Ferdinand stared at him. “What you mean, Jock? You just spend close to wahn hahf hour tahkeeng to heem. You no cahl dees ‘meet- teeng?”’
It was Jack’s turn to stare, then. “You mean. that nice fellow who — you mean he
“Yes mon.”
Again Limekiller considered for a long time. And, again, said, “. Oh.”
It might have come as a surprise to Dostoievsky, who wrote in the near-slums of St. Petersburg, or even to Tolstoy, writing on the noble estate where he had been born, that a writer is supposed to have to move and write somewhere else… in order to do good writing. On the other hand, Vergil might have dug it. He wrote about Mantua, Carthage, and the Tiber: but he wrote about them in Naples. However, Vergil was an exile, not an expatriate. Other images haunt our thoughts, floating like phosgenes before our eyes. The Stevensons in Samoa. Hemingway in Paris. Oscar and Bosie, sipping sticky liqueurs in a villa near Florence. (It wasn't near Florence? Okay, it wasn’t near Florence.) Paul Bowles in Tangiers, Ian Fleming in Jamaica, Maugham on the Riviera, Wouk in the Virgin Islands: some of these images of course haunt us less than others.
Perhaps all of this anyway merely echoes what men of boats have been doing since before there were men of books. “Happy he who, like Ulysses, has made a good voyage." The man spent a generation trying to get from one part of Greece to another, and we call this a good voyage? Clearly, rapid transit was not what was had in mind, nor was he the first war veteran in no hurry to see the folks back home. Nowadays Penelope would have acted differently, unshipped her loom and had it stowed aboard the pentacoster, or whatever, before Ulysses could have made the morning tide. What? Not in the Mediterranean — that “tideless, dolorous midland sea” — Well. Whatever.
Fifty years ago if a married man had the urge to go down to the seas once more (or, likelier, for the first time) he had to tell his wife that he was going down to the corner for a bag of rolls; then he would run like Hell. Today, he has only to dream aloud in order for his wife to say, “Yes! Let’s!” Amelia Bloomer, Lucy Stone, Carrie Chapman Catt, did you envision all that lies in this apostrophe-5? “What we would like,” she says… or maybe he. “We heard that we can get a boat built cheaply down here,” he says… or perhaps she. “We thought, maybe, a little bit of land on the coast or on a river or on one of the cayes,” they say. They ask: “What do you think, Mr. Limekiller?”
“ We’ve heard that you have some land for sale, Mr. Limekiller.”
“ They say you know all about the boat situation here, John.”
“ Could we see it, do you suppose, Jack?”
Now, Limekiller does not really want to sell his two acres up at Spanish Point, in the country’s farthest north; nor his three acres on the Warree River in the country’s farthest south; nor his halfacre out at Rum Bogue Caye, nor his equally-small properties along the coast at, respectively, Jack of Nails (north-central) and Flower Bight (south-central) — not unless he should get some irresistible sort of prices for them. for any one of them… all of which he bought for less than a good second-hand van would have cost him. After all, these lands represent his legal raison d’etre for taking people up and down and around about and in-between. At, of course, a reasonable charge. It was Government’s way of giving him permission to make a living without actually having giving it to him.
Given its choice, Government would probably have preferred for foreigners to have sent money in a plain sealed envelope, and stayed back home and not bothered it. Failing that, it would have been satisfied if visiting foreigners had been satisfied with the services which Nationals had to offer, however minimaclass="underline" foreigners, somehow7, tended not to be satisfied with that. Nationals, unless it wras during certain fishing seasons, w'anted to come back home every night: foreigners usually wanted to keep on going. In short, the emerging nation of British Hidalgo was slowly, very slowly, beginning to emerge into grappling with tourism. There was a gap. a very, very large gap. Limekiller, to an extent, was capable of filling part of it. He was not a better man because he was foreign. It was perhaps unfair that, being foreign, he could take care of other foreigners in ways that Nationals could not… as yet. Very w ell. For as long as “as yet” might last, Limekiller was given a semi-free hand. Maybe one could learn by looking, listening, observing. Maybe some of it would rub off.
Anyway, although it might be a shame that he was making money which a National ought by rights be making, at least he was spending all of it, well, nationally. Better that he be on hand to take visitors where and how they wished be taken than that the visitors should depart a day after they arrived. To be sure there were other foreigners engaged in tourist-taking-care-of, some of them not even (as was Limekiller) citizens of a Commonwealth country; mostly they were from the States, mostly they operated newish and slick and fast, fast motorized boats; they took middle- aged to elderly, and always obviously prosperous, fishermen of the sport sort on gilded tours. This was all easy for local understanding.
“Beatniks” were also easy for Government to understand (in the Republics, this class was still termed existensialisto), or, anyway, Government thought so. When they had first appeared, long-haired and oddly-dressed, they were assumed to be a sort of White Rastafarians; it was now accepted that this definition was in general too broad, as it was now accepted that not every White man with long hair or beard was a “Beatnik.” But what was it then, about “Beatniks,” which made Government unhappy? Well, for one, they spent no money, or anyway very little. They were given to bathing nude: disgusting! They did not obey the unwritten but perfectly well known local codes about where one smoked weed and where not. And they lived lazy. Bad examples. So Government did not want “Beatniks.” This was also easy for National understanding.
Less easy by far wras the intermittent appearance of foreigners who were not rich-looking, yet not “Beatniks” either. Lack of communication, we are often told, is the curse of our time. But Limekiller did no longer feel his time accursed.
Limekiller: an afternoon at the Hotel Pelican. Bathsheba and he were sleeping together, that is, they had already made love and Bathsheba and he had fallen asleep, only she was still sleeping, her smooth tan body as calm as a child’s next to him; he had awakened. Every room still had the ceiling fixtures for the old, slow- fans; in most of them however there was no longer any fan: there was here, though, and he had paid extra for the room on account of it. Jack watched the fan go humming around and around and listened in complete idleness and utterly complete satisfaction to the slow hum of voices outside. somew hat away.
He did not have to go to the third floor verandah to look down; he knew what he would see, as he knew what he was hearing. On the second floor verandah several young women looked out and watched the slow passage of people up and down the street, watched the children (some of them theirs) either in the yard or right there on the verandah playing and tumbling or sleeping or also sitting and watching; while they, the young women, talked easily as they finished up between them a huge platter (someone was, or had very recently been, both prosperous and generous) of food: rice and beans with chunks of vigorous native beef, chopped hard-cooked eggs, salad and fried plantains. and, to Limekiller and others from the frozen north, incredibly hot (but only pleasurably so to the young women) country peppers with onions and sugar and salt and lime. They ate neatly, delicately licking off their fingers after each mouthful.