Voyager: Travel Writings (11 page)

And that fellow who owned the hotel, Chase’s father said. What was his name?

Archbold. John Archbold, I said.

Oh, him I actually know! Longtime member of the Choate board. Class of 1918, I read somewhere. Small world!

By the time we were ready to leave Dominica for Martinique, the airport fire engine had been repaired and we were able to fly out of Canefield Airport, a small strip on the coast near the town of Roseau where, happily, jumbo jets could not land. Where we were headed, however, they could land, and with them the disgorged hordes—package tours, the bane and, as some persist in thinking, the salvation of tourism in the Caribbean.

After landing, we drove north from Martinique’s Pointe du Bout and the south coast, where most of the larger, better-known hotels and topless beaches were located. We skipped a visit to the Musée de la Pagerie, birthplace of Napoleon’s Empress Josephine, for lunch at a waterfront café in bustling, cosmopolitan Fort-de-France. Then it was up the scenic coast to Le Carbet, where Gauguin had briefly lived and painted. At the Musée Volcanologique in the town of St-Pierre, we turned inland and uphill, and once again we were in a mountainous rain forest, the Parc Naturel Régional, with deep gorges, waterfalls, and, in the distant mist, the green cone of Mount Pelée, which had erupted as recently as 1902, destroying St-Pierre and killing thirty thousand people. Thus the Musée Volcanologique.

By late afternoon we had reached the northern tip of the island, a rolling coastal plain covered with banana trees that slowly rose to a long wooded ridge. We checked in at the Leyritz Plantation Hotel, which, instead of the restored sugar plantation described in the guidebooks, was a half-renovated ruin with a few new cabanas and a low-roofed kitchen, dining room, bar, and gift shop freshly constructed on top of and inside the shells of the original cut-stone plantation outbuildings.

On registering, we learned that the main building, called the Great House, was not yet ready to admit guests. Though open for business, it was still a resort-in-progress. We were offered a room in the Workers’ Quarters instead, a cluster of new thatch-and-bamboo bungalows built on the foundations of the long-gone slave huts down by the Distillery, which, according to the brochure handed out at the desk, would eventually function as an educational exhibit to demonstrate the entire process of turning sugarcane into rum.

Not sure we could sleep peacefully on top of the graves of the slave huts, we turned down the Workers’ Quarters and sprang instead for one of the more expensive suites carved out of the original main kitchen, called, naturally, the Kitchen, a low, narrow stone building tied to the half-restored Great House on the hill by an open passageway and terrace. With a separate structure for each
domestic function—cooking, sleeping, dining, entertaining, maintenance, and so on—all of them linked to the main building with passageways and terraces and porches, the layout reminded us of the nineteenth-century great camps of the Adirondacks. Except for that sticky business about the African slaves.

The hotel grounds were spacious and inviting: crisscrossed by meandering walkways that passed through elaborate, overgrown, untended flower gardens along old crumbling walls and moss-covered brick terraces and fallen columns and dry fountains with soaring royal palms lining the long, curved drive. We dined in the Sugar Mill below, and afterward, before retiring to our suite in the Kitchen, we walked slowly back up the hill. On our way we passed through an unlocked side entrance of the Great House and wandered along the ground-level halls and crossed the parlors of the empty, unfurnished Georgian building and out to the columned veranda in front and stood there and took in the silver-green fields and the blackened sea beyond. As darkness came on, a full moon rose out of the sea.

Then suddenly the place went all eerie on us. Most of the restored plantation houses we’d visited so far had felt and looked like sets from the movie versions of
Captain Blood
or
Wide Sargasso Sea
or a Caribbean ride at Disney World, as harmless and unthreatening as kitsch. Soon Leyritz Plantation would be another romanticizing stage set, a slavery-days Potemkin village. But for now, tonight, up here on the hill by the Great House and Kitchen overlooking the glistening fields below, it was the real thing. The buildings seemed to have been only recently abandoned by the planter and his extended family, their slaves, like the livestock, left to fend for themselves in the forested hills above the fields or else swiftly captured and reenslaved by the absent planter’s white neighbors.

We felt utterly alone in this ghostly, ghastly ruin. It was late in the season, and there was only a small, bare-bones staff. The other paying guests all seemed to have been housed someplace far from us. Probably down in the Workers’ Quarters, I muttered. Except for
the soft wind, it was silent. Silver moonlight carved sharp blue shadows on the lawns. I left Chase seated on a stone bench on the terrace outside the Kitchen facing the fields and the glittering sea and the pale moon and went to our bedroom and retrieved two glasses and the unopened bottle of Trois Rivières
rhum agricole
I’d purchased earlier in Fort-de-France.

I hadn’t noticed, or perhaps had merely not admitted it to myself, but over the weeks I had begun drinking a bit too heavily in the evenings, shot by shot, usually starting before dinner at the bar with rum and a slice of lime and, when available, ice, and then a bottle of wine at dinner, continuing afterward with a different rum, neat, claiming that I was only sampling the local rums of all the different islands, as if I were a connoisseur or training to become one.

I sat beside Chase on the stone bench and poured us each a few inches of the clear liquid and thoughtfully sipped the Trois Rivières and pronounced it satisfactory. Chase left her glass untouched while I drank. She was growing concerned about my drinking and had mentioned it once or twice several islands back, offhandedly, as if in passing. But by now my drinking to excess was evident—although the reason for it was not—and undeniable, even by me.

That’s when we started to hear them. Voices—faint voices in the wind. At first we thought that’s all it was, the wind. And maybe it
was
only the wind, the soft Caribbean breeze unfurling from the sea. But they were human voices we thought we heard: we both definitely were hearing them—men and women and children in the distance, laughing, singing, then weeping close by, and now moaning—just behind us, right in front, on both sides of the terrace, coming from beyond the flower gardens where the dark shadow of the Great House filled the space between the two buildings.

We sat there for a while, silent and grieving, until gradually the voices, or the wind, subsided and eventually all was still. Chase
shook herself free of the dream or vision or fantasy, whatever it was, and stood and said she was going to bed. I told her I was too sad to sleep and needed to sit here awhile longer alone. She seemed to understand, assuming that my sadness was due to the place, the ruins of the plantation and its ghosts, and gave me a hug and a delicate kiss and went inside.

I had not been this sad since leaving Jamaica ten years earlier, after Christine and our three daughters had gone back to the States a month ahead of me. The closer Chase and I got to Jamaica, where our courtship tour through the Caribbean was scheduled to end, the sharper and darker were my memories of that time and place. Christine’s and my marriage had been in tatters the entire year, held together solely by our shared love of our children. In order to keep from quarreling, she and I had reached a point of barely speaking to each other, except to negotiate childcare and finances. We had decided that she and the girls should go back home for school a month early without me, while I finished my research on the Maroons, descendants of eighteenth-century runaway slaves living in the isolated village of Accompong in the nearly inaccessible hills of what was called Cockpit Country. The Maroons and Accompong and a white American academic researching their history were central to my novel, which eventually became
The Book of Jamaica
. I had convinced myself that I could complete my research only by residing for a month alone in Accompong in a one-room cabin loaned to me by a Maroon friend, a Rastafarian ganja grower who was accompanying Christine and the girls on their return to the States. He was a man I had come to trust and in many ways to admire. He hoped to find some kind of work in our New Hampshire neighborhood as a handyman, for he was indeed handy, and in a few months earn enough cash under the table from me and Christine and our friends and neighbors to support his family back in Accompong for a year or more. At least that is how he and Christine described the arrangement when it was first proposed.

Guilt mingled with anger creates sadness—at least for me it does. And unexpectedly the guilt and anger invoked by the ghosts of Leyritz Plantation, by the vivid tangibility of the plantation’s history from slavery days to late-twentieth-century tourism, had somehow smeared over, or perhaps by emotional association had called back the guilt and anger I had felt a decade earlier in Jamaica, when my marriage to Christine was falling apart. Add to that the guilt that was still pummeling me for having left my third wife, Becky, for Chase the year before, mingled in turn with the anger I was directing against myself for having married Becky in the first place, and you have a man falling, or pushed, down a well of sadness. A man pouring himself another three fingers of Trois Rivières, shortly followed by yet another. Until finally, hours later, his fiancée appears at his side and helps him stand and walks him to their bedroom, where he falls into the sleep of the insensibly drunk.

The rest of our stay on Martinique, once we departed from Leyritz Plantation, turned surprisingly sunny and cheerful. In our yellow rented Toyota we wandered down along the many bays and out onto the narrow peninsulas of the east coast. We visited the Saint James rum distillery, naturally, and took the tour, lightly sampled the wares, of course, and became learned in the various gradations of rum. We ate well just about everywhere on Martinique. As was true on all the French islands, the breads were crisply crusted and chewy Parisian-style baguettes and country farm loaves. We almost always ordered the house special, no matter what it was called, because it usually turned out to be the day’s catch and fresh local vegetables, prepared creole style, with plenty of hot peppers and onions. Most of the off-islanders we met were chic French vacationers, who, instead of driving their cars or taking a train to the Mediterranean, were increasingly flying here and to Guadeloupe, and we noticed an unusual amount of condominium and second-home construction, especially along the northeast coast. The island had Continental flair and energy—but it also had traffic congestion,
the beginnings of air and water pollution, and, in the capital city of Fort-de-France, where class divisions were most noticeable, racial tension.

The next island on our itinerary, St. Lucia, is Martinique’s nearest neighbor to the south, and although both islands are relatively large and volcanic, and have rain forests, beaches, and jagged coasts, the two could not be more unlike. The Caribbean’s turbulent history, in which all the islands were pawns in wars fought thousands of miles away on the European and North American continents, accounts for much of their similarity today, but also their surprising diversity. In order, citizens of Spain, Great Britain, France, the Netherlands, and Denmark met here and promptly went to work exterminating the Taino and Arawak and Carib natives. Then they enslaved Africans to work the plantations and, after ending the slave trade, imported East Indians to till the fields. For four centuries, the Europeans stole and swapped and sold the islands to one another, until finally in the twentieth century the colonies became too expensive to rule and too impoverished to fight over, and one by one the islands, in particular those controlled by Britain, were allowed to become deeply indebted, independent micronations or, like the Dutch and French islands, distant dependencies more or less on the dole from their mother countries.

After sophisticated Martinique, St. Lucia seemed sleepy and backward. With 150,000 people, most of them of African descent, it was one of those independent British micronations abandoned by, and in perpetual debt to, its master. Nearly half the total population resided in and around the deepwater port of Castries. Settled originally by the French, St. Lucia wasn’t taken over by the British until 1814, fairly late, which accounts for the mostly French place names, the patois spoken by the natives (although English is the official language), and the very good creole cuisine. In the late 1980s, when we
came ashore, St. Lucia was still an agricultural island, with bananas the main cash crop, but tourism was coming up fast, especially along the northwest coast.

Although the island, for its size, felt crowded, the interior mountains were still inaccessible, except to the most intrepid of hikers and the last 150 jacquots on earth, a rare green Amazon parrot. In a last-ditch effort to save it from extinction, the jacquot had recently been designated St. Lucia’s national bird. Too little, probably too late—like so much of Caribbean wildlife. The beaches and new resorts above Castries were no better or worse than those on most of the islands, so it was here, below the town of Soufière, in the southwest corner of the island, that one would lay over, especially if one was eager to see the magnificent Pitons, two half-mile-high volcanic peaks that rise abruptly, dramatically, from the sea; or if one intended to visit the Sulfur Springs at Diamond Baths or climb the dormant volcano, named, like the volcanoes on Montserrat and Guadeloupe, La Soufrière.

All of which we did—viewed the Pitons, bathed in the Sulfur Springs, climbed La Soufrière.

My walking stride had been reduced to a head-down trudge, and my drinking was getting worse by the day—or rather, by the night. Chase’s concern was now serious, although she did not reveal this to me until many years later, when my drinking no longer worried her or me. As I trudged from island to island, always circling in on Jamaica, I remember thinking, So this is what depression feels like.