A Simple Distance (7 page)

He looked over at us, annoyed. Susan and I engaged in easy conversation, half-listening to him to be polite, attention fixed on each other instead.

Just then a school of the small fish swam directly into my floating body, dozens upon dozens jumping out of the sea, onto my chest, my face, my flailing arms as I tried to move. Elevated tone, Uncle Martin explained that we should move away quickly. It meant the silverfish were being chased by a bigger one.

Lessons learned, we drove home in the warm breeze of the growing darkness. My hands sunk underneath my legs in the passenger seat, fingers trembling and my breath coming shallow and fast, shallow and fast.

Dinner, I took out to the porch, sat in my grandmother’s chair, and stared at her moon.

CHAPTER 9

Uncle Martin was always looking to be someone more important than the man he really was: always in the shadow of Uncle George. One of Baobique’s lesser mountains.

He won his chance when he and Mr. Williams followed us into the gardens at Godwyn, through the bush to the far end of the estate, watched Susan and me pull each other close.

And he ran with it, ran us all the way back to Tours, just as Mr. Williams ran down to Sommerset. Both men bursting with the news—
a Hill and a Pascal, two women, caught in the dirt, acting like one a dem shoulda been a man. I tell you, it was a SIGHT to see.
Neither man believing the luck he’d unearthed out there just past Grampy’s grave.

At Tours, it was decided. Uncle Martin and Uncle Charles discussed the settlement over a bottle of rum around the dining table, as Susan and I sat, prey to a movement we couldn’t control, at either end. My mom and Auntie Clara busying themselves making sardine sandwiches in the kitchen, and Granny listening from her lawn chair on the front porch, the sea blast carrying their angry voices and our silence straight to her ears on pregnant beads of moisture.

Uncle Charles did the speaking.

He screamed.
Five years in prison, Jean! Five years! This isn’t San Francisco, woman. What filth have you brought here?

Dirt and clay caked to the back of both my elbows, eyes to the floor, all I could see was my own shame—stripped and naked with nowhere to hide.

How could you do this to us? How could you do this to George? Are you trying to kill him?

Uncle Martin chimed in,
Do you know what will happen if Mr. Williams tells the local police? They’ll lock you up for gross indecency. And what could we say, na? George wrote the law himself!

Uncle Charles:
You’d put that choice to him? You’d make your dying uncle lock up his favorite niece for this?

Susan and I sat silent at the dining table, its white cloth glowing in the coming of the dark.

The women were silent: Granny on her porch, Auntie Clara in the kitchen, my mom in the doorway just watching.

This was men’s work. If Susan and I had been men ourselves, we’d have been facing ten years, not five.

Looking back, I see how much danger we were really in. I didn’t have to be scared all those years I’d stayed away from Baobique, but I’d been wise to keep my mouth shut about being gay.

No one is out in Baobique. They can’t be.

Susan and I were never to see each other again. My uncles said since neither of us lived on the island, and I rarely even visited, they would be able to laugh off the rumors certain to spread from Sommerset. They would simply deny it ever happened.

From his bedroom, Uncle George overheard the whole thing. He didn’t have to be dead to roll over in his grave, turn his slouching back to me. The next morning, the morning of the Hill funeral, bright and early, he had Uncle Charles give him a shave, a proper shave with his straight-edged razor from London. And just as Granny began working herself up over company expected after the funeral, Uncle George called me over to his good side. I fed him a sip of grapefruit juice I had just squeezed in the kitchen to keep myself from the vulnerability of idleness.

Very slowly, through heavy, heavy lips, Uncle, the orator, took me into his confidence:
There is something about an island, Jean. It gets in your blood. I could have stayed in Canada for treatment. I would have lived longer. But there are worse things than death, to me.

His breathing was even, from the depth of his lungs. Calm.

When the people in Sommerset had only the river and rain water to wash their clothes and supply their houses, I put in two water spouts, one at either end of the village. So they had running water close by. And when they started using those spouts every day, and the road became muddy from the spills, and the red mud caked on the old women’s feet as they carried their jugs back and forth to their homes, I paved that road so it would be easier for them to access the water.

That simple thing, a water spout, won me the constituency. It made them feel someone cared, made them feel they were as important as the people in Bato, or Port Commons. And that one village gave us our green light for the coup. You see, nothing is too small to be overlooked. In politics, the tiniest village can take on a significance far greater than its actual size.

Until that water spout—no, until I paved that road—I was getting rotten tomatoes thrown at me during my campaign speeches. Rotten tomatoes. This scar above my eyebrow, from a rock.

The pull of his breath took on a labored air but didn’t stop him. His breathing more and more audible.

Do you know that most Baobiquens have two telephones at home? Two telephones. One CarCom and one Cable and Wireless. The CarCom telephone plan is much cheaper. But there is a catch. The CarCom telephone is only compatible with other CarCom phones. Both parties must be on CarCom to communicate. If I call you on CarCom, you must receive my call on your CarCom phone. So, to use CarCom, you must know beforehand that the recipient has CarCom. Same telephone number as the Cable and Wireless phone. Same ring.

Most Baobiquens—not all, but most—have CarCom. We must always try CarCom first for local calls because it is a Baobiquen company, locally owned. While the Cable and Wireless devices can accommodate both local and long distance calls, Cable and Wireless is a British company and none of their revenue benefits us.

Sometimes, for a joke, we answer our telephones by saying:
CarCom to CarCom
. But I tell you, it is no joke. It is survival.

He had some trouble with the saliva collecting at the base of his lazy larynx. Yet Uncle George pushed on, cleared his throat with force. Focused.

You would be surprised at the extent to which your First World countries try to take advantage of our little island. They are most shameless. We must continually resist their exploitation.

Years ago, when you were a child, just about the same time your country celebrated their bicentennial anniversary of independence, Baobique celebrated its first. We were no longer a British commonwealth. But it is not easy for such a small island to be self-sufficient, so when the formation of the European Union took away our major source of income and the United Kingdom stopped subsidizing our banana exports, we could no longer remain hidden from the rest of the world. If we did not reach out and develop new contracts, we would not survive. Instead of telling your big corporations to take their business elsewhere, we welcomed them.

But we have done, I believe, a commendable job of resisting temptation and limiting foreign ownership on the island. We do not want to go the way of Antigua, its land stripped of all but its white sand beaches; an entire population watched bloodshot by fraternity boys through the bottoms of beer mugs on their spring holiday. What do you call it? Spring break.

Uncle George’s breathing grew as loud as his voice.

You would be surprised at how difficult it is to steer a different course for Baobique. It is a constant battle. Constant. With the wrong leadership, a few thoughtless decisions, it would not take long to lose all this, to turn our rain forests, our valleys, our mountains, into a First World playground, to be unwrapped, used up, and discarded by American tourists. And then what would we Baobiquens be left with? Answer me that.

And so we have fought to keep out companies who offer us U.S. dollars at the expense of long-term sustainability. When your Caribou Cruise Lines wanted to come into Bato seven days a week, monopolize our only deep-water harbor at the expense of all other exports, so that hundreds of tourists could pour into our capital every day, litter our streets, over-use our trails to places like Soufre Lake and Victoria Falls, cut through our rain forests for better access—when the cruise line tried to do that, we just smiled. When it came time to negotiate their contract, again we smiled, but we told them they’d have to pay the Baobiquen workers who would clean their toilets, cook their caliloo and fried plantain, the same wages they paid their American employees.

Of course, we knew they wouldn’t. They offered to build us a second deep-water port, up near Granny, in De Cote, just so they could keep the tourists streaming in. But the long-term costs to the island would have been detrimental.

Our constituents in Bato were not happy they did not get those new jobs and they did not get that regular supply of fresh tourists to put shoes on their children’s feet. Explaining the breakdown in the contract negotiations with the cruise line to the public was a delicate maneuver. In the end, it worked best to create a diversion. To take their minds off that problem. Give them something else to worry about … There are some times, Jean, when creativity is a government official’s most important asset. And, I tell you, they do not teach you that in law school.

There were countless victories in the work.

My uncle paused to regain the composure pilfered by his paralysis, his breath slow and steady, returning to him like an obedient dog to its master after only a few seconds.

I’ve told you about the American fellow, in Tete Queue, who came to the island and took up living there. The homosexual who began, shall we say,
corrupting
some of the local boys. Do you know what he would do, Jean? Do you? He’d call them in for cold juice or rum, or some other such pretense, and they’d wind up doing only God knows what unspeakable things. So when he tried to buy a house on the island, to live here permanently, he ran into his share of bureaucratic obstacles: land surveys not using the right valuation formula, missing signatures, unexpected deadlines. I made sure of that.

And I’m certainly not saying this is true, but I also heard rumors that some of my constituents in Tete Queue approached him about leaving the island late one night when the generator supplying the area with its electricity wasn’t running and the moon was just a sliver in the sky.

He left quite abruptly. American Airlines flight 2330.

Uncle George had hit his stride, spoke clearly even through the slack in his face.

These are the moral victories that made my political work most satisfying. Because—listen closely, Jean, you must not forget this—just as we must preserve Baobiquen culture by resisting the economic exploitation that will scavenge the best from our island for the whimsy of American tourists and leave us destitute in twenty years time; just as we must choose the services of our local companies, like CarCom, before we succumb to the convenience of First World corporations—just as important to the health of our island is its moral cleanliness. We cannot have people like that here in Baobique.

I admit my law practice has suffered since I entered politics. At times, your Uncle Martin has had to take on some of my overflow cases. But the truth is, the work I most enjoyed was never the litigation. The work I most enjoyed was the politics.

When I served as Chief Minister, under Prime Minister Devon, Dame Devon, for the Liberty Party, I effected more change on this island than a hundred lawsuits.

When I ask myself, Jean, if I have lived a good life, it is not just me who answers. It is also the old women in Sommerset with running water; it is those boys in Tete Queue who will grow to have wives and children; it is their parents; it is the collective voice of Baobique.

Ask yourself that question in twenty years time. And see what you have to say for yourself.

Thank you for coming, Jean. But it is time for you to leave Baobique.

CHAPTER 10

At my table in the coffee shop, I had forgotten to drink my latte. My fingers, turned cold as milk, curled tight around the circle of the mug and heavy with the weight of remembering, felt for the envelope in the outside pocket of my briefcase. Thin, blue airmail stationery worn thinner from handling. Mine.

I already knew each line, what it asked that never got answered. I opened it up, even though I didn’t need to, skipped to the same part I always did, like a broken record since I’d received it, months before:

They do not read the mail here, you know, like they do at the Post Office in Bato. So if that is what is stopping you from writing, it shouldn’t.

My residency in Nassau will end in six months. I have options, J. There are fellowships in California well within my reach. But they are of no interest to me without a reason to be that far from home. And you would be the best judge of that. You need to tell me if I have a reason. If you want me, you have to say so.

I can come to the States. But this is not a decision I will make without you. It is hard for me to believe that you’ve yet to respond to any of my letters. You are not alone, J. I am also confused. But I know we both felt a certainty in Baobique. And I cannot get that back by myself. Tell me, how on God’s green earth can you hide from me? Even now, I see you. I know you better than you know yourself, Pascal. You are so damn difficult.

I would never force a decision on you. But I am telling you, now, I will not wait forever. You are making a mistake.

I would like to believe that love feels better than this. I would like for you to be the one to convince me of that.