Visiting Mrs. Nabokov: And Other Excursions (10 page)

'5 to 11 — Complimentary Champagne
FOR ALL LADIES,'
says the sign, rather desperately, in the bar of the official hotel. Needless to say, Gaby and Steffi are not to be seen here, enjoying six hours of complimentary champagne. There used to be a few ravers among the better-known players; but tennis girls are compulsive types, and once they started raving, they soon stopped being among the better-known players. All that is of course out of the question these days. Fun and boys and free champagne, like everything else, is scheduled to happen 'later'.

Steffi and Gaby are not to be seen in the hotel. They are cordoned off elsewhere. Only the Coach Class players dwell here in Park Place. They wander around with their sausage bags. They drink milk with breakfast (suggesting childish tastes as well as sensible nutrition). They sleep three to a room and talk worriedly about how they will split the tab. They are not yet — and may never be — on the other side, the place where everyone is suddenly dying to give them money. Their numbers remorselessly dwindle as the week goes on.

For things are getting serious. The plucky underdogs and the eyecatchers are all falling away: Gigi Fernandez, with her vociferous flair and fecklessness; Rafaella Reggi, the glamorous grunter; squawlike Mary Joe Fernandez, the unforgiving baseliner; Sandra Cecchini, dynamically butch and spivvy; the Czech pylon Helena Sukova, borne everywhere on the shoulders of two little bodybuilders (which turn out to be her legs): the shriekers and whoofers and hworfers step aside, revealing the handful of players who are capable of winning it - or of worrying Steffi Graf. All week, as tickets get pricier, the seat allocations for the press have become more and more disadvantageous. For the final, a further spasm of sponsorial greed lofts us up into the bleachers. It is the match everyone wants to see: Graf
v.
Sabatini. Fräulein Forehand meets Bonita Backhand.

On the big day I breakfast within eavesdropping distance of the TV crew that has flown down for the match. 'Do we do a
pre-match
interview?' one of them asks. 'With Steffi? I don't know. She goes into like a trance before the start.' The upside of interviewing Steffi in mid-reverie — or of at least televising the trance — is briefly discussed. Can they
get
the pre-match interview? They think so. In no other sport will two individuals be given up to three hours of screen time, and TV is the fount of all the real tennis money. It is why each square inch of Steffi's shirt is worth a million dollars.

'Ladies and gentlemin!' Seen from on high, the demeanour of the show court clearly reflects the narrowing gap between top tennis and show business. The flags, the floodlights, the VIP boxes, the camera gantries, the officials in candy stripe (pompous Pancho Gonzalez lookalikes, fully convinced, like the TV people, of their vital contribution to the spectacle), the rockhard PR girl with her interminable plugs and mentions and personal thanks to all the allegedly wonderful Dekes and Duanes and Sharons and Karens who have made all this possible. The crowd, too, is participatory in the American style. What kind of clothes do Americans wear when they watch tennis? Tennis clothes. And they join in with their aggressive questioning of calls, frequent demands to be reminded of the score, and continuous and deafening cries of
'Quiet!'

Steffi Graff is something unbelievable on the tennis court, a miracle of speed, balance and intense athleticism. She looks like a skater but she moves like a puck. During changeovers she gets up early from her chair, and she is always exasperated (hands on hips, head bowed) by any delay from opponent or ballboy. After a great shot she doesn't wait for the applause to start, let alone stop, before she is striding back to the baseline, twiddling her racket like a sixgun. She never smiles.

She wants to win every set to love and get on with the next one. You feel that the only player she would enjoy facing is herself.

Today she is facing Gabriela, who has never beaten her in eleven meetings. And it looks like the same old story. Steffi's forehand is booming, and she is slicing her backhand under the breeze. Instead of retreating twenty feet for the high topspin (as Evert had done in the semi-final), Steffi adopts the ploy of jumping waist-high to make her drives. Steffi is one set up and serving at 3-2 in the second. The crowd (strongly Hispanic, or strongly Jewish and therefore anti-German) groans and sweats for the wilting, shamefaced Gaby. Then something happens. And we'll never know what. Steffi collapses in a blizzard of errors, losing all but one of the next eleven games. An instant after the last point Gaby has the snout of a TV camera in her face. Then a microphone in her hand ('It's hard to talk right now'). Soon she is in the press tent, being asked what she feels ('It's hard to say'). And then she is packing her rackets and heading down to Key Biscayne for the Lipton, where she will lose to Mary Joe Fernandez in the quarters, and where Steffi, as tennis writers say, will return to her winning ways.

The person to ask about modern tennis stardom is not a modern tennis star, who will probably be seventeen and speak little English, and who will have attended a course on how to handle herself with - or, more simply, how to handle

— the media. The person to ask, if you can get past her agent, is Tatum O'Neal, who is married to John McEnroe and, more importantly, was herself a prodigy, a thoroughbred of the star system. The system prescribes a life of unique enclosure, in which every contact is featherbedded, insulated, mediated. Fixers, helpers,  PR people,  guys with guns everywhere: these extras are just part of the scenery for the gazelles and snow-leopards of modern tennis, a protected species

— priceless specimens — in their bijou theme park. Of course, for the virgin millionairesses there will be life after tennis. But there was no life before it — before they sank into the strange obscurity of stardom.

Vogue, 1988

ST LUCIA

St Lucia — land of contrasts! Patched, mottled, sickly-looking white people sprawl on the fronded patios. Meanwhile, beautiful young black people hover in attendance, making snacks, making drinks, making beds. It is the West Indian reality, obvious and inescapable: the Catering Society. Charming youths with charming nameplates on their breasts (Bently, Regis, Hillary, Justas) fondly anticipate your needs and whims; in the distance, the pretty maids flap and chatter like birds of paradise. With their security guards and pest-controllers, the hotels are townships, fortresses of inflation and entropy. They are protectorates. But what do they protect you from?

The gulf between holidaying and travel is a wide one, and gets wider every day. The big hotels were a part of travel, once upon a time. Yet who uses them now? Who are the five-star people? The prestige of St Lucia is at present undermined by an association with the British package holiday. Some of the older waiters have been known to walk off the set when they saw the people they would have to be waiting on. The typical five-star couple will never stray from the premises, except on some Jolly Roger Buccaneer Bar 'B' Q excursion or chaperoned shopping tour. After lunch it's Limbo Demonstration by Vince; before dinner it's Reggae with Ronnie. Against an attractive spattering of palms, they sit and drink by the pool, frowning at buxom paperbacks or miming along to the canned pop. How can they afford the five-star prices? Are they all betting-shop nabobs or coin-op kings? Have they scrimped and saved for that 'holiday of a lifetime' canvassed in the brochures? After a while I developed the fantasy that they were all highly successful criminals. I moved among train-robbers and jewel-thieves, among industrious burglars. I imagined that an extradition agreement between the UK and the West Indies would, at a stroke, bring the tourist business to its knees.

Cunard La Toc, near the capital of Castries, has recently spent $6 million to 'redefine luxury vacationing in the Caribbean'. This costly redefinition, it turns out, is an attempt to emulate the 'villa' holiday that has effectively preempted the role of the big hotels. The main difference is room service. Anyway, the experience has the authentic torpor of brochure prose. Your suite, ideally designed for comfort, offers plunge pool, personal bar and a panoramic view of the ocean setting. In the restaurants you sample genuine Creole or continental cuisine, together with the island's finest entertainment. Here sports abound: snorkelling, tennis under the sun or the stars, golf on a challenging course cooled by easterly tradewinds. An oasis of natural beauty, created for those who want to 'get away from it all', to relax and unwind ... In the meantime you wonder whether Paul Theroux would be satisfied by this elegant breachfront resort set in over 100 acres of unspoiled magnificence. Would James Fenton or Bruce Chatwin? Would
V.S. Naipaul?

Time to travel, or to attempt it. Shrugging off the beach fatigue, bidding farewell to Regis and Bently, my wife and I were driven through Castries to Vigie inter-island airport, to collect our hired car. Castries is described in the brochures as 'bustling'. The people lying flat out on the main street seemed to be questioning this epithet. Also, a not particularly restful-looking spot was signposted
'NO IDLING. NO SLEEPING'.
There were, at any rate, two men beneath the awning. One was sleeping. One was only idling. At Vigie, despite all kinds of reservations and confirmations, there was a mood of mission-impossible at the car-hire kiosk. The two uniformed ladies, Denise and Michelle (I would later see Michelle in a Castries bookshop, purchasing a Western), squabbled like love-hate sisters over our voucher, which lay there, scorned, gestured-at. Suddenly I was told that we would need a St Lucian driving licence. I saw myself taking St Lucian driving lessons in Castries, or at least joining a queue in the bustling town hall. My wife and I experienced our first panic attack, our first wave of hotel-need. Regis! Bendy! We told the girls to forget it. We demanded rehotel-isation. A few dollars later, though (the licence was no more than a levy), and the car was ours. Having read that there were 'as yet' no traffic lights on the island, I groped for my seatbelt. There was no seatbelt either, as yet. We drove on to Vigie Peninsula — a distance of about fifteen yards - and parked. According to the brochure, the Peninsula 'boasts one of the finest beaches on the island'. The boast was an empty one. It didn't look nearly as nice as the beach at La Toc, where I now saw myself reclining, with Bently hurrying towards me over the smartly raked sands.

But it transpires that St Lucia, for now, is both beautiful and innocuous, like its people. In the small towns (and small towns are the only kind of towns there are here) you sense a strange air of poverty and prettiness. Most of the 'traditional' timber houses, while inconceivably tiny, are primped, made much of, tirelessly adorned. You pull up for a soft drink and find that the Coke and 7-Up signs are there for decoration. The children lining the rural roads are trimly uniformed, healthy-looking, well-ordered - and above all numerous. Dennery and Micoud, the more neglected townships on the island's battered Atlantic coast, lie soaked and puddled in rainy-season boredom. There is much unemployment, and no welfare. People are poor, but nature is rich; it would be hard to starve. The street-wanderers of Micoud regard us with ambiguous levity. We stop for a can of orange juice and are unsmilingly overcharged. Although you wouldn't call them hostile, they are no more friendly than I would feel, if a stranger drove down my street in a car the size of my house.

Even at its most rank and jungly, St Lucia has a kiddy-book harmlessness. The leaves and palms seem greased with baby oil. You expect to encounter Babar the Elephant, smiling tigers, naughty monkeys. Even the real dangers ('minor only!') are Disneyish: poison apples, falling coconuts. Swooningly the vegetation topples into the bluer green of the sea. The Pitons, twin larval peaks, look elemental — a land that time forgot — but cinematic too; King Kong would feel at home with them, clambering from one to the other. At the 'unique' drive-in volcano our gaptoothed Rasta led us through the smells and steam of Sulphur Springs. Now here was blackness and menace. The dark cauldrons bubble at 300°F. Fall in there and you would be dead five times over in a couple of seconds. Everywhere the ground fizzed and simmered (busy counter-space in hell's kitchen), containing with effort the fury of its nethers. With its salty gusts, its splattings and eructations, the strangeness and danger of Sulphur Springs underline the absence of such qualities elsewhere. As we returned to town the locals waved at the car or gazed at us with languid scepticism. In your capacity as a tourist, you feel tolerated as something crucial to the health of the economy. You sometimes feel like a banana trader, a banana planter, a banana expert. Indeed, you sometimes feel like a banana.

Feeling like a banana, however, is not quite what the traveller has in mind. What
does
he have in mind - strange meetings, close encounters, freedom from the usual transactions? At Gros Inlet, on the northern tip, we had made our first entrance into the prettiness and poverty: a bluesy bar at noon, the talkative bargirl, the gorgeous baby, the youth wanting a light for his six-paper joint, the spent fifths of rum, a view of the changeless lagoon. On Friday night we returned, as invited, for the weekly Street Party - once a spontaneous carouse, now an island institution. (Spies from gimmick-weary, disco-infested Barbados have visited Gros Inlet, to see how it's done.) This is
rural
carnival: there is no sense of coercion, of enforced high spirits and interracial cheer. In the excited miscegenation you gamble and drink and dance. You needn't worry if one of the brothers tries to cut in on you and your wife. The mean-dude persona has yet to arrive, has yet to seep out from untamed Trinidad or feral Jamaica. There is no violence. There is innocence, in fact — and how terrible it would be if one could no longer recognise it. Money is clumsily at work on all this (the high prices, the preposterous odds of the dicing games), and one joins in the informal redistribution of wealth. Money is working on the innocence too; but the people are new at it, for now. Which way will things go?