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ruminated silently, and quite presumptuously, on the Bonaireans.
    In a book I was then reading called
Politics on Bonaire
, Anke Klomp describes the evolution of a system of political patronage that characterizes the island. (The Netherlands Antilles are autonomous within the kingdom of the Netherlands. The five islandsform a parliamentary democracy, with parliament sitting in Willemstad, Curaçao. Each island also has its own legislative and executive bodies.) Among the more interesting things Klomp discusses is the curious history of egalitarian society here. Because it could never support banana, sugar, coffee, cotton, or tobacco plantations, Bonaire never developed either a class of gentlemen planters or an agrarian working class. As a result, social distinctions based on ownership of land, on race or ethnicity, remained relatively unimportant, as they did not in the rest of the Caribbean. (The building of oil refineries on Curaçao and Aruba early in the twentieth century brought an influx of North American and European managers and divided those previously analogous societies more sharply along racial and class lines.) Bonaire exports very little today save salt (much of it bound for the northeastern United States, for use on winter roads); and it is without an agricultural or manufacturing base. Since all goods must therefore be imported, and because government is the major importer, politicians on Bonaire are in effect, in Klomp’s phrase, “ ‘gatekeepers’ par excellence.” Further, since Bonaire’s population is small, the imposing personality of a single politician can have a major impact on political expression on the island.
    Where this has led and how patronage operates on Bonaire are the central subjects of Klomp’s book. Observations in her introduction, however, cause a reader to reflect on the ethnic and racial accord apparent today in the streets and shops of Kralendijk and Rincon, Bonaire’s second town. And to wonder what changes have come since 1983, when
Politics on Bonaire
was written. The number of resorts and condominiums to accommodate divers has greatly increased since then; and, to hear local people tell it, the conspicuous wealth of North American and European visitors and their abrupt, suspicious public manner have subtly altered the unconscious atmosphere of equality that once characterized Bonaire.
    The situation, of course, is more complex than this worry. One gains some insight into social subdivisions, and into theisland’s history, by listening to where and how people speak. English, the language of tourism, is spoken at the airport, in gift shops and resorts, and in many of the restaurants. In the schools and in banks and government offices it is Dutch. On the street and in homes throughout the island (as on Aruba and Curaçao) it is Papiamentu, a creole developed from the Portuguese pidgin of slave traders and influenced by Spanish, Dutch, and West African dialects. In the open-air vegetable market near the Kralendijk docks, and on a popular radio station, it is Venezuelan Spanish. Bonaireans politely and easily compliment each other by saying so-and-so speaks three or four languages, lending the island a cosmopolitan aspect, but this is rarely true. What some people learn in addition to the language they are born to, which of course they may speak poorly, is almost always the “supermarket idiom” of another language, a tropeless speech of commercial transactions and declarative conversation—unengaged, impersonal, pleasant. It is the language of international air carriers, phatic and anemic. To listen closely to its banalities, or to hear no other, fuller language spoken in place of it, is eventually to become terrified. It is the language that matches the meals served at my resort.
    One evening, after Adam and I had walked back from town, after the silence of my room had replaced the night drift of human voices along the road, I grew restless and went out again. I stood