A Visit to Dominica continue… September 1, 2008
Posted by dodo in : Africa, Dominican Republic, London, Restaurant, Tour , trackbackSome way below the garden a man stood quietly washing himself in the hot water from the spring; it was channelled down there in a homemade aqueduct of halved bamboo stalks resting on forked twigs. ‘For every improvement to the guest-house, I make something for the local people,’ Anne said. ‘It’s their island.’
I wanted to see the rainforest I’d read about, a place where vast trunks rise up like the pillars of a gloomy cathedral, where lianas hang down, where bright parrots chatter in the sunlight of the tree canopy.
`Before the hurricane we had rainforest everywhere,’ Anne said. `Now it’s just jungle.’ The hurricane struck and blew the roof off Papillote. A wall fell across Anne and her Dominican husband and protected them. All over the island tall old trees crashed down, and less tall trees whipped about and were filleted of their leaves and branches. ‘Trouble is,’ Anne said, ‘hundred-year-old trees take a hundred years to grow.’
We hired a truck and a driver and explored the island, jolting along rough wet roads through an endless banana plantation. Yard-high walls of bananas waited at road turnings for the Geest lorry to collect. We saw the pale brown, almond-eyed Caribs spiritlessly making baskets for tourists. We saw dead volcanic lakes, grey under the grey sky. We picnicked on beaches of jet black sand under windy coconut palms, where surf rolled in from Africa. We swam in the chilly river of the Titou Gorge where it winds through caverns underground.
On our last evening in Dominica the weather was clear, after days of rain. Anne’s husband, Cuthbert, said there’d be fireflies tonight. He asked, with relish, ‘Ever seen mushrooms that light up in the dark? Like to see them?’
He led the way up a path through the jungle. We saw the moon appear and disappear, veiled by clouds. Gradually we could make out the shaking fronds of the trees, the thick herbs at the side of the path.
`Fireflies!’
The small, brave lights wandered among the trees, keeping together for comfort. They were like tiny aircraft following a demented flight- path, having lost their way.
Something else was alight in the undergrowth. Cuthbert drew out a damp stick on which were two pale blue, phosphorescent toadstools with delicate gill clefts, glowing like the harsh strip lights in a modern kitchen.
By the time we reached the airfield next morning a tropical storm was raging. We waited in the shed while rain boomed and clattered on to the metal roof, and no aircraft took off or landed for hour after hour. When we realised that we’d missed our flight to London from Antigua, my friend said,
`Let’s find where Jean Rhys lived. We could stay the night there.’ Anne had told us it was in Cork Street, Roseau, and had been converted into a sleazy guest-house.
It was a two-storey building, rather flimsy-looking, not old. The courtyard behind was now a restaurant, and had a tree which Jean Rhys might have remembered. Inside, Vena’s guest-house was certainly sleazy. The small lobby had a high plastic desk at which the manageress sat. She demanded payment in advance.
`It’s like a brothel in a French film,’ my friend muttered.
From somewhere inside the house came the loud, curlew-like cry of a tree frog. There was no character to the room we were shown into. It was impossible to tell what part of the house it had been. A pantry? A slice of a larger, more commodious room? Cheaply varnished, huge furniture leaned into it. The shutters were wedged shut behind a carelessly installed washbasin. When it came to sleeping on the horrid, plastic bed in the sultry room we had the choice of suffocating in the heat or enduring the groaning clatter of an electric fan, which sounded like the soukoyant flapping her leathery wings, rattling at the unopenable shutters and trying to get in.
It was a relief to get a flight the next morning, yet I felt I’d been dragged away from Dominica: I had not explored its dangerous magic as I ought to have done. The island had cheated and spared me, like a love affair where there has been no delusion, no passion and no remorse.
Since we returned, I’ve seen my friend twice. He is a bit of a loner.
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