An Iguana's Life

The riverside restaurant, Parlatuvier, lunchtime... My girlfriend, Clare, and I are sitting with Gloria, the proprietress and part-time chef, Bryner's wife, who is sipping a pink drink.

"Mmm," she says, with a glint in her eye. "They call this a flag-up. Help the old men to harass the ladies in the night. You want?" she asks us.

Clare laughs. "I'm not so sure."

Gloria nods in my direction. "He don't need?"

Just then Bryner walks up the steps. Barefoot, clad only in torn blue shorts, he declares, "But I need. I is a old man. Gimme a old-man help-up." Everyone laughs. Then he calls through the kitchen hatch, "Let it be cool."

A silent girl in the kitchen smiles and slowly moves toward the fridge.

That afternoon Parlatuvier was in good humor. From the restaurant, which sits high on stilts, the fine view looked out over the spread-out village, its houses seeming to stand on top of one another up the green hillsides. Groups of people "limed" outside the "parlors" - that is, hung out by the little blue-and-green shops. They were all looking just up the hill, where two big lorries had parked, eliciting horn blasts from the odd passing car.

"They chasing a iguana," Bryner said. Apparently the tasty reptile had been spotted crossing the road and had taken refuge among the red flowers at the top of a large immortelle, or coral tree. Men in the road were hurling stones into the treetop.

The iguana hunt became the afternoon's main attraction. Everyone had an eye on the reptile's fate. Bryner was convinced that if they did somehow knock it from the tree, it would only run away in the bush.

"Or else the next man catch it and make off with it," he conjectured, rocking with laughter.

Then someone brought a vast bamboo pole into play. With much effort it was maneuvered into position, the tip leaning against a twig in the branches. One man climbed a little way up the tree and attempted to steer the pole, like a billiard cue, against the animal, now spread-eagled magnificently among the high blossoms.

Meanwhile the bombardment of stones continued, with the impressive near-accuracy of born cricketers, until one of the stones knocked the end of the bamboo, just hard enough to make it stand up and tip past its point of balance. Slowly, to a cry of dismay, the immense pole, which had taken half an hour to get into place, fell back down to the ground.

From all over the village the sound of laughter and clapping rose up. I would never have guessed that so many people had been watching.

The entertainment over, Bryner showed me around his restaurant. In the kitchen a big bowl of chicken quarters was soaking in lime and peppers and water. "That go' be nice," he assured me.

Meanwhile, down in the dirt space beneath the house, a bowl of conch shells lay marinating in a mixture of Clorox and water. "I put a little Tide, too," he said, "to clean them out good." The shells were destined to be homemade lanterns, to decorate the stairs leading up to the restaurant.

The little town was a wonderful place to spend a leisurely afternoon, with its sense of coming prosperity, and yet everything still so traditional and rustic. It was as if the villagers felt their star was rising, and, therefore, life could go on as it always had, only a little easier perhaps.

Around four the daily cricket game started up in the road. Bryner urged me to join in.

"You is a Englishman," he said. "Show them how."

I didn't last long against the pace bowling of a boy in red shorts, but I took two catches. Then the fading light let me down, and I dropped one. Soon only red-shorts wanted to go on.

"He a bat," the others said. "Have night vision."