Did the she-devils ever leave their houses even though it was forbidden to do so? Yes, they did. The nature of life on our Atlantic Ocean island meant that most things were done outside. But, for example, any child would run home if a she-devil asked them to go and fetch a pail of water from the public tap, a request that no child could ordinarily refuse from an old person. But with the she-devil, you might take her the pail of water and then, overcome by the evil inside her, she might send the pail into you, and then woe betide you. Or a she-devil might ask you to bring her a bit of smoking kindling from your house, and then send it into your chest and you’d feel your innards burning from the fire inside you. Or you might perform the favour and she’d do nothing, but to thank you she’d give you a piece of yam, and you couldn’t eat the yam because the evil caused by her night heats made her put an invisible drop of poison in the yam, a potent poison that only she knew about. And because of all of this, they sometimes left their houses when they needed something, even though they knew they were not supposed to, and when they did they were targeted by children, children who remained innocent but who had heard about the evils of she-devils. All we did was throw stones at them and run away and hide, to avoid their curses or however else they might react.
I’ve already said that the she-devils were what I most feared on the island. Yes, I was greatly curious about them during the day, when I hoped to see one, if only out of the corner of my eye, standing in the doorway of her house, or even just moving about inside, for I wanted to be able to think about what daily tasks a she-devil busied herself with. But that great curiosity disappeared as soon as night set in, and if I had cause to walk down a street where one of them lived when it was dark, I avoided that street and went down a different one. In fact I avoided the adjacent streets too, even if this meant having to go a very long way round.
Any old lady might be a she-devil, and they filled us with great fear; they got the heats at night and became so tremendously hot that without thinking twice, or if they did think twice nobody knew about it, they took off their clothes and went to the beach, because they knew there would be nobody there, and they would go into the water, into the sea, into the darkness, in strict solitude. What nobody knew for sure, not even the adults, was what triggered the heats. What were the women doing when the heats invaded them? What did the mysterious being that visited them at night say? What did they talk about? Whether anyone knew the answers to these questions or not, it was considered bad luck for any man to catch a woman with the heats in the act of bathing. It was something best avoided. It can’t have been easy to ignore, for everyone knew that night bathing was the one sure sign that the island had a new she-devil in its midst. But those who witnessed such a thing didn’t always like anyone to know what they’d seen, for if you caught a woman in the act of bathing at night you had to weigh up the risks against you. That new she-devil, or newly discovered she-devil, for she might have long been one but nobody knew about it, would do everything in her power to make your life a misery if you denounced her. She would lay traps for you at every opportunity, traps to inconvenience you and ultimately to ruin your life. Being a witness to the incriminating night bath was, therefore, an uncomfortable and dangerous position to be in.
First came the song about Nuestro Señor, the one they put a crown of thorns on, drove nails into and killed to save sinners. Back then I didn’t really understand who the sinners were. What’s more, in our island’s language, the language that very sad song was sung in, the word ‘sinners’ sounded very like ‘people’ or ‘folk’, and so in my innocence, I heard the words wrong. So what I understood was that the man who’d had nails driven into him on the cross had died to save us, us being the people of our island. I knew there were people in other places, but I only actually knew the ones on our island. And as we had so many needs, it seemed obvious to me that the man had died to save us. He had nails driven into him and he died to save us from the she-devils, from all the evils that could befall us, from the bad spirits of the land and the sea, from all the sickness, all the wickedness. But the saviour had died! That’s why the song sounded so sad to me. For at the time, whether because I hadn’t heard the song properly or didn’t understand the doctrina, I didn’t know about the promise that the saviour, who’d had nails driven into him after suffering so, would be resurrected. As far as I was aware, he was dead, and if he was dead he couldn’t save us from anything, least of all the terrible evils that afflicted us: the she-devils, the lack of soap kerosene matches clothes medicine, the terrible diseases, the lack of a man who was strong and tall and had a powerful voice to caution against anyone doing wicked things on the island. Know what the problem was with the doctrina? I only realised it many years later, as an adult. The problem was that every time anyone began preaching, they went back to the beginning and started the story from scratch. Nobody ever told the part about the saviour overcoming obstacles and saving us, it was always from the beginning, and then the nails, the thorns, the cross and death. And so those of us who were not familiar with the whole story and did not know the man was resurrected were left to wallow in a swamp of sorrow. Yes, I have seen a swamp before: there’s a village in the south of the island where it’s extremely swampy. Anyway, if I’d known the story was not about the Señor’s death but his triumph, I’d have known my worst fears wouldn’t come true. But the problem was, it was impossible to speak of triumph on our Atlantic Ocean island, given the conditions we found ourselves in. What we feared most was succumbing to our hardship, losing ourselves, disappearing, and then of course we heard our mothers sing the story of the Señor who had experienced the same hardships as us and died for his troubles. How could we imagine triumphing without anyone else’s help? I think I might already have mentioned it, but if it had been up to me, that song would not have been sung on the island at that time, though who knows whether it would have made any difference. For the thing was that everything happened in sequence, a chain of events, one thing after another: first, the Pico burned. Then they committed that act of awful wickedness with that woman, an unspeakable, truly awful act. Thrusting a stick into that woman’s femininity was a very big deal on our island. But it couldn’t be spoken of, not in normal conversation, though everyone agreed it should never have happened. And the moment it happened I knew everything would turn out for the worse. Then came the plague of death that brought the island to its knees. Throughout all this, I would have liked to hear what the Padre had to say for himself, to have heard him speak. He was a respected man, a venerated man even, and it would have been interesting to hear what he made of it all. But he was a man who spoke a language I didn’t understand — not because it was Spanish but because he didn’t know how to express himself properly. He was a terrible speaker, at least when not speaking in Latin, the Latin that released such an outpouring of pain and pity in the womenfolk of our island whenever a coffin was lowered into a grave. As the Padre was an incomer, I’d have liked to hear his explanations for the events I’m speaking of. The adults on the island did try to understand what was happening, otherwise they wouldn’t have gone around the island three times with the Maté Jachín. I see now that going round the island with the Maté Jachín, taking it to every accessible corner of the island, was more a matter of asking questions about what was happening than providing any kind of answer. For we died in droves, we suffered like the condemned, as if those thorns had been nailed to our heads, and then we lowered hundreds of coffins into hundreds of graves, graves dug by men to provide a final resting place for the dead. That thing about the departed coming home and making noise, I never saw it myself. In fact, I can’t imagine why the departed would come back to the house, if indeed they ever really did. It was said the deads could help the alives, and that was why they came back, but if that were the case, surely they’d have come to our aid during that terrible period. Although what was the point of a dead coming to the aid of an alive if the alive’s very problem was that the dead had died? Or that the alive’s own death was imminent? It would have made much more sense for the dead not to have died, or for the alive’s life not to have been in danger.