On the Way Back Read online

  Two weeks later the local newspaper publishes an article about Nathaniel Jones—“the latest expat entrepreneur to reach Anguilla”—together with a quarter-page advertisement for a full-time secretary/receptionist to work at the Business Center for Dragon Wings. In the meantime, the decoration of the office turns into a makeshift affair: Sheila gets two desks and a filing cabinet from an insurance company that is upgrading their offices; Nathe convinces Saul Newman, the owner the five-star Hotel Anguilla where he stayed originally, to part with a tired Persian rug and an old dark blue two-seat sofa that for years have been the first things you see when you walk into the hotel; a tacky globe, two PCs—with monstrously old-fashioned screens—and a huge map of the Leeward Islands complete the interior of our office.

  By the time we are through with the headquarters of Dragon Wings we have a workplace on our hands which oozes anything but luxury: the carpet and the sofa look larger in the crammed space of an office than in the spacious foyer of a luxury hotel; the two desks are slightly different shades of gray than the filing cabinet; the light that floods the room through the vast window is sucked in by the size or the color (or both) of the furniture inside; the desk by the wall opposite the window seems to float under the shaft of electric light that shines on it from the ceiling, covering it with a thick mist. So Nathe decides to bring in six new, comfortable, and expensive desk chairs from Colony Leisure, the colorfully named local interior design specialist. Since that time we have contracted the services of a full-time secretary, we have set up the payroll, opened the office, created a business, but we still haven’t received our six chairs. Apparently they will take another four weeks to arrive from the factory, somewhere in Canada or Brazil—it’s hard to know. But such is progress in Anguilla, such is life, and there doesn’t seem to be much anyone can do about it.

  When I first got to Anguilla I was full of doubts and, in all honesty, anger at the waste of time and money this would be. Six weeks later I get the feeling that I understand the Caribbean a bit less, not more, day by day, while my knowledge of aviation has been little enhanced by my systematic exploration of “the Bible of the air,” as Nathe calls the Eastern Caribbean Civil Aviation Authority (ECCAA) Rules and Regulations. And yet, somehow, we have managed to turn Dragon Wings into something considerably more substantial than just a silly name. Setting up this airline in time to profit from the winter season will be a titanic challenge, no doubt. However, it is a challenge we are eager to face. Dragon Wings will be the first Anguillan airline to run regularly scheduled commercial flights all year round. Dragon Wings is a joint venture between Nathaniel Jones, Sheila Rawlingson, and me. Dragon Wings is a mature man’s dream, a young professional’s adventure, and a local woman’s brave token of love. But Dragon Wings flies my name, is my child. I am Dragon Wings.

  IV

  Nathaniel Jones allowed Dagon to revel for a full week in the amnesia that Anguilla had brought to his senses. For a full week Dragon Jones loitered on pristine white-sand beaches, indulged in the fresh flavors of the culinary gem of the region, and explored the relatively limited options the island’s nightlife had to offer after dinner. It was during this time that Dragon ended up, on a quiet Wednesday evening after an overdose of sun, in one of the three establishments that provided entertainment through the otherwise helplessly idle tropical nights. Dragon scanned the premises in search of agreeable company. His happy, tanned face caught the eye of a lonely drinker at the other end of the bar. SamB, nice to meet you. An empty public house became the perfect stage for a parade of drunken anecdotes and amusing episodes to blend the souls of two connecting characters. A few hours later they still knew nothing about each other, and yet there was a palpable, inexplicable bond working its way between them. What does a guy like you do in a place like this, anyway? He was a pilot for New World Airways. We operate charter flights to the neighboring islands. No kidding.

  The dose of forgetfulness that Anguilla had instilled in Dragon’s mind was not enough to let the most random of coincidences pass by unnoticed. Suddenly, Dragon found in some unfamiliar corner of his brain the instincts of a spy and without alerting SamB to his little secret extracted every bit of information he could gather from his newly made friend. Oh, I’m just here with my company looking into the feasibility of a business project, but we can’t speak much about it yet. Ignorant of the role he was destined to play in such project, SamB extended an invitation to Dragon Jones to join us for dinner on Saturday night—it will be a quiet affair, just a few friends out at my place, but we’ve all been on-island for some time so you might be able to get some tips, who knows.

  That was the cue for Dragon to snap out of his casual oblivion and get back in work mode. Suddenly, the questions that troubled his mind on the long way from Gatwick, England, to St. John’s, Antigua, loomed in his consciousness—larger, more pressing than before. These were the questions, the doubts, the objections that Nathaniel Jones faced and was forced to dispel during a long Thursday morning of reservations, negotiations, and compromise that lasted well into the afternoon.

  No matter how you looked at it, it was madness. But Dragon felt more inclined to back the venture than he ever thought he would be, and Nathaniel was obsessed with the idea of seeing his insanity through, and the two of them were charmed by the idea of life in the sunshine, so in the end one, just one, condition was agreed upon and a handshake sealed a precarious deal between father and son.

  Then came dinner at SamB’s with a horde of friends. Then came the blast that was Sunday night, when the foundations of the Sheila Rawlingson cult were laid in Dragon’s heart as he simply wondered why he should ever have doubted the success of their partnership. Then came the meeting at Deianira Walker’s office, where more hands were shaken, more paperwork signed, and in the blink of an eye Dragon Wings came to exist. Then came Glenallen Rawlingson, the Business Center, six phantom office chairs, and an article in the Anguillan newspaper about Nathaniel Jones, the latest expat entrepreneur to reach the island.

  But once the relatively simple formalities (nothing was as simple as it seemed in Anguilla) of registration, location, and decoration were completed, the trio that formed not only the new Jones family nucleus but also the board of directors of Dragon Wings was faced with the far more demanding building process that would occupy the next five months of their lives. The call was to create an actual, rather than just a hypothetical, airline, but the greatest difficulty they faced was that all three together could not rustle up a single day of experience in the aviation business, nor did anyone on the island have significant knowledge of how to set up (or run, for that matter) a regular commercial air carrier. Now that the legal scaffolding was in place, the impending work seemed as urgent as it was colossal, with every single one of the crucial elements missing.

  Dragon did not have the first clue as to what was elementary, primordial, or even necessary for a running airline to function. And Dragon felt ill disposed toward the wasteful implications in terms of time and effort entailed by the methodical research of the ins and outs of this new subject he suddenly found himself tackling. So Dragon decided to follow his instincts and look at the issue with nothing more than a large dose of common sense. After all the deliberation Dragon found necessary—not very much—he concluded that his task should focus on the quest for a chief pilot for Dragon Wings. Routes were still being discussed with the government and no effort had been made yet to decide what sort of aircraft would be used, let alone to find the actual machines available in the region, but Dragon was guided by an inexplicable impulse to appoint a chief pilot. It makes sense: we need someone to help us figure out what we need and how to get it, and I know just the right person. Don’t you worry about it, Nathe, this is one thing we have covered!

  Carried by some sort of nostalgic frenzy, Dragon chose against the obvious move and instead of turning to the experience of SamB—We’ll poach him later—he delved into the distant recesses of his memory to evoke the presence of an extravagant fe
llow who over a decade before had caught his attention with his exotic origin and his unorthodox ways. Filled with expectation and overcome by an intense resolve, Dragon decided to incorporate a neglected friend into the current undertaking and convinced himself that he would be able to do it with a simple phone call. Despite the fact that Dragon had not seen Arturo Sarmiento in five years, not spoken to him in months, he harbored more than a hope—he was dead certain, really—that his old drinking buddy from the days of university would jump at the chance of joining the ranks of Dragon Wings. But as so very often is the case, life had shuffled the cards in the intervening years and Dragon’s hand was found wanting.

  V

  I’m not talking about a girl, Art, I’m talking about a project! My hands are sweating, my ears buzzing, my entire demeanor has been affected by this unexpectedly long negotiation. In the distance I catch Nathe’s gleaming eye. His evident anxiety can only be matched by mine, except I’ve had the small comfort of draining my internal agony through relentless talking whereas his only route of escape has been the short circuit offered by the pattern of the carpet. That was not the question, Art. Nathe’s arms cut violently through the room. Ill at ease in the position of spectator, his frustration turns into rage. I let out a sigh as I switch the phone from my left to my right ear. Art’s words escape the earpiece loudly, infesting the stagnant air with defeat. We both hear the words. We both pretend we haven’t.

  He’s out. I can see Nathe containing his anger. I sit, holding my aching head with my thumb and index finger, waiting for the news to sink in, the ensuing storm to break out. A few minutes race past us before the silence is shattered. I thought you said he would be in, no matter what. I can hear the tension stringing together Nathe’s words. He doesn’t want to lose his temper but I can already tell he soon will. I still haven’t moved an inch since I landed, defeated, on the blue couch. Gloom has taken hold of the scene, infecting Nathe’s tired speech as he completes another lap around the ruined carpet. What are we going to do? I’m still recovering from the lost fight, digesting Art’s refusal. What are we going to do? The room is too crowded as it is to allow silence to filter in, so Nathe rightly chooses to repeat the question over and over again. What are we going to do?

  The air shakes with his powerful voice and I’m forced back from oblivion. I don’t know, Nathe. I don’t know.

  So far, all we have is a business license, a name, and a bunch of promises. Plain facts have never been a trait of Nathe’s speech, so the matter-of-factness of his sentence yanks me back from my state of self-deprecating pity. Something clicks inside my mind and suddenly my attitude changes. I jump off the sofa, reinvigorated. Back on my feet, the atmosphere in the room feels different. Basically, we are fucked. In the face of extreme adversity we are both, for some mysterious reason, overwhelmed by an unvoiced confidence. We are fucked. The repressed smile in Nathe’s expression tells me that isn’t right.

  (Arturo Sarmiento)

  I

  A sullen, dark face cast its sad eyes on the nearly empty free house, sunken in a distant corner over a pile of cushions. Directly opposite the two small black eyes, sitting alone on a table by the window, Dragon Jones got lost in the semantics of putting together in a coherent script all those one-liners that swarmed his mind. Outside, the howling wind punished the flower buds that had blossomed at the end of dormant branches prematurely awoken by an early spasm, a preview, of spring. The music stopped. The empty room, momentarily stripped of sound, became even emptier. Suddenly, the storm outside shifted in the direction of the large window, a shower of ice pellets furiously rapping on the glass. The sad, sullen face acquired a body—short, strong, foreign—walked across the gloomy room, inserted a coin—his last one—in the jukebox. The storm was let inside by the riders of The Doors. The two small black eyes went back to their place in the corner by the cushions. Thunder roaring indoor, hail pummeling the window from the outside, finally succeeded in distracting Dragon from his work.

  The small sad eyes, filled with apprehension at the growing shadow of Dragon’s approaching figure, showed themselves candidly polite once the initial awkwardness of the situation was overcome by Dragon’s generous gesture: a pint. Arturo Sarmiento was a Venezuelan exchange student from the Catholic University of Caracas in the last year of his five-year course in economics. A combination of circumstances—parental and peer pressure, financial expectations, intellectual aptitude—had guided him through a long, not very straight path, which, after allowing him to pursue his academic interest in the field of sociology and tolerating his desire to test his manual skills as a mechanic, had made him slide right into the slot allocated to him by social determination long before his birth. Arturo had never thought of himself as an economist, but his father was one, as was his older brother, and Art’s older sister, while a lawyer, had completed an MBA and worked as a consultant in corporate law. Now, at long last and despite Art’s capricious spirit, it seemed as if by the end of the year he too would be worthy of calling himself a Sarmiento, a Sarmiento with a future.

  Dragon took an immediate liking to the foreign voice—the accent—that came with that foreign body. He liked the exotic nature of his name, the exotic name of his country. He liked the mature tone of a speech that, unlike his, no longer cracked midsentence. He liked the effect of the seemingly endless amount of knowledge a man only five or six years his senior could display. He liked to think that in five or six years’ time he would know as much about the world as Art did right now, just that then Art would still know five or six years more than him. But that did not make him jealous, it just made him smile. “There’s enough time for time.” If he could remember it tomorrow, he would have to add that one to the script. What I really want to be, though, is a pilot. Art had the perfect sense of timing characteristic of many South American people—the sense of timing that makes a story flow, that makes a joke work, that Dragon simply lacked. His speech was at times funny, at times serious, always engaging. His cadence followed the rhythm of a silent tune that kept Dragon’s mind dancing from sentence to sentence. Every pause seemed to demand a brief gasp, implore for a sequel. The final drops of a second pint swirled at the bottom of the glass as Art firmly planted it on the table. Like a performing jongleur, Art’s demeanor complemented his act, contributed to the ultimate objective of a third free drink. Ah-ah: never accept, my friend, what you cannot later pay for. Sorry! I put my last coin in the machine. But Art could see Dragon was too captivated to allow him to walk away, so he dropped the mask of politeness and agreed to have another drink. As Dragon walked to the bar, he quickly scanned the provisional profile of the characters in his play, pondered which would best suit the righteous sentence: “Never accept what you cannot later pay for.” He would have to create one.

  I got bored of business. I never wanted to be a businessman. Art’s erratic career as a student bore yet another bracketed pause between the sixth and seventh semester of his degree, when he discovered his passion for the sky. I quit uni, split from my parents, and went to live with my aunt on the island of Margarita, where I enrolled in an intensive flying course with the air force. One night, twelve months later, Arturo Sarmiento lay battered, naked, drunk unconscious, hair and eyebrows shaved off his head, in the middle of a field generally intended for the takeoff and landing of the Bell helicopters he was now licensed to pilot, at the end of the traditional military induction ceremony for graduating novices.

  Dragon was mesmerized. Every new tale brought a new beer and every pint seemed to run out just before the pregnant climax of each story, which inevitably alluded to yet-undisclosed anecdotes, to more material to unravel, to another drink. The storm receded. The jukebox fell silent. The whole world paused for Art to spin his particular yarn, for Dragon to buy the beer. I hadn’t enrolled as a conscript but as a civilian invitee. I was free to leave the academy, live life. Yet life as a private pilot failed to deliver the emotional fulfillment Art had found devastatingly lacking in academia: one year of hard
work turned into little more than three hundred hours of experience and, despite the reputable license that went with them, Art was unable to find stable employment. Flying for rich people in my country is the best: they give you their Kings, their Cessnas, tell you where they want to go, sit in the passengers’ cabin with their friends, and get drunk or fornicate. Art was lost in his memories now, his eyes focused somewhere far distant from that pub, recreating in his mind the scene he wished he could live out time and again forever. I flew to La Blanquilla, to Los Roques. Believe me, the most beautiful beaches in the world. He spoke with the conviction of someone who had what he was saying on good authority, which conferred his knowledge with more grounds than if he relied solely on his empirical experience. One time we went to Los Llanos—the plains. We flew just above the ground, just above the chigüires—I think you call them capybara—the cachicamos—armadillos—the tapirs, mowing the fields with our propellers, scaring the animals—who were unable to see or hear us until we were right on top of their heads—out of their skins. While he said this, Arturo glided the palm of his open right hand just barely over the back of his left, also open but pointing in a perpendicular direction to the path followed by his imaginary aircraft. We landed on a finca, had the traditional lunch—spit roast beef—and, after a nap on the chinchorros—woven hammocks—headed back to Caracas. All my boss had wanted was to escape for a few hours with his lover, away from the reach of his wife. Dragon no longer listened to Art’s words. He had been rocketed to the fairyland of Art’s dreams. He did not know where all these places were, these islands, he did not know what these animals looked like, what the food tasted like, but he could easily picture himself piloting a small plane in some distant, exotic corner of the world, granting his trusting employers the wish of a safe adventure.