The Sapodilla Queen

His arrival was predicted or premeditated: here where the streets were without names, if mere cul-de-sacs. Coconut-grove sheltered places really, not unlike shacks with strange but inviting smells: oh, colourful aromas. Mark Enders breathed in hard and walked along with the new sensation in him, almost a new energy: not unlike what he might have felt in Toronto, which fed his desire to come here. Now too,  it was the instinct to change his name to…Marco? He flexed his muscles, all due to the training he’d done.  And now he was prepared to meet the one calling herself the “Sapodilla Queen”.
             Really her?
            Again he sniffed the air as the trade winds blew. He walked into an inviting, but secluded, corner to meet her face to face. “I am here,” he hummed, as if to himself, and his heart fluttered with a rising expectation. “Why here?” a voice came back at him. Her dusky appearance quickly pulled him to her, her bosom rising and falling; and the dark pools of her eyes, and her languorous manner with a promise of more to come. See, he’d long dreamt of meeting one like her…just as the ad in the Toronto newspaper said.  But what if she wasn’t whom she seemed to be?  “So, North American-man, what plans d’you have for me?”
             “Plans?”
            She flitted her eyelashes; and momentarily he figured he was still back at the island airport bar. “Yes, it’s why you are here, isn’t it?” she hissed.
            Fantasy, as in no other place;  and she indeed called herself the “Sapodilla Queen,” didn’t she?  Marco had researched the word sapodilla:  a fleshy, mauve-coloured orange-shaped fruit special to the tropics, one that you want to sink your teeth into and slurp its juices.  Sappo-sapodilla! But a passerby called out, piped more or less, “Hey, Sabina, is who you meeting now?”  The caller’s wayward gaze lingered. But lips trembled.
            Marco repeated the name to himself as he studied her striking face with a sultry expression.  “You heard…me,” she said, in a rebuke. “Yes,” Marco forced a grin, his dalliance now with her. Then,  “I came from Canada to meet you only”– as if she didn’t already know.  Really cold up there?
            The island indeed being with sparkling bright  sunshine, and Marco blinked  and instinctively put his hand to his forehead to shield away the sun’s glare.  She too blinked.  At once he felt the strong urge to encircle her slim, tight waist. How  he  pulsated and heaved. Sapodilla Queen? Wasn’t that what the ad in the Globe and Mail had said: that she’d be all he wanted and more?
             “Will you take me to a place like Moose Jaw or Sioux Lookout?” she teased.  Chortled. Place-names…rolling off her tongue in an instant. The ground turned under his feet, and maybe he was no longer in an obscure island.  “Or to Thunder Bay?” Her cheeks flexed, becoming wider, the entire Caribbean archipelago now in her, it seemed.  Bahamas,  Puerto Rico, Cuba, Hispaniola, Jamaica, Leeward and Windward islands all.  A hurricane wind hurled, palm trees bending in Belize, Curacoa.  What else would he imagine?
            Oh, Marco wondered what she really had up her sleeves, as she also seemed to be from Africa,  near Benin, then a more exotic place in Asia, all with her swarthy-complexioned allure. And where else, if not like Goa, or the Bay of Bengal itself?  Sabina flashed her eyes at him with more alluring appeal and sensuousness.  Marco kept being glued to her, the real Sapodilla Queen, ah. The horizon kept slanting, the sun at an  angle with the sky almost tilting over. Cirrus clouds, then cumulus ones moved in tinselling light. Marco rubbed his eyes, and to the Sapodilla Queen he hummed:  It’s because of who you are that I am here.
             Her rebuke was instant: Who am I?
              Now he was determined to invite her to come back with him to Toronto,  homing ground as it was, if places like  Winnipeg, Calgary, Edmonton, or New Brunswick,  Montreal and  Quebec City all at once. More clouds rolled above.
“You know,” he continued, tentative sort of.
             “Know what?”
            “Why I am really here?” And it wasn’t just for sandy beaches and palm trees, a postcard-picture place as it was?
            —Go on, tell her.
             She pouted with full lips, seemed more beautiful.
             He rubbed his eyes to see more clearly. And did he really come from the Arctic where only cold air he breathed in? Now more about the Sapodilla Queen he wanted to know with the newspaper ad still resonant.  And did she call herself that in order to appear beguiling or just anonymous to suitors everywhere, if only to be different from everyone else?   Her  amber eyes, her bust rising and falling.
             Marco imagined her to be also of Yoruba ancestry, something like that.  Asia too loomed, and she might have been one Alexander the Great longed to meet centuries back, to sweep her into his arms as he  roamed the East; or,  she could have been a Mughal Emperor’s special prize, or an erstwhile  maharajah’s: everyone being attracted to her in particular or unique ways as the real Sapodilla Queen.
             Marco’s thoughts kept going around and around.
            Sabina smiled, her demeanour changing before his  eyes; and she wasn’t more than five feet tall, though she appeared taller the more he looked at her, really thinking who she was: Nefertiti and Cleopatra combined, the sun’s effulgence in her eyes;  and before he knew it he was underwater with her, in a whirlpool with coral all around. Whales kept circling. Porpoises started making acrobatic turns, sudden nose-dives.  The Atlantic’s Grand Banks too as schools of cod swirled. Tell her!
            Sabina looked at him, bemused. Ah, Marco figured he was drowning in an ocean with her. Indeed he also heaved in with chests of silver and gold, all taken from a sunken pirate’s ship, didn’t she know?  With a patch on one eye he was also Henry Morgan carrying bullion stolen from a Spanish galleon. All solid gifts for her.  And why did Sir Francis Drake and other Elizabethan privateers leave so much loot behind?
            Did the Sapodilla Queen have an advanced warning?
            –In real time, no?
             Marco huddled in air-pockets underwater, which no one thought existed before. Whales nudged the hull of a broken ship where Marco kept floating; they also surveyed the damage done with intelligent-looking eyes. Voices, the Sirens–more than echoes–he also heard.  Sabina was impressed by what he seemed to call up.  And how real was he now far south?
             Marco being in a kayak or canoe also, like a Native’s own birch bark rolling in water, if sheer dug-out. He  hurled against waves coming at him, in the St. Lawrence River’s rising tide. Ancestry in his veins, he tried to imagine next  who was a nameless Irish Queen brandishing a sword against every swashbuckler standing before her.  What a world!  The north star now being Marco’s guide; but  his eyes were fixed on astrolabe and quadrant. Fixed on longitude too he was, a makeshift map from Prince Henry of Portugal’s court before him, you better believe it.  Indeed, how he and Sabina plied the waters.  They did!        
             “Are we really going…somewhere?” she asked coyly.
            “We must keep going.”
            “How far?”
            “As far as we are meant to go.”
            “Beyond…the Caribbean?”
            “To the Gulf Coast itself,” he added, laughing, if for good measure.
            “It’s not the Franklin Expedition you’re taking me on then, are you?” she dallied.
            “No, never that.”
            Their being only in one spot: the archipelago indeed, islands being  everywhere and nowhere.
            “I belong where it’s always warm, you know,” Sabina said, as she figured they might have left the tropics for good in their fantasy.
            “I want to be with you in the Caribbean Sea only,” he replied.
            “Then not like Fletcher Christian in Mutiny on the—?”
            He played along, laughing. “Maybe Lieutenant Bligh only,” he teased. Then, “I could go by another name, if like time-honoured Marco Polo.” He kept up his dalliance, the ploy.
            “Ah, then you also imagine me being of Chinese extraction, d’you?” she taunted.
            “A geisha too,” he grinned.
            “Now I’m all things you want me to be, Marco,” she laughed.
            “We could go to a place called Moose Jaw, if just close to Lake Superior called keegeegomay by the native people.”
            “Really?”
            Love’s territory, if only discovery of new places: amidst hibiscus, bougainvillea, and more exotic tropical fruits like the sapodilla indeed: all being for the asking, or taking.  What else would she promise him because of his growing expectations?   Did he also want her to come through the Underground Railroad when slaves from the American south moved up north to become Empire Loyalists…before the American Civil War actually started? 
             What if she was also the descendant of an Apache or Cherokee brought from the US to the West Indies in the seventeenth century?  Cuba, welcome!
            Keep it up, Marco.
             Sabina looked at him steadfastly, as Marco kept going farther back in time. History’s gamesmanship, it seemed like.  Imagine purity of race or blood in the White House also. Then the Sapodilla Queen being a belle in a southern cotton plantation and appearing heavy-bosomed and durably broad-hipped…as she withstood the ravages of time.
            Sabina looked at him askance, wondering if he was really from Toronto where mountains had once loomed large aeons ago…and now he was bent on meeting an exotic island woman like herself…as the newspaper ad kept intriguing him. Who placed the ad anyway?
            Go on, tell her.
             Sap… Sappho?
            What if she truly wanted to come to Upper Canada as a middle-to-upper class society lady? Imagine, eh.  Who actually sponsored the ad, like a form of blood sport?  Lord Conrad Black of Crossharbour?
             —Pray, tell.
            Sabina was beginning to understand Marco in a new way, as a Canadian; and see, she no longer wanted to be called the Sapodilla Queen.  What for? Let Marco, a Christian–if a lapsed Catholic–spin more tales…and now their actually meeting as her  armpits became new territory for him to explore.
             Oh, believe!

                                                            ***
Territory to traverse, their traipsing around from island to island. How the moon’s light shone, sometimes appearing blood-stained. Then it was more of the sun’s radiance in Sabina’s eyes.  Another ship’s foghorn noise, if alerting everyone…about where they were actually heading. Where? 
            “You have no choice but to come with me,” Marco urged.
            “But…where?”
            “It’s because we can go everywhere you want, Sabina.”
            “Impossible!”
            “You are the Sapodilla Queen, aren’t you?” Marco yet dissembled. 
             “If you keep asking so many questions, how can I ever really make up my mind.”
            “Because you can never know, or never find out.”
            “Find out?” He pretended being aghast, then in desperation let out,  “Oh, tell me who you really are, Sabina.”
            Now more than anything he wanted to declare his love for her. Water lapped in a silent rhythm close to them, and his heart kept beating faster. Hers too beat faster.
                                                                        “We can’t avoid it, you know.”         
            “Avoid…it?” he drilled.
            “Being who we are. I mean, no matter where we come from– “
            “Not where we were born?”
            Trade winds blew, their yet being on the familiar island, nowhere else.  Not in Canada. Vaguely Marco wondered about a newspaperman  named Rupert Murdoch in Australia who might have placed the ad himself in order to invite a suitor, like himself,  to meet the elusive Sapodilla Queen. Like a game he was playing.  Everything being illusory too.  Ah, Australia…how really far away from Antarctica?
             “With satellite dish nothing’s far away,” Marco argued.
            Sabina scoffed, “Really far south then?”
            He shrugged, “Yes-yes.”
            “It’s Reality TV, isn’t it?” she admonished.
            “What?”
                                                                                                Then, “Wake up…or we’ll be left behind.”    
            He laughed back at her.  She also laughed.  Then, “You’re not just an explorer in the Caribbean, you know,” she grated.
            Waves kept rising. They saw themselves in a schooner or catamaran, now like really lost souls in a far ocean. Indeed the north star kept guiding them by. Longitude, then latitude in their wake, as they never wanted to fall asleep again, though exhausted they were like refugees…drifters. And they were destined to be together: so now tell everyone, including Sir Rupert Murdoch.
             Didn’t The Times of London or The New York Times also carry the ad?
             Blogs written everywhere, twitter. Cyberspace being  all in  their journeying.  Soon everyone would know about them and follow their path, like  true lovers. Females following  the Sapodilla Queen’s example, it seemed like. Males everywhere, as Marco only.
            Really?
            How true?

                                                                  ***
They opened their eyes after being in what seemed like a long sleep,  after the waves’ battering they went through. Now in  downtown Toronto they were, like their specially appointed place and rendezvous.
            “Am I really here now?” Sabina asked with a surprised expression.
            “We are.”
            “Not as a refugee, am I?”
            “Just as you are–”
            “The Sapodilla Queen, d’you mean?” she laughed.
            “Oh, like being in a carnival too.”
            “Oh, with a mask on? Maybe I’m not what I am,” she hurled back at Marco.
            “Then what are you?”
            Their not being in an obscure island anymore, if Tobago or Grenada; but indeed in the North.  As Sabina heaved in and said, “I never placed that ad, you know, to snare you, if it’s what you are thinking.”
            “Who did then?”
            She shrugged, she didn’t know.  And she couldn’t comprehend that one like Rupert Murdoch or Lord Black of Crossharbour did either, whoever they were.
             Who really?
            Marco looked at her, imagining what lay ahead for them in Canada.
Sabina asked, “Why did you really go there…to find me, I mean?”
                                    “I had to.”      
            “More than an obsession, was it?”
            What else kept stirring in them and between them? Oh, time.  
            They would now settle down and cook akee and codfish in a highrise condominium in multicultural Toronto, and pretending being who they weren’t.   And was Sabrina still the Sapodilla Queen in Kensington Market among thousands of West Indians and other ethnics  jostling to find the best vegetables and fish, and others waltzing down Yonge Street–still the longest street in the world…if during Caribana only? All occurring before the winter snow started falling, you see.
            “We can never stop the seasons from changing, you see,” Marco said.
            “As much as we can’t stop being who we are, isn’t it?”
             Now Sabina only wanted bright sunshine all year round as she  moved around with a shopping bag and even looked like a once unfamiliar bag lady, see.
             Was she?  “Marco,” she suddenly called out in a highpitched voice with a distinct island-accent, in her moment of recognition once more.
            He nodded to her.
            Louder she called; and she might indeed be a refugee or  someone who’d started loathing herself, if only because of her race and skin colour in a foreign land, no? What else would she have to put up with? Oh, look closely in the subway, bus, tramcar…eyes staring at her, everywhere. Who do you see?
Sabina draped in thick dark clothing, like a cape, or a burqa? Winter’s drafty weather she must inevitably cope with,  as she breathed in cold air.
            “See,” Marco said, “it’s what you have to cope with, what you must bear up.”
            “I will adapt, is that it?”
            “No one ever truly adapts,” he suggested.
            “I am different.”
            “With Caribbean waves lapping in your veins, how can you? I mean…be  comfortable in winter?”
            “Conch I keep hearing,”she smiled.
            “From afar?”
            A new day or time; and now new friends with them, everything being a hoot more or less  in Canada.  Mark and Sabina now participating in a genuine Caribana float and wearing authentic masks as they started gallivanting down Yonge Street holding hands and reminiscing about a familiar alleyway or cul-de-sac in the Caribbean archipelago.  How real?
             Then: “Ever thinking of going back?”
            “Why?” Sabrina countered.
             Inevitably Marco’s mind went back to the  newspaper ad, with more places to go or to come from, if now to Cuba’s Varadero, or Jamaica’s Negril with tropical allure everywhere, if only as choice vacation spots. And what if Sabina wasn’t whom she  thought herself to be in the first place with more cold weather coming? Hailstorms coming? Season inexorably changing.  As Sabina tried harder to cope, by being herself. Marco began thinking he might never have left Toronto in the first place to find his one true love. Ah,  Sabina also experiencing her own  longing and quest, wasn’t she?
            Nothing else mattered as they walked faster huddled up to their necks in heavy clothing because of a cold wind blowing.  And who passed them along the way but someone looking  like Rupert Murdoch or Lord Conrad Black, who hardly batted an eye at them as he whisked past without a hello.
             Marco figured he must continue to be himself, if with more fantasy in his veins. He pulled Sabina closer…imagining their again being in a tropical island.
             Sabina simply humoured him and felt his muscles tightening round her.
             So very real.