The first day in our house was really kamikaze house-finishing at its best. Though it had been suggested by many that we find a hotel until Monday, we didn’t, because I knew that roughing it would force us to faster action. There was no furniture, no kitchen sink, no fridge, no stove top, no washer, running water only in bathroom and the rinse tanks outside on the porch. No heater for the shower, and a shower drain that didn’t work, so no shower. No drawers, no closets. No screens on the windows, no curtains, no screen on the sliding door. The only plumbing was in the bathroom and the rinse tanks: two big concrete boxes outside on the porch plugged with sections of PVC pipe. A crude drain exited from the side of the house into the dirt.
But there’s always a moment when turning on a spigot after a renovation. It’s miraculous, the way the water flows into the pipe and from the mouth of the faucet, summoned by a twist of the hand. In my state of exhaustion, I let it flow over my hands and splashed it over my head, feeling “the bones” of the house, that the pipes ran from the main on the street, under the turned up ground, through and over its concrete walls, that the meter in the street box whirred away, registering how much was used, that it was fresh and good. The same, but different. No chlorine, absolutely pure. On Bonaire the tap water, mostly desalinated sea water, is always lukewarm. Hans had brought us an ice chest to borrow, which was so thoughtful. After dumping our suitcases in the bedrooms, we went out to buy beds, linens, towels, kitchen stuff, food and last but not least, ice for the ice chest. We had to go to three different places to find everything, even on a Saturday. This mad rush was a small baptism into the conundrum of Caribbean living. Many places are closed between 12:00 and 2:00, and of course on Sunday, everything is closed.
Also that first day we saw Yvonne, the woman who lives across the street, (whom I had met in April). As before she was very nice and welcoming, putting Emmett and Steve immediately at ease, the sort of person who knows everything that goes on and watches over all, but not in a meddlesome way. A round face as sweet as a child’s, she reminded me of someone I knew long ago in school, some little friend who hadn’t an ounce of malice. A sheltering person. I could see that she wasn’t much older than me, but she had grand kids over, one boy near Emmett’s age. Emmett was shy and so were we, as well as tired. I didn’t feel up to the importance of the occasion of seeing her again. I wanted to be, as she was the only person in the neighborhood that I knew.
Once we had the beds and the ice, we went to the big new Dutch Supermarket, Van den Tweel, and stopped at the cheap goods market for a rice cooker and coffee maker. These turned out to be life savers. Of course the coffee maker needed electricity. Fortunately we had some. We even had outlets above the counter top. In Steve’s bad old days he cooked all his meals in a rice cooker in a rented room. He rinsed the vegetables in the bathroom, cut them up on cardboard, and plunked the rice in. He let the rice cook to a certain point of chewiness, added the broccoli and carrots, and let the cycle finish out. With olive oil it made a nice meal. We had some excellent Dutch chocolate too.
After a relatively quiet Sunday walking around, swimming in the sea, we turned into the one big bed we had so far. At 3:00 a.m.
I was woken up by a donkey braying that sounded as if it were just outside the window, a few feet from my head. It was an enormous jolt. If I had brushed up against a large furry beast in bed next to me the shock would’ve paled in contrast. A donkey braying sounds like a hacksaw stuck in a tree, wielded by a disturbed, violent, but ultimately ineffective person. One can hardly imagine that it is a love call, so strangled and pathetic are the tones, so impotent does it sound. So hopeless. Lying in bed, bones rattling, I wondered what donkeys could possibly be communicating to each other with it. Existential dread? That they are domesticated animals now makes them a conduit to existential dread for us.
Steve, lucky for him, was getting juice in the kitchen at the time of the donkey explosion. For him it wasn’t that loud, he said. He was pretty certain it wasn’t in the yard. He said that donkeys are loud, it could have been somewhere in the neighborhood and we would have heard it. We’ve seen donkeys in fields, and along the roadways, but certainly not in the yard. It’s true that I’m somewhat sensitive to noise, always have been.
The third and fourth nights belonged to one dog, who I later named Bollocks for the size of his testicles, and his gall.
On Bonaire, most of the native Bonairians and many of the long term Dutch have dogs. These dogs are living burglar alarms. They are in yards to scare off the kids who will break into any home they think they have a shot at, to grab a camera, a computer, a TV, because there is no juvenile court on the island.
For the first couple of nights, we heard the neighborhood dogs bark in packs a few houses to the East/Northeast, a generalized, mass dog chorus of highs and lows, which would than go silent again, the urgent conversation amongst them having reached a mysterious conclusion. On my first visit to Bonaire, I had stayed a few streets over in the same neighborhood, noticing the ebb and flow of sound, and finding it bearable, even quaint. The dogs within audio-reach of Kaya India were about the same as then, the volume perhaps a few notches higher, as we were that much deeper into a true local area.
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