By Night the Mountain Burns

by Juan Tomas Avila Laurel

  The whole island cried a lot, a tremendous amount. They were eight men with wives and children, families who’d start to have it bad now that the man of the house was gone. To have it bad even in the context of the hardship we had anyway. The whole island cried a lot and for several days. It was said, based on what the sole survivor said, once he could finally speak, that the light they saw on the horizon wasn’t real, that it had been a trick. That’s to say, a light that led them to their deaths. It led them far out to sea and, when they were so far out they could no longer see the island, the light disappeared, as if it had never shone in the first place. They realised they’d been tricked, but there was nothing they could do other than go on paddling; from then on, and until midday the next day, they paddled non-stop, searching for the lost island. That’s why I said I could say it a hundred times and still not come close to describing how much they paddled. They paddled, and paddled, and paddled, and paddled, and paddled, and paddled, and paddled, and paddled, and paddled, and paddled, until they could paddle no more. And that’s when they saw land with mountains and trees. But it wasn’t real. There were trees and mountains that they could see right before their eyes, as if they could reach out and touch them with their hands, but when they rubbed their eyes to look closer, the mountains and trees were gone, and all they saw were the four points of the horizon again. They hadn’t eaten since leaving the village of San Xuan, and they’d taken nothing to drink with them either, for they had set off thinking that on that boat, from whatever nation it was, they’d be given food and drink, even that they’d smoke. But it didn’t turn out like that.

  One thing I know, for I’ve heard it said by adults many times, is that the last thing a lost canoeman does is stop paddling. When he lays his paddle down in his canoe, it’s because he’s handing his life over to destiny. Even if there’s no land in sight, you paddle until your last breath. What I also know, or think, is that not even the adults who went out in canoes knew how many countries there were close to our island, nor how near to us any of them were. So doubtless they did paddle until their last breath, but without knowing which direction to go in, until they were swept up by a current, and nobody can escape from a current, you just have to wait until it lets you be and deposits you wherever. The phenomenon of being swept up by currents has a fearsome name in my language. It only occurs way out at sea, in waters that know nothing of our Atlantic Ocean island. If any of those canoes ended up in one of those currents, they were doubtless taken to die somewhere very far from our island, somewhere no one returns from. They disappeared. We cried a lot, but they were never heard of again, except for one of them, who told the story of having been to the other side. The others were never heard of again. They disappeared from our lives.

  That was the terrible case of the men who got lost at sea. But I was talking about the young canoeman who left a woman on the shore of the big village and then she disappeared from sight. So what happened to her? The man knew she was in a hurry because her child was sick, but even so, she couldn’t have got up the beach in such a short time. Something had happened to her. The man became worried and set off to investigate, to find out what had happened to the woman with the sick child in her arms. And what had happened was this. On our island, children go to the sandy beach of the big village during the day. They go there because the sand is fine and fun to play in. And part of the fun, or the play, consists of digging big holes in the sand with your hands, climbing into the hole and hiding from other children. The adults know about this game and make sure the children fill in the holes before leaving the beach. But sometimes night might start spreading its dark cloak over the island and the children, hiding in their holes or running from one hole to another, are having too much fun to notice. Then their mothers appear to tell them it’s time to leave the beach and come home. And in their haste, brought on by the impending gloom and their mothers’ anxious calls, the children leave the holes they’ve dug and run home. Most children run home without even brushing the sand off themselves, never mind filling the holes in. And because most children are afraid of going near the water at night, they go to bed with sand all over their bodies, feet and face. Gracias a Dios, sand doesn’t stain or irritate the skin. I know this from experience. And considering how deeply we slept, a few grains of sand in the sheets obviously didn’t bother us. Just think: even with a bed full of sand we slept so deeply we wet the bed without realising it.

  Anyway, what’s significant about all this is that holes are left without being filled in, and anyone walking on the beach in the dark, like that woman with the sick child, could easily fall into one and hurt themselves. And that’s exactly what happened when the man laid down his paddle after travelling many hours from the south village. The woman fell into one of those holes and disappeared from the canoeman’s sight. And as he knew nobody on the island had ever disappeared before, the man became worried, became alarmed even, and so he took a few steps forward, for he’d have a story to tell the next day. If you were with someone and they disappeared, you’d be the first person on the island to tell of someone having the ability to disappear. And if that someone was a woman, she might be a she-devil. So you had to be alert. He went to see what had happened to the woman and, after taking a few steps, he saw what it was. It was night and the whole island was in darkness. The woman had stepped forward, met with no ground and been swallowed up by the hole. Furthermore, she’d toppled forward and landed face-first against the side of the hole, and sand had got up her nose and into her mouth. And because she didn’t know where she was stepping, and then stepped on nothing, the impact when her foot hit the bottom of the hole had jolted through her leg and sprained her ankle. The woman wasn’t expecting to come across a hole in the middle of the night, and when you put your weight down on something that ends up being nothing, you tend to get injured. That’s how the man found her. Her face ached from banging into the side of the hole, she’d swallowed a mouthful of sand and her ankle hurt from the jolt it got when her foot hit the bottom of the hole. The injury to her ankle caused her more pain than her nose and mouth. She could no longer walk. And what about the child she’d had in her arms? The child had come loose as she fell and landed a few feet away from the hole, still wrapped in cloth.

  The man got to where she was, found the woman whimpering and realised what had happened. He could make out the shape of the child lying a few feet away from the hole, although it wasn’t crying, it remained silent. The canoeman climbed into the hole and pulled the woman out. It wasn’t easy, for the hole was deep. It had been dug by several children at once. He sat the woman down on the sand and turned his attention to the baby boy, who the man understood was sick. And because the boy was sick and still only very little, he’d not moved from where he’d fallen after coming loose from his mother’s arms. Darkness reigned over the island. There was no light on the beach and they could see only what was close enough for them to make out. The man picked up the shape he assumed was the child and handed it to the woman, who was still whimpering because of her sore ankle. Did the man not notice that the child hadn’t whimpered at all, that it hadn’t cried once during the whole journey? He probably did notice, but the way things had happened there wasn’t much time to think, and the woman was still in need of assistance.

  Having established what had happened, he now needed to go for help. The woman had a sick child, but she could no longer walk. If she’d been on her own, without the sick child, the canoeman would have carried her home on his back, but he couldn’t carry her if she had to carry a child, for she wouldn’t have been able to hold on to his shoulders. So he needed to get help. There was no other option. In other circumstances, he would not have left a woman on her own on the beach with a sick child in the middle of the night. In other circumstances, the woman would not have let him leave her on her own in the dark at the water’s edge holding on to a dead child, for that’s what her boy was. Any unknown being might emerge from the sea, and she was a woman, and it was night. There
wasn’t another soul on the beach, for no one was expecting anyone to arrive from one of the settlements. But they had arrived, and in painful circumstances. They had no choice. The canoeman would knock at the door of the first house he found open, or else at the closed door of the house of an acquaintance, and ask for help. Given the situation, the man probably didn’t know where the woman with the sick child lived, so he could not go to her house to seek help there. And in any case, the woman had only one sister, and if the sister were away in another village, that house would be empty and shut. There’d be no sign of life in it and not just because of the dark.

  The big village wasn’t totally empty and the man found some people and explained what had happened: he had brought a woman from the south village with her sick child; they’d had a problem advancing in the canoe, but they’d got there in the end; the woman had climbed out of the canoe, taken her child and set off for home, but a few feet away from the water’s edge she’d fallen down a hole, and now she couldn’t walk. He said he needed help to get her off the dark shore, and that they needed to act right away. She’d be very frightened on her own at the water’s edge. As I’ve said before, everyone on the island knew each other, although not everyone knew the particular circumstances of everyone else. The people he told the story to showed their concern and a few minutes later they were all down on the beach, at the exact spot where the man had left the mother and her sick child, near the hole into which she’d fallen and hurt her ankle. They went with a lantern, and with people pitying that poor woman’s plight, but she wasn’t where the man had left her. She couldn’t walk, so how could she have moved? Did the woman have strange powers after all? The hole was there, but there was no sign of the woman. The lantern they had didn’t produce much light, and it made them nervous being on the beach at that time of night. Although if the lantern had made a lot of light, they’d have been nervous too, for they’d have been combating the darkness but exposing themselves to who knows what – for it was the middle of the night. Where had the woman gone? The man had assured the people who’d come to help that she couldn’t walk, and surely he would not have lied to make them leave home in the middle of the night. They looked at one another, they looked around, but they didn’t dare call out. Had yet another misfortune befallen her? Just as they started to doubt what they were doing there, they heard a whimper from a few feet away. A whimper like someone blowing their nose. A little fearful of what it might be, they approached with the lantern, the canoeman in front, and, in among the beached canoes, he found the woman. She lay sprawled out in the sand, her child held to her chest, though because of the way she was turned, the boy was also laid out in the sand. What had happened was that she’d felt very exposed out there in the middle of the beach, so she’d managed to drag herself, or crawl, with her child under one arm, to the beached canoes, where she’d squeezed in between two of them. The canoes were beached very close together with just enough room for a man to walk between them, so as not to take up too much space. She felt safer there. Lying in the dark, she’d thought about how all she had in life was one sister, that they’d had a hard life and that, although it had gone on being hard with a child she’d got after going to talk to the white men on the boat, she now felt devastated, for in a few hours’ time her child would be buried in the ground, because some sickness, or hardship itself even, had taken the child’s life away. That’s why she held the child to her breast, as if her son were still alive, and she cried for all that her life had been, culminating with breaking an ankle on the beach in the dark in the middle of the night. She cried in silence but you could still hear her sniffling, the sound of her nose. She lay sprawled out in the sand, something an adult rarely did. Sprawled out in the darkness, at the water’s edge, on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean.

  I’m not a writer, or a teacher, or a priest. I don’t know anyone on the island who could be described as a writer. It’s an occupation, or a state, that none of us knew anything about. We’d never heard of it before. The only people who ever knew how to write on the island were the teacher, the priest and the functionaries who worked in the governor’s office, though we never knew what they came to do. What I have spoken of is what I experienced, heard and saw when I was a child. It has never been put down in writing before, because, as I said, I am not a writer; nobody on the island is. If this story becomes known, it will be because of some white people. They came to our island and wanted to know our folk tales, the stories we tell at night before going to sleep. Or that we used to tell, or that we remember being told by others as we gathered round, ears at the ready. They asked me to tell them a folk tale, or several, and I thought the best thing to do was to tell them the story of my childhood, for I couldn’t remember any folk tales from back then. The white people said they had come to recover our oral storytelling tradition, and their leader, a man named Manuel, said I could tell him whatever story I liked, because childhood memories would likely hold some significance too. I told him what I remembered of those years, and I closed my mouth when I considered the story finished. It took us two days; that’s to say, we met twice, on two different days. I hope the contraption he used to capture my words captured them properly … If I’d been good at writing myself, I wouldn’t have required someone else to put down in writing what I myself experienced. But after learning to count up to five hundred and something, after learning to add, subtract, multiply and divide numbers with two figures, and after learning that Spanish words are divided into aguda, llana and esdrújula, I couldn’t take my studies any further. For many reasons. So the white people’s interest is my opportunity. I hope Manuel manages to find a way to get my story written down, so that anyone who experienced it, anyone from our island who was the same age as me when I experienced these things, is able to recall what happened in their lives. I know you can’t cover everything in a story told over just a few hours. But I thank Manuel for allowing my story, which is also the story of many people on the island, to take the place of the folk tales he wanted for his work.

  They found that woman drowning in tears, her child held close to her chest, sprawled out in the sand. She could no longer contain herself. She’d held it all in for the whole journey, and even a good while before that, but she could no longer contain her grief; she could no longer bear to wait until she got home, as she’d planned to do. Before getting home, yet another misfortune had befallen her, another misfortune to add to her living on that island in total hardship, to her never having lived with her parents and to the only child Dios had seen fit to give her having died. Her sorrow was tremendous, and she cried for herself, and they let her cry. And she’d broken her ankle, or at least could no longer use it, and could not take her dead child home. Few people have experienced such things. Her misfortune seemed to be particularly great, for ending up without the use of your foot just when you need it most is no small thing, not something that happens every day on the island.

  The people who had come to help the canoeman picked up the dead child, or the sick child, depending on how much of the story they knew, and the canoeman put the woman on his back. Then they went to the house the woman told them was hers, or that some of them already knew was hers. By midday the next day, a little coffin to bury the dead child in was ready. And because the boy was from his land, or at least half of him was, the Padre came down from the Misión and sprinkled holy water on his coffin. Then a man hoisted the coffin onto his shoulders and they took it away to be buried. Only a few people followed, people who knew the young woman, her only sister for example. The woman herself was not there. She could not attend her son’s funeral. She could not walk and there was no one strong enough to carry her on their back all the way to the cemetery. Besides, the adults on our island say that a person with broken bones should not enter a cemetery. If they do, the bones might heal wrong or not at all. And so she could not follow behind the tiny coffin of her son, Luis Mari. And while her son was taken away in that small, narrow coffin, she sat in her house
crying about everything that had happened. No one stayed behind to console her. She cried in a low murmur, as if she hadn’t the strength to show the magnitude of her pain. But her tears were plentiful, so abundant that you feared for her. She cried for herself, for her solitude, for her many years of hardship, and because she’d been abandoned by Luis Mari, the only child she had.

  They came back from the cemetery and waited for night to come before recalling all that had happened; to recall it, but only after dark. Because of her misfortune, someone would have given her a little kerosene to light her sad house. Then again maybe nobody had any to give, in which case her tears ran down her face and splashed on the floor in the dark. And without any light, her heart would have ached with sorrow all the more. She’d have cried for hours on end, until she fell asleep. She’d have woken up in the morning and started crying again, and the first person to talk to her would have heard a voice that was hoarse, spent and pained.

  A few hours after the funeral, the canoeman who’d transported the woman and her child from the south village went back to the beach and pulled his boat to the water’s edge. When he’d mentally planned the journey, he hadn’t imagined it ending in the cemetery. Luis Mari had been laid to rest, but life had to go on. He picked up his fishing tackle, put the canoe to float and jumped in. Behind him he left much pain, but life had to go on. There was no other option. With a few strokes of the paddle he moved away from the shore, whistling out of the corner of his mouth. Any canoeman on our island, any fisherman going out to sea, respected the island custom of whistling out on the open sea. Anyone walking close to the shore, even high above sea level, would hear his whistle. They would hear him even though it was difficult to call out to land from at sea. The wind carried words off to other parts, perhaps to the mountains up above.