Back to Belize - Chapter 1

 BACK to BELIZE –  Luigi Kleinsasser

Descended from an 18^th century Caribbean buccaneer, Blair Stuart after a long absence, returns to modern Belize to find himself entangled in a search for long-lost Spanish treasure.  His beautiful Belizean cousin, Contessa, is not about to let him or the treasure get away or fall into the hands of their greedy Belizean relatives who are also vying for the treasure.  A tale of romance, adventure, intrigue and corruption, this story will hold the reader spellbound until the last page is turned!

                                                            LEGAL NOTICE

   All of the characters, organizations and events in this novel are used fictitiously. 
Names of the characters in this novel should be considered fictional
and have no relation to actual persons, living or dead.

This copy is intended for the use of the original purchaser only.

No part of this work may be reproduced or transmitted in any form

whatsoever without the express, written permission of

the author − Luigi Kleinsasser.

luigi@luigiwho.com

Other works by Luigi Kleinsasser:

NOVELS

half Ghan

El Gran Mariachi

Seven Shaggy-Dog Stories from Australia

SELF-HELP

English lessons for Spanish-Speakers ‒  inglés llano (Plain English)

Chapter One

Struggling with the unaccustomed humidity, Blair lay on the bed, naked, unable to fall asleep.  The humidity was so oppressively thick that even the act of breathing was difficult.  Barely creating a breeze, the overhead fan spun slowly, squeaking softly on each revolution.

The room had an unusual odour that hung in the air − nothing positive, but because he was tired yet sleep seemed elusive, it became annoying and the source of blame for his wakefulness.  The cause of the smell was hard to pinpoint, not strong, nothing definite, just an “aroma” that seemed to hang in the air like a weak mix of jasmine and bleach.  At first Blair wondered if it were in the mattress but when he pulled back the bottom sheet – nothing. 

He turned on the bedside light, tip-toed to the closet and stuck his head inside – not there either.  Maybe they mopped the tile floor with some powerful disinfectant?  The smell seemed to be everywhere he sniffed but nowhere in particular.  Turning off the light he threw himself back onto the bed trying to imagine the origin of the scent and where its base might be.  It was late and he was tired but he just couldn’t fall asleep. 

As the night air began to cool, the room’s elusive tang seemed to diminish and it was then that he detected a sound at his door.  He glanced at the luminous dial of his watch, brightly visible in the darkness.  Two o’clock.  

Slowly and silently the door to his room opened, allowing a shaft of light from the hallway accompanied by the distant sound of a motor to enter momentarily.  Haloed by the hall light, the blurred outline of a human form stepped swiftly into the room, closed the door soundlessly and glided across the room, almost disappearing into the darkness.  But for that slight clicking of the doorknob as it turned, the intruder’s presence might have passed unnoticed.  

Blair controlled his breathing as though he were asleep, but his eyes, now accustomed to the darkness steadily followed the trespasser’s stealthy passage around the room.  He concluded that it had to be a thief apparently searching for easy pickings – a wallet, a watch, or a suitcase to rifle.  Bewildered by the lack of luggage, the thief’s frustration could almost be sensed as nimble fingers searched chair backs and table tops while squinted eyes feverishly scanned the room. 

Earlier, Blair had slid his rucksack under the bed; he was aware of Belize’s high rate of petty theft, but never anticipated such blatancy so soon.  When the uninvited visitor lifted Blair’s khaki shorts from the chair over which they were draped and began carefully rummaging through the pockets, Blair calmly whispered,

            “Can I help you with something?” and flicked on the bedside light.

Both occupants of the room were momentarily blinded.  Blair rolled off the bed and stood in front of the door, barring any exit and turned on the main room light.  The intruder, hooded and clad in a black, skintight cat-suit was smaller than Blair had imagined and a lot shapelier too.  The boyish figure with firm, rounded breasts had crouched beside the chair but slowly began to edge backwards towards the window.

“Don’t be stupid.” Blair admonished.  “This is the third floor.  We’re too high up for you to jump!”

                                    * * * * *

Blair Stuart had arrived in Belize earlier that day.  The ten mile trip from the airport into the city seemed to take forever with the slow-moving bus stopping frequently to pick up or drop off a fare.  The flight from Dallas International had been delayed due to high winds in Texas and the hours spent waiting in the departure lounge seemed to drag on forever.  The plane’s eventual arrival at Belize’s Philip S.W. Goldson International Airport was very late so there were no taxis available.  Blair considered himself lucky to have caught the bus ferrying mainly airport workers back into Belize City.  

The passengers were rowdy and the driver had bantered back and forth with most of them in an accent familiar to Blair’s ear though the words themselves seemed foreign.   Much of the conversation involved the activities of a blowfly flitting throughout the bus.  It was most annoying as it buzzed back and forth, bouncing off the windows and lighting on the nearest person’s head. 

Everybody slapped and waved at the creature as it approached them; several of the children on board clambered noisily over the seats trying to catch it, but to no avail. 

Looking every bit the American tourist with lily-white legs showing between white socks and crumpled shorts, Blair stood in the aisle towards the back of the bus, rucksack on the floor between his feet, armpits and shirt-back dripping with perspiration.  His dark-skinned fellow passengers were a happy bunch, smiling and laughing and their cheerfulness was infectious.  Even though he was hungry, tired and uncomfortably grimy he was almost reluctant to step off the bus when the driver cheerily informed him he’d reached his stop.

Blair had dreamed of this day for as long as he could remember.  He was a baby when the agitation for British Honduras’ independence from Great Britain reached a head.  With backdoor neighbor, Guatemala, claiming ownership of the British colony, contesting territorial boundaries of the country and threatening war, the future of what would eventually be called “Belize” had seemed shaky indeed.  The Stuart family sold everything except the Estate and drove through Mexico, up the Gulf coast into Texas where they headed west to the Pacific then north to Ashland, Oregon.  It would be another decade before the tiny country of Belize stood on its own wobbly two feet, carefully propped up by Mother England 

Blair’s grandfather’s Scottish great grandfather had been a pirate.  Well, a swashbuckling privateer actually, according to the stories, plying the Caribbean in the late seventeen hundreds, plundering Spanish and French ships in the name of the ruling British Monarch.  They weighed anchor in the Settlement of Belize where the loot was divided and quickly spent.  When their tribute to the Crown dwindled to nothing and they began randomly plundering British merchantmen, Captain Stuart and his crewmen were branded as pirates and hunted down with a price on their heads.

Towards the end of the eighteenth century, around the time of the American Revolution and following the final sea battle between Spain and England off the Belize coast, Blair Stuart the First “retired” from buccaneering.  As a novice landlubber, he trekked the length and breadth of the Colony and eventually established for himself a subsistence farm in what was to first become British Honduras and finally Belize.  Had he chosen to engage in slave trading and use slave-labour, his farming enterprise would surely have been more profitable, but being totally opposed to the form of human bondage then practiced in North America, he, with hired hands, cleared the land, cultivated it and exported sugar and oranges, felling and milling logwood and mahogany trees for extra income. 

And so it continued for generations, but when chicle sap became the main ingredient for the ubiquitous North American penchant of chewing gum simply for the sake of chewing (which resulted in the creation of spotty footpaths from the improper disposal) another profitable source of income for the Stuart Estate was quickly seized upon.

The pirate’s wife, Juanita, had been “spoil” from a raid on a Spanish gold galleon.  While captive she submitted to his advances, chose to marry him and bore him two children, a girl and a boy.  Their daughter was sent to England to become a “lady” and refused to return to the Colony, marrying a distant Scots cousin instead. 

            When the fragile Juanita succumbed to yellow fever, the ex-pirate commenced bedding a procession of his Mayan serving maids who continued producing female offspring for him until the day he died.  His only son married a local lass of Mayan-English descent and in honor of his father, began the tradition of naming the firstborn son of each generation, “Blair”.  And so now, the latest Blair in the Belize Stuart line had come home to his birthplace.

                                    * * * * *

Belize City was nothing like he'd expected – tawdry men loitering on every corner, trash and unruly children littering the streets, motor vehicles rushing every which-way.  Everything seemed dirty.  And, coupled with the blast-furnace heat and the soup-thick humidity, sticky.  The yarns his grandfather had spun painted a much prettier picture, but then, the place had weathered several devastating tropical hurricanes and the economy had changed drastically since the family had upped stakes and moved away almost a quarter of a century before. 

After the airport bus had ponderously negotiated the abundantly flowered traffic island – the roundabout, which the locals pronounced as “de rond-aboht” – at the entrance to Belize City proper, slowing to a crawl but not quite stopping, Blair jumped off and shouldered his rucksack.  The driver bade him farewell with some friendly advice on accommodations and pointed the way to the waterfront, but Blair stared blankly unable to unravel the man’s words. 

The Stuarts of Ashland spoke English with an almost Cajun-like rhythm, a twang to their speech, but Blair’s ears had been dulled by his American education.  To be sure, while he now recognized the sounds of Belize he would discover that even though English was the “official” language, the locals seldom spoke it unless it was in response to a question directed at them in English.  It would be some time before he could make sense of the regional hybrid language spoken by most Belizeans – a strange mix of Kriol, Garifuna and Mayan with a lot of Spanish and a few English words thrown in Cajun-style. 

Walking the few blocks to the Fort George District gave Blair an opportunity to soak in a little more of the ambience over which his grandfather and his father reminisced so fondly.  A dozen miles north of his home in Oregon lay a town famous for its pears and paper mills, where the brown pallor of airborne particulate that spewed daily from the mills hovered over the city until the evening dew dumped a thick layer of greyish-brown soot on any flat surface as well as the leaves of the pear trees . 

Here in the old section of Belize City though, with the modern downtown area behind him and the fresh sea breeze in his face, the tropical air was clear and had an unfamiliar aroma of salty freshness.  The narrow, cobblestone streets, barely wide enough to allow two modern motor vehicles to pass each other, twisted and turned through two-storey stone or clapboard buildings with swinging overhead shop signs that were probably relics of Belize’s pirate days.  Away from the main thoroughfare with the traffic not so intense, the streets were quieter and the sounds were not those of the North American cities he had been raised in.  And the countenances he passed were always sunny. 

When he reached the Great House, a rambling colonial mansion that had been converted to lodgings, Blair checked-in, showered then wandered through the pricey boutique-type shops on the lower level and chose to dine in the courtyard’s Smokey Mermaid garden restaurant where there were many empty tables.

            His waiter was mestizo and as Blair’s side of the family tree probably fell into that ethnic category, he struck up a conversation during quiet moments between courses.  The barman was garifuna with an exuberant, almost rasta personality and while the waiter and the barman worked well together, Blair sensed that a silent resentment existed between the two.   They smiled at each other, but it was purely for show!

Over the ages, Belize had become a true, cultural melting pot; skin color had no more relevance than did the color of one’s eyes or hair.  While it was to some extent an indication of ancestry, it had nothing to do with perceived intelligence, social status or ability.  Where once there were distinct racial differences, those lines were becoming increasingly blurred as the years wore on.  Europeans, Negroes, Spaniards, Mayans, Caribs, Orientals – all had intermarried so that even the earlier ethnic “combinations” were almost impossible to sort out. 

Back when the Stuarts left the country, light skinned families of mixed European, Spanish and Mayan ancestry were considered mestizo.  European and Negro mixes claimed to be Creole, while Negro-Carib descendents were termed garifuna, although any lighter skinned person with African ancestry might also be considered Creole.  And there were still pure-blooded Mayans – the aboriginals of the region!  Through intermarriage, the caste hostility that once existed had been almost eliminated and any enmity now present was not between the classes but between families who might foster some long-standing grudge.  It became more a matter of what culture a person believed they belonged to and the perceived dominant ethnicity within the family seemed to rule. 

But even so, a group claiming garifuna descent had commenced a move to have their culture “preserved” under the auspices of the United Nations.  The Creoles also continued to agitate for the acceptance of their language, “kriol”, as a genuine, separate, cultural entity which should be taught in the schools as a second language. 

Would there ever be a “true” Belizean?  Blair pondered on whether the efforts by those various cultural groups to remain separate might be the cause of the country’s failure to completely integrate, consolidate and advance.  That too was the strength and weakness of the Maya, at least since the sixteenth century – with around two dozen linguistic sub-groups, fighting over territorial boundaries and squabbling over religious rites and royal privilege, they were never united enough to put up a solid front against the invading Spanish.  But conversely, no single major defeat of a sub-group was enough to subjugate them as a “race”. 

Now, in this day and age, the Mestizos and Orientals didn’t seem to care either way and simply got on with the business of doing business but the tiny nation of Belize unable to advance, remained trapped as a Third World country and, but for the might of Mother England would have fallen to the Guatemalan invaders just as the Maya were subjugated by the Spanish.

Blair had a list of names his father had given him, some of them were those of uncles, aunts and cousins, close and distant, descended from the two original Stuart lines. Others on the list were old family friends whose help might be enlisted if necessary and to whom his parents wished to be remembered if the opportunity presented.  Both the waiter and the barman recognized several of the names on the list and in some cases, to their mutual dismay, claimed common kinship.  Each glanced at the other suspiciously for the rest of the evening.  The very professional-looking, but hopelessly incomplete, national telephone directory revealed only a few addresses, which Blair noted for future reference.

Upon retiring to his room for the evening, Blair had emptied out his rucksack and from a plastic-wrapped bundle, unrolled a discoloured vellum map.  The map had been handed down from generation to generation, more as a curio-heirloom than anything else, little credence being placed on its implied location of buried treasure.  For years it had been pinned to a wall in Blair’s grandfather’s study where it was regularly referred to when telling his grandchildren tales of Belize and pirates. 

The grandly scrawled “X” allegedly marked the spot where Blair Stuart the First had stashed his ill-gotten booty before he adopted his new and legal profession of farmer.  He’d passed the map onto his grandson with the invitation to retrieve the treasure if “things ever got too bad” but with the clear warning that it was well protected and not easy to access.  Over the generations of subsequent passings-on of the map, accurate information as to the exact location and how the treasure was guarded had been expanded upon to the point where even Indiana Jones might be daunted to attempt its recovery! 

            Another challenge was in orienting the map to the actual countryside.  There were bold and unusual landmarks with unofficial names and the short area of what appeared to be a plotted coastline matched no modern map of Belize.  There was obviously no consideration given to “scale” at the time the map was drawn.  Blair had made a tracing of the map and had that laminated for protection against the humidity, leaving out certain prominent features, particularly the big “X” and any reference to buried treasure. 

Having grown up under the shadow of the map, Blair’s attitude towards its validity had changed several times.  As a boy, he loved to play pirate games and worshipped Errol Flynn’s swashbuckling movie roles, so the map was a focal part of his youth.  As his education progressed and his choice of reading material matured, the concept of pirates and buried treasure seemed trite.  Blair then considered the story a quaint family oddity.  During one American Thanksgiving dinner when reference was made to the map and the family’s history, Blair, then all of thirteen years of age, had sniggered noisily causing his father to admonish him severely.

So, Blair was well aware of the map’s relevance to the family’s history but his current plan was simply to travel about the country, get to know his homeland, become familiar with the topography, try to match the map to the scenery and if two and two fell into place yielding “four” he’d then decide how far he’d pursue the matter of searching for pirate’s plunder.  He was financially secure, had completed his formal education, there were no family obligations to fulfill which meant he had a future that lay before him as blank as a sheet of virgin newsprint.

His ancestry lay in Belize and he felt a powerful force compelling him to find his future here.  Yet while he was Belizean by birth he knew little of his homeland.  The history, culture and geography of Belize were not taught in American schools.  Belize was his to discover and there was no urgency.

                                    * * * * *

But now, the tales he had heard of rampant crime in Belize appeared to be true.  His first day in the country and already he was the potential victim of a burglary!  Eyes now accustomed to the overhead light, the crouching figure stood erect and a voice unlike anything Blair had ever heard before, responded to his sarcastically posed offer of assistance.  The voice had the clarity of a bell but the smoothness of silk; it was deep, almost husky but most definitely not masculine.  If the sound of the Pied Piper of Hamlin’s flute could induce rodents and children to follow him, if Persephone’s Sirenes could lure ancient mariners to a watery grave, this soft but firm interrogatory made Blair’s knees buckle! 

“You are Blair Stuart, am I correct?  Your grandfather’s and your father’s names are also Blair and your mother’s name is Yvonne?”  Her English was impeccable but with the slightest Continental quality to it.  In a flash the tone of her voice changed and she announced authoritatively, “I am Contessa Lacinda and I believe we are related.”  There seemed to be a slight sneer in her last words.

Blair stood flat-footed, flabbergasted as the woman removed her hood and shook her long, burgundy tresses free.  Her features were perfectly sculpted with full, inviting red lips, which pouted as she closed them covering her even, ivory teeth.  Her skin was smooth and golden as though sculpted from Italian marble.  Drawing herself up to her full height, she exuded confidence, as if she were addressing a crowded auditorium of worshippers.

Regaining his composure, Blair stated, “Well, I guess it’s just fine if family breaks into your room and goes through your pockets!” He then quizzed, sarcastically, with two fingers of each hand elevated at head level, “Is this like a ‘welcome home’ visit?  Early morning surprise-party sort of thing?  Couldn’t wait until daylight, eh?  Any more relatives of mine lurking outside?” 

Elegantly, the woman moved to the bed and sat on the edge, curling her feet up underneath her.  Motioning to the chair upon which Blair’s trousers now lay in a crumpled heap Contessa smiled and coyly turned her head away.

            “Please put your pants on.  You’re distracting me.  I am not happy to be here.”  She reached over, turned off the bedside lamp and sighed pensively, “You should not waste electricity.”

“Well, I figure as long as we’re related I have nothing to hide.  How close are we?  Kissing cousins?”  Blair scowled, crossed the floor and slid awkwardly into his pants.

“You are a direct descendent of the first Blair Stuart’s Spanish wife; I, of his Mayan mistress.  You bear the Stuart name, I do not.  My Stuart lineage is matriarchal.”  She paused as she looked directly at Blair as he struggled to work the zipper on his shorts, fearsome of an accidental entanglement. “My father is Creole and works for the Immigration Department.  He told me of your arrival when he came home this evening.  The airport bus driver, Henry, is my father’s Uncle. He told me where he dropped you off so it wasn’t all that difficult to trace you.”

Blair stared at his visitor and queried, “So why the predawn raid?  Why sneak into my room?  What do you want?  What’s the urgency?”

Contessa looked squarely at him, “Your family deserted our country many years ago when their help and influence were needed.”

Her voice took on a harshness that was incongruous with her appearance and her subsequent statements issued forth in staccato fashion. “Your unwelcome return was foretold.  You have no right to be here.  Do you have the map?  I had to be the first to speak with you.  Others will follow.  You must tell no one we have met.  While I care nothing for you, you may be in danger.  Some may stop at nothing to possess the map.  Get some sleep.  We will meet more formally tomorrow.” 

She stood, imperiously surveyed her surroundings then departed as silently as she had come, flicking the light switch off as she exited the room leaving Blair standing in total darkness.



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