The Soul of St. Barts

The French island can be a bubble of champagne, celebrities, and naked swims in the moonlight. But when visitors search for its inner depths, writes Janine di Giovanni, St. Barts can become an island of wisdom.

Julien Capmeil

Anse de Grande Saline takes its name from the large salt pond nearby. The beach is a favorite of nudists (who turn right) and gay visitors (who turn left), but everybody takes time out for lunch at Le Grain de Sel.

At various turning points in my life, I have run away and washed up on St. Barts like a worn piece of beach glass. There was the time I hid from a mad Italian boyfriend in a hillside villa near Luri. There was the Easter Sunday I spent with my best friend on Anse des Flamands, heartbroken, eating conch salad. There was also the time I went to St. Barts madly in love with my husband, Bruno, and our two-month-old baby, stressed out to the point of madness, the result of late motherhood after too many years reporting on too many wars.

For me, the island has never been a place, like Mustique or Harbour Island, where chic fashionistas get dressed up to go to the beach. On vacation, I'd just as soon not run into Elle MacPherson or see Princess Caroline filling an Hermès tote bag with courgette blossoms at the local market. I want to be invisible, peaceful, low-key. And over the years, I have discovered a parallel, private universe on St. Barts, a completely different world from the one you see splashed all over the pages of magazines.

In early May of last year, at the start of low season, I came back with my husband and that newborn, who was now five and just learning to swim. The trip did not start well. Our toy plane landed, but the bags didn't. Apparently, they had decided to stay behind and vacation on the tarmac in Guadeloupe. The pilot told us, reassuringly, "We can't carry luggage. Too heavy. Last week we crashed a plane." Normally, I would have had a heart attack and shouted, but instead I just smiled. I did a quick mental inventory: I had a comb and a toothbrush in my bag; my son could swim in his underpants; my husband could grow a beard. Tant pis, who cares, no big deal. We left the airport on the cusp of a tropical storm, the air slightly metallic, and ate dinner that night in our twenty-four-hour-crumpled clothes on St. Jean Beach—the AWOL luggage, the overdraft, the real world, all lulled away by the sound of the waves and a rum punch or three.

The next day, I had a meeting with the vice president of St. Barts's territorial council, Yves Greaux, and our conversation inevitably turned to the impact that the economic crisis—or, as the French prefer to call it, la crise—has had on the island. "We have absorbed it," he told me with perfect Gallic equanimity, and in fact the 2009 budget showed a surplus of more than $27 million. Then we moved on to the really big news. As of January 2009, St. Barts is no longer a département—the equivalent of an American state—attached to Guadeloupe; it is now a collective, allowing it to report directly to the Ministry of Overseas in Paris. St. Barts seemed to be taking pride in this new sense of autonomy, expanding an existing program that transforms salt water into drinking water and embarking on a new project: getting the houses numbered. Greaux doubles as the local mathematics teacher, and his logical Cartesian heart was clearly into this. "It wasn't a big deal before," he said with a shrug. "We didn't have numbers on the houses. Everybody knew where everyone lived. The mail got delivered. But things change, and now we need"—his eyes light up—"les numeros."

Taking a much needed break from the rigors of island life at St. Jean beach.

St. Barts may have absorbed la crise, but when I left Greaux's office and wandered through the empty early-morning streets, I could feel that things were calmer, less crowded, the days of crazy spending over. Aside from Larry Gagosian's epic stretch of beachfront property, most building work had halted, temporarily. Which can only be a good thing. But St. Barts has never allowed itself to be spoiled by overdevelopment. Strict zoning laws are part of the reason, but it also has to do with the mind-set of the locals, who are blessed with innate good sense and taste when it comes to the preservation of their —no casinos, no high-rises, not even a movie theater. On my first visit, I fell in love with St. Barts's minuscule scale—the toy plane, the doll-size houses, the tiny coves. Even the croissants at the boulangerie seem smaller than the ones in Paris. I remember the local vicar, Charles Vere Nicholl, saying years ago that St. Barts was more like a village in Provence than an island in the Caribbean, and he was right. Geezers playing pétanque, pastis, baguettes, Jacques Brel on the radio, every Peter Mayle cliché, but delivered without any of the stuffy uptightness of the mainland French. Imagine the laid-back, barefoot, sixties, hippie-ish spirit, what the French call décontracté, served up with just the right amount of impeccable taste, good food, and ridiculous attention to quality—perfection, non?

I know people would laugh out loud if I told them that I find St. Barts spiritual, but I do. After Sunday Mass and a powerful sermon on wisdom, courage, and love, delivered by my old friend the vicar, I was blinking back tears behind my dark glasses when he pulled me aside and introduced me to Trenette Wellesley-Wesley. "This is a true islander," he said. "You two should talk." Trenette, who runs the Thursday-night meditation group at St. Bartholomew's Anglican Church, didn't laugh out loud. "Yes, I agree with you. I have always felt there is something uniquely healing about this place." We arranged to meet for tea later in the afternoon.

Trenette's tiny house sits on a cliff overlooking Baie des Flamands. Inside, it was cool and dark and book-lined; outside, you could see Guadeloupe and Saba floating on a sapphire sea in the distance. Sipping a cup of green tea, she started to talk.

"Electricity only came here in the 1960s," she said. "The first telephone didn't arrive until 1963, there were hardly any cars, no doctor on the island, and no food in the shops except for onions and cabbages. It took a month to get a lemon from Europe."

A little later, we were joined by her friend Lena Jonsonn, who kissed me twice, à la française, and handed me a paper she had written on Swedish colonization between 1784 and 1878, when the island was handed back, like a football, to France. I also got a brief history. The first inhabitants were Arawak, followed by the Caribs, and although Columbus had spotted the island in 1493 and named it after his brother, Bartolomeo, no Europeans actually landed here until a few French colonists from nearby St. Kitts arrived in 1648. The Caribs responded by killing them all, mounting the victims' heads on poles, and then using the heads to decorate Lorient Beach. About twenty-five years later, a group of astonishingly brave (or foolhardy) Huguenots from Normandy landed, and this time they survived and prospered. (Interestingly, you can still hear faint traces of the old Norman dialect in places like Flamands and Corossol.) Scrubby, rocky terrain and no freshwater made farming impossible—and also explains the lack of a plantation economy later on—and the island became a way station for French pirates plundering Spanish galleons. The attractively named Monbars the Exterminator, a famous French buccaneer, reputedly had his headquarters on St. Barts, and some believe, as people will, that his treasure is still hidden among the coves of Anse du Gouverneur or buried in the sands of Saline.

"It was never really a slave island the way Martinique and Guadeloupe were," Lena told me. "It was more of a smuggler's and pirate's place. Slavery was abolished in 1813, after the churches arrived." This was relatively early. In Cuba it wasn't outlawed until 1886, and other colonies, like Puerto Rico, didn't get around to it until the 1870s. The stain of slavery, the sense that something truly evil happened, the seething resentment of injustice, is something you can still smell on other Caribbean islands but never on St. Barts. Here, the lingering darkness of history does not exist.

And there is little class structure. Even though most islanders are descended from the original families who came here in the seventeenth century—Vice President Greaux told me that his family tree spreads out on paper for eighteen feet—there is no cachet attached to who arrived first, no Mayflower mentality.

No matter who you are or how many feet wide your family arbre is, there comes a time of the year when St. Barts belongs to Euro trash and jet-setters. For two weeks, between Christmas and New Year's, the people who like to see and be seen invade the island. Huge boats clog the harbor, Sean "Diddy" Combs cruises in with Queen Latifa and Billy Joel, and Roman Abromovich takes over Maya's restaurant. During the time of the locusts, the locals lay low. "I've lived here forever, and even I can't get a table at a restaurant," says Jean-Philippe Piter, the editor of Pure St Barth magazine. "It's a good time of the year to stay home." A few of the invaders return at Easter, but for the rest of the year the island remains what it has always been—a place for libertines, hippies, and people who have inherited that early pirate spirit. "Except," noted Piter, "the hippies have grown up and smoke cigars now instead of joints."

Aside from the hippies, there are real characters, what the French call personnages. One morning, a friend suggested I go see Arlette Magras, another true islander. She spotted me at the gate to her cottage. "Don't think I have any alcohol in the house!" she shouted. "I am about to leave on vacation! I can't offer you a drink!" It was nine in the morning, and I assured her I could survive without a cocktail, so grumbling, she let me in, putting a plate of meat-and-onion-stuffed dumplings, island specialties, in the oven for us to eat. Arlette has written a book about her childhood and life on the island, Parfums d'Antan, and her home is a museum to herself. The front room is full of a bizarre mix of objects (it reminded me more of Cuba than St. Barts). There was a shaving brush, fake Limoges china only slightly chipped, Santa Claus dolls, a cookie jar shaped like an elephant, an ancient sewing machine—Mademoiselle Haversham's spoils, gathered together over a lifetime of collecting. She showed me a photograph of the first Dominican priest on the island: "A handsome young priest, he died of a mysterious skin disease."

Arlette's family has been on the island since the seventeenth century. She is related to most of the people here, and like most old-timers, she likes to complain endlessly. "Can you tell me why they need such big cars?" she said of the tourists who rent huge jeeps. "The old people were cultivated. It's the new. . . ." She waved her hand in disgust. The postman arrived as she was in mid-rant, and she took a letter and immediately dumped it in the trash. "The European elections—who cares?" She was clearly irritated by the intrusion.

I have to admit that everything Arlette said made perfect sense to me, so I was a bit concerned: Was that how I'd be at her age? She made me buy her book, pricey at forty dollars, but I had no choice. Then I was shown to the gate.

The first time I came to St. Barts with Bruno and our newborn son, Luca, we lived in a bubble of happiness. Champagne (more bubbles) on the beach; swimming naked in the sea at night—our life was full of endless joy and hope. Five years later, it was a very different trip. Everything had changed, and I knew we were both in dire need of a large dose of the healing quality that Trenette had talked about outside the church while I was blinking back tears after the sermon.

The vicar's powerful words were not the only reason I was crying. Bruno and I had both been war correspondents—he a cameraman/producer, I a journalist—when we met and fell in love in Sarajevo in 1993. We spoke a private language that nobody else understood—he got me, I got him—and we never had to explain what it was like to be shot at. Avoiding death breeds a special kind of intimacy. Soon after we married, Bruno was badly wounded in Africa, his back broken, and shortly thereafter, when he returned to Paris, he was beaten up by the CRS (the French security police) at a Tibetan peace rally—why should they care about his back brace? Then we descended into hell. Post-traumatic stress, too much wine, two years in AA, constant pain, constant shrinks—he was a deeply troubled person.

Early one morning, a few days after we arrived on St. Barts, I woke up and walked out onto the terrace, and there was my husband, on his knees, praying. "I can't do this by myself," he whispered. He was crying, begging for help. I crouched down, kissed him, and we held on to each other. Here we were in the most beautiful place on earth, the same place we had traveled to with our baby boy only five years before, and now all his suffering had come bubbling up to the surface—forget the champagne, those days were long gone—and we had to figure out how to get through this thing together. Amazingly, we did. With a little help from the island we both loved. Slowly his despair lifted, and we talked for hours and hours in a way we never did at home, sitting together outside after we had put Luca to bed. On our last Sunday on St. Barts, we went to church—two barefoot lapsed Catholics—having made our own kind of peace with the world.

Way back in 1945, before the houses got numbered and the streets were given names, a renegade Dutchman, Rémy de Haenen (whom Jean-Philippe Piter described as "a pirate, an adventurer, a playboy"), landed the first plane here on the grass at La Savane. It was not an airstrip. He had to scatter the goats first by flying low to scare them off. A few years later, he bought a chunk of rocky peninsula at St. Jean and built L'Eden Roc, named after the legendary hotel at Cap d'Antibes on the Côte d'Azur. He got Garbo to come and Robert Mitchum and later Gore Vidal. He was elected mayor in 1962 and soon afterward got the phones and electricity installed. He also started the school system. Before that, children from different parts of this tiny island spoke their own dialect. One of the things I love most about St. Barts is the way the language weaves and flows with the division of the island. The windward quartiers (St. Jean, L'Orient) express themselves in a kind of Creole. The leeward side (sous le vent—places like Corossol and Public) speak patois. David Rockefeller and Edmond de Rothschild built houses here, Baryshnikov and Gelsey Kirkland came, and later the fashion tribe, led by Calvin Klein and the photographer Patrick Demarchelier. Four hours from New York, St. Barts became, by default, a party island.

But my St. Barts isn't like that at all. The hotels I stay in are small, out-of-the-way places, perfectly clean and rarely more than a hundred dollars a night. I eat at tiny restaurants tucked away in the hills—like Santa Fe, where you won't find a single sun-toasted tourist. One Saturday night, Luca, Bruno, and I went for pizza at The Hideaway (a.k.a. Chez Andy's, whose motto is "Lousy food, view of the car park"), and we were the only non-locals. Everyone was with their extended families, shouting, passing baskets of bread and bottles of wine, kissing noisily, and hugging each other. And in the many times I've run away to St. Barts, I've spotted only two celebrities—perhaps because I am indifferent: Lee Radziwill, cool, elegant, and lifted, in white chinos, on a small plane from St. Martin; and Naomi Campbell stomping out of the Gustavia pharmacy. ("Naomi angry, just for a change," said Piter with a laugh when I mentioned it.)

One morning, Pierre, the sweet concierge at my hotel, told me to take Luca to the Shell Museum. "It's great, and the guy who runs it, Ingénu, is really interesting."

We set off in our jeep—not one of the big ones Arlette was ranting about—and came to a signpost at the crossroads that read cartier in one direction and dreamtime in the other. Being more interested in Dreamtime than in gold watches that tell the real time, we turned left. The museum was locked, but we found Ingénu out back. He was born in the village and, at eighty-nine, his face was lined and freckled after a lifetime in the sun. He lives in his museum now, sleeping on a small cot with a blue coverlet, underneath a worn photograph of his late wife. I found all of this unbearably sad, but at the same time there is something touching about his total devotion to his work, lovingly trading shells with collectors around the world.

His life, I could tell, was hard. His left eye is sightless, the result of a careless local doctor having left a piece of cotton in it after surgery, and it looked painful. Luca pulled on my sleeve. He asked why Ingénu couldn't take the plane to Paris and see a good doctor. The old man laughed—he does not feel sorry for himself—and gave Luca two dried-out, delicate sea horses as a present. He put them in an old box, and I tucked them into my bag. Ingénu took us through the rooms of lavender and rose coral behind dusty glass; enormous langoustine shells; a mounted, angry-looking blowfish; and row upon row of sand from beaches all over the world—Coney Island, Barcelona, Ko Chang in Thailand, even English sand from Burnham-on-Sea.

The next day we returned to the Shell Museum. Luca was upset about Ingénu's eye and wanted to give him a present—some money from his piggy bank so he could take the plane to Paris "to see a good doctor." That day, Ingénu told me about the past, the grinding poverty, the famines. "Sometimes we had no bread. It was la misère noire." Black misery—a million miles, but not so many years, away from Diddy's boat, which, when it comes to St. Barts, docks in the harbor within sight of the Shell Museum.

On our last day, Trenette told me that I had to go to La Rotisserie and get the white fish cooked with peppers, but the chicken was just out of the oven, all golden, and I couldn't resist. I bought cucumber salad with mint, and we took our picnic to Saline Beach, which was windy and completely empty. The sky was gray, and it opened up and rained but only for a moment; then the sun broke through the clouds. We swam all day, pushing Luca between us in the waves, and by the end of the afternoon he was weaving in and out of the surf confidently without his floaters. "Mama, Mama, look at me!"

When we'd arrived on St. Barts a week before, I had fantasized about returning to the past, to that prelapsarian champagne-infused bubble of happiness we had experienced five years earlier, but of course we couldn't. The reality was that my husband was a wounded person and my boy was growing up, yet even if they were both drifting off to another land where I could not necessarily follow them, I knew that I would never lose them. I wasn't entirely sure what lay ahead, but I had come to terms with that. And the unadulterated joy and hope of our first trip had, over the years, been tempered by pain. The hope remained, strong as ever, and now some kind of wisdom had replaced the joy, which isn't such a bad deal after all.