Fish spilling onto the shore was nothing, nothing I tell you, compared to something similar that happened, though on a much larger scale and for reasons nobody understood. It happened less frequently, though it was regular in that it tended to happen around the same time most years, years long ago lost in time. So it was impossible to predict, but it was regular. That’s all I can say. If I’d seen it happen as an adult, I’d have tried to find out more about it, that wonder of our island’s oceans. What happened was that at a certain time, and without anyone understanding what caused it, there flowed onto all the island’s shores, onto every beach on the island, an unquantifiable number of squid. You could see them coming from way out at sea, one by one or in groups, rushing towards the shore and then onto the beach, where they stayed. Watching this curious phenomenon, it looked as if the squid had received a strange order they were determined to obey. After washing up on the beach they showed no sign of wanting to get back in the water, back to where they came from, which must have been very far away, deep out at sea, for squid weren’t common or easy to catch. Indeed it was very rare for a fisherman to catch such a specimen and it was generally thought that squid lived in a different part of the ocean, or in its extreme depths. Well that’s what we thought until this strange phenomenon occurred, this mass squid exodus, as we called it. Although it was more like a mass suicide or a mass expulsion than a mass exodus, for it surely wasn’t something those molluscs would have done voluntarily. What was it? What drew them on such a journey away from wherever they lived — and on a one-way trip at that? Was it because they were chased by predators, as happened on a smaller scale with the sardines? It was something nobody understood, for the quantities involved were truly amazing: hundreds and thousands of squid would wash up on the beaches, stranded in the sand or on rocks, and perish, never to return to the sea. What an incredible thing! What an amazing phenomenon! I’ve said it once but I’ll say it again: what was it?
Whenever it happened, and it always happened in the afternoon, the first people to see it would start yelling to let everyone else know: ‘Squid! Squid! Squid!’ That was all it took for everyone to come running and for the great squid festival to begin. There were huge piles of squid run aground on the beach in the big village. Piles and piles of them. Then more piles on the next beach, and more on the next beach after that, and so on; hundreds of squid landing on the shores of our island for no apparent reason. And down came men, women and children to harvest the bumper sea crop. And they went on shouting squid squid squid, and no one went without, and no one knew what to do with so much squid. And something needed to be done to provide for times of shortage. So, after the harvest was complete and all the squid that had spilled out from the Atlantic Ocean had been gathered in, decisions had to be made about how to make all that nourishment last for the days and months ahead. But before anything was decided, the island’s fishermen had made their preparations and were licking their lips in anticipation. For they knew squid meat was the perfect bait. With squid meat for bait, you could lure any fish onto your hook, even fish that usually only ate plants. And there was one fish in particular that was very fond of squid, a fish that swims in our waters and doesn’t have a name in Spanish, only in our language. It’s a flat fish and it must be an oily fish, for it has a blueish colour. We call it pámpan’a. And so the squid harvest was always eclipsed by the great pámpan’a harvest, and we thought we lived by the most bountiful sea in all the world, somewhere so bountiful that fish could just be plucked from the water. For the fishermen caught pámpan’a in such huge quantities … Amazing, truly amazing quantities. They caught so many that nobody, absolutely nobody, went without fish for several days. Even families with grandfathers who had no friends and refused to go to the beach to fraternise with the fishermen. Widows, single women, disabled men, recluses, men who didn’t fish because they had a different job, everyone, everywhere; no one went without a fish to boil in their pot. Fish was smoked, fried, salted, lightly boiled, the water used as the next day’s condiment, and everything came accompanied with what was left over from a few days ago, namely squid, boiled and salted. What huge quantities of seafood we ate! Truly amazing quantities! We could never have imagined, without seeing it before our eyes, that there were so many fish in the sea.
We ate the squid, we ate the pámpan’a, and later we experienced periods when we hungered for fish again. In truth, the people on the island didn’t appreciate the squid itself as much as they appreciated the marvel of its coming. Because the sudden abundance of squid was a mere prelude to that huge fish harvest, to what we considered the sea’s fertile season. We saw the sea as our island’s larder, the place where we kept the fish assigned to us; any man past adolescence could pick up his fishing tackle and go out to sea at any time, so long as it wasn’t stormy. And with such a larder at our disposal, households with men didn’t go as hungry as households without them. Or households with one who refused to have anything to do with the sea, even turned his back to it.