The Roar of Morning

FIVE

I spent my tenth and most of my eleventh year — probably the period in your life when you see and hear most new things — on the mainland with my Venezuelan uncle. The man was neither Venezuelan nor even my real uncle, but I called him that because he lived on the mainland and was married to a Venezuelan woman. He was an odd character, but I guess he meant well. In the early years of the oil industry he had worked for Shell, but after spending some time among the oil tanks that mushroomed on the north side of the harbour he felt a vocation to become a minister. He went to Europe to study and returned a few years later, not as a Protestant minister, but as an evangelist belonging to some obscure sect obsessed with showing mankind the error of its ways and threatening hellfire and damnation. In between he found time to marry a beautiful Venezuelan woman, whose jet-black eyes and long, raven-black hair I can still recall. They lived on the mainland but visited the island, he as guest speaker to deliver fire-and-brimstone sermons in a tiny church on the other side of the harbour, she to buy a fresh supply of jewellery and other items and take them back illegally.

Not that the señora’s smuggling was particularly secretive. When she left she was usually weighed down: three or four necklaces round her neck, her wrists covered in bracelets, and rings on all her fingers except the thumbs, sometimes even two rings per finger. On one occasion when I went back with them during the holidays, I saw her nearly get caught when she arrived at Puerto Cabello. In addition to the usual huge quantity of jewellery, she was lugging an enormous bag bulging with top-quality American chewing tobacco. Suddenly she was accosted by a customs officer with a great deal of silver on his cap and epaulettes, a youngish fellow with a tiny but smartly groomed moustache: “Madam, your bag is very large and heavy.” “That’s my Venezuelan aunt behind bars,” I thought to myself. But she raised her head proudly and said, “You look like a charming young man, but you don’t seem to realise that a lady’s handbag contains secrets no man must ever see.” The man had a light-brown complexion, but I still noticed he was blushing. He nodded speechlessly and made a helpless gesture with his hands — and the contraband was allowed straight through. Less than two years later she was killed in a train crash.

The “uncle” and his wife were childless, and during a two-week holiday with them I made such a good impression that they wanted to adopt me. That was impossible, of course, but they did persuade my parents to let them borrow me for a time. The decisive factor was their promise that I would receive an excellent education. Not much came of my studies, however, as the schools were closed for most of that year. Quite apart from the normal holidays, there always seemed to be a revolution or rebellion in progress somewhere in the country. The initial response to this was invariably to close the schools. And when the situation returned to normal, reopening the schools was always the last thing the authorities thought of. All this was fine with me, but I thought it better not to write home about it. When I returned to the island after two years, I was put in the fifth class of my old primary school, but was demoted to the fourth class after three weeks because I was behind in just about every subject.

My Venezuelan uncle was obsessed with two things: the Bible and chess. Thanks to him I still know many passages from the Scriptures by heart, and I learned to play chess so well that if I was angry with him for some reason, I could usually beat him in fewer than thirty moves.

Every Saturday without fail my uncle would visit the prisoners incarcerated in the Castillo and bring them the Word of God. I was often made to accompany him so that I could see “the ugly side of life.” During the fifteen-minute work breaks and the one-hour lunch period, he would read to the prisoners from the Bible and speak words of comfort to them, emphasising the forgiveness of sins and God’s great love for all men, even for them, whatever they had done wrong. We had to get everything ready for the trip on Friday evening, as we left on the first bus at six the next morning. My uncle would take books, magazines, pamphlets, and miniature draughts and chess set with him, and I had to lug a basket containing fruit and those hard, round biscuits that were so popular at the time. At about eight the bus reached its terminus at the village of San Vicente. It was always a dusty drive, through little villages that all looked the same, and the bus would get fuller and fuller and noisier and noisier. From San Vicente we had almost an hour’s walk down a narrow country road before we arrived at the Castillo, a large, ugly building that looked nothing like a castle. By this time the inmates were already hard at work in the fields surrounding the prison. Hundreds of sweating men, all stripped to the waist, were busy digging, breaking stones, pushing heavy wheelbarrows or driving juddering drills into the ground. Two concrete mixers made an earsplitting din that never seemed to stop. All around, on low mounds and boulders, stood the uniformed guards, short, fat men who constantly wiped the sweat from their brows. They had long, old-fashioned rifles, and a few carried pistols.

Then came the sudden shrill whistle that everyone had been waiting for. The prisoners dropped their tools where they stood, or let their wheelbarrows crash to the ground, and hastily sought out a shady spot. My uncle would then join one group or another, and while the men lay on the ground smoking cigarettes, or pissed in the bushes, or stared absently in front of them, apparently without hearing or seeing anything, he would talk to them about God. Sometimes he would also play a game of draughts with one of the older prisoners, and between moves he would continue to talk about the second coming of Christ.

I used to sit on a boulder next to a man who kept himself apart from the other prisoners. He was tall and terribly thin; his eyes were lifeless and he seldom spoke. After I had been sitting next to him for some time, he would sometimes say, “Hello, lad.” I would answer, “Hello, sir,” and push the basket towards him, but he never took anything from it. Without saying a word, he would quickly smoke two or even three cigarettes in succession. Then the whistle would go and he would silently stand up and rejoin his work gang.

My uncle would come and sit with me for the hour and a half until the next break and teach me the finer points of chess. Now and then he would approach the guards, but did not like to do so because they had forbidden him to talk about religion. He was allowed to do that only to the prisoners, because they needed it. “We’re going to heaven anyway,” the guards would scoff.

When the whistle went for the next break, my uncle would hurry over to another group and the thin man would take up his usual position. Dutifully, I pushed the basket towards him yet again, though I realised he would never take anything. Many times I sat on the boulder next to that man and in all those months he said only a few words. Still, I think we communicated spiritually and I learned something from him, though I’m not quite sure what.

The thin man lit up a cigarette and inhaled deeply. He looked upwards and I followed his gaze. Far away in the taut blue sky a bird of prey soared upwards, its wings motionless. It rose higher and higher and became smaller and smaller, until it was no more than a tiny black cross floating up to heaven. I had to stop watching because my eyes were beginning to ache from the bright sunlight, but the man kept on staring at the bird. What’s going on in his head at this moment, I wondered. I felt sorry for him because he was in prison and couldn’t go home that evening as I could.

He now had a cigarette end between his lips and had placed his hands on his knees. He clenched his fists, and I saw that the taut skin of his hands was like the tanned hides of reptiles displayed in shops. I had the feeling that his clenched fists were not a sign of impotent rage; it was more as if he was trying to cling on to something. At any moment I expected him to sigh, “Oh, how wonderful everything could have been.” But he said nothing. Finally he lowered his head, and without blinking focused his attention on a dwarf bush a few yards away. It was a plant with dull green, saw-edged leaves which gave off a scarcely perceptible heat, suggesting that the bush was burning in some mysterious way. Beyond it was a low hill that had been deeply quarried out by the prisoners, creating a cave into which the sunlight fell obliquely. I watched the man and saw that he had looked away from the bush and was now staring at the gash in the hillside. For the umpteenth time I was struck by his tormented eyes and wondered whether he had clairvoyant powers. I looked back at the cave. It was probably stifling hot in there; who knows, it may have been home to the ghosts of prisoners who had succumbed to the brutal prison regime. If I strained my eyes, perhaps I could see the same things as the man sitting next to me. Halfway between us and the cave the sunlight and the darkness merged, and at that spot a clearly perceptible haze rose from the ground, in which the blurred reflection of the bush shimmered. Once again, I hoped that the man would say something, but the whistle sounded and he got up and left. I felt disappointed and slightly intoxicated. My eyes were hurting, there was a cramp in my legs and I was stiff all over from having sat for too long. I hated the merciless sun and the sandy soil on my skin and in my clothes.

The signal for the lunch break was a cannon shot from the Castillo. The iron gates of the prison opened with a hideous grating sound and a decrepit pickup truck drove out, bringing the food for the prisoners and guards. My uncle and I were given a portion from a large aluminium dish, invariably a greasy stew of rice, meat, beans and bananas. I took only a few mouthfuls. I preferred one of the hard biscuits from the basket, although they always gave me hiccups.

In the afternoon everyone worked at half-speed. The sun burnt even fiercer and the heat became almost unbearable. The pickaxes went into the ground at longer intervals, the wagons were filled more slowly and the wheelbarrows were pushed even more languidly. The guards sat on the mounds and the sweat marks around the armpits of their shirts grew larger and larger. The only one who did not malinger was my uncle. He spoke just as fervently about Our Lord in the afternoons as in the mornings.

Towards sunset, when it was time to go, my uncle would discover yet again that the basket was still full, and would ask me reproachfully, “Why didn’t you distribute the things among the prisoners?” But he never waited for an answer. He took the basket and hurried over to the prisoners already lined up waiting to be counted before marching back to the Castillo.

Once on our way home I asked my uncle about the thin man with the dead eyes and about what crime he had committed, and my uncle answered abruptly, “That’s El Verdugo. He’s driven by the forces of darkness. His soul is damned. You mustn’t bother with him.” This noncommittal reply only increased my sympathy for the man on the boulder.

After those trips to the Castillo I would lie in bed in the evening utterly exhausted, my back aching from all the sitting. Yet it took me some time to get to sleep. I would listen to the guitar music that drifted into my room almost every evening from the alleyway behind our house. It was usually a sombre, monotonous melody unaccompanied by any singing, which I found strange, as most people who play the guitar seem to feel that they have to sing as well. Between the strumming I heard other sounds: the cannon shots from the Castillo, the whistles of the guards, the sharp hissing sound when the air compressor was switched off, the loud clang when the tailgate of the pickup was dropped, the ceaseless clatter of pickaxes on the rocky ground, the rattling voice of my uncle, who could speak at such lightning speed about God in the work area of the prison. And once again I smelt the odours of the day: the freshly baked bread at the bus stop in the mornings, the starch from my uncle’s clothes as he sat bolt upright beside me on the bus, the orange and pineapple that rose from the basket, the reek of rum on the guards’ breath as they talked to my uncle, and most of all the smell of newly dug earth and crushed blocks of stone. I also saw an unending succession of images floating towards me: the curious grimaces my uncle made when he talked to the prisoners; the sweating, trembling flesh of the workers as they thrust their pneumatic drills into the earth; the clouded eyes of the man who never spoke, the man my uncle had called a “thug” and who exhaled cigarette smoke in spiralling wisps that dissolved like question marks in the windless afternoon; the long shadows of the convicts as they marched back to the Castillo in the twilight. Then I would shut my eyes even tighter, trying also to close my ears to all sound and to breathe as gently as possible: I strained to keep my body still, avoiding even the slightest movement and banishing all thoughts except those of falling asleep. It was on an evening such as this, when it was already dark and deathly quiet, that my boy’s hands discovered the taut hardness and the unfamiliar warmth in my loins. But then at once I heard my uncle speaking, in a voice more thunderous than the cannon of the Castillo, of the hellfire that awaited all sinners.