JANUARY 22, 2000
Bye-bye, Jamal. Bye bye!”
Albertina is beaming, glowing like a diva as she dances among the Hotel Galápagos’ dining room tables, setting the places for breakfast. Outside the sky is gray, overcast. The hotel’s four guests this morning are still sleeping. In the kitchen, Betty, the cook, slices a bowl of papayas while a transistor radio perched in a window delivers the news.
“Hasta la vista, baby,” chirps Albertina, ducking in for a handful of silverware. “Adios!”
Mahuad has been ousted. It happened late yesterday, and it is still playing itself out at this moment—Ecuador’s first coup in twenty-one years. More than fifteen hundred protesters armed with pickaxes and shovels broke through the barbed-wire barrier surrounding the National Congress in Quito yesterday afternoon. They stormed into the building, leaned out windows, and pushed onto balconies to the roaring cheers of ten thousand people below, all calling for Mahuad to resign.
He resisted at first. Barricaded in the presidential palace just twenty blocks down the street, he appeared live on nationwide television, pointing at the camera and shouting, “I am not going to abandon you.”
But by nightfall he was in hiding, whisked away in an ambulance while thousands of Indios joined by Ecuadorian soldiers outside the palace danced and sang and shot bullets into the air.
Once the smoke cleared—what little smoke there had been—a mere eight protesters had been wounded in both Quito and Guayaquil. Two more lay dead, but they were not shot by soldiers or police: They had tried looting in the midst of the chaos and were each killed by the owner of the store they had raided.
That was early last evening. By midnight, a three-person junta—a military colonel named Gutierrez, a former Ecuadorian Supreme Court justice named Solorzano (who tried to proclaim himself president during a similar upheaval three years ago), and an Indio leader named Antonio Vargas—had declared themselves in command of the country. One Ecuadorian congressman dismissed the triumvirate as “the Three Stooges.” U.S. State Department officials promptly decried the takeover, calling it a “proto-coup” and warning of “disastrous consequences for all Ecuadorians.”
The junta apparently listened. General Carlos Mendoza, the same man who had warned of just such a coup not two weeks ago but who had also vowed his allegiance to Mahuad both in person and in a full-page newspaper ad, ordered Gutierrez to get lost and then took his place in the ruling triumvirate. Mendoza then promptly dissolved the junta. At three A.M. the threesome stepped aside, and by sunrise Mahuad’s vice president, Gustavo Noboa, had emerged as Ecuador’s sixth head of state in the past four years.
At this moment, this morning, according to radio reports, Noboa is in Guayaquil, meeting behind closed doors with the president of Congress, deciding what to do next.
“Ese hijo de puta!” spits Albertina. “That son of a whore.” She does not like Noboa.
“Okay,” answers a voice at the door, speaking, like Albertina, in Spanish. “Who do you want?”
It’s José-Luis, with Christy, come for a quick cup of coffee before starting their day.
“I want the generals,” says Albertina as José follows her into the kitchen. “I know we’re going to suffer, but I’d rather see the military in there than all these ‘politicians.’”
José comes out with a roll in his hand. “She is absolutely right,” he says, shrugging his shoulders and taking a seat. “This is bad, and it’s going to get deeper.”
Christy sits down beside him. She takes off her hat, leans back, and crosses her legs. “Bad, bad, bad,” she says, taking a sip of her coffee. “This is the worst I’ve ever seen.”
“Well,” says José, gazing out at the gray clouds hanging over the harbor, “we do have a lot of presidential material here in Ecuador.”
The door opens again. In comes Jack, a knapsack slung over his shoulder. “Good morning,” he says to Christy and José-Luis. He sticks his head in the kitchen then moves down to his office. “The shit is now hitting the fan.” He speaks with no trace of emotion, as if he’s describing the weather outside.
He flips on his own radio and drops his sack on the desk beside a small sheaf of papers, including the receipts for the surf group—Nuñez and the others—who checked through yesterday on their way back to the mainland after their week of wave-riding. None of them seemed too upset about events in the capital. And they left with their hotel bill still unpaid.
Jack, however, has larger concerns at the moment. Romy recently found out her visa’s expired, and the government official she’s been dealing with in Quito for the past several weeks to renew it is now pushing for a bribe—he calls it a “fee”—of $5,000. So Jack needs to put in a few calls to some friends on the mainland who can go talk to this asshole and straighten things out. No way is Jack going to pay that kind of money for a matter as simple as this.
But it’s the trip to Thailand that’s got Jack worried most. He’ll be leaving soon, and with the government now in a shambles, all bets are off in terms of such things as international flights through Quito or Guayaquil. To make matters worse, outbreaks of dengue fever and leptospirosis have been reported in Guayaquil. Dengue—also known as “breakbone fever” and “dandy fever”—affects tens of millions of people each year, mostly in tropical countries. Carried by mosquitoes, the virus causes fever, nausea, vomiting, shock, and, in one out of twenty cases, death from internal bleeding. Leptospirosis is no more inviting. Caused by drinking or even just swimming in water contaminated by the urine of infected animals, this bacterium causes severe headaches, chills, vomiting, jaundice, diarrhea, kidney damage, meningitis, and, in some cases, death. It looks like Jack will be spending quite a few hours on the telephone this morning.
The day’s guests have now arrived in the dining room and are having their breakfast: a Spanish couple with their young daughter, and an American from North Carolina, a computer programmer named George. Christy and José-Luis have moved on, but another visitor has arrived. He’s a large man, a gringo, wearing white trousers, cowboy boots, and a white, long-sleeved shirt. A pair of aviator sunglasses covers his eyes, and a thick, walrus moustache droops down both sides of his mouth.
“Steve Divine,” he says, extending a hand. He’s here for a cup of coffee before fetching his little boy, Stevie, and driving up to his farm in the highlands. The mud-splattered maroon Diahatsu pickup parked outside belongs to him, and within minutes he’s behind the wheel, whipping it down Darwin Avenue toward the harborfront home he shares with his wife, three kids, and his mother, Doris. Until a couple of years ago, Doris Divine could still get around, but she’s gone downhill lately. Now, much like Margaret Wittmer over on Floreana, Doris spends most of her days upstairs in bed.
“Mentally, she’s lost it,” says Steve, waiting for a group of straw-hatted tourists to stroll past before pulling into his driveway. “At eighty-four, though, that’s not surprising.”
Steve’s wife, Jenny, is at work at the travel agency she operates just up the street. Their daughter, Janine, the thirteen-year-old, is in bed sleeping late this Saturday morning. Fifteen-year-old Jennifer is up, parked in front of the television, watching an MTV video dubbed in Spanish. She has no interest whatsoever in joining her dad and her brother for a day on the farm. Neither does her sister.
“Getting either of them to go up there is like pulling teeth,” Steve says. “But Stevie likes it. The horses, tortoises, wasps, ants—he really gets into it.”
As if on cue, nine-year-old Stevie bounds out of his bedroom, barefoot, blond, deeply tanned, and very, very excited. “One time I take a ant,” he says, speaking in clipped, broken English, his eyes wide with amazement. “This big!” he says, holding his finger and thumb a half-inch apart. “And you know what? I throw him in a—what—a spider web. And the spider, he suck the ant’s blood. And I watch it. It was fun.”
Steve grabs a laptop computer on the way out the door. “For Stevie,” he says. “So he can play that video game Quake.”
“Oh, yes,” says Stevie, following his father out the front door, “I love those monsters.”
Stevie climbs in the truck’s backseat and urges his dad to stop at the grocery on the way out of town. This is the best part, says Stevie, of living down here instead of up at the farm. “Is many places,” he says, “to buy things for eat!”
Steve relents, and they make a quick stop at a tiny bodega, where Stevie picks out a container of yogurt with graham-cracker crumbs.
“Junk food,” snorts Steve.
“It’s delicious,” says Stevie with a grin.
Before climbing back behind the wheel of his truck, Steve suits up, slipping a cloth ball cap onto his head, draping a wraparound scarf down over his neck, and pulling on a pair of long, white gloves. In the hat and the hood and the gloves, along with the shades and the trousers and the white, long-sleeved shirt, he looks like a beekeeper. Or a nuclear power-plant worker.
“It’s the sun,” he explains, buckling his seat belt. “Even on a morning like this,” he says, looking out at the gray sky, “you’ve got at least twice the UV rays you get on the sunniest day in southern Florida. Remember,” he says, gunning the engine and pulling away, “these are the tropics. Those rays are coming straight down.”
Steve’s concern with the sun is a recent obsession. He didn’t bother with sunscreen until he was in his late twenties. That’s when he began noticing spots on his skin. “Little, scabby, wartlike things. Precancerous keratosis. I had them burned off. No big thing. Ten or fifteen a year.”
Early last year that number leaped to near fifty. Then, just this past October, only three months ago, the doctors removed more than a hundred spots from Steve Divine’s skin. More than half of those were from his left arm alone, his driving arm, the one he hangs out the truck’s window when he’s at the wheel, like today.
“That woke me up. That’s when I got serious. Something like that tends to get your attention. Before was like heartburn. This was a heart attack.”
Between here and Bellavista the landscape is brown, sunbaked, barren. Then the road starts to climb, the air becomes cooler, and deep-green forests of cedrela and cascarilla trees rise up on both sides. The sun breaks through the clouds, and horses appear, along with herds of burgundy-and-white cattle grazing in elephant grass that rustles like wheat in the soft morning breeze.
“If it was up to just me, I’d never come down from here,” Steve says, pulling up to a barbed-wire gate at the side of the road. This is the entrance to Rancho Mariposa, the farm his father, Bud, named nearly a half century ago.
Bud Divine. There are few names more fabled among these islands than Steve Divine’s dad. Remember Forrest Nelson, the man who earned such respect as a can-do gringo in those hard, early days at the turn of the ’60s? Well, Bud Divine was on this island years before him, in the early 1950s, running a small store and a bar—in a shack made of pitch pine—in the village and raising his family on the “Other Side,” across the harbor in a small house beyond the barranco. The serene little cove by that house, near the path to Tortuga, is still called Bud’s Bay today because that’s where old man Divine anchored his boat for so many years.
But woe to the person who called Bud Divine “old” to his face. Right up to the day he died, Bud Divine was a man who’d kick your ass roundly if you rubbed him the wrong way. He was a fair man, make no mistake about it. And he could be a hell of a lot of fun. He knew how to drink, no question, and he smoked like a chimney. His bottom line, always, was that he valued in others the qualities he demanded of himself: no bullshit, no slack, work hard, play hard, and expect no more or less from this life than you can carve out of it with your own honest hands.
The men who worked for Bud Divine were at first dumbfounded when payday arrived and they found they’d been charged for each of the cigarettes they’d bummed from him during that week. Divine jotted the numbers they owed him in neat, minute script on empty Marlboro packs he used for notepaper, then subtracted the sums from their paychecks. Once they got over the shock, they realized this was just the way Bud Divine was, a bit of a tight-ass, but fair if you thought about it. This was, after all, the Galápagos, not Guayaquil, or, God forbid, a place like New York. There was no room for excess here. Each drop of water, each bite of food, and, yes, each cigarette was a thing to be treasured, to be worked for and savored. Generosity, sharing, helping out someone who’s truly in need—these things all had their place. But to reach out for something you hadn’t paid for or earned, or to throw away something you had, was unheard of.
Waste in a place such as this was a sin. People still talk about the time Bud Divine saw someone toss an old, broken broom handle from a work site out into the harbor. Divine leaped into his skiff, the one with the twenty-five-horsepower engine (the most powerful motor on the island at that time) and roared out toward the small, floating stick, bellowing at the miscreant: “Jesus Christ, man, you can use that for something!” He fished the pole out of the water to keep for himself, which cost him more in boat fuel than he would have paid for a new broom, but that wasn’t the point.
This obsession with waste made Bud Divine’s death seem all the more wasteful. It happened in 1983, four years before the old man would have turned seventy. He was riddled with cancer, all but housebound, needing help from Doris and Steve just to make it through the day. It was torture. That’s the reason he’d come to these goddamned islands in the first place. It was just about the last place left on Earth where there was nothing that stood between a man and his existence but his hands and his head and his heart and his will.
Bud Divine had spent his whole life staying one step ahead of the bullshit: the government and the politicians, the lawyers and their laws, societies built on dependency and need. He’d worked as a prospector back in the States and as a cowhand, too. (He still wore that ten-gallon hat and brown rawhide boots when he first came to the islands, but he soon traded the hat for a baseball cap.) He took an epic trip once in the ’40s on horseback from Arizona up to Montana, got snowed in at the end there, and came away with some frostbite, but who cared about that? It was a hell of an experience.
He owned a ranch for a time in Arizona, the Butterfly Ranch. That’s where the name Rancho Mariposa came from for this spread in the Galápagos hills, a Spanish translation of Bud Divine’s old place in the States. His first taste of the islands came during the war when he worked manning a barge that hauled fresh water from San Cristobal to the troops over on Baltra.
After the Japanese surrendered, Divine wound up in Seattle, where he met Doris (a newspaper reporter) and swept her off her feet. They bought a sailboat—the Symbol, as a matter of fact—in 1947, and two years after that they sailed the thing to the Galápagos. By the time Steve was born in 1954, the family was settled here on Santa Cruz, with a house down by the ocean and the farm up in the hills.
That’s how Bud Divine came to these islands, pushed by the need to live life his way. And that, in a sense, is how his life ended. Riddled with cancer, having to ask others to do for him what he could no longer do for himself, was no way to live. And so one evening in the autumn of 1983, down in that house by Bud’s Bay, he sent Doris out for an errand. Then he fished out his. 32 revolver, put the barrel to his mouth, and pulled the trigger.
Of course, some called it cowardly, a terrible thing to do to the loved ones he left behind. Sure, Steve admits, it still hurts, thinking of his dad dying that way. But Steve understands. As for Doris, well, who knows? Her memory’s gone. She passes her days in the upstairs room in Steve’s house in town, just a husk of the young woman she’d been all those decades ago back in Seattle, when Bud Divine walked into her life and swept her away.
Steve climbs out and opens the gate to the ranch. The smell of horse manure hangs in the air. When Steve was a boy growing up in the ’50s and ’60s, horses were the centerpiece of this farm, both for working the cattle and for sheer transportation. The only way to the town in those days was on horseback or on foot. They had close to a hundred horses back then, recalls Steve, but now there are maybe thirty, and only a half dozen of those have any real use.
“The rest are just family,” says Steve, pulling the truck through the gate, then closing it back behind him. “I could get maybe thirty dollars each for them now, which is nothing. Actually, I’d be lucky to get that. Since the road was put in, the value of horses on this island has gone to almost zero. Sometimes you can’t give ’em away.”
He’s got a few cattle on his 750 acres up here, but any income the farm generates these days is mostly from tortoise-watching—from the tourists who pay three bucks a head to hike through these forests and fields and photograph themselves among the dozens of Galápagos tortoises who make their highland home here.
Divine averages five tour groups a day. The groups range from a half dozen to as many as a hundred. Last Wednesday a group of sixty from the cruise ship Polaris came up. The next afternoon there were fifty from the tour boat Santa Cruz. Sometimes the tourists pay Divine out of pocket, but typically he collects from the tour boat operators, who don’t always come through with their payments. The Galápagos Explorer, for example, says Steve, hasn’t paid him in over a year. Right now, he says, they owe him more than $1,000.
“It’s not fair,” he says. “A ship that size, with that kind of money behind them, not paying their bills? I could understand if it were a small operation having a hard time. I can let things like that slide. But this, this pisses me off.”
This is a slow day. There’s only one group scheduled, a class of sixteen biology students from a school in the United States, a place called Calvin College in Michigan. They’re down in a meadow, circled around their professor and a good-sized pair of tortoises as Divine pulls up and parks in the shade of a massive teak tree beside a low, cinder-block building.
The view is breathtaking. White cattle egrets in full breeding plumage soar over rolling green meadows that slope down toward the sea. Far below, the ocean spreads out like a hazy, blue blanket. To the left, on the southern horizon, beyond the gray haze that hangs over Puerto Ayora, sits a dark, rounded hump framed by billowing white clouds: Floreana. To the right, the west, looms the outline of Isabela—large, dark, and cragged, it appears close enough to reach out and touch.
A distant whinny drifts from the moss-draped forest above. A yellow warbler chirps in a nearby stand of smooth, gray-trunked balsas. From the far side of the house, where an open veranda looks down on the sea, come the sounds of rumbling, groaning, and electronic beeps.
Stevie’s got the laptop plugged in, and he’s shooting the monsters on his video game.
“At least he still likes coming up here,” sighs Divine, lifting a couple of cases of bottled water from the back of the truck. “The girls prefer it down there in town, where everything’s happening. They get bored up here.”
A woman named Juanita, whose husband Efrain runs the ranch for Divine, stands at a stove by the veranda cooking lunch. An infant sits strapped in a stroller beside her. Efrain is off repairing a fence on the west end of the spread. Later today he’ll move a few cattle. Then he’ll get back to clearing the brush and spraying for mora, which has become a chore without end since the vines first appeared here a dozen or so years ago.
“I didn’t realize how bad it could get,” says Divine. “I had no idea. For the first couple of years, I was reluctant to use herbicides, and then the mora just exploded. Now there’s no alternative. It’s either use the Roundup or go under.”
A young Ecuadorian man wearing a Park warden’s uniform sits at the veranda’s open-air counter, drinking a bottle of beer and nodding his head at Divine’s words. The man’s name is Washington Parédes Torres. He’s guiding today—that’s his group down in the meadow, the Michigan kids. They can take care of themselves for the moment, says Washington, so he’s taking a break and having a beer. He doesn’t mind jumping in on this talk about mora because his own family is fighting the same stuff on their farm just up the road, the farm he grew up on.
“The, how you say, scientists,” Washington says, taking a swallow of beer. “They always do the same thing. They come and they study and they study. And then they leave, and then another scientist comes and he study and study. But nobody does anything.
“We have one scientist last year who helped,” he continues. “He was named Billy. He give us thirty, forty gallons of Roundup and we use it. And it worked. But you need the same gallons three or four more times for each hectare because the mora come back again. It is in the ground, the seeds, and it doesn’t go away, even with the poison.”
There is a movement just past the teak tree, a slow-crawling shadow. A head pokes into view: hairless, leathery, reptilian. Then a long, outstretched neck lined with deep wrinkles. Then a smooth, weathered shell, the size of a coffee table, supported by four elephantine legs. The thing moves in slow motion, oblivious to all that surrounds it—the people, the cooking, the sounds of the computer.
“That one’s probably about eighty years old,” says Divine, hardly looking up from the bottles he’s unpacking as the immense tortoise comes into full view. “We’ve got some here as old as a hundred and fifty.
“You can pretty much tell the age by the smoothness of the shell,” he continues. “The smoother it is, the older they are.
“It’s kind of funny that way,” he chuckles. “We get wrinkled, they get smoother.”
Hang around here long enough, says Divine, and you hardly notice the tortoises anymore. They come and go just like this one, in silence, stopping every couple of slow, deliberate steps to chew a mouthful of grass, or to sink in the mud of one of the forest’s wet spots, or to gulp the freshwater they find in the highland’s puddles and ponds. The one time they openly announce their presence is during mating season, when the male’s bellowing roar can be heard like a lion’s, echoing through the treetops as he couples with his mate.
But it’s not mating season right now, and the hillside is silent, serene. Steve grabs a bottle of water and settles into a chair overlooking the ocean below. Juanita has mentioned the government overthrow on the mainland, but, to tell the truth, Steve’s just not that concerned. This stuff has been happening in Ecuador ever since he was born—ever since Ecuador was born. What matters to Steve is what hits closer to home, what actually happens here, on these islands: this mora, for example, or the goats and wild pigs that have been spreading like crazy, or those freighters from Japan sitting on the horizon, filling their holds with pepinos and such.
“They’re raping this place,” Divine says of the illegal fishing, “turning it upside down just so half of Asia can get their dicks hard.”
He takes a hit off his water. “I’d love to see Greenpeace come down here,” he says. “Or the Sea Shepherd,” he adds, referring to the vigilante ecowarriors whose ships roam the world’s oceans, enforcing international fishing regulations in places where those laws are blatantly violated.
This is about as far as Divine’s concerns go. The world beyond these islands’ shores remains for him much as it has been all his life—a universe away. Steve’s got snapshots of himself as a baby, in a bassinet fashioned from an old tortoise shell. He’s got memories of old Christian Stampa, one of those first pioneering Norwegians, talking with Bud and Doris on the porch of their house down by the bay about the trips Stampa used to make over to Floreana and the run-ins he had with the baroness herself.
“He’d go over there to hunt wild cattle,” says Divine. “She actually pulled a gun on him, or at least that’s what I heard. She was a little bit wacko.”
He takes a deep breath. Washington’s gone now, back to rejoin his tour group. Stevie’s still engrossed in his video game. There’s a wasp’s nest Steve would like to go find and hack down a bit later. The wasps have been stinging some of the horses and cattle lately, and Steve’s got a pretty good idea where the nest might be. But there’s plenty of time to do that. Besides, he says, it’s good for Stevie to be around people speaking English like this, to hear this language and maybe speak some of it himself. Stevie’s sisters can speak hardly a word, and that bothers Divine.
“They need to learn English,” he says. “It’s the language of business. It’s the language of travel. And here in the Galápagos, it’s the language of tourism. That’s one of the reasons I like to bring Stevie up here, so it’s just me and him talking.”
English, says Steve, was the language of choice among the expatriate community he grew up with down on the “Other Side.” With both his own parents born and raised in the States, it’s no surprise that Steve, though he calls himself Ecuadorian, walks and talks like an American. He didn’t even visit the United States until just five years ago, when he and Jenny and little Stevie flew to upstate New York to see some relatives and friends.
“I couldn’t believe how fast-paced everything is,” he says. “Everyone’s in a rush. Too damned aggressive, if you ask me. That’s one problem up there, is that so many people are just downright ornery.”
But then, he adds, there’s a bright side to all that rushing around. “I like the way everything works up there. I mean, you pick up a phone, and there you are. It works. And everything’s so organized. The superhighways, for example. I mean, it would scare me stiff to actually drive on the things. My wife did the driving while we were up there. But navigating is so easy. Everything’s marked, which it’s not in Ecuador. Highway signs down here are conspicuous by their absence.”
Steve was blown away by the bus trip he, Jenny, and Stevie took during that U.S. visit, from Buffalo all the way to Miami—a trip Steve enjoyed immensely, although Jenny (an urban Ecuadorian whom Steve married after meeting her in 1983 while she was leading an island tour from the mainland), did not.
“Yeah, she almost killed me for that one. We went by Greyhound, thirty hours straight through. I loved it. I’ve done a lot of busing in Ecuador, back and forth from Guayaquil to Quito and such. Let me tell you, a Greyhound bus is paradise compared to Ecuadorian buses.”
He takes a swig of his water. “First of all, you’ve got legroom. Your knees aren’t crammed up in your chin. And no one’s carrying chickens and pigs. And you’ve got a rest room. It might not be clean, but at least you don’t have to wait and hold it till the next stop. And,” he adds, standing and stretching, “nobody’s smoking.”
Steve’s been thinking hard lately about taking the whole family, including the girls—“especially the girls,” he says—up to live for a while someplace in the United States so the kids will be forced to learn English. He’s been giving it a lot of thought lately. He’s considered Miami. It seems as if everyone he knows around here goes to Miami. He and Jenny have got friends there so it wouldn’t be hard to find a place to stay. “The trouble is,” he says, standing and tossing his empty water bottle in the trash, “everyone speaks Spanish in Miami.”
If he had his choice, Steve would prefer someplace a little less urban, a bit more like this farm, with hills and trees and wide-open spaces without all the crime they’ve got in a big city. And yes, a place where his kids could learn to speak English. Someplace like…Arkansas.
“I’ve heard Arkansas’s rural, quite cheap, and beautiful country,” says Steve. “Not a place to go for a job or anything like that but a good place to vacation. Of course I’ve never been, but it could happen. Maybe this summer. We’ll see.”
Stevie’s done with his game. Lunch is ready. The tour group has left, gone back down to the town, where the morning grayness has moved off toward the west, toward the “Other Side,” and the sun is now beating down.
It’s early afternoon, siesta time, and the harborfront is deserted. A couple of water taxis putt back and forth among the tour boats anchored out in the bay, but other than that there are no people in sight, not at this time of day, not in this heat. The tourists are resting inside their cabins out on the boats. Or they’re back at their hotel rooms having a nap. Or they’re eating a late lunch in one of the restaurants. Or perhaps they’re doing some shopping in one of the waterfront shops, such as the Angelique Art Gallery down by the wharf, where a hand-painted banner fashioned from a bedsheet and strung loosely between two rooftop poles proclaims:
PEACE ON EARTH
Angelique Art Gallery
Wishes You A Happy New Century
www.sarahdarling.com
Inside, behind a small desk, sits a willowy, darkly tanned woman. She looks about forty and is wearing a white peasant blouse and a long skirt to match, with brunette braids brushing her bare, freckled shoulders and a smart, little straw hat pulled tight on her head. The shop is tiny, no wider than the empty tour bus parked at the curb just outside, just deep enough to allow four, maybe five, customers to step in at one time and take a look at the artwork arranged on the walls.
The woman is, of course, Sarah Darling. Her paintings are hallucinogenic swirls of fluorescent colors in the shapes of various Galápagos animals. When she goes home at night, she locks up the shop and walks down to the wharf. There she unties a small motorboat and takes it across the lagoon, out past the point, into the ocean beyond the barranco, and around to Bud’s Bay. This is where she and her husband, Gus Angermeyer’s son, Franklin, have lived since they met and married back in 1989.
Franklin’s at home at the moment, working on one of several sailboats that—in true Angermeyer fashion—sit in various stages of construction or repair. Meanwhile, Sarah, like everyone else in this town on this day, is glued to the radio, listening for updates on the fall of the government. She comments occasionally, in her thoroughly British accent, using terms such as “dreadful” and “vile.”
She’s upset about all of it: the grief on the mainland, the ugliness that’s invaded these islands, those “horrid” industrial fishing boats slaughtering the innocent animals. She’s been working with the school system on that last one, she and a local “shaman” named Pepé. Sarah would like to use her artwork and Pepé’s storytelling to teach the local children about the preciousness of the natural wonders around them. We can’t even see all the damage we’re doing, she says. The shamans will tell you, she says, that there are things none of us can see with our eyes alone. There are a half dozen or so “medicine men,” as they call themselves, in this village. Most have drifted here in recent years from the mainland, where the tradition of shamanism is deeply embedded in Ecuadorian culture. There are some people in town who take these men at their word, who believe that these ponytailed strangers are truly plugged in to the mysteries of the ages. There are others who call them “shams,” not shamans, and say they are nothing but dope-smoking charlatans riding the coattails of a venerable tradition.
Franklin couldn’t care less either way about this shaman bullshit. Now, give him a good bottle of tequila, a willing circle of friends, and a clear, starlit evening, and he’ll pull out the musical instruments from the old, wooden chest he keeps down in the living room where he’s set up an old rowboat as a bar—an honest-to-god, full-sized skiff that he hauled right into the house when it had no more use on the water. He’ll dig into that chest and pull out the beat-up ukulele, the bongos, the guitar, the maracas, and the small, four-stringed quatro, and he’ll deal them out to his friends like a wild deck of cards. Then he’ll lead the group onto his back porch, and they’ll all find a seat, and the music will start, and the bottle will pass from one hand to the next. And Franklin will show them the way, a mad grin creasing his face, sweat beading up on his broad, weathered forehead, his tangled, brown hair knotted with sea salt and wind, the muscles on his ropy forearms straining as he bangs on his bongos, exhorting the others to sing and to dance and to bark at the moon.
“From the soul, man!” he shouts, his hands beating the drums braced between his bare legs. “Shake it, but don’t break it, baby!” he bellows, as the group follows his lead, and the porch shudders and shakes, and the music rolls out into the purple night air up toward the moonlight-washed volcanic peaks. The shadows of Franklin’s uncles—Fritz, Hans, Karl, and Franklin’s own father, Gus, back when they were all Franklin’s age and did this same thing—their spirits hover above these cactus and rocks and float out over the still, dark bay waters that lap at the front side of this house.
Franklin does not give a damn about shamans, but Sarah’s done her time in Nepal and India and throughout the Far East. She’s got a tattered paperback in her shop—Southeast Asia on a Shoestring—which she carried with her back in the old days, in the late ’70s, long before she met Franklin, after she left her family’s wooded estate in Wiltshire, England. She’d grown up there riding horses and all that and went searching for—well, searching for something. She finally found it here, in the Galápagos, where Franklin whisked her right off the deck of a tour boat (his tour boat) and now—what, eleven years later?—here she is, although she’s not completely settled with the idea of being an Angermeyer woman, even after all this time.
Just look at Gus’ wife, Lucrecia, who separated from Gus in the late 1960s and now lives in Quito. Gus still lives here, spending his days across the lagoon in that small, roughshod house on the barranco, the place he calls his “cave.” It’s a playpen of sorts, and God knows Gus has always known how to play, which is both a curse and a blessing. Sarah will tell you, the same way Lucrecia would, that Gus Angermeyer is an easy man to love but a hard one to live with.
“He’s slept with more women than you’ve eaten hot dinners,” Sarah says of her father-in-law. “He was dreadful that way, always out on his boat, chatting up and charming the women. A free spirit. Kind of a German hippie who never grew up.”
There’s a lot of that spirit in Franklin as well, although Sarah’s determined not to wind up like Lucrecia. It’s all very complicated, she says, the magnetic allure of these Angermeyer men, of their Galápagos way of living. That lust for life in a setting like this can be very seductive. To have those parties take shape at the drop of a hat, to travel to work each day not in an automobile but in a small boat (or to not travel at all), to work with your own hands as Franklin does, to build and sail your own boats through channels and inlets you’ve known and explored since the day you were born, and to step out your door and see frigate birds float on the breeze and blue-footed boobies dive into crystal-clear water that laps at your porch—Sarah adores all these things. But it worries her as well, the fact that while this is all so eternally timeless, it’s also impermanent, if that makes any sense. Sarah wonders sometimes if it does make any sense, the gnawing anxiety that comes with the sweetness of living this life, the lingering fear that it could all come to an end at any moment. Because that lust for life cuts in so many directions. It can turn out the light as suddenly and as intensely as it switches it on.
Maybe that’s why Sarah’s artwork has come to mean so much to her. Every time one of those cruise ships pulls in, Sarah prays there’s a patron on board, an angel who’ll take one look at her paintings and bring them to New York or Paris, hang them in a gallery or in the gallery of a friend, sell them to the world. No matter what happens with Franklin, no matter what happens on this island, whether Sarah stays here for the rest of her life or flies out of Baltra tomorrow, her artwork is with her forever.
There’s so much that Sarah’s unsure of, but one thing she knows is she doesn’t want her life or Franklin’s to wind up like Gus’. Don’t get her wrong, she says. She loves Gus, she adores that old man. She’s heard what so many people in town say about him: He’s nuts, wacko, gone out of his mind, hanging around the waterfront, bothering the tourists with his insane ramblings about God and the cosmos and the iguanas, who supposedly share all his feelings.
Sarah knows Gus isn’t crazy. Although he can seem that way to the more adventurous visitors who catch one of those water taxis, cross the lagoon, and come upon the grizzled old man perched on the cement steps that climb up the barranco from the small concrete wharf where the motorboats dock.
He sits by himself, in a T-shirt the color of limes and faded swim trunks the color of coral. His skin, dark as mahogany, is wrinkled and scarred from an incomprehensible lifetime of barehanded, barefooted labor. It’s clear why they called him “the Tractor” back in the old days. His massive hands could clamp around the trunk of a fallen tree like the jaws of a vise; his shoulders could lift that tree up and out like a steam shovel. Even his toes were powerful tools, able to grip a boat’s oars as Gus rowed with his legs, with the force and the sureness of two normal men’s arms.
They called him the “King of the Galápagos,” the magazine and newspaper reporters who came here over the decades to see these legendary brothers for themselves. They’d ask them to pose for corny photographs, to lean on a tortoise, smoke a pipe and look thoughtful, or to wear phony feathered caps on their heads, like tropical Robin Hoods. And the brothers went along with this game because, what the hell, it was fun. It was all fun—goddamned hard work, but a blast just the same, living like they did, in those days when there was hardly anyone else on the islands.
Now things have changed. Time has moved on. Hans and Karl are dead. Fritz is still hanging in there, just up the way from this wharf, in his own modest waterfront house. He can’t hear a thing anymore—he’s been stone-cold deaf for a few years now—but he’s still alert, able to enjoy a drink or two in the evening with friends.
As for Gus, well, it’s hard to tell how Gus is doing. When a passerby stops to greet him, he looks up, the snowy stubble of his unshaven chin glinting in the sunlight, the thatch of thin silvery hair on his head shining as well. “You don’t know me!” he says with disgust. Then he grins, shakes his head, and turns away. “You are crazy,” he murmurs in English with a thick, German accent.
A woman is down on the wharf, with a small blond boy, a toddler, who stands by the edge gazing into the water.
“You’re stupid,” Gus says, spitting his words at the woman. “You’re really stupid. I would never let a little child close to the water like that.”
The woman is unshaken. She laughs. “I’m a good grandmother,” she says in a calm, soothing voice.
And Gus then laughs, too. It’s a game they are both playing. They know each other well. They are neighbors. Her name is Anita, and that’s Robert, her grandson. Anita and her husband have lived on this island for years. They run a large restaurant across the harbor, above the town, on their farm in the highlands. The tourists drop in and eat at her place after taking in Los Tunéles, the lava tunnels near Media Luna. You can call her anytime, she says, on her marine radio, Frequency 23-A.
“Ahhh, Galápagos,” says Gus, leaning back on the steps, crossing his legs and looking up at the sky. “Galáaapagos.”
Suddenly, he sits upright, furrows his brow, and spits toward the water. “Galápagos is kaput. Not only Galápagos, but the whole world is kaput.”
Anita laughs. Gus relaxes his face, and now he’s laughing, too.
“I’m no pessimist,” he says. “I will never be. I am the biggest optimist on the planet Earth.” He stops speaking, gazes out at the frigate birds floating over the bay, drifting on thermal upwellings, each of them motionless and suspended in the air, as if held in place by the strings of a puppeteer.
“Those are my birds up there,” says Gus. He leans back, extends a knuckled finger, and begins counting.
“Eins, zwei, drei…” He stops at six. “Where’s the seventh?” He squints his eyes, searching the gray, wispy clouds laced across the bright-turquoise sky.
“Ah, there he is.” He smiles, nods his head. “My birds. So beautiful. You would not believe. These birds, they know me, they know who I am.”
A water taxi shoots past in the distance, the drone of its engine like a nest full of hornets.
“Man stirbt nicht,” Gus says slowly, as if reading the words. “Man bringt sich um.”
He repeats himself, this time in English: “Man does not die. He kills himself.”
A small splash hits the glassy water below. Then another. And now the harbor’s surface is dancing with the droplets of a light afternoon drizzle.
“Angel’s tears,” Gus says, squinting up at the clouds.
Anita and Robert hurry up the steps, say good-bye, and hustle down the path toward the home of a friend. Gus rises as well, and moves a couple of steps toward a rough wooden gate by a hand-painted sign at the edge of the lane. The sign warns, “PRIVADO.”
As Gus steps through the gate, a gray-striped tabby cat appears from the mangroves by the edge of the little home’s small, stony yard. The cat follows Gus as he finds cover beneath the overhang of the cabin’s back patio. He takes a seat on a large slab of wood. The cat curls beside him.
“What is beauty?” he asks, stroking the animal. “And what is not?
“Die Schönheit,” he answers himself, “ist ein Licht in dem Herz.”
“Beauty,” he translates, “is a light in the heart.”
The rainfall makes a light hissing sound as it lands on the black lava stones in the yard. “This is an incredible creature,” says Gus, caressing the tabby. “You see only a cat.”
He shakes his head. “This creature knows things you will never know, things you will never understand.”
A small lava lizard darts from the brush onto one of the wet, glistening rocks, its bright-orange throat throbbing against the dull brown of its body.
“You see that creature?” asks Gus. “He, too, knows.” He sighs deeply. “It is incredible what you can learn when you observe.”
He sighs again. Then he shoves the cat off the bench onto the patio’s hard concrete floor, where it lands and darts off into the brush. “Piss on him! And shit, too, if you can.”
He leans back, closes his eyes, and his face softens. “Gott ist Liebe,” he says.
“Do you know what that means?” His eyes are now open. “Our mother would tell us this when we were children: ‘God is love.’” He shuts his eyes again. “Our mother, she was the most truly, perfectly beautiful person, believing in God.”
It has been sixty-five years since Gus said good-bye to his mother in Germany. Sixty-five years since he and his brothers sailed here to the Galápagos. Gus is thinking about that right now, about his brothers and sisters when they were all young, their parents back home in Hamburg.
“Heinzi, Guschi, Hansi, Karl, Fritzi,” he says, his eyes turning moist. “There was Lene, the daughter, she was first. Then the last, Ane Lise.” He grins, shakes his head. “Between two very foolish females came five brilliant men.”
He turns, spits in the dirt, and stands. “This is shit talk, Scheiss, you know that?” When he stands like this, he can see beyond the rocks and the brush and out over the harbor.
“That yacht now that is going out there,” he says, watching a good-sized ship move off toward the sea. “How many yachts have been here? How many yachts cruise through here? How many cruise and cruise and cruise?”
He sits down again. “Some find what they are looking for. Some keep on sailing and never find.” He looks at the lizard, which still sits on the rock. Another lizard appears, and the two begin chasing each other, skittering over the slick stones.
“What do you see?” asks Gus. “Are they playing?” He pauses, then answers himself. “They are not playing. I have observed these animals for many years. They are like man, like human beings. Jealousy. Territory. That is what’s happening.”
The rain’s falling harder now.
“Seele, ach meine Seele,” he says, so softly the words can hardly be heard. “Noch ein Kind zu sein.”
There is silence for a moment.
“Soul, oh my soul,” he says, just as softly. “A child still to be.”
Silence again.
“Ich bin noch ein Kind.”
His fingers curl gently around the cat’s head. “I am still a child.”
The cat is purring now, as loud as the rain.
“Something my mother said to me when I was a little boy.”
The cat’s eyes are closed. The lizards are gone. The rain falls on the rocks. The harbor is still.
“Du bist wer du bist; du bist was du bist.”
He stands one last time. “You are who you are,” he says, pulling open the door to his hut. “You are what you are.”
He steps into the house and closes the door.