I knew no history. I had little concept of time beyond the harvest seasons, the changing weather. When I stood on the fishing dock as a child and looked out at the other islands in the archipelago, I was not thinking of battleships or explorers or sea monsters from mythologies. I was not thinking about what came before or what lay beyond.
What can I tell you about my young life on the island? It is shrouded in the mystery of childhood itself. I try to picture myself age ten, for that is the time when the ‘trouble’ – as you call it – began. But I don’t have an image of this girl. I can’t see her from the outside. There are no photographs. Besides, I don’t trust them.
I could tell you that my only true friend on the island, apart from my older sister, Giovanna, was a donkey with weepy eyes and long lashes, a white patch of fur on his belly I took pleasure in scratching. A rusted bell hung around his neck. He had a bung leg. We called him Shuffles. What is the significance of this donkey, I imagine you asking. Nothing, nothing. Except to say that when he was deemed useless we cared for him. Fed him apples. Tied scarves around his head. A big bow between the ears. I remember thinking I would marry him when the time came. I remember thinking this as if it were the most normal thought in the world.
Do you see what I am trying to say? Our world was very small. When I was ten and Giovanna was twelve, we had never left our island, not even for the others in the archipelago. We knew the islands surrounding us not by their proper names but by what they resembled: a turtle, a dog lying down, a mountain, a jagged crown. Those islands were black or grey or brown depending on the position of the sun. Ours was emerald green.
Every morning, Giovanna and I went down to the fishing dock to watch the water. We could tell if rain was coming by where the clouds hung in the sky (this, we learned from the fishermen). From May to September, it hardly rained at all. The cisterns on our roofs went dry, and the smell of dead fish – thick in the summer – wafted through the circular hole above the door of our bungalow, even when our mother stuffed it with rags.
Although we lived at the bottom of the island in a small fishing village, we still felt we were better than the people who lived on the opposite side of the island by the port. The port people were ignoble, Mother told us, because they cavorted with the sailors, and they were not ashamed to live near the rubbish heap. Besides, the port was ugly. The port was not a well-regarded place. Even where we lived – in the damp, narrow alleyways above the fishing dock – had more prestige than the port! Between the two villages was a large valley with vineyards planted all over the slopes. Two mountains – our two sleeping volcanoes – stood on either side. On our island, the higher you lived, the richer you were. Still, our little village was respected. In the evenings, everyone gathered in our square. Most nights, we saw amber specks fizzling against the black sky coming from the volcano on the island opposite. Little spurts of lava that shot up rhythmically. A constant, hazy glow. We knew those amber specks meant danger for the people on that island, but we were on the green island, and so we cared little.
You must understand: from birth we had been told that our island was rich in resources. We had no need to worry – the shipmaster would take care of us all.
He was the only person who routinely left and returned. Left not just for the other islands in the archipelago, but for unknowable places beyond. He brought back gifts. He had a gold cane with a goose-head handle, and he took it with him on his walks around the square. The way that he moved – slowly, gracefully – signalled his difference to the rest of us. He did not stumble. He rarely yelled. If I close my eyes, I can see him standing at the balustrade at the edge of our square looking out at the sea below. His long beard is neatly combed and turning grey at the tips. His lips are hidden underneath his thick moustache. He is walking past the baker’s shop and raising his cane. Now the baker’s daughter is running out.
He was a king to us. A god. At the very least, our protector. Really, he was a trader in exports who commandeered an impressive fleet.
All of us in the village, whenever we saw him, would make a little gesture as he passed us. Mother bowed her head, so Giovanna and I did the same. The fishermen only ever spoke to him with eyes averted and their hands clasped firmly behind their backs. The older widows fussed over him. Often, they tried to kiss his hand. Once, the baker’s son saluted him, and we – all of us in the square – had to wait until the shipmaster was out of sight to let out our laughter. Our bellies sore from holding it in. It was the baker’s daughter, though, who embarrassed us most with her confusing gestures. Whenever she held out the bread, she squatted before him – an awkward curtsy – and we had to look away.
There was another embarrassing woman in our village. A widow, like Mother, who went about in an evening gown that was torn and yellowing. This woman refused to wear black. She had no tact, Mother told us, because she wore her hair in the manner of the shipmaster’s wife. Uncovered, that is, and twirled into two shapes that looked like snail shells, pinned at the nape of her neck. She lived alone, and although she tried to hide it, she spent her nights in the grotto near the port where the other drunks met. To get there, you had to wait until the tide was low and climb along the rocks. People talked about a secret path, a way to get there from the lighthouse above, but none of us ever found it.
There was a rumour about the woman leaving the grotto one night and throwing herself into the sea. Apparently, she had to be fished out. When she came to, she told the rest of the drunks that she had merely wanted to wash her dress. She clambered over the rocks and left the wet gown on the roof of her bungalow to dry. We knew this, because the baker had seen it there.
This woman – still so large in my mind – does not appear in your book, Professor. I woke up this morning with the thought that I could write to you. That I could tell you some of the things you missed.
According to your version of events, an insect pest arrived on our island hidden in some bits of wood and destroyed all of our vines. Excuse me for saying, but you seem obsessed with the aphid! Forty pages on its breeding cycle, its microscopic body, its way of burying itself into the roots – imperceptible to our eyes. When you explain its method of sucking the life from our vines, I detect a certain relish. You appear like a young, excitable boy at a science fair presenting his hypothesis.
There is no mention of the shipmaster in your book, nothing about our village. There is nothing about the men who arrived on our island in the spring before the vines began to die. You must not realise what an event it was. We did not know they were coming. No one had told us about the new law. We were not expecting a ship of prisoners in the archipelago. Professor, when I was a child, I did not know what a prison was.
That spring, I was ten years old, wearing a dress made of muslin cloth and a red woollen cloak, holding on to Mother’s hand as we walked down the hill to the market by the port. We saw an unfamiliar ship in the distance – saw the white trail it left in the water as it approached our island. By the time we reached the market, the ship had docked. The gangplank dropped and the men came walking out. I counted twelve. Everyone stopped to watch. We did not know they were prisoners. We only saw a group of strangers. They were both young and old, with beards roughly clipped, wearing grey tunics. Some of them were paler, but most had our hue – that is, olive-skinned, as they say today, though I don’t understand what an olive has to do with it. One of the men stood out for his honey-coloured hair, the tufts on his cheeks that glinted in the sun, but the rest looked similar to the men on our island. Later, Mother said that they looked nothing like our men.
In her memory of their arrival, it was always raining. But the sun was out, I remember – the first feeling of warmth on the skin after a long winter, though the wind was cold and brisk. The men stood on the dock with their tunics fluttering and their faces tilted towards the sun. Two guards wearing jackets with bright buckles and large black hats emerged from the belly of the ship. They jostled the men into the back of the shipmaster’s largest carriage. The mules were whipped. The carriage travelled in the direction of Mount Fern and we followed it. Half our village were trailing behind, looking up at the men while they stared back at us. One of them even blew us kisses! I saw his head bobbing above the crowd.
When we reached the valley, the carriage stopped outside the shipmaster’s house. We kept our distance and hid behind the trees. We did not talk to each other for fear that the shipmaster would hear us. He was waiting outside his gates when we arrived. He spoke to the guards and then motioned for his driver to continue up the mountain. This time we were unable to follow. The shipmaster was looking at the trees where we were hiding. He held his gaze. Little ripples. My skin felt prickly from his stare. One by one, we came out from our hiding spots and walked silently back to the market.
That evening, everyone was in the square pretending to look busy. Really, we were waiting for the shipmaster. Waiting for him, on his evening walk, to tell us who these men were and what they were doing on our island.
Giovanna was with me and Mother and she was jealous. She had not been at the port when the men arrived. We were standing near the path that led up to the forest, waiting for the shipmaster to appear among the trees. Meanwhile, the baker’s daughter was doing laps around the square, talking to anyone who would listen to her about the men. She was telling us she did not need any more amorous advances; the shipmaster’s sons were enough to deal with.
An hour passed. The sky and the sea turned orange, then pink, a reddish purple. Wind came hurtling around the cliffs. All of the women in the square stopped fanning themselves. We were silent. Listening for footsteps when all we could hear were cicadas, the wind whistling, the rocks being dragged into the sea on the beach below. Mother went inside the church with the others to pray, but the wooden doors flew open while they were kneeling, extinguishing their lit candles. A bad omen, we thought.
Night came. It was cold and dark and no one had thought to bring lanterns. We were not expecting to be out for so long. At the entrance to the church, our priest was sweeping sand out the door. He was telling us it was time to go home. He went inside to ring the bells. We heard them chime nine times.
The shipmaster never came to the square that evening, and rarely did he miss his evening walk. His absence was not only unusual, it felt threatening. As you can imagine, Professor, it only inflamed our curiosity about the men.
As far back as I could remember, there had been no new inhabitants on our island. No visitors, apart from the sailors, who only stayed a day or so and even then, we rarely saw them. They kept to the port side and spent their nights in the grotto. Only once had I seen a sailor close up. I was at the market with Mother and wandered off. The tide was low. I saw a body splayed out over the rocks – his back arched. His face was bloated and his pale tongue was sticking out. He had drowned. I know that now. At the time, Mother told me he was sleeping.
We knew that the men were staying on our island, but we did not know why. In those first days, their presence was not properly explained. They were being kept on Mount Fern, sleeping among ruins that none of us would go near because a child had died there and it was thought to be a place that brought bad luck. We heard they were working in the shipmaster’s fields on the port side. But the baker’s wife said she had seen them walking through the forest that bordered on our square. At this, she was indignant.
About a week after they arrived, Giovanna and I came upon the men bathing in an inlet at the edge of our village. They looked nervous as they waded into the waist-deep water, holding their privates as they crouched down to splash their armpits, faces and backs. Not one of them put their head underneath. We thought perhaps they could not swim. We were lying on our bellies on the cliff above, watching them, loose rocks scattered around us. Without saying a word, Giovanna picked one up and threw it off the edge. It broke the water below and the men looked up. Days later, we returned at the hour we knew they would be bathing, both of us gathering rocks along the way.
Do I feel some shame in writing this? Yes. But we were frightened of them. Unsettled by what the adults around us said. If we threw rocks at them, it was because we feared them. But we also found their presence oddly thrilling. The other islands in the archipelago had their active volcanoes; now we had the men.
We overheard the women in our village warning Mother not to walk alone at night. They told her to listen for the trumpet each evening, telling the men to return to Mount Fern, where they would be counted by one of the shipmaster’s sons.
Have I mentioned his sons? He had nine. Some of them were smaller than us, but the older ones carried rifles. It was not unusual to come across them in the square, racing one another around the benches or straddling the mermaid statue that stood near the church. Sometimes we heard shots echoing through the forest when they were hunting rabbits in the valley above. They dressed differently from the sons of the fishermen in our village – wearing long trousers that covered their ankles and shirts made from fine linen. Whenever the shipmaster was away from our island, they would knock on the drunk widow’s window at all hours, singing songs about taking an ugly wife or a woman with a bosom so big that she had to walk with a stick. As a group, they were intimidating. There were so many of them! This was, according to Mother, the real reason why the shipmaster’s wife rarely left her house. Nine sons would break any woman, is what Mother often said. The youngest was five and had an especially large head. Mother said it would have been his ears that hurt the shipmaster’s wife the most, pointy as they were, like wings.
Our mother slept with a grimace – her mouth folded downwards – and sometimes a word, seemingly foreign, would shoot out of her mouth, so that Giovanna and I had to rub her back to wake her. The three of us shared one bed. Our father died when I was young, and as a child I had trouble picturing him. He always ended up looking a little bit like the shipmaster, only wearing the calico pants and red cloak of a fisherman. This secret image – treasure of all treasures – was ruined by my sister. You wouldn’t have any memories of him, is what Giovanna said. But I did have memories! Of hairy hands filling a pipe with tobacco, the smell of smoke and brine on his wiry beard, a voice – soft and low – singing to us in the early evening. None of that is real, Giovanna would tell me, smiling triumphantly.
All my life, my sister never let me forget that she had been a second mother to me. I was late to walk and talk. According to Giovanna, I used to point to my open mouth and she would know to feed me. It was her, and not Mother – Giovanna said – who taught me how to speak. Mother always slept, Giovanna would say. I was the one who wrapped blankets around you!
I was a docile child. Fearful. Obedient. All the things my sister was not.
We lived off the pity of our neighbours, who gave us fish, and the shipmaster, who was our true benefactor. Every week, one of his sons would appear at our door holding a pot of something warm from their cook or a few coins. Mother would take the coins and put them in the leather pouch she wore tied around her neck, while Giovanna and I watched from the bed.
But that spring, the sons stopped visiting. It happened abruptly. The shipmaster no longer took his evening walks in our square and his sons no longer knocked on our door. Mother said the shipmaster must be avoiding any questions we had about the men. She took herself to bed. Mother could sleep for hours if she wanted. Nobody could sleep like Mother. She told us that she knew how to sleep standing up. She had taught herself when she used to wake early and wait on the dock with the other wives for the fishermen to return.
Photograph © Alice Zoo
