The Roar of Morning

NINE

The days and years have all been lived and have crumbled to dust. I am cocooned by the final night, uncertain of what heavenly bliss and hellish pains lie beyond the horizon. At the mercy of an alien will, yet at the same time strengthened by an unsuspected reserve of courage that derives from my drinking, I await unrepentantly for whatever else the night may bring — and still there are surges of a will to live. I look up at the ebony ramparts of heaven, but on the far side of the hemisphere the knives are already out. Fragile angels with flashing swords they can barely lift are quite calmly searing away what is engraved in the book of nature. By the light of billions of yellow candles I hear the cosmic silence shattered by the death rattle of all earthly dreams and the howl of frightened dogs.

I pick up the whisky bottle, which is still half full, and unscrew the cap. I hold the bottle upside down over the flowerpot and with a pang of guilt see the noble liquid greedily absorbed by the bone-dry earth. Just before the bottle is completely empty, I quickly turn it upright and place it between my feet on the terrace. I strike a match and drop it carefully into the bottle. The last drops of alcohol ignite immediately and a small blue flame spurts up through the neck of the bottle with a soft hum. Just when almost everything has burnt up and the fire is dying down, I close off the mouth of the bottle with the palm of my hand. The flame goes out at once and the bottle fills with smoke. I slowly raise my arm and the bottle follows, stuck to my palm. This drunkard’s party piece is called “conjuring the genie out of the bottle.” I detach the bottle from my hand, neatly replace its cap and with a powerful swing hurl it across the garden, over the road and into the undergrowth on the other side. Keep Your Island Clean! The slogan of the sanitation department doesn’t apply tonight.

I extend my right arm so that the light from the lamp falls on it: there is a small pink circle on the inside of my hand. I’m a marked man. Then I extend my left hand, so that the light catches my wristwatch.

It is 2:46 am — and at that moment the water level changes in all the wells and springs on the Caribbean islands and the South American mainland. All domestic pets grow restless; in the towns the rats flee noiselessly from the sewer; and in the snow-covered southern regions of the continent animals with faded coats awaken prematurely from hibernation. The firmament is now strewn with stars; the earth is being sympathetically observed by millions of fiery eyes.

The sound of a distant waterfall, at first a murmur, becomes louder and more ominous, like the grumbling of a god who has decided to exterminate everything that lives. The fear and terror of the falling water is conveyed like feverish painting on the wind. The message is picked up and understood by a cricket at the top of the indju tree in my garden and it immediately passes on the news of apocalypse to its fellow crickets. Hearing the chirped signal, the little nocturnal birds, alarmed, cease playing on the wind above the ridges of the hills and fly hurriedly over to the mainland to announce the dreadful tidings. The news spreads like wildfire.

From the crenellated coast of Venezuela in the north to the sunless southernmost tip of Tierra del Fuego, from the Bahía de Sechura to where the Parahyba River flows into the Atlantic in the east, there is a delicate, high-pitched trilling sound, which takes on a shriller quality as millions of grasshoppers join in. The sound swells. All the bees and mosquitoes start to buzz; from the mountain slopes and treetops and the roofs of houses all the crickets rub their notched hind legs against their forewings, transmitting their rasping codes to other insects across the huge expanses. Everything capable of producing a sound makes itself heard: like an endless, shrill death rattle, the appalling sound soars through the selvas, across the llanos, campos and pampas, over the vast plantations and haciendas, the tiny plots of the peasants, through the valleys green from the rain and along the muddy riverbeds, through the never-sleeping streets of the great cities.

When I was a boy, lying in the small square of darkness in my room, I often used to listen to the crickets: the shrill rasp of a house cricket behind the wardrobe, or the enervating kri-kri-kri-kri of a jet-black garden cricket outside. On nights when their monotonous chirping kept me awake until late, I could hear the cursing and shouting of the drunken sailors beating each other up and throwing bottles. Our house was close to the harbour and living in the same street was a lady of easy virtue, although at the time I had only the faintest notion of what that meant. Her house was the onshore address of innumerable seamen, mainly Norwegians, who came to drink, kick up a rumpus and so on. The Norwegians all drank Dutch gin mixed with bright-red Curaçao liqueur, both of which they bought at my father’s shop. My father, himself a devoted jenever drinker, called the combination of aged Dutch gin and the sticky-sweet liqueur “dynamite.” No wonder the wild drinking sessions invariably ended with a free-for-all in the street. The neighbours said that after these battles, anyone rendered unconscious either by drink or by the injuries they had sustained was always carried or dragged back to their ship by his mates; no Norwegian seaman was ever left behind. My mother told me that when I was born — it was early one Sunday morning, pouring with rain, and the church bells were ringing for the first dawn mass before Christmas — there was a fight in full swing in our street. My father had to brave both the rain and the flying bottles to fetch the midwife.

Not ten minutes’ walk from our house was a hill on which a large water tank had been built. From there you could look down on the whole expanse of the harbour. I often sat there after school and watched the bustle below. Whenever a vessel put to sea flying the Norwegian flag, I wondered whether the crew, after a night of boozing and brawling, were still capable of manoeuvring the ship out of the harbour without ramming the vessels moored in the narrow channel or sinking the opened pontoon bridge. Even when the ship reached open water, I was still doubtful whether the sailors, with their fearsome hangovers, would manage to cross the ocean and reach Norway safely.

Almost every ship I saw sailing out of the harbour awakened an odd, unpleasant sensation in me, as if I had forfeited something. As I watched the vessel grow smaller and smaller, I felt horribly lonely and abandoned. At one such moment I scratched the words OUTLAW in huge letters on the steel belly of the water tank. When I lay awake at night, I struggled to understand the strange feeling these departing ships provoked in me, but without success. Until, that is, the night when I was listening to the idiotic sound of the crickets and suddenly heard three sharp blasts from the siren of a vessel ready to sail: every ship is a tiny, sparsely populated island. When it is on the high seas, surrounded on all sides by endless ocean, each member of the crew is a loner, without parents, without a dog, without a school, without a church. His day’s work is closely regulated and his free time is contractually fixed. The crew sleep on stiff canvas in tiny one-person cabins too small to stand up in. Once docked in a foreign port, they can go on shore leave, get drunk and womanise.

Yet I had no desire to become a sailor when I grew up. Even as a child I was a coward.

At 2:47 the inhabitants of twenty republics rush out of their houses and shacks. The streets overflow, screaming children are trampled underfoot. In the countryside the frantic livestock break down fences and stampede into the fields.

When I was small, and even after my boyhood was over, I often fled from people, things and situations that I didn’t like or that scared me. Sometimes for no apparent reason. For example, I have never found a rational explanation for my determined avoidance of church services, unless it was the annoying slowness of the Protestant ministers I encountered when I was still young and a keen observer. Unlike the Catholic fathers I had watched, who rattle off everything as quickly as possible to the accompaniment of careless movements and gestures, ministers are extremely sluggish and drag proceedings out for as long as possible. With measured Old Testament solemnity, they stride towards the pulpit, mount it with dignity, stare for a few seconds over the heads of the congregation at a blank wall, and then spend thirty minutes expounding a two-line biblical text that is as clear as crystal.

When I did my military service, those not yet twenty-one were regarded as underage and had to attend church on Sundays. I was eighteen, and very much a minor. With the exception of two other Protestants, all the men in my company were Catholics; they had it easy, since after attending a brief mass in the gym they were free to go. The Protestant trio were loaded into a weapon carrier and under the supervision of a sergeant driven to the fort church in town. The vehicle stopped in Government Square, and under the watchful eye of our chaperone we had to walk through the arch of the governor’s mansion. Once we had reached the church steps and the surveillance ceased, I would always take my leave of my comrades and march briskly out of the square through a narrow alleyway near the old post office. On the way home I had to keep a sharp lookout to avoid bumping into the sergeant with whom I should have been sitting in church.

Sometimes there is no escape from unpleasantness. I once lay on a bed in a neurological clinic in the freezing capital of Colombia while a gay male nurse shaved off my pubic hair very professionally and with obvious pleasure. I’ve never felt so humiliated and helpless, but in such circumstances it’s difficult to make a getaway.

At 2:48 am God embraces the continent with his gigantic arms; with one hand on the Atlantic east coast and the other on the Pacific west coast, he squeezes with all the fearsome geological strength at his command. The continent creaks from top to bottom.

The great cities, the tall governmental towers and the skyscrapers of the industrialists collapse, and an avalanche of concrete, steel and glass devastates the smaller buildings; the church towers of all the towns and villages crumble, burying everyone who has sought sanctuary in the house of God. Enormous tidal waves smash the coasts and engulf the towns and villages along the coast of South America. Fishing boats, freighters and oil tankers are tossed ashore; thick black blood flows from the tankers back to the sea. High walls of water, mud and rock rush down the mountain slopes, burying every living thing in the valleys. The noise of insects continues to swell and soon drowns out the roar of the landslides and the toppling mountains, a diabolical cacophony that bursts the eardrums of all surviving vertebrates. Cries of pain from men and beasts resound through the continent, but, all being deaf, no creature hears another. Only now do the crickets and grasshoppers fall silent and, together with the beetles, the earwigs and the springtails, they descend upon the emptying forests, where they devour everything green. At the same time, multicoloured butterflies and hideous moths invade the cities in endless swarms and attack the struggling humans and animals; the big butterflies cling to their burning-hot eyes, while the smaller varieties and the moths wriggle, scores at a time, into the nostrils of men, women, children and animals and choke them. Light-hating termites leave their colonies in vast armies, devouring the stripped trees and the timber in the wrecked houses. Stinking cockroaches and giant spiders crawl from their dark hiding places on the forest floor to partake of this final meal.

I shudder at the growing hideousness of the spectacle. I can hear the voice of my Venezuelan uncle saying that God speaks to men through earthquakes, that they shall be visited with winds, storms and devouring flames. I must quickly redirect my thoughts.

From far off I hear music, antique music played on horns and shawms, and very close to me I feel the breath of a young woman. As clearly as if in broad daylight, a procession of beautiful creatures passes before me, their rhythmically swaying bodies immaculate, eyes shining with pride at their nakedness, each with a crown of white flowers, their private parts decked with evergreen. They rise up from the earth and are received into a merciful black hole beyond the luminous ribbon of the Milky Way. My grateful heart rejoices when I see among the chosen ones the long-haired blonde girl who ages ago, in a distant country, ignited my only true passion.

At 2:49 am dead birds begin to rain down on the ravaged earth; only the vultures remain hovering in prayer in the sky. Suddenly they too dive down at lightning speed and plunge their bald heads ravenously into the swollen human and animal carcasses. When the heads reemerge, great chunks of intestine, dripping with blood and fat, are hanging from the curved beaks. Among the ruins of the towns and villages insects with bloated stomachs swarm over the human and animal remains, now stripped of flesh. The ants leave their shattered dwellings and advance in countless disciplined armies for the final reckoning. The gorged vultures and insects they find among the skeletons offer no resistance and are all destroyed. Once the task of retribution has been accomplished, each ant grabs another and after a ritual death dance each mortally wounds the other with its mandibles and injects its deadly poison. Nothing on the continent is left alive.

It is finished; the entire history of the old continent has been written. And at 3 am precisely there will be light, because the sun will be ignited. This tropical sun, murderous rather than life-giving, hangs in the splendid blue sky that succeeds every natural disaster, casting its even glare upon the universal putrefaction. The vast land is empty and lifeless; only in the deepest recesses of a gigantic ice floe that drifts up from the Antarctic is there a faintly throbbing, slimy mass, from which one day an amorphous, translucent creature will be born. Perhaps one day a new continent will emerge from it. A new territory that this time will not be linked to the north by a twisted umbilical cord and will not have Spanish as its lingua franca.

I go inside; the Caribbean islands have yet to be destroyed. I do not lock my door, I do not let the dogs out, I do not turn off the lights, I do not brush my teeth. I take the pistol from its hiding place in the wardrobe and lay it on the bedside table to the right of my bed. I switch on the air conditioning and, without undressing, lie down on the bed. With fading recognition I look at the familiar things around me: the wardrobe full of clothes, most of which I have never worn; the big curtain over the window, lined with thick material to keep out the light when I sleep all morning; the small, brightly coloured vase that I have been looking at for twenty years and which every Wednesday I am always afraid the cleaning woman will smash, as she has done with most of the glassware; the orange rug next to my bed, on which I sometimes let one of the dogs spend the night when it is ill or sad. The feeling of oneness with these things has vanished — it is as if they already belong to others. I light a cigarette. The smoke I exhale is sucked up to the ceiling by the air conditioning and then snakes lazily back down the wall. Outside I can hear the crowing of the cocks. The roar of morning is here once more and is not to be trusted.

I have no near neighbours and no one is out walking at this hour. Only my dogs will hear the shot — and all the Caribbean islands, which geologists had long suspected are mushroom-shaped, will snap off from the earth’s crust and be washed away by the boiling maelstrom, sucked down one by one into the depths by the crazily swirling sea.