I saw her one morning in the courtyard of the hotel, the old Dutch house in the coco forests on the ocean shore where I lived in those days. And afterwards I saw her there every morning. She sprawled in a reed armchair in the light hot shade that fell from the building, a stone’s throw from the veranda. His bare feet crunching over the gravel, a tall, yellow-faced, agonizingly narrow-eyed Malay, dressed in a white canvas jacket and trousers of the same kind, would bring her a tray with a cup of golden tea and set it down on a little table beside the armchair, would say something to her deferentially, without stirring his dry, tightly pursed lips, would bow and withdraw; and she would sprawl, and slowly flap her straw fan, rhythmically fluttering the black velvet of her astonishing eyelashes… To what species of earthly creations could she be assigned?
Her small body, tropically strong, had its coffee-coloured nakedness revealed at the breast, on the shoulders, on the arms and on the legs as far as the knees, while the torso and hips were somehow entwined with bright green cloth. Her small feet with red toenails peeped out between the red straps of varnished yellow-wood sandals. Her tar-black hair, piled up high, strangely failed to correspond in its coarseness with the delicacy of her childlike face. In the lobes of her small ears swung hollow gold rings. And improbably huge and magnificent were her black eyelashes – the like of those heavenly butterflies that flutter so magically on heavenly Indian flowers… Beauty, intelligence, stupidity – none of those words went with her at all, nor did anything human: she truly was as if from some other planet. The one thing that did suit her was speechlessness. And she sprawled and was silent, rhythmically fluttering the black velvet of her butterfly lashes, slowly flapping her fan…
Once, in the morning, when into the courtyard of the hotel ran the rickshaw with which I usually went into town, the Malay met me on the steps of the veranda and, with a bow, said quietly in English:
“One hundred rupees, sir.”
24th May 1944