The time came for the boat to up anchor. Months went by and the things we got from the friendly nation’s fishing boat ran out. One of the women who had been to talk to the white men was the goddaughter of that man we thought had always been on the island and who was friendly with our grandfather. It so happened that this man, who I’m not sure we didn’t confuse with somebody else, had been not to the place where our fathers were — the place you went to in a boat full of hens and cockerels and other edible things, donated by our grandmother and other women from the island — but somewhere else: Calabar. And there were Igbos in Calabar and they were people who ate other people. We were told you had to be very careful with Calabarians. Well, that friend of grandfather’s was a bit of a joker, among other things, and he let it be understood by everyone on the island that he’d been to Calabar and knew things about the people who lived there. In fact he sometimes talked the way people from Calabar talked and he founded an association of people who danced at Christmas dressed the way Calabarians dress, and talked the way men who liked eating other men talked. Anyway, his goddaughter took part in the expedition to the boat, where the women went to see those white men and talked to them so well they reached an understanding. And the fruit of that understanding was the growth of that girl’s belly, a growth that remained even when everything else from that expedition of understanding had run out. In fact not everyone knew that her belly was growing, nor did they know that the growth was a result of her having talked to, or with, the white men on the boat. But her belly went on growing and people gradually found out that she was expecting a child and that the child would be the son of a white man, and that only she knew who he was because the liaison on the boat had taken place out of sight of everyone else in the village. She was a goddaughter, it’s true, but she lived with her sister, the person she was closest to in life. Her parents had died a long time ago, back when nobody could imagine that one day we’d find ourselves in this situation.
The days went by and the island gradually went back to being gripped by shortages, and then something happened that frightened everybody. In fact all the wicked things started to happen, as if they’d been lining up, waiting their turn. The first thing was that a woman and her sister set off up the Pico carrying a piece of smoking kindling. They were going to their plantations in the mountain’s foothills, next to a lake — Lake Nosopay. The lake and the mountain look like they’re side by side when viewed from a certain angle, but really they lie on different planes and are not that close together at all. The mountain, the Pico, or el Pico de Fuego, to give it its full Spanish name, looks down on everything else, defiant and proud, and at its feet, as if asleep, lies Nosopay, the lake. Nosopay is also the name given to the flat plateau above, from where you catch a sudden glimpse of the lake down below when the plateau breaks off into a sharp precipice. You look out into a void and see the lake in a vast bowl at the bottom, its water disturbed only by a gentle breeze.
So the two sisters set off towards Nosopay carrying a piece of smoking kindling, for they planned to make a fire up there, at the base of a dried-out tree they wanted to fell and use as firewood. If they’d been more agile, or if they’d been born men rather than women, they’d have climbed the dried-out tree with axes and chopped it down, bit by bit, branch by branch, for a tree gives firewood for many months, many, many months. But they didn’t have axes, or they didn’t have the dexterity to use them, and they’d been born women. And back then there weren’t enough men on the island for all the undexterous women. Which was why the two sisters resorted to fire, burning through the base of the tree instead of cutting through it. Furthermore, by making a fire on that plantation of theirs, they could pull a yam from the ground and leave it to cook in the embers, giving them something to fill their stomachs with while they worked. So they made the fire and got stuck into their tasks. They worked from the moment the sun poked its nose over the horizon until they felt they’d done enough, when they stopped and straightened their backs; it was time to go round the plantation with the basket to collect all the yam and cassava they’d pulled up, the fruits of their labour of a few months ago, plus any bits of cane they’d cut down while searching for the yam and cassava. On that Atlantic Ocean island, harvesting was something you did day in, day out, for no one had an area of land large enough to harvest everything all at once, at least not a harvest big enough to keep the whole family from hardship. When those two sisters finally straightened their backs, it was just a few hours until sunset, but the king of stars was nowhere to be seen due to the thick clouds of smoke.
‘Dios mío, we got distracted,’ said the older sister.
‘We’re in trouble! We’re in big trouble … ’ added the younger one, putting her hands on her head, tears already surfacing.
What had happened? Well, while they were busy at work, bent at the waist, eyes glued to the ground, they’d not once stood up, and so they hadn’t realised that the fire they’d made around the base of that dried-out tree had spread, that it had burned through the dry leaves, dry twigs and dry grass under the tree and reached the next field, a field full of shrubs about three feet tall that were of no use to anybody but that were also dry at that time of year. The women’s eyes bulged and they started to scream. They knew they had to get out of there fast, not because they were in danger of getting burned, for they could still escape on foot, but because they knew they had set a calamity in motion. The ground in the field where the shrubs were was so stony that nobody on the island ever risked planting there, despite the fact that it was an area four or five times the size of any plot of farmland the women owned, farmland they inherited from their parents, specifically their mothers. Whenever anyone looked at that large area and thought about planting on it, they remembered that anything they raised above their heads, a hoe or a pick, or whatever name they gave to the tool they had, would meet stone as soon as it hit the ground, that in fact that whole area covered in shrubs was one giant rock. But the awful thing was that if that area caught fire, the flames would spread through it fast, skirt around the Pico and advance on the big village itself. And before that happened, assuming it didn’t go out for some lucky reason, the fire would raze all the neighbouring farmland for, as it made its way down towards sea level, it would meet pockets of earth where a few trees grew, and in among those trees were plots where women had planted to make the most of what opportunities there were in that oasis of rock. Too much effort had gone into tending those little plots for a fire to consume them before the women had reaped their rewards. So the two sisters would earn the wrath of all the women whose plots had been destroyed — and this before the worst of it for, after raging through the plantations, the fire would advance and seek lower ground, sea level. And sea level, in the direction the fire was travelling, meant the big village and everyone’s homes.