Martinique - The Traveller's Tree: A Journey Through the Caribbean Islands - page 37

customs that still prevail in the villages of Rumania, and they were based on the same neighbourly de-
sire not to let the corpse feel out of it during the vigil period. Friends and neighbours, he explained, sit
up all night round the coffin, telling funny and often improper stories, dancing, and drinking rum, and
even, after concealing small objects in the mouth or the other natural hiding-places of the corpse, playing
games of hunt-the-thimble. If the corpse has been a heavy drinker during his lifetime, bottles of rum are
poured down his throat; if a dancer, his body may be removed from his coffin and whirled round the room
in a lively saraband, changing partners every few seconds. Sometimes he is propped up on a chair among
his cronies, as though he were participating in the convivialities of the evening. 'You can't imagine,' the
speaker concluded, 'how very curious this looks. C'est un spectacle fort bizarre ….'
The headlights scooped a long tunnel out of the night ahead of us, a leaf-fringed and mysterious cavity.
We crossed several bridges, and I noticed that occasional solitary figures squatted on the parapet, with
their broad-brimmed hats held in a peculiar fashion against their faces. It was some time before I was able
to make out the purpose of this precarious position, and its intimate nature….The moment the headlights
of a car destroyed the privacy of the darkness, they achieved a simple incognito by clapping to their faces,
in the manner of the Venetians of Longhi, these improvised masks, which they held there until the danger
was past, and then replaced on their heads. There was something very satisfying about the economy of
gesture and the foolproof efficacy of this device.
Walking down the passage of the Vieux Moulin—the Air France hotel in which we lived—I was arrested
by a strange astrological injunction hanging on a little placard outside the door of one of the bed-
rooms: FAVOR NO MOLESTAR. I puzzled over the identity of the molestars all through breakfast, and
wondered why none of them should be favoured. The Pole Star? The Great Bear? The Dog Star? It was
obviously, judging by the spelling, a bit of advice from America. I could bear it no longer, and ran upstairs
to see if a closer examination would shed any further light. In the corner, in minute Spanish print, was the
name of a printer in Mexico City. Turning it over, the words 'Do not disturb' appeared. Of course! I re-
placed it on its hook, but only just in time, as the door opened a second after and I found myself suddenly
two inches away from a pair of tired Aztec-Iberian eyes…. It was the same kind of language error that
prompted the tongue-tied Polish forces to buy up, soon after their arrival in the Middle East, every single
copy of Polish up Your English to be found in the bookshops of Cairo….
The Vieux Moulin has a singular charm. It is perched high on a ledge of the Didier plateau, built round
the massive stone cylinder of a windmill that some former decade has plucked of its sails. The windows
from this tower look out over a swimming pool and a delightful flower garden and a long avenue of
palmistes leading to the main road, where the ground begins to fall to the hollow in which lies Fort-de-
France. The roofs of villas interrupt here and there the descending ledges of green. Across the blue haze
that hides the capital, the dim peaks of Morne la Plaine and Morne Constant hang in the air; in their lee,
on the other side of the gulf, are hidden the town of Trois Ilets and la Pagerie, the home of the Empress
Josephine. The country behind the hotel climbs northward in a green jungle to a series of peaks called
the Pitons du Carbet and the Gros Morne; steep and improbable green cones, ending in bare pencil-points
of rock. In middle distance a white building appears, a dazzling structure whose faintly Moorish, faintly
Gothic and Romanesque lines leave the observer at a loss. It turns out to be an exact replica, in the depths
of the forest, of Sacré Coeur, and it is designated by the proud islanders as the Montmartre Martinicais .