The days went by and the island gradually went back to being gripped by shortages, and then something happened that frightened everybody. In fact all the wicked things started to happen, as if they’d been lining up, waiting their turn. The first thing was that a woman and her sister set off up the Pico carrying a piece of smoking kindling. They were going to their plantations in the mountain’s foothills, next to a lake – Lake Nosopay. The lake and the mountain look like they’re side by side when viewed from a certain angle, but really they lie on different planes and are not that close together at all. The mountain, the Pico, or el Pico de Fuego, to give it its full Spanish name, looks down on everything else, defiant and proud, and at its feet, as if asleep, lies Nosopay, the lake. Nosopay is also the name given to the flat plateau above, from where you catch a sudden glimpse of the lake down below when the plateau breaks off into a sharp precipice. You look out into a void and see the lake in a vast bowl at the bottom, its water disturbed only by a gentle breeze.
So the two sisters set off towards Nosopay carrying a piece of smoking kindling, for they planned to make a fire up there, at the base of a dried-out tree they wanted to fell and use as firewood. If they’d been more agile, or if they’d been born men rather than women, they’d have climbed the dried-out tree with axes and chopped it down, bit by bit, branch by branch, for a tree gives firewood for many months, many, many months. But they didn’t have axes, or they didn’t have the dexterity to use them, and they’d been born women. And back then there weren’t enough men on the island for all the undexterous women. Which was why the two sisters resorted to fire, burning through the base of the tree instead of cutting through it. Furthermore, by making a fire on that plantation of theirs, they could pull a yam from the ground and leave it to cook in the embers, giving them something to fill their stomachs with while they worked. So they made the fire and got stuck into their tasks. They worked from the moment the sun poked its nose over the horizon until they felt they’d done enough, when they stopped and straightened their backs; it was time to go round the plantation with the basket to collect all the yam and cassava they’d pulled up, the fruits of their labour of a few months ago, plus any bits of cane they’d cut down while searching for the yam and cassava. On that Atlantic Ocean island, harvesting was something you did day in, day out, for no one had an area of land large enough to harvest everything all at once, at least not a harvest big enough to keep the whole family from hardship. When those two sisters finally straightened their backs, it was just a few hours until sunset, but the king of stars was nowhere to be seen due to the thick clouds of smoke.
‘Dios mío, we got distracted,’ said the older sister.
‘We’re in trouble! We’re in big trouble … ’ added the younger one, putting her hands on her head, tears already surfacing.
What had happened? Well, while they were busy at work, bent at the waist, eyes glued to the ground, they’d not once stood up, and so they hadn’t realised that the fire they’d made around the base of that dried-out tree had spread, that it had burned through the dry leaves, dry twigs and dry grass under the tree and reached the next field, a field full of shrubs about three feet tall that were of no use to anybody but that were also dry at that time of year. The women’s eyes bulged and they started to scream. They knew they had to get out of there fast, not because they were in danger of getting burned, for they could still escape on foot, but because they knew they had set a calamity in motion. The ground in the field where the shrubs were was so stony that nobody on the island ever risked planting there, despite the fact that it was an area four or five times the size of any plot of farmland the women owned, farmland they inherited from their parents, specifically their mothers. Whenever anyone looked at that large area and thought about planting on it, they remembered that anything they raised above their heads, a hoe or a pick, or whatever name they gave to the tool they had, would meet stone as soon as it hit the ground, that in fact that whole area covered in shrubs was one giant rock. But the awful thing was that if that area caught fire, the flames would spread through it fast, skirt around the Pico and advance on the big village itself. And before that happened, assuming it didn’t go out for some lucky reason, the fire would raze all the neighbouring farmland for, as it made its way down towards sea level, it would meet pockets of earth where a few trees grew, and in among those trees were plots where women had planted to make the most of what opportunities there were in that oasis of rock. Too much effort had gone into tending those little plots for a fire to consume them before the women had reaped their rewards. So the two sisters would earn the wrath of all the women whose plots had been destroyed – and this before the worst of it for, after raging through the plantations, the fire would advance and seek lower ground, sea level. And sea level, in the direction the fire was travelling, meant the big village and everyone’s homes.
There was nothing those two sisters could do about the fire other than pray to the Señor on high that the wind didn’t pick up and fan the flames. The water in the lake below twinkled before their eyes. Water to put the fire out. But it was an optical illusion: what the naked eye couldn’t see was the impassable precipice. And if the precipice was impassable, carrying buckets of water out on people’s heads was simply unfeasible. Besides, there were no buckets anywhere on the mountain.
The sisters rushed to gather up what they’d harvested, loaded it on their heads and ran to get home. But the fire had already reached the edge of the path, so that if they tried to go back the way they’d come, they risked becoming surrounded. They probably wouldn’t have been surrounded and, even if they had, they probably wouldn’t have been incinerated, but the chance of it happening frightened them and it’s easy to imagine how, under the circumstances, without being able to see properly in the smoke, they weren’t thinking straight. Anyone in their position would have been afraid of the wind making matters worse by blowing in from the right, stoking the fire and forcing them to move off the path to the left. And with loads on their heads, panicked and unable to see properly, they didn’t know what lay off the path to the left – which in fact was nothing much – and they feared losing their footing and falling off the precipice, delivering their hard but young lives to Dios, and whoever else, down on the muddy banks of the lake.
So they retraced their steps in search of a different route. The safest option was a path on the edge of the precipice that skirted round the lake before descending on the other side, via countless steep steps, coming out by the main access point to the lake, the waters of which were useless to them. From there, the path ran in an almost straight line all the way to the big village. This was the path the sisters took, but it was a long journey. Therefore, by the time they reached the village, our village, the big village, their family had become very worried. Having seen the fire, they feared something terrible had happened and some of them had gone off in search of the two sisters, for on our island everybody knows how long it ought to take anyone to get anywhere. When they then saw the two sisters approaching from a totally different direction, they realised the situation could be about to get worse. However they were a long way from imagining how much worse: that in a few days’ time they’d experience the most significant and distressing moment of their lives. Nor could I imagine I was about to experience, albeit in someone else’s skin, the most significant and distressing moment of my life, my life on our quiet Atlantic Ocean island. And it wasn’t just significant and distressing, but an evil that wrapped its tentacles around so many people, including me. Around our lives.
The sun turned crimson, ready to take itself away to wherever it went at that time of day, and by now everyone’s eyes were fixed on the mountain. Everything else paled into insignificance as we watched the fire spread, a fire whose cause we still didn’t know. We had eyes only for that advancing fire, ears only for its crackle. And the fire went on advancing. The sun set and night awoke but we didn’t notice the stars in the sky, nor any other jewels up in the great canopy: ou
r eyes were transfixed by the fire, our ears by the crackle of the dry branches as they burned. Many plantations were at risk but, as the fire spread, the real risk was to our lives. If it went on advancing as it was doing, there was a strong chance it would reach the houses on the edge of the big village, and from there it would rage through the village, a village where most of the houses were made of dry wood and jambab’u. Everything would burn to satisfy the fire. Whenever I’d seen fires before, fires nobody had provoked but that were impossible to put out, I’d been struck by how many things had to burn to satisfy the fire, to make it happy. And so we were all unhappy. Everyone was on tenterhooks. The mountain would burn, the fire would spread, our houses would burn to the ground and there was nothing we could do about it other than paddle out to sea in canoes and wait until everything had been consumed. And our family had it particularly bad because it was hard to imagine grandfather, the only man of the house, managing to find us a canoe and paddle us to safety. He didn’t have a canoe. I was only a child at the time but I could tell we couldn’t put the fire out by turning on all the street taps in the village and fetching buckets and buckets of water, and fetching buckets and buckets from the sea if there was no water in the taps. Child’s eyes they may have been, but I could tell the fire was big, really big, too big for us to fight, too big for us to extinguish and save ourselves from incineration. So the fire would push us out into the immensity of the deep blue sea, and it was night and we wouldn’t know what to do … Well, I just couldn’t see how we could all go out to sea in the middle of the night and not come to any harm so, as far as I was concerned, the fire had to burn itself out up there, on the slopes of the Pico, where it had started.
Night advanced and the fire advanced and we went upstairs to grandfather’s balcony. And there we saw that he was very worried too. So much so that the doors to the balcony were wide open and grandfather was on his feet the whole time we were up there. He watched the fire with a worried look on his face and he made no attempt to hide it. Maybe he thought the same as me: that if the fire penned us in, he wouldn’t be able to save us and we’d be the only ones in the whole village to perish. Doubtless I wasn’t thinking about the business of going out in canoes very clearly, for I’d always been nervous of the sea. But anyway, grandfather made frantic, worried gestures and, of course, seeing him so affected made us worry all the more. If he’d appeared calm before us, we’d probably have thought the whole thing was serious but nothing the adults couldn’t handle, the adults who weren’t like him.
Night advanced, the fire went on advancing and grandfather remained where he was, standing up, perhaps cursing his lack of paddling expertise, and we noticed that he was crying, and, what’s more, we noticed that the chair he usually sat on, which was empty right then, had a round hole in the seat, where the middle part of his backside would go. But it wasn’t a hole made by accident: it was a special chair with a hole that had been put there deliberately. This discovery, big though it was, couldn’t distract us from our fear, a fear grandfather made worse with his crying. We were crying too and so his tears added to our tears, although only one or two of us actually saw the tears on his cheeks. As night was well advanced and the whole thing was shaping up to be very distressing, grandmother sent us to bed. It was impossible to tell what she thought about the whole situation, but she thought it was time we went to bed, even though she must have known we wouldn’t be able to sleep with a fire breathing down our necks, with our lives hanging by a thread that might be singed at any moment. We could tell she was afraid, but she hid her emotions from us and so we didn’t know whether she thought the same way we did about grandfather’s attitude, the feelings he’d openly shown, or whether she felt the same way he did. We knew she was afraid but it was impossible to gauge how afraid she was. Nevertheless, when she sent us to bed we obeyed, and we did so because we needed someone to give us an order, as an indication of the gravity of the situation if nothing else. An order from an adult, a person we loved and trusted, and who we knew loved us. If she’d told us to go down to the beach and paddle aimlessly out into the deep blue sea, we’d have obeyed, understanding that it was our only hope given the grave danger we faced. But she told us to go to bed, so we went to bed, a bed we typically woke up in several times during the night because it was sopping wet. And do you know why it was sopping wet? Yes, you know. Oh, the stink of stale urine! Anyway, there we were, lying in bed, while outside, up on the Pico, a fire burned that threatened to raze the big village to the ground. We’d left grandfather up on his feet, rather than sitting in his chair, a chair that had a hole in the middle of the seat, a hole he usually hid by covering it with a cloth, or a rag, or some kind of fabric at any rate, that he draped over his knees and tucked his hands beneath. We left him there unable to hold back the tears, even if they were only two little trickles that ran down his face. The way we saw it, those tears were revealing, because he was an adult. If an adult was crying, it was because the situation was a lost cause. Why did the man cry? Did the fire remind him of something that had happened to him before he knew us? What did it remind him of? Or maybe he cried because he wasn’t an adult but a child? That could have been it, that would have explained a lot, because on our island the only people who didn’t fish or paddle canoes and who cried about things they didn’t understand were children. Nor could children enter the vidjil to talk to the adults there. Didn’t I begin by saying I never knew whether my grandfather was mad? Didn’t I say I never quite knew what he was? Well, we discovered part of what he was that day, on the balcony, and when we went into his room. Which I’ll tell you about later.
That night was one of the most restless nights of our young lives and we woke up in a soaking wet bed, the unstoppable river having flowed with such vigour it might have been used to put the fire out. The mattress was sodden, from head to toe, sodden with something that seemed to gush out of you the moment you were about to wake. Those morning pees were the worst, the ones that happened when the adults had already left the house. They were the worst because they made you think that if you’d only woken up a minute earlier, you’d have done so with a full bladder and been able to open the front door and aim your stream in the sand. You wouldn’t bother writing your name or drawing a house or anything so early in the morning, you’d stretch and yawn as you peed, eyes half-closed. Peeing outside was the best; we always peed outside, even though we had a bathroom in the house. So when you woke to find the bed freshly wet with the spray of your own pee, you were angry with yourself because you’d been so near to waking up a hero, returning triumphant from war. I say war, but whatever really, anything you can return from triumphant. Or undefeated, at least. Not having been struck down by stones, witchcraft or evil.
We got out of the wet bed and went to look at the mountain that had put the fear of death in us the previous night. Everything was bare and black. Bare because all the vegetation on the mountain had burned, leaving only the rock itself, the immense rock that was the mountain. And black because it was all scorched, that greedy fire having raged through everything in its path: bushes, shrubs, lizards, centipedes, snakes, the nests of hens that ran wild on the island and laid their eggs up there. All the rats had died, rats that were the scourge of the plantations. But the worst of the inventory was the total destruction of the plantations. We didn’t see the damage for ourselves, for we didn’t go up there, but from the house we saw women come back from the plantations in tears. The look of despondency on their faces told of what they had seen. Mango trees, that belonged to nobody and everybody, their leaves and fruit burned along with their seeds, the seeds which were the fruits of the future. Cassava plants with stems and leaves burned, though the cassavas themselves had been saved, protected as they were underground. Banana and plantain trees with everything burned, and only those yet to bear fruit would ever grow back. Yam plants with the overground parts burned, the leaves and stalks that tangle up with neighbouring trees as they climb, though the yams, like the cassavas, had survi
ved, meaning the owner of the plantation would have to have a very good memory to remember where she’d planted everything. Malanga plants weren’t so affected because they didn’t really grow on the Pico; they needed the moister ground of the southern plantations. All the snakes, crabs, lizards and lizards’ eggs burned. And I mustn’t forget the rats, all of them destroyed by the fire, all those rats and mice that were such a scourge of the women’s plantations. Maybe I already mentioned the rats, but it’s worth mentioning them again, because of the terrible damage they used to cause. The eggs of all the snakes also burned. Can you imagine the job the women now faced to resurrect their farms, to revive them from the state I’ve just described? They cried over the catastrophe that had befallen them. They’d already cried the night before, when the fire was raging, but out of fear that the flames would devour us. Now they cried for their wasted labour. They left the yams as they were, for the overground parts would sprout again with the first rains. They recovered what plantains and bananas they could, those that had reached a certain ripeness and hadn’t been totally scorched. As for the cassava, the cornerstone of our island diet, they pulled them from the ground and rescued what they could. The cassava plant can’t survive the death of its stalk, and the stalks had surrendered their sap to the all-consuming fire. It was such a terrible pity, but, more than a pity, it meant a lot of hard work, hard work wasted and hard work to come, to make use of so many cassavas, large and small, cassavas that should have remained underground and sustained the family for several years. Of course the women put them to good use, making breads and flour, but the plots were left moribund, as if they’d never been planted in, so the women would have to start again from scratch at the beginning of the rainy season, plant everything all over again and then wait almost a year before gathering the first fruits. It was such a pity to have lost so many years of effort, and all because of a fire whose cause still nobody knew. Given what I know now, and all that happened afterwards, I can say with some conviction that it was for the best that nobody ever knew exactly how the fire started. For I know now that all people are not treated equally when it comes to apportioning blame for bad things that happen in communities. I know that, in this world of ours, how facts are judged depends on who’s doing the judging. I learned all this later, after seeing what happened on our Atlantic Ocean island.
By Night the Mountain Burns Page 5