About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory Page 4
I wanted to know in the way, sometimes, you want to know very much more than a person’s name.
On the way back to my room, just as I was passing an open window, I unconsciously raised a hand to brush my forehead and glanced in. Moonlight filled the interior of a bedroom. A woman in a sleeveless cotton nightgown lay wide awake beneath a single sheet. She waved at me tentatively, as though I were someone walking by in a dream she was having.
III
OUR LAST DAY on Bonaire, Adam and I drove a small Japanese rental car south of Kralendijk to see the salt flats that had once drawn the acquisitive attention of the Spanish and then the Dutch. The salt ponds here were actively worked from about 1624 until 1863, when the Dutch abolition of slavery rendered the operation unprofitable. In 1972 a United States and Dutch concern began exporting salt again on a regular basis. A few of these shallow ponds also now serve as a fortuitous refuge for a once endangered population of greater flamingos. (Their numbers have increased tenfold since this nesting ground was closed to egg collectors, hunters, and low-flying aircraft.) The nearby rows of slave huts—each a carefully restored, peakroofed, work-week domicile for two—are an anomaly, too comely a reminder of this malign human proclivity. Out of curiosity I began to sketch and measure the huts to see what I might learn. I didn’t know whether they had been accurately restored, but standing inside them it was apparent they had been designed to take astute advantage of cooling trade-wind breezes, to shed downpours, and to insulate against tropical heat, like tile-floored adobes.
As is sometimes the ironic case with such shadowed places, they have attracted lovers in another age, people who have drawn hearts and scribed their initials or written their names in chalk and ink all across the whitewashed walls, inside and out. Here, also, was “The Criminal gang is the best so fock [sic] the rest,” a sentiment about life on the island that hadn’t yet registered at the resorts.
At a place called Onima, fifteen miles away on the east coast—because of heavy surf and strong currents there is no diving on this side of the island—we found several sets of Caiquetío pictographs in unprotected shelters. (Early chroniclers describe the Caiquetío as tall, honorable, “una gente muy pulida y limpida,” a clean people elegant in their manners and movement.) Many of the pictographs had been gouged by vandals or written over with graffiti. It took several minutes to spot, higher up on the undersides of overhanging rocks, other drawings in apparently perfect condition. Fascinated, I began to draw some of them, including a strikingly accurate rendering of a species of angelfish. As I did so, a woman approached in a rental car along the dirt road. Who was this? A companion, someone like us? Driving slowly, she rolled down her window and scanned the limestone bluff where I was standing, as though searching for an address; then, gathering speed, she drove quickly away. I imagined her indifferent to the site, to the history it contained. Then I realized she was alone, that two men were standing around, and that this was an unfrequented part of the island. We had closed it to her.
The paintings and drawings were similar to ones I had seen in northern Spain, in Arnhem Land in Australia, at Brandberg in Namibia, in canyons on the Colorado plateau. The evidence of humanity in each place is tantalizing, replete with meaning, but finally elusive, inscrutable.
An hour later, within Bonaire’s relatively large Washington/Slagbaai National Park, Adam and I located a watering hole called Poos de Mangel. Numerous birds flitted through the thicket of its trees crowding a small, dust-and-algae-covered pool. I got out of the car with my binoculars and a locally published guide. Whenever I visit a new country, I buy as soon as I can a guide to its birds. It often proves to be the most accurate and least political survey of life in the region. Its pages, frequently written in a tone of appreciation, urge a reader to do little more than share the author’s regard. In Kralendijk I had found Peggy Boyer’s Birds of Bonaire, a guide in English and Papiamentu with black-and-white line drawings by Carl James Freeman. Opening it, I immediately recognized a half dozen birds I’d seen around the resort but had not known names for, like the bananaquit.
I stood back in the trees by the pool for half an hour, watching red-necked pigeons, yellow warblers, smooth flycatchers, and black-faced grassquits angle in warily, branch to branch, finally hopping down to sip the water.
Turning back south, we stopped at several spots along the coast where Adam hoped to photograph flamingos and where we saw great white egrets, brown pelicans, and least terns. Late in the afternoon we halted for cool drinks at a small inn on a cove near the island’s northwest tip, a place called Boca Bartŏl, a stunning dive site. Spokes of coral radiate seaward from the beach, the canyons between them floored with pale sand—a formation called spur-and-groove. Inviting as it is, few divers travel to this site. The currents are often strong and the drive up from Kralendijk can take more than an hour on a winding, pitching dirt road. Adam and I sipped our drinks and watched with mild envy as four divers prepared to go in. (Nitrogen gas remains in solution in a diver’s tissues after he or she surfaces, the result of breathing normal air at depth. It may take twelve hours or more for this gas to completely diffuse into the bloodstream, the circulatory system carrying it to the lungs, where it is exhaled. Prudence dictates divers stay out of the water during the twenty-four hours before they fly to guard against decompression illness, the gas-bubble-related maladies that can set in when an aircraft gains altitude and cabin pressure drops.)
The four divers before us glinted like seals in sunlight glaring from the water and then were gone. We knew how ethereal, how quiet, how consolidating to the spirit such a stray kingdom as this could be. It might launch you past many forms of melancholy.
In Rincon, at a filling station across the street from a branch of Maduro & Curiel’s Bank, we asked which road would take us back to Kralendijk via Gotomeer, the lake where flamingos mass in the evening. Rincon seems an amiable town. Its streets meet at casual angles, like footpaths in a mountain village, and many of its house doors stand ajar. With the heat of the day now past, a group of boys was changing clothes in an open field at the edge of town for a soccer game. As we merged with the main road I saw a statue briefly in the rearview mirror, a man in a suit and tie and hat, striding. I guessed at who it must be—José Gregorio Hernández, a Venezuelan physician who died in 1919. Gregorio Hernández is said to have ministered to his patients diligently and compassionately, often without charge. He is regarded by many today in Bonaire, Aruba, and Curaçao as an intercessor before God on behalf of the sick. You spot his picture in taxicabs. Statues of him in that black suit, a dark vest, and a fedora are found beside sickbeds.
The fact of Gregorio Hernández (his admirers continue to petition the Catholic Church to have him beatified), like the clouds that pass majestically over Bonaire each day, makes the ordinary venality and inevitable shallowness of so much in human affairs—the coarseness and greed of life, the failure of ideals, the withering of our aspirations—seem forgivable, even inconsequential. The memory of Gregorio Hernández’s work on Bonaire, as his admirers describe it, filled Rincon in that moment with grace and made its every element—watchful dogs, paving stones, wild parrots—transcendent in the afternoon light.
I wanted to go back and look at the statue, but Adam hoped to see the flamingos gathering at dusk, so I drove on. As the car picked up speed, we passed a middle-aged man with hand tools walking home from his kitchen garden in trousers caked with mud. I wanted to see the vegetables washed and firm on his dinner plate. I wished to know more about Gregorio Hernández. I wanted to come back to dive between the pale green coral spurs at Boca Bartól. I wanted the exquisite flamingos just ahead to ferry each heart’s anguished speculation about who we are, the knowledge of our beautiful and infernal complexity, across to the shores of Venezuela tonight, where, in another language, the endless deciphering of what we are up to would go on.
2
A SHORT PASSAGE IN NORTHERN HOKKAIDO
EAST OF THE TOWN of Abashiri, the long shallow c
urve of northern Hokkaido, northernmost of the Japanese islands, turns abruptly northeast to form the high, uninhabited coast of the Shiretoko Peninsula. A heavy surf breaks on light gray sand here on a fall afternoon, where I stand looking out across waters most Western eyes are innocent of—the Sea of Okhotsk. Russian waters.
Behind me, to the south, stretch maritime meadows and nearly unbroken tracts of pine and spruce forest in which volcanoes stand dormant. Brown bears walk in the wooded hills rising to the east, beyond a trim pattern of small farms. Red foxes run these beaches. I can see their prints and, beyond, the upright figure of my friend Naoki, now leaning over to pick up something.
This half-wild, bucolic landscape is not what one arrives in highly industrialized Japan expecting to experience. I’d been told that the people of northeastern Hokkaido, the side of the island opposite Sapporo, had a different bearing, that they were not so distant with strangers and that they were less formal in their day-to-day affairs than Japanese in cities on Honshu to the south—Osaka, Kyoto, and Tokyo, from whose hectic precincts Naoki and I had just come. I could easily see for myself upon arriving here that there is no headlong development in this region of Japan, no impetuous commerce. The people are proving to be as I have been told, shifting from acquaintance to something like camaraderie almost as quickly as some North Americans.
I had thought about the far reaches of Japan for years. The kind invitation of a Japanese novelist enabled me to travel to Tokyo and when I revealed a curiosity about Hokkaido he sent me north immediately with Naoki Nishibe, a friend of his and a native of that region.
Naoki’s father, Kazumi Nishibe, met us at the airport at Memambetsu, south of Abashiri, and drove us north to the coast. Naoki, twenty-seven, is an intense, short, powerfully built man. His father is much more reserved. His hands and face are creased and seasoned by forty years of outdoor work. He wears a light gray suit and tie.
What Naoki has found is a perfect scallop shell, its delicate, unchipped edge like the crenulated rim of a Belleek porcelain dish.
We drive on along the wave-crashed shore to Lake Notoro, an embayment, actually, of the Sea of Okhotsk. Mr. Nishibe bargains with fishermen at a small dock for fresh salmon, scallops, and snails. (I’d asked Naoki to keep an eye out for an intact scallop shell on our beach walk, a gift for someone back home. Mr. Nishibe, though he speaks no English, quickly caught the drift of that conversation—it precipitated his parley with the fishermen for fresh scallops.)
With the shellfish and salmon secure in the trunk of the Honda, the three of us head down the coast to the Nishibe farm where Naoki grew up, a few miles outside the town of Koshimizu. As we drive I can only stare in enchantment. I am reminded of the sparsely settled, agrarian countrysides of western North America, the coast plains of Washington State and lush green riverine valleys in the Coast Ranges.
I ask Naoki if many tourists ever come to this part of Hokkaido. My Japanese is rudimentary, his English halting. Very few gaijin, he says, very few foreigners, but a fair number of Japanese, especially in the spring, when wildflowers are in brilliant profusion; also in the summer, when warm weather makes a boat ride on one of the area’s pristine mountain lakes or a walk in the evergreen forests very pleasant.
“Many honeymooners,” says Naoki after a long pause, looking up from his Japanese-English dictionary with a smile.
When the road draws close to the beach I ask if we might stop again. I am astounded—the Sea of Okhotsk, I keep saying to myself. Siberia fronts these same waters. This ponderous storm surf, I reflect, will soon lie frozen on the sand in buckled plates of sea ice. Snow will fly, and the bears of Hokkaido will go into hibernation. It seemed as obdurate a coast as I imagined that of the Atacama Desert in Chile to be. Down the beach from where I stand, fifteen or twenty gray herons, birds that would come to my shoulder, strut all angular in the churning surf. What do they seek there?
The Nishibe house, set amid fields inland from the sea, is foursquare and plain. I offer Naoki’s mother two small presents from home when I enter, a jar of my wife’s pear marmalade, a jar of my neighbor’s fireweed honey. I was made to understand before I departed for Japan that to be a guest in someone’s home here would give me a completely new understanding of what welcome and cordiality meant. I was intent on reciprocity in these matters, however, and out of habit carry many small presents to convey my sense of pleasure at being brought in out of the indifferent world.
Mrs. Nishibe—a glance at the hand-polished surfaces of her kitchen tools and I can hope her judgment will be informed, not merely polite—samples both marmalade and honey immediately and pronounces each exquisite. And nothing will do now but that she must prepare a few presents for me to take home, just as soon as she prepares tea and a light meal for all of us. Her guileless courtesy is disarming. A well-mannered people, I conclude, watching Mrs. Nishibe later ironing furoshiki, the traditional wrapping cloths used with presents.
That evening Mr. Nishibe takes his son and me and a friend of his to a Japanese resort inn, a ryokan, where guests can soak in the steaming mineral waters of a hot spring. Before we do, the four of us enter a shoji-screened private dining room, for the evening meal. We sit cross-legged on tatami mats, Naoki and I side by side with our dictionaries between us and facing his father and his father’s friend, Minoru Taketazu, across small black lacquered tables. The meticulously prepared food placed before me is so carefully arranged—the half dozen dishes on the first of four trays, and the food itself, arranged on each dish according to line, color, and texture—that I am hesitant to disrupt the symmetry. I enjoy traditional Japanese food, but am hard-pressed here to distinguish among many varieties of raw fish and sea vegetables. I am also apprehensive that I might embarrass my host with failures of etiquette, but Mr. Nishibe only nods reassuringly at my adventurous appetite, and even compliments me on my use of the chopsticks. Speaking through Naoki and shaking his head in disappointment, Mr. Nishibe adds that the youth of Japan are sadly deficient in these skills. Too many forks, he says.
Mr. Taketazu, sitting directly across from me, full of gesture, loquacious and affable, seems oddly familiar. It’s something in the drift of our conversation, which is turning on the habits of wild animals. He speaks very little English but, again with Naoki’s help, we manage to exchange a startling amount of information. He is about the same age as Mr. Nishibe, and the two of them exchange the beaming looks of proud parents when, at several points during dinner, using my dictionary, I try to state my affection for the landscape of Hokkaido.
I knew before I came, I tell them, that it is possible to witness the elaborate courtship displays of the Japanese crane here and to see other large birds unknown to most North Americans—Blakiston’s fish owl and Steller’s sea eagle. The Kurile seals, I continue, the brown bears, red foxes racing over the frozen sea—such animals, encountered in the undisturbed wilds of Shiretoko and Akan National Parks, could pull a disaffected visitor up out of himself very quickly. Was it really true that few foreigners ever came? The three men looked at one another. Mr. Nishibe made a summary comment to Naoki.
“No Holiday Inn,” said Naoki.
After supper Mr. Taketazu asks me to sign a book of mine, a translation, and offers me a book of his in English, Fox Family: Four Seasons of Animal Life. I try to compose words appropriate to the moment, words that in the future may recall the memory of the meal, our enthusiastic conversation, and the generosity of our host.
Something hangs unresolved in my mind about this modest Mr. Taketazu. When he hands me the fox book, I decide his name must be familiar from a scientific paper I might have once read in translation.
We return to our separate rooms, change into light cotton kimonos, the summer yukata, and meet again outside the men’s ofuro (communal hot tub). Naoki explains the etiquette—a small towel held over the genitals, a thorough scrubbing and shampoo at one of the washing stations along the wall before entering a large tiled tub sunk in the floor. The chasteness, cleanliness, and ord
erliness of this ritual (my clothing rests folded in its own small wicker basket, perfectly aligned with dozens of other identical baskets on a white shelf in an adjoining room) are in keeping with principles of behavior long observed throughout Japan.
The steaming, sulphurous water is intensely calming. It encourages gentle and desultory conversation, not serious talk. Nevertheless, Naoki successfully communicates something quite abstract, that, traditionally, these circumstances did away with the façades from behind which people might be inclined to speak falsely. No one, he says, tells lies here.
A wall at the end of the room separates our ofuro from the women’s, but it does not reach the vaulted ceiling of the building. From behind it come bursts of evocative, high-pitched laughter.
We retire an hour later. Before stretching out on my sleeping mat, or futon, an inviting envelope of ironed white sheets and cotton quilts, I glance through Mr. Taketazu’s book. Staring at the many stunning photographs of foxes, I finally recall the connection. Several years before this Mr. Taketazu had made a film about the red fox, or Ezo fox, of Hokkaido. It virtually changed the attitudes of Japanese people toward this animal. I’d seen an edited version of the film in the States and been very impressed by the compassionate way Mr. Taketazu had suggested making provisions for wild animals within a settled but still rural land.
Tomorrow, I thought, I will have to pay my respects to Mr. Taketazu. I quickly make some notes about the day’s events and get into bed. I am exhausted by the effort to understand and to be understood, and I know no moment so blissful at the end of such a daylong effort than repose between fresh sheets, one’s skin bare and still puckered and tingling from a hot, soaking bath.
IN THE MORNING the four of us drive up to Mount Iō, a barren, jagged volcano on the periphery of a taiga plain. The wail of the ground vents, that violent escape of steaming air, and the pall of sulphurous fumes end our conversation along the footpath and send each of us off into private thought. The surface of the ground near the larger vents is coated bright yellow with sulphur deposits. Apart from these brilliant fumaroles, the volcano has a stern, prehistoric visage. It’s a dark shoulder set against the melancholy taiga and denser forests to the west. The Hokkaido bear, the same species as the North American brown bear, lives out there in good numbers, but it is rarely seen by the automobile traveler. If you want that encounter you must hike up into the mountains. Standing on the volcano’s steaming flanks, staring up into the moss-hung limbs of the pines and spruces, I could easily imagine bears watching the handful of visitors strolling here. Perhaps the bears have their own version of the ofuro rituals, and are waiting for nightfall, when all of us will have moved on.