Left at the Mango Tree (33 page)

“It’s alright,” Raoul said. “We can go. I’ve sent someone to make arrangements.”

So the men took up their procession and their processional again, putting the mango tree behind them. Raoul marched. Cougar shored up. Nat played. And Bang sang.

20

T
he rest of that next day, the day after the revival of the annual marimba competition, Oh was shiny and wet. The island’s puddles had yet to dry. The wounds of the night before, those real and metaphorical, had yet to heal. But the sky was clear, as Raoul had so clearly put it, and there was every reason to believe that like the island’s puddles, so too the blood and the scandal, after their initial gush, would dry and flake, and be blown away by the wind.

When the islanders spoke of what happened that night on Sinner’s Cove, and to varying degrees they always would, what they remembered most was the rain. The way it had come down for weeks, merciless, and then had simply and suddenly stopped, as if having drowned whatever beast, what sin, in need of drowning. The rainy scenery always began the tale, theme on which to base the variations. The rest of the story would undergo innumerable changes, be corrupted by its tellers and bent by their leanings.

Some would say that Gustave had been long misunderstood, that he had saved poor Raoul’s life; others would say that Gustave had gotten served his just desserts—“comeuppance long overdue, that!”; still others (imagine!) would say that Raoul was a murderer, that he had stabbed Gustave in a mad and deadly rage to avenge my
mother’s rape. The more salacious the reasoning and the sharper its tang, the better and broader it spread (islanders do like their spice, after all). But like passions and novelties and the moon itself, fiery tastes wane, and gentler, blander versions of the story were served up soon enough.

I won’t bother you with too much else of what the future held for Oh after that, just enough that my story, and my grandfather’s before it, might finish properly. Besides, unknowing, you may care to imagine things turned out differently than they did. Rosier and more brilliant, or more wretched, the whole island swallowed up by a giant wave perhaps, pushed into the depths of the sea where not even the moon’s pervasive gleam could reach it. No harm in that, that the story should be hewn by its readers. Myself, I can’t take such liberties, for neither Raoul nor Gustave would forgive me a finish as cheap and facile as a hungry wave. Like Abigail and Lullaby and Alejandro Creek, they’ve both known the resilience that only Oh inspires, that pliable spirit bequeathed by each generation to the next.

So I, too, must bow to the fitful island winds and shape the contours of my sandy tale to the doings of the tide and moon, however accidental and undue.

Hear.

The Belly seemed less festive on that next day. Its floor was littered with the scraps of the marimba contest and its stage was disordered and silent. Its emptiness called to mind a wedding hall after a wedding, the confetti tossed so gleefully now mocking bits and pieces of real life to be swept away. Broom in hand, Bang
shuffled along the floor arranging the dirt into neat, gritty piles, that they might be collected and disposed of more easily. Now and then he stopped to have a rest, propping his broom against a wall and puffing into his now certifiably magic and life-saving harmonica. If you arrived at Oh on that particular day, you wouldn’t have found him at the airport chopping his wares and dazzling you with his shiny, gold tooth. He was too sleepy for that, not having shut his eyes the whole night, and something in his gut said the Belly was where he belonged.

Cougar’s gut told him the same, and so instead of dozing or doing his daily accounting in the Sincero’s cluttered office, he too spent the first half of the day cleaning in the lounge with Bang. Each found the company of the other soothing, though neither said as much, or indeed said much of anything at all. Not even Nat spoke, when he arrived soon after, not to comment on the night before, not even to relate some oddity of the passenger he had picked up that morning (and each of his passengers was odd). He simply took up a towel and scrubbed the tables. The three of them scoured and polished, dusted and wiped, a silent catharsis they hoped would wash away their sins.

Whether or not they achieved the redemption they sought, it’s hard for me to say, and frankly I’m not sure they deserved to. But by noon the Buddha’s Belly Bar and Lounge was spotless, shinier than it had been in a very long time. As if by magic the three chums were less tired than before they had started, and they sat at the bar to share a drink. Anything but Pineapple Sting, they all agreed. Cougar poured and together they sipped, blissful in their easily-donned ignorance, for none had yet—nor ever would try—to grasp what Raoul had sacrificed in the name of their friendship.

Ignorant, too, was Raoul, if truth be told, for he had no idea where the truth really lay. On that same morning he stood at the airport pondering the fact that Gustave was gone, and with him, any chance for answers about my beginnings. He couldn’t have imagined that Gustave was as ignorant as he.

While the passengers slid through the grit on the airport floor, a distracted Raoul studied their faces and the pictures in their passports, tried to size them up, wondered to what lengths his misjudgments must stretch, to what extent his miscalculations, seeing how very far he had strayed in his jumbled appraisals of his enemy and his friends. The latter had cost him the truth (or so he thought), while the former had paid with his life. The irony of the loss, so final, so complete, might have made a lesser man bitter. But an islander knows to move with the tide, and Raoul admitted that some polynomials were simply too complex to solve. He was tired of trying to reconcile reality with Stan Kalpi maths.

I suspect it didn’t hurt matters that Gustave—that my father—had saved my grandfather’s life. In so doing, Gustave had at least validated my parentage in Raoul’s eyes, mysterious though it remained in its mechanics. Raoul would never tell me any of this; he wouldn’t speak of it at all, as a matter of fact. He had come to no real conclusions, and had cost me a father in the process. For a while after that, he couldn’t even look me in my Vilder eyes, so great was his shame. Eventually, he would resume his visits to the library (it would soon be Tuesday again), and though the book of Stan Kalpi with its silhouetted cover had been washed out into the sea, Ms. Lila would have plenty else to show him. Raoul would give up on his variables in her company, and would relax—for a little while—his strictly plain-as-noses-on-faces philosophy.

Like Raoul at the library, Bang, Cougar, and Nat would resume their routines, too. Bang would smile at the tourists, entertain them with his pineapple tricks and sell them his hand-carved pen-knives by day, his words and his melodies by night. Cougar would furnish his hotel guests with charm and with overpriced maps, while the Belly’s visitors and the island girls would get rum and romance, respectively, overpriced as well. And Nat, Nat would drive his shiny taxis all around the island, one day picking up a girl, or a lady, who would indeed be satisfied with market-day t-shirts, a diet of fish, and his cottage with its new front door. Then at the end of the day, all four mates would meet for a drink at the Belly, none so petty as to forsake a friend over a dented harmonica or a bit of smuggling. Could Oh’s sandy shore ever forsake the vicious tide?

Second chances on Oh are as prevalent as promises and mangoes, and Raoul—and his cohorts—had been so shaken up that none would keep a secret from the others ever again. Rainbow bills and back-stabbings would come between them no more, nor would adverts in the
Morning Crier
. The island daily, of course, will outlive us all, for the islanders care to know exactly what’s going on and require the inaccuracies of the paper to confirm their private convictions on matters from Parliament to pineapple. (If you were wondering, by the by, Oh’s Parliament never did respond to Killig’s request to purchase Oh’s pineapples. The case was suspended pending the Customs and Excise investigation into the island’s missing crops. By the time Parliament remembered to resume its deliberations, Killig’s blight was gone and the point moot.)

Cyrus Puymute assumed for himself the General Manager position vacated by Gustave and kept up-and-running the plantation, which Pedro haunted, sharing the odd beer and odder word with Puymute’s pickers. Abigail, after Gustave’s death, restricted
her midwifing to the demands of the so-called seedy port girls, dividing her time between them and me (and I got the lion’s share of it, I’m happy to say).

With Gustave gone, the island’s appetite for magic, if by no means starved, was at first subjected to a stricter diet than usual, for in dying Gustave had wiped the Vilder lineage officially from the island’s plate. Unofficially, I carried on the Vilder line myself for nearly twenty years, with all the whispers and attention and finger-pointing that that entailed. The islanders all assumed I was Gustave’s daughter (and so did I), though none of us knew how this had come to be. I did ask sometimes, my mother, my father, Abigail. They all claimed to know nothing and were quick to respond with worried questions of their own: “But aren’t you happy as you are? Don’t you want to be here with
us
?” Though I wasn’t always happy being who I was, I
did
want to be there with my mother and my father, and so to spare them any further discomfort, I finally stopped asking why I was different. Raoul and I never discussed my pale white skin or where I came from. For as long as I can remember, I knew—though I’m not sure how—that this was a subject I could never bring up in his presence.

Happy as I was otherwise with my grandfather, or with Abigail or my three favorite uncles (Bang, Cougar, and Nat), outside the loving and colorful home that Edda and Wilbur had made for me, my world was black-and-white, and lonely. Or, rather, my world was black, and
I
was white and lonely. All I ever wanted was to blend in.

So like Emma Patrice before me, and at about the very same age, I traded island sands for mountain snows in Switzerland, that mysterious land that had once swallowed up my grandmother, land of my childhood fantasies and landscapes as white as my skin.
I bought a house with some money that Abigail gave me and made a modest living as a painter, as I told you before.

But like Mr. Stan Kalpi who awoke one morning dissatisfied with mere mathematics and pork, I began to wonder who I was really. I wasn’t an islander like the others, yet at times I felt like more of one than they could ever be. I must be a Vilder, but what was a Vilder anyway? I was like the polynomials that Mr. Stan Kalpi taught his students at school, a string of unidentified variables that together equaled Almondine Orlean.

My father would be a variable, and my mother, too, but those were dead ends, for Gustave was dead and Edda, for all her motherly love, had never looked into my eyes and seen that they were red, not black like hers. Then there was Raoul, and Abigail. They were variables, too. They had dodged my questions before, but maybe it was time to insist. I thought maybe I should lock up my small house, take a leave from my colors and canvases, and go back to Oh to attend to my past. An almond couldn’t flower hidden deep in the snow.

As luck or magic would have it, the moon and the wind had never lost sight of the fruit they left at the mango tree. They had never stopped watching over me, never stopped playing their tricks. So when I could no longer resist the gibbous moon’s shine or the songs and the scents on the meddling breeze, when I finally recognized that I was a mosaic full of holes, wind and moon conspired and dropped a variable at my door. One evening dressed up like any other evening (cold, gray sky; goat cheese and chimney-smoke wafting from next-door Maxim’s), as I packed up my belongings to go back home, my grandmother knocked and asked to buy a painting.

I knew her at once, for despite her age Emma Patrice bore a striking likeness to my mother Edda, or vice versa, I suppose.
Emma Patrice was well preserved, her smooth skin spared all those years of island sun, and she was eager to tell her story to her granddaughter. Emma Patrice hadn’t perished that day on the slopes, she said, hers was escape not demise, not a choice but a pure doing, selfish and selfless both, motivated by the simple island philosophy that “happiness is what life’s all about.” Had Emma Patrice remained on Oh, she said, her island fever would have burned permanent scars into Raoul and baby Edda. For her own sake and theirs, she had to get away. She might have taken her baby with her, Emma Patrice admitted, but then what would have come of poor Raoul all alone?

You probably don’t understand this kind of reasoning, especially not after seeing how devastating and permanent an effect a missing mother had on poor Edda. But Edda’s loneliness is what saved my life, and because of that and my own escapist tendencies, I subscribed to my grandmother’s belief that one might justify betrayal for the sake of a loved one’s best interests (so had my loved ones done to me my whole life, as I was about to discover). All the same, Emma Patrice was saddened to know of the pain her absence had inflicted on Edda; she had rather hoped my mother would be emboldened by her state, broadened, forced to allow for circumstances that cracked the island’s usual molds.