shards of amphora. Fixing the general location in our memories, we moved up the reef to spearfish and then returned to Providencia for lunch. A small crowd had gathered on the dock, anxious to learn if we had found Morgan’s treasure. No matter what we said, it was assumed we were hauling up gold by the bucketful. My journal advises me that I was too excited to speak, and that someone commented on the wild, lusty look in our eyes. After lunch, Howard and I returned to the site with tanks and crowbars. The journal entry ends anticlimactically, but with a trite and grandiose flourish: We found nothing of great significance, except to me, but we know of two more galleons, and these have never been dived on—so there is this possibility called tomorrow.
Christ.
We were the most hapless bunch of treasure hunters the world has seen, our naïveté only exceeded by our incompetence. I’m not entirely sure why, but I never dove on a wreck again. Anytime we took a boat out to the reef, however, it seems, now, the entire island grumbled: Dem fellas takin’ we gold. We had the license, the scuba gear; we were gringos. We were chronically half-assed, but that trait seemed to elude the isleños. In their minds, two plus two equaled millions, equaled Morgan’s treasure.
Meanwhile, a better story unfolded, far richer in potential: the island itself, its astounding beauty, and the fascinating singularity of its people. I rented a house on the beach in Old Town, on the other side of the harbor from Town (which no one called by its actual name, Santa Isabel). The house had no furniture and, like everyone else’s, no running water (we bucketed water out of a cistern squirming with mosquito larvae), and though it was one of the rare houses in Old Town with electricity, the power plant only managed to function three hours in the morning and two more in the late afternoon, keeping the fishmongers’ freezers in a state of perpetual thaw.
I purchased a kerosene stove and lamp, removed the kitchen door from its hinges for a table, with seats made from driftwood, ordered a hammock from Moraduck the hammock-maker in Lazy Hill, and began to feel, with an overwhelming inner sense of arrival, at home—a feeling that my new neighbors, welcoming me with fresh-baked johnnycakes and plates of food, did not discourage.
For twelve dollars I became the owner of Reeva, a spirited Paso Fino, and we began to explore the island, galloping bareback on the palm-lined beach at Southwest Bay, reining the horse into the turquoise ocean until the bottom fell away and we swam together in liquid air, my hand wrapped in Reeva’s black mane. In rum shops I sipped the local moonshine—called Jump Steady or Jom’s Toddy—and heard the braggadocio of the fishermen. Ingesting the mushrooms called duppy caps—duppy meant “ghost”—I climbed into the mountains whacked out of my mind to stand on the peaks in the raging wind, the sea an expanse of fox fire and tumbled jewels below me.
Howard moved in and set up his compressor on the veranda; so did a woman named Beth, from Friday Harbor in Puget Sound, whose brother had once worked for the Maltsbergers in Honduras. I began courting the only available Latina on the island—twenty-year-old Marta, uprooted from an upper-class life in Bogotá with her younger sister, Clara, and two little brothers and transplanted unhappily in this most remote of places by her beautiful but slightly demented and unforgiving mother, a relative of the Archbishop of Colombia, who exiled herself and children to an alien paradise upon learning of her husband’s infidelity. Marta’s overprotective mother despised me, naturally—I was the first boyfriend of her oldest and favorite child. She’d come hammering on my front door to rescue Marta from my caresses; her shrieks would send Marta dashing out the back door, scurrying across the mudflats to be home waiting not so innocently for madre’s tempestuous return.
Life for all of us grew more immediate, less gold struck, more devoted to the quotidian pleasures of survival, island dramas, the textures and subtleties of a community where poverty intensified, rather than corroded, the honest joys of existence. Assimilating into their rhythms, we flared with modern schemes for short periods, then relapsed into timeless slothful bliss, taking to our hammocks with a book, savoring our Cuba libres. The Maltsbergers’ efforts to lure investors into the wonderful world of treasure hunting never got far off the ground. Linda and I came up with an idea to write a cookbook, but the project lost momentum and nothing ever came of it. I pitched articles to magazines, collaborated with a photographer, worked tenaciously, ran out of money . . . and nothing ever came of that either.
Before long I went native, joining up with a pair of Old Town spearfishermen—Raimundo Lung and Gabriel Hawkins—leaving before dawn each morning to sail out of sight of land in Mundo’s lanteen-rigged catboat, learning the labor, fear, and glory of their profession and bringing home dinner to a house now crammed with a revolving-door ensemble of wanderers, outcasts, and expatriates. Then the collective magnificent weave of the year unraveled and overnight, it seemed, we were all gone, riding away on the currents to our separate futures, leaving behind in our wake a minor but nagging contribution to the island’s mythology, another screwy installment in Providencia’s leitmotif of gold.
To tell the truth, I did not want to go back. For a long time, that’s how I felt.
Coming back, though, was also part of the ethos of Old Providence, as was the act of leaving. “What defines islanders,” says the writer P. F. Kluge, “is not the way they live on islands but the way they move between them.” The islands—all islands—depended on the human flow. On the profound restlessness that leads to self-exile; on remittance; on the magnanimous return of the prodigal son. Travel as a rite of passage into manhood or some variety of marriage.
This is what happened when you lived on a remote island, an unimaginable distance from the push and shove of things, the commerce and convenience of the temperate latitudes and the developed world, the dubious but seductive advance of the nuclear age and its postmodern spawn. An island where men, under their own power, went to the sea each day for their living, challenging its caprice in the smallest of boats. Where families took to the sea on holidays, to visit and to celebrate. Where obtaining a government permit, or buying a bag of cement, or keeping a doctor’s appointment meant risking the hazards of the sea. One day you were talking with someone, playing cards with him, dancing with her. The next day they were never to be seen again, and you were dreaming of them falling, slowly, with macabre beauty and grace, through the blue, ever-darkening thickness of space, and the dream never stopped but at its bottom lay all your missing friends, looking up through the water at the moon.
Here is what I remember:
Shortly before dawn each morning, Mundo would send his little girls down the beach to wake me, like songbirds. Mistah Bob, they’d whisper cautiously. Mistah Bob, they’d whisper through the open slats of my window, their melodic voices barely audible over the lap and hiss of the lagoon. Me faddah say you sleepin’ long enough, mahn. I would growl theatrically, they would giggle. Mundo say git up, Mistah Bob. Is time to go fishenin. They were beautiful cherub-faced girls with gap-toothed sunny smiles. I could see their silhouettes in the lavender light of the window, their long wavy tresses braided and beribboned, the pleasing line of their plaid school dresses. Mistah Bob, they’d persist, Mistah Bob, until I threw open the door and stooped for their quick kisses, and that would be the end of our lovely game.
The year 1976 was the last time Mundo and I exchanged letters. His read: Bob, I have a sad story to tell you. My two daughters went to San Andres for Christmas and on their way back the Betty B [an old inter-island cargo and passenger boat] burst open and more than half the people drown. You must just know how I feel. Margarita and Virginia died.
With great reluctance I had sailed on the Betty B myself, and I had sailed on the Acabra too, which was even less seaworthy than the Betty B, and proved it by sinking first, only a few months after I had sailed away from Providence, overcrowded with passengers but close enough to shore for all hands to be saved. And a month or so later, my friend Captain Ibsen Howard would disappear one night in the passage between San Andrés and Providencia, washed overboard his own boat in heavy seas.
However you got yourself to Providence, your faith in everything—God, man, technology, yourself—was sorely tested by the voyage, and never so wantonly as when you flew Cessnyca and its nine-passenger twin-engine Beechcraft, apparently maintained by obeah priests. My final letter to Mundo, hastily scrawled from the Windward Islands in the summer of 1976, where I was a Peace Corps volunteer, was to report that I had been assaulted and stabbed; stay tuned, I wrote, because further conflict seemed to be brewing. Except for that one night in my life when someone woke me in my bed and tried to kill me, I had never experienced moments of sheer terror except courtesy of Cessnyca.
On my inaugural flight during December’s stormy weather, the fucking pilot knelt on the tarmac, crossed himself, and prayed before boarding the plane in front of me. Airborne, we roller-coastered through tremendous thunderheads, my surfboard levitating in the aisle. On my second flight to Providence, the pilot lost control of the steering as we touched down, the dirt runway turned to muddy soup from a recent downpour, and we crashed sideways through a stone wall, coming to rest in a mangrove swamp. Another day, my photographer friend arrived at the airstrip to find the flight crew wrapping a rope around one propeller and yanking it, the way you would a lawn mower, to start the engine.
Twenty years later, getting on and off Providence still seemed like risky business, at least psychologically if not statistically. By the time I arrived in San Andrés from Bogotá I was understandably wired and struggling against a creeping sense of depression. No surprise to see that San Andrés hadn’t changed much—its fate was to be a teeming, overbuilt tropical shithole, eternally engaged in the process of making itself uglier, a low-lying featureless free port roamed by sunburned hordes of Colombia’s equivalent of Kmart shoppers, loading up on faulty appliances. The only difference seemed to be that now the mafia—meaning, the cocaine cartels—was doing its laundry here, building tacky mansions and chintzy resorts, apparently designed by architects using the Jersey shore for their aesthetic model.
On the other hand, San Andrés’s frenetic shabbiness had always been the perfect foil for the purity of Providence’s unassailable beauty, multiplying a traveler’s sense of thanksgiving and wonder, seeing for the first time its exotic peaks, its stunning cobalt reefs, its raw charms, experiencing the midwestern hospitality of its people. Island-style here was an irresistible production, sort of a blend between Sinbad the Sailor and Little House on the Prairie, performed by a very mellow all-black cast directed by uptight, but absentee, South Americans. The kind of destination you truly only connected with in your imagination, because its existence was oftentimes too good to be true. A place endangered, ultimately, by your desires.
If leaving was a mistake, I figured coming back had the potential to shake out as an even bigger one. Why break my heart reconfirming the trend, proving to myself that Providence was, after all, neither a quirky utopia nor an idyllic glitch, but a doomed fragment of a fragile, shrinking world? When the developers and speculators deployed—as surely a battalion had by now—who was going to be the fool who played Diogenes, rejecting their temptations, scoffing at their inevitability? Twenty years ago, I listened to the alcalde of Providencia tell me that he hoped the personality of the island never budged, never came to resemble San Andrés. “I watch my children riding horses bareback into the sea,” he said wistfully. “I leave my doors open at night knowing no one will enter and put a knife in my back. We live in peace and to destroy this would be a serious crime. If we can reject the influences of big capital, if we only allow the building of cabanas and reject any project bigger than this, then we can preserve our home in all its natural beauty.”
Twenty years ago I believed this guy but now, as I sat eating my lunch at a little makeshift restaurant near the airport, waiting for the SAM flight to Providence, I entertained grave doubts that his vision, however sincere, could have withstood the onslaught of the forces playing late-century hardball capitalism in this part of the world. Reject the influences of Big Money? Yeah, right, I thought sarcastically. I fretted that I was coming back too late yet I didn’t know, I had lost touch absolutely, and since Providence was so vital a part of my past, had performed in fact a catalytic role in my self-definition, it was time I found out. As if, in judging Providence after twenty years of distance, I would also be measuring the life I had led against the life I might have lived, had I remained behind or had dismissed the impact Providence had delivered to my heart and soul. And what of Marta, whose mother had denied her the twentieth century by flinging her backward into the primitive world of a colonial pioneer? What of the two fishermen who had allowed me to share their lives as well as their boat—Gabriel, who had made me his brother, and Mundo, in so many ways my father?
Long ago I had heard that Gabriel went to Jamaica looking for work, then shipped out on a freighter headed north. Had the northern ports bedeviled him, turned him into something as rare as murder on Providence—a racist? Had he ever raced home to marry his sweetheart? And what of Mundo? The Canadian novelist Robertson Davies once wrote that a man, in his youth, has several fathers, and his biological one isn’t necessarily the most significant. I had three: the one who fathered my physical self; a professor in Missouri who fathered my passion to be a writer; and Mundo, the third and most adroit, a poor black fisherman, the father of my spiritual point of view, who taught me how to persevere past hardship and never to be afraid of life. Mundo, I was convinced, was dead.
It didn’t really eat at me, the life I never chose, and to say I missed Providence would not be entirely true, though Providence is the only place I’ve ever lived where I envisioned myself not leaving. But years ago my island fever metamorphosed directly into an obsession for writing and swept me off into another life. I had never been homesick for Providence, though I often felt as if I had been born there, but I was aware of it always, embedded there in my existence, like a phantom limb. I was never homesick for Providence but, more to the point, I was utterly bewitched by it. I was haunted, though in a kindly way.
My past on Providence wasn’t ice but fire, burning with indelible images that kept reappearing in my fiction writing; the last thing I wanted to do was mess with the mojo, or spoil a dream year’s delicate aftertaste by indulging in the overrich confections of nostalgia or, likewise, the thin broth of pity and regret and disillusionment.
I finished my lunch but not my despondent mood. I ambled back across the road to the airport and asked a taxi driver whatever happened to Cessnyca.
“It dropped,” he said, an answer that required no further elaboration.
As I sat in the departure lounge watching the weather deteriorate, I kidded myself into believing I’d been through too much over the years to feel trepidation about the flight. Even buckled in, finally, on the sweltering, claustrophobic nineteen-seater I was more or less fine, a little jittery maybe, but the jolt of takeoff reawakened the religious conviction of the woman across from me and, damn it, it makes my skin crawl when people stutter their prayers out loud on small airplanes. With horrific noise, rain blasted against the cockpit windows; a downdraft slapped us into a steep bank. I closed my eyes—here was the old dread, an overwhelming sense of déjà vu—and when I opened them again we had busted through the squall; below us spread the inside reef like a celestial swimming pool, and in front of us humped the musky, verdant mountains of the island that had gotten deep inside me, so deep it seemed to have rearranged my DNA. I had flown back not into time but into some other stage of my imagination, my serendipitous literary collaboration with place, back into the genesis of my own symbols, themes, and fictions.
I jumped into a taxi; the road—the only road—had, like the landing strip, been paved some time ago, and already it begged repair. Larry, the amiable driver, smiled when I told him I wanted to get a room in Town. Alvaro’s residencia had a new life as a general store; the Hotel Aury now housed the bank and some municipality offices. Now the hotels were all in Freshwater Bay (Aguadulce in Spanish) and having to rely on them underscored my unfamiliar status as a tourist.
Driving through Rocky Point, through Mountain, and down into Town, I was cheered to find that, at least on the surface, Old Providence had not been inspired or coerced to re-create itself for a profit. We gossiped, Larry and I.
“There was a fisherman in Old Town, Raimundo Lung . . . ” I said, tentative, providing a lead.
“Yes, yes, Raimundo. He was our most famous diver on Providence. Guys would come from all around—Cartagena, the Caymans, the States—to dive against him. But they never beat him, you know. He was our best man with a speargun. Now nobody dive in Providence these days except with tank.”
Finally I had to ask: Was he still alive?
“Livin’ right there in Old Town still,” Larry told me. Suddenly I was euphoric with relief, and coming back made sense. But then, just as suddenly, our conversation had a trapdoor in it, which sprang open underneath me. I asked about Marta and her sister, Clara. What had become of them?
“Them still here,” Larry said. This was unexpected—wonderful—good news.
“No,” a passenger we had picked up along the road corrected him. “One of them is dead.”
On December 1, 1979, Marta and eight other passengers boarded the flight to San Andrés and took off into what turned out to be catastrophic weather. That was the last anybody saw of them and no trace of the wreckage had ever been found.
I was numb with sorrow when Larry pulled over in front of Mundo’s house. What I had attained, exactly, by my return to Providence was an invitation to an emotional slam dance. Through the greenery, I could see down the path where Mundo stood, leaning over a worktable. Age had sucked at his muscles and carved into his face; his hair was graying, but then so was mine. When he realized it was me we embraced, tears in our eyes and now I was back among the living.
“Mistah Bob,” said Mundo tenderly, “I thought you were dead. I am a grown man, but when I received your last letter, and then no more came, I lay in bed at night and cried, telling myself them rough fellas in St. Vincent killed you, and you was dead.”
We held each other’s hand like lovers, reluctant to let go.
“But Bob,” Mundo continued, “just last week I was fishenin’ with Armando, and I tell him, Somehow I feel Mistah Bob is alive.”
Anyplace else, coming from anybody else, Mundo’s declaration would have struck me as mannerism, the exaggerated rhetoric of a good friend, but Providence had a way of forcing the supernatural down your cognitive throat, and twenty years ago, Mundo had startled me with his clairvoyance, again and again, until years later, a student at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop, I was compelled to write about his eerie talents, fictionalizing the truth of events I was unable to comprehend, and although I had crafted an alter ego for myself, it seemed unnecessary and even somehow wrong to give Mundo any other name—or reality—but his own. In life, he had always been larger than life.
The same goes for duppy-haunted Providence, rubbing itself so intimately against the cosmic shanks of nature. The island had always played Twilight Zone tricks on me, suggesting, among other mysteries, that there were moments of inexplicable mysticism in the human act of expression, especially the act of writing, moments that would reach out to tear a souvenir off the coattails of the future. Where does an imagination come from, I found myself asking on Providence, but the island always answered back with a riddle—Where does reality come from?—and a biblical reproach—In the beginning was the word. It’s the language, dummy. There was no other link between real events and the imagination but language and nature and the imagery that hovered between the two.
Our reunion drained me. I was both exhausted and exhilarated, heartbroken remembering Marta and, remembering her, chilled by the fact that an image of her death—a woman sinking to the bottom of the ocean—had been with me—I could date it in my notebooks, since 1979, the year she vanished into the deep.
I needed a room, a shower, stiff drinks, food, and a bed. I promised Mundo I would return tomorrow and we’d go fishing Monday. Not Monday, he said. We’d be hungover Monday. For a few minutes more, we said what needed to be said between us. Then, as I was poised to reenter life under the microscope in the nineteenth-century village that was still Old Providence, Mundo paved the way for me.
“Mistah Bob,” he said, his tone a mild warning. “When you left everybody said you took the gold. But I told them no, I knew you well, you were not that type of man, that was not you.”
The Monday after Sunday’s fete at Mundo’s, I couldn’t determine if I was actually hungover from aguardiente or if my beaten-up feeling could be written off as emotional decompression. My former self chastised me for renting a moto in Freshwater Bay to tour the island, opting for convenience and speed over the old-fashioned rewards of putting one foot in front of the other, because even though the number of cars and pickup trucks had doubled to about sixty since I was last there, as had the population—about 4,500—the underlying pace of the island was still dictated by the start-and-stop stroll of pedestrians.
Whom I didn’t overly blame for not stepping out of my way as I puttered past like a mechanical mosquito. Before I could click into third gear, I had left behind Aguadulce, Providence’s only bona fide tourist zone. In my day I would ride my horse, Reeva, here from Old Town, or walk the distance with Marta—an hour-and-a-half Spanish lesson, one way—to sit on an empty beach in a prolifically empty landscape. Marta and I loved our sense of sole ownership, making out in the sand. By the end of my year on Providence, a mainland panya visionary had constructed three rustic cabanas under the shade trees behind the beach, easy to scoff at since the one-room clapboard shacks sat unrented, unwanted. Providencia wasn’t for tourists, it was for travelers, traffickers, drifters, exiles, runaways. Sail in, sail out.
Now the paradisiacal beach had eroded to a narrow crescent, and Freshwater Bay supported a thriving but inoffensive village of restaurants, open-air bars, and lodging. No grand projects, cash only—even your traveler’s checks were no good. Providence simply lacked the infrastructure and accessibility for corporate greed to take root. In this insular nook of the world, greed was still the prerogative of individuals mostly lacking deep pockets, the damage they caused less visible: a few kids knocked into outer space by drugs, several luxurious hideaways for nameless kingpins, ruinous land speculation.
“It [the island] will be totally private ten years from now,” one of Providence’s new entrepreneurs told me. “A few of the large landholders will get rich, but everybody else will be fucked. They’ll have to move up into the mountains, or to San Andrés. Their children’s children will never be able to afford to live here.” What he described I accepted with fatalism for I had witnessed it happen again and again, a centuries-long heritage and way of life suffocated overnight, assigned to the archives. Make way for the twenty-first century, where the gold is electronic and all acts of piracy in the global village are cultural.
Over a hill that plunged precipitously into blue-green waters, I motored onward to Southwest Bay, once the island’s most magnificent beach, yet despite considerable erosion it remained wide enough to accommodate Providence’s most colorful spectacle—the Saturday morning horse races. I’d come to find the Brittons—Van, his father Burgo, his sister Indiana. Mutual friends in Miami had asked that I take them a gift, a modest amount of money, a fresh reminder of caring, old bonds renewed. But Burgo, I soon learned, had fallen out of a sea grape tree and broken his back; Indiana, two years younger than I was, had a heart attack—they were both dead. I followed directions to a trailhead into the bush, parked, and hiked through the scrub to scout Van’s weird, serene—as if it were intentionally vacant—tourist compound and give him the money.
Hey, remember me? Yeah, you took the gold.
Back on the motorbike, I traversed the hilly southern tip of the island, dismayed by the sight of well-armed marine guards posted at all four compass points on the sun-scorched mountainside. The Colombian Navy found itself high and dry here in a garrison ostensibly built to show the flag to those bellicose Nicaraguans, who for some unfathomable reason were nursing a Falkland Islands territorial fantasy about Old Providence. That would be an interesting turn of events for a population who has no communal memory of institutionalized colonialism or slavery, only of being ignored and forgotten, thanks very much. Most islanders wouldn’t readily admit even to being Colombian. What are you then, I’d ask. We is gyad-dyamn Englishmen, Mistah Bob.
Down where the eastward slope flattened on the outskirts of Bottom House, I stopped to ponder an unpaved turnoff I’d never seen before. Had someone bulldozed a road up over the densely jungled hill to Manchineel Bay, once only reachable by boat or by a perilous horseback ride along the cliffs? The Manchineel Bays of paradise were reserved for lovemaking, one of those spots you would never bother to go to without a date, one of those places where you unabashedly worshipped sensuality, enslaved yourself to it, where you ended up contemplating, if you were male and so inclined, the metaphor that if islands were women, tropical islands were women who riveted you with lust, and how many islands would it take to soothe the itch, you licentious dog? How many islands before you came to your senses, settled down, and married Ohio?
I couldn’t imagine that a road, however rocky and washed-out, would enhance Manchineel Bay’s reputation for intimate liaisons. Better go see, I thought, and what I thought was true—cookshacks, snack bars, thatched ramadas shading picnic tables, a covey of sunbathing tourists, some Bottom House locals playing dominoes. I bought a bottle of beer and sat down, feeling irrational, feeling jilted. Things weren’t so bad at all. The beach was still spectacular, peaceful, its atmosphere like an erotic daze. So what if Manchineel had lost her virginity? That didn’t make her a whore, at least not yet and maybe never, even if the municipality went ahead, as promised, and paved the road.
Still in love with her, I began to brood, took a walk and a swim to sort out my thoughts, ease the ever-increasing pressure on my heart. Rather than disoriented, I felt surreally connected, more, perhaps, than I wanted or deserved. Come back to Providence and all of a sudden you’re loaded up with dead people. My own personal ghost fleet of souls, and the manifest was growing daily. The worst of it was, and not without its tragic beauty, I had become a medium between the two worlds, the one here and the one not-here, not just an emissary from the past but from the afterlife, toting around the images that survived beyond death. There they were, the bulge in my day pack. My books, of course, and two carousels of slides, previously thumbed by a curious National Geographic editor twenty years ago and then returned with apologies.
In this poor place condemned to poverty and isolation, no one had pictures of their dead, no one could recall the faces of their lost children, fathers, sisters. Last night at Mundo’s we had tacked a bedsheet to the wall, turned off the lights, and I began the show. Neighbors crowded in the doorway. I was prepared for the bittersweet taste of peeling back time, but I hadn’t counted on opening so many graves.
Now everywhere I went, sad-eyed but hopeful islanders were flagging me down on the road. Like Miss Daci in Old Town, who waved me over because she had lost three of her four young sons with Mundo’s daughters on the Betty B. Someone at Mundo’s had recognized the eldest, an iconic shot of a fourteen-year-old boy standing up to his chest in slate-green water, fishing with a hand line. Her surviving son, Roy, now the cashier at the bank, had only been a few years old when his brothers drowned. He had no memory of them, and Miss Daci herself couldn’t quite reassemble their faces in her mind, it had all happened so long ago. So it was I began making house calls, delivering back the disappeared to their families and loved ones, and two nights later I set up shop in the town square, running an extension cord out of the bank, which had agreed to remain open for this purpose and, as twilight fell, I projected my mixed bag of phantoms and former selves across the wall of the erstwhile Hotel Aury. Duppyshow, I would overhear someone in the enthralled crowd say, matter-of-factly.
There’s Oscar Bryan, my uncle, said the bank manager.
Three schoolgirls sitting splay-legged on the ground: My God, mahn, the one in the middle is my wife!
Ah, look, poor Winston. He get crushed by a truck.
Lookout House—it burn down, you know. Yes, I know, and Linda’s dead now seven years, her ashes scattered off the Turks and Caicos.
Margarita and Virginia, angels, no? Raimundo and Miss Pearlie’s girls.
Marta. Hello, Marta. Good-bye.
I turned around to see who had identified her so quickly. It was the island’s agent for SAM airlines. “Bob,” he said, extending his hand, “you don’t know but I am Roberto, Marta’s youngest brother.” He was four years old when I left, had inherited my surfboard, which still hung on his bedroom wall. His older brother and sister had moved to Miami; Roberto had stayed behind to look after his mother, who had not come out of the house since the day Marta had died. No, Roberto told me in answer to my questions, Marta had never married; according to Clara, after me she never had another boyfriend either and, as for Clara herself, she hadn’t become the aviator she had once dreamed of being, a sixteen-year-old girl sitting in the moonlight on my veranda, staring at the sea, but she had read about my books in the Miami Herald and knew about my life. It meant a lot to Clara, Roberto said, that things had worked out for me.
There was just so much of this I could take. My stoicism collapsed into melancholy and I began giving away the slides, shedding my collection of spirits like a retiring schoolmistress dismissing class, sending everybody home for the last time. I escaped to the boat bar tied up to the wharf—Glasford’s boat, Ibsen’s brother—where I could sink into a pair of island traditions equally eternal as its ghosts: listening to country and western music, the more sentimental the better, and firing back a bottle of Medellin rum. Bullshit optional, but just as time-honored.
Mistah Bob, mahn, listen, Mundo’s new wife, Concha, is going to say to me, the day before I leave again. When we are bairn we are each given a destiny, not so?
I want to answer petulantly, wearily, cynically, I know, I know. But I don’t know, really.
Or I want to say, Deaths, yes. Destinies, no. Destinies you wrestle with, until they shake you off.
I don’t have a new revelation about Providence, but instead a revitalization of my original one: Time and chronology are two different animals; the latter tame, a beast of burden, always hungry; the former wild, unruly, popping in and out of existential holes, coming at you from all directions, everywhere at once.
Sunday, we sat at a table moved out to the yard to eat the stewed conch, beans, and rice Concha had cooked for lunch. Chickens and cats scavenged at our feet, Jim Reeves crooned on the cassette player. Gabriel was there, returned from the world to marry his gal, Vivian, and take a government job, night watchman at the new hospital. His domesticated paunch and burgher’s affability made a poignant contrast to Mundo’s wizened poise. In went the food, out came the memories.
I had first met them as a customer, wading out on the flats in front of Old Town to join the queue surrounding Mundo’s catboat, attempting to buy a fish. Mundo gave me a five-pound slab of red snapper but would not accept my money, which made me uncomfortable. Next day, same thing. Who did he think he was, Santa Claus? Take my pesos, I urged, but on the baffling basis that we were neighbors, he kept refusing. Neighbors, according to my upbringing, were nothing more than the people next door, a fuzzy part of the scenery. You didn’t need them, they didn’t need you.
Where did a white kid from the D.C. suburbs go in 1973 to develop an abiding sense of community, family, tolerance, and generosity? How would I know? I would have replied at the time. Seek virtue was not ranked on my list of Things to Do in South America. I would have regarded any suggestion to go live among poor black people in the Third World as dubious indeed. Maybe even more so today, having done quite enough of it for the time being. All I know is that it was my destiny to alight in Providencia for a year, to rent a house in Old Town, to have Mundo as my neighbor and friend, then as my teacher. His pedagogy was rudimentary: Watch and learn. He rarely gave instructions or advice or reproach, except where danger and harm were imminent. He allowed me my mistakes, and I accepted his affectionate bemusement with my awkwardness.
Occasionally he would say, about something good or bad, wrong or right, That is the black man’s way. Occasionally I would say the same thing about whites, but generally the issue of race was so mundane and pointless we never discussed it, except as a joke. I could never get him or anybody else on Providence to stop calling me Mistah—I even retaliated for a time with Mistah Mundo, with no success. It became my name, yet when Mundo requested my most earnest attention, he’d drop the formal, slightly teasing designation in a second. Bob, he’d say in his soft-spoken voice, I am a grown man and my father is dead but still I hate him for taking my future away from me to give me this life of hard work and suffering. In his youth, famous as a baseball player in Cartagena, Mundo was scouted by the gringos and offered a crack at the minors, and an education, in the States. A good son, he returned to his father’s house in San Andrés to ask permission, but his father said no and in those days, Mundo emphasized, you obeyed your father.
Or, we’d be out on the reef, I’d be rowing, Mundo diving, when suddenly he’d spring up to rest his elbows on the gunnel, his face a bowl of euphoria. Bob, he’d say, put on your mask and come look. This is a beautiful spot, bwoy. Beautiful. He didn’t place a lot of faith in my nautical abilities, though he held to his conviction that, since I had voluntarily crossed the threshold into his world, on land or at sea, under his protection and guidance, I would endure, and that single belief became my own, became deeply self-defining. In return, I trusted him, probably far too much, not to kill me when he went a-cowboying beyond the limits of sane seamanship in his livelihood, half profession and half blood sport. It was a most unusual alliance.
In went the food and beer, out poured the memories. Mundo and Gabriel exhaled laughter, reminiscing about the first time they carried me fishing. We went outside the reef into big swells; for eight hours I lay tucked into a fetal curl, awash in pink slimy bilge, puking, dry heaving, getting scorched with second-degree burns. That was the end of my life as a fisherman, they assumed, but at dawn the next morning I was on the beach with my gear, ready to go, and was never seasick again. My skin turned brown—When you come to Providence, bwoy, you cyan’t stay white for long.
Now we had to talk about the first day they trusted me to row the catboat while they both dived. Mistah Bob come back sayin’, “My hands! My hands! They all bloody! What did you do with my hands!” The first time they let me share the diving: You swam ugly, Mistah Bob. Ugly. Like duck. My first encounter with a shark, which had just bumped me and wheeled around for a second pass—I never see a fella fly into a boat so fast as Mistah Bob. And him shoutin’, “Fuck this, fuck this, I ain’t punchin’ no more shark. Fuck this you motherfuckers.”
More beer, more memories and hoots of laughter. Our two-week excursion up to the Serrana Bank aboard a mother ship, the time the panya cook pulled a knife on me and Gabriel stepped between us. Serrana, where some of the men in the catboat fleet went ashore on one of the atolls and robbed the eggs from the nests of boobies, terns, man-of-war birds. The eggs were overdeveloped and mostly rotten; they ate them anyway that night. Serrana, where you didn’t have to dive, just wade, to fill up a boat with conch, where the sea turtles were as plentiful as hummingbirds in a garden of bougainvillea. Where Mundo announced one morning he had a “sign,” had dreamed that night that he had sex with a man, and that meant this day he was going to shoot a big male hawksbill. And did.
Mundo’s dream interpretations of the future, their accuracy—I’m at a loss for what to say about them. Or what to say about the psychic coincidence of a moment like this: In “Hunger,” a short story I had written about Serrana, there was a line I penned about Mundo’s mother, the only line I ever wrote about her, something about how she looked at the white man “as if he had come to steal the toes from her feet.” Naturally, I wanted to know what had become of her, since she had lived with her son but obviously wasn’t around anymore. With great pain, Mundo told me she had died only last year after long suffering. She had scratched her ankle, contracted blood poisoning. Mundo took her to the hospital in San Andrés, where they amputated her foot. Just coincidence, I know, but one of an abundance, offered to existence as a novelty. Like certain poems, the incident seems to beg meaning but eludes understanding, perhaps because I’ve lived so many years with these people in my imagination.
After lunch I unzipped my day pack and brought out my books, flipped through Easy in the Islands, showed Mundo and Gabriel their stories, later read aloud from “Mundo’s Sign.” A tribute. If, as Debussy said, “music is the space between the notes,” then stories are the space between the islands, between lives. Mundo’s reaction was, well, demure; he regarded the books with a thin, aloof smile and, disappointed, I returned them to my bag. There were other people I wanted to show them to anyway.
Fishing again with Mundo brought another twinge of heartache, like watching a former winner of the Kentucky Derby being roped up to a plow. Forget sailing, forget catboats—everyone used a motor launch now. The whine of the two-cycle engines replaced the hum and slice of the wind. Free diving was out, scuba tanks in. Plastic Clorox bottles instead of calabash gourds for bailers. The reef itself was in robust good health but you had to go farther and deeper to find the fish.
The result of our hard day’s labor: not even enough of a catch to pay for our gas. On the way back in Mundo began telling me a story of another day he had spent in rough seas. A year after I had left, he built his first launch, took it eighteen miles up north to the top of the reef, and went outside into the indigo water. Then his engine conked out and the bad seas stove in one of the planks along the keel. He wedged his shirt into the hole and, with a piece of iron, banged the board back into place. Now they wouldn’t sink but they had to bail constantly. As night fell, he threw out the anchor to slow their drift through the open ocean. When the sun came up, he waited for Cessnyca to come searching for them and send a rescue boat, but there was no plane, and no rescue boat, and when the sun went down again he told himself, Fuck it, they think we’re dead, nailed a sheet of plywood to the bow to catch the wind, pulled the anchor and told his mate they were going to Nicaragua on the current. And for three days and nights, without food or water, that’s what they did.
Mundo, I wanted to say but didn’t, you’re planting another story in me.
This is what I remember.
These are the lives I imagine.
These are the recurring images that inhabit me, outside place and time:
The ballet of a man and turtle, their pirouettes through the sorrow-filled loneliness of a blue universe. A black man gorging himself from a bucket of rotten eggs. Sharks like a whirl of gnats around the head of a diver. Boys racing horses on an endless golden beach. The spiral arm of a hurricane, like a serpent’s tail, lashing against the coast. The sleepless eyes of killers and the grin of the barracuda. A quiet day, fishermen asleep in their boats. A naked woman eating a mango, juice dripping off her chin. Rain like a swarm of crystal bees. A catboat heeling into a squall and going under. A machete slashing the arched throat of a hawksbill turtle. A man playing the jawbone, the bounce of the quadrille. An old black woman’s frown of suspicion. An old black woman’s prayers for my safe passage. The phantasmagoric light of the flambeaus, the slap of dominoes against wood, and children drowning. And this, first written in 1979 on the beach in Cape Hatteras, revised in 1980, coming to final rest in ’81, at home and at rest finally, in a short story called “Easy in the Islands.” A woman crawling along the ocean’s floor, weightless as a feather, her hair in flames of phosphorescence. Unbidden, after her death, without my knowledge of her death, Marta came to me, and comes to me, to construct another type of romance altogether.
On my last day with Mundo I gave him, as I had always intended, the book containing his story. I wasn’t certain he wanted it, or what it meant to him, or if he thought of me, ultimately, as nothing more than a voyeur and a thief. “Ah,” he said softly, “I finally have it. Here it is in my hand,” and, to my astonishment, he raised it to his lips to kiss its cover and complete a twenty-year circle, spinning out into that place where everything exists but our flesh.
Now it is time to confess. This is what I did with the gold.
(1994)