Wait. . the old indju tree in my garden sighs and the cool night wind caresses its bony arms for the last time, lisping words of consolation. When in nine minutes’ time I am dead, when my heart no longer beats in my cold body and my soul is already in the hereafter, the watch on my wrist will go on ticking for hours.
NINE
The days and years have all been lived and have crumbled to dust. I am cocooned by the final night, uncertain of what heavenly bliss and hellish pains lie beyond the horizon. At the mercy of an alien will, yet at the same time strengthened by an unsuspected reserve of courage that derives from my drinking, I await unrepentantly for whatever else the night may bring — and still there are surges of a will to live. I look up at the ebony ramparts of heaven, but on the far side of the hemisphere the knives are already out. Fragile angels with flashing swords they can barely lift are quite calmly searing away what is engraved in the book of nature. By the light of billions of yellow candles I hear the cosmic silence shattered by the death rattle of all earthly dreams and the howl of frightened dogs.
I pick up the whisky bottle, which is still half full, and unscrew the cap. I hold the bottle upside down over the flowerpot and with a pang of guilt see the noble liquid greedily absorbed by the bone-dry earth. Just before the bottle is completely empty, I quickly turn it upright and place it between my feet on the terrace. I strike a match and drop it carefully into the bottle. The last drops of alcohol ignite immediately and a small blue flame spurts up through the neck of the bottle with a soft hum. Just when almost everything has burnt up and the fire is dying down, I close off the mouth of the bottle with the palm of my hand. The flame goes out at once and the bottle fills with smoke. I slowly raise my arm and the bottle follows, stuck to my palm. This drunkard’s party piece is called “conjuring the genie out of the bottle.” I detach the bottle from my hand, neatly replace its cap and with a powerful swing hurl it across the garden, over the road and into the undergrowth on the other side. Keep Your Island Clean! The slogan of the sanitation department doesn’t apply tonight.
I extend my right arm so that the light from the lamp falls on it: there is a small pink circle on the inside of my hand. I’m a marked man. Then I extend my left hand, so that the light catches my wristwatch.
It is 2:46 am — and at that moment the water level changes in all the wells and springs on the Caribbean islands and the South American mainland. All domestic pets grow restless; in the towns the rats flee noiselessly from the sewer; and in the snow-covered southern regions of the continent animals with faded coats awaken prematurely from hibernation. The firmament is now strewn with stars; the earth is being sympathetically observed by millions of fiery eyes.
The sound of a distant waterfall, at first a murmur, becomes louder and more ominous, like the grumbling of a god who has decided to exterminate everything that lives. The fear and terror of the falling water is conveyed like feverish painting on the wind. The message is picked up and understood by a cricket at the top of the indju tree in my garden and it immediately passes on the news of apocalypse to its fellow crickets. Hearing the chirped signal, the little nocturnal birds, alarmed, cease playing on the wind above the ridges of the hills and fly hurriedly over to the mainland to announce the dreadful tidings. The news spreads like wildfire.
From the crenellated coast of Venezuela in the north to the sunless southernmost tip of Tierra del Fuego, from the Bahía de Sechura to where the Parahyba River flows into the Atlantic in the east, there is a delicate, high-pitched trilling sound, which takes on a shriller quality as millions of grasshoppers join in. The sound swells. All the bees and mosquitoes start to buzz; from the mountain slopes and treetops and the roofs of houses all the crickets rub their notched hind legs against their forewings, transmitting their rasping codes to other insects across the huge expanses. Everything capable of producing a sound makes itself heard: like an endless, shrill death rattle, the appalling sound soars through the selvas, across the llanos, campos and pampas, over the vast plantations and haciendas, the tiny plots of the peasants, through the valleys green from the rain and along the muddy riverbeds, through the never-sleeping streets of the great cities.
When I was a boy, lying in the small square of darkness in my room, I often used to listen to the crickets: the shrill rasp of a house cricket behind the wardrobe, or the enervating kri-kri-kri-kri of a jet-black garden cricket outside. On nights when their monotonous chirping kept me awake until late, I could hear the cursing and shouting of the drunken sailors beating each other up and throwing bottles. Our house was close to the harbour and living in the same street was a lady of easy virtue, although at the time I had only the faintest notion of what that meant. Her house was the onshore address of innumerable seamen, mainly Norwegians, who came to drink, kick up a rumpus and so on. The Norwegians all drank Dutch gin mixed with bright-red Curaçao liqueur, both of which they bought at my father’s shop. My father, himself a devoted jenever drinker, called the combination of aged Dutch gin and the sticky-sweet liqueur “dynamite.” No wonder the wild drinking sessions invariably ended with a free-for-all in the street. The neighbours said that after these battles, anyone rendered unconscious either by drink or by the injuries they had sustained was always carried or dragged back to their ship by his mates; no Norwegian seaman was ever left behind. My mother told me that when I was born — it was early one Sunday morning, pouring with rain, and the church bells were ringing for the first dawn mass before Christmas — there was a fight in full swing in our street. My father had to brave both the rain and the flying bottles to fetch the midwife.
Not ten minutes’ walk from our house was a hill on which a large water tank had been built. From there you could look down on the whole expanse of the harbour. I often sat there after school and watched the bustle below. Whenever a vessel put to sea flying the Norwegian flag, I wondered whether the crew, after a night of boozing and brawling, were still capable of manoeuvring the ship out of the harbour without ramming the vessels moored in the narrow channel or sinking the opened pontoon bridge. Even when the ship reached open water, I was still doubtful whether the sailors, with their fearsome hangovers, would manage to cross the ocean and reach Norway safely.
Almost every ship I saw sailing out of the harbour awakened an odd, unpleasant sensation in me, as if I had forfeited something. As I watched the vessel grow smaller and smaller, I felt horribly lonely and abandoned. At one such moment I scratched the words OUTLAW in huge letters on the steel belly of the water tank. When I lay awake at night, I struggled to understand the strange feeling these departing ships provoked in me, but without success. Until, that is, the night when I was listening to the idiotic sound of the crickets and suddenly heard three sharp blasts from the siren of a vessel ready to saiclass="underline" every ship is a tiny, sparsely populated island. When it is on the high seas, surrounded on all sides by endless ocean, each member of the crew is a loner, without parents, without a dog, without a school, without a church. His day’s work is closely regulated and his free time is contractually fixed. The crew sleep on stiff canvas in tiny one-person cabins too small to stand up in. Once docked in a foreign port, they can go on shore leave, get drunk and womanise.