There was nothing those two sisters could do about the fire other than pray to the Señor on high that the wind didn’t pick up and fan the flames. The water in the lake below twinkled before their eyes. Water to put the fire out. But it was an optical illusion: what the naked eye couldn’t see was the impassable precipice. And if the precipice was impassable, carrying buckets of water out on people’s heads was simply unfeasible. Besides, there were no buckets anywhere on the mountain.
The sisters rushed to gather up what they’d harvested, loaded it on their heads and ran to get home. But the fire had already reached the edge of the path, so that if they tried to go back the way they’d come, they risked becoming surrounded. They probably wouldn’t have been surrounded and, even if they had, they probably wouldn’t have been incinerated, but the chance of it happening frightened them and it’s easy to imagine how, under the circumstances, without being able to see properly in the smoke, they weren’t thinking straight. Anyone in their position would have been afraid of the wind making matters worse by blowing in from the right, stoking the fire and forcing them to move off the path to the left. And with loads on their heads, panicked and unable to see properly, they didn’t know what lay off the path to the left — which in fact was nothing much — and they feared losing their footing and falling off the precipice, delivering their hard but young lives to Dios, and whoever else, down on the muddy banks of the lake.
So they retraced their steps in search of a different route. The safest option was a path on the edge of the precipice that skirted round the lake before descending on the other side, via countless steep steps, coming out by the main access point to the lake, the waters of which were useless to them. From there, the path ran in an almost straight line all the way to the big village. This was the path the sisters took, but it was a long journey. Therefore, by the time they reached the village, our village, the big village, their family had become very worried. Having seen the fire, they feared something terrible had happened and some of them had gone off in search of the two sisters, for on our island everybody knows how long it ought to take anyone to get anywhere. When they then saw the two sisters approaching from a totally different direction, they realised the situation could be about to get worse. However they were a long way from imagining how much worse: that in a few days’ time they’d experience the most significant and distressing moment of their lives. Nor could I imagine I was about to experience, albeit in someone else’s skin, the most significant and distressing moment of my life, my life on our quiet Atlantic Ocean island. And it wasn’t just significant and distressing, but an evil that wrapped its tentacles around so many people, including me. Around our lives.
The sun turned crimson, ready to take itself away to wherever it went at that time of day, and by now everyone’s eyes were fixed on the mountain. Everything else paled into insignificance as we watched the fire spread, a fire whose cause we still didn’t know. We had eyes only for that advancing fire, ears only for its crackle. And the fire went on advancing. The sun set and night awoke but we didn’t notice the stars in the sky, nor any other jewels up in the great canopy: our eyes were transfixed by the fire, our ears by the crackle of the dry branches as they burned. Many plantations were at risk but, as the fire spread, the real risk was to our lives. If it went on advancing as it was doing, there was a strong chance it would reach the houses on the edge of the big village, and from there it would rage through the village, a village where most of the houses were made of dry wood and jambab’u. Everything would burn to satisfy the fire. Whenever I’d seen fires before, fires nobody had provoked but that were impossible to put out, I’d been struck by how many things had to burn to satisfy the fire, to make it happy. And so we were all unhappy. Everyone was on tenterhooks. The mountain would burn, the fire would spread, our houses would burn to the ground and there was nothing we could do about it other than paddle out to sea in canoes and wait until everything had been consumed. And our family had it particularly bad because it was hard to imagine grandfather, the only man of the house, managing to find us a canoe and paddle us to safety. He didn’t have a canoe. I was only a child at the time but I could tell we couldn’t put the fire out by turning on all the street taps in the village and fetching buckets and buckets of water, and fetching buckets and buckets from the sea if there was no water in the taps. Child’s eyes they may have been, but I could tell the fire was big, really big, too big for us to fight, too big for us to extinguish and save ourselves from incineration. So the fire would push us out into the immensity of the deep blue sea, and it was night and we wouldn’t know what to do … Well, I just couldn’t see how we could all go out to sea in the middle of the night and not come to any harm so, as far as I was concerned, the fire had to burn itself out up there, on the slopes of the Pico, where it had started.
Night advanced and the fire advanced and we went upstairs to grandfather’s balcony. And there we saw that he was very worried too. So much so that the doors to the balcony were wide open and grandfather was on his feet the whole time we were up there. He watched the fire with a worried look on his face and he made no attempt to hide it. Maybe he thought the same as me: that if the fire penned us in, he wouldn’t be able to save us and we’d be the only ones in the whole village to perish. Doubtless I wasn’t thinking about the business of going out in canoes very clearly, for I’d always been nervous of the sea. But anyway, grandfather made frantic, worried gestures and, of course, seeing him so affected made us worry all the more. If he’d appeared calm before us, we’d probably have thought the whole thing was serious but nothing the adults couldn’t handle, the adults who weren’t like him.
Night advanced, the fire went on advancing and grandfather remained where he was, standing up, perhaps cursing his lack of paddling expertise, and we noticed that he was crying, and, what’s more, we noticed that the chair he usually sat on, which was empty right then, had a round hole in the seat, where the middle part of his backside would go. But it wasn’t a hole made by accident: it was a special chair with a hole that had been put there deliberately. This discovery, big though it was, couldn’t distract us from our fear, a fear grandfather made worse with his crying. We were crying too and so his tears added to our tears, although only one or two of us actually saw the tears on his cheeks. As night was well advanced and the whole thing was shaping up to be very distressing, grandmother sent us to bed. It was impossible to tell what she thought about the whole situation, but she thought it was time we went to bed, even though she must have known we wouldn’t be able to sleep with a fire breathing down our necks, with our lives hanging by a thread that might be singed at any moment. We could tell she was afraid, but she hid her emotions from us and so we didn’t know whether she thought the same way we did about grandfather’s attitude, the feelings he’d openly shown, or whether she felt the same way he did. We knew she was afraid but it was impossible to gauge how afraid she was. Nevertheless, when she sent us to bed we obeyed, and we did so because we needed someone to give us an order, as an indication of the gravity of the situation if nothing else. An order from an adult, a person we loved and trusted, and who we knew loved us. If she’d told us to go down to the beach and paddle aimlessly out into the deep blue sea, we’d have obeyed, understanding that it was our only hope given the grave danger we faced. But she told us to go to bed, so we went to bed, a bed we typically woke up in several times during the night because it was sopping wet. And do you know why it was sopping wet? Yes, you know. Oh, the stink of stale urine! Anyway, there we were, lying in bed, while outside, up on the Pico, a fire burned that threatened to raze the big village to the ground. We’d left grandfather up on his feet, rather than sitting in his chair, a chair that had a hole in the middle of the seat, a hole he usually hid by covering it with a cloth, or a rag, or some kind of fabric at any rate, that he draped over his knees and tucked his hands beneath. We left him there unable to hold back the tears, even if they were only two little trickles that ran down his face. The way we saw it, those tears were revealing, because he was an adult. If an adult was crying, it was because the situation was a lost cause. Why did the man cry? Did the fire remind him of something that had happened to him before he knew us? What did it remind him of? Or maybe he cried because he wasn’t an adult but a child? That could have been it, that would have explained a lot, because on our island the only people who didn’t fish or paddle canoes and who cried about things they didn’t understand were children. Nor could children enter the vidjil to talk to the adults there. Didn’t I begin by saying I never knew whether my grandfather was mad? Didn’t I say I never quite knew what he was? Well, we discovered part of what he was that day, on the balcony, and when we went into his room. Which I’ll tell you about later.