Travels: Collected Writings, 1950-1993 Page 16
The afternoon Jane left for a weekend in Taxco, Loplop decided that I was lonely. She came to tell me so while I was lying in a hammock. Reaching up from the floor and using my posterior for leverage, she climbed into the hammock. I moved quickly to another, taking care first to raise it well into the air. She gurgled. If I wanted to make things difficult, it was quite all right with her; she had plenty of time to achieve her aim. She clambered down, pushed across the floor, shinnied up one of the posts that held the hammock, and slid down the rope into my lap. By the time I realized what had happened, it was too late. I was in my bathing trunks, and she made it quite clear that if I attempted to lift her off she would show no mercy. All she wanted was to have her belly scratched, but she wanted it badly and for an indefinite period of time. For two hours I halfheartedly tickled and scratched her underside, while she lay on her back opening and closing her idiotic eyes, a prey to some mysterious, uncatalogued avian ecstasy. From that day onwards she followed me through the house, ogling me, screaming “Baklava! Loplop!” trying to use my legs as a tree trunk to climb up to my face. Absolute devotion, while admirable, tends to become tedious. I sold Loplop back to the ladies from whom I had bought her.
The following year I found the best of all my Amazons, a perfect loro real with a great gift for mimicry. I looked into a little garden and there it was, perched in its cage, demurely conscious of being stared at. I approached it, asked it its name, and it slowly turned itself upside down before it put its head to the bars nearest me and replied in a coquettish falsetto that was almost a whisper: “Co-to-rri-to.” This, although it was in truth its name, was obviously a misnomer, for the bird was not a cotorro but a parrot, and a large-sized one. We had a short conversation about the weather, after which I bought my new friend, cage and all, for six dollars and carried it home, to the delight of the Indian maids, who felt that the kitchen was not complete without a loro to talk to during the long hours they spent combing their hair. They wanted beauty advice. “Do you like it this way?” they would ask, and then, changing the position of the tresses, comb in mouth, “Or like this?”
Cotorrito was an intelligent bird – well-balanced emotionally, and with a passion for regularity. He wanted his cage uncovered at half past six in the morning, and bananas at seven. At about nine he had to be let out so he could perch on top of his cage, where he would stay until noon. Then he made his tour of inspection of the house, toddling from room to room, just to be sure the place was in order. After that he climbed on to an old bicycle tire, hung in a shady part of the patio, and remained perched there while we ate lunch nearby, joining in the conversation with short comments such as “¿Verdad?” “¿Cómo?” or “¿Ay!” and bursting into hysterical giggles if the talk became more animated than usual. During the afternoon he took his siesta along with the rest of the household. When the shadows lengthened he grew lyrical, as parrots have a way of doing toward the end of the day; and when the maids gathered in the kitchen to prepare dinner he went back there, climbed atop his cage and superintended their work for two hours or so. When he got sleepy, he stepped into the cage and softly demanded to have the door shut and the cover put over him.
His performing repertory seemed to be a matter of degree of excitement rather than of choice. Tranquillity expressed itself in a whispered monologue, quite unintelligible, punctuated with short remarks in Spanish. One step above that took him completely into Spanish. From there he went into his giggles, from that into strident song. (At some point he must have lived within hearing of a very bad soprano, because the flatted notes of a song which began “No sé qué frio extraño se ha metido en mi corazón,” were always identical.) Beyond that there came a strange rural domestic scene which began with a baby that cried, sobbed, and choked for lack of breath, went on to a comforting mother, an effete-sounding father who shouted “!Cállate !” a very nervous dog that yapped, and several varieties of poultry including a turkey. Lastly, if his emotion exceeded even this stage, which happened very seldom, he let loose a series of jungle calls. Whoever was within hearing quickly departed, in sheer self-protection. Under normal circumstances these different emotional planes were fairly widely separated, but a good loud jazz record could induce a rough synopsis of the entire gamut. The sound of the clarinet, above all, stimulated him: giggling went into wailing and wailing into barking, barking turned swiftly into jungle calls – and at that point one had to take the record off or leave the house.
Cotorrito was a good parrot: he bit me only once, and that was not his fault. It was in Mexico City. I had bought a pair of new shoes which turned out to be squeaky, and I was wearing them when I came into the apartment after dark. I neglected to turn on the light, and without speaking walked straight to where Cotorrito was perched on top of his cage. He heard the unfamiliar shoes, leaned out and attacked the stranger. When he discovered his shameful error he pretended it had been due to extreme sleepiness, but I had previously roused him from sleep innumerable times with no such deplorable result.
Two parrots live with me now. I put it thus, rather than, “I own two parrots,” because there is something about them that makes them very difficult to claim as one’s property. A creature that spends its entire day observing the minutiae of your habits and vocal inflections is more like a rather critical friend who comes for an indefinite stay. Both of my present birds have gone away at various times; one way or another they have been found, ransomed from their more recent friends and brought back home. Seth, the African Gray, is the greatest virtuoso performer I have ever had. But then, African Grays are all geniuses beside Amazons; it is unfair to compare them. He was born in a suburb of Leopoldville in August, 1955, and thus by parrot standards is still an infant-in-arms. If he continues to study under his present teacher, a devout Moslem lady who works in my kitchen, he ought, like any good Moslem, to know quite a bit of the Koran by the time he reaches adolescence. The other guest, who has been with me for the past fourteen years, is a yellow-headed Amazon. I bought him from a Moroccan who was hawking him around the streets of Tangier, and who insisted his name was Babarhio, which is Moghrebi for parrot. I took him to a blacksmith’s to break the chains which fettered his legs. The screams which accompanied this operation drew an enormous crowd; there was great hilarity when he drew blood from the blacksmith’s hand. Much more difficult was the task of finding him a cage – there was not one for sale in Tangier strong enough to hold him. I finally got wind of an English lady living far out on the Old Mountain whose parrot had died some years ago; possibly she would still have its cage. During the week it took her to find it, Babarhio made a series of interesting wire sculptures of the two cages I had bought him in the market, and wreaked general havoc in my hotel room. However much freedom one may give a parrot once it has become accustomed to its surroundings, it certainly is not feasible at the outset; only chaos can ensue.
Almost immediately I got Babarhio used to traveling. I kept him warm by wrapping around the cage two of the long woolen sashes that are worn by the men here, and putting a child’s djellaba of white wool over everything. The little sleeves stuck out, and the cage looked vaguely like a baby with a large brass ring for a head. It was not a reassuring object, particularly when the invisible parrot coughed and chuckled as he often did when bored with the darkness of his cage.
There is no denying that in tropical and subtropical countries a parrot makes a most amusing and satisfactory companion about the house, a friend you miss very much when it is no longer with you. Doña Violeta, a middle-aged widow who sold bread in the market of Ocosingo, had hers for some thirty years, and when a dog killed it, she was so deeply affected that she closed her stall for three days. Afterward, when she resumed business, with the embalmed body of her pet lying in state in a small glass-covered coffin on her counter, she was shattered, disconsolate, and burst into tears whenever one showed signs of commiserating with her. “He was my only friend in the world,” she would sob. This, of course, was quite untrue; one can forgive its exaggera
tion only by considering her bereavement. But when she added, “He was the only one who understood me,” she was coming nearer the truth – a purely subjective one, perhaps, but still a truth. In my mind I have a picture of Doña Violeta in her little room, pouring her heart out to the bird that sat before her attentively and now and then made a senseless remark which she could interpret as she chose. The spoken word, even if devoid of reason, means a great deal to a lonely human being.
I think my susceptibility to parrots may have been partly determined by a story I heard when I was a child. One of the collection of parrots from the New World presented to King Ferdinand by Columbus escaped from the palace into the forest. A peasant saw it, and never having encountered such a bird before, picked up a stone to hit it, so he could have its brilliant feathers as a trophy. As he was taking aim, the parrot cocked its head and cried “¡Ay, Dios!” Horrified, the man dropped the stone, prostrated himself, and said, “A thousand pardons, señora! I thought you were a green bird.”
How to Live on a Part-Time Island
Holiday, March 1957
TWO TYPES OF LANDSCAPE have always had the power to stimulate me, the desert and the tropical forest. These two extremes of natural terrain – one with the minimum and the other with the greatest possible amount of vegetation - are both capable of sending me into a state bordering on euphoria. Unfortunately, when you have a taste for two antithetical things, you are in danger of becoming a pendulum, moving with increasing regularity back and forth between them.
I bought a house in North Africa to be near the desert. Then, after a decent interval, I found myself thinking with nostalgia of the jungle. Since the closest rain forest to Morocco lies on the further side of both the Sahara and the Sudan, I decided to look eastward for the other extreme, and hit on the idea of trying Ceylon. There would be luxuriant vegetation, and there would also be the pleasure of contact with an unfamiliar culture.
Of course, as is almost always the case, the spot turned out to be something very different from what I had imagined it would be. Its flavor was far less “Oriental” that I had foreseen. Each successive European occupation – Portuguese, Dutch, English - had left deep marks on the culture, but there were enough unexpected charms to outweigh this initial disappointment. The people were unusually sympathetic and hospitable, the food was the best I had encountered in an equatorial land, the hotel service was impeccable, and, most important, the place possessed an inexhaustible supply of superb tropical scenery.
Taprobane Island, off the coast of Weligama, Sri Lanka (Ceylon)
I explored Ceylon and became acquainted with its magical mornings and its incomparable sunsets. Early morning, once the mist is gone, the loveliness of the land is in full focus, and color and form are clearest; as the day progresses the increased light tends to blur both. The sunsets, particularly on the coast, are vast, breathtaking productions which last only a few minutes. The months passed. I moved from place to place, continually finding each new one better than the others, but wishing there might be some spot with which I could identify myself through ownership.
Before I had left England, I had been shown photographs of an extraordinary property off the south coast of Ceylon – a tiny dome-shaped island with a strange-looking house at its top, and, spread out along its flanks, terraces that lost themselves in the shade of giant trees. These pictures, probably more than any other one thing, provided me with the impetus to choose Ceylon rather than Thailand when I was casting about for a likely country to examine. But I returned to Europe without having caught more than a second’s glimpse of the shaggy little island, from the Matara train as it rounded Weligama Bay. The memory, however, does not relinquish its images so readily; the photographs with their casuarina trees, balustrades, breaking surf and curving palm-fringed shore line remained in my head, and on my next trip to Ceylon I made a point of going to Weligama Rest House, on the shore facing the island. From here I could look straight across into the sunny verdure opposite, and I determined to explore the place.
Early the first morning I put on my bathing suit and started out. The waves were blood-warm. When I climbed up onto the long boat dock ten minutes later, there was no sound but the lapping of the sea around the piles underneath. At the far end was a padlocked gate. I called out and a dog began to bark. Soon a man appeared out of the tangle of trees, naked save for a white sarong, his lips, teeth and bristling moustache brick-red with betel nut. For a rupee he agreed to show me around the little estate.
It was far better even than I had expected – an embodiment of the innumerable fantasies and daydreams that had flitted through my mind since childhood. But when I got back to Colombo and made definite inquiries about the island, I learned without much surprise that the owner had no intention of selling it. Once again I returned to Europe laden with visions of the little island, but this time they had substance; the color of the filtered light on the wooded paths, the hot smell of the sun on the flowers, the sound of the sea breaking on the big rocks. More than ever the island represented an unfulfilled desire, an impossible wish.
One day six months later a cable arrived at my hotel in Madrid. It read: “Owner Taprobane Willing Sell X Rupees Stop If Interested Wire Money Immediately.” I was suddenly downstairs at the desk, the telegram still in my hand, cabling Ceylon. The trees, the cliffs, the strange house with its Empire furniture, were all mine. I could go there and stay whenever I felt like it.
When I broke the news of the purchase to my wife, her reaction was less enthusiastic than I might have desired. “I think you’re crazy!” she cried. “An island off the coast of Ceylon? How do you get there?” I explained that you took a ship through the Mediterranean and the Red Sea, crossed part of the Indian Ocean, landed at Colombo, and hopped on a train which let you off at the fishing village of Weligama. “And once you’re on the island there’s nothing between you and the South Pole,” I added. She looked at me for a long moment. “You’ll never get me there,” she said.
But three years later she stood on a black rock under a casuarina tree and looked out across the Indian Ocean toward the South Pole.
According to the deed, the original name of the little hump rising out of the sea was Galduwa, a Sinhalese word meaning “rocky island.” There seems to have been some kind of house standing on the highest point as long ago as anyone remembers. In 1925 a gentleman of leisure, the Count de Mauny-Talvande, purchased it and erected an octagonal fantasy in pseudo-Pompeiian style which, according to oral accounts, he proceeded to decorate in a manner we should now associate with mild megalomania. (He also changed the island’s name to Taprobane, the word the ancient Greeks had for Ceylon.)
Right at the beginning he decided he wanted not a real house with an interior, but a pavilion which would be a continuation of the landscape outside, and from every part of which there would be multiple views. And so, blithely, he did away with walls between the rooms so that all nine rooms (including the bathrooms) would in reality be only one, and that one open to the wind. Then, having chosen as his aesthetic north a little island across the bay whose form he particularly liked, he constructed his octagonal house so that from its exact center that island would be visible – framed first by columns, then by a further doorway, the paths of the formal garden, and finally by the hand-planted jungle beyond. The result is very rational, and, like most things born of fanaticism, wildly impractical.
Since the place had been empty for several years, save for the resident guardian and his wife, a good many replacements had to be made. We had arranged before leaving Morocco to have new mattresses manufactured to fit the enormous beds, and in Colombo we had stocked up on sheets, towels, mosquito-net canopies, kitchenware, kerosene pressure lamps, a new stove and large quantities of food. I remembered that in Weligama the shops carried full lines of flashlights, sarongs, bicycles and firecrackers, but little else. Simple things like vinegar, salt or coffee simply did not exist.
The tempo of a sojourn in an unfamiliar place is undeniably
slow at the beginning, and you wonder how you will ever become accustomed to the deliberate, leaden passage of the hours. But with each successive day you find an imperceptible increase in speed, until you cease eventually to be aware of time passing at all. We settled into a life which was strange to us only because there was nothing “to do”, nowhere to go, and no one to see. Perhaps it was just as well that our routine was made more difficult by an important error of judgment we committed before we arrived at Taprobane.
We had been warned that the two resident servants would not be able to prepare our food, and so on arriving in Colombo we engaged a cook, a man named Fernando who had spent a few years in the galley of a freighter. I should have heeded my initial doubts about carrying an urban Sinhalese to the country, for the friction engendered by this sophisticated outsider proved an insoluble problem. Fernando refused even to enter, much less sleep in, the cavelike servants’ quarters, choosing instead to set up an army cot in the library of the main house. Though I was unversed in the rules of Ceylonese master-servant protocol, I should have had sufficient intuition to know that the resident servants would consider it scandalous behavior to permit such a thing. They showed their disapproval very soon. By that time, however, I did not need their innuendoes and grimaces to help me understand that Fernando was a distinct handicap. First of all, he screamed in his sleep. I, who had been looking forward to the luxury of long tropical nights whose only sounds would be the songs of insects and the wash of waves against the rocks, found myself being repeatedly awakened during the dark hours by hair-raising cries. Fernando’s sleep was one long nightmare. Nor, to judge by his accounts, could his days have been much pleasanter. According to him not only our own servants but all the people on the south coast were dangerous thieves and cutthroats. Fights ensued at the market when he went to buy food, and the police came to complain. The only solution, they told us, was to get a cook from the region.