One thing I know, for I’ve heard it said by adults many times, is that the last thing a lost canoeman does is stop paddling. When he lays his paddle down in his canoe, it’s because he’s handing his life over to destiny. Even if there’s no land in sight, you paddle until your last breath. What I also know, or think, is that not even the adults who went out in canoes knew how many countries there were close to our island, nor how near to us any of them were. So doubtless they did paddle until their last breath, but without knowing which direction to go in, until they were swept up by a current, and nobody can escape from a current, you just have to wait until it lets you be and deposits you wherever. The phenomenon of being swept up by currents has a fearsome name in my language. It only occurs way out at sea, in waters that know nothing of our Atlantic Ocean island. If any of those canoes ended up in one of those currents, they were doubtless taken to die somewhere very far from our island, somewhere no one returns from. They disappeared. We cried a lot, but they were never heard of again, except for one of them, who told the story of having been to the other side. The others were never heard of again. They disappeared from our lives.
That was the terrible case of the men who got lost at sea. But I was talking about the young canoeman who left a woman on the shore of the big village and then she disappeared from sight. So what happened to her? The man knew she was in a hurry because her child was sick, but even so, she couldn’t have got up the beach in such a short time. Something had happened to her. The man became worried and set off to investigate, to find out what had happened to the woman with the sick child in her arms. And what had happened was this. On our island, children go to the sandy beach of the big village during the day. They go there because the sand is fine and fun to play in. And part of the fun, or the play, consists of digging big holes in the sand with your hands, climbing into the hole and hiding from other children. The adults know about this game and make sure the children fill in the holes before leaving the beach. But sometimes night might start spreading its dark cloak over the island and the children, hiding in their holes or running from one hole to another, are having too much fun to notice. Then their mothers appear to tell them it’s time to leave the beach and come home. And in their haste, brought on by the impending gloom and their mothers’ anxious calls, the children leave the holes they’ve dug and run home. Most children run home without even brushing the sand off themselves, never mind filling the holes in. And because most children are afraid of going near the water at night, they go to bed with sand all over their bodies, feet and face. Gracias a Dios, sand doesn’t stain or irritate the skin. I know this from experience. And considering how deeply we slept, a few grains of sand in the sheets obviously didn’t bother us. Just think: even with a bed full of sand we slept so deeply we wet the bed without realising it.
Anyway, what’s significant about all this is that holes are left without being filled in, and anyone walking on the beach in the dark, like that woman with the sick child, could easily fall into one and hurt themselves. And that’s exactly what happened when the man laid down his paddle after travelling many hours from the south village. The woman fell into one of those holes and disappeared from the canoeman’s sight. And as he knew nobody on the island had ever disappeared before, the man became worried, became alarmed even, and so he took a few steps forward, for he’d have a story to tell the next day. If you were with someone and they disappeared, you’d be the first person on the island to tell of someone having the ability to disappear. And if that someone was a woman, she might be a she-devil. So you had to be alert. He went to see what had happened to the woman and, after taking a few steps, he saw what it was. It was night and the whole island was in darkness. The woman had stepped forward, met with no ground and been swallowed up by the hole. Furthermore, she’d toppled forward and landed face-first against the side of the hole, and sand had got up her nose and into her mouth. And because she didn’t know where she was stepping, and then stepped on nothing, the impact when her foot hit the bottom of the hole had jolted through her leg and sprained her ankle. The woman wasn’t expecting to come across a hole in the middle of the night, and when you put your weight down on something that ends up being nothing, you tend to get injured. That’s how the man found her. Her face ached from banging into the side of the hole, she’d swallowed a mouthful of sand and her ankle hurt from the jolt it got when her foot hit the bottom of the hole. The injury to her ankle caused her more pain than her nose and mouth. She could no longer walk. And what about the child she’d had in her arms? The child had come loose as she fell and landed a few feet away from the hole, still wrapped in cloth.
The man got to where she was, found the woman whimpering and realised what had happened. He could make out the shape of the child lying a few feet away from the hole, although it wasn’t crying, it remained silent. The canoeman climbed into the hole and pulled the woman out. It wasn’t easy, for the hole was deep. It had been dug by several children at once. He sat the woman down on the sand and turned his attention to the baby boy, who the man understood was sick. And because the boy was sick and still only very little, he’d not moved from where he’d fallen after coming loose from his mother’s arms. Darkness reigned over the island. There was no light on the beach and they could see only what was close enough for them to make out. The man picked up the shape he assumed was the child and handed it to the woman, who was still whimpering because of her sore ankle. Did the man not notice that the child hadn’t whimpered at all, that it hadn’t cried once during the whole journey? He probably did notice, but the way things had happened there wasn’t much time to think, and the woman was still in need of assistance.
Having established what had happened, he now needed to go for help. The woman had a sick child, but she could no longer walk. If she’d been on her own, without the sick child, the canoeman would have carried her home on his back, but he couldn’t carry her if she had to carry a child, for she wouldn’t have been able to hold on to his shoulders. So he needed to get help. There was no other option. In other circumstances, he would not have left a woman on her own on the beach with a sick child in the middle of the night. In other circumstances, the woman would not have let him leave her on her own in the dark at the water’s edge holding on to a dead child, for that’s what her boy was. Any unknown being might emerge from the sea, and she was a woman, and it was night. There wasn’t another soul on the beach, for no one was expecting anyone to arrive from one of the settlements. But they had arrived, and in painful circumstances. They had no choice. The canoeman would knock at the door of the first house he found open, or else at the closed door of the house of an acquaintance, and ask for help. Given the situation, the man probably didn’t know where the woman with the sick child lived, so he could not go to her house to seek help there. And in any case, the woman had only one sister, and if the sister were away in another village, that house would be empty and shut. There’d be no sign of life in it and not just because of the dark.