“This one’s on the way out,” I hear a man’s voice say. “That lousy Violet Saint of yours is already cheering in heaven.”
“Por Dios, Bencho!” cries an alarmed woman’s voice. “I wouldn’t say things like that if I were you. It’s just asking for trouble. You’d better cross yourself right away.”
Suddenly there is complete silence, as if everyone has disappeared and left me alone in an empty room. A new dream is about to start. I can see no images, but I know that I am in a secluded spot in the forest, and I inhale the scent of thick undergrowth and newly dug earth. I open my eyes to see where I am, but I am back on the hard bed again, with two female figures moving about at the foot. I cannot make them out with any clarity, because the dream seems determined to stay incoherent. Then my delirium is completely dispelled by the sharp sunlight that streams through the doorway and casts a pattern of rectangles across the floor.
My eyes adjust to the light and I can at last see the two old witches. One of them is a real virago, tall and wide, with an enormous head of curly hair that glistens hideously from an excess of coconut oil and looks like a nest of young snakes. She is holding a dove in each hand, white creatures with red eyes incessantly jerking their heads back and forth. The second woman is equally tall, but is thin as a rake and flat-chested; she holds a knife between her teeth and is tying a grubby apron around her companion. When she has finished, she pulls the blanket off me and rolls up my trouser legs. She takes one of the doves from the other woman and in one rapid movement she twists its wings over its back and holds it belly up in the palm of her left hand. Her fingers grasp the bird’s neck and tail, so that it can move only its legs. With her other hand she takes the knife out of her mouth and with one swift stroke slits the dove open from neck to tail. The bird makes no sound. With the same dexterity the woman presses the creature she has cut open against the sole of my foot.
“Quick, cut the other bird open,” she snaps, handing the knife to the virago. The huge woman makes an incision in the second dove and presses it against my other sole. The blood of the birds feels tepid at first, but then becomes burning hot. Is it my imagination, or can I feel tiny, convulsive flutterings of intestines and bird claws against the soles of my feet? I begin to feel sick and try to pull my feet away, but the nausea is already giving way to a sensation that completely paralyses me. It is as if my body is emptying itself, as if my internal organs are relaxing in a series of minor spasms, as if all my pores are gaping to allow some slimy liquid to seep out of me. I feel as if my body is melting and I am sinking slowly into a substance that is neither solid nor liquid, but feels almost unbearably sensual and delicious. My every fibre is trembling with exaltation.
“Koño!” exclaims the woman who is tucking me in. “This fellow can’t be all that ill. Just look at his trousers. He’s come all over the place!”
I cannot make out all the words that a warm mouth is whispering close to my ear, but in the sweet murmurings I recognise the sounds I used to hear so often on hot afternoons when, with a woman’s sticky body pressed against mine, I rocked gently in a hammock that made faint rattling sounds. Suddenly I’m plunged into the tender warmth of Irma-Luz.
I never really got used to a hammock. With such an unstable structure you must take great care over every movement you make, and consequently I tumbled out of it a few times. Irma-Luz’s hammock was an enormous affair that stretched from wall to wall across her large room and was lavishly decorated with scores of ribbons and strings of beads in every conceivable colour. But the two rows of rattles at either end were the craziest idea of all. Irma-Luz had made them from hollowed-out gourds, which she had painted in bright colours and filled with pebbles from the beach. The slightest movement you made in the hammock caused stones to rattle. From the very start the constant noise got on my nerves. “Do you realise that that stupid rattling could make a man impotent in time?”
“On the contrary,” Irma-Luz had replied with a laugh, “don’t you know anything about psychology? You’ll probably be so conditioned by all that rattle that you’ll get an immediate hard-on whenever you hear the noise!”
On the afternoon of one of those sultry days in early May when a tepid, paralysing veil envelops the whole island, Irma-Luz and I were lying motionless in the hammock, our sweaty bodies pressed together. The primeval force that had taken us to the heights of ecstasy had subsided, the arousal and the passion had turned to satiety and exhaustion, and we lay so still that even the rattles at the head and foot of the hammock were silent.
This tender silence was suddenly shattered by the wailing of sirens and the screech of tyres, hideous sounds that went on and on, as if at least a hundred ambulances or police cars were chasing each other down the street.
“Sudden voices always make me jump,” Irma-Luz whispered without opening her eyes. I had already felt the shock go through her body.
“Perhaps World War Three has broken out,” I joked.
“There must have been some terrible accident — so many sirens, there’s no end to them. I must have a look out of the window.”
The stones rattled furiously as she jumped out of the hammock, and I had to roll quickly towards the centre of it to avoid falling out. She half-opened the window and we both caught the smell of burning that drifted in. She covered her breasts with her hands and leant out of the window.
“There’s a big fire. I can see a huge plume of smoke somewhere near the bridge. Wait a minute, there’s fire on the other side of the harbour too.”
I joined her at the window and we counted four fires. Down below, a truck full of soldiers roared past, preceded by two wailing police motorbikes. We closed the window to keep out the pungent smell of burning and switched on the radio. We listened to the news with mounting dismay. The newsreader was hard to follow, because at intervals he would break into a hysterical scream. The room filled with a stream of shocking reports: a mass march of striking workers in the centre of town; cars overturned and torched; vandalism and looting in supermarkets; a mob robbed of its senses by stolen liquor; bloody clashes between demonstrators and police; crowds, shootings, arson and looting; the sealing off of the town centre and the closure of the airport; a ban on assembly, a ban on the sale of alcoholic drinks, the imposition of a curfew. .
“I’ll get you something to eat,” said Irma-Luz. “You’d better stay here tonight. With that pale Protestant mug of yours you’d probably get lynched if you stepped into the street.”
I spent this day when so much changed, when my sleepy native isle was rudely deflowered by revolt, pain and blood, with a woman whose skin was soft and medlar-coloured in a hammock adorned with rattling gourds.
Later, after midnight, Irma Luz sat in the hammock once more; she had had a bath and was still naked. She dangled her legs over the side and pressed a tiny transistor radio to her ear. Now and then she relayed a news report. I knelt in front of the hammock and put my hands on her knees. I spread her thighs wide and pressed my head into her lap. I don’t know if it had anything to do with the smell of burning that still hung in the room, but her pubic hair smelt of incense, the same odour I had smelt as a small boy when mass was celebrated on the playground of my primary school. I lifted my head and studied the folds of her genitalia at close range. I realised at the same time that from below a thousand demons, and from above a thousand gods, were looking back at me.