An Embarrassment of Mangoes (23 page)

1⁄4 cup Parmesan cheese, grated

Salt and freshly ground black pepper

2 tablespoons dried breadcrumbs

1. Cut the christophenes in half lengthwise and remove the seed from each. Place the halves in a large saucepan and cover with water. Bring to a boil, and cook for 20–30 minutes, until the christophenes are slightly soft. (You should be able to pierce them easily with a skewer.) Remove and cool.

2. Carefully scoop the pulp out of each half, leaving about 1⁄4'' of shell intact. Chop the pulp and place in a strainer to drain; reserve the shells.

3. Heat the butter or oil in a frying pan and add the onion, garlic, hot pepper, celery, and green onion. Sprinkle with thyme. Cook until onion is soft and translucent, about 5 minutes. Add christophene pulp and cook gently for about 5 minutes. Stir in half the grated cheddar and half the Parmesan. Season to taste with salt and pepper.

4. Place the reserved shells on a baking sheet. Fill them with the christophene mixture. Combine the remaining cheddar and Parmesan with the breadcrumbs and sprinkle on top.

5. Bake at 375°F for about 20 minutes, until cheese has melted and filling is lightly browned on top.

Serves 2–3 as a main course, 4–6 as a side dish

Feelin’ Trini
to deh Bone

Oh, merciful Father, in this bacchanal season
Where some men will lose their reason
But most of us just want to wine and have a good time
While we looking for a lime, Because we feeling fine, Lord . . . amen.
And as we jump up and down in this crazy town
Send us some music for some healing . . . amen.

FROM THE SONG “HIGH MAS” BY TRINIDADIAN CALYPSONIAN
AND SOCA STAR DAVID MICHAEL RUDDER

Trinidad has one of the highest public holiday counts in the world. One of our guidebooks says that when Columbus “discovered” the island, he stumbled onto a big party. Another gives a short glossary of frequently heard Trini words—almost all of which have to do with partying and having a good time.
Fete, bacchanal, jump-up, lime
—they’re all variations on the fun-loving theme.

At 11:30 on a Wednesday night in November, things are just getting going at the Mas Camp Pub in Port of Spain, Trinidad’s capital. The room is packed not with college kids or twenty-something clubbers, but with middle-class, close-to-our-own-age Trinis. “Don’t these people have to go to work tomorrow?” I shout at Steve over the music and laughter of the crowd. Feeling a bit like Dorothy, we have been dropped into the heart of the Trini music scene—but we feel no urge to go home.

Wednesday night is Calypso Night here, a far cry from Movie Night, Wednesday’s regular activity back at the cruiser compound in Chaguaramas, the “suburb” of Port of Spain where
Receta
is docked. The performer on the Mas Camp Pub’s stage, a young up-and-comer, has just realized that Gypsy, the reigning king of extempo, is in the audience. “Extempo” comes from
extempore
and refers to spur-of-the-moment calypso: Each singer tries to outdo his rivals in improvised, unrehearsed rhyming song-duels set to standard melodic lines. And so the up-and-comer starts razzing the king—in extempo, of course—implying that he’s afraid to come up onstage for a friendly little round of song. Gypsy rises to the bait, and the two duel it out at the mike, heads close together, to the crowd’s glee. The up-and-comer gets the final shot: “I’m being paid,” he sings, “while I got Gypsy to perform for free.”

Now the Trini soca star Superblue takes the stage, and midway through his act, he also invites a number of well-known musicians in the audience to join him. In an abrupt change of mood and music, they link arms and break into Bob Marley’s “One Love.” Even we, newcomers to the island, know what’s going on: It’s an elegy to Kim Sabeeney, the “queenmaker,” the organizer of Trinidad’s beauty pageants. Her death a few days ago has been headline news, the papers full of stories about her contributions to the country and analysis of what her death will mean for Trinidad’s place in worldwide beauty competitions. This is a country that takes its beauty pageants seriously—the reigning Miss Universe is a Trini—but then again, this is a country that has a lot of raw material to work with.

I’d caught Steve staring open-mouthed like a lovestruck (luststruck?) teenager at the women in Veni Mangé, the restaurant where we’d had dinner earlier tonight. But who could blame him? To a woman, they were absolutely gorgeous—and, besides, I had made the mistake of telling him how attractive I find the Trini men. Like the guy in the boatyard.

I had been working on earning more martyr points during the afternoon, scrubbing the accumulated burned crud off all the bits and pieces of
Receta
’s little stern-rail barbecue, when the voice snuck up behind me at the outdoor water tap. It belonged to one of the workers in the yard, where
Receta
has been hauled onto dry land to have her well-barnacled bottom scraped and painted. “We be havin’ barbecue today?” he inquired. The “we” in his question was ambiguous, but it
begged
interpretation as meaning him and me, and I was ready to run in the 100-degree heat to the supermarket to grab a couple of steaks to throw on the ’cue. It was more than his looks—though they certainly didn’t hurt; I’ve fallen in love with the soft, musical, lilting, smiling, flirtatious, seductive, downright sexy, melt-your-heart Trini voice. It was enough to make me forget I was covered in grease and sweat. It made me feel delicious.

Maybe
this
was what Dingis meant about Trinidad being dangerous.

O
oooh. It
very
dangerous.” Dingis shakes her head disapprovingly. We’ve hiked up the Lower Woburn hill—it’s still much easier to do a thirty-minute sweaty round-trip walk than attempt communication by phone—to tell her we’re leaving for a month or two: We’re off to Trinidad, Grenada’s neighbor to the south.

It’s not the thought of us sailing 75 miles overnight that has Dingis worried. “She people not friendly, like we,” she says. There’s something of a love/hate, envy/scorn, country cousin/city slicker relationship between the two islands. Compared with Grenada, Trinidad is big, bustling, urban: 1.3 million people to Grenada’s 102,000. Trinidad has a thriving economy, thanks to its oil and gas fields, and Port of Spain—home to 350,000 of the island’s people—is one of the major commercial centers of the Caribbean. Many of Grenada’s consumer goods are imported from Trinidad, and the few Grenadians who can afford it go to Port of Spain to shop. Trini music and foods flow north and threaten to drown Grenadian culture.

One of the hit songs of Grenada’s Carnival this year was a many-versed calypso lament about how the culture of “TNT”—Trinidad is the larger, more influential part of the two-island nation of Trinidad and Tobago—is overtaking Grenada. “Supermarket have it bad/Everything from Trinidad/We lost local appetite/And we laugh and say we bright,” sang its creator, Smallies, dressed in an outfit made from the Trini flag.

And the crowd would pick up the refrain: “Port of Spain, Port of Spain/There is no St. George’s again.”

“Be careful no one tiefs you,” Dingis warns us glumly when she sees she’s not going to dissuade us from the journey. We promise her we’ll watch out for the pickpockets, muggers, and other unsavory types she’s sure we’ll find in Port of Spain, give her a hug, and tell her we’ll see her soon.

F
rom
Receta
’s bow, Steve hauls up the anchor a foot at a time, while I sit in the dinghy wearing my yellow Rubbermaid dish gloves and armed with a hammer and a toilet brush. While we have been parked at Hog Island for almost three months, assorted marine life has taken up residence on the anchor chain, and to avoid the smell of putrefaction in our anchor locker, the heavy 3⁄8-inch galvanized chain has to be scrubbed before it comes aboard—all 100 feet of it, one link at a time. The hammer is for the tenacious barnacles, which maintain their hold with a waterproof adhesive that’s one of the world’s strongest known glues, the envy of dentists. Steve pulls and I whack and scrub; despite my strong aversion to toilet brushes and other house-cleaning paraphernalia back home, I don’t even mind the job.

I don’t mind the night sail either. Anxiety and fear are noticeably absent—just a bit of nervous excitement at getting underway again after so long in one place. “It was an easy, uneventful overnight passage,” I e-mail Belinda and Todd after the trip, eighteen hours from the time we lift anchor in Grenada until we’re tied to the Customs and Immigration dock at Chaguaramas, the center of the island’s recreational boating community. “Can you believe I can now actually refer to an overnight passage as easy?”

In fact, it’s a lovely night, with a wind that tends to be too light rather than too heavy. The boat requires little attention, so I can stand watch—what a misnomer, since I’m curled up comfortably on the cockpit cushions, a coffee and a Dominican MasMas chocolate bar close at hand—lost in my own thoughts under the almost-full moon. Steve and I disagree about the moon and night passages. He likes to travel on no-moon nights; the darkness, he says, makes it easier to pick up the lights of other vessels. I, unsurprisingly, prefer a full or close-to-full moon; light is comforting, makes the night less ominous. I made my first night passages under a benevolent full moon, and from then on, I’ve loved the way moonlight makes the water sparkle. The bioluminescence—“living light” of tiny marine creatures—is usually best around the full moon, too, and tonight is no exception. In a sailing account I’m reading, I came across a traditional Irish nursery rhyme recited upon seeing the new moon; it has no sailing connection, but sounds as if it should, and I love saying it to myself as
Receta
glides through the night and the water glimmers: “I see the moon, the moon sees me/God bless the moon and God bless me/There’s grace in the cabin and grace in the hall/And the grace of God is over us all.”

The moon has importance to me now, in a way it never used to. I can tell you its phase, something I rarely noticed two years ago, more easily these days than I can tell you the daily headlines. That tossed-off phrase “once in a blue moon” has come to have real meaning, too. A blue moon has nothing to do with color, but refers to the second full moon in a month—for me, a bonus—and a phenomenon that occurs on average only about once every three years. The coming year will have two blue moons, rarer still, and an even bigger bonus. (There won’t be another year with two blue moons until 2018.)

Just two weeks ago was Rosh Hashanah, the Jewish New Year. As I said prayers privately, in a country without a synagogue, I knew that Rosh Hashanah coincides with the new moon. “Sound the Shofar on the new moon”—I had read it in the Rosh Hashanah prayerbook every year since my childhood. But the words were devoid of a connection to nature. Now they
meant
something: I already knew there would be a slim crescent hanging above
Receta
low in the western sky that night.

I’ve realized how disconnected my daily life had been from the natural world. The weather, the wind, the moon, even the seasons—and the attendant plants, insects, birds, and animals—came and went. But I was removed, at a distance. So what if the moon was new or the sky was pissing rain? I still had to go to the office. The natural world—in all its forms—is so much more immediate now. It forces me to pay attention.

A
fter three months at bucolic Hog Island, Trinidad is overwhelming: the heat, the size, the pace, the number of boats, the number of people, and the sheer number of choices of things to do each day. And night. The cruisers’ morning VHF radio net buzzes with activities, a hundred times worse than George Town. Dominoes Night, Movie Night, Trivia Night, organized taxi trips to the Port of Spain market, fabric-shopping excursions, happy hours, buffet dinners, potluck dinners, group outings to musical performances, festivals, and bazaars. Merengue lessons are Wednesday night, the Bathing Suit Lady comes on Thursday morning (she’ll custom-make any sort of swimsuit you want from whatever fabric you purchase on the fabric-shopping excursion), the Veggie Truck arrives on Friday, and the Roti Van rolls in at about eleven almost every morning of the week. Once we get our Trini land legs, start scouring the newspapers for interesting happenings, and begin to explore on our own, things get even worse. Steve catches me digging out a mildewed day diary to keep track of everything we want to do and accuses me of backsliding. Perhaps
this
is what Dingis meant about Trinidad being dangerous.

V
eni Mangé—“Come Eat”—is a pleasure to look at, and not just because of its gorgeous women. The art on the walls, the table settings, the menus, the clothing on the staff, and the food have all been chosen by someone with a real eye. Located in a Creole-style house, this one-night-a-week restaurant serves Creole-style cuisine, prepared by a Cordon Bleu–trained chef, one of two Trini sisters who own the place. The dishes are simple, but perfectly executed: grilled whole snapper with a ginger-lime-rum-butter sauce; battered flying fish with tamarind salsa. Midway through our first course—callaloo soup for me, saltfish fritters (sans christophene) for Steve—Rosemary, the front-of-house sister, sweeps in and begins rearranging table settings and juggling the seating, as if this were a dinner party she was hosting in her own home. And in a way it is: The room fills up, everybody knows everybody else, and even we are made to feel like old friends. “Come back on Friday,” she says when she swings by our table to chat. “That’s when we have a lime.”

Trinis have perfected the art of “liming”—spending time relaxing, laughing, talking, drinking, enjoying music, taking it easy. A lime is any informal gathering for the purpose of having fun. Call it hanging out, or call it a party. “The perfect start to a great lime,” says the advertising for Veni Mangé. “Bona fide fishermen only. No liming here,” reads a sign on the fishing cooperative on the road outside Port of Spain. The etymology of the word is hazy. According to one account, it was coined during World War II, when the nightclubs and dance halls of Port of Spain were frequented by foreign servicemen. The Americans appeared to have endless amounts of money to spend, but the less-well-off British were often forced to listen to the music from outside, watching the Americans inside dance with all the girls. Local schoolboys, who also used to stand outside listening, coined the verb “to lime”—meaning to stand outside a dance hall or party as the “Limeys” were doing.

According to another story that dates to the same time, the sour taste of limes is behind the term: If you weren’t invited to a party, you would go to the house where it was being held anyway, but just stand outside and feel sour. This was called “sucking lime.” Other friends might join you, and you’d all stand around outside talking. This was called “bussin’ a lime”—which became shortened to “liming.”

Someone dinghies by, sees us in
Receta
’s cockpit, detours over, and spends the next half hour hanging on to our stern ladder and chatting. I used to call this wasting time. Now it’s “liming,” an acceptable—even required—part of our day. I’ve learned I don’t have to be frantically, productively busy every waking minute as I once was. I’ve taken to liming with a vengeance.