By Night the Mountain Burns

by Juan Tomas Avila Laurel

  Out in the waves the canoeman was worried too. He knew that if he lost control, the waves could flip the canoe over, sending the woman overboard, and that in the speedy approach to the sand, the canoe could smash into her father and something serious could then happen to either of them. To the woman, for she wasn’t used to how the sea behaved, and to the old man, because of his age, because he wasn’t used to the water and because, as we could all now see, he was sick. So, quite close to the shore, the canoeman lay his paddle down, jumped into the water and grabbed hold of the back of the canoe. He wasn’t heavy enough to halt the canoe or stop it being violently pulled in to the beach, but his efforts had some effect. The canoe came rushing in onto the sand and the canoeman told the woman to get out right away, something women can’t really do at speed. But our mother was already soaked, so there was no need for her to take care, and she got out as fast as she could. The next thing was to try and keep the canoe upright so that the waves would help push it up the beach, even if just a bit. Then our hands and the hands of our mother were needed, for while the two men held the canoe steady, we had to unload it as quickly as possible and take everything as far away from the water as possible. Everything, no matter how heavy it was. We gave it our all, and we dripped with sweat, even though we were in the water, and we managed to get the canoe unloaded. Mission accomplished. But then we had to move everything again, further up the sand, for the tide was coming in fast. So we did that too. When it was all done, grandfather told our mother, the one who had been in the canoe, to take us home. He hoped it wasn’t too late to contribute to the offering to the king, so he said to tell grandmother to take the water filter that was on the table in his room. He said all this in a voice that was so low we couldn’t make it out. We only knew what he said because our mother told us afterwards. And because she was being honest with us, we dared ask her about what grandfather had strapped to his side, or stomach. What was it?

  We did as grandfather said and carried the load home on our heads, and when we got there grandmother brought the water filter down to take for the king. It was a sort of bottle, like a vase, and I knew of it because it was one of the things we’d seen in grandfather’s room when he’d gone out, which happened so very, very rarely. I liked that filter a lot and considered it a precious item. It had a tap on the front, in the bottom corner. I thought the filter was the most beautiful object in the whole house, certainly the most beautiful thing I’d seen upstairs, and it made me sad to see grandmother taking it away. That afternoon I didn’t go down to where they performed the orations. I wanted to watch the canoes from the shore nearest to the house. I didn’t want to be around other people while I was busy questioning whether the king took what was tipped in the water for him. I wanted to be on my own, able to take it all in and keep my doubts to myself, my doubts about the people in the canoes not looking. Not looking to see who took the things, out of fear of what might happen to them. Practically the entire island was gathered by the vidjil, filling the beach from one end to the other. I think the only people not to watch the ceremony were grandfather and the canoeman. When we left the beach with our loads on our heads, I was at the rear, behind my other brothers and sisters, and I looked back to see grandfather and the canoeman sitting on the beach talking. It was one of the very few times I saw grandfather talk and that canoeman was one of very few people to hear his voice. What did they talk about? What did grandfather say to him? Interesting things no doubt, so interesting that a few months later, the following thing happened.

  One day, in the middle of the night, when we were already in bed, we heard adult voices. In truth, adults were the only ones allowed to speak at night. What was going on? Well, a young man had come running from his house crying because he’d gone to live with a woman and the woman wasn’t intact. Not intact? He cried, because this evidently pained him a great deal. It turned out the woman was my grandmother’s niece and she’d been raised in our house. The man? The very same canoeman we’d left talking to grandfather on the beach by the cemetery. Over time he’d been through all the formalities required to marry a woman from the family, and I guess one of the things he’d had to do to earn the right was go to the plantation to bring that load back by sea. Why did they take so long? Was he trying to convince that mother of ours to do something? Do what? Whatever it was, there was nearly a catastrophe because of it. So anyway, one night the canoeman came to the house crying and complaining that his woman wasn’t intact. It was their first night together, but what was he hoping to do on their first night? He was most aggrieved because she wasn’t intact and so he cried all the way from his house, on the other side of the village, to our house. Or so I was told. In fact, the word used in our language is not quite the same as intact, but it can be translated like that. It was only later, when I was more grown-up, that I properly understood what he was upset about. The man had expected to be the first man in the girl’s life. He wanted her to be a virgin, and it had been believed, or at least the man believed, that she was. But somehow he found out she wasn’t and this pained him; in fact, it pained him so much he cried all the way from his house to our house. When I understood the real ‘flesh’ of the story, I laughed a lot. What had he been planning to do with her that he could not do now that he’d found her as she was? Some people even said he arrived practically naked as well as crying. I’m not sure I believe that, although I consider both to be equally over-the-top reactions. Is the disappointment at finding out your woman is not a virgin really so great? I couldn’t believe it. I don’t know how they resolved that case, and I hope it didn’t cause trouble for grandfather, as he was probably the one who arranged the relationship, otherwise what were they talking about on the beach by the cemetery? As I said, they stayed behind on the beach, and I don’t know whether that young man already knew about the bag grandfather had strapped to his stomach or whether he saw it then for the first time. But either way, they likely exchanged confidences, for that young man knew of grandfather’s troubles, that’s to say he knew grandfather suffered from an illness that required a bag being strapped to his side. And from that day forth I began to understand my grandfather a little better. When I asked what that bag was, I did so with tears in my eyes. And the tears came because of how I felt. I felt sorry for him, and I thought about how his life had seemed so strange to us that we’d even gone into his sleeping room to see what he had in there. And so now I should tell you what we saw. But after we’d been in there, when we came out, we made the sign for silence with fingers on lips. We were the only ones who knew what we’d seen, and we decided not to tell anyone. We decided not to tell anyone because they might tell our mothers, or our grandmother, and then our grandfather would find out that we’d been looking at his things in his absence, and this could lead to severe punishment. Yes, what we saw made us afraid, but with that gesture of fingers on lips, we promised not to tell anyone. And we kept our mouths shut forever. Which is why even now, I can’t really tell you what we saw.

  That bag. Grandfather had no anus and he had that bag to collect what could not come out of him in a natural way. How long had he suffered from such a thing? The illness probably caused him to lose his job on the boat he worked on. All this makes me feel very uncomfortable, and has done ever since I first found out about it. It must have been awful to live back then with an illness like that. What happened to him? How did the illness start? Where did he put the bag? How many people knew about it? The illness was probably also the reason why he lived separate from the rest of us, why he didn’t go to the vidjil, why he didn’t fish. I now view the way he conducted his life as entirely reasonable. And let me repeat what I said before: I never saw him eat. I never saw him eat anything at all. And I guess that was because he couldn’t eat just anything. I say this because I don’t think it was a simple matter of that bag filling up from time to time and having to be emptied. I’d find it very hard to live with an illness like that. Not being able to lead a normal life on an island where life was hard enough as
it was, for the island had nothing! When I found out, I decided grandfather had actually been a hero. But even so, his illness didn’t explain everything. What did the haircut have to do with it? Was it some kind of pledge? A ritual of some sort? I know it was often said that men who worked on boats kept many secrets and made many pacts. A lot of things were said about men who worked on boats. But I just don’t know, for he was gone before I had the chance to find out about that terribly ugly haircut. Half his head shaved, and he took care to keep it like that. Was it not something that people really ought to have asked him about? I once drew a picture of my grandfather, of when I saw him on the sand with half his body in the water, not wearing any trousers, on the beach by the cemetery. He was as thin as a thread, naturally, for he didn’t eat anything because he had no anus to expel what wasn’t needed. But you didn’t notice he was skin and bone when he was dressed. My grandfather.

  Speaking of that man who came crying to our house because his woman wasn’t intact, or wasn’t as he expected to find her, makes me think of what it was like as a boy growing up with girls. I’ve already said that when we learned the ideo-visual Spanish alphabet the boys sat separately from the girls. And when you went to Misa on Sunday, if you were a boy or a man you sat on the left, and if you were a girl or a woman you sat on the right, as you went into the church. The Padre never mentioned this during Misa, but it was instilled in us from an early age that males and females shouldn’t intermingle. We were told this to keep us away from the girls. And the girls were told the same thing. But we boys and girls also knew there were certain things you did without telling the adults. For example, playing at mummy and daddy. When our parents were out, and before we were old enough to go to school, we played at kitchen, dividing ourselves up as mummy, daddy and children. Those given the role of children ran errands and might get a smack. Whoever played mummy went away and brought back firewood and food; she’d been to the plantation. Whoever played daddy went away and brought back fish he’d caught at sea. The mummy cooked, we all ate and then it was bedtime. All of this was pretend, acted out as if we were giving a performance, though the smacks were real enough. At bedtime, the children curled up wherever, but the mummy and daddy slept together. We knew daddy had to sleep with mummy, even though it was something we’d never seen before. The children from our house, and indeed the children from most houses, knew that was the way it was meant to be – only there were no daddies to sleep with the mummies where we lived. And we didn’t know whether grandmother slept with grandfather as she was always the last one to go to bed. I never asked her where she slept. But anyway, we played at mummy and daddy and the two people playing the mummy and daddy roles slept together. And at our age, that was as far as it went. But I knew a girl and a boy could go and play mummy and daddy elsewhere, on their own, and do things they couldn’t do in front of the rest of the ‘family’, things that couldn’t be done in front of the children. Even though we lived in a house where we’d never seen our mothers do anything with men, for there were no men, or practically none, we knew you could go and play mummy and daddy on your own. From what I remember, nothing happened other than you went away and found a hiding place and then the game broke up because the ‘children’ didn’t like being abandoned by the ‘parents’, who’d gone away to play at being parents on their own. So all the ‘children’ got up and either tried to find the hiding place or said they didn’t want to play any more and went home. Like I said, nothing happened, but it was still something you couldn’t tell the adults you’d done. And even though nothing happened, when we grew older and wanted to take the game further than we had back then, we still called it playing mummy and daddy. We still thought it was a game. And we still didn’t tell the adults. But it might so happen that ‘mummy’ got upset, or one of the ‘children’ got jealous, and then tongues began to wag. Then the real parents found out and took drastic action. The girl could end up with chilli burning inside her, all for a sin she hadn’t committed, or had merely thought about committing, or had committed only a little bit, kids’ stuff. They used chillies to punish girls who’d done things with boys that they wouldn’t confess to. The chilli was put down there and they cried for hours. I think the Padre, the parents, the teacher and all the adults were worried about what we might get up to. And I think their vigilance was effective and most children became adults knowing you could play mummy and daddy but you couldn’t actually do it. In fact, any young man who’d reached the age of taking drinks to the house of a girl he wanted to marry might expect, as the canoeman who talked to grandfather on the beach did, that the girl he wanted to marry would be ‘intact’. That’s to say, that games of mummy and daddy had gone no further than rolling around on the ground with your eyes closed. But of course some children weren’t afraid of chillies, or they knew good hiding places – a house being built, your own house while the adults were out, or underneath an upturned canoe, for example. I think we must have been quite good at hiding, as I don’t remember many cases of chilli being applied, or tears from other such punishments. All of which is why I thought the man was overreacting when he came crying because the girl whose house he’d taken drinks to was not intact. He cried like a child, and everyone saw him cross the village with woe pouring from his heart. He’d overreacted. And what if he was lying when he said the girl wasn’t intact? What’s more, was it really something he couldn’t put up with? Was it really an insurmountable problem? In any case, I was born on the island and I grew up on the island and became a man on the island, and nobody ever told me anything about what to expect of a girl whose house you took drinks to because you wanted to start something serious. Or maybe these things were usually taught to you by the man of the house, and we didn’t have one. I grew up not knowing what to expect of a girl you spoke to with serious intentions. I didn’t know what being intact was, nor why it should make a man run crying through the village in the middle of the night feeling sorry for himself. How did people learn such things? Who taught that young man? If it was an important piece of knowledge, I grew up without it. Maybe you did need some special preparation before taking drinks to the house of the girl who’d won your heart, but I was never told about it. Oh, and I never saw chilli applied to a boy either, though I did hear of it happening.

  I mention all this about boys and girls, infants really, to show how we lived in the big village, and in the other villages of our Atlantic Ocean island, and grew up believing whatever we understood or thought to be the truth. And of course there’s nothing remarkable about that, nothing special about boys and girls having eyes to see and hearts to feel with. As a general rule, all boys and girls who were at or below the age of first Communion were considered innocents, or ‘pures’. Everyone was pure up to that age, and I don’t remember any example of an evil happening that stopped them from being considered pure. Which meant that if for some reason you needed a ‘pure’, any child would serve the purpose. In the same way that men couldn’t be visited at night by a mysterious being that made them feel hot and want to bathe in the saltwater, as happened with the she-devils, children couldn’t become infected by evil. Be they boy or girl. Other than the usual illnesses, children were immune to evil. They were pure. And as I already said, they were used whenever pures were required. For example, in our village there was an illness that was treated using urine, but not anyone’s urine, only a pure’s urine, only a child’s. It was said that people suffering from that illness should be given a pure’s urine to drink, and if the doctor was dealing with such a case you’d see the doctor’s helpers going through the streets with bottles asking children to pee in them, as many bottles and children as it took. Only the urine of pures, boys or girls, but of course it wasn’t as easy for girls to pee into a bottle, though they did the best they could. I know the name of the sickness you treat using urine, but I only know it in my language, the language of our island. Looking back, I suppose if you really could treat that illness using urine, then surely anyone’s urine would do. By which I mean
it would make no difference whether it was a child’s or an adult’s, though I see why they only asked pures to pee in bottles, the innocent. It’s fairly obvious why, but it does change what was meant by innocence.