Once I had recovered my breath a little, I shouldered the rucksack again, tore some branches off the shrubs and crawled on my hands and knees to my lookout post. Although the stone bridge is about eighteen inches wide and less than six feet long, crossing it is a scary business with the yawning abyss beneath you. But with the help of my guardian angel I reached the far side in one piece. Now I had to hurry, because it would soon be dark.
With the branches I had brought with me, I swept the bathtub as clean as I could. All kinds of vicious creatures could be hiding under the dry leaves and loose stones. I was particularly on my guard against scorpions. I get them in my own house occasionally, but they are the reddish-brown kind whose bite can sting and itch painfully, but which are otherwise harmless. However, their larger black relatives that live under stones and in withered cactuses are much more poisonous and can cause severe pain and fever. Country people say that you also develop a raging thirst, but that you mustn’t drink any water, for then the poison will spread through your body and could be fatal. As a precaution I folded the bottom of my trousers tight around my legs and pulled my socks up over them. God knows what damage the poison glands of those diabolical creatures may do to certain body parts located below the belt. I took the blanket out of the briefcase and laid it down neatly folded in a corner of the fort so that it could serve as a seat for the time being.
Darkness fell quickly. The blue vault of the sky turned grey and the forest below was plunged into semidarkness; only on the highest treetops was there still a soft, silver glimmer that gradually faded. Near the summit of the mountain a young falcon hovered in its brown fledgling’s plumage. The gaps between the bushes on the terrace opposite filled with ghostly silhouettes and mysterious blackness, and a dull red glow lit the steep cliff face. Then everything went dark and the wind got up. In the space of a few moments the setting sun took away all the beauty it had brought. The walls of the fort towered above me and I was sitting in the large square of darkness. I had my first shot of whisky.
Who could say how many slaves had met their deaths in the place where I was now sitting? The island’s black population still tells strange stories about slaves who used to fly back to Africa. They still firmly believe that slaves who had eaten no salt were capable of this feat. The slaves sought out a high place, raised their arms to heaven, and took off on their flight to another continent. I can’t believe that, even three or four hundred years ago, people were stupid enough to think that. But if the stories do have any basis in truth, this spot must have been an ideal takeoff point.
From a military point of view too, the place clearly had strategic importance. Were this island to be invaded — by Venezuela or Cuba, for example — and were the defenders of the town obliged to retreat from superior forces, they could withdraw to this high ground. The troops could camp on the terrace and five or six marksmen could position themselves in this natural fort. The fantastically shaped battlements would not only provide cover from enemy guns, but also enable the defenders to return fire unseen and hold out for a long time against their besiegers, who would be forced to clamber up towards them.
Later that evening the legions of mosquitoes moved into action — annoying little creatures that tried with all their might to get into my nose, ears and eyes. This aggression forced me to light up another cigarette and have a stiff drink. Alcohol, so beneficial and effective against so many things in this world, might also repel insects. In this spot the silence was even more oppressive than on my terrace. But here too the nocturnal darkness that had by now washed over everything had its own sounds: the wind through the trees and around the rocks, the rustling in the undergrowth, the dull thud of a stone dislodged from the cliff face, the unrecognisable call of an animal — sounds that in some mysterious way finally seemed to convey the same message of comfort.
I must have dozed off, because I suddenly awoke with a start as a sharp gust of air struck my face, as if some heavy shape had sped past, narrowly missing me. I recovered from my fright when I saw a large owl glide silently over my lookout post a few times and then swoop down to a rocky niche opposite. It perched upright in the aperture, its chalk-white underside clearly visible, looking like the statues of the Virgin you can see in Catholic shrines.
I had not sighted an owl for years. It is said they can see a hundred times more acutely than human beings, and that their hearing is so sensitive that even on the darkest night they can fly straight towards their prey, mostly mice and lizards, guided only by the tiny noises these creatures make. They swallow the mice and lizards whole and later regurgitate the hair and bones. Perhaps owls should be held up as an example to mankind. They mate for life and use the same nest year after year. There is another species of owl that is feared as a harbinger of death. It has a long, angular body resembling a coffin when it is in flight. If you see one of these, you must cross yourself quickly.
After some time, my white owl flew up out of the niche and, without a screech, disappeared into the night as abruptly as it had come. I decided that I might as well turn in. I spread the blanket out on the rocky ground, had a nightcap, and lay down.
The twentieth century was drawing to a close. I lay on my back and looked up at the silver disc in the sky. I am tall and skinny, so my feet touched the southernmost tip of Argentina and Chile, while my head lay against the coastal ranges of Venezuela. I spread my arms so that my left hand touched the Atlantic coast of Brazil and my right the Pacific seaboard of Peru. I stretched my arms above my head and my fingertips counted the Caribbean islands. It was dark over the whole continent and all the islands, and the darkness lasted the whole night.
In the hidden blackness of the selvas and on the pale, duncoloured beaches, thousands of vague phantoms, the damned from five hundred years of Latin American history, emerge from their shadowy realm to torment the human beings of today, robbing them of their guns and jewels. The aerial roots of the mangrove forest lining the creeks waft their noxious breath over the landscape. Centuries-old trees, their branches malevolently twisted as if they wished to strangle all those who have been silently sinning for so long, wear a satanic leer in their weathered crowns — the grimace of pain and impotence that cannot be erased because it is the suffering and helplessness of our ancestors. We are destined to feel its consequences to our dying day, when we pass on the burden to our firstborn son. Today’s suffering is caused by what happened yesterday. For centuries a passive god has passed by the continent and the islands in silence.
The torch of the sun that appears at dawn brings light but no lightening of the load. This is the primeval sun created in the first chapter of Genesis that surveys the entire continent and all the islands, that knows everything because it can extract every secret from the earth with its piercing light. It stores the gamut of human experience in its fiery womb which, filled to the brim, boils, splits and expels the charred excess in a blinding orgasm that astronomers in Europe and the United States observe as the red excrescences of the solar corona; but it continues uninterrupted on its orbit around the world of men, uncovering new deeds and storing them in its temporarily unburdened womb. The South American sun commits a thousand murders every day, because it is not just the chronicler, but also the instigator of the blackest human deeds. At six in the morning it rises treacherously amid silver streamers that jubilantly unfold, and at six in the evening it smothers itself in the yellowish-red miasma of the swamp that fills the western sky.