My feeling of gathering isolation wasn't helped as we neared the coastline of the small Cape Verde island of Brava that Klaus Gehler said he owned a big slice of and I saw Gehler's red-tile-roofed native stone villa hovering over the top of a cliff. There seemed to be only a narrow pathway through lush semitropical foliage rising and cutting back here and there from the pier to the top of the cliff. Gehler had told me that he came here whenever he felt the need to be entirely cut off from the world, and the immediate impression I got of the locale supported this completely. There was no other sign of habitation as I scanned the island upon our approach.
It had taken us three days to sail from Malta to the Cape Verdes. In that time, Estaban hadn't visited or called for me a single time after that first day of multiple takings while Gehler was on Malta. Neither had Gehler. I was beginning to feel the same way I had with Coach Jacoby when I anticipated him taking me aside and fucking me—and he didn't. I began to wonder if—and, worse, worry that—I didn't appeal to either one of them, which I felt was odd even when I realized I felt that way. I should have been happy that they were leaving me alone. I was determined not to give in to this lifestyle that they represented. And, yet, the more they didn't accost me, the more agitated I got.
"Leave the luggage, Jack," Gehler said when the launch had been lashed to the pier and we'd scrambled up on the dock. "Estaban will bring it up."
I felt that the vines, large-leafed plants, and trees were grabbing at me as we mounted the pathway, which I found strange, as the Cape Verdes were, I thought, semiarid. I remarked as much to Gehler.
"Ah, we have Miguel and his now-deceased father to thank for that. Miguel is my gardener. I originally had my retreat in Bermuda until it got entirely too crowded, and when I moved down to here, I brought Miguel and his father with me. They are Portuguese. The gardeners of Bermuda are Portuguese, you know. We also brought the Bermudan techniques for gathering runoff water, and Miguel and his father created this paradise of vegetation similar to what I enjoyed on Bermuda. Don't you find it intoxicating?"
I just murmured a response that could be taken either way, because my immediate reaction was that it was stifling and a bit intimidating, but upon further thought, I guessed that intoxicating was just as good a term for it.
We brushed by Miguel near the first terrace. He was fighting with a stand of bamboo that threatened to obstruct the view of the ocean from that terrace. He was stripped to the waist of quite skimpy shorts. He couldn't have been more than twenty-five, which came as a shock to me. To have helped established plantings of this maturity in an unforgiving environment, he must have come here to work when he was a young child. He was dark skinned, although not as dark as Estaban was, probably mostly from the constant exposure to the sun. He was rather small in stature, but heavy with muscle in keeping with the hard work he had to do, which must have redoubled since his father had died. I wondered if he was the only gardener now. The estate obviously was large. Of course the landscaping, apparently on purpose, was wild and unruly on the ocean side of the house. But I could see around the side of the house toward the landward side, where there was a more park-like setting short of what appeared to be high stone walls surrounding the grounds on all sides except for the seaside cliff front. The walls didn't help me with my closed-in feeling of confinement.
The villa was in a rectangle, the longer side toward the sea. It was built around an interior courtyard, complete with stone flooring and a pond with a fountain and the ever-present overflow of big-leafed plants and exotic-colored flowers. Hibiscuses, bougainvillea, lipstick plants, hydrangeas, and banana trees predominated. The lounge area took up the ground floor of the side facing the sea, with Gehler's study and a small office he assigned to me above. The opposite wing, opening out onto the more formal, lawned park area had an open loggia with arched doorways on the ground floor and two bedrooms, each with bath, above. A hallway stretched across this section facing the inner courtyard, and a balcony ran the full length of this wing on both sides. The short wing to the west had a kitchen and storerooms on the ground floor, with a large dining room above with a bank of arched windows cut in the stone walls on each side. At the west corner, where the lounge was located on the seaward wing and the kitchen on the west wing, was located a breakfast room and staircase on the first floor, and a servant's room on the second. There were staircases and servants rooms in the other three corner sections as well. There were two more bedrooms with connecting bath on the second floor of the east wing. I was not shown what was on the ground floor of that wing. The sturdy wooden door to that was shut tight and had a padlock on it, and all of the windows were heavily shuttered.
What appeared to be the only house servant, a small, yet nicely formed African with black curly hair and features that showed some mix with European stock, barefoot and wearing only an orange-red sarong skirt tucked at his waist, had met us at one of the French doors from the upper terrace into the lounge and had followed Gehler and me around as Klaus acclimated me to the house. Klaus told me the houseboy's name was Jolo, and he just lowered his eyes in supplication, without sound, when I was introduced to him. He appeared to be hardly more than a boy, although Klaus told me that he had had him for several years. In the kitchen, we found a hulking German of coarse features and heavy musculature, perhaps in his forties, who Gehler introduced as Gerhardt, the cook and general housekeeper. Gerhardt leered at me in a manner that made me quite uncomfortable, and I was pleased when we moved on, climbing the stairs to the principle bedroom wing facing the landward side park area.
Gehler said that I would have the second bedroom in this wing, right next to his. Both bedrooms had two pair of double French doors giving access to the common balcony on the landward side of the villa. Gehler told me that it would be wise to leave the French doors open at night to catch whatever breeze could be captured at this time of year. He said the thick stone walls helped keep the villa relatively cool, but that, of course, there was no such thing as central air conditioning on the remote Brava island.
Remote indeed. I felt the remoteness. And all there was in the way of servants to take care of this estate were the cook, the gardener, and Estaban, as the general handyman when Gehler was in residence. The yacht's crew tended to remain on the ship unless or until Gehler wanted one of the young sailors to come to the villa for his own use. I was particularly struck that there was no evidence of any women in residence. It struck me then that Gehler's secretary was male—and even his temporary secretary—me—was a man.
Gehler left me to think my increasingly disturbing thoughts and to watch Jolo unpack my suitcases and occasionally give me a shy, appraising look. He really was a well-formed young man, although it still was difficult to think of him as a man.
