Iguanas and Orchids

Come on in.

It’s the stories that I remember, the telling of stories.

Yes.

On returning, I’d come upon it much as it had been left. The doors were hanging off their hinges. The windows banged in the breeze. The fire had not taken all the buildings. Collapsed jalousies allowed the light to paint in broader strokes. There were shards of shattered glass on the floor. The weather had since intruded on the rooms and corrupted the papers, damp and mildewed, lying on desks and in drawers, dusty with woodlice. Rain and light had done their work. The surfaces of windowsills and tables were sticky and grainy with salt. Cupboards still held bottles and vials of medicine. The contents had spilt, or evaporated. Others were still there, lurid and labelled. Chaulmoogra Oil. Filing cabinets had been rifled, thrown to the ground, with their personal records pulled out and strewn on the floor. Syringes were now glass dust. It crunched under my feet on the pitch pine floors.

Was this the way of the exodus, or had this happened in its aftermath? A bit of both, I supposed. This was the kind of thing I saw in the offices and the stores.

Scraps of bandages, like cotton on the cotton trees outside, hung in the fetid air with the dust.

A net of mosquitoes festered like the noise of discordant violins.

On the wards, the iron beds were upended, some had had their springs knocked out, their struts and posts collapsed. Fibre from the disembowelled mattresses was sodden and rotting. Feathers from gutted pillows stirred in the air, floating in the light. Despite this almost total exposure to the elements, a lingering hospital smell filtered through the scent of decay. Human residue and chemicals. Faeces were smeared on the walls. There was the stench of urine.

Somewhere, still, there was that other smell, creeping out of everything.

Two iguanas scuttled among the dry leaves beneath the old almond tree. The mauve mimosa, Ti-Marie, crept to the door with her thorns, closing her leaves to our passing touch.

The bush had encroached on what had been the clean yards around the huts. The pink coralita vine scrambled over broken-down, rusty galvanise fences. I could see broken crockery and corroded pots and pans. The gardens had joined the wild, but their purple, red and orange bougainvillea, the chalices of yellow allamanda, still broke out, overburdening the other bushes in the enamel-like jade which was the green of this place.

Butterflies hovered and attached themselves to the wild flowers. The garden ticked with insects. It screamed, the cigale’s scream, that incessant pitch of the cicada’s sawing whine. It rustled and creaked. In the breeze, it scratched at the wounded galvanise roofs which bled their rust.

A wild, white orchid exuded its perfume.

The place was unusually still. Then, there were the gusts of wind, the soft touch of sea breezes, and the waves breaking repeatedly, with their particular monotony, on the beach below, where I’d left the pirogue. I wandered back to the boatman on the jetty.

In the distance, the ocean was swollen and smacked against rocks on the point beyond Salt Pond and Bande du Sud. It rolled on in an unstoppable tide, coming through the bocas between the islands and the continent.

I felt that much had been preserved in the camphor of time, but time had also picked holes in the fabric of this place; a place which had been home for each of us for a period which had seemed as if it would never end.

Leaves fall from a library of leaves in a dry season.