DESERT PATROL VI: MOUNT LAVINIA (ONE YEAR LATER)
BY GUIDO FRANCO

Presented here is the sixth part of Desert Patrol (une aventure sous les tropiques), a travel memoir by French Swiss photographer Guido Franco published in 1980 and introduced here. It concerns what Franco saw of the pederastic scene involving local boys and foreigners on his return visit to the beach resort of Mount Lavinia, a suburb, famous for its beaches, of Colombo, the capital of Sri Lanka, in December 1979 to January 1980.

Epilogue: Mount Lavinia (one year later)           

LENA^[1] is complaining bitterly that the Mt. Lavinia beach is no longer what it was.

“Look at those people!” he laments, pointing to the crowd spread out on the beach, the numbered cabins (Hier spricht man Deutsch) and the rest of it.

But on the fifth of January they’ll be gone,” he says to reassure himself. They always go off on the fifth of January. After the New Year and so on.

Lena contemplates the beach with the air of a connoisseur, but a disillusioned one. It will be around . . . twelve years ago that he met Neville. Who is now at the University of Miami, right? Next to him, Sugar-doll pulls a long cigarette from a red packet, “MORE”.

“I had to go in to Colombo yesterday, at forty in the shade, to find a carton of these cigarettes for him,” the German tells me. “They’re the only ones he wants now.”

Christopher didn’t go to Germany last year.

“But this year he will come, he has his passport already, it’s certain,” Lena says.

“And what will you do with this monkey in Germany?” I enquire in a neutral tone.

“That is indeed the problem,” he admits.

This year he arrived with a stereo radio-cassette player, a mini TV in colour, and he has settled in at the Viveka Lodge for sixty rupees a day. The proprietor is a drunk, but a friend of the President, who even sent him a New Year greeting. He showed me the note.

Christopher now comes to the beach in a black velvet shirt and swimming briefs with stars. He also has a few more bangles.

“Look at his bum!” Lena advises me, just to say something. But his heart is no longer there.

He sent him money over the summer, so he could go to school and for him to learn German, but it seems they shared the cash around the family, and the kid used the remainder to play cards with Kemal,^[2] and lost.

That’s what most disgusts Lena.

“He’s nothing but a little black monkey,” I tell him as encouragement. Next year he will be even worse.

“Ye-es,” Lena admits, contemplating his gem. “The beauty goes. In the end they all look like gorillas.”

“You will remember Lawrence,” he now says for the fifteenth time, “the group leader at Neckermann. A real gorilla. Well, you won’t believe me, but in bygone days he was truly sweet.” It’s true, I don’t believe him. 

*       *       *

Lena has only one word on his tongue: bumsen, which in his local dialect means screw.

“Christopher screwed two French girls yesterday,” he tells me. “One after the other. He screwed one at Saint-Sylvestre and the other the next day. It was they who paid for the room at Rosebud, the beers, the colas and the rest.”

It seems it had been a week since they had screwed. Not bad, said Lena, but terribly vulgar. They must be prostitutes.

My own impression was that it seemed unlikely that prostitutes on holiday, even French ones, might have the idea of having it off with his Sugar-doll, who looked like a money in disguise. But Lena stuck to his guns.

“The bum is not bad,” he said. “But they were really vulgar.”

Last night he bought a whole stock of rockets, a whole display of bangers, bombs and sparklers on the way out of the Golden Gate, and he got the idea of celebrating New Year again on the second of January, on the roof of the Hotel Duro. He was at once thrown out by a group of Japanese who called the guards, but he continued at the Silverbird, the gay hotel in Welawatte.

“You should have been there,” he told me.

And then it seems Kemal had taken advantage of the opportunity and found a customer at the Silverbird, but, just his luck, he found an American negro who wanted to screw him.

“Large as it seems she is in that region,” Lena confided to me, very pleased with Kemal’s misadventure.

“And do you know how he managed to get away?”

“No (obviously I know nothing because I wasn’t there).”

“Well when he saw the fellow’s prick, as he said, well he said he was going to get some cream from another room, he told the negro to wait a minute, and he buggered off. He had a narrow escape,” Lena added, observing the Mt. Lavinia beach from a distance.

It was clear that he wouldn’t have been displeased had Kemal been screwed, if it were only because of the shirt that the boy had swiped from him, and Zuckerpuppe’s little elephant in false brilliants which had disappeared, the belt with the stars . . . (Kemal denied everything out of hand, obviously.)

Lena didn’t want to look like a fool, and one could understand that. He didn’t want to have his things nicked from his room by a boy for whom he had bought meals at the Golden Gate and whom he had not even screwed. But in my opinion he was dwelling too much on the matter. After all, we didn’t even know whether it was really Kemal who had taken that shirt from him.

“And the little elephant with brilliants, then?” Lena said. “And the belt with the stars?”

“Only yesterday you were admitting that perhaps Christopher had lost them in a taxi!” I protest.

But Lena didn’t want to hear anything. Christopher had told him that Kemal was the one who had pinched his things. End of story.

*       *       *

To tell the truth, I cannot understand what Lena sees in his Zuckerpuppe: firstly he looks like a monkey in disguise, he is feather-brained, and has a falsetto voice. But Lena seems to be smitten, and apart from a few frivolities with the boys at the Hotel Duro bar, he sticks to him a hundred per cent.

*       *       *

He has got his passport, and he even claims to have bought him a ticket on Aeroflot.

“You can see it,” he tells me.

“What are you going to do with your Zuckerpuppe in Germany,” I ask him.

“Ach ... he’ll be able to learn German, and keep house ...”

“A lazybones like him? He’s going to spend the day in front of the mirror.”

But Lena is not listening to me.

“And then besides, with German girls, he will be successful, don’t you think?”

“ ... ”

“Do you think his nose is going to get bigger, flatten out?” he asks me, suddenly worried.

“He’ll have a nose like a shoe!” I tell him.

Lena admits that it is possible, but deep in his heart he doesn’t believe it.

For forty rupees he has bought a leather frame for Christopher’s photo; he will put it on his desk at Mercedes in Wüpperthal.

“Do you know what he does now? He takes my cock in his mouth, and so on.”

Lena pauses to gauge the effect.

“Afterwards he goes to have a wash,” he admits, “but all the same, it’s not bad. And look at his bum.” (I tell him for the hundredth time that Christopher’s bum leaves me completely indifferent.)

“Come on, look at him, he’s a tart, that’s all he’s good at.”

“Not at all, you’re the one who uses him as a tart, and then he does what you want.”

It’s useless.

“Look at him now with his little shirt and his bum, what do you think of him?”

“Shit,” I say to Lena.

*       *       *

Look at it however you like, but Mt. Lavinia is really superior to the Balearic Islands, the French Riviera, and so on. Firstly there’s the sea and the beach, secondly the jungle is not far away, for those interested, and thirdly it’s a country of real culture which was apparently visited by Buddha in person. In Europe there is no longer anything similar. The beaches are cluttered, and sometimes even commercial. Bottles of cola are everywhere. Everything is horribly expensive. And no true culture with that. Nothing but old neglected churches, gothic porticos, and items of that kind. That’s what distinguishes Mt. Lavinia from the rest. Very fortunately there is no cloister to visit, no arenas, no Roman architecture, in fact nothing at all, and that’s a great relief for everyone. For those who truly insist, the authorities have discovered archæological treasures in the interior of the territory, but it’s a long journey and it’s infested with mosquitoes. But armed with a great wisdom they have discovered neither antiquities nor monuments at Mt. Lavinia. Nothing but the sea and the beaches. 

So everyone is happy at Mt. Lavinia, probably even the hotel personnel who must all the same have known better times. It seems that the place was frequented by English society of the day, ladies, gentlemen. Well now, with the changing times, it’s the second-class charters, the Germans, the Swiss, retired people, cellulite, bums two metres wide, varicose veins, in short all the post-war horrors. I wonder how they can put up with that. And no tips, it seems. Nothing.

It’s no surprise with all that when it is said that tourism is corrupting the country. There’s no way to stop it. In every corner, in Paris, in Germany and elsewhere, there are agencies that send tourists off to Ceylon without reflection. All of that lands on the Mt. Lavinia beach with bottles of sun-cream and pastilles against the trots.

*       *       *

Soon in the cafés of Ceylon they will be writing the menus in German. It’s time to leave. It’s time to leave the country to Neckermann and Tjaereborg. I shall come back when the aeroplanes have stopped. I shall build myself a hut in the forest, and I’ll live there with Mercy. But there I am running ahead of myself….

Continue to Desert Patrol VII: Manila IV (one year later)

^[1] Lena, apparently a long-standing German visitor to Sri Lanka, featured in Franco’s earlier account of Mount Lavinia in Chapter I as one who “specializes in the education of deserving young Sinhalese.” [Website note]

^[2] Kemal was a local, implicitly sixteen by this time, who featured prominently in Franco’s earlier account of Mount Lavinia in Chapter I both as a boy who went with many foreign men for money and as a good and generous friend to the author’s son Raphael, then aged 11 or 12. [Website note]