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In a GardenWhile my best friends and I (Darlene for Africa, Farida for India, Anna Christine for Portugal and my blond and blue-eyed self for Britain) stood rigid on the airport tarmac waiting for Israel’s Golda Meir to disembark and shake the hand of each nation (China and the Amerindians were there too but I didn’t know those girls), I was thinking about that matchbox and its note while my friends were considering how to avoid being raped during their upcoming compulsory military service. Fish ah play ah sea, he nah know watah ah boil fuh am. Play while you can. Some play long, some short. Notes were passed and plans were made. The red-haired, black-eyed man dropped grubby folded paper through the bars of my parents’ gate and I responded with smeared and crumpled missiles tossed over the branches of the flamboyant tree and onto the verge beyond the wall. We agreed to meet. He suggested the Botanic Gardens. I said only at dawn. When I got up that morning the household was asleep. I took the dog as my alibi and walked down Kaieteur Road awash in pearly mist, opalescent light glazing trees and grass and pinking all right up to the water in the ditches. The walk wasn’t far. The Botanic Gardens were nearby. Where once 184 acres of sugar cane waved and rustled, since 1884 the land was laid out with ponds and plants and statuary. There was the pride of an early botanist, his Victoria Regia lily found in Guyana’s Berbice River, so very big its leaves spread sometimes six feet wide and 15-foot-long napping boas rest safely on the great green plates. At the gates was a zoo opened in the 1950s. Concrete, iron-barred pens held bored and pacing panthers, leopards, jaguars – all the feline strength of the country’s jungles – and one bony, matted lion with a cough. Tame pelicans congregated on the gravel paths and caged monkeys were tormented by the screams of wild ones dropping from the trees onto the roofs of their pens. When I arrived that morning the sun was just up. Macaws and parrots, wild and captive, made a racket and mist rose out of the warming ground to make the scene Shakespearean. Toil and trouble. There, by the gate, stood the man with the Afro, and he smiled and stepped up to walk beside me and I noticed that his shirt was bleached white and his pants were polyester, woven strands of brown and blue and flared out over his shoes, polished up and shining for the day. “Hey girl,” he say. “Come dis way. I for show you someting magic.” And he did. On the gravel path ahead and through the wet, green haze just visible walked a long-legged man in a turban followed slowly, slowly by a baby elephant. We joined, procession-like, behind them and went too into the green and silent heart of the garden and were all, for that moment, characters in a child’s picture book. Guyana, Guyana. The name means Land of Many Waters, which is true; it is, from its leaf-stained rivers – Essequibo, Mazaruni, Berbice, Demerara – where piranha swim, to the cascading Orinduik and the highest Kaieteur Falls. And the gardens were no different. There the murky manatee pond with, we’re told, its mermaid, never seen by anyone I met. There the kissing bridges, all flaking white and ornate wood arched over streams and sluiceways. There the koker on display, not meant, in that particular place, to hold back sea water but, for sure, for sure mahn, needed elsewhere in that low-slung town and so a part of Georgetown’s model garden. |
