Guadeloupe - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 2

technique with which the new arrival shook hands. His right hand pumped up and down three times as he
raised his resplendent headgear with his left, and brought his heels neatly to attention. Lift; shake; click.
A Packard drove up at the head of a fleet of cars that engulfed him and the other officials. The band
struck up again, the harbour gates opened and a cohort of coloured policemen shepherded the silent crowd
back; and the cars sailed away towards the governor's palace in the west of the island. The crowd broke
on to the quay and the lesser passengers crowded down the gangway.
Half an hour later the Colombie, that congenial ship, was preparing to weigh anchor, and we were sitting
in the lounge of the Hôtel des Antilles. We had followed the elderly Negro who pushed our luggage up
the main street of Pointe-à-Pitre. The heat was so intense that our clothes had stuck to our arms and legs;
nearly everybody, we observed, was wearing open shirts and shorts or cotton trousers. The brilliance of
the sunlight made all the shadows appear black and profound, and the change of temperature when walk-
ing into the shade was as welcome as a waterfall. All the way to the hotel we had not passed one white
person. This, and the dazzling robes of the older women, the hundreds of black faces, the sound on every
side of the odd new language, most of whose words were French but whose tenor was incomprehensible,
this, and the murderous heat, invested the place with an atmosphere of entire strangeness. Even at eleven
in the morning a heavy tropical languor weighed on the air. The streets had grown emptier every moment.
With slow enjoyment we ate the fruit we had bought in the market. The bananas were gigantic but
commonplace. The soursops were about the size of a child's football, tapering into the shape of a pear,
and covered with a dark rind roughened with innumerable little hooked briers. The fruit inside was semi-
liquid and snow white, expelling an aroma faintly resembling peardrops, and wringing our dusty palates
with a delicious and slightly acid astringency. The paw-paw, which we next opened, was roughly the
same size, but the soft rind was a smooth, patchy gold in colour, mottled with green and rusty brown. We
halved it lengthways, and discovered two deep oblongs of a dewy, coral-coloured fruit of a consistency
miraculously poised between solidity and liquescence; much sweeter than the soursop, and, I thought,
even better. Its sweetness is mitigated and, as it were, underlined by the faintest tang of something sharp-
er—was it creosote or turpentine?—but so slight that one loses the identity of the taste while attempting
to define it. Pushing the ruins aside, we each chose an avocado pear: dark green or violet globes the size
of cricket balls, enclosed in a hard and warty carapace. The knives made a sharp tearing noise as we
opened them. In the centre, loose in their hollows, lay big round stones, completely spherical and smooth
and very heavy. I hated throwing them away, they seemed so perfect and neat, and somehow important,
but except as embryonic avocado trees, they are useless … The pale green fruit clung to the shell with a
consistency half-way between butter and plasticine.
Our ejaculations of delight must have been unusual, for two wide-eyed Guadeloupean waitresses made
occasional bird-like titters. They were a mahogany colour, barefoot, and dressed in white, with aprons
and turbans of marmalade-coloured tartan. They talked to each other in the same lingo as our porter, but
addressed us in a prim rather old-fashioned French mysteriously lacking in R-sounds.
The world outside the windows had by now become a calcinated desert from which the perpendicular
sun had driven every inch of shade. The palm trees, overtopping the corrugated iron roofs, stood motion-
less in a pale blue haze. The two maids showed us upstairs to our rooms, large wooden barns with no
furniture except the beds under their milky tents of netting. I climbed inside and began cutting the pages
of the memoirs of Père Labat, a French Dominican who lived in these islands at the end of the seven-
teenth century, but even the lively prose of this extraordinary monk failed to keep me awake for long….