And the following day too, when all the boys and the priests were attending mass, I was left to my own devices. Though I was supposed to stay in the classroom and go over the day’s lessons, I didn’t feel much like doing so. My classroom was on the second floor and, tucked safely away behind a row of flower tubs in the corridor, I watched events down in the playground with interest and a mixture of feelings. It struck me as some weird kind of play being performed in an incomprehensible language, but at the same time I was attracted by the mysterious gestures of the priest before the altar, by the Latin words that he would sometimes mutter inaudibly and at other times sing out at the top of his voice, by the swinging of the censer and the tinkling of the little bell.
It was now time for the boys to take communion. They left their benches and lined up by classes before the altar, their teachers in front. When it was the turn of my class, I left my hiding place, went into the classroom and made straight for the cupboard where equipment was stored, as I knew it contained a telescope. It was right at the top and I had to stand on the bottom shelf to reach it.
The telescope belonged to the teacher. He had once taken the instrument to pieces, explaining to us in detail how it worked. Then he allowed each of us in turn to look out of the window through it for a few seconds. The teacher used the telescope for bird watching, which was, he said, a fascinating hobby. He often told us delightful stories about how birds behave, invariably concluding by making a comparison with human beings. In the garden behind the school there was an upturned metal drum on which every day the teacher would put out a bowl of water, bread crumbs and some sugar for the birds. He would position himself some distance away, half-hidden, and observe the creatures through his telescope. We had once been allowed to walk in the garden during breaks, but ever since one of the boys from the senior classes emptied an inkwell into the rain gauge set up there, and no one would name the culprit, the garden was off-limits to all pupils.
For some reason, one of the teacher’s stories has stayed with me. It was about a pair of troupials that came to eat and drink at exactly the same time every afternoon. They were beautiful specimens, with their sharply contrasting deep-orange and gleaming black feathers. One day the pair arrived with two chicks, which, in contrast to their parents, were bald and grey. With the exception of baby chickens, the friar told us, all young birds are ugly. These chicks had gaping beaks, and their parents fed them first, before eating anything themselves. The funny thing was that after a week or so, when the little ones had learned how to feed and threw themselves greedily on the food on the drum, they were pecked and driven off by their parents. Only after Mum and Dad had finished their meal were the little whippersnappers allowed at table. The friar concluded his story with a short sermon about parental wisdom and love, and about the respect and gratitude that all boys owed to their father and mother.
Armed with the telescope, I went back into the corridor, crouched behind the tub and followed the activities in the playground, now at very close quarters. In one hand the priest held a large chalice that looked as if it were made of gold and with the other hand he distributed the wafers. He had long, elegant fingers — I could even make out his well-manicured nails. A boy from my class took a couple of timid steps forward, with a look of something like alarm on his face. He knelt down rather stiffly in front of the priest, who carefully placed the wafer on the boy’s pink tongue. I saw the boy’s expression brighten immediately and I was glad, although I did not know why. Then I suddenly felt an emptiness in my head and sweat forced its way out of every pore in my body. I became paralysed, as if all my soft tissue had lost its resilience and all my bones had become petrified. With one hand I clung to the edge of the tub, and with the other I pressed the telescope desperately to my chest so as not to drop it. I thought I had suddenly been taken ill, and was terrified. But I was not ill, because the fear in my heart soon gave way to a strange feeling of relief, which was replaced in turn by an intense happiness that seemed to fill not only my body but the whole corridor.
My second dizzy spell occurred under very different circumstances more than a year later, during the summer holidays. I was staying with an aunt and uncle who lived out of town in a mansion, but because they were rather elderly, I spent most of the day on Tochi’s little farm not far away.
Tochi and his wife were both warm, cheerful people who didn’t give a damn about the sordid aspects of life and seldom took anything seriously. They were very similar in appearance as welclass="underline" both were short, fat and rotund, and both had broad, dark-brown faces that were always gleaming. They had a daughter and two sons, the youngest of whom, Cinto, was my age.
Tochi grew a variety of vegetables and usually managed to sell all his produce to the big tourist hotel on the coast. But his crops often failed, either because they were attacked by insects and other vermin or because the rain stayed away for too long and the well dried up. This inspired the crafty Tochi to involve himself more directly with the island’s tourist industry. The sandy track that ran past his farm to the coast had once been the only link between the hotel and the main road to town. The track wound its way along the foot of the Montenegro, a range of quite steep hills that reached almost to the coast and was quite dangerous because stones and boulders sometimes rolled down the slopes. At one time the track had been lined with signs in English warning the tourists of falling rocks, but these were soon removed by the locals for firewood. When a second modern hotel was built on the coast, a four-lane asphalt road was constructed on the other side of the hills as a direct link with the town and the airport. The new road was considerably longer, so many economy-minded American tourists continued to drive along the sandy track, especially as the tourist brochures described it as a “scenic route.” This gave Tochi the idea of exploiting the holiday market. A short distance from his house he kept three large boulders ready at the side of the track, and in lean times he would roll them onto the roadway with a thick pole so that cars could not get past. It was Cinto’s job to hang around nearby until a car carrying tourists, usually a man accompanied by a scantily dressed woman, came along and pulled up at the road block. The man would usually get out and try to shift the massive stones. At that moment Cinto would arrive and offer in broken English to call his father and big brother, who would be able to roll the boulders out of the way. The offer would be eagerly accepted. At the beginning Tochi charged five dollars for this service, but since the day when a tourist had pressed ten dollars into his hand he had changed his tactics. Now, when he and his sons had cleared the road and the tourist asked how much he owed him, Tochi would say, “I may be a poor farmer with a family of twelve to support, but if a man helps a fellow human being, he mustn’t charge money for it.” This almost always resulted in the tourist slipping little Cinto a ten-dollar note. An elderly couple once even gave them twenty-five dollars. Every time they pulled off this con trick, Tochi would say to his sons, “We’ll go on doing this until we get our fingers burned. But why should they catch us out? We don’t do it every day, and those tourists only stay a few days at the hotel and others come in their place. We can’t live on air.”