By Night the Mountain Burns E-Book

Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel

• Herausgeber: And Other Stories
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch
• Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2014

Seitenzahl: 402

Beschreibung

By Night the Mountain Burns recounts the narrator's childhood on a remote island off the West African coast, living with his mysterious grandfather, several mothers and no fathers. We learn of a dark chapter in the island's history: a bush fire destroys the crops, then hundreds perish in a cholera outbreak. Superstition dominates, and the islanders must sacrifice their possessions to the enraged ocean god. What of their lives will they manage to save? Whitmanesque in its lyrical evocation of the island, Ávila Laurel's writing builds quietly, through the oral rhythms of traditional storytelling, into gripping drama worthy of an Achebe or a García Márquez.

Leseprobe

First published in English translation in 2014 by And Other Stories London – New York

www.andotherstories.org

Copyright © Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, 2008 First published as Arde el monte de noche in 2008 by Calambur Editorial, Madrid, Spain English-language translation copyright © Jethro Soutar 2014

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

The right of Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel to be identified as Author of By Night the Mountain Burns (original title Arde el monte de noche) has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

ISBN 9781908276407 eBook ISBN 9781908276414

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s ‘PEN Translates!’ programme. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org

‌

Contents

By Night the Mountain Burns

‌

‌By Night the Mountain Burns

‌

The song goes like this:

Maestro: Aaale, toma suguewa,

All: Alewa!

Maestro: Aaaalee, toma suguewa,

All: Alewa!

The ‘toma suguewa’ part means ‘give it a pull’, but it also means ‘will you give it a pull’, or ‘will you all give it a pull’, even ‘will sir give it a pull’. Know why it can be any of these things? Because in the language the song is sung, my island’s language, there is no polite form of address like there is in Spanish. Nevertheless, the maestro treats everyone with respect, as if he’s addressing them as ‘sir’, and because he asks them so respectfully, they pull. He does it all singing, and it’s a song that brings back many memories and fills me with nostalgia. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the most beautiful song in the world.

Aaale, toma suguewa,

Alewa!

Aaaalee, toma suguewa,

Alewa!

No, there are no other words to the song, no more verses. That’s it. The song consists of what the maestro asks, sung in a beautiful voice, and what the people say in reply, as they answer his call: Alewa! Then all together, as one, they pull what they’ve been asked – with due respect – to pull.

Does anybody know what they’re pulling? It’s something that happens on my island, which is located just below the equator. If I’d studied geography, I’d give degrees of latitude and longitude, so that you might look the island up on a map, or on some other more modern means of looking for things. In any case, I should mention that the island is African and that the people who live on the island are black, every last one of them. And that it’s surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. Totally surrounded. The black people I speak of live on a sliver of land that pokes out of the murky waters.

And what of the simple but meaningful song? The inhabitants of the island live from fishing, a fishing that’s done almost entirely by hand out at sea. And in order to get out to sea the fishermen paddle flimsy canoes. These canoes are made out of tree trunks, cut from trees that are known to be good for floating. There are only three types of tree on the island that can be used for making canoes, only three.

Does anyone know how you start when making a canoe? First you select the tree, and if it’s not your tree but a tree on a woman’s plantation, women being the ones who farm on the island, you go and speak to her. You might be lucky and she’s a widow or has no husband, or she has one but he’s away. Or you might be unlucky and she has sons who are growing up, and she knows that one day the tree will make a good canoe for those sons, when they’re old enough to go out fishing and transport things about the island. Every man on our Atlantic Ocean island has his own canoe, and if he doesn’t have one, a new canoe is brought into the world so that he does, so that nobody on the island has to borrow one from anyone else.

If you manage to do a deal with the woman, or if it turns out that your own woman has one of the three types of trees on her farmland, you cut through it until it falls to the ground where you found it. This last part is worth mentioning because if the land happens to be planted, it’s going to be very difficult to get the woman to agree to your cutting the tree down, even if you offer her something of equivalent value in exchange.

After chopping off the branches and piling them up to be used as firewood once they’re dry, you’re ready to call upon whoever you consider the best craftsman, so that he might start work on your canoe. It’s important that you pay him a visit and that he accepts the invitation. He, the maestro, won’t ask you for anything impossible in return, nothing that will cause you to look to the heavens. Normally he won’t ask you for anything at all and it will simply be enough that you show him respect, but if he does ask you for something, it will be something readily to hand. He might ask for a drink, a drink that everyone has or can get hold of, or he might ask for a favour in return. He might say to you, without lifting his voice or showing much concern, that you could clear some land for his wife, for she’s found an empty plot where she’d like to plant malanga and plantain. So anyway, you come to an agreement, and as soon as he can the maestro starts work on your canoe. The first job is the hardest job: hollowing out the trunk. This means digging the wood out so there’s enough depth and space for you and your wife, your little children and the load you’ll be carrying when you paddle from one part of the island to another. The hollowing out of the trunk is done right where the tree falls, the tree that will become your best friend, your right-hand man. The dug-out chunks of wood are gathered up by boys and girls and some older ladies, for they know a big tree gives a lot of itself. They collect the bark too, and when these chunks of wood and strips of bark are dry, they put them to burn in the stone tripod of the fireside, where the pot boils with things to eat, whatever there is.

The job of hollowing out the trunk is a hard one and it’s done using the heaviest kind of axe, an axe with a long handle. In truth it’s a job any strong young man can do, albeit with the guidance of the maestro, to make sure the youngster doesn’t overdo it and leave the canoe with too little walling. The trunk is only half-emptied at the place where the tree is felled, meaning the top side is cut into, the part that will become the inside of the canoe, and the edges are whittled down evenly, for they will become the sides of the canoe. The part that’s in contact with the ground is left alone for now. As the tree trunk is often longer than the canoe’s required length, another important job is to separate the canoe from the rest of the trunk. This job is a little more delicate than the hollowing out stage because through this process the front and back ends of the canoe emerge, the parts that distinguish the more striking and beautiful canoes, those made with real skill. One part, the front part, will have to break through the sea waters, and it will also be the part that’s seen when the charming little thing is beached after a day’s fishing. The back part supports whoever’s paddling the canoe, the helmsman, and it’s where he jumps on when he gets into the canoe and off when he reaches land.

Once these tasks are complete, most of the maestro’s work remains to be done and the canoe is still in the bush, where the tree was felled, a long way from the shore. It now has to be transported to the shore, where the maestro can finish his work close enough to the sea to hear the waves break, to taste them, and close enough for men to come and watch the work being done and comment on it. Only once it’s on the shore does the canoe really start to take shape, start to become a canoe that will be admired by all men and make the maestro proud. So that shell of a canoe has to be transported to the nearest feasible beach. The nearest and the most feasible. The double condition mustn’t be ignored because transporting the thing is hard, heavy work, and not every part of the coastline on our Atlantic Ocean island will welcome a canoe into its waters. Do not be fooled: there are certain shores on our island, some sandy, some stony, where the waves are angry and will not allow anyone into them in any kind of vessel, no matter what offering is made.

Does anyone know how you get the half-formed canoe to the shore from the bush it lies in? Some of you have guessed: by pulling it to its final destination, the bottom part dragging along the ground, which is why it’s left as it is, rugged and round. The owner of the canoe, he who asked for it to be built in the first place and who will use it for his needs, speaks to all his friends, and they in turn speak to their friends, and everyone agrees on a date when they will come and help pull the canoe to the shore. The owner knows there can never be too many hands. He also knows nobody will ask for anything in return, absolutely nothing for what is a hard job that takes a long time and uses up a lot of energy. So he also speaks to all the womenfolk he knows, especially the women who are his relatives, and he asks them for something too. He asks them to prepare, for the afternoon of the day of the pulling, a big pot of malanga soup, enough to feed all the people that will be needed to perform such an arduous task. This will be their only compensation and will send them home satisfied, energies restored, and safe in the knowledge that one day it will be their turn to call for the help of all noble men, and to ask their female nearest and dearest to prepare, for a particular hour of a particular afternoon, a restorative malanga soup.

The day arrives and the half-formed canoe is fastened with a long, thick rope, a rope that has been brought along especially by its owner. Indeed that rope is used for one thing and one thing only on our Atlantic Ocean island, and its owner has long felt obliged to let it be used for that purpose. The maestro ties the rope around the trunk in such a way that those pulling can get a good purchase without the canoe coming to any harm and without those pulling the canoe coming to any harm either. Next, those who know about such things chop down a banana tree, or a different tree of similar size, and cut the branches into rollers the canoe can slide along. The paths on our Atlantic Ocean island are rough, the trails are extremely stony and there are many steep inclines. All of which means that pulling a canoe to its final destination involves a lot of hard, dangerous work. And because there are not an infinite number of rollers, or even enough to cover the entire route to the nearest feasible shore, the way it works is this: after each small stretch, once the run of the rollers is used up, strong young men take them from the back and return them to the front, so that the half-hollow trunk can slide over them again, that’s to say, so that the process is repeated. Have I mentioned the inclines on our Atlantic Ocean island? Well, this means that the trunk doesn’t always slide along the trail as intended, even though the route has been chosen so that those pulling hopefully won’t fall off the path. Therefore other men, typically younger men with some experience of canoe pulling, place themselves at the front of the canoe armed with sticks, sticks they’ve cut and stripped down especially, and they prod the canoe to straighten its course.

The half-made canoe is pulled along by human force, one single force drawn from many different men and women, with many different physical aspects and motivations. The whole thing is done so that lots of individual pulling becomes one united thrust. But how is it done? After all, herein lies the secret of how that shell of a canoe gets from the bush to the nearest feasible shore. It needs someone who knows how to make lots of little energies come together at the right moment and become one giant mass of energy. That someone is the maestro and he does it by singing, which means he has to have the dual qualities of being a boat-carpenter and a singer. To those dual qualities you might also add that he needs to be tough, because sometimes he has to sing and take his turn pulling on the rope at the same time. His is a rare yet essential skill, the ability to orchestrate everyone’s efforts through song, uniting the exertions of men and women of different physical aspects around one half-made canoe. He knows they will heed his call. So let’s go back to the beginning and sing the song once more:

Aaale, toma suguewa,

Alewa!

Aaaalee, toma suguewa,

Alewa!

The wise old man opens his throat and sings, like a great maestro, the first part of the song. Then the friends of the owner of what will soon be a canoe, and the friends of those friends, cry: Alewa! This, as you can hear, is a word with three syllables. The men and women dedicated to this arduous task answer at the tops of their voices, for it could hardly be a conversational reply, and they put the emphasis on the second syllable, in tandem with the force they apply to the rope. The middle part stands out –aLEwa– and the canoe, which all of them treat as their own, gains traction:

Aaale, toma suguewa,

Alewa!

Aaaalee, toma suguewa,

Alewa!

So you could say alewa is the ho of heave-ho, or you could make a more literal translation, like this:

‘Will you give it a pull?’

‘We’ll PUll!’

And on the PU comes the unified force that moves the canoe along another stretch in its journey to the nearest feasible beach. For short journeys, for example from the wetlands to an area of the beach safe from the waves, there is a shorter version of the song in which no one leads and everyone chants the Alewa part over and over again, until the final destination is reached. Or until the next resting point, where there’s a pause while the stronger ones reset the rollers, and then everyone starts the chant again, and so on until the final destination. But when what you want to drag lies several miles from the coast, deep inside the bush, and involves navigating difficult paths, dangerous inclines, stony trails and other hazards and perils, the only version of the song that’s sung is the one I’ve been singing. It doesn’t matter if there are several resting points over the long journey. When the pulling gets going again, everyone falls back in with the song, though the conductor of the orchestra is eventually changed. Yes, I call it an orchestra, because there are so many men and women, and they all sing at the tops of their voices in order to keep spirits up. Neighbours on nearby malanga plantations, or plantations of cassava, yam or plantain, neighbours who will typically be mothers with little children, hear the song from wherever they are and know right away what’s happening. The song is the same everywhere on the island, and there is no other event or activity when it is sung. So they might come across the pulling procession on their way home, but even before that, whether they have been on high ground or low ground, they’ll have heard the song making its way through the silent bush:

Aaale, toma suguewa,

Alewa!

Aaaalee, toma suguewa,

Alewa!

If there were too few people on our Atlantic Ocean island, too few strong people, we obviously wouldn’t be able to fish in canoes. There would be no need to ask a woman to have a malanga soup ready at a particular hour of a particular afternoon, and nobody would sing to pull a half-made canoe to its final destination.

Has anyone worked out why the canoe is not finished where its mother tree is felled? If it were done there, the effort needed to move it would certainly be reduced. But have I mentioned the number of rocks there are on the island? I said the island lay in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but did I mention the unevenness of its terrain? A canoe that left the bush finished and polished would reach the coast snapped in two, no matter how much care was taken. And then all the singing, all the cooking, all the pain and effort put in over so many hours, would have come to nothing. And this would be very upsetting for the owner of the canoe, for the maestro who built it and for everyone who took part in the pulling. And the owner of the rope used to pull the boat, he’d be upset too. And if it were to snap when the malanga soup was already prepared, everyone would sit down disappointed and eat the soup in silence. The song would be left hanging in the air, unaware as to why it had been sung with such vigour and heart:

Aaale, toma suguewa,

Alewa!

Aaaalee, toma suguewa,

Alewa!

Like I said, that little song fills me with nostalgia and makes me think of all the people who lived on the island when I was a boy, and it makes me think of my grandfather.

I can’t say for sure whether my grandfather was or wasn’t mad. I saw him through a child’s eyes and through such eyes it’s impossible to tell whether an adult man, who lives in your house and who you’ve been told is your grandfather, is mad or not. Whether an adult is mad or not is not something easily understood by a little boy, who judges things with the eyes of his age, or doesn’t in fact judge them at all. But grandfather didn’t go unnoticed by me or by the other children living in the house. What I mean by saying he didn’t go unnoticed is that, if it hadn’t been for someone I loved and trusted telling me in a reassuring voice that as well as living in the house he was a member of the family, I’d have been very afraid of him and would have avoided him at all costs.

We lived on our Atlantic Ocean island, as I said, and in a house with an upstairs and a downstairs. There were no more than two houses on the whole island that had an upstairs and a downstairs, so I knew that whoever built our house must have been a man of means at some point in his life, at least of more means than most people on our island, the geographical coordinates of which I still don’t know. I say this because it was obvious most people were not of means and had never been of means, for they lived in simple houses built around makeshift wooden posts. The walls between posts were filled in with palm-tree branches, the roofs with jambab’u, a shrub you cut when green, leave on the ground to dry and then gather up in sheaves to carry home on your head. These sheaves are then used to make a thatch by weaving the jambab’u together and tying it at the corners to the palm-tree branches. It makes a secure roof for it doesn’t let water in. Nor does it heat up much when the hot sun beams down on it. In fact it hardly heats up at all. But, unlike the house I grew up in, you don’t hear the rain when it rains on a jambab’u roof. And I like the rain too much for it to happen without my hearing it. I don’t know whether I feel this way because I grew up in a house where the rain pounded on the roof, or just because I like the rain and like to be able to hear it.

So my grandfather lived upstairs in our two-storey house, as if living up there was the only thing he knew how to do. Consumed by time, that man never came downstairs, or practically never, and as a child I couldn’t understand why he never came down a set of stairs that he himself must have built. The house wasn’t far from the shore and at night, when silence took hold of the village, you could hear the waves breaking on the sand. You heard the waves better at night, and I repeat this because we believed that not only could you hear them better at night, but that night was when the waves brought sea beings to the village, beings that might be good, like the sea king, or bad, like strangers who took children away, which the adults warned us about. No activity took place on the beach at night, nor did people go there to meet up with friends and tell stories. Well, actually yes, some men went down to the beach at night to catch crabs in the wet sand. These crabs made their dens in the sand and came out at night to wash themselves in the splash of the waves. The men used the crabs as bait when they went fishing. But there was no other reason to go down to the beach at night, except, actually yes, people also went there to relieve their bellies. The thing was, as most houses consisted of no more than four tree-trunk posts and a jambab’u roof, they had no bathrooms, and therefore some people went down to the shore after dinner and made the most of the darkness to relieve their bellies. They went there in groups, albeit small groups. We didn’t go because we lived in one of the few houses on the island to have a bathroom.

Apart from the reasons I just mentioned, there were also some people who went to the beach at night to commit a shameful act and they would have fingers pointed at them the next day and be called wicked. These people were always women, usually older women, and when it started to be said that a particular woman went by herself to the beach at night, our grandmother would tell us never to walk past the door of her house, for that woman had acquired the ability to send objects into any child that went naked before her.

I never saw grandfather come downstairs and I never saw him eat, either. I don’t know when he ate or even if he ate at all, and I suppose it didn’t bother me because I must have thought that grandfathers just didn’t eat. We children were given food on individual plates; at night this consisted of a piece of fish with some sauce, though it wasn’t really sauce but rather the water the fish had been boiled in. We were also given a hunk of floury cassava bread and we sat eating on benches underneath the eaves of the house. We ate all together, all the children of the house, and we looked at our plates and at everyone else’s, comparing to see if anyone had got a bigger piece of fish. If they had, the more sensitive among us might feel hurt and start crying, which meant that one of two things could happen: the person who’d dished out the food would feel guilty and give the crying child an extra bit of fish to console them; or the crying child would get a smack for spoiling the harmony, a smack on the back that made you go gulp. ‘Gulp!’ was what grandmother used to say to make us hold back the tears, even when the cause of our tears was a slap on the back from her. ‘Gulp!’ grandmother would say, with her hand raised, for if you didn’t ‘gulp’ down your crocodile tears you got another smack and then you really did have something to cry about.

When nobody complained about the portion they’d been given, we ate ‘savouring’ our fish, making it last in order to make the others envious, the greedy ones who finished first. If the fish we ate had lots of bones, and especially if one of us ended up with a piece that had sharp, hard bones, after eating, and after properly sucking them clean, we would store the bones in a corner of the house. Those thick bones were what we used for getting ticks out. We knew ticks lived in the sand, in dusty areas and near pigs, but even knowing all this we were never careful enough to avoid catching them. You knew a tick had made a nest in you when you felt a harsh burning in your foot, between the toes. The smallest children in the house would complain of stinging and cry because of it, but they couldn’t get the ticks out by themselves. So an adult, a woman, would have to free them of the parasite. Those of us who were a little more grown-up de-ticked ourselves, though we weren’t very good at it. The girls and women were best at it. The trick was to get rid of the tick while causing minimal pain, which meant doing it quickly and breaking as little of the skin it had nested under as possible. To manage all this, you had to have a sharp eye and a steady hand. Often older people in the neighbourhood would send a message to our house to ask one of the girls to go and rid them of that disgusting parasite. As these older people could no longer see clearly and had very thick skin on their feet, they couldn’t detect the nests very easily. So on one of those elderly people’s feet you might find six or seven of the beasties, all of different shapes and sizes, some so old they had beards, beards that stuck out from under the skin. A tiny tick is about the size of the nib on a ballpoint pen but, once under the skin, after sucking on your blood or whatever it feeds on, it can grow to the size of a drawing pin. Adult ticks are ugly and look like eyeballs, but without the shiny, shimmering bits, and with heads: the part that bites into the skin. Often you feel a sting, look down at your foot and see, between your toes, a tiny tick biting its mouth into you. If you don’t get it out straight away, it gets under your skin, expands and grows a beard. Ugh! Disgusting things. When you catch a little one trying to burrow into your foot, you pull it out and stick it on the nail of your left thumb and then squash it with the nail of your right thumb, and it goes splat as it bursts.

My grandfather was just the sort of person ticks love but, because he lived upstairs, he was hardly ever troubled by the beasties, which attacked like a plague in the dry season.

I’ve already talked about my house and where it was located. I said how you could hear the waves breaking on the shore at night and that you could sense the dangers that might emerge from the sea. The house was close to the beach, and not any old beach either but the big village beach. Yet despite being so close to the shore, grandfather had built the house with its back to the sea. In fact, in order to look to the horizon, the house would need to have been built on a different street. But on the street where my grandfather built his house, everything faced the mountain. So although it was the tallest house in the neighbourhood, it had its back to the sea. However, it had a good view of the mountain, the Pico. El Pico de Fuego, as it was called in Spanish. From upstairs, you could see all that was happening on that great mountain. And when I think of my grandfather, I think of how he spent years and years of his life sitting where he could watch what was happening on the mountain at all hours of the day. And how he stared at it, and how I ended up thinking he must have been waiting for something to happen there, or for something to emerge from up there. And that’s why, though he could have chosen to build his house on a plot of land with a sea view, he’d chosen to build it where the main doors and windows gave out on to the mountain. Was he hiding from something by turning his back on the sea? Did he expect something more important to come from the mountain?

I almost always saw grandfather sitting in the same place. I never saw him eat and I never saw him talk, by which I mean what might proper‌ly be called talking. He made minimal communications but I myself never had a conversation with him. Nor did I ever hear him say a word to anyone, although I know, from what my brothers and sisters told me, that he did occasionally talk to one of his friends. Of course a long time has passed since then, since the last time I saw my grandfather, and it could be that I did have short conversations with him when I was very little but that I no longer remember them. Yes, that could be so.

You entered the house at ground level and then went up some stairs into a living room. That living room gave on to a balcony where you could see practically the whole village, although we don’t call it a village in my language; the word we use is more like town or capital city. Anyway, like I said, you went into the living room and came out on a balcony that looked towards the Pico, and you’d see grandfather sitting there with his back to you, in a chair made out of esparto grass. He positioned the chair a little away from the balcony handrail, as if not wanting to expose himself fully in public. He’d be dressed in a shirt, a V-neck sweater and brown trousers, almost always with a towel draped over his thighs, although he was never seen without his trousers on. The first thing that you noticed about the man was that he’d shaved off half his hair, by which I mean the hair had been deliberately removed, for there was nothing to suggest an accident had caused him to lose half his hair. Well, I suppose it wasn’t quite half, but it was the better part of half, and it was shorn right down to the bone. What was this? Why didn’t he shave the other half off too, or let the shaved half grow so that it was all uniform? Was it some kind of fashion? And if it was, could someone not have told him it looked awful? That it was really very ugly and didn’t suit him at all?

Whenever any of us went out on the balcony, we’d greet him, for he was our granddad, and he’d make a gesture to show us he’d heard. He might briefly look at his feet to check he wasn’t being bitten by mosquitoes, but he never turned to look at us and answer. Sometimes one of the younger children of the house would go upstairs because they were learning to talk and they knew that the man up there was their grandfather, so they went up there and leaned on the armrest of his chair and asked him questions or tried to make conversation, but grandfather would do no more than look briefly at the child and then carry on attending to the mosquitoes. He didn’t get annoyed, but when he thought the child had said enough he looked inside the house for an adult to come and take the child away, which was what usually happened. Sometimes, if he thought the child was old enough to be left on its own without an adult, he’d get up, for grandfather could walk, and lead the child downstairs. But his leading the child downstairs was actually no more than his placing the child at the top of the stairs and giving the boy or girl a little push to help them on their way.

Any child in the house who was prone to crying already had plenty of reasons to do so and there was no need to make matters worse by visiting that man upstairs who never spoke to you. This was to his advantage, for I can’t imagine what would have happened if one of the biggest cry-babies in the house had gone up there and made him angry, even made him shout. Of course it possibly did happen, but I never saw it. I think little children are able to sense an adult’s kindness, if not their friendliness, and they avoid adults that seem sullen.

Although men usually represent family security on the island, I always felt more secure and connected to the women in our household. This could have been due to my grandfather’s particular nature, but I think it had more to do with my grandmother. Grandfather was always around, yes, but one day it occurred to me that maybe he had nothing to do with the family, that maybe he wasn’t even from the island. What if he were an incomer, someone who’d got lost on his way home and had taken shelter on our island but knew nobody? What if he’d arrived by sea, all alone, as we were told the images of the church saints had done, and that was why he didn’t know how to talk, just as the images didn’t? This was what I thought as a child, and I regret that grandfather never let us know more about him. And I never imagined that one day I’d be telling the story of my childhood.

When our mothers went off to their plantations they left the youngest children in the care of an adult of the house, if there was an adult who wasn’t going to the plantations for some reason, or in the care of older children, ideally a girl. Entrusting children to a girl was best, because girls are more responsible, but that way you sacrificed someone capable of doing more work on the farm and bringing back a heavier load than a boy. As a child I never understood why girls had a greater capacity for carrying weights on their heads, but now I suppose boys and girls probably have the same capacity, just we boys used to complain and cry about how heavy the loads were while the girls didn’t. This might have been because they were under more pressure to put up with it, because one day they’d become women and they’d be talked about and labelled lazy if they started crying because of the weight of a load. But doubtless they hurt just as much as we did.

Anyway, one day we children were left on our own in the house, and a plane flew over the village. Most of us had never heard or seen a plane so close before, and so it gave us all quite a fright. One of the youngest children in the house was so frightened he climbed the stairs and went crying to grandfather, seeking the comfort of an adult embrace. Grandfather understood and saw that though the plane was long gone, the boy was still afraid and sought refuge in his grandfather’s lap, which meant he stuck his head between grandfather’s thighs and closed his eyes. The boy thought it the safest place for him, and the old man understood his grandson’s fear and comforted him by stroking his back with his hand. It was a very brief show of affection. Or maybe it was such an effective show of affection that the boy immediately felt at ease. Either way, he came back downstairs and played with the rest of us, and though we’d all been frightened by the plane, none of us had thought to seek grandfather’s protection.

The house I grew up in was full of women, my grandparents having had only daughters. We children were the offspring those women had brought into the world and, as they were all about the same age, and saw that their mother, our grandmother, was still fit and strong, they had us believe that grandmother was really our mother. We never spoke of our fathers. If we needed a man to comfort us, we went upstairs to talk to the only one we had, he who sat staring at the mountain. I’ve already said what happened then.

Grandmother had a niece who came to our house a lot. She was chubby, with fat thighs, and she was very smiley; I never saw her get angry about anything. When she came to the house we all competed to throw ourselves into her loving arms. She hugged us each in turn, and after she’d greeted and kissed everyone, and after she’d talked to the other girls her age in the house, she would go upstairs, pull over a chair and sit down next to grandfather, her back to the balcony rail. She went up there to chat to him, to tell him things, tell him about her life. Armed with her cheeriness and her smile, she told grandfather things, she smiled, she laughed, and it was as if they really were chatting. Was that aunt of ours so smart and kind that she knew how to make conversation with him, even though he never replied to anything she said? Did she know how to choose the right words so that he didn’t need to respond to them, so that only she had to speak but there was no lack of communication? While she talked to him, she never stopped laughing, as if she were chatting away to a normal person. Did she have some ability we lacked? Did she know how to read grandfather’s gestures and communicate with him that way? Did they have a secret they shared?

When she thought it had been enough, she would stand up, put the chair back, say her farewells and come back downstairs, and not with the frowning face of a failed encounter, but more smiley than ever. She must have known something we didn’t, we who lived with the man. In any case, grandmother’s niece was older than we were, as we were the children her cousins had brought into the world, so she knew more things than we did. But she was the same age as our mothers, so we found it strange that none of them enjoyed the same privileged relationship with him that she had. Or could the answer lie simply in her boldness and not the hidden explanations I looked for?

Like all the inhabitants on our Atlantic Ocean island, we lived in the big village during the rainy season and went to the settlements in the dry season, to eat whatever we could find there. In most families the change of season presented few problems, for the whole family went to the settlements and the house in the big village was locked up for the season, sometimes with keys, more typically with two sticks crossed over the door. But in our family we couldn’t all go to the settlements, for there was one family member who never made the journey: grandfather. He never made the journey because of two invalidating reasons, if that makes sense. For a long time I thought grandfather was an invalid, which is why that expression popped out just now. It would have had to have been a totally debilitating invalidity, for he did absolutely nothing. But anyway, the two reasons why grandfather couldn’t go with us to the settlements in the south were one, he couldn’t walk there, and two, he couldn’t paddle a canoe. The fact that he couldn’t paddle a canoe was what finally convinced me he was an incomer and that he simply hadn’t learned since coming to the island. Because every man and grown-up boy on our Atlantic Ocean island knows how to paddle.

The problem was we couldn’t leave grandfather on his own in the big village. And the reason wasn’t that he didn’t want to be left on his own, for doubtless he would have liked it, but rather that there’d be nobody there to cook for him. So grandmother arranged it for her daughters to take turns staying with him, in three shifts of one month, which was how long the dry season lasted. I didn’t think anyone needed to stay behind with him to make him food, for I didn’t think the man ate. I only learned of this requirement the year when it was my mother’s turn to stay with him, by which I mean the mother who’d brought me into the world and with whom I was very much in love at the time, for I’d only just found out she was my real mother. I missed her, and if it hadn’t been for the fact that by being in the big village I’d have missed my brothers and sisters, and missed out on all the fun being had in the settlements, I’d have asked to go with her. But I’d have been on my own, for my brothers and sisters were happy where they were, eating birds that were preserved in salt after they’d been caught by those who’d learned how using traps or a sticky resin from a tree.

Sometimes grandmother’s niece invented a reason why she had to stay in the big village during the dry season and said it would be no trouble to take food to grandfather every day. When this happened none of my mothers had to take a turn to stay behind and cook. And I kept thinking: but the man doesn’t even eat! What did he eat? Who was he? What was going on with that crazy haircut? In truth there were a great many things that puzzled me about my grandfather. For one thing, why did he not go to the vidjil, the recreation hut the men had down by the beach? He never went, maybe because he didn’t like it there but more likely because he refused to leave the lookout that was his balcony at home. That a man living on an island in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean should refuse to have anything to do with the sea, and never go to the vidjil, was a strange and striking thing. You actually did nothing at all at the vidjil, so it was especially strange that he didn’t want to go somewhere where you did nothing and where I’d have thought he’d be happier. The men at the vidjil were about the same age as him, they would have reminisced about old times and talked about things he knew. Did he not go because he didn’t know the others, didn’t know about the same things? It was possible, and this reinforced my belief that he was an incomer.

That he didn’t go to the vidjil because of his views or tastes was of no interest to anybody. That was his business. But it was a great disadvantage to us that he stayed at home. Because, if he had spent long hours at the vidjil, as the other men of his age did, he would have come home at the end of the day with a bundle of fish and we would have eaten more fish than we did. That’s why I found it so incomprehensible that he stayed at home. Because at the vidjil you did nothing and you took home handouts given away by the fishermen when they got back from a day at sea. The thing was, it was customary on the island for the men at the vidjil to help pull the canoe in when a fisherman got back from sea, and to show he was a good man as well as a good fisherman, and to keep our island’s customs alive, the fisherman would hand out a few fish to the men who helped pull him in. Now some of the men at the vidjil were quite old, and some of them no longer could, or no longer would, get up to drag a canoe in. But others, though they too lacked youthful vigour, got up whenever a fisherman came back and, while the strong ones pulled the canoe in, they merely touched it, making sure it was noted that they’d touched it, and with this gesture they qualified for the thank-you handout. It was a kind of begging, a kind of scrounging that was quietly accepted. Or a kind of gentleman’s agreement. Which just left those old men who no longer could, or would, get up from where they were seated. But no fisherman ever failed to show his appreciation to them too, be it because he was fond of a particular old man or because the old man had certain qualities that meant he was somehow esteemed. In truth, all men were esteemed once they’d reached a certain age.

But back to my grandfather and his not going to the vidjil, nor to any other part of the shore where people fished, and to us, as a consequence, eating so little fish. All of my grandfather’s offspring were female, and we, the males, the grandsons, were too young to go out fishing. Was my grandfather not somehow esteemed? Did he not have in him those qualities that meant he’d be given fish even though he’d done nothing? Had he been bad in his youth and that was why he avoided other people, because he’d wronged them and they didn’t like him because of his past?

The one person who made sure we didn’t go too long without eating fish was my grandmother’s lovely niece. From an early age she developed a habit of being charitable towards us, at first giving us fish from her father, then her brothers, and then from the husband she acquired once she’d reached the age of desire. There was never any doubt that girl would find a good husband for she was so lovely.