Time passed, the tide came in and went back out, big fish were caught, octopus was eaten. There were rains and storms, the sun rose and set, and when it rose once more the woman’s pregnancy had grown big enough for all to see, the woman who’d talked to the sailors from the friendly nation. By the way, does anyone know why we say that boat belonged to a friendly nation? For it certainly wasn’t the only nation whose boats came to take our fish. Boats from many different places came to our waters, our shores, but when our men saw them and took to the sea to go and ask them for a handout, the sailors of those boats must have thought the people in the flimsy canoes were going to accuse them of stealing, for they quickly hauled in their nets, wound in their reels and disappeared over the horizon. Isn’t that disgraceful? They made it obvious that they were thieves, and what’s more, thieves who couldn’t care less about us, every man for himself, each to his own suffering. Sometimes the boats from nations we didn’t know even waited until our canoes were right up beside their boats and then they fired jets of dirty water, or hot water, at our men, to show us they were prepared to play ugly. They tried to sink our canoes, or maybe poison our men with toxic water. Gracias a Dios, our canoes didn’t sink. They capsized, but thankfully all the men on our Atlantic Ocean island can swim, although there was no one to teach us in our house. The arrival of these boats on our shores was fairly frequent and so we soon learned to differentiate the friendly nation’s flag from the flags of other nations. There were all kinds of flags: three bright horizontal stripes, one of them blue; three vertical stripes, one of them black; a single dark colour with a white sun in the middle; a single dark colour with a picture of something curved, the colour of mango. No one knew what nation this last flag belonged to, but it had, along with one of the tricolours, the fastest engine driver: as soon as a canoe left our shore, the boat set off at full pelt, as if the driver had heard there were witches on our island that had to be avoided at all costs.
Do you know what colour the friendly nation’s flag was? I doubt the woman who dealt with the sailors on the boat knew. Back then, the women who were old enough to go and talk to the sailors didn’t know much about the flags of nations. Did the woman even know for sure which sailor she’d had the liaison with when she fell pregnant? She wouldn’t have recognised the flag and I doubt she’d have recognised the sailor. For one thing, white people all look alike, even those who live under different flags, never mind those who live under the same one.
Coloured flags, men who had to be liaised with, women who were taken out to the boat of the friendly nation by other men. Flags that had to be distinguished beforehand, paddles put at rest if the boat with its nets cast was from a nation that liked to play ugly. If the men on our island had trouble recognising the flags, how could the women be expected to recognise them? As I’ve already said, the women didn’t know the flags and it’s unlikely they’d ever even noticed them. And that’s because in order to see them you had to be quite close to the boats, those thieving boats, friendly or otherwise. But the women on our island went about on foot until the need arose to go somewhere by canoe, when they would find a man to transport them. But even then, they would sit in the canoe facing the man doing the paddling, the canoeman they’d asked to take them wherever they needed to go. So to get to the meeting with the men on the boat, the canoemen paddled with their backs to the little village, meaning the women sat with their backs to the horizon and, with their backs turned, they wouldn’t have seen the flag of the nation of the men they were about to reach an understanding with, in order to help ease the desperate situation the island found itself in. And once the canoe was moored at the side of the boat, you could no longer see the flag. The women therefore liaised with the men oblivious to their nation or flag. Gracias a Dios, those boats were from a friendly nation and didn’t flee as soon as our canoes took to the water.
The pregnancy grew and that woman gave birth to a pretty little child they wrapped in rags, for by then there was nothing left of what had been brought back from the boat. And nobody had known at the time that visiting the boat would result in the birth of a child who’d require clean clothes. Anyway, the baby was born. Time passed and by now those white men knew when our waters were most full of fish and so they came back the following season, after a particular length of time had passed. They came back in the same boat, with the same name painted on the back and the same flag, but with different people who answered to different names. For example, the one who might have been the father of the newborn child didn’t come. However, I doubt that woman could have pointed to any one man and said he was the father of that pretty child. Unless something had happened on the boat and only one man … No, there was no way of telling; she wouldn’t be able to tell.
They cast out their nets, which is why they’d come, stole our fish and then looked to the shore, and when they saw us coming in our canoes they were pleased to see us. And they listened to the story of the white child being born in our big village, and they held their hands up and said no, the child’s father was not with them, but yes, they ought to do something for the boy, who was still then only a baby. And so they gave us fish, they gave us salt, soap, matches, cigarettes, clothing for the baby boy and for other children, kerosene to light our houses on dark nights and many different types of things to eat, for they had lots of food on the boat to keep them going for several months away from home, away from their nation. They also gave us fish hooks and nylon, which we’d really struggled without since the boat from the place where our fathers were had stopped coming to the island. And they held the boy in their hands and they danced with him gleefully and they said he reminded them of the father, who could not, for whatever reason, be with them. And, because he reminded them of the father, they said that child of theirs should be called Luis Mari.
They came ashore and visited the house where their boy lived, met all his brothers and sisters, and realised they probably ought to do more for him. But they had a busy job sailing the seas and stealing other people’s fish, and they couldn’t afford to worry too much about a boy growing up without a specific father, for who knows what really happened out on that boat. So the sailors from the boat with the flag of the friendly nation decided their duty was done and they bid us farewell, their boat’s store-rooms overflowing with fish taken from our waters. The men from the island who went out to the boat saw this for themselves. Goodbye Atlantic Ocean island, goodbye Luis Mari. Goodbye sister-in-law. We’ll be back to steal your fish again at a particular time in the future, and we hope to find the boy has grown and the mother is well. But given what we’ve just seen, it wouldn’t surprise us at all if we came back and were told the boy had gone to fill his place in the cemetery, which incidentally doesn’t seem to have too many places left. You really do have a large cemetery for an island of so few inhabitants. Bye.
Months passed and everything returned to the way it had been before. Those inhabitants who weren’t so well connected to the white men from the boat went back to living with outstretched hands. The first thing to run out was the tobacco, the island’s supply of cigarettes. Men were soon forced to return to old ways, smoking papaya leaves, or else they wandered the streets with bundles of fish in search of a cigarette or half a tobacco leaf. Women kept tobacco stored away like gold, real gold, and they called their tobacco leaves their ‘husband’. Tobacco became the husband of any woman who didn’t have a flesh-and-bone husband. Tobacco in all its forms, including snuff. The women pounded tobacco into snuff and added the powder of a stone only known to people who liked sniffing it. I’ve already said how some older women stuffed tobacco in their gums, which I never understood, but that wasn’t why tobacco became a woman’s husband. Tobacco was like a husband because it enabled single women to get things they usually needed a man for. They kept their tobacco in a strongbox and turned to it whenever the need arose. And when a man yearned for tobacco more than he yearned for anything else, he took to the streets with his fishing bundle and offered fish in exchange
for tobacco, doing so with the following cry: ‘Fish, tobacco! Fish, tobacco!’ If he needed palm oil, it was: ‘Fish, palm oil! Fish, palm oil!’ If a single woman had a ‘husband’ in a strongbox, she could do deals to satisfy her needs: if she needed a man to clear a plot of land she wanted to plant on, if she needed a canoeman to transport her and her children to the settlements, if she needed a tapper to give her a pot of palm wine to take to a Misa for the dead, etc, etc … I speak only of the needs a woman might satisfy by keeping her ‘husband’ safe in a strongbox. Tobacco was a sort of life insurance to them. Even so, the time inevitably came when there was no longer a scrap of tobacco anywhere on the island. And the men, driven on by their craving, made their bundles larger, the fish in their offerings more colourful, and they headed out into the street with the same cry on their lips: ‘Fish, tobacco! Fish, tobacco!’ And they covered every street, the entire village, and found nothing. All that was left in the strongbox was the smell, a smell that lingered in the houses, clinging to clothes hung up for some special occasion. ‘Ahhh!’ sighed the smokers as they breathed in the air from the strongbox, trying to satisfy their craving with the smell.
Yes, tobacco life insurance, and I think the tobacco husband was actually more useful than the flesh-and-bone one, because the tobacco husband could fish, clear land and transport a woman and her load wherever she needed to go, which was all real husbands did back then anyway. And if there was no fishing line in the strongbox for the flesh-and-bone husband to use, nor any tobacco or cigarettes, soap or kerosene, he probably wouldn’t have been able to satisfy the needs of the household. Furthermore, a flesh-and-bone husband might lose his strength for clearing small plots of land. So tobacco always trumped them as husbands. Ah, yes, and brandy too. I could never understand why men on our island went to such great lengths to get products that provided enjoyment for such a short amount of time. It made me think that maybe we had more than just material needs on the island. But what could be made of a man who spent his whole day sitting in a canoe on the choppy sea and then prowled the streets looking for tobacco and brandy as soon as he set foot on land? As a child, I thought tobacco and brandy must be the most powerful substances known to man. It’s easy to see why youngsters desire cigarettes and brandy when they see the strongest men in their communities making superhuman efforts to get them. Youngsters look up to such men and think the quickest way to be like them is to get tobacco and alcohol for themselves.
My grandfather, the house, his room, that hair, which I think he groomed in the privacy of his sleeping room. I’ve said it before, but I’ll say it again now he’s come back to mind: what was it with that haircut? I know some people make deals and pacts with dangerous beings and if their deals turn sour they have to honour whatever they agreed to, which might mean doing strange things in public. But although we suffered terrible hardship on the island, we did have mirrors. As a man who’d once been a sailor, the captain of a ship even, grandfather must have had a mirror and he must have looked at himself and seen that his haircut looked ridiculous. And though it’s true he never left the house, people still saw him, and they must all have thought that crazy haircut really didn’t suit him. How could that man he went to the cemetery with, a man who was supposed to be his friend, not have said anything about such an awful haircut? What were they hiding? What secrets did they share? What mysterious things were they mixed up in for something that everyone saw and thought ugly to be of no consequence to them? They who were adults, older men even! I mention his haircut again because we found nothing in his room to explain it. Whatever his reasons were for having that haircut, they weren’t reasons of a tangible or material nature, just as the reasons for his overall behaviour lay beyond our grasp. We saw things in his room, but nothing to explain why an adult man would shave the hair off one side of his head and act like it was perfectly normal, indeed act like it was the only hairstyle to have.
Furthermore, why did he cry on the night of the fire? I ask this now, when I’m no longer a child, for, looking back, I see how inconsiderate it was of him to shed those tears in front of us, that he had no appreciation of how we’d react to seeing him cry. I think he either didn’t know how to act like an adult or basically wasn’t an adult, and all the people who cared for him, or gave him food, must have thought the same. Grandmother and our mothers, and even our fathers who were away in that place you went to by boat, all treated grandfather like a child who needed looking after. And why did he never speak when there were so many children around him who were anxious to hear what he had to say? Had something happened to him when he was younger that caused him to lose his voice? And what secret did my grandmother’s niece know that enabled her to chat to him, or at least to seem satisfied by their conversations? If I’m asking all these questions again, it’s because I still don’t know the answers. And like I said, I’ll talk about what was in his room later, when it’s time to talk about him again.
Several days after the Pico burned, we were in the square playing billiards when what I’ve described as the most significant and distressing thing in the island’s history occurred. Did I say billiards? As kids we had a set of see-through plastic balls with coloured pictures inside them, pictures of flowers and things like that. We liked those balls a lot, so much that one day, out of curiosity, we broke into them to find out what the pictures really were. But as soon as we broke into them, the pictures disappeared, so we stopped doing it pretty quickly. It’s always sad when you break something pretty but it’s especially sad when you do it deliberately and it proves to be pointless. Anyway, we used to play a game with those balls, a game we called billiards. The game consisted of throwing your ball to try and hit your opponent’s ball, while proving your skill at laying traps, exploiting openings and speaking in the special jargon of the game. Part of the tactics involved drawing lines in the sand with your hands while saying the names of the positions and moves in the special jargon. But, just as there were shortages of everything on the island, so we ran out of the balls, which were white people’s balls, and then we couldn’t play any more. But we couldn’t just stop playing billiards, so we found a solution. Back then there was an unusual plant that had very thin branches. These branches didn’t grow upwards but rather in circles, coiling round the plant’s stalk to create an impenetrable barrier that no human could get through. And the barrier became all the more impenetrable when the outside branches dried out and grew spikes, tiny little spikes that pricked your skin and held on to your clothes. It was a very self-protective plant and anyone who went anywhere near it risked getting tangled up in its thin, spiky branches, or pricking their feet on the dead spikes that dropped to the ground. Anyway, this plant, which really was quite something, had little capsules in spiky shells, and the shells opened when ripe to reveal a ball, the billiard balls of our island. Admittedly they weren’t perfectly round, like the white people’s ones, nor did they have pictures inside them, but for the purposes of the game they proved a good replacement for the real billiard balls. What’s more, it meant we had lots of billiard balls to play with, although to get lots you did have to suffer a few scratches and pricks scrambling about under the plant’s tangled web of branches. It’s a plant everyone ought to see, especially when its branches are dry. Very few living things could get through its spiky branches. Some soldiers came to the island from the place where our fathers were, or possibly from somewhere else, and we named the soldiers after the plant. The soldiers were black, but they never learned our language and they didn’t know how to swim or paddle a canoe, despite the fact that they were adults. As I said, they never learned our language. How did they expect to do a good job of being a soldier in a place where they knew nobody, didn’t speak the language and couldn’t swim or paddle? I don’t know whether that’s why they were named after a plant you couldn’t pass without getting a sharp reminder it was there. We islanders never learned their language either. Nor did we make friends with them, though we didn’t treat them badly. The only thing we
learned about them was that when they opened their mouths to start a conversation, to call someone over or stop a passerby, they said something in their language that can be translated as ‘Me say’. Imagine that! You don’t know someone, you’ve never spoken to them before in your life, you can’t even see their face from where you’re standing, and when you want to speak to them for the very first time, you begin with ‘Me say’. That ‘Me’ thing must be very important to them. I personally think that anyone who uses ‘Me’ as the first thing he says to a stranger is rather strange himself. Especially if the person you don’t know but want to talk to isn’t even looking at you. Is that why they tried to be soldiers without knowing how to swim, fish or paddle a canoe?
Well anyway, those men were sometimes called the ‘Me-says’ and sometimes called the name of that spiky plant, the plant that provided us with the billiard balls we were playing with when the significant and distressing thing happened. We were near the square, though not actually in the square itself, because billiards is better played on sand and the square is paved. So that afternoon we were happily playing when we saw a great many people come running down from the upper part of the big village, running and shouting. They ran through the square and went off in the direction of the beach. We thought something had happened down on the beach or at the vidjil, which was also in that direction. Had the sea dumped fish on the shore? Was it the squid beaching? We got up and followed the uproar and, as we ran through a clearing, we noticed that some people were carrying sticks and seemed angry. We thought it might have been a dog sacrifice. On our island, whenever a dog was to be sacrificed for some reason, a dog or a bitch, it was tied to a tree and all the kids threw stones at it until it died. They were dogs said no longer to serve their purpose, whatever their purpose was, for in truth dogs didn’t really do anything. They were sometimes used for hunting wild cats, which we used for their skins. We made drums out of their skins, drums we played in times of need to remind ourselves that we were from our island and that we had our ways and our customs to protect. The cats were skinned and the meat was thrown away, until some people on the island started to eat cat meat. Well, not just any people but specifically a group of young men who gathered together and formed a sort of club to cook cat meat. They formed the club there and then and drew up rules, the main one being that you had to cry before eating the food that was prepared. You couldn’t eat unless you cried. As for the dogs, I don’t recall anybody ever eating dog meat, but we did use their skins, which were bigger than cat skins and made more than one drum. It wouldn’t be right for me to have mentioned the thing about the cat meat without adding that the people who ate cats acquired the habit elsewhere, somewhere they’d met people with bad customs.
By Night the Mountain Burns Page 6