By Night the Mountain Burns

by Juan Tomas Avila Laurel

  But before he’d had a chance to do any of that, he’d stood at the water’s edge in the big village, looked out to sea, then back at the woman walking away with a child in her arms, and she’d disappeared. What had happened to her? There had never been talk on our island of people having the ability to disappear, or even that such things had ever happened. There had been talk of people having the ability to fly. And of apparitions: people materialising on the island without anybody knowing where they’d been born or come from. But these weren’t things the island’s inhabitants had experienced themselves; they were stories from long ago, when the islanders believed that the people who just appeared must be very powerful, for they came from a place where magic was possible. Back then, the island’s inhabitants could point to particular families and say that such-and-such a man had appeared just like that, without anyone knowing where he’d come from. But all of this, the apparitions and the pointing, had happened long ago and many years had passed, many, many years, since the men who appeared just like that had died. What I mean to say is that people on our island did talk of people who appeared, and of people who could fly from one place to another, or to places that were far away and out of sight, but only of it happening long ago. When we lived through that period of hardship, nobody flew or appeared out of nowhere. Rather people got lost in the bush, or went out fishing, or out to sea for some other reason, and were never seen again.

  So I was talking about a man who’d been looking at a woman he’d just left on the big village beach, a man who briefly turned his eyes away and, when he looked back, could no longer see her, as if she’d disappeared. And then I said that nobody actually disappeared on the island back then, rather that they got lost in the bush or at sea. It wasn’t very common but it did happen, and I can’t go on without telling you of a time when it did happen. I was just a child, as I was when everything I’ve been talking about happened, but I knew a man who was going to go to hell. Everyone knew he was. All the adults on the island knew that man would not be granted salvation. I never knew whether the man had a wife, a mother, children, brothers or sisters. It’s quite possible he did not. In any case, he was a man who was openly wicked. You could accuse him of any wicked thing you could think of and people would believe you. He was afraid of nobody, though I was very afraid of him. And the reason I was afraid of him was that I knew he would not be saved, that he was going to go to hell. I was afraid of him because he said things that nobody should ever say. He said, for example, very wicked things about Dios and the Virgen María. He was capable of saying things like Dios is jealous or the Virgen María is an epileptic, things as bad as that. And he didn’t say it playfully, but deadly serious. On the other hand, although he had no mother, wife, children or siblings, he had no physical defects; he was even rather handsome, quite light-skinned. So maybe he acted the way he did because he had nobody and he hadn’t been able to stand being an orphan. He was wicked because he was free to say and do whatever he liked. He was also a very good fisherman, and he was one of the best at gliding over the waves that broke on the beach by the cemetery. That man, who was still young, might have been paddling a canoe laden down with a precious load, but if he went past the shore by the cemetery and the waves were breaking from far out at sea and might be glided over, he paddled his laden-down canoe right into the waves and played in them. And nothing ever happened to him! In truth, I never knew specifically of any wicked things he did, although I did hear him say awful things about the Santos, the Virgen and Dios. And he didn’t respect other adults. He wasn’t very talkative but he tended to argue with people when he did exchange words or when there was something he decided to speak up about. That man was known throughout the island, because of the way he behaved and because he ended up being mentioned in a folk song.

  Well it so happened that one day, during a period of great hardship, Sabina went out into the street crying because the deads wouldn’t leave her alone. She even said that this time it wasn’t just the deads talking to her, but that she could see clearly what was going to happen, as if it were right there before her eyes. Sabina, who as I’ve said was very pretty, although I knew her only when she was old, said that whenever she was on the path to the plantations, whether she was coming or going from them, she would be approached from behind by a group of men, and they smelled strongly of sea water, she even said they were soaking wet. They were men, lots of them, and going in the same direction as her, so she had to move to one side of the path to let them pass. But before they reached her, she always smelled them first, the smell of men soaking with saltwater. She said she even recognised one of them and that it was the man who said awful things about Dios and the Virgen, the man who was free to say and do whatever he liked. Of course, Sabina saw what other people could not see, and so people doubted her. Ordinary people couldn’t see or smell men coming from behind their backs. And so Sabina suffered alone, suffered for what was going to happen and for those men, because she knew the deads were telling her to warn everyone that something bad was going to happen on the island, and furthermore she knew the man who would not be granted salvation was going to be involved. We lived in our usual hardship and Sabina went on crying about what was going to happen. She also cried because nobody would believe her, and because nobody believed her she was punished by the deads. Or so we understood it. It went on like this until the hardship on the island became unbearable. It had been unbearable for years but hardship gets worse as the years go by, and the years went by without offering any respite. That was the situation we found ourselves in when, during a month when most people were in the settlements, the men in the village of San Xuan saw a light on the horizon. Back then, anything appearing on the horizon looked very far away, so far away that having anything on the horizon seemed an impossibility. And if you saw a light on any of the four points of the horizon, it would be as small as a speck of light in a person’s eye. Those men saw a light and they imagined what it might be: a boat bearing all that we lacked on the island. It was night but those men thought it better to go out and meet that light than to go on suffering because of what we didn’t have: soap and kerosene, clothing, medicine, nylon, tobacco, firewater, matches. Can anyone believe that I grew up thinking tobacco was a product of primary necessity? I’ve already mentioned this. Well, those men said they had to try, and they got together and talked and then went down to the beach, a beach shaped like a cave. They put their benches, paddles and scoops in their canoes and dragged the canoes down to the water’s edge. They waited to see if the furious waves would let them out onto the open sea, and they were in luck and the waves let them out. It was a moonless night and there was no light anywhere on the island except for the stars and some lights you saw in the bush, at the tops of trees. Nobody knew what those lights were and we were afraid of them. The men went out into the dark open sea and set off towards the bright speck on the horizon. They paddled, and paddled, and paddled, and paddled, and paddled. I could say it a hundred times and still not come close to describing how much they paddled to get towards what they thought was a boat full of all that we needed. They paddled, and paddled, and paddled, and paddled, and paddled, and paddled, and they got tired, but they didn’t get nearer to the light. They hadn’t realised the light was so far away. But they didn’t stop paddling. They paddled, and paddled, and paddled, and paddled, and when they looked back, they could no longer see the island. But they were no nearer the boat; they were still very far away from it. They could no longer see the island, which was a significant thing, and I think that’s why they didn’t stop paddling. How could they see the island if there was no source of light anywhere on the island? No source other than something frightening that shone in the tree-tops, and which anyway would have stopped shining by that time of night or would have been too far away to be seen? By now, their salvation depended on the boat, for if they reached it, they would be taken back to the island after they’d been attended to. It had happened before, and the sailors on the boat couldn’t be
lieve the canoemen they’d taken on board had come from the island they said they’d come from. They put their hands on their heads in disbelief when our men told them where they were from. The sailors looked at a map and said that if our men really had paddled from there, they were lucky to be alive to tell the tale. They set off for our island with the sailors still not really believing the canoemen. But history didn’t repeat itself. This time our men didn’t reach the boat. And nor could they return to the island, for they could no longer see it, paddling as they were in total darkness. They went on paddling, knowing they couldn’t stop paddling, and then nobody knows what happened. I ought to say that there were eight of them, eight men, and that they were in several canoes, most likely two to a canoe. Of the eight men, the sea returned only one of them to land. Not two. At least not as far as I remember. In fact I’m sure it was only one. The sea returning that one man was a sign that the rest of them had perished, that nothing could be done for them, and we never heard anything about them ever again, not ever. If not one man had been washed back, we might have thought they’d reached the boat and the captain had decided to take them all to a different land, to one of the countries that lay somewhere way back behind our island, countries none of us had ever seen before, and that they were all now living there in better circumstances, albeit without their wives, their sons and their daughters. But we know this didn’t happen; they all died, except one. What we know of the story we know from the sole survivor, the one the sea brought back. And that’s not all that happened to him. The only one of the eight canoemen who was saved from an anonymous death spoke of things that nobody would have thought possible. For he’d been to a place that, once there, few people come back from. He’d been to the other world, albeit in his canoe. He said it was something he started to experience when he’d given up all hope of returning to the island alive, to the extent that he’d even given up paddling. There were things … Things that nobody had seen before, nor ever would see unless they lived through a similar experience. He said he’d experienced being in two different worlds at the same time. A man who does a lot of fishing and goes out to sea a great deal sees many things, but even such a man would never see the things that sole surviving canoeman saw. They were things you could only see with one foot in the next world – though he came back, he didn’t stay in the next world. But even after they’d pulled him ashore and he’d recovered his health, even after he’d told us what had happened to the other canoemen that he’d set off with in pursuit of the boat, one foot remained in the next world. That’s right: he was never himself again after that, not his full self. Besides, to bring him back to this world, he had to be given special cures. This was something that was only done on our island to people with special sicknesses, sicknesses that weren’t known to us but that people with special eyes could detect and could tell were life-threatening.

  The men who died in that pursuit of the light were Sambachita Ánkene, who I think was the tallest man on the island, Ze Gutín Pêndê, Fidel Gañía, Pudul Jodán, Ze Fingui, Zancus’u Gueg’a, Ze Jandjía Teix, Menembofi Sugalía and that man who everyone knew would not be going to the Señor’s paradise, because he said such awful things about Jesucristo and the Virgen. And once again, Sabina’s premonitions had come true. For she had said she’d been met by many soaking men who smelled of saltwater, and she’d seen a face among the men that had been so familiar she hadn’t been able to keep quiet about who it was, and so she’d told everyone that something bad was going to happen and that it would involve that man who was not going to be granted salvation, that something bad was going to happen at sea, and that was why those men looked soaking wet and smelled of saltwater, at least to Sabina’s eyes and nose. But nobody had listened to her, maybe because nobody was willing to accept that yet another catastrophe was going to befall the island. And in fact that had a lot to do with why Sabina went around crying; she didn’t want to be the bearer of bad news, to have to tell people that more misfortune lay ahead. But there was no escaping it. When I got older and started to listen to adult conversations, the deads would make me very angry. Up until then, I’d understood that deads could help alives avoid catastrophes. But once these things came out of Sabina’s mouth, or out of the mouths of any of the other clairvoyants, the catastrophes happened without anybody being able to do anything about them. I said to myself: What’s the point of the deads? I thought they were meant to protect us? I found it hard to believe that they were so powerful they could bother Sabina by telling her a catastrophe was going to happen, but they couldn’t do anything to prevent the catastrophe from happening. I thought of all this because it was what I heard the old people say, and they knew the most about everything.