Paradise Regained
Bucco: Paradise Regained
The couple in the seats behind me had been here three days, but they already knew their way. The bloke took out a sheet of tickets and ripped out two to give to the bus driver. Not surprisingly, they were Trini. And Trinidad had come to Tobago: for the first time—as we headed to the Claude Noël highway—I saw guns in the street.
They were submachine guns, cradled by two burly, sour-faced men who were sweating in their camouflage fatigues as they walked down the street.
“Trouble?” I asked.
“There is crime here,” Chamilla said. “Christmas is coming.”
For a while I wondered whether I would become one of the Sunday School crime statistics—people would come from all over, not just Tobago but further afield—but when I got to Bucco the thought seemed absurd.
*
Whoa, what had happened to the aircon?
The heat was like a smothering blanket as I stepped off the bus. As I wound my way to Auntie Flo’s, I gradually reduced my marching speed to what I assumed was a Caribbean pace.
Auntie Flo was minding one of the tiny stalls that serve as shops here. One of her friends waved me over and walked part of the way up to the guesthouse with me. “You trying to set the speed record?” he asked.
“If I slow down any more, I’ll stop,” I gasped. I’d found that, below a certain speed, my bags make me wobble. My rucksack was dangling lopsided from my shoulder, although it was nearly as heavy as my backpack. “I need rhythm.”
At that the man nodded understandingly.
*
A woman gave me a lift up to the fruit stall which had greeted me at the street corner yesterday. She had a bottle of beer clamped between her thighs as well.
The fruitstall was the one where you get two limes for a dollar instead of one. It was also the only greengrocer around. And there was a kitchen in the downstairs part of the guesthouse (which has—guess what—en-suite rooms). Two kitchens, in fact.
I had brought my spice box. It turns out that, around here, they like a woman wot cooks 😉
I made a very oily aubergine curry (no kitchen tissue to blot the things with, not even salt) with garlic & ginger-fried plantain and a salad. It was filling, to say the least. Showered and fed, I was ready to explore. But when I opened the gate the yard dog slipped past me, and vanished.
That was my excuse to see Smokey again. He and his mates were once more by the cars underneath the trees, surrounded by puppies, although there were no children this time. He told me to chill about the dog, it would come back, and—in a friendly, casual way that reminded me of a mate of ours who was partial to the odd joint—invited me over to the Captain’s Sand Bar across the street for a drink later on.
That’s when it struck me, as I sauntered the few dozen steps up the road to that idyllic bay. These guys weren’t a couple of chums from South East London here on holiday. They really live here.
They live in a place so beautiful that it’d made me choke twice so far (once on each visit).
And I hadn’t even looked below the surface yet.
Tags: Americas, Neither here nor there, Tag Index
Denni