That night was one of the most restless nights of our young lives and we woke up in a soaking wet bed, the unstoppable river having flowed with such vigour it might have been used to put the fire out. The mattress was sodden, from head to toe, sodden with something that seemed to gush out of you the moment you were about to wake. Those morning pees were the worst, the ones that happened when the adults had already left the house. They were the worst because they made you think that if you’d only woken up a minute earlier, you’d have done so with a full bladder and been able to open the front door and aim your stream in the sand. You wouldn’t bother writing your name or drawing a house or anything so early in the morning, you’d stretch and yawn as you peed, eyes half-closed. Peeing outside was the best; we always peed outside, even though we had a bathroom in the house. So when you woke to find the bed freshly wet with the spray of your own pee, you were angry with yourself because you’d been so near to waking up a hero, returning triumphant from war. I say war, but whatever really, anything you can return from triumphant. Or undefeated, at least. Not having been struck down by stones, witchcraft or evil.
We got out of the wet bed and went to look at the mountain that had put the fear of death in us the previous night. Everything was bare and black. Bare because all the vegetation on the mountain had burned, leaving only the rock itself, the immense rock that was the mountain. And black because it was all scorched, that greedy fire having raged through everything in its path: bushes, shrubs, lizards, centipedes, snakes, the nests of hens that ran wild on the island and laid their eggs up there. All the rats had died, rats that were the scourge of the plantations. But the worst of the inventory was the total destruction of the plantations. We didn’t see the damage for ourselves, for we didn’t go up there, but from the house we saw women come back from the plantations in tears. The look of despondency on their faces told of what they had seen. Mango trees, that belonged to nobody and everybody, their leaves and fruit burned along with their seeds, the seeds which were the fruits of the future. Cassava plants with stems and leaves burned, though the cassavas themselves had been saved, protected as they were underground. Banana and plantain trees with everything burned, and only those yet to bear fruit would ever grow back. Yam plants with the overground parts burned, the leaves and stalks that tangle up with neighbouring trees as they climb, though the yams, like the cassavas, had survived, meaning the owner of the plantation would have to have a very good memory to remember where she’d planted everything. Malanga plants weren’t so affected because they didn’t really grow on the Pico; they needed the moister ground of the southern plantations. All the snakes, crabs, lizards and lizards’ eggs burned. And I mustn’t forget the rats, all of them destroyed by the fire, all those rats and mice that were such a scourge of the women’s plantations. Maybe I already mentioned the rats, but it’s worth mentioning them again, because of the terrible damage they used to cause. The eggs of all the snakes also burned. Can you imagine the job the women now faced to resurrect their farms, to revive them from the state I’ve just described? They cried over the catastrophe that had befallen them. They’d already cried the night before, when the fire was raging, but out of fear that the flames would devour us. Now they cried for their wasted labour. They left the yams as they were, for the overground parts would sprout again with the first rains. They recovered what plantains and bananas they could, those that had reached a certain ripeness and hadn’t been totally scorched. As for the cassava, the cornerstone of our island diet, they pulled them from the ground and rescued what they could. The cassava plant can’t survive the death of its stalk, and the stalks had surrendered their sap to the all-consuming fire. It was such a terrible pity, but, more than a pity, it meant a lot of hard work, hard work wasted and hard work to come, to make use of so many cassavas, large and small, cassavas that should have remained underground and sustained the family for several years. Of course the women put them to good use, making breads and flour, but the plots were left moribund, as if they’d never been planted in, so the women would have to start again from scratch at the beginning of the rainy season, plant everything all over again and then wait almost a year before gathering the first fruits. It was such a pity to have lost so many years of effort, and all because of a fire whose cause still nobody knew. Given what I know now, and all that happened afterwards, I can say with some conviction that it was for the best that nobody ever knew exactly how the fire started. For I know now that all people are not treated equally when it comes to apportioning blame for bad things that happen in communities. I know that, in this world of ours, how facts are judged depends on who’s doing the judging. I learned all this later, after seeing what happened on our Atlantic Ocean island.
Time passed, the tide came in and went back out, big fish were caught, octopus was eaten. There were rains and storms, the sun rose and set, and when it rose once more the woman’s pregnancy had grown big enough for all to see, the woman who’d talked to the sailors from the friendly nation. By the way, does anyone know why we say that boat belonged to a friendly nation? For it certainly wasn’t the only nation whose boats came to take our fish. Boats from many different places came to our waters, our shores, but when our men saw them and took to the sea to go and ask them for a handout, the sailors of those boats must have thought the people in the flimsy canoes were going to accuse them of stealing, for they quickly hauled in their nets, wound in their reels and disappeared over the horizon. Isn’t that disgraceful? They made it obvious that they were thieves, and what’s more, thieves who couldn’t care less about us, every man for himself, each to his own suffering. Sometimes the boats from nations we didn’t know even waited until our canoes were right up beside their boats and then they fired jets of dirty water, or hot water, at our men, to show us they were prepared to play ugly. They tried to sink our canoes, or maybe poison our men with toxic water. Gracias a Dios, our canoes didn’t sink. They capsized, but thankfully all the men on our Atlantic Ocean island can swim, although there was no one to teach us in our house. The arrival of these boats on our shores was fairly frequent and so we soon learned to differentiate the friendly nation’s flag from the flags of other nations. There were all kinds of flags: three bright horizontal stripes, one of them blue; three vertical stripes, one of them black; a single dark colour with a white sun in the middle; a single dark colour with a picture of something curved, the colour of mango. No one knew what nation this last flag belonged to, but it had, along with one of the tricolours, the fastest engine driver: as soon as a canoe left our shore, the boat set off at full pelt, as if the driver had heard there were witches on our island that had to be avoided at all costs.