By Night the Mountain Burns

by Juan Tomas Avila Laurel

  Sometimes grandmother’s niece invented a reason why she had to stay in the big village during the dry season and said it would be no trouble to take food to grandfather every day. When this happened none of my mothers had to take a turn to stay behind and cook. And I kept thinking: but the man doesn’t even eat! What did he eat? Who was he? What was going on with that crazy haircut? In truth there were a great many things that puzzled me about my grandfather. For one thing, why did he not go to the vidjil, the recreation hut the men had down by the beach? He never went, maybe because he didn’t like it there but more likely because he refused to leave the lookout that was his balcony at home. That a man living on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean should refuse to have anything to do with the sea, and never go to the vidjil, was a strange and striking thing. You actually did nothing at all at the vidjil, so it was especially strange that he didn’t want to go somewhere where you did nothing and where I’d have thought he’d be happier. The men at the vidjil were about the same age as him, they would have reminisced about old times and talked about things he knew. Did he not go because he didn’t know the others, didn’t know about the same things? It was possible, and this reinforced my belief that he was an incomer.

  That he didn’t go to the vidjil because of his views or tastes was of no interest to anybody. That was his business. But it was a great disadvantage to us that he stayed at home. Because, if he had spent long hours at the vidjil, as the other men of his age did, he would have come home at the end of the day with a bundle of fish and we would have eaten more fish than we did. That’s why I found it so incomprehensible that he stayed at home. Because at the vidjil you did nothing and you took home handouts given away by the fishermen when they got back from a day at sea. The thing was, it was customary on the island for the men at the vidjil to help pull the canoe in when a fisherman got back from sea, and to show he was a good man as well as a good fisherman, and to keep our island’s customs alive, the fisherman would hand out a few fish to the men who helped pull him in. Now some of the men at the vidjil were quite old, and some of them no longer could, or no longer would, get up to drag a canoe in. But others, though they too lacked youthful vigour, got up whenever a fisherman came back and, while the strong ones pulled the canoe in, they merely touched it, making sure it was noted that they’d touched it, and with this gesture they qualified for the thank-you handout. It was a kind of begging, a kind of scrounging that was quietly accepted. Or a kind of gentleman’s agreement. Which just left those old men who no longer could, or would, get up from where they were seated. But no fisherman ever failed to show his appreciation to them too, be it because he was fond of a particular old man or because the old man had certain qualities that meant he was somehow esteemed. In truth, all men were esteemed once they’d reached a certain age.

  But back to my grandfather and his not going to the vidjil, nor to any other part of the shore where people fished, and to us, as a consequence, eating so little fish. All of my grandfather’s offspring were female, and we, the males, the grandsons, were too young to go out fishing. Was my grandfather not somehow esteemed? Did he not have in him those qualities that meant he’d be given fish even though he’d done nothing? Had he been bad in his youth and that was why he avoided other people, because he’d wronged them and they didn’t like him because of his past?

  The one person who made sure we didn’t go too long without eating fish was my grandmother’s lovely niece. From an early age she developed a habit of being charitable towards us, at first giving us fish from her father, then her brothers, and then from the husband she acquired once she’d reached the age of desire. There was never any doubt that girl would find a good husband for she was so lovely.

  That we didn’t eat fish because the man of our house didn’t fish and refused to go where he ought to go was no small thing. Because, on our Atlantic Ocean island, if you didn’t fish, or get fish to eat, you didn’t eat. And don’t ask me why we didn’t raise hens, goats or pigs on our island of unknown geographical coordinates. Let’s just say that when we did, they were much more likely to be taken away on boats than find their way into grandmother’s cooking pot. It was said that all the animals we never saw eaten were taken to where our fathers were. There were many of us in my grandmother’s house and all of us had a father in that place you went to by boat, a boat we only ever saw in the distance, from the beach. All of which meant that when we had no fish, grandmother put a hunk of cassava bread in our hands, as dry as a remnant from the fire. And nothing more was said of it. So in order to eat in our house, two adults had jobs to do. It was grandmother’s job, aided by her daughters, our mothers, to make sure there was always a hunk of cassava bread to put in our hands or, when there wasn’t, a mash of something cooked inside a parcel of green banana leaves. And with this, they could be satisfied they’d done their duty. Then it was the man’s turn, and the man of the house could be satisfied he’d done his duty when fish reached the house through his doing, and in sufficient quantity that there was enough to go round. The man of our house refused to have anything to do with the sea; in fact, he built his house turned to face the mountain. Nor could we little men of the house help, as we saw other grandchildren do, grandchildren whose grandfathers took them out to sea to learn how to fish, in exchange for a bit of seasickness and vomiting. Seasickness and vomiting from the grandchildren, I mean.

  And how do you think we were left when grandmother’s niece didn’t send us even a solitary fish’s head, which was all she did send some days? We were left holding a hunk of cassava bread and thinking of salt. I’ve already said how dry the bread was and that it was difficult to swallow on its own. Indeed it was painful to swallow if it wasn’t softened by the water the fish had been boiled in, water we liked to call sauce. I think I already mentioned it. You dipped your bread in the water, the leftover water from grandmother’s cooking, and that way it went down your throat painlessly and with some sense of taste. So when not even a fish’s head reached our house, the more sensitive among us ate nothing and, after biding time beside the kerosene lamp, we went to bed on empty stomachs, feeling terribly sorry for ourselves. That lamp was the only source of light in the house. Gracias a Dios, it didn’t end up with grandfather upstairs, though maybe he had his own. Anyway, the more enterprising among us held that piece of bread in our hands and thought of salt and chillies. We carried the lamp, or whatever light was available, and groped around outside looking for chillies, tiny chillies that were red when ripe, green otherwise. Then we went back into the house and crushed them up with a bit of salt. As we did so, grandmother and our mothers would warn us about the heat, though sometimes they just left us to it. Emergency preparations made, the next step was to dip your piece of bread into the chilli and salt mix, then stuff it in your mouth. It was our substitute for fish, the fish our grandfather had failed to bring us by shutting himself away at home. You had to blow on your lips as you chewed, to counter the intense heat and burning. For the thing is, the chillies on our Atlantic Ocean island may be small, but boy are they potent. You chewed and wham! You blew on your lips and tears came to your eyes, for chillies seem to demand a lot of water. In fact, you blew on your lips only because you couldn’t eat and drink at the same time, but as soon as you’d chewed and swallowed, you tipped a whole glass of water down your throat. You finished and then it was bedtime, and ouch for any boy who forgot to wash his hands before putting them in his trousers and taking hold of his organ to pee! And ouch for any girl who carelessly let her unwashed hand touch her slit! Ouch! Ouuuch! I already said how hot the chillies are on our island. And if it was hard enough to get over the heat on your lips, it was harder still to get over a heat that burned inside you, and in such a sensitive area, and all because of a man whom we knew nothing about, our grandfather.

  I don’t want to say any more about the lack of fish and other animals to eat without mentioning that I knew the island priest because we used to take eggs to him. So surely we could have eate
n eggs with the cassava bread! Why did they not cook eggs for us? Grandmother would send us to take eggs to the Padre, and we were glad to be sent on such an important assignment. The Padre lived at the Misión, just above the church, or behind it, in the upstairs of a building joined on to the Misión. Someone worked for him and it was this person who opened the door and took the eggs from us. Sometimes we could see the priest whiling away time on the balcony, staring out to sea. From the Misión you could see the sea, and also our house. And you could see someone sitting on our balcony, which had to be grandfather. Sometimes we thought our grandmother sent us there just to see grandfather and the house from a different angle. The Padre did the opposite to grandfather and stared at the sea, in case a boat passed the island. Grandfather stared at the mountain, every day, and never tired of looking at it, as if he knew that whatever it was he was waiting for would come from up there. Perhaps he was waiting for the king of the mountain, or of the lake, which was, and still is, on the other side of the mountain.

  As our bodies grew, so too our curiosity, and one day we got the idea of going into grandfather’s sleeping room. He slept alone, or at least I thought he slept alone, though I never knew if grandmother slept with him. I didn’t know if his room was really their room, because grandmother always went to bed after everyone else, so I never knew where she slept. But anyway, we wanted to know what was inside grandfather’s sleeping room. Although first I should probably explain where we all slept. Our mothers slept with their littlest children and their daughters, even if those daughters were not little but the same age as us, the boys. So it might be that in one bed slept one of my aunts, a child of between two and six, sometimes older, and a girl about the same age as me. They arranged themselves like this: first the mother, then the child in the middle, and the girl by the wall. If there was another little child, a little girl or a boy who wasn’t yet as old as we were, he or she slept at the feet of the other three, and nobody complained, and two of them would wet the bed, even if they’d been made to go outside and pee at the door before bedtime. In another bed there might be the same arrangement, assuming the next aunt had the same number of children, by a father who was in another town, somewhere you got to by boat.

  All the boys who were a bit more grown-up, of whom there were three in grandmother’s house, slept in the same bed, a bed that had evidently been of good quality once upon a time. I was the youngest of the three, so I slept in the middle. All three of us peed in our sleep, that’s to say, we all wet the bed. Which is why it ended up ruined. When I started sleeping in it, the base had already begun to rot because of the ferocity of my older brothers’ peeing. Wetting the bed was something we just couldn’t help and if I were to start telling all the stories born of our torrential peeing, we’d be here for several days. Let’s just say that between the three of us we got through that good mattress, which had been a white man’s mattress, the grass mattress they gave us afterwards, the bed base, the board they put under the mattress when we first made a hole in it, and so on, until there was nothing left for us to get through. And the cloth we covered ourselves with was turned to rags. Of course the adults sought cures; someone said we’d stop wetting the bed if we ate crab droppings. I ate them, my bedfellows ate them, and still the unstoppable river flowed. Such was life when we decided to explore grandfather’s room.

  Our chance came when a man we understood to be grandfather’s friend came to visit him. He was a man the adults in the house said had only just come to the island, that he’d arrived on the last boat, although we had the impression we already knew him, or had at least seen him around the big village. Maybe we confused him for someone who looked like him, or we never associated him with the arrival of a boat, and therefore we never knew that previously he hadn’t lived on the island. Whatever it was, we were told he’d arrived on the last boat and, as he was a good friend of grandfather’s, he came over to see him. He waved to grandfather up on the balcony and grandfather went downstairs and out to meet him. We watched them walk away together, towards the north of the village, and it was said that grandfather talked to him and that they talked about things only they knew about. It was even said that from time to time during the conversation my grandfather shook his head and cried out in exclamation, as if incredulous or surprised, as if one of them had said to the other that only in Africa could such things happen. In any case, it was said they talked in low voices, as if exchanging confidences or secrets. We didn’t see any of this, but it made sense that if grandfather had gone out with the man, he must have said something to him. Grandfather knew how to speak after all! So why did he never talk to us at home? Anyway, we saw them walk away towards the cemetery. Now that I think about it, somebody had died that day and there’d been a funeral procession.

  There was, indeed there still is, only one cemetery on the island and everyone is buried there. Before heading for the cemetery, the priest is called, and he comes dressed in his official garments, assisted by his altar boys, at least two of them, one to carry candles, the other to carry incense. In my youth, back in my grandparents’ days, the whole church entourage would come to the house of the deceased and then leave with the coffin, followed by almost every one of the town’s inhabitants. And if it wasn’t quite every last one of them, it practically was, and it certainly included people who weren’t very close to the deceased or the deceased’s family. I remember seeing it and I remember there being so many people they wouldn’t fit in the church. But before the funeral procession made its way through the town or big village, all the children who lived along the procession route were shut up in their homes, with the windows covered over. It was said that if the funeral air, ‘the air of the dead’, came into contact with children, it killed them and took them away with whoever was being buried. Of all the terrifying things we were told about in our youth, being touched by the air of the dead was the thing that frightened us most. Children could only open the door again when their mother or another adult of the house told them it was safe to do so.

  So that day someone had died, although we didn’t know who, and that friend of grandfather’s, who’d recently arrived by boat, came to tell him about it, and grandfather left his lookout and went off with him. The funeral procession had already set off but they followed along, slowly, each man walking with his hands clasped behind his back, walking along as if they knew everyone would wait for them, as if whatever had to be done at the cemetery couldn’t be done without them. As if everyone were waiting for them to arrive and deliver the final prayers in Latin, though it’s highly likely grandfather and his friend were atheists and refused to have anything to do with religion. Didn’t I say my grandfather might have been an incomer? That would explain why he wasn’t the same religion as us. I knew, from what people had told me, that incomers often didn’t go to church and that they ate people. They ate other human beings.

  When we knew grandfather was far away, we older boys, and a few of the girls, got rid of the little ones and went up to grandfather’s room. We looked at each other and put fingers on lips calling for silence, even though the house was already silent, and then we carefully opened the door, just a bit, and three of us went in, two boys and one girl. We went in and opened our eyes wide. Shit! Grandfather’s secrets! The things we saw in that room only confirmed what a strange, disconcerting man he was. After seeing what was in there, we went out again, our hearts pounding, and called for silence. Our other brothers and sisters wanted to see what we’d seen, so we let them go in but, because we were nervous, for we knew we were doing something forbidden, we told them to hurry up and they rushed out wide-eyed. Then we put fingers on lips again and I knew, we all knew, what was meant by that, and we closed the door. Can anyone guess what we saw in that mysterious man’s sleeping room?

  We knew grandfather would soon be home from the cemetery and so we hurried to put everything back the way we’d found it. What did we see in that room? Before I say, we ought to think for a moment about what a great friend that man
who came to see him must have been. I say this because he made something happen that none of us had ever seen happen before, namely that grandfather came down from upstairs. Or did grandfather go out sometimes when we were asleep? Because, to us, grandfather leaving the house really was a big deal. And in our island’s culture, it’s believed that when something extraordinary is about to happen, there’s always a warning sign. In this case, the warning was grandfather going out with his friend to join the funeral procession, although I don’t know for sure whether they actually entered the cemetery. What happened after that was something truly extraordinary, one of the most extraordinary things that ever happened on our Atlantic Ocean island. But it wasn’t a good thing, it was very tragic, so not extraordinary in a good way. Something momentous. It might be said that we children unleashed an evil by going into grandfather’s room. I wouldn’t say that, but it is true that the momentous thing began that day, after that funeral. I don’t know if I’ll be able to remember all the details but I’ll try to, and I’ll tell you as much as I remember. But I’ll do it slowly, like telling a ghost story under a full moon, for it would be wrong to rush the telling of something so momentous.