A Moveable Feast (16 page)

John T. Newman was born in Gary, Indiana, but by the time he was three years old, his family had returned to California, where their roots go back to before the Gold Rush. He grew up in, and around, the San Francisco Bay Area and holds a BA from the University of California at Santa Cruz and an MFA from San José State University. He has travelled all over the world, and spent a period of ten years, when he was working for a scuba diving magazine, travelling exclusively in tropical countries. He is the author of
Scuba Diving and Snorkeling for Dummies,
and dozens of travel stories. He currently lives in Santa Cruz, California, with his wife and seven cats.

There it was again. That insidious undertone beneath the faint scent of nutmeg, cloves and sacred jasmine drifting across the deck. The reek of decomposing flesh. The stench of death.

I couldn’t come up with many rational explanations. Some compound of sulphur dioxide drifting across the narrow channel from the chuffing black volcanic cone of Gunung Api? But the
cloud belching from the gut of the caldera was drifting
away
from our anchorage. The breeze was coming from Neira island – carrying its mysterious aromas, the warbling cry of the muezzin calling the Muslim faithful to evening prayers, and the harsh squabbling of parrots from the green darkening slopes. Perhaps the flower of some species of
Rafflesia,
a plant that is pollinated by flies and produces a giant blossom that smells like rotting meat?
Rafflesia
are native to Kalimantan, 700 miles to the west, but I’m not sure they even grow here in the Banda Islands.

That these tiny islands in the tepid equatorial waters of the Western Pacific are home to fantastically exotic flora is axiomatic. These are the legendary Spice Islands. It was these mythic, fecund groves that Columbus was seeking when he stumbled onto the New World. It was here that the Portuguese, the Dutch and the English battled for control of the world’s only source of mace, cloves and nutmeg in the seventeenth century, staining the soil, and the sea, with blood – each other’s and that of the indigenous people. It was on these little islands that the legendary fortune of the Dutch East India Company was built. It was for these islands that the Dutch traded Manhattan to the English.

Today the native spices are no longer so rare. They are grown in tropical countries all over the world and the Bandas are largely forgotten, except for the occasional tourist. Most of these are scuba divers – underwater the Bandas are even more dazzling and exotic than they are topside. We were among them. We’d flown into Ambon from Bali to board the MV
Pindito,
a 124-foot
pinisi
-type schooner converted to a liveaboard dive boat.
Pindito
books most of its clientele from Europe. With the exception of Smiley, the photographer, and myself, our group was entirely Swiss. We’d spent the previous three days working our way down to the Bandas, a dozen small islands surrounded by deep ocean, 160 miles south-east of Ambon, diving some of the most dazzling coral gardens in the tropical Pacific along the
way. On the fourth day, we dropped anchor in the harbour of Bandaneira, the capital and largest town. The setting sun washed the towering nimbus that loomed over Gunung Api in shades of pale peach and apricot. The harbour, still as a summer lake, was awash in the drifting enigmatic scents of heaven, and horror.

I went below to join the rest of the passengers in the lounge for a dinner of fresh fish, rice and veggies. For dessert we were presented with a large bowl of what looked like miniature eggplants, and which the Indonesians called, without a trace of equivocation, the Queen of fruits: the mangosteen. The mangosteen tree doesn’t grow in places where the temperature dips below four degrees Celsius. It doesn’t even do well below fifteen. The fruit doesn’t travel well, either, so fresh mangosteens are not well known outside of the tropics. Like the rest of the spectrum of toothsome equatorial produce, it is different enough from its temperate cousins to defy comparison. The rind is purple and leathery. The flesh is segmented like a tangerine, but as white as a lily and not nearly as acidic. The taste is flowery with buttery caramel overtones – in other words, ineffably exquisite and orgasmically delicious. Smiley and I wolfed nearly the whole bowl in a spontaneous gustatory blitz-orgy.

‘Wow,’ Smiley said, ‘if that’s the Queen of fruits, I wonder what the King is?’

Peter, our host and dive master, chuckled and scratched his stubbled cheek. ‘That’s durian,’ he informed us. ‘Durian is King of fruits.’

‘Can we get some?’

‘Probably, but durian, it is not like this one. Durian takes some getting used to.’

‘King of fruits,’ Smiley mumbled. ‘Wow.’

At dawn, the eastern sky showed the swollen purple of an ugly bruise, and the day quickly deteriorated into the kind of prodigious downpour that occurs only in that narrow belt of boiling atmosphere within a few degrees of the equator. Fantastic cascades of tepid coffee-coloured water gushed from every gutter, drain and downspout, and ran in muddy rivers through the streets. By afternoon the rain had cleared and the sky was bright blue, and we decided to tour the town of Bandaneira. I wanted to make a phone call home, so Peter gave me directions to the post office, where the island’s only public phone could be found. We agreed to meet in an hour at the open-air market near the dock.

I ambled through the narrow streets past tidy homes surrounded by gardens spilling over with nutmeg, clove, orchids and giant flaming crotons. On a sunny afternoon, Bandaneira seemed a peaceful and prosperous place. The post office was at the top of the hill, in a small, prosaic concrete building. The walls inside were painted pale green and hung with the stern portraits of government officials back in Jakarta, in Nehru jackets and those caps that look like an inverted canoe. There was a single counter. A few flies circled endlessly in the middle of the room. A postal official slumped at his desk in the heat. He nodded to me, and when I picked up the phone, he smiled faintly and closed his eyes again.

When I’d finished my call, I headed down the hill for the market. Before I’d gone far, I was being trailed by half a dozen local kids. They trooped along behind me at a safe distance, giggling and clowning, and chattering in their own tongue.

I glanced over my shoulder and waved. ‘Good afternoon,’ I said.

One little man in a baggy T-shirt and filthy red shorts stepped forward and assumed what looked like a wrestler’s crouch.

‘Hollywood!’ he declared, as if he were challenging me to a match to once-and-for-all redress the cinematic insults my home
state had foisted on the world. But it would hardly be fair. I outweighed him by at least 140 pounds. Still, he was a tough-looking little guy.

‘Do you speak English?’ I asked.

‘Hollywood!’ he repeated, and they all erupted in gales of shrill laughter.

I started down the hill again and they shadowed me. A man on a beat-up bicycle laboured up the hill with a big basket tied to the fender behind the seat. I passed a yard with a prodigious flamboyant tree ablaze with scarlet blossoms. Scents drifted on the air: jasmine, and damp earth, and something else – the faint stench of putrefaction again.

It didn’t seem like my juvenile escort spoke much English, but I thought it worth a try. I stopped and turned to the kids.

‘What’s that smell?’ I said, grimacing and holding my nose. ‘What stinks like that?’

The little fellow in the red shorts took a boxer’s stance, his fists held low.

‘Rambo!’ he shouted, and they all collapsed in rollicking hilarity.

I didn’t necessarily disagree with his critical opinion, but I didn’t remember the film emitting an actual odour. I waved to them and continued down the hill to the market. They followed along for a block or two, but when I ignored them they finally lost interest and scampered off.

The open-air market was two rows of plywood booths under shade cloth, hung with bright banners and coloured flags. The stalls and the alley between them were crowded with shoppers examining baskets of rice, beans and lentils. Stacks of rangy new-butchered meats teemed with green flies. Children offered scruffy parrots and shoddy handicrafts for sale. Skinny forlorn dogs wandered through the crowd. I found Roland and Katarina, two of the Swiss travellers, at a booth haggling over batik sarongs. Smiley was nearby snapping pictures.

We worked our way through the crowd. The stalls ended near the dock, where a produce merchant was doing a brisk trade. His wares were displayed in hanging bunches, heaped in baskets and spread out on sheets of cardboard on the ground. A whole galaxy of succulent tropical exotics appeared: bright yellow star fruit and mangoes, stacks of emerald avocados, half a dozen varieties of unfamiliar citrus, snake fruit, jack fruit, pineapple, sapodillas, pomegranate and great fuzzy bunches of crimson rambutan, a fruit with sweet, pearly flesh and the delicate nose of rose petals – a scent that unfortunately was impossible to appreciate at that moment because the mysterious stench was back, with a vengeance. I was contemplating buying a bag of mangosteens when Smiley elbowed me.

‘Check it out,’ he said, pointing at a dozen oblate spheroids at the merchant’s feet. ‘The King of fruits.’

‘Doesn’t look all that regal, does it?’ I said.

They were pale green, about the size and shape of a cantaloupe, and the skin was covered with a dense thicket of silvery thorns, like an overgrown hedgehog.

‘I’m going to buy one,’ Smiley declared, but Roland, who was already haggling with the merchant for one of the prickly potentates, offered to share his with us. He reached some agreement with the seller, hoisted one of the spiky monarchs and put it in his bag. As we returned to the boat in the lengthening shadows, the stink followed us.

Back on deck, with an hour to dinner, Roland decided that morsels of his princely produce would serve nicely as hors d’oeuvres. He got the durian from his bag, fished out his big clasp knife and split the thing open to reveal a pale custard-like flesh – and the answer to the olfactory mystery that had haunted me since my arrival in the Bandas.

When I was a child I lived in a rural area near the town of Sebastopol, California. The region was mostly farms and apple
orchards back then. There were no sewer lines; everybody who had indoor plumbing had a septic tank. Our neighbours up the road were once forced to dig theirs up to make repairs. Naturally, this drew a crowd of kids. We all wanted to know what kind of mysteries might be going on underground in a septic tank. It wasn’t very impressive when they first lifted the heavy concrete top, but when the gloved hero in overalls plunged a long pole through the thick brown crust that floated on top, everything changed, and very quickly.

We took to our heels without so much as a gasp. I remember wondering, as I streaked across the farm fields clawing at my face, if a smell could kill you. It was days before the world started to smell ordinary again.

And so it was with the redolence of the King. Roland grimaced and jerked his head away.

The smell of the durian has been compared to rotting onions, stale vomit, skunk spray, pig shit, an infected wound, putrescent corpses boiled in fetid effluvium and strained through the filthy sweat socks of 40,000 sufferers of terminal trench foot – or all of them combined. Even the famed British naturalist Alfred Russel Wallace, a paragon of scientific objectivity (and master of understatement), was forced to admit: ‘The smell of the ripe fruit is certainly at first disagreeable.’ But Wallace was one of the nineteenth century’s most intrepid adventurers. Not only did he steel himself to sample the legendary durian repeatedly, he became, in time, one of its champions. In 1856 he raved:

Personally, I have accepted my gastronomic gutlessness. If I want the flavours of cream cheese, or onion sauce, or sherry wine, then I’ll damn well
have
cream cheese, or onion sauce, or sherry wine – and without the rank bouquet of an open sewer. Smiley, on the other hand, was determined to show no less grit and cultural broad-mindedness than Wallace. Pinching his nose shut, he popped a slice of durian into his mouth. He rolled his eyes. He seemed to be cautiously searching for something alarming in the basic taste. Apparently finding nothing, he released his nose – and instantly began to gag. He danced around the deck like a lunatic suffering first-degree burns, flapping his arms and twisting his face into a series of hideous, tormented grimaces. By all appearances, the hints of cream cheese, onion sauce and sherry wine were still some way down the road of appreciation. Initially at least, there was nothing subtle about the flavours of durian, and ultimately Smiley proved no match for the King of fruits. He spat it over the side.