By Night the Mountain Burns

by Juan Tomas Avila Laurel

  The canoeman steered them clear of any hazards and then he sat down. A canoeman doesn’t sit down until he’s sure he’s clear of any waves that might knock the canoe back. He made himself comfortable, for going from the south village to the big village meant going from one end of the island to the other, but in a canoe, and travelling through waters that demanded attention and respect. In fact, the sea route between the two villages included a stretch of water that was so turbulent there was a folk song about it. The song said that only a man could cross those waters and, as only men had canoes on our island anyway, what the song meant was that only a real man could cross those waters. Anyone else should turn back and avoid the worst. But what was strange about those waters was that they were quite close to the shore, and you don’t usually get turbulent waters so close to the shore. It was difficult to tell, but the water was very deep there and if you stood on the cliffs to fish you needed many yards of nylon. And no ordinary nylon either, it had to be thick nylon, because deep-water fish were big. That cape had a fearsome name, though I only know it in our island’s language. Above the cliff there was a mountain and on that mountain there was an area where it was said the deads lived. All the deads on the island apparently went there, though I never understood why as I thought dead people were buried in the cemetery. But anyway, everyone knew the deads lived on that mountain, which was a little in from the coast, and so no woman should ever plant there. I never knew how they found out that mountain was where the deads went, nor for how long the deads had been going there, but anyway, the deads living there had nothing to do with the sea being so ferocious. The water was a long way from the mountain, way down below, and, besides, the sea had its own reasons for being ferocious, different reasons; the deads living on the mountain was a different matter.

  The canoeman sat down and mentally planned the journey to the big village. That way he could work out how long it would take and what rhythm he ought to paddle at. There was a woman with a sick child in his canoe, so there was a certain urgency, but the sea would dictate things. The young man knew that anything could happen when travelling from the south village to the big village. Getting there sooner or later wouldn’t depend solely on how he handled his paddle; there would be other factors too, circumstances beyond his control and impossible to foresee. Nevertheless, he faced up to the challenge and determined to get there as quickly as circumstances would allow. Like most canoemen, he’d made the sign of the cross before getting in the canoe, and now they were out of the bay and clear of the waves that might have knocked them back, he repeated the gesture. But, like all canoemen, he knew the journey only really began now. The young man started to paddle. He paddled, and paddled, and paddled, and he shook his head. Crossing the turbulent waters that only a real man could cross was proving very difficult. He paddled with all his might, but he barely made any progress. Despite its fearsome name and ferocious waters, crossing those waters was really only a matter of paddling hard and leaving the south village coastline behind. The man went on paddling, for he had no other option. He could not turn back. The big village was the objective of his every stroke: he couldn’t not get there, for that was where the medicine was, or so they liked to think, for the big village was big, hence its name. He paddled with all his might; he paddled, and paddled, and paddled, and finally he showed that he was a man: he rounded the infamous cape with the turbulent waters. The place was well known for its waters, and also because of the crosswinds that whipped around the headland. So it might be that you managed to pass the infamous cape but then the crosswinds wouldn’t let you go a stroke further. They might even threaten to capsize your canoe – such a calamity was suffered by many a canoeman, but gracias a Dios, before learning to paddle on our island, you’re taught to swim. However in this case there was a woman with a baby at the breast, a sick child who had never been in a canoe before, so the canoe simply couldn’t capsize. And with great effort and determination, the canoeman paddled them clear of the worst of the crosswinds. Yet they were still not advancing as quickly as they should have been. Something was wrong. It wasn’t normal that no matter how hard he paddled, the canoe stayed in the same spot: it was as if someone was pulling the canoe back, preventing its progress. The man couldn’t understand the canoe’s sluggishness. It was as if the canoe were new, as if the wood were full of sap, yet to be treated. But it wasn’t new, so what was the problem? He didn’t stop paddling, for you couldn’t stop paddling at any moment when journeying from the south village to the big village. He went on paddling, but he was getting increasingly frustrated at the lack of progress: as a native of the south village, as someone who’d made the journey several times before, he knew what progress he should be making, given the load he was carrying. It was as if he were carrying a different load, a load that was a good deal heavier than a woman with a small child. Someone’s preventing us from advancing, he said to himself, but he went on paddling. He refused to accept defeat, and the situation wasn’t so bad that they didn’t advance at all, and eventually they rounded another headland and left the turbulent, ferocious waters behind. Even so, he knew they were still not advancing enough. It felt as if he was carrying more than the load he could see in his canoe. Was there a problem with the canoe? he wondered. For the canoe wasn’t his but rather the maestro’s, who had lent it to him to take the woman, the maestro’s goddaughter, to the big village in search of medicine for her sick child. So it might have been that the canoe had an extra thick base, that for some reason the maestro preferred a canoe with very little wood removed from the bottom, and that was why it weighed so much. But if that were the case, the maestro would surely have told him about it, or the canoeman would have realised when he had the canoe at the water’s edge. That couldn’t be it. So what was it?

  The man went on paddling, and he advanced enough for the headland of a village that was halfway between the south village and the big village to come into view. It was a small village with calm shores. That halfway village’s canoemen were spared the worst vagaries of the sea. They could paddle out of their bay with their eyes closed. The man paddled, confident he’d soon be leaving the calm waters of the halfway village behind. But he went on feeling like he wasn’t advancing properly. Either he had a huge invisible load in the canoe or someone was pulling him back, preventing his progress. This had never happened to him before. One woman with a baby could not weigh so much, he thought. He went on paddling and, just to say something to distract himself from his travails, he asked the mother whether she shouldn’t suckle the child. The child wasn’t asking to be suckled, but it was a long time since she’d suckled it and, if it was sick, that couldn’t be a good thing. And the mother said she hadn’t suckled it because the child was asleep and she didn’t want to wake it. That was the end of the matter, although a little later, the woman took out her breast and put the child to suckle. The man didn’t look and, as the child was wrapped in cloth, he couldn’t see whether it suckled or not, though he presumed it did. That she hadn’t suckled the child hadn’t been bothering him: he’d only said it to distract himself from what was puzzling him so. Which was why they were not advancing properly. Something was obstructing them, though he couldn’t think what. And it was beginning to anger him.

  It was common on the island for a canoeman paddling from one village to another to throw a fish hook and bait out and to have a length of nylon at his lips. That’s how he held on to the line, by curling his lips. Anyone who’s not been a fisherman on our island might imagine this being troublesome or difficult, but it’s not, and there are two things I ought to make clear: one, the canoeman never stops paddling, and two, the nylon is not really nylon but rather a thicker type of thread used to fish larger specimens, fish of the shark variety. If a fish tugs on the nylon, the line of thread falls away from the canoeman’s lips and only then does he stop paddling, to deal with developments. If he’s in luck, he’ll be able to haul in the thread, pull the fish into the canoe and kill it with his baton. This is easier said
than done, and struggling with a large specimen can be dangerous, but anyway, assuming he kills the fish, there might not be enough room for it in the canoe. In which case the canoeman puts it back in the water and tows it to the big village. In such circumstances, he’d be justified in feeling an extra weight as he paddled, because of the drag caused by the large specimen, a shark, a swordfish, a tuna, etc … But no such thing had happened that day. Given the child’s sickness, the canoeman hadn’t wanted to lose any time, so he hadn’t thrown out a fishing line. He wanted to get to the big village as quickly as possible, to seek out the medicine. That being the case, what was the problem? What was hindering their progress? He paddled, he paddled, he paddled, but they didn’t advance as much as they should have. What a tremendous weight, this really isn’t normal. Something’s happening that I’m unaware of. Is someone preventing me from reaching my destination? I never expected an old canoe to weigh so much. I can’t understand it. That’s what the canoeman said to himself. He even thought about pulling up on a beach to see if there was anything stuck to the underside of the canoe, something that was preventing it from advancing properly. But what could it be? Sometimes little fish, the sort that follow bigger ones and travel in pairs, accidentally get stuck to a canoe. They fix on to the canoe using their suckers, though nobody knows why. But they are tiny fish and barely weigh a thing. And besides, they’re found much further out at sea where they follow the bigger fish, fish that are so big they don’t notice a couple of tiddlers stuck to their underbelly, until the fishermen pull them off and throw them back into the water.

  The man knew all this, and he knew it couldn’t be the cause of the problem. So he didn’t pull up on a little beach to check whether anything was stuck to the canoe and obstructing it. But it was exasperating and it was making him angry. He was having to make much more effort than he ought to, and they hadn’t got to where they were going yet and he started to worry, for he was getting tired. What was it? He was a long way from guessing what the problem was, but he was right to think there was a reason the canoe felt so heavy, much heavier than there being just a woman and a sick child in it. To understand what it was, we have to go back to when they were pulling the half-built canoe to the beach. Back to the south village, to when the half-built canoe was still a long way from the shore, to when the women who had received the call were peeling malangas to prepare the soup that those pulling the canoe would eat later.

  Aaale, toma suguewa,

  Alewa!

  Aaaalee, toma suguewa,

  Alewa!

  Maestro: Aaale, toma suguewa,

  All: Alewa!

  Maestro: Aaaalee, toma suguewa,

  All: Alewa!

  And the canoe advanced as the men and women cried out in unison. And in among those men and women there was a particular woman, who had gone to see the maestro to ask a favour without knowing a canoe was being pulled that day. She’d gone to see the maestro, who was her godfather, to ask him to take her to the big village because her child was very sick. But there are lots of things you do collectively on our island, and to bring people together collectively you have to give them prior warning. And once people have readied themselves for whatever collective exercise you’ve called them for, you can’t just tell them to go home and come back another day, for those people have volunteered their help out of goodwill, even though they’ve been asked to do an arduous task. Which is why the maestro told the woman she’d have to wait, that they’d deal with her matter as soon as this other matter had been taken care of. Furthermore, because of the way these things are done, the maestro had to be there. He was the only one who had to be there, despite the fact that the song seemed simple, despite the fact that in terms of pulling the canoe, what you might call the actual pulling, he’d do very little. But he was the maestro, and on our island there are many things that seem simple but that are only done when the right person is present. Nobody takes someone else’s place on our island without being publicly invited to do so. And that was the case here. The woman had to wait and she understood this. And although she had a child on her back burning with fever, she joined the men and women who had volunteered to pull the canoe from the bush to the water’s edge, where the maestro would finish his work. He’d earn nothing for the work, because back then people didn’t charge for such things.

  As I’ve already said, that woman was an orphan: her parents had died and she’d been left with nobody but a sister. She had nobody else in the world. She was a woman, that’s to say an adult, but she felt like an orphan, for she’d grown up without anybody. With the terrible shortages we suffered on the island, she’d been taken to the boat and she talked to the fish thieves and was given something to help relieve our hardship. And after the visit she was left with a child, a baby boy, and the boy’s fathers came to visit him. But it seemed that we were condemned to go without and we were soon back to living without matches, kerosene, soap, tobacco, clothing, needles or sewing thread. And after seeing so many people die, people began to return to the settlements, in order to get away from the reminder of the cemetery in the big village. That woman went to the south village and she took her white child with her, the boy she’d got after going on board the boat. As the boy was so little, she put him on her back and took him with her to the plantations. Then she left him to sleep on some lengths of cloth, while she went round harvesting and weeding. She covered him up to protect him from the sun and from any creatures that might come along. If the boy cried, she got up and went over to suckle him. On our island it’s said that a mother who doesn’t eat fish is a mother without milk in her breast. And because she was an orphan, she ate very little fish. She only ever ate fish when she was given some by a neighbour whose husband had come back with a big catch. Otherwise she closed the door when night fell and went to sleep with her child in the dark. They slept on dry banana leaves, over which she’d lain lengths of cloth and old bedspreads. If she came across a coconut tree on her plantation, and if it was in season and she was able to climb it, she took coconuts for herself and her child, for the baby liked coconut milk and she could make a mash with the pulp that saw her through times of hardship. She threw a little cassava flower in with the coconut mash and ate well enough. But I’m not sure that woman always had the strength to climb coconut trees. And when she didn’t, she’d look up at the coconuts and sigh, and suckle her child as best she could.

  That was the way things were until the child got sick. The sickness could have been caused by any number of things: a hard life, the sun, mosquitoes, the fact that the child’s mother had no one in the world but a sister. What’s more, the child was white and I don’t think white people are born to lead such hard lives. And so the child’s mother sought medicine. She knew she could not stay in the south village with a sick child. But she had to wait. And when she held the rope and heard Alewa! she added her strength to the strength of the others, and anyone who looked at her would have seen thick beads of sweat pouring down her face. She had the child on her back. Alewa! – the canoe advanced a little, and anyone who looked at her would have seen her face covered with perspiration. She added her strength to the strength of the other men and women from the village, in order to get that canoe where it needed to be. It was a long journey. As she carried a double load, she tired quicker than the others, but she couldn’t give up. She had to be where the rest of the village was. She knew that the sort of help she needed came about because of these collective exercises. And so she went on pulling when it was her turn to pull on the rope. Hours later, when the canoe had reached its final destination and there were only a few hours left before sunset, she put her child in her godfather’s arms, sat down in the middle of the canoe, on the dry banana leaves, and took her child back in her lap. She was ready to cross a stretch of water so turbulent there was a folk song about it, in order to get medicine for her sick child. The water in the bay went calm for a moment and they pushed off into the sea. The woman’s godfather climbed up onto a mound and watched them l
eave the bay, and from there he shook his head in pity. He knew what had happened. He knew her secret. Her secret was that when she’d gone to see him to ask his help, the child was already dead. He’d seen it from a foot poking out of the cloth in which the child was tied to her back. He could tell from the child’s little face, and he could tell from the woman’s face and from her words. And he could tell because he was old. And because of this he knew that it made no difference whether the child was attended to sooner rather than later, for what they wanted to avoid happening had already happened. But he kept quiet, just as the woman kept quiet. He knew the woman had nobody and that she’d need to be strong to get to where she had to go: the big village. If everyone knew of her misfortune, she probably wouldn’t have found the strength to get there of her own free will, she’d have had to be carried there. And he knew there was only one cemetery on the island, the one in the big village, so he acted in such a way as to keep her secret safe. And he told her what he told her, said what he felt he ought to say. The rest of what happened is something I’ll never know how to explain. The woman pulled the half-built canoe with the dead child on her back, and anyone who saw her face thought she was sweating from the pulling, for they didn’t know her story. What they took for beads of sweat were mostly tears, tears that poured from her eyes, tears of hurt, tears for her terrible misfortune. She cried, but she refused to give up. She didn’t like to ignore customs, nor did she think it necessary to do so now. And she held it all in until, out of necessity, she placed her dead child in her godfather’s hands, so that he might share her secret: the child was dead. And she didn’t cry until the canoeman asked her whether she shouldn’t suckle the child, for a long time had passed since she’d last done so. She took out her breast and put the child to suckle, to satisfy the canoeman, who still didn’t know he was transporting a dead child. She suckled the dead child, though it could no longer suck. It had been dead for some time. And she did this to make the man paddling think the child was alive, so that he wouldn’t worry. But he was worried, for due to something he was unaware of, they were advancing much more slowly than they ought to. Only the woman knew the reason. She knew what was obstructing them, what made him feel as though his hands were tied, which is how it felt, for the fact of the matter was there was a dead person aboard the canoe. And it was no ordinary thing to transport a dead person, even if, as on that occasion, the dead person was an infant. Everybody knew deads weighed more than alives. Some people think what weighs is the sadness, the pain, the immense darkness of their closed eyes. In death, you have to cross a strange, dark wall. You stop being. You’re destined for the blackness, and you let yourself be taken there. You sleep more deeply than a normal person. And all of this weighs. Other people say no one knows what weighs or why death weighs. It just does. Any man transporting a dead should therefore be forewarned, even if, as in this case, the dead person is a small child. Such journeys are special and the canoeman should be mentally prepared, even though he won’t do anything special himself. But on this occasion, the canoeman was not informed. He went on paddling and asking himself why there was such a great weight all the way to the big village, specifically to the big village’s beach. The bay at the big village was rarely plagued by turbulent or troublesome waves. Indeed, rarely were the waves that broke on its tranquil shores worthy of comment. The canoeman paddled in to the shore and guided the front part of the canoe onto the sand. Does anyone know what time it was? First of all, I ought to say that it’s unlikely anyone on the whole island had a watch. That said, the hours of the clock did sound in the church belfry, although nobody paid them much attention. What time could it have been? The cocks were crowing, the sun had long since set. Darkness reigned over the island, for it was not a moonlight night. The canoeman got out of the canoe and pulled it onto the sand, and as the waves were gentle, the woman could get out easily enough. But she’d have to pass her sick child to someone again, and the canoeman offered her his arms. She’d been sitting down for a long time and so had a little trouble standing up and stretching her legs. And she was carrying a child. So the man came to her aid; he took the child in his arms for a brief moment, while the woman got out of the canoe. Then he returned the child to her and they bid each other farewell, as if they’d been in each other’s company for only a few moments. The woman turned her back. It was night and, although she moved away into the darkness, she could still be seen. The man watched her walk away, he looked briefly out to sea and when he looked back again he couldn’t see her. He thought it strange she could no longer be seen walking up the beach. Had she disappeared in a puff of smoke? There was no way she could have reached the first houses of the big village yet. She’d vanished into thin air! The canoeman gave a start, and he moved forward to investigate the mystery. It was impossible! he thought. But after a few steps he saw what had happened. He was alone on the beach, for the men typically leave the vidjil along with the last of the day’s light, except on moonlight nights, when men go out at sunset to fish under the full moon. A few men then stay at the vidjil to help bring the canoes in and because they know they won’t go home empty-handed. A fisherman’s cheer tends to be the cheer of the men at the vidjil too. So the canoeman was all alone on the beach and, because he planned to wait a few hours before heading back to the south village, he’d made sure to leave the canoe in the middle part of the beach. This he did by taking hold of the back end and dragging it round, spinning the front end as if on a pivot. After the first pull, the back of the canoe pointed up the beach to the nearest houses, the front end out to sea. He then picked up the front end and repeated the process, and so on, until the canoe was a safe distance from the waves. A safe distance meant calculating the height of high tide; no fisherman on our island could ignore whether it was high or low tide. What the man planned to do was go home to his house in the big village and sleep for a few hours before heading back to the beach, launching the canoe into the water and fishing all the way back to the dark and shiny rocks of the south village, which he’d reach by the time the sun was at its highest point over the island.