By Night the Mountain Burns

by Juan Tomas Avila Laurel

  I went to the settlements with that friend of grandmother’s and in the south village I found a boy I’d met before. We weren’t exactly friends, because we didn’t live near one another in the big village, but in the south village any company was welcome. That boy was a little older than me and he’d gone with his mother to the village for the same reasons I had, although in his case the woman he was accompanying to make sure she wasn’t lonely was not his grandmother’s friend but his own mother. It was highly likely his father was in the place you went to by boat. Being typical boys, we wanted to be like men and act like men, men who’d been taught how by real men: we wanted to fish. But back then, nobody had any nylon in a strongbox. If our mothers had kept any hidden away, they’d have given it to us, for they knew that the south village was a place with beaches and that a little fishing made life more agreeable in the solitude down there. As we were only kids, nobody expected us to go out fishing in canoes. And they didn’t expect it because in the south village the waves broke onto the beach with such ferocity that going out to sea was no easy thing. What’s more, where the waves broke was not even really a beach but rather a rocky bay. The waves crashed against the rocks with such ferocity they seemed angry about something, about the place they’d been sent to die. So going out in a canoe from any of the south village shores was quite something. To fish at our age, we had to go and stand on the rocks and cliffs that jutted out to sea. There we’d throw out our bait, watchful of the waves that broke over the rocky headland, making sure we weren’t dragged in by them. But as I said, we had nothing to throw out to sea to tempt the fish with. In previous years we’d tied together strips of plastic we found in leftover bits of rubbish. By tying them together carefully, strip by strip, we managed to get enough length to reach the depths the coastal fish liked to swim at. And on the end of our fragile fishing line we attached a hook, made out of a rusty bedspring from a mattress found at the rubbish dump. The rest came down to our fishing expertise. But the years went by and there was no more leftover rubbish to take strips of plastic and springs from. By then, not even the adults, not even the men who fished for a living, had anything to fish with. So in the southern settlements we longed for fish. We ate cassava, or whatever else was gathered from the plantations and given to us to eat, but we ate with little enthusiasm for we were unable to moisten whatever it was with sauce, the water that had boiled with something tasty. We had to do something about it. It would have shamed us not to do anything about it, little men that we were. So we weighed up our options. We could try and catch crayfish from the river or go out hunting and try and hit a bird with a stone mid-flight. There were very few seabirds on that coastline and the chances of our hitting one of them with a stone were slim. Indeed the effort involved would probably have left us hungrier for fish than when we started. As for the crayfish, there were not many people in the settlements but there was someone who threw stones at you whenever you went in the river. Whoever it was couldn’t be seen, and it was frightening to expose yourself to the stone-throwing of a hidden stranger. Another option was a type of wild hen that could be found in certain clearings in the south of the island, but we’d never heard of anyone catching one by any means other than with a rifle. So there were things that could be boiled as a substitute for fish, but all of them were beyond our reach. And so our hunger for fish continued, until we saw a bird up in the mountains. The bird was large and it made its nest in the hollows of trees, but it could be reached by hand with relative ease. It may have been a kind of fowl, for it bore some resemblance to a duck, and although it nested in the mountains, mountains we could see from the south village, it fished in the sea, flying back to the nest with things it caught to feed its chicks. The more we watched the bird, the more encouraged we became, because although the bird was a good flyer and a high flyer, it seemed to have difficulty taking off. It made its nest wherever it found a hole but it had to build a ledge to launch itself from because it was too ungainly to take off directly from the ground. Which meant that if we snatched it from its nest and threw it to the ground, it wouldn’t be able to escape. Another encouraging factor was that, although it was a wild bird, it didn’t avoid human contact. In fact it was so unconcerned by humans you could go right up to its nest without it flying away. To catch that bird, that sea-hunting fowl, we wouldn’t need sticks or stones or a rifle, just enough agility to climb up a tree with a hole in it, a hole with a feathered tail sticking out. The bird was white, completely white, and its tail was long, sometimes as long as the bird itself. What made the tail special was that it consisted of one single feather; one long white feather, poking out of the nest. Now that I think about it, I remember that bird was thought to be very nervous, so nervous that if you saw it flying over you and screamed, it would fall to the ground. I never saw this happen, but I remember screaming at it as a child, trying to make the bird that lived in the mountains and fished in the sea fall from the sky and land in my mother’s cooking pot.

  We longed for fish and we saw all those encouraging signs from that bird with the single-feather tail, a bird we could see flying about in the mountains from the south village. It became increasingly clear to us that the answer to our problems lay with the bird up there. And so one day, when that friend of grandmother’s took the same path to the plantations as my friend’s mother, we decided to make the most of the opportunity to look for the bird. We’d accompany our respective adults, his mother and my surrogate grandmother, and keep them company as required, but when the chance arose, we’d head up the mountain to see what we could do about our longing for something to eat that wasn’t dry malanga or boiled banana. We’d whistle to one another from our respective plantations and assemble at an agreed meeting point. But we’d have to make sure we wouldn’t be missed. The women we accompanied went there to work, but they wouldn’t ask us to work, so if we waited until they were immersed in their tasks, we could sneak away and be up the mountain and back down again in time to put our loads on our heads and accompany the women home. We planned all this and we rubbed our hands in anticipation of the adventure that lay ahead and the result we hoped to achieve. In the bush, children can only communicate by whistling. The women emit a different sound, a sharp cry, something they’ve agreed on beforehand, or sometimes it’s the call of a particular family and all the women in the family know the call. So me and the other boy whistled and assembled and started to climb up to where we’d seen the birds flying about, those birds that so whet our appetites. Lacking fish, lacking wild hens, lacking seabirds you threw stones at and river crayfish that meant stones were thrown at you, lacking anything at all that offered any flavour, we climbed the hill, excited by the prospect of the long-feathered bird. We didn’t want the adults to miss us, so we hurried to get up there and we made quick progress. We soon found ourselves up in the clouds, the clouds that hover about the mountain-top, although we didn’t realise it right away. It was very misty, and we thought it must have rained, or was about to. But then we saw the birds, flying in and out of their nests in the trees right in front of us. And we thought our luck was in. We looked around for trees that weren’t too tall for our young bodies to climb, and we looked for white-feathered tails poking from holes. Eventually we found the perfect tree with the perfect tail, the tail of a beautiful specimen of that bird of our dreams. We were all set. He would go up, as he was the oldest and the more experienced. All he had to do was grab hold of the unsuspecting bird, clip its wings or break them, and then throw the bird down to me on the ground. So my friend boldly set off up the tree, and he climbed up a considerable distance. Then he screamed. ‘What’s the matter?’ I called. And he screamed again. His second scream was accompanied by other signs that something was wrong, for he started to shake. But he couldn’t move, meaning he couldn’t carry on climbing or come back down. I was standing at the bottom of the tree, looking up, unable to understand what was going on. Frozen up there, halfway up the tree, he told me to look down. I didn’t think there was anything to look
down at, other than the path we’d come up. But he went on shaking and whimpering and he told me to look down the other way. I took a couple of steps forward and a great void suddenly rushed up at me. We were at the summit of one of the highest mountains on the island and we hadn’t even realised it. My friend had only realised once he was halfway up the tree, and he immediately felt overwhelmed at being so high. And the thing was, that mountain had a precipice and the tree he’d been climbing was on the edge of the precipice, jutting out over it in fact, which was something we’d failed to appreciate, due to our desperate need for fish, or because of the clouds, or our simple youthfulness. You couldn’t see the precipice from the south village as it was on the north face of the mountain; it would have only been possible to see from the settlements further east, on the mountain’s other side. That explains why it’s so misty, I said. But that was easy for me to say, for my feet were on firm ground and I could take a step back; he couldn’t move at all, although on the other hand his body was moving rather exaggeratedly: like I said, he was shaking uncontrollably. The solution was for him to come back down, but he couldn’t move, not now he’d seen where he was. And, although he was older than me, he was still just a boy, and so there he remained, stuck up the tree, shaking and crying. I became gripped with fear, convinced he was going to fall. And I saw that I too was in danger, so I moved further back. Had we really gone up so high? We’d reached the summit of the mountain without even realising it! I couldn’t believe it. As he went on shaking, unable to look down because he couldn’t bear the sight of the nothingness beneath him, I realised I had to do something. So I told him to hold on, I’d go and get help from the women further down. They were adults and they’d know what to do. I descended the mountain without looking where I was going. I have to say I ran, because I had two feet, indeed I still do. But really I flew, and I cried, for there was only one of us returning where two had set off, and that was a very bad thing. I got to my surrogate grandmother’s plantation and saw my load waiting for me on the ground, the load she’d prepared for me to carry back to the house. And I knew that if she’d already prepared my load, she was either about to leave or had already set off. So I ran around the farm, making lots of noise so that she knew I was there. The woman was not my own grandmother so I was reluctant to call her by her name. On our island, children don’t call adults by name unless they’re family. But on the other hand, I’d gone to the south village with that woman, and we were living together in the same house, so it would have been equally disrespectful if I called her by the general term we use to address all female adults. I was in two minds because of this, so I went on making a noise, showing that I was back from the mountain, back with her, until finally she appeared. She knew something was wrong the moment she saw me. She put down whatever she had in her hands and came over to me with a look of alarm on her face, ready for me to tell her what had happened. Once I’d done so, her face filled with fear, and she made the call she’d agreed with the mother of my friend. As the woman was quite far away, I couldn’t tell her what had happened until she reached us. And when she heard the call, she’d have understood it as the signal for departure, for it was in fact time to go home. My surrogate grandmother was too agitated to finish off the day’s tasks. Unexpected developments had upset her plans. So we just waited and, as she was an older woman, she started talking to herself, muttering about what might happen. She was worried. A certain time passed and then my friend’s mother appeared. Because her son had not come back in time to leave, and because her friend had called her, she knew something was wrong. She arrived looking worried, and it didn’t require much from me to deliver the bad news, for she already feared the worst. And that was because so many awful things had already happened on the island, and everyone, especially the adults, were very affected by it. Well, something awful had happened again. She listened to me tell the story, but before I’d even finished, she put her hand on her head and set off, as if she knew the path we’d taken better than anyone, and up the mountain she went. I followed, along with my surrogate grandmother, both of us crying, until we all got to where I said the tree was. It was still misty, and the cloud cover had increased. This is it, I said, showing them the tree. And below … I didn’t know whether to tell them that a few feet away from where we were standing was a giant void. I was certain we were in the right place, but there was no sign of our having been there, nothing we’d left behind, no item of clothing etc … So I began to have my doubts. But was there even anything we could have left behind? We’d set off without food, meaning there were no leftovers, no bones or peel; we’d not brought machetes to cut down branches and, as we were barefoot and had mainly been walking on fallen leaves, we’d hardly left any footprints. No, I was certain we were in the right place. The tree was unmistakable, the precipice too. But my friend was nowhere to be seen. The two women looked at me. They looked up, looked down and looked around, hoping to see the boy sitting there waiting for us. I looked up again and I saw one of the birds we’d come to catch approaching the tree, and any doubts vanished: that bird confirmed to me we were in the right place. I even thought I recognised the bird, that it was the exact same one that drew us to the tree in the first place. Never mind that those birds were all alike, I could just tell it was the one that enticed my friend up the tree. So I wasn’t wrong; we were in the right place. But where was my friend? I told the women this was definitely the spot, and as there was no one up the tree, they felt their worst fears confirmed. But I didn’t know what their worst fears were. All we really knew was that the boy wasn’t up the tree any more. I had another look for him, going round all the trees nearby, until finally I gave up. And I passed the burden of the matter on to the two women. They had their hands on their heads but, before they wept, the boy’s mother made the call their family used in the bush: uuhu-huhu-huuuuuu … ! There was no reply. She repeated the call, directing it over the precipice. Nothing. The boy wasn’t there. We now knew he wasn’t there because he hadn’t answered the call, and so we had a catastrophe on our hands. The most likely scenario was that he’d slipped from the tree and either fallen to the ground or over the precipice. If he’d fallen over the precipice, he’d have landed in the trees below and come to serious injury in the branches. But if he’d fallen to the ground beneath the tree, his soul would have ripped out of his body on impact. That’s what their worst fears were, what we all now feared. And we gave in to our sorrow. But first we had to get to the south village, to see if the boy hadn’t made it back somehow. If there was no sign of him there, we’d wait for a little while longer before gathering our things and heading for the big village. The disappearance of a man, woman or child was not something the big village could remain uninformed about. Bad news for one family was bad news for the whole island, and the news had to be spread round the big village so that everyone was aware of it and suffered over it.

  We put our loads on our heads and walked back to the south village, the village we’d originally gone to in search of food. With the disappearance of my friend, the son of my surrogate grandmother’s friend, the circumstances had changed and our stay would be cut short. We’d go back to the big village where a decision would be made about what to do, whether to send out a search party to look for the boy, and if so, what sort of search party, whether the ministrants would be involved. And this was because on our Atlantic Ocean island, searches often failed when they were not led by the ministrants but by ordinary people. Or it might be decided simply to go back to the place where he’d been seen for the last time and place a † under the tree, on the understanding that his body had fallen to the ground and his innocent soul had ripped out of his body on impact. And that cross would have remained there forever, as a reminder to everyone that it was a dangerous place, so dangerous that somebody had lost their life there.

  My friend and I had gone looking for that bird that fished in the sea and lived in the mountains, a bird with a long tail made of a single feather. I’ve already talked about
the colour of the bird and spoken of the difficulty it had taking off from the ground. I’ve also said something about our motivations for going up to that misty and cloudy place, although we didn’t know it would be misty and cloudy when we set out. Our motivations: we had a great hunger for fish and, in the houses where we slept, there were no adult males who knew how to fish, and we didn’t know how, so we felt compelled to go to the mountains to catch a bird that wouldn’t take flight when man approached it. The bird did tend to peck if anyone tried to touch it, but its peck wasn’t so vicious that you couldn’t grab hold of its neck. But we principally went to the mountain because of our lack of fish, that shouldn’t be forgotten. If we’d had the means to throw a bit of nylon and an improvised hook into the sea, we would not have felt compelled to go to the mountain and put our lives at risk. Our duties in the south village should have been to accompany our respective mothers to their plantations so that they were not lonely, come back with them around midday, dump our loads in front of the house, follow the path to the nearest shore and return three hours later with a bundle of fish. I knew the shores of that part of the island well and I knew they were full of hungry fish. Indeed, I didn’t know of a shore on the island that wasn’t full of hungry fish. And I think that fact hurt us all the more, made our longing for fish that bit stronger. We could see fish right in front of our eyes and at the same time we had nothing to fill our mouths with. Or rather we had something to fill our mouths with, but it wasn’t what we wanted to fill them with. What grew in most abundance in the south village was cassava, which could be made into a round, white bread. And that bread was much nicer to eat if accompanied by a piece of fish and the sauce the fish had been cooked in. So that the sauce could soften the cassava bread and … I think I’ve talked about it already. When there was no fish, there was nothing. At a certain hour of the evening, your mother, or your grandmother’s friend, would shut the door, pulling it to from the inside with a stick, and you’d go to sleep on a noisy mattress of dried banana leaves. You’d go on hungering for fish, you’d have the cassava bread in your hand and you’d be in total darkness. Back then nobody in the south village had kerosene to light their lamps with. If there was any kerosene on the island at all, it would have been used to light lamps in the big village. So you’d be in total darkness in the south village, holding your hunk of cassava bread, waiting for sleep to take hold of you. Back then, all children slept right through. They slept right through whether they wet the bed or had grown out of the habit. Before going to bed you peed outside, two steps away from the door. In the south village, nothing gave off any light, and I think most people thought like me and preferred there not to be a moon, one of those bright full moons. Because they leave you exposed. I couldn’t go anywhere on my own on moonlight nights, for I knew evil things could see me from far away. And in that south village there was no noise of any kind at night, other than the cricri of the crickets and a noise the bats made with their throats. It was unusual for there to be any cocks in the south village as the season wasn’t right. So in that silence you heard the sea, the waves breaking against the rocks. The shores down there were rocky, in fact the whole southern coastline was rocky, and you heard the distant murmur of something pounding against the rocks. It was a frightening sound. In truth, everything was frightening at night. And before night had set in, you’d been hungry for fish, and you’d gone to bed in total darkness, so you’d been unsettled in the first place. And then you heard something pounding against the rocks in the distance, shaking the whole island.