The Sugar Islands Read online

  The Tahitian woman lives for pleasure. She does hardly any work. By day she lives languidly on her veranda, and by night, with flowers in her hair, she sings and dances and makes love. The woman of Martinique is a beast of burden. When the liner draws up against the quay at Fort de France you will see a crowd of grubby midgets grouped round a bank of coal. [The ships that call at Martinique now are oil-burners and this practice has consequently ceased.] When the signal is given they will scurry like ants, with baskets upon their heads, between the ship’s tender and the bank of coal. The midgets, every one of them, are women. They receive five sous for every basket that they carry. When there is no ship in port they carry fish and vegetables from the country into town. There is a continual stream of them along every road: dark, erect, hurrying figures bearing, under the heavy sun, huge burdens upon their heads.

  In Tahiti there exists a small, formal, exclusive French society, composed of a few officials and colonial families who hold occasional receptions, to which those who commit imprudences are not received. But the average visitor is unaware of its existence. It is uninfluential. In Martinique, too, there is such a society composed of a few Creole families. It is very formal and very exclusive. Its Sunday dejeuner lasts, I am told, till four o’clock. It is also extremely powerful and holds all the power, all the land, and most of the money in the island.

  Tahiti is a pleasure ground; Martinique is a business centre. The atmosphere of Tahiti is feminine; of Martinique masculine. In Fort de France everyone is busy doing something: selling cars, buying rum, shipping sugar. Whereas social life in Papeete is complicated by the ramifications of amorous intrigue, in Fort de France it is complicated by the ramifications of politics and commerce. ‘Life here is a strain,’ a young dealer said to me. ‘One has to be diplomatic all the time. One has business relations of some sort with everybody.’ In Papeete it is ‘affairs’ in the English sense; in Fort de France in the French sense. No one who has not lived in a small community, each member of whom draws his livelihood from the resources of that country, can realize the interdependence of all activities, the extent to which wheels revolve within one another. Everyone has some half-dozen irons in everybody else’s grate.

  In Tahiti the only people who are in a position to spend money are the tourists who stay over between two boats and the English and Americans who come to spend a few months on the island every year. In Tahiti there is accommodation for the tourist. In Moorea there is a good hotel. There are bungalows to be let by the month within four kilometres of Papeete. In the country there are several places where you can spend a few days in tolerable comfort. In Martinique there are no tourists. Between January and March some dozen English and American liners stop at St. Pierre. Their passengers drive across the island to Fort de France, where they rejoin their ship. That is all. There is no accommodation for the tourist. In Fort de France there is no hotel where one would spend willingly more than a few hours. [There are now at least two hotels, the Lido on the beach and the Vieux Moulin in the foothills. Both are about six miles out of Fort de France.] In the country there is no hotel at all. As far as I could discover there was not in the whole island a single foreign person who lived there out of choice.

  Finally, the native population of Tahiti is freeborn; that of Martinique has its roots in slavery. You have only to walk through a native village to realize the difference that that makes. In Fort de France, which is cosmopolitan, you do not notice it. But in the country, where day after day you will not see one white face, you grow more and more conscious of a hostile atmosphere; you feel it in the glances of the men and women who pass you in the road. When you go into their villages they make you feel that they resent your presence there. You are glad to be past their houses. They will reply to your ‘Good mornings’ and ‘Good evenings’, but they do not smile at you. Often they will make remarks to and after you. They are made in the harsh Creole patois. You do not understand what they say. You suspect that they are insulting you. They are a harsh and sombre people. They do not understand happiness. You will hear them at cock-fighting and at cinemas, shrieking with laughter and excitement, but their faces, whenever they are in repose, are sullen. Their very laughter is strained. They seem to recall still the slavery into which their grandparents were sold. It is only eighty years since slavery was abolished. There are many alive still who have heard from their parents’ lips the story of those days. They harbour in their dull brains the heritage of rancour. They are exiles. Under the rich sunlight and the green shadows their blood craves for Africa. They are suspicious with the unceasing animosity of the undeveloped. They cannot believe that they are free. In their own country they were the sport and plunder of their warlike neighbours. It was the easy prey that the pirate hunted. They cannot believe that the white strangers who stole them from their dark cabins have not some further trick to play on them. They cannot understand equality. They will never allow you to feel that you are anywhere but in a land of enemies. In vain will you search through the Antilles for the welcoming friendliness of Polynesia.

  [This is, it must be remembered, a first impression. I do not feel in that way now in Caribbean villages and, of course, in thirty years great changes have taken place in West Indians themselves, mentally as well as materially. They have acquired self-confidence. At the same time, even now there is a basic difference between a freeborn people and one that has been subjected to foreign domination. I felt this very strongly on a recent visit to Thailand (1957). The Thais have a light-heartedness that I have not found in India or Malaya. Prince Chula in The Twain Have Met referred to the ‘colonial neurosis’ to which his fellow-countrymen had been exposed.]

  In Martinique there is no accommodation for the tourists. If you are to stay there you have to become a part of the life of its inhabitants. Within two hours of our arrival Eldred Curwen and I had realized that.

  ‘We have got,’ we said, ‘to set about finding a bungalow in the country.’

  I am told that we were lucky to find a house at all. Certainly we were lucky to find the one we did. Seven kilometres out of town, between Case Navire and Fond Lahaye, a minute’s climb from the beach, above the dust of the main road, with a superb panorama of coastline, on one side to Trois Ilets, on the other very nearly to Case Pilote, it consisted of three bedrooms, a dining-room, a wide veranda over whose concrete terrace work—the hunting ground of innumerable lizards—trailed at friendly hazard the red and yellow of a rose bush and the deep purple of the bougainvillea. The stone stairway that ran steep and straight towards the sea was flowered by a green profusion of trees and plants; with breadfruit and with papaia; the great ragged branch of the banana; the stately plumes of the bamboo; with, far below, latticing the blue of the Caribbean, the slender stem and rustling crest of the coconut palm. [The villa was still standing in 1952, but I had great difficulty in finding it, so built over was the hillside surrounding and below it.] It was the kind of house one dreams of, that one never expects to find. Yet nothing could have been found with less expense of spirit.

  It was the British Consulate that found it for us.

  ‘You want a house,’ they said. ‘That is not easy. We will do our best. If you come tomorrow afternoon we will tell you what we have been able to manage.’

  It was in a mood of no great optimism that we went down there. Everyone had shaken their heads when we had told them we were looking for a house.

  ‘Nobody will want to let his house,’ we had been told. ‘A house is a man’s home. Where would there be for him to go? And for those who have a house both in the country and the town—well, that means that he is a rich man, that his house in the country is his luxury. There are not many luxuries available in the colonies. He would not be anxious to deprive himself of it.’

  It sounded logical enough. And when we found two men waiting for us in the Consulate, it was with the expectation of being shown some sorry shack that we followed them into the car. The sight of the house upon the hill was so complete and so delight
ful a surprise that we would have accepted any rent that its proprietor demanded of us. We were prudent enough, however, to conceal our elation. And three days later we were installed in the bungalow with three comic-opera servants, the sum of whose monthly wages in francs can have exceeded only slightly the sum of their united ages.

  Our cook, Armantine, received eighty francs. Belmont, the guardian, whose chief duty was the supervision of the water supply and the cutting of firewood, fifty francs. His wife, Florentine, who ran errands, washed plates, and did the laundry, had forty francs. It does not sound generous, but it is useless to pay negroes more than they expect. American prosperity is built on a system of high wages. The higher the worker’s wages, the higher his standard of living, the higher his purchasing capacity, the greater is the general commercial activity. But the negro in the French Antilles has no ambition; he is quite content with his standard of living. He does not want it raised. If you were to pay him double wages, he would not buy himself a new suit. He would take a month’s holiday. A planter once found that, however high the wages he offered to the natives, he could not induce them to work. In despair he sought an explanation of an older hand.

  ‘My dear fellow,’ he was told, ‘what can you expect with all those fruit trees of yours? Do you think they are going to work eight hours a day when at night they can pick enough fruit to keep them for half a week ?’

  In the end, at considerable cost and inconvenience, the planter cut down his fruit trees. Then the natives worked.

  Our staff considered itself well rewarded with a hundred and seventy francs a month. And it not only made us comfortable but kept us constantly amused.

  Armantine was the static element. She was a very adequate cook, considering the limited resources at her disposal. Meat could only be obtained in small quantities twice a week. Lobster was plentiful only when the moon was full. The small white fish was tasteless. There are only a certain number of ways of serving eggs. And yam and breadfruit, the staple vegetables of the tropics, are uninteresting even when they are flavoured with coconut milk. It says much for her ingenuity that at the end of six weeks we were still able to look forward to our meals. She was also economical. I have little doubt that our larder provisioned her entire family. But no one else was allowed to take advantage of our inexperience. Resolutely, sou by sou, she contested the issue with the local groceries. I should be grateful if in London my housekeeper’s weekly books would show no more shillings than Armantine’s showed francs. She was also an admirable foil to Florentine.

  Florentine was quite frankly a bottle woman. She was never sober when she might be drunk. Amply constructed, I have never seen a person so completely shapeless. Her face was like a piece of unfinished modelling. With her body swathed in voluminous draperies it was impossible to tell where the various sections of it began. When she danced—and she was fond of dancing—she shook like an india-rubber jelly. Very often after dinner, when we were playing the gramophone, we would see a shadow slinking along the wall. On realizing that its presence had been recognized it would quiver and giggle, turn away its head and produce a mug sheepishly from the intricacies of its raiment. We would look at one another.

  ‘Armantine!’ Eldred would call out. ‘Here!’

  In a businesslike, practical manner Armantine hurried round from the kitchen.

  ‘How much,’ we would ask, ‘has Florentine drunk today?’

  Armantine’s voice would rise on a crescendo of cracked laughter.

  ‘Too much,’ she would reply.

  We would look sorrowfully at Florentine and shake our heads, and she would shuffle away like a Newfoundland dog that has been denied a bone. On other evenings Armantine would be lenient.

  ‘Yes,’ she would say, ‘you may give her some tonight.’

  So the bottle was got out, the glass was quarter filled. Florentine never looked at the glass while the rum was being poured. She preferred to keep as a surprise the extent of her good fortune, in the same way that a child shuts its eyes till a present is within its hands. And in the same way that a child takes away its present to open it in secret, so would Florentine, with averted face, hurry round the corner of the house. A minute later she would return; a shiny grin across her face.

  ‘Now I will dance for you,’ she would say.

  Sometimes she would become unruly as a result of visits to the village. And Armantine would come to us with a distressed look.

  ‘Please,’ she would say, ‘give Florentine some clothes to wash. She earned five francs yesterday. Unless she is employed here, she will go down into the village and get drunk.’

  So we would make a collection of half-soiled linen, and sorrowfully Florentine would set about the justifying of her monthly wage.

  A grotesque creature, Florentine. But a friendly, but a good-natured one. Once I think she may have been attractive in a robust, florid, expansive way; the kind of attraction that would be likely to wake a last flicker of enterprise in an ageing heart. For Belmont was very many years her senior. Now he has passed into the kindly harbour of indifference. He does not care what she does. He observes her antics with the same detachment that one accepts the irritating but inevitable excursions of a mosquito. He remains aloof, behind an armour of impressive dignity.

  He was one of the most impassive and the most dignified figures that I have ever met. He never hurried. Under the shadow of such a straw hat as one associates with South America he moved at a pace infinitely slower than that of a slow-motion film. He possessed a pair of buttonless button boots which can have served no other purpose, so perforated were they, than the warming of his ankles. One day he would wear the right boot. On the next the left. Every fourth or fifth day he would wear neither. Only once did I see him wearing both. That was on New Year’s Day. To our astonishment he appeared at breakfast-time in both boots, a straw hat, a flannel shirt buttoned at the neck, and a clean white suit. In his hand he carried a bunch of roses. He was going into Fort de France, he explained, to wish the proprietor of the house a happy New Year.

  ‘C’est mon droit,’ he said, ‘comme gardien.’ No Roman praetor could have boasted more proudly of his citizenship.

  Indeed, there was a Roman quality in Belmont. There was something regal about the way he would lean completely motionless for a whole hour against the concrete terrace work, looking out over the sea, and then at the end of the hour walk, across to the other side of the veranda to lean there for another hour, motionless. And as he slowly climbed the steep stairway from the beach, a long, straight cutlass swinging from his wrist, he looked very like some emperor of the decadence deliberating the execution of a stubborn courtier.

  There are two ways of forming an impression of a country. In a few weeks one can only hope to gain a first impression. Very often, if one stays longer, the vividness of that first impression goes. The art of reviewing a book is, I am told, not to read the book carefully. Accurate considered judgment of a book within twenty-four hours of reading it is not possible. A rough idea is all that can be got. And it is usually to one’s first impression that ultimately one returns. At the end of ten days in a place I have often felt that I should know no more of it if I were to stay ten years, but that were I to stay ten months the clarity of that first impression would be gone. My sight would be confused with detail; I should be unable ‘to put anything across’.

  The tourist has to rely on first impressions. The question is how is that first impression best obtained? There are two ways. Either you are the explorer, who leaves no corner unexamined, who hurries from place to place collecting and codifying facts; or else you are the observer. From a secluded spot you watch the life of one section of it pass in front of you. From the close scrutiny of that one section you deduce and generalize. Each way has its merits and demerits. It is a matter of temperament, I suppose. Myself, I have always chosen to let life come to me. And in the mornings as I sat on the veranda of our bungalow I would watch the life of the island pass in review before me.

 
; Northwards and southwards, over St. Pierre and Fort de France, there is a rainbow curving, for the rainless is as rare as the sunless day; westwards, on the horizon beyond ‘the bright blue meadow of a bay’, ships are passing: the stately liners of the Transatlantic, with their twin funnels and their high white superstructures; the smaller boats of three or four thousand tons, the innumerable and homely cargoes, broad, black, low-lying, with only the white look-out of the bridge above their high-piled decks. Whither are they bound? Northwards for New York, for Jacmel and the dark republics? Southwards for Cristobal, for the silent wizardry of Panama? Afterwards in the blue Pacific will they turn southwards to Peru and Ecuador, or northwards to the coffee ports of Mexico and Guatemala; to Champerico, where they haul you in baskets up onto the long iron pier that runs out into the sea; to Puerto Angeles, where the lighters are loaded by hand, by natives who splash through the waves, their broad shoulders loaded; to Manzanillo, where for three intolerable days I sat in the shadow of a café among squabbling Mexicans, while the City of San Francisco discharged an oil tank; Salvador, Guatemala, Mexico? In six weeks’ time, who knows, these broad beams may be swinging through the Golden Gate; there may be passengers there who six weeks from now will be looking down from the high window of the St. Francis onto the lights and animation of the little square. Whither are they bound, those nameless cargoes? Hour after hour I would watch them pass and repass upon the horizon.

  Sometimes, in a state of high excitement, Armantine would come rushing from the kitchen. ‘Regardez! Touristes Américains!’ Slowly, in the majesty of its twenty thousand tons, the vast ship would be moving southwards. Shortly after breakfast it discharged its passengers at St. Pierre. For a little they wandered among the ruins; then in a fleet of cars they hurried over the southern road to Fort de France. For an hour or so they will assume control of it. With cameras in their hands they will stroll through the town as though it were an exhibition. They will peer into private houses. They will load themselves with souvenirs, with shouts of laughter they will call each other’s attention to such sights as will appear to them remarkable. They will consider fantastically humorous their attempts to make themselves understood in pidgeon French. For an hour, buying, examining, commenting, they will parade the town. Then, with a sigh of relief, they will consider their educational duty to themselves acquitted. It is time the fun began.