Those female adults were obliged by the governors to remain in their homes and never come out. They were not allowed to go to their plantations and nobody sent their children to ask them for a burning coal to make a fire or to borrow some bananas, as is our custom. The woman might sometimes ask others for such things if she was desperate, but people would usually not answer the door to her, denying her the right to practise those customs of ours. And this was because the adults were afraid of these women too. In fact it was the adults who agreed to their being confined to their houses. Why? It’s a question worth asking again. They were confined to their houses because of their secret knowledge. Women like them lived like normal people, but at a certain hour of the night they started to feel hot, very hot — so hot that if they didn’t immediately splash themselves with water they’d fall ill. That’s what the adults said, and there had to be some truth to the matter for it had been talked of on the island for so long. Overcome with heat, they secretly left their houses in the middle of the night and went down to the beach to bathe. As I’ve already said, no activity took place on the beach at night. It was a dark place where all that could be heard was the breaking of the waves on the sand, a sound that was amplified because everything else was silent. What’s more, in our village it is very unusual for an old lady to go to the beach to bathe, even during the day. In fact, no woman of marrying age ever does so. Nor is it common for men of the same age to do so. Therefore, was it not rather strange that a female adult would leave her house in the middle of the night to go and bathe? Furthermore, seemingly a confirmation of the secret nature of the thing, she bathed completely naked. This was unthinkable for a woman beyond marrying age. The beach was not somewhere a woman tended to go to by day, unless she needed to send something to the south village, or collect a load brought from there, so what led them to go to such a dark and solitary place at night? Well, it was because of the heats that invaded them. The heats became unbearable after midnight, which in actual fact was not a time when it was particularly hot on our island. And when it was hot, during the daytime, those same women went around with lengths of cloth draped over their clothes, covering their heads and their backs. In any case, they were invaded by the heats, and it was said, the adults said, that it was because they’d been visited by someone. This someone didn’t visit just anyone, and not at just any time either, and that’s why those women were considered special. If any woman was discovered bathing on the beach at night it was treated as proof that she’d been visited by someone at night, a mysterious being that transmitted the unbearable heats. And because such things always required explanations on our island, it was understood that whoever visited the women at night was a powerful being, because the heats they felt were no ordinary heats. It was therefore understood that it was an evil being, a being that brought evil. A being, therefore, connected to the Devil.
No matter who the woman was, once she’d been discovered bathing on the beach she was judged to be connected to the Devil and became someone you had to avoid. She could no longer share anything with anyone, absolutely nothing at all. Of course it was possible some women were visited by that mysterious being at night and nobody ever found out. But it would have been unusual. It was more common for traces of the terrible heats to show up on their bodies. What’s more, it was common knowledge that after being visited by the being, the woman acquired powers she didn’t have before. And because the powers were connected to the Devil, they were powers she would use to evil ends. That’s why she was feared, and that’s why the governors ordered her confinement. And they were indeed special powers. For example, if a child passed by naked before the woman’s house, and she was seated at the door and saw the child, she could use her powers to send a piece of wood from the ground into the child’s body, or a piece of metal from the street. And from that day forth the child would complain of a pain in his or her side, or chest, or back, or wherever the old woman had sent the stick, the scrap of metal, the saucepan, whatever she’d had to hand when the child passed by. In the language of our Atlantic Ocean island there is a word we use for such women, a word that in Spanish would be witch or sorceress or she-devil, but that in our language means all three things. I’ll just pick one and say that those women were she-devils. Well those women could not only send objects into children, they could also poison their food or kill them with witchcraft. What’s more, and by some method only they knew about, those women could pass on the condition of being a she-devil. They could choose to pass the condition on to whomever they wanted, though only to women, or someone would be chosen for them by being visited with bad luck. And once a woman had been chosen, she’d be called upon by the mysterious being of the unbearable heats, and she became a she-devil too.
The adults on our island have always recognised she-devils from their bathing naked in the middle of the night and sending objects into children with the intention of killing them, and also from their penetrating stare. If a she-devil thought nobody was watching her, she could often be caught staring at someone with unusual intensity. Or she’d be caught doing the sort of thing nobody would ever admit to, things no adult of sound mind would ever do if they knew there was a chance of being caught. Things that were obviously of evil intent. After being visited by the being that brought the heats, the woman seemed to have a constant need to cause harm to the rest of mankind. A normal person, normal in the sense of being a woman of adult age, would not spit in someone else’s bucket of water, for example, unless that someone else was her sworn enemy, and even then she’d only do it when she knew she wouldn’t be caught doing something so repulsive. And the she-devils did things like that, or so the adults said. I remember being told to avoid she-devils at all costs, but if I did catch one staring at me with unusual intensity, I was to hold her stare, because if you looked away, she’d send something into you, and then woe betide you. Can you imagine that? Hold the stare of a woman who everyone said was a she-devil and was therefore extremely dangerous. I understand very well why they had to be shut away in their houses. It was so that they couldn’t stare at you in such a dangerous way, and to avoid accusations of their sending pieces of stone or lumps of metal into children, for the she-devils were unable to resist the temptation. I heard cases of mothers taking their children to the house of a she-devil to demand that she remove the saucepan, the water cup or the whatever it was she’d sent into the child, because the child was dying from having it inside them. Yes, I’ve heard it talked about as if it were the most normal thing in the world.