But back to my grandfather and his not going to the vidjil, nor to any other part of the shore where people fished, and to us, as a consequence, eating so little fish. All of my grandfather’s offspring were female, and we, the males, the grandsons, were too young to go out fishing. Was my grandfather not somehow esteemed? Did he not have in him those qualities that meant he’d be given fish even though he’d done nothing? Had he been bad in his youth and that was why he avoided other people, because he’d wronged them and they didn’t like him because of his past?
The one person who made sure we didn’t go too long without eating fish was my grandmother’s lovely niece. From an early age she developed a habit of being charitable towards us, at first giving us fish from her father, then her brothers, and then from the husband she acquired once she’d reached the age of desire. There was never any doubt that girl would find a good husband for she was so lovely.
That we didn’t eat fish because the man of our house didn’t fish and refused to go where he ought to go was no small thing. Because, on our Atlantic Ocean island, if you didn’t fish, or get fish to eat, you didn’t eat. And don’t ask me why we didn’t raise hens, goats or pigs on our island of unknown geographical coordinates. Let’s just say that when we did, they were much more likely to be taken away on boats than find their way into grandmother’s cooking pot. It was said that all the animals we never saw eaten were taken to where our fathers were. There were many of us in my grandmother’s house and all of us had a father in that place you went to by boat, a boat we only ever saw in the distance, from the beach. All of which meant that when we had no fish, grandmother put a hunk of cassava bread in our hands, as dry as a remnant from the fire. And nothing more was said of it. So in order to eat in our house, two adults had jobs to do. It was grandmother’s job, aided by her daughters, our mothers, to make sure there was always a hunk of cassava bread to put in our hands or, when there wasn’t, a mash of something cooked inside a parcel of green banana leaves. And with this, they could be satisfied they’d done their duty. Then it was the man’s turn, and the man of the house could be satisfied he’d done his duty when fish reached the house through his doing, and in sufficient quantity that there was enough to go round. The man of our house refused to have anything to do with the sea; in fact, he built his house turned to face the mountain. Nor could we little men of the house help, as we saw other grandchildren do, grandchildren whose grandfathers took them out to sea to learn how to fish, in exchange for a bit of seasickness and vomiting. Seasickness and vomiting from the grandchildren, I mean.
And how do you think we were left when grandmother’s niece didn’t send us even a solitary fish’s head, which was all she did send some days? We were left holding a hunk of cassava bread and thinking of salt. I’ve already said how dry the bread was and that it was difficult to swallow on its own. Indeed it was painful to swallow if it wasn’t softened by the water the fish had been boiled in, water we liked to call sauce. I think I already mentioned it. You dipped your bread in the water, the leftover water from grandmother’s cooking, and that way it went down your throat painlessly and with some sense of taste. So when not even a fish’s head reached our house, the more sensitive among us ate nothing and, after biding time beside the kerosene lamp, we went to bed on empty stomachs, feeling terribly sorry for ourselves. That lamp was the only source of light in the house. Gracias a Dios, it didn’t end up with grandfather upstairs, though maybe he had his own. Anyway, the more enterprising among us held that piece of bread in our hands and thought of salt and chillies. We carried the lamp, or whatever light was available, and groped around outside looking for chillies, tiny chillies that were red when ripe, green otherwise. Then we went back into the house and crushed them up with a bit of salt. As we did so, grandmother and our mothers would warn us about the heat, though sometimes they just left us to it. Emergency preparations made, the next step was to dip your piece of bread into the chilli and salt mix, then stuff it in your mouth. It was our substitute for fish, the fish our grandfather had failed to bring us by shutting himself away at home. You had to blow on your lips as you chewed, to counter the intense heat and burning. For the thing is, the chillies on our Atlantic Ocean island may be small, but boy are they potent. You chewed and wham! You blew on your lips and tears came to your eyes, for chillies seem to demand a lot of water. In fact, you blew on your lips only because you couldn’t eat and drink at the same time, but as soon as you’d chewed and swallowed, you tipped a whole glass of water down your throat. You finished and then it was bedtime, and ouch for any boy who forgot to wash his hands before putting them in his trousers and taking hold of his organ to pee! And ouch for any girl who carelessly let her unwashed hand touch her slit! Ouch! Ouuuch! I already said how hot the chillies are on our island. And if it was hard enough to get over the heat on your lips, it was harder still to get over a heat that burned inside you, and in such a sensitive area, and all because of a man whom we knew nothing about, our grandfather.
I don’t want to say any more about the lack of fish and other animals to eat without mentioning that I knew the island priest because we used to take eggs to him. So surely we could have eaten eggs with the cassava bread! Why did they not cook eggs for us? Grandmother would send us to take eggs to the Padre, and we were glad to be sent on such an important assignment. The Padre lived at the Misión, just above the church, or behind it, in the upstairs of a building joined on to the Misión. Someone worked for him and it was this person who opened the door and took the eggs from us. Sometimes we could see the priest whiling away time on the balcony, staring out to sea. From the Misión you could see the sea, and also our house. And you could see someone sitting on our balcony, which had to be grandfather. Sometimes we thought our grandmother sent us there just to see grandfather and the house from a different angle. The Padre did the opposite to grandfather and stared at the sea, in case a boat passed the island. Grandfather stared at the mountain, every day, and never tired of looking at it, as if he knew that whatever it was he was waiting for would come from up there. Perhaps he was waiting for the king of the mountain, or of the lake, which was, and still is, on the other side of the mountain.
As our bodies grew, so too our curiosity, and one day we got the idea of going into grandfather’s sleeping room. He slept alone, or at least I thought he slept alone, though I never knew if grandmother slept with him. I didn’t know if his room was really their room, because grandmother always went to bed after everyone else, so I never knew where she slept. But anyway, we wanted to know what was inside grandfather’s sleeping room. Although first I should probably explain where we all slept. Our mothers slept with their littlest children and their daughters, even if those daughters were not little but the same age as us, the boys. So it might be that in one bed slept one of my aunts, a child of between two and six, sometimes older, and a girl about the same age as me. They arranged themselves like this: first the mother, then the child in the middle, and the girl by the wall. If there was another little child, a little girl or a boy who wasn’t yet as old as we were, he or she slept at the feet of the other three, and nobody complained, and two of them would wet the bed, even if they’d been made to go outside and pee at the door before bedtime. In another bed there might be the same arrangement, assuming the next aunt had the same number of children, by a father who was in another town, somewhere you got to by boat.