By Night the Mountain Burns Read online

  First published in English translation in 2014 by

  And Other Stories

  London – New York

  www.andotherstories.org

  Copyright © Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel, 2008

  First published as Arde el monte de noche in 2008

  by Calambur Editorial, Madrid, Spain

  English-language translation copyright © Jethro Soutar 2014

  All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transported in any form or by any means (electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise), without the prior written permission of the publisher of this book.

  The right of Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel to be identified as Author of By Night the Mountain Burns (original title Arde el monte de noche) has been asserted by him in accordance with the Copyright, Designs and Patents Act 1988.

  This book is a work of fiction. Names, characters, businesses, organisations, places and events are either the product of the author’s imagination or are used fictitiously. Any resemblance to actual persons, living or dead, events or locales is entirely coincidental.

  ISBN 9781908276407

  eBook ISBN 9781908276414

  A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

  This book has been selected to receive financial assistance from English PEN’s ‘PEN Translates!’ programme. English PEN exists to promote literature and our understanding of it, to uphold writers’ freedoms around the world, to campaign against the persecution and imprisonment of writers for stating their views, and to promote the friendly co-operation of writers and the free exchange of ideas. www.englishpen.org

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  Contents

  By Night the Mountain Burns

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  ‌By Night the Mountain Burns

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  The song goes like this:

  Maestro: Aaale, toma suguewa,

  All: Alewa!

  Maestro: Aaaalee, toma suguewa,

  All: Alewa!

  The ‘toma suguewa’ part means ‘give it a pull’, but it also means ‘will you give it a pull’, or ‘will you all give it a pull’, even ‘will sir give it a pull’. Know why it can be any of these things? Because in the language the song is sung, my island’s language, there is no polite form of address like there is in Spanish. Nevertheless, the maestro treats everyone with respect, as if he’s addressing them as ‘sir’, and because he asks them so respectfully, they pull. He does it all singing, and it’s a song that brings back many memories and fills me with nostalgia. As far as I’m concerned, it’s the most beautiful song in the world.

  Aaale, toma suguewa,

  Alewa!

  Aaaalee, toma suguewa,

  Alewa!

  No, there are no other words to the song, no more verses. That’s it. The song consists of what the maestro asks, sung in a beautiful voice, and what the people say in reply, as they answer his call: Alewa! Then all together, as one, they pull what they’ve been asked – with due respect – to pull.

  Does anybody know what they’re pulling? It’s something that happens on my island, which is located just below the equator. If I’d studied geography, I’d give degrees of latitude and longitude, so that you might look the island up on a map, or on some other more modern means of looking for things. In any case, I should mention that the island is African and that the people who live on the island are black, every last one of them. And that it’s surrounded by the Atlantic Ocean. Totally surrounded. The black people I speak of live on a sliver of land that pokes out of the murky waters.

  And what of the simple but meaningful song? The inhabitants of the island live from fishing, a fishing that’s done almost entirely by hand out at sea. And in order to get out to sea the fishermen paddle flimsy canoes. These canoes are made out of tree trunks, cut from trees that are known to be good for floating. There are only three types of tree on the island that can be used for making canoes, only three.

  Does anyone know how you start when making a canoe? First you select the tree, and if it’s not your tree but a tree on a woman’s plantation, women being the ones who farm on the island, you go and speak to her. You might be lucky and she’s a widow or has no husband, or she has one but he’s away. Or you might be unlucky and she has sons who are growing up, and she knows that one day the tree will make a good canoe for those sons, when they’re old enough to go out fishing and transport things about the island. Every man on our Atlantic Ocean island has his own canoe, and if he doesn’t have one, a new canoe is brought into the world so that he does, so that nobody on the island has to borrow one from anyone else.

  If you manage to do a deal with the woman, or if it turns out that your own woman has one of the three types of trees on her farmland, you cut through it until it falls to the ground where you found it. This last part is worth mentioning because if the land happens to be planted, it’s going to be very difficult to get the woman to agree to your cutting the tree down, even if you offer her something of equivalent value in exchange.

  After chopping off the branches and piling them up to be used as firewood once they’re dry, you’re ready to call upon whoever you consider the best craftsman, so that he might start work on your canoe. It’s important that you pay him a visit and that he accepts the invitation. He, the maestro, won’t ask you for anything impossible in return, nothing that will cause you to look to the heavens. Normally he won’t ask you for anything at all and it will simply be enough that you show him respect, but if he does ask you for something, it will be something readily to hand. He might ask for a drink, a drink that everyone has or can get hold of, or he might ask for a favour in return. He might say to you, without lifting his voice or showing much concern, that you could clear some land for his wife, for she’s found an empty plot where she’d like to plant malanga and plantain. So anyway, you come to an agreement, and as soon as he can the maestro starts work on your canoe. The first job is the hardest job: hollowing out the trunk. This means digging the wood out so there’s enough depth and space for you and your wife, your little children and the load you’ll be carrying when you paddle from one part of the island to another. The hollowing out of the trunk is done right where the tree falls, the tree that will become your best friend, your right-hand man. The dug-out chunks of wood are gathered up by boys and girls and some older ladies, for they know a big tree gives a lot of itself. They collect the bark too, and when these chunks of wood and strips of bark are dry, they put them to burn in the stone tripod of the fireside, where the pot boils with things to eat, whatever there is.

  The job of hollowing out the trunk is a hard one and it’s done using the heaviest kind of axe, an axe with a long handle. In truth it’s a job any strong young man can do, albeit with the guidance of the maestro, to make sure the youngster doesn’t overdo it and leave the canoe with too little walling. The trunk is only half-emptied at the place where the tree is felled, meaning the top side is cut into, the part that will become the inside of the canoe, and the edges are whittled down evenly, for they will become the sides of the canoe. The part that’s in contact with the ground is left alone for now. As the tree trunk is often longer than the canoe’s required length, another important job is to separate the canoe from the rest of the trunk. This job is a little more delicate than the hollowing out stage because through this process the front and back ends of the canoe emerge, the parts that distinguish the more striking and beautiful canoes, those made with real skill. One part, the front part, will have to break through the sea waters, and it will also be the part that’s seen when the charming little thing is beached after a day’s fishing. The back part supports whoev
er’s paddling the canoe, the helmsman, and it’s where he jumps on when he gets into the canoe and off when he reaches land.

  Once these tasks are complete, most of the maestro’s work remains to be done and the canoe is still in the bush, where the tree was felled, a long way from the shore. It now has to be transported to the shore, where the maestro can finish his work close enough to the sea to hear the waves break, to taste them, and close enough for men to come and watch the work being done and comment on it. Only once it’s on the shore does the canoe really start to take shape, start to become a canoe that will be admired by all men and make the maestro proud. So that shell of a canoe has to be transported to the nearest feasible beach. The nearest and the most feasible. The double condition mustn’t be ignored because transporting the thing is hard, heavy work, and not every part of the coastline on our Atlantic Ocean island will welcome a canoe into its waters. Do not be fooled: there are certain shores on our island, some sandy, some stony, where the waves are angry and will not allow anyone into them in any kind of vessel, no matter what offering is made.

  Does anyone know how you get the half-formed canoe to the shore from the bush it lies in? Some of you have guessed: by pulling it to its final destination, the bottom part dragging along the ground, which is why it’s left as it is, rugged and round. The owner of the canoe, he who asked for it to be built in the first place and who will use it for his needs, speaks to all his friends, and they in turn speak to their friends, and everyone agrees on a date when they will come and help pull the canoe to the shore. The owner knows there can never be too many hands. He also knows nobody will ask for anything in return, absolutely nothing for what is a hard job that takes a long time and uses up a lot of energy. So he also speaks to all the womenfolk he knows, especially the women who are his relatives, and he asks them for something too. He asks them to prepare, for the afternoon of the day of the pulling, a big pot of malanga soup, enough to feed all the people that will be needed to perform such an arduous task. This will be their only compensation and will send them home satisfied, energies restored, and safe in the knowledge that one day it will be their turn to call for the help of all noble men, and to ask their female nearest and dearest to prepare, for a particular hour of a particular afternoon, a restorative malanga soup.

  The day arrives and the half-formed canoe is fastened with a long, thick rope, a rope that has been brought along especially by its owner. Indeed that rope is used for one thing and one thing only on our Atlantic Ocean island, and its owner has long felt obliged to let it be used for that purpose. The maestro ties the rope around the trunk in such a way that those pulling can get a good purchase without the canoe coming to any harm and without those pulling the canoe coming to any harm either. Next, those who know about such things chop down a banana tree, or a different tree of similar size, and cut the branches into rollers the canoe can slide along. The paths on our Atlantic Ocean island are rough, the trails are extremely stony and there are many steep inclines. All of which means that pulling a canoe to its final destination involves a lot of hard, dangerous work. And because there are not an infinite number of rollers, or even enough to cover the entire route to the nearest feasible shore, the way it works is this: after each small stretch, once the run of the rollers is used up, strong young men take them from the back and return them to the front, so that the half-hollow trunk can slide over them again, that’s to say, so that the process is repeated. Have I mentioned the inclines on our Atlantic Ocean island? Well, this means that the trunk doesn’t always slide along the trail as intended, even though the route has been chosen so that those pulling hopefully won’t fall off the path. Therefore other men, typically younger men with some experience of canoe pulling, place themselves at the front of the canoe armed with sticks, sticks they’ve cut and stripped down especially, and they prod the canoe to straighten its course.

  The half-made canoe is pulled along by human force, one single force drawn from many different men and women, with many different physical aspects and motivations. The whole thing is done so that lots of individual pulling becomes one united thrust. But how is it done? After all, herein lies the secret of how that shell of a canoe gets from the bush to the nearest feasible shore. It needs someone who knows how to make lots of little energies come together at the right moment and become one giant mass of energy. That someone is the maestro and he does it by singing, which means he has to have the dual qualities of being a boat-carpenter and a singer. To those dual qualities you might also add that he needs to be tough, because sometimes he has to sing and take his turn pulling on the rope at the same time. His is a rare yet essential skill, the ability to orchestrate everyone’s efforts through song, uniting the exertions of men and women of different physical aspects around one half-made canoe. He knows they will heed his call. So let’s go back to the beginning and sing the song once more:

  Aaale, toma suguewa,

  Alewa!

  Aaaalee, toma suguewa,

  Alewa!

  The wise old man opens his throat and sings, like a great maestro, the first part of the song. Then the friends of the owner of what will soon be a canoe, and the friends of those friends, cry: Alewa! This, as you can hear, is a word with three syllables. The men and women dedicated to this arduous task answer at the tops of their voices, for it could hardly be a conversational reply, and they put the emphasis on the second syllable, in tandem with the force they apply to the rope. The middle part stands out – aLEwa – and the canoe, which all of them treat as their own, gains traction:

  Aaale, toma suguewa,

  Alewa!

  Aaaalee, toma suguewa,

  Alewa!

  So you could say alewa is the ho of heave-ho, or you could make a more literal translation, like this:

  ‘Will you give it a pull?’

  ‘We’ll PUll!’

  And on the PU comes the unified force that moves the canoe along another stretch in its journey to the nearest feasible beach. For short journeys, for example from the wetlands to an area of the beach safe from the waves, there is a shorter version of the song in which no one leads and everyone chants the Alewa part over and over again, until the final destination is reached. Or until the next resting point, where there’s a pause while the stronger ones reset the rollers, and then everyone starts the chant again, and so on until the final destination. But when what you want to drag lies several miles from the coast, deep inside the bush, and involves navigating difficult paths, dangerous inclines, stony trails and other hazards and perils, the only version of the song that’s sung is the one I’ve been singing. It doesn’t matter if there are several resting points over the long journey. When the pulling gets going again, everyone falls back in with the song, though the conductor of the orchestra is eventually changed. Yes, I call it an orchestra, because there are so many men and women, and they all sing at the tops of their voices in order to keep spirits up. Neighbours on nearby malanga plantations, or plantations of cassava, yam or plantain, neighbours who will typically be mothers with little children, hear the song from wherever they are and know right away what’s happening. The song is the same everywhere on the island, and there is no other event or activity when it is sung. So they might come across the pulling procession on their way home, but even before that, whether they have been on high ground or low ground, they’ll have heard the song making its way through the silent bush:

  Aaale, toma suguewa,

  Alewa!

  Aaaalee, toma suguewa,

  Alewa!

  If there were too few people on our Atlantic Ocean island, too few strong people, we obviously wouldn’t be able to fish in canoes. There would be no need to ask a woman to have a malanga soup ready at a particular hour of a particular afternoon, and nobody would sing to pull a half-made canoe to its final destination.

  Has anyone worked out why the canoe is not finished where its mother tree is felled? If it were done there, the effort needed to move it would certainly be reduced. But h
ave I mentioned the number of rocks there are on the island? I said the island lay in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean, but did I mention the unevenness of its terrain? A canoe that left the bush finished and polished would reach the coast snapped in two, no matter how much care was taken. And then all the singing, all the cooking, all the pain and effort put in over so many hours, would have come to nothing. And this would be very upsetting for the owner of the canoe, for the maestro who built it and for everyone who took part in the pulling. And the owner of the rope used to pull the boat, he’d be upset too. And if it were to snap when the malanga soup was already prepared, everyone would sit down disappointed and eat the soup in silence. The song would be left hanging in the air, unaware as to why it had been sung with such vigour and heart:

  Aaale, toma suguewa,

  Alewa!

  Aaaalee, toma suguewa,

  Alewa!

  Like I said, that little song fills me with nostalgia and makes me think of all the people who lived on the island when I was a boy, and it makes me think of my grandfather.

  I can’t say for sure whether my grandfather was or wasn’t mad. I saw him through a child’s eyes and through such eyes it’s impossible to tell whether an adult man, who lives in your house and who you’ve been told is your grandfather, is mad or not. Whether an adult is mad or not is not something easily understood by a little boy, who judges things with the eyes of his age, or doesn’t in fact judge them at all. But grandfather didn’t go unnoticed by me or by the other children living in the house. What I mean by saying he didn’t go unnoticed is that, if it hadn’t been for someone I loved and trusted telling me in a reassuring voice that as well as living in the house he was a member of the family, I’d have been very afraid of him and would have avoided him at all costs.

  We lived on our Atlantic Ocean island, as I said, and in a house with an upstairs and a downstairs. There were no more than two houses on the whole island that had an upstairs and a downstairs, so I knew that whoever built our house must have been a man of means at some point in his life, at least of more means than most people on our island, the geographical coordinates of which I still don’t know. I say this because it was obvious most people were not of means and had never been of means, for they lived in simple houses built around makeshift wooden posts. The walls between posts were filled in with palm-tree branches, the roofs with jambab’u, a shrub you cut when green, leave on the ground to dry and then gather up in sheaves to carry home on your head. These sheaves are then used to make a thatch by weaving the jambab’u together and tying it at the corners to the palm-tree branches. It makes a secure roof for it doesn’t let water in. Nor does it heat up much when the hot sun beams down on it. In fact it hardly heats up at all. But, unlike the house I grew up in, you don’t hear the rain when it rains on a jambab’u roof. And I like the rain too much for it to happen without my hearing it. I don’t know whether I feel this way because I grew up in a house where the rain pounded on the roof, or just because I like the rain and like to be able to hear it.