We listened to him and we stared at him, covered in rags, scratches all over his face, barely able to move a muscle. He lay prone on the bed and people came out of the bone healer’s house as if they’d seen a dead body. It was like visiting a wake. A deathplace. And before he was able to speak and tell us what had happened for himself, people talked about what they thought must have happened. Many repeated what they heard a woman say, a woman from the village of San Xuan, the very severe patron saint. And what that woman said was what she’d seen. On the way back from her plantation, which was at the foot of the mountain that separated San Xuan’s village from the south village, she’d seen a boy on his hands and knees pulling up malanga plants from a farm that obviously wasn’t his, for children don’t plant on our island. At first she thought he was a thief, or rather a thiefess, for only women went to the plantations and only thieves pulled malangas out by their stems, being too hurried to dig into the ground underneath the tuber. But then she saw it was a boy and that he wasn’t just pulling up the plants but sticking them into his mouth, indeed sticking anything into his mouth he could lay his hands on. She said the only way to describe it was that he was rabidly hungry, for he chewed frantically at whatever he put in his mouth, dry leaves, malangas covered in sand, small plants, anything at all. She’d never seen the like of it. She became afraid, for she thought it might be the Devil himself, but the boy became afraid too and tried to run away. Yet something stopped him: he couldn’t run; he couldn’t even walk. So how had he got there? That was the mystery. And who was he? After all the energy he’d used up ransacking the plantation, and after discovering he couldn’t walk, never mind run, he collapsed where he was, mouth open, panting, a panting that gradually died down. The woman was shaking with fear, but she said an Avemaría Purísima, made the sign of the cross and approached. As she got closer, she saw the boy was in a terrible state. She saw he was at death’s door, maybe even halfway through the door, given how strangely he was acting. It was the moment before death, she thought, and he’d lost his reason. But really she didn’t know what was going on. She left him where he was and went to find other women on their way back from the plantations. When she told them what she’d seen, they didn’t believe her. Word got round and people came from the little village to look at the boy and they all recognised him, all knew which family he belonged to. Because everyone lived in the big village most of the year, no child’s face was unfamiliar. And if it was to you, it wouldn’t be to someone else, to one of the people you’d called to come and help you with the mysterious business you’d stumbled across; they’d confirm it was not an apparition, or a living dead, rather that the boy was the son of so-and-so. Female adults could always tell that we were from my grandmother’s house just by looking at us, and we never understood what it was they saw so clearly.
They carried that boy as best they could to San Xuan’s village. They thought they’d let him sleep until his family came to find him. It was all they could do: they didn’t know where his family was, and they didn’t know what circumstances he’d been lost in. They probably also tried to send word of the boy to the other villages via anyone who happened to be travelling to them. And they probably found that no one happened to be travelling anywhere at that time of day. The sleeping boy, or rather the semi-conscious boy, would have woken up in the village the next morning had it not been for the fact that he’d never spent the night in San Xuan’s village before and so he’d never been presented to San Xuan. He’d never asked for San Xuan’s blessing nor sought his protection. And that is why the very severe saint would not let him sleep and woke him at midnight. After all he went through, if my friend reached the big village alive it can only be because Dios is great and because my friend’s time had not yet come. Or as the adults like to say, because he was still innocent. Although in fact the word in our language doesn’t quite mean innocent, though that’s the equivalent in Spanish. At least not innocent in the sense of not being guilty: when we say he was innocent we mean he was pure, because he was still a child. Well, that boy was utterly broken when he got to the big village, so the adults said. But he showed signs of pulling through and the ministrants were called to pray for him. From what that woman had said about how she’d found him, it was feared the boy would end up mad. So the ministrants sang their prayers to drive out the evil that had entered him. And bit by bit he began to recover, until finally he was cured. But he never fully regained his strength. In fact, for a long time he couldn’t exert himself at all, which is why he never learned to fish, and he had to be taken to the small settlements by canoe because he couldn’t get up and down the slopes. And he became quite mean, I don’t know why. That meanness cost him his friends, and I eventually lost track of him too. He was probably taken by boat to wherever our fathers were, to finish off his recovery or start a new kind of life.
When the Pico burned and I saw my grandfather cry, my curiosity in him grew and I wondered about who he really was. And I thought about what we’d seen when we went into his room. What did we see in grandfather’s room? Well, after all those people were taken by the cholera, it was decided that we had to give food to the king of the sea. As a child, I never knew how news reached us of the things we had to do on the island, how the adults were told what needed doing. The ministrants took the Maté Jachín out and went round the island, three laps in a canoe. They took the Maté Jachín out and went through the bush, through all the streets and the surroundings of the big village. The Maté Jachín was carried at the front, followed by all the ministrants in their white tunics and then the women who accompanied them. First the order went out that everyone had to go and wash in the lake. Then that everyone had to go and give food to the king of the lake. And finally that we had to give food to the king of the sea. I never understood who it was that gave the orders to do these things, but what I do know, from what the adults said, the female adults, is that some women on the island talked to the deads. One such woman lived near our house and was called Sabina. Actually she wasn’t just called Sabina, her full name was Maminda Zé Sabina, but anyway, she was one of the women who talked to the deads. And those women brought news of what we had to do and of what was going to happen in the future. This I know from my grandmother and other female adults. And from them I also know that most women who talked to the deads hardly believed a word the deads said. As I was only a child, this wasn’t something I could easily understand and, indeed, I found the whole thing quite frightening. Like I said, I knew Sabina and I knew she was one of the women who brought the orders of what had to be done. Although in actual fact it wasn’t quite like that: I knew Sabina talked to the deads, and that’s all I knew. I don’t remember ever speaking to her myself, but I remember she had a strange face, or at least I thought it was strange. Her face always looked as if it was about to laugh or cry, so when you saw her you thought she might burst out laughing or crying at any moment. And I say this not because I was an expert on faces and expressions but because when you’re told a woman talks to the deads and you get a chance to look at her, you look. As far as I was concerned, a woman who talked to the deads was no ordinary woman. And Sabina’s face made you think she was about to break down in tears or break out in a big smile. One or the other, at any moment. Was it because of the conversations she had with the deads? I don’t know, but what I do know, from what my grandmother and the other female adults said, is that the women who talked to the deads suffered a lot. So was Sabina’s face the face of a woman who would have been happy if it weren’t for the constant strain of having to talk to the deads? That could be it. That’s to say, if it hadn’t been for the deads always bothering her with things they wanted to convey to the village, she’d have been a smiley woman. That could be it. From what I remember of Sabina, I’d also say she was a very beautiful woman. And again, I probably say this because I looked at her a lot, because she wasn’t a she-devil. She-devils were no ordinary women either, but I wasn’t brave enough to look at them. But I looked at Sabina a lot. There were other women on the island who spoke to the deads, but I only remember Sabina, because she was our neighbour.