So news reached us that we had to give food to the king of the sea, who ruled over the waves, the fish, the whole island in fact, for our island was out in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. Was the king of the sea King Atlas? If only! What a discovery that would be! But anyway, we had to give food to the king of the sea, and during the offering ceremony there should be no one at sea, not a single canoe. And so it was announced that there’d be an offering the next day. A man went through the streets announcing what was going to take place and that everyone should assemble in the big village to witness the event. Really he announced it not so that people would attend but to make sure everyone gave something. You weren’t obliged to give anything in particular, just some of whatever you had.
It so happened that around noon on the day of the offering, one of my mothers went out with a canoeman to collect a load from a place where there was a little church by a river. We had a plantation there and a few days earlier grandmother had gone there to harvest whatever was ripe and ready for eating, including two big bunches of palm dates. As the load was large, she thought she’d get a man with a canoe to come and pick it up. The place wasn’t far from the big village and we could have walked there after school to fetch it, but grandmother thought it best to bring the load back by canoe. I mentioned school. Back then, the children in our house who were old enough went to school. There we did ‘the junk’, which was what the basic-level class was called. We learned the Spanish ideo-visual alphabet: amapola, burro, cochino, dado, foca, gato, huevo; indio, jaula, kilo, lechuza, llama, molino, niño, oso … that’s as far as I can remember. Or rather I don’t remember the ‘p’, so let’s skip it and go on: queso, skip a few more letters, then uva, vino, xilófono, yegua, zape. We learned to count up to five hundred and also to do times tables. I remember the times tables because we learned them by singing and we enjoyed it: seven times one is seven, seven times two is fourteen and seven times three is twenty-one; seven times four is twenty-eight, etc … We did it all singing: five hundred and one, five hundred and two, five hundred and three, five hundred and four. In those days, I thought numbers stopped at five hundred; that five hundred and its add-ons, five hundred and one, five hundred and two, etc, were the highest numbers there were. We learned everything by heart, and I think that’s why we did it singing. In fact, although we sometimes saw books with the letters and pictures, I didn’t know that amapola, burro, cochino and dado were the Spanish words for poppy, donkey, hog and dice, or that poppy, donkey, hog and dice were things we were supposed to have heard of. I didn’t know what any of them were, so I didn’t know the words were supposed to represent the letters and I didn’t associate the letters with the pictures in the books. It was only years later that I found out what an amapola or a burro was. But they sounded good. The other thing I remember about school is the whip. If you couldn’t say cochino or dado properly, you got the whip. The whip was a cord made of I don’t remember what, but it had several knots in it and was tied to a stick. The teacher held it in his hand when he gave class. Although we liked it when we sang, school was a place where we had to speak a language that was not our own and where we might get whipped, so it was a place we were afraid of. What’s more, it was a place you went to but weren’t allowed to leave unless the teacher said so, and sometimes he wouldn’t even let you go to pee! Even if you went up to his table and asked in Spanish, a language that was not your own. I always wanted to be at home, with my mother, and I thought school was a terrible kind of punishment. For a while, I couldn’t get the thought of being at home out of my head. Home and school were very different places, totally different. What’s more, there were some wicked children in the school, children who would harass you and threaten to beat you after class if you weren’t their friends. They were the same children who got the whip the most for not being able to point out foca or gato or 501 on the blackboard, and they took revenge on anyone who laughed by fighting them later. I didn’t like any of this. We had a break, a play time that we liked a lot because it was like being temporarily released from prison. And during play time we gathered in the yard and ran about. That was what most of us did, just ran about — I suppose because nobody had a ball or anything else round and soft we could run about after — but some boys refused to stay in the school grounds and went off into the bush. They tended to be the naughtiest kids. What did they go off into the bush for? To look for fruit, especially guava. If it was mango season, they came back to the schoolyard with huge quantities of mangoes, carried in their laps and pockets, and with their shirts mucky from everything they’d touched. The mango tree itself has a sticky sap that’s impossible to get out. So yes, those boys went into the bush and had fun looking for guava and mango and sweetsop, but it wasn’t easy to keep track of time in the bush and they couldn’t hear the bell at the end of play time, so they’d get back to find the school in silence, a silence that really put the fear in you. And it put the fear in you because you realised you were the only one not in your seat. Some children even cried when it happened, for they knew what awaited them. And if you stayed outside until it was time for ‘school break-out’, which was what we called home-time in my language, you knew you’d get your comeuppance the next day. You’d probably have to spend the whole day on your knees, and this after getting the whip several times. And the red marks the whip left on hands and arms meant we all knew that getting the whip was no small thing. Besides being away from home and exposed to the threat of other boys, what I disliked most about school was the fact that I was expected to trust someone who might punish me with a furious beating, a beating from which there was no escape. That’s to say, there was no way of avoiding punishment. I don’t remember anything we learned in that school on our island, other than a class about Spanish words being divided into three categories, aguda, llana and esdrújula, depending on where the stress fell. It must have been a lesson after ‘the junk’, although it all merges into one in my memory. Anyway, the reason I remember the class about the three categories of Spanish words is because the teacher walked around the classroom with the whip in his hand, asking everyone how words are divided. Curiously, over half the class didn’t know the answer. In fact, never mind half, not a single kid the teacher asked knew the answer, and he asked practically the whole class. I say curiously because the answer was only three words and they were three words we’d just been taught. So anyway, I used to sit towards the front of the class but the teacher started at the back, moving down the rows and asking every boy and girl the same question, and not one of them answered. Every one of them got the whip, be it on the hand or the head, and the less resilient started to cry. The girls sat on the left in class, the boys on the right. So he’d asked almost everyone in class by the time he got to my desk, and he asked the question to the children sitting around me, in desks of two. None of them knew the answer. He asked me the same question, wearily, for he no doubt expected the same non-answer, as no one in the entire class had replied, and I don’t recall ever having shone at school before in anything. But without hesitation, for I knew the answer very well, I said words were divided into agudas, llanas and esdrújulas, and the teacher cried out, in joy and in anger, well at least one person in the entire room managed to remember one simple thing about the lesson. I swelled with pride. It was the single moment of acclaim of my whole school career.