Hannah Tennant-Moore - Wreck and Order

MIRIGALLE

I get off the train in a beach town whose name appeals to me. On the street outside the station, well-dressed men fall into step alongside me, offering me the best room in town, very good price, special price just for me, come and see, they drive, no problem. I find an unaggressive rickshaw driver, fit my bag into the back of the tiny three-wheeler, and ask him to take me to the Retired Peacock, a guesthouse recommended to me by a pimply older man just before I got off the train—“Italian lady owner. You say Tharaka sent you.” The driver barrels past vans and flatbed trucks piled with timber, then turns down a narrow coastal road. The air is alive — vapor exhaled by leaves after a rainstorm. Or something. Droplets of sunlight flirt with the surface of the ocean. It’s pretty, is what I mean. Boys in torn shorts stand on fishing stilts in the shallows. A pile of rocks covered in wire separates the road from the sand, protection against another tsunami, more hopeful than actual.

We turn down a dirt path. I am all alone in the back of this rickshaw on this unknown road under a pale pink sky, just visible through the gaps in the silly palm trees. My freedom is huge and it adores me. The driver honks at a cow blocking our path. The beast moos in protest before ambling into the woods. Rebar juts out of crumbling pastel walls, the remains of houses decimated by the tsunami. The driver stops in front of a white picket fence. “Welcome” is written in English, Italian, and Sinhala in small, neat, golden letters. As I step out of the rickshaw, a pack of dogs bounds toward the gate, leaping and growling.

“Dogs okay,” the driver tells me, extending his palm to collect the fare.

“You don’t scare me,” I lie to the dogs as I walk through a yard of patchy grass and unpainted stone huts. A lanky boy lugging a dead palm leaf stops short when he hears my footsteps. He looks terrified, like I did that time in Paris when two giggling girls passed me as I was walking in the Jardin des Plantes and I shrieked and dropped my book. I spent so much time alone then — raking the dead leaves of my thoughts, staring at the piles and hoping a pattern would emerge — that the intrusion of laughter frightened me.

“Do you have any rooms?” I ask the startled boy.

“I get Manuela.” He walks to a stone patio attached to a house. Fluffy blue cushions are scattered on the ground. A solid stone coffee table and bench seem fashioned directly out of the earth, an ancient boulder resigning itself to the quaint human need for furniture. A woman rises off the bench and sets her book on the ground. She wears a yellow linen skirt and a loose tank top, no bra. Her hips are wide, her arm muscles conspicuous, her hair long and dry and white, tied in a ponytail slung over one shoulder. “You want a room? You did not phone?”

“No. I just — someone on the train told me about this place. Tharaka? He said he knew you.”

“This is a resort. This is not a backpacker hangout. Really, you should have called. You should not trust a stranger on the train.” She stares out of pale, pale blue eyes.

“How much are your rooms?”

“We have private cabanas. They start at three thousand rupees.”

“Oh. Shit.”

“How much were you hoping to spend?”

“More like six hundred.” I have thousands of dollars in the bank. Still, it feels true that I could not afford to pay thirty dollars a night for a private hut on the beach. I’m so accustomed to frugality, never having counted on myself for a steady income. That’s partly why it felt like I was doing something really good when I brought Suriya and Rajith to a fancy hotel. But it was just another idea from which I wanted too much.

“I can’t open up one of the cabanas for six hundred rupees,” Manuela says. “I’m sorry to turn you away. I’ll have one of the boys take you back to town at least. I was about to send him to the market anyway.” She has the indeterminate accent of a nonnative English speaker who’s been speaking English for many years in a country of nonnative English speakers. “Might as well take off your pack and have a drink before you go.” She walks into the main house and returns with a lopsided hand-blown glass filled with ice water. She sits down cross-legged in front of the bench and rolls a cigarette. I walk to the edge of the patio, which extends to a cove. Upturned canoes lie on the sand. Hammocks link palm trees. Manuela coughs.

“How long have you been here?” I ask.

“Twelve years.”

“And you stay here year-round?”

She nods inside whorls of smoke.

“You never go back to—”

“To Italy? No.” She smiles with abrupt tenderness.

“Do you mind if I walk down to the beach?”

“Please.”

The wet sand mirrors the sunset. I raise my skirt above my knees. Warm water pools around my ankles. “Oh,” I say out loud, and cup my hands over my smile. Could I ever love anything more than the ocean? A huge wave rears up. I run backward, but the water crashes down on my legs and knocks me off my feet.

Manuela calls out from the patio. “Why don’t you just stay here? I don’t have any reservations for a while. Eight hundred rupees?”

—

My cabana is a hollowed-out stone containing only a white bed frame — high off the ground and net-free, since there are screens on the many circular windows. We eat bread and bananas for dinner. Manuela eats with one hand and reads with the other, sitting cross-legged with her back against the stone bench. I float in a chair swing. Cicadas fill the gaps between the crash of waves. Manuela offers me a glass of wine. I hesitate for a moment, afraid of my excitement at the prospect of breaking the alcohol fast my body has been relishing since I got to Sri Lanka. “I’d love some wine. Just one glass.”

“I wasn’t offering more than a glass.”

She walks toward the kitchen. Acne covers the surface of her back, pustules so tiny and white they are almost pretty on her leathery skin. She returns with two glasses half full of lovely maroon liquid. A dog sighs and rests its chin on its paw. The ceiling lights are dim, their fixtures clogged with dead insects.

“For a resort, this place doesn’t seem all that hedonistic,” I say. “It’s more like a monastery.”

“Or a prison. A voluntary prison.”

“Why did you put yourself in prison?”

Manuela’s laugh is like a glass half full of lovely maroon liquid. Convenient metaphor that happens to be accurate. When she first came to Asia, she tells me, she had all these ideas of changing her life. She had been trying to party her way out of misery for most of her adulthood. She spent two years at a monastery in Bodh Gaya, the place where the Buddha attained enlightenment. Although she never actually took the vow, Manuela lived as a nun — celibate, no eating after noon, barely speaking. And then she realized that for her being a nun was just another extreme, another way to avoid herself. She got to know an Italian couple staying in Bodh Gaya — nouveau Buddhist fanatics who were in the process of divesting themselves of their worldly goods, one of which was a large property on the Sri Lankan coast. They offered it to Manuela dirt cheap when it seemed like the war would never end. Manuela never (“nev-er,” she repeats, separating the syllables) thought she’d be the kind of person who would operate a resort, but it’s ended up being perfect for her. As soon as she started hiring local boys to build the cabanas, she felt immense relief, as if the vague inner demand she had spent all her life trying to ignore suddenly shut the hell up.

“And now you’re helping people. Giving them a place to get that same kind of relaxation.”

Manuela shrugs. “Everyone wants something different from this place.”