The Roar of Morning

FOUR

Under the influence of drink, I can look at an animal, a plant or a stone with a child’s eye and suddenly see everything anew, hoping in my befuddled way for a miraculous release that will allow me to start life again with a clean slate. Sometimes alcohol disperses the demons of the night, soothing the exhausting tensions inside me and healing my seared mind, heart and conscience. Unerring as a laser, a healing ray of light falls from the moon’s silver sickle onto my path.

Drink the great healer; the treacherous quack. I’m well aware, even when drunk, that what I’m so eager to clasp to my bosom may be no more than a temporary illusion. An adult can never become free again — he can never shake off the impure things that have attached themselves to his life with their suckers. There is no way back. But I drink, and in my brief intoxication allow myself to be carried back to a period when my life was not yet withered. Otherwise I should have to content myself with the implausibly calm existence of a naïve old man who thinks he should be happy because no great catastrophes have befallen him.

And yet, just as a boy in the process of becoming a man doesn’t know what to do with his arms and legs, which have suddenly grown longer and collide clumsily with doorways, so the adult looking back at his youth staggers under the weight of years. When you are no longer young, everything pristine and untainted is a reminder of death. That’s when my solitary game becomes dangerous.

I sit on my terrace and command the ridges of the hills to stop their grotesque metamorphoses. I order the exotic night birds to cease their hysterical cries. The world becomes silent and motionless, and I try to summon up that dizziness in my head which takes me back to childhood. But the great arch of the sky buckles, the starless heavens have come noiselessly off their hinges and begin to collapse, slowly at first, then faster as if trying to suffocate me. The air becomes compressed between heaven and earth. I’m lying on a hard bed gasping for breath. The pure dream that had begun to emerge disintegrates and I feel a burning fever all over and unbearable pain in my limbs. My eyelids are swollen and my eyes sting. When I half-open them, I’m looking into the ugly features of the curandera, who is leaning over the bed stuffing herbs under my pillow. Then she goes to the foot of the bed and starts smearing a black paste on the soles of my feet.

The moon wind blew for the first time around the middle of the seventeenth century when, by the light of a full moon, the itinerant priest Plácido died a martyr’s death on a limestone plateau on the north coast, slain by a drunken, red-haired mercenary. Ever since, the phenomenon has been repeated in the same place almost every September. There has not been a single family from the village lying at the foot of the plateau that has not had at least one member snatched away by the terrible moon wind and the raging fever it brings. The three shops in the village sell only sombre mourning garb, as no one ever has a chance to don colourful clothes; before the two years of mourning for one victim are up, there is always a new death in the family. No one plays music in their houses or even in the village’s two bars. The men and women wear such surly expressions, and even the children are serious when they play. The late poet Pierre L. once read me a moving poem, an epic without a hero, in which he calls the village successively Village of Mourning, Village without Music and Village without Smiles.

Legend has it that, when Father Plácido’s strength was failing and he sank, mortally wounded, onto the chalky ground, purple blood flowed from his Spanish body. There came a roar like that of a gale, but the brightly lit night was windless and the atmosphere was sultry. The rumbling in the sky persisted. It was a sound that the soldiers had never heard before, and it filled them with a strange fear. The heat became almost unbearable, and all the air seemed to be sucked away. Cursing, the soldiers unbuttoned their tunics, revealing sweaty, hairless chests that glistened in the moonlight. Suddenly an icy blast came whistling across the plateau and chilled them to the bone. They took refuge in a cave, but the moon wind fever was already coursing through their bodies. None of them left the cave alive. The eleven skeletons were found some twenty-five years later.

Each September, when the moon is full, the villagers gaze into the sky with resignation on their faces but bitterness in their hearts. If they see a purplish glow around the lunar disc, they know the moon wind is on its way. They quickly lock themselves in their houses. Everything is shut tight; they stuff folded newspapers and strips of rag between the closed shutters and in every chink, so that not a breath of air can get in. When the wind has gone from the plain and the heat returns, it becomes boiling hot inside the houses, but people know that they are safe from the biting cold that will roar past. But almost every year there are victims. A window swings open in a little room where a baby is crying because of the heat. An old man, ignorant of the danger, sleeps off his hangover behind the tavern. A rash youth refuses to give credit to a silly legend.

When rumours started to circulate that the island’s Catholic authorities had begun an inquiry into the life and death of Father Plácido, with the object of starting the official process of canonisation, or at least beatification, some of the villagers saw this as an excellent opportunity to gain favour with the saint-to-be and thus stop the moon wind. They organised a collection with the aim of erecting a statue of Father Plácido. There was a shady Italian in town with a flourishing trade in magic potions, designed to protect you against evil influence, bind a loved one to you forever, cause children’s milk teeth to come through painlessly and much else besides; hearing of the collection, the Italian announced that he was in fact a trained sculptor and would be glad to offer his services. As a sample of his work he produced a painting showing a rather stocky man with his face raised piously to heaven and his habit half-open to reveal a snow-white chest bearing a purple heart; “The Violet Saint,” read the inscription. But the statue never materialised, because the rumours about canonisation were false. The diocese found it necessary to issue a communiqué containing the startling revelation that neither the Archivo General de Indias in Seville nor the archive of the apostolic prefecture in Caracas contained any information about a Father Plácido.

Thus the Violet Saint remained unpropitiated and the moon wind still sweeps across the plain almost every year. Men, beasts and plants alike are affected when, in the midst of scorching heat, the freezing wind unexpectedly descends from the mountains and chills everything in its path. Young vegetables lose their sheen and come out in black spots, tamarind husks shrivel on the branch and unripe mangoes and medlars fall from the trees, riddled with tiny grey worms. The morning after the full moon, cattle are found with paralysed hind quarters. Pregnant goats lie on their backs and writhe in pain as violent abdominal cramps choke the young inside them. Not a single offspring of any species survives exposure to the moon wind. Small children lose all power of movement, their skin develops thick, ugly folds and death follows swiftly; older children may hold out for two or three days, but very few withstand the devastating fever. In grown men and women it lasts from eight to ten days. With eyes tight shut, distorted mouth agape and cheeks seemingly turned to leather, the victims lie in bed with trembling limbs, constantly shifting from their left side to their right. Their families and neighbours busy themselves day and night administering folk remedies that are supposed to draw the fever from the head of the sufferer to the soles of his feet, so as to quench the heat ravaging his body. After a week, sometimes a little longer, the patient suddenly rolls over onto his back, his arms and legs stop trembling, his glazed eyes are half-open and his tanned face begins to look like a death’s head. The priest is hurriedly summoned to give the last rites with professional aplomb.

Occasionally some man or woman who is stronger in body, mind and faith survives the fever, but no one escapes the chastisement of the Violet Saint without some memento. Pipi Gatiero, the skinny village drunk who no one thought would recover, was left with a permanently bent neck, so that his head lolls ridiculously when he walks. “The booze in my blood was my salvation,” he constantly intones, and drinks more than ever. Since his miraculous recovery Fèfè Notisiero has had ten stiff fingers that he cannot persuade to move. All day long he sits on his step violently shaking his head. His grandson sits next to him, and from time to time shoves a pipe into the mouth of the old man, who sucks furiously on it. Since Fèfè used to be a keen domino player and now walks around with his fingers splayed, the village boys have nicknamed him “Double Five.” Chela, the only loose woman in the village and one of the few females to have withstood the fever, emerged from her ordeal without a hair on her head. For years she wore a black headscarf day and night, but now she goes around in a luxuriant wig. Tough old Don Bèni, who owns more goats than anyone else, escaped with nothing more than slurred speech. This was because his wife summoned a doctor from town who gave him injections. In his case the fever lasted only six days. “I have lived twice,” Don Bèni never tires of telling anyone who will listen. “In those days of delirium my whole life — even things I had long forgotten — passed before my mind’s eye in the minutest detail. I have lived twice, and the second time around every experience was more intense.”

Each time someone survives the moon wind sickness, their feverish hallucinations are the talk of the village. There is also some interest in the capital: a few years ago a learned researcher wrote a thesis entitled A Psychological Study of the Experiences of Nine Survivors of Moon Wind Fever, which provoked much controversy. A civil servant from the government medical service even appeared on television to dismiss the so-called moon wind fever as nothing more than a severe form of dengue.

The survivors are unanimous in stating that, throughout the whole time the fever rages, any kind of restful sleep is impossible, and that this leads to utter mental and physical exhaustion; this must be why so few people recover. There are lucid moments when the patient observes everything around him with burning eyes — but he is so exhausted that he can do nothing, and eventually his consciousness clouds over again and he drifts into a half-waking state where he can hear voices and other sounds but cannot identify them. He is overwhelmed by terror as he feels himself sinking further into the morass of his fading consciousness. He thrashes about in a futile attempt to escape the swampy blackness engulfing him.

“He’s trying to talk, praise be to the Mother of God,” echoes another voice. “O Queen of heaven, hear the plea of Thy black slave and drive out the fever from the body of this man. Blessed be the name of Thy Son.”

Try as I may, I keep drifting into a new delirious dream. I hear the voices of black women, I see white women’s breasts with firm, reddish-brown nipples: an incoherent dream full of squirming, slippery creatures, lisping sounds and warm orifices. My body trembles, possessed by a strange exultation, and I try to sit up, but I am forcefully thrust back into a prone position to continue my rhythmic contortions on the bed. Over the pitch-black pool I find myself in, a faint greyish glow begins to break. A shadow comes to life, a shapeless mass that writhes slowly forward, now swelling to a terrifying bulk, now shrinking to a thin ribbon, then growing once more into a strapping giant with a thousand arms that wave like the tentacles of a polyp. I hear a shot and wake with a start, paralysed by fear. I don’t know whether the shot was in my dream, or whether someone actually fired a gun nearby. Or did I fire the shot myself? Did I reach out and take the pistol off my bedside table? Birds die in the blue of morning too, I say to myself, without knowing why.

It is not completely dark in the room I am in, as there is a small fire burning somewhere. I cannot make the fire out itself. But I can see the flickering of its flames reflected on the massive roof beam above my head. The only sound I can hear is the guttural rattle I produce as I inhale the cold air through my nostrils and expel it feverishly, causing a dull pain in my chest. Where did the chattering women go? It’s probably the middle of the night and everyone is asleep. But it’s nothing new for me to be lying alone at night while other people sleep. Once again I am lying, as I used to, in the little square of dark.

But I am not alone. Someone is sitting at the foot of my bed. One of the old women? What has she brought now? Another bowl of iguana soup to build up my strength, or another infusion of lemon grass that she will make me drink while it’s still boiling so as to drive out the fever? I cannot identify the nodding figure.

“Are you awake?” I recognise the old woman’s voice.

“What? I don’t know. .”

“It’s best not to talk, it’ll tire you out. You must save all your strength to get better. Santísima Virgen, make this son’s body healthy again. Is there anything this old woman can do for you? Do you want a drink?”

“I need a pee.”

“Oh, that’s easy. I’ll just get the can.”

The blanket is shoved aside and with strong hands the woman rolls me onto my right side.

“Have I got my trousers on?”

“Yes, just a minute, we’re almost there.”

The callused hands fiddle roughly with my body. Then she says, “It’s hanging in the can. Go ahead.”

As the burning liquid leaves my body I experience enormous relief. Then I feel myself sinking back into the blackness of a yawning chasm. The last thing I hear is the splash as the old woman throws the contents of the can out through the doorway.

The grey fronds before my eyes turn into the green of a papaya plantation. I see endless, dead-straight lines of trees, their six-fingered leaves waving in the wind, and I begin to hope that the breeze they are sending in my direction will dispel all the pain. I look up at the white clouds gliding mysteriously past against the vast blue backdrop. The shadows are dark on the earth, but white in the sky. These clouds are the white shadows of things on the earth, the capricious silhouettes of mountains, trees, houses and people driven silently and aimlessly across the sky like insubstantial veils and fleshless forms. The spectacle does not last long. Low on the horizon a broad grey band spreads and in the far distance there is the dull, intermittent rumble of thunder. The white clouds and the blue backdrop darken and draw a new, hazy night over themselves. Everything goes black.

The next night — in my delirium, that is — I am a boy of about eleven. I am staying with my uncle, who lives on the mainland, and am lying on my back on the roof of the house. I am watching incredibly large white clouds being blown into each other by the wind, like fragile curtains, and finally being driven away to distant countries. The corrugations of the iron roof are hurting my back, but I do not move. Any movement would make the metal creak and betray my presence. And anyway I welcome the pain. I lie there motionless.

The evening dew makes the metal sheets freezing cold, and the soreness in my back is almost unbearable. I clench my teeth and squeeze my eyes tight shut. Perhaps the pain will get so bad that I will die. In the morning, when the sun rises and the roof begins to warm up, I shall be dead: a corpse with eyes tight shut and clenched teeth. The birds of prey that live in the mountains will discover my body during their early morning reconnaissance and start to circle the house. Suddenly they will hang perfectly still in midair, and if no one in town is watching them, they will swoop like lightning down onto the roof. They will rip my flesh, greedily drink my blood and crush my bones. When their bellies are full, they will fly off with the remaining scraps of meat and bone to feed their young in their nest high in the mountains. Then it will pour with rain, washing all trace of blood off the roof.

No one will know what has happened to me. In the eyes of my classmates at the Colegio Aquino, I shall be a hero: a schoolboy who simply vanished off the face of the earth! The old women in our neighbourhood will say that it is not the first time a boy on the threshold of manhood has been abducted by an evil spirit. He’ll be lying at the edge of town somewhere, they’ll say, in some dark place where people seldom go, foaming copiously at the mouth. The men will jeer at the women and say the boy has met a rich lady who has fallen in love with him and that he’s now living like a lord in the capital. Who’d have thought it of such a well-behaved boy, brought up strictly and with a smile for everyone. My uncle the minister will call in the police to search for me, and if they find nothing he will send a sad telegram to my parents and probably pray for weeks for the return of the prodigal son.

I am lying not on a corrugated iron roof, but on a hard bed, and I have pains not only in my head, but also in my chest and throat. I am awake now, but I keep my eyes tight shut and my teeth clenched; I breathe laboriously through my nose. To judge by what I can hear, there are a lot of people in the room — men, women and children — and there is a lot of noise: the hubbub of the voices, the clatter of plates, pots and pans, and a scraping noise as if something is being dragged across the floor. I am surprised to find that, in spite of feeling pain all over, I feel at ease amid the turmoil of this strange room and among these people who are not part of my past. What am I doing here? Why am I not at home in my own bed? Is anyone missing me? Why am I not being rescued from this hole by my relatives?

“This one’s on the way out,” I hear a man’s voice say. “That lousy Violet Saint of yours is already cheering in heaven.”

“Por Dios, Bencho!” cries an alarmed woman’s voice. “I wouldn’t say things like that if I were you. It’s just asking for trouble. You’d better cross yourself right away.”

Suddenly there is complete silence, as if everyone has disappeared and left me alone in an empty room. A new dream is about to start. I can see no images, but I know that I am in a secluded spot in the forest, and I inhale the scent of thick undergrowth and newly dug earth. I open my eyes to see where I am, but I am back on the hard bed again, with two female figures moving about at the foot. I cannot make them out with any clarity, because the dream seems determined to stay incoherent. Then my delirium is completely dispelled by the sharp sunlight that streams through the doorway and casts a pattern of rectangles across the floor.

My eyes adjust to the light and I can at last see the two old witches. One of them is a real virago, tall and wide, with an enormous head of curly hair that glistens hideously from an excess of coconut oil and looks like a nest of young snakes. She is holding a dove in each hand, white creatures with red eyes incessantly jerking their heads back and forth. The second woman is equally tall, but is thin as a rake and flat-chested; she holds a knife between her teeth and is tying a grubby apron around her companion. When she has finished, she pulls the blanket off me and rolls up my trouser legs. She takes one of the doves from the other woman and in one rapid movement she twists its wings over its back and holds it belly up in the palm of her left hand. Her fingers grasp the bird’s neck and tail, so that it can move only its legs. With her other hand she takes the knife out of her mouth and with one swift stroke slits the dove open from neck to tail. The bird makes no sound. With the same dexterity the woman presses the creature she has cut open against the sole of my foot.

“Quick, cut the other bird open,” she snaps, handing the knife to the virago. The huge woman makes an incision in the second dove and presses it against my other sole. The blood of the birds feels tepid at first, but then becomes burning hot. Is it my imagination, or can I feel tiny, convulsive flutterings of intestines and bird claws against the soles of my feet? I begin to feel sick and try to pull my feet away, but the nausea is already giving way to a sensation that completely paralyses me. It is as if my body is emptying itself, as if my internal organs are relaxing in a series of minor spasms, as if all my pores are gaping to allow some slimy liquid to seep out of me. I feel as if my body is melting and I am sinking slowly into a substance that is neither solid nor liquid, but feels almost unbearably sensual and delicious. My every fibre is trembling with exaltation.

“Koño!” exclaims the woman who is tucking me in. “This fellow can’t be all that ill. Just look at his trousers. He’s come all over the place!”

I cannot make out all the words that a warm mouth is whispering close to my ear, but in the sweet murmurings I recognise the sounds I used to hear so often on hot afternoons when, with a woman’s sticky body pressed against mine, I rocked gently in a hammock that made faint rattling sounds. Suddenly I’m plunged into the tender warmth of Irma-Luz.

I never really got used to a hammock. With such an unstable structure you must take great care over every movement you make, and consequently I tumbled out of it a few times. Irma-Luz’s hammock was an enormous affair that stretched from wall to wall across her large room and was lavishly decorated with scores of ribbons and strings of beads in every conceivable colour. But the two rows of rattles at either end were the craziest idea of all. Irma-Luz had made them from hollowed-out gourds, which she had painted in bright colours and filled with pebbles from the beach. The slightest movement you made in the hammock caused stones to rattle. From the very start the constant noise got on my nerves. “Do you realise that that stupid rattling could make a man impotent in time?”

“On the contrary,” Irma-Luz had replied with a laugh, “don’t you know anything about psychology? You’ll probably be so conditioned by all that rattle that you’ll get an immediate hard-on whenever you hear the noise!”

On the afternoon of one of those sultry days in early May when a tepid, paralysing veil envelops the whole island, Irma-Luz and I were lying motionless in the hammock, our sweaty bodies pressed together. The primeval force that had taken us to the heights of ecstasy had subsided, the arousal and the passion had turned to satiety and exhaustion, and we lay so still that even the rattles at the head and foot of the hammock were silent.

This tender silence was suddenly shattered by the wailing of sirens and the screech of tyres, hideous sounds that went on and on, as if at least a hundred ambulances or police cars were chasing each other down the street.

“Sudden voices always make me jump,” Irma-Luz whispered without opening her eyes. I had already felt the shock go through her body.

“Perhaps World War Three has broken out,” I joked.

“There must have been some terrible accident — so many sirens, there’s no end to them. I must have a look out of the window.”

The stones rattled furiously as she jumped out of the hammock, and I had to roll quickly towards the centre of it to avoid falling out. She half-opened the window and we both caught the smell of burning that drifted in. She covered her breasts with her hands and leant out of the window.

“There’s a big fire. I can see a huge plume of smoke somewhere near the bridge. Wait a minute, there’s fire on the other side of the harbour too.”

I joined her at the window and we counted four fires. Down below, a truck full of soldiers roared past, preceded by two wailing police motorbikes. We closed the window to keep out the pungent smell of burning and switched on the radio. We listened to the news with mounting dismay. The newsreader was hard to follow, because at intervals he would break into a hysterical scream. The room filled with a stream of shocking reports: a mass march of striking workers in the centre of town; cars overturned and torched; vandalism and looting in supermarkets; a mob robbed of its senses by stolen liquor; bloody clashes between demonstrators and police; crowds, shootings, arson and looting; the sealing off of the town centre and the closure of the airport; a ban on assembly, a ban on the sale of alcoholic drinks, the imposition of a curfew. .

“I’ll get you something to eat,” said Irma-Luz. “You’d better stay here tonight. With that pale Protestant mug of yours you’d probably get lynched if you stepped into the street.”

I spent this day when so much changed, when my sleepy native isle was rudely deflowered by revolt, pain and blood, with a woman whose skin was soft and medlar-coloured in a hammock adorned with rattling gourds.

Later, after midnight, Irma Luz sat in the hammock once more; she had had a bath and was still naked. She dangled her legs over the side and pressed a tiny transistor radio to her ear. Now and then she relayed a news report. I knelt in front of the hammock and put my hands on her knees. I spread her thighs wide and pressed my head into her lap. I don’t know if it had anything to do with the smell of burning that still hung in the room, but her pubic hair smelt of incense, the same odour I had smelt as a small boy when mass was celebrated on the playground of my primary school. I lifted my head and studied the folds of her genitalia at close range. I realised at the same time that from below a thousand demons, and from above a thousand gods, were looking back at me.