By Night the Mountain Burns

by Juan Tomas Avila Laurel

  On the island I speak of, our island, when the ministrants went out in search of a lost person, they went to all corners of the island, and because the Maté Jachín was so powerful, they used it to find whoever was lost. Furthermore, it was the Maté Jachín that moved the ministrants’ feet, and it made them follow the boy carrying the Maté Jachín, for anyone holding the Maté Jachín became filled with its power. No one moved of their own free will. That’s what the adults said. The Maté Jachín was also taken out whenever it was felt something terrible was going to happen on the island, and so if you saw the ministrants out with the Maté Jachín, taking it, or being led by it, to all corners of the island, you knew a catastrophe was imminent. But because we’d been living in the south village at the time, a long way from the big village, we didn’t know if anyone had been lost, be it in the bush or out at sea, although if it had been out at sea the songs of the ministrants wouldn’t have been heard up in the mountains. Nor did we know if a catastrophe was imminent, and that’s why the ministrants were covering all corners of the island. In truth, given all that happened with the fire and the woman and the cholera, there were plenty of reasons why the ministrants might have been out with the Maté Jachín. But anyway, no such news had reached us in the south village. My friend told me he heard them singing, fear swept through his body, he was already shaking, and in his fear he jumped out of the tree to escape them, and he ran until he could no longer run. That’s what he told me. That’s what he told me and told others, once he was well enough to speak.

  We listened to him and we stared at him, covered in rags, scratches all over his face, barely able to move a muscle. He lay prone on the bed and people came out of the bone healer’s house as if they’d seen a dead body. It was like visiting a wake. A deathplace. And before he was able to speak and tell us what had happened for himself, people talked about what they thought must have happened. Many repeated what they heard a woman say, a woman from the village of San Xuan, the very severe patron saint. And what that woman said was what she’d seen. On the way back from her plantation, which was at the foot of the mountain that separated San Xuan’s village from the south village, she’d seen a boy on his hands and knees pulling up malanga plants from a farm that obviously wasn’t his, for children don’t plant on our island. At first she thought he was a thief, or rather a thiefess, for only women went to the plantations and only thieves pulled malangas out by their stems, being too hurried to dig into the ground underneath the tuber. But then she saw it was a boy and that he wasn’t just pulling up the plants but sticking them into his mouth, indeed sticking anything into his mouth he could lay his hands on. She said the only way to describe it was that he was rabidly hungry, for he chewed frantically at whatever he put in his mouth, dry leaves, malangas covered in sand, small plants, anything at all. She’d never seen the like of it. She became afraid, for she thought it might be the Devil himself, but the boy became afraid too and tried to run away. Yet something stopped him: he couldn’t run; he couldn’t even walk. So how had he got there? That was the mystery. And who was he? After all the energy he’d used up ransacking the plantation, and after discovering he couldn’t walk, never mind run, he collapsed where he was, mouth open, panting, a panting that gradually died down. The woman was shaking with fear, but she said an Avemaría Purísima, made the sign of the cross and approached. As she got closer, she saw the boy was in a terrible state. She saw he was at death’s door, maybe even halfway through the door, given how strangely he was acting. It was the moment before death, she thought, and he’d lost his reason. But really she didn’t know what was going on. She left him where he was and went to find other women on their way back from the plantations. When she told them what she’d seen, they didn’t believe her. Word got round and people came from the little village to look at the boy and they all recognised him, all knew which family he belonged to. Because everyone lived in the big village most of the year, no child’s face was unfamiliar. And if it was to you, it wouldn’t be to someone else, to one of the people you’d called to come and help you with the mysterious business you’d stumbled across; they’d confirm it was not an apparition, or a living dead, rather that the boy was the son of so-and-so. Female adults could always tell that we were from my grandmother’s house just by looking at us, and we never understood what it was they saw so clearly.

  They carried that boy as best they could to San Xuan’s village. They thought they’d let him sleep until his family came to find him. It was all they could do: they didn’t know where his family was, and they didn’t know what circumstances he’d been lost in. They probably also tried to send word of the boy to the other villages via anyone who happened to be travelling to them. And they probably found that no one happened to be travelling anywhere at that time of day. The sleeping boy, or rather the semi-conscious boy, would have woken up in the village the next morning had it not been for the fact that he’d never spent the night in San Xuan’s village before and so he’d never been presented to San Xuan. He’d never asked for San Xuan’s blessing nor sought his protection. And that is why the very severe saint would not let him sleep and woke him at midnight. After all he went through, if my friend reached the big village alive it can only be because Dios is great and because my friend’s time had not yet come. Or as the adults like to say, because he was still innocent. Although in fact the word in our language doesn’t quite mean innocent, though that’s the equivalent in Spanish. At least not innocent in the sense of not being guilty: when we say he was innocent we mean he was pure, because he was still a child. Well, that boy was utterly broken when he got to the big village, so the adults said. But he showed signs of pulling through and the ministrants were called to pray for him. From what that woman had said about how she’d found him, it was feared the boy would end up mad. So the ministrants sang their prayers to drive out the evil that had entered him. And bit by bit he began to recover, until finally he was cured. But he never fully regained his strength. In fact, for a long time he couldn’t exert himself at all, which is why he never learned to fish, and he had to be taken to the small settlements by canoe because he couldn’t get up and down the slopes. And he became quite mean, I don’t know why. That meanness cost him his friends, and I eventually lost track of him too. He was probably taken by boat to wherever our fathers were, to finish off his recovery or start a new kind of life.

  When the Pico burned and I saw my grandfather cry, my curiosity in him grew and I wondered about who he really was. And I thought about what we’d seen when we went into his room. What did we see in grandfather’s room? Well, after all those people were taken by the cholera, it was decided that we had to give food to the king of the sea. As a child, I never knew how news reached us of the things we had to do on the island, how the adults were told what needed doing. The ministrants took the Maté Jachín out and went round the island, three laps in a canoe. They took the Maté Jachín out and went through the bush, through all the streets and the surroundings of the big village. The Maté Jachín was carried at the front, followed by all the ministrants in their white tunics and then the women who accompanied them. First the order went out that everyone had to go and wash in the lake. Then that everyone had to go and give food to the king of the lake. And finally that we had to give food to the king of the sea. I never understood who it was that gave the orders to do these things, but what I do know, from what the adults said, the female adults, is that some women on the island talked to the deads. One such woman lived near our house and was called Sabina. Actually she wasn’t just called Sabina, her full name was Maminda Zé Sabina, but anyway, she was one of the women who talked to the deads. And those women brought news of what we had to do and of what was going to happen in the future. This I know from my grandmother and other female adults. And from them I also know that most women who talked to the deads hardly believed a word the deads said. As I was only a child, this wasn’t something I could easily understand and, indeed, I found the whole thing quite frightening. Like
I said, I knew Sabina and I knew she was one of the women who brought the orders of what had to be done. Although in actual fact it wasn’t quite like that: I knew Sabina talked to the deads, and that’s all I knew. I don’t remember ever speaking to her myself, but I remember she had a strange face, or at least I thought it was strange. Her face always looked as if it was about to laugh or cry, so when you saw her you thought she might burst out laughing or crying at any moment. And I say this not because I was an expert on faces and expressions but because when you’re told a woman talks to the deads and you get a chance to look at her, you look. As far as I was concerned, a woman who talked to the deads was no ordinary woman. And Sabina’s face made you think she was about to break down in tears or break out in a big smile. One or the other, at any moment. Was it because of the conversations she had with the deads? I don’t know, but what I do know, from what my grandmother and the other female adults said, is that the women who talked to the deads suffered a lot. So was Sabina’s face the face of a woman who would have been happy if it weren’t for the constant strain of having to talk to the deads? That could be it. That’s to say, if it hadn’t been for the deads always bothering her with things they wanted to convey to the village, she’d have been a smiley woman. That could be it. From what I remember of Sabina, I’d also say she was a very beautiful woman. And again, I probably say this because I looked at her a lot, because she wasn’t a she-devil. She-devils were no ordinary women either, but I wasn’t brave enough to look at them. But I looked at Sabina a lot. There were other women on the island who spoke to the deads, but I only remember Sabina, because she was our neighbour.

  So news reached us that we had to give food to the king of the sea, who ruled over the waves, the fish, the whole island in fact, for our island was out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Was the king of the sea King Atlas? If only! What a discovery that would be! But anyway, we had to give food to the king of the sea, and during the offering ceremony there should be no one at sea, not a single canoe. And so it was announced that there’d be an offering the next day. A man went through the streets announcing what was going to take place and that everyone should assemble in the big village to witness the event. Really he announced it not so that people would attend but to make sure everyone gave something. You weren’t obliged to give anything in particular, just some of whatever you had.

  It so happened that around noon on the day of the offering, one of my mothers went out with a canoeman to collect a load from a place where there was a little church by a river. We had a plantation there and a few days earlier grandmother had gone there to harvest whatever was ripe and ready for eating, including two big bunches of palm dates. As the load was large, she thought she’d get a man with a canoe to come and pick it up. The place wasn’t far from the big village and we could have walked there after school to fetch it, but grandmother thought it best to bring the load back by canoe. I mentioned school. Back then, the children in our house who were old enough went to school. There we did ‘the junk’, which was what the basic-level class was called. We learned the Spanish ideo-visual alphabet: amapola, burro, cochino, dado, foca, gato, huevo; indio, jaula, kilo, lechuza, llama, molino, niño, oso … that’s as far as I can remember. Or rather I don’t remember the ‘p’, so let’s skip it and go on: queso, skip a few more letters, then uva, vino, xilófono, yegua, zape. We learned to count up to five hundred and also to do times tables. I remember the times tables because we learned them by singing and we enjoyed it: seven times one is seven, seven times two is fourteen and seven times three is twenty-one; seven times four is twenty-eight, etc … We did it all singing: five hundred and one, five hundred and two, five hundred and three, five hundred and four. In those days, I thought numbers stopped at five hundred; that five hundred and its add-ons, five hundred and one, five hundred and two, etc, were the highest numbers there were. We learned everything by heart, and I think that’s why we did it singing. In fact, although we sometimes saw books with the letters and pictures, I didn’t know that amapola, burro, cochino and dado were the Spanish words for poppy, donkey, hog and dice, or that poppy, donkey, hog and dice were things we were supposed to have heard of. I didn’t know what any of them were, so I didn’t know the words were supposed to represent the letters and I didn’t associate the letters with the pictures in the books. It was only years later that I found out what an amapola or a burro was. But they sounded good. The other thing I remember about school is the whip. If you couldn’t say cochino or dado properly, you got the whip. The whip was a cord made of I don’t remember what, but it had several knots in it and was tied to a stick. The teacher held it in his hand when he gave class. Although we liked it when we sang, school was a place where we had to speak a language that was not our own and where we might get whipped, so it was a place we were afraid of. What’s more, it was a place you went to but weren’t allowed to leave unless the teacher said so, and sometimes he wouldn’t even let you go to pee! Even if you went up to his table and asked in Spanish, a language that was not your own. I always wanted to be at home, with my mother, and I thought school was a terrible kind of punishment. For a while, I couldn’t get the thought of being at home out of my head. Home and school were very different places, totally different. What’s more, there were some wicked children in the school, children who would harass you and threaten to beat you after class if you weren’t their friends. They were the same children who got the whip the most for not being able to point out foca or gato or 501 on the blackboard, and they took revenge on anyone who laughed by fighting them later. I didn’t like any of this. We had a break, a play time that we liked a lot because it was like being temporarily released from prison. And during play time we gathered in the yard and ran about. That was what most of us did, just ran about – I suppose because nobody had a ball or anything else round and soft we could run about after – but some boys refused to stay in the school grounds and went off into the bush. They tended to be the naughtiest kids. What did they go off into the bush for? To look for fruit, especially guava. If it was mango season, they came back to the schoolyard with huge quantities of mangoes, carried in their laps and pockets, and with their shirts mucky from everything they’d touched. The mango tree itself has a sticky sap that’s impossible to get out. So yes, those boys went into the bush and had fun looking for guava and mango and sweetsop, but it wasn’t easy to keep track of time in the bush and they couldn’t hear the bell at the end of play time, so they’d get back to find the school in silence, a silence that really put the fear in you. And it put the fear in you because you realised you were the only one not in your seat. Some children even cried when it happened, for they knew what awaited them. And if you stayed outside until it was time for ‘school break-out’, which was what we called home-time in my language, you knew you’d get your comeuppance the next day. You’d probably have to spend the whole day on your knees, and this after getting the whip several times. And the red marks the whip left on hands and arms meant we all knew that getting the whip was no small thing. Besides being away from home and exposed to the threat of other boys, what I disliked most about school was the fact that I was expected to trust someone who might punish me with a furious beating, a beating from which there was no escape. That’s to say, there was no way of avoiding punishment. I don’t remember anything we learned in that school on our island, other than a class about Spanish words being divided into three categories, aguda, llana and esdrújula, depending on where the stress fell. It must have been a lesson after ‘the junk’, although it all merges into one in my memory. Anyway, the reason I remember the class about the three categories of Spanish words is because the teacher walked around the classroom with the whip in his hand, asking everyone how words are divided. Curiously, over half the class didn’t know the answer. In fact, never mind half, not a single kid the teacher asked knew the answer, and he asked practically the whole class. I say curiously because the answer was only three words and they were three words we’d just been t
aught. So anyway, I used to sit towards the front of the class but the teacher started at the back, moving down the rows and asking every boy and girl the same question, and not one of them answered. Every one of them got the whip, be it on the hand or the head, and the less resilient started to cry. The girls sat on the left in class, the boys on the right. So he’d asked almost everyone in class by the time he got to my desk, and he asked the question to the children sitting around me, in desks of two. None of them knew the answer. He asked me the same question, wearily, for he no doubt expected the same non-answer, as no one in the entire class had replied, and I don’t recall ever having shone at school before in anything. But without hesitation, for I knew the answer very well, I said words were divided into agudas, llanas and esdrújulas, and the teacher cried out, in joy and in anger, well at least one person in the entire room managed to remember one simple thing about the lesson. I swelled with pride. It was the single moment of acclaim of my whole school career.