I mention all this about boys and girls, infants really, to show how we lived in the big village, and in the other villages of our Atlantic Ocean island, and grew up believing whatever we understood or thought to be the truth. And of course there’s nothing remarkable about that, nothing special about boys and girls having eyes to see and hearts to feel with. As a general rule, all boys and girls who were at or below the age of first Communion were considered innocents, or ‘pures’. Everyone was pure up to that age, and I don’t remember any example of an evil happening that stopped them from being considered pure. Which meant that if for some reason you needed a ‘pure’, any child would serve the purpose. In the same way that men couldn’t be visited at night by a mysterious being that made them feel hot and want to bathe in the saltwater, as happened with the she-devils, children couldn’t become infected by evil. Be they boy or girl. Other than the usual illnesses, children were immune to evil. They were pure. And as I already said, they were used whenever pures were required. For example, in our village there was an illness that was treated using urine, but not anyone’s urine, only a pure’s urine, only a child’s. It was said that people suffering from that illness should be given a pure’s urine to drink, and if the doctor was dealing with such a case you’d see the doctor’s helpers going through the streets with bottles asking children to pee in them, as many bottles and children as it took. Only the urine of pures, boys or girls, but of course it wasn’t as easy for girls to pee into a bottle, though they did the best they could. I know the name of the sickness you treat using urine, but I only know it in my language, the language of our island. Looking back, I suppose if you really could treat that illness using urine, then surely anyone’s urine would do. By which I mean it would make no difference whether it was a child’s or an adult’s, though I see why they only asked pures to pee in bottles, the innocent. It’s fairly obvious why, but it does change what was meant by innocence.
Time went by on our island and there was no news of our fathers, who were somewhere you went to by boat. The sun rose and set, it rained, we experienced the rain in the big village and then went to the settlements with our mothers when the dry season came. On our island, everyone went to the settlements where they had plantations. Almost everyone went, except for my grandfather and a few others who had reason to stay in the big village. Something must have happened with my grandfather, circumstances that I was never made aware of, because I have the feeling I never saw him again after leaving him on the beach by the cemetery. I left him sitting there, talking to the canoeman who had been transporting grandmother’s daughter, and I have the feeling I never saw him again, although when that man came crying to the house my grandfather must surely have been there and said something. But I don’t remember. As far as my memory is concerned, I left him there on the beach, the day we gave food to the Saltwater King. That was the last I knew of him, though in truth it probably wasn’t. That time and place is doubtless engraved on my memory because of the special circumstances. Besides, that was the day I discovered that grandfather was sick, and that perhaps because of his sickness he’d lost his job on the boat where he was captain, and was brought to the big village for someone to take care of him. He had a bag strapped to his stomach to put his leftovers in, his excrement. I don’t want to talk about it any more. But through grandfather I learned that such a thing could happen to a human being. And I think he was the only person on the island who suffered from it. So it gives me a funny feeling when I think about it. In any case, life went on and as far as I’m concerned I left him sitting there on the cemetery beach, and that was the last I knew of him until he died. When he died, on the very day of his death, they burned a lot of things from his room, things we’d seen when we went in there in his absence. But I’d rather not talk about it. I’ve said why.