This afternoon when he walked solemnly through my gate, I was burning rubbish in an oil drum nearby. He stopped and watched me without saying a word. This indicated that I had to say something.
“You look like a walking toadstool with that bloody hat on.”
He didn’t react, but said, “Today’s not a day for burning rubbish.”
“Why not? Is it Friday the thirteenth?”
“The wind’s blowing from the wrong direction.”
“That makes no difference if you do it in an oil drum.”
“But you’re standing on the wrong side as well. Your clothes and your hair might catch fire. That was a good poem.”
“What are you talking about?”
He dropped onto his right knee, untied his left bootlace and took out a neatly folded piece of paper the size of a five-cent coin. He stood up and offered it to me, but from the opposite side of the oil drum from where I was standing. I moved round to the other side and took the paper from him. I unfolded it and read: “After my death — and this will be a comfort to me — no one will be able to find in my papers a single explanation of what really made my life worth living; no one will be able to find the key inside me that explains everything. .”
“It’s not a poem. It’s a diary entry by Kierkegaard.”
He quickly took the piece of paper out of my hand with a rather offended expression and said, “You shouldn’t say Kierkegaard, but Kièr-ke-gòr. It’s written Kierkegaard, but you pronounce it Kièr-ke-gòr.”
“Thanks. Now I know.”
He dived into his boot again and produced another cutting, which he unfolded before handing it to me. It was my poem about Lilith, the first woman, that had been published some time previously in the weekend supplement of a local daily.
“Why do you think it’s a good poem, and why do you keep it?”
“It’s a wonderful poem.”
“Why do you think it’s wonderful?”
“Why do you ask stupid questions?” You think a poem’s wonderful because you think it’s wonderful. End of story. But you’re conceited — I expect you want me to sing the praises of your writing.”
“Do you want to come in for a drink?”
“Oh no, never again. Those four animals of yours aren’t dogs, they’re wolves. But if you’d like to get me a bottle of beer, I’d really appreciate it.”
I got him a bottle of beer. He took a short swig, tapped his hat with the neck of the bottle in a kind of military salute, turned on his heel and minced off in the direction of the village.
Now, as I sit here in the night gazing stupidly at hills that keep changing their shape — a game they will continue until morning breaks, when they will resume their original outline — I am overcome with feelings of both pity and admiration for Eugenio. This planet is one huge mess. Jews kill Muslims, Catholics blow up Protestants and the incumbent of the White House who’s acting the screen role of president of the United States is heading straight for a confrontation with the Russians. Lies and calumnies, falsifications of the Bible and history have made the world incomprehensible, and you wonder whether there’s any possibility of rising above the chaos. But lo and behold! Suddenly a little bird sings, and in this forgotten corner of the world that small action gives us strength because it makes things fall back into place: my poem in a madman’s stinking shoe.
A dearth of drink obliges me to go back inside to replenish my supply of Dutch courage, but soon I’m back in my old place under the neon strip, on the same lukewarm paving slab, flanked by my fresh provisions.
At moments like this, when there is not a breath of wind, the night speaks with a chorus of primeval voices: the vegetation in my garden pants, as if the densely planted bushes were gasping for breath; the indju tree moans; the tiny, nameless creatures that forage for food only when it is pitch-dark make rustling noises; far off, an exhausted goat with its head caught in a fence utters a death rattle. Now and then I hear the strange cry of the small birds of prey that come at night to soar in wide arcs on the thermal currents rising from the seaward slopes of the hilclass="underline" a high-pitched trill, like the giggle of a young girl, immediately followed by a protracted wail, as though the birds are in mortal danger — a moment’s happiness smothered by sadness. Just before sunrise, when they should be totally exhausted, the birds fly back to the coast of Venezuela where they live. Sometimes unidentifiable noises can also be heard, whisperings that seem like some incomprehensible warning. But none of these sounds, or even the shooting star high in the sky, manages to shatter the silence and imperturbability of the night which swallows up everything.
I love the hushed quality of the island when nature has fallen asleep, a few hours after midnight when the immobility of darkness prevails. The leaves hang motionless from the trees like tired eyelids. The trailing branches of the milkwood trees, which during the day flirt with the wind and climb up the telegraph poles across the road, have now ceased their coupling manoeuvres and droop loosely like dead snakes. The sky is black apart from an exceptionally large star here and there. Perhaps it will rain soon. When I was a boy I imagined that the darkness was square, four black walls that formed not so much a square as a rectangle, inside which everything was dark. When I was sent to bed and turned out the light, my room was enclosed within a small square. But there was still a narrow strip of light shining under the door, and now and then I could hear a voice or some other sound in the house.
Later, when the other lights in the house had gone out and the bright strip under the door had vanished, the whole building was enclosed in a large square of darkness. Even then there were faint sounds, inexplicable noises in and around the house, and the barely perceptible sighs that I sometimes thought I could hear in the distance. Not much has changed. The boy who used to lie on his narrow bed listening to the sounds of the darkness is now an old man sitting on his terrace gazing at the dark. The square has become larger: the whole Caribbean is surrounded by four black walls of China, and within them damnation continually smoulders.
I don’t know if it is a warning that my arteries are becoming clogged with cholesterol, but sometimes at this hour, when the alcohol has gone to my head, I have the urge to play Caribbean Man, or at least make an amalgam of all my fellow inhabitants of the archipelago and dissect them frantically. It is not the Jew but Caribbean Man who is the most tragic figure on earth; his destination is not Auschwitz but Disney World. He lives in hiding, even though the colonial occupation ended long ago. He suffers from night blindness and cures himself by spending the whole day in the sun. His life, a feast of laughter and dancing, is actually a lament, intoned to the sound of calypso, reggae or merengue: his mistrust is fed by disillusionment and the inexorability of fate, by a fundamental scepticism about the likelihood of happy endings. This coconut mentality makes his very existence a web in which he is increasingly entangled. The white man isn’t white and the black man isn’t black; both are aliens in this land where their umbilical cords are buried.
Eugenio is right. If you try to fill the night with drink alone, you end up fretting about problems that are insoluble.
Around three in the morning, when the silence is intense and the night is at its loveliest, the cockerels start their din. When I was a child, they told me at school that the cockerel flaps its wings and cries cock-a-doodle-doo to greet the sun. That is pure fantasy: the creatures start their hideous concert when it’s still pitch-dark and do not stop until it is broad daylight. At the first cockcrow my conscience starts to feel remorse because, unlike other mortals, I am still up at this ungodly hour. Then I quickly clean the glass and the bottle and hurry indoors. But it is at least another hour before I turn in, for I have to follow the nightly rituals to the last detail. The three male dogs must be taken for a walk, for between ten and fifteen minutes each. It must be done separately, or they will tear each other to pieces; having a vagina, Fonda is the only one on good terms with them all. Of course the dogs should have been let out long ago, but I don’t like them barking and dashing around when I’m sitting outside. Another end-of-day ceremony is cleaning my teeth. I do this meticulously, brushing upwards and downwards as well as forwards and backwards, then rinsing with a mouthwash that reeks of the hospital. All this is designed to banish the foul aftertaste of drink and cigarettes so that I can go to bed cleansed. The last item on my daily schedule is to take the pistol out of its hiding place in the wardrobe and place it on the table to the right of my bed.