REPRODUCTION AND REALITY

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Yesterday, whilst I waited for the news from Greece, I headed over to Paradise Island. This is smaller and narrower than New Providence, and close enough for a bridge (there are two). However, there is also a sea taxi, which runs every half hour, and has that definite Bahamian style to it...
“When does it leave?” I ask the ticket girl.
“Twenty-five minutes.”
There are already some people sitting inside the ferry, waiting. I decide I don’t want to sit for that length of time.
“You gotta get on for the time to start.” she tells me. “The time don’t start counting down til you get on.”
She tries to persuade me that the 25 minutes before departure will not start ticking down until I am aboard. I wait in the shade and get on just before we leave.
A chatty character called Scratchy (“my brother’s called Itchy” he tells us) yatters needlessly to us all the way there, some eleven minutes. Paradise Island is one of the traditional locations for the beech houses of millionaires. We get to see Mick Jagger’s place (I don’t think Jagger really has a house here, he has one further south in the Caribbean; I might be wrong, I guess), Nicholas Cage (plus motor yacht), and the houses of this and that notable tax exile. Scratchy then tells us with some eloquence that he gets no money for being our ‘narrator’ for the journey, and that we in fact are his bosses. That’s a buck from each of us.

Paradise Island is home to one of the biggest monuments to tourism in the Caribbean, a mega hotel complex called Atlantis. However, the first monument to tourism here was built back in the 1920s, when Paradise Island was developed as a luxury destination (Charlie Chaplin bought a house here). A touch of class was called for, so a medieval cloister from France was brought over and reassembled. It is called, not very creatively, the Cloister, and in 85 degree heat and no shade it’s a bit of a trek from the ferry terminal, especially if you get lost. When I finally arrive, it is indeed a small medieval cloister, and nothing else. I don’t suppose they’d let you export a medieval cloister from France these days, but they did an OK job with this one back in the 20s, laying it out on high ground with views back over to Nassau.

The cloister sits in a beautifully kept garden. It doesn’t, I don’t think, symbolize anything or have any special significance. It doesn’t have a religious name or a saint associated with it. In fact, I don’t know what it’s true purpose here is. Unless you’re at the hotel nearby, the only other people around are in holiday condos (we’re a mile from the center of Paradise Island and all the tourist action). No one else is here this morning. Nevertheless, it is peaceful and very relaxing, despite the trucks that keep rumbling past in the road close by. Perhaps that’s enough. Perhaps there should be medieval cloisters everywhere.

I walk back towards the massive pink towers of the Atlantis resort. The Atlantis experience begins with Marina Village. If you want to know why Bay Street is such a shabby disappointment, here’s the answer. No one is bothering to spruce up downtown Nassau, because a new and infinitely cuter colonial shopping experience has been constructed here. The little shop buildings are in different colors, and they are selling the same touristy stuff as they do over in Nassau. But it’s so much cleaner, more civilized, and no stoned bums in their fifties are sitting on the sidewalk, gnawing on chicken bones and shouting ‘yo, whiteboy!’ at passing tourists.

I take some photos. Other people also take photos. I wonder whether any one is taking photos of this place in the same was as they photograph Bay Street (i.e. because it is an interesting, authentic sight)? And will there come a time, years hence, when Marina Village is perceived as truly ‘authentic’, when it has aged a little, or when, like the Cloisters, people simply become unaware that it is incongruous and contrived? Perhaps I’m wrong about this; perhaps Marina Village is authentic, only a different kind of authenticity, one that reflects our contemporary aspirations. It certainly is interesting to wander into a created reality, one which copies (and improves upon) reality. The question is (I think): is it endlessly interesting, like a real street, like Bay Street (which I am beginning to like, as I get top know it)? Or is it just comfortable, safe, reassuring, but ultimately unsatisfying? If it gets too cutesy, I guess they could pay actors to sit on the sidewalks shouting ‘yo, whiteboy!’

From the village you walk past the yachts, some of which are enormous, and into the air-conditioned wonderland that is Atlantis, not so much ‘a lost world’ as a world to get lost in. It is huge. Word has it that the owners (who also own Sun City in South Africa) want to buy up the whole island. Even as it stands, it covers acres and acres of the island, comprising five gigantic towers and a casino beneath, all bound together in an endless web of high-end clothes and jewelry shops. Modern tourist hotels, it seems, are all about shopping. The towers straddle a man-made marina that runs right across the island; there is a dolphin enclosure (yes, you can swim with them), and also a mass of multi-colored condos for purchase or time-share on the edges of the marina (which, of course, is huge). The condos, of course, are in a colonial style that few of Nassau’s original buildings have managed to maintain.

Atlantis is built on a scale of opulence which is hard to take-in. Surrounded at ground floor level by an aquarium stocked with big floppy sting rays, its entrance hall soars up to a domed ceiling, each panel of which is hand painted with colorful scenes. The columns which hold all this up are chunky and lopsided, like great big slices of wedding cake. Then there are ridiculously large plinths in the middle with potted palm trees on top that reach way up into the golden arched roof in front of the dome. Water, needless to say, trickles and gurgles from every conceivable hole and ledge. Most curious of all, however, are four massive oyster shells, each of which has a sphere of black marble in it (two feet in diameter) which rotates gently under the force of water that spurts down onto it from above. Atlantis has a theme, obviously, but where does this fit in? The black pearl of Atlantis?

On it goes, a giant sculpture at the entrance to the casino that looks like it was made from used coke bottles. Golden sea horse sculptures at the other entrance. A wonderful fountain outside with golden horses flying out of it (this is a copy of a fountain in Rome, I think). There are great big golden chairs to sit on everywhere, in all kinds. People in shorts and sneakers sit there like mini-despots. Yet many people are carrying blue boxes from the sandwich counter, because although there are around 20 restaurants here, not many people could afford to eat every day in them. There’s even a NOBU, Robert De Niro’s 3 Michelin star restaurant, said to be amongst the world’s top ten restaurants - the London branch, not this one, which doesn’t even bother to open for lunch.

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I decide to ring Sovereign about the Headless register of directors. They tell me the directors are registered at Sovereign’s own company of directors, on the Turks and Caicos islands. I already knew that they might be. These days many firms dealing in offshore companies have their own facility that provide directors (who simply do as they’re told by the ‘real’ company owners, who thus keep their names off the company documents). There’s little point in going to Turks and Caicos, because there’ll be nothing to see; just an office, although I do like the address, Front Street.

Anyway, here’s some news just in...

‘Headless’ is AKEFALOS in Greek (same in Ancient Greek).
KEFAL- is the stem; the noun in AG is KEFALH head.FEM (last vowel is H, eta, long e),
which has degenerated to KEFALI head.NEUT in MG. Adjective ‘headless’ was/is akefalos.MASC, akefali.FEM (last vowel spelt H in A & MG), akefalo(n).NEUT
Spellings of k/f as c/ph are the norm in Latin/Romance renditions.

I am on my way to the Registrar’s office.

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