By Night the Mountain Burns

by Juan Tomas Avila Laurel

  So my grandfather lived upstairs in our two-storey house, as if living up there was the only thing he knew how to do. Consumed by time, that man never came downstairs, or practically never, and as a child I couldn’t understand why he never came down a set of stairs that he himself must have built. The house wasn’t far from the shore and at night, when silence took hold of the village, you could hear the waves breaking on the sand. You heard the waves better at night, and I repeat this because we believed that not only could you hear them better at night, but that night was when the waves brought sea beings to the village, beings that might be good, like the sea king, or bad, like strangers who took children away, which the adults warned us about. No activity took place on the beach at night, nor did people go there to meet up with friends and tell stories. Well, actually yes, some men went down to the beach at night to catch crabs in the wet sand. These crabs made their dens in the sand and came out at night to wash themselves in the splash of the waves. The men used the crabs as bait when they went fishing. But there was no other reason to go down to the beach at night, except, actually yes, people also went there to relieve their bellies. The thing was, as most houses consisted of no more than four tree-trunk posts and a jambab’u roof, they had no bathrooms, and therefore some people went down to the shore after dinner and made the most of the darkness to relieve their bellies. They went there in groups, albeit small groups. We didn’t go because we lived in one of the few houses on the island to have a bathroom.

  Apart from the reasons I just mentioned, there were also some people who went to the beach at night to commit a shameful act and they would have fingers pointed at them the next day and be called wicked. These people were always women, usually older women, and when it started to be said that a particular woman went by herself to the beach at night, our grandmother would tell us never to walk past the door of her house, for that woman had acquired the ability to send objects into any child that went naked before her.

  I never saw grandfather come downstairs and I never saw him eat, either. I don’t know when he ate or even if he ate at all, and I suppose it didn’t bother me because I must have thought that grandfathers just didn’t eat. We children were given food on individual plates; at night this consisted of a piece of fish with some sauce, though it wasn’t really sauce but rather the water the fish had been boiled in. We were also given a hunk of floury cassava bread and we sat eating on benches underneath the eaves of the house. We ate all together, all the children of the house, and we looked at our plates and at everyone else’s, comparing to see if anyone had got a bigger piece of fish. If they had, the more sensitive among us might feel hurt and start crying, which meant that one of two things could happen: the person who’d dished out the food would feel guilty and give the crying child an extra bit of fish to console them; or the crying child would get a smack for spoiling the harmony, a smack on the back that made you go gulp. ‘Gulp!’ was what grandmother used to say to make us hold back the tears, even when the cause of our tears was a slap on the back from her. ‘Gulp!’ grandmother would say, with her hand raised, for if you didn’t ‘gulp’ down your crocodile tears you got another smack and then you really did have something to cry about.

  When nobody complained about the portion they’d been given, we ate ‘savouring’ our fish, making it last in order to make the others envious, the greedy ones who finished first. If the fish we ate had lots of bones, and especially if one of us ended up with a piece that had sharp, hard bones, after eating, and after properly sucking them clean, we would store the bones in a corner of the house. Those thick bones were what we used for getting ticks out. We knew ticks lived in the sand, in dusty areas and near pigs, but even knowing all this we were never careful enough to avoid catching them. You knew a tick had made a nest in you when you felt a harsh burning in your foot, between the toes. The smallest children in the house would complain of stinging and cry because of it, but they couldn’t get the ticks out by themselves. So an adult, a woman, would have to free them of the parasite. Those of us who were a little more grown-up de-ticked ourselves, though we weren’t very good at it. The girls and women were best at it. The trick was to get rid of the tick while causing minimal pain, which meant doing it quickly and breaking as little of the skin it had nested under as possible. To manage all this, you had to have a sharp eye and a steady hand. Often older people in the neighbourhood would send a message to our house to ask one of the girls to go and rid them of that disgusting parasite. As these older people could no longer see clearly and had very thick skin on their feet, they couldn’t detect the nests very easily. So on one of those elderly people’s feet you might find six or seven of the beasties, all of different shapes and sizes, some so old they had beards, beards that stuck out from under the skin. A tiny tick is about the size of the nib on a ballpoint pen but, once under the skin, after sucking on your blood or whatever it feeds on, it can grow to the size of a drawing pin. Adult ticks are ugly and look like eyeballs, but without the shiny, shimmering bits, and with heads: the part that bites into the skin. Often you feel a sting, look down at your foot and see, between your toes, a tiny tick biting its mouth into you. If you don’t get it out straight away, it gets under your skin, expands and grows a beard. Ugh! Disgusting things. When you catch a little one trying to burrow into your foot, you pull it out and stick it on the nail of your left thumb and then squash it with the nail of your right thumb, and it goes splat as it bursts.

  My grandfather was just the sort of person ticks love but, because he lived upstairs, he was hardly ever troubled by the beasties, which attacked like a plague in the dry season.

  I’ve already talked about my house and where it was located. I said how you could hear the waves breaking on the shore at night and that you could sense the dangers that might emerge from the sea. The house was close to the beach, and not any old beach either but the big village beach. Yet despite being so close to the shore, grandfather had built the house with its back to the sea. In fact, in order to look to the horizon, the house would need to have been built on a different street. But on the street where my grandfather built his house, everything faced the mountain. So although it was the tallest house in the neighbourhood, it had its back to the sea. However, it had a good view of the mountain, the Pico. El Pico de Fuego, as it was called in Spanish. From upstairs, you could see all that was happening on that great mountain. And when I think of my grandfather, I think of how he spent years and years of his life sitting where he could watch what was happening on the mountain at all hours of the day. And how he stared at it, and how I ended up thinking he must have been waiting for something to happen there, or for something to emerge from up there. And that’s why, though he could have chosen to build his house on a plot of land with a sea view, he’d chosen to build it where the main doors and windows gave out on to the mountain. Was he hiding from something by turning his back on the sea? Did he expect something more important to come from the mountain?

  I almost always saw grandfather sitting in the same place. I never saw him eat and I never saw him talk, by which I mean what might proper‌ly be called talking. He made minimal communications but I myself never had a conversation with him. Nor did I ever hear him say a word to anyone, although I know, from what my brothers and sisters told me, that he did occasionally talk to one of his friends. Of course a long time has passed since then, since the last time I saw my grandfather, and it could be that I did have short conversations with him when I was very little but that I no longer remember them. Yes, that could be so.

  You entered the house at ground level and then went up some stairs into a living room. That living room gave on to a balcony where you could see practically the whole village, although we don’t call it a village in my language; the word we use is more like town or capital city. Anyway, like I said, you went into the living room and came out on a balcony that looked towards the Pico, and you’d see grandfather sitting there with his back to you, in a chair made out of esparto grass.
He positioned the chair a little away from the balcony handrail, as if not wanting to expose himself fully in public. He’d be dressed in a shirt, a V-neck sweater and brown trousers, almost always with a towel draped over his thighs, although he was never seen without his trousers on. The first thing that you noticed about the man was that he’d shaved off half his hair, by which I mean the hair had been deliberately removed, for there was nothing to suggest an accident had caused him to lose half his hair. Well, I suppose it wasn’t quite half, but it was the better part of half, and it was shorn right down to the bone. What was this? Why didn’t he shave the other half off too, or let the shaved half grow so that it was all uniform? Was it some kind of fashion? And if it was, could someone not have told him it looked awful? That it was really very ugly and didn’t suit him at all?

  Whenever any of us went out on the balcony, we’d greet him, for he was our granddad, and he’d make a gesture to show us he’d heard. He might briefly look at his feet to check he wasn’t being bitten by mosquitoes, but he never turned to look at us and answer. Sometimes one of the younger children of the house would go upstairs because they were learning to talk and they knew that the man up there was their grandfather, so they went up there and leaned on the armrest of his chair and asked him questions or tried to make conversation, but grandfather would do no more than look briefly at the child and then carry on attending to the mosquitoes. He didn’t get annoyed, but when he thought the child had said enough he looked inside the house for an adult to come and take the child away, which was what usually happened. Sometimes, if he thought the child was old enough to be left on its own without an adult, he’d get up, for grandfather could walk, and lead the child downstairs. But his leading the child downstairs was actually no more than his placing the child at the top of the stairs and giving the boy or girl a little push to help them on their way.

  Any child in the house who was prone to crying already had plenty of reasons to do so and there was no need to make matters worse by visiting that man upstairs who never spoke to you. This was to his advantage, for I can’t imagine what would have happened if one of the biggest cry-babies in the house had gone up there and made him angry, even made him shout. Of course it possibly did happen, but I never saw it. I think little children are able to sense an adult’s kindness, if not their friendliness, and they avoid adults that seem sullen.

  Although men usually represent family security on the island, I always felt more secure and connected to the women in our household. This could have been due to my grandfather’s particular nature, but I think it had more to do with my grandmother. Grandfather was always around, yes, but one day it occurred to me that maybe he had nothing to do with the family, that maybe he wasn’t even from the island. What if he were an incomer, someone who’d got lost on his way home and had taken shelter on our island but knew nobody? What if he’d arrived by sea, all alone, as we were told the images of the church saints had done, and that was why he didn’t know how to talk, just as the images didn’t? This was what I thought as a child, and I regret that grandfather never let us know more about him. And I never imagined that one day I’d be telling the story of my childhood.

  When our mothers went off to their plantations they left the youngest children in the care of an adult of the house, if there was an adult who wasn’t going to the plantations for some reason, or in the care of older children, ideally a girl. Entrusting children to a girl was best, because girls are more responsible, but that way you sacrificed someone capable of doing more work on the farm and bringing back a heavier load than a boy. As a child I never understood why girls had a greater capacity for carrying weights on their heads, but now I suppose boys and girls probably have the same capacity, just we boys used to complain and cry about how heavy the loads were while the girls didn’t. This might have been because they were under more pressure to put up with it, because one day they’d become women and they’d be talked about and labelled lazy if they started crying because of the weight of a load. But doubtless they hurt just as much as we did.

  Anyway, one day we children were left on our own in the house, and a plane flew over the village. Most of us had never heard or seen a plane so close before, and so it gave us all quite a fright. One of the youngest children in the house was so frightened he climbed the stairs and went crying to grandfather, seeking the comfort of an adult embrace. Grandfather understood and saw that though the plane was long gone, the boy was still afraid and sought refuge in his grandfather’s lap, which meant he stuck his head between grandfather’s thighs and closed his eyes. The boy thought it the safest place for him, and the old man understood his grandson’s fear and comforted him by stroking his back with his hand. It was a very brief show of affection. Or maybe it was such an effective show of affection that the boy immediately felt at ease. Either way, he came back downstairs and played with the rest of us, and though we’d all been frightened by the plane, none of us had thought to seek grandfather’s protection.

  The house I grew up in was full of women, my grandparents having had only daughters. We children were the offspring those women had brought into the world and, as they were all about the same age, and saw that their mother, our grandmother, was still fit and strong, they had us believe that grandmother was really our mother. We never spoke of our fathers. If we needed a man to comfort us, we went upstairs to talk to the only one we had, he who sat staring at the mountain. I’ve already said what happened then.

  Grandmother had a niece who came to our house a lot. She was chubby, with fat thighs, and she was very smiley; I never saw her get angry about anything. When she came to the house we all competed to throw ourselves into her loving arms. She hugged us each in turn, and after she’d greeted and kissed everyone, and after she’d talked to the other girls her age in the house, she would go upstairs, pull over a chair and sit down next to grandfather, her back to the balcony rail. She went up there to chat to him, to tell him things, tell him about her life. Armed with her cheeriness and her smile, she told grandfather things, she smiled, she laughed, and it was as if they really were chatting. Was that aunt of ours so smart and kind that she knew how to make conversation with him, even though he never replied to anything she said? Did she know how to choose the right words so that he didn’t need to respond to them, so that only she had to speak but there was no lack of communication? While she talked to him, she never stopped laughing, as if she were chatting away to a normal person. Did she have some ability we lacked? Did she know how to read grandfather’s gestures and communicate with him that way? Did they have a secret they shared?

  When she thought it had been enough, she would stand up, put the chair back, say her farewells and come back downstairs, and not with the frowning face of a failed encounter, but more smiley than ever. She must have known something we didn’t, we who lived with the man. In any case, grandmother’s niece was older than we were, as we were the children her cousins had brought into the world, so she knew more things than we did. But she was the same age as our mothers, so we found it strange that none of them enjoyed the same privileged relationship with him that she had. Or could the answer lie simply in her boldness and not the hidden explanations I looked for?

  Like all the inhabitants on our Atlantic Ocean island, we lived in the big village during the rainy season and went to the settlements in the dry season, to eat whatever we could find there. In most families the change of season presented few problems, for the whole family went to the settlements and the house in the big village was locked up for the season, sometimes with keys, more typically with two sticks crossed over the door. But in our family we couldn’t all go to the settlements, for there was one family member who never made the journey: grandfather. He never made the journey because of two invalidating reasons, if that makes sense. For a long time I thought grandfather was an invalid, which is why that expression popped out just now. It would have had to have been a totally debilitating invalidity, for he did absolutely nothing. But anyway, the tw
o reasons why grandfather couldn’t go with us to the settlements in the south were one, he couldn’t walk there, and two, he couldn’t paddle a canoe. The fact that he couldn’t paddle a canoe was what finally convinced me he was an incomer and that he simply hadn’t learned since coming to the island. Because every man and grown-up boy on our Atlantic Ocean island knows how to paddle.

  The problem was we couldn’t leave grandfather on his own in the big village. And the reason wasn’t that he didn’t want to be left on his own, for doubtless he would have liked it, but rather that there’d be nobody there to cook for him. So grandmother arranged it for her daughters to take turns staying with him, in three shifts of one month, which was how long the dry season lasted. I didn’t think anyone needed to stay behind with him to make him food, for I didn’t think the man ate. I only learned of this requirement the year when it was my mother’s turn to stay with him, by which I mean the mother who’d brought me into the world and with whom I was very much in love at the time, for I’d only just found out she was my real mother. I missed her, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that by being in the big village I’d have missed my brothers and sisters, and missed out on all the fun being had in the settlements, I’d have asked to go with her. But I’d have been on my own, for my brothers and sisters were happy where they were, eating birds that were preserved in salt after they’d been caught by those who’d learned how using traps or a sticky resin from a tree.