The Roar of Morning

ONE

I live on a core of sedimentary and igneous rock surrounded by coral reefs, part of the arc of islands that encloses the Caribbean basin; on clear afternoons I can see the outline of the mountains on the northern coast of South America. I’m not as young as I was, and on occasion I give myself over to that solitary gratification which the good friars back in school used to call self-abuse — a practice that, as I knew even then, flies in the face of all that is right and sane.

It’s about an hour and a half past midnight. I sit on the paved terrace in front of my house and watch the low hills opposite me descend in serried ranks towards the coast. During the day they are grey, but, now, through the magical effect of night, they are shrouded in a mysterious bronze-green veil. Attached to the façade of virtually every house scattered across the nearby slopes is a bare neon tube, and from this distance they look like giant straw-coloured glowworms gnawing at the walls with gently undulating movements. When there is a moon, you can make out the wrecked cars strewn around the houses like so many fossils, not decaying, but eternally waiting. My loyal bitch Fonda lies at my feet and now and then licks my toes slowly and obsequiously through my open slippers. In my garden, six yards or so to the right of where I’m sitting, there’s an old indju tree, a giant bowed by the wind. At irregular intervals it lets out a rasping moan, very like the dull, subdued growl that occasionally issues from the throats of old men. There is an unsightly kink in the trunk and the bark is covered in thick brown veins, formed by the sticky sap secreted by the tree. A worn-out veteran who knows he has grown too old and hasn’t bothered to clean up after his last ejaculation.

An ugly neon tube shines from the front of my house too. To my left on the terrace there is a small tumbler of whisky with a splash of lukewarm water — my fifth — and to my right the umpteenth bottle of ice-cold Dutch beer. For me they make the ideal combination, with an invigorating effect that I unfortunately discovered only late in life. Lager makes me languid and gloomy, whisky makes me aggressive and gloomy. By alternating these Scottish and Dutch derivatives of barley I often achieve the effect I look for in drink: of creating myself anew.

Every self-respecting citizen must have a front garden. That’s the custom around here. Even though the houses might be surrounded by the carcasses of discarded refrigerators, washing machines and cars, which serve both as status symbols and as breeding grounds for the dengue mosquito, the garden must be kept clean and tidy; any weeds must be destroyed immediately. As with certain other things, I have gone my own way. My cluttered, overgrown plot may compare unfavourably with the immaculate gardens elsewhere in the neighbourhood and probably invites critical comments, but I never hear them because I have hardly any contact with other people. I’m not a plant lover exactly, but I do enjoy the feeling of security that the tall bushes around my house afford me. My garden looks rather wild at the moment, as the rainy season has only just ended. Maybe I shall have to do something about it after all. It’s amazing how every year a different plant takes over. How these new species get into my garden is a mystery. The oddity currently is a thorny shrub that has grey-green leaves shaped like half-moons, but with the two extremities forked like a snake’s tongue; the stems are adorned with gleaming red fruits the size of a pea. Such a beautiful plant can only be poisonous. The emaciated goats that occasionally manage to sneak in here leave it untouched. Which may be why it’s running riot. The four trees against the fence on the left look particularly majestic, I think. Like soldiers on parade, they stand in a dead-straight line; they have no lower branches and rise a good twenty feet straight into the air, their thin trunks at once elegant and gross, like the gangling legs of a young goat, as frail and tough as all life.

People who know me, and those who don’t, accuse me, not without a touch of envy, of being a recluse who doesn’t give a damn about anyone else; they say I have removed myself from all contact with the outside world in this sparsely populated western part of the island, not even allowing a telephone in my hermitage. In fact, my house is on a fairly busy main road, although there are no cars passing at this hour. If I step on it, in twenty minutes I can be in town, where I visit the supermarket frequently, the bookshop occasionally and the barber two or three times a year. And my lair can’t be that hard to find, because I get more visitors than I would like.

This afternoon Eugenio dropped by. With his extravagant beard, parted in the middle from lower lip down to Adam’s apple, clothes that flap around him because they are several sizes too large and a straw hat with an enormous brim that almost conceals his diminutive figure, he is not an appealing sight and most people avoid him, although they know he’s harmless. For about fifteen years he taught the third class at the primary school in the village and organised sports for the children after lessons. It all started one Monday morning when he appeared at school with a stubbly growth of beard, and thereafter he never shaved again. In the space of a few weeks he lost an alarming amount of weight. When he began to keep his big hat on even in class, ceased to talk to his fellow teachers and started giving sex instruction instead of the usual language and math lessons, the headmaster had to act. Eugenio spent three months at the psychiatric clinic in town. Since his discharge, he has been either on sick leave or suspended on full pay; at any rate, he collects his teacher’s salary without fail each month. He now lives with a black woman who is twenty years his junior and has an exceptionally fine figure.

Sometimes he shouts obscenities at the packed tourist buses that drive past, and he likes to talk about the dreadful disasters that the astrologers wish upon mankind; as he does so, a fearsome look comes into his eyes, as if he were keen to start scourging himself. But in general he is very friendly. He talks about Abraham Lincoln as if he were still alive, and insists that we all have a double who will breathe his last at the same moment we do. He likes artificial flowers, because although they lose their lustre, they never in fact fade; and now and then he mutters something about hidden drawers full of secret documents.

The secret documents are actually in his boots. He wears calf-length boots that are too big for him, stuffed with pages torn out of books and folded very small. Most of the cuttings contain grandiose pronouncements by people like Churchill, Ortega y Gasset, Gandhi and Fidel Castro, but there is also, for example, a short dissertation on how to prepare a herbal remedy for syphilis, a list of proverbs mentioning cows or dogs, a colour photograph of a half-naked Marilyn Monroe, and the recipe for a hot sauce made of curry, garlic, sweet peppers and onions.

Though he may be a little unbalanced, Eugenio sometimes says things that make you think. “The inhabitants of this island are all scared stiff of walking in the rain. But the fools don’t know that it’s not the rain but the sun that they should be protecting themselves against.” Or, “That was an odd sermon the red-haired priest gave. As if he was addressing the rebellious descendants of the ancient Batavians and was unaware that his congregation in fact consisted mainly of the descendants of Angolan slaves.” About a fortnight ago I spent the whole afternoon drinking on the terrace with this oddball. He started talking about Nostradamus, and when I didn’t react he switched to the Revelation of St. John the Apostle. My suggestion that the two of them should get together and swap prophecies shut him up completely and we went on drinking in silence, which is the best way to drink anyway. Then, when dirty streaks of grey and pink appeared in the western sky and it began to get dark, he handed me his empty beer bottle and said, “One more beer. Then I must be off.” As I went to take the bottle from him, he did not let go immediately. He hunched up his body so that he practically disappeared beneath his hat, and as we both clung to the green bottle he muttered, “You’re playing a dangerous game. You sleep all day and stay awake all night. That’s unnatural and asking for trouble. You can’t protect yourself from perdition solely with drink. If you must be alone, you should at least fill your nights with daydreams.”

This afternoon when he walked solemnly through my gate, I was burning rubbish in an oil drum nearby. He stopped and watched me without saying a word. This indicated that I had to say something.

“You look like a walking toadstool with that bloody hat on.”

He didn’t react, but said, “Today’s not a day for burning rubbish.”

“Why not? Is it Friday the thirteenth?”

“The wind’s blowing from the wrong direction.”

“That makes no difference if you do it in an oil drum.”

“But you’re standing on the wrong side as well. Your clothes and your hair might catch fire. That was a good poem.”

“What are you talking about?”

He dropped onto his right knee, untied his left bootlace and took out a neatly folded piece of paper the size of a five-cent coin. He stood up and offered it to me, but from the opposite side of the oil drum from where I was standing. I moved round to the other side and took the paper from him. I unfolded it and read: “After my death — and this will be a comfort to me — no one will be able to find in my papers a single explanation of what really made my life worth living; no one will be able to find the key inside me that explains everything. .”

“It’s not a poem. It’s a diary entry by Kierkegaard.”

He quickly took the piece of paper out of my hand with a rather offended expression and said, “You shouldn’t say Kierkegaard, but Kièr-ke-gòr. It’s written Kierkegaard, but you pronounce it Kièr-ke-gòr.”

“Thanks. Now I know.”

He dived into his boot again and produced another cutting, which he unfolded before handing it to me. It was my poem about Lilith, the first woman, that had been published some time previously in the weekend supplement of a local daily.

“Why do you think it’s a good poem, and why do you keep it?”

“It’s a wonderful poem.”

“Why do you think it’s wonderful?”

“Why do you ask stupid questions?” You think a poem’s wonderful because you think it’s wonderful. End of story. But you’re conceited — I expect you want me to sing the praises of your writing.”

“Do you want to come in for a drink?”

“Oh no, never again. Those four animals of yours aren’t dogs, they’re wolves. But if you’d like to get me a bottle of beer, I’d really appreciate it.”

I got him a bottle of beer. He took a short swig, tapped his hat with the neck of the bottle in a kind of military salute, turned on his heel and minced off in the direction of the village.

Now, as I sit here in the night gazing stupidly at hills that keep changing their shape — a game they will continue until morning breaks, when they will resume their original outline — I am overcome with feelings of both pity and admiration for Eugenio. This planet is one huge mess. Jews kill Muslims, Catholics blow up Protestants and the incumbent of the White House who’s acting the screen role of president of the United States is heading straight for a confrontation with the Russians. Lies and calumnies, falsifications of the Bible and history have made the world incomprehensible, and you wonder whether there’s any possibility of rising above the chaos. But lo and behold! Suddenly a little bird sings, and in this forgotten corner of the world that small action gives us strength because it makes things fall back into place: my poem in a madman’s stinking shoe.

A dearth of drink obliges me to go back inside to replenish my supply of Dutch courage, but soon I’m back in my old place under the neon strip, on the same lukewarm paving slab, flanked by my fresh provisions.

At moments like this, when there is not a breath of wind, the night speaks with a chorus of primeval voices: the vegetation in my garden pants, as if the densely planted bushes were gasping for breath; the indju tree moans; the tiny, nameless creatures that forage for food only when it is pitch-dark make rustling noises; far off, an exhausted goat with its head caught in a fence utters a death rattle. Now and then I hear the strange cry of the small birds of prey that come at night to soar in wide arcs on the thermal currents rising from the seaward slopes of the hill: a high-pitched trill, like the giggle of a young girl, immediately followed by a protracted wail, as though the birds are in mortal danger — a moment’s happiness smothered by sadness. Just before sunrise, when they should be totally exhausted, the birds fly back to the coast of Venezuela where they live. Sometimes unidentifiable noises can also be heard, whisperings that seem like some incomprehensible warning. But none of these sounds, or even the shooting star high in the sky, manages to shatter the silence and imperturbability of the night which swallows up everything.

I love the hushed quality of the island when nature has fallen asleep, a few hours after midnight when the immobility of darkness prevails. The leaves hang motionless from the trees like tired eyelids. The trailing branches of the milkwood trees, which during the day flirt with the wind and climb up the telegraph poles across the road, have now ceased their coupling manoeuvres and droop loosely like dead snakes. The sky is black apart from an exceptionally large star here and there. Perhaps it will rain soon. When I was a boy I imagined that the darkness was square, four black walls that formed not so much a square as a rectangle, inside which everything was dark. When I was sent to bed and turned out the light, my room was enclosed within a small square. But there was still a narrow strip of light shining under the door, and now and then I could hear a voice or some other sound in the house.

Later, when the other lights in the house had gone out and the bright strip under the door had vanished, the whole building was enclosed in a large square of darkness. Even then there were faint sounds, inexplicable noises in and around the house, and the barely perceptible sighs that I sometimes thought I could hear in the distance. Not much has changed. The boy who used to lie on his narrow bed listening to the sounds of the darkness is now an old man sitting on his terrace gazing at the dark. The square has become larger: the whole Caribbean is surrounded by four black walls of China, and within them damnation continually smoulders.

I don’t know if it is a warning that my arteries are becoming clogged with cholesterol, but sometimes at this hour, when the alcohol has gone to my head, I have the urge to play Caribbean Man, or at least make an amalgam of all my fellow inhabitants of the archipelago and dissect them frantically. It is not the Jew but Caribbean Man who is the most tragic figure on earth; his destination is not Auschwitz but Disney World. He lives in hiding, even though the colonial occupation ended long ago. He suffers from night blindness and cures himself by spending the whole day in the sun. His life, a feast of laughter and dancing, is actually a lament, intoned to the sound of calypso, reggae or merengue: his mistrust is fed by disillusionment and the inexorability of fate, by a fundamental scepticism about the likelihood of happy endings. This coconut mentality makes his very existence a web in which he is increasingly entangled. The white man isn’t white and the black man isn’t black; both are aliens in this land where their umbilical cords are buried.

Eugenio is right. If you try to fill the night with drink alone, you end up fretting about problems that are insoluble.

Around three in the morning, when the silence is intense and the night is at its loveliest, the cockerels start their din. When I was a child, they told me at school that the cockerel flaps its wings and cries cock-a-doodle-doo to greet the sun. That is pure fantasy: the creatures start their hideous concert when it’s still pitch-dark and do not stop until it is broad daylight. At the first cockcrow my conscience starts to feel remorse because, unlike other mortals, I am still up at this ungodly hour. Then I quickly clean the glass and the bottle and hurry indoors. But it is at least another hour before I turn in, for I have to follow the nightly rituals to the last detail. The three male dogs must be taken for a walk, for between ten and fifteen minutes each. It must be done separately, or they will tear each other to pieces; having a vagina, Fonda is the only one on good terms with them all. Of course the dogs should have been let out long ago, but I don’t like them barking and dashing around when I’m sitting outside. Another end-of-day ceremony is cleaning my teeth. I do this meticulously, brushing upwards and downwards as well as forwards and backwards, then rinsing with a mouthwash that reeks of the hospital. All this is designed to banish the foul aftertaste of drink and cigarettes so that I can go to bed cleansed. The last item on my daily schedule is to take the pistol out of its hiding place in the wardrobe and place it on the table to the right of my bed.

I’m in bed at last and switch off the reading lamp. Then I lie in the small square of darkness as I used to. I reach out and take the pistol off the bedside table. The metal has gone cold quickly because of the air-conditioning. “Birds die in the blue of morning too,” I say, or think, and pull the trigger. Apart from the four dogs, no one will probably hear the shot. I have no near neighbours and at this hour there are no pedestrians on the road.

But I usually fall asleep quickly and without any problem, only to be overwhelmed by imaginings that seem to be the visual equivalent of the sounds of the night accompanied by my musings. A dense flight of ugly waterfowl with long legs and retracted necks crosses the plain on the north coast and sails low over the great boulders, whose whimsical, eroded shapes give them the look of massive tombstones. Snakes poke their slimy heads out of the crevices in the cliffs and scrutinise their surroundings through narrowed eyelids; they press their snouts into the ground and slide slowly forward, so that the horny layer covering their bodies is sloughed off; hundreds of cast-off snake skins are left to stink among the rocks. Small, thickset creatures with stubby tails bend themselves double and spit saliva onto the sack-shaped reproductive organ that bulges from their rectum. From a bay choked with driftwood and empty plastic bottles toxic fumes rise, and on the surface of the dead water millions of tiny creatures float, entangled in slippery threads to form a mass of purple jelly. Blue-black fish flap sluggishly about in the mud near the springs that well from the rough limestone. Then, like a speeded-up film, these become mere snatches of images: a long claw with three toes and pointed nails — a thick, rough coat — branching horns above a protruding snout — grooved teeth with poison seeping down them — a leering head with mobile, protruding ears — callused, hairless patches on a rusty-brown coat — prehensile feet like a giant’s hairy hands. .

It sometimes happens, though, that at about three, with the advent of the crowing cocks and the gnawing conscience, I manage to allay my fears with a stiff shot of whisky and decide to stay outside and wait for the sunrise. That means, of course, that I have to fill at least two hours with drunken philosophising, but it’s worth it.

When the sun comes up, I have to change my position so that I can look eastwards. I sit on the projecting rim of the big flower pot, in which weeds, not flowers, flourish.

There follows the ritual duel that puts an end to night. The bronze morning light seeps hesitantly through the resisting darkness, and the hills stand out more sharply against the sky, like reclining goddesses with drawn-up knees and enormous breasts. Then the peaks are surrounded by a halo of silver and the tropical sunrise explodes triumphantly over the landscape, a glittering tidal wave of light rolling down the slopes. In these few dazzling moments each day, I think in my drunken way, the heavens warn man of the hellfire awaiting him.

In a few minutes the miracle is complete. The sun now climbs quickly into the sky and casts sharp contrasts of light and shade across the island.