Days passed, though only a few, and then we saw the man’s many relatives come running down from the upper part of the big village, down towards the shore. What they claimed had happened I will tell you now, though whether that man ever did utter his dying words I don’t know. They said he did, and they said his dying words concerned what he’d seen on the morning of his death. The members of his household kept his dying words in their hearts and they waited until he was buried before acting on them. What were those dying words the relatives kept in their hearts? What did the man with so many sons and daughters say before his soul was ripped out of his body?
The ministrants sang things in a language that was not our own, and they therefore said things we didn’t understand. And given who that man was, the ministrants must have sung for hours and hours when he died and, I should imagine, they also took measures to elect the next senior ministrant. His funeral was a sight to behold, or not to. After the Padre’s Latin, the laments drowned out the murmur of the waves breaking on the shore. And if it had been day, night would have fallen, for on an island where we had nothing to combat the eternal darkness, we felt particularly vulnerable at night. Then again, on moonlight nights we felt exposed, for the moon lit up the whole village and advertised our helplessness. I always felt that moonlight nights revealed our skeletons, our defects. In fact the moon illuminated more than the sun did, for night was not meant for seeing as much as we saw on moonlight nights on the island. You could see from one extreme of the beach to the other, and if you saw someone standing at the other end you felt unnerved, for perhaps that someone had evil intentions. I’m not saying I preferred the dark exactly, but moonlight nights were frightening. They exposed our privacy to the world. Night is a time for privacy, for doing little things alone, and moonlight nights upset all that and cause misunderstandings. I remember the story of some older boys who were part of my family, although they lived in a different house rather than with us. Once, they got up in the early hours to gather mangoes, but on a moonlight night. Several cocks had crowed and they thought this singing clock meant it was dawn, or that dawn was at least around the corner. So they got up and they called for one another and they set off walking. Mangoes grow in great abundance on the island but you always go to get them in the early hours, so as not to have to climb any trees. If you get there before anyone else, you can fill your basket gathering mangoes from the ground, mangoes that have fallen from their branches because they are ripe. So those boys went and filled their baskets, but they waited for day to break before heading back home. Everything has its ways and its rules on our island. If they’d set off home right away, when the sun was poking over the blue horizon, they would have crossed paths with the women on their way to the plantations, and this might have led to a scene whereby they had to bend down to let a lady pluck a handful of mangoes from their baskets. The lady might be an aunt, a godmother, a neighbour or the mother of a friend, and it was rude not to offer her mangoes from your basket. She would need a mango to help her digest the hunk of cassava bread she’d taken with her to eat while she was working. And she might not have time to go looking for her own mangoes, if indeed she had a mango tree on her plantation.
So those boys filled their baskets and waited for day to break, to avoid such an eventuality. But what happened? They’d let themselves be tricked by the brightness of the moon, believing it to be dawn when it wasn’t, and so they’d got up and set off in the middle of the night. When they realised their mistake, they huddled together, laid their lengths of cloth on the ground and tried to sleep, waiting for the sun to appear and re-establish normality. And it was cold, as it always was at night. And when the moon withdrew behind the clouds, they became afraid, for darkness took hold of the bush and this was something they’d not experienced before. Being in the bush at night. They had never been in the bush at night, it was not something anyone chose to do, and indeed there was no reason for doing it. If, on the other hand, they’d gone straight home, ignoring their fear, it would have meant they’d left and gone back to the house in the middle of the night, and this would have been very suspicious behaviour. And their return would have been noted. And collecting mangoes wouldn’t have been a good enough explanation for coming and going at night, especially not given the rules of courtesy involved in gathering mangoes. Why should women waste precious time and energy searching their plantations for mangoes when they could be given a handful by children? What would the men have taken with them to wet their throats whilst out fishing if they hadn’t crossed paths with the boys and their baskets of mangoes on the way to the beach?
But anyway, it wasn’t mango season when the senior ministrant died, or, if it was, they weren’t ripe yet, for neither the man nor the boy accompanying him saw anyone carrying a basket of mangoes on their head. What they would have seen were women going to the plantations to harvest daily food staples. And given all that followed, we also know that they saw someone going to the plantations with evil intentions, or rather someone whose intentions were governed by an evil being. The ministrant said something along those lines before his soul was ripped out of his body. And what he said led to everything that followed, with his relatives charging down from the upper part of the big village. And what that man said was that he’d been followed that morning as he made his way to the palm tree, followed by someone with evil intentions, and it had been that someone who’d thrown him out of the palm tree with such great force that his body had hit the ground and had the life squeezed out of it. Those were the dying words his relatives kept in their hearts. Until the day they acted upon them. What they’d kept in their hearts moved their feet, made them come running from the upper part of the big village to the lower part.
It was the afternoon. They’d kept the words in their hearts for several days and they thought it was time everyone knew what those words were. Well, everyone as in everyone on the island. So what they did, acting as one, was go to the house of the woman I mentioned earlier, the one who lived at the end of a street that began at the shore, crossed our street and ran all the way to the upper part of the village. That woman had two daughters, only two, and lived with a man who was quite well known. He was a man who spoke in a very soft voice, in a woman’s voice, or practically a woman’s voice, and he also sometimes did women’s jobs, although he fished too. All the children knew him because adults had to answer us when we greeted them. And so we knew that man because of his woman’s voice, or child’s or sick person’s voice, and also for his hesitant walk. He was called Toiñ. And his voice was the voice of a man who had little to say. Why did he speak in such a soft voice? What was he afraid of? What was he hiding?