Read About This Life: Journeys on the Threshold of Memory for Free Online

on the resort’s plank dock by the water, near an open-air restaurant where the last patrons were throwing pieces of bread to schools of fish racing frantically back and forth beneath the illuminated surface of the water. Forty miles to the west the lights of Willemstad glowed on the horizon. Above the penumbra of that glow, Venus sparkled in a deep Prussian-blue sky. Higher overhead huge cumulus towers scudded west.
    I watched the enormity of the clouds for several minutes. What I wanted to experience in the water, I realized, was how life on the reef was layered and intertwined. I now had many individual pieces at hand; named images, nouns. How were they related? What were the verbs? Which syntaxes were indigenousto the place? I had asked a dozen knowledgeable people. No one was inclined to elaborate—or they didn’t know. “Did you see the octopus!” someone shouted after a dive. Yes, I thought, but who among us knows what it was doing? What else was
there
, just then? Why?
    I wanted to know in the way, sometimes, you want to know very much more than a person’s name.
    On the way back to my room, just as I was passing an open window, I unconsciously raised a hand to brush my forehead and glanced in. Moonlight filled the interior of a bedroom. A woman in a sleeveless cotton nightgown lay wide awake beneath a single sheet. She waved at me tentatively, as though I were someone walking by in a dream she was having.
III
    O UR LAST DAY on Bonaire, Adam and I drove a small Japanese rental car south of Kralendijk to see the salt flats that had once drawn the acquisitive attention of the Spanish and then the Dutch. The salt ponds here were actively worked from about 1624 until 1863, when the Dutch abolition of slavery rendered the operation unprofitable. In 1972 a United States and Dutch concern began exporting salt again on a regular basis. A few of these shallow ponds also now serve as a fortuitous refuge for a once endangered population of greater flamingos. (Their numbers have increased tenfold since this nesting ground was closed to egg collectors, hunters, and low-flying aircraft.) The nearby rows of slave huts—each a carefully restored, peakroofed, work-week domicile for two—are an anomaly, too comely a reminder of this malign human proclivity. Out of curiosity I began to sketch and measure the huts to see what I might learn. I didn’t know whether they had been accurately restored, but standing inside them it was apparent they had been designed to take astute advantage of cooling trade-wind breezes, to shed downpours, and to insulate against tropical heat, like tile-floored adobes.
    As is sometimes the ironic case with such shadowed places, they have attracted lovers in another age, people who have drawn hearts and scribed their initials or written their names in chalk and ink all across the whitewashed walls, inside and out. Here, also, was “The Criminal gang is the best so fock [sic] the rest,” a sentiment about life on the island that hadn’t yet registered at the resorts.
    At a place called Onima, fifteen miles away on the east coast—because of heavy surf and strong currents there is no diving on this side of the island—we found several sets of Caiquetío pictographs in unprotected shelters. (Early chroniclers describe the Caiquetío as tall, honorable,
“una gente muy pulida y limpida,”
a clean people elegant in their manners and movement.) Many of the pictographs had been gouged by vandals or written over with graffiti. It took several minutes to spot, higher up on the undersides of overhanging rocks, other drawings in apparently perfect condition. Fascinated, I began to draw some of them, including a strikingly accurate rendering of a species of angelfish. As I did so, a woman approached in a rental car along the dirt road. Who was this? A companion, someone like us? Driving slowly, she rolled down her window and scanned the limestone bluff where I was standing, as though searching for an