By Night the Mountain Burns

by Juan Tomas Avila Laurel

  Afterwards, when things eventually got back to normal, and in light of the visit of that friend of his, we were told that grandfather had once worked on a boat, that he’d been to many countries, even that he’d been the captain of the ship he’d visited those countries on. And that other man, the one I’ve said was supposed to be a newcomer but who we thought we’d known all our lives, was one of his travel companions, or worked with grandfather on the boat at any rate. Have I not said several times that grandfather might have been an incomer? The thing was, grandfather was so strange, that’s why people thought he was an incomer and were always talking about him, trying to work him out. And as he was our grandfather, we asked our grandmother about him, though not all at once: one at a time and on different days, according to the particular doubts each of us had. But she never told us anything that satisfied us. So we decided that she either didn’t like him or didn’t know anything about him either. Besides, if she never talked to him, it made sense that she didn’t know anything about him. She wasn’t annoyed by our questioning, for she didn’t scold us; she just didn’t answer, and she made gestures to suggest there was nothing to say. Then we tried asking her when she was eating, knowing the best time to catch someone in a good mood is to catch them eating, but she just chewed, sucked on a bone and waved her hand in the air to suggest that maybe there was something to say, but who were we to bother her about it. We were children and we knew there were some things adults couldn’t tell children, so we assumed the reason for his strange behaviour, the crazy haircut and the way he didn’t want to have anything to do with anyone, was something serious, something children couldn’t be told. Grandfather didn’t speak to us, but this didn’t bother us the way the lack of fish did, and the fact that we suffered that lack because he didn’t know any fishermen. And this on an island surrounded by waters overflowing with fish, for the sea around us had so many fish that sometimes they fell out of it onto the beaches, like mangoes falling from a tree. You’d be walking along the beach and suddenly hear a great splashing, and you looked up and saw a big fish jump in the air, chasing a number of smaller fish that jumped in the air to evade their pursuer. And all that movement and jumping told of a great quantity of fish just a few feet from where you were standing. The splashing would continue, the jumping would go on, and then the smaller fish jumped onto the sand to avoid capture. There was no need for a net or bait or a hook: the fish just landed at your feet. The most common type of fish on our shores were sardines, and they sometimes spilled onto the sand by the handful. But it wasn’t unusual to come across fish of bigger sizes that way too, like tuna, or fish from the tuna family; not fish that liked rocks and deep waters but ones that moved about in schools searching for whatever it is they search for.

  Fish spilling onto the shore was nothing, nothing I tell you, compared to something similar that happened, though on a much larger scale and for reasons nobody understood. It happened less frequently, though it was regular in that it tended to happen around the same time most years, years long ago lost in time. So it was impossible to predict, but it was regular. That’s all I can say. If I’d seen it happen as an adult, I’d have tried to find out more about it, that wonder of our island’s oceans. What happened was that at a certain time, and without anyone understanding what caused it, there flowed onto all the island’s shores, onto every beach on the island, an unquantifiable number of squid. You could see them coming from way out at sea, one by one or in groups, rushing towards the shore and then onto the beach, where they stayed. Watching this curious phenomenon, it looked as if the squid had received a strange order they were determined to obey. After washing up on the beach they showed no sign of wanting to get back in the water, back to where they came from, which must have been very far away, deep out at sea, for squid weren’t common or easy to catch. Indeed it was very rare for a fisherman to catch such a specimen and it was generally thought that squid lived in a different part of the ocean, or in its extreme depths. Well that’s what we thought until this strange phenomenon occurred, this mass squid exodus, as we called it. Although it was more like a mass suicide or a mass expulsion than a mass exodus, for it surely wasn’t something those molluscs would have done voluntarily. What was it? What drew them on such a journey away from wherever they lived – and on a one-way trip at that? Was it because they were chased by predators, as happened on a smaller scale with the sardines? It was something nobody understood, for the quantities involved were truly amazing: hundreds and thousands of squid would wash up on the beaches, stranded in the sand or on rocks, and perish, never to return to the sea. What an incredible thing! What an amazing phenomenon! I’ve said it once but I’ll say it again: what was it?

  Whenever it happened, and it always happened in the afternoon, the first people to see it would start yelling to let everyone else know: ‘Squid! Squid! Squid!’ That was all it took for everyone to come running and for the great squid festival to begin. There were huge piles of squid run aground on the beach in the big village. Piles and piles of them. Then more piles on the next beach, and more on the next beach after that, and so on; hundreds of squid landing on the shores of our island for no apparent reason. And down came men, women and children to harvest the bumper sea crop. And they went on shouting squid squid squid, and no one went without, and no one knew what to do with so much squid. And something needed to be done to provide for times of shortage. So, after the harvest was complete and all the squid that had spilled out from the Atlantic Ocean had been gathered in, decisions had to be made about how to make all that nourishment last for the days and months ahead. But before anything was decided, the island’s fishermen had made their preparations and were licking their lips in anticipation. For they knew squid meat was the perfect bait. With squid meat for bait, you could lure any fish onto your hook, even fish that usually only ate plants. And there was one fish in particular that was very fond of squid, a fish that swims in our waters and doesn’t have a name in Spanish, only in our language. It’s a flat fish and it must be an oily fish, for it has a blueish colour. We call it pámpan’a. And so the squid harvest was always eclipsed by the great pámpan’a harvest, and we thought we lived by the most bountiful sea in all the world, somewhere so bountiful that fish could just be plucked from the water. For the fishermen caught pámpan’a in such huge quantities … Amazing, truly amazing quantities. They caught so many that nobody, absolutely nobody, went without fish for several days. Even families with grandfathers who had no friends and refused to go to the beach to fraternise with the fishermen. Widows, single women, disabled men, recluses, men who didn’t fish because they had a different job, everyone, everywhere; no one went without a fish to boil in their pot. Fish was smoked, fried, salted, lightly boiled, the water used as the next day’s condiment, and everything came accompanied with what was left over from a few days ago, namely squid, boiled and salted. What huge quantities of seafood we ate! Truly amazing quantities! We could never have imagined, without seeing it before our eyes, that there were so many fish in the sea.

  We ate the squid, we ate the pámpan’a, and later we experienced periods when we hungered for fish again. In truth, the people on the island didn’t appreciate the squid itself as much as they appreciated the marvel of its coming. Because the sudden abundance of squid was a mere prelude to that huge fish harvest, to what we considered the sea’s fertile season. We saw the sea as our island’s larder, the place where we kept the fish assigned to us; any man past adolescence could pick up his fishing tackle and go out to sea at any time, so long as it wasn’t stormy. And with such a larder at our disposal, households with men didn’t go as hungry as households without them. Or households with one who refused to have anything to do with the sea, even turned his back to it.

  The sea’s resources seemed so readily available to us that people overlooked the need to make provisions for the times of shortage. Ways might have been found to make that huge quantity of fish last to cover less plentiful times, times when men went out to sea a
nd came back complaining that it was too windy, that it was too calm, that little fish were eating the bait and stopping it reaching the bigger fish, that conditions basically weren’t right for fishing … Some efforts were made, fish were salted and smoked, the only preserving techniques the adults knew on our island, but the smoked and salted provisions soon ran out and then it was back to eating chillies again.

  Wham! Blowing on your lips, and ouch if you touched yourself where you shouldn’t.

  Fish was for us a product of primary necessity; as I’ve already said, if there was no fish, you didn’t eat. What I didn’t realise as a child was that the whole island suffered from disastrous shortages. Yes, they can be described as such. And maybe I didn’t realise the island suffered disastrous shortages because I didn’t wash my own clothes or light the lamp in our house. Therefore I didn’t know there was no soap on the whole island and I didn’t realise that kerosene was in such short supply that at a certain time at night we had to switch the lamp off or turn the flame down to preserve what little we had. Reducing the light’s intensity was a tricky operation and only grandmother did it well. It seemed like such a simple thing but really it wasn’t and if you hadn’t mastered it, and we little ones never mastered it, nor did our aunties, it was better not to get involved. Only grandmother did it well, and this was significant, for it might happen that the lamp went out in the middle of the night, leaving the house in total darkness, all because whoever had reduced the flame had not done so with a steady hand. Then grandmother would have to trouble herself with getting out of bed and calling for a neighbour in a low voice, asking if we might relight our lamp from hers. And grandmother did this because she believed that so many children under one roof ought not to spend the night without any light, in case something happened to one of us and some problem needed resolving. And why did she call on the neighbour in such a situation? Because the neighbour shared her sentiments and also kept the light on low all night. And because we didn’t have any matches in the house.

  When the lamp went out for some reason before we’d gone to sleep, it constituted something of an education for me: I started to learn about our life and started to realise that things weren’t the way I’d always seen them. I started to realise that we didn’t have it so good. That kerosene, the liquid saviour, was scarce, that we had no matches and possibly no soap either. But how did all the kerosene lamps in our big village get lit? The same way the fires were lit. You took a coconut shell, with its leftover kernel, and went to the neighbour’s house, or to the neighbour’s neighbour, and asked for some burning embers. And you went back home and got some kindling you kept in the house and added it to the embers and the cuscús, which is what we call the kernel when it goes dry after all the oil is pounded out, and you lit the fire. If your neighbour had matches but already had a fire going in the stone tripod, she saved on a match and sent you into the kitchen to light your lamp. You had to kneel over the ashes, and this always betrayed what you’d been doing, though some people were able to squat and avoid getting dirty.

  If your immediate neighbour had nothing to make fire with, you went to the next one, and from the next one to the next one, a hundred yards, two hundred, it didn’t matter, you might walk two hundred and fifty yards until you found someone with smoke coming out of their kitchen. Often what you did when you were sent out with the lamp was peer over the rooftops looking for smoke. Then you headed straight for where you saw it, avoiding having to go from house to house singing ‘Mum says can we have some fire?’ That’s what you said in our island’s language.

  What with going from house to house asking for embers, a matchstick or a fireside to kneel over and stain your knees on, I realised that the adults on the island were exasperated by our situation and sought solutions in everything they could lay their hands on. But they could hardly lay their hands on anything, for our island was all alone at sea and there was no other land we could join forces with to combat our lack of everything. It was around then that I realised we islanders had no one to depend on but ourselves. That’s to say, we were on our own out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. People had given up hope of the boat ever coming back – the boat from the place where our fathers were. And in this great solitude, they stared out at the horizon all day, looking for a boat to appear that we could go and ask for things from. As children we saw how they rushed out to sea whenever they saw a stick on the horizon, thinking it might be a boat full of everything we needed. And they set off chasing after it with such conviction that they persuaded themselves the strength in their arms was equal to the power of the motor on the boat they were trying to catch. In any case, they tried, and they came back looking so disappointed it was as if they’d received confirmation that our situation was hopeless.

  In the period I’m talking about, those who had someone to go out fishing ate fish, and those who had nylon and hooks went out fishing. So the lack of fish was considerable in some families. We longed for the big fish to chase the little fish and for them all to fling themselves on the sand, as we’d seen happen so many times before. And we longed for the squid beaching, that it might become a weekly event. And if we longed for such miracles, which is basically what they were, for it’s quite something to have fish flung at your feet, it was because our situation had become desperate. And it was during those desperate times that the extraordinary events I mentioned began to occur. All the evil came at once. The worst moments in the history of the island.

  With the shortage of everything really squeezing at our throats, a boat appeared off the coast, and it was so close that we could tell it was taking fish from our larder, our sea. And so out we went, for we had something to say about this. But it turned out to be a boat from a friendly nation, stealing fish because it knew our island belonged to no one. Or rather that it belonged to us, but that we had no control over it. And we didn’t say anything about what they were doing, for every man’s conscience is his own, but we gave them a list of things we needed. This was it: soap, kerosene, matches and food. We didn’t ask for clothing because there was no need to say we lacked things to wear. But do you know what those men gave us? Cigarettes and fish. So many they wouldn’t fit in the canoes our men had gone out to the boat in. Can you believe it? They gave us cigarettes and fish. It was therefore clear that the owners of the boat from the friendly nation knew the fish were ours and wished to share them with us. And what about the tobacco? Our men had an unhealthy yearning for it, because for a long time they’d been reduced to smoking papaya leaves. So the men came back from the boat and no one can say things weren’t shared out evenly: fish for the women, tobacco for the men. In fact hardly any women on the island smoked, though a few of the older ones did something similar, chewing it and stuffing it in their gums. But only a few of them, and they never used it as snuff.

  When they saw all that fish and tobacco, some people thought we could maybe have done better, that fish and tobacco wasn’t exactly what we needed most. So it was decided it would be a good idea if the women went to ask for themselves, because if the men on the boat saw the women and talked to them, then things would doubtless change for the better. That’s right, for the better. The problem was that the women on our island didn’t know how to paddle – they still don’t – and so they had to be taken out to the boat to talk to the white men. I remember one of the women told me … No, nobody told me anything. The result of the deal the women struck with the white men was the arrival on our island – not in the canoes that the women were taken out in, but in the big boat’s fishing vessels – of everything the women felt we lacked in that terrible time of shortages: soap, kerosene, salt, clothes, shoes, matches, a variety of things to eat, fish and cigarettes, and alcoholic drinks. There were several containers of soap powder, which was good because it meant people could take a handful for themselves and everyone left happy. The same thing with the salt, because most of it was unrefined. The alcohol and tobacco caused a great furore among the men, and one or two of the women too, it
has to be said. A few people were lucky enough to get a shirt; others made do with seeing someone they knew take one away. The products that stretched the furthest were the fish, the salt and various things for making fire. And the alcohol, which spreads fast. Perhaps due to its flammable nature.

  The time came for the boat to up anchor. Months went by and the things we got from the friendly nation’s fishing boat ran out. One of the women who had been to talk to the white men was the goddaughter of that man we thought had always been on the island and who was friendly with our grandfather. It so happened that this man, who I’m not sure we didn’t confuse with somebody else, had been not to the place where our fathers were – the place you went to in a boat full of hens and cockerels and other edible things, donated by our grandmother and other women from the island – but somewhere else: Calabar. And there were Igbos in Calabar and they were people who ate other people. We were told you had to be very careful with Calabarians. Well, that friend of grandfather’s was a bit of a joker, among other things, and he let it be understood by everyone on the island that he’d been to Calabar and knew things about the people who lived there. In fact he sometimes talked the way people from Calabar talked and he founded an association of people who danced at Christmas dressed the way Calabarians dress, and talked the way men who liked eating other men talked. Anyway, his goddaughter took part in the expedition to the boat, where the women went to see those white men and talked to them so well they reached an understanding. And the fruit of that understanding was the growth of that girl’s belly, a growth that remained even when everything else from that expedition of understanding had run out. In fact not everyone knew that her belly was growing, nor did they know that the growth was a result of her having talked to, or with, the white men on the boat. But her belly went on growing and people gradually found out that she was expecting a child and that the child would be the son of a white man, and that only she knew who he was because the liaison on the boat had taken place out of sight of everyone else in the village. She was a goddaughter, it’s true, but she lived with her sister, the person she was closest to in life. Her parents had died a long time ago, back when nobody could imagine that one day we’d find ourselves in this situation.