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C O N T E N T S Welcome to Wanderlust On the Amazon: Snapshots of a Green Planet Two Sides of the Rhine My Best Holiday Experience The Dangers of Fade into Blue D E P A R T M E N T S Passages
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BY AMANDA JONES | it had been 48 days since she'd met him and 29 days since she'd last seen him. How good is the memory? She remembered waking up that morning thinking, oh God, the place wasn't what she'd expected, and the men, the colonialists, were barbarians. Coming here was a mistake. Still, here she was in this strange and twisted place. A country overrun by gun-toting expats who still called the natives savages and shot them dead if they got in their way. It was a gray place, and these white men were gnarled and decrepit. They leered and lolled and became florid-faced too soon. There was a feeling of carelessness. They were there for the money, which grew on the trees as coffee beans and tea leaves. She'd been taken to a party where the whole town appeared hell-bent on shooting someone or drinking themselves into oblivion. Her host was a young man brimming with an old man's failures. You'll be staying with me, he told her, swaying from side to side and poking his overripe face too close to hers, hand scuttling up her arm, crablike. You'll sleep in this guy's room. The guy, no, he's rock-climbing. He won't mind, he'll find somewhere else to stay. Oh, she thought, feeling strange. She fell to sleep that night with the smell of the unknown rock climber filling her head. It was intriguing. Yeah, the host said the next morning, if you come to my work, I'll send a bloke to take you walking. Although I'll be buggered if I know why you wanna walk, there're nothing but trees out there. She went to his coffee factory. The place was oppressive. Gray corrugated iron belching flames and blackness and debris into the shrouded highland morning. A honk and a native man scurrying, head down, to open the gates. No white person would open a gate in this place. Life without respect. She sensed that there would be trouble on this island soon. These foreigners had it coming. Inside there were stocky black men behind heavy doors, lifting and bulging and dragging and stoking. And storm fencing, lots of it, and another group of men huddled around a dying fire. Huddled as if it were cold when it was sweltering hot. More foreboding. And then the office, separated from the black men by barbs and bars. There were cigarette butts and dirt and a fluorescent pall, sputtering and ghoulish. She noticed the empty vodka bottles, the safe, the yellowed papers and the filthy typewriter. She stood in a corner and watched a white man hit a native in the face for removing a pen from a desk. She drifted into the next room. Introductions were made. A boy -- no, a young man -- stood up and stepped into the squalor. Later, she thought about how some events in life are inescapable. An unforeseen lasso is tossed, dragging us off our intended course, toward destiny. She thought about the magnetism between some people. How when we pass them in the street we recognize it and smile, feeling the pull but passing even before the smile is gone. When we see someone across a room and we feel the shadow of loss when they turn and leave, glancing back as they go. Is there a scientific explanation for this? The man stood there drenched in blue light -- at least, that's how he appeared to her. It was the kind of blue that artists use to depict dream scenes. She saw him with shock and perfect recognition, a vivid jigsaw piece mistakenly mixed into a gloomy puzzle. And then he smiled, and his face broke open. Beautiful teeth on a beautiful face. But a tired face, a heavy face, a burdened smile. She studied him. Fair-skinned. Brown hair that hadn't been tended to in days. Blue eyes beneath perfect eyebrows and long dark lashes. A jaw from some superhero caricature, cleft and all. This was the rock-climbing man. The one who had slept at the factory because she'd taken his room. He told her he would be the one to take her hiking, and she felt some ridiculous lift in spirits. He turned to show her the way they would go on a map pinned to the wall, but she stared at his forearm instead. Then she felt stupid and walked outside. For God's sake, look where they were and who he was. There must be something terribly wrong with any man who chose to live and work here in this private hell. As they drove to the mountain she asked him about his life. He was ex-SAS, special-service military. That had been his job. Skilled in rescuing and killing. He was probably very good at it, because he wouldn't talk about it much. He was here managing the coffee factory, he said, because his heart had been broken in his homeland. His skills didn't stretch to protecting his own heart. They walked uphill for a long way on a muddy path that tricked her with its altitude and tangled roots and flimsy shrubbery. He was very quick, this skilled man. As they walked he began to tell her long stories. About how many times sadness had brushed her fingers through his hair. About the science of staying alive. About life and death and the small difference between the two. And about the scaffolding that had crumbled when the love blew away. As he talked, she saw the scenes he was describing in her mind. She saw him jumping from planes, hanging from bridges, diving in dark rivers, riding silvery horses, loving transient women. She was fiercely drawn to him. As he talked, she wondered again what it is, this link between people. Does the heart strike at the same moment? Are the thoughts painted with the same palette? Do we recognize them from another time the mind cannot remember but the soul can? When she was clumsy and tripped on the trail, he was behind her. She had her camera in hand and felt her foot slide over the edge, but could do nothing to save herself. I'm falling, she cried, half in jest, and a firm hand caught her under the arm. It did not pull her up, just stayed there until she steadied herself. Her skin felt polished where the grip had been. They talked about many things but not the manifest attraction between them. He looked at her often, and those blue eyes made her beautiful when they settled on her. What did he see? Probably he saw a woman who never wore a watch. A woman to whom time meant constraint. Tall, long arms, thin shoulders. Her hair was fair and long, and very often tangled. Her affliction was that of a wandering spirit, keeping her on the road. Farther and farther away each time, in search of sights unseen and stories she would likely never tell. She was never without a tribal amulet around her neck. She believed in their power. She had been places most white people have no desire to go and seen things most couldn't imagine. It made it hard to talk about her life. She liked people but never minded being alone. She was a photographer and a writer, and guarded her freedom like a lioness does her cubs, instinctively savage the moment it was threatened. That night, she was invited to another awful party. She kept wishing he was there. It annoyed her, that kind of wishing. She'd be talking to someone and her attention would glide away into the parallel world of replay and elaboration. He didn't come, he hated those parties, preferring to remain around the perpetually dying fire with the dark-skinned men with their trusting smiles and fearsome eyes. On the fifth day, she woke early with the gong from the prison next door. Her ticket said she was to leave that day, but she knew she would stay. She was glad no one asked why, she didn't want to answer the question if she enjoyed this place or was staying for him, the beautiful, mysterious man who inhabited her vision. She hiked alone with him again, through bush with no path, with grabbing branches and soggy soil, past cobwebs as big as houses. They reached the waterfall he had promised her, where the water churned out of the mountainside and hammered at their feet. He sat on a rock and did not see the waterfall. She sat on another rock and stared at the waterfall but only saw him. Though the sun was high and hot, he looked pale and chilled. Something crowded out his sun. She knew there was no use in asking. She'd have to wait. They came across a village where naked children showed her how to use a slingshot. They walked back through the musky dusk, talking about chaos, time, chemistry. He turned, slid his fingers through hers and said, you make me happy. Simply that. He would work all night, and he asked if she would come to the loathsome factory to keep him company for a while. Of course, she said. They sat and drank port and looked at a world map, picking countries they wanted to go to, telling tales of strange people in peculiar places. They found they had similar interests, similar minds, different lives. When the night was almost over, he leaned forward in his seat and the structure of his face shifted. His eyes lay mute under those arched brows and his mouth stretched across a thousand unsaid words. I am going to tell you something no one else knows, he said. I shouldn't, but I need to tell someone. You must never mention it again. I will tell you why I am really here. The alcohol in her brain responded to the flattery and not to the gravity. It was raining outside. Tell me. This island, he began, is divided, and not by those who belong here. On the other half there is oppression, genocide, political intimidation. An invading force tolerated and supported by the West. I am a soldier, a good soldier, and soldiers must fight for what is right. The natives need help. There is a rebel force. I've been there before. I'm going back across the border into the jungle -- for a long time. Yes, there is a chance I might die. A very real chance. The invading army kills people like me. His eyes dug into her. Do you think I am an idealist? And so there it was. His shadow. His withheld truth. They talked idealistically about how idealism was the only way change happened in the world. They talked until the brown men had finished burning the beans and the sky was seamlessly dark. It was 4 a.m. and the hours had passed quickly. He laughed for the very first time and it was a colorful, natural laugh. The days, as all days, were numbered. They went to a tribal dance where the beauty was monumental and the colors ethereal. She saw it through the lens of her camera and was intoxicated. Behind that lens she changed into something that had a right to pry and to capture. She was greedy, and time went upward in long streams of smoke and existence became paint and sweat and glistening skin and the smell of pig fat. She tried not to think about what he had told her and he pretended she knew nothing. One night, the rain fell in steel sheets and they took refuge in the empty house of a friend. The houseboy lit a fire, they cooked and drank, lying on the floor. He stroked her hair, slowly, carefully. They found a book of the Chinese zodiac. She was born in the year of the tiger and he the snake. It did not portend well for the future. He took her many miles on his motorbike. She pressed against him on the back, feeling the wind, burying her face in the nape of his neck. They crawled below the earth to a subterranean chamber, where the tough native boys with them sang a gentle song by candlelight and threw stretched shadows on the far wall. She closed her eyes. There would be many indelible memories. He showed her, patiently and seriously, how to make a harness out of two lengths of cord. How to make a harness and then glide easily down a cliff. He took her to villages and to rain forests. He stood by as she bargained in markets, advising on things he didn't care much about. He taught her how to shoot an arrow with a long-bow. He tied a rope around her and coaxed her up a cliff when she asked to go rock-climbing. He muted his cry when she loosened a rock and it fell on him from above. He taught her how to hold and load a gun. How to shoot and not be shot. He drove her to the airport when she finally left the highlands and flew to the coast. She had another week. She didn't need to ask; she knew he would come. That night she was without him. She met people who were tanned and soft-spoken from days shaded by bougainvillea on shimmering black sand. She felt loud and uncontained beside them, still strung high from rock-climbs, motorbikes and caves. She went to bed in the fading heat and did not sleep. He arrived the next morning. They put on tanks and dived down to skeletal wrecks -- war boats and fighter planes, their skin brushing underwater. The days evaporated. There was no discussion of where he was going or what she was going back to. They lay on the bed, their breath touching. It seemed like a waste of time to close their eyes, so they stayed awake until the light crept over the sea, telling stories. When she did fall asleep, she dreamed in blue. Everything was heightened. The colors in the air, the music, the smells, the words, the feelings. Time was burdened with an exquisite tension. And it finally ran out.
He took her to the airport and they didn't speak. He gave her a talisman, she gave him some words she had written. She committed his smell and face and voice to memory and turned to the plane. When she turned back, she saw a blue light shining through the window.
A peripatetic native of New Zealand, Amanda Jones is a freelance writer and photographer whose work has appeared in Vogue, Escape, Outside Online, the Los Angeles Times and the London Sunday Times. When not exploring the far corners of the earth, she resides in Northern California. Have you had a romantic encounter while on a trip? Share your experience in Table Talk. |
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