The Roar of Morning

THREE

The only tangible objects in the cocoon I have spun for myself are the glass on my left and the beer bottle on my right. The night is getting cooler. Half-transparent wisps of cloud float across the dark heavens and dim the brightness of the stars. I long for one of these mild shapes to descend upon the island, brushing my body with a consoling caress like a velvet-skinned woman, faintly perfumed and whispering soft words.

The night speaks to me. I listen to its sounds and try to decipher their message. I attempt to receive the faintest signals from those unfathomable depths of the universe where the darkness is eternal and the prehistory of all living matter lies hidden. I try to recall the history of everything that guides and influences me; whatever it is that persuades me to sit on my terrace at two in the morning and drink my life away. Sometimes I succeed in freeing myself for a moment from time and space, from attachment and shyness. Then the people and the dogs and the sins that have forced their way into my life disappear like impurities, and in that hallowed mood I am no longer at odds with my own being. The beer and the whisky, though both necessary to set the process in motion, become superfluous at the point when the gaseous mixture mantling the earth changes composition and from the canopy of heaven a cool breeze of freedom and timelessness wafts towards me, containing ecstatic extracts of cactus, mushroom and ergot. A shiver runs through my limbs and it is as if the weight of my melancholy and the threat of the future are shaken from me. My sense of balance deserts me and I am overcome by a dizziness which creates the illusion that depths, emptiness and old fears can be erased, that happiness can simply be conjured up.

I have felt this dizziness at longer or shorter intervals throughout my life, sometimes at very inconvenient moments when I did not know how to respond. I found the sensation particularly annoying when I was young, and felt awkward enough anyway. It is only recently that I have begun to summon up the feeling deliberately; I call it my “solitary game.”

As far as I can remember, I was about eleven or twelve when I first experienced this vertigo. It happened at school, but luckily I was alone at the time. As a boy I went to a Catholic school, simply because it was the nearest one to my home. The Protestant school was in a different part of town and to reach it you had to cross the big pontoon bridge, so my parents thought it safer to send me to the nearby Catholic school. Each day began with half an hour’s religious instruction, with the emphasis on the Seven Sacraments and the Ten Commandments, which were relentlessly and repeatedly analysed. As a non-Catholic I did not take part in these catechism classes, and so in each term’s report, alongside the words “Religious Instruction,” there was always an oblique stroke rather than a mark out of ten. For the first half-hour of each day I sat with a textbook open in front of me, but did not read it because I was secretly following the lesson. I did so because those classes taught me something about what was happening within me and outside me, neither of which I fully understood.

Two or three times a year, on Catholic feast days, an open-air mass was celebrated in the playground. Everything had to be prepared the day before. The sections of the prefabricated wooden altar were taken out and assembled; a rectangular red carpet was laid out in front of the altar and tubs of flowers were placed on either side. The large space beyond the altar was filled with an enormous number of benches, which the boys had lugged out of the dining hall and corridors and placed in two dead-straight lines. The previous afternoon the whole school had marched in procession to the church to confess, so that they could take communion during the open-air mass. While this was happening, I stayed behind at school and hung about. There was also a Jewish boy from a higher class, but I paid no attention to him.

And the following day too, when all the boys and the priests were attending mass, I was left to my own devices. Though I was supposed to stay in the classroom and go over the day’s lessons, I didn’t feel much like doing so. My classroom was on the second floor and, tucked safely away behind a row of flower tubs in the corridor, I watched events down in the playground with interest and a mixture of feelings. It struck me as some weird kind of play being performed in an incomprehensible language, but at the same time I was attracted by the mysterious gestures of the priest before the altar, by the Latin words that he would sometimes mutter inaudibly and at other times sing out at the top of his voice, by the swinging of the censer and the tinkling of the little bell.

It was now time for the boys to take communion. They left their benches and lined up by classes before the altar, their teachers in front. When it was the turn of my class, I left my hiding place, went into the classroom and made straight for the cupboard where equipment was stored, as I knew it contained a telescope. It was right at the top and I had to stand on the bottom shelf to reach it.

The telescope belonged to the teacher. He had once taken the instrument to pieces, explaining to us in detail how it worked. Then he allowed each of us in turn to look out of the window through it for a few seconds. The teacher used the telescope for bird watching, which was, he said, a fascinating hobby. He often told us delightful stories about how birds behave, invariably concluding by making a comparison with human beings. In the garden behind the school there was an upturned metal drum on which every day the teacher would put out a bowl of water, bread crumbs and some sugar for the birds. He would position himself some distance away, half-hidden, and observe the creatures through his telescope. We had once been allowed to walk in the garden during breaks, but ever since one of the boys from the senior classes emptied an inkwell into the rain gauge set up there, and no one would name the culprit, the garden was off-limits to all pupils.

For some reason, one of the teacher’s stories has stayed with me. It was about a pair of troupials that came to eat and drink at exactly the same time every afternoon. They were beautiful specimens, with their sharply contrasting deep-orange and gleaming black feathers. One day the pair arrived with two chicks, which, in contrast to their parents, were bald and grey. With the exception of baby chickens, the friar told us, all young birds are ugly. These chicks had gaping beaks, and their parents fed them first, before eating anything themselves. The funny thing was that after a week or so, when the little ones had learned how to feed and threw themselves greedily on the food on the drum, they were pecked and driven off by their parents. Only after Mum and Dad had finished their meal were the little whippersnappers allowed at table. The friar concluded his story with a short sermon about parental wisdom and love, and about the respect and gratitude that all boys owed to their father and mother.

Armed with the telescope, I went back into the corridor, crouched behind the tub and followed the activities in the playground, now at very close quarters. In one hand the priest held a large chalice that looked as if it were made of gold and with the other hand he distributed the wafers. He had long, elegant fingers — I could even make out his well-manicured nails. A boy from my class took a couple of timid steps forward, with a look of something like alarm on his face. He knelt down rather stiffly in front of the priest, who carefully placed the wafer on the boy’s pink tongue. I saw the boy’s expression brighten immediately and I was glad, although I did not know why. Then I suddenly felt an emptiness in my head and sweat forced its way out of every pore in my body. I became paralysed, as if all my soft tissue had lost its resilience and all my bones had become petrified. With one hand I clung to the edge of the tub, and with the other I pressed the telescope desperately to my chest so as not to drop it. I thought I had suddenly been taken ill, and was terrified. But I was not ill, because the fear in my heart soon gave way to a strange feeling of relief, which was replaced in turn by an intense happiness that seemed to fill not only my body but the whole corridor.

My second dizzy spell occurred under very different circumstances more than a year later, during the summer holidays. I was staying with an aunt and uncle who lived out of town in a mansion, but because they were rather elderly, I spent most of the day on Tochi’s little farm not far away.

Tochi and his wife were both warm, cheerful people who didn’t give a damn about the sordid aspects of life and seldom took anything seriously. They were very similar in appearance as well: both were short, fat and rotund, and both had broad, dark-brown faces that were always gleaming. They had a daughter and two sons, the youngest of whom, Cinto, was my age.

Tochi grew a variety of vegetables and usually managed to sell all his produce to the big tourist hotel on the coast. But his crops often failed, either because they were attacked by insects and other vermin or because the rain stayed away for too long and the well dried up. This inspired the crafty Tochi to involve himself more directly with the island’s tourist industry. The sandy track that ran past his farm to the coast had once been the only link between the hotel and the main road to town. The track wound its way along the foot of the Montenegro, a range of quite steep hills that reached almost to the coast and was quite dangerous because stones and boulders sometimes rolled down the slopes. At one time the track had been lined with signs in English warning the tourists of falling rocks, but these were soon removed by the locals for firewood. When a second modern hotel was built on the coast, a four-lane asphalt road was constructed on the other side of the hills as a direct link with the town and the airport. The new road was considerably longer, so many economy-minded American tourists continued to drive along the sandy track, especially as the tourist brochures described it as a “scenic route.” This gave Tochi the idea of exploiting the holiday market. A short distance from his house he kept three large boulders ready at the side of the track, and in lean times he would roll them onto the roadway with a thick pole so that cars could not get past. It was Cinto’s job to hang around nearby until a car carrying tourists, usually a man accompanied by a scantily dressed woman, came along and pulled up at the road block. The man would usually get out and try to shift the massive stones. At that moment Cinto would arrive and offer in broken English to call his father and big brother, who would be able to roll the boulders out of the way. The offer would be eagerly accepted. At the beginning Tochi charged five dollars for this service, but since the day when a tourist had pressed ten dollars into his hand he had changed his tactics. Now, when he and his sons had cleared the road and the tourist asked how much he owed him, Tochi would say, “I may be a poor farmer with a family of twelve to support, but if a man helps a fellow human being, he mustn’t charge money for it.” This almost always resulted in the tourist slipping little Cinto a ten-dollar note. An elderly couple once even gave them twenty-five dollars. Every time they pulled off this con trick, Tochi would say to his sons, “We’ll go on doing this until we get our fingers burned. But why should they catch us out? We don’t do it every day, and those tourists only stay a few days at the hotel and others come in their place. We can’t live on air.”

I heard the whole story from Cinto, with whom I also used to go and spy on Shon Joshi. These spying missions were exciting in themselves, because they meant running the gauntlet of the ferocious-looking dogs that guarded the property, but I could never see what was so special about Shon Joshi. Cinto was full of enthusiasm, though: “You must go and see the old guy. Everyone for miles around knows him and hates him, but has great respect for him. He’s got a huge prick and he uses it every day. He’s rich. He’s been to bed with almost every girl around here. My father once said that if he ever laid a finger on my sister Rosamaría, he’d chop him into a hundred pieces with his machete. And the randy goat is really old. He’s over sixty! But he’s got a super-prick, because he drinks turkey blood every morning. Hot blood, straight from the bird’s neck. He must have a thousand turkeys. You really must see the horny old slob.”

Shon Joshi lived in a splendid white mansion with a massive roof, a number of elegant dormer windows, and a raised front terrace flanked by corner turrets. He had a big turkey farm and every year at Thanksgiving and Christmas he slaughtered hundreds of birds and sold them to the tourist hotels.

We climbed over the fence and crept stealthily through the undergrowth. “It takes longer from this direction,” explained Cinto, “but it’s safer. If you walk into the wind the dogs can’t catch your scent, and if we don’t make any noise they won’t notice us.” We crept behind the long row of cages. It was the first time I had seen live turkeys. I thought they were hideous, with their swollen combs and wattles and their dreadful high-pitched squawks. When we got closer to the house, we looked for a well-camouflaged spot from which to survey the terrace and wait until Shon Joshi emerged. “He’s got at least ten or twelve maids,” said Cinto, “all of them sixteen or younger. The men who feed the turkeys and clean out the cages are never allowed in the house, and if they trespass they’re sacked and kicked out. Look, there he is!”

I had expected a giant of a man, an imposing figure bulging with muscles, but Shon Joshi turned out to be a short, puny creature, dressed in an immaculate tropical suit that seemed too big for him. On his neck I could see red combs and wattles, smaller versions of the ones on his turkeys, and there were brown lumps on his cheeks and forehead. He walked up and down the terrace a few times with a cautious, mincing gait, then looked up at the hot sun, took out a white handkerchief, wiped the backs of his hands with it and quickly disappeared back into the house. “Come on, let’s get out of here,” whispered Cinto almost triumphantly.

“My leg’s gone to sleep, I can’t get up yet,” I lied. “I’ll come along in a minute.”

This was because at that moment I felt the strange dizziness in my head. I was now in the house following Shon Joshi down a long passage. He was no longer the seedy little man I had seen a few minutes earlier, but a handsome eastern prince, complete with moustache and short beard. When he reached the end of the passage he opened a heavy oak door with a bold gesture and strode through. From the room beyond wafted a pungent, pleasant perfume that I inhaled deeply. I too was an Arabian prince, clad in a colourful costume with sleeves that were much too wide and wearing a winered turban secured by a golden clasp on my head. As I stood in the doorway, I was obliged to give my eyes time to adjust to the semidarkness. Although there was an enormous chandelier with at least a hundred slender branches hanging from the ceiling, none of its lamps gave more light than a candle. I was in a very large chamber, whose four walls were hung with patterned curtains and rugs with scenes woven into them that made me blush. The floor was strewn with huge, plump cushions, and I blushed even more when I saw the scantily clad young women sitting or lying on the cushions in shameless poses. But I plucked up my courage and, ignoring the leers of the sprawling girls, marched determinedly between the cushions to the back of the room.

There sat Rosamaría, Cinto’s sister, who was four years older than him. She had constructed for herself a kind of armchair out of salmon-pink cushions and she half-lay and half-sat upon it, in exactly the same position I had seen her in that morning, in a hammock on the small terrace in front of her parents’ house. At the time she had looked at me with troubled but kind eyes, and I even thought I saw a faint smile on her lips. Now she was sitting with her face to the wall, and I concluded from this that she was desperate to keep apart from the other girls. I stood behind her, leant forward a little and saw through the semitransparent fabric that swathed the outlines of her mysterious brown body. Embarrassed, I stepped back and lowered my eyes, but immediately afterwards I took another look. I stretched out my right arm and softly stroked her cheek with the backs of my fingers. I hoped she wouldn’t notice the slight trembling of my hand, and would not turn round and look me straight in the eye. But she remained motionless and I continued to stroke her cheek. Then I touched her ear with my fingertips and ran my thumb along one of her eyebrows a few times. Like that morning, I thought I saw a faint smile on her lips and felt embarrassed and gratified at the same time. Then she leant back further and pressed her head against my chest, which gave me a pleasant tingling sensation.

Outside, the gobbling of the turkeys and the barking of the dogs ceased, and in the sudden silence I was able to distinguish tiny noises. I was still crouching in the same spot in the undergrowth. There was the faint hum of insects in the warm afternoon air, and a smell of dry soil and dead leaves. From the top of a tree came the hesitant cheep of a young bird, fresh from the nest, trying out its voice. A few large yellow leaves, their work done, came spiralling down to cover the nakedness of the forest floor. Close to where I was sitting, a large bush and a dark red vine clung together in a passionate embrace.

It was the first time I had an erection thinking about a girl.