Pages from a Cold Island (11 page)

In Rome I was for te
n days the guest of Ed, an Amer
ican novelist my age. Like me, Ed had published one interesting novel which seemed destined to be his life
’
s out
put. Where Ed got his money I don
’
t know, nor did I ask, though he appeared to have plenty of it and worked all the angles besides, including having on retainer of twenty-five dollars a month a Roman overseas operator who between midnight and eight permitted him to make calls to the States. Each day at Ed
’
s apartment we were drunk on vodka by one p.m., at which time we enthusiastically endorsed the Roman custom
fare la siesta
and snored until five, then cleaned up and went to the Trattoria Maria on a lane off the Via Veneto and ate antipasto and spaghetti
al burro
or
con salsa di vongoli,
then went back onto the Via Veneto to Harry
’
s American Bar, got drunk again on Irish whiskey, and in English talked nostalgically with other Americans about professional football, which we all missed and all agreed made the autumn an execrable time to be in Italia. On returning to Ed
’
s apartment we drank espresso and grappa and talked about our
“
work in progress
”
until two in the morning—eight at night on the eastern seaboard at home—and then using Ed
’
s bribed operator we telephoned people we knew in the States. Nobody seemed surprised or awfully pleased to hear from us, and when I was asked, as I invariably was, what I was doing in Rome I always said either that I hadn
’
t the foggiest notion or that I
’
d come to see the Colosseum but that nobody
’
d tell me where it was. Ed and I were doing nothing we couldn
’
t as well have done from the bar of the Village
’
s Lion
’
s Head Ltd. had we been able to bribe a New York City operator.

At Harry
’
s I struck the acquaintance of a wealthy, Vandyked, Oxford-educated Maltese of thirty who owned apartment houses in London, Paris, Rome, the South of France, Jamaica, Trinidad, and Valletta, Malta, where he lived but was only able to get a few days a year. He hadn
’
t when I met him been home for nineteen months. He was having a torrid and, I suspect, sick affair with an American starlet who had come to Italy for the spaghetti Westerns. I can
’
t imagine what she was doing to him, but he was so enslaved he daren
’
t leave her for the few hours necessary to fly to Malta, and as he saw I wasn
’
t doing anything he sug
gested I go there, live in his apartment, and spy on his manager who he was sure was screwing him. He would give me a letter to the manager admitting me to the apartment— he described it as splendid with wrought-iron balconies overlooking the Grand Harbor—and said I was welcome to all the whiskey in his plentifully stocked cabinets. He said the matter of checking on his manager was easy. He drew me a map of his various properties, including alleys leading into the courtyards behind them, and told me all I had to do was wait until dark and check the lights coming from the various apartments. His manager claimed the buildings were running to only sixty percent occupancy, and if lights were coming from all the windows he was obviously not only going to need a new manager but the present one would be food for Mediterranean fish. For an Oxford man, he made the threat ring paradoxically and sinisterly true. Detecting my reluctance, he picked up the bar phone at Harry
’
s, charged the calls to a number in Rome, and in his Oxford accent made loudly impressive talk to both his grocer and liquor dealer in Valletta. He told them I was to be his guest in Malta and that they should give me any thing I needed and bill him for it.

“
You are set, dear Frederick. What do you say, chap?
”

I went. I stayed for eight days, had all my clothes cleaned and laundered, repacked my bags against what I was sure was going to be instant flight, and checked on nobody, not to mention the manager. Each day I sat from sunup to sundown in my jockey shorts on the wrought-iron balcony, watched the yachts and the naval ships maneuver in the Grand Harbor, and drank vodka and Schweppes quinine water. The only volume in my host
’
s library not dealing with money or sex (the same thing, in a way) was
History of the Wars of the French Revolution
, a ten-pound tome I laid at my feet on the balcony and read cover to cover, hunched over with my drink and turning pages with the big toe of my right foot. When I completed it, and I cannot now remember a single notion put forth by its authors, I thought about going to India to the Vindhya Hills north of the Narbada River to seek out a holy man about whom I
’
d read, but as I had no idea how to get there I flew instead to Barcelona and for a week walked all day and well into the night looking for a shaded park or
avenida
of which I
’
d once seen a photo. Hemingway was said to have sat on a bench beneath its trees and thought long thoughts. When the
calles
of Barcelona all became familiar and began to repeat themselves in my mind and I still hadn
’
t found the park or
avenida
—or if I had, hadn
’
t recognized it—I flew back to Luxembourg and used the other half of my ticket to return to Nassau.

In Nassau I stayed four days, and on my last night there got the worst beating of my life. At the piano bar of the Anchorage Hotel up the street from where I was staying at the Sheraton British Colonial, I
’
d met a Bahamian charter boat captain and his stunni
ng girl friend, a wealthy Ameri
can of nineteen from Medford, Oregon. The captain was a Conch. In the parlance of south Florida and the Bahamas a Conch or Conchy Joe is an interbred person, mostly white, who for reasons known only to himself hates blacks with a near-deranged passion, and he and his family, as they have done for generations, make their livings from the sea. Conchs are stoic, formidable, uncommunicative, terrifying in anger. The captain had the same name as a family I knew on Singer Island, and since I knew them to be originally from the large Long Island in the south Bahamas I asked him if he was from there.

When he said that he was, I said,
“
I know some of your cousins stateside.
”

“
Got nothin
’
but cousins, mon.
”

That was almost the extent of the conversation, his odd American paramour being even less communicative than he. Thus the next day proved an unsettling surprise. While the Conch was
“
fishing a party
”
from St. Louis, she came to my hotel in her eighteen-foot custom-built Donzi with twin 427 Holman Moody engines and at a hair-raising seventy miles an hour took me to a small out island to water-ski. We water-skied for an hour, dropped anchor in a cove, waded ashore, and lay down face up on a blanket, whereupon, as abruptly as a belch, she took down my bath ing suit and with her mouth engaged me. She did this all day long, and did the same for the next three days. She
’
d absorb the load, lay back, leaving her hand on my exposed genitalia, then after a time begin all over again. She wanted to do nothing else. Whenever out of the most rudimentary considerations of politeness I
’
d query her about her past, she
’
d hatefully sneer,
“
Medford, Oregon—what
’
s to know?
”
And though I suppose that she was, I
’
m not much given to the literal use of
“
insane.
”
If I confronted the malaise with a quart a day I had to concede her her right to confront that same malaise in her own way and admit the simple poss
i
bility that she was, as the kids say,
“
doing her own thing.
”
Daily she had me back at the Sheraton British Colonial by four, I
’
d shower, shave and dress, then go to the hotel
’
s Whaler sidewalk cafe fronting on Nassau
’
s lovely harbor and drink V.O. until dark, whereupon I
’
d retire in anticipa
tion of the next day
’
s ogreish pleasures.

On the fourth evening I decided to see the town, and after inquiring of a cab driver ended at Tommy
’
s night club. Between strident calypso sets of the steel band, I talked with Tommy, the owner. As an American married to a Bahamian he was under the black government allowed to own a business. When he pointed out his wife manning the cash register at the far end of the bar, without thinking I said,
“
She
’
s a Conch, isn
’
t she?
”
to which he shook his head in wondrous admiration and said,
“
You better believe a Conch. You cross her she
’
d cut out your gizzard and feed it to you.
”

At one point late in the evening I mentioned my strange girl friend. Tommy moaned and said,
“
You
’
re not foolin
’
round with her, are you? She
’
s crazier than a shithouse rat. They ought to run her out of the Bahamas.
”

“
We
’
ve been going miles away to one of the out islands.
”

“
That don
’
t matter a shit,
”
Tommy snapped.
“
She tells
‘
im about it. She gets her jollies watching him and his two black mates stomping the shit out of her quote lovers.
”
He repeated,
“
She ought to be run out of the Bahamas.
”

Tommy called his wife down from the cash register and said something to her. She looked wide-eyed at me.

“
Oh, no, mon, you stay with us tonight and get out of the Bahamas tomorrow!
”

I graciously and stupidly declined her kind invitation, believing her disposed, as was the novelist Robert Wilder, to romanticize the violence of the islands. When I turned into the long front walk leadi
ng to the entrance of the Shera
ton British Colonial, the girl was there on the well-trimmed lawns with the Conch and his two black mates and whether or not this was part of the game in which she got, as Tommy said, her jollies, she at least feigned concern for me and bellowed at me to hightail it. Thinking they wouldn
’
t be stupid enough to start anything in front of the Sheraton British Colonial (
it’s
very name has the ring of empire, what?). I kept walking, head down and very purposefully. When the Conch grabbed me by the arm and said something to me, I yanked my arm free and said,
“
Fuck you, Conchy Joe.
”
When he knocked me onto the lawns, I stayed there hoping he
’
d think me more hurt than I was. The last thing I remember was their starting to kick me.

When I awoke in the
hospital, I had a minor concus
sion, I had lost a tooth, my entire torso from beneath the armpits to the waist was tig
htly swaddled in adhesive cover
ing two cracked ribs, my scrotum was swollen and throbbing terribly, and in it they had cut a small incision and inserted a tube to let the blood and pus hemorrhage into a kind of diaper they
’
d put on me. Even though I was all doped up, I had to get out of there and knew a hospital was the easiest place in the world to get out of. I summoned the hospital authorities, lied by telling them I hadn
’
t a farthing, and they let the police take me to my hotel for my bags, thence to the airport, where I caught a Shawnee Airlines Beechcraft back to Palm Beach. When I got to the Seaview I discovered I
’
d been gone a month to the day, assuredly a lunatic
’
s
“
grand tour,
”
and I now went to bed for another month and in tall frosted cylindrical glasses labeled
Islander Room
drank triple vodkas and
grapefruit juice and read maga
zines cover to cover.

Toni changed my bandages, my sheets, the records on my Garrard turnstile, fluffed my pillows, and from Mc Donald
’
s fetched me Big Mac hamburgers with the works.

The swelling in my groin refused to deflate, and a serious infection set in. Three times I had to return and get the scrotum draining
“
healthily,
”
and each time I was given ever increasingly potent drugs. Insisting I should be in the hospital, the doctor told me antibiotics could not properly do their work until I abstained from booze. But I didn
’
t stop drinking. Toni was with me and heard what he said, so she refused to go to the bar for me and whenever I needed a drink I had to fetch it myself. On those occasions I had because of my crotch to walk with my legs wide apart as though I had an unseemly load in my pants. The regulars at the bar all laughed at and jeered me, mainly because I
’
d refused to say a word about my month away from the hotel or tell them what had happened to me. We had become too much the family, and everyone at the hotel believed he should have easy access to everyone else
’
s most cherished places. Especially was this true of Toni. That anything as
“
juicy
”
as my being beaten up had occurred and she did not have a single detail made her absolutely rabid with fru
stra
tion and her posture became nastily self-righteous.