…She had a blue dress that described a large parrot, it’s head under the left breast and it’s tail swinging to her right side where it met the tail of another parrot whose head rested by her left omoplate!
The sentenced died there, on a French word that he could not translate, a tragedy for someone dedicated to spending the rest of his life writing English novels. The island had not a single Anglophone, no books, dictionaries, anatomical charts. Nada. People here spoke occasional Spanish and a curious dialect called Intoto. Of course there was no Internet. This is 1935, a time of wooden boats and sisal rope, like the kind that broke off from the anchor, precipitating his 30-foot ketch to a splintering death on the coral shoals. That was a year ago, the beginning of what Raymond had thought to be a brilliant literary career, analogous to Gauguin’s own artistic flowering on a Tahitian beach. He would give a manuscript to his editor every six months, when the noisy blue Fokker would land on the beach to provide the essential mail service. After six months, he had four or five chapters still missing and a list of 312 words that needed translation, each written down in French with a blank space next to it where an obliging bilingual proofreader would write it in. After twelve months, his typewriter ribbon had expired and the first chapter had been eaten by an agouti, a local rat-like creature for which he did not have an English word. After eighteen months on the island, Raymond had managed to get two girls pregnant, for which he had to pay their respective fathers a pig each. That took care of his meager cash reserve after the shipwreck. After two years, he was the proud father of a set of boys that cried loudly, discouraging any attempt at literature. The two women laughed together when Raymond scribbled through the night with a worn pencil under an oil lamp. Their warm bodies were starting to look elsewhere, especially towards Alomi, a tall Polynesian with a pony tail and long shiny muscles. Raymond’s share of food was acquired through hard work at the pineapple field, handling the machete with a skill that surprised even him, the ex-New York stockbroker who had never so much as planted one seed in his entire life, the two boys not being counted as agriculture. The foreman was a lady, the widow of the estate that provided jobs for a good third of the islanders. She was in a grumpy mood most of the time except after the boat came to be loaded with her crop twice a year, paying her in good solid Aussie dollars. That night was exceptionally happy since the crop fetched a record $25,000. quite a sum in those depression years. She had invited Raymond to be the bartender at a party thrown for the employees. Alomi was not one of them, a fisherman with the best boat in the island. He was having his own party with two young mothers anxious for long overdue sex. The giggling in the hut would have made Raymond sick with jealousy if the blue lady had not suddenly turned on to Raymond as he was raking ice cubes from the bottom of a wooden box. A hand on someone’s rump is no signal of interest, but that fragrant hand was kneading a subtle message that said, translated roughly from the Intoto dialect: ‘I have been a widow for too long. Come in my bed as soon as the last guest leaves. Raymond had noticed the sky blue dress with the large breast resting on the surprised head of a parrot. The following night made him realize that he madly in love with ‘la patra’, Intoto for “the woman boss”. When he walked into his own hut, the girls were sleeping soundly with their respective son, each groping for a breast that was not delivering milk at the normal rate. Something was wrong and Raymond had no idea what it was. Instead of waking the young mothers, he chose to sit under the acacia and write a new novel, the blue lady, underlining the word blue with a worn H4 pencil that required two strokes or more to create a visible line. When he reached the word “omoplate”, he stood up and had one look at the sea. The old Fokker was to land on the beach in five days. He could persuade the pilot to take him and ‘la patra’ to the mainland for well-deserved R&R. His passion had shifted from writing to making love for hours at a time. The girls sold fish at the market, being paid in substance. They would lack nothing during his absence since the rice bag was still nearly full, with plenty of okra in the cellar bin. La Patra was thrilled with the idea, a week in Brisbane with her new lover. He only fear is that having never cultivated a good lieutenant, she feared that her employees would not perform during her absence. Raymond had an idea. Why not invite an outsider with authority to take over for a week? He had just the right candidate, a tall fisherman with machismo and the capacity to quell any mutiny. Alomi was hired when the plane left the beach and circled overhead.
The hotel was clean, pale blue with a radio in every room. The plane had rattled them both and they needed a nap. La Patra was already snoring when Raymond turned on his side, resting on one elbow to better observe the soft belly rising and falling under the blue silk dress. A few centimeters lower, a powerful bush created a dark shadow that moved with her respiration while the radio played “A night in Tunisia” by Artie Shaw. Raymond had to pull up that dress and look at that area, his mouth watering with desire. A quick glance at the locked door and he was in full facial contact, sucking in the delicately smelling tasteful morsels of that powerful woman. She moaned a tiny moan and soon was withering with pleasure, accidentally tearing off her dress so that each parrot was now independent from one another, lying helplessly by the bed. Her breasts were now jiggling all over her chest as she was massaging Raymond’s scalp with nails that had been carefully lacquered the night before. Out of breath and thirsty, Raymond took a swig from the wine bottle by the bed, offering the lady a sip that she refused, busy as she was coordinating the sexual orchestra at her disposal. Grabbing Raymond’s trombone, she pulled it hard in the direction of her inner sanctum, begging in Intoto: “ley marinn, ley marinn’’. Raymond had heard that expression before from her mouth as she often exhorted her workers to plant their machete deeper into the top part of the fruit, better to sever the top leaves. “Ley marinn”, he had concluded, meant “dig in deeper”. Proud of his linguistic skills, he proceeded to dig into ‘la patra’ with a barely contained gusto that was rewarded with cries of satisfaction and ample heaving from her perfect pelvis.
Alomi had put in a nine hour day, counted all the machetes and walked home from the plantation carrying four juicy fruits. He stopped at the girls hut to drop two of these when they said. “Alomi, tang dey lama yi”, Intoto for ‘’You are invited to eat with us and in no way you are going to say no”. He obliged but first showered in the back of the house with a rubber hose connected to a rooftop tank that became quite hot in the daytime. The girls were giggling and the kids laughing, a happy moment made happier when after the meal as they all piled up over Alomi, saying that the Ray would be gone all week. That meant many good quality orgasms for all without the risk of having an unpleasant moment. “Tari tari” “All is well”
Raymond boarded the plane with La Patra on a Sunday morning, having loved and shopped all week with a part of the proceeds from the sale of the last crop. La Patra was wearing a new dress, blue with a streak of lime green across both breasts. Very smart. Only according to the pilot they were overweight by 20 pounds, almost exactly the weight of the new cast iron Royal typewriter . It was decided to leave it at the Aero Club until the next trip. The boys were happy with their rubber molded kangoroos and the girls just loved their new phonograph with its shiny bell. They actually fought to decide who was to crank the contraption when the record slowed down. Alomi went back fishing with a new reel, American made with self-lubricating bearings. “Tari tari”.
Raymond was soon made superintendent at the pineapple ranch and Alomi was now fishing for big stuff, yellowtails and swordfish. Soon he rigged his boat with imported sails and could extend his forays to the next island where they had electricity and night clubs. Of course the girl knew the details of all that and were just dying to go there. That occasion materialized months later when La Patra decided to go to Sidney with Raymond to buy a new crusher for her plantation. Their return by boat with the one-ton machine was to take two weeks. Saturday morning, after Alomi had been tending the plantation expertly all week, it was decided that he too needed some R&R . So did the girls who always giggling were introduced to winches and spinnakers and halyards, all of that in Intoto, of course. The blue sailboat drifted off at noon and a full wind soon pushed off towards Akina, the mysterious and sexy island next door.
Meanwhile in his cabin on the boat Raymond was writing a poem about the deep blue sea. He had the blues allright, mostly because he did not get a chance to retrieve the typewriter from Brisbane several hundred miles to the south of Sidney. His writing career was getting nowhere, a childhood dream squandered by family and duty. But he did have dictionaries now and quite a bit of money thanks to a profit-sharing arrangement with LaPatra that attached a reward to productivity. The last crop was exceptional again and in a perverted way, that gave Raymond some hope. Indeed he could buy a new sailboat one day and just…sail away to a bright literary future. He tore the poem and went on deck, staring towards the northeast. He would just leave for San Fancisco, sell the boat and write a complete best-seller in one year max. This way he would make enough money to one day retrieve the boys and their mothers, sending all four to college in the USA.
Wearing identical blue sarongs, the girls entered their first nightclub, their little hearts beating over one hundred per second when they saw a real stage with dancers and musicians. Alomi was triumphant to produce such emotions in his uneducated girlfriends. He wasn’t much better since he could barely write. But he could read the sea like no one, pull the big ones in patiently and even wrestle with a small blue shark as he was rumored to have done. The return trip had more stars in their eyes than into the entire austral night sky. They made love at the foot of the mast with a full spinnaker pulling them forward at clipper speed. Under a bright moon, the exhausted Alomi steered to boat into the cove sight unseen a 2 in the morning. “Tari Tari”
The kids were now well over 2 years old when the girls were in labor again, simultaneously. The nurse brought the good news to the pale father none too soon. He had been waiting for hours, attempting another novel on a series of paper towels. His hands were grimy as he had earlier spent several hours trying to fix the pineapple crusher that had broken down. He felt miserable to have to need the childbirth excuse for a chance to write. Now with two more mouths to feed, when will he get the leisure to restart his real life passion.
”Mister Raymond, you have two girls, already fully sun-tanned and ready for the beach” Raymond was overjoyed at the curly headed little critters than sang a full octave above the remembered sound of the boys when they were born. For a while life was sweet at the plantation as well as at the house. The little darlings slept full nights and grew with incredible speed and agility. Raymond’s tiller was also filling after two more highly successful crops brought about by a new irrigation technique learned in a book he had purchased in Brisbane the same day his typewriter was repatriated. That left him no time to write but the typewriter was used as a percussive instrument by all four babies when the mothers played that new thing on the phonograph, American jazz. When vacation time came about, Raymond had bought a ream of paper and sat at the instrument with the unrealistic desire to write a novel in two weeks. He cooked a pot of coffee, lit a cigar and proceeded to write when he realized that three keys still lifted when pushed down hard enough. Salt air from the sea had completed the damage brought about by American music. He was determined to succeed to such a degree that he used the typewriter as a door stop to keep dogs and kids away, proceeding to complete the damn thing by hand. The four typewritten letters on one sheet spelled B…..L.U……E. He would call the novel “BLUE”. By hand, laboriously at first, he spelled:
She had a blue dress that described a large parrot, it’s head under the left breast and it’s tail swinging to her right side where it met the tail of another parrot whose head rested by her left shoulder blade.
There, he said patting the dictionary, I am now an American writer.
The girls did not appreciate the isolation that papa Ray was subjecting himself with the illusory purpose of becoming famous. They resented his writing so much that they spent entire evenings playing Mah Jong with Alomi, the daughter playing house and the boys playing pirate on Alomi’s boat. Raymond needed to fix machines all the time at the plantation. La Patra was cruel he told the girls as he was trying to conceal scratches on his chest and legs. His two wives were not duped that easily since Alomi had punched a hole in the cannery wall, one that gave a full view into LaPatra’s bedroom, concealed by a collection of sea shells. There he had seen Raymond’s short naked silhouette striding from bed to latrine with an excited step. He did not need to see more to convince the girls that hubby was not above all cheating. The household slowly turned silent as the kids played outside and away most of the time. The girls were now taller than the boys and were constantly kidded about it at school. The rumor had it that their mothers had had tiki tiki with a tall man, one with dark skin and long lean muscles. Raymond was by now certain of that fact although he had earlier blamed far reaching genetic laws for the difference in skin tones. He did not care any more. His LeJeannot 35 was soon to arrive on the island, his chance for a slow sail to San Francisco and a new beginning in the world of American literature. La Patra had had an hysterectomy that turned south, souring her mood permanently it seemed. A hurricane had wiped out the last crop and the mothers were now completely hostile to Raymond, insensitive to his gifts or his chatter. Alomi was caught stealing and was never re-hired on the plantation. Many had left after the hurricane and the blue mail plane was now only once a year for lack of enough mail to fill its cargo bay.
Raymond was never bored as the novel BLUE had grown to one hundred glorious pages, safely stashed away in the map box of his gleaming new sail boat. He had spent his leisure hours beefing up the rigging for a Pacific crossing, keeping to himself and spreading distrust all around him if that was still possible. His Sailor’s Almanach was now a book he read everynight after the women were asleep. There was a window of opportunity for that crossing, the first week of May. San Francisco in July must be awesome he throught, with all these quaint coffee houses where poets read their lines holding up a glass of wine. How quaint and positively exciting, he thought as he was trying to figure out his auto-pilot rigged to his rudder. He would need to understand that device if he expected to get any sleep. Only when he bought that second hand boat, no instruction came with it. His poetic brain could make no sense of it so he decided on one more trip to the mainland where the boat broker would certainly oblige with a detailed set of instructions. With no plane scheduled in for awhile, he decided to take Alomi as a mate and sail all the way to Sydney. Alomi was a wonderful sailor who managed to figure out the auto-pilot before they were out just a few nautical miles away from their island. They played with the wind like schoolboys and returned to the cove on time for a pig roast where all were happy.
Pigs were hard to come by as the island degenerated into the unemployment capital of the entire Micronesian archipelago. It was time to leave, thought Raymond, just a week ahead of the Almanach’s best sailing schedule. His bag was ready, hidden under an abandoned pirogue. He could barely sleep. He left one thousand Australian dollars in a tin pot for the girls to discover after he left at dawn. Sleep finally came, a heavy kind with nightmarish qualities. Must be that bad meat he had for dinner, he thought as he awoke for his transatlantic journey. The girl’s room was empty. Girls will be girls he thought with some sympathy, noticing that the school girls were also missing…and the boys too. They cannot all be with Alomi he throught as he approached the neighboring hut like a hunter. It was empty, missing also the fishing gear, the bags of rice and several other manifestations of life on the island. An ominous thought entered his mind. What if…what if…He soon realized upon climbing to the ledge that the cove contained nothing but several islander fishing boats and Alomi’s sailboat. LeJeannot 35 was gone, maybe for good, as well as his entire family.
A true poet is not afflicted by material loss when the passion feeds him night and day, thought Raymond. He would furiously finish the novel and mail it to his friend at Random House. No one was here anymore to distract him, no more pestering kids and sulking wives, barking dogs and paper-eating rats. But he could not find it after looking everywhere, even in the pantry where he had a habit of hiding things in pots and pans not used often. The money was gone. Good grief, had they read my mind? He said to himself walking to LaPatra’s house for a stiff drink.
The boat was sailing sumptuously towards Queensland and the Great Barrier Reef, the boys manning the mainsail while the now much taller girls handled the jib and the spinnaker. All were sun-tanned like Coppertone kids, albeit with different degree following their respective DNA, a still unknown notion in 1942. The mothers wore beautiful pareos bought with their allowance money in a tourist island visited earlier. They were cleaning the galley. “Para wha!” (What’s this?) said one to the other holding a bunch of handwritten sheets. “Fita filawo nai’ said the other pulling the entire manuscript away from her and throwing it overboard as they giggled hysterically. She had said “Food for the blue shark’ Sure enough, the first page with the word B..L..U…E floated by Alomi who was fishing at the back of the boat, quizzically looking at it as a blue shark was showing no interest, biting his line hard instead.
